New Year's holidays are a great way to sit down, take stock of the year, and 2020 is also an occasion to take stock of 5/10 years and write an article "what would I advise myself 5-10 years ago, and what today."
KDPV (メモリーズ)
Under the cut: tediousness, multiple sclerosis, unproven claims, and more.
Besides:
- Graveyard of IT professions.
- We call this groan a song - personnel policy, hiring and the situation with personnel.
- Industry average salaries.
- Do middles dream of an electric tractor?
- Total - what would I advise myself about 5 - 10 years ago, and what today.
TLDR: You need to go into development, those who don’t go talk about the tractor (those who left don’t talk), there really aren’t any cheap personnel, you need to learn English and OOP.
Instead of the preface:
There used to be an anecdote about “noble maidens” that before exams they are loaded with knowledge like a cannon, they blurt out during exams, and absolutely nothing remains in the barrel. Now this, unfortunately, is not an exception, but the rule. The fragility of knowledge is seen as the norm. It comes down to curiosities. In the senior years of the faculty of foreign languages, students seriously ask teachers whether it is necessary to know the words that they learn in the last years at the state exam, or whether it is also necessary to know the words that they memorized in the first.
A.A. Lyubishchev. On the situation in high school, 1956.
1. Cemetery of IT professions
Of course, many people remember 2019 as a result with Rambler, but this issue has already been discussed enough. Personally, I remember this year as the year of a sharp increase in demand for DevOps and DevOps engineers. At the same time, the responsibilities for the vacancy are written, as before, by copying from 2-3 vacancies - developer, DBA, Linux administrator, for testing and sometimes responsible for information security. It’s easier to call the position you get DevTestProdSecEtcAllOther than trying to figure out the intricacies of desires.
It is strange that the search for customers and the purchase of equipment have not yet been included in the tasks.
This hype went unnoticed:
1.1 Further growth of clouds, starting from the big five AWS - Azure - Google - IBM - Oracle.
1.2 Decrease in the cost of SSD, maybe even lower than the price of 10k disks of the same volume.
1.3 Active promotion of All as Software — Software-defined storage (SDS), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Software-defined data center.
1.1 Further cloud growth
The logical result of the first point has been repeatedly discussed - the overall demand for "localhost system administrators" is falling significantly. If 10 years ago it was necessary for the system administrator to understand at least a little bit about server hardware, now this is not required, you need to pay bills in a timely manner, the rest will be done by itself, by the spirit of the Omnissiah in the cloud.
Yes, the configuration “it’s good if the servers are at least supermicro, and all the software is obtained from publicly blocked sources” is still out of competition in terms of price / quality ratio, but exactly until the staff salaries become the biggest costs, and if the salary of an additional an employee will be higher than the cost of the cloud - services will be moved to the cloud, and tasks for accessing the cloud will be outsourced. Pure business, nothing personal. Assistance with formatting documents, replacing cartridges, and, of course, writing complaints to vendor channels will remain in the local segment.
Сonclusion - the profession "as a whole" is gradually moving in the same direction as engineers for Novell, Lotus, OS / 2, AppleTalk, and so on.
1.2 Decreasing cost of SSDs
If earlier it was necessary to calculate something to solve data access speed problems, now the solution is simple - “Take an SSD”. The result is wonderful articles on Habré, in the style
thanks to the transfer to storage with All-Flash-architecture, the performance of a rather critical system has noticeably increased. We didn't take precise measurements. but it feels like an increase in speed amounted to 50-70%
Measuring growth by feeling is fresh, original, and very engineering. It would seem that it is difficult to open the statistics data "before" and "after", but no.
How does this affect the market? Just.
- You don’t need to count (even on a calculator), you just need to buy SSD drives (or even All flash array) and press “on”. Further, the storage system will do everything itself. In general, everything.
- It is not required to maintain magical storage, which means that a dedicated employee or (a separate position in the outsourcing contract) is not needed for it. We set it up once, then we only replace disks and ethernet / fc SFP modules. The main thing is not to replace SFP FC8 with 10GE (real cases from practice). However, even if the customer insists on having a certified %Vendor% engineer on staff, you can still buy a certificate.
