
According to Hoyle...
Software
Development Jobs in a Down Economy
[ Part I | Part II | Part III ]
April 2009
by Jonathan Hoyle
jonhoyle@mac.com
macCompanion
http://www.jonhoyle.com
We continue this month
exploring this month exploring the software development job market in the
present economy, from a Macintosh perspective. Last month, I began by making the comparison of the current economy with the '92/93
recession. In particular, I
noticed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which is a
wonderful resource by the way) listed the January 2009 unemployment rate at
7.6%, which neared the high of the recession 15 years earlier (which itself
peaked at 7.8% in June 1992).
A
month later, we now have the February 2009 unemployment rate, which has jumped
to 8.1%. This figure edges out the
worst of the '92/93 recession, and one must go back to '82/83 to beat that
number. For those keeping score at
home, this latter recession peaked at a whopping 10.8% in November and December
of 1982. Hopefully we will not see
the jobless rate spike to quite those levels, but it's certainly too early to
rule out anything yet.
But of course, this 8.1%
figure is the overall jobless rate. What would this figure be if we were to limit our arena of interest to
that of software development? As
pointed out last month, this is the first recession to affect software
engineers in any measurable way. The Bureau does not break down the unemployment figures in narrow
occupational fields like "Macintosh engineers". The most specific these numbers get is
in very broad categories, and in the Professional and Related Occupations group, the unemployment rate is 4.5%, or nearly half
the overall jobless rate.
At first
glance, this may appear to suggest that the current recession is not hitting
professionals nearly as hard as other categories. As it turns out, such optimism is not warranted, as
professionals typically have a lower unemployment rate even during good
times. For example, the February
2008 overall jobless rate stood at 4.8%, but for professionals was 2.3%. If anything professionals are being hit
harder, as their unemployment rate has nearly doubled in a year's time, whereas
the overall market has seen its joblessness jump only 68% for the same time
period.
Posting Your Resume
Obviously the first thing
you want to have ready is your resume. Keeping it up-to-date and ready for the viewing is certainly
essential. Some of the job-hunting
books do not put a high premium on keeping a static resume, but rather
recommends that a professional taylor a resume specifically for a position for
which he or she is applying. Despite the logistical hassle of rewriting dozens of resumes, this
recommendation may have made a bit of sense in the pre-internet days. However, today most resumes are
searched and found digitally, and keeping your resume accessible online precludes
you from knowing who is actually reading it. And although it is true that a significant number of resumes
are still printed and mailed, those searching for software engineers rely less
on old school approaches and more on the Internet.
Most people have heard of
monster.com and other resume resources, and I
encourage everyone - whether you are looking for job or not - to keep your
updated resume posted at all times. Moreover, keeping your resume copied on your own web site is useful (as
mine is at http:www.jonhoyle.com/resume). True, this may generate some unwanted phone calls from time
to time, but it's an excellent gauge to determine your marketability. It provided an object lesson for me
only a few years ago, as at one time recruiter calls began to diminish. As it turned out, my resume (which
boasted of very strong C++ and Carbon skills) made nary a mention of
Objective-C and Cocoa. Callers who
did contact me made it clear that this was quickly becoming an important skill
set. This information became a
wake-up call for me, and allowed me to be ahead of the game once Apple's "Death
to Carbon" pronouncement was made at
WWDC 2007.
I found another unexpected
benefit to my policy of keeping my resume continually posted. I had just started working for a small
company, and apparently the CEO liked to keep track of his employees by
monitoring for their resumes on monster.com. If he suddenly sees a resume for one of his employees pops
up, he knew that they were interested in leaving. Once I was hired, he had expected that I would mark my
resume as inactive so that it would no longer be publicly searchable by other
employers. However, I never
did take it down. After a time,
this CEO very indirectly brought up the topic about resume searches to me, and
I happen to mention that I always kept my updated resume online simply as
policy. Once this understanding
was made known, it allowed me the flexibility a few years later of looking for
other opportunities without communicating that fact to my present employer.
