OT: A Generation of Semi-Useless “Workers”

[jgharston]

commodorejohn wrote:

The amount of armchair quarterbacking here from people who are either long retired or in the end stages of a long and established career is honestly a little maddening. I don't mean that as a diss against the older members here, but if you haven't actually been looking for work in the last fifteen years you do not understand just how hard it actually is to get work in the 21st century, at least in the US - let alone achieve broader financial stability.

Oh, definitely this. I try to explain to people that I've applied for over 3000 jobs in the last 15 years, and they don't believe me. But you HAVE to apply for that many just to get any replies. My experience is you get no response at all from 90% of applications, 90% of the replies are "we don't want you", and 90% of follow-ups are "after talking to you we don't want you". And the maddening question "why have you got gaps in your employment history?" Well, because I was unemployed!

And the maddening frustration with recruiters who see "software engineer" means "IT" means "IT Engineer" which means.... furniture removal. "What are you complaining about, you're putting computers on desks, that's IT, you say you're an IT worker." NO I'M NOT!!!! I'M A ******* SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!!

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This was despite the fact that I was actively and consistently applying for the entire year and had ample job experience and demonstrable work history.

I've applied for jobs that are literally (not metaphorically, LITERALLY) identical to jobs I've done before - right down to the exact same employer - and get turned down. It's maddening.

[jgharston]

I was going through this evening's job applications, and another bugbear raised its head: overly prescriptive requirements.

One vacancy asked "How many years of LabView do you have?"
LabView? Never heard of it. Zero. Hmmm...
Googles "what is LabView": LabView is a graphic programming environment where you connect functions with visual representations of functions.
Ooo, I remember seeing something about that on TV in the '80s as the Next Big Thing.

Ok, I'd be able to do that. But, no, can't get the job as it requires five years' experience of LabView. Not five years' experience *programming*, or the ability to pick up a new development environment when you're sat in front of it. But five years' experience of one specific piece of software.

You wouldn't advertise for "somebody with experience of driving a 1.2L Ford Focus". You advertise for somebody *who* *can* *drive*.

I've 40 years' experience of assembly language programming. A few years ago on a whim I downloaded an instruction set reference for the 8051, read through it, and started coding some 8051 code, just for the fun of it. A couple of months ago I picked up an 1802 mini-reference at a trade show, by the end of the week I'd coded a disassembler and emulator, and was coding bits of code, just for fun.

But the job market is "sorry, we don't care that you've coded in z80, 6502, pdp11, 8086, 32000, 6800, 6809, 6812, 68000, ARM, RISCV, **** off, we need an 8051 coder, and it's impossible for you do be able to do that." Hell, a few years ago, with 30 years ARM coding experience I taught myself the ARM64 instruction set in a few days in order to assist with the writing of an ARM64 assembler. Programming is programming is programming.

[sark02]

jgharston wrote:

I try to explain to people that I've applied for over 3000 jobs in the last 15 years, and they don't believe me.

Quote:

And the maddening frustration with recruiters who see "software engineer" means "IT" means "IT Engineer" which means.... furniture removal. "What are you complaining about, you're putting computers on desks, that's IT, you say you're an IT worker." NO I'M NOT!!!! I'M A ******* SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!!

This is tingling my spidey senses. There must be more to this story. What kind of jobs are you even applying for that this is the quantity (200 per year open positions relevant to your field) and your experience (interacting with people who are apparently hiring software engineers but don't know what the term means)?

[jgharston]

sark02 wrote:

jgharston wrote:

I try to explain to people that I've applied for over 3000 jobs in the last 15 years, and they don't believe me.

Quote:

And the maddening frustration with recruiters who see "software engineer" means "IT" means "IT Engineer" which means.... furniture removal. "What are you complaining about, you're putting computers on desks, that's IT, you say you're an IT worker." NO I'M NOT!!!! I'M A ******* SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!!

This is tingling my spidey senses. There must be more to this story. What kind of jobs are you even applying for that this is the quantity (200 per year open positions relevant to your field) and your experience (interacting with people who are apparently hiring software engineers but don't know what the term means)?

here's a recent list

[sark02]

jgharston wrote:

here's a recent list

Thanks for that.

If you see yourself as primarily an embedded software engineer, then I'm seeing a lack of focus in that list. I'd avoid anything other than actual programming (anything with "support" or "field" in the title), or "junior" (indicating a company focus on new grads, low pay, modern languages and methodologies, and no or limited 3rd party ways of doing things that need to trained-out). As an embedded engineer, I'd also avoid any "software engineer" position where the description doesn't explicitly say it's a hardware-focus or firmware/embedded position.

