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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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... is bad. Don't be looking for a contract here anytime soon....
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
But after eight months without a job, the 37-year-old Raleigh, N.C., resident had burned through his 401(k) savings and was nearing the end of unemployment insurance.
How did that happen? $401k in 8 months? Am I missing something here?
Maybe he should try relocating to find a proper job.
Someone's got to say it:
How many of these people are MBA's vice-presidents of marketing or business analysts.
They don't mention anything about out-of-work programmers, sysadmins and webmasters. I'd think that a lower percentage of real techies are out of work.
Replies welcome any out-of-work C coders. Anyone?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
These are quotes from the article about the jobs that people were laid-off from :-
"Here I am throwing mail with an MBA"
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager "
"write scripts for now-defunct Web soap opera The Spot"
"quality assurance (QA) job "
"product manager for software development "
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.
Sig is taking a break!
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.
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?
With the end of start-up dreams, times are now bad for techies. One year ago, finding a job was a easy as posting a message on Dice (or equivalent sites), and waiting 24 hours. Then, you just had to choose for the best offer.
Nowadays, finding an IT job is *difficult* , especially as opensource techies. Not a lot of company are hiring. Either they already have their technical staff, or they moved to external consultancy services.
There were plenty of new jobs because there were a lot of new companies popping up everywhere. Now, it's over.
I'm looking for a job for weeks with no success...
{{.sig}}
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?
I'm lucky. I got a programming job at a 2-year college in 1982. I grew through the ranks and am now in charge of a 25-person tech support team. (Management sucks, but that's for another /. story comment.)
My pay is around $50K and I sat by in my safe job while others I knew, many of them my students from my evening classes I taught, some my former employees, many friends, flew off and made huge bucks and taunted me endlessly about what a fool I was to stick in my "low pay" job.
I've also known a lot of them to use their income to buy $40K+ cars, huge houses, and saddle themselves with all sorts of debt.
As for foolish me, I will be able to retire in five years with a full state pension, medical benefits for life, and still be just 47 and able to do some of those high-risk high-return jobs later.
A bit of gloat? Yeah, perhaps. Human nature. Doesn't mean I don't feel bad for them nonetheless.
However, tech is still the future and the job market will turn around and the big rewards will return. So while it might be necessary to throw mail around and make $13/hour for a while, just don't fall behind in your tech skills. One day they'll pay off big again.
My advice, however, is next time around (or if you still have a fat job), squirrel away some cash for a rainy day, keep expenses down, and stay out of debt. Then next time a dry period blows through, you may just have enough saved to not have to work, go back to school and learn those new skills you've been wanting to get, and then come out the other side stronger and end up in the long run, much better than I am. Because everyone knows, intelligent risk taking, while it often has short-term losses, over the long run, pays off much better than the guy (like me) who plays it safe. No one gets rich playing it safe...
If you're still looking for an IT-job, the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy, ...
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector. Jobs over there are however relativily scarce as there aren't a lot of (big) companies in this sector. Not something to place your bets on.
All in all, take what you can for the time being. While searching for the perfect job for over a year shows a lot of tenacity, corporations usually value things like experience a lot higher.
<Sig>The good thing about having a good memory is ... euh
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)
I agree times are hard (having got laid of by a biggish now smallish teleco equipment manufacturer) but managed to find a job before my contract ended.
In the UK at the moment there seems to be a shortage of real-time software engineers with a number of companies I know having a shortfall in that area.
However in the IT support, web development, etc. areas then I agree times are very hard and not really showing signs of recovery despite what our blinkered politicians try to say.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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 &
The telecom slump (crash) hit Denver pretty hard. I've been out of work for over 9 months without a good lead in sight. Right now, I'm working a $12/hr temp job that could get canned at any moment, but I'm glad to have it.
Colorado seems to have this tendency to put all of its eggs into one economic basket. Before the telecom crash, there was the petroleum industry crash, and other economic downturns before that.
I'd have to side with the pessimists. Many of the jobs during the golden years are gone forever. And forget the crazy salaries! $110K for an NT admin?! Sheesh.
WWW
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.
Come on lets be real here, how many people during the .com boom thought "He got a job as a developer ? Bloody Hell"
.COM created a huge amount of jobs in companies that had no business being in business, this skewed the market. Now its a question of being the person with experience, and being a _good_ SOFTWARE ENGINEER, rather than a "hacker" or "techie". Basically folks
The reality is that
Welcome back to 1995. Talent counts, experience counts. There are still loads of jobs out there if you have the right experience, if you spent 2 years developing a "cool" website that went under using non-core languages (i.e. not MS, not C++, not Java) then you'll struggle, because the companies who work like that went bust.
The problem, though, is that most peoples' networks are down and dead in the water.
Networking is the easiest way to get a job. Personally, it's the only way I've gotten my jobs in the past (apart from one blip, but that was mostly accidental).
The problem is that it gets really difficult to network your way into a position when everyone you can network with is also looking for a job. Talk about Catch 22.
Experience doesn't seem to count for much right now. Or rather, it does, but you'd better have EXACTLY the experience they're looking for, in stone, that you got employed to have on a professional contract/job basis (which means no ramp-up time either... you can't know the concepts and wing it until you know the API set you're talking to -- you need to know it all now).
Add to that the fact that the market is saturated with all those resume's from out-of-work web developers, perl scripters, VB devs, etc etc. who aren't as experienced -- but are still applying for every job that comes up, and you've got real problems.
It gets even more problematic when the same job is being touted by 15 different recruitment/staffing firms. I got three phone calls in one day, all from different firms, all talking about the same job. My fiancee' then got 4 calls from different firms about the same job.
It's a mess out there. There's thousands of people out of work, and they're all scrabbling down the same avenues trying to get a job.
Take this advice to heart: If you can network, do it. Unless you have a good in, you're not going to be able to get the time of day from most people.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
A lot of the people I know were "paper techies" who used to brag about how much they made. Well, who has the job now?
:)
On the other hand, I also know plenty of good people who got let go "just because". They were adequte to stellar performers, who were in the wrong business unit at the wrong time.
If your skills are marketable, and you're lucky, you'll find a job. Bottom line. If you have so-so skills (see oddtodd.com for a good list of so-so skills) then you won't find a job. A professionally polished resume doesn't matter if everything "interesting" you did was for a bunch of fucked companies that didn't deliver anything.
I think that's the crux of the biscuit. All the badass experience doens't matter if everyone looks at it and says, "but this company didn't *do* anything, and it failed". OTOH, if you delivered (more or less on schedule and at budget) a (blah blah blah buzzword) then you have something. You'll find work. Software is still being developed, web sites are launched, the world is still turning.
We're just at the bottom of a cycle. At the end of the hype, everyone was saying "XML this" and "Web Services that". Well no one really knew what to do with all that. Once people start to figure out how to hook up the latest tech with the consumer/end user, the same way Netscape brought the web to the masses, you'll see it pick up. It may take 2 years, or 5. But it'll happen. The VC will go back to insane spending. All the MBAs and "Director of Multimedia Development" types will work again. Don't worry.
Just make sure my latte is right, OK? Working in the NOC takes good Joe. It won't be long before you're bossing me around again.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I know this has been mentioned a lot the past couple months, but gov't is where its at right now. I'm currently in the process of converting my military TS clearance over to contractor and giving serious thought to doing gov't work again (I'm a sysadmin).
The company I work for makes equipment for telecoms and we've been hit HARD the last few months with no sign of letting up (at least not for another 12-18 months...maybe).
Say what you want about working for The Man, but The Man will provide me with a salary 1/3rd greater then I'm currently making (have clearance, will pay). Its a 5 year contract so unless I'm fired, I'm safe from layoffs. How many others can claim that right now?
