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Fewer Jobs, Less Pay In The IT Industry
dipfan writes "At last an explanation why you can't find a job: a report in the Washington Post says there were more than 500,000 tech jobs shed in the US during the last year, and (for the first time in several years) average IT workers pay is down by 11 percent - down from $71,000 to $63,000. There is some good news on the horizon - the survey of employers by the Information Technology Association of America says that more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year, taking employment back to pre-2001 levels."
concerning the Post report:
I'll believe it when I see it.
You just keep telling yourself that, and eventually it will happen :)
Free Mac Mini
Hard to believe that pre-2001 times would return. Its all just wishful thinking.
The job market suddenly became very tight here in Columbus, OH. When my last contract ran out five weeks ago, I didn't realize that it would be so hard to find another position, but here I am, still sending out resumes.
Oh, and I am a decent coder with 18+ years of experience. I can imagine how hard it is going to be for the lackeys to find something...
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
I dont want to troll, but I feel the IT job cuts for the most part were a good way of cleaning out the underbrush so to speak. Good IT people are still finding jobs and getting work, the people who arent are for the most part not cut out for it. Now there are some examples, but look at me, I have no degree, 5 years of admin experience, 3 as a Unix admin, I went looking for a job, and it took a little while (I wasnt looking full time since I was still working) and I found 3 offers that I got to pick from...
I dont think it has been that hard for those who belong in the positions, just for those who held positions they had no right, education, experience or mindset for.
#include sig.h
1 million jobs - 250,000 H1Bs a year = 0 jobs in 4 years.
Hey, I would be lucky if I made $63'000 !!!
While the article sees an upswing in the nearish future, I see a shift of a lot of technology jobs being farmed out to overseas operations. What this means for IT professionals in the US I don't know. But when you have US employees earning $63K yearly and foreign IT workers earning 10$ an hour to do the same work... things don't look so good.
I really wish I could run into a good NT guy, just to change my perception.
The last guy would reboot the NT server, because the mmc was crashing (He was installing a new Server App), and he didn't know how to kill it or something... "Umm that's the MMC crashing, why don't we just kill it instead of rebooting the server in the middle of the day?"
The 2nd to last guy I worked with spent who-knows-how-long screwing with 3Com diags on an NT box, before I plugged the network cable in for him.
Really fucking pitiful... And I don't even like NT. (I'm fucking cheap, but NT makes me want to run out and buy Netware)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
If thats the industry standard pay I need to get out of PA!!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
I'd say the IT world is shedding the cruft. I hope I'm not cruft.
Software Wars
a $8,000 pay cut is a lot, but your are still makin $63,000!! There are people who have worked 20 years and only make 2/3's of that. Most of the people who make that type of money are not even in their 30's. It is sick how money turns people crazy.
Makes me kinda greatful for my 3% raise this year
"Tech-workers" is such a broad category, according to this JavaPro article, Java programmers are earning more than ever and working less to get it.
However, I'm a Java programmer and I don't have a job so you can't rely on everything you read.
-Russ
Me
YOU are made of ASS and POO
(more POO than ASS, in your case).
Ok...I'll throw out my little theory and see if anyone else agrees. I think the .com bubble brought everyone and his brother into the "IT" industry (whatever that definition includes). So, I would assert that a lot of the lost tech jobs are poli-sci-majors-turned-web-designers. As the dust settles, I think the tech jobs will return to tech-interested people. Basically, the talent pool is really diluted. It's tougher for companies to sift through stacks of resumes to find good people. When they do settle for a burger flipper, of course they'll pay him less...actually, closer to what he's worth. Eventually, IMHO, this process will work bandwagoners out and things will return to normal...hehe...I've always loved throwing that word around.
I need my dick sucked
Things seem to be heating back up in the Metro DC area. Following 9-11 things really started moving downhill fast but the economy has shifted in many ways. It seems that a lot of people have moved over to new government initiatives. The beltway bandit is on a comeback, the .com folks are rotting on the vine.
Where I'm at, theres no job opportunity in IT, but then, I didn't see the help wanted section of the Sunday paper recently. I do have a contact in the staffing industry and she informed me that even people with MCSE certification, Novell certification, and CS degrees are still unable to find gainful employment. While I was looking for my current job (which only pays about a third of the national average for IT), I was given the suggestion of relocating. That was not an option for me at the time because I didn't have money or the resources available to do a relocation. Once I get my year or two where I'm at right now, I'll be ready to move on.
I'll believe it when I can afford to buy a copy of the newspaper.
Of course. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.
Isn't the ITAA responsible for lobbying Washington for H1-B visa permits? Tech businesses want to keep importing 200,000 IT workers a year, so of course they are going to say "but we need more bodies for next year."
The dot-bomb caused the wage numbers for It to be inflated though. Over-paid employees working for a upstart that is spending it's venture-capitol like water had wages that made no sense and were purely for bragging rights.
we can expect to see IT wages to further drop on average to the $60- $62K with the bottom being around $38K and the top at $80K with some bizzare exceptions to the rule... (public Schol IT way underpaid with a few overpaid employees in the valley)
I highly doubt the "explosion" in IT jobs though.. I see a higher demand for really-good and expierienced It people and much less for MCSE's or other certs. time in the field is starting to have much more weight, as you are expected to run a department and be a tech at the same time. (3 offices, 200 workstations and 8 servers... I am the ONLY IT person/manager. God help the poor soul that tries to fill my shoes if I leave.... as management will say, "what do you mean you need help? the last guy did it by himself for 5 years!")
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not the same quality of work, though, that's for sure. Not for $10 an hour. You get what you pay for. I've seen it firsthand, several times.
according to the article, when the economy gets better, we see a rise in unemployment.....
when i am doing better at my job, they pay me less....
this is a well known fact.
who are these people?
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
In New York it's crazy now. $45/hr is the going rate for consultants. (it used to be $90+) It is also very hard now to get a salaried job over $100,000.
;-) )
(If you think these numbers are insanely high... shut up and move to NYC and see your expenses.
I had my resume out since Nov 2000, during the time from Nov 2001 to around Feb of 2002 I would multiple requests from places I did want to relocate to. After that Feb 2002 I was not even getting thoses, still have my settings as looking for a job even after getting one.
Hopfully the market will be back up again in 3-4 years when I get sick of this location and want to come find a new place and job.
got a 10% pay cut last November been testing the waters for a new position ever since - no luck 2 years ago, a posting on monster.com would get me 20 phone calls and 30-40 emails in the first week alone. This time I have received a total of 4 emails and 2 phone calls in about 2 months. on the plus side the dot-com i work for is still chuggin along
I wonder how many H1-Bs will still be brought in this year? It's a damn shame no one (mainstream)is calling to repeal the flawed system...now that we've seen how much damage can be done to citizens when things aren't so grand.
You guys do realize that $63k is still quite a bit of money, right? Think how much higher that is than, say, a teacher. I know I work awefully hard, but I can't be working as hard as some of my teachers seemed to, with as few benifts.
Mod point free since 2001
...the majority of these one million jobs aren't just PC support or help desk openings. The ITAA member companies seem to think that U.S. IT employees aren't capable of much else and go whining^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlobbying to Congress every year for more H1B visas to bring in more foreign workers at bargain basement wages. If they've got the money to spend greasing Congress's palms you'd think the ITAA members would be able to divert some of that cash to training the U.S. citizens that are looking for work.
Obligitory Microsoft slam: Once Microsoft takes over the entire IT industry, those one million jobs openings will be for people whose daily task consists of walking around and rebooting the wedged Windows PCs.
I'm an IT professional with 6.5 years of experience, who lost his job in the great downsizing. It's been a pain, but I've also learned a lot, especially by talking to companies, recruiters, and my fellow downsizees. This is what I've found - though your millage may vary.
.NET. I've also seen companies lose people because HR moves to slow - losing people in THIS economy.
First, even with the job cuts, IT is a huge and unavoidable part of the economy. It will inevitably recover because IT is too important. It will expand because IT has definitely not met the limits of what it can do.
Second, some of the cuts done were extremely unwise and are backfiring on companies already. I hear stories of patches not being released, remaining staff members working on maintenance instead of improvement or expansion, etc.
