Another day began, as is customary for a winter day in a short week. Classic tasks were pouring into the task manager — "I sent a letter to Vasily Ivanovich at Sportloto yesterday, instead of Ivan Vasilevich at Loto-million, where I wrote all sorts of nonsense about Vasily Ivanovich. Make sure he doesn't read the letter.” or “Last year at the branch, we optimized the system; instead of hiring an administrator, we took the director's best friend's son, for which we received a contract from the director's friend. But his son lost our database along with a new SSD disk that was bought cheaply. Please help us back to how it was.«.
I was listening with one ear , while with the other I was hearing the noise from the effective manager coming through the thin drywall partitions. when suddenly an unfamiliar contact tapped me on %messenger%.
TL:DR Let's talk about money, HR, and, as always, a stream of consciousness.
Hello, said the contact, I found your phone on hh, are you a bit interested in a job?
Well, I replied. Please announce your offer: what, where, and at what price?
I carefully stored the correspondence with the HR, but believe me — there was nothing new or interesting there. The young HR wasn’t young, moderately attractive, but she was completely unable to explain what prospects there could be in an organization where I had interviewed 1.5 years ago and where they had offered exactly the same salary and the same conditions as today.
In a year and a half, the large and promising (TM) organization still hadn’t bought a coffee machine ($500) and hadn’t moved from the office, which was "only half an hour walk through snowdrifts from almost the farthest metro station." We didn’t find mutual sales love, but nevertheless, the correspondence made me think about what questions I should ask even before going to the office and having interviews "over Skype"? I have already written, but I still need to get to those questions.
The first question.
In my opinion, the simplest first question that should be asked to save both my time and others' is the question about money.
If the HR cannot or doesn’t want to state the salary range — then the further conversation doesn’t really make any sense.
Of course, there are exceptions: firms with a constant recruitment of employees and a good, well-known reputation "in general."
There are reasons for such an apparent simplicity of the question, and for HR's sharp dislike of such simplicity.
The first reason.
Quote: The main issue for IT professionals in Russia lies in the fact that they are not needed. There are hardly any serious IT businesses in Russia, and businesses in general are struggling. In government agencies, the pervasive approach is 'good enough', therefore
a) total nepotism (cronyism). The Owl )
b) they are indifferent to advancement (certificates, skills, knowledge).
However, there are more IT professionals in Russia than needed, as the country historically has a strong math school. But they have nowhere to work, thus competition for positions (which is quite mediocre, of course) is above average compared to Western countries.
However, IT is not needed more in some places and less in others. In places where HR sends out searches without indicating salaries—candidates are not needed at all. This sometimes happens—perhaps they need to simulate activity in searching, or show a specialist a thick stack of resumes and say, 'Look, Evgeny V.! So many people can be found for your position.'
The method is certainly not very honest, but approximately leaders can apply even more than that.
The second reason.
Regardless of what is said in HR lectures about non-material motivation and 'money is not the main thing and only works in the short term', non-material motivation only works under comparable or better working conditions. Money is almost always the top priority for nearly everyone, phrased as 'not less than'—
Russian companies' personnel are motivated by 'fair monetary compensation', while a 'incompetent management team' demotivates. Retaining employees is easiest done by offering them a salary increase, established analysts at Hays. The amount of monetary compensation is simultaneously the main motivating and the main demotivating factor for most Russian workers, according to research results from the recruiting company Hays. The particular importance of this factor was indicated by 93% of the 3600 respondents in a study of employees from 486 Russian and international companies operating in Russia, predominantly in Moscow.
Source:
Since RBC cannot seem to decide when to block what, here is the .
The second question.
The second question is even simpler — who, exactly, are they looking for, and did the future manager read the job description?
If the HR cannot answer the second question at all, other than saying „well, there are computers, servers, DHCP, ReFS, Proxmox, NoSQL“, or confidently replies „no, I did everything myself“ — then, it means that the employee is indeed not needed; it looks like a façade of busy work.
In such conditions, asking about education in the specialization, DMS, and so on is already meaningless — what can one expect from an organization where the department management is not interested in who and how the HR is looking for?
It's easier to say (or write) „thank you very much, I will review your offer in detail a little later, and if I find it interesting, I will respond to you.“
It saves a lot of time, both yours and HR's.
Of course, there is a risk of getting blacklisted as „difficult and greedy“ — such lists were recently published for Ukraine, and I have no doubt about their existence in Russia, but blacklists for distribution among organizations where there is no need for staff hold value… only among similar organizations.
The end.
P.S. A stream of consciousness about aluminum forks.
TL:DR As always, at the end of the text, there is a stream of consciousness without any structure.