Сonclusion - the demand for storage engineers is falling, the profession of "storage engineer" loses the ability to replenish personnel from something that knows and requires less retraining of "personnel" from relatively small organizations. Dedicated storage engineers remain with vendors, integrators and the bloody enterprise, and both there and there they will soon have to be grown locally from scratch. At the same time, young cadres should immediately think about the prospects, like that Sharik from the joke - how many years will it take to move to the middle, and maybe he should take a course in C #?
1.3 Active promotion of All as Software
Over the past 10-15 years, “everything is like software” has grown from “just virtual machines” to such solutions as
and ,
from к .
SDS have grown from the level of “just giving away space via iSCSI” to large distributed systems (albeit with their limitations, of course - which many users of Rosreestr have witnessed)
Despite the fact that in local installations with 100 workstations and 10 virtual servers, this level of virtualization is not required (not to mention the price of the solution), result will be the same - if we start mass configuring something programmatically (automate, yes), then the number of required employees decreases.
However, I am calm for networkers - in all somewhat large infrastructures, a network management software infrastructure has already been deployed, and it will not be possible to do less of them, until AI network management solutions enter the market, based on
However, as services begin to migrate to the cloud, the concept of “calculating how much a Software-defined data center will cost us compared to our own” becomes more and more interesting, and devoting to some division (development?) not only virtual machines, but an entire SDDC can become financially justified.
Outcome is the same - the transfer of "everything" from iron to Software-defined reduces the need for qualified personnel in the primary link "in pieces". Even for the reason that anyone can stumble buttons in the Web GUI.
2. We call this moan a song - personnel policy, hiring and the situation with personnel
“Daddy, what are we going to eat today?”
- Nothing, I'm working on an interesting project in a friendly team.
Before reading this part, you need to understand the following:
* Even the simplest formsheet and JSON writer is the center of production. It is he who creates the added value (which, of course, still needs to be able to be sold or handed over under the act). This is "profitable IT".
* A system administrator of any kind (except for the case when the integrator rents him for $10 an hour, $50 for a trip, there is a friend who is a business analyst, data center, Power BI, measuring any of your metrics) is a cost center, wasting money and unconditional expenses . Such IT does not create any net profit for the end customer.
Thus, any developer has much more pluses - he is a profitable unit. This is clearly seen when comparing two stories on YouTube - ITGM report # 14. (Speaker Stary Hrych) and "The maximum salary of a system administrator" from Ilya Rud.
As a consequence of all of the above (including the series of articles “Why didn’t they call me back”), often heard groans resemble a well-known anecdote, “You look to the left... - mountains..., You look to the right... - mountains..., And if you peck yourself in the leg - it hurts!«.
Questions from HR are sometimes more and more striking:
- We are looking for personnel, why didn’t you even respond to our spam mailing list “everyone in a row”, where are your soft skills?
Why don't you want to work for a gray salary lower than your current white one?
— How so you are not happy with the fact that our director bought a new Bentley? Where is your sense of command?
- What does the Labor Code of the Russian Federation mean? Firstly, we have a startup, and secondly, we know better what is written in the shopping mall. Why go to court, we talked normally.
Why are you asking if employees had heart attacks at work?
– We have order and well-established business processes, namely a strict work schedule, a dress code, accounting for entry and exit times, writing off hours, multiplying KPI (and bonuses) by zero for a delay of 10 seconds, agreeing on a budget in just six months, and issuing laptop in just a month - we are just waiting for you to restore order in the rest.
- We do not have Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google (FAANG) - but you need to go to us. We don’t know exactly why, behind the atmosphere of a startup mess, here! There really is no money, but the startup will definitely shoot.
The bottom line: When someone declares that “there are no personnel”, then he is absolutely right, only the phrase must be read in full: “our HR cannot find personnel for the salary and conditions we offer, with the knowledge we require. They do not find the desire and courage to say that our requirements do not correspond to the market, and we do not check that they are really looking for someone, and do not write and call everyone in a row according to the lists of open vacancies and keywords. This situation suits us, because we can always blame the problems on HR. HR is also happy with the situation, since their KPI is tied to the number of letters sent and resumes sent to us, and not to the closing of a position.»
