Alex Funkhouser, Sherlock Tech, shares his perspective on the state of the technology job market. As a recruiter, Alex has a unique perspective of what employers are looking for and how that has been changing over time. Also, we talk about why community involvement is so important to him.
Links referenced in the show:
The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.
Transcription
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Alex 00:00:23 My name is Alex Funkhouser. I serve as president of Sherlock Technology Staffing based here in Miami Beach. Additionally, I serve as president of the .NET Miami usergroup as well as the Azure South Florida usergroup and the Gold Coast usergroup as well as serve as chairman of the Academy of Information Technologies Advisory Board for Miami-Dade County public schools. And all of these different hats that I wear really work together for the IT community and software developers in particular. So what I’d like to do is share with you some of the evolution that I’ve witnessed in the professional software development field over the past 12 months especially as well as over the past dozen years since originally getting into this industry here in South Florida.
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Ryan 00:01:41 I think that’ll be great to hear, you know, because what you’ve got is this bird’s eye view, right? Like, as being the connector between kind of the jobs and the workers. I think it’s easy for people to get a little bit myopic, like, they know their area and they may not be paying attention to how…it’s hard to see how the landscape is changing when you’re kind of in that rut. So this is, I think this is going to be great.
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Alex 00:02:04
Excellent. Excellent. Well let me start off with some great news. Over the past 12 months, really, from first quarter of 2010 here into the first quarter of 2011, hiring in IT has had a rate of increase over the past 12 months of almost 300%. It’s incredible. It’s really been a fantastic year in terms of how much more active the hiring market is. Now we do need to keep in mind that this is coming from a period in 2008 and 2009 which was anemic at best and could more easily be described as paralysis. You know, the hiring shut down. Companies stopped hiring full-time employees and started shutting/laying off full-time employees. They fired contractors if the projects they were working on were simply projects that they could easily turn off. If the projects were capitalized then the contractors would stay on but as the, you know, budget was expended then the contractors would be laid off as well. So this is very good news for us. IT is really leading overall in the nation’s economy in terms of growth of any industry sector. And it’s being felt here in South Florida in particular. There was a time 18 months ago to 2 years ago where there would be some very, very highly skilled, highly experienced software developers that may have gotten laid off from a position when a Fortune 500 company might have shed one of their development arms. And those individuals might have been on the job market for a little while looking for a new opportunity. That’s not the case at all now. All of the senior people are busy working, mid-level people are busy working, even junior level developers are hard at work. Good opportunities coming. We are definitely experiencing increases in salaries, in hourly rates. A common salary now for a senior level .NET developer, for example, C# developer is in the 85k to 105k, you know, base salary rage. Usually benefits on top of that. Mid-level professional, junior to mid-level could be anywhere from 50, 55 up to 65, 70, 80k. So these are good times in the IT industry again. With some perspective looking back, you know, a dozen years in 1999, I don’t, you know, know if we’ll ever see that kind of frenzy again where we had the convergence of both the .com Internet excitement as well as, you know, the Y2K extravaganza.
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Ryan 00:05:36
Yeah. I think some people talk about mobile apps being similar but, yeah. It doesn’t seem like it’s nearly as big, right? Even if there are correlations between them, it’s not quite the same thing.
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Alex 00:05:47
Right. It’s not the same frenzy although as far as the actual total size of it, it’s actually considerably larger now. The market is larger. Technology has infused itself into, much more deeply into the corporation. Not only, you know, large corporations and medium-sized companies. And now very much even very small companies are embracing technology in ways that were never possible before due to high upfront costs, buying huge amounts of hardware and, you know, hiring all of the people required for it. The industry has really changed considerably in that. And another piece of the puzzle that should be pointed out is, you know, all of the development as well that’s moved offshore to India, China as well, eastern Europe, and Latin America. And so there’s a great deal greater demand for development and, you know, it’s being delivered not only from here in the United States but around the world as well.
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Ryan 00:07:03
Right before I’d got on here, John Dunagan, friend of the show, hit me up on Twitter and one of the topics he wanted to talk about: geographic areas. And he was particularly interested in what makes a recruiter who could work from anywhere pick the area that they work from. Have you always been around Miami or for you is it just Miami Beach, who wouldn’t pick there?
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Alex 00:07:25
Well it certainly is a good question. You know, it’s true that a recruiter can work from anywhere. But there is an element to recruiting that if it’s really embraced it can make a huge difference in how successful a recruiter can be. And, you know, I moved to South Florida down from Amsterdam about 15 years ago and really enjoyed the lifestyle here and thought this is a great place to live. And then got connected into this local IT community here in South Florida. And by developing the relationships, the long-term trusted friendships over, you know, the past dozen years in this industry, it’s really allowed a sense of communal support that only truly comes from human-to-human contact at, you know, usergroups month after month, year after year; a togetherness, a unity. Which really makes a fun job of recruiting even better.
