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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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Some years ago, 1995, I got through a 5-month unemployemnt period.
It was quite hard to keep in a good mood but I went through by doing as many benevolent work as I could (development, Acorn/RiscPC User Group, continuous self-teaching of things like web development, GNU/Linux hacking...).
As these activities involved lots of professionnally valuable material, I ended finding a job as a Macromedia Director teacher for unemployed, then as an interactive devices developper, then as a webmaster...
The hardest thing was gather some money to buy some book but I benefitted from my bro's Internet access, in the university and I could print many many RFC's, man pages, etc.
So, my advice is that one should remain busy learning interesting potentially emerging new technologies so that this unemployement period appears to be constructive, after all.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Guess again. All the people I know out of jobs are hardcore geek types. The marketing people I know actually had no trouble finding new jobs.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
So with all of these way-overqualified former dot-commers taking up all the blue collar jobs...where does that leave me and my fellow struggling student workers looking for summer jobs? (Don't even get me started about the severe lack of the "necessary" internships.)
Even more troubling, where does that leave me once I graduate with a BS in EE?
~~as one famous philosopher once said: GADZOOKS!~~
That's why I spent seven years learning programming, object-oriented design, business logic, server admin, web development and project management: so I could attain the dignified and much sought-after title of:
"techie"
Kinda answers the whole question of the importance of the software engineer, doesn't it?
The rest of the rant would be redundant. It's all been said before. The only people who matter to a business are management and the HR department. Everyone else should just be prepared to watch their kids grow up in poverty right under their college degrees on the wall.
god bloody awful.
I think my resume is quite good. I have electronics/telecoms/computing back to the late 80's including defence and stock exchange network support, but now I need to resort to getting certifications to get work.
In Sydney, no MCSE, CCNA, etc, no work.
The market is saturated with newbie wanabies who have plenty of cert but almost nil experience, so it's hard to get noticed when companies are expecting cert.
So, I'm fixing that now but I kinda wish I would'nt have to. Most MCSE's I've met would'nt know a kernel if it blue screened on them.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster? Before 2001, I could literally find a job within a week of starting my search, and the quality of my references or the reasons for my newly-found state of unemployment were mostly irrelevant. Imagine my horror when that all changed in April 2001. Ahh well, at least I'll get all of those taxes back thanks to making less than $10k last year.
On another note: is it my imagination, or do most of the people in that article seem like the same marketing wonks who should be the first people to be 86'ed from a failing organization anyway?
Although this was a pretty good article, it smacks of the whiny 'I went to school! I deserve a great life and a high paying job' attitude that many of us have come to despise in those MBAs who think they know anything about running a business.
It's enough to make sucessful business people puke, to hear the lame ass excuses people who have supposedly been trained to TAKE CHARGE, and generate PROFIT, for a company come up with.
After years riding high end, high speed networking jobs, using my expertise and experience to the max, I got caught in the Nortel 'halving'... I had spent the last 5 years of my career kicking ass, and taking names doing high end routing, high end security, and integrating optical technology...
Unfortunatly for me, jobs like that are now hard to come by. Luckily, I started out small, with my own ISP, and find myself somewhat gainfully self-employed supporting a lot of small 'mom-and-pop' ISPs,(and thier new crop of high speed customers, who cant stand the customer non-service of the larger carriers) who find that thier conservatice business plans are now paying off in spades. (ie, thier 'smarter' competition ran themselves out of business trying to do DSL for the same price as the phone company)
I believe that doers do, and whiners don't. My last day at nortel was in december, and I am very grateful to them for treating us like human beings, and letting all of us down easy. I know that hasn't been the case for a lot of people who got 'down sized'.
I hope someday to return, but in the meantime, I will continue to bust my butt, and make my own destiny.
(PS. Health insurance for the self-employed is remarkable affordable, if you shop around)
Well. No wonder the article is full of stories of people out of work for a year. Hell, if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Now, that's not to say that it's wonderful out there. As an employer, I've been used to begging for resumes for the last 3 years. When I had an opening 3 months ago, I was seriously inundated with resumes. The job market is swarming with candidates. Of course, quite a good number of the candidates I saw shouldn't have been in the industry in the first place. It was obvious from the few hundred resumes I went through that the layoffs throughout Silicon Valley have been mostly about letting go of dead weight. But even that is bad news for qualified people. Think about it: even if you're a genius, your resume is buried in a pile of 400 other lackluster resumes. If you want to succeed, you'll need to be aggressive.My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Undoubtedly- except not in the West because we're way too expensive. You can get highly skilled developers and designers to build your software from India, Asia and Russia for a small fraction of the cost of a US or European developer. And they'll be doing hardware next.