If the market improves, then maybe I'll go back private sector. But right now, gov't work is safe.
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 am CEO of a small company which specialises in web development. It is still true (at least in my part of the world) that many "web design" companies have staff whos only qualification is to have taught themselves to "program" in HTML. Many of them are from non-techy backgrounds, often design or Mickey Mouse degrees like Media Studies. These companies often offer all types of services (such as those that really require real programming or project management skills) which they don't have the skills and experience to offer. So if these people are being made redundant and having a hard time finding new jobs - well, tough.
To get a good job is hard. Always has been, apart from temporary crazy blips like the dot-com boom. Just because it is now hard to get a good job does not mean that good jobs do not exist, rather it means that the brief period of crazyness when mediocre people could get good jobs is over!
Here in San Francisco - the epicenter of the dot-com boom and bust - the market is grim. Finding work, even if you are highly qualified and experienced is a slow, brusing experience. If all you have is a reasonable degree and a couple of years experience at some failed dot-com, then its essentially impossible to find work in the high-tech sector and damn hard to find it elsewhere.
Over the summer of 2001 the City was flooded with laid off tech workers. For several months you literally could not hire a moving truck from any Bay Area rental company. Every one was hired and heading back east as yet another dot-commer left the City.
Its not all bad news, however. Housing costs in San Francisco are falling back from the ludicrous heights they reached a year or two back. Its now possible to rent in the City for less than $1000 a month. You can now buy a decent home for less than $350,000. Neither was possible two years ago. The City is also becoming more civilized again as the white heat of the boom years cools down a little.
Its also possible to detect a very slight improvement in the job market. This is partly because so many people have left the local market: noticeably fewer people are competing for the few jobs that come up. Its also true that as the economy slowly, slowly begins to come alive again, a few companies are starting to hire again.
But it will be a long time before we truly recover. Anyone remember the mid 80's?
Sailing over the event horizon
I was laid off with about 100 other contract workers last july. The market here is so depressed that the recruiters are leaving in droves. The few programming jobs that are getting posted are very vertical niches and as someone that always had a broad background in development, the positions are going to the couple of people that have been doing one thing for 15 years. it's tough going from $160k to unemployment when you've been working steady for 20+ years. Doesn't help when your kid's financial aid forms go back 3 years for income. So, here I am working with agencies that used to call weekly with people I've never heard of that have no idea what any of the buzzwords they get asked for mean. You want fries with that?
All the people interviewed in that article are wimps. They clearly say they are looking for jobs similar to what they had before. Tough luck chumps, go look somewhere else. They think that because they are taking commitment-less jobs while they look for another "fall-back-into-a-shitload-of-money-job" we should feel sorry for them? Get up and tough it out and look for a different type of job. I can't imagine someone with a MBA is limited to dot coms.
I began working at a private manufacturing company several years ago. It's not glamorous, but making $45k in a very rural area (read: low cost of living) doesn't seem too bad to me. Actually, I probably got hired on at a good time; I expect the salary offered would be lower now. Anyway, as the only "techie" here at this plant, I've been able to watch the tech industry crash and burn knowing that the only thing that could take my job away would be the plant closing, which isn't going to happen.
I'm in London, UK.
/ever/ been unemployed. It's pretty fsckin' crappy, I can tell you. The only bright spot is having plenty of spare time for reading (Slashdot, Bugtraq, Incidents, Vuln-Watch, ISN, nanog,...), and finally getting round to writing some actual releasable-quality Free software - which is tons o' fun. Otherwise, frankly, it's damn depressing. And reading posts here saying "anyone who can't get work must be a loser or a prima-donna or a MCSE-mill twit" doesn't help! ;p
I wouldn't have believed it possible a year ago, but I've been out of work since my last employer went bust in August 2001. OK, I'm not a hardcore CS-grad C programmer - I'm mostly a Perl programmer, with a minor in "anything-todo-with-security", and basic (NT, Linux, BSD) sys-admin skills. I'm not asking an insane salary. I've never been unemployed since starting in IT professionally in 1995, and this is now the longest I've
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I am find it real hard to even believe that the MBA degree is worth anything. Let us look at what it says, Master of Business Administration. Doesn't this sound like a glorified secretary? If the degree imparted any real knowledge, then the holder of such a degree should be able to run his/her own company/business. Since this is obviously not the case, why then does such a degree exist? Management, management comes the chorus! Most MBA's go to work fo SOMEONE ELSE, rather than starting their own company. What kind of mastery does this imply? None, IMNSHO. Working for someone else may pay the bills, but I know of no business where a newly MBA'd individual would be allowed to MASTER the business right out of school. Work expierence is what counts. This guy is a ME, yet he is not doing ME work from the get-go. This looks like someone who can pass tests and get grades, but who is NOT working in a field for which he studied to be a part. This guy seems confused, someone told him that you get an engineering degree coupled with an MBA and you can go places. Look where he went. That fact says it all. Valued contributers to any organization are retained, or re-trained. Real world seems to be intruding on the fantasy world once again.
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.
Why, oh, why, don't all of you out of work open source hippies try to sell your software!!!
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.
is now people want MORE for LESS. Most jobs you see advertised now are for, say, a Systems Administrator versed in Solaris [ok], AIX [ok], IRIX [ok], Linux [Alright...], MCSE Certified [Okay, i can see all of the above for Sr. Level..] almost-DBA Level oracle knowlede [ ditto.. ] J2EE [WTF?!@] 10 years experience [Righto] a Bachelors [!] and some_unheardof_application_that_nobody_uses [Broadvision!]. For $35,000/yr.
A tad exaggerated maybe.. but thats where its going. I got a job april of last year, and the conditions are less than ideal. I come in making as a UNIX administrator what I made as a helpdesk rep at one of my first jobs. I felt insulted. [but, i didnt have much choice].
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
Things have been bad in New Jersey for a while (telecom slump). How are they elsewhere?
As an adopted citizen of Buffalo, things are pretty rough up here. On the up side, though, there's a recession coming up.
Hey, when your city's been in a depression for the last thirty years, a recession is actually a step up.
--saint
I'm seeing a really disturbing trend in here. It seems those who have recently lost their jobs are taking a lot of heat for their situation. Some people seem to suggest that unemployment is almost always a result of poor skills, poor performance, poor planning, or a combination of these mistakes.
This pious "I have a job, they're easy to get and keep if you're as good as me" mentality smacks of a selfish immaturity drawn from too little interest in others' situations. These same people that are saying things like:
I believe that doers do, and whiners don't.
A lot of the people I know were "paper techies" who used to brag about how much they made. Well, who has the job now?
All the people interviewed in that article are wimps.
I'd bet if (when?) these people lose their jobs, they won't be blaming themselves, but instead the President, Congress, Alan Greenspan, bad managers, stupid customers, El Nino, anti-technology conspiracies, and anything else that might lessen the impact on their over-inflated egos.
Give these people a break. You may need one yourself one day.
I'm in the 10th year of my software development career. I've done large-scale custom middleware for most of that, and web architecture and development for the last two. Last spring I was laid off from my contracting position with a major employer, one of its first round of cuts. I was at least given two weeks of notice. I spent that two weeks calling people I knew, hitting all the local employment sites on the web, and stopping by to see what the big firms around had to offer. This was the start of the big down turn.
I was lucky at that time to move into another contract, and even fortunate enough to keep my $100k pay rate. This contract though was not in my core skill set, and I was not doing a good job at it. I used my networking skills to learn of another project at the firm that was having trouble and that needed my skills. I consulted on their floundering project a bit while I floundered on mine, and eventually got myself transferred. Now nearly a year later we're fielding a groundbreaking project that's going to have a big impact on a national pharmaceutical distribution firm.