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Ryan 00:08:41
So really, for you, it was you moved to the area that you wanted to be in and then you participated in helping cultivate the kind of experience that you felt would help the industry thrive?
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Alex 00:08:52
Exactly. Exactly. And it’s really a, it’s a long-term commitment. And that comes not only from a commitment to those that are already in the industry, but also, very importantly, a commitment to the students of technology that are in high school, that are in college. One of the hats I mentioned that I wear is as chair of the advisory board for Miami-Dade County public high schools Academy of Information Technology. This is part of the National Academy Foundation whose purpose is to help prepare our nation’s youth for industry. And just, for example, tomorrow President Obama will be visiting Miami Central High School. That is an Academy school. We’re fortunate that we actually have an intern from Miami Central High School working with Sherlock through the Academy of Information Technology. And we truly believe that all of South Florida’s companies should be bringing on interns. They should bring on interns. Our technology industry is, unfortunately, it’s actually shrinking in the number of American IT workers. The number of students that are going into the maths and sciences and computer sciences, it’s decreasing. Year after year it’s decreasing.
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Is that going into specifically those fields or higher ed. in general?
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Alex 00:10:46
Higher ed. in general is solid; there’s no question about that. But what we’re seeing is people are going much more into marketing and business, finance, accounting at the expense of not going into computer science, for example. And that does not bode well for our industry’s future here in the United States. We need the youth of our nation to be learning about technology because I think we can all agree that a large part of our future is based on technology; the progress we need.
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Ryan 00:11:25
That’s interesting. I wonder if that, in any way, relates to the fact that all other majors are becoming increasingly tech-centric. Like, think about even journalism; it’s all about, you know, leveraging all these different tools. Like, some journalists are very big on social media; some are big on, like, curating and aggregating. When I was going into college it was, “Oh, so you like computers? I guess you’re going into computers, right?” Because that was like a thing that people did. Whereas now it’s, “Oh, you like computers? Well, that’s good because everything is computers.”
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Alex 00:12:01
That’s an interesting point, Ryan. I would look at it in a couple of different ways. One is, yes: we all have to be computer users; adept computer users. And that’s essential for our own productivity whether we be in marketing and using social media technologies to enhance our marketing abilities. But the other piece of it where the computer science degree comes in is the ability to create new technologies and to see opportunities in the marketplace and create game-changing technologies to solve our nation’s greatest challenges. And if we don’t have the people who are creating the new technologies, that have the computer science depth of knowledge, it just means that that type of creativity and development is going to take place on the other, perhaps on the other side of the world more than it is here.
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Yeah. That would be interesting to follow. I haven’t have no reason to look into stats like that, but now that you’ve kind of piqued my interest I’m very curious about that.
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Alex 00:13:13
It’s very near and dear to my heart. As a father of four children I want to see our nation do well, our economy do well, and our community right here in South Florida do well. Which is really why I’m so committed in taking a long-term approach to number one, supporting the development community that we have here in South Florida and really being transparent with the community in doing the best I can do and that our company Sherlock Technology can do to help our community ascend the value chain to where our programmers aren’t just programming nuts and bolts together, which can easily be outsourced to Bangalore, but ascend the value chain…
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No further nuts and bolts.
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Right. Ascend the value chain of analysis and business analysis. And apply technology intelligently, analyzing opportunities in the marketplace and coming up with new applications that can be produced more efficiently, you know, at a smaller cost. It’s been an interesting progression, Ryan, to see people that had been, you know, AS/400 programmers, for example, in the, you know, in the late ’80s and the ’90s are moving into object-oriented programming and client-server. And that’s really when I got into the industry, especially during that transition. And then with the explosion of Web applications, you know, allowing new business applications to be built at much smaller costs. And currently is just a tremendously exciting time with cloud-based applications, firing off the app from the cloud, the database is in the cloud, it’s mixing with a mobile device, and social media is driving the rapid adoption of, you know, that new dating application that has the geo-referencing so, you know, if you show that you’re available and you’re wanting to meet up with, you know, on a new date with someone, you turn on your location-based services and all of a sudden it’s like, “Okay, well let’s meet up at, you know, at the corner bar, for example.”
