This Business and Moment...

[dlockers]

As for working in IT I would say the biggest thing graduates seem to lack isn't technical skills but rather SDLC understanding. So for example they may be very competent in language X, they can write code to produce a required output. What they can't deal with so well, is things like figuring out what data they need to prove their code, understanding the relative importance of different environment stacks, planning and reporting on the status of their work, understanding the interelationships between different elements of a system (e.g. thinking about the potential implications of a change in one area impacting on something else) etc. My guess is they tend to learn concepts in isolation like standalone tasks, rather than as part of a big cohesive ecosystem.

Take this in the way intended (it's late, I'm still working), but this is part of the reason why the cleverest developers shoot off from firms who still have traditional IT houses. These folks should be incubated to be world class developers, not pseudo PMs (or vom-in-my-mouth 'technical' PMs) adopting what their forefathers saw as the important bit.

People should play to their strengths.

 

[HangTime]

That could be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that some of those people take time to fill the roles required of them in the 'traditional IT houses'. It might not play to their strengths, but the organisation may not have the need / agility / vision to do that. Realistically, incubating them to be a world class developer could well result in them shooting off in any case. Or to put it another way, arguably organisations may want [in some roles] developers that can play to the strengths of the organisation, to be a cog in a machine, rather than the other way around. They simply aren't set up to have a team full of the cleverest.

 

[Rroff]

I don't think much has changed. Youngsters will be coming from a learning environment so are naturally adept/tuned to absorbing theory whilst also not being tuned to practical application of that theory because they have no need to. They need to answer exam questions expecting an answer in a certain format, not applying concepts to 'off-piste' troubleshooting. I don't remember a time when youngsters were better at this practical element than they are today - they've always been inexperienced and needed time except for a few who pick it up quicker - maybe you've just been lucky in the past.

I guess what I have noticed as I've aged is that despite one of my strengths typically being very good at adapting to new systems and software, I've now had a couple of times where I've struggled to fully get my head round something new until I hit a 'eureka' moment where it clicks into place. This is different from my youth (let's say up to late-20s) where I would learn everything the same way, just naturally pick it up incrementally quite quickly with no 'big bang' realisations. I guess the flipside to this is as you age you get better at dealing with a lack of knowledge, i.e. being able to tread water / BS / talk around / engage appropriate support on things you don't fully understand until such time as the penny drops. Young people tend to be more like the rabbit in the headlights who 'panic' when faced with something they don't understand.

As for working in IT I would say the biggest thing graduates seem to lack isn't technical skills but rather SDLC understanding. So for example they may be very competent in language X, they can write code to produce a required output. What they can't deal with so well, is things like figuring out what data they need to prove their code, understanding the relative importance of different environment stacks, planning and reporting on the status of their work, understanding the interelationships between different elements of a system (e.g. thinking about the potential implications of a change in one area impacting on something else) etc. My guess is they tend to learn concepts in isolation like standalone tasks, rather than as part of a big cohesive ecosystem.

Occurred to me reading your post it probably depends a bit industry to industry as well - as it is mostly warehouse stuff we tend to have a mixture of part time university students and/or those at college planning to head off to uni who only hang around for a couple of years or people who have kind of fallen down the cracks for various reasons. On the driving side it still tends to be mostly older people and that hasn't really changed much in years - still broadly the same spread.

We are definitely seeing a trend where the ability to land on their feet is less common while the ability to absorb information is significantly increasing.

 

[HangTime]

Maybe that's general societal change where the current century is the information age, people are glued to devices absorbing information rather than getting hands on with practical stuff. Plus people rarely repair items any more they just buy new ones. So if you need people with practical skills they may be getting harder to come by. I can't really think of a good reason why people wouldn't be able to apply their learning in cases where it doesn't involve a huge amount of physicality however (e.g. learn how to operate machine equipment).

When I reflect back on my first job after uni it took me a few months to get up to speed but I don't think it would be much different if I had to go back and do the same again now, I got more proficient as I went on due to experience on the practical side (how to fix problem X) and just general absorption of tacit knowledge that wasn't really written down anywhere, plus learning how to optimise my work to do more in parallel / reduce waste.

