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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."
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
where do you get years from?
last year we had the smallest recesion ever. Companies and finacial institutions over reacted and threw away more people than needed, but Jobless rates do not a recession make.
unemployment is a symptom of a recession, but you can have high unemployment with out having a recession of the economy.
hell, economists would not call having 25% of the populus out of work a recession as long as the dollors were increasing.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
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.
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
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.
Im a webmaster, my wife is a middle school teacher.
.. she makes just over 30k
.. lets say she makes 31,000 a full 12 month year (with no summer jobs or incentive teaching programs) [which .. by the way .. most teachers have to do to make ends meet .. having their summers off is a crock.]
.. and we are assuming that she only has each student once.
.. that she is geting approx $0.42 cents a child per hour (and forget all the decimal places)
.. so i have to figure the going rate is probally around 2 .. but i get a break cause there are a lot of cool toys in the house ;) [www.remsbox.com]
.. the first insult is that my wife gets paid less than a 13 year old kid .. and needed a BA + certification to have that priveledge.
.. *PER YEAR* - that works out to $0.02 (rounded up) a day in art supplies ..
.. all those wondeful taxes you pay to the government for "schools" is buying your 12 year old son $0.44 cents a day worth of education. (you can multiply that out for 7 classes yourself .. but keep in mind .. not all those classes have such a lavish budget.)
:
.. sit on my a$$ all day .. fill out some code .. then go home.
.
I work for a a fortune 500 , she works for the county of a fairly well known city.
I make a little under 70k a year
I did the math once on how 'valuable' she was to society.
she has about 300 students a day:
and for argument
that makes her monthly (pre tax) salery about 2,583 - $646 a week - $129 a day [this is pre tax mind you] for a 5 day work week. that means she is paid $0.40 cents a student per day.
she has 7 classes that are 50 mins long
lets for argument say
I can hire my 13 year old neigebor as a baby sitter for the premium price of $1.50 an hour.
kids used to get $1 an hour when i was 13ish
so
NOW lets talk about her budget.
She has an annual budget of $1000 for art supplies. thats $3.33 (ish) cents per child
so far
Add into this the job descriptions of
- must argue with irate parents over their failing kids
- must 'teach' class-sizes of 35+ students
- must contact parents 2 times verbally and 1 time in writing before failing a child. [regardless of their performance , or even ATTENDANCE]
- must police halls
- must immediatly report any child on 'agressive profile' list (a-la colembine)
- must pay for extra art supplies out of her own pocket or explain to children why they are drawing with water on bathroom tissue AGAIN.
- must not call on 2 boys in a row, or two girls, or two children of the same nationality, may not correct a student's answer when they answer a question wrong. [ever notice how your teachers always asked at least 3 kids before correcting 'all of you?' they get in trouble if they dont.]
- must not ever touch a child in any way. [a teacher in our county was sued by a family because she tried to catch a child who was falling (due to ironically , her twin brother tripping her) the child suffered a sprained arm where the teacher grabbed her as her head was rushing towards teh concreate)
these are only the tip of the iceberg.
I on the otherhand
are IT professionals overpaid compared to people who do other 'necessairy' jobs ? yeh . I have to say that we are.
Its just a personal pet peve of mine that teachers, the folks who are RESPONSABLE for us being smart enough to do this work . get shafted
Baltimore County cant seem to find any $$ when her school's heaters break, but they found enough $$ to build a by-way that allowed a contracter to build 4,500 townhouses in a previously unreachable tract of land.
to really throw injury on insult, they predict that the community raised by at least 6000 familys this year, and her school cut 7 positions.
how's that for efficiency ?
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
Part of the problem is so many of the folks that *think* they are IT folks really are not.
Here in the Dulles Tech Corridore in VA, there are hundreds of out-of-work "IT" people, that barely graduated (or dropped out of) highschool, never got a certification, played all day on the 'net during the web boom, squandered opportunities to go to college, badmouthed everybody that bothered to go to school and get certified, know nothing about anything beyond being the admin of a few FreeBSD machines and are now on perpetual unemployment swearing that they know better than the folks that still have jobs at their old firms (if those firms exist at all).
For one, I am glad that I stayed in the Defense sector as a functional, rather than jumping the fence to the true tech side. My background is military and finance, two things that seem not to "fit" very well with the techies, but I still get to go gadget and application crazy at home.
Where I work, we need the techies for our proprietary apps and communications, but in our shop the functionals drive the system. Might have something to do with our being profitable too, since the focus is on the product (analysis and professional services) rather than on how many lines of code can be written in a month.
Techs routinly get hired here for $50,000 right from college and are not normally required to be EE or CS, but it is preferred. More Sr. people get hired too, but we do not have a massive turnover (any more) in the tech side, so they promote from within and give decent raises.
Now, we have a problem finding qualified functionals, but we do not have zads of people that watched a war movie or two claiming to be "military experts" out of work with an evaporating job market. Even an ex-private that was booted from the service knows not to apply here.
Might want to carry that analogy to the "IT professionals" that are not qualified to compete in the industry, if they will bother to listen to you between online games and dumpster diving.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Never forget that:
Seastead this.
I agree - the H1-B visa program does help. Look at i2 in Dallas...they recently moved several hundred of their H1-B's back home to India to set up shop.
It is true that the 14th amendment says American laws apply to everyone on US soil, and does not use the word citizen. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has not been interpreting the Constitution to mean this recently. For example, undocumented worker Jose Castro was last month denied back pay, even though under US law he has a right to it. As the dissenting opinion on the 5-4 opinion stated, by denying him back pay, this just encourages more employers to hire undocumented workers.