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Former Dot-Com Workers Crowd Homeless Shelters
An anonymous submitter sent in this AP article - Former Dot-Com Workers Crowd Homeless Shelters. This article has inspired huge threads on two mailing lists I subscribe to, people coming out of the woodwork saying that they too were laid off/fired/quit many months ago and haven't been able to find jobs. Is the job market really that bad?
They were complete frauds. They weren't really worth $100K. But the dotcom market was expanding so fast, that anyone who read "Java for Dummies" was hired with a huge salary to make lots of meaningless, slick powerpoint presentations.
Now the shakeout is on. Those with real skills (strong C/C++ skills, network admining) will survive. The overpaid will experience severe withdrawal. Those who saved will settle and survive at a lower (more realistic) pay level for their skills. The ones who bought the $40K Ford Excursions and owing $3200/month for their half a million dollar home, and were so 31337 that they 0wn3d your asses, will be slammed hard into the ground of reality. For these idiots, I will not feel sorry.
c'mmon, 4.2% unemployment is not that bad. In my country, unemployment is around 10%.
"Employment figures" like this are meaningless unless "average pay" is stated right along side it. e.g., 10,000 cut defense industry jobs with high pay in the 80s are not "made up for" in the 90s by creating 100,000 jobs in the service industries. Percentage of people employed is only half of what matters.
Congratulations, you're obviously in good shape. You're attending CMU, one of the best computer science schools in the country. You've interned for some of the most famous software companies in the world. You're obviously one of the brightest students out there, and your future is just as bright as you are.
But one thing I don't understand about bright people: they never seem to realize how bright they are and the perks that come with their intelligence. You'd think that, being bright, they would be able to figure this out. Maybe you haven't taken stats 101 at university yet?
Your personal experience in job market is just a piece of anecdotal evidence. It means nothing to the rest of the world. Not everyone has a CMU education, not everyone gets a job at Microsoft (only about 2% of people who apply to Microsoft actually get hired), and there are a lot of people out there who simply aren't as eligible as you are and aren't having the same success in the job market. That doesn't mean they don't exist, or that unemployment isn't a problem.
Again, I congratulate you on the success you have achieved already. You no doubt have a highly productive career developing software ahead of you. But you aren't being productive when you argue ridiculous propositions like "I have a job, therefore the job market isn't a problem".
Here in Seattle, my view on the situation is that if you have hard skills - solid C++ and/or Java programming skills or even good network admin skills with experience - then you can get a decent job. Unfortunately, for all those who were working at dot-coms doing customer service, order fullfillment, copyediting, etc. you are out of luck and have to look at customer service jobs at old industry firms - which come with low salaries and no-fun workplaces.
I think people assume that dot-commers were techies - most weren't. I think a lot don't have well-defined skills and are generalists - which is hard to sell to employers these days.
As the veteran hacker (12 years) at my company, I've been tossed too many of these techno-wannabees to train. They are clueless. They ask me why I don't rewrite the Perl form processor in Java. When I ask them why I should do that, they say "Because Java is better." That's it. No qualification beyond that. Geez.
I call these people "buzzword employees". All they do is spew buzzwords to try and look 31337 and all they do is fuck everything up. It's like high tech Boomhauer CB lingo. "Yeah man, we gotta ODBC the IIS enterprise with the Sequel (SQL) Server and ramp up the TPS count and interface it all to the Excel Template for report generation for the CIO, I tell you whut."
Yeah sure, you go whip up some powerpoint slides, while I ignore you and keep the system up running normally, just as it has been. I will not upgrade my system just to make it buzzword compliant.
Well, not the shakeout is in full swing and these cookbook guys are the first to get the boot. Good riddance, I say. They were never really useful to begin with. Hope they got a Starbucks on skid row.
After reading many of the comments here, I've come to the obvious conclusion that many people here are talking out of their posteriors. I'm here to set the record straight and in doing so, punch a hole in a couple of the ridiculous dot-com myths that seem to thrive here and elsewhere.
"Good people don't get layed off" This is one of the most absurd generalisations floating around. People need to get a clue about how layoffs work. The people making the decisions about layoffs don't know shit about how good people are. All they see are numbers next to names and a burn-rate they have to go below. These guys can't pronounce half the stuff on the resumes of their technical staff, much less judge their competence.
"I saw the dot-com bust coming long before anyone else and the dotcommers are getting what they deserve" This is classic I-told-you-so-syndrome that pops up in all facets of life, whether you're talking about the dot-com bust or telling someone how you alone predicted the Rams would win the 1999 Superbowl before anyone else. The fact is that most dot-com worker saw a chance to do something they loved, in an atmosphere they enjoyed with an opportunity to make tons of money. Some jealous-folk wipe a bit of sweat from the brow in reassurance when these young people did not end up as successful as the hype of a few years ago was leading the public to believe. Using other people's misfortune for self-justification only shows how pathetic YOU are.
"Layed off workers living in San Jose should work at McDonald's to make ends meet" Trust me, if you're working at McDonald's in Silicon Valley, you'd still be in a homeless shelter, believe that. Your time is much better spent looking for a decent job either in Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
This post isn't meant to crap on ALL the comments here. Many of the comments are obviously spoken by those who've gone through layoffs or at least have true familiarity with them. Yes, there are people out there who turn down decent jobs just because they aren't paying their overpriced salaries of a year ago. And yes, people who only know HTML are in trouble while the market for C++/Java programmers is still pretty solid. But unfortunately the legitimate commentary is in the extreme minority.
Those of you doing this chortling obviously haven't actually been looking for work.
Things changed, changed badly, in the past three or four months. The job market right now is TERRIBLE, at least for Internet-related jobs. I'm a Solaris admin with 6 years experience in Solaris and >10 years total in various flavors of UNIX, and I can't find a position. (A highly skilled sysadmin, mind you, with great professional references. I'm no experience-poor hobbyist calling himself a sysadmin or a clueless tech-wannabe with a padded resume.) I stopped looking for something specific to my skill set weeks ago, and am now looking for ANYthing, even a LAN job. And still nothing. The recruiters don't call you back. Resumes are thrown in the circular bin. That flood of calls that always used to follow posting your resume on any job board has been conspicuously absent.
Hiring freezes are everywhere. Companies that aren't in hiring freezes seem to be looking for Supermen-- sysadmins and programmers that can fill the shoes of five people, simultaneously. Some of the job descriptions I've seen are INSANE. Positions for senior-level sysadmins that are also senior-level network engineers while also being Oracle DBAs with certification! I have to assume this has something with the downturn... knowledge-poor management assuming they can combine positions and Save Bundles Of Cash[TM].
It's bad, people. Pay attention. This could be you next.
The lesson I learned from this? I still don't have a job, but I know that as SOON as I can, I'm going to acquire expertise in a UNIX other than Solaris or Linux, and in a context other than the Internet. I just hope I get a chance to do so. (That's not intended as a slam against either... it's just that there seem to be a lot more jobs for the other flavors than those two.)
And I'm getting OUT of this goddess-forsaken, PHB-ridden industry as soon as I can.
Well, if the rent is so high in Silicon Valley, then get out of there! The United States is a big country, it's certainly possible to find a good job somewhere out there. In most places, the rent is certainly cheaper..
This appears to me to be like many of the mini-recessions that have hit specialized industry centers over the years. A decade or so ago, many areas of Michigan got hit as sales of American cars slowed. Sometimes, it just takes a restructuring of an industry, such as when textile mills on the east coast grew by an order of magnitude and moved away from the rivers that had been their main source of power until electricity came into widespread use.
Other than that, I think I have to follow the opinion of others posting here -- lots of people don't have the skills they say they do, only have a very narrow skill set, or just don't want to lower their standard of living by getting a cheaper car or smaller apartment.
--
I am currently an undergrad at CMU. I was also in the internship market this last semester (as I have been the past two or three years).
Overall, no matter what job market there has been, finding an internship has been damn easy for me. Here's what I think really helped me get those internships:
Find a job you're interested in. Sounds pretty easy, and it was for me - I'm interested in pretty much everything in computer science. However, I think this is the most critical thing to do, because of the next reason:
Know what you're talking about. This sounds pretty obvious at first glance. However, there are a lot of idiots out there that have no clue what the fuck they are talking about. If you followed my first piece of advice, then you have a better chance of having this part taken care of. Also, if you are interested in the job, and know what you're talking about, this really tends to come out during interviews.
Have a good resume. Well, this seems to be less important to me, but you should have a resume that's easily readable and gets straight to the damn point. HR people don't need your life story, but they need more than your last job and why you quit. I personally have had internships in the past, which have been pretty good for dressing up my resume. If you're looking for your first one, then highlight the best stuff you've done - contests you've done, community work you've done (at school or whatever), etc. Independent projects (ahem, open source projects) are especially good.
Go for it. I personally hate online job applications. The reason is that I feel my resume just gets lost in the sea of crap. I don't mean to sound better than everyone else, but that's the way I feel when I compare my skillz against other people applying to the same job. Find a way to make your resume stand out. Send it to a friend at the company, or if it's a startup, have the audacity to send it to one of the founders - I think they get a kick out of that.
Bleh, that's all I can say. I've interned for MetaCreations (graphics software), Akamai, and now I'm interning for Microsoft (hey - I couldn't pass up Xbox, would you?).
Also, I had three internship offers this year, so I don't see where all this "crappy job market" stuff is coming from. I think that all the idiots are being filtered out, for the most part.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
From now on, "techies" who work in software should be called "software engineers". "techies" who work in hardware should be called "hardware engineers".
Except that "software engineers" and "hardware engineers" are far more than merely "techies" who work in software and hardware, respectively. The term "engineer" denotes an understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of the field. If someone calls themselves a "hardware engineer," I expect them to be able to design at least some simple circuitry and explain to me how a CPU works internally. Someone who can build computers from components is certainly not a hardware engineer.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yeah, Houston is damn cheap. I know some people who pay around $900 for a 3-bedroom apartment in Austin though. The rates near the UT campus are abnormally high due to high demand from 50,000 students, but the rates in the rest of Austin are reasonable. Not as cheap as Houston ($900 vs. $500 or $600), but not $1400 either.
-delirium
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Err, I meant 3-room (1 living room, 2 bedrooms), not 3-bedroom. =P
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
Yeah, I read Future Shock too and even got fired up about that. Then I did it some. I've had several careers and done well in them. I've made some mistakes along the way but I never deserved to be laid off. I picked myself up, dusted myself off and got back on the horse. I think I might be able to do it one more time but I don't think I can do it 3 more times. Why? Each time took alot outta me. I'm not getting any younger and neither are you. Since I became a developer, I work longer hours than I did as an engineer. Retraining sounds good in the saying but when you go do it, it gets old fast and employers will not hire you on the basis of having taken refresher courses. They want actual work experience. I have done what you describe twice. You're right. It CAN be done. But the cost deserves discussion. I will contend that most people I have worked with over the last 25 years could not have done what I have done to stay afloat in some kind of technical field. They were forced out into non-technical jobs paying much less. So I'm not saying your way won't work. It did work for me. I'm saying it is not a viable approach for many if not most people who find themselves in similar circumstances. They will not land on both feet and start running. They will fall flat on their faces and get hurt. Is that how it ought to be? 15 years ago, I would have said yes. Today, I'm not so sure.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
It's sad to see dot-com workers lining up for spots in homeless shelters, since such spots are scarce enough as it is. There must be a better answer, and I think I've found it:
It's time to resurrect the modern leper colony.
Today, Molokai island stands as a pristine isle off the coast of Hawaii's main island. Well into the 20th century, people who had contracted Hansen's disease (leprosy) were corralled and left to fend for themselves apart from the rest of civilization. Though the leper colony became obsolete with the advent of modern antibiotics, it remains a powerful idea with a powerful purpose.
Geeks are little different from lepers, when you look at it. Both suffer from an incurable disease (at least in classic times), both are shunned by mainstream society, and both are wont to have random body parts die and fall off. A leper colony for geeks would be the natural and proper solution.
But how to get them there? Unlike in ancient times, we can't just throw them on a boat and leave them off on the shores. We need strong incentives. Part of the job is already done for us: Hawaii's pristine beauty and untrampled (except by zillions of tourists) lands are unparalleled in popularity and acclaim. Advertised as an island getaway, the leper colony could attract a large number of geeks on that fact alone. The rest of the mopping up could be done with promises of excesses of bandwidth and numerous sexually available local fauna.
Once isolated, the geeklepers would live out their natural lives. Since we all know geeks don't have sex, we needn't fear the propagation of their species. After one or two decades, the last remains of an unwashed mass of pimpled sociopaths could be collected and used as compost.
Above all, homeless shelters would again be free to admit truly down-and-out members of society who didn't go to expensive colleges and didn't recently live in the lap of luxury. That is a world worth fighting for.
You ever see The Grapes of Wrath? Well that kind of thing is happening now, thousands of programmers coming here in search of better luck. Houses in Pleasanton which sold for $1 million in 2000 are now selling for $2 million. Houses in Conta Costa County sell for $1.5 million where in 2000 they were only $1 million. An equivalent rise happened in rent, with most places rising 18%.
Because it shows how while most of the country expects men to win the bread, it's an almost psychotic obsession in Calif*rnia. You don't see any women in homeless shelters because
#1 unless they God forbid want to become engineers they can't live here unless they're married to a male breadwinner who can pay the mortgage and
#2 the wives expect R.E.S.U.L.T.S. Marriage in CA 2001 means wife not having to enlist in the workforce at all.
#3 in order to cut the mustard their wives expect, the male breawinner has to be so competitive as to never get laid off, a kind of super edgy provider.
There's a difference between no training and what RIP is talking about. When I'm interviewing someone who supposedly has been coding for 5 years, I expect them to have learned a thing or two in that time. If they haven't, what are the odds I'm going to be able to train them now?
sigs are a waste of space
I guess one thing that bothers me. It appears to me that this "GNU movement" led by the likes of Richard Stallman, et al. is actually working against those of us in the tech world who would prefer to be paid commiserate salaries based on our actual knowledge. At least I view his attitude as being one of "you should do this for love, not money." and in so doing undercuts us.
Anyway, I guess I feel I'm one of the tech people who does have no problem understanding the business. I just find it rather boring and have no interest in doing that sort of work.
But I don't believe that someone who understands the business side is somehow worth more than someone who understand the technical side. They both have different types of domain knowledge and both play an important role for the profitability of the company.
I honestly have no disdain for the work of the business managers. Sometimes I wish they would be more focused. But I certainly do not appreciate disdain being shown towards technical staff such as the above poster mentioned.
Jamaica hasn't seen unemployment that low as far as I can remember. Right now we are floating somewhere around 35% and have never been in single digits. At least not in the last 40 years.
Worse yet they have a screwed up way of measuring unemployment. If you work even 1 hour out of every 3 months you are called employed. Nobody wants to count the way I suggest. I.e. If you earn minimum wage or above you are considered employed.
They are afraid to reveal that more than 1/2 the population is unemployed or at least not earning a living. At my company we have gotten applications from people who graduated university in 1998 and have never had a job.
So next time a valley worker gets laid off just stop whining jump in the car you don't actually own anymore. Draw out all the cash in your account. Dump your most expensive toys in the trunk and start driving. Stop and look for work at every town you come to. Ask about rent and other expenses too. If you find a place where you can hold $1000 per month after paying the basic expenses (Light, Rent, DSL) just settle down.
New York is paying $50,000 per year for veteran schoolteachers. Find out if you can get the government to foot the bill on a teaching degree so you can go get the $35,000 or thereabouts for an entry level classroom victim.
Money isn't everything but when the glamor goes a little of it is all you need. Better yet servicing printing equipment for a small town newspaper or going door to door for a utility company will leave you enough time to write a book, talk to people, perhaps even have sex.
OK. That last one may be wishful thinking.
I guess what I am trying to say is that for an educated man to suffer he must be forced to stay in a place with limited upertunities (like Jamaica with can get only so many visas availeble to our citezens) or he must give up and surender to his circomstances.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Is it that bad? Yes and no. And I'll give you examples of both:
A young relative of mine graduated from a respectable state university three months ago with a BS in Chem and a minor in CS. She moved into my Seattle basement and started sending out resumes for "web designer" jobs. I tactfully cautioned her that the market for such jobs was becoming *very* tough and that she might be better off looking to a chem-related company and work towards her development goals over the next few years.