Third, one of the biggest barriers to hiring now is the HR department. Consulting companies, recruiters, and potential employees are confronted with slow processes, poor interviews, and HR departments that do not know what they're talking about technology-wise. Nothing like having someone ask you if you have two years of Windows 2000 or
Fourth, as the article notes, many companies have largely screwed themselves in their approach to IT. IT, in my experience, has a high turnover rate, and these recent activities only encourage people to leave IT and avoid IT. Without training, their employees won't have skills (while some of us hardcores will practice our code while we flip burgers or cash our unemployment checks). They'll have to break down and hire knowledgeable people.
In my experience, the market has already started opening up, especially for people with 3+ years of experience. Give it another year and IT will be back to where it was and then some - because, even if people don't like it, they need us.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
mabey next year i can afford real meat instead of spam
There is some good news on the horizon - the survey of employers by the Information Technology Association of America says that more than a million IT jobs are going to be created in the coming year...
:D
And, why, exactly, should we trust an entity with an acronym like ITAA?
I think it's just a ploy by the RIAA and MPAA to get geeks to stop downloading music and movies and go back to looking for jobs, using the Internet for what it was designed for, like spamming resumes...
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
- down from $71,000 to $63,000.
I hope those in this situation have enough decency to shut up. 63K US is kind of just a dream to me, I'm making 42K CAN and I think I am making good money. Hey, I'm making more then both my parents together! I have a little car, a digicam, my good ol' computer, what can I ask more?!? Yeah, I used to dream of making 1K US a week, driving an Audi TT and living in a big house. And I was mad that I was not earning enough, fast enough. Then, recently, things went bad around the world, I kept reading about unemployement. One of my cousin lost it's job last year and he is still searching a new one. He got nothing more then a few little contract of 2-3 weeks. It change my mind, that is the only good thing about all this (for me). Now I'm placing some money, I enjoy what I actually have because tomorrow it could all change. Honestly, I would accept 63K US any day, but I really don't need it...
I'd rather be sailing...
Well, for one thing I'd consider the source. The ITAA has a vested interest in hyping industry growth. While most of us smell unfettered bias in studies underwritten by certain other notorious associations (RIAA) we shouldn't be blinded by our desire for this projection to be true.
If the results were different (say a 10% market reduction) would the study be getting this much attention?
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
The average pay of an IT worker is $63,000?
Bl$$dy hell, I'm the best paid programmer in the company and I'm only on 2/3rds of that.
I'd love to know where these 'average' jobs are available...
Factories are designed to make their workers into interchangeable parts.
Having worked on many, many software projects, I don't think programmers are going to become fungable anytime soon. There is too much variation in talent.
I can't say about other parts of IT.
...with no experience and a MCSE. They say that there are over 45 million unfilled IT jobs in my town of 250,000 alone, and for the measly price of $45,000, I can get an A+ and an MCSE and be the CIO of a Fortune 500 company tommorow. Golly gee willikers!
That's a real problem -- too many unskilled entry-level folks are flooding the job pool. And most certifications are as useless as used Kleenex.
I've been jumping from one sinking ship to another the last couple of years. I've managed to spend less than 2 weeks total unemployed between jobs, but the pay has been unsatisfactory and I'm constantly aware of the fact wherever I am is not a very solid position. I finally found a pretty solid company, but I got in under a situation which will be resolved in a few months and therefore my services are no longer required, so I've started circulating my resume again... If what they said is true, maybe I'll have an easier time of it. Of course, we keep hearing this again and again, but maybe for once they will be right. I have noticed an increase in open positions and a couple of companies lifting hiring freezes.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Wow. Just down in the road in Dayton, OH, those of us on the air force base can't find enough qualified IT people. Have you considered working in civil service for a while? The pay's pretty good at the IT level.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Developers seem to be much worse off. It's a lot easier to cancel new development, so new development has been cut down to the bone.
Maintenance programming is still going on, but if you're a developer in new software and you're out of work, things are very very tough right now. There are still some jobs of course, but the competition is very intense.
While the market is certainly not as hot as a year and a half ago, when we were making $120K offers to some star candidates, the number of resumes we get for open position is still on the low side and quite often not one of them is qualified for the position.
This in contrast with eight years ago, when you had your choice of which expert to hire at a very affordable $50-60K per head...
I've been looking for a summer job in the IT field this year (I am between my Junior and Senior year of college). Last year I found one pretty easily, but now it doesn't seem like there is anything out there. They don't even bother to send me rejection letters any more.
:) There must be some company out there that wants to exploit cheap student labor...
So, it looks like I will be working at Wal-Mart, unless any of you guys are looking to hire a comp-sci student for the summer
I'd credit slick willy for this more than anything...the recession started under his watch, and he signed the H1B increase right before it.
Republicans might be slanted towards business....but good business means jobs, folks. It's not going to get fixed overnight by ANYONE...but we're on the right track.
BTW...BAD liberal trollmonkey!
I understand getting Java certified or MSCE to get through the door but at the end of the day you have to deliver, you have to stay current and from the software side of things, this industry is about solving problems.
I can't blame anyone for taking advantage of the last few years, more power to them but there are a lot of people who are going to make a lot less money in their new, non-IT, jobs and that's a bitter pill to swallow.
Moore's law is a bitch. You think you can get a certificate, get a high paying job doing nothing and keep it? I'm a developer with a real degree and I feel like I need to put a huge effort into staying on top of everything and do my job. I enjoy it and that's why I do it but don't think it's just a cake walk or something. It's definitely more than 40hours a week.
Because the going rate for new hires increased faster than the raise structure of most companies, older workers got screwed (as a former colleague put it, "Last In, Wins"). Doesn't give much incentive for someone to be 'the loyal employee' any more.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
One thing that is often forgotten in IT jobs is that your non-IT skills actually make a difference on a job. You can be the greatest coder, but coding is not everything. You need planning and organizational skills, you need people skills, you need business skills in order to work within a company.
... at least for applications development and support ... American workers are being replaced with H1-B visa imports. It's more commonplace, and it's happened at the last 3 shops I've worked at, and in once case my position was replaced with an H1-B visa holder - the firm there doesn't like to use the term "outsourcing", they prefer to term it out-tasking. The bulk of the programmer team resides offshore (in India, or Maylaysia, or Indonesia, or Mexico ...), while a few business analysts and lead level (which are mostly staffed by H1-B visa workers employed by the contracted offshore firm).
Here's a list of prominent Fortune 500 companies that have moved all or a significant portion of their application support and development programmer staff offshore, that I and/or friends have had firsthand experience with:
The trend seems to be to move data center and system programming operations to the likes of IBM but to move the application coding development and support to offshore vendors. I can't speak for smaller/medium sized firms, but at the big corporate shops, this is a certainly a constant for contemporary times.
Sorry if it appears that I'm ranting, as this issue has affected me personally and it sucks watching friends and colleagues struggle to find work, unemployed for entirely too long now, about to lose their house if their wife/husband don't have a good income and they can go back to school to learn another craft. It's really disguisting to see foreign labor still imported and populate the workplace when these experienced individuals go hurting. Especially when those brought in or those who work in foreign centers aren't even close as qualified - with unverifiable references and doctored qualifications. Yes, it's gets personal when you study and work hard to put bread on the table for your family and you are powerless to stop the curtailment of opportunity. Being programmers, it's our nature to be independent and introverted, and that works against us - as I couldn't conjure up a scenario where this would occur with um, let's say truck drivers. There'd be blood in the streets.
But to hear all of the politicos du jour speak, it's simply a matter of education! Poppycock. In the new paradigms of globalization, it really doesn't matter, as "knowledge" jobs can be moved just as easy, if not easier, than manufacturing jobs. There's some deeper questions that need to be asked and answered in the new century. Else we end up in a universally feudalistic model, with a small fortunate few and the the rest of us left to fend off eachother for the few morsels tossed our way ...
And the ITAA are nothing more than tech industry lobbyist shrills, who have only the interest of employers at hand, and care not for the tech worker.
Here is an open letter to Mr. Harris Miller of the ITAA, in response to blatant misinformation propagated by him and other lobbyist shills.
AZspot
"Industry Standard" Paycuts in IT? makes good companion reading here.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Yeah but my old company (IT Consulting) is cutting all the people with degrees, and keeping all the losers who'll never be able to get another job like it. Granted, they'll be closing their doors by the end of the year with that strategy - but that's what they're doing.
