Trends in High-Tech Hiring Practices

Technical Skills Are in Demand

The charts I present show the demand growth rates for skills -- not the total number of positions available. For example, if there was a demand for six Eiffel software engineers at the start of May and a demand for 12 at the end of July, then demand for Eiffel skills increased 100 percent. On the other hand, if during the same period the demand for Java software engineers increased from 5000 to 6000, then the growth rate is only 20 percent. Negative growth rates indicate shrinkage in demand for that skill.

In developing these charts, I've made a number of assumptions. First, the trend lines have been treated as linear. Also, this sample is representative of the job market in general. Lastly, we know that hot topics like Linux and Java have nonlinear growth rates, but for this short a time period, a linear assumption provides a good estimate.

Figure 1(a), for instance, shows that jobs for PL/1, Cobol, and SmallTalk programmers are losing ground as demand for them dwindles. On the other hand, demand is growing fastest for XML/HTML, Eiffel, Perl, and Java developers.

Figure 1(b) illustrates the normalized demand for each language. Here, the market growth/shrinkage is multiplied by the proportion of the market the language has. At the moment, more opportunities abound in Java and C/C++ than in any other language.

Figure 2(a) shows that the growth rate for Linux skills is outstripping demand for any other platform. Meanwhile, demand is up for skills on all major platforms. (Both UNIX and Macintosh trends are based on regression calculations, not on actual figures.)

In Figure 2(b), it appears as if the current demand for Windows NT, and Windows in general, far outweighs any other platform. However, Solaris and Linux both make a respectable showing. Especially since the latter has only recently received a lot of media attention. (Both UNIX and Macintosh normalized demands are based on regression calculations, not on actual figures.)

Figure 3(a) illustrates the changing demand in different technologies. The growth rate is greatest for ASIC-, database, CORBA-, and Internet-related skill sets. Internet-related skills are defined as positions listing Internet, Java, HTML, DHML, or XML in their job listings.

Finally, Figure 3(b) shows that the greatest demand is in Internet-related technologies. Database skills come in a respectable second. While the first is no surprise, the fact that database skills are in high demand may be.

On the Management Front

It is no secret that, in all business areas, outsourcing is becoming a way of life. Companies are doing this so that they can concentrate on their "core competencies" and become more efficient. All other functions are being farmed out to contracting organizations. This includes human resources, payroll, system maintenance, operations, and most low-tech jobs. Labor and tax laws also make contracting as an individual activity more and more difficult. Firms do not want the potential liability of hiring independent contractors, so they buffer themselves by using outsourcing agencies as much as possible. In many high-tech firms, contract staff compose 14 to 40 percent of the work force. Because many companies are hesitant to reveal exact outsourcing figures, these estimates are probably low. Also, the outsourcing trend will grow. In the future, expect it to exceed 70 percent of the operating staff at many companies. Only the timeframe is in doubt.

Outsourcing also tends to turn contract staff into commodities. Because companies are using outsourcing for noncritical tasks, the outsourcing agencies are looking for skilled workers who give reliable and consistent results. To avoid employment liability, companies also may only keep contract staff for a short period and expect the outsourcing firm to supply replacements on a regular basis. This employment by the numbers also destroys any concept of company loyalty and the idea of commitment to a goal. More and more contractors will treat the job as a 9-to-5 experience.

Outsourcing is not necessarily bad for individual contractors. People working for outsourcing companies get more varied experience and higher basic compensation than their directly employed counterparts. Contractors also get their marketing done for them by outsourcing firms, and contractors do not need to spend significant amounts of time finding the next contract nor dealing with the complex sales aspect of selling their services.

In Marketing

Marketing makes the world aware of your products and the potential solutions that your products and services offer the customer. To do that, marketing tries to find out what customers want. There are many ways of doing this, but the growth of the Internet has added new dimensions to this effort. It is now possible to get tens of thousands of potential customers interested, where before marketing was limited to dealing with hundreds at most. It used to take weeks, even months, to find out what was happening. It is now possible to get useful information in hours or in a day or two. Given that marketing has found out what is needed, they then want to sell it on the Web using e-commerce. This will affect the basic technology we use and how we use it. Massive system rewrites will occur -- not in the sense of modifying code, but in creating new systems to replace old ones. The new systems will also be expected to have greater functionality, interoperability, flexibility, efficiency, and reliability.