Handling Recruiters
Getting calls from
recruiters is an occupational hazard for any Mac developer wishing to test the
waters for a new job. Recruiters
come in different grades of quality, and sadly the worst ones become more
numerous in down economies. After
all, with a larger number of fresh people looking for work, one can quickly
start up a business by simply collecting online resumes. All you need to do is send out emails
to the world about some vague "opportunities" that require
"immediate responses", and watch the replies come in. And since recruiters make their
commission whether or not the job is the "right fit", many of these
recruiters will persuade, cajole and pressure you into taking whatever job into
which they can place.
Some recruiters will even
undermine other job opportunities you have lined up, just so they do not lose
their commission. This happened to
me about 15 years ago, when I was asked by a recruiter to tell him what other
interviews I had lined up (asking under the pretext that he did not wish to
duplicate those same efforts). I
naively told him what else I had scheduled for the next week. I didn't think anything of it until on
the day of one of those interviews, I had found out that this recruiter called
this company's CEO, telling him of my other interview options, and placed me
into a rather awkward situation.
Do not give to a recruiter
any personal information (beyond that which is reasonably useful for job
searches), unless you have a long standing and trusting working relationship
with this person. There is too
much temptation for such people to compromise your situation so as to pad their
bottom line.
Fortunately, there are
also some excellent recruiters out there as well. The good ones will tell you as much they can about a company
who is hiring. Sometimes they
cannot give complete disclosure, but they will do due diligence in ensuring
that this would be an acceptable option for you. Where bad recruiters will barely read your resume and
attempt to fit you into a non-Mac related position (due to ignorance or apathy
or both), good recruiters know what you are truly looking for and will filter
out inappropriate options.
Good Example: As I
do not wish to endorse any particular agency, I will mention one which is sadly
no longer doing business: Scientific Placement.
Back in the pre-internet days, readers of MacWeek would recognize Scientific Placement's ad in the classified section over the
many years. Scientific Placement
was one of the best Mac recruiters in its day, and its reputation only grew due
to its professional integrity and individual personal attention to its
clients. Run by Dave Small and
Allyson Pardue, this team of recruiters represented the best of the best. To them, you were a person first and a
client second. They were genuinely
try to find an appropriate match for both you and the hiring company.
Bad Example: There are so many bad ones that I don't mind naming
names. Here's one that has annoyed
me most recently. I received an
email a couple of months ago from a guy representing
"BigMoneyJ*bs.com" saying he found my resume "nice" and
wanted me to call him back for a immediate job opportunity. Of course I knew immediately that this
bozo simply skimmed my name from a web scraper searching for resumes and that
there was no "immediate" opportunity. I knew that in all likelihood he was trying to build a
database of Mac engineers, just so he can market this to companies looking for
people. But I figured, "Fine,
I post my resume on his site. Who
knows, can't hurt, can it?" As long as I am with other Mac developers, at least I'd be in good
company. So, I go to this
recruiter's web site, and clicked on "Post a Resume", I got a server
error indicating an incompatibility with Safari. So I email him back mentioning that his web site is not
compatible with the most popular web browser on the Mac, and that this was not
the best way to attract Mac engineers. I send him the full server
trace and error log, with a recommendation on what he should do. Despite my detailed explanation of his
server problem, this genius here came back with "try and type in the
address by hand." I realized
quickly that this guy was about a sharp as a bag of wet mice, and so I wrote
him off and forgot about it. That
is until about a month later when I received nearly the identical email about
an immediate opportunity again. I
emailed him back that he already emailed me, and told him to remove my name
from his spamming list, and not to contact me again until (minimally) he fixes
his web site. Yeah, right. I now see a new email from him every
month about immediate opportunities. Thank God for spam filtering.
Lesson: Life's too short to deal with morons! Do not waste too much time with
recruiters in general until they have proven themselves to be best of
breed. If they are, they will do
so. If not, you save yourself a
great deal of grief.
Coming Up Next Month: In
Part III, we will discuss interview techniques. See you in 30!
[ Part I | Part II | Part III ]
To see a list of all
the According to Hoyle columns, visit: http://www.jonhoyle.com/maccompanion
http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/April2009/Columns/AccordingtoHoyle.htm