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."

Comments

Re:To vocalize what's on everyone's mind...

[JPriest]

Programmers and IT geeks will be the factory workers of the future, Only that factory work requires a BS, a handfull of certs, and years of knowledge and experience. I should have gone to med. school.

Many IT jobs moved offshore ...

[Naum]

... 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:

• American Express is about to complete the movement of all of its IT application development and support offshore - it's a net loss of approximately 2K+ programmer jobs - to India (mostly), Maylasia, Phillipines, Indonesia, etc. although it can be buried through levels of "outsourcing" (i.e., Company A contracts with Company B which in turn contracts with Company C ... with less and less money going to the actual programmer).
• Honeywell, is moving the majority of its application support and development offshore to Ireland, India and/or Mexico. The strategy is proudly pronounced by execs, as everyone wants to follow the GE "Be Like Jack Welch" model of outsourcing everything. They like to call it their "recsourcing strategy".
• APS, Arizona's largest power company, has embarked on an effort to move support (and eventually development) of its customer information systems to India.
• Motorola, Intel both have slashed FTE's and replaced with offshore imported programmers of the H1B visa variety - very few programmer positions are open to experienced American programmers at either place.

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.

From the other side of the fence

[jonnystiph]

I am seeing a lot of posts talking about people who went to college and grabbed a degree and talk about clearing out the underbrush. Did it ever occur to you that perhaps some of this underbrush are people that never had the chance, or even desire to go to college.

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.