Over the next few weeks, I became a bit more worried, because of several factors. Foremost, she lacks any experience in the real job market, and thus lacks the basic understanding of how to interview, and how to position herself as a desirable candidate. She's shooting for technical/dev design jobs when she needs to be looking at entry positions. Secondly, like many of her age-mates, she vastly overestimated the depth & value of her technical skills. Since I've done quite a bit of technical interviewing, I gave her my 10-question interview for an entry-level web-app developer. Basic stuff like "What kind of development do you want to do?" and technical zingers (not) like "What does SSL do?" If it has been a real interview, I would have ended it at question 5 in order to save her further humiliation. Finally, her salary expectations are completely unrealistic in the current environment. She's watched her friends with similar skillsets graduate over the past 2 years and walk into $40-70k jobs, so she feels like $40k is a reasonable minimum. This combination frightened me (I want the best for her, but I don't want her living in my basement forever), and I tried to give her some sense of reality. I pointed out that many of her friends in those $40-70k jobs are now unemployed. It didn't take. She continued searching for jobs that don't exist anymore.
Then I got laid off.
My company of 300 people had a major financial fuck-up (we grossly overestimated the target market for a new bet-the-company service and instantly saturated it in 4Q2000), and it finally hit hard with a layoff in April. I doubt the company will survive to see 1Q2002; the CFO has the brainpower of a barnacle and the money should run out sometime around September.
Now my situation is a little different. I have a mixed background (2/3 Tech/Sys+Net + 1/3 Security/InfoMgmt), with 10yrs experience. I don't have an MCSE, CCNA, or any of that crap, but I have experience that I can demonstrate, excellent references, and a heap of work samples. I know my shit, I know how to use it, and I play nice with others.
But I was blindsided by the layoff. That was stupid; it should not have been a surprise that a large number of the senior staff (read: expensive) would be let go. But I learn from my mistakes, and am relatively self-aware. I went home with my two cardboard boxes of personal belongings and worked on the yard for a few days. When the anger had left, I set about looking for a job in a careful and targeted manner. Yeah, most of the wads of cash are gone, but it took me 5 weeks to find a job with a *better* pay+bene package than the dot-bomb that gave me the heave-ho. It could have been worse, I know, but then again I'm not so proud that I wouldn't have taken work as an electrician or similar if nothing turned up.
Three months on, my relative is still looking for a job. She can get a job tomorrow at $25+k working for the state as a Chemist I, but she won't apply for it. She clings to the fiction that the fluffy web-dev Javascript-and-Photoshop jobs she wants are still out there. And she clings to the absurd notion that a just-graduated kid deserves $40-60k+. Shit, I graduated in '91 with a triple major at a US-top-10 private university, but I landed right smack into the Bush Sr. recession. It took me 2 months to land a $20k job. I could have held out for a better job then, but I don't regret taking the one offered for a moment. This isn't some sage BS about how I suffered this way or that -- you just have to take a realistic look at your situation, use your brain, and exercise your best options.
She's got another month, and I'm kicking her out. If the entire US economy were taking a complete shit, instead of a minor dip that's hitting tech kinda hard, maybe I would feel differently. But I have the same sentiment for her as I hold for every other whiner who thinks their trivial grasp of logic and knowledge makes them a technical genius deserving of huge wages. She can go take her unrealistic, job-market-clogging expectations and go live with her parents until she gets a clue. If there are ex-tech-sector workers who would rather go to a homeless shelter than move home or take a job that offends their out-of-balance sensibilities, I only feel sorry for the actual involuntarily homeless folks who have to listen to their whining.
J
I think not...(*poof*)
I doubt it. Not for the reason most people think either :-)
Oh, I believe there may be more then 4.2% of the population that is untrainable for jobs. I don't believe the unemployment rate counts many of those people. The unemployment rate tracks job seekers, so people who have given up (my wife for example) and aren't looking for work anymore are not counted as unemployed.
A lot of those people are the untrainable, and I believe most active job seekers are trainable (or pre-trained) for something.
Calculating the unemployment statistic this way has its advantages (decent measure of how many people are competing for any given opening), and disadvantages (doesn't show how many people really are out of work).
That's not the same unemployment number that gets published. I got counted as unemployed for a few months because after getting layed off I marched down to the unemployment office and signed up to get my money back (in VA at least the unemployment pay pretty much came out of your paycheck, and you can never get back more then you gave in). I have some friends who are too proud/stupid to do the same, so they aren't unemployed, they just have no job. I also know people who quit work out of disgust and are without jobs, and are not being reported as unemployed (they aren't eligible for unemployment insurance benefits, as the quit).
P.S. yes, I did find another job pretty quick. Actually I had my first offer (no stock, but more cash then my last) within a week or two, but it took three months to find a job I really wanted. I think if you have the same skills it took to get a job in 1992, you can get one again now. Well not quite the same skills (SunOS 4 knolage won't get you anywhere unless you call it Solaris and forget the "1"), but a similar set.
That may be pretty true, but I think it is more a matter of they can't get better for the money. Fast food service has been crappy for as long as I can remember. That includes a few times of high unemployment. Why? Well I'm guessing that the service can be crappy and the place keeps pulling in money, so enough money is offered only to get a minimum level of service. If they payed enough to get bright cheerful people they would have to pay as much as a real restaurant, which would drive the prices of the "food" up to close to real food, and fewer people would go eat McProtoplasam when they could pay almost the same for real food.
A fine idea. One not followed often enough in the USA (if you believe government statistics almost nobody has more then two months savings, few even have one months!)
A lot of people have friends pretty much only in the same industry (mostly at the same company). Chances are they were mostly all layed off together.
Note that in many places the government handouts came directly out of your pay check (or very close to it), and you can't get out more then you payed in. In fact you can't even get as much as you payed in back (in VA you can get the last 18 months back, then your screwed). Also note that unless you are taking these handouts you aren't unemployed (that is you don't count that was in the government statistics).
Even if you have saved up, it is pretty foolish not to march off and get your handout while looking for work. Or at least it's foolish not to find out for real what is involved. In VA it is about an hour and a half to set it up, and one brief phone call per week (assuming you are approved to do "resume searches").
Or at least not a whole lot over. I beleve my mutt was $130, closer to $200 with shots and all. Much smarter then the (~$300) purebreed I had as a kid too.
Be sure those numbers were calculated the same way. Fifteen of my friends have no jobs. Ten of my friends have no jobs, and are looking. Only four of them are unemployed. How is the 15% number for the french calculated?
Wrong.
Worldcom is over ten years old. It is a really big company. It is the number two US long distance carrier. It is not only the largest ISP, but it is larger then the next twelve ISPs combined.
It also layed off a ton of people about three months ago. Nice severance packages though.
The megacorps will not (for the most part) go bust, but they will lay people off as part of their strategy to not go bankrupt.
Polorid is more then ten years old. It may be 100 years old. They announced layoffs last week (I think).
Kodak is over 100 years old. They may not have had layoffs yet (I think they have though), but looking at their annual reports, they will.
When you are asked to do the modification in line the caller isn't going to free a return'ed buffer. In fact it may not look at the return value at all.
How many programs would break if strcat started returning a malloc'ed buffer?
P.S. send me your name, I'll make sure you don't get an interview :-)
(yeah, it was a joke, I expect you would pay more attention during a real interview, plus there are other questions)
Either you are in a bad area for jobs, don't interview well, or arn't as good as you think. Like I said I was unemployed for three months, that was basically through the end of May...
I have about two years income saved. I would like to save enough to live on by the time I reach retirment (I don't think the social security I'm forced to pay will do much for me). My car and my wife's are payed for.
If you aren't interviewing with your coworkers it doesn't sound like it is a job I would be aiming for. If that's the best in the area maybe you should think about moving? If you don't want to move maybe you should think about what it's costing you. I know what my refusal to move costs me (it's humid here, cost of living is high, traffic is bad).
Your writing a reply to someone else. I didn't say move in my last message. Of corse I did in this message...but this would be a planned leaving, not right in the middle of a lease. Later at the end of the lease, or when you get hired some place that will pay the fee to break the lease as part of moving expenses...
Again, even though you clicked "reply to" on my message, you are quoting someone else.
You could sell that car, I use to drive a $700 car, it sucked, but was livable. Today's junk mail shows a used Saturn for $5000, if that is the cheapest car you can find swapping it for your car and $1000 may not be a good idea because you know your car is in pretty good shape, and reapirs should be both rare and free.
Well it would be rather cruel to the rest of the world, plus we can't produce enough oil and other things for domestic use. Plus we make a fair amount of exports that we would lose. Closing the borders would make the current economic downturn look like the golden age, you know back when we all had food...
Or did you mean why can't we just protect jobs in your field, and keep screwing everyone else?
I had three years of experience before entering collage. It may have been mostly CS and QA, but it was still technical.
I've dropped all of my pre-collage experience and some of the stuff from collage in order to keep my resume to two pages. I hadn't realized it would keep me from being falsely branded a liar as well!
No, when I said "one pass" I didn't mean it had to be their loop, calling strlen is "one pass". As far as this question goes yes calling strlen is better then doing it oneself, for pretty much every possible reason (maybe faster, far more readable, and less likely to get the call wrong). However I normally don't count off for doing it with a loop.
If I had asked for it to be as fast as possible, or asked for something where work can be combined with the length calculation, then I might have cared.
I do tend to ask why someone made a choice, and not so much care if they make the same one I do, just if they have a good reason. Well, except if the choice is "mallocing something and not freeing it" or other things that are ever so clearly bugs.
After all surprisingly few people manage to get the bloody thing right. If it works, and doesn't leak memory, the answers to the other questions tend to be more important (esp. the two sort questions, and the trick regex question...).
One of the sort questions is "in any language you like", and the other just requires a description of the algo.
Thanks, it seems to be the only thing I have produced at my new job -- three interviews in my second week.
Nah, I'm more lax on what is correct then you think. Normally I'm pretty happy to get O(...) right. In this case I'm slightly more strict then O(N), I want to see O(2N) -- which I know is technically the same as O(N), but I don't know the right notation.
Depends on how trivial the code should be. "Write a function that reverses a C string in place" should be OK with no references to the man pages, up on a white board. In the past I have asked exactly that question, given the interviewee a xterm with vi or emacs running and let them at it.
On the whiteboard I would forgive simple syntax mistakes and the like. There don't need to be any function calls (a lot of people call strlen, which is fine, but not needed). I'm looking for things like "did you malloc a buffer you don't need, and then forget to free it, or worse yet return it?". If they did the online version, did they test it? With both even and odd length strings? A zero length one? A single byte?
A lot of people who claimed to know C couldn't get the syntax right for the function (given a compiler, I expect one to be able to compile edit compile until you at least get syntactically correct code!).
More people didn't know what "in-place" means (hint, if you aren't sure what you are being asked to code, ask for a clarification).
Still others merely used a poor algo, like malloc'ing a second buffer, copying the string in reverse to that buffer, and then moving it back to the first buffer. Those people are minimally qualified. If they do well on other questions the may still get an offer.
Remarkably few made one pass over the string to find the length, and then a single extra pass to do the reverse. Those are the people I was looking for :-)
The thing to remember when interviewing is any environment you give them will be unfamiliar. They will be under a whole lot of pressure (esp. now, the three people I have interviewed since my multi-month unemployment have received more simpathey from me, but not easier questions). Don't base the whole outcome on a single question.
Seriously don't base it all on a logic puzzle. They may have heard it before. Two flash lights, five people blah blah. Why are manhole covers round? So on... You may end up with a drooling idiot that red the same interviewing books (or logic puzzles...with answers!), or who got asked those same questions last interview and at least was smart enough to find the answers later!
I do show potential maintance programmers a buggy line of code and ask them to spot the bug, or short functions with obvious bugs. But these are clear bugs (like if (a or not a) then x), and not the whole interview.
... but most of those that can't find money in dot coms are often the folks that
- don't really have any marketable skills
- Decided to drop out of college because they thought they could make just as much or more without a degree (sorry, it still matters to any real employer)
- Don't have enough capital to start up their own consulting firm (about 2 to 3 months salary)
- Never really had any talent to begin with and bullshitted their way to their dot com position anyhow.
This isn't to say that there aren't people out there that *are* qualified and still can't find jobs, but in my experience, those are also the same people that can't/won't move from an area with a glut of people that are technically inclined to another area where their skills might be appreciated more (Yes, we know you like the Valley, but bite your lip a little more move to Des Moines, or Cleveland. Give another city a chance).
I am always of the opinion that if your work ethic is good, you have some kind of marketable skill set, you MARKET that skill set properly (no, that does not consist solely of posting your resume on monster and thingamajob) and are willing to be flexible, you can get a decent, well paying and fulfilling job. It's all yours for the taking if you have the desire.
And if for some reason you DO have 2 to 3 months of living expenses in the bank, start your own company. Learn from the mistakes of your other employers and do it better. Realize that their failure could be YOUR ticket to success.
Very, very true. Back, before I got a tech job, I was working at a gas station. We had a very intelligent, older gentleman who worked graveyard. Since I worked Graveyard also, I got to know this person fairly well. He used to talk to me about programming mainframes and about operating systems and languages I never heard of (the letters PL/I spring to mind). However, he now has (and still has, I just went there yesterday) a job manning the gas station, being the person behind the counter who handles "10 on pump 5".
He is in a trap. He works graveyard (late at night), so he can't take day classes to become up-to-date on his computer skills. He is from the generation of "keep the same job forever", so it is difficult for him to move to another job. Point of reference: He is the only person who still works at this Gas station who worked there when I worked there, six years ago.
I also met another person, in his 40s, who used to work for EPYX during the video game boom of the 1980s. In 1990 or so, EPYX finally went under, surviving the post-video-game crash for six or seven years, and he lost his job. He never recovered from that to get another technical job. He is, last time I talked to him, a janitor who cleans buses.
However, I do not believe the job market is as bad as some people say it is. I still get "cold calls" from recruiters. A friend of mine recently posted avability at dice.com and received 20 calls. People with solid technical skills are still being hired.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Some other data points from my circle of friends:
Maybe I just hand around the kind of people who have what it takes to get good jobs.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I attend job interviews (as an interviewer) on a semi-regular basis where my role is to ask the technical questions. Out of 10 people I may interview, only 2 or 3 will have any decent knowledge in therr area - the rest really struggle with even basic concepts/situations.
I find it really depressing that there are so many people in the IT industry with useless skill sets or with no in-depth knowledge. And to make it worse, most times they don't even realise (or want to accept) that their skill base is so poor.
From what I have seen, skilled IT people have no problems getting jobs - it's (generally) the unskilled ones who do.
Just how much of this is due to the insane
rents in the SF Bay Area? I'm (almost)
willing to bet that no such story is happening
over in Boston, which certainly saw enough
of both the boom and bust, and where
rents are high but not insane.
It's exactly people with this sort of pompous, bullshit attitude who deserve to be homeless. I worked restaurant and retail sales jobs until I got my first tech job (web design and programming) in 1996, and my salary went up and up until this past year. Since then, I've been through four tech jobs after leaving a stable but relatively low paying job with a public school system to work at Intel, getting laid off there, and then getting laid off by another startup, and finally ending up at a web entertainment company that is actually pulling a modest profit. I never saw the gigantic salaries of the Silicon Valley people -- I was never willing to put up with that lifestyle -- but $65k/yr wasn't too bad for never breaking a sweat or forming a callus and seldom working over 40 hours a week.
In between "real" jobs, I grabbed any temp opportunity I could, and flipped burgers a few times, too. I didn't have any trouble finding "junk" jobs on account of my background -- low-level retail managers expect a high turnover rate anyway, and there's no "couple years" of training involved in working a cash register. I'm still behind on a lot of bills, but not nearly as far as I would have been if I had sat around believing that I was actually worth what I had been paid during the bullshit-fueled internet boom.
The real world isn't Disneyland, no matter how much it might have looked that way to the VC junkies in parts of the tech industry. Reality -- and what is so far a pretty minor downturn -- has come home to roost, and if these cream puffs are throwing up their hands and getting in soup lines because they're too full of shit to wash dishes, I don't want to know what they'll do if the economy goes into a full recession.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Ive been reading articles about teachers, police officers, ambulance drivers and other public workers living in missions in California. The rent is too high for these lower income jobs, that people are sleeping in thier cars, staying at missions.
Here in Washington State we offer Police Officers in Cali, houses (with local credit union bank loans) and moving expenses to move up here, and live in our smaller cities where they need trained police. Works great, better or same pay and they can now own a house, and afford to have a family.
I havnt been worried about dot com'ers ive been worried about all those people who make the cities run on a daily basis, not being able to ame ends meet. Sounds like a total collapse waiting to happen.
Been There, Done that.. Its a bitch ...
The problem with anecdotal evidence is that nobody believes the problem is widespread. (Like the dust bowl pictures of Okies in Life magazine right next to ads for luxury items.)
Then the problem with statistics is that nobody believes them because they're just faceless numbers.