We've had the good times and we've priced ourselves out of the market. It was cool while it lasted.
With the possible exception of the QA job, none of these sound like techie jobs. They are all just fairly unskilled jobs that happen to be in a technical company. This article is very misleading.
Are you an idiot? These people were working tech jobs prior to losing their tech jobs and taking non-tech jobs.
The jist of the article is that while "unemployment" is over 5%, the uncounted "UNDERemployed" is an ever-growing mass because unemployment benefits run out quickly (8+ months is quick? It is when you're holding out for a job!)
These people HAD to take non-tech jobs because there was nothing else! They are underemployed because they are skilled people in unskilled positions. I would say that the article is right-on and you're just not reading very carefully... typical though -- trying to read just enough to make it seem like you know what you're talking about so you can post a comment on Slashdot...
Try again!
This may come as a shock but not everyone on here is american and so knows about obscure american
savings plans. Why not tell us all about a TESSA then? What , you've not heard of it? Well maybe
thats because its British.
Man, some of these articles really hit close to home!
One of the problems is finding where the jobs are. In the economic boom, the recruiters helped everybody out. But although I consider myself a savvy job hunter, I'd had difficulty figuring out what companies are out there. National job boards are mostly useless because only a small percentage of companies need to advertise heavily to find a suitable candidate. Individuals need a good directory of company links in their local market.
IT people are used to thinking of themselves as belonging to an exclusively IT company. In actuality, a lot of non-IT companies need help managing their network. Not as glamorous maybe, but at least it's a job.
The real problem with IT unemployment is that people are reluctant to accept non IT positions. Why? You stop gaining new skills and quickly lose touch with what skills are in demand.
I'm a technical worker out of work for 9 months, partly by choice. I used some of the time to update my skills. If only I had a crystal ball that allowed me to see what skill will be necessary for my next job, that would simplify things. As such, I'm busy learning about everything. A job interview revealed my ignorance about Win Active Directories, so I check out a book on the subject. Another job interview asks about XWindows, and so I pick up another book. Learning about this stuff is not very painful, but it's frustrating not having a clue what skill will land you the job. It's also frustrating trying to balance the time you spend job searching with the time to update skills.
Is anyone spooked by all the defense jobs out there? As it turns out, I can't qualify for security clearance because I'm seeking dual citizenship. But if you looked at the postings, you'd swear that a good 50% of job opportunities are related to defense contractors.
I had a good job with Dell; they treated me very well and there were lots of perks. In a day I'm going to a job fair for contract Dell tech support jobs, probably without benefits or job security. Hey, if it pays the bills, I'll be happy. (Just cancel that trip to Mexico for this year).
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
1. Resumes don't matter in any way shape or form.
2. If you're over 25 you are obviously "burnt out" and of little
use to any company.
3. If you have 5 years experience of exactly the API that your
future employer seeks then you might get the job as long
as you don't try and fuck them over by asking for a decent wage.
4. In the UK I.T. is obviously booming as our IT minister still
insists that everything is rosy and let's get that cheap labour
in as fast as we can, as well as training up toilet attendants
to do Y2K work.
Bitter? You bet
Unemployed? What do you think?
Experienced? Only 20 years but hell I'm not 25
and don't know every parameter of every function in the J2EE spec so I'm screwed.
Before the bubble burst, I had a measly B.A. in Spanish, but I still got hired at startups for various jobs, mostly web-oriented stuff like search engines. I made as much as $650/wk for a short while, which ain't too shabby for where I live.
Since the bubble burst, I'd got a non-technical temp job at the county tax office. When I got laid off from that job a friend got me hired at a convenience store, where I do 9-hour shifts with no lunch break for $5.50/hr. I've lost my wife and son because I am unable to support them on a near-minimum-wage part-time job. I'm living with my parents because I can't even afford to support myself. Oh, yeah, and I have about $20,000 of college loan debt to pay off.