I'm a 2000 man.
like or lump it but IT is getting easier.
5 years ago you couldn't get a Red Hat distro or Win2000 CD that you could put into a CD and let it autoconfig everything for you.
Word on the street is that Mircrsoft is offering to send all of the laid-off and underpaid tech people to law school in exchange for a promise that, upon graduation, they will join MS's Unholy Army of the Attorneys.
The promise includes a guarantee of lifetime employment.
These are the same people who said that 450,000 jobs went >unfilled last year because there were not enough qualified technical people. Let's get some truth on the scene here (previously linked from slashdot here, here, and here). The ITAA is an industry spokes-puppet which is trying to spread a misconception that there is no jobs shortage, and that there is no unemployment, so that the industry can beg Congress for more slave labor force called H-1B. And I'm not referring to merely having more people than there are jobs. The real danger of the H-1B program the ITAA is constantly promoting is the fact that employees under this program:
That last one is especially sinister because it means that the usual market forces, supply and demand, and competition for skills, is NOT allowed to function for H-1B workers, giving employers a windfall of what is essentially cheap slave labor. They are hired into jobs the employers claim require extended skills, and paid only the average programmer salary (not the near double amounts such skills would normally draw) because the H-1B law only requires the average to be paid based on all programmers (not specifically those with the required skills).
In other words, what the ITAA is spouting is a bunch of crock.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The parent was not a troll. He did, however, report some facts that make slashbots uncomfortable.
This should have been modded -9999999999999999, Uncomfortable Fact.
Offshore development houses like Cognizant, Satyam Computer Services, and Wipro Technology have been posting 20%+ YOY growth since at least the mid-nineties and they're all doing embedded stuff. In his recent book ("Straight from the Gut"), Jack Welch admits that although GE built and abandoned manufacturing plants in India (for Plastics, Lighting, and Aircraft Engines, I believe), they're still growing their software development center there.
With my latest raise, I now earn the same as the average IT worker!
Now if we can just get their average salary to drop a little more, I'll be ahead of the game! Woot!
Problem is, a lot of the businesses that have folded up over the last couple of years have been heavily tech-dependent (e-commerce companies and such) - when the shakeout came, IT jobs were disproportionately affected. In a way, it's been the opposite of previous recessions, where the jobs lost were at the high end of the food chain. Since the normal pattern over time is for economies and businesses to grow, ultimately jobs will be added, but at a more reasonable clip than happened in the bubble. That doesn't help a lot if you're out of work today, though.
After all, they're called bubbles at least partly because they pop at some point.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The "armies of rebooters" are a byproduct of the cost-savings that came from the client-server revolution. Killing the big glass room had a price tag associated with it: We put way too much intelligence into the client side and then expected a dumbed-down OS to keep the whole thing running. OK, we learn our lessons and move on. A more stable OS, thin clients, platform independence, smarter servers, centralized storage of data -- the return of the glass room. Back in the early 90's I predicted that people wanted PCs (instead of ASCII terminals) on their desktops only to get a GUI interface -- that local CPU power would be mostly wasted and installing local copies of front-end software would prove to be more of a liability than an asset.
average IT workers pay is down by 11 percent - down from $71,000 to $63,000.
Who'd have thought that 4 years after everyone and their mother got a Comp. Sci. degree that the average pay would have gone down?
Go back a few yuears, everyone is trying to get on "that Internet thing". High demand for programmers/web designers/sysadmins drives up salaries. Dot coms go bust, there's flood of new IT graduates into the market and companies are cutting pack on web presence. Demand for IT professionals drops and salaries begin to drop. I know a guy who did some very innovative work at Ask Jeeves who's about to be evicted because he can't find a job in his field.
There's no grand conspiracy here.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
I'm 17, I started working in I.T. when I was 16. I work full time while I attened the community college for both highschool and college credit. (I'll have 73 college credits when I graduate high school.) Then, after high school I'm transfering to the corporate office, while I go to a sate university. This is my third job in "IT" the other two were at local computer shops, where i installed and maintained networks for some of the smaller buisness in the area. Can you imagine how customers of the bank would react if they knew the entire bank network was installed by a 15 year old?
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
According to my calculations I earn about 35000 gross a year (makes about 27500 net per year). For the record, I have my CS degree and about three years of work experience in various domains (including Java, C++, Delphi, Oracle, and I could get on) Oh, and I live in one of the wealthiest country of the EU.
I do realise they were talkig about averages, so my three years experience do not count much compared to a 20 year experienced Guru. ;-)
Why is there such a huge gap? It can't come all from the fact that you have to take your own health insurance and stuff like that. Because otherwhise I go to the US and get rich quick.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
As far as the ITAA report which said IT jobs will grow - bullshit! The ITAA is the *enemy* folks, they're the ones who lobbied to bring in hundreds of thousands of H1B's, they're the ones that did away with overtime laws for "computer operators", they're the one fighting to keep section 1706 in tax code (which drives independent consultants into body shops) and so forth. The ITAA is lying - the ITAA is who was talking about shortages for years before the current glut. Don't you people see the commercials on TV talking about a technical career while everyone is being laid off or getting pay cuts? Don't you all realize there is a massive deception going on - wonderful careers in IT are being advertised for while things for the profession get worse and worse?
I can't believe that the same BULLSHIT that that the ITAA has been saying for the past several years has made it to the front page of Slashdot. I know it is on dice.com's front page and other places - they made their bullshit report recently to counter things like Representative Tancredo's legislation that would tie H1B caps to the unemployment rate (which is the highest in 8 years).
So you morons who think you're some kind of programming super-genius who is a "hard worker" and is some kind of socially retarted dork who puts all his self-value in how much computer skills he has - can you please explain why not only jobs are being cut but why salaries are being cut? It's called supply and demand, folks, and the ITAA has been at the forefront of raising the supply of workers, hours worked by them, and their mobility (especially that of H1Bs or those who would like to be independent consultants).
Now, most IT professionals I talk to don't want to form a union (collective bargaining association) which leaves us with one solution - a professional association, just like the doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. No, not the IEEE, they've sold out to corporate sponsors when they had efforts to lower the H1-B cap killed. The Programmers Guild is the best organization I've seen of this type. Joining together and fighting for our profession against the ITAA is the only solution.
My web page, the Oncall Guild, has more information about all of this, mostly links to good sources of information about non-technically related things to our profession. If you want to be part of a million individual super-genius hard-working dork programmer lemmings headed off a cliff, be my guest, if you want to join together with other engineers and fight the employer-financed ITAA in a non-union association, join the Programmers Guild and read the information on my web site.
Never forget that:
Seastead this.
You really have to get out there and meet people. I only found my current job through making friends, I actually applied to the company once before, but my almost anonymous resume got lost in the pile. Right now there are more jobs than people, even for qualified people, that's true, I think its wrong to say "this just gets rid of the bottom feeders", its actually getting rid of lots of talented, capable people as well. Looking at teaching as another possibility could be another way for some, but with every budget being cut and with the rapid growth of globalism its likely we're seeing a huge set of people being " retired at 21", now that you can face federal crack house charges for throwing a party, going into music isn't as viable either. Soon the only jobs will be military, security, or police, and that's it, until they build robo cops and then its time to destroy us nasty humans who have to have sex to reproduce, and replace us with safe, clean robots that god will love better because they manufacture themseleves, instead of having to have dirty, nasty intercourse to reproduce. You'll never find a hidden porn collection on your robot work's pc!
Check my site out for ogg vorbis music produced with linux.
I live in Calgary, Alberta (which, off-topic, is now buried in snow :) and I just finished my first year of IT work and I am earning 39k CAD yearly now.
Not a lot of money, but my yearly living expenses are just over half that, and I have paid off a good chunk of my outstanding debts already (furniture, student loans).
And of course, there are other factors. I get two weeks vacation, stats, and float days off, a yearly company performance bonus, really good benefits, and (relatively) high job security.
Salary alone is a bad measure of the benefits of one job over another.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
For the rest, I plan buying a small apartment in the next few years (putting aside about 33% of my salary each month) and am still happy with my old computers too. Being happy with small things is perhaps one of the best ways to keep partially happy.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Hey there fellow north dude - and north dudes across the country.