Having spent the first six months of Y2K in Manhattan ($ all around but none for a job for me,) I was an anecdote. I found something but the burn rate hurt like you can't believe. I can no longer afford to retire for twenty years and I'm living from paycheck to paycheck retiring debt instead.
But now that companies, including the one that hired me, have stopped "wasting money" for head hunter commissions, life for the recently unemployed (some of whom are head-hunters,) has got a lot tougher.
The objective reality is that its chaos out there.
I have house cats with a higher IQ than the most powerful man in the country (USA.)
He's out in Europe making Canada look good, trying to sell a useless pork barrel boondoggle that nobody wants and which utterly fails to address the threat from smaller nations rightfully angry about being so callously abused for their resources.
McVeigh didn't use a missile. He used a truck. Will the missile shield cover the interstate too?
Hurtling to oblivion racing to get there faster than the heat death of the universe.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There have been consumer satisfaction surveys that show that consumer satisfaction with fast-food restaurants goes down during low-unemployment periods, and goes up during high-unemployment periods.
I maintain that the reason for this is that during low unemployment, the better workers have all got jobs, and the job pool has fewer good workers left in it. Therefore the fast food places have to hire the best people they can get, but those aren't as good as the best people available at 5% unemployment.
Further, you can't fire them, because they'll not only be hard to replace, but the pool of replacements mostly consists of people who couldn't get a job.
I'm not the only person who has reached this conclusion:
Here's a link to an audio recording of a National Public Radio "All Things Considered" segment on the subject.
Here's Cnet's Mike Yamamoto talking about it.
Here's ADT Mag's Charles Trepper on the subject.
You'll find that below 3%, it's hard to put ANY warm body into a job, much less find a good employee. Somewhere close to that percentage, you find the people who are pretending to look for a job, so they can collect unemployment assistance, but deliberately sabotaging their interviews or even outright defrauding the system so that they'll never be employed.
Personally, I think they should subtract another 3% from the figures and report 3% unemployment or less as 0% unemployment. They already don't count people who are unemployed and not filing unemployment claims or applying for jobs.
-
c'mmon, 4.2% unemployment is not that bad. In my country, unemployment is around 10%.
4.2% is bad, but not for the reason most people think; with only 4.2% unemployment, it's hard for the economy to grow, because most of that 4.2% are the hard-core untrainable.
Go into any American fast-food restaurant or convenience store right now, and it's quite likely that you'll be dealing with idiots who can't even work the cash register without their manager present. If they treat you like crap, they won't get in trouble, because the manager knows he'll have trouble replacing them.
It's a little better at 4.2% than it was at 3.3%, but the principle still holds.
I'm no economist, but I bet the "ideal" unemployment rate is somewhere between 5% and 7%. Remember, 5% unemployment doesn't mean 5% starvation due to months of being out of work; it means 5% are out of a job some time during a given time period. That includes anybody who leaves one job before they find another, and then finds a new job two weeks later that pays more.
I'd further be willing to bet that 3% of the potential job pool are people who couldn't hold a job as a greeter at Wal-mart if it paid $50,000 a year, and that if any one of 'em were taking your order at McDonald's you'd consider physical violence.
-
Last fall I took a 3 week vacation and just flew around the country: myself, a sleeping back, a small pup tent, and a small plane. Sometimes I would camp out next to the plane, other times I would find a hotel room.
:-)), visited my grandmother again the following morning, and then pointed the plane eastward toward Yosemite, vowing never to return.
... assuming you've booked that hotel room four or five months in advance.
When I went to visit my grandmother at her nursing home in San Jose I discovered that there was no hotel room available anywhere within an absurd distance. Had I wanted to get a room I would have needed to book months (!!) in advance. Months, long before I had even considered making the trip.
I've been around the world twice, and in all my travels I have never run into such absurdity. No accomodations, at any price.
The result? I spent the day with my grandmother, slept on the couch at the airport's FBO (no camping on the ramp at San Jose International
I am not surprised at the cost of rent, or the other problems (economic and otherwise) afflicting the region. There is a serious supply/demand dysfunction in the silicon valley area, whether it is living accomidations, electricity, hotel rooms, or what have you. While I doubt I could identify all of the causes myself, the pattern was clearly recognizable after being in the region for less than twenty four hours and long before the dot.com bust.
To those living in silicon valley and scratching by desperately looking for work I can only say this: run. Run like the wind and don't look back. Pick any city in the United States, any at all, that is not within 100 miles of silicon valley, and you will find conditions much more suitable to human life. And if you're absolutely in love with the region (having been born in Palo Alto I can sympathise), you can always return again for vacation
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have the best of both worlds. I work for a Irvine California company at California wages. But I live in Texas (home of the real deal, the Alamo, and lots of tasty animals to eat).
Texas: No income tax. Low sales tax (6.25 + 2 MTA), Low housing (3/2/2 for 100k are common) and I am sorry to say, but Californians have no idea about BBQ.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Personally, I left full-time employment and started contract-based jobs back when the Y2K "bug" was an issue. It was steady work until right around the 2K turn. Suddenly I found myself without any contract opportunities because everyone had projects "on-hold" until after the turn. Once 2000 came and nothing blewup/melted down, it took a couple months for things to start moving again. So, I was without work for 4 months. Not too long compared to some, I'm sure, but enough to through me behind in finances towards the end of that stretch. I had saved enough to cover short-term breaks between contracts - but apparantly not enough.
Do you think a burger flipping job would have covered even my mortgage alone? If so - you're smoking something seriously illegal (according to Drug War Inc). I spent most of that time searching for a job meeting my income needs. If I had taken "something", yeah I'd have been working, but I wouldn't have had the time to hunt for a "real job".
I AM, therefore I THINK!
As for not attempting to find temporary income - Umm... contract work by it's very nature is temporary. I just chose not to waste my time in a minimum wage job rather than meeting daily with recruiters and going on interviews. I must have interviewed for at least 15-20 jobs during that 4 months. I was perfectly qualified for all but a few, and was even the intended hiree for a couple. But lack of movement on the part of the company interviewed at resulted in lots of "we're reevaluating our project plans and resource needs" responses. When I wasn't in an interview, I was preparing for another, or following up on a previous one. This takes quite a bit of time.
Bottom line, a part-time low-wage job may have dragged my savings out a bit more and made things a bit easier, but at the expense of other efforts I had going. Make not mistake, however, it in no way, shape, or form would have sufficiently replaced my needed income levels. THAT is the point I'm making - you cannot expect someone going from 60-80K to drop down to 10-20K and expect them to survive. At least not without losing all they own and... living at a homeless shelter! The entire point of the article
I AM, therefore I THINK!
As a child, my father screwed up at work and was fired for allegedly giving company bid info to 2 former co-workers who left to start a competing company. The simple fact that he still spoke to 2 guys he had established friendships with at work was all the grounds his employer had to fire him. Getting another job was impossible, since his reputation was harmed so badly. So he and my mother, along with their 5 children, lost their home and other assets in bankrupcy court. We then moved from the nice middle class neighborhood to the ghetto. We got by, survived as you put it, on Welfare as it existed in 1975 and the few part time jobs he and my mother could get with minimal transportation. I was nine at that time - it took 6 years for my father to clear his name in court and return full time to his chosen field. During that time, I myself was nearly shot in the head by some punk who decided a little blonde-haired, blue-eyed white boy didn't belong on "his" bus on the way home from school. The devastating impacts upon my entire family, not to mention the severe depression experienced by my father, is indescribable. That we all "survived" is in a large part due to the timeframe involved - 1975 to 1981. Given the current social climate, I'd seriously doubt we could have handled the same in todays world.
Bottom line - It's not easy to make that kind of drop and emotionally hold together. It's not easy to find affordable housing on such low wages. It's not easy to obtain government assistance if you're not a minority (should have seen what I went through getting financial aid for college - "what do you mean your parents aren't contributing, you're white?" - YES I WAS actually asked that!).
The story all this was posted under was that out of work techies were flooding homeless shelters. That would be the case whether they had a job flipping burgers, or cleaning bed-pans - there is NO available housing in most of the places these people are located. The point I was making was that it is not a simple matter of taking a minimum wage job - that cuts into the time available to run around interviewing for a real replacement. There are many factors involved in each individual case - lumping it all together and calling these unemployed people lazy for not taking shit work is ludicrous.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
I live in St. Louis, MO where I pay $450/month for a spacious, nice but older apartment with hardwood floors in a nice neighbourhood. The Market's a bit stagnant here but not horrible and the cost of living is excellent.
Celebrate the finer things in life
I hate to be overly critical, but why the hell aren't these idiots moving?
They're not married, dont' have kids in school or a house or anything else to tie them down. There is no sane reason any one of these morons should be staying in a homeless shelter taking up space and food that a truly needy person could use.
News flash: its an expensive city, and there are about a million other people with your exact qualifications looking for the same jobs in that city. All the companies in that city are not hiring for those jobs because they are the ones who laid you off in the first place!
I know that folks in NYC and Silicon Valley can be myopic about the world, but to stick around in a homeless shelter when plenty of other cities and states are still desperate for tech workers is sheer lunacy.
This is like guys who actually get upset because they cant pick up a girl at a strip club. No kidding, did it occur to you that a thousand guys a day ask that girl for her number? Why don't you TRY SOMEWHERE ELSE where the odds are a little better?
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
What age group are you assuming? I couldn't have joined the Army or Navy even when I was young (eye problems), but I did learn that they are quite reluctant to take anyone over 30, ever. I suppose that it's possible that this has changed, but I rather doubt it.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Actually the practice of miscounting the unemployed dated back to at least the 60's. And that was just when I heard about it. The details may have changed at some point, but I never heard that they did, and what you are describing sounds like the statistical method that Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower. And I'm not saying that Ike started it.
It's been broken for a long time, and nobody's wanted to fix it, because it's always to the benefit of whoever's in charge. It makes things sound better than they are, or in good times, it gives an excuse to make things worse.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
a) Moving costs money
b) Moving removes any benefit to the resumes that you already have out
c) Moving disrupts any networking you are doing
d) Moving doesn't free you of the obligation to pay off your lease, etc.
Don't assume that everyone is in your situation. (And even if they were, I would consider your response quite impolite. Traumatized people are not at their best, and take longer to come to the best decisions. A bit of patience costs nothing.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't have a wide experience. But it's reasonably deep. In my experience it's not unusual for a manager (or other person in a position of power) to assume that since they have the power, it is somehow "right" that their whims always have precedence. Whether or not there is a good reason for doing otherwise. I usually find that one can assert one's opinion, provided that one doesn't insist on it.
But I sure don't think much that's printable about them. And I'm quite looking forwards to retirement. And nobody yet knows it. I'll give sufficient notice, as I intend to leave with a clean rep. I expect that if I need a reference for some reason, that I'll be able to get one (not certain...my current boss may also retire). But I'll believe most things said about the stupidity of the decisions that bosses make, and their unwillingness to be guided by experts away from disaster. And their unwillingness to accept responsibility for their own decisions.
But guess what? Have you looked in a mirror recently. That's a description of people, not of any particular sub-category of people. People believe what they believe, and it's quite hard for mere facts to persuade them. People claim credit when things work out well, and try to duck responsibility when they don't. All people that I've had a chance to examine have these characteristics. Bosses aren't anything special.
Another characteristic that people have is a desire to blame the victim. It somebody is out of work, then it must be his fault. If it's random chance (or some close relative) then it might happen to me, and that's too scarey. So if I can make it his fault then I won't need to worry about it. So this is basically a way to feel safe in a dangerous world.
Don't expect people to behave differently. Some will, but not many, and even those will need to constantly work at it.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I don't know how Jamaica measures unemployment. If they say it's up around 35%, then they may be telling the truth (noting your comment about: "for at least one hour in 3 mo.s). The U.S. lies about it more creatively. Nobody outside the government has any idea what the real figure is. The official figures only tell you whether more people have recently lost their job than had awhile back. And even then they don't count everyone. Only those that officially qualify for unemployment.
..." should not be misunderstood. I don't know that anybody inside the government knows what a real number is. I just know that nobody depending on the official figures does.
I have no idea whether the real unemployment is 6% or 60%. All that I know is that it's guaranteed by the govt. to be higher than 4.2%.
P.S.: My comment "Nobody outside the government
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
> expertise in a UNIX other than Solaris or Linux,
> and in a context other than the Internet.
Quite right. Solaris was used in the dot-com boom because VCs felt that it covered their asses. It had nothing to do with technical strength and everything to do with "Nobody ever got reamed out by their investors for using Solaris". When you hear how it cost "donthaveabusinessmodel.com" $10m to set up their web servers and store application, that's because the VCs and their lackeys spec'd Solaris, Oracle, and some nice expensive old-school brand-name non-commodity Unix hardware. Woulda cost $25K max if it had been done in any non-dot-com business.
In the real world, there are many businesses that turn over billions of dollars annually, have heavy-duty information processing requirements, yet run entirely on Windows LANs, for example. These aren't Fortune 500 companies, they're just medium-sized. The problem is that dot-coms tried to emulate the Amazon "instant-Fortune-500" model, which ended up with the ridiculous scenario of little companies with 50 people acting as though they were General Electric. "Do you think we need an HP Superdome, or will a farm of Sun Starfires do the trick?" Business sense didn't go out the window - it was never there to begin with.
My advice to people in this market is to learn a bit about business yourself (read the Wall Street Journal or The Economist or something) and make your own, realistic assessment of the business that's hiring you. How do they make their money? Who are their customers? How are they going to survive the next economic downturn? Also, try to determine what value you're adding to the business. Being a kick-ass sysadmin means nothing if you're administering machines that aren't necessary in the first place.
Many people tend to accept jobs with a charming but foolish degree of trust. They trust that the company really needs them and that they're not being hired due to some political whim. They trust that the company isn't going to go out of business within the next 12 months ("Surely they would warn me?") Trusting your employer to know what's best for you, or even for themselves, is a 1950's hangover from when IBM employees all got together every morning in their suits with mandatory white shirts to sing inspirational company songs. Get with it, people! You're an independent economic entity and the only person responsible for your economic survival is YOU! If you take a job at a doomed company, you have nobody to blame but yourself!
Hunting for a job is itself a full time job, especially as bad as the market is right now. Even headhunters are losing their jobs.
If you do have to go to work in some job that pays very little, the problem with that is that it takes so many hours at the job just to make enough money to pay the rent and buy some food, that there is no time left to do job hunting for a real job for which your technical skills apply. When you do get an interview (and remember, count on at least 20 interviews on average before you get an offer) you have to take time off work, you lose some of the precious pay, and you risk losing that job as well. Do that 10 times and you can count on being back on the street.
You say the jobs are there... no, these are "junk" jobs. In fact, getting such jobs isn't even that easy. The managers will know you're not the kind of person to stick around for a couple years to make the training worth while. The "real" jobs ... are just not there right now, unless you know one of the fad skills which are in overdemand, like Java.
Reality is, a lot of the techies are not needing to support families. So they can at least go work on hunting for a real job ... while living in the shelter.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
But wait ... if the pay was so high, doesn't that mean their were more jobs and fewer people, like ECON 101 taught us? Not really. There were a number of issues that tipped the scales to make the appearance of higher demand ... when in fact even during the peak, lots of techies had trouble finding work. One problem was that the suits jumped into the Internet mess so fast, they had no time to learn enough to even figure out who was smart and who wasn't. The very recruiting process they loved so much was falling apart because not enough non-techies knew enough of the new technical stuff to understand the techies to figure out who to hire. Then the bigger companies couldn't attract people with stock options very well. Sure they had stock options available, but those companies were too big (diluted with assets) to ever have spectacular growth.
The job market was just totally distorted, and is in shambles now as a result. The cause? Mismanagement on an enourmous scale caused by the rush of the ignorant to buy into the Internet craze.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The unemployment rate is NOT 3.2%. During the first year of the Clinton administration, the government changed the formula for how they determine unemployment. Essentially it comes down to measuring people only if they specifically seek government assistance of some kind as a result of unemployment, and only if they do so within 6 months of being let go. And when their unemployment benefits run out (about 3 years now I think), they not only no longer get anything, they don't get counted any more, either.
Unemployment is really closer to 6% or 7% right now, and upwards of 30% in some technical fields like Internet, E-commerce, and Telecom. Need to verify this? Go to the retail/consumer stores like Sears or Walmart or Best Buy and ask the managers how their sales have been doing the past year.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When a whole company goes under, as many have done, those who are let go happen to be everyone. It doesn't matter if you are clueless or a genius. And in big companies, the same thing also happened on a project basis. The decisions of who to let go had almost nothing to do with whether you were clueless or a genius. If you were on a project that got scrapped, then you got the pink slip. It's easy for a company to do this because it's perfectly defensible. If they had instead shuffled people around to try to keep the geniuses, that means they would have had to let some clueless go in continuing projects. And that would have opened them to legal liabilities because quite often people sue over these matters. The people who were let go were the ones specifically associated with a job that was eliminated.
