ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, October 24, 2023

ACM CareerNews is intended as an objective career news digest for busy IT professionals. Views expressed are not necessarily those of ACM. To send comments, please write to [email protected]

Volume 19, Issue 20, October 24, 2023

The Top Startups in the Country Are Hiring For $100,000-Plus Remote Jobs
CNBC, September 28

Many of the top startups in the country are hiring, and a lot of them offer six-figure salaries and remote accommodations. The latest report from LinkedIn on the top startups in the U.S. shows that young businesses disrupting retail, health care, and artificial intelligence are some of the most highly sought-after places to work. These early-stage businesses are hiring for roles in engineering, product and design, analytics, sales and marketing, operations, customer service, and security, many of which pay $100,000 or more. Remote roles make up more than half of the available jobs at the top startups.

If you only have time to do one thing to update your LinkedIn profile, consider paying special attention to your skills section. More than 50% of hiring managers on LinkedIn now explicitly use skills data to fill their roles. Add context by listing them within a specific job, experience, education, project or credential. Recruiters are 50% more likely to search for candidates by skills rather than years of experience, and some 75% of recruiters predict skills-first hiring will become a priority for their company in the next 18 months, according to LinkedIn. On the technical side, some of the most in-demand skills employers are looking for include IT skills, software development and data analysis. More broadly, listing management, communication and customer service skills could also land you a recruiter message much faster.

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Teaching AI to Behave Is the Fastest-Growing Career Skill
Computerworld, October 19

Prompt engineering has become an important IT skill to highlight on a resume, judging by the number of job candidates that are now putting similar types of generative artificial intelligence (AI) skills on their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. Quite simply, businesses now want these skills, and job seekers are looking for ways to showcase these skills. According to LinkedIn, there has been a stark rise in the demand for prompt engineering, with more than 10,000 job offers mentioning it for various positions. Since the start of the year, LinkedIn has seen on average a 75% increase each month in members worldwide adding terms like ChatGPT and prompt engineering to their profiles.

AI and machine learning specialists top the list of fast-growing jobs, according to a recent survey by to the World Economic Forum. Prompt engineers can earn a healthy six-figure salary, as much as $335,000 a year. That is because prompt engineering is needed to improve human-machine interaction with generative AI tools. The need for skilled prompt engineers is growing rapidly, as fast as generative AI applications are being considered and piloted. Thus, it is important for enterprises to train their existing developers and software engineers on new prompt-engineering techniques. It is not easy to get good results out of generative AI models unless you are skilled at data preparation and process flows for prompting models effectively. However, you do not need to run out and hire new staff for it. You likely need just a handful of specialized prompt engineers to jumpstart the development process and to help train other motivated and competent engineers and developers already in your organization.

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Which Tech Roles Are Hardest to Fill Right Now?
Information Week, October 18

There are three IT roles that recruiters have found especially challenging to fill: designers, architects, and leaders. Even with a much talked-about IT skills gap and recent layoffs at high-profile tech companies, there simply do not seem to be enough candidates. For example, companies say that it has been difficult to find candidates with a true talent for design. Designing a new user interface or a new software solution requires a high degree of skill, and designers must be able to apply their skills toward anticipating both customer and end-user expectations.

Architecting is a skill that, to a certain extent, can be trained. However, a truly great architect possesses a rare inherent talent. Architects, at least in technology settings, must be able to view a large, complex problem and deconstruct it into workable components. This requires some impressive mental fortitude and flexibility, which is why the best architects are those whose minds are uniquely suited for the role. Skilled architects understand that we should not use tech solely for the sake of using tech and simplicity is the gold standard. To identify strong candidates for technology architect roles, leaders should think outside the box. Once the initial screening questions have been covered, interviewers should ask thought-provoking questions to gauge creativity and problem-solving skills. What is important here is not necessarily the solution, but rather the ingenuity of the candidate and how they methodically walk themselves through a given puzzle or question.

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The Hottest Remote IT Jobs In 2023
CRN.com, October 14

Remote jobs are here to stay and, if anything, high-paying jobs like software developers and systems analysts are even more in demand than they were just a few years ago. According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, remote IT jobs are on the rise. In September alone, there were about 48,000 open roles for software developers and engineers, 33,000 open roles for IT project managers and data analysts, and about 18,000 open roles for IT support specialists. The five hottest cities with the most remote IT job postings include Washington, D.C, New York, Dallas, San Francisco and Chicago. While remote IT jobs were at its peak in mid-2022, the highest in the last four years, it has steadily dropped but not to the point where it was in January 2019.

Software developers continue to lead the way when it comes to the most popular remote IT jobs. In September, there were 10,561 job postings, while the average salary was $117,298. Software developers are responsible for designing, developing, installing, testing and maintaining software systems through coding, designing, and building applications, websites or mobile apps. IT project manager is another popular remote role. There were 5,983 job postings in September, while the average salary, according to Indeed, was $99,330. IT project managers oversee the planning, executing and delegating responsibilities around all IT projects. They work closely alongside a variety of IT areas and guide along the completion process for major large-scale projects.

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5 Ideas for Programmer Self-Promotion
Dice Insights, October 18

If you are a software developer on the hunt for a full-time job or new contract gig, it is important to build a reputation and get your name out there with hiring organizations. While social media can be effective in building an online reputation, it can also be a very crowded space. Better options include creating your own blog or newsletter, contributing to open-source software projects, or creating new online training courses. Along the way, you should be building a robust network of contacts who can help you land future jobs and promotions.

There are several ways you can attract the attention of hiring managers. You could create your own blog or newsletter, create open-source software code, or participate in open-source projects. You could also create programming books, digital learning resources, or training courses. Finally, you could create your own programming language. In order to create your own programming blog, think about ways that you can stand out from the crowd. Consider breaking down a unique project, or your approach to debugging, or anything else that is unique and special to you. Once that is up and running, consider adding a newsletter.

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The continued pace of innovation within every industry means that it is not just jobs themselves that are changing, but also the way in which these jobs are filled. According to recruiters, there is a huge amount of tech innovation in the recruitment market right now, especially in areas such as data analytics and artificial intelligence. These technology tools are having a clear impact on recruitment trends, especially on how and where employers find new talent.

In recent years, recruiters say that there has been a fundamental change in where the best candidates can be found. As a result, recruiters now need to be far more aware of how to find the best talent. There is a world of talent out there that is still to be developed and to be found. Just keep in mind that very different strategies may be required to find this talent. The best candidates can often be found at hackathons or in the world of GitHub. As a result of this, recruiters need to cast a much wider net. It is still very much a candidate-short market, and therefore, you need to be able to know where to look for them and you also need to know how to entice them.

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The 7 Best Freelance Developer Jobs
Make Use Of, October 5

Software developers continue to be very much in demand by a wide range of organizations spanning nearly every industry. Whether these organizations need to create a digital storefront or build an app for their clients, developers are almost indispensable. Some of the best freelance developer careers, based on potential earnings and job responsibilities, include web developer and mobile app developer.

Web developers rank among the best freelance IT jobs. As a freelance web developer, your core responsibility is to create websites and web applications for businesses and organizations. These websites and web applications serve a variety of purposes, such as promoting products and services, providing information, and processing transactions. To do this, you can either become a full-stack developer or learn either back-end or front-end development and team with someone else to create responsive websites. If this career interests you, but you do not know how to code, you can easily learn to code with the best coding bootcamps for career changers. Some of these coding bootcamps can tailor a part-time program to make learning coding easy for you, even while working a full-time job.

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Job Hunting Is Difficult: This Programmer Filled Out 250 Applications to Find Out Why
Wired.com, October 17

Within the tech industry, job hunting can be an exhausting, discouraging process filled with clunky application software and low response rates. Research suggests the frustration is widespread: 92 percent of candidates abandon online job applications before completing them. In order to figure out what makes the job hunting process especially challenging, one programmer applied to 250 jobs across a range of industries and company sizes.

While job hunters have much to gripe about, from ghost jobs to the dreaded resume black hole, the biggest complaint seems to be the initial application process. There are three main factors that affect the time it takes to apply to a new job posting: the size of a company, the industry it is part of, and the applicant tracking software being used. Applicant tracking software was a major source of frustration. Even when they have AI-powered features included, these software programs can be very difficult to worth with for candidates. They can, for example, direct candidates away from the careers page and make them create a separate account for each new application, adding significant time and vexation. Another frustration point is retyping information already uploaded on a resume because the software somehow misread it.

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Working Halfway Around the World
ACM Queue, September 20

Helping to start or manage a software development group in a locale halfway around the world can be a fantastic career opportunity. Often, these opportunities can lead to future promotions or higher pay, as long as you are able to put in at least a six-month stint abroad. But, as the article points out, there are a number of things you need to keep in mind before accepting such an overseas assignment. For example, there are always going to be situations where handling the local language is important, so you need to be open to the idea of learning a new language or culture.

Apart from the differences in language, every location (such as a particular country, province, or city) has a different culture, both inside and outside of the workplace. You cannot insulate yourself from the culture by becoming a robot who only goes from home to work and then back. Even if you hid in your house, eating expensive imported food and consuming entertainment from home over the internet, you would still have to go out and work with this group that you are supposed to be managing. How can you hope to manage people whose lives and motivations you have made no effort to understand? If you think you find different ways of working when you switch companies, that is nothing compared with the differences you will find every day when you arrive at the office in a different country.

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Can AI Be Fair?
Blog@CACM, October 2

Over the past year, there has been a boom in the use of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. These chatbots have spread rapidly all over the world, in places such as the U.S., China, Israel, Russia, and India. Since these countries differ in culture, education. and politics, it only makes sense that the answers their chatbots provide can also differ. So how does the affiliation of developers to a particular country affect the responses of chatbots? By answering this question, it is possible to arrive at a sense of the overall fairness of AI chatbots in general.

Testing data shows that ChatGPT-3 almost completely coincides with the position of the U.S. government on the most pressing global problems. Perhaps this is due to the position of the dominant media, or perhaps it is due to the innate biases of the developers. At the same time, the Russian AI (known as RuGPT-3) showed a negative result. Its absolute value is not as large as that of ChatGPT. While a small part of the answers demonstrates a coincidence with the point of view of the Russian government, most of the answers actually contradict the official Russian position. This brings into question, of course, the potential ideological influence on artificial intelligence going forward. In the future, as AI technologies continue to develop, this is an important issue to track and monitor. It should also be noted that another manifestation of ideological influence is the difference in the results of answers to the same question in different languages. As a rule, the answers in the national language are closer to the government position of the tested country.

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