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Here goes a longgg blog entry.
It should be very apparent to most IT staffers by now that corporate IT jobs in America, particularly high-cost enterprise jobs, are being outsourced by the truckloads to countries such as India and the Russian Federation. However, bear this in mind- the problem is not quite as dark and brooding as it may seem. The quality jobs, those which require a great deal of communication and interpersonal skills, quick wit and ingenuity, and adaptability, mostly remain in the U.S. These admirable traits cannot be outsourced, and often those skills are responsible for maintaining an edge on the competitive markets both domestic and worldwide. I am not suggesting that Russians and Indians lack these skills, rather I am simply saying that these skills are quite useless when dealing abroad with a contracting firm, particularly if the company is not allowed to direct the actions of the contractors for fear of legal repercussions (being forced to reclassify the contractors as employees).
Recruiting firms in the Bay Area focus on delivering contracts and jobs to locals that are frustrated with the application process of large corporations. Part of this frustration has its roots in the deceptive nature of online job postings. Let's say an IT job seeker visits a corporate website, say Apple.com for example. She finds several jobs that suit her well and applies to them. She gets an automated confirmation of her resume, and she waits for a response from a human, but even after two weeks, nothing happens. More often than not, the positions to which she applied were never truly within her grasp. Apple Computer posted the job internally and had every intention of hiring from within and shuffling around employees before turning to the great unknown, the sea of resumes clogging Apple's email servers. Apple was required by California state law to post the job to the public at large, and did so only to satisfy Dept. of Labor codes.
You might be trying to decide whether you condone or deplore this practice. My personal take is this... It's somewhat annoying, and a big time-waster, but you are in fact submitting your resume to these companies and adding fresh data about yourself to the terabytes and terabytes of employment data already archived on their servers. Yes, ARCHIVED. Don't think that applying online is a fair-headed, first-come, first-served system. It's more of an apply-and-be-compressed system, one that requires a lot of persistence.
Disclaimer: Apple Computer was only used as an example in this entry. Any implications toward Apple Computer's hiring practices, positive or negative, are not intended, blah blah blah, whatever, SO SUE ME! No wait, HIRE ME!
Q: Russian Federation? What's that?
A: It's the conventional long form for the country "Russia." I use it out of courtesy, and it sounds better than Rossiyskaya Federatsiya.
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