The next day began, as befits a winter day in a short week. The task manager was filled with classic tasks - “Yesterday I sent a letter to Vasily Ivanovich in Sportloto, instead of Ivan Vasilyevich in Lotto-million, where I wrote all sorts of obscene things about Vasily Ivanovich, make sure that he doesn’t read the letter" or "Here at the branch last year we optimized the system, instead of an administrator we hired the son of the director’s best friend, for which the director’s friend brought us a contract, only his son lost our database along with a new SSD drive bought cheaply, make us happy as it was«.
I listened with one ear , and to others - the noise coming through thin plasterboard partitions from an effective manager , when suddenly an unfamiliar contact knocked on my %messenger.
TL:DR Next about money, HR, and, as always, stream of consciousness.
Hello, said the contact, but I found your phone number on hh, and you’re not a little interested in work?
Of course, I agreed. Announce your proposal: what, where and how much?
I carefully buried the correspondence with HR, but believe me, there was nothing new or interesting there. The young HR was not young, moderately pretty, but she was completely unable to explain what such prospects could be in an organization where I had already been for an interview 1.5 years ago, and even then they offered exactly the same salary and exactly the same conditions as and today.
For a year and a half, a large and promising (TM) organization has not bought a coffee machine ($500), and has not moved from an office of the class “only half an hour’s walk through the snowdrifts from almost the farthest metro station.” Our mutual, corrupt love did not work out, but, nevertheless, the correspondence itself made me think about what questions should be asked before going to the office and interviews “on Skype”? I have already written, but these issues still need to be addressed.
First question.
In my opinion, the simplest first question that is worth asking to save both your own and other people’s time is the question about money.
If HR cannot or does not want to voice the salary range, in general, further conversation does not make any sense.
There are exceptions, of course: companies with a constant recruitment and a good known reputation “in general”.
There are several reasons for this apparent simplicity of the issue, and HR’s sharp dislike for such simplicity.
The first reason.
Quote: The main problem of IT specialists in the Russian Federation is that they are not needed. There are practically no serious IT businesses in the Russian Federation, and business in general in the Russian Federation is a bit difficult. In government offices, the “it will do” approach is universal, so
a) total nepotism (nepotism. Owl )
b) they don’t care about advancement (certificates, skills, knowledge).
At the same time, there are more IT specialists in the Russian Federation than are needed, because... a country with a historically strong math school. But they have nowhere to work, so the competition for a place (very so-so, of course) is higher than the average for Western countries.
However, IT is not needed in some places more, but in others less. Where HR is sent to search without specifying money, personnel are not needed at all. This happens - perhaps you need to imitate search activities, perhaps you need to show some specialist a thick stack of resumes and say look, Evgeniy V.! There are so many people who can take your place.
The method is certainly not very honest, but approximately managers may use something different.
The second reason.
No matter what they tell themselves in HR lectures about non-material motivation and “money is not the main thing and works only in the short term,” however, non-material motivation only works under comparable or better working conditions. In the first place, almost always and for almost everyone, money is in the wording “no less than” -
The personnel of Russian companies are motivated by “decent monetary remuneration”, and demotivated by “incompetent management staff”. The easiest way to retain people is by offering them a salary increase, Hays analysts found. The size of monetary remuneration is both the main motivating and the main demotivating factor for the majority of Russian workers, according to the results of a study by the recruiting company Hays. The particular importance of this factor was indicated by 93% of the 3600 employees of 486 Russian and international companies operating in Russia, mainly in Moscow, surveyed during the study.
Source:
Since RBC can’t decide when to block what, here’s .
Second question.
The second question is even simpler - who are they actually looking for, and has the future manager read the job description?
If HR cannot answer the second question at all, other than “well, there are computers, servers, DHCP, ReFS, Proxmox, NoSQL,” or answers confidently “no, I did everything myself,” then the employee is really not needed , there is a picture of vigorous activity.
In such conditions, asking about specialty training, voluntary health insurance, etc. is already pointless - in fact, what can you expect from an organization where the department management is not interested in who and how they are looking for HR?
It’s easier to say (or write) “thank you very much, I’ll carefully read your proposal a little later and if it seems interesting to me, I’ll answer you.”
It saves a lot of time, both yours and HR’s.
Of course, there is a risk of ending up on blacklists of “means and greedy people” - recently such ones were published for Ukraine, and I have no doubt at all about their existence in the Russian Federation, but blacklists for distribution among organizations where personnel are not needed have value... only among such same organizations.
End.
