Andrej A lot of what you say rings true to me - I have extracted your name and forwarded it to a good contact in IndustryNZ who is interested (professionally) in employment issues. Cheers Sue
-----Original Message----- From: Andrej Falout [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 31 March 2003 09:31 To: Canterbury Software Email Forum Subject: RE: [csforum] Are we going to let this one get away? > Hi Carol and Andrej Hello Sue, WARNING: this is a relatively long and relatively personally flavored rambling, you might want to skip it if you don't like this sort of thing...or are short on time... or dislike ramblings :-) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: (gotta have one) Lack of established and open job market is hurting everyone in Canterbury IT industry equally. Employers, recruiters and job seekers should get together to create IT job market. (See? I did not mention government, not once!) > I talked to a guy like this this week but he'd only been here 8 weeks. I > suggested he contact you guys via the CS website/forum, also Michael Miller. > I also said much the same as Andrej (but without your great numbers). It > seems people advertise when there's a statutory need to do so or the company > is specifically looking for overseas recruits. Advertise where? When I was looking for a job last time, practically all offered "jobs" on company web sites where several months or more old - and even if there where newer they had distinct "we are not really looking for anyone in particular, but we had to have Jobs section on our web site because everyone else does" feeling about them. "The Press"? Now that I would like to see... maybe I gave up too soon (after a month or so) but I distinctly remember seeing 1 (one) IT related add in that period of time. I read Computerworld and InfoTech Weekly errr... weekly, for over 3 years, and if you see more then one job a month advertised there for Christchurch, this is a reason for big excitement. Only large recruiting agency that I ever seen advertise any jobs in CHC methodically, was "advertising" exactly the same add for about 2 years, via monster.co.nz and couple of times in Computer world. Ironically, long list of skills in this add matched almost 80% of my skills, and when I persistently asked how can it happen that they advertise for 2 years need for same skill set, but I can't even get an interview, they finally organized the "interview". I was "interviewed" by people that received crippled version of my CV (recruiter that did it would probably call it "adding the value"), that did not know for which position they are "interviewing" me for, because "actual person supposed to do the interview called in sick today". So after a 10 minute chat about the weather, I left. Next day I was told by the agency that "they are not interested in me at the moment". I responded with "This is ridiculous!", and the recruiter in cold blood asked me "What is ridiculous?". The add that was posted every 2-3 weeks for 2 years, was never posted again. Now I wonder... Do you? Why am I spending my time writing about this? Because this is a big problem for IT industry here, which I'm part of. Which we are part of. Even more so of the problem then for job seekers. Trust me, for the caliber of people we are discussing here, finding a job in unnamed country not so far away will be very easy, IT recession or not, if they are not greedy. And they are very unlikely to be, if they are looking for a job in Christchurch, New Zealand. They can probably just go to AKL for that matter. They would obviously prefer to find something - if not anything (including cooking in the example that started this discussion), but they can't. We had them on the silver plate. We let them go. It's not only a shame, it will cost us all. Now I wonder, what would happen if I lost my job, and walked straight into "Work and Income" office. Would they help me find a job, as they would in most countries? How would they do it, for someone like me, almost 20 years of IT experience, hopelessly overqualified, and only think I know how to do is IT. Nobody advertises jobs, no obligation to file available positions, no job market whatsoever. Maybe someone should pick up the phone and call them, see if they have statistics for unemployed IT workers. One can talk on and on about IT related initiatives, government support, targets and goals, but if IT job marked is not created here, in Christchurch, this will just not happen in my opinion. Competition on internal level is needed to create industry that can compete on external (international) market. Companies capable of succeeding on this markets, that are not rooted in environments that create industry competition internally, are exceptions in every single global industry - software, mobile phones, shoes, cars, vine... Some of the crucial elements in negotiations between countries scheduled to join EU is free trade, free capital flow, and free workforce flow. Now try to imagine the last one without the job markets and associated infrastructure. Only people that represent the best on the global level are capable of producing the best on the global level. How exactly would I find such a person without interviewing tens if not more candidates for each job? How