Slashdot Mirror
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?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
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 &
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.
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.
- 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.
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 :)
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