By the way, the unemployment rate here in the US is figured on the basis of how many people are eligible for and seek government assistance, not how many people would take a job if there was one. This was done by the Clinton administration to prop up labor unions and help them bargain for higher pay.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Obviously you are the clueless one. You missed the quotes around the term "junk". That means that's the common phraseology used.
I never said there was a couple years of training involved. There is some, and it varies by job. There are jobs even better than cash register, but they need a week or two of "training" which means they are non-productive until the training period is over, and it costs the employer money. The "year or two" is how long the management hopes the employee will stay on. If they are sure the candidate will be leaving as soon as the tech jobs pick up again, and another candidate perceives this job as a good career for the next 5 to 10 years, guess which one the smart employer will hire. I've been on both sides of employing, and I know how it works. And back when employers were not afraid to tell candidates why they were not chosen (back before all the lawsuit threats) some of the things I heard frequently are "overqualified" and "this would not challenge you enough" and "you'll be bored here". Good hiring managers know how to measure people (though I suspect a lot of that didn't happen during the peak of the crazy dot-compensation-extreme days).
I'm glad for you that you do have at least some other skills, like sales. Most techies would never survive in sales, if they could even land such a job, not even retail sales. To those who can, of course they should.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Last month at the local Internet Society meeting, over 50% of the jobs that hiring managers were seeking to fill were for e-commerce positions involving programming in Java. Java was 3 times in demand as PHP and C++ combined, and nothing else was. Of course that's one small meeting job/forum. And they were all server side jobs. There is apparently nothing going right now for client side Java. Besides, I have all that disabled and I know a lot of other people do, too.
But maybe you're right. I've heard some horror stories with regard to various Java facilities. So maybe those Java jobs that can be gotten will end up being doomed because nothing will end up working and the company will go bust. I think I'm still glad I didn't get into Java.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I didn't say it was proof. The whole process is very empirical anyway. The point is that there are more people out of jobs than the unemployment figures tell about. If you want to know how many, you have to find a way to measure them somewhere. The drop in consumer demand is one possible way to do that. But also beware of the shift. For example the demand for essentials like housing, food, and soap (well maybe not soap for some) will remain up or at least not drop as much, while the demand for optional and luxury goods will drop a lot. Just watch the figures on the financial web sites and see what is going on. It's not pretty, but at least it kinda looks like it has begun to level out. But you can be sure (well, I sure hope so, anyway) that it won't be as crazy as before.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'm not sure what numbers you're looking at. For some jobs like McDonalds, sure, I can see 100% in many places. But there are lots of stores I go to frequently and the same people have been there for years. At the local electronics store (not Radio Shack), half the people working there last month were there 7 years ago when I first went to the place. Maybe the other half does turn over entirely in a year, but there is a solid core staff there. I sure hope they get paid well (but somehow, I doubt it).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So what makes you think I am in California? I am not.
So what makes you think I live in a homeless shelter? I do not.
So what makes you think I am whining about my situation? I have not.
So what makes you think I am not in the midwest? Actually, I'm not, I'm in Texas, the state that sells power to California.
So what makes you think I'm unemployed? Well, maybe technically. But I do have 2 part time contracts and am building my own business. I don't need that job at McDonalds. If I took it, I'd be depriving you.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I don't think those companies want the high turnover. So they're sure to be using the risk of leaving soon factor at a higher weight when making the decision to hire someone. I know I would. It's the non-techies that in general will make the better employees in those jobs. Good workers are hard to find (at least legal ones), and when you have a choice in hiring, you choose the better ones for what the job is. And it ain't flipping CPU chips at McD's.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Of course I don't want the US technology industry to be hurt. And you make a good argument for why we should bring in H1B's. But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers. There were likely other factors such as not wanting to spend the time working within a rather bad system we have of actually finding people, as well as people just plain not willing to relocate to places like California, which perhaps did deplete its resources (we know they tend to deplete other things like electric generating capacity).
I got a few job enticements to go to California for pay as high as $275k/yr. I'm glad I didn't waste my time with that. They sure seemed too good to be true. I bet those are the places that failed first.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People who truly have given up, and don't want to be employed anymore, of course should not be counted. But those who decline to seek government assistance, perhaps because they are smart enough to have savings to live on, or can go back home to live with the parents, or even did grab a part time job dumping fries into a vat or stocking the shelves at the supermarket, should be counted. But they are not the way the system works.
The tweak that was made a few years ago did change the unemployment rate result about 3 to 4 percent. The political analysis of the time primarily focused on it being a means to let labor unions bargain from a stronger position. Face it, lower unemployment figures do drive up wages and salaries. That's not necessarily a bad thing for "the people", but the less accurate the measurement is, the less stable the economy will be because other measurements will be more inconsistent depending on whether they work with, or work around, the unemployment figures. For example, consumer buying went down right after the unemployment went down, which is an inconsistency that can destabilize things.
What we need are accurate figures that correctly categorize how many people are in each of the various groups of unemployment (even if living off smartly retained savings) or underemployment (i.e. working to pay the rent but not in their proper career path).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why do you classify these jobs (web design and system administration) as not ...jobs which require more skills.? Is it because you see them being mostly currently filled by people with lower skill levels? Just what job functions do you see as ...jobs which require more skills.?
IMHO, you'd be insane to start a CPU design company, and possibly even a software company, even here in the US ... unless you're going for a small niche that won't attract the Intel's, AMD's, Transmeta's, IBM's, Oracles, Microsoft's, of the world to compete head on against whatever you come up with.
I'd agree about keeping the skilled workers here. And there are certainly advantages for us to bring the skilled foreign workers here (though in reality I've found quite many of them less skilled than out of work people here, because the foreign workers are also known to be good brown nosers, and unlikely to sue for anything). But let's get people back into the workforce here, and get those w/o jobs who want them employed. People*time is a resource we are currently wasting. And that includes web designers and system administrators (and there are some out there who are exceptionally skilled in their field).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I do attack the methodology. Just not here because the topic here is not about the methodology. Here, people have used those false numbers as if they were truthful, and I don't accept that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sorry, I can't moderate and post the same thread. Besides, you're at 4 as of when I'm replying. That and I didn't get any points today, anyway :-)
One of the problems in the technical fields is that there has been a huge influx of new products, tools, languages, features, and systems to learn. Then businesses end up making (usually stupid, and often horrendously assinine) decisions about which of these things to commit themselves to, then when they look for a techie, they demand only someone who has precisely that set of skills. If one skill is missing they can't "hit the ground running". And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive". This greatly complicated the effort to find technical talent. For every 100,000 people out there with hireable technical talent, maybe 5 to 10 actually were exactly what they were looking for (because they were so picky about an exact match) and of course they were not in the local city.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Almost every single McDonald's, Wendy's, White Castle, Wal-Mart, Meijer's, etc. have "Now Hiring" signs up. I was at Kohl's (dept. store) yesterday, and they're hiring third shift right now. Maybe a person won't be able to buy 6-figure cars and 7-figure homes working at that kind of job, but they'll be able to eat. Are there no jobs out there in fact, or are these "dot-commers" unwilling to work at anything but their first choice of employment?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Only the cookbook dotcomers are being laid off right now.
At the beginning of the downturn, that was true. But it's not the case anymore. I have three friends out there who are out of work right now. One of them is a Solaris/AIX admin with about ten years of experience, and he's *really* sharp. The other two are very good DBA's, one with about 9 years and the other with something like 20. They're having trouble even getting interviews. It's just plain bloody over there right now. Noone is safe. I'm personally thanking my lucky stars that I fled to the east coast about two months ago, and am happily employed here. (That Solaris/AIX admin I mentioned worked for the same company I did, and was laid off just a couple weeks after I left along with dozens of others.)
But as for everything you said about techno-wannabies, rock on my brother.
Regards,
-BK
Chemical Blog
Waste of time too. TOTAL waste of time to try and have a job in an industry where all the technical decisions are made by non-technical people for all the wrong reasons.
So you get a job in the "IT" industry? What have you got? A flimsy promise that there'll be a paycheck for a while? Other than that its "one week of bad economic rumors and you're out on your resume." Bah. Forget it. Let 'em figure out how to develop their own n-tier databases with MS Project.
Ironic too, we just published an article on this:
http://www.heavycat.com/cattracks/ (in case the link doesn't work)
It is a mistake to assume all the 'dotcom poor' are techies. Many many dotcoms hired *lots* of people, at rather higher than average salaries, for technical support, phone handling, etc. Businesses are far more than just their programmers you know...
I mean, what do you expect? You have silicon valley, a huge influx of people move in to work because of the boom, and then things return to normal.. what do you expect is going to happen?
People with solid skills will find work. People without them will be in the same position they were in before this all happened in the first place.
experience counts. This is not a negative against anyone...but no matter how 'good' you are at youre generalist job, many companies are not about to hand you a high level admin position with no experience, period.
I said much the same thing as you 8 years ago or so.. 'aww but look at my mad unix skills! I know tcp/ip inside out! I want the lead job'.. well, tough.. the guy who's 10 years older with a few more years experience actually doing the job gets that spot, and that's how it is. Why?
Sysadmin is more than the hardware, and the technology.. it's keeping it all together, management skills, doing the job. It's just *assumed* that you know the technical details.
This is not new to any profession either.. what do people think, you leave University and go straight to the top? Not likely.
Now, I'm not saying I didn't bitch and complain too.. but now, after a few years of working perhaps not the greatest jobs, I managed to get to the point where I actually can apply for high level positions and get interviews. I can attack the Sr. Admin position for some company with serious intent.
Wow... so, a month from graduation, they have no jobs, and you determine this is bad? What did they think.. they'd all be snapped up instantly?
Did you do no job research before you did Comp. Sci? There is nothing in your local town.. was there during the big boom?
Do you think that Yahoo, Microsft, etc are going to answer calls from the tens of thousands of applicants they get each week?
Do you have relevant job experience, or are you green? Are you trying to be a programmer, or an administrator, or what?
the reason many people say this is because they think they can get a top-level tech job straight out of school, be it a university degree, or their MCSE.
Sure, a few might. Most won't.
You get an entry-level job, and work your way up. I don't mean necessarily at the same company, but if you do grunt low-level admin work somewhere for a year, your odds are a lot better for getting that mid-level admin job the next year.. and so on and so forth. Within a few short years, you can command (if you are any good) top level admin positions wherever you want.
I've been interview people for the last year or so for what is basically a c++ development job. The main skill we need is c++ but databases, ood, java, web based skills, php etc. are all things we use and are bonuses but not requirements. We need at least a years c++ experience but we're not too fussy on the details or the exact skills.
I've probably interviewed about 100 candidates for the job over the last year and only found about 6 that were suitable.
Many candidiates described themselves as c++ experts or claimed many years experience of c++ but were unable to answer a simple question such as "what would you use a virtual function for in c++". Or we've had a few candiates who claimed to have several years database knowledge who were unaware that database queries could involve more than one table.
Put simply, about 75% of the candidates seem to have little actual knowledge of the subjects on which they claimed to be experts.
The other problem we have is with people who clearly don't want the job on offer and just see it as a way to getting another job. We have seen quite a lot of people who are clearly more interested in becoming a "team leader" than in actually developing software. Well that's fine, but not if you've applied for a software development job.
Finally we've had quite a few candidates who have the required technical ability but have not managed to convince us that they could actually work in a commercial environment. For example we usualy ask something like "what would you do if half way through a project it became apparent that you were not going to be able to meet the deadline for your work?". Quite a few candidates have basically said they would change nothing because clearly the deadline was wrong.... Well that's one answer and sometimes true but misses the point that you must at least inform the person managing the project of the problem. Not sure I explained that very well but the point is that quite a lot of people just seem unemployable.
So for every person claiming to be an expert at c++ we have found about 6 that actually are.
So, if our experience is in any way typical and you are a software developer who actually knows how to do your job, don't worry too much. You appear to be a rare breed.
Sig is taking a break!
but no former CEO would catch himself dead flipping burgers or working retail, even though they're perfectly good jobs for anything...but its a freaking INCOME.
i hate to say it, but this applies to more than just former CEO's. My sister's boyfriend was without a job for 4 years because of a dislike of any work in the "food service" industry (flippin' burgers). the only job interviews he'd go to were for jobs he couldn't possibly get, but he refused to "demean" himself by settling for anything less. so instead, my sister got the lovely job of supporting his lazy ass until i convinced her to make him get a job, any job, anything at all.
every fast food place i go to nowadays has signs up looking for employees. i know it's not a lot, but its got to be better than nothing. most of them claim to start at a minimum of $7-8 an hour.
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
I don't have a sob story, but it's definetely not the same here that it was. I changed jobs barely over a year ago. Many phone screens. At least a half dozen serious interviews and two great offers to pick from by decision time. It took 2 months.
I start my next new job 6/25. Again it was only two months, but I had only two interviews (one of which I think was bunk from the start; feeling the waters maybe?). I'm doing well, getting a raise on this move, and generally feeling I'm getting into a higher quality company, but I do get the strong sense I was lucky.
My skills? Network engineering, multi flavor unix admin, and perl programming with between 3-6 yrs. exp. on them. Not a ton of time behind me, but I've done large scale data management and compute environments, built big complicated networks, and have written perl code with many layers of logic. I got 1 interview and 1 offer in 2 months. Certainly got me thinking a bit more about the ol' savings account.
But to your original point, I think it's valid. I only started saving money at all after coming to Boston from SF. It's very hard to get your head above water out there and once you do it is (was) tough not to let it run away with you. One of the first things I noticed coming back to Boston was how less common Porche, Mercedes, Jaguar were on the roads. The people with the mansions on the hills like I used to see along rt. 280 out west back east are the same old money people that have always had them, not 27 yr. old CEO's. My perspective at least...
Maybe because the porn site owners realize you don't need a huge staff of technical people to run a site.
I know a few people who run porn sites...usually they are the *only* technical person involved. They do all the site design, server stuff, etc. They realize that successful website design does not necessarily require 5 people sitting around in a conference room for a week trying to decide which shade of off-white is the perfect shade for their background.
Now admittedly there's some porn sites out there that are ugly as hell...but you know what? It doesn't really matter. In porno, we can really see that it's all about the content. Good pics in well-organized libraries, with frequent new additions. If you have what the customer wants, aesthetics becomes a secondary concern.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
I've done this, so nobody need quip me with any "thats easy for you to say".
The biggest problem I see here is that the people are looking for a job. But its not that simple. They're not looking for A job, they're looking for a job that pays them what they're used to with the skills and qualifications they have to offer.
Instead of swallowing their pride and picking up a job, ANY job to pay the bills, and in the mean time cutting way WAY back on their expenses so they can survive on that job, meager as it might be, at least they will be able to keep a roof over their heads.
Oh.. but nobody can afford rent of $1800 a month. Option, if you're living in your car anyways, it really doesn't matter WHERE you live. Rent is much cheaper elsewhere. In fact, its cheaper pretty much ANYWHERE else than smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. Move. Fill
up your tank with gas and drive somewhere else.
This also falls to the issue of living beyond one's means. Just because you're banking $100,000 a year doesn't mean you have to spend all of it. It might be nice to think that everything is on the up and up and nobody will ever have to suffer again, but thats just sadly not the case. Be prepared for the bottom to fall out beneath you. At least if you're prepared you can cushion the fall. And when you're out of a job, get into another one. If you spend 2 weeks looking for something in your field and you're simply not getting anything, GET A JOB. McDonalds, UPS, mow lawns, stock a grocery store. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that you'll have a steady revenue stream. It might not be able to meet your expenses, but it will make your saftey net last MUCH longer, and when you finally find a job you can leave your temporary job with little to no notice.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I find it hard to believe someone that used to earn around 100k is now homeless.
Don't you have any savings?
And what are they doing in the sillicon-valley anyway? Move to somewhere else, find a decent job, if you where good enough to earn 100k, you're good enough to do lot of other jobs - c'mmon, 4.2% unemployment is not that bad. In my country, unemployment is around 10%.
So don't work in what you used to do - find some other job
intersect in this topic. To name a few: the laid-off overpaid and underskilled former dot-commers who too quickly got used to living beyond their real means in the white-hot bubble economy of the Bay Area dysfunctional region; what it means to have lost a job (for whatever reason, due to no moral fault of one's own), and dealing with that, going through recovering and getting on with it - first surviving, and then finding the next viable situation - and succeeding; and, how to search for and find the right new job effectively. These are all interesting topics to discuss at some length here, because everyone reading this has or will someday deal with such issues in their own life (well, maybe not being overpaid and underskilled then abruptly fired).
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
I've had over a dozen jobs so far. Some of the earlier ones weren't paid, or paid rather little (how'd you like to make $1.25/hour for a 12-hour harvest shift on a ranch, then have them deduct 25 cents per hour for your room & board? I rode my motorcycle 300 miles each way to take that job for a couple of months when I was 17... it was the best summer job I could find at the time, and I even went back the next year - to drive a forklift. I learned some things there, saw a culture previously foreign to me, and had interesting times. Some friends found the Peace Corps of value for similar reasons).
OK - here's my jobs list, in chronological order: paper boy (afternoon), paper boy (morning), HS projectionist (carbon arcs!), HS radio announcer and disc-jockey, summer field-hand, commercial announcer, materials handling office-manager / salesman / driver, coffee shop short-order cook, data-processing operator (tape-ape), DP night manager, H200 assembly and COBOL programmer, DEC TOPS-10 computer operator, DOS/VS computer operator, DP supervisor, COBOL Programmer trainee (twice, let's not get into that), network install manager, network support manager and programmer, OS/VS1 systems programmer, MVS systems programmer (three different companies), Big-8 IT senior consultant, Big-5 IT manager, IT consultant for a small private firm, and now an IT management consultant for a large multi-national firm). It's not just a single career, is the point (though I'll admit it's been IT focused for quite a while, and is likely to remain so - but not in the same position for longer than a couple years at a time).
I was laid off once, and I've been fired a couple of times too. Some suck-ass managers can't handle honest communications, so what else can I say? (With few exceptions, don't trust an IT tech manager who's never been fired - (s)he's more politician than honest, won't work with you when you're right; (s)he will likely stab you in the back at the first opportunity that may present itself. Ah, here's another juicy topic - IT politics rears its ugly head.)
Early in one's career it's easy to find the next job. That's all it is, then - a next position - and all you need are the technical skills on your resume and showing up (clean, rested, and well-dressed) to convince the hiring manager and her technical interviewer that you've got the chops and want to work for them. However, as your career evolves (and one hopes it will) other factors beyond mere technical skills start to become increasingly more and more important for finding that next right position: things like appropriate presentation and personal style, smooth people skills, fitting into a company culture and ecology, good communication and negotiation skills, management judgement, thinking on your feet, and coolness under fire. These factors all become more important in your job as you (and your pay scale) rise in IT management. No dot-com buzzword lamers need apply.
Losing a job unexpectedly is emotionally devastating. Personally, I'm not sure I'd keep a position where my next task would be to tell people they were simply being laid-off. I guess it would depend upon how well it was going to be done and what accommodations the company would make available to them. (Working through the process of shedding an obviously bad employee is another matter though, as they will get ample warnings to shape up or ship out in that process.) Still, it's a hard thing to lose a job. I believe it's harder on most men than most women, because many guys tend to define themselves through their work, whereas most women are a little more balanced about working to live rather than living to work, in my experience.
Losing a job is a high stress event in anyone's life. It ranks right up there with a death in one's own family, or a divorce. As such, it's not something one just deals with rationally at first - or even for some period of time. (This might go a way to understanding why a few former dot-com staffers are now staying in homeless shelters in the Bay Area.) The process of dealing with the loss of a job is a lot like the one that is inevitable for any other major loss - impending divorce, death of a spouse or child, even the imminent prospect of one's own death. It's the progression through denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally, acceptance. I've been through it, have you? If you have, it wasn't very much fun at the time, was it? Like those other major life changing events, it's a time to draw close one's supports, find a way to get through the darkness, and seek another path to peace with what is, and go on to what's next, whatever that may be. (I lost both parents to cancer in the late '70s - it took years, a failed marriage, and a good friend, for my grief.)
However, when one gets laid off - you're supposed to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and then get back in the race. Yeah, I know it's not much fun at the time, but that's the only way you're going to find your next position, so you might as well get with the program. There are more free or low-cost job finding resources out there now than ever in the entire history of this planet. Want to work in Saudi Arabia? You can find that job today! Like the idea of Las Vegas? There are all kinds of IT jobs seeking your skills there. South Florida, Manhattan, Chicago - same thing there. If you're presently unemployed and willing to relocate and make a new life, there are lots of jobs available. And we haven't scratched the surface of all the independent contracting yet. There's work out there, just waiting for your shining self and skills. If you need a job, go out and get one real soon, or quit your snivelin'.
It sure as hell does. I know of about half a dozen places within walking distance of me that are looking for programmers. Submitting your resume to a recruiter means hundreds, literally, of offers.
Move somewhere sane and stable and look for work there.
The employment in our country is truely in a tragic state. I can not quote any figures, but I have read in various locations, as well as heard on the news, that the standard of living in America is lower than it has been in some time. It simply costs more to survive. Housing costs, the price of food, and pretty much everything else, in combination with businesses greed and desire for money, push the 'working class' - everyone from McD's workers to the experienced System Administrator/Everything Including the Kitchen Sink Programmer - towards the lower end of the income spectrum. Meanwhile, corporation owners, investors, and the social elite manage to stay on top of the game by charging excessive, extortive rates for products which were produced using the cheapest labor possible, irregardless of the quality that such labor provides.
My mom is a registered nurse and graduated from Duke University's School of Nursing magna cum laude. (In 1981, I think.)She is an incredibly intelligent person, able to converse philosophically or theoretically on nearly any topic immaginable. She is well versed in her trade. However, the economy where we live (South Dakota) is so depressed that she only makes hourly wage of $14/hour.
My father also graduated from Duke University, but from the School of Engineering. (In '81, again, with a pretty decent GPA.) At the time of his graduation, the economy was doing quite well for progessonal engineers. However, like our current tech. situation, the market was saturated with engineering graduates who thought the money would be good. The economy obviously didn't have enough jobs for all the PE's, and wages dropped. Now, engineers don't make much money at all - 30k to 50k, generally, with Senior Engineers getting paid 60k if they're fortunate at the end of their career. As a result, engineers are generally considered (from my perspective) as poor workers, slackers, and do-nothings, simply putting in their hours for the pay. Engineers are generally not terribly tallented or valued anymore, as they once were, and it's simply seen as 'another technical job' and not something requiring too much skill or ability.
Contrast this to what the economy was like 40 years ago. An individual could own a small store - say, a hardware and surplus store - and make a healthy living for them and their family. Not only that, but they might be able to pass their company on to their children while they were still relatively young (50 or so), and retire, living off of substantial savings (provided they were wise with their money.) Quite simply put, such companies don't exist anymore, at least not in quantity or quality. Large chain stores, or large corporations, are able to provide similarly appearing products and services to those of the Mom 'n' Pop variety at a fraction of the cost, riding the lows of the economy, killing their competition, and cheapening the cost of hired labor all at the same time.
God bless America, because quite frankly, the American people have once again screwed things up, this time well beyond a miracle. Corporations with more power than the government now rule America. Everyone else has to grovel for money, including the government.
If you don't believe me, contrast what a factory worker makes (16$/hour or so) to what your average 4-year graduate earns after several years of work (maybe 20$/hour or equivilant, if they're fortunate). Either the collegate educational system is a crock, or corporations are abusing the abundance of 'educated' indivuals, whether in the tech industry or not.
Heck, at this point, I'd be happy for 15$/hour.
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm also no more socialist than Stalin was.
You really should get your basic governmental systems in line. Saying I'm an out-and-out communist followed by saying I have a basic Green/Socialist party line is pretty hillarious and contradictory.
What I'm saying is, quite simply, that commericialism has gotten out of hand. As a way of managing things, it is probably one of the best, but when allowed to get out of hand (this is what the government deems as 'monopoly' - such as AOL/TW, MS, and such large companies or corporations) things do not work as they should, and are corrupted.
Fundamentally, Communism is really a much 'better' system than that of commericialism, were it to ever work. However, the failure of the system lies in lazyness, as opposed to greed being the falure of commericialism. It takes a lot longer for greed to get a dickhold on commericialism and choke out competition than it takes communism to die due to lazyness and corruption.
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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Caimlas
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As a recent college grad who has been looking for a job for 6 months now, in vain, I can definitely back this up. Wanna see what came in my inbox today from Dice.com??? ...
"Software Opportunity for BSCS and EE Honors Graduates or candidates just graduating from a Masters programming CS or EE. Candidates mush have a GPA of 3.9+ from a top tier school. Also considering candidates with 1 year of experience but the same academic requirements apply (GPA 3.9+)."
Even the job title was "Junior Software Engineer (GPA 3.9+), BSEE or BSCS". This isn't typical, though; the typical listing is one of two things, either "This is NOT an entry level position, no entry level candidates please, entry level candidates suck" (about 85% of the listings online) or it's something like this: "Looking for bright young motivated enthusiastic individual fresh out of college, great entry level position... Requirements: 2+ years employment non-educational experience in Java, C++, Web Design, WebSphere, Flash, Perl, Cold Fusion, ASP, AS/400, DB2, COBOL, NT, SMS, SMS Installer, Oracle, TCP/IP, IOS, and anything else the HR department found in a computer dictionary today".
And there's the days when my Dice.com jobhunter subscription returns a blank page. That's like opening the classifieds and seeing that the help wanted section was replaced with the TV listings.
Luckily, my rent and living expenses are not that high, I can fall back on my parents for some things, and a seasonal job is holding me over for at least a few months, if not more. But the best of luck to all you Valley people... what can I say, move to Mexico and work for an American car company down there...
Well, Starbucks ain't paying 9+ an hour, but yea, that's out there.
FYI I'm doing what you went through, although I have to admit I'm living in NJ for the same rent and living somewhat ideally at the moment. Not that I can do much going out and spending, but I have what I have from college and I'm happy with it. I also have a seasonal job to hold me over, but it's not the cure to my problems.
I did want to dispute you on the availability of part-time, menial, and/or temporary work. Tech people have three big problems with that right now:
1. They aren't the most qualified people for the job. Believe it or not, teenagers in high school are more qualified to work at the supermarket than we are. Why? Cause they fit the needs of the employer better, in the eyes of the employer. We're just gonna run off when we get a real job. They might stay longer. I know, cause I went through this already with a store manager...
2. They are overqualified. Being overqualified scares people. Especially that big bad tech resume... there's what I call the "technical resume conundrum". Basically, if you're applying to a technical field, anything that's not specific to the field is irrelevant and should be left off (that camp counseling job with the Special Olympics for example), as it only pushes out of the way more things that you can tell white lies about in the technical field. But, apply for a job anywhere else with a technical resume, and you won't get the job - all that mumbo jumbo scares off the prospective employers, and your resume doesn't seem to contain any down-to-earth business experience anyway.
3. Finally, and this is the killer: The market is flooded with service and temporary job seekers at the moment... especially because it's the summer and all the kids are home, but more so because of the layoffs in every sector. If you live in a substantially large urban area (like NY), the chance of landing a really cushy job over $6 an hour is almost nil, cause there's thousands of poor people that would take that pay in a second, and thousands of temps who are in line already at the local staffing agency. But working for $6 an hour doesn't pay $600 a month rent unless you work 160 hours a month part time... which is possible, certainly, but then you have utilities, car insurance, medical coverage, food, gas for the car, etc... so basically look at working 60 hours part time a week, most likely at 2 or 3 different jobs. And when does that leave you time each day to look for another job? It's not like you're working in the office and have a computer to use to hit Monster.com every 1/2 hour... (granted, that scenario is bleak... working 40 hours a week at $12 an hour is definitely enough to cover expenses, I agree on that... but still, it's been 3 weeks that I've been home, and nothing has appeared yet. I'm patient, though)
Remember those things, be more aggressive, and use every little last bit of networking power you have... and you might find something. I hope I do... I'm a BS in CIS with an MIS minor and two internships completed at big companies, plus I know what I'm doing, but it hasn't been enough - yet.
Escorted from the building? Hah hah. It's your snobbish achievement-oriented attitude that's responsible for the fucked-up situation in the tech sector in the first place. Aggressive, stupid, and arrogant, that's what it is.
Yes, the best jobs, promotions, titles, money, etc. should go to those who work for it. Well I fucking worked for it at a four-year institution, and I had to sit home for the summer after I busted my ass for 6 months trying to find an internship. But YOU assume that, because I didn't spend ALL my time doing it, that I don't deserve anything. Well, REALLY? Maybe I should just walk away from the industry altogether, because I don't obviously have the obssessive/compulsive brainwashed dedication it takes to slave away for snotty brainless dot-com managers who can't even run a simple business right.
I'm not saying natural born white people have a disadvantage for working hard... they actually have the advantage of racial bias and fluent English on their side, sadly. But if you've been paying attention in the last 10 years in this country, top notch colleges put diversity ahead of achievement, and therefore you wind up with the best schools accepting all the rich white kids and a lot of normal, but super-achieving, foreign and rural-based students. I know, cause I had the same exact problem getting into HIGH SCHOOL, as it was that competitve!!! Talk about a fucking rat race.
Anyway, the foreign kids have nothing better to do than to work their asses off... after all, if they want to keep their sponsorship, they better be the best! I certainly admire that kind of tenacity and dedication to work, but I've said before, I don't need to lay those extreme expectations on myself... they would occlude my other goals in life, such as eliminating stress, keeping my friends and family important, and maintaining my interests outside of the field of computers.
Unfortunately, the shortsighted market decides to hire skills over brains, and the rat race continues. Granted, it's definitely a reward for a lot of hard work, but I achieved a lot in college myself... I have an honors minor, two internships, and I'm provably very intelligent. And yet, I don't even think that entitles me to anything... I have to work hard to get it. But right now there's no opportunites on the market, and even these CMU kids getting internships are gonna get royally shafted when they graduate and their former employers decide not to retain their previously loyal interns for a career. So then they start from square one, where I am right now. I can't be bitter, really... they wasted more time doing useless hard work and they can't do better than me, so they should be bitter toward me!
Not only did I not ask for freebies, I also love how you assume I'm some party animal! How many times do you drink per week? You're probably hung over right now! And CMU students earn internships, except it's CMU, and I guarantee they get more opportunities there than other students in CS programs do. Hey, I got into CMU in the first place but decided not to go, why can't I get a internship at Microsoft? (I applied but didn't get one last summer) Because I went to another school? Do we really not work as hard at my school, one of the top 25 public schools in the nation and certainly in the upper tier of prestige? My school has a very good reputation. But the simple matter is, CMU students do get more opportunites than we did. It wouldn't be so bad if the hiring market wasn't totally fucked up and if all you Gen X people didn't crash the industry with all these high-flying ideas that sunk to the bottom.
I don't pity myself, though... I just curse out those of you who are ridiculous enough to continue on this track. I say, "Don't want to hire me? Your loss." One of my interview companies, a fast growing telecommunications company in the area, about two months ago told me that I was overqualified and that I'd probably get bored. I'm confident, I'm smart, and I didn't waste my time learning all kinds of skills that will be obsolete in a year - I went after general knowledge, and now I can learn anything easily and adapt to any situation. Additionally, I'm a normal person and I'm easy to work with. Tell me that this makes me a far worse job candidate than someone who can only say that they have "1 year + Java".
That last line is the clincher though. Do you have prospective candidates escorted out of the building on a regular basis? People like you deserve to lick the crap out of public toilets. Then we'll see what happens, we'll see if you can maintain your hubris when the shit hits the fan for you.
Yea I had fun. And now I have a life. In the grand scheme of things, though, not going to CMU isn't a stupid decision... it's a good or bad decision depending on priorities. For example, I wanted to do Comp Sci, but I also wanted to spend at least half of my time doing things outside of my major. Since I wouldn't have been able to do that at CMU probably, I made a good decision.
To you, it's a bad decision. To you, now I don't deserve a job. Well guess what... I've got a BS in Comp Sci, and a good head on my shoulders. And I'm not going into the IT industry because of pricks like you... I'm holding out for a job in media or publishing, cause I like doing that more, and I like the people more. Now go play with your expensive silicon toys and obscure programming languages, ass.
Yea, exactly... I can't search "entry level" cause all I get is "no entry level"...
I guess that since it's an employer's market now, they have the luxury of requesting specific skills and not having to do training. Screw 'em, cause when I start my own company and I buy one of these places full of skilled 'tards, the axe will fall swiftly and harshly. *giggle*
We're paying for the mistakes of all the people who've been around for a few years, honestly. They don't care about the pipeline, and they're just killing the industry more. Furthermore, half the world is in denial about it, saying "Oh there's plenty of jobs out there! You can make lots of money." Basically, it's like we're all a big bowl full of brown M&M's, and the companies want individual flavors of Skittles.
Companies are like that though. And if we were stupid enough to work for such a company, you know that they'd lay us off in a second if they didn't need those specific skills anymore... if they go from Unix to NT, they just fire all the Unix people and hire college grads who spent 7 years at college while working full time at an NT house. Then they go back to Unix. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
Start your own company. Do whatever with it. Just don't fall for the crap of the business world. I know that's what I'm doing after my first 2 years, surely...
Yea, but that doesn't qualify as "cushy". They pay minimum wage. Most adults today cannot live on minimum wage alone unless they REALLY scrimp, and I don't expect most college-educated adults more than 2 years out of college to go back to living in a dormitory-like apartment and to give up all expenses. It just can't happen... medical, car, and rental insurance are enough with food and rent to make $6/hr unlivable. Bump it up to $10 an hour and then you can do it... but the economy can't afford to have so many $10/hr positions to compensate for layoffs. For jobs $13/hr, you still need training and skills, AND friends in the business... those jobs are just as hard to get as those CEO of dot-com company jobs.
In all fairness to laid off employees, McDonalds is pretty much rock bottom. But still, pride aside, the math doesn't work out... even working at McDonalds full-time hours (something they don't always let you do, so you have to moonlight at Wendys) will not pay living expenses in the cities without some serious cost-sharing and cost-cutting measures. Although I'd surely like to hear of someone that has done it.
Yea. I'll find a job when I mature and start lying about having 2 years experience in Java, not a minute before then.
I don't have a problem with the long hours. Really. At my one internship, I worked in the city from 9am to 9pm sometimes, and it didn't bother me. Right now I have a seasonal job where I work difficult 11 - 12 hour shifts. At school, I used to work from 5pm until 3am, and then I had to wash dishes and mop the floor until 4am.
I'm not saying I WANT to work 60 hours a week for someone else, but that I can if I have to. It's just that I can't see myself doing it unless I have some faith in the company, and knowing what the industry is like, I have little faith for anything anymore.
I resent the fact... not just for me, but for everyone else as well... that people are now expected to work way more than 40 hours a week at tech jobs, especially when the US already has the longest workweek in the modern world. I'm not saying I won't pay my dues NOW, but I'm afraid down the line that I won't be able to watch my kids' little league games or take my wife out to dinner without getting a dirty look from my boss. The solution to that ISN'T to drink more coffee.
Of course, hackers are notorious for being selfish, arrogant people, so being a hacker for 80 hours a week comes way ahead of family and friends, I know.
By the way, I chose the profession in high school... four years ago when things were a lot different. Sorry that I can't predict the future and know ahead of time when I'm 17 that everythings gonna go belly up... well, I kinda figured that out when I was 18, but I stuck with my major so I'd graduate within four years. And before you ridicule me for that, I'll just let you know that a fifth year meant $20,000 more in loans, and I graduated technically EARLY to avoid that scenario. And I'll take whatever I want to take in college, and it's nobody else's business. Leave deciding the merits of a BSCS that I may not use to my own thoughts.
I'm a moron for leaving the industry if I wind up doing that? Well, you're a moron for staying in it. Most of you "hackers" are gonna get pushed around by businessmen for the rest of your lives, cause you don't know any better, and just because they can. 60 hour workweeks have nothing to do with being hackers... there's plenty of people who work that hard not knowing that someone at the top takes it for granted.
Finally, it's exactly that attitude - that my computer science education is worthless, but someone who knows Java and nothing else is golden - that's gonna sink the industry again when everyone realizes they've got idiot employees who know nothing beyond an introductory CS course. And, of course, that's one of the reasons why I don't want to be in the industry... cause I don't want to get caught on the sinking ship like all these stupid fuckin people that just got laid off with their jaws on the floor. Their lives are a joke, they can't afford the Mercedes payments anymore, and now they live in homeless shelters. I deserve better for myself.
First, I never said I didn't want to work long hours at all. I just think that working long hours for a long time is not something to be for granted, yet the industry has a bad habit of doing that. It's not a matter of "I won't", rather it's a matter of "I'm not willing to do it until I retire".
Second, CS grads are not a dime a dozen. Enrollments are down, actually. It's tech workers in general that are a dime a dozen... a small percent of those (not as big as you would think it would be) have a four year BS degree in CS. (that's right, four years I made it in... most college kids in any major stretch it out to five years, but I worked hard through illness and bad semesters to get out on time... but that's irrelevant) Unfortunately, colleges aren't in the game of technical training, and the job market is focused on technically trained individuals at the moment. If you're a fresh college grad, there's no basic entry-level jobs being offered at the moment, not with the industry where it is (in carnage)...
Third... although I may have had some bad foresight as a high school student as to where the industry would be the moment I graduated (things were VERY different last April, for example), are you really saying that all IT workers must commit to at least 80 hours a week working or forget even trying to get your foot in the door? That's ridiculous. If you love something and it's your own thing, then I understand working 80 hours + a week for it. If you own your own business, for example, then I can see that kind of commitment. However, if you're working under 50 layers of management, and you have no chance of being promoted without an MBA AND a CS degree, then why work yourself to death for someone else? It's the rat race... many industries have went through this slaughter/burnout cycle before, and it's a shame that no one learns from history. Rent "Wall Street" from Blockbuster and see what I'm talking about. Surely there's room for workaholics in this world, and I can choose to be bitter about it or I can do something about it... but I shouldn't be forced into being a workaholic just to get a job in the profession. Because in that case, I'd rather start my own software company, and maybe I'll be working 110 hours a week but at least at the end of the day, it's for me, not for someone else who doesn't give a fuck about me...
It's a blessing in disguise. Now's their chance to really help society, and get the homeless up to speed on technology. They'll learn Java! They'll set Google as their default search engine! They'll learn to turn off JavaScript in their browser! They'll change the world! They'll be no more "digital divide".
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
So does this mean my donation to the Salvation Army will be used to set up a LAN at my local homeless shelter?
Being on the hiring end, it sounds like you have an attitude problem.
Dave
New Brunswick.. Saint John actually.. yeah, it is pretty nice an area. I'm originally from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, but had to MOVE, because there aren't any jobs there (Fancy that :). SJ is pretty industrial, but it's nice out of the city. I don't know why anyone in their right mind would move to Cali - traffic pisses me off. :)
..don't panic
Maybe in the USA. I have an engineering degree and can't call myself an engineer for another 3 years (Although I can call myself a EIT, Engineer in Training). In Canada the engineering profession agressively defends it's trademark on the engineer title (yes, by law, they have domain). The reason they do that is exactly what you described above: There is a difference in skillset and responsibility between a technician, e.g. "Techie", with practical technical knowledge and an engineer with theoretical and design experience.
..don't panic
Heh, if you're living in a homeless shelter, then that should be a big, red, blinking sign that your life is not on track and you're not following a sustainable path for employment in the future. Learn how to do something else. Go back to school. Assess what you're trying to do with your life. I think anyone paying $3 grand US a month for rent in Cali is insane. Move somewhere else. Reality-check time.
Nobody - but nobody - that I know who legitimately understands technology, has good qualifications, and most importantly, can do something besides useless "process meetings" and powerpoint slides - is worried about getting a job, or keeping a job. I still get cold calls, and a quick scan of monster.ca lists loads of jobs in technology. This is in CANADA! Our unemployement rate is more like ~8-10%, and in my area (Atlantic Canada) it's more like ~20%. Most americans need to contend with a rate below 5%!
Mind you, I did my time in the trenches, I produce product to deadlines, and I understand what I do. I have a Engineering degree, not a CS degree. I might have done CS, but there were way to many of those cookbook .com'ers in CS when I looked at it - people wanting to program for the money, not because it was what they were good at. That devalues the degree in the workplace. I suspect it's these people that are screwed.
Those who can do things will never have a problem finding work. If you can't do anything, then you're in big trouble - and you should be.
Another few words of wisdom are to make sure you have at least a few month's bills worth of cash in the bank. If you don't, then you're spending too much money. Having debt is one thing (ah, I love my student loans..), as long as you're able to service that debt through a dry spell.
..don't panic
You have obviously never worked for a corporation. Corporate culture is 100% about job satisfaction or in managerial speak "alienation". The idea is to alienate you from life so you wont be alienated from work. Example, John likes to hit the clubs on the weekends, go to youth clubs during the week and hang out with his friends at a local coffee house. John does not associate himself with his work. "It's just a job" says John. Occasionally someone at work will say something that John doesnt agree with and John is the kind of person who will set them straight rather than giving in to "group think". If John's skills are required and no-one else can be found to replace him then John's good performance reviews better result in a predictable raise each year or John wont feel secure. If John's basic needs arn't met he will get a job somewhere else. Steve on the other hand cannot initiate a conversation with anything other than "so what do you do?" Steve is a good employee, but he is more than that, he is a member of the corporate "family". He is a "team player" and puts in long hours because he believes in the company vision. Steve hasn't spoken to his friends from college in a few years now. Occasionally a friend will call up and ask him to go out but Steve has a deadline he has to meet. If there is a downturn Steve will be the last to go and will happily take a pay cut although he knows the company would never do that to him. Steve arranges "relaxation events" and company outings and gets upset when someone doesn't show up to the company picnic. If you ask Steve he will tell you what he does is important. Without him the company would crumble.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Although I have no stats for this, it's my impression that almost all of the recent layoffs have been in the tech industry. If unemployment jumps 1.5 percentage points and tech is, say, 10% of all San Francisco jobs, then from the point of view of a geek, the market has been literally decimated.
Just stay the hell out of Kansas City and I'll be happy. We don't want you here! There is a lot of demand here for 2 reasons:
1. There are still A LOT more tech positions available than there are techies to fill them.
2. All you jackasses east of the Mississippi and west of the Rockies think of Kansas as the land of Toto, Bob Dole, and Clark Grizwald's brother. You probably can't put K.C. on a map - so don't bother coming here. Here's some advice for anyone wishing to invade:
This list will be handed to each person as they enter the state.
1. That slope-shouldered farm boy did more work before breakfast than you'll do all week at the gym. How'd you like to go home and tell your momma you got your butt kicked by a big guy in bib overalls?
2. It's called a 'gravel road.' No matter how slow you drive, you're going to get dust on your BMW. I have a four wheel drive because I need it. Drive
it or get it out of the way.
3. We all started hunting and fishing when we were nine years old. Yeah, we saw Bambi. We got over it.
4. Any references to "corn fed" when talking about our women will get your butt kicked...by our women.
5. Go ahead and bring your $600 Orvis Fly Rod. Don't cry to us if a flathead breaks it off at the handle. We have a name for those little 13-inch
trout you fish for...bait.
6. Pull your pants up. You look like an idiot.
7. If that cell phone rings while a bunch of mallards are making their final approach, we will shoot it. You might hope you don't have it up to your ear at the time.
8. That's right. Whiskey is only two bucks. We can buy a fifth for what you paid in the airport.
9. The Jayhawks and the Wildcats are as important here as the Lakers and the Knicks...and a dang sight more fun to watch.
10. No, there's no "Vegetarian Special" on the menu. Order steak. Order it rare. Or, you can order the Chef's Salad and pick off the two pounds of ham and turkey. Yeah, we have sweet tea. It comes in a glass with two packets of sugar and a long spoon.
11. You bring Coke into my house, it better be brown, wet, and served over ice.
12. So you have a sixty-thousand dollar car. We're real impressed. We have quarter of a million dollar combines that we use two weeks a year.
13. Let's get this straight. We have one stoplight in town. We stop when it's red. We may even stop when it's yellow.
14. Our women hunt, fish, and drive trucks-because they want to. So, you're a feminist. Isn't that cute.
15. Yeah, we eat catfish, carp too-and turtle. You really want sushi and caviar? It's available at the bait shop.
16. They are pigs. That's what they smell like. Get over it. Don't like it? Interstate 70 goes two ways-35 goes the other two. Pick one.
17. The "Opener" refers to the first day of pheasant season. It's a religious holiday held the closest Saturday to the first of November. You can get breakfast at the church.
18. So every person in every pickup waves. It's called being friendly. Understand the concept?
19. Yeah, we have golf courses. Don't hit in the water hazards. It spooks the fish.
20. No, we can't shoot the doves. They're song birds. Okay, even we feel a little stupid about that one.
Now, enjoy your visit and then go home.
Either the above post is missing the "online" point, or it deserves to be marked up as "funny".
Okay, even if it were 50k or 60k after taxes, the numbers are still obscene.Didn't that drop from $80K to $50K result in your savings calculation dropping to something less than being able to keep $5k/yr?
It wouldn't be the first time, of course. California has always been so intent on image rather than reality that it has resorted to applying legal pressure to suppress news about the number of fatalities in the great SF earthquake, the fact of bubonic plague's introduction and spread there, and probably other disasters that no one has heard of because they were more successfully hidden.
Person who left Silicon Valley the year before returns, meets someone he knew there before.
"How are you doing? How's the dog?"
The other person, cluing him into reality with a gentle voice:
"There are no dogs in Silicon Valley anymore."
(Apologies to Thornton Wilder)
There ya go! Teach them a skill that
Hey! Let's build a snowman!
They're there because they want to be their. Sure the job market has been down, but for one to think there are no jobs is ludicrous. What I think is happening is, those who are staying in these shelters are likely to think that someone owes them something. When the dot com industry was at its peak, many became spoiled with huge salaries, perks, etc., and now that it's gone, it could be these people aren't settling for realistic jobs which are available at lower costs.
Look the dot com industry is not as bad as everyone thinks it is, sure many companies have went down, many merged, and many left because of mergers, etc., but there are still plenty of jobs lurking on Monster.com, Hotjobs.com, etc., and for anyone who is too lazy to get off their ass, I personally have no pity for them.
I've worked in companies that have went under, and always have managed to get something within two weeks to four weeks never anything higher than that. All this and I never took the time to finish school, nor get any specific training, and I still manage to make as much as a double income family.
Anyone who complains there are no jobs isn't either looking, not looking hard enough or being too picky about things. I feel no pity for them sorry.
Want Root?
You know when I made this post I didn't think people would take it the way the have so here's my obvious rebuttal.
you cant see shit cause things must be real nice on your chair at the table.
Give me a break I take nothing for granted after working for three companies that went belly up. It just so happens as I stated maybe people aren't looking too good for work, or maybe if they knew how to budget they wouldn't be in a crunch. Immediately after some of the companies went under I was on the ball looking for work including walking countless city streets on interviews, so for those who think I don't know what it's like, I've been there done that.
One of the things that puzzle me is how many people complain but never take actions to do something for themselves. Again Hotjobs is listing 697 jobs for the New York City area alone, Cali has 423 listed this past week so who's fooling who?
if you actually experienced the reality of what it is like to start at a company with high hopes in their future and then watch as people suddennly start leaving the office for good on one afternoon after a quick hoorah company meeting.
Spare me, as stated I've been there three times, and don't expect anything to last which is why I'm happy with my current job, and save money as much as possible. 1) I don't pay Cali style rent 2) I don't need every single Palm that comes out every week 3) I maintain good status with recruiters, and others in the industry and assist them when I can since one hand washes the other in my eyes.
So for those who's feelings I've hurt wish I could truly say sorry but I can't. As stated I'm nothing special and no better than anyone, but one thing I do know no matter who claims what is, there are jobs out there and if you don't get one your either a complete moron, not looking hard enough or underqualified. Take your pick and act on it.
Want Root?
Someone whould put this line on bumper stickers, because its so true.... And its so easy to distort peoples understanding with anecdotes.
Do we remember all the anecdotes about ``how no company could find qualified technical employees''? has anyone forgotten that the reason these guys couldn't find qualifed technical employees was because they were offering 70% the salary that these skills were going for in the area!
And these cheap nuts testified before congress.
Things may have changed; two-bit hacks are being weeded out.
But, repeat after me: An anecdote is not proof.
Got any Department of Labor statistics for your area? Have you called the chamber of commerce organizations for nearby areas, or in other states? How have the unemployment numbers for your area changed in the last 4 months?
Maybe it is a problem, maybe it is something that I should worry about. But I'm not going to let a few anecdotes try to fool me into worrying needlessly. One can listen to heartfelt plees all day long about not having a job.... Even in the recent tech boom, one in fifty people could give an anecdote of how they lost their last job. (Unemployment of even 2% is incredibly low.)
So, will you come back and convince me?
C'mon their rates for Network operations staff is less than most people make flipping burgers
True; I still laugh at the response I get to that point:
"Well, that's what training is for!"
Sounds like it's a good time to get that HR certification...
*scoove*
ROTFL - yea, the welcome image is a...er... trip. Wow. Took another look... that image better not pop up at inopportune times!
Another poster mentioned the proof of the guarantee. To be fair, the only proof I've seen is people truly internalizing it and the personal success they've seen. That's about as unscientific of a causal relationship as they come.
Still, for Keirsey 'rational' temperament (which the technical world probably sees a greater representation of), objectivism is about the most effective operating system to run.
I'm still trying to see the theory applied to non-intellectuals to determine the extent of its application.
Regardless of theory, however, the greatest lesson many can come away from in this downturn is that the only job insurance is your own competence. Now if we could just ensure this rule got applied to the PHBs...
*scoove*
And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive".
This seems to be the tip of the iceberg in a major anti-tech backlash - probably consistent with the "irrational exhuberance" against solid techs in the stock market.
I've been dealing with private company funding (yea, nice timing, eh?) and have had to deal with a consistent thread: technical people are making too much money.
Mind you, I'm paying a CCIE and RF expert $75K, a CTO $85K and the CEO is still under $100K - for a growing startup with good performance and a team with exceptional industry experience (these people are starters as well - commandos who build, operate and manage with solid backgrounds doing this before). These wages, which would be considered poverty levels in the tech industry a year ago, are only marginally balanced to the recepients by their equity.
Yet I'm hearing frequent whines from prospective individual investors about "how horribly overpaid the technical people are" by an alleged factor of double (this coming in many cases from old money, and Wharten MBA grads, mind you!). There's also the frequent reference to how technical people really shouldn't have equity stakes, since they "don't understand the business the way an MBA would."
Suggested retail price for techies?
CCIE: $45K
Wireless Engineer: $30K
Network Operations Staff: $6/hr
In other words, the establishment is having its counter-revolution and working with great vigor to counteract the impact technology has had in creating new wealth (and disrupting the social order).
*scoove*
But please don't leave for Europe. Don't spoil the excellent market here :)
Here's a little reminder for those who would, for reasons that are now all-too-obvious, rather forget what they were advocating not even a year ago:
106th CONGRESS 2d Session
S. 2045
AN ACT To amend the Immigration and Nationality Act with respect to H-1B nonimmigrant aliens.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
TITLE I--AMERICAN COMPETITIVENESS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SEC. 101.
SHORT TITLE. This title may be cited as the `American Competitiveness in the Twenty-first Century Act of 2000'.
SEC. 102. TEMPORARY INCREASE IN VISA ALLOTMENTS.
(a) FISCAL YEARS 2001-2003- Section 214(g)(1)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1184(g)(1)(A)) is amended-- (1) by redesignating clause (v) as clause (vii); and (2) by striking clause (iv) and inserting the following: `(iv) 195,000 in fiscal year 2001; `(v) 195,000 in fiscal year 2002; `(vi) 195,000 in fiscal year 2003; and'.
etc. ad nauseum
Seastead this.
When I entered college (1979), the hot jobs were in the energy sector. I took the bait and changed my major to geology from computer science. By the time I graduated from college, oil prices dropped from $50/barrel to ~$20/barrel. The consolidation of the oil industry started at nearly the same time I received my diploma. Jobs for anyone with a BS or BA vanished in less than a year and those with MS degrees either had to fight for the few jobs that remained in exploration, or they moved over to environmental positions in production. Those folks with doctorates who had contacts and could get academic positions considered themselves lucky.
The next group were the MBA crowd of the mid- to late-1980's. Every graduate school of any size was milling out MBAs by the thousands. Eventually the stock crash and recession removed that degree from the "hot" list and computer science moved to the top slot.
For those of you who have lost your jobs but love the industry should take my advice: Don't jump ship because the waters have gotten rough. Consider this current downturn as an opportunity to flush the deadwood and uncommitted from the field. If you can hang in there long enough, keep your skill level up, and are willing to make job changes (and location changes) to keep yourself fed, you can bet that you will be well positioned when demand increases again. Just don't expect that demand to be what it was during the dot com craze.
Had I not stayed with geology, I wouldn't have accumulated the experience that allows me to earn the wage level I've attained. Had I quit and become a dot com worker in the early '90s, I would have gone from one frying pan to another. I would have made some great cash for a short period of time, but I would have jettisoned all the experience I was building as a geologist.
I haven't forgotten the lesson of the downturn, however, and have cross trained extensively since my first brush with that state of "unemployable" you are now experiencing. I'm not just a geologist/hydrologist/geophysicist, but I also have experience in industrial hygiene, computer programming, computer network administration, heavy equipment operation, asbestos removal, building demolition...
I hope I'm making my point.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I have been unemployed since March 2001. It is almost three months. All the phone calls and e-mails I got were recruiters from job agencies. No interviews yet. I have gone to job fairs, daily job searches, etc. I have three months of unemployment payments left. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been having hard time looking for a new job for many months now. Many companies seem to be interested, and I've been to several interviews, but they haven't contacted me after that. There are surprisingly many Linux/Unix jobs, but there are also many people with a lot of experience in them.
The US unemployment system probably sucks, I'm glad I don't live there. But then, my last job ended 1½ months ago, and I'm now living on 0 income. We do have decent unemployment system in Finland, but unfortunately I happen to be registered at university as a student. Even if I deregister, I wouldn't get any unemployment support for 3 months, and I keep hoping that I get a job sooner than that.
Then, of course, companies want people with certain "attitude". Meaning that you must love submitting yourself as a slave with no rights. You may not object to HR manager-psychologists doing personality tests and probing your personal matters, but you must confess your sins to them. You should not have opinions about business policies or ethics, or expect ethical behaviour from the company. That's risky for the company - you might even sue them if they treat you bad.
It's rather irrelevant that you're an enthusiastic person who loves making advanced software. Ordinary bosses and even most software workers (the career-pipe types) have no understanding of "hacker work ethics"; they really live in a totally different world and expect you to live there too.
It's also difficult for a person who has opinions. The last company I visited is preparing a set of software patents. I'm really not very enthusiastic about that. But what should I do - stay unemployed with no income just because of that?
I have applied for many jobs for which I'm incredibly well qualified, and been turned down for various reasons. Many times they won't hire someone with my qualifications even at entry-level salaries because they believe I'll hop to the next available job when the market picks up.
Other times I can't get someone on their end that can even understand my thrice-simplified, dubmed-down resume, since during the beginning of the .com squeeze last year most companies replaced techies in the hiring chain with marketroids and suits, because they thought MBAs would be more concerned with the flow of money into their coffers and less concerned with the needs of the other technies.
And don't even try recruiters right now. Get a clueless recruiter talking to the clueless people on the hiring end, and you're better off walking door-to-door in the more developed areas of town. Even the best recruiters I can find have a hard time understanding my resume, which most techies and even non-technies from other fields have told me is very easy to understand. Filter job-search language through three levels of uneducated indirection and the childhood game of Telephone takes on an entirely new meaning.
But I've seen things pick up significantly in the last month or so, only if you have _real_ skills to offer. I think many companies over-compensated and realized that technical position != .COM position, and many companies have struggled to fill the _truly_ skilled positions since December or January. If you see the same company posting the same job again and again, they could just be trolling to build their resume files, or they could really be desperate! Go seek them out at their headquarters and demand to see someone on the hiring side, and ask if their position is for real, and ask for something reasonably but substantially more than they initially want to pay, and you might get a reasonably mellow job with a good salary even now.
It is said that less than 2% of teenagers want to persue a high-tech career since all the layoffs. What does this mean? This means that teens like me who still want to do it will be in high demand in a few years.
Please do not think this way.
Although it is easy to feel threatened by entering a competitive industry, competing with your industry-mates will make you, and the industry, better in the long-run. As the industry grows, and as your career grows, you be that much further away from the lowest jobs in the industry; you will get to do the work you want to do. As long as there is an IT worker shortage, you will be forced to do less interesting work, because real work can't get done before the dirty work is completed.
Think about it: skills such as web design and system administration (the two big "janitorial" IT jobs) are very commonplace. But they have to be because they are in demand. If system administration was an elite skill, then companies would have a hard time hiring system administrators, so they would be less hardware, less software, offer fewer services, and generally get less work done.
The more people who are more skilled means the industry will be that much stronger and more exciting. If you hope that people don't enter IT, you're hoping that less technology gets developed. More players in the industry means more competition, and better products, shorter development cycles, and lower prices. If there were more competent software developers in the world, Microsoft would have a lot more competition, and that would benefit everybody.
If you are competent and committed, then you will rise to the top in the industry. If the industry is big, you are that much more important. Do you want to be a big fish in a small sea, or a big fish in a big sea? But you do have to realize that in the IT industry, although your education is pretty easy (compared to law or medicine), you have to work very hard during you career and stay on top of everything.
Another facet of this is immigration: for the same reason, don't fear immigrants taking your job. As long as you have real skills (i.e. more than just coding, web design, system administration, etc.) then you will rise to the top, and the rest in the industry will be there to do your dirty work.
I don't believe it was. Perhaps they evetually came to realize that the supposed IT worker shortage was a big fraud manufacturered to force techies to accept lower pay.
The IT worker shortage was definitely not a fraud. We were hiring up until a couple of months ago, and it was still extremely difficult to find people who actually have real skills (even though the job market was quite weak at that time).
If we do not have more H1B's, the most skilled workers from countries such as India, China, and Pakistan will form their own companies and compete with US companies, which means that US companies will be hurt. This is bad for the workers of these companies also, because their jobs will be in jeopardy if the company goes down. With nice H1B allotments, the US has a virtual monopoly on the best worldwide IT workers which is VERY good for the country.
Do you want the US computer industry to end up like the US auto industry in the 80's, where it was unable to compete with Japanese companies? That's what is going to happen if we don't aggressively hire the best foreign workers.
But given the fact that there were quite many very experienced technical people looking for working during even the peak, tells me that the difficulty in finding good people was not as a result of there being a lack of numbers.
Although that's true, anybody who has trouble finding a job right now would have a much tougher time if the industry were not centered in the US, or even if non-American companies built signficant share. Now we just have to worry about competing amongst ourselves (including immigrants) for jobs, but if foreign tech powerhouses emerge, we also have to worry if our nation's industry is the strongest.
To the extent to which immigrants do compete with American-born workers for jobs, it does make the whole American workforce that much more skilled and productive, and better prepared to withstand foreign competition. On that account alone, I believe we should continue to expand immigration even during an economic downturn. I believe there is a very strong chance that relatively unskilled IT jobs such as web design and system adminstration will be outsourced to countries such as India in the next few decades. This is good for the US economy, because it frees up native talent to do jobs which require more skills.
Right now you'd be absolutely insane to start a CPU design company, or a software company (e.g. OS or application development), anywhere but the US. Let's keep the skilled workers here, and bring the best foreign workers, so the jobs stay in the US!
First of all, educating yourself is the best investment you can make during a recession. The opportunity cost is much lower now, than it was two years, because you aren't foregoing a $100k/year job that you could have had (most likely, you couldn't find a very good job right now).
:-)
Second, chances are that the American economy will not collapse, and that the computer industry will not collapse either. The fundamentals are still there, and I think that the industry will continue to be strong, and that the US will be the leader, for the foreseeable future. Even if technology does collapse, your degree will you man you're more qualified for that grocery store clerk job than the average joe on the street.
I know two techies who are socially inept. Both became unemployed in the crash. One of them is still unemployed. He has gotten two jobs, and in both cases left within a month due to personality conflicts. He is used to being treated as an elite coder code and doesn't like sitting in meetings with idiots. He is also quite frightening to non-techies - streaks of the BOFH. The other guy has a job largely because I hooked him up. I'm not sure how long he'll keep it, although he's doing a very good job. The thing is, he doesn't know how to schmooze his manager at all. I'm not talking about utter corporate ass-kissing - I'm talking about the ability to give your manager more than a blank stare or a dissertation on the latest Linux kernel.
Anyhow, it's true that the end of the bubble spells disaster for some talented but unsocial techies.
"Top consultants and contractors once named their salaries in the valley. Now, even those who qualify for unemployment benefits soon discover the $40 to $230 weekly check will not cover an apartment here, where rent averages around $1,800 a month."
Which brings up the question:
1. Why didn't they put any money away for a rainy day? If they bought their own hype, expected to live off stock options, and didn't put any savings away, then they deserve to suffer for their own lack of foresight.
2. If it costs so much to live in the valley, why don't they move somewhere else? The saleries may be lower elsewhere, but the cost of living is generally MUCH cheaper. Here in Austin, decent aprtments can be had for $600 or less. And Texas, unlike California, has no state income tax. Nor does it have an artificially induced power-shortage brought about by short-sighted politicians who didn't understand economics and evidently didn't realize that prices can go up as well as down. (Or, like the poor yuppie victims mentioned in the article, that stocprices could go down as well as up.
3. Why aren't they staying with friends or family who are still employed? If they don't have any in the valley, why don't they move away? And this isn't some "if you only walked a mile in their shoes" BS. I spent four years living in someone's living room while I worked temp jobs and paid off credit card debt from my immediate post-college years, when I was making a hell of a lot less than $100,000 a year (try around $20,000 in 1991). Easy? Hell no. But I did it, and I'm currently debt-free. Unless your relations are really strained with friends and family (and there's another sign that something might be wrong with your outlook on life), they can support you during lean times, and expect you to do the same.
4. I've been to the valley twice this year, and I seem to remember a lot of "Help Wanted" signs in McDonalds, Burger Kings, etc. Why aren't they working there? There's nothing wrong with working a lower paying job until something better comes along, and to my mind it's far less injurous to your dignity than mooching off government handouts or the kindness of random strangers.
This story reminds me of that National Pravda Radio story on the woman who got a job with Dell, and then was let go before she ever started working. I felt empathy for her right up to the point where they mentioned she had spent $3000 on a purebreed dog to play in the yard of her custom-built house. Not only did she count her chickens before they were hatched, she spent the money she was going to get from the chickens in advance. If you're going to spend money like an idiot, don't expect any sympathy from those of us who put our money in the bank instead of spending $3000 on a dog. (Here's a tip: You can get a dog that's just as cute and friendly at the SPCA for under $100.)
Look folks, no one is guaranteed a ticket to easy street. No one should be saved from the consequences of their own poor decisions. Yeah, getting laid off sucks, but how you prepare for and respond to those situations is up to YOU. You shouldn't ask society and/or government to bail you out from your own shortsightedness. Thankfully, in a capitalist econonomy, you can generally get as many second or thirtd chances as you're willing to earn. In nature, making mistakes gets you killed.
"3.2 percent unemployment rate"? Poor frigging babies! Go over to France, where they have all sorts of welfare and unemployment benefits. And, directly related to same, unemployment around 15%. That's why high French officials warn other EC countries darkly not to engage in "tax competetion," because they know their creaking, failing socialist economy would inevitably lose jobs and industries to dynamic, nimble economies, like those of the United States. Yes, you're more likely to get laid off here than in Europe, but you're also much more likely to find a higher paying job afterword. The creative distruction and economic dynamism of capitalism offers far more opportunities to rise to the top than tired old socialist economies. That's why people write books with titles like "Thriving on Chaos." Yes, you're more likely to get laid off, but in the long run that's the only way that your children will be able to enjoy better lives than the ones you lead. That's a price worth a few layoffs.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I don't live gratuitously in Silicon Valley. I live in the city of San Francisco, which is in my native region, and wonderful, culturally. I live in an inexpensive 2 bedroom apartment with a friend, and my share of the rent is $1250. So although I had saved up $5000 over the less than half a year of employment I've had since I graduated from college, it is all long gone.
I get the impression that were I a couple of years older (I am 22), I would not be having this trouble finding work. Although _I_ can think of plenty of types of technical jobs I could and would love to do as a generalist (dept. liason, field engineer, alpha geek, internationalization engineer, etc.), apparently employers do not agree.
If you look at job descriptions for Managerial positions you will see that mostly the look for this sort of person.
Oh wait, the guy is a techie ....
http://www.jamesarcher.net/images/willcodehtml.j pg
I agree with the bulk of you comment, but the thing to keep in mind here is the outrageous rents in that part of the world. I was looking at starting salaries of $50,000 to $65,000 a couple of years ago when I wanted to go out there. Then I looked at the rents and saw studios going $1200/mo. The mindset when you get laid off is to try and get right back up on the horse and get a new job. Only problem is that can take months, and if don't have huge savings the rent eats up you cash real fast. And, unless you cut and run right away you can get stuck without the resources to move. Mind you, this whole situation made up my mind not go out there. As a native Californian, there's something I know that lot's of people don't. And, that is that the place is great with a dynamic and long term viable economy. However, it's also the land of the Gold Rush. Every few years there's a new one and people charge out, ride high on the wave, and get slammed hard into the sand when it breaks.
Oh yeah, your paycheck is in the mail.
Fight Spammers!
Aside from us liking the weather and the mountains and beaches, there's another reason why some people don't move out of California. There are a lot of minorities in Sili Valley and LA, and there's a perception here that minorities aren't treated that well in certain parts of the country. Maybe not so much in the Midwest, but definitely in the south. For the single guys, a lot of them might think they don't have a chance scoring with the chicks if they're not white, and for families a lot of them may not be comfortable sending their kids to school if they were the only non-white kids. I'd be interested to hear what the /.ers from the heartland have to say about this.
I really can't feel too bad for those who got caught in the dot-bomb burst. I mean, really, did you need the porsche?
Get a clue. Not all dotcommers were making Porsche money. Among all the overpaid idiot suits were a lot of talented, hard working people who weren't making the huge wages all you outsiders thought they were.
There were also plenty of dotcoms that had decent business plans too... but when 95% of your industry is crap like den.com, even the good companies can get dragged down.
In my past dotcom life I was a "product manager." As an unemployed bum, I haven't had but 2 interviews in 4 months of looking. I think that employers are figuring out that "product manager" means "talentless middle-management hack" and they are figuring out how to do without us.
I am not a programmer, but everywhere I look I see job opportunities for them. That part of the job market looks plenty strong to me. But if you don't actually PRODUCE something, god help you! I'll be working at Kinko's soon for 1/3 the salary. The last few months have definitely been a personal low. (Can I get a +1, Pity now?)
OK, so I'm currently keeping the lights on by bean-counting and picking up the odd free-lance writing job. So I stop coding for a while. I'm enjoying the vacation, a little bit.
My experience trying to find a technical job? I chase down openings, only to be told that the openings have been pulled "because of the economy." Some companies like talking to us older people, some prefer kids out of school. So be it.
I'm in Nevada, and want no part of the California lifestyle or expense.
Just my pair-o-pennies(tm)
First, you're 100% right-on to advise people to make a plan and then build their own companies with other competent people. Many who attempt to do this will of course fail, many others will cave into temptation and turn into PHBs themselves, and a few will stay true to their principles and actually make it work. In my opinion (and I'm a practitioner), it's well worth the risk and experience to attempt it.
However, as for your "guaranteed cure for unemployment" (the link you gave was: www.aynrand.org)... YEEEESH! Well, as powerful as her philosophy is, she's also a guaranteed cure for an erection! Yikes. They really need to change the welcome image!
Take a look around bub! It's not just dot.coms that are laying off people, it's the entire Tech sector from software to telecommunications and it has spilled off into other industries including automotive and most others. Nortel just layed off 20000 and just announced that another 10000 are going and that includes entire divisions that have been shut down. Do you thing those are all entry level html coders? Alot of those are engineers and people with computer degrees! Almost all tech companies have announced profit warnings and layed off people.
Man, think and use your head next time before you speak, less shit will come out of your mouth.
Mmmm, many jobs in retail have turnover rates well in excess of 100% -- I've seen numbers for fast food chains of well over 200% -- so I find it hard to believe that managers would be that worried about your not sticking around for a couple of years. Nobody sticks around for a couple of years, and at least you're likely to show up on time and sober.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
If you need to cut down on rent, the two best ways are to (a) live in a crappy location and (b) to get as big a place as possible and split it among as many people as you can, so you essentially get to amortize the cost of the common areas across more people. So instead of getting a bachelor apartment on the Peninsula, you rent an old, run-down house or something in the East Bay and have five people living there. And incidentally, even a tiny place can accommodate more than one person if you are really motivated; I used to date a girl (this was in New York) who was one of two living in an apartment that was no bigger than 300 sq feet. (I dated another girl who lived in a so-called "railroad flat" where one of her roommates had to walk through her room in order to get to his room -- and back through her room if he wanted to, say, go to the bathroom in the middle of the night -- which is a *really* interesting living arrangement.)
Just out of curiosity I went and checked out rental listings on sfgate.com. There are a handful of 2BR places listing for $1100-$1200 in San Francisco itself. Now, it's just a few listings, and I'm sure they'll be gone faster than you can say "make the check out to...". And I'm not suggesting that sharing a 2-BR place three or four ways makes for a fantastic life, nor that the real-estate situation in the Bay Area is not insane (it clearly is). I'd hate to have to go back to that kind of lifestyle now that I'm comfortable and can take care of myself pretty well. But my point is that people need to reconsider their standards of living when the shit hits the fan career-wise and they've got nothing to fall back on. Lots of people live this way all the time, and I'm frankly surprised that a techie would be so deeply insolvent and uncreative about his living situation that he'd find himself relegated to a shelter.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
You're right, I may have overgeneralized by saying "retail" when it's the fast-food places that have the really outrageous (triple-digit) turnover rates. Also, as you hint at, the smaller operations seem to have much less turnover than big chain stores. I don't have any hard numbers to back that up, but it's definitely been my observation as well.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I guess it never occurs to people that they might do what college students, recent graduates, and other financially strapped and/or marginally employed people have done since time immemorial: Find a roommate! Sheesh. When I got out of school in the early 90s and went to live in New York City (making a princely $10/hour -- this with significant business and tech experience and a degree from a top-ten university), I had friends who somehow managed to get by on even less than I did. Typically their living situation went something like this: Minuscule two-bedroom apartment with three or four people occupying it. Either there were bunk beds in the bedroom(s), or someone had a bed lofted over the couch in the 80-square-foot living room. Dinner was ramen noodles, the entertainment budget was sufficient to cover maybe two beers a week (though probably not if you bought them at a bar), and there was nothing as extravagant as cable TV.
This does not make for a glamorous life, but then again, it doesn't require much income either. Assuming rent of $2,400 a month, that's $600 divided four ways. You can cover that working at Starbucks: Every time I visit the Bay Area, I laugh when I see the help-wanted signs offering $9+/hour plus tips and benefits and, probably, a handful of stock options! Maybe that's not quite enough because you've still got student loans or something, so you get a second job temping or whatever. Oh, the tragedy.
Basically, I contend that former dot-commers who declare themselves homeless are either (a) unwilling to stoop to a job they consider beneath themselves or (b) unable to throttle back on their consumption. There are homeless people with real problems: They're substance abusers, or mentally disturbed, or illiterate, or single parents with kids. Them I feel sympathy for. These posers who are whining about not being able to find sufficiently cushy jobs, on the other hand, are not about to earn my sympathy.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Soylent green is... programmers!
The problem is that I'm simultaneously underqualified and overqualified - I don't have the depth of experience in any one or two skills to make me the "best" candidate for a job with a narrow focus, and all the extras just tell most employers that I'll be looking to leave ASAP, so they'll have to hire someone else anyway (which isn't true in my case, but they don't know that). My last IT job was working technical support for a well-known tax-preparation company's consumer tax software. All my "evaluations" said I was doing well above average, but I was still one of the 98% or so laid off in the middle of April.
And do you know what I'm doing for money now? Any day I don't have an interview (most of them) I'm down at the day labor agency at the crack of dawn; when I'm lucky I get called to work for barely above minimum wage doing semi-skilled construction work.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Christ, I pay $1400 a month for my place here. Then again, I do live right off of UT's campus. Still though, austin is pretty expensive compared to houston, where i have friends with the same sized apartment that costs $500 a month.
-
No, its not that bad. But most .com'ers won't settle for too much less than the huge startup they're coming from. There's thousands and thousands of jobs, many minimum-wage or aroud there, and they can at least find SOME income instead of that "I can't find a job and will rely on the rest of you guys to support me" mentality.
There's jobs, but no former CEO would catch himself dead flipping burgers or working retail, even though they're perfectly good jobs for anything. No, its not an IT job or something "high tech", but its a freaking INCOME. Glad my taxes aren't only going towards the guys using the money to buy more drugs, but lazy former suits who would rather not work than work for $5-$8 an hour.
Even if you can't find a great job elsewhere, moving can be a good idea because just about everywhere costs less than SV to live in. In Tucson you can get a deceant studio apartment for $300/month. That's cheap enough that you can live on $7/hour and still keep a cheap car. To be sure, you're life would need to be frugal, but it is doable.
I colocate my servers at a local ISP. They grew from 10 employees to over 200 employees in 2 year's time. A month ago 80% of them were laid off. They don't even have a support staff 24/7 anymore. They've cut off peering with many other isps in order to generate a profit.
Now I'm scared like hell and am thinking of moving my servers elsewhere where there's more stability.
Out of the 150+ people that were laid off, not ONE person has found a job in the past month.
This isn't surprising to me though, considering the amound of dumb paper mcse's that were hired during their heyday. There were idiot support guys that would answer my calls and not know what a netmask or a traceroute was. I mean, they are IDIOTS!
So it's no wonder so many former dotcomers are having a tough time finding a job elsewhere in the high-tech industry. They were just bandwagon dotcomers to begin with, and aren't worth much in real life. Perhaps they should switch their careers BACK to what they were doing before. They could find lots more luck there.
I think this time of turmoil is a really telling time where the weak are weeded out and the strong stay on board.
But of course I think the economy will pick back up again and the future will definitely be a bit brighter. Until then, those unfit for competition will have to eat Charles Darwin's theory of "survival of the fittest". It's a cruel world, but that's capitalism. Oh well...
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
I've been through three tech recessions, the first back in 86-7, 91-92 and 95-96. During the first, colleges that had been pushing computer grads were suddenly getting push-back from the industry saying there wasn't any more need for them, that CS was a mature field ... then networked PCs became the vogue and all of a sudden industry was screaming for more workers. In 1991 a general recession hit the US, mild by historical standards, but enough the you were seeing PostDocs working at KMart.
In 1995 there was a period where the multimedia and game industries collapsed - too many startups, too much anticipated demand that never materialized, too much hype.
We've just ended the first great Internet push. Someone was complaining here about those companies that were hiring HTML programmers for top dollar at that time but didn't really understand that at the time HTML programmers were what was needed. Many of those HTML programmers went on to become senior web programmers, webmasters, sysadmins and IT managers.
The point in all this is very simple - being in IT means keeping one eye out on what is coming down the pipe and taking the time to learn it. Note that this means that it is your responsibility to stay current, not your employer's (if you are still employed). This is unfortunate, and is yet another indication of the breakdowns going in business, since for many, many years, a good employer knew that keeping their staff current with technology would give them a competitive edge.
However, pertinant to this discussion, the onus now falls on you; take evening classes, set up a spare computer in the back room and play with new tech, or even old tech that may be experiencing a resurgence (Perl/CGI is expanding, for instance, and Python is enjoying something of a renaissance). Learn everything you can about XML, then learn some more, even if you're a C++ or Java programmer; we're fast moving to a time when every stream that an object produces or consumes will be in XML, and the more you know about Web Services, distributed programming, database to XML conversion and so forth, the easier it is for you to jump from IIS to Apache to WebSphere to whatever.
No one is going to hire a web developer in this day and age, because too many managers have assumed (incorrectly) that because the Dotcom bandwagon burst, the Internet is no longer important. It is, but not for serving up web pages; the demand that is beginning to grow is for on demand weblications, custom, in-house, and relying more on component development skills than on the ability to to build large-scale stand-alone apps.
Diversify your skill set; deep knowledge is wonderful, and from the recruiters on this board deep knowledge may be desirable, but on the flip side the reason that you get so many C++ "experts" that couldn't tell a virtual interface from virtual reality is because those same companies don't want seasoned veterans who can command higher wages, they want cheap but skilled labor. If you have secondary or tertiary skills, then you can walk into situations where you can use those skills, though with the realization that you won't (and shouldn't) get the same pay as for your primary skills.
Finally, realize that a company is not your friend, mother, nanny, or benefactor. Companies exist to make money. The more enlightened ones treat their employees well, but enlightenment tends to go out the window when the stocks are tumbling. Most managers have a need to fill and will get people to work for them to fulfill that need, and if they can get away with it, will jettison that person the moment the need no longer exists. This is what the Just-In-Time economy is all about, unfortunately.
Finally, diversify. Get into writing. Start a side business that has nothing to do with programming. If you're a marketer, spend some time learning about code. So many of the people that entered into the dot com market directly out of college have tied their entire identity to their jobs, and are only now beginning to understand that they are not programmers, or marketers, or managers, but people, with creative impulses that were stifled to get into the IT rat race.
-- Kurt Cagle
-- Author, Professional XSL, Wrox
I tend to agree with the Anonymous Coward who described this issue in terms of "buzzword dotcommers." Computers are changing life on Earth. But if one follows Moore's law backwards, it is changing it at the same *rate* as it did when ENIAC, UNIVAC, the Bletchley Park computers were new. Defeating Goering's U-boat code: now THAT is a 1942 "killer app" that I fortunately need not download from Alphaworks....thank you Dr. Turing! The fact that the world is "more changed" by computers now than in Babbage's time is a function of the cumulative "time integral" of the rate of change, not the rate of change. (No coincidence that it's now that computers are "more important than ever." The dotcom thing is a business phenomenon, not a computer phenomenon. Computers still work the way that Lovelace and Babbage described. Better and faster, but a Turing Machine is an Analytical Engine is a Pascal Calculator. The sociological effects of computing (or any human endeavour) are cumulative, their observed results tend to belong to history, not the news. I feel sorry for and care about people whose personal lives go awry, be it through a bad marriage or a business failure. Who knows, it could be me that's next. But I have to agree that a good deal of the people around me don't really seem to be working all that hard for a living. These are my very cubicle-mates. I think they're all very nice people: even to a person! I'm 32. I've been making money on computers mostly since 1994, when I started office temping to learn PC applications. In 2001, I'm about to have a servlet filter I wrote published in a Java white paper on XSLT. So 6 years in "business computing." Not too impressive for the dotcommer who wants a career (SUV) in 6 months.... But I've been enjoying computers since 1980, when as a 12-year-old I was hooked at school one-on-one to a Teletype DSR-33 with a Honeywell 66 behind it (110 Baud, Half Duplex). I have breathed and lived the idea of "computers" since I was a little kid. And I'm not hurting in my job: 62K with no degree, in my beloved hometown, often included on "most livable places" almanacs. I don't know if I'm lucky for keeping a job or just lucky that computers exist and they're interesting. But I would challenge those who read this far in this post, to look at the weaker ones around you and imagine the potential for the planet if they understood the machine as you do. In Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, we call it the "Flint Ridge Con." Describe a peculiar approach to the newbie, hook her/im on the possibility implied, and wait for them to just badger the living shit out of you with questions. To paraphrase Feynman, I think this is the only way in which any sort of progress can be made. Thanks in advance for the bandwidth. Alan p.s. This is my first Slashdot post. I tend to respect the views of people I read here, even if I don't agree with them (simple reason: a lot of good thinking goes on here.) So if you don't agree with my post, just tell me why I'm wrong. Mainly I have seen people get angry on these kinds of fora and I really would hate that more than anything.
Yes, I believe that there are degreed tech workers at a shelter in the Silicon Valley area.
Why, because employed tech workers were living at the homeless shelters BEFORE the crash.
The housing market out there sucks.
I don't have a idea why anyone with good credentials would consider working there. One friend of mine suggested that it had to do with all the action occuring there, "being a player in the industry".
Well, the industry is dead, and will be for a while. Go someplace else. There are tons of opportunities across the country. You'll just have more competition for a spot on the liferafts in CA.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
- A few weak statistics to "back up" their claims.
- A "personal perspective" (interviews with individuals) to show that the statistics are true.
- "Expert" commentary. (Ilene Philipson, the clinical psychologist).
- Overdramatized prose. Like: a surprising number of former high-tech workers are rubbing elbows with society's castaways
Remember how we were being told that there was a terrible shortage of tech workers one or two years ago? Perhaps there was, but I certainly didn't see it. At the last two companies that I've worked for, I spent a significant amount of time interviewing SW-Engineer candidates. Time I should have spent programming. If there was such a shortage, then were did these people come from? (btw, most of them were very qualified)Like most of what you see in the media, this article is partial-truths, rumor-mongering, hype and fiction.
Watch those resumes- the liars are coming! More specifically, those inflated titles and skillsets from all of those fly-by-night.com houses will be in print. Isn't there something wrong with a resume that boasts of 6-7 years of experience, but the person has only been out of school for 3 years? Check out some of those GIANT titles, too. FYI: those senior positions (i.e. sr. architect, etc...) really require years of development experience combined with a more recent tech set. The real problem is the ignorance of the people who are hiring...shame and a sin. Nobody asks (on interviews), "How much time was spent on new development and maintenance?" This is extremely pertinent! Instead, it's X years of this; X years of that. Yikes! Most of those places.com performed horribly! Anyone (e.g. fool) can take someone else's money and go on a hiring spree. I was surprised of magnitude of the ignorance that supported them and their "no proof of concept" approach. All the best, DjM (Sr Super-Duper Technical Lead Architect Specialist AND Vice President AND part-owner)