I lurk, at least, on several developer-related discussion lists and online communities. I've been on some of these lists for years, and I've seen the ups and downs of hiring trends: from Ada programmers offered $10 per hour (and desperate enough to take it), to the exuberance of the dot com boom, to the sad days when we expected to see programmers on street corners brandishing signs, "Will code for food."

Things do appear to have gotten better, since then. In fact, Karl Moeller, a developer in Tucson, recently wrote a message to the Arizona Internet Professionals list:

It seems there is a sharp spike regarding openings.. and it's not only $11.00/hr phone support. There's some career-style positions available. Did some venture capital just break loose? Something happened fairly recently to open up the high-tech hiring market.

No, there doesn't seem to have been any recent venture capital infusion. And the number of jobs listed has indeed increased. The problem is... the companies posting those jobs aren't always happy with the quality of the applicants they're receiving.

Tony Stratton, a programmer from Phoenix, explained:

We have had a real opening for months, and my opinion is that the skilled people don't exist, or at least, they are not applying. The resumes we are getting either barely qualify, or worse, so full of half-truths, that they can barely converse technically about very, very basic programming idioms.

The biggest deficiency among our latest candidates have been object oriented knowledge and sql experience. We have had candidates with beautiful résumés who once we had in an interview room, didn't know what a constructor was, nor could they write the simplest SQL query on the blackboard.

Maybe it is too much to expect? In the meantime, the work is piling up, and we are forced to seriously consider candidates who would require 12-18 months of hand holding.

(That specific job is listed online; Click on #6 and scroll down.)

While Stratton's job sounds like a good one (and hey, you'd get to play with fun golf equipment), I've also seen rumblings that indicate that many jobs offered are unrealistic. I'm not speaking of a listing requiring ten years of C# experience (we've all seen a few of those), but of the salary and benefits not meeting some base level of expectations.

Companies won't pay for training any more and new hires are expected to "hit the ground running." If there's no public or for-profit evening / weekend training available in ColdFusion, xSQL, Object oriented coding, etc., let alone obscurities like Zope and Plone, then the chickens have come home to roost. Companies arbitrarily choose base technologies, won't pay for training in those technologies, have openings they can't fill because of a lack of trained applicants (or internal candidates), and then they complain about the low quality of the applicants. A vicious circle.

Perhaps that's an old argument — on both sides of the hiring desk — but everyone's budgets are tighter now. Both the IT departments', and the developer, who can't afford to be as flexible as he once was.

Here's another, personal anecdote. In 2001, the "dark days" after the dot com explosion, one developer did a couple of projects for a Phoenix area firm. The manager for those projects said he wanted to hire the developer full-time, and expected to have an opening in January. By March, the developer had given up, and moved to a position in Nevada.

Finally, the manager contacted him. The position was open now. If he would show up, and endure the formality of an interview, the job was his. Sure enough, the offer came. But relocation was not included.

He liked the people, liked the work, already had a good footing there, prefered to live in Phoenix. "But moving back to Nevada had burned all our remaining cash," the developer complained. He couldn't afford to move his family again without assistance. The repeated moves and periods of no work, starting in 2000, had stripped their cash reserves. Yet, no amount of negotiating would get the company to do relocation — that was reserved for upper level execs. Eventually, he had to decline the offer.

The right person. The right job. That's what both employers and developers want. Why is it so hard to match them up?

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