Where are the good IT guys?

mick.fr

Hi there,

Been struggling in the past months to find good IT guys for different projects.
I had to end up with people from UK.

You would probably answer me that the good IT guys are probably very busy working and are not on the market, fair enough, but I have been seeking for the last 3 months and all I found (Even with the help of the main agencies in Dublin) is a bunch of chancers, making their resumes up, not willing to travel (Irish ones only, which I found weird, non national had no problem to travel).

Several of my customers have the same problem as well.

I am usually looking for senior people with large scale experience, but I found it impossible to find people who have worked in environments with more than 5 servers and 50 desktops.
Fair enough this is the majority of the Irish businesses, but there are so many Irish people who traveled in the US, Australia etc...and I was expecting a bit more.

Anyway all the people I have met are very poor technically (Even when they got 2 MCSE), are not willing to travel, etc...

feylya

It depends on what your actual spec and salary is. I'm coming from an environment of 25,000+ workstations in a forest of 250,000 and I don't know how many servers but I wouldn't be considered as senior. I reckon that's fairly common at the moment.

mick.fr

feylya wrote:

It depends on what your actual spec and salary is. I'm coming from an environment of 25,000+ workstations in a forest of 250,000 and I don't know how many servers but I wouldn't be considered as senior. I reckon that's fairly common at the moment.

I am looking for a Senior AD/Exchange consultant with design experience.
Daily rate 450/550 euro

feylya

Well, the pay is definately good but I would imagine that most senior AD guys are in permanent jobs instead of contract.

HashSlinging

Why would you need someone with exp of more than 5 servers and 50 desktops... The theory is the same X ?

mick.fr

HashSlinging wrote:

Why would you need someone with exp of more than 5 servers and 50 desktops... The theory is the same X ?

Thats completely different.
Example, Exchange 2007, in a SME envi. all roles are on the same box.
On a large scale, there are 6 Exchange servers at least, 2 Edge, 2 Hub, 2 Mailboxes/Client servers.

And deploying Exchange 2007 on several servers requires a lot more skills than just a single server.
Same goes for AD, FSMO roles, how many Catalogue Servers etc...

leeroybrown

HashSlinging wrote:

Why would you need someone with exp of more than 5 servers and 50 desktops... The theory is the same X ?

Not necessarily. In my general experience (not specifically referring to AD/Exchange), you'll run into new/different configurations and issues as you scale up to larger setups. The workload will move more towards the scalability factor than just the standard single unit configuration and the amount of effort required to make managing the large setup easy will be a lot more.

In my job the general 'small scale' skills that someone decent might have would be outweighed 3:1 by the extra work that moving to a much larger scale adds.

mick.fr

leeroybrown wrote:

Not necessarily. In my experience (not specifically referring to AD/Exchange), you'll run into new/different configurations and issues as you scale up to larger setups. The workload will move more towards the scalability factor than just the standard single unit configuration and the amount of effort required to make managing the large setup easy will be a lot more.

+1

mick.fr

feylya wrote:

Well, the pay is definately good but I would imagine that most senior AD guys are in permanent jobs instead of contract.

Shame, they are losing so much money :-)
A daily rate of 500 euro, this is 8000 euro in the pocket, taxes paid, as a contractor.

feylya

Sometimes, a steady job with benefits is more appealing than contract

mick.fr

feylya wrote:

Sometimes, a steady job with benefits is more appealing than contract

Once you have tested contracts and are good enough to stay in the market, I can guarantee you, you will never go back to work for an employer, even with free BUPA LEVEL D whatever thing, free parking, free laptop, free mobile phone... :-)

horgan_p

i must , with all due respect , point out that things are very different here in cork. A lot of sme are now cutting costs and one of the first things to get the chop is the "IT guy" ( esp. the contractor)

we deal with companies of over 100 workstations ,yet refuse to employ ANYONE full time as administrator or even a pc tech.
I agree its hard to find someone with the right experience in the type of environment you describe and i think its because these guys are entrenched in nice handy jobs in companies which arent going to challenge their ability.
i certainly would not like to be a contractor in cork at the moment.

