Labor Market Notes
Often, articles about the labor market in IT are reduced to clarifying the relationship between applicants who “can’t do anything” and employers who “can’t give anything to a valuable specialist”. This post is a happy exception, since in it I would like to share with the community my observations on job search, and not to look for the right and the guilty.
IT differs from other industries in a chronic lack of specialists, a high entrance threshold, high salaries and, as a result, a high cost of mistakes from both job seekers and employers, this is the first rule.
Even if you have already left the previous place of work, this is not a reason to be nervous and grab the first sentence as a lifeline. We are engineers, we have a calculator, so let's calculate: when you get a new job you plan to stay on it for at least a couple of years, right? Two years is 24 months, therefore even if it takes you a month to find a job and this month you will find a job where your skills and experience will be at least 5% more useful for the company and will be 5% better paid, this will be meaning and your efforts will pay off. This simple arithmetic works the better, the higher the level, and also is valid for employers. From the first rule follows the second.
We work in the industry and on projects where the most unexpected and unimaginable changes are possible, caused by both external and internal reasons, and your working conditions can change as quickly as requirements change, therefore just like any competent developer foresees and is ready to for the craziest requirements, he should be ready for a change of project. Personal finance planning should be treated as carefully and carefully as you think about architecture in order not to lose balance in the event of unforeseen circumstances and to achieve good results in the long term.
')
Having started looking for a job, I was faced with a not very pleasant fact - in order to at least just refresh my knowledge of the technologies indicated in my resume, I had to read about three thousand pages of technical literature. However, even more unpleasant observation was that employers still ask at interviews what the difference between a clustered and non-clustered index (I will explain: this is as obvious as the difference between a chair and a stool), and for example about fashionable things like the same REST, about the features of the architecture of cloud applications, or at least in general terms about MVC (we, dotnetchikov, MVC is still considered to be extremely stylish, fashionable, youth) have never been asked at all. Therefore, to some extent, this advice can be considered useless, however, if you have a desire to honestly enter a new project with fresh skills, think carefully about when exactly you will be doing all this, since it may take a lot of time.
Returning to the money issues, I would also like to comment on a common misconception about indexation and recalculation of salaries. If you once received X rubles, and inflation during your work in the company was Y, this is not a reason to indicate the sum X * Y in the summary. First, consumer inflation is a rise in prices for goods and services and, strictly speaking, the employer is not obliged to pay you extra for the fact that bread costs more today than yesterday, and a new bubble is blowing up in the panel box market that the employee is in a hurry to finance. However, the good news is that we live in a developing country, where wage growth is on average higher than inflation, so when you multiply X * Y, you are most likely doing this at a loss. By the way, my attempts to find historical information about the growth of real wages specifically in IT and specifically in my city were not crowned with success, although it would be interesting, especially in the context of technology. Secondly, when the applicant comes in for an interview, he offers quite specific expertise, which can be demanded in a particular project, and is completely unnecessary, and given the wide range of tasks solved in our industry, the number of possible tools for solving these problems also the skills of a single IT specialist, it turns out that statistics is not our method. Hence the conclusion: it is impossible to accurately calculate the new salary based on the old one.
Despite the fact that any analyst will tell you that IT and Telecom are financially stable industries with low volatility and blah blah blah, it seems that both global recessions and booms in the economy and seasonal factors affect the labor market and IT specialists no worse than others. If you sign up for job postings, you will very soon notice that there is some benefit in looking for a job in spring or autumn, and in summer and in winter, for example, to rest and not think about a change of job, if only because employers have summer too everyone is on vacation and there is nobody to mess with you. Yes, this advice is captaincy, but I decided to leave it here for those who for some reason do not yet know about it, for example, for juniors.
Having mentioned the juniors, I remembered how my career began. While still a student, I once was politely sent to wait when they call me back, but I got out, offering to master the necessary technologies on my own. The guys sent me a list of what needs to be read, gave me links to Training Kits, and after a few weeks they gladly accepted me to work - before that they were just too lazy to mess with the junior, but I was too lazy to deal with something before I had confidence that it would be useful in my work. From this story we can conclude: it is never harmful to try to understand the employer. For example, it is worthwhile to rationally treat such a phenomenon as HR, which offer you not the most suitable options. Think about where they come from - maybe the fact is that in the resume you wrote that five years ago you worked with something to which you are offered to return now? It is necessary to focus on what you are interested in, and describe the old experience briefly. And if you are called and offered a job clearly below your level - check the price tag, maybe it is understated and HR classifies you according to it. There may be many similar situations, but each of them is quite amenable to analysis.
