Thursday, March 18, 2010

More job thoughts

Those positions that I interviewed for back in February were either filled by internal candidates or remain unfilled a month later. Clearly many companies have no intention of hiring anyone unless they find a clone of the CTO. I had two phone screens this week, and both HR people told me that they are having extreme difficulty filling their positions. In one case the job listing has been active for more than five months. I don't understand the point of posting a job and going through the interview process with (probably) dozens of candidates if there is no intention to hire. So much for the productivity gains that you see in the news.

I worked at one company years ago that tried to stockpile "superstars" for a new project. One year into the project there was a 1,000 page system specification and a layoff. Everyone on the team seems to post that year as "manager" or "architect" on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

I continue to believe that I am getting consideration at these places simply to make EEO statistics look better. "Call a few old guys this month please".

One of those companies from last month is actually reversing their outsourcing and bringing jobs back to the US after a failed two years of outsourcing. Their client base is all in the US and Europe, so why anyone believed that moving all the work to India was a good idea in the first place is astounding to me. I thought I had a pretty good shot at a management position with these folks, until I started getting questioned on the depth of my PHP experience during my second interview. Of course the guy is hoping to find a clone of himself, who can do every software job in the company, thus boosting the productivity and making his job that much easier. This focus on the tools in use is very prevalent, and is only an excuse at best to turn away an older worker. If there is truly a pressing need for someone to walk in and perform at a high level on 15 different tasks on the first day, then valuable productivity and time is being wasted trying to interview for such a person, too. Apparently these hiring managers truly believe that they can find someone that is 110% productive on the first day on the job or there is some other mysterious force at work that hasn't manifested itself to me yet.

I got a phone screen at a large industrial conglomerate for a SmartGrid posting recently, but the questions focused on what type of functional organization I liked to work under, and it also became clear that C# and Microsoft APIs were going to play a large part in the hiring decision despite what the job listing said. Cisco also opened a couple of SmartGrid software jobs, but these are based in San Jose, so there is little chance I will get any consideration. Oh, those promised 10 or so job openings in Massachusetts did start to appear on the Cisco website last week. But remember - 80% of those are expected to be filled by internal transfers. See my prior rants about how Cisco considers that process to be an indication of "new hiring" and "dedication to the Massachusetts market".

Perhaps these open requisitions are so precious that the hiring managers can't bring themselves to "spend" them. Sort of like sitting on cash while watching the stock market go up and convincing yourself that the timing isn't right. I can rationalize my way to sanity on these things by believing that I would not want to work for such a company / manager anyway. After all, this is supposed to be the time to invest and gain on your competition, at least according to companies like Cisco and investors like Warren Buffett.

I've probably mentioned it before, but another tactic I've run into is a mindset that equates years of tool usage with productivity and intelligence. Many postings start off with "10 years Java, 5 years C++" and many other similar statistics. Of course this a means to pare down the number of resumes under consideration, but I believe these people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So I did have one moderately successful phone screen this week, for a customer SDK/API support position at a major mobile phone manufacturer. They are building out a cloud infrastructure, and apparently are having extreme difficulty staffing their development positions. I suppose they were hoping to attract droves of ex-Apple and maybe Microsoft or Google employees. At any rate, the expectation is that some bug fixing and coding work will go along with this job, in order to help out the development team who can't seem to hire anyone, and to build a strong foundation for supporting customers with deep technical knowledge of the suite of services. Hopefully the onsite interview materializes shortly, 'cause I'm not too hopeful about those other two phone screens this week.

No comments:

Post a Comment