As one of many CS grads recently released into the real world, I'm trying to gather some experience-based comments on entering the job market.
If any of you want to give me a shout, send a message my way - I'm at jeff_slash_suffix at jeffdom.com and remove the "_suffix".
I've got a website started and might start a web board about this - anyone with suggestions on job hunting, good web-board software, etc is encouraged to contribute or mail me.
Jeff
I know how to make true Artificial Intelligence. The applications are endless, and its almost as noble as space exploration.
www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~sager
God spoke to me
They'll just ship in cheap foreign labor to do the work. Your superiority in knowledge will still be ignored. Go Dubya.
Ok, I admit that my salary was bloated like everyone elses, but they are offering less money than what I made at my entry level position, and with 1 year contracts with penalties for leaving early. WTF???? After 8 years, can I get a little more money?
Am I the only one that this has happined too?
Where are you located? A $40K salary would be pretty comfortable in Iowa, and $63K is going to be tight in Silicon Valley. If you are not in the US, consider also the strength of the US dollar. Considering the exchange rate, cost of living and housing, things may not look so bad.
After being in the business for over 10 years, and being on unemployment for the first time in my life, it's a VERY humbling experience. Especially the fact that I have mouths to feed, and a mortgage to pay. And, to top things off, The Labor board is requesting a meeting w/ me to make sure I'm lookng for work! Do they think I LIKE getting $375 a week instead of $1400 a week? Don't they realize that I do NOT want to be on unemployment? Jeez!
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
It's 1996 Compaq hardware, with PPros that LIKELY have failing VRUs.
Trollbutt.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
Up here in Ottawa, wages for contractors and perms (for whatever "perm" means nowadays...) have gone down. Actually, not just the wages, but manners as well. I heard of a guy who got laid off recently after 10 years of loyal services, who was told bluntly by a headhunter/recruiter for a body-shop that he wasn't worth what he was making before being laid off. Hello?
But back to the money thing: I've heard of contracts for *SENIOR SYSTEMS ARCHITECT* (no junior role for sure) that was being paid 150$CDN a day. And some more junior positions I've seen are paid barely more than *minimum wage*. And the client/body-shop have the gall to demand *at least* a college degree *and* quite a few certs, all of this for a low-pay job. No wonder the "plumber" who just changed the faucet taps in my apparment left IT, he said he's now better paid and doesn't have to deal with the stress and as many PHBs as he did before!
(This begs the question: how many left the IT market for "low-tech" work and are not regretting (sp?) for now?)
This is truly a "buyer's market", except that many are abusing it a lot right now. Especially up here in "silicon valley north"...
The problem has several facets, some of which are of our own making and some of which are endemic to the software development approach, tooling, management and processes. Our problems start with a point-of-view which I discuss last.
.
.
Until this point is addressed, we can expect artificial pénurie perpetrated to keep H1B immigration up and salaries down while the local job market is being slashed to increase worker competition, and outsourcing to the developing nations, like India.
1) Productivity. MIS productivity sucks. MIS, or Informatics or Data Processing or what ever nom-de-jour you want to use, has always been and is still being run like a trade/craft, producing hand-crafted little gems when what's needed is art by the yard.
2) Cost. As if the speed of delivery wasn't bad enough, the costs of a craft style production system are ultimately way beyond the ROI.
3) Management. MIS (mis-)management is and has always been the blind leading the ignorant. I have witnessed intercine inter and intra departmental battles worthy of medieval knights. There were no hacked off limbs (a paper cut is an occupational hazard in D.P. though when its your pink slip it cuts pretty damn deep) but people's lives have been ruined, if not ended. But that doesn't get the job done and in the end, that's what counts.
4) Policies and Procedures that proceed by divide and conquer which cut out anything which is not entirely germaine to a system's implementation are fundamentally destructive and self-defeating. The parts of any system that deserve focus are not those parts that are entirely self contained but those that interface with other systems. This ties in with the next point.
5) Architecture Its amusing that in an industry which uses and develops systems built so heavily on soit-disant relational data bases management systems (DB2, Oracle, Ingres, PostGreSQL and others,) nobody seems to understand what a relationship is
Our systems keep focusing on the objects of a system without ever developping an understanding of the relationships involved, and the objects are basically and fundamentally monotonic and uninteresting while the relationships are what's important in a system design.
But our entire academic curriculum can't come up with or teach better, more descriptive and more realistic names for them than: is-a, has-a, has-some
To draw a parallel with something we all see every day, there is nothing in the CompSci curriculum which teaches the difference between:
a) a pallet of bricks and a sack of concrete on a loading dock,
b) a common garden wall
c) the Cuppola of the Piazza Duomo in Florence Italy, the largest free-standing brick and mortar dome in the world, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture and where, on its very steps, were born the mathematics and practice of artistic perspective.
What's the difference? Its not the bricks. Its not the mortar. Its the relationships between the bricks.
Until the profession wakes up to that fact, integrates relationships as first class objects into the analysis, documentation, design and implementation of systems and starts being serious about reusing components, they're doomed in a downward spiral of H1B immigration, cost-cutting, off-shore out-sourcing and people simple doing without.
The world can't afford little hand crafted gems. It can barely afford art-by-the-yard.
Think! http://wage.packet.org/ wander round the wiki.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Okay so to start, I don't mind NT, (it has its place for low end easy to operate small networks) but anyway I was working part time durring school kinda admining this small local area network for an alarm monitoring company. They were in the process of upgrading the monitoring software that they use. I made one request (which they ignored) that they do the upgrade on a day I was there. The company I worked for shelled out some big money to make sure that the developers of the software all came and did the install. I warned again this would not be good. My boss told me that they were assured that all three guys coming had MCSE Degrees. (Right then I knew I was getting overtime on this job.) The day came and pasted when they were supposed to bring in the new server and load everything up, and I got no page. So I figure everything was okay. Three days later I go in for my regular weekend shift and all three of the developers are still there. They had been trying to resolve a problem with the new server for 4 days!! 5 minutes after I got there I asked why they gave the server the same IP address as the network printer, laughed at them and told my boss I was taking the day off with pay for that one.
There will not be a million job swell. The ITAA has been re-issuing the same report for two years now. I have been seeing the same stats for years on computer training providers websites, GET ON BOARD FOR THE 3 TRILLION NEW JOBS THAT WILL BE CREATED AS SOON AS YOU FINISH YOUR TRAINING WITH US[info. source ITAA](Yes, I used to work for one). I think it is their joint scam to get unwitting newbs to pay them $15000 for training no one in IT finds valuable. Just call me paranoid.....
Damn recruiters will try ANYTHING!
why did i have to pick next weekend to be graduating college?
63,000? Damn. Its hard enough trying to squeeze $50,000 (blood) from a company (turnip) these days. I guess its a regional thing.
I have to kindly correct you, as my mother is a teacher as well, and i hate the fact that she is paid so little.
The going rate for a babysitter is currently $5. per hour, although, I have often babysat for as much as $5. per hour per child, which in the recent case of sitting for 4 children, gave me a "salary" of $20. per hour. WELL over what teachers are making!
http://www.automationmatrix.com
So if you and your co-workers want to unionize, there is a resource for you. If you don't want to collectively bargain, feel free to ignore this. Of course, unionization empowers workers and is considered a threat to the employers and their sycophants. Union organizers used to be accused of being communistic atheists, and these sycophants for the bosses will probably crawl out from whatever rock they're under and start attacking your right to join a union, just like a fundamentalist wackadoo attacks atheists. Despite the fact that your ultimate bosses, the people collecting dividends and interest from corporate stocks and bonds, are mostly heirs who have never worked a day in their life and have no skills whatsoever, unions will be attacked as hurting the hard-working and the skilled (even though guilds were originally formed to protect skilled workers). They will also call unions corrupt although they will neglect to mention the Ken Lays and the Enrons you work for being corrupt
Frankly, I'm sick of the little Farscape-watching socially retarted reactionary dorks I am often forced to work side-by-side with, who have no need for free time since they spend their free time in front of the computer for the boss instead of socializing with other human beings. Well - let them loose with their sycophantic rantings, just remember there are a lot of us, like you and me, who are on our side, and can and will do something about what's going on.
