How to hire an IT worker if you really need one in 2024
How to hire an IT worker if you really need one in 2024.
An indispensable article to help my former boss. Which he won't read.
And a little help for an employee who now decides to enter the market.
Instead of an introduction.
Even before Covid, I worked in one almost state organization. The manager is a man “from the workers”, who honestly grew and grew and became a leader, but not yet included in the modern nomenclature. The same horse that worked the hardest on the collective farm, but never became chairman.
Current tasks and problems.
The organization survived Covid relatively well – some were sick, some ended up in the hospital, some died. She experienced an internal transformation. It also survived transformation 2.22, because everyone who wanted to leave it left even before that, when, in the process of internal transformation, the organization moved to what is easier to call the new Soviet management model.
Errors of perception.
It would be a mistake to assume that the manager does not understand all of the above and below. Mostly he understands, sometimes even more, why he is sad. Despite this, some little things need confirmation, written evidence that he is not the only one who thinks so. However, the manager also has his own interests, and already in the field of soft skills, or more precisely, in performing regular exercises to submit a report to the top, which requires correction of the search. So that there is someone to blame the problem on at meetings. After which Deputy Zamych for engineering will say what the time is now, ask Deputy Zamych for administrative work to express his concerns to personnel, in 2-3 months the concern will reach HR directly and, maybe, something will change. But most likely – no, rather HR will write a report that he (she) works for autier great, it's IT that doesn't want to hire anyone exclusively because of his viciousness and incompetence in hiring, so his (her) KPI is met, give the bonus anyway.
New Soviet model of management.
Has the following properties:
– In it, control of the unit is weakened or absent until the time when “everything breaks down.” While “everything is working”, almost no one is interested in either constant rework or the lack of global prevention – when all the time is spent on maintaining what is in working order, and nothing on development and prevention.
– Work to retain an employee has been reduced to formal meetings about “difficult times”, some empty and non-anonymous questionnaires like “confirm that you like it with us by marking 10 points in column 2. Whoever puts 9 can bring a letter of resignation for signature tomorrow”
– There is constant pressure on the team that you are not really needed here, there is a line outside the fence.
– There is a struggle between departments to agree on an increase in staff, without an increase in functions. That is, when they try not to complicate the system by taking 3 baby squirrels, but to simplify it as much as possible and add manual labor to it, which will justify hiring 15-20 jerboas. Jerboas, so far, are easily replaceable and cheap. Automation is difficult and unnecessary.
– The process as “complicated and unnecessary” is also expressed in a change in terminology, when a system administrator is about Windows, and devops is about docker compose.
– The department, and even the entire organization, is considered the boyar’s fiefdom, all the slaves who escaped are traitors and under no circumstances should they return back, because see above about the queue behind the fence.
– Complex functions are outsourced to contracting organizations. The price of the transfer does not matter – the budget is not yours. Evil tongues say that if you transfer it to “your” people, then it is even more profitable, but it cannot be that the economic security department does not know and does not monitor.
– The entire search and recruitment department – HR – in this new nomenclature scheme considers itself “higher” than IT. Because HR is administrative personnel, and any HR can decide not to hire an employee who has not shown enough loyalty, and may not care about the opinion of heads of departments, departments, and so on – from engineering units. And of any kind, hiring into the economic control department is an even bigger show.
– The prescribed KPI for HR does not imply bonuses for closing a position, but is reduced to imitation of work. If the KPI exists and does not serve as a justification for not issuing a bonus.
– Market analysis is not carried out, or is carried out formally, with the result being adjusted to a pre-prepared conclusion: “the candidates are not the same, we need to look better, but the vacancy is fine, we are looking for a person who can fill three positions at once.”
Consequence.
No hiring will take place under these conditions. Because, contrary to numerous stories (I wonder if the new nomenklatura / management themselves believe in this?) about queues behind the fence, and the process of replacing Russian workers with more unpretentious workers from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan that is already taking place in education and healthcare, this does not work with IT yet , without considering installation work on SCS. Hiring Indians, even in modern conditions of work in India, for the rest of the world, however, is possible. The fact that the cost of such hiring will be 2-3 times higher than the cost of hiring an employee from the Russian Federation is not as important as the loyalty of such an employee. Moreover, if the money is not your own, which could go to the bonus, but state (or quasi-state), and you cannot directly spend it on the bonus “for yourself”.
