The Job Market - the selectivity
The other thing about the job market today is how selective many people are being. So many of the postings list all these years required for every little detail. It seems reminiscent of just after the bubble - lets require 5 years experience for something that has only existed for 3 years...
Other positions, they want someone with 7-10 years of experience, at least 8 in X, 5 in Y and Z, and on and on... Basically, we want the person who used to be doing this job back, or someone doing the exact same thing for someone else. What is especially frustrating is to be close to the requirements, but you know an HR person is just filtering you right out of the running - even though it is something you easily could do. Other positions want 10+ years of embedded programming for a basic programming position - but let's be real - I did embedded programming 10 years ago, and I could do it now - but the stuff I did 10 years ago isn't especially critical to being able to get the job done today. For a senior level architect position, sure - but not for actual coding.
After all, this isn't like 10-15 years ago, where learning a new language, or field required going out to buy a book, buy a compilor, take a training class, and so on. So much of what is done today you may as well have a browser window open for searches right next to the editor window - I'm not going to try and remember every detail and difference between C shell, Korn shell, PHP, Perl, etc. - I'm going to look up specifics when I need them. I can program in any of them, I just have to lookup occasional details the first time I use them that month. Now I'm not saying someone with no experience can learn J2EE multi-tier concurrency issues that way, but anybody with a fair bit of experience, who matches more than half the requirements, can probably do the job - just with a couple of months worth of learning curve.
What's really frustrating is to see jobs that you know you could do stay open month after month. For several of them - I know I could have started that job when I first saw it (or interviewed for it
), and be fully up to speed by now, yet the position is still listed as open. The company has gone without anyone doing the job, and people are going without jobs...
Of course, some of these might be more phantom than real jobs. Perhaps the hiring manager would rather keep the requisition open, so that it could be cut if more cuts are needed, rather than someone they know, or because having the excuse of not having the right people gets you out of certain deadlines, or they just don't have the time to spend on interviewing (which means they won't get help, and won't get ahead). Whatever reason is behind some of these, it is frustrating to see them.
Oh well, can't do much about any of this...
dgc03052 on 05.20.09 @ 11:00 PM EST [link] [No Comments]