Detailed H1B statistics:
http://www.automationmatrix.com
Check and see if the position you were
laid off from has been filled by an H1B:
http://www.zazona.com
Are we all looking at the negativity of this post? Are the majority of us /.'ers seeing the glass half empty on this situation? I'm glad your stating your opinion, but its sad to think that the hope for this empolyment situation is dissippearing. All the points are valid but i'd like to see some people's support for this topic.
Don't rule out the power of optimisim.
thelikesofwhich.com
It's hard to believe that there will be millions of IT jobs available next year, expect perhaps if all of us get fired and our jobs free up for people to make $5.50/hour at them. I'd really like to see the programming market pick back up so I can make the good ole cash-money. .: Ryan "Blackguard" Shwayder .: EverQuest II: The Age of Destiny .: http://www.EQII.com/
Anyone know how many there are? I'm looking to do a comparison of the total unemployed vs the total H1Bs. Thanks
spacecraft...and the only one that can be mass
produced with unskilled labor."
Wernher von Braun
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a
teacher. So, you shouldn't be paid like one.
Sorry.
I can only hold down one job at a time (well I could do more, but it isn't easy, and doesn't fit in with what I call my life) I don't care about fewer jobs, so long as there is one job that needs someone with my exact qualifications.
Unfortunatly my boss informs me that I'm already in that job, and have very little chance of finding a different one in todays market (But at least you have a job, unlike a lot of people you know), so he can treat my like dirt.
We need to start realizing that the USA belongs to American citizens, and that it is our place of business, and just like any business man or woman who fights and dickers for dollar and cent, we should fight and dicker and negotiate for every benefit and privilege that OUR AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP has to offer--for starters, every ordinary job should go only to American citizens, with the exception of medical doctors and PhD level scientists.
We OWN this country, people. Let's start acting like it, instead of acting like sheep.
This post is protected under the DMTA (Digital Millemium Trolling Act). It is illegal to moderate it as a troll.
Lowering costs helps company X put companies Y and Z out of business. Once that happens. you have less choice, so you have to put up with lower quality.
Good thing we imported all those H1-B visa foreigners!
I work for a multinational Israeli Company based in Cyprus. We have projects all over the world especially a lot in the States. We have teams based in Seattle and in Cyprus. When the Cyprus team leaves work they list up the list of problems and info reqd and sends off emails. When the Seattle team comes to work 4 hours later they get to work on this and by the time the Cyprus team is back in the office the next day they can get on with their work without the delay of 1 day waiting for a local infra team to fix things. This allows us to meet deadlines much shorter than those possible by working at one site only.
Just to give one more example in a recent project for a client in Moscow the initial design was done in Israel,the coding in Cyprus and Prague, system testing in Prague and user testing in Moscow and it went off flawlessly so I believe the argument that multi site working doesnt work is false.
Frankly nowadays companies get some work done in India and the rest in US so everyone is happy . If US firms were to say IT work will be given only to US firms there would be 2 consequences
1 the companies would probably go out of business
2 if the US govt supported such companies they would be in violation of the WTO
And yes I am Indian.(and thus the enemy for some of you)
Frankly what is happening in the states is bound to happen . Its even happening in India , the jobs at the lower end of the spectrum are going to Thailand and China and we have Chinese engineers working in Bangalore working for lower pays.
The solution is not to crib but to try and upgrade your skills and get used to working hard and not having coffee breaks every hour and spending half the workday playing Doom or surfing Slashdot.
**Life is too short to be serious**
As a programmer of Indian origin, I feel somewhat qualified to comment. Before I get to my main point, I need to provide a bit of a preface. Programmers from India that come with an engineering degree typically are much better at the problem solving and analysis that are required in IT than are folks from a sciences and the arts. The reason for this is that engineering and medicine are typically the higher (far higher in the case of compute related stuff) paying professions and the competition for admissions to these courses are fierce. In a process of evolutionary selection, typically the candidates better suited to problem solving and analysis are the ones that make it through to even getting admission to the professional schools.
Granted, as in every other field, a percentage of those admitted to egineering are duds. But statistically speaking, the odds are really good that someone from an engineering background in India is Good at IT. Conversely, the people who dont get into engineering and medicine are typically less suited to IT.
And now onto my point....
Coming from an enginering background myself, and having worked for one of the companies that do offshore development, I noticed a curious phenomenon amongst my (then) colleagues. The vast majority of them had scorn for the skills and capabilities of the average IT worker. I didnt understand this until I came to the US myself. Then I realized that the average IT worker in the US is more likely to be a former third grade teacher who sought a better paying profession than a graduate of engineering. My (then) colleagues were falling into the trap of comparing apples to oranges. They were comparing themselves and their colleagues (who were mainly with engineering backgrounds) to people who werent, and of course, in that comparison, the US worker came out short.
The correct way of comparing things would have been to look at where the people with engineering backgrounds (and in the US, this is only a rough indicator of problem solving and analytical skills, I know) went, and then, comparing themselves to the skill and efficiency of those workers. When I did that comparison myself, I found that there really was no inequity between the US and the Indian worker.
You (and many others) seem to have fallen into a similar trap : you are equating all Indian offshore companies without recognizing quality differences. This would be something like comparing IBM to Poppa and Momma IT Inc. The company that I had worked for hired really good people. There are companies from India in the same field that hire predominantly from the Arts and Sciences fields and because of the competition I mentioned before, the people that they get arent (statistically speaking) as good as the really good ones. So, the conclusion is, you can get really good work done at really cheap prices, provided you pick the right company!
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
yes, I've had to restrain myself a couple of time from telling my friends who became "programmers" during the dot-com boom when they complain about there not being any IT jobs out there that employers are just being more picky about who they pick now. For enterprise level jobs there is still plenty of need, the industry has gone back to a more realistic model of employement rather than "we need a warm body we can train for cheap"
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
"Excuse me good sir... you are wrong. I know because my mother is a teacher."
Oh, please. Can't you see this makes you unobjective!
Did your mother raise you to be an idiot: When
debating a position, don't point out weaknesses in
your own position unless they are already apparent
to the opposition.
These are times of record unemployment levels. During this time, the government has continued to bring in foreign labor, and is seriously considering it for the future. How dare they treat us so poorly. Are we getting our money's worth?
Maybe if people stopped paying taxes for awhile, our "representive" government would remove their attentions from their bribery system long enough to see just how disgusted and tired the population is with their reptillian manner of doing business.
IT workers are not being represented by the government. The taxes we pay, end up going to forward the agendas of people who are taking our jobs away.
[insert witty commentary about the SourceForge banner ads on Slashdot: "It's 2AM, do you know what your overseas developers are doing?"]
They came after the web developers, but I was not a web developer, and I did not object.
They came after the Java enthusiasts, but I was not a Java enthusiast, and I did not object.
They came after the open source developers, but I was not an open source developer, and I did not object.
Then they came after the ordinary, decent programmer, and there was no-one left to object for me.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
While you bemoan the growing dominance of foreign programmers, note that foreigners bemoan the dominance of American IT. "All these American computers when we could build our own, slap restrictions on their import!" America makes a lot of money exporting IT products abroad.
So if we make money selling products and services abroad, is it so terrible that other countries do the same? That's the way the global free market works. If we try to restrict foreign programmers, you can be sure they will slap tarrifs back on our products.
In general, I find most people have a very naive idea of the way things work: they assume America is God's Country (TM) and so we will always make tons of money and all the other nations will always be reduced to begging for scraps. The reality is that the rise of America coincided with a very strange period for others: colonization and WWII. As countries have rebuilt after the devastation of colonization and WWII, expect more competition for America and a more even distribution of capabilities and wealth.
Lies about crimes
The reason teachers get paid 31k/year for 10 months (Yes, I know it's hard making a living on that, and they have to take summer jobs, but you didn't say what she earns there, so it doesn't count) is simple - supply and demand - they can obviously get enough teachers of the quality they want (they meaning the people paying the taxes) for $31k! If they couldn't, they would have to raise the pay scale.
Some people ARE willing to pay more - and we move into areas with better schools, which usually have higher taxes
One thing I find fairly interesting is that in NYC, the bottom performing schools get significantly more money/student that the top performing schools! The interesting part however is this - More money gets to the CLASSROOM in the schools that perform well than the schools that perform poorly! (Can you say corrupt bureaucracy?)
