My Job Bridge Experiences

national | sci-tech | opinion/analysis Tuesday April 07, 2015 16:35 by Unemployed IT Guy

My Job Bridge software development experiences...

My experience is that companies place job bridges adverts for software developers and in one interview I attended, the company said they really only wanted someone to so IT support and also wanted someone speaking French ( for European support). No mention of that in the advert (i.e they didn't want the person to do actual software development) . I have a lot of software development ability and knowledge but can't get my foot on the ladder. I already did a Java Fas course and passed the Java Certification Professional exam. But I already had 10 years of development enterprise knowledge. The problem is when your longer term unemployed and get into your 40's, companies are only interested in younger grads. I am even told directly this by recruiters, I used to ring them up and apply for junior development positions, but now I know they have my CV on file, but they don't want to contact me.

Recruitment companies only contact me for very advanced positions aboard or relocation type positions etc. Another job bridge interview I went for and they wanted to start work on 3 mobile apps, but get this they had no experience of mobile development and I would have no involvement in generating the application requirements. This is means I wouldn't be part of the development lifecycle and they then added in they would like me to spent a couple of days looking after their enterprise server clusters, because I was capable of this from my It background.

I checked the company before and they had experienced Oracle and Mssql administrators who both had done a jobbridge the year before in this company. My point is the company was only LOOKING for experienced staff and they would not be providing ANY training, rather guidance. I said I would need 2-4 weeks to get up to speed with Phonegap as they wanted cross development apps. However they terminated the interview, by saying we really thought you were already up to speed on mobile development. This is know as technical debt in the agile software development industry, i.e the process of acquiring skills, learning Api(s) etc and when a company isn't even prepared to allow a person any time to get their feet under the desk then it really speaks volumes that the company is abusing the idea of providing/mentoring people in their job bridge description.

Quite clearly given my experience of over 15 years of working in the IT industry, Job bridge scheme would need someone like me to actually ensure the interns are actually getting training and gaining experience from the position. i.e people in the employments services have no actual IT or software development experience, the onsite mentoring of the job bridge process is purely to ensure they are truing up . If this job bridge system was run correctly it would require ALL companies to pay at least 150 euros per week to the worker and that would top up the amount paid by social welfare. The scheme should be reduced to 3 months intervals.ie for max of 12 months. with a 6 month cooling period. It's important for the employer to pay the person, so that everyone concerned is been professional in the process. When you are unemployed you still need to run a car, tax & insurance it to get to the job. If the company then employs the person for the next 12 months they should get Tax credits to benefit the company in reward for fully employing that person. When people are long term unemployed companies are un willing to take them for a few simple reasons, mainly because they think they will become resentful for working for nothing after a month or two, I read software company director who was sick that a young mobile developer he took on a bridge system found a job and left. The director was ranting on about how great the guy was, get this after 6 months and the fact he personally produced 6 apps some for major clients. They didn't offer him a position. That's the problem companies have no sense of decency in understanding that once the person is good enough they need to offer the person a position in writing i.e. agreed to take them on with a perm or 12 month contract when their job bridge is finished. Companies actually do themselves a disservice in the long run since other developers start to question the motives of a company when they have 2 or 3 rotating unskilled trainee developers replacing what should be experienced longer term junior programmers. This often leads to developers leaving themselves. One way this has effected developers is that software teams no longer have a web designer/graphics artist, this often get panned out to job bridge interns when they want people with graphic photoshop skills as they put it. The point being web designer basic salary has dropped over the last 10 years and this is the main reason as companies get interns to do the graphics. That may explain Windows 8 ( Ok that was a joke added in at the end) :-)