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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.
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
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)
Personally I agree with you. During the boom as little as two years ago, I read a lot of programmers protesting that they simply weren't prepared to take a five digit salary and that employers should bite the bullet and pay what the programmers thought they were worth.
The problem is that it's all crap. There's still a skills shortage, but now it's less pronounced salaries are beginning to get closer to decent levels, as a smaller choice means technical people are willing to take on jobs they weren't before.
With the exception of certain areas of the country where the dot-com boom and bust hit hard leaving a localised clump of highly skilled people, it's not difficult to get a job in programming, and you'll still earn a tremendous amount of money. Compare these "dreadful" $63,000 salaries to those of your non technical friends and family - unless you're living amongst lawyers and executives you're not likely to meet that many people on that kind of money.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
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
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
- 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...
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"...
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.
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.
I think this attitude is very common among employers these days, but they are soon due for a wakeup call.
Much of the problem over the last 8 months was a kneejerk lockup on IT spending due to Sept. 11th and the associated hit on the economy. So there is a TON of money just waiting to be spent on IT again. A certain degree of "you're lucky you have a job" was to be expected in an economic slump, but now employers are starting to push things a little too far.
I see the IT economy really starting to pick up and soon employers will find that bullying their employees will result in their not having any good people left. I suggest you take a look at what's out there now. Don't just take your boss's word for it.
---- Just another spud server.
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
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.
The $15,000 chemical engineer. *sigh*
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?