 

[OspreyO]

Take this in the way intended (it's late, I'm still working), but this is part of the reason why the cleverest developers shoot off from firms who still have traditional IT houses. These folks should be incubated to be world class developers, not pseudo PMs (or vom-in-my-mouth 'technical' PMs) adopting what their forefathers saw as the important bit.

People should play to their strengths.

Couldn't agree more.

 

[malachi]

Maybe that's general societal change where the current century is the information age, people are glued to devices absorbing information rather than getting hands on with practical stuff. Plus people rarely repair items any more they just buy new ones. So if you need people with practical skills they may be getting harder to come by. I can't really think of a good reason why people wouldn't be able to apply their learning in cases where it doesn't involve a huge amount of physicality however (e.g. learn how to operate machine equipment).

That's basically it.

Late 90's, early 2000's I was building PC's every week. That way I learnt about hardware due to being hands on, as time moved on we moved to mobile devices such as laptops. Today people hardly repair anything because as you said, they just buy new ones and manufactures such as Apple purposely make their devices harder to repair. If they do break forcing you to buy new ones. Many laptops come with RAM and storage soldered to the board so you cant upgrade or repair them.

You learn in the classroom but you wont have a chance to apply it in the working world so the practical experience gets lost. Can see it with networking and the push for Cloud and SDN, Network engineers with hand-ons knowledge will becoming less and less common.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

How much stock do you guys put in glassdoor reviews? The reason for my question is that I had an interview last week with a company that is producing software for construction projects. This is a product management position. I'm a product manager now, but for a component of the M&E package of the building, so moving into software would be a big switch. However, I see the salaries from that industry, the number of jobs available, and can see how much this sort of thing is going to make up the fabric of society in the future, so see the challenge as a great stepping stone.

Having said that, in the interview they mentioned working across different time zones (primarily Canada and India). I have a friend who does this, working with Asia. He says it's fine if once or twice a week you have to stay up early or work late for a particular meeting, but if it's regular it screws with you. That doesn't interest me. I had a look at the glassdoor reviews yesterday and there were only four averaging 2.2/5. That in and of itself doesn't bother me too much, but I read the details of them and it seemed to suggest that there are expectations of you being available for these sorts of meetings all the time.

One thing I really value in my current position is that I do 8 to 4:30, and that's it. I go home. Sometimes I might be there til 5, but there are no expectations on my evenings. But this might be a company that helps me get my foot in the door of a whole new industry...is it worth the sacrifice? They don't seem to have very high staff retention, so I could get a year's experience and go onto something bigger and better.

When it comes to the salary as well, we're talking at least 20% higher than my industry for an entry level position I think. At home, we aren't struggling financially but a bit of extra income would make us feel a whole lot better. And I have set myself a goal of increasing my salary by £20k in the next two years to buy out the help-to-buy loan on our house, which the sort of salary they're talking about would enable me to do almost immediately.

 

[HangTime]

I think they are a useful resource but you need a bigger sample size than four really. Most people won't go to the trouble of leaving a GD review unless they are either disgruntled about something or have been encouraged to do it by their employer.

The problem with working with Canada and India is you are effectively burning both ends of the candle. You'll start work with a bunch of stuff from India and then have late meetings with people in North America. You may also have the 'calendar tetris' challenge of trying to find suitable meeting slots for people from both timezones (early afternoon UK).

I guess only you know how much relative value you place on working hours but overall it sounds like an opportunity worth pursuing.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

I think they are a useful resource but you need a bigger sample size than four really. Most people won't go to the trouble of leaving a GD review unless they are either disgruntled about something or have been encouraged to do it by their employer.

The problem with working with Canada and India is you are effectively burning both ends of the candle. You'll start work with a bunch of stuff from India and then have late meetings with people in North America. You may also have the 'calendar tetris' challenge of trying to find suitable meeting slots for people from both timezones (early afternoon UK).

I guess only you know how much relative value you place on working hours but overall it sounds like an opportunity worth pursuing.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. I thought that too - you could probably bump these things up a little bit on the basis of negative reviewing.

I am concerned about the candle at both ends side of things. I think I would have to be firm and do one of the two per day. Sounds difficult to me, but I am on the side of the benefits outweighing the disbenefits at the moment.