Please excuse any mistakes on this, but I'm on some fairly nasty drugs right now, and can barely stay awake
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Personally, I have never enrolled into college. However that does not mean that I have no spent the last three years of my life trying to read/learn/expirement with everything and anything I can.
I feel that for someone with 5 years of Tech backround, three in unix, I have learned a lot. I usually have no troubles holding my own against a college graduate. But in the general sense, I fall into this "under brush" category.
Think about this, people like myself, we do truly do this for the love of labor. There was no driving force of college, just myself and a box. My own internal drive to learn and educate myself. To me these are sometimes more often the people that will really excel due to the motivation it took to get this far in the first place and the remaining drive of learning everything you can in an industry that advances as quickly as this one.
I just think that perhaps before you stand on your Berkely soap box, that sometimes you should appreciate there are more important things in knowledge/skill/education than college.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I don't know about the US at the moment, but I've heard much the same said of the UK, and it's certainly not true here.
A guy I used to know was laid off, and sent his CV off to dozens of agencies. He got only one interview, and moaned about it for days.
That sounds harsh, until you realise that he wanted to work the same five minutes from the office he always had (after taking the piss out of those of us who commute for years), expected at least as high a salary as he was on before (in spite of the fact that he'd been paid considerably more than the going rate for his skill and experience for some time) and so on.
I, and several other friends, have been looking at moving over the past few months, but we've been more flexible about location, package, and so on. None of us has had any problems finding interviews.
A lot of people complain that it's impossible to get jobs at the moment, people are very lucky to find them, etc. I'm sure, for some people, that's genuinely true. If they have families to support, a mortgage to pay and so on, moving can be hard, and I sympathise.
OTOH, a lot of these people are just whining because their massively overpaid jobs have run out, and now they're going to have to compromise with employers like the rest of us. For these people, I have little sympathy, I'm afraid. All they do is piss off those who do have jobs, and weaken the case of those who don't because of genuine bad luck.
At the end of the day, no-one has any right to be employed just because of some piece of paper they have or some item of experience on their resume. Your skills and experience are only valuable if someone needs to use them. If they don't, you either develop new skills and experience that are useful, or you relocate to somewhere where your existing skills are sought. It's not a hard concept, and whether or not we like it, it happens to be the way the world works. All we can do is deal with it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
look, the idea that IT employment in this country is going back to pre 2001 levels is a fantasy.
most of the jobs lost were from dotcoms that are never coming back (does anyone not realize this yet?) and from financial services companies that are pretty much in the same boat.
i'm sure there will be hiring, but not on that scale again. not until the next new new thing shows up.
No, no, Kleenex is useful. You can wipe your nose with it. It has a reason for existence, and what it is supposed to do, it does well.
People who get a certification without having any real experience have no purpose. Get some experience, THEN get a certification. That makes it worth something to indicate that you learned some stuff in your years on the job.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
What contribution to society do IT workers make that are significantly more important than the contribution of other similarly educated technical workers, i.e. mechnical, civil, or chemical engineers? None.
So why then do IT workers earn 50%-100% more than other technical fields? The bubble has burst and I think IT workers will have to take there place in the line of under-valued scientist/engineers/technicians.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
The H1B program itself isn't a problem...the raising of the limits to such high levels in the middle of a tech recession was the problem.
You can thank your buddy Clinton for that.
A troll is someone who does not have an earnest point to make. I do have an earnest point to make. Go read a history book, dip shit
This post is protected under the DMTA (Digital Millemium Trolling Act). It is illegal to moderate it as a troll.
Heck I'm an electrical engineer, do I consider myself an IT worker? HELL NO, it would be nice if the general public (and /.) made the disctinction.
to me IT isn't even programing, its the guys who do server/pc support maintenance, upgrades etc. Skills like that are more of a commodity, being a good programmer/engineer is not. For every design engineer you have several test/systems engineers who test their work(design engineers get paid more in general).
When did IT equate engineering and programing? They are not the same! Repeat again! They are not the same!
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
What I don't understand is the practice of American companies, who enjoy all of the protections and benefits of American society, can get away with refusing to employ American citizens. Like some sort of parasite.
an example about truck drivers
there are 2 reasons why this wouldn't work with IT people
1.) truck drivers are surly =)
2.) WE DONT HAVE A SINGLE GLOBALLY RECOGNIZED **UNION**
come on people
where is OpenUnion.org
if teh majority of people are members of a union they will be able to get clout with employers who will actually have to listen instead of just firing people, otherwise they will lose *ALL* their IT people instead of just some, and luckily ther eare laws to protect our union already..
so..
where are the architects, i'm must a visionary (adn i'm sure i wasn't the first to think of it)
and give them visas.
....
Do the math - H1b Visa Programs are merely an attempt to get cheap labor and not pay for American workers.
If you want high tech people to immigrate and become American citizens - those with advanced degrees - great!
But instead we cut down on US jobs for American IT workers and don't cut the H1B jobs.
Follow the money
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I'm not going to be surprised if I get all of 2002 off.
I ended a lucrative contract in December, and was planning to hang out until February, but the offers coming in were lame.
Management doesn't understand that it can't improve its business' efficiency by interfering, it can only brake it.
If the job-creation projections are right, I should be getting offers at an attractive rate just about the time my sabbatical fund is down to the 6-month get-a-job-dumbass cushion.
But if it's wrong and I start looking askance at my retirement accounts, hey, framing hammers are cheap, and day-labor that speaks English is the first in the back of the truck.
--Blair
"Income averaging, the Welfare of the '00s."
I happen to believe that the H1B program is a problem. If you are offended by my attempts to inform people about this, well..tough shit.
Nope, no slashdot id, but that's another issue entirely.
So, you object to me posting as an AC, and you object to me educating people about H1Bs. Why?
We DID have coal till last year - they are now gone
Charlie
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Does this mean MS is releasing *another* service pack. Damn.
If they count the number of jobs the way they did to pass the H1B visa bill, there will be a net gain of only 300,000 jobs and people still out of work.
This is a big myth that it is going to be bad for the United States (or whatever other country is dominant) if countries that are currently mired in all kinds of third world problems manage to pull themselves out of that mire and join the "first world."
I did not mean to imply that.
If India becomes an economic powerhouse it will be good for everyone in the world, including the United States.
I completely agree with this.
What I was saying: America will not be the only country in the world with competent programmers, excellent R&D, and a powerful millitary; get used to it.
Lies about crimes
H1B's cause the employees to compete with the world market, while the employers only have to compete with the local market.
Hey, it's called globalization. And globalization makes the world a better place for all us. At least I always thought so... After all, George W. Bush is supporting it... um, I mean, except for that steel import tax thingy...
After 10 years in the valley, and finding myself unemployed for over a year, I give up. Silly me, I thought that skills like signal processing, filter design, assembly language coding on 10+ proccessors/DSPs, hardware debugging and testing skills that rivals that, if not surpassing that, of a EE, would set me among the elite of the programming field. I thought I was very good at my career, but apparently I am underbrush or something. Fine, you made me bitter and resentful ensuring my unemployable status. I am taking what little money I have left and buy a house in the middle of nowhere where I can afford it. And rather than doing something that benifits humanity as a whole, I will just open up 1-900-speak-to-the-dead, or something to suck as much money out of the sheeple that I can.
You're doomed. I've been doomed since I graduated in December 2001. Never a bite on any job I applied to, online or otherwise.
So you'd better contact your local retail businesses, because it's going to be a long search for a job. Hopefully your parents won't mind having you back for a while, if not you'll have to bunk up with multiple roommates in some cheap apartment, have no car, and live paycheck to paycheck.
Don't worry about that economic upswing - I'm sure the government can import enough H1-B's to take care of that. Yes, I'm in a bad mood today.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Average salary was that high? Shit, right now I could make half of the new average and STILL be making more than I was.
All those 'tech schools'that keep pumping out people every quarter after quarter..
Cant they see that the market is saturated? Of course they do, but as long as they can pretend there are ' high paying jobs' they will continue
to sucker people in.. and make us old-timers lives more difficult, due to our higher cost of a greenie.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Many people with very little experience moved into IT in 2000 and 2001 in order to make a quick buck. Nothing wrong with that, but it was a temporary need, an employment bubble tracking an investment bubble. There is no reason, however, for many of those people to be able to expect continued employment in IT. In normal times, IT employment makes high demands on skill, education, and experience, and hiring is correspondingly selective.
