SharePoint Resources (SPR) ...
Management needs to KNOW SharePoint
A rant to a closed board
[This was taken from the web with permission of the author]
GET REAL! - A rant
I am already thrice-presented and that irks me...
I am already thrice-presented at many of your clients -- besides that they want Gurus for off-shore prices. They have calculated recruiting to blend ridiculously low worker-bee rates with exorbitant in-house legacy drone rates escalated by tenure of long-term employees. They need to offset shortfalls in engagement profit caused by projects bid excessively low in order to get in the best-and-finals and ultimately be selected the winner.
They did it with COBOL and their mindset is it will work with the new Microsoft Stack. Recruiters need to get real and stand up to them and tell them "real" SharePoint and .NET resources are scarce as "hen's teeth" and cost $125-185 an hour...
Even then, since stakeholders and hireing managers think in legacy terms, and all the retreaded "wanna-be" recruits they interview for SharePoint are legacy trained, they will instantiate Farms modeled after legacy non-collaborative paradigms. They then wonder why SharePoint doesn't enhance their enterprise knowledge use and live up to the panacea it is purported to be by Microsoft.
New-think is needed and it will be birthed only when upper management understands and accepts it must pay homage, as well as, the big-buck; it must trust Gartner and other soothsayers that Web 2.0 concept requires a re-tooling of ALL their platforms and models. Not new hardware and software but new ways of thinking and new inovative vision. An upheaval if you will.
Of this happening, I am not optimistic. It is like congressional ethics; incumbents think old school and it has served them well. Lobbyists, retirements into fortune-500 companies, book deals - no... without a clean sweep of upper management sheep dipping is all we will get. Mind you, it will come but not the kicking screaming kind of transition that would benefit Knowledge-management in the here-and-now, but it will be and evolution that seeps in like the ubiquitous PC that crept into the office while upper management, main-framers, and IBM had their backs turned or were asleep at the wheel.
Sorry for ranting but it rankles me when I get 40 recruiters with the same worn out skills statements written by legacy hiring managers and in-house recruiters who don't have a clue what SharePoint is. It wastes my time and yours.
Employers, recruiters, your COA (cost-to-acquisition) of a resource in SharePoint is not worth your time -- if you can't define the product you can't define support for it; and if can't define support for it you can't find people with the skills. Perhaps that is why "Administrator" and "Developer" is all you ask for?
I say this too much, but "Get real!"
Rankeled in DC>
From:
http://sharingpoint.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-letter-to-sharepoint-recruiters.html
An Open Letter to SharePoint Recruiters I get a lot of emails from recruiters looking for SharePoint resources. I welcome every message and try my best to connect the people I know with each opportunity that comes my way. One thing that I see over and over again is a job requirement that demands top-notch coding skills alongside advanced design/customization/deployment/project management knowledge. This is like asking the guy at GM who designed your SUV to also be the mechanic - they are two completely separate disciplines and anyone who claims to be good at both is going to be horrible at each one.
When was the last time you saw an architect framing a house and doing the brickwork? Or a graphic designer building a server farm? Or a nurse doing brain surgery?
Software architects and software developers have completely different skill sets. Yes, some skills overlap to a small degree, and knowledge of one discipline can make you better at the other, but to be really good at something you have to focus on that skill to the detriment of all others. I don't write code not because I can't but because there are people out there who can program circles around me with their eyes closed - but ask those same superstar developers to manage an end-to-end portal implementation or do all the design and customization work to take a project from mock-up to production and you'll get that deer-in-the-headlights look. They'll tell you straight up that's not what they do, that's what architects and designers do. And if they don't then they are a) lying and b) bad developers. Don't hire them; Period.
So please, to every recruiter out there, stop trying to shoe-horn two bodies into a single position - it won't work and your client will definitely not be happy with the result. If you get a requisition with this type of ridiculous stipulation it's your job to tell the hiring manager that he/she needs two experts, not one, and you'll be happy to go find them both. Let people do what they do best - good personnel placement is about fitting round pegs into round holes not drilling out bigger holes to make room for triangles, squares and octagons.
[Editorial note: Again, do you want your prospective employees, consultants, or adjunct staff
members feeling this way about you? No? Then get educated!]
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