 

[OspreyO]

Glassdoor not 100% accurate maybe. But there's no smoke without fire. You can read between the lines and get feel for the culture of a place.
There is often a culture of long hours in Software development companies (mainly due to poor management) which is interesting considering the habit of making Developers managers.
This will be compounded by working across time zones. Though most of the time to progress in any job industry you'll have to put extra time. No pain no gain etc.
You'd need to decide what's important to you. This place sounds a bit like a sweat shop. Which is fine if it suits you it gets you were you want to go.
Personally I've little patience for it anymore, even if I didn't have other commitments, which rules it out anyway.

 

[OspreyO]

That's basically it.

Late 90's, early 2000's I was building PC's every week. That way I learnt about hardware due to being hands on, as time moved on we moved to mobile devices such as laptops. Today people hardly repair anything because as you said, they just buy new ones and manufactures such as Apple purposely make their devices harder to repair. If they do break forcing you to buy new ones. Many laptops come with RAM and storage soldered to the board so you cant upgrade or repair them.

You learn in the classroom but you wont have a chance to apply it in the working world so the practical experience gets lost. Can see it with networking and the push for Cloud and SDN, Network engineers with hand-ons knowledge will becoming less and less common.

I've worked in IT for decades. In all that time, it would be rare for any place to fix its own hardware. Its almost always under some hardware service agreement. you might cobble together the odd machine or server for project. But it would be rare. Even when on contact with a large deployment team early 2000s rolling out thousands of machines. Any faulty machines went back. we never fixed any.

Network issues a different thing altogether. We would also outsource a lot of this. But you'd still need a fairly deep knowledge even to do that.

 

[randomshenans]

Just what I need a few weeks before Christmas

Sorry to hear that mate! I'm sure it'll be easy to line something else up, but I get it's a ballache you don't need now.

That's basically it.

Late 90's, early 2000's I was building PC's every week. That way I learnt about hardware due to being hands on, as time moved on we moved to mobile devices such as laptops. Today people hardly repair anything because as you said, they just buy new ones and manufactures such as Apple purposely make their devices harder to repair. If they do break forcing you to buy new ones. Many laptops come with RAM and storage soldered to the board so you cant upgrade or repair them.

I find this with my kids. Oldest is nearly 17. He "knows" a lot of stuff as he's consumed it online. He practically has zero experience though and no confidence in trying. They're not used to it like we were. Just windmill in and work it out was what we virtually had to do.

I think they are a useful resource but you need a bigger sample size than four really. Most people won't go to the trouble of leaving a GD review unless they are either disgruntled about something or have been encouraged to do it by their employer.

Yea, agreed. Also varies a lot for bigger companies as each country/ office will be different so take that into account too.

 

[HangTime]

They're not used to it like we were. Just windmill in and work it out was what we virtually had to do

I remember my dad getting a PC, the first one he'd bought instead of borrowing from work and for some reason I decided to try and overclock it (despite having my own PC) very soon after. I ended up corrupting Windows somehow (probably because all the bus speeds were linked on a ratio in those days, like you raised the FSB and then your PCI bus was overclocked potentially causing data loss) and this was the Win98SE era when Windows wasn't so good at fixing itself. So I had to completely reinstall windows, and try to get things back roughly how they were before he noticed anything. Plus the usual catch22 nonsense like needing a driver for the modem to work but not being able to get online without the modem so having to split it across floppy disks and stuff.

Its those sort of dread situations where you messed something up and had to figure out how to fix it where you really learn about stuff. Plus of course all the CONFIG.SYS editing, base memory optimisation, IRQ conflicts and the like we learned about to get games working properly.

That said, I do think there is an element of boomerism that goes on whereby we have some superiority complex about how 'back in the day' we used to be tinkering about and fixing stuff and 'kids today don't have the experience'. The fact of the matter is most of those skills are less valuable now because hardware and software is more user friendly and when you come across a problem you just google it or look for a video on youtube telling you how to sort it out. In other words having zero practical experience of something matters less if you know you can access relevant resources if a scenario comes up where you need to do something in that area. Maybe a good analogy would be say plumbing. I know nothing about it. 25 years ago if there was a minor plumbing issue, I would have to call a plumber. Now I can look it up on the internet first to see if there's an easy fix.

