Who of IT people in Russia live well (and who will be even better)
It seems that today it has become easier for an IT specialist in Russia to find a job. Last impressions of the Russian labor market: offers with a salary level are significantly higher than the average received by specialists of various profiles and not necessarily highly qualified. Moreover, it seems that for once IT professionals have the opportunity to choose from competitive offers! Candidates without special education and quite mediocre, at the level of amateur, versed in specialized technologies, proudly publish their new positions in social networks - developers, technical support specialists, implementers ...
In addition, stories about low-skilled developers, who nevertheless successfully passed the interview, more and more often appear in the press, and in the course of their work caused great financial damage to the company. So, in 2015, Uber accidentally published the passport data of its drivers, and Google in 2010 suffered a loss of $ 100 million dollars and lost to Oracle for using 11 lines of code without permission. And no longer from the life of giants: when the employer does not understand what the developer does, and the employee himself uses it and overestimates both the complexity of his work and its cost, and subsequently neglects the good faith in the performance of official tasks.
Our interest in these things is far from idle, because for the agency AGIMA, IT professionals are the main production asset. Therefore, the agency’s HR department asked our analysts to put aside Google Analytics, split testing, card sorting and sort out these issues. During the experiment, no analyst and the current project of the company were affected.
Analysts took the matter seriously and conducted a research paper on the topic “How will the requirements for IT specialists change and their level of wages until 2020–21: a forecast based on the Spens model”. In this article we will popularly retell the main premises of this work, its intermediate calculations and final conclusions.
')
Nevertheless, we understand that the article will be read not by analysts and specialists in the field of mathematical statistics, but by job seekers - both in IT departments of companies in the real sector and in organizations providing IT services. Therefore, we will try to uncover the topic as popularly as possible, and at the same time briefly explain what the Spence model is.
This article is not about how to quickly get a good job with a high salary. We only describe the current market situation and the most likely scenario of its development. We do not promise that it will help you get a decent position. This is just a market analytics, and it depends only on you how you can use it for your own benefit.
For our study, we borrowed the Mystery Shopping method from consumer rights oversight organizations and developed its own Mystery Candidate special operation based on it. The purpose of the special operation was not showing a high level of training in the field of informatics and programming, to get an interview in the largest possible number of companies of different profiles both in the real segment and in the IT market, and to get the desired “offer” (job invitation).
The candidate was aware of the latest trends in web development, knew the basic layout tools and could confidently talk about his experience in a professional language. The candidate has compiled a resume for the position of a web developer. The real work experience was six months as a web designer; The declared experience was two years. About seven months were invented along with the name of the company and job descriptions and placed at the end of the resume as the first job with the note “Internship”. Another additional year of work included working on freelancing with examples of sites made in two weeks using various designers, Wordpress and OpenCart.
Total: two sites were real orders, three were simply added from random sources from the Internet, five sites were made on designers and ready-made solutions, three sites did not exist at all, but their invented links were included in the list. Under each link was a detailed description of the work carried out on the site, compiled solely from a compilation of keywords and requirements that were set forth in such vacancies found. Responsibilities at the last job were copied from the requirements for a similar position of a large recruitment agency.
Each link of the site was equipped with utm-tags, and the sites had counters of visits, which later gave interesting statistics: all links were opened by less than 7% of companies, and about a third of companies stopped in their research on the second or third link. The overwhelming majority of the selection experts did not open sites at all. The measure of success of the interview was the lower bracket of wages of 60 thousand rubles. - As the doubled average salary across Moscow. The measure of the success of the information gathering stage was generally to obtain a sample sufficient for analysis using the Spens model.
The shocking details of the “Secret Candidate” special operation - right around the bend, stay with us! (We will also tell about the Spence model.)
To create a sample and analyze the interest of companies in the capabilities of our candidate who is not too sophisticated in technology, we used one of the most popular websites for job search in the field of IT and sent feedback on vacancies in 40 companies. We will not name them here, we just say that all of them are market players, have a turnover of more than $ 12 million a year and have been working on the market for more than five years.
We think you will be interested to know that of these 40 companies:
Only three companies asked for work experience.
