They’re managers (mostly pointy haired idiots with total lack of any technical skills), help desk phone answerers (who just pass problems along), cable pullers, desktop techs (who install software and swap out hardware), vendor package maintainers, user liaisons, on and on…

The vast, vast majority aren’t technical at all, yet for years they’ve managed to pull down high salaries because their job description has the word IT in it.

Not to say that their skills aren’t needed, but it’s far more difficult to find a solid developer than any of the jobs I just mentioned, yet I’d be hard pressed to say that management really understands that.

So, my answer to the question about whether their is a shortage of IT workers is no, but good developers are hard to find.

Oddly, Craigslist seems to be a decent resource, recently used it to find candidates for an admin position, but I think that’s mainly because there are fewer headhunters inserting themselves (usually uselessly) in the process, whereas Monster and its ilk are awash in people looking to take their cut in exchange for badly matching keywords.

If Rafe’s company wanted to hire you, they’d have to also work their network (their peoples’ networks). Forget Monster, the want-ads, the website, etc., because those are all pretty pathetic options in terms of candidate quality.

Chances are, if the people in a given company are at all active in the tech community (Why isn’t this encouraged at most companies? Here goes that inept thing again.) they know someone who knows someone good who is looking.

Yes, I agree that one must tailor one’s resume to the job, even if one is going directly to the hiring manager, because unfortunately, the idea of having the right buzzwords on a dead tree is so ingrained in our culture that fighting it is impossible. Here’s the rub, though: Past accomplishments are no indication of future performance.

No matter what goes on the resume, the information is worthless. So my dead tree says I “worked on” Oracle implementations, SQLSvr deployments, MySQL clustering, Shards, optimizing queries, tuning indexes, etc, etc, etc. Does that mean I’m a good DBA? Heck no! Does it mean that I know my stuff? No way! If I’m completely inept, so much so that I would not be able to do the job, I would still be brought in based upon my resume. And we would waste everyone’s time.

A good ‘screening tool’ would not allow such a false positive.

Further, a lot of my productivity seems to involve the environment I’m working in, so even I can’t tell how much I’ll be worth to a company in a day or so of interviewing.

Thus Rafe’s company doesn’t have a prayer of hiring me, because if they offer enough to interest me they’ll have to be sorting through a gazillion people attracted by the dollars, but have no way to distinguish between those folks and the actual superstars.

The only way the superstars take jobs is that they’ve developed a network of people who know both how much they’re worth and what sort of environments they’re most productive in. And I’ve tried, once, to break out of that mold that my career has been cast in, I was productive, but salary-wise, even though the raises started to come fast and furious, it was like starting at zero again, and eventually I said “it’s not worth the opportunity cost to build yet another network, let’s just go back to people I’ve worked with before and double my income”.

It’d take a tremendous leap of faith by someone who hasn’t had a few years working along side me to get me out of that network of people I have worked with before to get me or people like me. Most companies won’t risk that. The only way to really do it is to hire ‘em young and cheap because they don’t yet know what they’re worth and hope that they’ll be superstars, or hire from your network.

Lately it seems the really qualified folks are turned off by the limits on what we can offer them, and having interviewed them at all makes the other candidates less appealing. Following that stream of consciousness, it’s also amazing how things still keep running even when you’re short half your staff and can’t find anyone qualified and willing to jump in.

But I will make one point related to Jeff’s and bryan’s points about HR screening: there is a skill in tailoring your resume to the job. I’ve seen a lot of applications that may well have been good candidates get passed over because they didn’t take the time to match the list of “required qualifications” on the job posting with the items they list in their skillset. On one hand, it’s easy to blame HR (and in my case, State of Virginia) policies for having to pass these people over, on the other hand, I really don’t know if you’re familiar with MVC development or even version control if you don’t spell it out. We can’t interview everyone.

The problem, too, is that HR has contributed a lot to this situation. In order to justify their own high salaries, corner offices, and places at the VP tables, they’ve slowly taken over the meat of the recruiting/interviewing process.

Asking an HR drone to interview a tech person (or any other position except HR, for that matter) before you even let that person past the gate, is one of the key reasons why it is hard to find good people.

(Speaking of which, those who are skilled in getting themselves hired never go through HR until after the fact, and usually then because it is ‘company policy’ — but the decision to hire has already been made by the person’s future manager.)

That’s exactly the kind of loyalty that a company wants to discourage. If I see my salary is significantly lower or hear about a company paying 60% more, well, it matters a whole lot less how much I like my current job, I might look anyway.

If you want to save time=money looking for good candidates, spend money attracting them, not just keeping them.