So, I've decided to use up my remaining financial aid (even though it will add to my debt) to return to college for a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm hardly learning anything, since I already learned plenty on the job. (Unfortunately, my university does not count life experience for college credit.) Some professors have even told me that I am capable of teaching their classes, but that won't get me out of the credit requirements.
I'm planning to get my B.S. in Spring 2003, and hopefully by 2004 I'll be seriously working and living with my wife and son again...but who knows. I don't want to get optimistic.
By the way, I'm not alone in my neck of the woods. My best friend is in a similar situation. He has 12 years of programming and network administration experience. However, he has no degree, so nobody even wants to interview him. He's pushing 30 and has just entered college as a freshman.
Ride the wave of prosperity!
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
I'm an adjunct at a local major university in New Jersey and part of my duties include teaching classes in the CS department's continuing education arm. At times, it is difficult for me as an educator to make students face reality. Many students that enroll in our certification programs believe that all you have to do is sit through some classes to become a tech wiz and get a great paying job. The reality is that many of them don't have what it takes to become a good technologist. A student recently told me that he was very discouraged in his job hunt because he "spent three years making between $65K and $80K as an HTML coder". He now seeks a similar job with similar pay, but the fact is that he's has not demonstrated to me that he's even worth half of that salary in any technical position. While I am often tempted to use a "Here's a dime...use it to call your mother and tell her you'll never going to be a lawyer (or techie)" speech, I still must encourage my students to work hard to improve their skills. But it becomes difficult trying to get them to believe that they'll no longer get high-paying short-returns in this over-hyped market.
Yes, times are bad. A lot of people out of work - even the good ones. But the moral of the story is that many so-called techies need to re-evaluate their career path and their place in the industry.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a xenophobe, and see nothing nefarious about the idea of allowing people from other countries to fill positions for which there are no Americans available.
But it doesn't make sense to provide jobs for outsiders when our own can fill them.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the purpose of the H1B program has all along been to depress IT wages and skew the job market in favor of corporate employers. Employers have been making up "special skills" or listing jobs with low salaries to show an "effort" to hire a U.S. citizen, then hiring indentured H1Bs for 1/2 to 2/3 the salary. This should come as no surprise, since the same employers used the same tricks to not pay the market wage for U.S. electrical engineers in the 80s.
The program needs to be ended now. Current H1B visa holders should allowed to stay to the end of their terms, then they should return home to bring up the level of IT skill in their home nations, as the lobbyists and Congress said would happen.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
You cannot, cannot, cannot get a tech job unless:
- you get it through personal networking (before the job is "posted"), or
- you have done the exact job before.
I know a software development project manager (a real techie with assember, C/C++, and VB coding experience behind him) who looked outside telecomm and applied for a job in the pharmaceutical sector. Forget it; there are so many unemployed techies out there, the employer was looking for a certain set of skills and experience in the sectorI know another company that needed people to support a certain telecomm software system. They could afford to ignore everyone who could come up to speed on it, and hire only former developers of that system.
I'm still employed. If I'd been laid off last year (and I ducked two bullets by inches), I wasn't even going to look for a job; I was going to live off my wife's salary and write for a while.
You bet, though, if both my wife and I had been laid off, I'd be flipping burgers with the rest of them
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I live in upper Bergen county. I have been working for a fortune 500 company for almost two years. I started as a co-op. When it came time for me to graduate, before I actually graduated in May, the company put a hiring freeze on. I figured "oh, what the heck, it can't last that long". Boy was I _wrong_. I worked over the summer, and then took up a few graduate courses, just so they could keep me on. Now it is the beginning of the school year, the hiring freeze is still on, and I have no idea when they will cut the co-op budget. There was only three positions opened up by upper management this quarter. The uppers are really so disconnected from what is going on here, it is not even funny. They (the uppers) are all down in Atlanta, Georgia, and have not seen, or heard about what is going on here in NJ. We are so short staffed, that one of the projects I was working on actually had a production error that had to be re-staged because it was not caught in the QA faze. Now we are running into the problem that there are not enough developers to keep the projects that have not been cut on schedule. Because these guys don't have enough resources, the QA dept is just about doing nothing. The business requirements group is writing requirements for clients that could not possibly implement that functionality with the current amount of people. This is all for "cost-cutting" even though we still grew 5.6% percent this year, including Sept. 11th. Ridiculous.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Todays NY Times (free registration required) reports that teacher applications are up 45% this year. Many districts have a fast-track program of teaching after a couple intro courses, although you have to takes about a years worth of courses for certification eventually. In the L.A. area where I have some teacher friends, pay starts about $3000 a month and hits $6000 after a dozen years. (This is for a nine-month year where you moonlight or vacation in the summer.) Same thing happened during the 91-94 recession.
