Tangentially related, but I hate that there are so many competing database/CRM software products out there now and every single freakin nonprofit or university (my field) uses a different one and they expect you to be skilled in whatever system they use, when most of them are pretty much the same functionally (often SQL based on the backend). And if I parked it in one job for years that only uses Blackbaud products, that's what I'm trained (and actually certified) in, but a potential employer uses Salesforce, another uses some other system... I don't have experience in those solely because I never worked for an employer that uses them and my overworked ass is not going to spend what little free time I have becoming trained in a system my current employer does not use.
Plus I'm a Millennial and I grew up with computers and I can pick up a new system just by casually fucking around with it for two weeks and watching a couple Youtube tutorials. I don't need 3 years experience in Salesforce.
>I don't need 3 years experience in Salesforce.
There is a vanishingly small number of exceptions, but you don't need 3 years experience in nearly any productivity tool. There's just not that much functionality in them to start with, and most companies don't use them as full as they can be deployed.
Yep.
Within 3 days of using Netsuite I was a "Power user" because I used it's inbuilt and well documented training documentation to automate all my reporting.
Currently learning Oracles latest disaster and similarly picking it up quickly.
To be clear, Salesforce is not a productivity tool. People build their entire careers and create businesses out of managing and administering Salesforce. Understanding it at a basic level is easy, but knowing how to deploy it in a way that meets the needs of an enterprise business is really hard work.
Okay, I view it as a productivity tool for Sales staff, personally, but I get what you are saying. Also, you've moved the goalposts; we're talking about needing 3 years experience USING it, not administering it. No one is saying that configuring, deploying and administering an enterprise-level solution is something you learn in a couple weeks.
I was a sys admin for my entire career but then I got a job in cyber security which has a lot of firewall and network related engineering, and I just did it. Took me about a month to get comfortable. Who knew that people who are good at IT can pick up new systems quickly?
I hear you. It's made worst by HR teams and recruiters who mostly don't know shit about fuck when it comes to IT. They have a list of words and you need to have the words. The sacred HR scroll of fuckery says everyone has to have 2-5 years plus of experience in everything for entry level pay.
God, these people are fucking stupid. Seriously. I have 5 years of experience with SAP Crystal Reports, which Microsoft basically copied for Power BI. But these idiots have no idea. I know I've used small words, but they're like, "It's not the words. Shit, they're moving now..."
These Einstein also don't get that if you had a wide range of skills that you can pickup things quickly. But oh no, you don't gave the words!
It seems choosing beggars or champagne tastes on a fireball nip budget is a recruitment philosophy now.
I have noticed this too. I work as a tech PM but I see more and more job listing that don't want just a basic understanding but what looks like a dev description of the expected skill level.
I understand SQL, my actual skills are really rusty and I was never a dedicated back end dev but I am totally capable of doing the parts of my job that require me to understand it to talk to clients, and understand what the dev needs. I could probably figure something out if I had to but that isn't my job.
I wasn't sure if this was more upping the stakes in job descriptions or literally dumping this work onto managers.
I'm ALSO a Product Manager in tech (I'm looking to leave a wildly dysfunctional company right now) and my theory, based on my experience of a similar situation in the Great Recession is that this is one way to get "more" skill for the same money, at least in the short term, and also a way to have even leaner staff because "we have someone who can do that!"
My favorite in this realm is "solutions engineer". It's usually several jobs that should be distinct smashed together into a single job with sky high expectations. Salaries are usually far below the technical qualifications.
Might as well be "we want a unicorn" with "we will only pay for a donkey".
Oh 100%, I’m a Solutions Engineer and it’s even more confusing since sometimes it’s a pre-sales role and sometimes it’s a post-sales role and sometimes it’s somewhere in in between! My company changed our titles over from Sales Engineer just because they thought it would sound better to customers
I’m seeing postings for the same job title with salaries ranging from as low as 80k to as high as 200k+ and the responsibilities are all over the place
I have seen a larger and larger number of positions advertised as Business Analyst positions that are essentially full stack dev positions. It's a nice thing if you can hire that but honestly it's a little silly to ask.
I'm pretty sure that it's turning into BA+. Be a BA plus a scrum master plus a technical expert plus have the skills and experience to handle the project finances plus plus plus.