Your neighbor watches your kids for more than your wife gets paid to sit in a room with a bunch of kids because she is an independent contractor.
If this same 13 year old neighbor were a government employee doing the same thing, I would think that she would make as much as your wife.
In all honesty, schooling has one purpose: to get kids to think like lemmings and learn to conform to whatever place the first employer they have tries to stick them in. That's all.
I think it's a horrible job, as well as a horrible goal. Sure, your wife might think that she's helping to expand the minds of the kids in the class, but that's not her fucking job.
Schools are the greatest fiasco of the present day, and I'm sorry that you think your wife is doing a great thing by being part of that machine.
~D
Sorry but I don't think a statement like "America is pro free trade... In short, tough shit" really tells the story. America isn't just about free trade it's should be about the prosperity of its peoples.
That's why things exist like tariffs and subsidies. Do you want all the American farmers to go under because we can get really cheap x from country y? Is that in the best interest of America? Maybe but the number of industries which the US protects goes beyond produce.
Perhaps protecting IT workers so that those skills are cultivated and retained within our country would be useful. Perhaps not, but I'm sorry America is not based solely on free trade, it's based on the interests of its citizens.
My father worked in a FACTORY as a TINSMITH. And he made over $130k. Sure he had to work his ass off to get that, and put in many the 84 hour week, but who cares? He made a lot of damn money.
I don't make as little as $63k, but I'm not making double that either.
One of the reasons is that I'm no longer doing anything "new" or "difficult." A monkey could do 99 percent of what I've been doing recently. The economy has stagnated, there is no new development, and they don't need to hire smart people because the jobs that have to be done aren't complex.
When it turns around, and there is more R&D going on, then maybe I'll get back up to a reasonable salary. Until then, I'm stuck doing dipshit work for a dipshit company with a complete idiot for a Director.
That's where $63k comes from.
~D
Got to agree with you. I'm not sure how big business managed to label anyone against unlimited immigration with the label of 'racist' or 'facist'. Of course immigration makes sense from a business perspective - more supply of labor, bigger local market. From the typical American's point of view it's a mixed bag. Sure, some things are cheaper, like farm produce, lawn care and restaurant meals. However, it also means higher house prices and rents, lower wages, and lower quality of public services.
If you disagree with that last one, just look at house prices, working-class wages, and the public schools in California, the state with the most immigration. Hmmm....
FYI-
You can add ABM (American Building Maintence) to the list. Same deal, sysop/admin to IBM and programming to India.
They're calling it "out-tasking" as well.
Is this just the flavor-of-the-month or the future ?
Businesses are for globalization, not nationalism. A corporation couldn't care LESS about national unity, or they wouldn't SOLICIT other countries.
Actually, black people in NYC are angrier about mass immigration than white people. Because it undercuts them in wages. How the hell is an inner city kid going to get out of the ghetto when a illegal immigrant will take the job HE would've taken for a lot less? When I was a kid, I was a bus boy in a restaurant for minimum wage. I don't know of any kid who could even GET that job nowadays for minimum wage. He has to take sub-human wages. Which is NOT fair.
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
What a complete load of bullshit. I can't believe they have the gal to utter such utter crap.
Sorry to mention this, but the move to free software cannot help creating IT jobs. Our company has done nothing but embrace open source. We dropped oracle for postgres, dropped solaris for our servers - and we are now in the process of replacing most of our windows machines with linux thin clients. Our budget has dropped ~80%.
Will this may sound like a great victory for open source I cannot help but think that it totally devalues people who write software. From an economic sense it is the equivlent of
factory workers making widgets for free just because they like too... And then eventaully the company *expects* you to make widgets for free...
I would have thought this would get marked as flame bait or Troll. Instead it seems if u write a long enuff comment Slashdot editors/moderators will upgrade you interesting.
Since when did Slashdot become about quantity and not quality?
As to my response look at my comment just below.
**Life is too short to be serious**
If I follow the logic of your post it would mean that here in Europe where we are also in the middle of a hefty IT recession, we should not allow any Americans, no matter how qualified, to work here?
That is simplistic and attitudes like that won't get you your job back.
If Americans were suddenly to get told to leave the Chech Republic for instance, Prague would suddenly have about 30000 less people.
Low wages are not the only reason those people get Visas. They generally complain less and work more. This attitude of putting the blame on foreign workers will not get *you* your job back. A different attitude to work might.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
If you have good skills and don't see any openings in the 'help wanted' section, don't despair. Go through the yellow pages and build a listing of all the companies you want to work for. Customize your resume for the exact company you're applying for - don't spam them w/ all the same generic message.
Do your homework about the companies profits and other financials. If the company does all their information processing w/ email, network connections and other hacks, go to them and suggest to get a job working for them doing their much needed intranet!
Just a few ideas I've come up w/ on my own investigations...
peace,
galacticdruid
we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively - bill hicks
A few personal numbers from a durned furriner
I've been in the IT business since 1980. I've managed to stay technical rather than managerial. To give you some idea of where my ecological niche is, I have at various times,
Current Salary USD40,000. Which is more than I've ever been paid in my life before.
This is a world market. Some of those USD10 an hour Indian programmers are actually a lot better than most native USAians (though YMMV). I'm Australian, and some of our guys are also no slouches, and as you can see, only slightly more expensive.
Deal with it. Either reduce your rates, become more productive and professional, or buy some Congressmen (that's the American Way, a la Disney, Microsoft etc).
Trouble is, I personally know some really good, capable programmers in the US who've been out of work for over a year now. And some clowns still employed who are making a packet. Ability doesn't seem to make much difference.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
I've been in and out of IT since the mid eighties. At the moment I've been unemployed for a year and my chances of finding a new job in this field are small. I'm thinking of delivering Pizzas
Blaming companies outsourcing their IT work or foreign competitors is not going to help you cope. The companies do that because the sector is struggling and they have to somehow make a profit as well. The IT sector has been extremely lucky until the last couple of years, reporting growth every year. Did anyone bother to think that other industries that were major performers decades ago also went into bad times and laid workers off or outsourced to some cheaper country. IT is simply beoming a mainstream industry, sadly with workers who are technically able to unionise more easily than any other but unwilling to do so for fear of the competition or a myriad other reasons.
The way I see it one has a number of choices:
1.One forgets about the high flying career that one envisaged for oneself, takes a major paycut, but is possibly able to find work.
2.One advances one's studies. It might help if one has an extra qualification.
3.One leaves the IT sector and does something else.
4.One starts one's own business. An option not to taken lightheartedly.
5.One tries to cope with difficulties that one encounters with bosses etc instead of quitting at the first sign of trouble.
6.Consider moving away from the US. I know that Java programmers are wanted here in Europe and the pay is fairly good. If it's good enough for a H1-B it could be good enough for you.
I'm sorry if these things sound banal, but what choice does one have? Somehow one has to cope and survive. Starting unions might help, but it won't make a difference in the short term, and running around blaming others will not get you a job.
Things will be looking up in the next quarter? Can't have that. Time to launch another endless investigation into anti-competitive behavior.
I've recently been laid off, despite carefully not choosing a dot com type of company. Specialising in security - so I though my job was safe, especially due to the current trend of paranoia. Guess what? VCs who were about to fund us, walked away, leaving us(the company) in the shit. ... which furthers my suspicions that my CV isn't going to the places I apply for ... This annoys me tremendously. I expect soon that I will been told that since I dont have a LCE/MSCE/Other "professional" qualification that I'm unsuitable for development. Maybe it's time for me to become a contractor?
However, enough of how I got into this mess, and on with my observation. Most contractors I've come across (with the exception of two or three) are just complete typical MSCE idiots. God knows how they even passed the MSCE (not that I've taken one, though I hear they are quite easy).
These contractors are now unable to find jobs, due to the dot com bubble bursting and so they turn to permament work. So they're going for similar jobs as me, a staunch perm person. These guys get all the interviews because they have "lots" of experiance - mostly through upping their experiance in something from "I looked at X, while doing a Y project" to "Expirianced in X and Y". So I apply for a job through an agency and get silently filtered out, due to so called "lack of experiance".
