IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs While the tech sector job losses ticker has clocked up a global body count of 150,000 so far for 2023, those looking to hire IT staff are not out of the woods yet, according to Gartner. The market watcher has found demand for technology talent still significantly exceeds supply. According to a Gartner survey of around 18,000 …
A chap in my office uses Dreamweaver, has done since he started here in 1999.
I can't honestly tell you he's wrong for doing it either. It looks alright, and I had forgot about the built in FTP client. That was such a time saver back in the day, and for users like him it still is.
Now you need to spin up Kubernetes cluster with at least 5 nodes, setup CI/CD pipeline and once you hit git push, 10 minutes later you'll see the button you edited is now centred.
I can't believe how people could live in the past with those ancient tools like FTP, where you could just click upload and the page got updated instantly.
It's funny because it's almost true.
I mean, you wouldn't really have a k8s cluster for front end web development, and if you did you'd probably have a local Docker Desktop or K3s running on your laptop, but still. That's not funny.
I don't yet do PHP writing often enough to prod me to do something about it, but the write, upload, test, cycle does get a bit annoying, especially when I forget the upload bit and wonder why my edit hasn't made any changes. Plain HTML is so much simpler, edit, refresh, edit, refresh, don't need no steeking online access. ;)
If you're using PHP to do something local, such as a backend to a form that's only running on the content, you can set up a local HTTP server with PHP pretty easily. This gets more complex if you also have other components, such as a database which you'd have to clone or a cluster you have to interact with. Depending on your server, you could mount the directory on your local machine and do all the editing directly on the remote files such that saving is as good as uploading, but this depends on having enough access to set it up for the server concerned.
"A chap in my office uses Dreamweaver, has done since he started here in 1999."
I used Dreamweaver a lot in the early 2000s. I used it mostly as a code editor rather than for its WYSIWYG editing, and that built in FTP client was sooo useful.
Later I moved to a kubuntu machine, and found something that was similar, but not quite as good. Can't recall what it called now, but it was good enough for what I needed. I recently looked around for such a thing, but couldn't remember the name and didn't find anything that looked familiar. Anyone have any suggestions as to what it might have been?
These days, my need to make web pages is rare and simple enough that I can hand crank the code in VS Code. I was amused to note, while looking up some syntax, that YouTube is awash with very recent tutorials on how to hand code web pages - you know, like we used to in the 90s, with a txt editor and an FTP client. Suddenly everything old is new again:)
I felt so grown up when I discovered BlueFish, not having the WYSIWYG editor that Dreamweaver had, having to rely on my own mind to picture what I'm doing before I tried it out.
Internet speeds have gone so silly no one has to think about keeping the website compact. If you go on to any Trinity Mirror website you'll see what the internet has become. Full of adverts and pop ups which regularly crash my iPhone when you go to visit.
One day we'll have a new movement, going back to basics and less of the bloated JS and video shit that ruins the internet. One day, one day.
More people should use Dreamweaver. The old Dreamweaver. Pre-Adobe.
Far too many websites are crufty bollocks. Designers need to learn how to optimize websites... again.
The old Dreamweaver also had a very handy feature: it would check your HTML and optimize it for you and also highlight bad script. And it did CSS (may it rest in hell) better than most others.
Combined with Fireworks, it was a very efficient production pipeline.
RIP Macromedia. Screw you straight to hell, Adobe.
Using Dreamweaver is fine if it gets the job done. I have an older 2D CAD app on my Mac that I know extremely well so if I need to draft up something quickly, I'll use it rather than firing up Solidworks. There are many things that don't need a full 3D model but just a print to hand to the machinist. The same goes for a web site or just about anything. Time is always a big expense so an older tool that somebody knows well is just the ticket.
Meanwhile, employers should consider seeking out so-called passive candidates who are not necessarily looking to move, Schoen told us.
Given all the new bessie mates I'm accumulating on LinkedIn this has been going on for quite a while now and if HR departments are only starting now they're late to the party.
"The labor shortage is real."
Seems like. But recruiting is also still pretty broken.
E.g. I regularly get multiple contacts (email, vmail, linkedin, sometimes indeed) from headhunter types for the same datacenter ops gig. Sometimes different recruiters from the same search firm, sometimes from the same recruiter. Many of them are fronting for international consulting companies (you know the ones) so the wages are often low-ball terrible, no benefits, maybe not even a real job opening behind the post, just collecting resumes. You hope for an actual company with a job req behind it all, but no guarantees.