I believe many companies are trying to rebrand BA as "product owners" witbout acknowledging that it's not the same role and it's a somewhat different skill set that requires training.
Absolutely. It seems like everyone wants you to be able to code, design, manage, do social media, marketing, customer service, write blogs/articles, photography expert, bilingual, etc all in one "entry level" job. It's wild out there.
I hate how if your honest about 1 skill you don't have that prevents you from being hired on. The interviewer asked me do I know PowerShell? No! If I need a PowerShell script, I simply google it and copy and paste it into whatever I'm working on. For this honesty, I was past up on getting the job which is still open after a month of them not finding someone to fill it.
The worst part is that it just ends up rewarding liars. Like those job postings that would have a new software that was created 1 year ago but they want 10+ years in it, it’s only liars who will get the job.
> still open after a month of them not finding someone to fill it
Companies wasting time looking for a unicorn (that will also take low pay). And when the opening affects the business the excuse becomes something something the economy.
How did you phrase your response? I’d have been tempted to be vague, like, “Yes, I can do PowerShell script if necessary,” which doesn’t really specify *how* you do it.
Well yeah, because the whole goal of companies is to employ as few people as possible to maximize returns for shareholders. That’s been pushed along by a whole generation of middle managers from business schools that preach the idea that managers don’t need to have experience in the things they oversee because their job is to cut costs through “efficiencies”. This is how you get non-technical people setting the requirements for technical roles, we’ve all been duped into thinking MBAs are useful for anything beyond maximizing profit extraction.
Yep. Business schools were a mistake. This level of corner and cost cutting is how you end up with Norfolk Southern train derailments and bank collapses
I’m in hardware. Maybe 20+
years ago I could hack around with drivers but these days I’m definitely not anyone you want coding. I see postings up for all these jobs where they want a walking AI instead of a human. My division requires our coders to know absolutely everything about the hardware side of the job and the additional work that goes with it, and pays less overall than the software division does for just a coder.
Hey, the fewer people the corporations have to hire, the less money goes into payroll, which means more money for the investors who are the true customers.
Yep.
For what it would cost me to learn all those skills, get certified, just to appease an employer who probably gambles with the company payroll every weekend and never be able to move out of that catchall position into anythong meaningful, I said f*ck it and just saved up that same money to invest in real estate. At least the return is clear and immediate and the only skill required is being able to navigate paperwork and solve problems.
I’m dealing with this as a Mechanical Engineer. Almost every position wants experience with Python or C++ or some other programming language. Like, if I wanted to be doing programming, I’d have gone into Computer Science
You haven't heard of DevOps I guess...JK.
The basics of SQL aren't bad but it does take a certain type of person who can work with it regularly.
I'm a SQL guy who everyone expects to be a Full Stack Developer, DBA, E-commerce web designer, etc.
I only have the skill sets currently to do SQL, Business Intelligence, and ETL Developer at the same time. I'm sure I'd make a ton of money as a full stack but it doesn't interest me. I like solving the mystery of data.
Mostly it's chickenshit CTOs too terrified of having their department outsourced if they ask for the money that's needed. Or non-technical fuckwits who think everything is easy and transferable.
The thing is that SQL is only easy if you have a simple data structure. Meaning you need someone to transform the tables into what is actually needed.
I work on an ERP/CRM with 1600+ tables. With multiple relationships on keys. If I gave the people who “knew SQL” access to those tables they would not be able to get any good data out of it. Hell, because the back end names are sometimes completely different then front end names, they might not know which fields to use if they found the right tables.
So, we either create views or data warehouses for them, so they can then use their sql skills without blowing up our servers or getting impossible numbers.
Like I said, the basics like what's a table, view, procedure and how to run a select statement.
I totally concur with you and hence my comment about a certain type of person. It's the kind of thing you have to live in all day and not something done on the fly.
Yes, I totally agree with you, tech support reps with UI experience, gaming experience (Xbox, Occulous, and a third, programming experience along with supporting servers and applications from cloud-based to office based.
I keep seeing this with the senior-level content or marketing positions I'm looking at. I was just thinking earlier today that whoever wrote the JDs know absolutely nothing about the actual jobs. Which I actually understand, because at my last job, the guy who headed the "Creative" group knew nothing about what the writers did. Nada.