The job market in IT regarding system administration in Moscow is in a strange state, or at least it seems to me that way; maybe I just lack broader coverage, but based on several links, the picture looks similar.
Links:
, , .
From the employer's side, there is often a wailing like that of Yaroslavna (or even Natasha Rostova) that „there are no specialists with the required qualifications.“ Generally speaking, this is not the case, the specialists are there; the employer just subtly omits that the full phrase sounds like —„there are no specialists with the required qualifications for the specified salary, or our HR is dealing with something else, but we cannot admit that to ourselves.“. One of the links has a complaint along the lines of „we are not ready to pay as much as they want.“
From the employees' side, it seems that there are no jobs with a salary of NNN (in this case, it doesn’t particularly matter whether NNN is 100 or 500 thousand rubles).
This is also not the case; such vacancies do exist, but they almost never become publicly available beyond a certain salary range. For example, vacancies offering 100,000-150,000 rubles are seen on hh much more frequently than two years ago, while those offering 200,000 and above are almost nonexistent in the public space, even though such vacancies do exist and they are not necessarily executive positions. However, one must also understand Sova. Sova
A similar problem of "I want to receive without earning" has unfortunately not gone away either.
From my personal viewpoint, it seems that the job market in system administration in Moscow (and Russia as a whole) is contracting under various pressures. These pressures include factors such as:
— Stagflation in the economy, which is also accompanied by nepotism.
— Increased productivity of technology, where problems can now be solved simply by "buying an SSD".
— Eased deployment of virtualization systems. Using method X-X (and in production)
— Increased availability of clouds and cloud services, from Office 365 to AWS.
— Outsourcing non-core areas; in modern monitoring and task management services, it’s practically irrelevant how many points need monitoring — whether 100 or 500, which allows for personnel optimization (specifically moving them out of Moscow), and in some cases, even replacing staff with automation.
— Local cost-cutting.
— Reluctance to invest in specialists as a subtype of cutting costs (with variations).
I'll elaborate on the last two points.
— Local cost-cutting.
The demand for IT in Moscow developed unevenly. Riding the wave of oil money and with a lack of the variety of clouds and tools we have today, before the crisis of summer-autumn 2008, demand for staff was growing. From the start of the crisis, from autumn 2008 to 2012, the market was flooded with numerous candidates, including many with high competencies (experience and real certificates).
As a result, among some HR specialists, there emerged a belief that good IT specialists are available on the market, are inexpensive, and that finding such a specialist, in particular, and in IT as a whole is not challenging. In other words, one can hire anyone and their qualifications will be sufficient.
However, at the same time, there has been an intensified flow of specialists from IT administration into adjacent fields (development, testing, and sometimes even through 1C and into accounting).
Furthermore, since around 2008, there has been an increase (which hasn't stopped) in the exodus of specialists from the Russian Federation as a whole. This outflow is not noticeable in raw numbers, with hundreds of people leaving each year; however, they are not just junior staff or junior administrators — on the contrary, serious specialists are emerging from the Russian-speaking IT community. This is indirectly confirmed by previous analyses of blogs in Russian and the unfortunate fate of a once-popular website that, in pursuit of ad views, merged marketing, coworking, and narratives about space, food, plus headphones with a warm, tube sound into one chaotic blend.
Unfortunately, no public analysis (of job positions) is conducted by the only remaining major job portal — HH. However, HH provides an API for tracking employee loyalty, and there are rumors that the database can also be obtained in one way or another, yet there is no public statistics available, just as there are no tools for employees to evaluate job vacancies.
Perhaps statistics on the outflow of personnel can be obtained from certification tracking systems, such as VUE.
It might also be possible to indirectly assess the outflow of personnel through published lists of various experts.
— Reluctance to invest in specialists as a subtype of cutting costs (with variations).
Another complaint from the management and HR side is: 'Do not educate them, or else they will leave.'
This, in my opinion, is related to the fact that even inexpensive ($500) training can make a specialist realize that they are worth more in the market than what is being offered 'here', leading to them leaving after training. As a result, in the overwhelming majority of cases (in numerical terms), there is no training available in organizations, and there is an implicit (not advertised) ban even on free training — whether online or open competitions for pizza consumption. Sometimes there’s even no opportunity to set up a personal booth, even to check for updates on certain services. Variations occur in the form of mandatory additional periods in the gallery as 'either work off your training or return NNN% of the cost,' or a sudden change in management regarding what seemed like a promising individual, including the approach, 'develop your qualifications independently, I read books at your age.'Currently, all of the above results in a knocking sound from the bottom in the form of:«.
Conclusion.
