Career, Education

How to Approach the University Experience

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All discussions of university versus non-university aside, once a university (or college as the Americans generally refer to it) is chosen, the next step is choosing a degree program that will fulfill our needs for our chosen profession. This, of course, is based on the presumption that our chosen profession is going to be IT. If you are not interested in a career in IT, this is probably not the article for you.

University programs can be problematic, especially in IT, because they are often mislabeled, students often do not know what area of study they are interested in before beginning their studies and those pushing students towards university are often inexperienced in IT and do not understand the relationship between specific programs and the field itself. So those directing students towards university studies with the intention of a career in IT will very often pressure them into university programs ill-suited to IT careers at all.

Two things that we need to consider when looking to choose a degree program: what universities themselves are good at providing and what will be useful to us in our IT careers.

First, where do universities shine? The university system, its very core goals and values, are often completely unknown to the general public which makes the broad use of universities a bit odd and problematic on its own. The university system was never meant to train students for specific careers but instead to introduce them to many concepts and foundational knowledge (not foundational industry knowledge you must note) and to force them to think broadly and critically. In this aspect, good universities usually shine.

It should be noted that some universities, including a very famous and well respected US university on the east coast openly stated that its mandate was not to educate or service students in any way and that students attended its schools solely to finance the professors who were its actual product – beware that your university choices see education as a goal, not a necessary evil.

Treating a university as a trade school is a fundamental mistake made by many, probably most, students. Course choices are not intended to be focused on specific skills that will be used “on the job” but on skills that will make one a more generally useful member of society. For example the intended use of a university is not to teach someone the specific ins and outs of managing Active Directory design on Windows Server 2016; that would be the job of a trade school. Instead university programs are intended to be more broadly based such as teaching data structures, authentication concepts or even more broadly in areas like writing and communications.

A student leaving university is not intended to be ready to hit the ground running in a real world job; that is not a goal of the system. Instead the idea is that the student be well versed in the necessary skills to help them learn the specifics of a job or career and be overall better suited for it. It is not about speeding someone into a career but preparing them for a lifetime in the field at a heavy cost to the short term. The hope being that either the student has no concerns with finances (the traditional amateur system) or will make up for the cost (in both hard finances and in career setbacks) of university over the span of their careers. Understanding this is key to understand how to approach university education to gain the appropriate value that we seek.

Second, What is useful education to us in our IT careers? At an early stage in our careers it is generally impossible to predict which skills are going to be the ones that we will need to leverage throughout our career lifespans. Not only do we not know what industry niches we will want to pursue, but we also have little ability to predict which skills will be needed or even exist in the future. And even furthermore nearly all people working in IT, if not every field, have little ability to totally pick and choose the area of technology in which they will end up working but will instead be required to learn the skills of the jobs that become available to them, moving through their careers more organically than in a specifically predefined way.

Because of this, as well as because of the university values mentioned above, focusing on specific technical skills would be almost wholly a waste during the university time frame. Of drastically more value to us are soft skills and more broad ones such as developing a great world view, understanding business and accounting practices and concerns, learning psychology and sociology, studying good management practices, communications and, probably above all, becoming well versed in both written and oral business communications. Companies hiring IT professionals tend to complain about the lack of these skills, not a lack of technical competence, especially in smaller businesses where nearly all IT practitioners have a large need to communicate effectively with end users and often even management. Having a broad understanding of other job roles and the overall workings of businesses has great value for IT practitioners as well. IT only exists in a business context, the firmer the grasp of that context the more value someone in IT has the potential to provide.

For the most part, what we want from our university experience actually lines up with what universities are best prepared to provide. What is least useful to us, throughout our lives, would be highly specific technical skills that are overly focused too early in our careers (or even before they have begun) and skills that would rapidly become outdated often even before leaving university.

So where does this leave us? First we should look at the broadest degree options. Whether we are beginning to look at Associates (two year) degrees or Bachelor (four year) degrees we generally have a choice of an “of Arts” or an “of Science” option and, in a few rare cases, an “of Professional Studies” option. Each of these is simply a point along a sliding scale with an Arts degree being the most liberal and focusing the least on the area of study selected. A Science degree is more focused and less liberal than the Arts degree. And the rare Professional Studies option is even more focused than a Science degree with very little liberal studies, basically the polar opposite of an Arts degree.

Of these degree options, almost universally I recommend the Arts approach. A heavy focus on specific skills is generally a poor approach to university for any degree field but in IT this is more dramatic than almost any other. Classes and coursework heavily specific are not generally useful with education becoming overly focused on a single area. A Science approach is a reasonable option, but I would lean away from it. The Professional Studies approach is a clear attempt to mimic a trade school program and should be avoided both because it is a very poor use of university resources as well as being so rare that it would require regular explanation whenever a new person encountered it.

Staying highly liberal with our studies provides the best overall benefit from the university experience. Not only does it let us best leverage what the university offers but it also gives us the best foundation for our careers. There is also a hidden benefit, and that is career risk mitigation.

Career risk mitigation here refers to our university training not being overly specific so that should we decide later that IT is not the field that we want to pursue or after some time that it is not the career in which we want to remain that our education supports that flexibility in an effective way. Perhaps our IT careers will lead us into management or entrepreneurship. Or maybe our IT experience will be in a field that we end up enjoying more than IT. Or we might live in a place where our IT opportunities are few and other opportunities exist. There are myriad reasons why having a broad, flexible education isn’t just the best for our IT careers but also the best for our non-IT careers.

Thinking about how university works and understanding its core goals and how they apply to ourselves is the first step in being prepared to leverage the university experience for optimum value.

Career, Education

Getting Started with IT Certifications

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This question surfaces very regularly: you are at the beginning of your IT career or maybe have not even gotten into your career yet, and are wondering where to get started with certifications. Maybe you are in high school, maybe you have finished college, perhaps you are six months into your first job and feel that having a certification will help to move you forward. There are a lot of options and a lot of information about IT industry certifications out there but pretty regularly the advice around getting started comes down to just a few basic opinions and I will share mine (having worked in the certification industry for many years and having spent time both as a hiring manager and as a corporate career counselor in IT.)

Certifications that often get mentioned for people “starting” in IT include the CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+ (often called the Net+), Microsoft’s MTA certifications and Cisco’s CCNA.

When just getting started in IT, though, I recommend starting with a firm foundation. Some certs, like those from Microsoft and Cisco, might be great but begin to take you down very specific career paths which may or may not be the right ones for you. We should hold off on those kinds of certifications until we have a little of the basics firmly under our belts. They can be great as a next step, but we do not want to get ahead of ourselves.

It is also extremely important to note that the Microsoft MTA exams are “pre-professional” certs, not certs for IT Pros. They are not meant to demonstrate a level of skill for an existing IT Pro or even to show that someone is ready to work as an IT Pro but instead to show that someone is ready to intern in IT or to attend IT classes. The MTA is targeted at high school students to take after entry level high school classes and are too low level to be considered even at the college level, let alone at the working level. You should never include these on a resume, even if you have them, once you are working in the field. They are excellent for showing initiative for high school classes but should not be used as goals of their own.

CompTIA is a vendor neutral certification authority so tends to be a good starting spot in IT. CompTIA also focuses on more entry level and broad certifications than most other providers. This makes then exceptionally well suited to entry level folks looking to certify themselves before moving into more specific career paths. And because they tend to focus on foundational knowledge the effort spent certifying is rarely wasted at an educational level either.

CompTIA has two major certs that are generally considered here, the A+ and the Network+. The A+ is by far the more well known outside of IT circles, and this is actually because it is not an IT certification at all. The A+ was originally designed to certify that someone had the appropriate experience level of someone having worked on a helpdesk for six months. However the knowledge tested by the A+ generally covers archaic hardware and tasks that generally do not exist in IT at all but belong to another, related, field of “bench work.” No amount of IT experience, even decades of it, would prepare you for the exam. This makes the A+ specifically targeted at bench careers and has become the industry standard in that area – which includes local computer stores, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Staples and other non-IT computer “fix it” shops. The skills tested by the A+ are too “low” to be useful for testing in IT and focus on aspects of computers that are rarely, if ever, of concern to IT.

The A+ tends to focus very heavily on hardware and physical repair of consumer equipment. It does not cover tasks common to any level or style of IT. While some entry level IT areas would consider the knowledge in it common, most IT disciplines would not see it as foundational or useful and even the most senior IT professionals would often find it obtuse at best.

CompTIA’s other general purpose certification is the Network+, originally designed to represent the level of knowledge expected after “two years” working in IT. Both of these assessments are very poor, the A+ represents general knowledge or low level archaic knowledge that you would hope the general public would have and the Network+ really represents the knowledge level that you would look for a new hire, first IT job person to have. The Network+ is not a differentiator, therefore, between candidates but more of a foundational level of knowledge and a standard requirement. But that does not make it bad to have, it makes it good. The Network+, unlike its counterpart, does indeed focus on common and very important IT knowledge that those seeking a career in the field should most certainly have or acquire if lacking.

The Network+ represents standard knowledge useful for effectively any IT position or career no matter what technology or area of focus one chooses to pursue. For someone looking to go after their very first job or for someone looking to establish that they are well qualified in their first position or even for someone just looking to prepare themselves for the world of certification testing, the Network+ is an ideal starting point.

It is very unlikely that a Network+ on its own is going to lead to a job or promotion, but it establishes a starting point for looking towards other things. It is, more or less, the final “standard” starting point for nearly everyone in the IT field today. Many will not take the Network+ and certainly there are many options to enter the field without it, but I personally recommend it to everyone in every focus of IT. The knowledge needed for it will be useful throughout a career. As a starting point for a certification portfolio it is unrivaled.

The Network+, as the name implies, focuses almost exclusively on networking knowledge. This does not mean that it is only suitable for those interested in networking related IT careers. Networking is a part of everything that we do in IT today and is even important knowledge for non-IT users who want to understand their computers and their networks better. Even very non-network jobs like database administration would benefit from a firm foundation in networking.

Moving forward from the Network+ the world of certifications opens up and this begins a much more complex discussion. CompTIA offers other, good, general purpose certifications, such as the Security+, but at this stage we should be prepared to begin a bit of soul searching to determine exactly what path we want our careers to take from here. There are so many aspects of the IT field there is no way to provide a solid, reliable next step without looking at both short term and long term career goals and interests.

Architecture

Making the Best of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom

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The 3-2-1 or Inverted Pyramid of Doom architecture has become an IT industry pariah for many reasons. Sadly for many companies, they only learn about the dangers associated with this design after the components have arrived and the money has left the accounts.

Some companies are lucky and catch this mistake early enough to be able to return their purchases and start over with a proper design and decision phase prior to the acquisition of new hardware and software. This, however, is an ideal and very rare situation. At best we can normally expect restocking fees and, far more commonly, the equipment cannot be returned at all or the fees are so large as to make it pointless.

What most companies face is a need to “make the best” of the situation moving forward. One of the biggest concerns is that concerned parties, whether it be the financial stake holders who have just spent a lot of money on the new hardware or if it is the technical stakeholders who now look bad for having allowed this equipment to be purchased, to succumb to an emotional reaction resulting in giving in to the sunk cost fallacy. It is vital that this emotional, illogical reaction not be allowed to take hold as it will undermine critical decision making.

It must be understood that the money spent on the inverted pyramid of doom has already been spent and is gone. That the money was wasted or how much was wasted is irrelevant to decision making at this point. If the system was a gift or if it cost a billion dollars does not matter, that money is gone and now we have to make do with what we have. A potential “trick” here would be to bring in a financial decision maker like a CFO, explain that there is about to be an emotional reaction to money already spent and discuss the sunk cost fallacy before talking about the actual problem so that people are aware and logical and the person trained (we hope) to best handle this kind of situation is there and ready to head off sunk cost emotions. Careful handling of a potentially emotionally-fueled reaction is important. This is not the time to attempt to cover up either the financial or the technical missteps, which is what the emotional reaction is creating. It is necessary for all parties to communicate and remain detached and logical in order to address the needs. Some companies handle this well, many do not and become caught trying to forge forward with bad decisions that were already made, probably in the hopes that nothing bad happens and that no one remembers or notices. Fight that reaction. Everyone has it, it is the natural amygdala “fight or flight” emotional response.

Now that we are ready to fight the emotional reactions to the problem we can begin to address “where do we go from here.” The good news is that where we are is generally a position of having “too much” rather than “too little.” So we have an opportunity to be a little creative. Thankfully there are generally good options that can allow us to move in several directions.

One thing that is very important to note is that we are looking at solutions exclusively that are more reliable, not less reliable, than the intended inverted pyramid of doom architecture that we are replacing. An IPOD is a very fragile and dangerous design and we could go to great lengths demonstrating concepts like risk analysis, single points of failure, the fallacies of false redundancy, looking at redundancy instead of reliability, dependency chains, etc. but what is absolutely critical for all parties to understand is that a single server, running with local storage is more reliable than the entire IPOD infrastructure would be. This is so important that it has to be said again: if a single server is “standard availability”, the IPOD is lower than that. More risky. If anyone at this stage fears a “lack of redundancy” or a “lack of complexity” in the resulting solutions we have to come back to this – nothing that we will discuss is as risky as what had already been designed and purchased. If there is any fear of risk going forward, the fear should have been greater before we improved the reliability of the design. This cannot be overstated. IPODs sell because they easily confuse those not trained in risk analysis and look reliable when, in fact, they are anything but.

Understanding the above and using a technique called “reading back” the accepted IPOD architecture tells us that the company in question was accepting of not having high availability (or even standard availability) at the time of purchasing the IPOD. Perhaps they believed that they were getting that, but the architecture could not provide it and so moving forward we have the option of “making do” with nothing more than a single server, running on its own local storage. This is simple and easy and improves on nearly every aspect of the intended IPOD design. It costs less to run and maintain, is often faster and is much less complex while being slightly more reliable.

But likely simply dropping down to a single server and hoping to find uses for the rest of the purchased equipment “elsewhere” is not going to be our best option. In situations where the IPOD had been meant to only be used for a single workload or set of workloads and other areas of the business have need for equipment as well it can be very beneficial to go to the “single server” approach for the intended IPOD workload and utilize the remaining equipment elsewhere in the business.

The most common approach to take with repurposing an IPOD stack is to reconfigure the two (or more) compute nodes to be full stack nodes containing their own storage. This step may require no purchases, depending on what storage has already been purchased, a movement of drives between systems or often the relatively small purchase of additional hard drives for this purpose.

These nodes can then be configured into one of two high availability models. In the past a common design choice, for cost reasons, was to use an asynchronous replication model (often known as the Veeam approach) that will replicate virtual machines between the nodes and allow VMs to be powered up very rapidly allowing for a downtime from the moment of compute node failure until recovery of as little as just a few minutes.

Today fully synchronous fault tolerance is available so commonly for free that it has effectively replaced the asynchronous model in nearly all cases. In this model storage is replicated in fully real time between the compute nodes allowing for failover to happen instantly, rather than with a few minutes delay, and with zero data loss instead of a small data loss window (e.g. RPO of zero.)

At this point it seems to be common for people to react to replication with a fear of a loss of storage capacity caused by the replication. Of course this is true. It is necessary that it be understood that it is this replication, missing from the original IPOD design, that provides the firm foundation for high reliability. If this replication is skipped, high availability is an unobtainable dream and individual compute nodes using local storage in a “stand alone” mode is the most reliable potential option. High availability solutions rely on replication and redundancy to build the necessary reliability to qualify for high availability.

This solves the question of what to do with our compute nodes but leaves us with what we can do with our external shared storage device, the single point of failure or the “point” of the inverted pyramid design. To answer this question we should start by looking at what this storage might be.

There are three common types of storage devices that would be used in an inverted pyramid design: DAS, SAN and NAS. We can lump DAS and SAN together as they are both two different aspects of block storage and can be used essentially interchangeably in our discussion – they are only differentiated by the existence of switching which can be added or removed as needed in our designs. NAS differs by being file storage rather than block storage.

In both cases, block (DAS or SAN) or file (NAS) storage one of the most common usages for this now superfluous device is as a backup target for our new virtualization infrastructure. In many cases the device may be overkill for this task, generally with more performance and many more features than needed for a simple backup target but good backup storage is important for any critical business infrastructure and erring on the side of overkill is not necessarily a bad thing. Businesses often attempt to skimp on their backup infrastructures and this is an opportunity to invest heavily in it without spending any extra money.

Along the same vein as backup storage, the external storage device could be repurposed as archival storage or other “lower tier” of storage where high availability is not warranted. This is a less common approach, generally because every business needs a good backup system but only some have a way to leverage an archival storage tier.

Beyond these two common and universal storage models, a common use case for external storage devices, especially if the device is a NAS, is to leverage it in its native rule as a file server separate from the virtualization infrastructure. For many businesses file serving is not as uptime critical as the core virtualization infrastructure and backups are far easier to maintain and manage. By offloading file serving to an already purchased NAS device this can reduce file serving requirements from the virtualization infrastructure both by reducing the number of VMs that need to be run there as well as moving what is typically one of the largest users of storage to a separate device which can lower the performance requirements of the virtualization infrastructure as well as its capacity requirements. By doing this we potentially reduce the cost of obtaining necessary additional hard drives for the local storage on the compute nodes as we stated earlier and so this can be a very popular method for many companies to address the repurposing needs.

Every company is unique and there are potentially many places where spare storage equipment could be effectively used from labs to archives to tiered storage. Using a little creativity and thinking outside of the box can be leveraged to take your unique set of available equipment and your business’ unique set of needs and demands and find the best place to use this equipment where it is decoupled from the core, critical virtualization infrastructure but can still bring value to the organization. By avoiding the inverted pyramid of doom we can obtain the maximum value from the equipment that we have already invested in rather than implementing fresh technical debt that we have to them work to overcome unnecessarily.

Career, IT Hiring

Why We Avoid Contract to Hire

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Information Technology workers are bombarded with “Contract to Hire” positions, often daily.  There are reasons why this method of hiring and working is fundamentally wrong and while workers immediately identify these positions as bad choices to make, but few really take the time to move beyond emotional reaction to understand why these working method is so flawed and, more importantly, few companies take the time to explore why using tactics such as this undermine their staffing goals.

To begin we must understand that there are two basic types of technology workers: consultants (also called contractors) and permanent employees (commonly known as the FTEs.)  Nearly all IT workers fall into a desire to be one of these two categories. Neither is better or worse, they are simply two different approaches to employment engagements and represent differences in personality, career goals, life situations and so forth.  Workers do not always get to work they way that they desire, but basically all IT workers seek to be in either one camp or the other.

Understanding the desires and motivations of IT workers seeking to be full time employees is generally very easy to do.  Employees, in theory, have good salaries, stable work situations, comfort, continuity, benefits, vacations, protection and so forth.  At least this is how it seems, whether these aspects are real or just illusionary can be debated elsewhere.  What is important is that most people understand why people want to be employees, but the opposite is rarely true.  Many people lack the empathy for those seeking to not be employees.

Understanding professional or intentional consultants can be difficult.  Consultants live a less settled life but generally earn higher salaries and advance in their careers faster, see more diverse environments, get a better chance to learn and grow, are pushed harder and have more flexibility.  There are many factors which can make consulting or contracting intentionally a sensible decision.  Intentional contracting is very often favored by younger professionals looking to grow quickly and gain experience that they otherwise could not obtain.

What makes this matter more confusing is that the majority of workers in IT wish to work as full time employees but a great many end up settling for contract positions to hold them over until a desired full time position can be acquired.  The commonality of this situation has created a situation wherein a great many people both inside and outside of the industry and on both sides of the interview table may mistakenly believe that all cases are this way and that consulting is a lower form of employment.  This is completely wrong.  In many cases consulting is highly desired and contractors can benefit greatly for their choice of engagement methodology.  I, myself, spent most of my early career, around fifteen years, seeking only to work as a contractor and had little desire to land a permanent post.  I wanted rapid advancement, opportunities to learn, chances to travel and variety.

It is not uncommon at all for the desired mode of employment to change over time.  It is most common for contractors to seek to move to full employment at some point in their careers. Contracting is often exhausting and harder to sustain over a long career.  But certainly full time employees sometimes chose to move into a more mobile and adventurous contracting mode as well.  And many choose to only work one style or the other for the entirety of their careers.

Understanding these two models is key.  What does not fit into this model is the concept of a Contract to Hire.  This hiring methodology starts by hiring someone willing to work a contract position and then, sometimes after a set period of time and sometimes after an indefinite period of time, either promises to make a second determination to see if said team member should be “converted” into an employee, or let go.  This does not work well when we attempt to match it up against the two types of workers.  Neither type is a “want to start as one thing and then do another”.  Possibly somewhere there is an IT worker who would like to work as a contractor for four months and then become an employee, getting benefits but only after a four month delay, but I am not aware of such a person and it is reasonable to assume that if there is such a person he is unique and already has done this process and would not want to do it again.

This leaves us with two resulting models to match into this situation.  The first is the more common model of an IT worker seeking permanent employment and being offered a Contract to Hire position.  For this worker the situation is not ideal, the first four months represent a likely jarring and complex situation and a scary one that lacks the benefits and stability that is needed and the second decision point as to whether to offer the conversion is very scary.  The worker must behave and plan as if there was no conversion and must be actively seeking other opportunities during the contract period, opportunities that are pure employment from the beginning.  If there was any certainty of a position becoming a full employment one then there would be no contract period at all.  The risk is exceptionally high to the employee that no conversion will be offered.  In fact, it is almost unheard of in the industry for this to happen.

It must be noted that, for most IT professionals, the idea that a Contract to Hire will truly offer a conversion at the end of the contract duration is so unlikely that it is generally assumed that the enticement of the conversion process is purely a fake one and that there is no possibility of it happening at all.  And for reasons we will discover here it is obvious why companies would not honestly expect to attempt this process.  The term Contract to Hire spells almost certain unemployment for IT works going down that path.  The “to Hire” portion is almost universally nothing more than a marketing ploy and a very dishonest one.

The other model that we must consider is the model of the contract-desiring employee accepting a Contract to Hire position.  In this model we have the better outcome for both parties.  The worker is happy with the contract arrangement and the company is able to employ someone who is happy to be there and not seeking something that they likely will be unable to get.  In cases where the company was less than forthcoming about the fact that the “to Hire” conversion would never be considered this might actually even work out well, but is fall less likely to do so long term and in repeating engagements than if both parties were up front and honest about their intentions on a regular basis.  Even for professional contracts seeing the “to Hire” addendum is a red flag that something is amiss.

The results for a company, however, when obtaining an intentional contractor via a Contract to Hire posting is risky.  For one contractors are highly volatile and are skilled and trained at finding other positions.  They are generally well prepared to leave a position the moment that the original contract is done.

One reason that the term Contract to Hire is used is so that companies can easily “string along” someone desiring a conversion to a full time position by dangling the conversion like a carrot and prolonging contact situations indefinitely.  Intentional contractors will see no carrot in this situation and will be, normally, prepared to leave immediately upon completion of their contract time and can leave without any notice as they simply need not renew their contract leaving the company in a lurch of their own making.

Even in scenarios where an intentional contractor is offered a conversion at the end of a contract period there is the very real possibility that they will simply turn down the conversion.  Just as the company maintains the right to not offer the conversion, the IT worker maintains an equal right to not agree to offered terms.  The conversion process is completely optional by both parties.  This, too, can leave the company in a tight position if they were banking on the assumption that all IT workers were highly desirous of permanent employment positions.

This may be the better situation, however.  Potentially even worse is an intentional contractor accepting a permanent employment position when they were not actually desiring an arrangement of that type.  They are likely to find the position to be something that they do not enjoy, or else they would have been seeking such an arrangement already, and will be easily tempted to leave for greener pastures very soon defeating the purpose of having hiring an employee to the company again.

The idea behind the Contract to Hire movement is the mistaken belief by companies that companies hold all of the cards and that IT workers are all desperate for work and thankful to find any job that they can.  This, combined with the incorrect assumption that nearly all IT workers truly want stable, traditional employment as a full time employee combines to make a very bad hiring situation.

Based on this, a great many companies attempt to leverage the Contract to Hire term in order to lure more and better IT workers to apply based on false promises or poor matching of employment values.  It is seen as a means of lowering cost, testing out potential employees, hedge bets against future head count needs, etc.

In a market where there is a massive over supply of IT workers a tactic such as this may actually pay off.  In the real world, however, IT workers are in very short supply and everyone is aware of the game that companies play and what this term truly means.

It might be assumed that IT workers would still consider taking Contract to Hire because they are willing to take on some risk and hope to convince the employer that conversion, in their case, would be worth while.  And certainly some companies do this process and for some people it has worked out well.  However, it should be noted, that any contract position offers the potential of a conversion offer and in positions where the to “Contract to Hire” is not used, conversions are actually quite common, or at least offers for conversion.  It is specifically when a potential future conversion is offered like a carrot that the conversions become exceptionally rare.  There is no need for an honest company and a quality workplace to mention “to Hire” when bringing on contractors.

What happens, however, is more complex and requires study.  In general the best workers in any field are those that are already employed.  It goes without saying that the better you are, the more likely you are to be employed.  This doesn’t mean that great people never change jobs or find themselves unemployed but the better you are the more time you will average not seeking employment from a position of being unemployed and the worse you are the more likely you are to be unemployed non-voluntarily.  That may seem obvious, but when you combine that with other information that we have, something is amiss.  A Contract to Hire position can never, effectively, entice currently working people in any way.  A great offer of true, full time employment with better pay and benefits might entire someone to give up an existing position for a better one, that happens every day.  But good people generally have good jobs and are not going to give up the positions that they have, the safety and stability to join an unknown situation that only offers a short term contract with an almost certain no chance conversion carrot.  It just is not going to happen.

Likewise when good IT workers are unemployed they are not very likely to be in a position of desperation and even then are very unlikely to even talk to a position listing as Contract to Hire (or contract at all) as most people want full time employment and good IT people will generally be far too busy turning down offers to waste time looking at Contract to Hire positions.  Good IT workers are flooded with employment opportunities and being able to quickly filter out those that are not serious is a necessity.  The words “Contract to Hire” are one of the best low hanging fruits of this filtering process.  You don’t need to see what company it is, what region it is in, what the position is or what experience they expect.  The position is not what you are looking for, move along, nothing to see here.

The idea that employers seem to have is the belief that everyone, employed and unemployed IT workers alike, are desperate and thankful for any possibly job opening.  This is completely flawed.  Most of the industry is doing very well and there is no way to fill all of the existing job openings that we have today, IT workers are in demand.  Certainly there is always a certain segment of the IT worker population that is desperate for work for one reason or another – personal situations, geographic ties, over staffed technology specialization or, most commonly, not being very competitive.

What Contract to Hire positions do is filter out the best people.  They effectively filter out every currently employed IT worker completely.  In demand skills groups (like Linux, storage, cloud and virtualization) will be sorted out too, they are too able to find work anywhere to consider poor offerings.  Highly skilled individuals, even when out of work, will self filter as they are looking for something good, not looking for just anything that comes along.

At the end of the day, the only people in any number seriously considering Contract to Hire positions, often even to the point of being the only ones even willing to respond to postings, are the truly desperate.  Only the group that either has so little experience that they do not realize how foolish the concept is or, more commonly by far, those that are long out of work and have few prospects and feel that the incredible risks and low quality of work associated with Contract to Hire is acceptable.

This hiring problem begins a vicious loop of low quality, if one did not already exist. But most likely issues with quality already will exist before a company considers a Contract to Hire tactic.  Once good people begin to avoid a company, and this will happen even if only some positions are Contract to Hire, – because the quality of the hiring process is exposed, the quality of those able to be hired will begin to decline.  The worse it gets, the harder to turn the ship around.  Good people attract good people.  Good IT workers want to work with great IT workers to mentor them, to train them and to provide places where they can advance by doing a good job.  Good people do not seek to work in a shop staffed by the desperate.  Both because working only with desperate people is depressing and the quality of work is very poor, but also because once a shop gains a poor reputation it is very hard to shake and good people will be very wary of having their own reputation tarnished by having worked in such a place.

Contact to Hire tactics signal desperation and a willingness to admit defeat on the part of an employer.  Once a company sinks to this level with their hiring they are no longer focusing on building great teams, acquiring amazing talent or providing a wonderful work environment.  Contract to Hire is not always something that every IT professional can avoid all of the time.  All of us have times when we have to accept something less than ideal.  But it is important for all parties involved to understand their options and just what it means when a company moves into this mode.  Contract to Hire is not a tactic for vetting potential hires, it simply does not work that way.  Contract to Hire causes companies to be vetted and filter out of consideration by the bulk of potential candidates without those metrics every being made available to hiring firms.  Potential candidates simply ignore them and write them off, sometimes noting who is hiring this way and avoiding them even when other options come along in the future.

As a company, if you desire to have a great IT department and hire good people, do not allow Contract to Hire to ever be associated with your firm.  Hire full time employees and hire intentional contractors, but do not play games with dangling false carrots hoping that contractos will change their personalities or that full time employees will take huge personal risks for no reason, that is simply not how the real world works.

The Information Technology Resource for Small Business