PS 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 IT labor market in terms of system administration in Moscow is in some strange state, or so it seems to me, maybe I just don’t have enough breadth of coverage, but according to a number of links, the picture is similar.
Links:
, , .
From the employer’s side, sometimes Yaroslavna (or even Natasha Rostova) laments that “there are no personnel with the necessary qualifications.” In general, this is not the case, there are personnel, it’s just that the employer is a little silent that the full phrase sounds like this: “there are no personnel with the required qualifications for the specified salary, or our HR is doing something wrong, but we cannot admit it to ourselves". One of the links contains a complaint like “we are not ready to pay as much as they want.”
From the side of the workers, it seems that there are no jobs with a salary of NNN (in this case, it is not particularly important whether NNN is 100 or 500 thousand rubles).
This is also not true, such vacancies exist, but they almost never become publicly available beyond a certain amount. For example, vacancies for 100-150 thousand rubles are found on hh much more often than 2 years ago, vacancies for 200+ are almost absent in the public domain, although in fact there are such vacancies, and these are not managerial positions. But, again, you need to understand the Owl. Owl
A similar problem, “I want to receive, not earn,” unfortunately, also has not gone away.
From my personal side, it seems that the labor market in system administration in Moscow (and the Russian Federation) as a whole is narrowing under the pressure of various factors. These are factors such as:
— Stagflation in the economy, including those accompanied by nepotism (nepotism).
— Increased productivity of equipment, when problems could be solved “by simply buying an SSD.”
— Facilitating the deployment of virtualization systems. Method X-X (and in production)
— Increasing availability of clouds and cloud services, from Office 365 to AWS.
— Outsourcing of non-core areas; in modern monitoring and task management services, it makes almost no difference what number of points to monitor—100 or 500, which makes it possible to optimize personnel (or rather, move it out of Moscow), and in some places even take out the woman and put in a machine gun .
— Kroilovo is in place.
— Reluctance to invest in a specialist as a subspecies of Kroilov (with variations).
I will write in more detail about the last two points.
— Kroilovo is in place.
The development of demand for IT in Moscow was uneven. In the wake of oil money and in the absence of such a variety of clouds and tools as now, before the crisis of the summer-autumn 2008, the demand for personnel was growing. Since the crisis, from the fall of 2008 to 2012, the market, accordingly, has been under pressure from a mass of personnel, among whom were highly competent personnel (with experience and real certificates).
As a result, among some personnel specialists and HR, an opinion has emerged that there is a good IT specialist on the market, inexpensively, and there is nothing difficult in finding such a specialist in particular, and in IT in general. That is, you can hire anyone and his qualifications will be sufficient.
However, at the same time, there has been an increased flow of specialists from IT administration to related areas (development, testing, and in some places even through 1C and into accounting).
In addition, somewhere since 2008, the outflow of specialists from the Russian Federation as a whole has increased (and it has not stopped). In itself, in the hundreds of people per year, this outflow is imperceptible, but it is never enikey or junior administrators who leave - on the contrary, serious specialists leave the Russian and Russian-speaking IT community. This is indirectly confirmed by a previously conducted analysis of blogs “in Russian”, and the sad fate of one previously well-known site, which, in pursuit of advertising views, lumped together marketing, coworking and stories about space, food, plus headphones with warm tube sound.
Unfortunately, such public analysis (of jobs) is not carried out by the only remaining major job portal, HH. At the same time, the HH portal provides an API for tracking employee loyalty, and there are rumors that the database can also be obtained one way or another, but there are no public statistics on it, just as there are no tools for employees to evaluate vacancies.
Perhaps statistics on personnel outflow can be obtained from certification accounting systems, such as VUE.
Perhaps the outflow of personnel can be assessed indirectly through published lists of various kinds of experts.
— Reluctance to invest in a specialist as a subspecies of Kroilov (with variations).
Another knock from the bottom comes from the management and personnel, and it is called “there is no need to teach, otherwise it will run away.”
This, in my opinion, is due to the fact that even cheap ($500) training can give a specialist the understanding that he is worth more on the market than he is offered “here,” and as a result, the specialist leaves after training. As a result, in the overwhelming majority (in numbers) there are no training organizations, and there is an implicit (not advertised) ban even on free training - be it online, or open pizza-eating competitions. Sometimes it’s not even possible to assemble your own stand to at least check the updates of certain services. Variations occur in the form of a mandatory additional term in the galley in the form of “either work for studying or return NNN% of the cost,” or a sharp change in management about such a seemingly promising one, including the approach “develop your qualifications on your own, I read books when I was your age«.
Summary.
Now all of the above gives results in the form of a knock on the bottom of the species:
- “Oh, I’m a student, I was told to update the exchange during the test session, so we installed it from torrents, bought an SSD, but it still doesn’t work as it should, please help kind people, there’s no money for support.”
— oh, the trouble is, there are no personnel.
— oh, it’s not clear what to learn, they still don’t add money for certification, they still don’t pay 100 (200, 300) thousand.
- oh, well, there’s enough work for my lifetime, and then 65 years and a pension, we’ll live!
— there are NO frames at all in some places. Moreover, you are in Moscow, and the tasks are in the regions, so this is your problem, %username%.
The last point (there are NO frames at all in some places) also needs to be analyzed separately.
1. Washing out of personnel from the regions.
Almost all the smart people from the regions have either already settled down normally, or moved to Moscow (St. Petersburg) and then got on a tractor. There are few exceptions, although they do exist.
2. Optimization of what was 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 replacement for him if necessary, but this “something” is not his specialization.
3. The same applies to the maintenance of all small things, such as cash registers, computers, monitors, and so on. This is a small thing, but you also need to know and do it, along with this **** touch and no less the same *** system for recording wine and vodka goods, EGAIS.
4. The situation is worsening in spurts, because generally speaking, you need, say, 10 “total” good specialists per 100.000 people, approximately (in the market PP 3, where there are all sorts of small things). There will be a breakthrough at the moment when the next specialist either has a heart attack or stroke, or he moves to Moscow and St. Petersburg. The situation will immediately go down a notch.
For example, let’s take a small city of 50 thousand people. It has a conventional chain store, any - coins - fives - magnets - Dixie - tape - crossroads - whoever else. But there is. The store has cash registers, actually small PCs with a printing device screwed to electrical tape and a card terminal that somehow sends sales reports. There are SCS installers in the city.
There is no longer anyone capable of understanding the “print not printing” level problem and flashing or repairing it, or making a decision to replace the computer-printer-payment terminal combination. In general, there is nothing complicated there. But. But the closest personnel are sitting 100 kilometers away. They don’t mind driving for these 100 km - you just have to drive two cars on brutal roads (and two - because they drive one car only in the summer, and in the winter - well, it’s such a risk), and the price tag for their services is *10 - because that two cars and two drivers and risks, and this is for a day, and they also have a current job at their place of residence.
The same thing with any business is a little more difficult to “saw off with a grinder.” Well, yes, there are some personnel to ensure the current functioning, everything else is not there or very little. Not needed.
What to do with this, someone may ask, how to live, I would be glad, but...
Nothing new has been invented here.
— VUE certification (Prometric, etc)
— IELTS (TOEFL, CELPIP)
— LinkedIn (monster, etc)
— Three well-known exits.
For those who finished reading.
For many, it is a SUDDEN discovery that the Internet is full of not just courses on YouTube, but ready-made courses, laboratories and simulators, all without cost, that is, for nothing.
Without SMS and at high speed.
I will list the most famous:
AWS and Azure. Suddenly, both here and there they give from a month to a year “for free”, however, they will write off either a ruble or a dollar to Azure, and they say they will return it later.
MS
and to MS Hands-on lab -
Above-mentioned pizzedas: Microsoft 365 Intelligent Communications Global Azure Bootcamp 2019 Russia
vmware
and theirs
and their own freshly annoyed
storage.
List of VSA Virtual Storage
Some simulators are simply GUI or CLI, some are full-fledged virtual machines.
Networks.
Network simulators are even described here - from packet tracer to GNS3, where even ASA can be inserted with known tricks.
How does all this relate to the original title?
Simple enough.
The labor market in the world in general and in the Russian Federation in particular in system administration is shrinking, and retraining is becoming more and more difficult. As a result, it may happen that there will be no choice of work, at least there is some, and that’s good - but, in my opinion, such a situation should be avoided, and for this, monitor both trends “in general” and your own prospects with in terms of growth (both salary and qualifications) and stability. To do this, you need to spend less time on interviews in obviously unpromising places, and even less on work in such places, unless, of course, you want to suddenly find yourself at 50 years old with 2005-style knowledge doing an interview in a place where the staff is not very good and are 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. , you are welcome.
Have you encountered different types of cutters in the frames, and have you been to places where frames are not needed?
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32.1%Yes, I have been72
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24.1%It happened and it wasn’t like that54
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13.8%Wasn't31
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11.6%Who is Evgeniy V?26
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17.8%Author! Write about cats, it’s impossible to read40
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0.4%Other in comments1
224 users voted. 103 users abstained.
Source: habr.com