Three companies immediately put forward the conditions of the offer.
Two companies conduct entrance tests of candidates.
Only two companies asked to talk about additional education.
Only one company holds a special introductory technical interview lasting several hours.
One company conducts full-time admission tests of candidates.
One company is interested in recommendations from previous jobs.
One company attaches importance to the higher education candidate.
One company conducts interviews in declared foreign languages.
One giant company agreed to hire our candidate for the job!
In order not to make hasty conclusions, we waited another six weeks - catch a fish, big and small. Our patience was rewarded with a total of 120 views of the candidate’s resume and a good dozen invitations for interviews. We learned about three more companies that are interested in the candidate’s experience; about two more, which send candidates entrance test assignments; and one more that is conducting an introductory technical interview. The formation of candidates, paradoxically, seems to excite very few people - the only personnel officer from the original list who nevertheless requested this information apparently outdid it.
And most importantly - we received three more invitations to work. Remember our initial condition about finding a job with wages above 60 thousand rubles? We performed it, literally without hitting the finger - the average proposed wage was 80 thousand rubles.
So, out of 120 employers in the labor market, fifteen immediately (or almost immediately) invite our unremarkable candidate for an interview, and six of them offer him a position in the IT field with a fairly high salary. Now we have enough data to try to figure out how the hiring of IT specialists is arranged from the point of view of the Spens model.
But what is the Spence model - and who is this notorious Spence?
Michael Spence is an American economist, and nowadays he is already a classic. He was the first to set out to find out how, in the conditions of incomplete information about the capabilities of candidates in the market and, as a result, establishing the "market" level of their wages, the employer can learn about the capabilities of the candidate. To this end, he is in his work "Signaling in the labor market" (Spence M. "Job market signaling", Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 87 n.3, 1973) and "Competitive and optimal response to signals: analysis of efficiency and distribution" (Spence M. "Competitive and Optimal Responses to Signals: An Analysis of Efficiency and Distribution", Journal of Economic Theory, 7, 1974) examined how job seekers signal to employers about their productivity.
Such a signal could be information about the level of education, for example, about the duration of the candidate’s study, its intensity (the number of courses completed during the course of study) or the level of education received (the prestige of the diploma).
Further, Spence is a lot of formulas, we omit them. The main thing that we need to know is that according to the Spens model, the employer cannot determine which candidate has a higher performance if the corresponding signals do not come from them.
In order not to get confused, we will decompose Spens’s approach into separate calculations: the most common way to select a candidate from the pool of applicants: the principle of the “second best” is because, simply speaking, the best candidate is too expensive to take. When there are too many low-skilled personnel in the labor market - this is exactly the situation with IT specialists - it is difficult for an employer to select the best candidates. Often you have to choose the "best of the worst."
Low-qualified candidates are given a chance to prove that they are not so bad, and it is not so difficult for them to imitate the high qualifications in the entrance examinations; they have no one to compare them with.
The most important thing in the situation is “working with what we have” - employers are forced not only to offer competitive wages to low-qualified candidates, but also to incur the costs associated with their further education, incl. offering them flexible working hours and reimbursement of training costs, including corporate education.
When a low-skilled employee thus becomes
highly qualified, the employer is forced to retain him, raising him compensation.
Thus, in a market with a predominance of low-skilled labor, employers are forced to work for the future. Low-level candidates use this, and applicants with high qualifications are forced to put up with it. What is even more interesting is that in this situation wages do not become weighted average, employers by default treat all candidates as highly paid. Highly qualified candidates really have to hope that they will be able to move faster up the career ladder or wait for a new equilibrium in the market when it becomes more profitable for employers to hire high-class specialists for high salaries, and “juniors” for moderate ones.
Our task is to have the above sample in hand, analyze the current situation using the Spens model and predict how the market will change with respect to the level of education and wages of IT specialists. In this case, we will rely on Western sources, primarily on the article by Michael J. Lutz, J. Fernando Naveda, James R. Vallino, "Undergraduate Software Engineering: Addressing the Needs of Professional Software Development." Department of Software Engineering Rochester Institute of Technology, 2014. Similar studies, of course, are being done in Russia, but we have the IT direction, unlike the West, is only gaining momentum, and the observed trends repeat American and European trends with a delay of several years old.