At the time of writing this article, this is not so relevant – in my opinion, the IT labor market in the Russian Federation has been “waiting for something” since the fall of 2023, and in all industries. The only exception is the suffering hog shops making dumplings, where the state struck at the most valuable thing – salaries of 30k rubles. It turns out that now they pay 70k at a factory that is somehow dying, 100-120k in couriers (in Moscow), and even HR is already offering 100-200k in advertisements. It’s an interesting phenomenon: for IT, they don’t really like to list salaries, but for HR, they write their own salaries. Although they lie at the upper limit, of course. Out of habit.
Challenges of the time.
Meanwhile, northern kawaii arctic fox already here. Since the summer of 2023, import substitution began to be monitored according to a simpler scheme, without any percentage of the coefficients on the level of implementation – through the amount of costs. What you will then do with these Sugon and Inspur a la Rus, where and how you will use it in a system more complex than 1C – your problems. It's not even Xfusion (Henan Information).
Given that these servers can be more expensive than HPE with an SLA of 1 business day to 2.22, IT directors have very limited room for maneuver in the form of “buy and put in warehouse”, which will somehow have to be used. By the way, if you use it, don’t forget to check and refill the fire extinguishing systems, and store backups at least in another building of the building.
In addition, these products are often made in a “long” form factor, and will not fit into a 36-inch (914 mm) mm cabinet; you need to take 48 (1215 mm) or longer.
But.
There are very few people in the labor market who are ready to tinker with this in conditions “for the same salary as they have now.” Or rather, there are those who are ready to tinker, and the ability to produce results in the required time frame is not so simple – in order to work with this, you need to dive headlong into what was and what has become. There are no published ready-made solutions, none at all, and there never will be, except for wet water from integrators in coproblogs that integrators are ready to help. Integrators are really ready to help (not all), but so many There is not always money in department budgets. The equipment is already in supply, but what to do with it when it arrives? Let’s say, you can plug it into a power outlet, and even Debian and OpenNebula, oh, that is, Astra and Brest, will be installed there, but then what to do? And there are many such calls, and all this gives the bosses a headache more than usual. And if you have an uncolored nebula, and not by night be remembered by Basis? On which you spent more money than on a dog passport, and you need to recoup it somehow?
So, what to do then.
– Decide that you actually have a budget for hiring, and this budget is adequate to the market. Because otherwise you will be like the same MTS, whose vacancy about NSX was dragged by spammers – freelancers – all over the chats, with a salary two times lower than what was paid for it quite recently “according to the market”. No budget – no hiring, there was no queue for such roles either in 2017 or 2020, and there isn’t even now.
– Discussing something with HR, trying to clarify with them what they were guided by in their assessment of the market, is useless (but it can be internally pleasant). Although, what is the point in such self-affirmation, anyway, the budget will not be redistributed from them to you, at least at your level.
– Before you start participating in recruitment, decide on the opinion of management from above, whether they want to participate in this for some of their own purposes, or whether it is not interesting to them. If management from above is not interested, then you will not have an adequate budget until failures begin at such a level that they reach the level of deputy general directors. In the case of banks and CIIs, these are also regulatory authorities, which sometimes begin inspections due to the fact that citizens shout too loudly and often.
– Delegate someone to participate in the first interview (with HR), but in the “I’m just looking” mode. This will allow you to cut off from 1/2 to 2/3 of candidates “from HR” before the technical interview.
– It makes sense to start participating in the search yourself only if HR cannot fill the vacancy on their own for 3-4 months. Don’t forget to keep statistics – 100 resumes were sent from HR, of which 100% did not meet the requirements, including: .. , of them did not meet the requirements for knowledge No. 1 – 70%, for experience – 50%.
– When you start hiring on your own, get ready to rewrite the entire vacancy for real tasks. If you have Broadcom (VMware) everywhere, don’t write about the required experience with Proxmox and bhyve. If you have Acronis instead of backup, even if it has been renamed Cyberbackup, write it too right away, because after Veeam, Netbackup and Commvault it is impossible to use. This is some kind of interface to ntbackup, the level of bugs in basic things like tracking task time is insane.
