While attending Software Development 98 (SD '98) in San Francisco last spring, the most striking thing to me was not the technology -- it was the practices for hiring new employees. Hiring managers from various firms gave me different stories and contrasting images of what they consider a good employee. These views were also very regionally dependent: The ideal candidate for one east coast company was not the same as for another midwestern company; and the hiring practices of both companies were quite different from those used in the Silicon Valley.
East coast recruiters were looking for well-rounded team players. Such people would have the required general background and good interpersonal skills to make them a good fit for the corporate environment that abounds back East. Big corporations have a stable, well-defined culture with well-structured hiring practices, predefined career paths, and generous educational allowances. In contrast, smaller east coast companies have more limited career development paths, little or no educational allowances, and dedicated software departments are virtually nonexistent, the usual defense being that a small company cannot afford the overhead. For both large and small east coast companies, compensation usually includes 401(K) plans, health and dental benefits, and a cost of living increment for those working in the bigger cities.
An interesting exception is Reliable Software Technologies, a small, rapidly growing east coast company that has had tremendous success attracting and keeping employees. A major key to its success is being a laid-back west coast company on the east coast. The company has over 40 technical people and hasn't lost a single one in over five years. RST doesn't pay finder's fees or use ads. It finds bright people through contacts among its current employees and through faculty contacts at the local colleges. Jeffery Payne, RST's president, feels that its success is due to its philosophy of hiring problem solvers without regard to specific skill sets. Based on a long-term view, RST can afford to train its people. Jeffery also feels that going through the training process is important to RST's long-term health and expansion.
Midwest recruiters also look for well-rounded team players that have the general background and good interpersonal skills. Big corporations are fewer in the Midwest, and the ones that do exist differ in a number of ways from their counterparts in the East. There is more emphasis on professional development and more involvement expected on a personal level. They tend to view an employee as a whole person rather than just a cog.
Smaller midwestern companies try to develop the skills of their staffs and improve the software-development process to a larger degree than their east coast compatriots do. However, the margin for error is narrower in the Midwest, since their economic pool is smaller. This makes them ruthless at meeting project expectations on time and on budget. All the personal stuff is out the window if you can't carry your weight and produce.
Compensation includes those previously mentioned for east coast companies. Many companies also offer educational incentives for study in related fields.
The west coast in general -- and the Silicon Valley in particular -- is different from both the East and Midwest. The pressure to produce software products is so immense that it distorts all considerations. Hiring here is usually done based on specific skills. A person's ability to fit into a corporate culture is far less important. To be sure, there is a culture at most companies, but the three-month product life cycle takes precedence. If you can survive the pressure, you quickly become one of the "old timers" and fit in. The Valley hires mainly from those already in the Valley or from recent college graduates. In many cases, a Ph.D. is preferred. Many employees job hop between projects. The average employment period with any one company is two to three years and shrinking. It seems that a product's life cycle is the determining factor.
When it comes to software professionals, it seems as if there are two major classes of individuals in the Silicon Valley: Those who are entrepreneurial, and those who want a more stable environment. Startups and the gamble of immense riches excite the entrepreneur. However, once they have gone through half a dozen startups over the course of a few years, even the risk-takers may want more stability in their lives. They then evolve into the second class of individual.
What difference does the employer see? The entrepreneurial type of employee will work nights and weekends to get the product out, often at the expense of his or her personal life. This seemingly boundless energy particularly appeals to companies trying to get the first or next major product out the door soon.
The potential for immense wealth is what drives most of the entrepreneurial types. This, in turn, defines the compensation package that needs to be offered. Thus, stock options in startups are a major factor.
A hiring manager's job is to hire the needed and desired people. Excuses are not tolerated when the company needs personnel and isn't getting them. More than one hiring manager has called it "a war out there." Thus, hiring managers are offering better and more varied incentives, and taking on less-desirable candidates in the hope that they will work out.
It has been estimated that soon more than half of all new employees in Silicon Valley will have been educated outside the U.S. The demand for talented and skilled individuals has broken down most barriers. This includes race, religion, gender, country of origin, and weirdness. If you can code and know the employer's immediate application area, then you're in. I asked some ill-chosen leading questions about the viability of exporting the expertise we have developed here to places abroad. None of the employment managers I spoke to would hear of it: They needed the skills here now. If necessary and practical, they would work with or create subsidiaries abroad to fulfill their needs. Even more than money, skills are transportable and skills know no particular border. To fuel the explosive expansion of technology in the U.S. (and particularly in the Silicon Valley), many companies sponsor immigrants with the needed talents. Technology is too strategically important to the U.S. for any bureaucratic problems to be allowed to interfere. (At this writing, the U.S. government doubled the legal immigration limits for those with the needed high-technology skills.)