Alas, that contract is done, and I'm being pushed into the market again, at still a worse time. I've seen this coming though, and I've spent the time to know the market. I know what people are making. I know that there are over 100 other contractors in my field applying for every job that I see. I know they're getting $15-20/hr less today than last year on bill rates. I know some of them have been out there for months.
That's why I've done the same calling, the same web searching, the same drive-by interviewing. I've done the planning for when I'm done here in three weeks and am a month from selling off the car and the house to downsize my own liabilities. I've spent the last couple of months making giant payments on other things to lower monthly outlay. I've started my wife looking for a job and daycare for the two-year-old boy.
And today, I've heard from old colleagues, I should hear that I'm being offered a position that is at once a career step up and a salary step down. From being a highly paid contractor I'm going back to corporate life as a senior business analyst, the guy who whips sales people back to reality and IT folks into a frenzy to keep sales people selling. It's what I want to do, but it's not going to pay me as well. And I'm goign to be working in a couple weeks, which is a good thing.
I've gotten that position by managing my career in the local IT environment. I keep in touch with old colleagues and managers. I read in the papers and keep up on the firms. I know their challenges and their objectives before I go in for the interview. I find out who the managers are and I learn who they've worked with, who they've promoted, and who they've canned. I know whose coat tails they're riding. I find out what technology the firm is using, and what technology battles are going on. If you can't find out which side of those your prospective manager is on, you've gotta find a comfortable spot on the fence and find out which way to lean when you can.
The bottom line is that Skills Are Not Enough! At least 75 of the 100 people applying for the job have the skills. Fifty are probably experts. To land the job you've got to offer more. You've got to show insight and planning. Today you've got to be an industry expert, not just a technology expert. You've got to show them that you're going to keep them from making the same mistakes that you made at your last job. Most of all, I think, you MUST make them believe that you're taking the job not because you're about to lose your car and your home, but because you want to be a part of that firm. You need to be part of the firm because that's what's going to make your career grow. And if that's the case, then you're fortunate. If you're up on the local scene you're more likely to find that.
- Sig this!
Periodic bouts of unemployment are a feature of the modern lean and mean, just in time economy. It's inefficient, wasteful and demoralizing but it's not likely to change anytime soon either.
The trick is to prepare for it while you're working.
Turn the inevitable periods of unemployment into growth opportunities. Learn new skills or expand old ones. See if you can find a worthwhile volunteer job in your skill set. Read widely. Remember that having and keeping a job confers no moral superiority so your feeling of self-worth must come from somwhere else.
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...
I'm nearly 19, Have my MCSE, CCNA, Hell of a lot of experence
There are people who have more years of experience than you've been alive, and they are struggling to find jobs. Just trying to inject a little perspective.
Just out of interest though, what skills would you be looking to aquire for your company right now?
We've just recruited a very experienced business development manager. Other than that, we're not recruiting, but we're not laying off either.
The music has officially stopped; hope you're happy with the company you sat down with (Assuming you were lucky enough to find a seat.) Expect to be with them for a while. Things were just starting to look up when Enron drew our attention to the fact that some companies out there are a big scam. I suspect investigation will uncover about a dozen more fairly large companies doing the same thing, which will leave investors with the heebie jeebies for another year at the very minimum.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Read this article about the sort of folks more likely to be laid off. Here's its headline:
And so it goes.
the first thing you have to do is pay the rent,
feed your kids.
EVERYTHING comes after.
studying philosophy should come at a time when
survival is easy.
Working for necessity's mother.
"...the brief period of crazyness when mediocre people could get good jobs is over!"
Yeah, like when my dad was a warehouse laborer making $15.00 an hour in the 70's. It's a good thing that this 'middle class' madness is coming to an end.
From the article: She is versed in programming, account management, and customer
You may be horrified to hear this, but not all programming is computer programming. In this case it probably means organizing marketing programs.
bp
Thats about the only good result of the slump :-(
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.
Hey, techies losing their jobs, that's rough. But it's not as bad as my situation - I got laid off at the local grocery store so that they could hire a techie to do bagging!
Joking aside, the economy is fairly stagnant in general. My father's (civil) engineering company has had a difficult time finding work, because nobody wants to build anything in the slump (not like it's easy to normally find work out here - indept farmers don't exactly have a lively income).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
When I see a story titled "The World of the Laid Off Techie" I expect to hear about people laid off from actual technical jobs. Instead there's the Aggie "throwing mail with an MBA" (it doesn't say what his former job was, but I doubt it used his mechanical engineering degree), a former marketing manager who might know a little programming, etc. I'm sure there are many actual techies laid off, and their stories might be worse than these ex-suits described in the story, but one thing is very clear: the reporter doesn't even know what a techie is.
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.
That doesn't mean other people aren't qualified or smart, but when jobs are tight, people with lots of experience and credentials get the jobs. Think of it this way: during the dot-com bubble, companies desparately retrained and attracted workers from anywhere they could, but these are likely the first ones to go again.
Ahh, but there is a big reward. For that 50k/year he probably works little overtime, which means time with family (if so inclined) or other hobbies. I'm in a similear situation, I turned down a .com job (acually it wasn't offered, but I had decided to turn it down shortly into the interview) a few years back because I want a life. At 25 I would rather waterski behind a boat that can just barely pull me, then to own a nice boat that I don't have the time or energy to use. I'm only getting older, already my body complains about things that 5 years ago were no problem. I'm not every 30! Everyone I know who is old enough to know tells me that things really start going downhill much latter, and I have at least 10 good years left, and maybe 30. I'm also appear to be about average as as far as how far down I am already.
Now you can take your choice, high risk, big bucks, no life when you can enjoy it; or low risk, still excellent bucks (average pay is around $30k/year if I remember right, and that is US, add in the rest of the world and it goes down), and time to enjoy life.
And don't forget that part of risk is not making it. A lot of .com people took the high risk jobs, and didn't make the big bucks, now they are sitting on a pile of dept that assumed they would make the big bucks. Not a good situation to be in.
Take your pick. Me, I'd rather have my life with low risk, and a rewaed I'm like to get, than the life of others who took the risk, but didn't get the reward.
Every old Tandy CoCo user ought to recognize his name, at least the ones that ran OS-9. I'd get my employer to hire him but we're poor bastards.
Well, okay, OS-9 runs on a lot more than the old 6809 CoCo's, but that's what I ran it on. Pretty sweet to have a multiuser, realtime OS on a "toy" computer you picked up at Radio Shack.
But he fears his luck is running out. Last month he moved from a carriage house in Malibu, Calif., to a one-bedroom apartment in nearby Venice. His larger fear is that the best job of his life--writing for The Spot--is behind him, and his career will be a string of boring jobs. As a fallback plan, he's taking a real-estate course later this month.
... I got laid off when my software company went belly up (actually sold a product, not a .com, just ran out of money). This was not a wasteful, Aeron chair place, but it was a fabulous environment to work in. Really smart people and the technical guys were seperated from the marketing/sales by half a continent. Was definitely fun and the first place I've ever worked at where there were a sizeable number of people I thought were significantly smarter than me. Freedom was unparalleled, the work interesting and stimulating.
I found a job in 3 weeks working for a place doing government contracting. It pays the bills and I was happy to get it after 3 weeks of no return phone calls, let alone interviews (I have 4 years programming/web/database experience). Salary a slight bump down ($3K), but I took it.
But I really feel like it was so much fun. I miss it. I don't regret it. I don't even regret our CEO not selling out (I could've pocket $20-$40K in my paltry stock options if they took the deal after I'd been there around six months. But It would have cost me another year working at the funnest place ever). Sigh....