Win-Win situation.
Therefore, the groans and cries “oh no staff” from the management and the stories “at the interview they again asked about hatches and how many bits a line occupied in Java 5.0 - then they asked me if I was sure of my qualifications ( ) will continue.
The problem is that
- The era of the remnants of at least Soviet education has passed, and the mass of cheap qualified personnel is no more, and will not be.
- Personnel from the regions have been raked out, and the remaining ones are becoming more and more difficult to interest, they are already working at a rate of $ 15 / hour and higher.
- The demographic pit is not a statistical joke.
- Savings on IT constantly turn into a couple of days of downtime “to leave everything”, then “we have left the only one, he is a key specialist, our pipe is in danger.”
3. Salaries in the industry
A cursory study of habr and hh showed that there is no significant amount of salary statistics. Published statistics from my circle for how many - 800-1000 vacancies per direction? (Examples: , ) Something shows of course.
The hh payroll database is only available by subscription.
Attempt to parse hh — »”from Ilya Rudya suffers from certain shortcomings - only vacancies “with a salary” are considered there and only in the direction of Windows.
Vacancies in telegram channels (and everywhere) suffer from a spread of salaries of the form “50-150” or “130-330” thousand rubles per hand, while more and more often you can find out the actual salary plus bonus plus bonus criteria only after 1-3 months of work.
A particularly difficult situation is with the "annual bonus" - when it may simply not be given with the words "it was a difficult year, but you hold on." Savings on the payroll (wage fund) are especially good if the annual bonus is 3-6 monthly salaries and only with it the salary is approximately equal to the “market”, or rather “the one that was promised in a neighboring organization”.
This situation has been stable for years and completely suits both employees and employers - I can’t explain the absence of an analogue of Glassdoor in the Russian Federation in any other way.
The same situation causes unreasonable expectations for a number of IT members, where they expect salaries starting from *3 from the city average for the market. For example, if the average salary announced in the press in the market is 30 thousand rubles, then less than 90 thousand “on hand” is not expected. For Moscow, the “average” is from 55 to 80 thousand rubles, depending on which service was counted and for what.
The reality, in my opinion, is much worse, but I stopped collecting statistics a year ago for the reasons stated above.
Reality for Moscow, estimated and not provable:
Any June: 35-55 thousand rubles. With knowledge of English 45-75 thousand.
Any middle: 50-150 k. Knowledge of English is implied, at least at the level of years of mi speech from my heart, ?
further serious discrepancies in the level of salaries begin, depending on the direction, real level, length of service, and hundreds of other reasons.
4. Do middles dream of an electric tractor?
Citizens! Life dictates its own laws, its cruel laws. I won't tell you about the purpose of our meeting - you know it. The goal is holy. From everywhere we hear groans. From all parts of our vast country cry for help. We must lend a helping hand, and we will. Some of you serve and eat bread and butter, others are engaged in seasonal work and eat sandwiches with caviar. Both of them sleep in their beds and cover themselves with warm blankets.
Discussion of the topic “Piglets to the tractor” is certainly an interesting activity, but it depends on several things, namely:
- What exactly was the opponent reading. If the Horde, where factories, ships, rockets are being built one by one, then of course, why go somewhere.
If the case takes place in a competitive environment (1), then the question arises why the opponent is still here for the fifth year, if everything is so bad.
There is no publicly available statistical base for a numerical analysis of the situation with the outflow of personnel.
The data on the number of vacancies and salaries on hh does not show anything, since vacancies are published three times, and salary forks:
a) absent
b) published as "from 100 to 250 thousand rubles"
c) after the interview, they can be LOWER than the declared fork at the beginning.
The data of the State Statistics Committee on the number of people who left - arrived only show general statistics, the format "two million came from the countries of the south of the former USSR, 10 thousand left for Europe and the USA, it seems 9.5 arrived." Some reliability in terms of the "total number of those who left" is given by the statistics of the host country, but it does not contain a layout of how many APCS engineers left, how many developers, how many students, and how many children and relatives of respected people went "to study in Europe and look after the vineyards ".