Only last week I had to berate a stupid agents manager about his attitude - "you cant do this job because you havent worked in a consultancy like Anderson" - even when the job was a developer position!
The few interviews I've been on people have told me that most of the "highly technical" candidates fail badly at the technical interview
BLEH !
(Apologies to the few contractors out there - and MSCEs - that actually know what they're on about.)
...so I'll only say you're right when I see:
- guys in nice cars delivering pizzas in under 30 minutes
- robotic superdogs attacking ex-soviet cab drivers
- junkies paying 750 billion dollars for a hit
Oh how I wait for that day......
I am a programmer of a small software house in Hong Kong. I have a BS in CS and 1 year working experience. Let me tell me how much do we earn here.
In Hong Kong, for those programmers with 1-2 working experinces like me, we are earning US 15K. 63K can hire a half a dozen programmers here.
In China, programmers are earning US 3K a year!!! I am not kidding, 3K a year for a CS graduate. And 5K a year for a PHD.
This is absolutely crazy but there are still a lot of programmers flooding into China as they are expecting more good years to come.
of certification mill drones. Until I found my new job working in the IT Dept. at the college where I go, I worked retail, but played with computers full time. I have two almost useless certifications (A+ have and CNA) and at 18 very little experience. So I begged, and begged for temp work, then made a favorable impression. I am trying to get as skilled as I can at as many things as I can, not because I want to make money, but because I enjoy it. Too many people I see (many of whom are older, and more educated) seem to be in IT for the money. It is my hope that if anything, this current job shortage should weed out all the men and women who jumped on the bandwagon and are not really very good at what they do. I find it disheartening that there are so many skilled individuals who are working at Home Depot and the like, while people who could not pick a computer out of a police lineup still manage to keep their jobs.
"It tastes like.... burning." -Ralph Wiggum
not because they were great times, and not because they were horrible . . . but because we're senile.
I'm finishing up my computer engineering degree and I don't have a job and I don't know anyone who does, regardless of gpa. If anybody can tell me what I have to do to get a job, please tell me.
I can understand off-shore outsourcing, but this H1B thing is pure crap. ITAA *made up* numbers pulled from their arse to manufacture a "labor shortage".
IOW, they lied to congress to kiss up to MS et al.
We cannot stop off-shore work, but to keep bringing in lower-wage indentured servants to take away taxpaying citizen's jobs is a crying shame.
Slavery Has Returned. It is called H1-B.
Table-ized A.I.
(* Hey, it's called globalization. And globalization makes the world a better place for all us. At least I always thought so... *)
Globalization says nothing about importing cheaper *workers*.
If the gov tried to do that with say bus or truck drivers, you can rest assured heads would roll in the capital. Geeks have no political teeth, so we get it in the behind.
Soon: "First Wallmart sold cheap products from the East. Now they sell cheap workers from the East. Save 30 percent by getting the 12-pack, still in the original boa....um packaging."
Table-ized A.I.
I think we would all agree that teachers are underpaid. vastly underpaid.
but they don't do it for the money, they do it for the high of seeing the lights turn on in another person's head.
still, we really ought to pay teachers a living wage.
fucking Prop 13 in California, there's no supplies in the classroom. this is in a "good" school district (Cupertino).
Public school teachers in my part of Wisconsin haven't had a raise to reflect cost of living in roughly 6-8 years, and for a while, there was a state-mandated limit to how much they could be paid. The WI Teachers' Union was actually sanctioned by the governor (T. THompson) for striking for these reasons - and now, Tommy Thompson (who has done exactly jack shit for social welfare and education in WI) is the Secretary of Health and Human Services of the United States. How's that for irony?
Nice to know that this whole recession is doing something to 'weed out the underbrush'.
A little background. I have a Master's degree in computers, and I'm A+ certified (worthless, I know), 3 years experience, including 1 year managerial. As soon as I start working again, it's Cisco certification for me.
One little problem. Come next Friday, I'll have been unemployed one calendar year.
You really want to rethink that underbrush statement. I'm not even the worst off; there's people in the Chicago area that know their stuff that have been out of work 18 months.
And a $63k average salary? I'd kill for my old salary right now, which was half that. =b
I posted this story to a list I subscribe to. One of the members posted this, for which I am eternally grateful. And I've decided it was too good not to share, though some of you may have seen it before.
The Twelve Steps of IT Unemployed
1--We admitted we were powerless over Windows--that our networking skills had become unmarketable.
2--Came to believe a resume better than our own could restore us to IT employment.
3--Made a decision to turn over our references to the care of Human Resources, as we are underestimated.
4--Made a searching and fearless mental inventory of the certifications and training we have that are now obsolete.
5--Admitted to a headhunter, ourselves, and another human being the exact nature of our layoff.
6--Were entirely ready to have the headhunter remove all defects in our work records.
7--Humbly sought to upgrade our software certifications.
8--Made a list of all former bosses we had badmouthed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9--Made direct amends where it would do the most good, except when doing so would hurt our chances of IT employment or consulting jobs.
10--Continued to take personally our layoffs, and when we were denied unemployment or severance, promptly appealed.
11--Sought through networking to make contact with our potential IT employer as we understood him, praying only for insurance, a workstation, and a paycheck.
12--Having had a rude awakening as a result of the dotcom bust, we tried applying for help desk positions we never would have considered, and forget whatever principles we still had.
Duplicity Prayer
Bill grant me the duplicity to accept the job I cannot stand, the courage to send out my resume again, and the wisdom to pass more certs.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I don't think that's the "unskilled labor" he was referring to. And the abovementioned wife is a teacher not a prostitute ;)
The problem is that they are beginning to equate anything having to do with technology as IT. They seem to be confusing EE with CE.
This same thing has been happening with engineers too, not just IT people. The language barrier still causes lots of inefficiency though. If a business starts recruiting workers from outside the US for their US business, I have no problem with it - assuming the person really is the best suited for the job. If it's simply done as a cost-cutting measure (AKA. We only have to pay these guys X amount instead of Y!), they're being shortsighted. The poor English skills many of these people possess causes countless wasted hours redoing work due to misinterpretations of a manager's instructions, or inability to read English documentation.
I've run into Novell CNE's who didn't even know how to delete or rename files at a DOS command prompt.
I've also met CNE's who were absolutely brilliant though. As usual, having the certification doesn't really amount to a hill of beans, in and of itself. The only reason, IMHO, you might have better luck with CNE's than MCSE's is because the CNE isn't hyped up much anymore. People choosing to get certified in it nowdays do so typically because they already work hands-on in a Novell environment and desire to become better at it.
Everyone wanted the MCSE after all the radio and newspaper ads promised you an instant high-paying career job just by passing the exams.
If companies were smart, they'd test potential new hires themselves - and not be concerned with the possession of these certs. Ask them what *you* want to know if they know!
I've never thought they were the same. In fact, where I'm at, we have a seperate dept. for software development and IT.
Nonetheless, many good IT people have to know at least a little bit about programming of one type or another. For example, maybe you're writing complex batch files to automate processes on a server, or maybe you're working with SQL statements, or debugging troublesome macros in Excel? This isn't the same as application development, but it does take some of the same skills as programming. Often, it's skills like this that seperate the "senior" level IT staff from the rest.
There is a certain amount of skill inflation going on in the DP/IS/IT industry. Are CNE's and MCSE's really engineers? I think not! People who churn out lines of code implementing other people's design and algorithms don't deserve the title of programmer since they are just coders. A lot of the folks passing themselves off as sofware engineers have never studied this discipline and have a fuzzy at best understanding of what it is. Having worked in the CS department of a university I found that a far smaller percentage of graduates could do system work than programming. Most areas of programming and engineering allow workers to become specialists while systems people have to be generalists. Where I work we have systems so complex that nobody understands them top to bottom. The DBA's, data modelers, statiticians, and developers each understand their layer but the systems administrators are the generalists who know a little about every layer and often have to be called in to fix things that break and perplex the specialists. IT does not equate engineering and programming; it requires far more intellectual curiosity and problem solving.
I thought everyone already knew that the ITAA was a completely unreliable source of information. It's a trade association, of which Microsoft is a member. The ITAA may be single handedly responsible for the moronic, product certification test preparation cottage industry that sprung up several years ago.