Career Management – Page 85 – IS Survivor Publishing

IT rust belt (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Of all the requests for advice I receive, the hardest come from college graduates or career changers wanting to know how to break into IT, and from older programmers who want to write code until they retire but can’t even get an interview. They’ve been sold on the idea that proficiency with computers practically guarantees employment. Now, nobody wants ’em.

I’d love to offer hope and great advice. Regrettably, the best advice I have is this: Find a different field of endeavor. Unless you’re in the top rank, there’s little future for you in IT.

The supply of programmers exceeds demand, and that drives down prices — your wages. That’s because the genie of globalization is out of the bottle, and it’s going to stay out of the bottle at least until the Internet closes up shop.

Twenty years ago, the same thing happened to factory jobs. U.S. factory workers were unionized, which simply meant that instead of keeping jobs and accepting lower wages, their jobs went away altogether as the factories relocated to the Philippines, Malaysia, and Taiwan. Now it’s our turn: Indian and Asian programmers work as hard as or harder than their American counterparts, and for lower wages.

It’s easy to blame greedy CEOs for this mess, but employers aren’t just being greedy when they shift these jobs to foreign workers. If they don’t and their competitors do, they have to charge more for the same products and services. Not exactly a formula for success, and when business shifts to the competitors, the jobs do too — overseas anyway.

Nor would changing the H1b program — or even eliminating it altogether — help. Whether foreign programmers come here or programming jobs go there, the result is the same except for which country collects the income tax. Foreign programmers produce code just as good as that coded by American programmers. For less. Are you willing to compete?

Is this a good thing? Not for the average U.S. citizen, I imagine, although it will help keep prices down when we’re shopping.

Not every IT job will move overseas, of course. Much of management will remain, as will jobs where proximity, linguistic ability, and cultural familiarity are important, like network administration, systems analysis, user interface design, help desk, and project management. Nor will all programming jobs will move overseas either. Plenty of U.S. factories remain open, too. But the trend is clear, and it means an increasing number of American programmers will be competing for a decreasing number of jobs.

So if you still want a programming career, here’s the best advice I have:

Expect to work harder, for less.

Avoiding age discrimination (first appeared in InfoWorld)

A recent column proposed that reverse age discrimination is as real as forward age discrimination, and that both are really mismatches between expectations and reality. In it I stated that gray hair and exposed scalp are de rigeur for strategic consulting.

Several readers interpreted this as gender bias, due to the paucity of follicularly challenged women. Actually, I was proposing that sex discrimination has the same roots: What’s usually called the “Old Boys’ Network” is really the “Old Bald Guys’ Network,” and women’s real problem is too much hair.

No, huh? Okay, chalk it up to hyperbole that backfired. But let’s talk about getting hired in the face of, for example, age discrimination.

Your first step: Ground your tactics in reality — not how things ought to be — and in your goals, not anyone else’s. Which means:

For you, human resources is a barrier, not an enabler. HR has only two concerns: compliance — keeping the company out of court — and workload reduction. So it enforces a fair process that mostly screens out applicants whenever an objectively defensible rationale presents itself. That’s HR’s goal. Yours is to get an interview. Bypass HR. Either through personal networking or cold calling, get directly to the hiring manager.

For most hiring managers, the entire process is a distraction. They just want an employee who will succeed at the job. Get face to face and be that person.

Worried about age discrimination? Don’t give cues about your age until you’re face to face. List only your last ten years of experience. Don’t put dates on your education. If you like, don’t apply for the job: Make it a sales call, presenting yourself as an independent consultant. Just get face-to-face.

Once you’re there, take some great advice I once received from Challenger, Grey and Christmas, the outplacement company: Recognize the difference between disqualifying questions and qualifying questions. “Are you willing to relocate?” is a disqualifier. The answer is always either “Yes” or “Under the right circumstances.” Don’t disqualify yourself, and save your thoughtful responses for the qualifying questions.

Here’s even better advice. Repeat this mantra: “I’m a professional. I have no problems. I cause no problems. I’ll solve your problems.”

That’s what the hiring manager wants. That’s what you need to be: A professional who has no problems, causes no problems, and solves the hiring manager’s problems.

That’s what you are, aren’t you? You’d better be, because if you aren’t, you have more to worry about than age discrimination.