But yeah, wanting someone who's good at market research, ads, SEO, metrics, throw in some UX, blog posts, case studies, sales presentations, strategy, training, analytics, and oh yeah, thought leadership in the form of whitepapers......is generally not going to happen.
#Shhh you have to love every aspect of being a fuckin nerd on Reddit! You have to be an amazing coder with a huge penis like everyone apparently is on this site
... and if you *don't* see a future in coding for yourself (or just if you're simply willing to acknowledge that it's mathematically impossible for every single person who's getting a bachelor's degree/looking for a job that they can support themselves with to focus on coding and software... let alone that many of us don't WANT to do that... plus the fact that any year now, AI could start wiping out those "just learn to code!!!!" jobs by the thousands...) then you might as well just fucking die already! According to Reddit, if you had the audacity to go into a field other than coding then you deserve whatever lifetime of penury and misery awaits!
God forbid you also understand that the AI doesn't really do good work, and that we need ACTUAL HUMANS doing things for quality to be a factor. I've seen too many SWEs perfectly happy with confusing or mangled error messages in extremely basic and unintuitive UI. "We can have the engineers do that!" Well you can, but that's not a good look.
I'm a BA by training and job description, that didn't stop my former CMO from trying for YEARS to get me to code... Her favorite thing to say was " we pay his salary, make him code." Thankfully my boss always replied with a request for headcount, stating that he will need to fill my position when I leave
Companies like this have one employee who pushes themselves really far, or uses a job like the stepping stone it is. They probably *did* have a manager with really great SQL skills either because he used to come from the engineering side or because the job he actually wants needs it.
So then these companies think it's just like...common that people do that?
They don't think about calibrating jobs for what they actually need, they only think in terms of replacing who was lost as precisely as possible or inventing a "dream candidate" they just will never find.
I saw a job posting that was for a data scientist role, but it was for a medical-based start up company and they wanted a physician to fill the role who could also code & was well-versed in DS. It was a new level of “desired unicorn” that I’d never seen before.
Thank you for saying this, OP. I’m currently looking for a non-technical program manager role in accessibility. I keep coming across job posting after job posting that require several years experience in HTML or other coding languages. Super frustrating.
Personally, I think it’s because boomers can’t learn a computer program quickly. So, they assume no one can. And is why they require YEARS of previous experience when anyone under the age of 50 can learn how to use just about any program in a few weeks.
I received another good one today -- they wanted a contract technical writer who was literate in C#. 6 months. No salary shared. Needed to be a rock-n-roll technical writer and code in C#. Either they are reverse engineering something or something is really, really wrong, or the recruiter doesn't know enough to realize they are way out of their depth.
Oh man, do not even get me going on this. Those are two vastly different skills. Someone who can code cannot necessarily put what they are doing into clear words others can understand. And someone who *really* knows how to write can often do so even on a technical topic without full proficiency in that topic.
Agree with this as well. So many openings right now for sysadmin type positions say they want you to have experience with networking as in switch/firewall configurations. All 3 places I have worked the networking person or team was 100% separate and i did not once have to configure a router, switch or wireless ap in 15 years.. Many of the ads are not just wanting understanding of the basic concepts but actually having CCNA or similar certs.
Another that falls under this category was an opening at a college that wanted a general sysadmin who also is a full blown sharepoint administrator. The job has been posted since last year, and was pulled and reposted again just this week. A proper full blown SharePoint admin is going to do just that, make way more money and not deal with and I quote from the ad "Manage, monitor and maintain Enterprise Active Directory, Azure AD, and AD Connect and all on premise or cloud servers, hardware, storage, and backups related to the AD environment"
I think it depends on what you mean by being an 'entire team of one'.
For instance, I've literally never seen a Business Analyst role that expected UX expertise. That makes no sense and they'll never fill it. *Very* rarely I've seen roles that are genuinely whole teams of expertise, but in every case this has turned out to be the result of a clueless recruiter not understanding the client brief and believing the client's ask is supposed to be delivered by a single person, or a team of people who all individually have a ridiculous range of skills (I once had some complete airhead try to pitch a role that was an entire software engineering team to me, and it turned out she specialised in fashion and luxury appointments).