 

[randomshenans]

That said, I do think there is an element of boomerism that goes on whereby we have some superiority complex about how 'back in the day' we used to be tinkering about and fixing stuff and 'kids today don't have the experience'. The fact of the matter is most of those skills are less valuable now because hardware and software is more user friendly and when you come across a problem you just google it or look for a video on youtube telling you how to sort it out. In other words having zero practical experience of something matters less if you know you can access relevant resources if a scenario comes up where you need to do something in that area. Maybe a good analogy would be say plumbing. I know nothing about it. 25 years ago if there was a minor plumbing issue, I would have to call a plumber. Now I can look it up on the internet first to see if there's an easy fix.

I do absolutely agree with that too. We did it out of need, but now there is less need for it. So the kids don't have to do half the stuff because it's not as valuable. We are essentially tech boomers

Also agree, but I do think we have a more windmilly attitude to things, because of our background. Yes the resources are available, but I have found the younger generation not as keen to dive headfirst in. It might just be my experience and I'd be happy to have others have other experiences. I happily look up plumbing stuff (genuinely have done and fixed some things here), or how to refurbish a piano and jump right in and do it.

 

[Maccy]

Sorry to hear that mate! I'm sure it'll be easy to line something else up, but I get it's a ballache you don't need now.

Thanks mate, managed to sort it for now but I'll look for something in the new year.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

I'm working on an assignment for this construction tech company I interviewed for - product management position. Really quite clueless here as it isn't the part of the construction industry that I already work in. I know they're looking more at the process, but I'm so used to understanding my marketplace that coming at it from zero is really odd.

 

[dlockers]

I'm working on an assignment for this construction tech company I interviewed for - product management position. Really quite clueless here as it isn't the part of the construction industry that I already work in. I know they're looking more at the process, but I'm so used to understanding my marketplace that coming at it from zero is really odd.

Chart out what you do now and then try to apply generic steps to it.

Luckily there is lots of collateral on product manager type roles. Not the best example but e.g. this.

For your assignment make assumptions that mean you are clear on where your hard points are (i.e. I assume a plumber would LOVE a bluetooth enabled borescope) but be happy when the assumptions are challenged (e.g. plumbers hate using phones with wet hands) - but fundamentally your generic steps still make sense.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

Chart out what you do now and then try to apply generic steps to it.

Luckily there is lots of collateral on product manager type roles. Not the best example but e.g. this.

For your assignment make assumptions that mean you are clear on where your hard points are (i.e. I assume a plumber would LOVE a bluetooth enabled borescope) but be happy when the assumptions are challenged (e.g. plumbers hate using phones with wet hands) - but fundamentally your generic steps still make sense.

Thanks for the advice. I ended up just writing a really basic roadmap involving me establishing what the hell the product is. I got sick of it eventually and gave up a bit, just did a bit more and sent it off!

 

[iamdjdz]

Had to give feedback on one of the junior members of our team that means that he will lose his job. Feeling gutted for the guy as he is about to sign a mortgage and close to the end of his extended probation. But he's useless at the role and makes us look like clowns to customers, doesn't listen to instruction and seems unable to understand the role. Him going directly increases my work load and that of my team but just couldn't give positive feedback or honestly say he was improving. Never had to do this before and understand it's a business decision but so close to Christmas is horrible.

 

[fatbatman]

Had to give feedback on one of the junior members of our team that means that he will lose his job. Feeling gutted for the guy as he is about to sign a mortgage and close to the end of his extended probation. But he's useless at the role and makes us look like clowns to customers, doesn't listen to instruction and seems unable to understand the role. Him going directly increases my work load and that of my team but just couldn't give positive feedback or honestly say he was improving. Never had to do this before and understand it's a business decision but so close to Christmas is horrible.

Haha, sounds very familiar.

I've recently started a new role (three months in) with a couple of guys reporting to me. One of them was pretty awful to work with. Constant chasing up on work which I had to do in the end, really felt like I was gonna have to micro-manage him. Then he handed in his notice and expected a counter offer lol! Frigging no chance.

Don't feel too hard on yourself. At the end of the day he was probably / would have been eating into your time.