Jack's Rants - IT Hiring Chaos – The Strange State of the Tech Job Market

Welcome to Jack Swans, our series of smaller bonus episodes where I discuss recent IT and

security news that has popped up locally and worldwide which might not be the material for

my episode but nevertheless deserves a bit of insight. I am Jack Smith.

Earlier this week I was mingling a bit on an IT networking event and it was one of those rare ones

where you actually have the business site and the IT's guys on one end and also had independent

contractors and people from body shops around with both sides of defense. Both sides came to me

independently to talk and rant about the hiring market and this is a summary of my findings

and what I learned and what people have told me left and right. Currently you could say hardly

anybody gets hired in IT and some major topics were able to be identified. First of all and

actually the one and biggest one, the current economic uncertainties which exist. Long story short,

long-term budgets cannot be put together. First of all there is the cost of everything you don't

know what your transport is going to cost. You don't know what your raw materials are going to cost.

It adds a big and large question mark to what will be available when. On top of that some countries

have imposed import tariffs on the water which are quite volatile. Again, making it very hard to

define what your equipment will cost. Say you want to install a new warehouse with access points

or you want to renew an office with new switches or with new routers. You have no idea what these

are going to cost. You know what they will cost today but you will have no idea what they are

going to cost when they get ordered or paid or delivered two three four months down the line.

Those uncertainties make people just say, eh, we'll wait a bit and see how it goes in six months

and what will happen in six months. Well, there is not a single or very few chipfabs which have

capacity left for the next 18 months because there is this thing called AI in the market which

everybody is jumping on like a madman and if then it's justified or not is not what we're going to

talk about here. But there is no capacity left to make any new chips to make any new hardware. So

again, if you want an access point in those access points are chips. If current stock runs out,

there is no production capacity to make new ones and starting a new fab, new fabrication plant

will take years to become online so you cannot do that. With these uncertainties, business is

trying to save cost. What the contractors and the hiring managers from the body shops mentioned

most and for all is that malls are being merged as a costee where you would have had an SDM

through a delivery manager and a scrum master some pms separately. It is now being thrown into one

big pile. So you have your sdm scrum develops pm in for pm all combined into one which is a

position that basically in large corporations doesn't exist. You would have those four rolls

spread out to over well three or four people and today it needs to be merged into one which is a

different experience to have because you must be a specialist of everything and even a generalist

will have no chance because it might be a very good scrum master but this scrum master might

not be a good sdm or have you experienced in it so therefore it is a hard thing to find merged

in those profiles. Same story in the support world I had a guy that had to interview for an IT

and help us cleat and do a third line support on some application ownership at the same time

and it would have been a plus if he could also take on the role as the service delivery manager

for a few applications and departments towards the business which is not something that is very

common and not something that you can easily pull out of your head not even when there is a

white rabbit in there and then from mainly some contractors that I spoke over there across the

field it was both from business pms IT pms developers onto architects security guys whatever you want

so if they do get an interview it's really hard because then what you have across the table

it's been described to me as statler and Waldorf from the Muppet show and they are really in their

tower in the big city and have no feeling with the local production facility so this is more of

course in a blue color environment but there is no feeling with the technical side it is

like your in a tv show where you have to answer the correct buzzwords and then when the bell

things you get to advance to the next round your experience and your way of working is absolutely

not important you just have to tick all the theoretical boxes to fit into the framework that was

acquired from some expensive consultants maybe recently or a few years ago but anyway they are

stuck it if you do have a technical person in the interview from the employer side quite often

they don't really have a say or don't have that as to say and I ask the same questions on the

business side like hey like you know mr statler mr Waldorf if you interview for any position

what's it like for you what do you and first and foremost it well we cannot find profiles we

are looking for which is logical because they are as we said a bit earlier they are throwing

everything together onto one big pile good luck finding a delivery manager a scram master a

DevOps PM and infra PM in one or same thing good luck finding your IT lead hellabdesk lead

third line support doing some delivery management on the site really good freaking luck with that one

so they are stuck and then of course and then if they do find a good candidate that matches the job

they are more or less forced to go with the one that has the lowest cost which does not guarantee you

the best profile and even then approval to get everything hired and get every contact and every

PO if it is an external resource that just take forever and then from that is why from there on

almost nobody gets hired as well some guys were there that I knew for not a few years or even

a few decades and when they took me aside they were asking me is this my fault as in are they

at fault itself or not getting any reaction out there and no I don't think it it is it is not

the the contract is fault it is what the market is right now if there are any job postings and you

submit something there is any reaction or hardly any reaction and also any contract that goes on

the market and now I'm talking a bit more about the freelance market but bullish shops can also

apply for these two agencies you will see contracts being opened and closed and opened and closed

on the fly with nobody getting hired you will see a scrum master position come out on the market

and you have to put in your candidacy in the next two weeks after one week you'll see it has been

closed it has been vanished from the publication website to be reopened one week later without any

comment or any change but you have to resubmit your candidacy to it it gets closed again and then

comes back two days later and then you just only have to be not just a scrum master but also

a devils person and a devils PM and a delivery manager there is absolutely zero consistency in there

and then if somebody does get hired you see after three months after six months you see the same

positions coming out back on the market again and again and again so either the poster gives up

and doesn't find anyone or somebody does get hired and because of all the things being pushed

and at the lowest budget well sadly you know if you pay peanuts you know what you will get they hire

the wrong profile or somebody that is completely overwhelmed or was very good in talking his

her their way through the interview but once you get into the driving seat it doesn't work and

they just after three months well don't don't come back in tomorrow yeah it is also what is

been going on and then we've touched it a bit earlier the elephant in the room is AI at fault

because it's really easy to just to point to AI as I know it's it's it's AI that is at fault

it that's why nobody is getting hired well yes and no a few months ago there was in the local

news was a local professor made a very good statement saying that everybody is writing their resumes

with AI AI checks them and as a result nobody gets hired and this then goes into I think it's a

famous quote now from an IBM training manual from the late 70s that you cannot hold a computer

accountable therefore it should not be used to make an actual decision and that is what you see

here certainly on the HR level is that all kinds of toolkits if you want to call them AI yes or no

I leave it in the middle they are making decisions okay I do understand that you get 100 125

resumes in for a position you have to do a check but it is a blind check just looking for some

keywords and if you are really 100% checking on the key was existing yes or no well yeah people will

start plastering their resumes with keywords in the hope that they just get picked plus if you're

not having the right search because you don't know what you're looking for or you're putting

everything together you will not get the right candidates to pop up anyway another quote from

more of a scientific podcaster comedian whatever good guys I call it leave a share looking

up he made a quote that AI is an excellent intern and it does a lot of work but you have to

verify and validate everything that it does to make sure that it is correct and that is where again

we are today in conclusion to this rant are there contracts right now being put out well yeah not

much let's be honest about that it is a very very difficult market but there is work and companies

actually want to hire but they don't get the budget approved or they are forced to go with a lower

budget and then get basically not a good match in whatever they are looking for and of course

in the end AI is not helping this was Jack Smith have a nice day

the content of this podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only and is meant to

humorously explore various tech related situations any resemblance to actual events or real

persons living or dead is purely coincidental you ridicule situations never individuals or groups

listener discretion is advised and we encourage everyone to approach technology with a sense of

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