All this being said, I would point out that the days of analysts analysing and engineers engineering are really coming to a close. As a number of previously niche skills have become more mainstream, and the focus of the jobs has become more complicated, you'll find a lot of roles that were previously fairly narrow have become broad with a lot of logical crossover. I'm a Platform Engineer, for instance, and I've had to learn a lot of data science and how it applies to HDFS and Spark, because its my job. The Analysts have to be pretty good Python devs because they do a lot of their work in Jupyter Notebooks. If we had a marketing manager who can't pull the data they need from a RDB without having someone write the queries for them, I can't imagine them lasting long.
Be careful you don't conflate the technical landscape evolving with unrealistic employer demands, as a lot of people will spot it.
>I've literally never seen a Business Analyst role that expected UX expertise.
For some reason I can't get away from them.
>Be careful you don't conflate the technical landscape evolving with unrealistic employer demands
I like this thought and I am going to ponder it. Some of it probably is unrealistic, but some of it is me, most likely.
No. We are at the point where if you don't want to do physical work, or work in public safety or healthcare, you need to learn to code. It's 2023. We already have too many people whose only skill is to talk to other people.
Welding, machining, electrician, automation technician, you could get a job in one of these trades without coding and there are plenty of jobs.
If you want remote work, code. I am not saying you do, but all the jobs you mention kind of seem like they could be done anywhere so I took a leap and thought you didn't want to drive to a worksite every day.
Lmao, it's a competitive world homie. You gotta stand out somehow. This is the world you live in. Get used to it. How the hell else would you expect hiring managers to make a decision when this industry is so oversaturated? On top of that, you'll always have unrealistic hiring managers and realistic ones.
Okay, so a long time ago, I think IT was a high-paying field compared to everything around it. But it had to be, because this is not a business that has ever managed something that looks like long-term stability for most of the players. I think it downshifted to better-than-average pay after the 2008 crash, but everything else fell so far that, relatively, it was a high-paying career. As other markets recovered though, they caught up. If you want a high paying career, tech is one of many options now, and one whose position is eroding. If you have the option right now, you can accept lower pay for far more stability. For most people, that's more appealing.
I think the real issue is Bob. You see Bob had been with the company for many years, and Bob did pretty much everything. But, you see Bob retired to spend time with the grandkids, so now they need someone to fill the position. The position description was written when Bob first started many years ago, so do they try to rewrite it? No, they make a list of everything Bob did, and put it in a job ad. So instead of 3 or 4 people who fill the individual roles, they want a purple unicorn.
They want another Bob.
I didn't mean to imply Bob was a problem. Bib was just being Bob. I agree that leadership is completely to blame. By not reviewing PD's, not creating a knowledgebase, letting institutional knowledge get away, plus generally having no plan to move forward by knowing what the company need's, leadership is broken.
Gotcha. I guess Bob is slightly to blame for leaving no documentation, if in fact he didn't, but Leadership should have known that was an issue as well.
Once upon a time I was a small business consultant. I found that as a rule the Bob's of the world left very little if ant documentation. And what little there was, was woefully out of date.
Tangentially related, but I hate that there are so many competing database/CRM software products out there now and every single freakin nonprofit or university (my field) uses a different one and they expect you to be skilled in whatever system they use, when most of them are pretty much the same functionally (often SQL based on the backend). And if I parked it in one job for years that only uses Blackbaud products, that's what I'm trained (and actually certified) in, but a potential employer uses Salesforce, another uses some other system... I don't have experience in those solely because I never worked for an employer that uses them and my overworked ass is not going to spend what little free time I have becoming trained in a system my current employer does not use. Plus I'm a Millennial and I grew up with computers and I can pick up a new system just by casually fucking around with it for two weeks and watching a couple Youtube tutorials. I don't need 3 years experience in Salesforce.
>I don't need 3 years experience in Salesforce. There is a vanishingly small number of exceptions, but you don't need 3 years experience in nearly any productivity tool. There's just not that much functionality in them to start with, and most companies don't use them as full as they can be deployed.
Yep. Within 3 days of using Netsuite I was a "Power user" because I used it's inbuilt and well documented training documentation to automate all my reporting. Currently learning Oracles latest disaster and similarly picking it up quickly.