As a result of the work, we should get a detailed description of the trends in the influence of education on the choice of candidates and the level of the proposed salary. Omitting the details (related to the achievement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium, if you understand what we are talking about ...) go straight to conclusions - in the future the growth of the level of education of IT specialists and their salaries is inevitable.
On the one hand, universities are releasing more and more programmers and implementers of corporate IT systems, so that employers have a wider choice of candidates for the required vacancies. The company sends its signals to young specialists and today's students through open platforms: forums, webinars, conferences, informal meetings (“meetings”), partnerships with well-known youth brands, educational events. By organizing internships for future graduates, companies choose the best of them and offer them a permanent job, thus obtaining loyal specialists with the necessary qualifications.
On the other hand, the wider the spread of high technologies, the more their fans become - the very low-qualified candidates. Competition at this level will grow, and the best of the "amateurs" will be forced to upgrade their skills - perhaps even receiving a "real" education. Thus, in the next few years - by 2020–21 - the market will be filled with IT specialists.
They write about this and "Vedomosti":
“Now Russian universities produce up to 25,000 specialists, which is not enough to meet the needs of the industry ... Until 2018, the education system must train at least 350,000 IT specialists, of which at least 125,000 are trained in public places ... ", -" The state, planning to increase the number of IT-specialists, deliberately closes its eyes to their professionalism " , Oksana Goncharova," Vedomosti ", 11/24/2014.
So, in the future, the situation of “working with what we have” will come to naught. Experts interested in their development will improve their skills, and not try to talk to the HR manager for an interview. The choice between hiring a low-qualified candidate for the junior position and a highly qualified specialist for a highly paid position will become quite conscious, large companies in Russia have already switched to this type of selection of IT professionals. Smaller companies still have some time to lose good candidates until their recruiters learn how to work better. Specialists of IT specialists will become strictly diversified and structured, there will be an urgent need for experienced CIOs, especially in the field of e-commerce.
And, of course, the situation with the level of interviewing, which our spherical candidate in a vacuum faced, will come to naught. Interviews will take place in several stages, full-time testing of candidates and the decision of certain cases will be not the exception, but the rule.
Perhaps you wonder how a similar situation develops in the United States. Based on the salary survey of IT professionals at The Entry-Level Game Developer Salary Survey, analyzed by Jill Duffy in Game Developer on July 1, 2009 (Vol. 16, Issue 7, 31, 2009) and a study by the Statistical Bureau of the United States Department of Labor "Surveys Report Rising Pay For Web, Internet Professionals" (source: BNA - Bureau of Labor - 2014), we can conclude that the wages of highly qualified developers with a diploma of specialty not lower master's.
Today, employers are willing to close their eyes to the candidate’s level of education, if he has at least some of the required skills - therefore, they lead soft screenings of candidates and incur costs by investing in low-skilled personnel with an eye to the future. Only large companies are ready to strictly select the best of the applicants. For the rest of the employers, highly qualified IT personnel remains valuable employees, and they are forced to improve their working conditions or put up with their transfer to large companies.
However, with increasing interest in high technology, more and more people are knowledgeable in IT, and as a result of their competition, the number of professionals is growing. The selection of IT specialists in the labor market will become more stringent, the average wage level for highly qualified professionals will seriously increase from the prospect of growth to IT managers, and junior specialists will have to be content with base rates - and strive to improve their skills.
Analysts predict the emergence of a large number of technology parks, specialized centers of excellence and labor exchanges. The most desired industries for IT professionals will be e-commerce, web and mobile technologies.
I would also like to see the following in the future for the selection process:
The problem of the selection of technical specialists will be relevant for a very long time. Even if a company manages to find a highly qualified specialist, there is no guarantee that he will fall into a comfortable environment for his professional and career growth. When applying for a job, a candidate’s accompaniment should not end, but should only begin. How our agency Agima manages to select only the best personnel on the market, and why every digital specialist wants to work in the agency team, you can find out on our open door on October 27! Details will soon appear on our facebook page!
In addition, stories about low-skilled developers, who nevertheless successfully passed the interview, more and more often appear in the press, and in the course of their work caused great financial damage to the company. So, in 2015, Uber accidentally published the passport data of its drivers, and Google in 2010 suffered a loss of $ 100 million dollars and lost to Oracle for using 11 lines of code without permission. And no longer from the life of giants: when the employer does not understand what the developer does, and the employee himself uses it and overestimates both the complexity of his work and its cost, and subsequently neglects the good faith in the performance of official tasks.
Our interest in these things is far from idle, because for the agency AGIMA, IT professionals are the main production asset. Therefore, the agency’s HR department asked our analysts to put aside Google Analytics, split testing, card sorting and sort out these issues. During the experiment, no analyst and the current project of the company were affected.
What awaits you in this article
Analysts took the matter seriously and conducted a research paper on the topic “How will the requirements for IT specialists change and their level of wages until 2020–21: a forecast based on the Spens model”. In this article we will popularly retell the main premises of this work, its intermediate calculations and final conclusions.
')
Who is this article for?
Nevertheless, we understand that the article will be read not by analysts and specialists in the field of mathematical statistics, but by job seekers - both in IT departments of companies in the real sector and in organizations providing IT services. Therefore, we will try to uncover the topic as popularly as possible, and at the same time briefly explain what the Spence model is.
Disclaimer
This article is not about how to quickly get a good job with a high salary. We only describe the current market situation and the most likely scenario of its development. We do not promise that it will help you get a decent position. This is just a market analytics, and it depends only on you how you can use it for your own benefit.
Secret candidate
For our study, we borrowed the Mystery Shopping method from consumer rights oversight organizations and developed its own Mystery Candidate special operation based on it. The purpose of the special operation was not showing a high level of training in the field of informatics and programming, to get an interview in the largest possible number of companies of different profiles both in the real segment and in the IT market, and to get the desired “offer” (job invitation).
The candidate was aware of the latest trends in web development, knew the basic layout tools and could confidently talk about his experience in a professional language. The candidate has compiled a resume for the position of a web developer. The real work experience was six months as a web designer; The declared experience was two years. About seven months were invented along with the name of the company and job descriptions and placed at the end of the resume as the first job with the note “Internship”. Another additional year of work included working on freelancing with examples of sites made in two weeks using various designers, Wordpress and OpenCart.
Total: two sites were real orders, three were simply added from random sources from the Internet, five sites were made on designers and ready-made solutions, three sites did not exist at all, but their invented links were included in the list. Under each link was a detailed description of the work carried out on the site, compiled solely from a compilation of keywords and requirements that were set forth in such vacancies found. Responsibilities at the last job were copied from the requirements for a similar position of a large recruitment agency.
Each link of the site was equipped with utm-tags, and the sites had counters of visits, which later gave interesting statistics: all links were opened by less than 7% of companies, and about a third of companies stopped in their research on the second or third link. The overwhelming majority of the selection experts did not open sites at all. The measure of success of the interview was the lower bracket of wages of 60 thousand rubles. - As the doubled average salary across Moscow. The measure of the success of the information gathering stage was generally to obtain a sample sufficient for analysis using the Spens model.
The shocking details of the “Secret Candidate” special operation - right around the bend, stay with us! (We will also tell about the Spence model.)
Sampling (you can’t easily catch a fish from work)
To create a sample and analyze the interest of companies in the capabilities of our candidate who is not too sophisticated in technology, we used one of the most popular websites for job search in the field of IT and sent feedback on vacancies in 40 companies. We will not name them here, we just say that all of them are market players, have a turnover of more than $ 12 million a year and have been working on the market for more than five years.
We think you will be interested to know that of these 40 companies:
3
Only three companies asked for work experience.
Three companies immediately put forward the conditions of the offer.
2
Two companies conduct entrance tests of candidates.
Only two companies asked to talk about additional education.
one
Only one company holds a special introductory technical interview lasting several hours.
One company conducts full-time admission tests of candidates.
One company is interested in recommendations from previous jobs.
One company attaches importance to the higher education candidate.
One company conducts interviews in declared foreign languages.
One giant company agreed to hire our candidate for the job!
In order not to make hasty conclusions, we waited another six weeks - catch a fish, big and small. Our patience was rewarded with a total of 120 views of the candidate’s resume and a good dozen invitations for interviews. We learned about three more companies that are interested in the candidate’s experience; about two more, which send candidates entrance test assignments; and one more that is conducting an introductory technical interview. The formation of candidates, paradoxically, seems to excite very few people - the only personnel officer from the original list who nevertheless requested this information apparently outdid it.
And most importantly - we received three more invitations to work. Remember our initial condition about finding a job with wages above 60 thousand rubles? We performed it, literally without hitting the finger - the average proposed wage was 80 thousand rubles.
So, out of 120 employers in the labor market, fifteen immediately (or almost immediately) invite our unremarkable candidate for an interview, and six of them offer him a position in the IT field with a fairly high salary. Now we have enough data to try to figure out how the hiring of IT specialists is arranged from the point of view of the Spens model.
But what is the Spence model - and who is this notorious Spence?
Model Spence
Michael Spence is an American economist, and nowadays he is already a classic. He was the first to set out to find out how, in the conditions of incomplete information about the capabilities of candidates in the market and, as a result, establishing the "market" level of their wages, the employer can learn about the capabilities of the candidate. To this end, he is in his work "Signaling in the labor market" (Spence M. "Job market signaling", Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 87 n.3, 1973) and "Competitive and optimal response to signals: analysis of efficiency and distribution" (Spence M. "Competitive and Optimal Responses to Signals: An Analysis of Efficiency and Distribution", Journal of Economic Theory, 7, 1974) examined how job seekers signal to employers about their productivity.
Such a signal could be information about the level of education, for example, about the duration of the candidate’s study, its intensity (the number of courses completed during the course of study) or the level of education received (the prestige of the diploma).
Further, Spence is a lot of formulas, we omit them. The main thing that we need to know is that according to the Spens model, the employer cannot determine which candidate has a higher performance if the corresponding signals do not come from them.
In order not to get confused, we will decompose Spens’s approach into separate calculations: the most common way to select a candidate from the pool of applicants: the principle of the “second best” is because, simply speaking, the best candidate is too expensive to take. When there are too many low-skilled personnel in the labor market - this is exactly the situation with IT specialists - it is difficult for an employer to select the best candidates. Often you have to choose the "best of the worst."
Low-qualified candidates are given a chance to prove that they are not so bad, and it is not so difficult for them to imitate the high qualifications in the entrance examinations; they have no one to compare them with.
The most important thing in the situation is “working with what we have” - employers are forced not only to offer competitive wages to low-qualified candidates, but also to incur the costs associated with their further education, incl. offering them flexible working hours and reimbursement of training costs, including corporate education.
When a low-skilled employee thus becomes
highly qualified, the employer is forced to retain him, raising him compensation.
Thus, in a market with a predominance of low-skilled labor, employers are forced to work for the future. Low-level candidates use this, and applicants with high qualifications are forced to put up with it. What is even more interesting is that in this situation wages do not become weighted average, employers by default treat all candidates as highly paid. Highly qualified candidates really have to hope that they will be able to move faster up the career ladder or wait for a new equilibrium in the market when it becomes more profitable for employers to hire high-class specialists for high salaries, and “juniors” for moderate ones.
Our task is to have the above sample in hand, analyze the current situation using the Spens model and predict how the market will change with respect to the level of education and wages of IT specialists. In this case, we will rely on Western sources, primarily on the article by Michael J. Lutz, J. Fernando Naveda, James R. Vallino, "Undergraduate Software Engineering: Addressing the Needs of Professional Software Development." Department of Software Engineering Rochester Institute of Technology, 2014. Similar studies, of course, are being done in Russia, but we have the IT direction, unlike the West, is only gaining momentum, and the observed trends repeat American and European trends with a delay of several years old.
