Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

Re:Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Ris... by eli_gottlieb on Friday May 19, 2017 @02:16PM (#14378118)

A second anecdata point. I got laid-off from a job in embedded firmware in January. I just started a new gig this week as a web developer. Prior to that, almost every single position I interviewed for turned me down. I asked for feedback. They invariably said, "Not enough experience with our area." When this was web-dev, where I have little to no experience, this was understandable -- it was also 90% of the available jobs. When this was embedded firmware, it just boggled me.

Almost two years' experience in embedded firmware is not enough qualification to write embedded firmware? Because I wrote bare-metal firmware, and you want someone who's used your dev-board or your embedded Linux before? Come on.

Employers are currently very exacting.

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Re:Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Ris... by marvin on Saturday May 20, 2017 @05:09AM (#14381576)

I'd guess the classical problem of leadership with no technological skills. They're unable to see how embedded firmware skills transfer between specialties. Either that or the "not enough experience" was a lie and there was something else, but I've seen enough of the "management has no technical skills" to believe that was the reason.

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Re:Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Ris... by eli_gottlieb on Saturday May 20, 2017 @11:28AM (#14382805)

I mean, I am inexperienced for my age due to taking time for an advanced degree. This ought to be balanced by applying for junior to intermediate positions, though.

I received similar feedback from recruiters, saying that once you've been in industry a couple of years, employers view you as specialized to exactly what you've done before. Apparently it got hard to even sell my resume for non-embedded roles.

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