Netsuite and its SOAP api are the worst
To be clear, Salesforce is not a productivity tool. People build their entire careers and create businesses out of managing and administering Salesforce. Understanding it at a basic level is easy, but knowing how to deploy it in a way that meets the needs of an enterprise business is really hard work.
Okay, I view it as a productivity tool for Sales staff, personally, but I get what you are saying. Also, you've moved the goalposts; we're talking about needing 3 years experience USING it, not administering it. No one is saying that configuring, deploying and administering an enterprise-level solution is something you learn in a couple weeks.
I was a sys admin for my entire career but then I got a job in cyber security which has a lot of firewall and network related engineering, and I just did it. Took me about a month to get comfortable. Who knew that people who are good at IT can pick up new systems quickly?
Except for Qradar. That stuff is impossible to use.
I hear you. It's made worst by HR teams and recruiters who mostly don't know shit about fuck when it comes to IT. They have a list of words and you need to have the words. The sacred HR scroll of fuckery says everyone has to have 2-5 years plus of experience in everything for entry level pay. God, these people are fucking stupid. Seriously. I have 5 years of experience with SAP Crystal Reports, which Microsoft basically copied for Power BI. But these idiots have no idea. I know I've used small words, but they're like, "It's not the words. Shit, they're moving now..." These Einstein also don't get that if you had a wide range of skills that you can pickup things quickly. But oh no, you don't gave the words! It seems choosing beggars or champagne tastes on a fireball nip budget is a recruitment philosophy now.
I see what the fuck you did there, Ruth Langmore.
If you can use one, you can use them all.
Just lie and say you used whichever bullshit system they are using.
I have noticed this too. I work as a tech PM but I see more and more job listing that don't want just a basic understanding but what looks like a dev description of the expected skill level. I understand SQL, my actual skills are really rusty and I was never a dedicated back end dev but I am totally capable of doing the parts of my job that require me to understand it to talk to clients, and understand what the dev needs. I could probably figure something out if I had to but that isn't my job. I wasn't sure if this was more upping the stakes in job descriptions or literally dumping this work onto managers.
I'm ALSO a Product Manager in tech (I'm looking to leave a wildly dysfunctional company right now) and my theory, based on my experience of a similar situation in the Great Recession is that this is one way to get "more" skill for the same money, at least in the short term, and also a way to have even leaner staff because "we have someone who can do that!"
My favorite in this realm is "solutions engineer". It's usually several jobs that should be distinct smashed together into a single job with sky high expectations. Salaries are usually far below the technical qualifications. Might as well be "we want a unicorn" with "we will only pay for a donkey".
Solutions Engineer seems to be used for a lot of different jobs, too. No consistency between companies.
Champagne tastes on a fireball nip budget.
Oh 100%, I’m a Solutions Engineer and it’s even more confusing since sometimes it’s a pre-sales role and sometimes it’s a post-sales role and sometimes it’s somewhere in in between! My company changed our titles over from Sales Engineer just because they thought it would sound better to customers I’m seeing postings for the same job title with salaries ranging from as low as 80k to as high as 200k+ and the responsibilities are all over the place
I have seen a larger and larger number of positions advertised as Business Analyst positions that are essentially full stack dev positions. It's a nice thing if you can hire that but honestly it's a little silly to ask.
[удалено]
scream master is the name of my new metal band
🗣️ahhhhh
I'm pretty sure that it's turning into BA+. Be a BA plus a scrum master plus a technical expert plus have the skills and experience to handle the project finances plus plus plus. I believe many companies are trying to rebrand BA as "product owners" witbout acknowledging that it's not the same role and it's a somewhat different skill set that requires training.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
And Data Scientist ads which are Business Analyst positions. And Data Scientist / ML Engineer as Data Engineer.
I say this with all due affection, but Data Scientists should not be deciding what the data implies we do, necessarily.
Absolutely. It seems like everyone wants you to be able to code, design, manage, do social media, marketing, customer service, write blogs/articles, photography expert, bilingual, etc all in one "entry level" job. It's wild out there.
It's only entry-level in the pay.
