Subject: "Lots of bad IT Workers" ?

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 13:33:45 +0200 (IST)

I once talked with choo about something, and then he commented that as a
result of the IT boom and the high wages, we mainly got a lot of bad IT
workers. Now I spotted this Advogato diary entry:

http://www.advogato.org/person/ib/diary.html?start=7

(skip the initial paragraph)

Jonas Luster there describes how his compant is looking for some clueful
UNIX engineers and programms, and encounters some job applicants who are
completely clue-less.

Are there still enough jobs for competent IT workers. When I started
working in Elpas (my first real job as a programmer) which was during the
start of the IT boom (1997 or so), I only had experience programming with
C, Basic and VBA on my home computer. Yet, I was still competent enough to
be of value to them. Afterwards, when I switched jobs to Cortext, a
web-publishing house based on UNIX and Perl, I had to learn all about UNIX
and Perl there, yet I was still able to get my job done. I feel that I
have greatly improved since this point in every area I did back then.

Do you think the Shlomi Fish of 1997 could still find a job today?

OTOH, I hear from some people who I know are competent and qualified who
can't get any jobs. Is this part of the large system effect? (lots of
companies looking for competent programmers, each with different skills,
lots of resumes floating around each with different information or
disinformation, all pretty much look the same)

I know of a fellow student who graduated from EE (maslul "handasat
machshevim vetochna") in the Technion and could not find a job because he
claimed workplaces look for someone with more experience, and he has none
except for his studies. I know him and he's a bright, and talented guide,
albeit does indeed not have much real-world experience. I suggested him to
take on open-source development while he's unemployed so he'll have
something impressive to put in his resume/.

I know of an American fellow, named Jay Glascoe, who has an M.Sc. in
mathematics, and know Linux, C, C++, Perl and Python well, and could not
get a job. He sent me a code he wrote in Python that displays the
solutions of my fc-solve program graphicall and interactive. I did not
take a thorough look of the code, but the program is working nicely. At
the moment, he moved from New-York to Pennsylvania, has several job
interviews in a week, and spends time working on a Dominoes game for KDE.
Maybe I should match between him and Jonas Luster? (!)

Have Hetz ben Hamo eventually find a job? He certainly knows Linux
in-and-out, but naturally is not a qualified programmer.

At the moment, I'm completely confused. And I'm almost sure there are many
mediocre IT workers who have jobs now. (refer to the Linux-IL thread about
the Israeli web-sites).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: Arik Baratz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 15:16:21 +0200

Shlomi Fish wrote:

[snip]

> UNIX engineers and programms, and encounters some job applicants who are
[snip]

I can attribute from my experience.

I have interviewed a system administrators which (supposedly) knows 
UNIX. As the interview didn't go smoothly, the guy was answering my 
questions without volunteering much information, I decided on a 
different course of action.

I went to the whiteboard, wiped it clean, and started scribbling UNIX 
terms on it, requesting their definition. I scribbled very simple stuff 
- ls, grep, chmod, chown, passwd. Things like that. The interviewee was 
struggling with the simplest of commands, not knowning what a chown was, 
or sort.

I could tell where he got his UNIX experiene - from his first-year 
excercise in the university. This is not system-administrator material. 
I wouldn't have hired such a sysadmin were it the 1998 boom. I prefer 
teaching someone who is passionate about computers from scratch than 
having someone who lies about their skills, and who obvously went to 
university because of the 'high-tech rush'.

-- Arik

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 18:33:24 +0200 (IST)

> university because of the 'high-tech rush'.

You mean he was a University graduate? Of which university? Not that I
expect a graduate of any university to have an adequate knowledge of UNIX.

In any case, with what Luster reported and with Chen's mention of the
Sysadmin UNIX applicant who could not name any shell, it seems that some
people believe they know UNIX more than they actually do, and think it's
enough to work on it. Maybe it's encouraging because it shows that Linux
is no longer a guru-only OS, and some relatively clue-less users can use
it nicely enough.

While I believe my knowledge of UNIX is good, there are some things I
don't know or readily know. Things I don't know:

1. Terminals, ioctl's, /etc/termcap and its ilk.

2. Configuring sendmail. I know a litle qmail (as its current IGLU
configuration) but would not call myself a qmail expert.

3. X Internals and programming with X lib.

4. Debugging GUI code. I tried it with a program I found on the net and
liked a lot, and was unable to resolve the issue I discovered no matter
what I did.

5. I do not thoroughly know Python, Ruby and Tcl.

6. I know about ifconfig and its networking friends. However, I many times
resort to the scripts or front-ends provided in a RH/Mandrake system. I'll
probably be especially clue-less in other UNIXes where these commands may
vary.

7. While I can work with processes, permissions and their friends, I do
not claim to be an expert with the fine points of UNIX' internals as
demonstrated in Steven's book.

8. Super-secure and robust socket programming. All I did was a few clients
and servers in Perl. (and one client/server pair in C for a homework
assignment)

-----

When I started working in Cortext, my supervisor said that it takes 10
years to learn UNIX, and that he expects me to learn it in a month. By the
time I got there, I installed Linux at home but only played with it
superficially. Still, my knowledge and what the others taught and
explained to me there, was enough to get by.

Of course, I was a strange UNIX worker. I wrote my shell scripts in Perl
(in fact, I wrote almost everything in Perl), and I think I could not tell
much difference between the FreeBSD workstation, the SunOs 4.1.3, and the
IRIXes we had there. I was still able to compile and install
source tarballs following the instructions in their readme's.

Only later, when I installed Linux on its dedicated hard-disk and started
seriously experiencing with stuff, I became much more knowledgable.
Mailing lists like Linux-IL also were very helpful in gaining new
knowledge.

My point is that UNIX is so huge, that it takes most people a lot of time
to learn "all" of it. And I doubt there's a UNIX guru somewhere who knows
everything there is to know about it. But I think someone can survive
knowing a relatively small part for it for day-to-day work.

The problem may be that nowadays, there are higher-level abstractions
about it (like KDE, GNOME, linuxconf, the Mandrake Control Center, etc)
that makes doing most mundane tasks GUIishly without using the canonical
tools. So many people start using Linux as if it was Windows.

While this may be bad news for employers who are looking for real UNIX
gurus and I flooded by a lot of point-and-clickers, it is good news
because it means Linux is ready for the desktop, even for Aunt Tillie.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> -- Arik
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---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 18:50:38 +0200

> Do you think the Shlomi Fish of 1997 could still find a job today?

You have to put experience in context.
The Shlomi Fish of 1997 was (and I'm just making up a story here, please don't
flame me too much if I get the facts wrong) a young guy, who did not think too
highly of himself, and his (relatively) little knowledge was consistent with
him being smart (it's not that he learned slowly, he just had only a few years
to learn). So an employer was faced with a cheap smart employee: don't sound
too bad.

But the problem is that "we" (people involved in hiring other people, and for
the last year I'm no longer one of those "we") don't just get "Shlomi Fishes
of 1997" - we also get people who think highly of themselves and demand high
salaries, but know very little.

We got people who've been around computers for several years (e.g., spent the
last 3 years in the Technion's CS department) and yet the amount of knowledge
that has rubbed on them appears to be tiny.

Imagine I talk to someone who has dwelt in computers and had all the resources
(computers, books, network, people) imaginable, and still didn't learn
anything beyond what was spoon-fed to him in class (and even that is
questionable when he comes in with a relatively low GPA). Why should I believe
that in my company this guy will be different? Maybe after 3 more years
he'll work in (say) Linux he still wouldn't know anything I (his boss) did
not explicitly tell him to learn (and it's not hypothetical, I know such
people). Maybe it means this guy is not actually interested in computers,
but is in it only for the money?

