Slashdot Mirror
The Laid-off Techie
LazyBoy writes: "ZDNet News has this article entitled "The world of the laid-off techie". Yikes! Things have been bad in New Jersey for a while (telecom slump). How are they elsewhere?"
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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!
Yeah - looking at Computing, they've got 8 pages of job advertisments. This time last year, it was ten times that.
I've got a feeling though that over the next six months, systems are going to start going wrong or need to be updated and a lot of companies will realise that they do need some people with some skill. IT is so fundamental to the way companies operate these days - it's not going to go away any time soon. There has, in the past, been a problem with IT being regarded as an end in itself - resulting in millions of $ being spent on systems which don't actually help companies very much. This will have to change.
"Under the iron bridge, we fist" - The Smiths, Still Ill
Some years ago, 1995, I got through a 5-month unemployemnt period.
It was quite hard to keep in a good mood but I went through by doing as many benevolent work as I could (development, Acorn/RiscPC User Group, continuous self-teaching of things like web development, GNU/Linux hacking...).
As these activities involved lots of professionnally valuable material, I ended finding a job as a Macromedia Director teacher for unemployed, then as an interactive devices developper, then as a webmaster...
The hardest thing was gather some money to buy some book but I benefitted from my bro's Internet access, in the university and I could print many many RFC's, man pages, etc.
So, my advice is that one should remain busy learning interesting potentially emerging new technologies so that this unemployement period appears to be constructive, after all.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
god bloody awful.
I think my resume is quite good. I have electronics/telecoms/computing back to the late 80's including defence and stock exchange network support, but now I need to resort to getting certifications to get work.
In Sydney, no MCSE, CCNA, etc, no work.
The market is saturated with newbie wanabies who have plenty of cert but almost nil experience, so it's hard to get noticed when companies are expecting cert.
So, I'm fixing that now but I kinda wish I would'nt have to. Most MCSE's I've met would'nt know a kernel if it blue screened on them.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
We all became convinced that things that people at "normal" jobs take for granted - eg working at the same office for more than a year - were irrelevant. Hell, why work hard or show up on time when the recruiters will swarm your phone as soon as you put your resume on Monster? Before 2001, I could literally find a job within a week of starting my search, and the quality of my references or the reasons for my newly-found state of unemployment were mostly irrelevant. Imagine my horror when that all changed in April 2001. Ahh well, at least I'll get all of those taxes back thanks to making less than $10k last year.
On another note: is it my imagination, or do most of the people in that article seem like the same marketing wonks who should be the first people to be 86'ed from a failing organization anyway?
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)
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 &
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 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!
I'm an adjunct at a local major university in New Jersey and part of my duties include teaching classes in the CS department's continuing education arm. At times, it is difficult for me as an educator to make students face reality. Many students that enroll in our certification programs believe that all you have to do is sit through some classes to become a tech wiz and get a great paying job. The reality is that many of them don't have what it takes to become a good technologist. A student recently told me that he was very discouraged in his job hunt because he "spent three years making between $65K and $80K as an HTML coder". He now seeks a similar job with similar pay, but the fact is that he's has not demonstrated to me that he's even worth half of that salary in any technical position. While I am often tempted to use a "Here's a dime...use it to call your mother and tell her you'll never going to be a lawyer (or techie)" speech, I still must encourage my students to work hard to improve their skills. But it becomes difficult trying to get them to believe that they'll no longer get high-paying short-returns in this over-hyped market.
Yes, times are bad. A lot of people out of work - even the good ones. But the moral of the story is that many so-called techies need to re-evaluate their career path and their place in the industry.
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a xenophobe, and see nothing nefarious about the idea of allowing people from other countries to fill positions for which there are no Americans available.
But it doesn't make sense to provide jobs for outsiders when our own can fill them.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the purpose of the H1B program has all along been to depress IT wages and skew the job market in favor of corporate employers. Employers have been making up "special skills" or listing jobs with low salaries to show an "effort" to hire a U.S. citizen, then hiring indentured H1Bs for 1/2 to 2/3 the salary. This should come as no surprise, since the same employers used the same tricks to not pay the market wage for U.S. electrical engineers in the 80s.
The program needs to be ended now. Current H1B visa holders should allowed to stay to the end of their terms, then they should return home to bring up the level of IT skill in their home nations, as the lobbyists and Congress said would happen.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
How did that happen? $401k in 8 months? Am I missing something here?
I'm assuming that you're not American, a 401(K) is the mechanism used to save for retirement. In UK terms, it's a bit like a private pension, but it's also like an ISA, because you get to choose directly what goes into it. But it's not like an ISA because there is no maximum limit.
You can access the money in your 401(K) for a number of things, off the top of my head, education and buying a house, and I guess unemployment too.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
First off, I agree with most posters that this article doesn't really describe techies, but those who probably are unemployable in thier fields. How many of us worked someplace where more than half the people there were not qualified to do thier job let alone get the saleries they were getting? From what I have been able to see so far, this "recession" is a massive house cleaning. Unfortunately, some very talented, hard-working folks also got the shaft.
The article also states that some of us are "settling for contract work without benefits." Uh, I've actually been doing FAR better contracting this year than I had been last year making over $80k. And suprisingly, getting work is far less complicated than you might think.
Here are some tips that have helped me out:
Thats just my two cents. After my former employer stole my 401k money and failed to pay us our last 2 pay check, things have improved greatly for me. This advice has gotten me off unemployment and I'm now on the road to recovery :)
The Programmers Guild is a recently established organization aimed at American programmers working together to safeguard their profession, their craft and their rights.
On their website, they state the following reasons for why they started the organization:
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist