College Degrees More Expensive, Worth Less in Job Market. Employers and career experts see a growing problem in American society — an abundance of college graduates, many burdened with tuition-loan debt, heading into the work world with a degree that doesn't mean much anymore. The problem isn't just a soft job market — it's an oversupply of graduates. In 1973, a bachelor's degree was more of a rarity, since just 47% of high school graduates went on to college. By October 2008, that number had risen to nearly 70%. For many Americans today, a trip through college is considered as much of a birthright as a driver's license. Marty Nemko, a career and education expert who has taught at U.C. What's not watered down is the tab. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for recent grads rose as well. The devaluation of a college degree is no secret on campus. Employers stress that a basic degree remains essential, carefully tiptoeing around the idea that its value has plummeted.
So what does it take to impress recruiters today? High-Tech Hiring: Youth Matters. In IT engineering, young hires tend to be more energetic and up to date. Older workers need to keep skills fresh, or aim for management posts In the engineering globalization debate, the battle lines are drawn. Companies like Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC), and Oracle (ORCL) say there are severe shortages of skilled workers and they need more visas to bring in foreign workers to stay competitive.
Unemployed engineers say this push for more visas is a plot to suppress wages. My own research at Duke University has shown that there is no general shortage of engineers in the U.S. The globalization debate shouldn't focus on the issue of visas. Instead, it should examine an issue that tech executives don't like to discuss: age. Documenting Age Discrimination One of the staunchest opponents of foreign worker visas is Norm Matloff, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who says careers in the programming profession are notoriously short-lived. Limited Senior Management Berths. Google Rejects Awesome People So It Doesn't Hog All of Them. How I Hire Programmers (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee.
You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with. The traditional programmer hiring process consists of: a) reading a resume, b) asking some hard questions on the phone, and c) giving them a programming problem in person. So when I hire people, I just try to answer the three questions. To find out whether someone’s smart, I just have a casual conversation with them. But if I had to write down what it is that makes someone seem smart, I’d emphasize three things. Second, are they curious? Yup. Thoughts on Hiring: Why You Shouldn't Judge People Solely O. History and track records are important. They establish credibility and inspire confidence.We see this in many things: best-selling authors, recommendations in Linkedin, suggestions for doctors from someone you know, or people's resumes and references.Track records can also be kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy for success; the more successful you were in the past, more people will want to work with you and the more opportunities will come up.
The problem that I see with track records is, most people, especially when desperate for more help, never look beyond it and just take everything people with good track records say at face value, and don't dig any deeper. This is especially dangerous for non-deterministic situations. Fortune's RoleTrack records are made out of outcomes. The thing about outcomes is a lot of it is due to chance. Not All Successes are Made EquallyThis sounds really obvious. Do they try to get quick feedback? 2009-10-08/no_hire.md at master from raganwald's homoiconic. Bob Sutton: Challenging Ingrained Assumptions in HR: My Remarks. As I reported in my post on the "Dumbest Practices Used By U.S. Companies," I was fortunate to be part of the closing panel at the Singapore Human Capital Summit last week. I had a delightful time in Singapore, as my hosts did a wonderful job of organizing the conference and making sure that those of us involved in the conference never stopped exchanging ideas with others -- in talks to large groups, meetings with small groups of business leaders and government employees, and one-on-one meetings of all kinds.
My liaison for the conference, Noelle Yee, somehow scheduled things so I was busy almost every minute but somehow never seemed rushed. I met all kinds of interesting people at the conference, but several stand-out. The second was Dr. I could go on and on about other people and things I learned. As such, about four hours before my talk, I slipped away for a couple hours and pounded out the list below of 10 "Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions About Managing People. " 1. 2. Programmer Competency Matrix | IndianGeek. Programmer competency matrix. How Do You Find the Best Employ. In the past year I've spent a lot of time thinking about hiring due to a recent surge in the amount of interviews I've participated in as well as a surge in the number of folks I know who've decided to "try new things".
One thing I've noticed is that software companies and teams within large software companies like Microsoft tend to fall into two broad camps when it comes to hiring. There are the teams/companies that seem to attract tons of smart, superstar programmers like a refrigerator door attracts magnets and then there those that use the beachcomber technique of sifting through tons of poorly written resumes hoping to find someone valuable but often ending up with people who seem valuable but actually aren't (aka good at interviewing, lousy at actually getting work done). Steve Yegge talks about this problem in his post Done, and Gets Things Smart which is excerpted below Now Playing: Soundgarden - Jesus Christ Pose.