Similarly, when you talk to a person who has just finished some course
converting them from another profession to computers, the details are very
important. I've seen, for example, two excellent people, with a biology
degree, that have taken a CS course and successfully switched to computers;
Both of them took serious 1-year courses (tought by Technion professors, and
containing serious CS courses, not just C and HTML), got genuinely interested
in their new profession, and their employers did well on gambling on them.
But you get other people, who tell you how much they hate computers ("I
prefer to work with people"), barely know anything ("Where's 'The Internet'?
Isn't it some building in America?"), and don't care enough to change that.
Nobody wants an employee like that.

Returning to the Shlomi of 1997 for a moment, there is one downside that
prevents some employers from employing "rookies" like you describe, even
if they show a great potential and are very smart. This happens in three
cases:
 1. The company (e.g., start-up) only has plans for the next year. It has
    no use for somebody who will only start really helping the team after
    6 months. It looks for people who can start doing real work NOW, and
    pours money on them.
 2. The company already puts a very high load on the low-level managers or its
    good technical employees. Employing a rookie means more load on the low-
    level managers who'll need to show him the ropes, or on the good
    technical employees who'll need to teach him what he still doesn't know.
    In some situtation, these employees are better off spending that time on
    completing the job.
    I've seen a *very smart* part-time-employee student get fired, for exectly
    this reason.
 3. In some types of job markets, you face a high risk of the rookie bailing
    out on you just when he has finally got enough experience to be truely
    useful. The army has a very simple solution for this problem: sign on
    people for 6 (!) years.
    In the job market of 3 years ago, I even saw a guy leave his job for a
    better paying one, after 2 weeks (!) in the job...

> something impressive to put in his resume/.

Why doesn't he have any experience other than his studies? Did he ever program
for fun, whether free software or just stuff he'd written for himself? Did
he program before he went to the Technion, or program for fun during his
studies?

If the answer to all of that is no, it might mean he came from a poor
family and didn't have time during his studies. But it might also mean that
he's not genuinely interested in computers. Since he can't offer any examples
of his work, why should employers believe that option #2 isn't the truth?

This is why personal connections is the best way to get jobs. A personal
friend of yours knows exactly what you're really worth, and doesn't have
to make guesses based on your previous experience.

> mathematics, and know Linux, C, C++, Perl and Python well, and could not

The guy you describe certainly sounds better than a lot of people who do
find jobs.
Maybe there are other circumstances you don't know. Maybe this guy is
asking for too much money, has other unrealistic expectations, or isn't
as good as you believe. Maybe he's trying at the wrong companies. Or maybe
he has incredibly bad luck.

> in-and-out, but naturally is not a qualified programmer.

I don't want to discuss a specific person (whom I don't know well), so
I'll say something general based on your premise that he is not a
"qualified programmer" (I assume you mean he's not a good programmer,
because there is no 'programming degree' to qualify).

Indeed why should someone who's not a good programmer, and not showing the
potential of being one, be hired to do programming??? 

It's like I'm really crappy in sports. Do you think that if I hang enough
time around soccer fields and in soccer mailing lists, and know the "ins and
outs" of soccer, Maccabbi Haifa will hire me to replace Yaakubo Igabini?
Of course not, I'll have to show some prospects of good soccer-*playing*, not
just interest in soccer-watching and talking about it...

But in the situation about, I might be able to get a job doing soccer-team
PR, or something similar.

> mediocre IT workers who have jobs now. (refer to the Linux-IL thread about

Judging from what goes on around me, the number of mediocre IT workers who
are getting high salaries (not kids who do web sites) is rapidly decreasing,
being replaced by much better (technically) people brought from other
companies. But, again from personal experience, this does not always make
working in such an "improved" company more enjoyable.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Saturday, Jan 4 2003, 2 Shevat 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I started out with nothing... I still
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |have most of it.

---

From: voguemaster <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 21:55:33 +0200

>It's like I'm really crappy in sports. Do you think that if I hang enough

If it were that simple. Sometimes (and this has happened to me) a friend's
colleagues demand to see what you're worth too. A good friend of mine
tried to set me a job at his company but the head of the development team
thought that I didn't have enough experience in programming with DirectX
so they eventually took someone else for the job.