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
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 :)
Maybe I would disagree on the order of priorities (first feed the kids, then pay the rent), but, overall, this is a most sensible post.
Philosophy? When there's barely enough money to keep you alive?
Come on!
This sounds like media FUD and that we're not getting the whole story on this guy. Unfortunately, the media is great at finding the oddball and making him the "norm". I would grant you that if this was geologists getting laid off in an oil crunch (i.e., those who are stuck working for one industry) that would be different.
I'm not saying some fields are having a hard time, but I find it VERY odd that someone with an engineering degree from Texas A&M AND an MBA is having a hard time landing a job other than sorting mail. I would love to know the answers to the following:
Have you look for work in other states? I have a stepson going to Texas A&M this school is about #5 or 7 in the nation for engineering. They also have a strong networking foundation as well as a lot of alumni in business locally. I can't believe he couldn't come back to Texas and find an engineering job. You can't just look in your town or even state. Sometimes you have to move to where the jobs are.
How old are you? If you're under 30 you may want to drop the MBA mention unless you're looking for a job in that field. Advanced titles can be a catch 22, i.e., employers think you're overqualified for lower positions, but aren't willing to hire you for the upper level positions because you don't have enough years of experience.
I would add: If you were some dot-commer management previously making a salary way above your experience/job duties from the regional average, I would list my salary as more reasonable if asked. Employers who look and see some 29 year old making well over the norm are going to shitcan the application because they are going to assume that's the range you're looking for.
Yes, these may seem like fudging or leaving out something on the application. However done creatively, this is NOT the same as declaring a degree you don't have.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
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.
Believe it or not, tech companies need non-techies to succeed. You do need designers, marketers, and managers to succeed in the web design business. It's not all just backend-coders.
A successful business requires a team approach. What made/makes the web a success is simplicity. It is the simplicity fo the web that made it a success. If it required people to know C++ or other "real programming or project management skills" then it never would have taken off.
I would think a CEO would know these things. But then again since I don't have a degree in Computer Science and have only worked in multimedia and web design/production since '94 I may be wrong.
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.
Now Delaware is about to be Slashdotted!
;-)
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
Yeah, now we just need to get rid of mediocre CEOs
who think that a full time software engineer should also be able to do the full time jobs of a sysadmin and web designer.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
It's far, far worse than you think. I currently write device drivers and systems level code for a living. Right now, I'm having to deal with an employer that's struggling to make payroll (Been dealing with that for 8 months now) and trying to find a job in this stupid market. Few prospects in the Dallas area- and the ones I've sent off resumes to have returned dead silence.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I mean they *ARE* trying to cut costs, and a guy with an MBA probably expects to get paid more than an equivalent programmer without the Paper...
Given the recent Enron fiasco on top of the general Bad Economy Thing (BETtm), things in Houston are pretty bad. Compaq, one of the areas larger tech employers has done significant layoffs, too.
;)
I am still employed, thankfully, but my company has also done layoffs, which means more work--fewer people.
I moved down to Houston a year ago, and damnit, I want the economy rebounded already so I can get the hell out of here!
a bad product with good marketing will have a much better chance of its company surviving that a company with a good product but lousy marketing. As a techie who's the son of a marketing guru, I can assure you this is simply untrue. If it were true, I'd be buying high schooler-coded projects and $10 million dollar marketing teams. One of the first tenets of marketing is that nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing. Similarly, nothing bolsters a good product faster than good marketing. These two entities, marketing and development, are codependent. If there's a scaleback, intelligent convention dictates that both be scaled back equally (that's how our company handled its most recent round of layoffs).
Believe it or not, tech companies need non-techies to succeed.
No! You don't say! Thank God for that. I'm doing something right! I've got business managers, graphic designers, a journalist and marketing specialists on my team, and only a couple of techies.
What made/makes the web a success is simplicity. It is the simplicity fo the web that made it a success. If it required people to know C++ or other "real programming or project management skills" then it never would have taken off.
Yes. Google is wonderfully simple, for instance. But that doesn't mean that it is simple to create a system like Google. Buying a book on Amazon with one-click is really simple, but that doesn't mean that it was simple to create Amazon's web site. I could go on...
We use graphic designers on all our projects, believe me. We specify the requirements of the interface, the designers do drafts, the clients approve them, and then the techies make the system look like the designs. But the graphic design work is often only about 10% of the overall project, both in cost and importance.
Look at pretty much any major, successful web site. They are often driven by complex content management systems, linked into ERM and CRM systems, and often legacy systems.
The fact of the matter is that many people in the "web design" industry up until now have been neither professional graphic designers nor professional programmers. Knowing 'now to make a web page' is not difficult. Being an excellent graphic designer or programmer is difficult. That's why I do not feel sorry for all these people who are finding it difficult to find work now. It's because they were getting well paid for a relatively simple job.
I would think a CEO would know these things. But then again since I don't have a degree in Computer Science and have only worked in multimedia and web design/production since '94 I may be wrong.
You are a web design/production specialist? Can you make me a site like Slashdot then? Can you create a site on top of a clients in-house created CRM system? Can you create a site with a single point of data entry, but output in HTML, WAP, and WebTV format using XML and XSL? I would have thought a professional web designer with so many years experience would know these things... Or are you really just a mediocre graphic designer that knows HTML and a bit of Javascript?
Yeah, now we just need to get rid of mediocre CEOs who think that a full time software engineer should also be able to do the full time jobs of a sysadmin and web designer.
Did I say that? No, I didn't.
The point of my post was that there have been a lot of people who wouldn't cut it as professional graphic designers or programmers who have managed to make a good living during the dot-com boom as "web designers", when in reality all they really know is HTML and understand a bit of Javascript. There are a lot of these people around, and frankly they are just mediocre people doing a realively simple task. That's one reason why they're having so many problems getting work now the dot-com boom is over.
I saw one position (on Dice?) that wanted 10+ years of Cobol and Java. Like the number of people who have used both Cobol and Java professionally during the past decade can be counted on more than the fingers on one thumb.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Yes, I'm probably over simplifying it here, but isn't that the way it should be? I mean, heck, I love doing tech work for the sake of tech work, but I don't expect to make any money from it. The real money in IT, IMHO, should be made in the pursuit of using IT as a leverage to make a business stronger and more efficient.
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
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
That article was straight out of the 1970s.
Today some people job hop, but many more people sign on for a project and move on when the project (or their part of it) is finished. If you stay on as a "staff programmer," not only do you not get the tasks that help you develop your skills (they go to experts brought on board for the project), you also have a harder time getting your next job because HR departments increasingly expect specialization.
The older developers tend to be in project management or senior guru roles, something that takes much more time than any simple development task.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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
anyone who uses their 401k as their emergency fund is on crack. they should get crappy temp work before they touch their 401k/ira funds
Maybe their out of any other kind of money.
As unvelibable as it might seem, people can run out of money.
I took a job at UPS for the same reason. I recently quit because it wasn't where I wanted to be. However, just because the jobs aren't available does not mean you can't MAKE the job. Contract consulting isn't such a bad game. And you can purchase the monthly benefits that are so coveted with typical employment. So that might mean you can't live the lifestyle you're used to, but at least the subject of the article was able to go 8 months on savings before getting desparate. At least he seems like a smart guy. At least he's not afraid to swallow his pride and get a job, even if its less than desireable.
Why he's embarrased about it, I'll never understand. Its work. Its money. I used to love telling people I was a supervisor at UPS when they witnessed some technological marvel I was working on or had produced. With the resulting shock and explaination that I should consider a career change, I ask them if they're hiring. The subject doesn't typically come up again.
