San Diego Housing Bubble News and Analysis

It's tough out there, a friend of mine who is very experienced also got laid off in Dec and he is still looking.

A friend who got laid off right in mid Dec was working again by mid Jan. A friend whom he had worked with before found him a position at his new company.

Personally, I think linked in only works one layer deep, ie those who have worked with you directly. And I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't check linked in that often.

Do you have a facebook account? I think that is where most of his friends found out he was looking for work...most people on facebook are on there daily.

All the jobs that I am seeing are supporting activity for small retail outfits trying to improve their web presence. They don't pay well, come with few if any benefits, are not stable and are hard to get.

Now is not the best time to hate your job. Even worse to lose it.

I just made a job offer to someone last night. This is someone I worked with in the past and it was not an advertised job. I think now more than ever, the best way to find a job is through someone who already knows the quality of your work.

JustLurking - I completely agree and think that the most likely source of a job is through people who know you and the quality of your work - My problem is that I only have a dozen or so of those contacts and while each of those has indicated that they would like to bring me on, none can do so until 'the project gets approved' or 'the deal closes' - it just feels like everybody is waiting on someone else to make the first move and the whole world is just waiting, holding on, and about to collapse ....

I haven't tried facebook - thiught that was more for teenagers and personal use - if it were me, and I had someone on that was checking out there facebook page at work I would wonder about their work ethic, but if I found the same resource checking their LI page, I wouldn't think much about it ...

Guess I'm just old school, Cest la vie - I'll look into Facebook anbd see if that might be a good avenue ( Heck, I'll try anything at this point )

Thanks ...

I'm a technical recruiter here in San Diego. Maybe your resume needs a little work. If you want me to personally review it and make suggestions, my email address is: suite343 [at] yahoo.com.

I agree with JustLurking. My company is not in SD (closest offices are in Woodland Hills, Thousand Oaks, or Camarillo) but I work from home with a team of mostly all remote employees from all over the country. Over the past year we have hired 6 contractors on our team. All but 1 of those contractors are people someone on the team knew and had worked with in the past. And of all of the full time employees already working on the team, ALL of us knew someone professionally. It's a large corporation so 3 people have to be considered and interviewed for every spot but it's all about who you know when it comes to getting hired.

Outside of my company, I have not heard any good news for IT jobs out there. I know someone who took a programming job in Irvine recently for almost 1/2 of what he was making and was happy to just get a job at this point.

Speaking of job and employment and your typical recession....here's a graph of how indeed, this is different this time....
http://js-kit.com/blob/dhqa2NecrQXTvSxeY...

WestCoastNole,

My company is in Sorrento Valley and hiring several programming type positions. Email me at pizrin @ gmail .com. I'll send you more information if you are interested.

Nobody said they had to check it from work...if they see you are looking they can set the wheels in motion the next morning when they return to the office.

svelte - Sorry, I suppose I jumped to conclusions ...

Good point - I'll check it out ....

You aren't looking very hard...

http://jobs.ucsd.edu/bulletin/category.a...

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/eng/

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/sad/

Good luck on your job search.

I suspect that there are jobs out there but they don't pay what he/she is used to making and probably won't for a very long time.

I never understood why IT people, many with no degree, made substantially more than mechanical/electrical engineers, chemists, etc. many with advanced degrees. Maybe we're finally seeing "reversion to the mean" for salaries in IT.

Actually, you're opportunities for finding an sofware engineer job are looking better than those of finding MechE and EE jobs out here right now.
And the reason why is simple. Software engineering has much more broader demand in varying industries than pure EE/MechE. You can work in biotech,tech,info tech,and small mom and pop shops. Plus it is entirely possible to telecommute because you don't need to be onsite next to some hardware.

I wouldn't get to arrogant at the prospects of "IT" work coming down but MechE and EE not. Folks that previously were EE and cut over to software know exactly what I'm talking about. It sometimes is to your advantage to wear both hats.

Pure hardware engineering demand is going to go even more soft when people aren't buying electronics in this economy.