Here, here, I agree!
I took a slightly different (and slightly more profitable, in the short run at least) tack. I stuck with a dull internal IT network management job. We're about as far as you can get from high-tech, dot-com, but I've managed to keep my hands involved on internet tech and UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD) in addition to the typical Windows stuff, whiny end users, and so on.
I *did* have a state University job before I came here, and I kind of regret not getting a full lifecycle on that gravy train. 25 year retirement w/full bennies sounds awesome. But when I had that job, I felt kind of trapped -- the money absolutely *sucked* relative to my living expenses. And too many people I worked with said "private industry while they'll still take you", since they felt that too long in a state job meant weak private industry hiring prospects. Glad I made the switch -- a slight reduction in security for a definite increase in earnings..
I always felt a touch jealous of the dot-com people, the money they were making and the whole dot-com lifestyle. Now that these people are delivering my interoffice mail or whatever, I don't feel so bad anymore.
- Teacher's assistant
- Assisstant professor
- Professor
- Department head of university
- 7-11 night shift clerk
I dare you to guess at what point during his career he moved to Canada. Go on, guess. The guy had something like two full Masters with graduate work, and he was applying for a $12 CDN cable monkey job.Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I used to feel pretty secure with my network of co-workers who were still connected to their former employers -- a who's who of the world's tech giants. A few weeks before the company laid off a large percentage of its employees, it announced a new policy: anyone supplying a reference for a former employee would be subject to termination (and possibly legal action). They had the power to do this because all but the execs were "at-will" employees.
When the layoffs came, I was led into an office where an exec reminded me of the company's new policy. He offered to "bend the rules" for me for $5,000. "We understand how hard the job market is now, we'd like to help you because you've done such good work for us." Suddenly I realized why the strange policy had been implemented. They were robbing us of a fundamental entitlement so they could sell it back to us when our backs were against the wall. (I'm not saying I was entitled to a reference from the company, but my co-workers and I were entitled to provide references for each other.)
I wonder how many other companies are doing this. How many people paid the price, and how many people are out of work because they didn't pay that price.
There have been booms and busts before, but there is something different about this bust. There used to be a certain understanding between employers and employees in their treatment of each other. As the New York Times put it, "the old understanding is dead."
Not really.
In my former company I was a techie (coder + sysadmin skill needed), front line (level 2 support, 3 spoken languages). And I was in the second batch to get the axe. The first batch were the ones that spoke only 1 language.
The quasi-moronic manager didn't get the axe until this month, or so I said.
Now, living underemployed. And I'm happy to make $10/hour. It could be much worst. Like making $0.00/hour.
:/
First off, I agree with most posters that this article doesn't really describe techies, but those who probably are unemployable in thier fields. How many of us worked someplace where more than half the people there were not qualified to do thier job let alone get the saleries they were getting? From what I have been able to see so far, this "recession" is a massive house cleaning. Unfortunately, some very talented, hard-working folks also got the shaft.
The article also states that some of us are "settling for contract work without benefits." Uh, I've actually been doing FAR better contracting this year than I had been last year making over $80k. And suprisingly, getting work is far less complicated than you might think.
Here are some tips that have helped me out:
Thats just my two cents. After my former employer stole my 401k money and failed to pay us our last 2 pay check, things have improved greatly for me. This advice has gotten me off unemployment and I'm now on the road to recovery :)
Like any other university grad, I started my career thinking project management, documentation, and QA were just for people who "couldn't program." The past 15 years in the industry have taught me that real design documentation, project management, and QA are critical to the success of a project. It's only the little one-person jobs that don't "need" those features, and those tasks are now the domain of office automation software, not development teams.
On the downside, the first areas of a development team to be hit when there are budget cuts are QA, design/documentation and programming teams. Good managers hang on because they have a knack for getting the most done with their ever-reducing resources, but the poor ones are out the door as quickly as the rest of the team.