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Ryan 00:16:04
Sure. Yeah. Actually, I just recently heard through the Twitter stream a handful of people are doing that for tonight. It’s interesting how it can sound kind of almost pervasive to someone who hasn’t used a lot of these technologies, but to other people it’s just kind of how you find things now, right? Like, how do you live without GPS in your pocket, how do you socialize without a lot of these, I mean, I don’t want to say crutch, but I think you know what I mean.
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Alex 00:16:29
Well, it’s an expectation. If I’m going on the road somewhere, I’m really not concerned about exactly how I’m going to get there until it’s almost time for me to get there and then I pull out the, you know, the Windows Phone 7 and take a look at Bing Maps and it’s taking me straight to my destination. All I knew is that I needed to take Atlantic exit off of I-95 and then it’ll take me the rest of the way there.
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Ryan 00:16:57
Do you see similarities in that mentality because that just seems like that’s how people are solving problems in general? Like, you mentioned the cloud and people using services. It does seem like we’re almost outsourcing lots of kind of thought, right? How do I find these people? I use this service, you know, go ala foursquare, Twitter to find out where people are eating tonight. I don’t need to think about that. In the same way, like, any other kind of problems that you’re solving in your workspace it seems like, you know, why would I build this since I can just use someone else’s? Maybe I pay for a service, maybe I use this open-source library that’s already been built. Doesn’t really, you know, not to get into the difference between those two choices. But just why build a lot of these things internally since most of these dragons have already been slayed?
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Alex 00:17:42
It allows us to focus our own creativity on what we believe in and what we want to focus our efforts on so that our higher valued thought can progress. I mean, that’s the progression of innovation; in taking other people building blocks and standing on the shoulders of giants.
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Ryan 00:18:08
And seeing trends in what people are looking for when recruiting, you know, new talent for their companies. Is that indicative in their choices, like, in what they’re asking for, like, in their resumes or?
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Alex 00:18:20
Sure. A common requirement that we see, for example, is a C# developer. You know, currently with the 3.5 framework and preferably some experience on the 4.0 framework. And, you know, they’ve had some experience with Silverlight, for example. They don’t have to be an expert in it, but they want someone that has that skill set. They want someone that has had exposure to building an Azure application. Or it may be a position that is, you know, 100% Azure application development. We have a number of clients that are purely cloud-based processing. You know, their applications that they have running are all running in the cloud. They don’t have a single server in their company. They don’t have a piece of hardware. And that’s also something that IT professionals should be aware of is what are the trends, where are the jobs going to be. If they’ve traditionally been a hardware engineer, they’ve been working tech support to support a company’s infrastructure, if they’ve been responsible for rolling out hardware upgrades inside the company. The people with these skill sets, they need to be aware that more and more corporate infrastructure is either moving to, you know, external data centers or really just completely up into the cloud. And internally, inside of the company, they’ve got a solid broadband connection into their thin client PC and that’s about it; that’s all that’s needed. So it’s really important for people to keep up with the technology, see where the trends are taking us, and adjust their career progression accordingly.
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Ryan 00:20:36
One thing that’s interesting, you mentioned, you know, on one resume looking for, you know, C#, Silverlight, and Azure. So for people not familiar with all these technologies, you’re talking about the back-end language, the front-end language, and even how the infrastructure comes together. This seems to imply that largely you’re seeing a trend toward, you know, more generalist or jack-of-all-trades. Is that often the case or, like, do you think that maybe this idea of moving a lot of infrastructure to these services, does it make for a different set of requirements where people just kind of need to understand how to wire up these existing things without necessarily needing to build any of them?
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Alex 00:21:17
It’s really going to depend on the company’s needs. There are scenarios where it’s a fairly straightforward application. So they want to have one person come in that can build the database, have it running in Azure, they can build a front-end to it, you know, maybe use some HTML editors, maybe use Silverlight, maybe use HTML5, and just get a fairly straightforward application working. There are other scenarios where, you know, it’s a very highly complex, algorithm-rich, back-end application that’s running and the front-end needs to be very, very user-friendly with a navigation that really just leads the user in the shortest number of steps possible to the objective of that application. And if that’s running on a mobile device then you may well need a very specifically-skilled Windows Phone 7 developer that can program that the most effectively, someone else on the back-end developing the C# code, a SQL Server developer to really, you know, build out the complex data structure and data model on the database. So, again, it really depends on the application and how complex it is.
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Ryan 00:23:04
Great. So the trend isn’t all-encompassing, in a way. You kind of thinking back to what you were saying before about where people are going in education. It isn’t necessarily saying that also the needs are going away, for people to just really be hardcore on one thing, do that one thing well. It’s just that they maybe need to think about what that one thing is and if that one thing is making buggy whips, maybe we don’t need so many these days. You know, the AS/400, it becomes, I guess to be generous I’ll call it boutique.