I know several brilliant people in IT who have no degree, it's not that uncommon. In IT, you have to produce, and a degree (even in Computer Science) will not really make a difference one way or another.
You need a specific set of skills in the IT field you're in, and companies need someone with that specific set of skills and most could give a wit about whether they have a degree or not.
I think that the field itself is just getting hit.

Word flu. There aren't a lot of EE jobs in SD right now.

That would be me!

Its simply a matter of supply and demand. At the university where I work, a new <50k faculty position will attract thousands of applicants. All with Phd's, of course. A new 75k IT job, on the other hand, will be lucky to attract even a few good applicants. Degree or not.

I will admit that a plus of the down economy is that we are finding it easier to hire competent talent.

IT is also a young discipline. I'm only 35 and have worked under some of the pioneers in the field, including the inventor of C++. This stuff is still all pretty new and dynamic; hence competence still demands a premium.

Employers that have a choice between a competent employee with a degree and a competent employee without a degree (not just in IT but any discipline) at a similar salary will most likely choose the former. At the very least a degree is indicative of the ability to successfully achieve objective goals. The last 15 or so years have been an anomaly in IT in that demand has exceeded supply. A rising tide lifts all ships per se so the college-drop-out DBA for example, has been overpaid relative to their intrinsic value. The problem is that many of these people know nothing else, not unlike someone that bought a house in 1996 and was convinced that housing always appreciated and only at 10+% rates.

Recessions suck and I hope that this one, deep as it may be, will end in the foreseeable future. But one advantage of a recession is that it tends to shake out inefficiencies in the marketplace and a good example is a college drop out DBA making $125,000 per year or a used car saleperson turned mortgage salesperson making even more than that. Like housing hyperinflation this isn't sustainable in the long run.

Peace

You'd be surprised.. some HR journal must have said something about requiring degrees being a good idea. I've never seen more jobs in IT that are requiring degrees. Often times those requirements are firm enough to prevent a discussion on the subject from coming up..

It's VERY bad in IT right now.. some people will say it's fine and they probably have jobs.. in the coming months it will be obvious to everyone how bad it is.. lots of layoffs to come and many people cruising along on unemployment..

Personally, I've sent my resume out 78 times(counted yesterday) in the last couple of months and I've gotten probably 3 automated responses! In the past I got every job I interviewed for, so I'm very qualified and interview well.. the employers are just being barraged by resumes so no matter how good you are, it's hard to get in. The companies that will likely respond are the ones paying $15/hr for what normally pays $80,000-120,000!

Try contracting.. use Craigshelper and check off 'telecommute' you can find quite a few good contracts jobs remotely that way - that's how I got my current contracts.

Wrong...With the exception of your first "entry level" job, most of experienced the top dollar jobs goes with the person who has the most experience and expertise for a position, regardless of what school they went to if they went to a school at all. Statistically, there are more people who have college degrees that have that experience than people who do not. BUT, i can say a PHD in MechE applying for a DBA position with no experience will be S.O.L. And a company that has a data center will not hire that person to man their infrastructure and commit suicide on their mission critical business operations, because running the business poorly affects the bottom line.

In most cases, a degree and school you went to only matters when you start out in your first tech jobs for the first 3-4 years. And the reason for that is because, with so little experience, there is nothing really else to distinguish a "good candidate" from "not so good" and you're really green when you first start out. You're looking at a few thousand dollars of salary difference between a good school or better school. But that's it... (It disappears after taxes). Once you have your foot in the door, what you do beyond that point is what you learn yourself.

For the record, most MechEE and EE jobs are no different. You learn the same thing, you build the same type of hardware and control gates, then same rules of physics apps as it did 20-30 years ago. A college grad is basically learning what has already been done and already known. Nothing special there.
I know, because all college the communication systems courses and information theory courses all look and feel the same as they did when i took them (12 years aao)... Basics are basics. The only time you move into specialization is in upperdivision courses...But then you run the risk of specialization on something that is not in demand in the industry. The notable exception is if you are actively doing R&D in in a company's R&D department. For instance, at the old QC, R&D dept requires a phd in the relevant field (almost). But this is really the exception than the rule. Most jobs that are readily available do not require rocket science brain to develop an expertise in.

