How's the employment situation now.....

... in S California

I ask, because a large well know company is doing some development work for us and it's running a bit behind. They said that ideally they need another 20 experienced people but "they are impossible to find at the moment". Given all that I've seen in the press about how many engineers are currently under-employed because their jobs have been out-sourced I find it hard to believe that a major blue-chip can't find 20 well qualified embedded guys available to start next week. However, as most of their employees that we liase with are Indian, I'm thinking that perhaps they meant " H1B's are impossible to get at the moment".

Anyone got any comments?

tim

Reply to
tim
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Or "impossible to find at the salary, experience and working conditions we need"

Reply to
Jim Stewart

You are being "slow rolled" by your development company. They must have a fixed price contract with your company and are unwilling to spend what it takes to get the job done on time.

Insist that they stick to the schedule and if they don't, start reverse charging them for your extra costs and losses.

There are plenty willing people available in California that are qualified to do almost any kind embedded work.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Tom Woodrow

tim wrote:

Reply to
Tom Woodrow

[snip]

Sorry, I don't know about the situation in S.C. - but if your contractor is using a recruiting agency, and if recruting agencies are anything like they are where I live, then I'm not too surprised. By that I mean that recruting agencies (again, at least where I live) are IMHO generally incompetent (their personnel seem to consist of failed salespeople and ex dot com middle managers ;-). Especially when it comes to "advanced" stuff like engineering they act more as a hindrance than help in bringing the right parties together. Perhaps you should ask them _how_ they try to hire those people - just a thought.

DJ

Reply to
Dr Justice

20

I SECOND THAT.. !

Reply to
TheDoc

Can't they rehire all of the engineers that they layed off during Christmas

2003?
Reply to
£¢$¥

I hope the OP is enforcing any delay and quality penalties available. There is absolutely no problem finding qualified people today - just ask your taxi driver.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer@yahoo.com) (cbfalconer@worldnet.att.net)
   Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
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Reply to
CBFalconer

I've no idea what the commercial side of the deal is. I suspect that as a late release is not a sensible option, some non-core feature will be dropped and we will pay them less money (see other reply).

This is what I though, though I'm not sure what I can do with the information other than making the right people aware of it.

thanks

tim

Reply to
tim

They came up with a big list of "can't do's". No doubt this is a negotiating ploy and they will settle for a shorter list.

Some of the work is being done on the basis of we buy X million of their hardware and they keep the rights to the software. If they don't do some of this work the product is less attractive to us (and others), we sell less product, less chips are sold and they make less money. Some of the software is being transferred to us, I doubt very much that there is a fixed price regardless of what is delivered, a short delivery will result in a lower payment. I've no idea which category of work has slipped

Not my problem, in fact no-one in the engineering chain has this level of authority.

As I surmised

thanks

tim

Reply to
tim

Can't see this being the issue. They are a large enough company to recruit using a variety of methods, they simply don't want to spend the money and the commercial people in my client company are probably going to be fobbed off with an excuse.

tim

Reply to
tim

You're not a grumpy old geek yet are you?

Companies don't layoff their best and brightest unless they absolutely have to. They generally layoff the people that are the most expensive and least productive. Now do they want to hire these people back? Of course not. They'll want to replace them with 'bargains' that are sharp and will work for less money. Is this illegal? Quite possibly. Can they get away with it? Most of the time.

Reply to
GrumpyOldGeek

Are any of the positions for hardware engineers or project managers? The reason I ask is that I have hard data on the availability of engineers in those areas, but I don't have hard data about coders.

Reply to
Guy Macon

That's the plan at the VP level. When it hits the "you are ordered to fire 10% of your engineers" department head level, it is the engineer most likely to replace the department head that gets the axe.

Reply to
Guy Macon

There are no positions because the company aren't going to create them, they are either going to deliver short or late, or dump some of the work onto us to do ourselves (in which case there will be positions on this side of the atlantic).

I would guess that the stuff that will be lowest priority is the application layer software as that is the part that can most easily be moved elsewhere or added to the product later.

tim

Reply to
tim

This is a well known ploy / trick, call their bluff and ask for BIG discounts for each item they "can't" do. Just remember, they knew (or should have) known what they were bidding on and commiting to.

Not your problem ... insist on the full featured product that was contracted for.

The software being transfered to is now worth much if you can't duplicate the development environment and build (compile, link and run) ALL of the modules. Don't let then scrimp on the documentation either.

Good luck Tom Woodrow

Reply to
Tom Woodrow

That sounds like the Survivor game - Engineering Edition!

I wonder what the immunity games are...

Thad

Reply to
Thad Smith

Just an after thought to my previous post ...

The problems really begin when the brass from both companies get too chummy. Too many expense paid golf games and weekends at the cabin.

Tom Woodrow wrote:

Reply to
Tom Woodrow

Different strategies for the cube rat come into play depending on if the

10% cut will be by head count or by salary.

If by head count, then you need to be better than 10% of your coworkers. If by by salary, you better hope there are enough expensive old guys that have pissed off the VP over the years.

Kelly

Reply to
Kelly Hall

Hum, 'bidding'? I think you have the wrong impression of what is being suppied here, the company were selected from a choice of not much more than one who could come close to the delivery schedule. I'm afraid that I can't fill in more details as I don't want anybody calculating the products involved.

And when they say 'no' our options are? We have far more to lose than they do if they walk away.

Which of course we can. We have a team of ten guys replicating this process

Isn't it self documenting :-)

tim

Reply to
tim

"Jim Stewart" wrote

As always, it's the money. Pay enough and you will have all the experience and flexibility you could ever dream of.

Ask a realtor: The #1 (and only) reason a house doesn't sell -- the asking price is too high.

--
Nicholas O. Lindan, Cleveland, Ohio
Consulting Engineer:  Electronics; Informatics; Photonics.
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Nicholas O. Lindan

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