Its not all bad. The blue collar industries are delighted to get a flood of competant employees during a downturn. People who are used to working 80 hour weeks make wonderful workers. They show up every day, they never complain about working too much.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Many of them are from non-techy backgrounds, often design or Mickey Mouse degrees like Media Studies.
You're right on about the web development industry. Professional shops who've been doing it since before '99 were probably a little better prepared for the current slump, so hang in there. I have a friend who runs a 5-man web design shop, and they're now hustling to catch up on the "harder" aspects of web development, ie databases, online ordering, etc. It's a tough business right now, but they're pros and they know how to compete.
I worked for that company when I was in high school, long before the web boom, when their core business was interactive CDROMs and video production. I was grateful for the opportunity to work on "Mickey Mouse" stuff like banging out HTML, as it was just the opportunity I needed to get into Perl, C, and networking. While not every one of your hires will have the skills and experience you're looking for right off the bat, I hope you'll keep your eye out for motivated young guys who want to learn. They just might turn into the star coders you need.
> There is no point in half assing life. Either bust ass or get out. This is weak.
I find I must protest your implication. His implication is not to "half-ass" life, but to expend less of his life on his job. At the expense of financial reward, he's getting more time to spend on things other than his job. If he chooses to spend that extra time watching TV, that's his choice. I wouldn't do the same (actually, I don't do the same) but this does not necessarily mean he's a layabout.
I've had a lot of people tell me that I could do better than I have if I'd get a job at a bigger company, but since money is only a part of what I want to get from life, I'm instead working for less of it. In trade, I get to work at a great little company serving a niche market, making decent money doing what I love doing. If you think that means I'm "half-assing" my life, my sons and my instruments will disagree with you.
Virg
The average 401K isn't very large. People with families and average paying jobs save just enough for the match if they can spare at all.
For one thing, I have multiple physical disabilities and IT is my field. What frustrates me is that others and I can't find a job because employers are afraid to hire us. They think we can't handle the job because of our physical abilities. I read that about 80% of U.S. citizens with disabilities are unemployed (from a few years ago and I am sure it is worse now). Yes, there are laws but we're are still being discriminated with almost every employers.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Escpecially as you get older. A new-brand insurere like ACM or Blue cross is about $120 * age-in-years per year when all the deductables and co-pays are factored in. Someone in their 50s may be looking at $6-7K per adult in their family. 20-somethings may just need a couple thousand a year.
If you buy something from one those street-poster ads, or a company you never heard of, you will never get a claim paid. Matt Damon's movie Rainmaker is about this.
> Both may be more physically demanding then what you are used to, but still will be a paycheck.
Good reading. He's got a job, you dimwit. And, since it's a part time, $5.50/hr convenience store job, I'd have a hard time saying he feels any particular job is "beneath" him. I find it easier to believe you're just more full of bluster than comprehension.
Virg
I live in Canada, so I'm familiar with the NA situation. What's it like in European IT centres (London, Amsterdam, Dublin, etc.)? Let's say I wanted to find a contract as a Java or C++ programmer, with lots of Linux/Unix experience (I'm not a web programmer). What's the deal over there?
In NA, it's a funny situation: there are a LOT of web people out of work (Flash, Javascript, etc.) but there is still plenty of work in the higher-end tech stuff (C++, Java esp. J2EE, and so forth). It seems like there is still something of a shortage of programmers -- I still get calls from headhunters, though not like before, I admit -- and the people who are really hurting are the web developers.
I'm glad I'm not the onlt one noticing the dissapearence of the Middle Class.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
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
So basically you want the government to save your ass and thus your cushy IT jobs?
In a word, YES!
There was a time when businesses treated their employees, their PEOPLE, as investments. Treat them well, they perform well. If you need a new skill, pay to have someone trained to the task.
Somehow businesses stopped trusting its own people. Somehow this idea disappeared when flashy salemen showed the beancounters how they can save gobs of money by abusing the H1B system. There are so many cases of H1B fraud that fraud is the rule and not the exception. Suddenly, the notion of instant gratification naturally agrees with business people wanting to save money.
This shift represents a business perspective of its people from being assets to being liabilities. It's immoral.
Back to us wanting the government to save our asses? YES! I want the government to save our asses because THAT is their job! The U.S. economy has gradually failed because its government has been serving business interests too often at the expense of hundreds of thousands of tax payers. Where will those people get work? How will they pay taxes? How will they vote? Yes, they should save our cushy asses. The constitution says the function of the federal government is to promote the general welfare.
If they put more U.S. American citizens back to work, then they would certainly be meeting that basic basic function -- promoting the general welfare.
And there's more... with improved U.S. economy, the world will follow... just as it always has.
She is obviously a woman from California, a "Valley Girl".
They really talk like this.
A lot of us know both, and we're still looking for a job.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Quality Assurance a non-techie position?
Have you ever been involved in a big project? The ones that need QA?
QA is a techie position.
Pretty much true. I'm lucky to still have a job, but a lot of good people I know are unemployed. And yet when my current company was reviewing resumes recently, easily 3/4 of what we saw was crap, completely unsuited for the position. I'm not trying to downplay people's suffering here, but they have to realize that the tech job market was severely inflated, and now it's crashed, and so it's glutted with people who think it should be easy to get a job in the field.
For the daily dose of lies, damn lies, and statistics, here's a link to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps tabs on the US unemployment rate, among many other numbers. The current rate (5.6%) is historically low; between Sept. 1974 and March 1988, it did not go below 5.6%. Now that's a dry spell for ya.
As for IT, I got out of consulting last year; when I had lunch with my firm's recruiter, I told her that IT consulting was a dying field, and when she mentioned something about going back to school to become a teacher I said 'go for it'. I think she did... more power to her.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I work independantly. I've owned retail stores, done numerous service-type businesses, and now work as a freelance programmer.
Life has never been easy, but it's never been impossible, either. Generate something of value that people want or need, let people know you have it, and people will buy. It doesn't matter whether you are writing software, building information systems, or cleaning carpets.
The hard part is to always keep your eyes open and look for something of value that you can deliver that somebody else will pay for.
Ask people you barely know questions like "If I could NNN, would you pay XXX for it? How many would you buy, and why?".
Or, "What is it about NNN that you find most compelling?". The answers often surprise.
Once you get that figured out, $40 at the local kinko's will get you some business cards - then it's just a matter of communicating to prospective clients.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Health insurance is remarkably affordable, if you lie about your medical history.
The problem is that insurance companies are so risk adverse that they'll take minor things and blow them up into life-threatening illnesses. I could go into a doctor today, have a complete physical, and be told that I'm in pretty good shape except for slightly elevated cholesterol - something I'm already addressing with changes in diet and exercise. But to the health insurance providers, I'm completely uninsurable for two separate reasons, both minor and both years ago, and only have insurance because I qualified for the state's uninsurable insurance pool. It's insane to say situational bipolar illness (basically, if the stress gets too high I start to show mood swings, so I've learned to control the stress!) or a viral infection that 99% of the rest of world has a childhood illness with no ill long-term effect puts me in the same risk category as late-stage AIDS patients and recent cancer survivors, but according to the insurance companies it does.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I agree with your main point, but you say you've *never* been in a job interview that you thought was "torturous"? All I can say is count yourself very lucky!
I can remember several that were painful. One was at Mastercard, some years ago. I was being interviewed for a support position, but the portion of the interview related to my PC knowledge and troubleshooting skills was a 2 minute long thing where they sat me down in front of a Windows '95 PC and asked me how to "select a file" and "shut down the computer properly".
Then, I got escorted into a training room where I was given over an hour's worth of psychological exams, including this ridiculous "personality profile" where I was asked to circle adjectives that I thought described my behavior, and cross out ones that didn't describe me. (I was supposed to mark words in some other way if I didn't know what they meant, or thought they were made-up words.)
What the hell was that crap supposed to prove? Anyone with a little common sense could circle the words (like "motivated", for example) that management would like to see - and it would really have no bearing of whether or not the interviewee possessed those attributes!
I was approached by some execs who were setting up a startup a few years ago. They wanted me to design, build, and run the data center (a near perfect fit for me). Alas, when it got to the point of talking about stock options, I was asking questions the CFO couldn't ... or wouldn't ... answer. I guess it became apparent that I also knew enough financial stuff to not be fooled. I never heard from them again.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yes, we should have equal opportunities to work like anyone else. Even during dotcom days (I miss them), it took me over seven months to get my first full-time employment in 1998. I am still considered an entry level because I only have 2.25 years/27 months of full-time professional experiences (I am not counting part-time jobs, volunteer work, etc.).
:(
Right now, I have been unemployed for over ten months.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
> they say the metro area here has the one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation
The unemployment rate is 7.5%, second only to Miami. This is the worst I've seen it here in Oregon since the early 1980's.
> I lost a job in
> march, gained one in june, lost it in september, got an offer in january, and said no to the offer. unemployment has run out,
> subsisting on emergency fund.
Except for a couple of odd jobs, I haven't been able to find any work. My phone interview with Intel in December was the first interview I had with a hiring manager since I let go in May.
If it wasn't for my wife having a fulltime job, I would be scared. (There always seems to be a demand for accountants.)
I haven't been proud: I applied for a mail-handling job for the Xmas rush, & it didn't come thru. (Probably something about all of my high-tech employers -- they wanted a list of all of my employers for the last 10 years. Of my last 8 employers, 2 have gone bankrupt & at least one has vanished in a merger.)
And from talking to folks at the Linux Users' Group meetings, & to former co-workers, the competition is tough. Employers are now demanding degrees in either CS or engineering, & unbelievable amounts of specialized experience. Folks with 12, 15 or more years of practical experience are being passed over.
My strategy? Use my time to learn more about computing, & to network more. This downturn has to end eventually.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I don't want to evoke Schadenfreude either, but what is happening to the tech industry is the same thing that happened to all other production and manufacturing jobs over the past couple decades: the value of their work decreases as productivity of systems increases, as markets saturate, as margins thin, as processes become easier to automate. In a recession, the people who are really worth their weight in gold are people who can grow demand. That's why sales organizations, and those who work at a strategic level, get compensated so far beyond the rank and file, modulo a handful of hotshot engineers. I think it's wrong, mind you, but it's pretty much inherent in the way of things.
But that link definitely moderated any sense of sympathy or pity I had for the lay-offees - and made me grateful for the fact that I'm enjoying a standard of living and security that, frankly, I don't inherently deserve.
I find your reply demeaning. Of course developers should know XML systems if your infrastructure requires it. Specialists need to bring detailed information to a project. But to think that a project will succeed because of its infrastructure or other technical requirements and that if a team member doesn't know that they are somehow mediocre is the epitome of hubris.
Are you going to have your developers create the page template? Is it your graphic designer? Is your graphic designer or backend developers going to conduct usabilty testing? Does your designer need to know SQL to design a web-based interface to modify your DB? Or do they just need to know what is possible and appropriate for each screen?
I may have nobody to blame but myself for not having a job, but if I was going to interview for a web designer job I shouldn't be expected to know network administration, Java, COM, and SQL. I should know how to successfully communicate via the web. If I know HTML, XML, the principles behind database integration, browser limitations, DTDs, JavaScript and the like then I should stand a good chance of getting that job. That's because I know how the system works together, I don't need a specialized knowledge in HTML output via XSLT, that's what the developers are for.
Thats what I tried to say. All I hear you say is you demand everybody know what your developers should know.
I see a bit of a reality check. For the people who lost their jobs and KNOW that all in all, there are no shortcuts, I'm tempted to exercise a little empathy. But for what the dot-bomb era brought us, I have none.
I am STILL amazed when I think about how fast and furiously many of these companies burned through someone else's money. I'd say that for those whose skills were marginal, even non-existent at the time they were hired, they were living in a world every bit as phony as the companies themselves. Don't cry about it, just learn from it.
I am an ex-Ask Jeeves employee that was able to pull in a small 6 month contract in New York after months of looking everywhere. Now, I have spent almost 4 months looking for another job. The San Francisco Bay Area industry is very painful. I used to receive 10-20 calls per week from recruiters, now I never receive them and I am the one making all the phone calls. I am not one of the paper techies and have abundant skills in many area -- computational linguistics, information extraction and retreival, 7 years of Java experiences, databases, FreeBSD kernel development, and I could go on -- but nobody is hiring.
From what I've heard in few off the record conversations with hiring managers, companies are mostly in a looking phase; they are trying to feel out the market and see what kind of talent they can grab in their price range. I used to make over $100,000 a year, but now I am being asked how I feel about large salary cuts. I wish that I could say that things are looking up, but I still here of all this pseudo-interviewing going on. I sometimes call recruiters back a month or two later, and often the positions are still open. Either the companies are becoming exceptionally careful of their candidate choices of they are still not really hiring and feeling out the waters.
No, what I said is MEANT to be torturous. I have been through at least one torturous interview, but that was because the interviewer was asking me about technical issues that I had gotten very rusty on. Fair, obviously important to the interviewer, and not meant to torture me. My response was to make sure for the second interview that I had boned up on the issues he raised.
The process eventually ended in a job offer.
What you describe (the psychological tests, etc.) is certainly objectionable, but I wouldn't call it torturous. Just boneheaded, and a good sign that you wouldn't want to work there.
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.
Wow...I wasn't expecting so much of a response.
I didn't post this to be a sob story; I posted it as an example of a techie who can't get a tech job. I don't think I got treated any more unfairly than most of you.
I can tell by many of the responses that most of you live in cities. I live in rural Pennsylvania. (That's why I said $30,000 isn't bad.)
People have weirded out on me about getting a Spanish degree for years. I won't bother going into how that happened, and it's fairly irrelevant. The point was, back in the day, I (like many others) didn't need a degree to get a job. Furthermore, for some time, I made more than I needed, so I wasn't worried about having a family. I made all these decisions before everything went to hell. My other reasons are personal and irrelevant. In any case, scolding me for not being able to tell the future is silly.
I lost my wife because she was immigrating as my wife (as opposed to as a student). Thanks to some laws passed a couple of years ago, you have to meet certain income requirements, which the available local jobs could not meet. Sure, you might want to call me stupid for not learning this until too late, but like I said, these laws are quite new, and neither I nor any of my friends had heard of them. We got and immigration lawyer, but that didn't help much. These are details, and tangental to the topic. The point here is that if I could have found and maintained a job like a couple that I had had before, we would have our own apartment in the States by now.
Some of you have mentioned that even the degreed guys aren't getting hired. I know. I've thought about this myself. However, I distinctly remember that when the headhunters turned cold on me, the specific pretext they kept using was that I didn't have a degree. That's why I'm giving it a shot, taking it a step at a time.
Lastly, it's funny, but it is next to impossible to test out of the classes I'm taking, mainly for administrative reasons. You can laugh at me for going to such a lame school (I've been laughing myself for a long time), but I'm here for strictly financial reasons. And speaking of college, I have to get back to class. Thanks for your input.
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
Sorry, gotta disagree there. You're violating the "20 second rule": if they can't read enough to be interested within 20 seconds and without looking for it, you get binned. Sad, but true.
I've made some suggestions for writing a good CV on /. before, based on personal experience from both sides of the fence. There's also a link in that comment to "Susie the Screener", which is a must-read for anyone seriously interested in getting a job. I suggest anyone having CV-writing dilemmas take a look.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Large-scale, diverse environment" translates to "whatever you haven't worked with" in an interview.