It didn't matter that I had already more than 2 years of experience in programming
(on Linux, but still) and had done some stuff with DirectX. They wanted someone
who knew exactly what to do and needn't be taught anything. So even though
I had a good chance because a friend introduced me, it's not always enough.

Eli

"There's so many different worlds
 So many different suns
 And we have just one world
 But we live in different ones.."
 
 - Dire Straits - "Brothers in Arms"

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 22:16:29 +0200

On Sat, Jan 04, 2003, voguemaster wrote about "Re: [hackers-il] "Lots of bad IT Workers" ?":
>...

It also depends how this friend of yours introduced you. He could have said,

"hey, I know this unemployed guy that I used to play basketball with, that
supposedly knows Linux (or whatever) - maybe you can take a look at his CV?"

and he could have said

"Wow, I know this great Linux (or whatever) person, he's probably one of the
best in his field in the country, and I heard that he's looking for new
opportunities. This guy taught me everything I know! He's exactly what we
need. He's an incredibly smart guy. We must have this guy at any cost!"

Also, there's a difference between you approaching your friends to pass your
CV around (from my experience, these friends, not being HR people, will never
really know what to do with those CVs), and when your friends remember you as
the "really good guy in ..." and they call on you when they hear the company
is looking for that thing you're good in.

That being said, I admit getting contacts through friends doesn't always
work. I had a bad experience like that once, where a friend was eager to
get me to work for his company, but since it was a big company (one of the
biggest hightech companies in Israel) I had to pass through several annoying
layers of managers and interviewers who didn't know anything about me,
standardized tests, and so on - they dragged me for a few weeks until I got
annoyed and told them I wasn't interested any more, and that I had plenty of
other choices at that time.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |      Saturday, Jan 4 2003, 2 Shevat 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |I would give my right arm to be
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |ambidextrous.

---

From: guy keren <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2003 09:33:38 +0200 (IST)

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003, Shlomi Fish wrote:

> Are there still enough jobs for competent IT workers. 

there are - for people with certain types of 'desired' qualifications.

if you have deep knowledge in some wanted area, which has too few good 
people, you're likely to be able to get a job (or choose amongst several 
jobs - depending on how many companies deal with this area).

not all companies are looking for employees - but there are quite a few 
that do. some due to etting larger, and some - in order to replace 
previous employees, who are either too costly (still getting the crazy 
salaries from their contracts from 1999-2000) and/or not good enough to 
keep.

during the bad years (1998-2000) - companies had to accept people for 
unrealistic salaries (mostly in start ups) or accept people who were lousy 
at programming (mostly in large companies, that needed to recruite people 
en-masse). the good thing about those years, is that some wealth was 
spread to a larger group of people (investors lost, certain employees won 
that money - no money was _realy_ lost altogether, except for virtual 
money - it mostly just switched hands).

currently, companies are doing the ugly move, of firing people that cost 
alot, while recruiting people that are now free in the market, with a 
lower salary, and often a better throughput. gone are the days where you 
could see a mediocre programmer becoming a team leader after 1-2 years in 
the field, and similar symptoms.

so, it is still possible to find a job - and even people with very little 
experience can manage to find a job - provided that they are persistent in 
their search (i know someone that took about half a year to find a job 
just now - and almost gave up in the middle) and have some qualificatoins 
that distinguish them from others, and have (or develope) good 
interviewing skills. by the way, even during the crazy years, some people 
found it hard to find a job. at my former company, we got a guy that had a 
2nd degree in some medical area, that did a 'transition course' in sela - 
and it took him about half a year to find a job.

and, yes, _good_ experience counts for quite a lot. it allows you to do 
your work with much less bugs, much less not-understanding the 
requirements, and much less time. thought this is mostly a matter of 
character - a few (rare) people come with the right character to their 
first job. most people gain the require characteristics during them 
gaining work experience, and often because of being exposed to other 
people's methods of working.