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Alex 00:23:34
Right. And to really to maximize financial gain, to get that premium on labor, on your labor, on your efforts it is critical to be a master of a specific technology and then recognize that that one technology is not going to last forever and it’s probably only going to last a year or two before either another version has come out or there’s a game-changer and you’ve got to, you know, learn something entirely new.
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You’d hope so, right? Otherwise, what’s the point in getting in technology?
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Alex 00:24:10
Right. Right. And technology’s not going away. It’s only going to increase. Not only is it going to increase, the rate of adoption will continue to increase. The applications that we’re using today, we’ll look back only five years from now and be like, “Oh my God. I can’t believe, you know, I was using a 14.4 dialup modem.” Or something like that and we’ll just be astounded that we didn’t have all these applications that we depend on.
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It’s crazy now to have a computer, like, when the Internet goes down it’s like, “What’s the point?”
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Alex 00:24:49
We are so thoroughly connected now and we expect that. In some ways it’s a little frightening because it can really, it can take over our lives if we allow it to. We’ve got to maintain an understanding of who we are and keep control of our own lives and our own humanity so that we don’t let the computers take over us as well.
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Hey, speak for yourself. I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.
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Well, with Watson…
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Right. Totally.
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With Watson beating out the humans on Jeopardy.
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We’re all doomed. Soon enough the robots will just be programming themselves and I just get to spend more time drawing.
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Well, and if that’s the highest value that you want, you know, you might be drawing something that will be the next Da Vinci.
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Ryan 00:25:47
Well, I’m not that good. So, Alex, one thing that I think is really interesting, you mentioned in the beginning of this that the importance of community to you. And this has been a huge common thread between many people that I’ve talked to. And I’m not sure if it’s just the people who are attracted to being on podcasts or if it says something about South Florida in general, I like to think maybe both. I would lean toward the latter if I had to pick a favorite, but why is this important to you? You had said before, you know, you just wanted Florida. It wasn’t like Florida’s your hometown and there’s some kind of hometown pride. You wanted to move here but now that you’re going to make it your home, you need to make it the right kind of place to live.
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Alex 00:26:21
Exactly. Exactly. We want to strengthen our industry. We want to know that, you know, it’s interesting. Florida has the third largest number of information technology workers. And you might hear that and tilt your head over to the side a bit because we’re not; it’s not all concentrated in one place. There’s no one place in Florida that is…
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Like a Silicon Valley, right?
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Exactly. Or Boston. But spread around the state of Florida you’ve got, you know, four or five different centers that really add up. And we have to continue to strengthen this and actually bring the community of Florida together in the IT industry. And I believe if we do that all of our futures will be improved and, you know, as a byproduct of all the effort that Sherlock Technology puts into strengthening the community, Sherlock Technology will be strengthened as well.
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Ryan 00:27:32
Yeah. I sure hope so. It’s awesome how many people I hear basically under the same banner with that. And not even “We need to make Florida a tech hub.” “We need to just let everyone know that it already is.”
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And it is and that’s what’s interesting. As a tech hub it’s separated out so it’s hard for that to be a, to truly be a hub.
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Ryan 00:27:53
Well, one thing that I’ve seen though is even as far as, like, going up to Orlando or Tampa, I recognize familiar faces. They come to Miami, we go up there. I mean, we not be, you know, geographically, like, very tight, but there is a lot of bleeding over. You know, the Venn diagram overlaps more than I think people would think it would.
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Alex 00:28:16
Yeah. Looking at over the past ten years, ten to twelve years, there is one person in particular that came into this market about a decade ago and has done more for the region in the IT community than any other person I know and that’s Joe Healy. Joe Healy from Microsoft has done an incredible job of bringing developing developer communities and bringing the state of Florida together, especially and even north of Florida in Alabama and Mississippi. He’s done an uncanny job of introducing like-minded professionals and, you know, fostering a sense of growth and community that we have much to thank Mr. Healy for.
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Ryan 00:29:15
You know, Dave Noderer just said the same thing, ultimately, not exactly the same words. So, Joe, looks like we have to get you on this podcast soon.
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Good plan. Good plan, Ryan.
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Well, this has been great. So for the listeners, anything you want to throw out there?
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Alex 00:29:30
Sure, Ryan. One thing is that, you know, Sherlock produces a newsletter that goes out every week. Includes all of the technology events and the technology happenings here in South Florida in particular. Goes out to about 20,000 IT professionals. And look forward to posting this podcast to the newsletter.
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Oh. Well that would be great. Thank you.
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Very good, Ryan. Thank you for your time.
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Oh. Thank you. It’s been great.