You can try to rely on survey data like At present, 53 percent of citizens aged 18 to 24 would like to emigrate from Russia.. An excellent form of survey, you can just as well ask “would you like to get a million”, without specifying - a million dollars in small bills without obligations or a million rubles at 40% per annum.
You can try to search for lottery data
There could be a table in this place, but for all the years on Habré they have not mastered making the insert table button, and manually I am too lazy, and they are buggy here.
Russia, total
2010 - 101,324
2011 - 140,444
2012 - 167,600
2013 - 218,862
2014 - 249,670
2015 - 265,086
2016 - 274,746
2017 - 332,069
2018 - 434,353
I don’t know what conclusion to draw and how to read this data correctly. In any case, 430 green card applications are weakly correlated with 53% of applicants.
At the same time, as knowledgeable people irresponsibly declare, juniors are not expected “there”, and “seniors” are still well fed and here they are fed, maybe even better. At the same time, “there” there is a demand for the middle level, but the closer to the senior, the greater the chance of subsidence in the standard of living, from marbled beef again to doshirak, because the apartment is expensive, medicine is expensive, the high cost is terrible around.
Summary. There are dreams and conversations. There is no publicly visible movement. It is possible that those who wanted and could have already left, or even already returned.
(1) The competitive environment is “whoever has dinner with a girl dances her”, more precisely, what the channel / group administrator is rooting for on a spiritual and / or material basis, will be the only correct point of view.
5. Total - what would I advise myself about 5 - 10 years ago, and what today
At this point, it was possible to insert a table of pros and cons, but for so many years on Habré they never made a button for inserting tables. so it will be like this:
The developer is:
- Immediate profit for the business (System Administrator - net loss in terms of accounting)
- Growing Russian and global market (SA market is falling. After a dozen racks and with modern automation tools, the difference between 10-100 and 100-1000 is getting smaller)
- Ability to work from home (CA sometimes has to go to the iron)
- Global demand is growing (for SA it is falling, global clouds are often more profitable than local ones due to dynamism)
- Weak connection to the existing and rarely updated infrastructure (Which is not in the local infrastructure. The service life of equipment is 3-5 years, you can’t immediately leave Cisco for Arista or HPE for any SDS, you won’t be able to change the physical infrastructure every day).
Summary. There are no advantages at the start of a career in the direction of a system administrator (operation), but the requirements are growing. OPS/SRE looks more attractive.
Note: at the same time, in other industries in the Russian Federation with an engineering direction, an even more complete despondency in wages reigns, here , therefore, there are prospects in SA (operation) in themselves, perhaps comparable to automated process control systems, only there are not Cisco / HPE, but Siemens.
The advice will be the same as 5 and 10 years ago:
- Learn the theory and mathematics of programming
- Demanded languages change every 5 years, algorithms - not so often
- The second mandatory requirement is the study of English (optionally German or French, the second foreign language)
- Regularly read recommendations for hiring employees "for the customer." Sections “how to convince a candidate that he is not worthy of such a salary even at an interview”, “how to convince an employee of the inevitability of a bonus and an imminent increase, or rather a change in plate”, “stories about the benefits of working 12 hours and on Saturdays” and other career counseling courses and increasing soft skills from business oldness.
As for the forecasts, I think that 2020 will bring us all a lot of new and funny under the signs of “soft skills” and “toxicity”.
Literature for extracurricular reading.
If anyone has read it:
THE STATE OF IT HIRING
In search of top IT talent
What IT execs are doing to fill critical positions and takeaways for job seekers.
Copyright 2018 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP.
Candidate expectations can cause other wrinkles: 58 percent of respondents say they frequently or constantly run into candidates whose salary expectations are out of reach for their budgets.
It can be difficult to attract staffers with the coveted high-tech skill sets because good IT candidates are in demand across the industry—and they know it.
Particular attention should be paid to page 10 - Sweetening the pot for potential IT hires
Given that global trends reach the Russian Federation in 3-5 years, then by 2022, perhaps, this document will be translated and brought to the attention of those interested.
Source: habr.com