– Write or copy from the Internet a list of questions that you will ask, and keep a table of answers with points, who answered how.
– Be sure to indicate the expected answers in the list of questions, and do not forget to tell the candidate what you expected to hear.
– The assessment system needs to be formalized, at level 0 – heard for the first time, 1 – heard something, 2 – worked with what is required.
– Invite a colleague for an interview to get a second opinion, remembering to send him a table of questions with answers and scores in advance.
– Be sure to adjust your questions after the first and second interviews, especially after hearing what the candidates really think about your questions.
– Be prepared for the fact that in the end you will have to carry out the initial screening and hiring entirely yourself.
– In the worst case, especially taking into account the thinking of the superior manager that those who ran away for the sake of a second bowl of doshirak are not needed here, you will have to raise the established social connections and convince the management that it has been impossible to find anyone for six months and soon everything will fall completely, so you will have to raise salaries for vacancies, and not to promise a bonus, and even, what’s terrible, to try to outbid someone who has run away. Otherwise, problems self-escalate to the very top. It must be taken into account that employees often run away from the incompetence of management and the lack of prospects and goals for self-development, so there won’t be as much money.
– Salary increases are carried out through numerous committees and meetings over six months, so it is better to raise this issue right away. Then it will take you, in total:
3 months before you can show your management in numbers the incompetence of your HR. Maybe you’ll be lucky and have normal HR, this happens quite often, you need to talk to them more often. It seems to me that integrators have the most adequate HR, and vice versa – all HR banks and four cell phone companies consider that working for them (with an installed anal probe and remote control 1 day a month no further than the Moscow Ring Road) is a great honor.,
1 month to convince management and
3 months to committees.
In total, about six months, and another month for hiring. After a year, the procedure will have to be repeated.
For the employee.
If you decide to change jobs now, consider the following:
– All news about the lack of personnel should be read in full: There is still a shortage of highly qualified, low-paid personnel in the labor market.
– In the HR sector, finally!!111, salary indexation has taken place, and now, sometimes HR can earn more than 150k per month. This allows you to look at a delivery driver for 100k in Moscow (the salary of a courier in Moscow) as Volturi vampire clan.
– The same indexing took place in the field of “marigolds”, they even made it into the news.
– Since the real and effective demand for personnel is now near zero, and real hiring has stopped, then get ready for the fact that the expected salary will be hidden from you until the last minute. But at the same time, they are quite capable of calling your HR and reporting a traitor who is preparing to escape. Until 2/22, the salary was not shown, supposedly so as not to raise others. Now they don’t show it because the salary offered is already lower than both the market and what you have. The average candidate will stop believing in “promises of a guaranteed bonus” after about 2-3 years from losing faith in Santa Claus and believing that condensed milk will make something stick together.
– Since real hiring (when you need to hire, and not go around the market – asking the price, maybe at least someone will be found) has been stopped, then during the interview they can and will ask some questions from the depths of the documentation. Which are needed either for taking the exam, or once a year. Here in the comments and article it is revealed in detail – about Garbage Collection (GC).
– I don’t even know what’s worse, quickly trying to remember the code of a solution with leetcode \ codility and writing it “on a piece of paper”, or finding out that devops is, depending on the organization, it can be a DBA, a developer, and an SDLC specialist, and k8s – and in any combination. The distribution of the meaning of the word is completely random, as are the icons “jun” and “middle”.
– Some workers and commentators, when assessing the market, operate with the already outdated opinion that 300k rubles per month in development is the level of a senior. Even before 2.22 in Moscow it was not even the level of “strong middle in development”, but for about 20 years now there has been a wonderful tradition, in IT and not only – to give “our beloved senior” badges instead of salary. Many people believe in both badges and certificates, until the time comes to take out the first mortgage – and then, for some reason, they don’t take certificates.
Literature on the topic and history of the issue
Recruitment and HR 2024 – what's new
Is IT no longer needed in the Russian Federation? An attempt to analyze the market based on what is not there
Comment thread about the same thing from 2022
About technical specialists, 2017
Import substitution in medicine