Currently, all of the above results in a knock at the bottom of the species:
— "Oh, I'm a student. I was told to update the exchange during the probation period, so we installed it from torrents, bought an SSD, but it still doesn't work as it should. Please help, good people, I have no money for support."
— Oh, what a disaster, there are no specialists.
— Oh, it's unclear what to study; they don't increase salaries for certification anyway, they won't pay 100 (200, 300) thousand.
— Oh, well it will be enough for my working years, and then I'll be 65 and retire, we will live well!
— There are NO specialists in some places AT ALL. And you're in Moscow, while the tasks are in the regions, so it’s your problem, %username%.
The last point (there are NO specialists in some places AT ALL) also needs to be discussed separately.
1. The outflow of specialists from the regions.
Almost all competent specialists from the regions have either settled down well or moved to Moscow (St. Petersburg) and are now on the tractor. There are few exceptions, though they do exist.
2. The optimization of what’s left has led to the fact that there is simply no personnel who can do something needed once a year. There is a type of substitute available if needed, but that "something" is not his specialization.
3. The same applies to servicing all sorts of minor items, like cash registers, computers, monitors, and so on. These are minor items, but they also need to be understood and handled, along with that **** barcode and about the same *** inventory system for alcoholic products, ЕГАИС.
4. The situation is deteriorating in spurts because, generally speaking, you need about 10 good specialists for every 100,000 people, roughly (in the market like p. 3, where all sorts of minor items are involved). A jump will occur when the next specialist either suffers a heart attack or stroke, or moves to Moscow-Petersburg. The situation will immediately drop a level.
For example, let's take a small town with a population of about 50,000. There is a conditional store chain, any of them — Monetochki, Pyaterochka, Magnit, Dixie, Lenta, Perekrestok — whoever else. But there is. The store has cash registers, essentially — small PCs with a printing device attached by duct tape and a card terminal that somehow send sales reports. There are SCS installers in the city.
There is no one capable of solving a problem at the level of 'printing not printing' and reprogramming or fixing or making a decision about replacing the connection between computer — printer — payment terminal. It's really not that complicated. However, the nearest specialists are 100 kilometers away. They don’t mind traveling that distance — it’s just that you need to dispatch two vehicles over harsh roads (and two vehicles because only one can operate in summer, and in winter, it’s too risky), and the price for their services immediately skyrockets by *10 — because of the two vehicles, two drivers, and associated risks, and this is for a day, plus they have ongoing work at their current location.
The same goes for any task slightly more complex than 'cutting with a grinder'. Sure, there are some experts for current operations, but everything else is either non-existent or very limited. Not needed.
What to do about it, someone might ask, how to live? I would be happy, but...
Nothing new has been invented here.
— VUE Certification (Prometric, etc.)
— IELTS (TOEFL, CELPIP)
— LinkedIn (monster, etc.)
— Three widely known options.
For those who read this far.
For many, it’s a SUDDEN discovery that the internet is full of not just courses on YouTube, but ready-made courses, labs, and simulators, all for FREE, that is, for nothing.
No hidden fees and at high speed.
I will list the most well-known ones:
AWS and Azure. Unexpectedly, both offer 'kinda free' for a month to a year, although Azure will deduct either a ruble or a dollar, but they say it will be refunded later.
MS
and for MS Hands-on lab —
The aforementioned pizza makers: Microsoft 365 Intelligent Communications Global Azure Bootcamp 2019 Russia
Vmware
and their
and their freshly prepared
Storage Array.
List of VSA Virtual Storage
Some simulators are just GUI or CLI, while others are full-fledged virtual machines.
Networks.
Network simulators are even described here — from packet tracer to GNS3, where you can insert ASA with known tricks.
How is all this related to the original title?
It's quite simple.
The job market globally, and in Russia in particular, is tightening, and reskilling is becoming increasingly difficult. As a result, it may happen that there will be no job options left; any available job might seem like a good opportunity. However, in my opinion, such a situation should be avoided by monitoring both the overall trends and your own growth prospects regarding salary and qualifications, as well as job stability. To achieve this, you should spend less time interviewing at obviously unpromising places, and even less time working there, unless you want to suddenly find yourself at age 50 with 2005-era knowledge interviewing for a position where skilled workers are not really needed.
In my opinion, it’s much better when you decide whether to call back or not, %username%.
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , please.
Have you encountered various forms of trimming on personnel and been in places where workers are not needed?
32.1%Yes, I have.
24.1%I've seen worse.
13.8%I haven't been.
11.6%Who is Evgeny V.?
17.8%Author! Write about cats; it's impossible to read this.
0.4%Other comments.
224 users voted. 103 users abstained.
Source: habr.com