I have it all, but if you also have some observations that you could share, welcome to the comments.
IT differs from other industries in a chronic lack of specialists, a high entrance threshold, high salaries and, as a result, a high cost of mistakes from both job seekers and employers, this is the first rule.
It makes no sense to hurry
Even if you have already left the previous place of work, this is not a reason to be nervous and grab the first sentence as a lifeline. We are engineers, we have a calculator, so let's calculate: when you get a new job you plan to stay on it for at least a couple of years, right? Two years is 24 months, therefore even if it takes you a month to find a job and this month you will find a job where your skills and experience will be at least 5% more useful for the company and will be 5% better paid, this will be meaning and your efforts will pay off. This simple arithmetic works the better, the higher the level, and also is valid for employers. From the first rule follows the second.
Need to be ready for anything
We work in the industry and on projects where the most unexpected and unimaginable changes are possible, caused by both external and internal reasons, and your working conditions can change as quickly as requirements change, therefore just like any competent developer foresees and is ready to for the craziest requirements, he should be ready for a change of project. Personal finance planning should be treated as carefully and carefully as you think about architecture in order not to lose balance in the event of unforeseen circumstances and to achieve good results in the long term.
')
Refresh your knowledge beforehand.
Having started looking for a job, I was faced with a not very pleasant fact - in order to at least just refresh my knowledge of the technologies indicated in my resume, I had to read about three thousand pages of technical literature. However, even more unpleasant observation was that employers still ask at interviews what the difference between a clustered and non-clustered index (I will explain: this is as obvious as the difference between a chair and a stool), and for example about fashionable things like the same REST, about the features of the architecture of cloud applications, or at least in general terms about MVC (we, dotnetchikov, MVC is still considered to be extremely stylish, fashionable, youth) have never been asked at all. Therefore, to some extent, this advice can be considered useless, however, if you have a desire to honestly enter a new project with fresh skills, think carefully about when exactly you will be doing all this, since it may take a lot of time.
Inflation is not the same as wage growth
Returning to the money issues, I would also like to comment on a common misconception about indexation and recalculation of salaries. If you once received X rubles, and inflation during your work in the company was Y, this is not a reason to indicate the sum X * Y in the summary. First, consumer inflation is a rise in prices for goods and services and, strictly speaking, the employer is not obliged to pay you extra for the fact that bread costs more today than yesterday, and a new bubble is blowing up in the panel box market that the employee is in a hurry to finance. However, the good news is that we live in a developing country, where wage growth is on average higher than inflation, so when you multiply X * Y, you are most likely doing this at a loss. By the way, my attempts to find historical information about the growth of real wages specifically in IT and specifically in my city were not crowned with success, although it would be interesting, especially in the context of technology. Secondly, when the applicant comes in for an interview, he offers quite specific expertise, which can be demanded in a particular project, and is completely unnecessary, and given the wide range of tasks solved in our industry, the number of possible tools for solving these problems also the skills of a single IT specialist, it turns out that statistics is not our method. Hence the conclusion: it is impossible to accurately calculate the new salary based on the old one.
Caution, seasonality
Despite the fact that any analyst will tell you that IT and Telecom are financially stable industries with low volatility and blah blah blah, it seems that both global recessions and booms in the economy and seasonal factors affect the labor market and IT specialists no worse than others. If you sign up for job postings, you will very soon notice that there is some benefit in looking for a job in spring or autumn, and in summer and in winter, for example, to rest and not think about a change of job, if only because employers have summer too everyone is on vacation and there is nobody to mess with you. Yes, this advice is captaincy, but I decided to leave it here for those who for some reason do not yet know about it, for example, for juniors.
It is worth trying to understand the employer
Having mentioned the juniors, I remembered how my career began. While still a student, I once was politely sent to wait when they call me back, but I got out, offering to master the necessary technologies on my own. The guys sent me a list of what needs to be read, gave me links to Training Kits, and after a few weeks they gladly accepted me to work - before that they were just too lazy to mess with the junior, but I was too lazy to deal with something before I had confidence that it would be useful in my work. From this story we can conclude: it is never harmful to try to understand the employer. For example, it is worthwhile to rationally treat such a phenomenon as HR, which offer you not the most suitable options. Think about where they come from - maybe the fact is that in the resume you wrote that five years ago you worked with something to which you are offered to return now? It is necessary to focus on what you are interested in, and describe the old experience briefly. And if you are called and offered a job clearly below your level - check the price tag, maybe it is understated and HR classifies you according to it. There may be many similar situations, but each of them is quite amenable to analysis.
I have it all, but if you also have some observations that you could share, welcome to the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/285560/
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