Evolving Complexity & Hiring Challenges

When was the last time you broke a shoelace?  When I was a kid, we kept shoelaces in our junk drawer (never the right size, for some reason) because those cotton laces were carefully designed to break whenever you were running a few minutes late.  These days my sneakers have nylon laces that consistently outlast the shoes.

Are you old enough to remember navigating with paper maps?  We used to keep several in our car, a state map, a city map, and a book that showed detailed street maps of nearby metropolitan areas.  In the best cases, you had a navigator in the passenger seat who could monitor your progress and warn you what your next turn would be.  In the worst case, you were driving alone and had to pull over from time to time to get oriented and consult the map on your next few decisions.

My IT Career started in 1980.  Lots has changed since then.  The mainframe computer on the raised floor data center at the insurance company where I worked supported all operations and software development and had a small fraction of the computing power and storage of my current phone.  

Lots has changed in the technology field.  By the time I obtained my computer science degree I had a solid foundation in computing systems from top to bottom.   I had written an operating system, I/O drivers, and a compiler.  Early in my career, I wrote a distributed relational database.  I was pleased with myself, but things kept getting more complex.  

The pace of change kept increasing. I understood early communication protocols, but it was challenging to keep up with all the developments in communications.  Widespread adoption of personal computers led to implementing client server systems.  Networking exploded.  The internet blossomed.  Object oriented programming and web programming and firewalls and security protocols added layers on top of layers.  Hackers exposed flaws in our complex systems, leading to more complexity in attempts to thwart their intrusions.

My clients’ IT organizations have become extremely specialized.  Desktop support, network management, web services, databases, business analysis, capacity planning, disaster recovery, application support, security… things have become so complex that few people living (certainly not me) can keep track of it all, let alone maintain intimate knowledge of all the details.

The nice folks in Human Resources have had trouble keeping up.  Job descriptions often expect applicants, even at entry levels, to have depth knowledge in multiple aspects of the information systems domain, rather than a solid grounding in IT in general.  Let’s agree that if you want to fill a position as lead Database Administrator for your Oracle database, extensive Oracle database experience is a reasonable requirement.  Can we also agree that anyone who has mastered several programming languages can probably get up to speed on whatever language your shop is using in a week or two?

Some of this is on the nice folks in HR, and some of this is on IT managers who would rather get a root canal without anesthesia than jump through the flaming hoops required to update a job description or create new duty statements.

A lot of my clients seem to be having hiring challenges these days due to qualified candidates not getting through an HR filter driven by obsolete or needlessly prescriptive job descriptions/duty statements.  These need to evolve as quickly as our technology.