this is just my opinion from what i have seen myself.

mick.fr

horgan_p wrote:

i must , with all due respect , point out that things are very different here in cork. A lot of sme are now cutting costs and one of the first things to get the chop is the "IT guy" ( esp. the contractor)

we deal with companies of over 100 workstations ,yet refuse to employ ANYONE full time as administrator or even a pc tech.
I agree its hard to find someone with the right experience in the type of environment you describe and i think its because these guys are entrenched in nice handy jobs in companies which arent going to challenge their ability.
i certainly would not like to be a contractor in cork at the moment.

this is just my opinion from what i have seen myself.

Thank you for sharing your experience.
I had the same problem a couple of years ago, since I have specialized in some areas to avoid this type of bad situation.

kmick

And here is one of the small side effects of two planes hitting 2 buildings in 2001. Up to that point the people in IT were increasing but after that day a lot of people could not get jobs and left IT (a couple of friends of mine were fired an hour after the buidlings collapsed). Also students choose other more standard routes like Commerce because there was an assumption there would be no jobs for a while. The year i finished college we all got jobs. A year later only 2 had jobs lined up.

This is good for the guys who are left as the rates are going thought the roof. Bad for employers. However its a vicious cycle in that when thngs take a nosedive IT departments are the first to go which creates instability in the industry and discourages others from starting their career in the field.

Anyway what is wrong with having UK people. A body is a body.

mick.fr

kmick wrote:

And here is one of the small side effects of two planes hitting 2 buildings in 2001. Up to that point the people in IT were increasing but after that day a lot of people could not get jobs and left IT (a couple of friends of mine were fired an hour after the buidlings collapsed). Also students choose other more standard routes like Commerce because there was an assumption there would be no jobs for a while. The year i finished college we all got jobs. A year later only 2 had jobs lined up.

This is good for the guys who are left as the rates are going thought the roof. Bad for employers. However its a vicious cycle in that when thngs take a nosedive IT departments are the first to go which creates instability in the industry and discourages others from starting their career in the field.

Anyway what is wrong with having UK people. A body is a body.

Yep had the same issue for a couple of months in 2001 as well.
I do consulting, direct or indirect with the customer, it depends, so rates are anything between 500 and 1000 usually.
Regarding UK people, there is nothing wrong, I was just pointed that because I have found nobody here, we had to pick up guys abroad, which is a shame for the Irish and non-Irish living in Ireland. I am sure there are very good guys here, they are just hiding :-)

mickoneill30

Not that I'm a good IT guy but one thing that severly limits me when looking for jobs is the commute. I live in Dublin Northside and I've just handed in my notice (in Hatch St.) because I'm fed up getting stuck in traffic every day. There were a fair few jobs (some of them with a decent pay rise) that I just ruled out straight away because they were further away or meant sitting on the M50 every day. I really can't face 2 - 3 hours travelling every day anymore for somewhere that isn't that far from home. I've no problems travelling for the job but I've had enough of day after day of battling to get onto overcrowded buses to go at just over walking speed. Why do companies set up in the city centre? The office I'm in (which costs a fortune) has 300 people and 11 car parking spots.
When you get to a certain level (in your job and in your life) you don't chase the jobs anymore. You wait for the one that you want.

The job you're advertising is pretty reasonable. People who are senior enough for those won't have a problem getting other jobs too. So they can choose. But of course for every job you get a pile of chancers applying. Same everywhere I'm afraid. I used to work in Australia where one of my duties was interviewing. You really need technical people on interviews because the CVs you get look spectacular but when you ask them technical questions you get blank stares or explanations of how they can't remember etc.

Keano

However its a vicious cycle in that when thngs take a nosedive IT departments are the first to go which creates instability in the industry and discourages others from starting their career in the field.

All you seem pretty well up and sorry for going a bit off topic but how do you think guys starting out can get a break in the industry? I.E me with only 6 months experience!!

BostonB

No one trains anyone these days, so theres theres a finite resource of experienced people. Its not being replaced by people coming through the ranks. Contracting is great if you have the experience and skillset. But you can't get either because people won't take them on. Where I am only about 20% or less of IT staff are under 30.