I imagine many of these are widespread headhunter contact attempts, scattered to the four winds in hopes of getting a couple of return inquiries. I can only guess at the hit rate.
Now granted, I'm inviting (or at least permitting) most of this, because my linkedin profile is public and tagged "open to work", I've had public resumes for years, etc.
But most of the first contact I get is simply not very good.
If you are struggling to hire, it means you are not offering enough dinero.
Sin dinero = sin trabajo
Sure you are going to cry crocodile tears to the government, so that they'll loosen the immigration policy so that you can lure in poor souls from 3rd world countries to work their bottoms off for your next private jet.
But we know what you are.
I saw a recent job ad that started with a long list of technologies the candidate would need 3+ years of experience using in a corporate environment, and ended with "this position will suit a new graduate looking to get a start in the IT world".
Yes, really.
Oh, also reporting to two different managers.
"long list of technologies the candidate would need 3+ years of experience using in a corporate environment, and ended with "this position will suit a new graduate looking to get a start in the IT world".
We seek a convicing liar - was Theranos looking to replace Ms Holmes who I understand is taking an enforced sabbatical?
"If you are struggling to hire, it means you are not offering enough dinero."
That's a biggie and so is a poor HR department. When I was out looking I saw so many job postings that made not sense. Many of them had a couple of paragraphs of business buzzwords and one sentence describing the job and even that one sentence was very ambiguous. Spelling? Obviously HR workers didn't take a degree in English (or how to use a spell checker). I was telling the truth on my resume for a while until I figured out that it was a mistake. The company wanted somebody with Catia experience and I had listed Solidworks (same publisher and very similar products with Catia having more backend functions). A department manager would know this but not HR so if the ad wanted Catia experience, I tailored a resume to show lots and lots of it.
Location can be a big problem. I'd never take a job in Silicon Valley. The cost of living is outrageous, the traffic is horrible and the community is very one dimensional. I get a couple of emails from recruiters every day for jobs in cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. Neither are very attractive places to relocate to from where I am now sitting in a home that's paid off while I contemplate buying the vacant lot next to me to build a workshop/garage/studio. Pay, location, professional satisfaction, benefits and a diversity of non-work activities. It might be odd of me, but I'd like a good description of the job before I tender an application (that will wind up in digital oblivion). If there is any mention of diversity, inclusion and that sort of wank, I'm out. I want to work with a company that's focused on making the best products or providing the best services, not accommodating everybody with an agenda. Silicon Valley Bank had a manager for that sort of thing but strangely nobody in the role of Risk Manager.
I wonder how many people who left google are just like the guys sitting on the roof at Hulu (in Silicon Valley) who are basically just kept on because the company got too much VC money. Likewise at Google and Microsoft, when times are good they probably employ a whole bunch of people who don't actually produce very much.
So, that doesn't really help IT department, as they can't use people like that (who might have superb skills in diversity, equity and inclusivity, and setting up policies, sending out useless emails, and putting up flags for the latest thing)
"Every company has the useless twats in every department."
True enough but up until now whole departments composed entirely of useless twats have evolved within organisations that really should have known better.
As enterprises so encumbered face new economic realities a good many of these albatrosses will be tossed overboard in their entirety.
"There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth....and you yourselves thrust out." KJV
Denying resources to the competition by overhiring does happen. But sometimes it's merely that the company has the money, and they have no coherent internal product management or strategy, so they've started far too many projects than can actually be finished or brought to market.
>Likewise at Google and Microsoft, when times are good they probably employ a whole bunch of people who don't actually produce very much.
Not necessarily a fault.
You might employ a Linus, or Bjarne or Guido even if they don't check in any code - to attract other star employees.
You might hire people because you are planning on moving into a new area and are "building a bench" or you might be snapping up all the experts in a field to stop a competitor.
Microsoft research is widely believed to be a way of keeping down a lot of possible disruptive startup ideas. Famously "if only we had managed to hire a couple of Stamford grad students and paid them to research page ranking algorithms - without them doing anything"
Also "useless waste of space" and "bullshit jobs" are synonymous. You can have morons working in vital departments and geniuses working as patent clerks
It's not moving too fast, just that the garbage is piling up.
i.e. why does the newest version of X require more mouse clicks/keyboard commands than before, for the same result? And why are they more obscure than ever?
The tech is being piled on for no noticeable improvements. Which is entirely backwards. Less cruft, better results is the goal.
