Why technical professionals can’t find employment

Dear Bob …

I’m writing in response to your Advice Line post, “A Cobol programmer with a seven-year employment gap,” (11/2/2008):

“What to do when you can’t find the job you want and haven’t been able to for far too long… Unrealistic performance expectations, and insistence on inappropriately high levels of qualification on the part of applicants. This seems like an unlikely interpretation.”

I’d go along with you if I hadn’t run across so many anecdotal and documented cases of people getting attaboys and glowing reviews one day and being dumped the next, of engineers laid off in 1990 still out of work in 1998, and so on.

At some point, the “you must just not be a very good employee” argument falls flat.

And it’s not just the COBOL and Fortran programmers, the OS/360 and SCOPE dinosaurs. It’s also the software architects; data-base architects; system and network administrators; PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, and Objective-C software engineers; and heavy metal engineers who were presenting papers at national and international conferences one day, and pariah the next. Even the president of the ASPE was caught by surprise by the destruction of US STEM workers’ opportunities.

Of course, the standard response is that “You should just train yourself more. Go to the juco.” (given even by Alan Greenspan) which overlooks the fact that experienced programmers/analysts/software engineers have already generally mastered the baby courses offered at the juco, and some of us have resorted to teaching such classes to the many cheap foreign guest-wrkers being brought in, as a survival job. But, more important, it ignores the fact that a long-term unemployed software engineer isn’t likely to have the funds for tuition, fees, text-books and transportation. At the same time, shifts in the tax structure and inflation have severely eaten into the tax breaks which used to encourage executives to invest in flying in US citizen candidates for interviews, relocating US citizen candidates, and educating and training US citizen employees (including new-hires).

“The industry [executives have] made it clear. [They are] not interested in re-training the current work-force, which is likely adequate for its needs. No, it wants fresh bodies, preferably young or beholden ones willing to accept entry-level wages for long hours and who are either burdened with few family obligations or willing to pass them over… for the most part, companies are unwilling to re-train experienced programmers to fill available slots…”

Margie Wylie “Signal 2 Noise” _CNET_ http://www.kermitrose.com/econ1998.html#19980204

And the guest-workers are apparently unable or unwilling to keep the “comments” section of InfoWorld in operating order.

– Disagree strongly

Dear Disagree …

It’s like this: Rightly or wrongly, in the United States, labor is treated as a marketplace. It’s subject to the laws of supply and demand, and the customer is always right.

Since I try to avoid recommending solutions that require legislation, and also try to avoid moralizing in my writing, I recommend courses of action based on this being how the world works right now.

People are products in the employment marketplace. If someone can’t find a job, that means for one reason or another that person isn’t a competitive product. The problem might be marketing, packaging, pricing, or a perceived lack of quality. Whatever it is, this is no different from any other marketplace — it’s up to the seller to package, price and market a product people want to buy.

A failure to do so with automobiles is why GM is on the verge of destitution. A failure to do so is also, by definition, why some technical professionals find themselves without employment.

It isn’t that I don’t sympathize. It’s that my form of sympathizing involves an attempt to refocus their attention — away from all the reasons someone else needs to do something differently, to thinking through what they need to do differently.

Oh, in case you’re interested, InfoWorld’s Comments system is provided by a third party. To the extent it’s unsatisfactory and InfoWorld is culpable, the problem is with due diligence, not systems administration.

– Bob