At my current employer, I am the round One interview. I don’t negotiate or care about salary. I just talk about .NET. I have 20 standard questions I ask each and every person, then I throw in a few question specific to their resume.
Now keep in mind these aren’t hard questions to answer.
What is the difference between session state and viewstate?
What is the life cycle of an ASP.NET page?
I don’t go into these interviews looking for a person to know every one of the answers, but there are a few that I consider critical. I just want to measure their depth and breadth of knowledge of the .NET framework. What I’ve come to realize is finding talent is hard. So when I browsed to FoxNews.com and saw this article, I know exactly what they are talking about. You’d think with unemployment hovering around 10% that talented people would be available.
Then when you do find somebody worth hiring, its not a done deal. Due to the extremely tight market when you find a developer you want, you are battling with other companies. Even meeting salary expectations isn’t enough, because of the market the employee can pick and choose which company they want to work for, with little risk of letting a good opportunity pass them by.
Now just so this post isn’t one big rant I want to throw my thoughts out on a few aspects of this topic.
What does this mean for companies?
1. It means you need to be willing to pay top dollar. This isn’t a market where you can negotiate down a persons salary. If they say it is going to take 80K to get them on board, then you need to be prepared to pay 80K.
2. It means you better pay the employees you have. I’m new to my job, and while money was far from the primary or only factor, it was a factor. Companies need to pay the employees they don’t want to lose top dollar. This, surprisingly, isn’t a market where a 5% raise guarantees an employee sticking around.
3. The cost of development has gone up. The out-sourcing movement has had its affect on the market and there is no India to turn to to drive cost down. Talented workers are expensive workers.
What can be done about it?
1. Training must be encouraged. As the previous article stated in another way, you aren’t going to take the factory worker and plug them into these jobs. People like me have been constantly learning for years to get to where we are. They need to understand that just because they were a lead worker on their factory line, they will have to be the follower in their new line of work.
2. Government incentives. I think this is a place where a focused tax benefit could come in handy. Give companies a significant tax break for hiring entry level workers for these positions. It cost money to train them and their newbie mistakes cost money. Give companies a reason to hire relatively new people.
3. College for all. Yep, the small government Republican just said that. We need to find a way to get more people into college. We can’t compete if we don’t have the skills to compete.
What does this mean for the worker?
1. Don’t be afraid to look around. One of the big causes of the tight job market is that people are afraid to switch jobs. I’ve never been one to play into this fear much. I know that with some risk comes reward.
2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money. Lets be real here when I say, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter.
3. Stay up to date on your skills. This is why there is an allusion of age discrimination in the IT field. People get comfortable in what they are doing and when technology moves on, they can’t find a job when they need one.
With all of that being said, my employer is still looking to hire several .NET developers. If you are interested contact me and let me know. Going through me, does offer some incentive as I do get a referral bonus. Not that I’d take it any easier on you in the phone interview, but it sure does make me like you more :-).
[Referenced article in PDF form]