I can say that most IT positions are priced in just about where outsourcing virtues is questionable. The cost of IT work in india for instance is not cheap anymore.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Actually, the what recessions do is level the unemployment for all technical work. If you are a MechE or EE, don't be surprised in a few months if you're posting here asking if there is an opportunity. Like i said before, when people aren't spending, there's no need for all engineers to build all those techie gismoes, planes, trains, and automobiles.

Anxvariety,
What IT field are you in? Just curious.

Doofrat

I think that simply a side-effect of the recession. The employers have more purchasing power, at the moment, so they are making the most of it. Unemployed engineers are really no different than any other distressed asset when you think about it.

A reason I've largely avoided employment troubles is that I've always been honest about my credentials with any potential employer and been very competitive re: compensation. Given that I don't have the burden of student loan debt I consider this a fair bargain.

So while I may not have made bank during the boom years, at least I've managed to keep my job, bennies and sanity!

.NET Development

I'm sorry. You know the industry is moving anti MSFT.
Java is saturated as well.

There's a few Ruby type stuff available in orange county. Also, stuff picking up with Cocoa.

I know that's tough medicine to swallow, but finding enterprise .net stuff is going to be uphill.

I'm not so sure about that.. I know it's popular to hate on MSFT right now and all this LAMP hype.. but I haven't seen any particularly good jobs in those areas either.

.NET is no where close to going away.. the only companies using Java IMO are the ones that are stuck with it. c# vs Java isn't even really fair.

All I can say is software, firmware and IT have way more opportunity then digital hardware.

Most of the bigger companies here in SD that I'm seeing do not run a .NET enterprise. Maybe I haven't seen much....Can't speak for the smaller companies.

Your are comparing apples and oranges. Comparing an IT engineer to a 'real' engineer is like saying a mechanic or custodian is the peer of a rocket scientist.

And remember, I'm an IT engineer.

Truth be told, I really doubt you can find a single practicing engineer in one of the 'hard' disciplines that doesn't have a formal education. Most IT is like trade work and programming, especially for user applications, is as much a creative and artistic endeavor as it is an engineering discipline.

Real 'engineering' is like brain surgery. No amateurs allowed. Would you trust a dropout to design a bridge or a jet engine?

However; I'll comment that mechanics and custodians have better survival characteristics than rocket scientists during severe economic recessions. Businesses and governments will be more interested in maintaining existing systems vs. developing new ones.

I'll say this, most MechE and EE do not use most of what they learned in school unless they happened to do research/speciality in the area where they are working.

Case in point. All the EE's that decided to go work for qualcomm...Most folks are "implementation" engineers. Here's a spec, go implement it in hardware or software. The basic tools are all their in school. Very few are working on the actual wireless protocol, etc. How many of them are really using their communication theory, digital signal processing background,etc. I'd say some, but not all. I sure as hell didn't in my brief tenure there. The "hard core" discipline isn't as "hard core" as you think it is. I have a another buddy of mine that is MechE M.S. from a top engineering school, doing control systems at Intel. Most of his work is, yup embedded software design. I'm not demeaning the EE/MechEE work (it's not easy). But again, a lot of the work isn't rocket science either. And yes I have an EE degree and was doing said stuff early on.

I used to work at Bell Labs in N.J., in the same building where many of the wireless protocols were in fact designed. All of the PI's had a Masters at least. Most had Ph.D's.

And I suspect the teams providing the specs to the implementation guys are similar.

Anyways, it takes all kinds to make the world work. I appreciate everyone with a good work ethic, whether they are diplomats or ditch-diggers.

I do feel bad at times that I slacked off in school and have ended up doing better than many people that spent 8-10 years in higher ed and ran up 100k of student loans. But such is life; I assume.