These discussions lead us to lament the U.S. educational system's lack of preparation for the coming years. It is the consensus amongst the hiring managers I talked to that the problem does not lie with a quick fix to the college program that the politicians suggest. The fix is a change of attitude in our society. We place far more emphasis on sports and far too little emphasis on academics. If you are reading this, you can think of yourself as an instance of "the revenge of the nerds." Fortunately or unfortunately, there are far too few of us.
Have you ever wondered what the person looking to hire you thinks? At the moment, it is not too flattering. If you have been job surfing (that is, going from job to job and project to project) but have the needed skills, then the manager will probably hire you -- with the knowledge that you have no corporate loyalty and will most likely change jobs again within 18 months. The concept of instant gratification has reached the job market. The employer's' view is that you are constantly looking for a new high and they need to provide it in order to get your attention and your commitment to work on their projects. The phenomenon has been likened to channel surfing by the TV generation.
Compensation packages usually include competitive salaries, health benefits, and 401(K) plans. Larger companies can also offer campus environments, built-in gyms, and membership to health clubs. Newer, smaller companies offer the usual benefits plus stock options. Examples of some of the more unusual inducements include tickets to sporting and cultural events, and passage to exotic places for you and your companion. Not everyone offers these unusual things. Companies offering these inducements see those who take them with less than enthusiasm. Basically, if trivial things like this turn your head, then so will other trivial things. Tickets to a football game are not normally viewed as a career enhancing inducement.
The company's attitude seems reasonable until you consider the job hunter's point of view. Most companies today try to buy an employee's loyalty as opposed to winning it. They hire and fire at will as the economic condition changes. While that is reasonable in some cases, it often appears to be the quick and dirty way out of a financial bind that harms those least responsible for the problems. There is also another factor working here. In the Silicon Valley, the average half-life of a startup is less than a year. Therefore, a person can be out of work for any number of reasons outside their control. Thus, short-term gains may be the only things that a job hunter can count on.
Given these scenarios, we are left with cynics on both sides of the hiring equation.
The need for human resources and the need to keep overheads to a minimum have promoted the rise in the temporary worker population. Almost everyone seems to do it. A complex set of IRS rules are used to determine whether a person is a consultant or employee. Most companies hire temps through an agency. Agencies often exist solely to protect their clients from tax liabilities arising from the use of temps.
Temps are usually experienced personnel that can be thrown into a situation at a moment's notice. Larger companies often use temps. Of temporary workers, Patty Taylor, CFO of SmartSource, said, "They need to fit right in." By this, she meant that temps must meld with a client's corporate culture. Entrepreneurial types do not fit in well here. Temps are typically people who have been through the wars and now just want to make a decent wage on a number of interesting projects. They may also be using temping as a strategy to check out possible regular jobs. Companies often offer exceptional temps permanent jobs when their projects end.
However, for strategic, proprietary, or mission-critical work, hiring managers want employees, not temps. They use temps for more standard jobs and ones where confidentiality is less of an issue. I believe that this is a perception issue. Although I pointed out that the same confidentiality agreements could be used for both temps and employees, the tendency still is to use regular employees for sensitive work.
Working for temp agencies has a number of benefits. Some agencies pay weekly as opposed to every two weeks or monthly. As a temp, you are usually paid more than you would be as an employee and you get a wider variety of experiences than the average employee does. The downside is that you are usually solely responsible for providing your own benefits. (If you are a long-time employee of a temp agency, they may offer you medical and dental benefits with some form of 401(K).) Often, when you are not working, you are not paid, and there is no guarantee that you will have a continual stream of work.
During the interviews, I discovered that a number of the hiring managers were temps. This arrangement works best for startups that want to minimize human resource overhead. What surprised me was that larger firms do this also.
Are the young the only ones that are excited by new technology or who understand it? Do older job hunters use their experience to see problems coming? Do they have ready solutions to problems they have seen before? Are older tech workers slow, untrainable, and expensive? Why, with the tremendous shortage of skilled technical people, do companies prefer to go overseas or cross-country rather than attempt to employ or retrain older technical personnel? Does it surprise you that having more than 10 years of experience is often viewed as a negative? Are there easy answers to any of these questions? Unfortunately, there are not.
Older IT professionals do have a number of positive attributes. They have mastered a number of different languages, operating systems, utilities, and techniques in their careers. They have shown their flexibility and dedication in many instances. They tend to be more laid-back and more able to handle disasters calmly. They usually have more sensible priorities. They can also serve as mentors to their younger colleagues. Does older always mean better? The answer is no.
Some older workers are comfortable with their existing skills and do not want to learn yet another technology. Since there is often a call for their existing skills, they try to leverage those. Also, many older job seekers do not even try for some of the more leading-edge positions. One recruiter told me that they have the greatest difficulty filling more senior positions with older personnel because these positions need a current skill set plus a desire and flexibility to learn new things. In many cases, no birthdate information is required on the application and the initial interviewing is done by telephone. Thus, many physical attributes are masked. The most telling comment that the recruiter made was that "Everyone has control of their future in their own hands." Regardless of age, it is up to each of us to stay current. However, I also found it interesting that the older workers were often referred to as "older folks."
There seem to be few hard facts on age as a factor in hiring and success on the job. For example, are there any differences in the failure rates between older and younger employees, both nationally and within a company? Does having a longer employment history improve the hiring and placement practices in a company? What are the sick and absentee rates amongst the various age groups? Is age too narrow a selection criterion?
One hiring manager suggested that résumés should ignore any employment history older than 10 years. He stated that 90 percent of the résumé should concentrate on what you have done in the last two years and 10 percent on what you have done before that. He says that your résumé speaks for you and that it needs to say that you have stayed current and are of immediate value to a potential employer. During interviews, I would also suggest you never start any sentence with "I remember when..." For the younger folks reading this, remember that you may be lucky enough to be older some day. You can make your life easier then if you keep an open mind now.
Having said that, is there a stereotype about older workers? Statistically, the average age of people working in the Silicon Valley is well under 40.
The Silicon Valley is important to all of us because it is a precursor of what is to come. All over the world, governments, businesses, entrepreneurs, and politicians are trying to reproduce the results of the Silicon Valley. They are learning its lessons and applying them elsewhere. You probably know of a technical incubator near you. The formulae that will be applied includes these elements: High pressure to produce quickly; high technical and intellectual content; short time to market; high financial and political stakes. Even large established Fortune 500 companies are getting entangled in this mesh. If it is not one of their direct competitors using hi-tech for a competitive advantage, it is a fast rising hi-tech competitor. Two examples come to mind. Egghead has closed all its retail stores and has gone solely online; and Barnes & Noble has gone online to compete with a new upstart called Amazon.com.
All businesses are being shaken to their roots by the technological changes swirling around them. These changes are going to suck you in, affect your job, your future, and how you get hired.
There has been a major change in the layout of résumés and their content. In the Valley, most companies use scannable résumés that they receive via the Internet. These résumés are kept on file in a searchable database for a period of six months or more. Because human eyes no longer view many résumés, their formats have changed and so have some of their content.
Automation has affected the format of résumés. Now, the résumé should be done in simple fonts without italics or underlining. Length is no longer a major issue, but résumés need to be well organized; and in case you make it past the first cut, you should still try to keep the résumé to two or fewer pages so humans can read it easily. They should also use keywords that match the type of skills and attributes that the company wants and that the job demands. This has led to the "keyword" résumé. It lists a set of keywords at the start of the résumé and then, in the body of the résumé text, supports the keywords listed.
List dates, the company you worked for, your positions, what you did there, and what you accomplished. For example, from 1993-1997 at company ABC, you were project leader for product X. X was the most successful and most bug-free software ever released by ABC. X's best feature was the 70 percent gross margins it achieved for the company. This says that you know how to produce profitable software -- a rare talent, indeed.
All the words and opinions in this article are strictly mine. The following people were kind enough to provide me with insights into the practical aspects of hiring personnel: Tina Goulart and Dan Reilley, staffing consultants for the Border Services Group at Novell; Jeffery Payne, president of Reliable Software Technologies; Peggy Owens and Steve Weinberg, HR manager, both of Sharp Labs of America; Patty Taylor, CFO, and Carleen VanDerostyne, recruiting consultant, both of SmartSource Inc.; and Linda Vallner, employment manager of Rational Software Corp.
DDJ