would you attract this candidates, if 90% of the jobs never get advertised? "Word of mouth solutions" is a slogan of RealContacts. Not to say they don't have a place in job market, but think about where would a global capitalism be if it relied only on "word of mouth" and where would US economy be without mobility of it's work force. To start with, Silicon Wally would never be created. People are what makes a company, and for an IT company, when you remove chairs and computers, it is only people that make a company. I was working in IT industry in at least 10 countries, but have never seen situation like this, with possible exception of southern Spain. I have also never seen so many people in wrong paces - not necessarily incompetent people, but in wrong places. BA's trying to do support, sysadms doing DBA's work, team leaders acting as software designers... results where usually half baked, everyone was getting frustrated, but everyone also kept quiet - knowing how hard would it be to find the job that is the right match for there skills and ambitions. Or even worse, any job at all. About half of this kind of people I met since arriving in CHC are no longer here - some of them very capable man and woman. Some can say, "money", but I say it was much more then that. One of them, a wonderful person and big talent, hard worker, a man called Geoff, a true Kiwi spirit guy born here, fishing, BBQ's and all, left CHC and New Zealand simply because he felt his career is not going anywhere. He looked high and low for years, inside his company and under every rock in Christchurch to find a way to lift his career on the next level, get out of the mud he got stuck in, and failed. It is not that there was no opportunities for him here, he just could not find them. Probably some team leader was hired to do software design work, instead of Geoff - based on the "Word of mouth solutions" methodology. "Hey John, grab a beer, I need a software guy?". "Sure Bob, I know one, have another one, I'll tell him to call you tomorrow." Sounds familiar? "It's how we do things around here, son." I often tell people asking about my "salary expectations" that if they give me that elusive "right" job, I'll do it for free. Hell, I'll pay them to let me do it. Ok, I really like my job, but there are many people out there same as me, especially in places like CHC - you can be reasonably sure they are not here for the money. The rest already left. All we need to find the right places and right jobs for this people, and to do it we need a job market. There is no doubt in my mind that unless a job market is created in Christchurch, IT as an industry will not go anywhere - but competent and skilled people will. We need to mobilize recruitment agencies, as well as employers. We need to get employers to abandon the "Word of mouth solutions" as a primary method, and we need to get recruiters to put an effort in building a market here for there services. CS can play a crucial part in this process - we need to get people together. Advertising available jobs should become a rule, not an exception. We also need a central place for this, untill proper jobs market is created. BTW, am I the only one that tried to use "jobs" link on top of the Canterbury Software web site: http://www.canterburysoftware.org.nz/spis/runisa.dll?SV:CSTechJobsAvailable I'm not sure what "SPIS Site Automation Services" is all about, but I see no mention of word "job" there... I staid in CHC by accident more then anything - I was already half packed and ready to go home. So we hear this story again and again - and it's affecting even more people with a lot of experience and wide range of skills. To say I heard "over-skilled" phrase more times then "interview" would be understatement of the year. I had no problem doing work on offer, so why did they? I got a 3 month contract in AU, manager there said "We have no problem with you being over skilled, if you don't, come do the work". So why are Kiwis short-changing themselves all the time? No matter what we might think about http://realcontacts.com it strikes me as very appropriate that there idea was born in Christchurch .... Good luck to them, I say. But we need much more, and we really need it now. > ICT is such a wide field now - do we know which skills are in scarce supply? Hard to say - and with 90% of needed skills not even advertised, we will probably never know. We might think this or that, but with so many people in wrong places, it is not uncommon to find a guy with 10 years of DBA experience doing coding, in company stating it needs a good DBA. We can look to AKL and WEL for answers, but it's not the same thing. AKL gets a lot of imported "Java Programmers" and ".NET programmers with 10 years of commercial experience". Don't laugh, miracles do happen! WEL has a lot of "IT managers" that used to be used car salesman. Given the speed of change in IT technology in general, and by definition the small size of IT companies in CHC, I guess "fast learners" are in scarce supply here. > It seems to me the Poly's are turning out 'website developers' a dime a > dozen. Are these really scarce skills? There are 'website developers', and then there are 'website developers', as with any skill. With current emphasis on cutting IT budgets, 