Tech hiring is tough on veteran workers

Keeping up with the latest gets ever-harder

September 18, 2011|By Katie Johnston, Globe Staff

(Jessey Dearing for The Boston…)

Brewster Smith specialized in mainframe systems for 35 years in the technology industry, recently converting his employer’s mainframe to servers that use newer programming languages. When Smith completed the project in July, his company laid him off because his skills no longer fit the new system.

“It will take at least two years to train you to be productive,“ he recalled his Concord, N.H., employer telling him. “Why do that when we can just hire someone off the street and they’ll be productive immediately because they know the languages.’’

The high-tech labor market may be on fire, but not for workers like Smith, who haven’t kept up to date and have found that skills that kept them working just a few years ago are no longer in demand. Even as some firms decry a looming labor shortage in the industry, many educated, experienced, and technically savvy workers are finding themselves shut out of the latest tech boom.

Smith, for instance, recently got a call from John Hancock Financial Services, but the conversation ended quickly when the hiring manager found out he didn’t know the .NET framework for Microsoft Windows.

“The prospects are pretty bleak for what I’m doing,’’ Smith said.

Such workers represent a dark side of tech, an industry in which skills and people can quickly become obsolete and some companies, believing high unemployment will give them the pick of ready-to-produce workers, don’t provide training. The ability to learn new skills is rarely at the top of a recruiter’s job orders; many companies demand candidates with skills that perfectly match their requirements.

“They’ll give us literally a laundry list of 15 technologies,’’ said John McBride, vice president of sales at the Needham IT firm Syrinx Consulting. “If [candidates] don’t know one or two pieces, then they’re down.’’

It is a particular problem for older workers, many of whom have worked for the same company and with the same technology for years, and may not have kept up with mobile applications, web development, and cutting-edge programming languages.

The automotive website CarGurus.com in Harvard Square, for example, is so intent on finding the most qualified software engineers that it offers a $20,000 bonus to employees who make successful referrals.

Oliver Chrzan, vice president of engineering at CarGurus, knows he is not going to find people with a lot of experience with new programming languages such as Ruby and Python. What he looks for in the 100 or so resumes he scans to fill each position is evidence that the candidate has tried to keep current.

“If they’ve been working in the same technology for a long period of time, then the concern is: Can they learn the new technology when it comes along quickly?’’ Chrzan said.