p.s. note that when i say 'knowledge in a certain area', i am not talking 
about 'being a very good software engineer'. companies prefer now people 
with real knwoledge with specific technologies and products, and 
often under-estimate good software engineering skills - which IMO are 
harder to aquire, and are rarer. examples? you have good knowledge of the 
linux kernel, and programming for it - you'll easily and quickly get a job 
if you look properly (i.e. not that many companies deal with it to find 
via news paper adds - but enough do relative to the little ammount of 
qualified people). the same goes for linux system programming. the same 
goes to software verification (very few companies realy deal with it - IBM 
And intel to name the two i know of, in israel - but also very few people 
got the proper background for this). the same probably goes to embedded 
systems development in linux, vxworks and few other systems.

thus, i'd suggest you choose an area or two in which you want to become a 
real expert - and start learning them deeply. it'll help you alot.

--
guy

"For world domination - press 1,
 or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2003 09:58:23 +0200 (IST)

> to learn). So an employer was faced with a cheap smart employee: don't sound

This is more or less an accurate description of me than. I got the job by
using contacts: my father was a good friend of that start-up's CEO, and he
recommended they give me an interview. I went to the interview, and they
eventually decided to hire me. I eventually turned out to be their chief
programmer after the main programmer, a strange bird who started playing
computer games all day was fired, and I started doing his job anyways.

> in their new profession,and their employers did well on gambling on them.
> Isn't it some building in America?"), and don't careenough to change that.

True.

> if they show a great potential and are verysmart. This happens in three
> cases:

Understood.

> of his work, why should employers believe that option #2 isn't the truth?

Actually, I think he mainly focused on his studies (Technion students are
given enough programming exercises), and just wanted to have non-computer
related fun (which is OK). Studying in the Electrical Engineering
department is very hard consumes a lot of time and concentration. I
somehow managed to find time to hack on free software, for E-mail
correspondence, reading Linux resources etc. Many times, it is done before
doing homework.

I don't think is family his poor. He seems like middle-class to me. Like I
said, he is a bright kid, and I'm sure he can learn new things if given
the chance. As far as programming is concerned he is higher than the
Shlomi Fish of 1997. As far as Electrical Engineering is concerned it is a
difference of heaven and earth.

Like I said, I recommended he works on open-source projects for the time
being, to gain some experience. Not only can he put something impressive
on his C.V., but he'll also be able to deal with a lot of real-world
situations, code, and hacktivity.

> to make guesses based on your previous experience.

I noticed this myself in several occasions. The only serious job I did not
get out of personal connections was Smart-Link, where I was somehow
invited to a job interview, they were impressed by me, and accepted me. I
did not anyone from there up to this point.

> > mathematics, and know Linux, C, C++, Perland Python well, and could not
>

I don't think he is asking for too much money. At the moment, he is
unemployed and will probably accept any job with a reasonable payment. He
sent me a code he wrote in Python that worked pretty well. I did not look
at the code too closely, but he also did things the hard way, and parsed
the output of fc-solve text-wise. At the moment he's trying at any company
that gives him a job interview.

In the past week-end I was able to get him 3 job opportunities. One of
them may hopefully prove useful.

> PR, or something similar.

Exactly. I think Hetz (judging by the knowledge he shows in the mailing
list) can be a good Q&A person, or a system administrator, or something
like that. Maybe his problem is that he focuses too much on getting the
latest Linux news, instead of learning to program properly.

> working in such an "improved" company more enjoyable.

OK. Web-design is probably not very hard. When I did it I worked on UNIX,
with hand-written HTML and Perl CGI scripts. I suppose learning HTML and
ASP or HTML and PHP or other adequate combination is not that hard either.

One problem my web-publishing company encountered is that we charged for
designing a web-page, which we then hosted on our server, and then kept it
there. I don't know if they charged for extra maintainance, but I suppose
most web-design houses do (and should).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish