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The Laid-off Techie
LazyBoy writes: "ZDNet News has this article entitled "The world of the laid-off techie". Yikes! Things have been bad in New Jersey for a while (telecom slump). How are they elsewhere?"
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Yeah - looking at Computing, they've got 8 pages of job advertisments. This time last year, it was ten times that.
I've got a feeling though that over the next six months, systems are going to start going wrong or need to be updated and a lot of companies will realise that they do need some people with some skill. IT is so fundamental to the way companies operate these days - it's not going to go away any time soon. There has, in the past, been a problem with IT being regarded as an end in itself - resulting in millions of $ being spent on systems which don't actually help companies very much. This will have to change.
"Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
"A year ago, Jose Carlos Cavazos was enthusiastic about his new career in telecommunications and his position with Nortel Networks. Now he's throwing mail on the night shift at a U.S. Postal Service distribution center for $13 an hour.
Geez, you only have to read the first line.
He was working in an unnamed position at Nortel. The article goes on to describe that he's got an engineering degree from Texas A&M (one of the best) and while he was operating with an MBA (probably because he wanted to move into management where more money was) he still has a tech background and is a direct victim of the tech slow-down. And in this case, since he was working for Nortel, it didn't matter if he was pushing a broom under their roof, it was a tech company he was released from.
Reading the following details, you will see that it's an artical that illustrates that it's the tech 'industry' that's failing, not merely tech 'jobs.' And again, these people still have 'tech' backgrounds. As managers and leaders, do you think the people under them kept their jobs or do you think they fired management and kept the underlings?
Peter Peets has a different take on layoffs. The Chapel Hill, N.C., resident took a job in December 2000 as product manager for software development in a regional office of Cisco Systems. He got laid off four months later in a downsizing that eliminated 8,500 Cisco positions, and he spent the summer fretting about his mortgage and how he'd fund the college education of his three children.
Again, a person showing technical ability but happens to have been in a managerial position... why? Because most people (not you) realize that when management gets the axe, the people under them have already gotten it.
It's not misleading, you're misreading.
I suspect you're quite comfortable in your position..? Don't fool yourself into thinking they axe management and marketting before they lay off the "line workers." It's the "workers" who get axed first. They show management getting it because it's more dramatic though they ASSume the reader understands that in some of these cases, hundreds and thousands of people below them got the axe first.
How did that happen? $401k in 8 months? Am I missing something here?
I'm assuming that you're not American, a 401(K) is the mechanism used to save for retirement. In UK terms, it's a bit like a private pension, but it's also like an ISA, because you get to choose directly what goes into it. But it's not like an ISA because there is no maximum limit.
You can access the money in your 401(K) for a number of things, off the top of my head, education and buying a house, and I guess unemployment too.