Jumpy

mick.fr wrote:

Yep had the same issue for a couple of months in 2001 as well.
I do consulting, direct or indirect with the customer, it depends, so rates are anything between 500 and 1000 usually.
Regarding UK people, there is nothing wrong, I was just pointed that because I have found nobody here, we had to pick up guys abroad, which is a shame for the Irish and non-Irish living in Ireland. I am sure there are very good guys here, they are just hiding :-)

Mick, can you pm me the details of the position? I have to state that I am not avaliable for it, I am curious as to what it entails though.
The one reason we dont contract anymore is that it is difficult to predict whether future work will be available. The job I am in right now is permanent and obviously lower pay than contracting (god I loved the contracting pay) but after the sudden decline we are far more cautious than before, even though the industry is back to normal.

The Insider

mick.fr wrote:

Once you have tested contracts and are good enough to stay in the market, I can guarantee you, you will never go back to work for an employer, even with free BUPA LEVEL D whatever thing, free parking, free laptop, free mobile phone... :-)

Hmm... you left out paid holidays, paid sick leave, study leave, exam leave, pension, exams/study being paid for, redundancy pay etc...

I did contracting for a while albeit at a lower level then you are talking about, however whilst I could earn more money I soon got sick of chasing up payments, keeping track of hours worked, invoicing, looking for the next contract etc and loosing out on the above benefits.

I think contracting is a young mans game as you get older and have a mortgage/kids to think about you want the stability of a permanent job. I think there would be very few people who have the level of experience you are looking for and don't have those kind of commitments.

BostonB

The Insider wrote:

Hmm... you left out paid holidays, paid sick leave, study leave, exam leave, pension, exams/study being paid for, redundancy pay etc...

I did contracting for a while albeit at a lower level then you are talking about, however whilst I could earn more money I soon got sick of chasing up payments, keeping track of hours worked, invoicing, looking for the next contract etc and loosing out on the above benefits.

I think contracting is a young mans game as you get older and have a mortgage/kids to think about you want the stability of a permanent job. I think there would be very few people who have the level of experience you are looking for and don't have those kind of commitments.

That kinda sums up why I left it. Perhaps in the future I'll go back to it, as I really enjoyed contracting.

mick.fr

The Insider wrote:

Hmm... you left out paid holidays, paid sick leave, study leave, exam leave, pension, exams/study being paid for, redundancy pay etc...

I did contracting for a while albeit at a lower level then you are talking about, however whilst I could earn more money I soon got sick of chasing up payments, keeping track of hours worked, invoicing, looking for the next contract etc and loosing out on the above benefits.

I think contracting is a young mans game as you get older and have a mortgage/kids to think about you want the stability of a permanent job. I think there would be very few people who have the level of experience you are looking for and don't have those kind of commitments.

Yes you are right it takes time to sort your stuff out, timesheets, invoices etc but with a bit of organisation this goes well...and yes if you are sick you don't get paid, unless you have a good insurance.
But really this is about the entrepreneur spirit or way of thinking, the freedom
and also the payroll.
I am almost 32, been doing this since 2001 because I lost my permanent job and could not find any new, so bizzarely I started to contract in this period when everybody was trying to get away from contracting.
I will never go back to the employee's job. I am like a mercenary now but there is no bullet here :-)

dazberry

mick.fr wrote:

I am almost 32, been doing this since 2001 because I lost my permanent job and could not find any new, so bizzarely I started to contract in this period when everybody was trying to get away from contracting.

I went the other way, contracted 1998 to 2004, 2002/3 were pretty lean, took the first perm job in 2004. Definitely done a lot better over the last 3 1/2 yrs than when I was contracting - but christ do I hate my job. Plan to stick it for another 6 months, get my yearly 10% bonus and then bail. Alot more padding for the lean times this time around.

D.

Feelgood

Contracting with IBM for the last 3 years...rolling 3 months contracts...
Everyone on my team (30+) are also contractors!. Some guys have been here
on contract for 13 years!!