A lack of career focus is a red flag, to me at least, and as I don't know you I might assume the worst. And when you're face to face with a hiring manager, you need an attitude of "I love this stuff!" rather than "I am technically competent to do the tasks assigned to me." At least... that's how I am and that's what I've always looked for in a candidate, regardless of age.

I don't know you or your life or your struggles or experience. I don't know if you get along with people, can take direction, have a passion or just want to 9-5 it to pay the bills... And I haven't had a job in the UK for 30 years, so I don't know anything about the UK market, how interview go, or what hiring managers think. Everything here is from my experience in the US... and it's certainly different.

Good luck to you, mate. Your interest in different CPUs and writing assemblers and simulators for the fun of it sounds like me... so I hope you find something interesting.

[barnacle]

At my last employer (since retired) we had a _huge_ problem finding people with the skill set generally evinced here: a mix of hardware and software design, at very low level: coding on the metal in either assembly or C; using next to no frameworks beyond basic RTOS.

Lots of people with high level skills, coding for Windows, Linux, or mobile phone OSes, lots of Python and Java, but almost no-one that understands what is necessary to handle ultra-low power design, or knows what an output control register does, or that trying to drive a 30 ohm load directly from a microcontroller pin is generally not a good idea (or even what a 30 ohm load is!).

But very very few hobbyists, tinkerers, experimenters who have discovered things the hard way and yet also have at least some formal training. The issue is not knowledge so much as mindset, I suspect.

(none of this is intended to slight or annoy JGHarston; just an example from the other side of matching skills against requirements. It may also now be out of date, since I left some months ago.)

Neil

[GARTHWILSON]

sark02 wrote:

A STEM degree is as much a demonstration of character as it is a technical yardstick.

There's a reason they call it a B.S. degree.  It means you can put up with a lot, including hoop-jumping, bureaucracy, etc..  My general observation however is that those who can get through the most tend to be the least creative.  We need all types of course; but I myself fit best in a very small company where I might be the whole department and I'm free to be a free thinker rather than have someone tell me what processor, what language, etc. to use, and be treated like a piece of equipment wheeled around on a cart where it's needed most, regardless of my own wishes.  (I do have an associates' degree, and it's not in electronics; but I did take a couple of computer classes for the fun of it.)

I mentioned earlier the frustrations of the problem of what's coming out of our schools.  The best employee I ever hired was a graduate of DeVry; but what made him so good was traits he had before he even went to the school.  He was resourceful, worked continually, was humorous and a real pleasure to get along with, etc..  I also hired another tech who graduated with him, having taken the same classes, and he was not much good.  None of the other techs I hired from DeVry or ITT Tech were much good either.  I hired an MSEE from Cal Poly who knew the math better than I, but couldn't design his way out of a wet paper bag.  There was another local electronics school I had considered a number of applicants from.  These schools all apparently enticed students with grandiose ideas about working in the field, and rushed them through a tour of the land of electronics, exposing them to all the buzzword technologies, but did not teach them to understand and settle into this land.

commodorejohn wrote:

if you haven't actually been looking for work in the last fifteen years you do not understand just how hard it actually is to get work in the 21st century, at least in the US

I myself am finding that now, as I was laid off yet again at my new place of work.  My boss told me last month, "I'm sorry—the bank account is dry, and work has stopped coming in, and I can't afford to pay you for any more projects at this time.  We've been super happy with your work though.  If you have to find another job, we understand, but we hope you'll be available to do more things for us on the side if business picks up again."  I had only been there about five months.  I was at the last previous place 32 years, before I got the same message from that one too.

My job search has been extremely discouraging.  I've been going to the local industrial parks, but finding again that there's not much electronics industry in this part of town.  The industrial parks have almost no manufacturing of any kind, and I mostly find things like distributors' warehouses of food, carpet, flooring, shoes, plastics, cleaning supplies, etc., all unrelated to electronics.