Market outlook
As a result of the work, we should get a detailed description of the trends in the influence of education on the choice of candidates and the level of the proposed salary. Omitting the details (related to the achievement of perfect Bayesian equilibrium, if you understand what we are talking about ...) go straight to conclusions - in the future the growth of the level of education of IT specialists and their salaries is inevitable.
On the one hand, universities are releasing more and more programmers and implementers of corporate IT systems, so that employers have a wider choice of candidates for the required vacancies. The company sends its signals to young specialists and today's students through open platforms: forums, webinars, conferences, informal meetings (“meetings”), partnerships with well-known youth brands, educational events. By organizing internships for future graduates, companies choose the best of them and offer them a permanent job, thus obtaining loyal specialists with the necessary qualifications.
On the other hand, the wider the spread of high technologies, the more their fans become - the very low-qualified candidates. Competition at this level will grow, and the best of the "amateurs" will be forced to upgrade their skills - perhaps even receiving a "real" education. Thus, in the next few years - by 2020–21 - the market will be filled with IT specialists.
They write about this and "Vedomosti":
“Now Russian universities produce up to 25,000 specialists, which is not enough to meet the needs of the industry ... Until 2018, the education system must train at least 350,000 IT specialists, of which at least 125,000 are trained in public places ... ", -" The state, planning to increase the number of IT-specialists, deliberately closes its eyes to their professionalism " , Oksana Goncharova," Vedomosti ", 11/24/2014.
So, in the future, the situation of “working with what we have” will come to naught. Experts interested in their development will improve their skills, and not try to talk to the HR manager for an interview. The choice between hiring a low-qualified candidate for the junior position and a highly qualified specialist for a highly paid position will become quite conscious, large companies in Russia have already switched to this type of selection of IT professionals. Smaller companies still have some time to lose good candidates until their recruiters learn how to work better. Specialists of IT specialists will become strictly diversified and structured, there will be an urgent need for experienced CIOs, especially in the field of e-commerce.
And, of course, the situation with the level of interviewing, which our spherical candidate in a vacuum faced, will come to naught. Interviews will take place in several stages, full-time testing of candidates and the decision of certain cases will be not the exception, but the rule.
Perhaps you wonder how a similar situation develops in the United States. Based on the salary survey of IT professionals at The Entry-Level Game Developer Salary Survey, analyzed by Jill Duffy in Game Developer on July 1, 2009 (Vol. 16, Issue 7, 31, 2009) and a study by the Statistical Bureau of the United States Department of Labor "Surveys Report Rising Pay For Web, Internet Professionals" (source: BNA - Bureau of Labor - 2014), we can conclude that the wages of highly qualified developers with a diploma of specialty not lower master's.
Today, employers are willing to close their eyes to the candidate’s level of education, if he has at least some of the required skills - therefore, they lead soft screenings of candidates and incur costs by investing in low-skilled personnel with an eye to the future. Only large companies are ready to strictly select the best of the applicants. For the rest of the employers, highly qualified IT personnel remains valuable employees, and they are forced to improve their working conditions or put up with their transfer to large companies.
However, with increasing interest in high technology, more and more people are knowledgeable in IT, and as a result of their competition, the number of professionals is growing. The selection of IT specialists in the labor market will become more stringent, the average wage level for highly qualified professionals will seriously increase from the prospect of growth to IT managers, and junior specialists will have to be content with base rates - and strive to improve their skills.
Analysts predict the emergence of a large number of technology parks, specialized centers of excellence and labor exchanges. The most desired industries for IT professionals will be e-commerce, web and mobile technologies.
I would also like to see the following in the future for the selection process:
- conducting a professional technical interview;
- demonstration of confirmed real-life cases;
- verification of most of the information claimed by the candidate;
- passing written or oral technical test tasks;
- mandatory advanced training of specialists in the field of information technology.
The problem of the selection of technical specialists will be relevant for a very long time. Even if a company manages to find a highly qualified specialist, there is no guarantee that he will fall into a comfortable environment for his professional and career growth. When applying for a job, a candidate’s accompaniment should not end, but should only begin. How our agency Agima manages to select only the best personnel on the market, and why every digital specialist wants to work in the agency team, you can find out on our open door on October 27! Details will soon appear on our facebook page!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/339216/
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