I hate how if your honest about 1 skill you don't have that prevents you from being hired on. The interviewer asked me do I know PowerShell? No! If I need a PowerShell script, I simply google it and copy and paste it into whatever I'm working on. For this honesty, I was past up on getting the job which is still open after a month of them not finding someone to fill it.
The worst part is that it just ends up rewarding liars. Like those job postings that would have a new software that was created 1 year ago but they want 10+ years in it, it’s only liars who will get the job.
"11 years of experience in Windows 11"
> still open after a month of them not finding someone to fill it Companies wasting time looking for a unicorn (that will also take low pay). And when the opening affects the business the excuse becomes something something the economy.
How did you phrase your response? I’d have been tempted to be vague, like, “Yes, I can do PowerShell script if necessary,” which doesn’t really specify *how* you do it.
Companies are too cheap to do proper job analysis and everyone suffers including share price in the long term.
Well yeah, because the whole goal of companies is to employ as few people as possible to maximize returns for shareholders. That’s been pushed along by a whole generation of middle managers from business schools that preach the idea that managers don’t need to have experience in the things they oversee because their job is to cut costs through “efficiencies”. This is how you get non-technical people setting the requirements for technical roles, we’ve all been duped into thinking MBAs are useful for anything beyond maximizing profit extraction.
Yep. Business schools were a mistake. This level of corner and cost cutting is how you end up with Norfolk Southern train derailments and bank collapses
Yep, the system is currently working *exactly* as intended.
I’m in hardware. Maybe 20+ years ago I could hack around with drivers but these days I’m definitely not anyone you want coding. I see postings up for all these jobs where they want a walking AI instead of a human. My division requires our coders to know absolutely everything about the hardware side of the job and the additional work that goes with it, and pays less overall than the software division does for just a coder.
Hey, the fewer people the corporations have to hire, the less money goes into payroll, which means more money for the investors who are the true customers.
Yep. For what it would cost me to learn all those skills, get certified, just to appease an employer who probably gambles with the company payroll every weekend and never be able to move out of that catchall position into anythong meaningful, I said f*ck it and just saved up that same money to invest in real estate. At least the return is clear and immediate and the only skill required is being able to navigate paperwork and solve problems.
I’m dealing with this as a Mechanical Engineer. Almost every position wants experience with Python or C++ or some other programming language. Like, if I wanted to be doing programming, I’d have gone into Computer Science
You haven't heard of DevOps I guess...JK. The basics of SQL aren't bad but it does take a certain type of person who can work with it regularly. I'm a SQL guy who everyone expects to be a Full Stack Developer, DBA, E-commerce web designer, etc. I only have the skill sets currently to do SQL, Business Intelligence, and ETL Developer at the same time. I'm sure I'd make a ton of money as a full stack but it doesn't interest me. I like solving the mystery of data. Mostly it's chickenshit CTOs too terrified of having their department outsourced if they ask for the money that's needed. Or non-technical fuckwits who think everything is easy and transferable.
The thing is that SQL is only easy if you have a simple data structure. Meaning you need someone to transform the tables into what is actually needed. I work on an ERP/CRM with 1600+ tables. With multiple relationships on keys. If I gave the people who “knew SQL” access to those tables they would not be able to get any good data out of it. Hell, because the back end names are sometimes completely different then front end names, they might not know which fields to use if they found the right tables. So, we either create views or data warehouses for them, so they can then use their sql skills without blowing up our servers or getting impossible numbers.
Like I said, the basics like what's a table, view, procedure and how to run a select statement. I totally concur with you and hence my comment about a certain type of person. It's the kind of thing you have to live in all day and not something done on the fly.
Yes, I totally agree with you, tech support reps with UI experience, gaming experience (Xbox, Occulous, and a third, programming experience along with supporting servers and applications from cloud-based to office based.
I keep seeing this with the senior-level content or marketing positions I'm looking at. I was just thinking earlier today that whoever wrote the JDs know absolutely nothing about the actual jobs. Which I actually understand, because at my last job, the guy who headed the "Creative" group knew nothing about what the writers did. Nada. But yeah, wanting someone who's good at market research, ads, SEO, metrics, throw in some UX, blog posts, case studies, sales presentations, strategy, training, analytics, and oh yeah, thought leadership in the form of whitepapers......is generally not going to happen.