I worked on an n-tier system for 20,000 people as a member of a huge team once, and I guarantee you I wouldn't get hired.
Skills only get you so far. So you're a certified Java developer, architech, or whatever.
Can't you just hear the "so what?" after every word the candidate utters? Is there a point to this process?
In other words, if you have already written the application they are developing, you're hired, but only long enough to upload your source.
Most often when you've worked with the big, expensive tools you've seen a project worth knowing about.
Otherwise, your knowledge is less than worthless. Shouldn't have wasted the time, or you should have bought the big expensive tools yourself so you could learn them and still not be qualified.
Skills are easy to come by.
That must explain the some 8,000 pages of technical books and seven years of work.
Character, insight, and work habits that make a good team member are harder to find.
...and obviously far more important. As long as you are:
..but put all that aside at will in order to agree with everyone even when they are wrong, then you are a "qualified team player." Otherwise, you're unemployed.
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
hacker: knows assembly language.
professional software engineer: knows UML.
Who are you going to hire to impelement your project?
The one who can explain concepts the clearest without resorting to a badly-designed methodology for drawing whiteboard diagrams?
Si
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Perhaps if the job market is so crap, it's time to go a-travelling or living the hermit life style in Sri Lanka until the market bounces back? Go backpacking around Europe and just work for your food and keep.. a lot of people do it, and it can be an enjoyable way of keeping out of the industry for a while.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Coupled with the fact that there are quite a number of CS graduates out there who can't even install their own Development software (I know, I had to do it for a whole gaggle of them, and my CS graduate roommate was computer illiterate as well), it's no wonder that people are antsy about picking them up when there's already enough talented people out there waiting to be picked up.
Not to say that you're not talented or know your stuff, but when a profession becomes an "educational fad" the market gets diluted with wanna-bes who dilute the market.
Safer to be a funeral director these days. At least business is going to be booming there for at least one more generation.
Sadly, that's how most people in the field are reacting right now. College graduates simply aren't useful enough to hire. Therefore, they don't deserve jobs.
I've got two responses to this:
* What does it take to break into the field, then? Is it only when companies are spending money ridiculously and irresponsibly that newbies, no matter how competent or promising they are, can get jobs and make a living?
* Is a college degree in comp sci completely and practically useless? Is it becoming like majoring in Art History, where people go, "What kind of job can you get with an Art History degree?" People assume the opposite about CS - that you can get rich if you know computers no matter what. (This is oh-so-infinitely-wrong, but that's besides the point) Right now, I see it as the opposite... you can be quite the "starving coder" if you can't break into your field in a very big way. So basically, it's a useless degree if you can't get a job in the field. And right now, without good connections, it's really hard to get a job in the field no matter what your credentials.
Don't forget, a lot of other professions discriminate against CS degrees... usually CS majors don't have a diverse background (I can hear "Why the hell do I have to take breadth courses?!?!" echoing in the background), prospective employers try not to hire anyone that might be too smart, and who will subsequently get bored at an open position, and furthermore everyone thinks "Well, don't you REALLY want to go into computers?" Simply put, people from CS may have a lot of potential, but simply don't look like the most suitable candidates on paper. Kind of like how more experience beats less experience even if the more experienced candidate sucks.
I know everyone's going through a tough time, fresh college grads and middle aged programmers alike. But this whole thread is obnoxious. It's obvious that half the people here want to viciously yell at people who feel sorry for themselves... while the other half pretty much feel sorry for themselves. I rarely see anyone in these threads actually thinking about the problem and trying to work with others on a solution.
Ironically, that's supposed to be one of the strengths of a programmer... the ability to analyze complex problems and develop solutions. If nobody here is able to do that to help out some fellow unfortunate professionals... well, maybe none of you people should have a job right now.
Hey, fuck you. Not true. I go home at night and play diablo 2!
You can send the $50 to the EFF, OK?
With an attitude like that, it's no wonder that you don't interview well. Anybody who's ever been in the situation of having to work with an incompetent hired via a "friend of friend" deal without a technical interview knows just how lousy that situation is. I'm not paid to teach someone the basics of object-oriented programming, I'm paid to design computer software.
Yes, I'll ask "zinger" questions, and questions that don't seem to have anything to do with the job. Having endured the "Employee from Hell" once, who despite having no industry experience felt he was God's gift to to the computer industry, I don't want to repeat that experience. So you get an attitude test. You got a problem with that? Not my problem.
And yes, I'll ask you open-ended questions about things on your resume, and if you don't know something, you better not try bullshitting me because the interview will end shortly afterwards. I want to make sure you know the fundamentals, and that you have a history of learning new things. I don't want to work with someone who can't learn new things, who's been doing the same thing for the past ten years.
Bonus brownie points for working on Open Source software in your spare time. That shows dedication and willingness to do different things and ability to work on your own. That's one of the most important things in my book.
But NONE of these questions are aimed at simply putting you through meaningless hoops. The success of a team depends upon its members, and we can't succeed without members who are competent, capable of getting along with each other, and who can work both as part of a team and as individuals as required. Prima donnas and keyboard monkeys (people who learned one thing ten years ago, and have been repeating ever since) need not apply.
So: Are you enthusiastic? Have you done good work in the past, in a variety of areas? Do you know your stuff? Can you get along with people? This isn't bullshit, this is the lifeblood of a development team.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
If being hired as a solo programmer, personality becomes less of an issue. But for team projects, prima donnas and slugs both are irritating (prima donnas because they don't listen, slugs because they don't contribute and require constant guidance). Having skills is a requirement, but if you can't work with the team, all the computer skills in the world are useless.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
It's not that they don't deserve jobs, more that I don't feel I personally should have to hire them. I'd far rather pay twice as much for someone who isn't going to waste all my time or my other managers' time.
We recently posted some positions requiring a fairly specific skill set. If I get one more resume that suggests some dumb one-semester course project that was turned in and immediately forgotten is a viable substitute for years of experience in the relevant areas, I'm going to go over and smack someone.
Plenty of careers require lengthy periods of "getting up to speed" before the gravy starts pouring. Consider the long and painful residency periods that doctors go through. Or apprenticeships in many crafts.
The problem, I think, is that the last few years of crazy spending have left people with a sense that they deserve to get paid all sorts of money for poking at a computer, just because they were so incredibly smart and far-sighted to choose to study computer science.
The fact is, in the real world, in normal conditions, you have to grow into your success, fighting for opportunities to prove yourself, and then actually being better than some other people. No reason it should be any different for computer folks. Even during the boom times I suspect we all would have been a lot better off if random idiots weren't able to get paid mad ducats for performing minimally useful services to the IT department.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I agree with what you say... and yet, I don't think the current situation is the way to deal with these things.
I think that you bringing up doctors' residency brings up a very good idea... since college grads are not exactly ready for prime time and aren't worth as much as an experienced tech worker, why not provide solid growth and learning opportunities to them rather than cast them off to the side? There is little to no existing reference for setting up a "computer residency", but I firmly believe that such positions should be widely available... considering that colleges are very steadfast in eschewing the practical in favor of professing the academic, and employers are very demanding of prospective employees in terms of requiring specific skillsets. Why not provide something that bridges the gap?
This benefits everyone - it takes the onus off of colleges to provide technical training to high-tuition students; it provides employers with a way to employ young, promising individuals without spending a fortune on them or taking unnecessary risks in hiring them for crucial positions; and finally, although CS grads might start out with less money, at least they have an opportunity to make a decent living this way.
Does any of this sound horrible?
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..