I blame the job-finding difficulty partly on the employers, at least the bigger companies that have HR departments that don't know what they're hiring for, like the one I mentioned earlier that required 15 years of C programming, back when C hadn't existed for 15 years yet.  But worse, now they use this so-called "artificial intelligence" to supposedly improve efficiency, without putting humans on the job, and I'm finding that this AI is more like what a friend called it, "genuine stupidity."  I signed up with lots of job-search services, and uploaded my resume and gave them other information, including how far I'm willing to commute, and they send me scores of recommendations every day which are much too far away and/or have nothing to do with my field of work, electronics engineering.  I get job suggestions for accounting, driving, medical records, taking surveys, mechanic, HVAC, college admissions, and the one that really takes the cake, doing mammograms!  I'm old enough to start getting social security; but I'd rather wait a few more years.  I want to work!  If I'm limited to SS, maybe I can supplement that income with $200 here and there by playing cello as I have done recently for local school choirs' performances.

I commented to my wife that I wonder if there are any newspapers anymore with want ads, to search for a job the way we used to decades ago.  She said "I doubt it."  A good thing about it was that they were local to the area the newspaper covered, unlike the internet.

Things that seemed like possibilities have come and gone.  The only possibility in the works at the moment is one of teaching electronics in the local community college.

Dr Jefyll wrote:

BigEd wrote:

I hate this thread. It's just a place to be grumpy, right? Share the dissatisfaction, share the negativity.

Just sharing my thoughts. I know it won't improve anything - just as this whole thread will improve nothing.

Hmm. Under normal circumstances, anyone who doesn't like a thread is invited to simply not participate -- and appropriately so, IMO. If a thread puts you off, just don't read it... or at least move on and don't engage.

The same would apply here if the thread were 65xx-related, but it's not. I think this situation raises questions about the forum's mandate in general. Yes we have some tolerance for OT content, but within certain (somewhat fuzzy) limits. I believe it would be shallow to treat this as being simply about the uncomfortable reaction of one individual. There's more to discuss than that.

Speaking for myself, I'm interested to hear the insights about education. I'm also glad to gain some casual familiarity with the views and experiences of other members of this community. In other words, ... so far, so good.

There have been relevant replies from a dozen people here, probably the majority of the really active forum members.  We are interested in this industry, not just the hobby; and problems won't get solved if nobody is allowed to talk about them.  Even if we cannot solve them, hearing others' experiences and perspectives might give us insights and ideas that could help us find work, or help others contemplating the field, or help us teach.  Nobody here is obligated to the strange, stiff, starched-collar standards of you-know-who.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

commodorejohn wrote:

if you haven't actually been looking for work in the last fifteen years you do not understand just how hard it actually is to get work in the 21st century, at least in the US

I myself am finding that now...

The employment landscape has indeed (no pun intended) changed, and not for the better.

Speaking from a US perspective, I can recall a time when the want-ads in the newspapers were brimming with open positions for every kind of job under the sun.  In the 1970s, there were a lot of ads for computer programmers, as it was during that period that computer usage in smaller businesses exploded and there was a huge demand for software that didn’t as yet exist.  Along side those ads were ads for the industrial trades, e.g., tool-and-die makers, machine operators, weldors, etc..  You name it, it was in a newspaper’s want-ads section, which would run for many pages.  When the company for which I was working in 1974 let me go in a cost-cutting exercise, I bought a newspaper, scanned it for interesting positions and made phone calls.  It took me less than two weeks to find another job that was more remunerative than the one from which I had just been dismissed.

Unfortunately, those days have evaporated.  The loss of American industrial might to overseas factories during the 1970s and beyond was a big factor in the change.  If manufacturers are no longer in business, the skilled industrial trades that found a home at those businesses are no longer needed and, by inference, the professionals who design the things made by the skilled industrial tradesmen are also no longer needed.  With a sizable part of the USA, at least, having switched to a service economy decades ago, we for a time ended up with a glut of talented and skilled industrial people with no place to go.

A very unfortunate side-effect of the shift to a service economy was its negative effects on the many small shops throughout the country that supported the needs of the larger manufactories.  These were the shops that often had the most skilled industrial tradesmen, especially machinists and tool-and-die makers.  Many of these shops are long gone—nobody needs their capabilities anymore.  The same thing has happened in the electronics industry.  Highly-skilled and knowledgeable technicians are no longer needed because the kinds of businesses that employed them are now on a different continent.  With everything electronic being made overseas, we don’t have jobs anymore for people who build and debug prototypes, and do bench-level repair work like what I was doing in the late 1960s.

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My boss told me last month, "I'm sorry—the bank account is dry, and work has stopped coming in, and I can't afford to pay you for any more projects at this time.  We've been super happy with your work though.  If you have to find another job, we understand, but we hope you'll be available to do more things for us on the side if business picks up again."  I had only been there about five months.  I was at the last previous place 32 years, before I got the same message from that one too.