So I don't blame you. It's a free-for-all and not in the good way. More like a barroom brawl.
Having made that mid-life transfer - although that was into IT - I can endorse the idea of a mid-career change. However, in my case the trick was to have built up the skills for the second career as a side-line in the first. If you've worked in IT in some particular industry review your experience of that industry. Have you picked up sufficient knowledge of that to transfer out of IT into a wider business role?
I've spent 30 years with a CompSci degree and decades of coding experience working in building and construction while trying to get coding work, which people refuse to employ me doing explicitly because I have spent time avoiding starving, while coding in my own time for my own interests. "But you're current job is an electrician, why are you applying for a job as a programmer?" "Because I *AM* a programmer!"
This is the problem I'm seeing. The industry feels like a diode.
The 'tech' bandwagon is running at full speed and everyone wants to jump on. You see jewellery restorers and nurses "learning to code" or taking the CAPSLOCK course, you also see people fresh out of OxDurBridge with their degrees in Mesopotamian Basket Weaving & Cantonese Linguistics, who take a bootcamp and land themselves in a Backend Engineer position in the City or "Senior Partner Cloud Architecture Practice" with no hands-on experience whatsoever at a Big4. All by age 25.
But people who were already in the tech industry can't seem to get out. If you spent ten years writing Python or fiddling with Kubernetes, you can't have that Digital Marketing, HR, policing, or heating engineer role even if you genuinely do want to.
Got a friend in this exact position right now and he basically says don't study tech courses at degree level, kids. You can all too easily up in a pigeonhole and find everyone on the outside can have your job with generic qualifications, but you can't have their old jobs with your CS qualifications.
So back when I wor a lad, and computers were fun, the advice was to do physics/maths/engineering not CS cos you could pick up that programming stuff yourself anyway
Then there was dot-com boom and everyone did CS cos it was an automatic job.
Then everyone had a CS degree so we only hired physics/maths/engineering people cos they hadn't just done CS for a job
Then nobody did CS cos you couldn't get a job
Now everyone does english/PPE/classics and a bootcamp - and we still only hire physics/maths/engineering who've learned programming stuff themselves.
Ladies/Gentlemen/AIs - that's the history of CS degree job prospects since the 80s
"So back when I wor a lad, and computers were fun, the advice was to do physics/maths/engineering not CS cos you could pick up that programming stuff yourself anyway."
I wish wish wish wish my Careers Advice Tutor (or anybody really) had known that and told me that in the mid-1980s. I and my friends had been "doing computing" for half a decade, to us writing programs and plugging in hardware and talking to it and getting different computers to talk to each other was "doing computing", so naturally upon going to university I applied for "Computing" courses. Only to get there and for three years wonder "when are we going to do some, yknow, *actual* computing?" When what I didn't realise was that "computing" is "driving a car" not "automotive engineering". And certainly the careers advice staff were completely out of their depth. With six years of designing and building computer hardware and software, and three summer jobs doing same, my careers advice was "go into local government admin".
Confession: So am I, and I'm taking a pay cut to do it.
Working in IT in the public sector has been a drain. There's no money and no progression. I could leave for corporate IT, but I think I'd rather shoot myself.
The most rewarding parts of my job has just been the helping people part, so last year I went for a number of interviews in the charity sector, training myself and making the case for transferrable skills. I just got a job that's 1k less than I'm on now, but a whole new career in helping homeless people, leaving IT entirely.
When you offer peanuts below NMW, expect non EU nationals to be imported to work on the BLACK.
I Wouldn't be surprised if MODIS International (Belgium office) is up to it again offering £5/hr (or less) for rollout, support or developer vacancies and offer them lodging with deductions from the peanuts offered. ( i caught them out with this fiasco some years ago for a local Council 5000 seat IT rollout, trying to recruit in Eastern Europe and Indian subcontinent)
Maybe, just maybe, those being let go from the "big tech firms" weren't the highly skilled, highly motivated people we are led to believe. Maybe they were not producing the quality work and were just the bloat the big companies could afford to carry. (Seems Twitter is running just fine without the bloat!)
And maybe, just maybe, having Google, FaceBook, Amazon, Twitter, etc. listed as your previous employer isn't the golden ticket some think. Maybe, just maybe, the woke, snowflake, bovine excrement that's gone on at said "big tech firms" by their employees isn't something other companies want from their new employees!
Remember, put those "preferred pronouns" on your resume (CV to you right pondians) and watch those offers NOT arrive!
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