I'm sure your technical coworkers were productive and did good work, but that does not sell a product. That only makes a product which isn't moving. Perhaps the marketing & middle management types were more worthy of the axe, but their job is to make the company a profit. The tech's job is an abstract creation of product to sell.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
If you want to improve your viability, what's the one thing you can advocate, yet still be a sycophant to your boss? The answer is skills. In fact, most bosses would be delighted if all their workers spent their free time polishing up their knowledge of C++ or Solaris memory or whatever.
That's the only thing I hear here. "Oh, well this will only effect lower skilled people". I'm 28, but I have been programming (originally in BASIC and machine language) since the early 1980's. I have enough knowledge to work as a DBA, network admin, system administrator or programmer. Of course, I only specialize in one so that I do it on a "senior" level. Nonetheless, the idea that your skill level is a panacea to everything is a lot of ca-ca. It goes against economics 101. If it didn't, why has the ITAA (and NTSA) made a war against engineers for the last few years for their paymasters? Bringing in 900,000 H1-Bs, doing away with FLSA for computer professionals, sticking section 1706 in IRS tax code to screw over independent consultants and so forth?
What's the result - people working 60 hour weeks, with a beeper oncall 24/7 for not that high of a salary and thinking that's normal. I guess if the geek stereotype I brough up is true, and you have no social life, you won't mind being a sycophant for your boss because you have nothing better to do. You sure will never be able to have a normal social life under such conditions. Pay freezes, pay cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs. Even if the less experienced people are being laid off, that's still a workload that you're going to have to pick up.
I can not fathom why people who consider themselves professionals do not have organizations to represent them like lawyers do (ABA) or actor's do (SAG, a union actually) or doctor's do (AMA). The ITAA is in Washington, DC changing the law so that IT workers get paid less, get their overtime increased where it doesn't get paid for (with FLSA) and have a higher unemployment rate. And because of the NTSA IRS tax code change, are financially forced to work for body shops instead of independently. The only reason I can come up with is that the slam that a large percent of engineers are socially retarted and wrap all their self-value in the idea that they are the greatest programmer is true.
Anyhow, the Programmer's Guild, Washtech and CESO are three organizations interesting to look at. IEEE-USA tried to lower the H1-B cap but their corporate funders squashed that. I hope my fellow engineers will look at my web page - http://www.geocities.com/oncallguild and begin educating themselves, and then joining engineer organizations which are fighting the ITAA's attacks on engineers livelihoods, which unfortunately, too few engineers know about, mostly because there are few engineering organizations, and the few that exist are mostly financed by the corporations how employ them, and thus like the IEEE flap over H1-Bs, ultimately answer to them
You might be able to productively spend 40 hours/week responding to job listings, but in much of the country there just aren't that many positions available.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This assumes a rudimentary ability to think about "what management would like to see." Shockingly, there are people who don't have this ability at all. A second consideration is that the test may have included a "lie scale" - some response could be considered "too good to be true".
Abraham, Hatch Create Bill For More Foreign Workers
Newsbytes
February 10, 2000
Flanked by a platoon of their Senate colleagues, Sens. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, and Spencer Abraham, R-Mich., today officially announced legislation (S.2045) that would significantly increase the number of visas available for foreign-born skilled workers.
The legislation - which in addition to nearly doubling the existing cap on H-1B visas, identifies new funding to train US-born workers for high-tech jobs - "seeks to address both the short and long-term needs" of the US high tech industry, Hatch said today.
The high-tech industry, which is suffering from a serious workforce shortage and has long clamored for an increase in the H-1B cap, was quick to applaud the Hatch-Abraham proposal.
"Increasing the availability of highly skilled workers to American technology firms is one of the most positive steps Congress can take this year toward continuing the robust growth of the New Economy," Information Technology Association of America President Harris Miller said in a release shortly following the Hatch-Abraham press conference.
The American Electronics Association had similar praise for the legislation, calling it "clear sighted action" to address the workforce shortage, in a statement today.
Specifically, the bill raises from 115,000 to 195,000 the cap on H-1B visas in 2000. The legislation includes larger annual increases in 2001 and 2002.
The bill also calls for a $500 application fee per H-1B visa, directing that money to fund training and scholarship programs geared toward allowing US workers and students to obtain high-tech educations.
While the bill would mandate a substantial increase in the availability of H- 1B visas, it does not go as far as legislation proposed last year by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., which would eliminate the caps entirely.
Such a proposal is infeasible, say supporters of the Hatch-Abraham legislation.
"I agree with Senator McCain absolutely that in an ideal world there should be no caps," Sen. Robert Bennett, R-Utah, said at today's press conference. But such a proposal would probably face insurmountable opposition from immigration opponents and organized labor, Bennett said.
"The bill we are supporting here can (garner) bipartisan support," he said.
In addition to lifting the cap, the Hatch-Abraham legislation would exempt H-1B visas granted to the employees of universities and research facilities from counting toward the 195,000-visa limit. Visas granted to recent PhD graduates from US colleges would also be exempted from counting toward the cap.
The legislation also would direct the National Science Foundation to study the so-called "digital divide" between information haves and have-nots.
The legislation already has more than 20 Senatorial co-sponsors including Democrats Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Bob Graham of Florida.
Seastead this.
I'd be willing to bet that Taco is, in effect, bound and gagged when it comes to the H-1B issue. It is no surprise that this is too hot for Slashdot. Taco sold out a while ago. The money was spent to purchase Slashdot for a reason. This issue is exposing why that money was spent and the sorts of things bought.
Seastead this.
Wyould your last name be Shifman? ;-)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Why not policmen , firemen , lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, etc?
H1B is mostly for programmers; regular H1 is for other in-demand professions.
IT "veteran" doesn't mean the same thing as it did 5 years ago. Thats whats happening right now, industry wide. A huge-ass shakeout, to keep the ones that are worth keeping, and send the Sally Struthers School of PC Repair graduates back home to mommy. The industry is infested with them.. Guys who think plugging in a PCI card, pushing a power button and clicking "OK" when Windows comes up qualifies as "industry experience".
And thank you, yes, my job is quite secure. Its secure because I can name a dozen things that set me apart from other spuds in terms of skills and experience. Can you?
Bowie J. Poag
You make it sound like rental pricing is actually bearable in the Bay Area. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead of being on the outer rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell, rents have fallen back to the the middle of the rim of the Seventh Layer of Hell.
I was merely pointing out the direction of the trend, not its magnitude. I agree the Bay Area and particularly San Francisco are still amongst the most expensive places on earth to live. Its just not quite as extreme as it was. Prices are noticeably down.
And I'm not sure if I would want to actually see the location of a place you could rent in the city for under a thousand per month.
Agreed, you'd have to look around the Mission or (shudder) out west in the Sunset, land of eternal fog. Friends of mine just rented a large 2 bedroom house with parking a couple of blocks from the ocean and just off the N Judah for under $1400 a month. One bedroom apartments can be had for under a grand in safe, decent but unexciting neighborhoods.
And housing for under $350,000? Again, where? Seriously, I want to know.
SOMA. Really. All those "live/work" lofts that were fetching way above half a million last year are now sitting empty. I'm seeing a lot of them advertised around the $350,000 mark. Look on Potrero Hill, particularly the east side - a lot of new development there that just can't be sold, so is going at (relatively for SF) firesale prices. Look out on the west side of the City, the Richmond, the Sunset, there are bargains to be had. Even neighborhoods like Glen Park are getting cheaper.Of course you won't find a luxurious 3 bedroom apartment with views on Telegraph Hill, but if you are prepared to compromise you'll find good housing in decent places for much less than I paid for my house 18 months ago (sob :-)
Sailing over the event horizon
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wouldn't consider Britan to be 'western society' so much as 'British society.' But that's just me. Sorry for the confusion.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.