Alongside a highway in Kansas City, Missouri, past Dr. Dwight's billboard promising dentures in just 24 hours, there is a large, flashing advertisement for C++ jobs. Movie-goers in California's Silicon Valley can't avoid the giant, smiling engineers who appear on the screen before the previews, inviting you to join their company and become their friend. The Sunday edition of North Carolina's Raleigh News & Observer recently sported more than 200 help-wanted ads for programmers and engineers. And across the country, high-tech job fairs are cropping up faster than Starbucks coffee shops.Euphoric is the only way to describe the high-tech job market these days. Unemployment hit a 24-year low in May, and technology companies are growing and hiring like crazy. A record number of engineers were hired last year, with average salaries in the upper-$40,000 range.
With the job market so good, the $40,000 (or higher) question for aspiring professional programmers is, where do you sign up? And with so many employment opportunities, how do you find the company that fits you best?
College Career Centers
If you're a student, the job will most likely come to you. Career centers at schools like Dartmouth College and Colgate University report that companies are seeking students in droves.
After graduating last May from the University of Waterloo with a bachelor's degree in math and computer science, Greg Burns found his present job at Sybase through Waterloo's Cooperative Education and Career Services department. The University of Waterloo's co-op program requires students to alternate four-month terms of classes with six four-month work terms, matching students with area employers.
Through the co-op program, Burns spent time programming at an insurance firm, a small consulting firm, and Sybase. At the end of his last work term with Sybase, the database vendor offered Burns a job. "I had a couple of months to decide, so I looked at some other jobs," said Burns. "But I liked Sybase, so I accepted the job in February."
Many students, like Burns, take advantage of their school's career services to find their first jobs. Lance Choy, assistant director of career placement at Stanford University, claims that 57 percent of its undergraduates and 66 percent of its master's candidates used the Stanford career center to find jobs.
About 50 of the 350 companies participating in Stanford's on-campus recruiting and interviewing program last year were high-tech companies. According to Choy, these companies tended to be the more established ones. "The companies are very happy to get anyone," said Choy. "They tend to be unhappy that not enough students sign up for interviews; they wish more students would sign up."
Other companies bypass Stanford's on-campus recruiting program, opting instead to browse the career center's books of résumés and contacting students directly. One survey of Stanford students reported that approximately 15 percent had been contacted directly by companies who had seen the students' résumés in this book.
Although Stanford's proximity to Silicon Valley would seem to give it an edge, schools less strategically located are also managing to draw more employers, thanks to a combination of high and low technology. Several colleges, including Montana State University, Allegheny College, and Robert Morris College, have installed on-campus video conferencing centers, allowing vendors to interview students remotely. Other schools have formed consortiums that sponsor local job fairs, so companies can reach students at several schools simultaneously.
Companies, often constrained by both time and money, are finding tools like video recruiting to be useful alternatives to visiting every school. Mike Foster, Intel's corporate college recruiting manager, says that "Because of the huge demand, we've had to broaden our recruiting network. [With video conferencing], we now 'visit' 10 to 20 universities we wouldn't normally visit."
Some companies are eschewing college career centers altogether, going directly to the source. emWare, a startup company based in Salt Lake City, Utah, works closely with students at the University of Utah. In fact, Robert Kessler, last year's acting chair of the University of Utah's computer-science department, sits on emWare's board of directors. According to emWare CEO Mike Nelson, "We've gotten very involved in the educational process at the University of Utah and BYU. We use their students on projects, hire them for part-time work, and we go on to hire some of them for full-time positions. It's a good way to find good people. There are a lot of bright guys there who know lots about Internet stuff."
Taking the Job Search into Your Own Hands
While the number of companies visiting colleges seems to be increasing, their offerings are nevertheless limited. That's why Jeff Rakow, as a Princeton CS student, decided to track down companies on his own. "My basic theory was that the job market was good enough that I didn't really want to be limited by what was available in Career Services. There were a lot of jobs to be had, so the most important thing to me was to find a company that I was really excited about working for."
Rakow spent six weeks reading books and surfing the Web, coming up with a list of 100 companies, eventually narrowing it to 40. After sending résumés to these companies and listening to offers, he decided to work at Connectix, a company in San Mateo, California, that sells utilities and video software. Rakow had originally included Connectix on his list because he had used its RamDoubler software on his Macintosh while in college.
Bill Harper, who graduated last year from the University of Utah, also searched for companies in addition to using his school's career services. "I posted my résumé to CareerMosaic and MonsterBoard, and got responses the next day, which surprised me. In fact, I'm still getting calls, even though I already have a job."
The Internet
Both students like Rakow and Harper and employers are using the Internet as a recruiting tool. A survey by Bernard Hodes Advertising reported that, in 1996, 56 percent of students looked for a job on the Web. CareerMosaic (http://www.careermosaic.com/) and MonsterBoard (http://www.monster.com/) are just two of many web sites that let students post résumés and employers post job listings. Other sites include CareerPath (http://www.careerpath.com/), an online compilation of job listings from major regional newspapers, and JobTrak (http://www.jobtrak.com/), a company that partners with college career centers to allow companies to reach more students and place better targeted job postings.
As an employment resource, the Web goes beyond résumé services like MonsterBoard. Many companies devote large sections of their web sites to recruiting. David Reed, Andersen Consulting's director of recruiting in the Americas, commented, "A large portion of our web site is focused on recruiting in general, and on-campus recruiting specifically." At one point last year, says Reed, the career section of Andersen's web site had one million hits in a single month.
According to Forrester Research, companies will spend $30 million this year for online recruiting alone. Intel's Foster said that the Web is "one of the areas we've spent a lot of time developing. If people want to know more about us, there's lots of info on our web site. We post job opportunities there, and explain how to submit résumés."
Companies are also using the Web to proactively seek qualified students. Reed states, "We use the Web in two ways. One is in the marketing sense. Our web presence shows the opportunities available at Andersen, our clients, what we do. The second way we use the Web is as a sourcing device. We have recruiters surfing the Web looking for résumés at sites like CareerMosaic and MonsterBoard."
Some companies even surf student web pages in search of potential employees. "We have dedicated staff whose job it is to locate students with certain skills," said Foster.
Word of Mouth
Perhaps the best way to get a job in the software industry is via word of mouth. Rakow got one offer from a consulting firm building multimedia kiosks in baseball stadiums. Rakow was offered the job by the wife of a friend, who heard that he was interested in baseball from another one of Rakow's friends.
Rakow's experience was not unusual. While Bill Harper spent six or seven months searching the Internet and exploring his college's career center for opportunities, he ultimately found his job at emWare through a friend. "I had a friend working here, so I talked to him about the company. It just seemed very interesting, and very challenging. It was a small company with lots of opportunity to grow."
In a survey of 801 companies by the American Management Association, 47 percent of the companies polled made heavy use of employee referrals to fill positions, second only to newspaper advertising, which 61 percent of the companies used heavily for recruiting.
Many companies, such as Trilogy, an Austin, Texas-based electronic commerce company, and 3Com, offer employee referral incentives, paying a sum of money to those who refer future employees to the company. Andersen's Reed said, "We find employee referrals important for a number of reasons. First, there's a monetary incentive for our people to refer good people. We work in a team environment, and so our people generally look for good people. Our people know best what makes a good person."
Location, Location, Location
High-tech jobs are by no means limited to Silicon Valley or Massachusetts' Route 128. Various regions-from Austin, Texas, to North Carolina's Research Triangle-have positioned themselves as the next Silicon Valley, and the growth of software companies in these areas seems to support these claims. According to the American Electronics Association, California led the nation in software employment in 1996, followed by Virginia, Massachusetts, Texas, and Michigan.
In Washington, D.C., a consortium has formed to create technology courses and curriculums in area schools, in the attempt to fill an estimated 19,000 technology jobs. Washington state's Puget Sound region has recently seen a growth of software startups, no doubt because of good, local universities and a large software company based in Redmond.
While strong regional growth in the software industry theoretically means more flexibility in choosing location, there are other constraints. College career placement centers tend to be biased to their own region. And students may, in general, be more comfortable working near their schools. Greg Burns, who is now working in Sybase's Ontario location, said, "I was trying to be open, but I liked Waterloo. Location was a factor." Bill Harper also ended up working near his alma mater in Utah. He explored companies in other areas such as Los Angeles, but found that "Los Angeles wasn't very appealing."
Students looking for nonlocal jobs, especially small startups, will most likely have to resort to searching means other than what their colleges provide. However, tools like the Internet and video conferencing will likely improve the regional selection at universities. As Andersen's Reed said, "Geography is less of a barrier."
Once students find jobs in the location of their choice, actually relocating is normally not a difficulty. Most, if not all, medium and large software companies provide relocation packages of one kind or another. While smaller companies may not have a specific relocation package, they will normally provide some type of reimbursement plan.
Supply and Demand
Why so many good opportunities are available almost anywhere in the nation is a simple matter of supply and demand. But is there any reason to believe it will last? The number of college students majoring in CS and engineering started dropping after 1986, probably due to the layoffs in the defense industry towards the end of the Cold War. Back then, Lotus was the world's largest software company, people were programming applications in Pascal, and Microsoft was just another software company.