One thing I do is voraciously read various (on-line) publications about the shifting winds of the economy.  A persistent story is that of California hemorrhaging employers for well-known reasons that I won’t rehash.  We have a similar trend here in Illinois—for the same reasons (two of my clients moved out of state and one went out of business in the last seven years).  I fear that you are going to be running into more of this as time goes on.

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The industrial parks have almost no manufacturing of any kind...

Same around here.  In fact, referring to them as “industrial” is wishful thinking...everything is logistics, which is nothing more than schlepping products made off-shore from one warehouse to another, and ultimately to a store somewhere.  Anything electronic associated with the logistics business is a throwaway device that was also made overseas.  Not a whole lot of skill is needed to unplug a blade server and plug in its replacement. 

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I blame the job-finding difficulty partly on the employers...now they use this so-called "artificial intelligence" to supposedly improve efficiency, without putting humans on the job...

Welcome to the brave, new world, where common sense and critical thinking has been replaced by a machine full of canned responses.  The use of AI to filter job applications depends a lot on looking for word patterns whose meanings vary according to the understanding of the programmer(s) who wrote the AI software.  Those meanings may not be anything like what the job applicant thinks they are, which almost guarantees that AI “intelligence” will reject an applicant for baffling reasons, or will try to match the applicant with positions that have, at best, a tenuous relationship to what the applicant is qualified to do.

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I want to work!

Most of us who have a few years on us want to work as well—we were infused with a work ethic by our parents’ generation.  Unfortunately, ageism tends to make things difficult—a 30-something hiring manager views a Social Security-age applicant the same way an automotive engineer views a hand crank for starting an engine.

BigEd wrote:

I hate this thread.  It's just a place to be grumpy, right?  Share the dissatisfaction, share the negativity.

Unless one is independently wealthy or has retired with a decent source of retirement income, the state of the employment landscape and the larger scope of the economy—good or bad—is of considerable importance.  Our ability to engage in our 6502-related hobby is affected by external economic factors, including the all-important one of being able to generate an income.  Some grumpiness has been expressed about the vicissitudes of job-hunting, but not everything can be rainbows and sunny skies, can it?  In any case, the original topic had to do with the types of people coming onto the job market, not about employment-seeking woes.

[BruceRMcF]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

... The loss of American industrial might to overseas factories during the 1970s and beyond was a big factor in the change.  If manufacturers are no longer in business, ...

Of course, the US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world, so the manufacturers didn't all go out of business ... but even if they are in business, "productivity gains" is another way of saying getting more units shipped per worker ... when I was not so long ago working assembling aluminum engine front modules to be shipped off to the motor plant for a full sized pick-up truck, the assembly stations had more than a dozen robots, between drivers, checkers and what not in between the nest where the machined part and its components where laid in and the finish side where the finished part was grabbed, inspected and either loaded into the tote or scrapped. A key part of the job was knowing which fault was likely involved with which detector getting aluminum chaff on it, spraying alcohol on a q-tip and cleaning the detector so the swarm of robots could get back to work.

One engine front end module assembler and set up person and oil pump assembler do what once would have been four or more jobs on an assembly line running at a slower output rate.

And electric vehicles are mechanically simpler, so part of the higher capital cost of the batteries is offset by reduced spending on the labor to make oil pumps, variable valve timing parts, pistons, etc.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

BruceRMcF wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

... The loss of American industrial might to overseas factories during the 1970s and beyond was a big factor in the change.  If manufacturers are no longer in business, ...

Of course, the US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world...

The industrial might of which I speak is/was the ability to make everything on-shore, starting with raw materials.

The United States did not become the “arsenal of democracy” in the 1940s by importing things from Asia, especially iron, steel, aluminum and other materials.  Our capacity at that time for producing things literally from scratch was so great we were able to support a two-ocean war, plus produce materiél for our allies.

We don’t have that capability anymore, as we are no longer a manufacturing economy.  Most of what passes for manufacturing in the USA these days is bolting together parts and subassemblies shipped in from another country.

Quote:

And electric vehicles are mechanically simpler, so part of the higher capital cost of the batteries is offset by reduced spending on the labor to make oil pumps, variable valve timing parts, pistons, etc.

Yep!  No question a Voltswagen is mechanically simpler than its ICE-powered counterpart.

Of course, there’s a little inconvenience: the batteries in those Voltswagens are produced by off-shore manufacturers from raw materials that come from a certain country that is economically hostile to the USA. 