'website developers' often do a work 'website developers' should be doing - but managers just don't have a choice. This created an illusion that there are a lot of 'website developers' looking for a job - just as there where a lot of 'Java programmers' looking for a job a year or two ago, and before that 'ERP consultants', and before that 'Y2K consultants'... all the way back to 'desktop publishing' and 'Visual basic' people... Job seekers are very flexible - they tend to be exactly what you are looking for. Finding out who exactly are they, is another exercise completely. I recently had a experience working with one person, presented to me as an 'website developer'. The person had actually developed a simple web site for one Christchurch company. When presented with CMS based web site, and stripped of drag-n-drop point-n-click tools, this person showed the real extent of 'website developers' skills. Is this person a 'website developer'? Maybe, for someone. Was this work/position ever advertised? Guess... > I know there's a shortage of > imbedded code developers and hardware/software overlap people. What else? "hardware/software overlap people" are a separate issue. I would probably be one. Problem is that mostly companies making hardware are looking for this kind of people, but are highly skeptical (and I don't really blame them - there is a big difference in attitude here) about people with strong software background. It is not necessarily the skill they are after, it is mostly the experience, and they tend to jump over every CV that don't include high percentage of HW work in last year or two. They won't admit it in most cases, but what they are really looking for is a hardware person that is comfortable with software. If they would be willing to look at people that don't fit in this pigeon whole, they might find lot more people to talk to. My guess that embedded skills are also exaggerated by lack of correct targeting. Embedded software and hardware platform market consolidated dramatically in recent years, and is now largely divided between embedded Linux variants and Windows CE/Embedded 2002. Increases in capacity (CPU, memory, available tools) created situation where RT programming is not really needed in 98% of applications, and this also applies to machine code (assembler) programming. Not sure about Windows background folks, but I would say that every UNIX developer that ever ported code to a different CPU would be capable of doing today's "embedded" code development in no time. Well, if you read all this, I guess you are interested in this subjects. So why not write a line or two for others to know what you think? Or if you prefer, you can send it to me directly. Cheers, Yours, Andrej Falout, http://falout.org/disclaimer.html Project manager, Aubit project: http://aubit4gl.sf.net Software architect, http://maketxt.com/ PLEASE NOTE: All HTML email sent to me WILL BE DELETED AUTOMATICALLY WITHOUT READING. > Cheers Sue > > -----Original Message----- > From: Carol Webb [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: 27 March 2003 17:03 > To: Canterbury Software Email Forum > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [csforum] Are we going to let this one get away? > > > Did anyone not see the story in Tuesday's Press about the extremely well > qualified and experienced American website developer who has been looking > for work here for eight months and is now packing his bags to return home > with his skills? > > Homeward bound > 25 March 2003 > Where are all the IT jobs in Christchurch? Will Harvie talks to an American > web developer who is preparing to back his bags and head home after having > no luck jobhunting. > See the full story here: > http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2355956a28,00.html > > and if you have an opening, or know of someone who does, please email him > asap. > > He's Aaron Parkening mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Thanks in anticipation > > Carol Webb > WebbWords > 32 Lindsay St > St Albans > Christchurch > Tel: 03 377-6402 > E-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Website: http://www.globe.net.nz/~carol > > > > > > --> via Canterbury Software email forum: Success through Connections > Email your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Searchable list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Leave or rejoin the list: http://canterburysoftware.org.nz/forum.htm > > > > > > --> via Canterbury Software email forum: Success through Connections > Email your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Searchable list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Leave or rejoin the list: http://canterburysoftware.org.nz/forum.htm > > --> via Canterbury Software email forum: Success through Connections Email your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Searchable list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Leave or rejoin the list: http://canterburysoftware.org.nz/forum.htm --> via Canterbury Software email forum: Success through Connections Email your messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Searchable list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Leave or rejoin the list: http://canterburysoftware.org.nz/forum.htm
