Excellent article Steve, we're seeing a way worse situation in Britain, especially in the development sector where there's 50% of programmers out of work.

This is mainly as a result of our woefully out of touch government thinking there's a skills shortage, and opening the flood gates for anyone who's seen a PC to come into the country.

Sadly, older, way more experienced, quality people are being ignored by recruiters here, because companies can get someone who isn't up to doing the job, cheaper. All good old fashioned false economy. But then idiots never learn, by definition. And they wonder why their projects fail.

We're also seeing alot of Visual Basic developers who have maybe used Enterprise Manager a few times applying to be DBAs, in the hope that they can pull the wool over the interviewers eyes.

I've interviewed two dozen people for three DBA positions in the last 18 months, and I've asked them some VERY simple questions first which every DBA should know in order to warm them up, and guess what? 8 out of 10 can't answer them. And that's after we've rejected the obviously hopeless CVs. We had one guy who was apparently an MCDBA, who didn't even know what the two types of indexes are that you can create on a table !! <And for those developers who are reading this and about to look it up for your next interview, that one's off my list now 🙂 >

Now I know rates drop in a recession, but we're getting many unscrupulous, major IT recruitment agencies and companies advertising jobs at £10-£15/hr, where £35-£40/hr would be usual. Because they know that if they can't fill the position within a month, our immigration rules say we can then advertise it outside of the western european union area. And guess what? No one on home soil bites. They'd be better off working a check-out in the local supermarket. So we end up paying lots of social benefit to unemployed IT people, whilst the companies get someone "cheap", who in my experience of interviewing them, hasn't got the first clue. Really worrying situation, and going by what happened in the 1970's, many qualified, experienced IT people will leave Britain permanently in another brain drain and never come back - myself included.

The other problem we have here is incredibly stupid management. Scott Adams would have material for life. In Britain, if good technical people want more pay, they have to move into management (d'oh), so the company looses their technical skills and invariably gains a not-too-hot manager. Or, if you can't stomach the politics, you move elsewhere and your company quite justifiably looses your company-specific knowledge and has the cost of finding someone else. We also have a corporate culture where we promote people based on how dangerous they are - ie : techies who are clueless or incompetent get moved swiftly into management, where they can't touch anything critical, and because their management are in turn too spineless to sack them. In their new role, they then become the incompetent who does the hiring and get the wool pulled over their eyes by even more incompetent "technical" people who can interview well and can talk the talk rather than do the job, exacerbating the problem even more. So we end up in a vicious downward spiral. Hope you guys in the US do it better, because this country's on a steep downward dive which we're not going to get out of. As a piece of advice, if you've got a brain, forget coming to Britain, you won't be appreciated or paid well. If you can get a job in IT that is.

Jon Reade