[BruceRMcF]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

BruceRMcF wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

... The loss of American industrial might to overseas factories during the 1970s and beyond was a big factor in the change.  If manufacturers are no longer in business, ...

Of course, the US is still the second largest manufacturer in the world...

The industrial might of which I speak is/was the ability to make everything on-shore, starting with raw materials. The United States did not become the “arsenal of democracy” in the 1940s by importing things from Asia, especially iron, steel, aluminum and other materials.  Our capacity at that time for producing things literally from scratch was so great we were able to support a two-ocean war, plus produce materiél for our allies.

Yeah, the US is down to the 3rd largest steel producer and 6th largest pig-iron producer in the world, but raw materials are not self-replenishing ... being more self-sufficient by expanding the current focus on domestic production from scrap iron and steel to making iron and steel from imported iron ore may be more playing games with semantics than gaining actual self-sufficiency. And 74% of steel and iron by value from North America vs 16% from East Asia, with nearly as much from Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and Thailand as from mainland China, does suggest that the focus of concern for dependency on sources outside of the continent may well be the embedded raw material story.

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We don’t have that capability anymore, as we are no longer a manufacturing economy.  Most of what passes for manufacturing in the USA these days is bolting together parts and subassemblies shipped in from another country.

And as well, much of what passes for manufacturing in the US these days is the high capital intensive, labor efficient parts of the process ... making the machine that makes nickle plated screws for smartphones, while someone use runs that machine to make the nickle plated screws. The bolting together of parts and subassemblies may well need to be closely tied with some capital intensive process to make it a US manufacturing activity, like smelting aluminum to make gravity cast and injection molded aluminium parts, or forming the engine block that a motor maker builds the ICE around.

[jgharston]

sark02 wrote:

A lack of career focus is a red flag, to me at least, and as I don't know you I might assume the worst.

The problem is, Being Alive Costs Money. The career focus is software development, but that HAS to take a back seat to just plain being able to afford to be able to eat. And the problem is, if you can't afford to just sit on your arriss until a career job comes along, you HAVE to do whatever you can get, just to stay alive. And then that record of just plain staying alive is used as a reason to refuse to employ you. So, employers are blocking jobs to anybody other than those who don't need to actually be paid in order to stay alive.

After doing software development in Hong Kong, I came to the UK in the 1990s, and smashed straight into "we don't recruit people who aren't already working here", resulting in five years unemployment, with the last software development paid employment being further and further in the past, and being used more and more as a reason to not employ me, resulting in my last work being further and further in the past, and being used more and more as a reason to not employ me, etc., goto line 10. "Your last job was domestic electrical installtion, WTF should I employ you as a software developer?" All along with employers screaming that they can't find talent while simultaneously refusing to employ the talent that is actually there.

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have a passion or just want to 9-5 it to pay the bills...

My passion is creating software. But, the universe requires me to take whatever I can get to pay the bills.

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Good luck to you, mate. Your interest in different CPUs and writing assemblers and simulators for the fun of it sounds like me... so I hope you find something interesting.

Thanks.

[barnacle]

I have always felt that the only honest answer to the question "Why do you want to work for XYZ Ltd.?" is "Because I have a mortage."

I've been where you are/were and you have my sympathies; I've been lucky enough to have obtained enjoyable and challenging work reasonably quickly in most cases. But dropping out of management and back to electronics in my fifties and after a year-long break (to do a Masters degree) was a depressing challenge.

Neil

[jgharston]

On another thought, I just need to be able to stay alive another 28 months and I've paid off my mortgage, and half my outgoings vanish. At that point, I don't *NEED* to work for a living, and there's every incentive for my to just stick two fingers up to the employment market.

And it's not just me. We are in the middle of a crash of skilled workers in all fields getting into their late-50s/early-60s and their living expenses vanishing, and them seeing it's just no longer worth the hassle trying to find somebody prepared to pay them work. The existing skills base is being incentived to bugger off, and there is nobody replacing them, and employers are screaming for somebody to rescue them from their own self-destruction.

[barnacle]

A point I made recently on The Register: when I started work in the seventies, companies expected to train their employees - at least for specialist skills; mine took three years with a mix of classroom and on-the-job training to take school leavers to a degree-level education. At the time, this was not unusual - I had four job offers in the same month and all offered similar schemes.

These days, I know of very few companies that still do that basic education... they expect someone to have trained their employees for them. When I left my original employer after thirty-odd years, they were still offering training, albeit with a graduated penalty if you left the job too soon after training (which doesn't seem unreasonable). But that was fifteen years ago.

It's all very strange.