Many people have mentioned that some staff get retained because they "get along" with people in management. Where is the surprise here? If you don't get along with anyone except hard-core techs, how can you hope to collect business requirements (from people who don't speak geek), follow up on bug reports, or convince anyone that your work is important? Take the arrogant hard-core computer geek attitude and you just alienate the people you're supposed to be servicing.
While I'd rather program for fun, my job is servicing business needs. It took the first few years of my career to learn that, and that bit of experience is the main reason most placement agencies want people with 2-3 years experience or more. Working on part-time jobs during your education that are one-person development projects doesn't develop those skills and understandings, which is why interviewers only want to know about the work you did after graduating.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They are all just fairly unskilled jobs that happen to be in a technical company.
Sigh. I know it's very popular here on Slashdot to denigrate any career that doesn't involve all-night coding sessions propped up only by acid rock and Mountain Dew, but just because you don't have the skills to get an MBA, write a marketing plan, generate publicity for a product, write a script, or plan and maange a timeline for a new product release doesn't mean that the folks doing those jobs are unskilled.
Yes, I am (well, was, until recent layoffs) in marketing. I chose to develop my communication skills rather than my programming skills when I went to college (despite getting a 5 on the AP Pascal exam, and having received high marks in my high school career programming in BASIC and FORTRAN.) I have worked with a lot of IT people who didn't know their ass from their elbow, so just having the job doesn't mean you are skilled.
Just like those ineffectual IT people, sure, I have worked with incompetent marketing people. But please stop assuming that just because someone isn't coding in their job that they are unskilled. I dare you to write a halfway decent press release, or brochure, or anything else that makes your market want to pay money to your company to buy the wonderful software that you just coded. It's not as easy as it looks. And the company won't be successful if either one of us isn't doing our job well.
All the fluff in the world can't create and sustain a market for a piece of crap product, and the best product in the world won't find its way to the masses without some sales and marketing efforts. Try to respect my work, as I respect yours.
I used to work on the 83rd floor of a target.
On the plus side, I'm still suckin' air.
On the minus side, I haven't earned a dollar in salary since September, '01.
It not for lack of mailing out resumes, getting interviews (even second interviews,) or chopping my income requirements, moving to get my expenses down, cashing in the 401k to get rid of all my debts [actually, they were leaking close to a grand a month before that anyway so it waa cheaper to cash 'em in than hold on to 'em,]
Its just tough out there. I'm in a depression. The economy's in a recession.
Before the crash(es, two planes and an economy) I worked for somebody who believed that systems are maintained by oral tradition, never wrote down things like specs or documentation and was ignorant of the glaring flaws in the system and in her managerial abilities.
This person was a DE-motivator. The biggest kick in the 'nads you can ever get is a whiny voice intoning "But I 'TOLD' you." Yeah, like I have time to listen to every word of your endless stream of conciousness and engrave it in my memory.
I'm poor, going on broke but I'm still better off than if I'd stayed there.
Now I sleep nights (mostly,) and I've stopped worrying about planes and falling buiuldings but I still get nightmares about "But I TOLD you..."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The Programmers Guild is a recently established organization aimed at American programmers working together to safeguard their profession, their craft and their rights.
On their website, they state the following reasons for why they started the organization:
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Ok, I'm a tech head. Hold a BS in Comp Sci from GA Tech, a Java certification, and 4+ years experience in Java and internet related technologies with lots of breadth. I was on a contract position which was supposed to last 6+ months. Well, the client changed their mind and nuked all the contractors after 3 months. That was mid-October. I've been out since then and am struggling. I know SOOOO many other programmers here in Atlanta that are out of work too. These are no "lightweights" mind you! The market just plain sucks.
After 6 years of boom time where we were able to pick and choose companies and pay, now the tables are turned. I used to get 4-5 calls from recruiters a week back in 2000. Now I can't even get them to return my calls and answer my responses to their job postings! Companies are being VERY picky about who they bring in now. If you don't have EVERY skill they list on their want list, you're thrown in the trash. For instance, I've done DB2, Informix, SQL Server, MySQL, but NOT Oracle. As a Java developer, it really doesn't matter what the database is because you talk through JDBC. When I talk to recruiters though, and they say that the client is looking for somebody who has Oracle and I say that I have everything but and it would be no problem picking it up, they say "Sorry! No can do."