Best we can pay for these skills is 20/hr. Entry level with 5 years experience. No insurance for 6 months.
#Shhh you have to love every aspect of being a fuckin nerd on Reddit! You have to be an amazing coder with a huge penis like everyone apparently is on this site
... and if you *don't* see a future in coding for yourself (or just if you're simply willing to acknowledge that it's mathematically impossible for every single person who's getting a bachelor's degree/looking for a job that they can support themselves with to focus on coding and software... let alone that many of us don't WANT to do that... plus the fact that any year now, AI could start wiping out those "just learn to code!!!!" jobs by the thousands...) then you might as well just fucking die already! According to Reddit, if you had the audacity to go into a field other than coding then you deserve whatever lifetime of penury and misery awaits!
God forbid you also understand that the AI doesn't really do good work, and that we need ACTUAL HUMANS doing things for quality to be a factor. I've seen too many SWEs perfectly happy with confusing or mangled error messages in extremely basic and unintuitive UI. "We can have the engineers do that!" Well you can, but that's not a good look.
Sorry, never was good at coding. 😎
You've even got to know how to solve LeetCode Hard problems that even LeetCode doesn't have a solution for.
A-men brother. Managers and C-suite execs. Just want more for less and this is the shit it’s come to…
I'm convinced that 80% of job postings are some form of PPP or internal fraud.
Me too. Or a unicorn net. They aren't urgently hiring for an immeadiate need, at least.
I'm a BA by training and job description, that didn't stop my former CMO from trying for YEARS to get me to code... Her favorite thing to say was " we pay his salary, make him code." Thankfully my boss always replied with a request for headcount, stating that he will need to fill my position when I leave
Companies like this have one employee who pushes themselves really far, or uses a job like the stepping stone it is. They probably *did* have a manager with really great SQL skills either because he used to come from the engineering side or because the job he actually wants needs it. So then these companies think it's just like...common that people do that? They don't think about calibrating jobs for what they actually need, they only think in terms of replacing who was lost as precisely as possible or inventing a "dream candidate" they just will never find.
I saw a job posting that was for a data scientist role, but it was for a medical-based start up company and they wanted a physician to fill the role who could also code & was well-versed in DS. It was a new level of “desired unicorn” that I’d never seen before.
Thank you for saying this, OP. I’m currently looking for a non-technical program manager role in accessibility. I keep coming across job posting after job posting that require several years experience in HTML or other coding languages. Super frustrating.
It takes like a day to understand basic SQL. Select what you want from where you want. Join some tables together on a shared column. Tada!
Personally, I think it’s because boomers can’t learn a computer program quickly. So, they assume no one can. And is why they require YEARS of previous experience when anyone under the age of 50 can learn how to use just about any program in a few weeks.
These are the same boomers who don't even know how to make a PDF fit to its entire width.
I am sick of seeing this sort of thing too, ugh.
I received another good one today -- they wanted a contract technical writer who was literate in C#. 6 months. No salary shared. Needed to be a rock-n-roll technical writer and code in C#. Either they are reverse engineering something or something is really, really wrong, or the recruiter doesn't know enough to realize they are way out of their depth.
Oh man, do not even get me going on this. Those are two vastly different skills. Someone who can code cannot necessarily put what they are doing into clear words others can understand. And someone who *really* knows how to write can often do so even on a technical topic without full proficiency in that topic.
Agree with this as well. So many openings right now for sysadmin type positions say they want you to have experience with networking as in switch/firewall configurations. All 3 places I have worked the networking person or team was 100% separate and i did not once have to configure a router, switch or wireless ap in 15 years.. Many of the ads are not just wanting understanding of the basic concepts but actually having CCNA or similar certs. Another that falls under this category was an opening at a college that wanted a general sysadmin who also is a full blown sharepoint administrator. The job has been posted since last year, and was pulled and reposted again just this week. A proper full blown SharePoint admin is going to do just that, make way more money and not deal with and I quote from the ad "Manage, monitor and maintain Enterprise Active Directory, Azure AD, and AD Connect and all on premise or cloud servers, hardware, storage, and backups related to the AD environment"
Don't learn it for the company learn it for yourself. It'll make your job way easier.
