[LA.pm] jobs available, going unfulfilled

[Todd Cranston-Cuebas]

Randal,

I'm glad that you bring this out in the open. As you all know, I'm a
recruiter so, well... I live the local job market. Here are my replies to
Randal's initial comments...

Is it a supply problem, or a demand problem, or both?

I would say both... employers have not had the budget to open new jobs and
now that they do, they're under pressure to justify each opening. This
justification doesn't usually equate to just needing more "hands on deck"
and instead seem to be more geared toward fixing specific skills or business
knowledge gaps (or both). These types of roles have a tendency to be more
senior (i.e., management responsibilities or requirements for strong client
handling/management) and are linked to specific, unique skill sets. These
are, be definition, not jobs that provide opportunities for someone to "grow
into."

Candidates on the other hand have a tendency to have more generalized
skills, a strong conviction in their ability to take on new challenges given
the opportunity, etc. I also believe that candidates are actively avoiding
becoming a "niche player" in technology when it has been proven in the past
that niche skills can be outsourced. There are however exceptions to that
rule, especially for obviously very "hot" new technologies (e.g.,
Flash/Flex, HTML5, Java spring/hibernate expertise, virtualization, cloud
computing, mobile app dev, etc.). Which basically means that the jobs that
are being offered, are not the jobs that people are necessarily prepared to
walk into from day one (or if they are, candidates are not making this
obvious). So, yes, this is a supply problem but also a disconnect between
management and people looking for work.

Schools are not helping the situation because they are clinging to producing
engineers who are extreme generalists. I wouldn't have as much of a problem
with this IF I saw students who knew the foundational knowledge of CS
inside-out-and-backward, but I'm not seeing that either. Preparing students
for possible employment by providing a single class in web technologies or a
token class in mobile/gaming engineering is really not doing the job.
Students need a good foundation but they have to also be heavily exposed to
real-world frameworks, languages, platforms etc. or it's tough going in this
job market for all of the points noted above.

You all know I'm a huge fan of open-source and I'm convinced that the OS
world can provide an alternative educational track than going the college
route. That being said, people looking for work are going to have to make
the hard choice to specialize or not to specialize. If you do specialize
(which the market would indicate is important) you then have to decide what
you're going to specialize in... of course, to add complexity, you'd like to
specialize in something that stands a chance of having some job "life" and
will not be outsourced relatively soon. It's a moving target out there!

Finally, along with missing senior-level candidates, there is also a hole in
the availability of associate- and mid-level engineers with these special
skill sets. The lack of mid-levels is not really that surprising since
employers have not been hiring in recent years and the skill sets they are
looking for are mostly learned on the job. If you don't hire associates, you
won't have mid- and senior-level candidates in the coming years.

Any thoughts on these comments? Does any of this reflect what you have been
seeing?

As in, are there fewer Perl programmers here but the same demand?

I can't give insight into the next two questions because I have not been
recruiting for perl talent in years. That being said, I would guess that the
demand may have gone up a bit simply because the market is beginning to heat
up, but... I would say that the demand for other languages and technologies
would be growing at a faster pace (e.g., Java/spring/hibernate as the
corporate standard, anything mobile, PHP ever present and growing, all
things javascript-like for RIA dev, etc.).

I'd love to hear from others specifically about the growth of opportunities
in the perl sector.

Or the same (or more) Perl programmers here, but even more demand?

Regards,

Todd


On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 11:18 AM, Randal L. Schwartz
<merlyn at stonehenge.com>wrote:

>
> Twice in the last two days, two different organizations in the greater
> LA area approached me to help them find folks to fill mid-level Perl
> hacking slots (varying between IT and webdev).  They both said "it's
> getting *very* hard to find people."
>
> Now, I'm really curious.  Why is this?
>
> Is it a supply problem, or a demand problem, or both?
>
> As in, are there fewer Perl programmers here but the same demand?
>
> Or the same (or more) Perl programmers here, but even more demand?
>
> Or something else entirely?
>
> By the way... I'm not trying to make a buck out of this.  I'm just
> trying to help people who ask me to help, and I'm also genuinely curious
> about the state of hiring in the Perl community, particulary in LA since
> I'm also working here for a while.
>
> (I'll also be sending this message to the other local PM groups, so if
> you see it multiple times, I'm sorry.)
>
>
> --
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
> <merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
> See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside
> discussion
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>
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