Basically, it SUCK out there!
BTW, if anybody knows of a position for a 4 yr Java Developer with server side experience..... Write me! makopack@yahoo.com
The Associated Press reports that "U.S. companies and other groups applied for 342,035 H-1B work visas in 2001, up 14 percent from 2000, before the economy tumbled.", "The number accepted also rose by 40 percent..." and "About half ... are for computer related jobs." The article cites research by UC Davis Professor Norman Matloff saying that "wages of computer programmers and engineers working in the U.S. on the visas
are 15 percent to 33 percent lower than those of U.S. citizens".
Mark Shevitz of VisaNow is quoted as saying, "I think it surprised everyone. All that you hear about in the media is these huge layoffs and the tech industry is just shedding workers."
Finally, the article reports "Bay Area companies Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel and Sun Microsystems were among the top users of the program in 2000, as were universities such as Harvard and Yale. The INS did not have numbers available on how many applications the companies filed last year amid layoffs.
----
BTW: It is illegal to use the H-1B program to lower wages from the rates prevailing in the absence of the program.
Here's information posted by an anti-H-!B activist at another site:
Additional information provided by an h1b activist (although I encourage people to avoid political action, there are far more effective things they can do with technology to deconstruct the edifice that did this to us because it is, after all, in existence because of technologists -- the real ones, not the Wired magazine ones):
80% of the US public opposed H1-B expansion. Part of what makes the bill increasing H1-B Visas so unusual is that it was so unpopular and was passed with very, very little debate.
Zazona is the most comprehensive site on the H1-B issue. Corrective legislation is now in a US congressional Committee. The philosophy of HR 3222 has been supported by a diverse group that includes Buchanan Supporters, Nader Supporters, and the National Urban League. HR 3222 is a compromise-it roles the level of new H1-B Visas back to 1998 levels and puts in place an unemployment adjustment mechanism.
H1-B Visa expansion was advocated by the ITAA. Organized opposition to H1-B includes:the AEA and the Programmers Guild.
You can Look at H1-B applications by company,state,city. You can write your Congressional representatives if you have a problem with the current H1-B situation. You can also write your state representatives. The only aspect of the H1-B issue that is in state jurisdiction is use of H1-B labor at state institutions. However, state representatives are influential in their parties-if your state representative writes a letter to congress it could mean a lot.
Seastead this.
I think you havea good point about a company needing good marketing - however, if a company is failing then wouldn't it make sense to adjust the marketing dept. first? After all, as you say a good or bad product can benefit from good marketing so that should be the area of first concern. If the product itself is just bad you can at least try to use the people there to fix it, though you may need to get people who know what they are doing to lead them.
As for my own experience, in any company I've been at I would have said laying off lots of the marketing and middle management types would have been a lot more healthy than laying off the technical staff. Almost all technical staff I've worked with have been very productive and done good work, which I've seen a lot of slacking or just simply inept (some actually creating MORE work than if they were not there through needing to fend off poor ideas on the tech side) marketing people in my day.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have ten years of OO design and development experience, but I don't have a degree. As you can expect, I've been out of work for a while and couldn't seem to get anyone to even call me back. One company did call me back. After the preliminary interview I had a second one with the CTO and DirEng. When they asked me what I had been doing I didn't have to say "Sitting around on my ass, mostly." Instead I pulled out my latest project, a little portable device built out of off-the-shelf embedded computer components and held together with some C++ and Python I wrote (not unlike the popular car MP3 player projects.)
Guess what? I got a job doing embedded development work at my old salary despite not having any real embedded experience at all! In part because I was able to demonstrate that I am resourceful, creative, and hard-working, even when nobody is holding a carrot/whip over me. That is what employers want.
So write some software, build some hardware, do something, anything, to differentiate yourself from the hordes of people who have been catching up on playstation between jobs.
burris
I worked at Intel (one of their software development houses in the mid-west) up to January 2001. I was actually part of a cross-platform Linux/Win32 apps group. In Jan. 2001 we were scheduled to move to a new building, but instead the division lost some 500 employees (myself included) due to budget cuts (now the new building sits half-empty with some of the tightest security systems installed I've ever seen ;-)
In addition to that, several other semi-local (one state over) businesses layed off large numbers of people (IBM and TI). Due to this, I, and many of my friends and former coworkers, found themselves in dire straights with poor job-outlooks. Perosnally, I spent nine months without work (and I didn't have a 401k or any real savings due to an automobile accident the previous year that wiped out my savings).
