Is the UK IT industry suffering from Brain Drain?

I am not convinced that it is always organisation-wide incompetence. You may think that you have a set of technical questions that will sort who can and cannot do the work, but all you need to get is one of those persons who are really good at selling themselves. They may not appear all that often, but they are out there and you may not realise that they cannot do the job until after you have employed them. You could have got competent people the rest of the time, as the vast majority of applicants will be able to do the work, even if they do not sound as good at interview.

Thoughts: a) sales (aka presentation) and confidence does matter, because communication is the primary skill expected from a candidate (verbal, body and attitude), particularly listening and making the interviewer feel at ease. b) knowing WHAT you are talking about helps c) knowing HOW to find the right answer is much more important than knowing the exact answer. d) knowing WHY the question was important is crucial. e) understanding that demonstrating your god given genius will always provoke offence, so keep it in the bag until you get the job and use it to gain credibility with your teammates.

Bad interviewers don’t know the above and try to interview along the lines of if i make up a question based on my opinion and the answer is my opinion, they must know what they are talking about otherwise they are a losser ….FAIL.

who are these people… usually the non manager or line manager who was delegated to the 1st round interview.

how to avoid: listen to what they are saying, and reiterate with different words. Then trow in a randon example and high light some interesting facet of your work… this gets the interviewer into conversation … keep them smiling.. PASS.

Round 2. Senior manager … hat on now talk about Binary trees. but dont scare him, with n(n-1)2xyz… etc. tip look for the glaze eye effect and you know your going too far … recover with a past example and ask if they do similar?

Some good tech people fall into the trap of i work in the basement so at the interview ill act like i’m in the basement… you gotta be savvy and get your game hat on.

Interviews are really about whats not said. i.e. emotion and feeling as well as facts.

From an inteview pov . Allways start with some vanilla questions that prove someone has basic skills… What are the 3 pillars of OOP, explain how i might get the total value of sales transactions in may this year. if i wrote a class, and it contained a reference for a database connection object, is the relationship between the connection object and the class object an example of Inheritance or encapsulation? if the class (Class A) was extended into (class B) what is the signature of the default constructor of A… and B if A accepts a Reference to the data Object..

That should filter most loosers.

next ask domain specific questions. i.e. We develop flight simulators, what math types can be used to express an object path of travel…. [a:vector] etc

Then ask the “how does he learn/research” Questions …. ask something that the exact answer is unlikely to be known and ask how it could be determined..

Overall accept that non one is perfect and you are trying to gauge how much and what type of training will be required when they arrive on your doorstep. and obviously if they are grumpy energy sucking letch, find a way to wind up.

Best people left the UK I would never work on a Sharepoint role for 40 or 45k. I get it in my country

Best wishes from Brazil:)

Rod

Hari you can interview me hahahha

if the contract market gets back to what it was between 2006 and 2007 where you could get DECENT rates you guys will get good candidates. Rates 400 to 500 a day. People will get motivated to work in the UK. I met some of the best developers in the world there but NONE of them were British. Like you say in your discussions. The British have a flair for SALES, Marketing, Banking but definitely NOT IT;)

One way I would put my view is that Application and Interview is always going to be sales oriented, even when you ask reasonably high level questions. Hence, which ever applicant you choose is going to be reasonably good at sales. Hence, in my book, there needs to be less dependance on Application and Interview and some better way of guaging ability other than through the sales oriented pur application and interview.

Asking technical questions is not sales is knowledge!

Most IT jobs are advertised through recruitment agencies. I know that agents want to see a c.v. that looks like a good sales document. People who write a good sales document get more interviews and more chances of finding a job. They then have most experience.

If you want more technical people applicants then you need to change the way you (directly or through use of agencies) sift the applications.

The UK has a new problem: the UK used to import many skilled people and I used to work in the UK with people from all around the world. People used to turn up from places like Australia, India, Malaysia and Europe learn the job, settle and stay.

Up until 1997 I used to work with people from the Indian sub-continent (mostly Indians) who would get ripped off in their first six months then move on to better paid contracts (perm or contract)..
From 1999 onwards the freshmeat from India were on restricted visas which made it difficult for them to change jobs and did not encourage them to settle here. Since 2005 the people I met on “Fast Track” visas seem to believe they are indentured labour – unable to change jobs.

Fifteen years ago and earlier, people would go to the UK, learn skills, gain experience and settle to become part of the UK skills base. If you were a cunning Oxbridge graduate and you wanted a way to destroy the UK skills base you could not do more damage than by issuing short term visas to people who might have become immigrants, so they take their skills away with them. Except if you were to impede the UK based workers with increased tax and reduced flexibility.

Hari: Thanks. as it happens, the last job I got an interview for had been keeping a possible second job on the backburner, dependent on certain new contracts. I started today. Pay’s not bad for a junior position in this field. It’s not impossible to get a half-decent job in this area, I think it’s just hard for everyone and will be until companies are hiring more than ‘letting go’ in the post-recession fallout.

HonestJoe: Believe me, it never even got that far, he decided immediately that I didn’t know what I was talking about and no amount of backpedalling to the basics was going to work. It was only when it was obvious that no amount of damage control was going to save it that I asked if he even knew what a binary tree was. Obviously someone promoted out of harm’s way.

Congrats Paul. I’m not sure about the “hiring more than ‘letting go’” though as a lot of jobs are going being offshored and those jobs aren’t coming back, so from the trend I can see, the market is only going to shrink and kill off the weakest and least experienced first. I personally hate counting years, I’m more interested in natural talent and what people can do… but it seems I’m the exception to the rule. The “Brain Drain” I think is being precipitated by the lack of opportunties. Why study at all when uneducated people are making more money than grads doing in a lot of other jobs these days, they get no student debt and buy houses quicker and have kids etc.

Paul, on the bright side … its better to know he was a chuff upfront. Money isn’t every thing. ps good luck on the new role.

Rod – asking technical questions may involve knowledge but that does not change the fact that the interview is always going to be sales oriented.

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