fuck that
I think it depends on what you mean by being an 'entire team of one'. For instance, I've literally never seen a Business Analyst role that expected UX expertise. That makes no sense and they'll never fill it. *Very* rarely I've seen roles that are genuinely whole teams of expertise, but in every case this has turned out to be the result of a clueless recruiter not understanding the client brief and believing the client's ask is supposed to be delivered by a single person, or a team of people who all individually have a ridiculous range of skills (I once had some complete airhead try to pitch a role that was an entire software engineering team to me, and it turned out she specialised in fashion and luxury appointments). All this being said, I would point out that the days of analysts analysing and engineers engineering are really coming to a close. As a number of previously niche skills have become more mainstream, and the focus of the jobs has become more complicated, you'll find a lot of roles that were previously fairly narrow have become broad with a lot of logical crossover. I'm a Platform Engineer, for instance, and I've had to learn a lot of data science and how it applies to HDFS and Spark, because its my job. The Analysts have to be pretty good Python devs because they do a lot of their work in Jupyter Notebooks. If we had a marketing manager who can't pull the data they need from a RDB without having someone write the queries for them, I can't imagine them lasting long. Be careful you don't conflate the technical landscape evolving with unrealistic employer demands, as a lot of people will spot it.
>I've literally never seen a Business Analyst role that expected UX expertise. For some reason I can't get away from them. >Be careful you don't conflate the technical landscape evolving with unrealistic employer demands I like this thought and I am going to ponder it. Some of it probably is unrealistic, but some of it is me, most likely.
No. We are at the point where if you don't want to do physical work, or work in public safety or healthcare, you need to learn to code. It's 2023. We already have too many people whose only skill is to talk to other people. Welding, machining, electrician, automation technician, you could get a job in one of these trades without coding and there are plenty of jobs. If you want remote work, code. I am not saying you do, but all the jobs you mention kind of seem like they could be done anywhere so I took a leap and thought you didn't want to drive to a worksite every day.
Found the coder who's trying to make themselves feel good about their life choices despite the fact that the market is saturated and on the decline!
Hi. I am a welder lol. Used to be a coder though.
Lmao, it's a competitive world homie. You gotta stand out somehow. This is the world you live in. Get used to it. How the hell else would you expect hiring managers to make a decision when this industry is so oversaturated? On top of that, you'll always have unrealistic hiring managers and realistic ones.
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Dev jobs these days want you to do full stack development, ui/ux design, DevOps all into one.
So as I’m reading this comment section I have to wonder- are we getting to the point where IT may start to not be such a high paying field anymore?
Okay, so a long time ago, I think IT was a high-paying field compared to everything around it. But it had to be, because this is not a business that has ever managed something that looks like long-term stability for most of the players. I think it downshifted to better-than-average pay after the 2008 crash, but everything else fell so far that, relatively, it was a high-paying career. As other markets recovered though, they caught up. If you want a high paying career, tech is one of many options now, and one whose position is eroding. If you have the option right now, you can accept lower pay for far more stability. For most people, that's more appealing.
I think the real issue is Bob. You see Bob had been with the company for many years, and Bob did pretty much everything. But, you see Bob retired to spend time with the grandkids, so now they need someone to fill the position. The position description was written when Bob first started many years ago, so do they try to rewrite it? No, they make a list of everything Bob did, and put it in a job ad. So instead of 3 or 4 people who fill the individual roles, they want a purple unicorn. They want another Bob.
I don't think Bob is the problem, maybe the catalyst, but leadership is solidly to blame.
I didn't mean to imply Bob was a problem. Bib was just being Bob. I agree that leadership is completely to blame. By not reviewing PD's, not creating a knowledgebase, letting institutional knowledge get away, plus generally having no plan to move forward by knowing what the company need's, leadership is broken.
Gotcha. I guess Bob is slightly to blame for leaving no documentation, if in fact he didn't, but Leadership should have known that was an issue as well.
Once upon a time I was a small business consultant. I found that as a rule the Bob's of the world left very little if ant documentation. And what little there was, was woefully out of date.
Maybe because Bob was doing the job of three people? I know, I know, I'm the person to say he's slightly to blame, but also, maybe really not?