I eventually got lucky and found a job at a major University as a minor SysAdmin, making a fraction of what I was being paid before ($15/hour, but with benefits).
So, yes, things are really bad out there. If you are a techie and still have a decent job right now, consider yourself very lucky!
(signed annonymously and with no reference to locations because, in spite of the massive decrease in pay, I do feel very fortunate that I have my job, and my current manager was actually a friend who pulled some strings just to get me it)
Actually, not true.
;-)
;-)
I am a programmer with experience in many different languages. I'm fluent in C/C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc., etc.. Hell, I've even been employed in the past to code in Fortran, COBOL and Pascal (even had to re-write another's code in some of these languages into C.. which was ugly
But I found myself out of work due to massive budget cuts at a major company (Intel). In my case, the lay-offs seemed pretty indescriminate: some 500 people from my division lost their jobs. Some were posers who had done little more than code a few HTML/PHP/CGI pages (they were mostly temps, tho), but many were very talented people.
Now I have been forced to take a much lower paying sysadmin job just to survive. (Read my other rant here.
So don't think just because someone is a "real" techie they are immune- 'cuz they ain't
Contracting in the UK is dead, and it won't come back. Tony, Gordy and their chums have seen to that
I never understood the thinking behind the IR35 tax laws which basically destroyed the tax benefits of being an independant consultant.
The Govt. clearly thought that they'd close a few tax loopholes and make a bit more cash out of a small percentage of the population who could easily be portrayed as "having it too good for too long".
It must have been obvious to anyone with half a clue that contractors were an entrepreneureal, highly skilled, educated and above all mobile section of the workforce. Why they thought we'd stay and take it is anyones guess.
I work in the US now and I have heard of others relocating to Holland and Germany. Vote with your feet.
Would the last consultant leaving the UK please turn out the light.
Where are you based?
A guy I used to work with made a similar argument when he was made redundant a few weeks ago. He claimed there was nothing around, that no-one was recruiting, and so on.
And then the reality dawned.
Ironically enough, the same guy previously spent much time having a laugh at me because I valued skills and doing things properly, because I commute a significant distance to work, and because I usually only apply to jobs personally.
I know another guy, similar experience in similar fields, also recently made redundant. He lives in somewhere more tech friendly, used his contacts and made an effort, and found a new job pretty easily.
I'm also in the market myself at the moment, not redundant luckily, but certainly looking for a move. Strangely enough, by being prepared to make fair compromises, I'm having no trouble finding potential vacancies. I just don't expect to get paid twice what everyone else does, with zippo qualifications and limited experience, and have all the perks.
There's a certain generation out there who "grew up" with massively overpaid web programmers flooding the market, and high salaries because skilled work was short. These people seem to think that this is normal, and that it's somehow unfair for them to have to actually do some work to find a job. Sorry, but it just doesn't work that way.
While some people clearly have been genuinely unlucky in this climate and I have sympathy for them, I can't help thinking that many of those complaining are the freeloading types (MBAs, MCSE-wannabes, 2-minutes-of-HTML-and-I-deserve-to-be-rich kids) and they're just getting what's been coming to them for several months.
Sorry about the rant, but this prevailing attitude is really annoying me now. I've worked very hard to get where I am, and watched freeloaders keeping up or exceeding me in pay and conditions for the past two years. I don't think it's an accident that I still have a job while the freeloaders are getting binned, and I don't accept the argument that there isn't work around, because all the evidence I can see says there is.
True. God help you if you mention the word "Java" in your "we're hiring" page. You'll get flooded with clueless J2EE idiots to the point that you can't even find the reasonably intelligent people through the noise.
We just replaced the word "Java" with "OO programming" and the volume of applicants dropped 10x and the quality shot up.
Those of you saying this article is misleading and the layoffs aren't "techies" obviously have not been reading the news or the financials. The tech sector is IMPLODING.
I got the axe March 2nd from UUNET, where I was working as a Network Analyst in the Houston DC. A week or two before I got my walking papers, I was commenting to my coworkers that I was glad I was in the money making part of MCIWorldcom. I didn't think I was going to get hosed like the onsite MCI telecom guys did. ALL OF THEM. A buddy of mine worked in the MCI call center in Houston, doing help desk, he got layed off March 2nd too. 15% of MCIWorldcom got layed off. Those are techies that got it, telecom guys and network engineers.
We're hurting here in Houston, we got hit hard. Compaq layed off a couple thousand, Dell layed off a couple thousand, Nortel layed off, Enron melted down, Cable and Wireless and TXU **shut down** their call centers. IT shops all over town have gone into the crapper. There are so many techies out of work in Houston that its nearly impossible to get a CALL BACK, because there are dozens of applicants for each open position.
This isn't just the administrative assistants being layed off.
I have been to India (did consulting there) and have to say I have nothing to worry about. Sure some work will go to India, but you get what you pay for. I am not knocking the Indian programmers.
Here is the problem. The Indian programmers are not paid that much. Hence they cannot afford to train themselves and are totally reliant on the company. They also have the problem of not being able to buy the hardware that we have.
Result? Programming comes back. Even India now has competition from China. India is becoming too "expensive".
As an example of labour coming back no further than Canada. There are plenty of hightech companies in Canada? Why because labor is CHEAP! A very good programmer in Canada makes about 90K CDN, which translates to about 55K USD. This wage is good in Canada, but buys you very little outside of Canada. But that is what a Canadian programmer makes (hence why many Canadian programmers work in the US).
What does Canada offer? Great education, safe country included healthcare, etc, etc. A country like Canada makes it very hard for India to compete.
Hence my original comment is that jobs will come back, but you have to lower your expectations. BTW the "Indian threat" has been going on for a decade now!!!
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
At a recent job fair for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, there were the IT layoffs, and then there was everyone else. In fact, if you were primarily an IT skilled person, they put you in one line to meet the recruiter, and if you had any other substantial skills that were not IT related you were placed in another line. It was pretty creepy.
Of those "IT" skilled folks, I was able to easily catagorize three groups of people: The first group were the real "nerd" group. You could see who they were because they had the body language and appearance that they didn't usually dress in a suit. There weren't many of them. Then there were the recent graduates. They were more numerous. They were the fresh faced folks who looked as if they'd been coached pretty well.
Then there were the folks who had clearly ridden the dot com boom up as far as it could take them. They often had a few worry lines on their faces. And they were the most numerous. Just from idle chatter while waiting in line, I discovered that many of them tended to emphasize what projects they had worked on with what packages, instead of what they'd done. Many of them may have been pretty good at what they did, but without much to show for what they'd done, they were in a terrible bind.
I was there to shop. I have some background in RF and control systems as well as software.
And the recruiters clearly were looking for more than just an IT background. Yes, software engineering and programming experience is good, but they were looking for other skill sets as well. The recruiters seemed to be quite happy to have the pick of the IT litter. The job fair was put together just before the really big dot com cuts sank in.
Anyway, I've been working for the same company for over a decade. It's been comfortable, if not exactly lucrative. It's not sexy work, but it's stable. Draw whatever conclusions you want.
The bit about Juliette Katz wondering why she's where she is starts with:
Juliette Katz spent the past seven years sharpening her resume as a marketing manager at America Online, Food.com and other Internet start-ups. so that's at least 3 different companies in 7 years... or more likely at least 4 if you assume "other" means at least 2,and I'd bet it was more then that. That means she probably spent perhaps a year and a half at each place.. maybe 2 at one or another.
I've seen this over and over in the whole of IT space.. people that have zero company loyalty and will jump at the slightest higher offer. Companies aren't going to do what they can to keep you if you're likely to just jump ship yourself. I saw a group of people I work with jump for a new startup, and the kept asking me to go with them, but I knew it wasn't smart so I stayed. Now most of them are either not there anymore, or overworked and/or worried for their jobs.
Personally, I've been in my current job for over 4 years, and have no plans to leave. I'm loyal, I work hard, and I'm rewarded for it.
Maybe if some of these other people would've stuck with a company for more then a few months, they might've had someone above them that knew them, knew their worth, and fought to keep them if/when layoffs happened.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue