IT Inability to Hire Increases
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@scottalanmiller said:
There is a reason why most system admins and DevOps people start their careers in those roles, they don't grow into them. They start as juniors, they don't come from networking, helpdesk or something else.
I guess that is why I am so biased... I started as a help desk type guy, and then landed in a JOAT role for most of my career (single employer for 10 years)... I am used to switching hats more than a few times a day.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
You don't become a DevOps person overnight, but if you need a higher level DevOps guy, promote one you already have... and then bring your Helpdesk guy in as an entry level DevOps guy...
That's still a lateral move.. taking a people person and making them a scripting admin. There is nothing in the one job role that would make them a good candidate for the next. Why take someone good with people and make them do a job that is completely out of their wheelhouse?
You do have a good point, but it doesn't always have to be like that. Offer the promotion to someone who may be comfy with it... If they don't want to move in that direction or you don't have someone comfy with that kind of position, then you can look outside.
I don't like thinking of it as a promotion, it's a move. Promotion implies that system admins are better or higher than helpdesk. They get paid more, but just because they are responsible for more risky systems and have to cover more hours and stuff.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
There is a reason why most system admins and DevOps people start their careers in those roles, they don't grow into them. They start as juniors, they don't come from networking, helpdesk or something else.
I guess that is why I am so biased... I started as a help desk type guy, and then landed in a JOAT role for most of my career (single employer for 10 years)... I am used to switching hats more than a few times a day.
That's a generalist. That's not where the industry hiring issues tend to be located.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
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@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
I honestly never get that. Low end firms, sure. But those firms aren't trying to hire real skills anyway.
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Skills and HR doing the hiring just don't go together. Every firm that needs skilled workers knows this.
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@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"
But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"
But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.
I've never seen anyone hire (or not hire) on certs. Literally, never.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"
But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.
I've never seen anyone hire (or not hire) on certs. Literally, never.
People on Spiceworks are real die had believers in certifications mean you can get a good job with good pay, no matter how many damn threads there are explaining experience is more important in IT than pretty much anything else. That and switching jobs fairly often, another thing most of them are too afraid to do.
This is true really on most IT forums, there tend to be roughly 20% people who have the skills to be in IT and 80% pretty incompetent, and within that I'd say about 10% are dangerously incompetent and will laugh at you if you point you passwords that are "so easy they're impossible to guess" are a bad idea.
I blame schools like ITT Tech, a school which costs almost as much as an Ivy League school but gives you almost no real world knowledge and most companies don't take it as a serious education,; I always throw CVs and résumés with ITT Tech or similar schools in the trash.
Plenty will disagree, even on Spiceworks I've been physically threatened by an ITT Tech student who said he'd kick my ass for saying his education was useless. I say, bring it on, it's still useless.
So now the market is flooded with tons and tons of people who don't know anything and many don't want to learn anything, they think they're smart because their grandmother once praised their computing ability because they changed her video card. You can find these people as the ones who are trying to hang on to VB6 and Windows XP, not due to corporate requirements they cannot control, but because "they're the best!" and they violate every security protocol there is to keep things the old way.
And they drive down the market prices. When I started in this industry even people at entry level made probably at least 3x what they do now. Of course, if you bring this up, there's always the jackass who says "well, I make $80k a year, so everyone else must as well so your facts don't matter!"
Meanwhile nobody's hiring at that even for people with great experience. If you have niche skills most of that 80% avoid (see all of the "I'll never bother with Linux" posts on said forum), and you get lucky, yes maybe you can pull it off, but it's not like it was even 10 years ago, and all of the crappy rip off schools are making it worse, and all of the self-diluted people who think they know everything are also poisoning the well.
The only reason I go to Spiceworks is for that 20% of talented people, I want to help them learn and learn from them, I try to avoid the other 80% who are "experts" on HIPAA but spell it HIPPA every single time.
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The flooding of the market is really causing problems. The market is absolutely full of bodies, but not full of trained or experienced ones. The IT field would benefit from being a lot smaller. So many people working in IT don't actually like IT. There are so many people that the idea that people who excel will bubble to the top doesn't actually work. You can be amazing but your career is over before you have a chance to demonstrate it because all of the managers are the 80% and have no way to know that you are doing well or, more often, do know it and need to crush you to support their own careers.
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@tonyshowoff said:
The only reason I go to Spiceworks is for that 20% of talented people, I want to help them learn and learn from them, I try to avoid the other 80% who are "experts" on HIPAA but spell it HIPPA every single time.
This for me too. I don't claim to know 100% of everything but I do (in my opinion) know a lot of different things from all fields and I do call myself a jack of all trades. I feel I could excel in most fields of IT including Management.
@scottalanmiller said:
You can be amazing but your career is over before you have a chance to demonstrate it because all of the managers are the 80% and have no way to know that you are doing well or, more often, do know it and need to crush you to support their own careers.
I've found everywhere I've worked so far that the IT Manager has ever come from the field, they have been managers in different fields e.g. Accounting, and "promoted" into IT. So I found this in one place and got out quick as the "manager" I felt was holding me back and taking advice from a poor MSP over my recommendations.
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@scottalanmiller said:
The flooding of the market is really causing problems. The market is absolutely full of bodies, but not full of trained or experienced ones.
I can attest to this. I went through an A+ class with an excellent teacher (had us working in software and hardware and he really knew his stuff -- I was just in it for the cert)... At the end of the class, those that had no desire to learn still couldn't tell the difference between USB and PS/2.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The flooding of the market is really causing problems. The market is absolutely full of bodies, but not full of trained or experienced ones.
I can attest to this. I went through an A+ class with an excellent teacher (had us working in software and hardware and he really knew his stuff -- I was just in it for the cert)... At the end of the class, those that had no desire to learn still couldn't tell the difference between USB and PS/2.
I had a similar experience. We had a guy in A+ class (this was in highschool) there the entire semester, couldn't do anything with a computer, still passed the A+ test. Thats when I determined that the cert tests were pretty much worthless since you could just study for the test and have no practical skill to back it up.
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@brianlittlejohn said:
@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The flooding of the market is really causing problems. The market is absolutely full of bodies, but not full of trained or experienced ones.
I can attest to this. I went through an A+ class with an excellent teacher (had us working in software and hardware and he really knew his stuff -- I was just in it for the cert)... At the end of the class, those that had no desire to learn still couldn't tell the difference between USB and PS/2.
I had a similar experience. We had a guy in A+ class (this was in highschool) there the entire semester, couldn't do anything with a computer, still passed the A+ test. Thats when I determined that the cert tests were pretty much worthless since you could just study for the test and have no practical skill to back it up.
The A+ isn't really an IT certification any way so that's not too surprising
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"
But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.
I've never seen anyone hire (or not hire) on certs. Literally, never.
Yep, we don't do worry about them. There not even listed as required, preferred etc on our job postings. We do however not hire a lot of people who had fake/dumb titles for the job they had. Or who only have SMB expirence, in the same job. They of we hire an SMB expirenced only person it's usually at the bottom. Going from SMB to enterprise is basically starting your career over.
We do pay for and give pay increases for both Certs and degrees though. Degrees usually being MBAs for those in IT.
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@hobbit666 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You can be amazing but your career is over before you have a chance to demonstrate it because all of the managers are the 80% and have no way to know that you are doing well or, more often, do know it and need to crush you to support their own careers.
I've found everywhere I've worked so far that the IT Manager has ever come from the field, they have been managers in different fields e.g. Accounting, and "promoted" into IT. So I found this in one place and got out quick as the "manager" I felt was holding me back and taking advice from a poor MSP over my recommendations.
That's normal for IT directors and CIOs not to be from IT fields/backgrounds. They are usually a little bit technical. But they are business management jobs, not IT. Sounds like they just have bad management skills then. The CIO & IT directors are suppose to hire competent people, who they can trust and listen too their input. Because their employees would be the experts on the matter
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Yeah, when I first became an IT Manager, I hadn't worked in IT before.
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@Jason said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@travisdh1 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The IT job market continues to tighten as companies find it harder and harder to find workers with the skills that they need.
Really? Wonder how many HR types would claim I'm not qualified just because I don't have a cert?
Yeah I've never understood that about certifications either. Sure if you work for a Citrix or VMWare or even an MSP who supports such software you want to say "we have certified professionals on staff to assist"
But as a hiring manager who needs someone with proven experience, a cert is just toilet paper when it comes to it. Prove it by doing what you say, not by showing me a piece of paper.
I've never seen anyone hire (or not hire) on certs. Literally, never.
Yep, we don't do worry about them. There not even listed as required, preferred etc on our job postings. We do however not hire a lot of people who had fake/dumb titles for the job they had. Or who only have SMB expirence, in the same job. They of we hire an SMB expirenced only person it's usually at the bottom. Going from SMB to enterprise is basically starting your career over.
We do pay for and give pay increases for both Certs and degrees though. Degrees usually being MBAs for those in IT.
The only place that I find certs useful in the hiring process is that once in a great while they are useful for specifying a target audience. For example... we don't need someone with an RHCE, but an RHCE range of experience. Helps people to know that we don't want skills from outside that scope (or aren't looking for them.)
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@Jason said:
@hobbit666 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You can be amazing but your career is over before you have a chance to demonstrate it because all of the managers are the 80% and have no way to know that you are doing well or, more often, do know it and need to crush you to support their own careers.
I've found everywhere I've worked so far that the IT Manager has ever come from the field, they have been managers in different fields e.g. Accounting, and "promoted" into IT. So I found this in one place and got out quick as the "manager" I felt was holding me back and taking advice from a poor MSP over my recommendations.
That's normal for IT directors and CIOs not to be from IT fields/backgrounds. They are usually a little bit technical. But they are business management jobs, not IT. Sounds like they just have bad management skills then. The CIO & IT directors are suppose to hire competent people, who they can trust and listen too their input. Because their employees would be the experts on the matter
Can't upvote this enough. A CIO is a business role primarily. Should they understand IT, sure. Should they have a clue, of course. But this is department management role, not a technical decision maker role. If you put an IT person there, which you can, they had better have some crazy good business skills and they had better not try to use their IT skills to micromanage or you have a disaster. No competent manager is going to micromanage, that's a newbie entry level management mistake, but bad companies promote bad people.