Since then, the software industry has become the third largest manufacturing industry in the United States, every year growing over twice as fast as the economy as a whole, according to Nathan Associates. The Stanford Computer Industry Project (SCIP) estimates that nearly 190,000 software positions are unfilled today in the U.S. And yet, the number of students receiving bachelors degrees in CS has decreased over 40 percent since 1986, according to the Information Technology Association of America.
This discrepancy in supply and demand has caused many industry groups to predict an upcoming crisis. In reality, the demand for qualified software engineers is probably overstated, especially for college students. Part of the demand is created by engineers moving from one job to another, an expensive proposition for companies, since it takes time and money to train newly hired engineers, even ones with experience. While this phenomenon raises average salaries for all, those newly opened positions are not necessarily available for students just out of college.
Additionally, a significant percentage of the software positions available are in areas where students generally have little, if any, training. According to the SCIP, software publishers-the Microsofts, Oracles, and Intuits of the world-make up the smallest segment of the software industry, with $92 billion of business worldwide. In-house information systems people-SQL, PowerBuilder, and Visual Basic programmers-represent $700 billion of worldwide business a year, and the SCIP estimates that the embedded systems market is probably even larger. And while the Year 2000 dilemma will create jobs with exorbitant consulting fees for 50-year old Cobol programmers, it doesn't create many opportunities for outgoing college students.
Even so, the job market is clearly outstanding even for college students. Intel's Foster noted that "the numbers [of jobs] are so huge, anyone we can find, we hire."
"Several years ago, we couldn't find students who knew anything about compiler design. But that's changed," said Foster. Not only does the market often affect what students are taught, in the case of today's high demand for Internet and multimedia experience, students probably have more experience than those with several years in the workplace.
Why the supply has not met demand is the more difficult question. Stanford's Choy joked, "Maybe it's calculus. Maybe it's CS107. Students might find those courses too difficult. Or maybe it's the thought of being in front of a computer screen for a long time." However, concern over dwindling supply may be overstated as well.
A 1996 survey by the Computer Research Association saw bachelors degrees in CS awarded rise by more than 10 percent, with the number of overall bachelor candidates increasing over 40 percent. Nevertheless, the numbers are still well below the peak 1986 levels, causing some companies to seek help in other countries, such as India and Israel.
While in many regions, job movement is increasing demand and thus, depleting supply, other areas are seeing a quite different effect. In the Silicon Valley, it's not uncommon for many engineers to get offers regularly from other companies. Rakow said, "It's actually amazing. I'm virtually fresh out of college, and I don't know how anybody would have my name from any source, but you get calls, not infrequently. People calling, 'I'm so and so from such and such a company. We're looking to hire engineers.'"
However, companies in other states, such as Washington, Utah, and North Carolina, have good local schools and lower employee turnover. Nelson, of Utah-based emWare, said, "We haven't had a problem finding people with strong engineering and a strong design background."
Also somewhat misleading about the numbers is that surveys define "qualified people" as those with technical degrees. Choy noted that "it's not uncommon for significant number of people [with liberal arts majors] to inquire [about technical jobs]."
Some companies hire substantial numbers of students with nontechnical degrees for technical positions. Andersen Consulting is a notable example. This past year, Andersen hired about 2700 students for technical consulting positions. Of these students, 60 percent had business, economics, or liberal arts degrees.
To prepare its new hires for technical work, Andersen spends substantial amounts of money and time on training. "Our training program mechanism is to bring together all those different backgrounds and to give them the skills they need," Reed said. "Every individual goes through a very rigorous and ongoing training process. We don't just put them through a program for a month and then send them on their way. The ability to learn is one of the things we look for, because technology just doesn't stand still. Even if you know the cutting edge skills right now, those won't be the same in a year." In 1996, Andersen spend $332 million on training, about 6.5 percent of its total revenues.
The Bottom Line
No matter how many surveys you read or how you decide to interpret the numbers, the bottom line is that companies are hiring lots of programmers. "If I were graduating this year, I'd be the happiest person around, because there are so many good opportunities out there," said Reed. "Focus on getting a good education, but don't get hung up on what you major in. Work hard, and do your homework on possible employers."
In the end, job seekers have control over their own destinies. Rakow advised, "The most important things to do is to figure out what you want in a job, what direction you want to be going, and interview the companies. The jobs are there; if you just figure out what you want and go after it, the opportunities are there."
DDJ