Marketing may be the first to see the business opportunity for these new systems, but expect the company to increase the pressure on its IT staff so that the company can stay competitive. To deal with the explosive growth that the Internet brings, best-of-breed software will be purchased and deployed. So, besides needing to garner and improve your overall programming skills, expect to be trained in new externally developed products that your company will purchase/ lease.

Hiring Efficiency

Job seekers are using the Internet more and middlemen less. At the same time, those hiring are becoming inundated with information and résumés. Both parties are also going nationwide using the Internet. Decisions on interviewing and hiring are speeding up -- in more and more cases, you will hear in 1-2 days if you are in the pool of eligible candidates or not. The first interview is also likely to be a telephone interview. These trends are happening in many high-tech industries, not just computing. As Bruce Hatz, Hewlett-Packard Corporate Staffing Manager said, "Rapid response to qualified applicants is a competitive advantage." Thus, the question becomes "Are you a qualified candidate?"

The ideal candidate is a self-motivated, self-starting, team player who has just done exactly the desired job successfully in a closely related business -- preferably at the competition (if those hiring you can avoid a lawsuit). Such a candidate is ideal because they are the ultimate in efficiency: no training, immediate utilization, highly recommended (by the competition), and no wasted effort on the part of the hiring manager trying to balance various tradeoffs. They are worth even more than they were getting before because they shorten and simplify the hiring cycle, degrade the competition's competitive advantage, and add to the hiring manager's reputation for attracting new people.

Unfortunately, there never was nor ever will be an ideal candidate as described earlier. Any new employee is initially inefficient: The new company's culture differs from the old one; the new team takes time to integrate any new team member; and the new firm's processes and procedures differ from the old firm's way of doing things. It will take any new employee three to six months to integrate and become a part of any effective working group. Also, consider this: If the new person has done the same job at his previous employer, then he may not bring any new approaches. Remember that this person was hired because he didn't rock the boat -- he was supposed to be plug-n-play.

We are constantly faced with the tradeoff between short and long term goals, between geeks up on the latest and greatest technology and those with a broader vision gained through experience. There is a place for both, but there are more slots for geeks than there are for the person with the vision that experience brings. You can deduce this from the fact that there is only one CEO at a company, but many individual contributors. So where does someone with broad experience go? My recommendation is into middle management, project management, and mentoring. Or as one CEO of a rapidly expanding startup said, the older managers provide adult supervision for the younger employees.

Middle management is currently a dirty word, but newer high-tech companies now face a dilemma. They have few management levels and the manager at each level tries to manage more and more people. Industrial psychology and organizational dynamics studies show that the ideal small group size is 7 +/- 2 people (Miller's Law). Graicunas' Law states that relationships increase exponentially with the number of people managed. Thus, a department larger than 150-200 people becomes unmanageable. A department of 200 needs to be broken up into 20-30 teams. Each team uses a team or project leader. A possible management hierarchy could be one department head, 4-5 assistant department heads, 25-30 project leaders, and 164-170 individual contributors.

Prepare Yourself

Here are a number of things you can do to actively manage your career:

• Learn at least one new skill per year and use it so that the experience is real.
• Network inside and outside your normal environment. Volunteer for something that interests you.

• Be opportunistic. Learn about what is hot and what is not.

• Find a mentor, be a mentor.

• If you are transitioning up the organization, keep your skills set current for the type of team you are managing -- don't give up your day job.

• Keep your résumé as current as possible. List skill sets, responsibilities, and projects as you work on them.

• Be prepared to contract with an outsourcing agency -- this means keeping your skills current.

Here are some things to avoid:

• Working all hours. Better you should "get a life."
• Becoming complacent about your skills, position, or network.

• Believing any job is permanent.

• Being so self centered that you find yourself often working alone.

Conclusion

You know that change is coming. Be prepared. Train yourself, remain flexible, and network like mad. Treat the changes that do come as opportunities to see new vistas and, lastly, enjoy the journey.

Acknowledgment

This article would not have been possible without the assistance of Walter Cheney, SPHR, a true human-resource professional. His help in researching organizational laws was immensely rewarding.

References

Cordella, Antonio and Kai A. Simon. "The Impact of Informational Technology on Transaction and Coordination Cost," Proceedings of IRIS 20, 1997.

Gulick, Luther and Lyndall Urwick (editors) Papers on the Science of Administration, Institute of Public Administration, 1937.

DDJ