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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.
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.
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?)
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
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
Right, those of who can't find jobs will simply have to wait a little until they die in the streets, and that will be a good thing because it will clear out the underbrush.
And anyone with the right skills knows that they can get hired, because the managers who make hiring decisions are just utterly brilliant in their jobs, and know so much about IT that they can instantly tell who knows what they're doing. And if you can't find a job, that just means you're not as incredibly smart as the person who wrote the parent post.
- 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...
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!
... 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
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
I wouldn't want to be so insensitive as to refer to those who can't find a job as "underbrush", but really, can we expect the job market to be as good for IT people since the Internet bubble burst?
One of the vital processes in market economies that keeps them working is something called clearance. Inefficient methods of operating, like spending venture capital for operating funds for years waiting for a bad business plan to turn a profit, are cleared from the market eventually, leaving room for things that make sense.
This does lead to people being jobless. But, this also encourages everyone to keep their skills current and their pay expectations realistic.
Clearance is something we have to attempt to apply to large Government bureaucracies constantly as market forces don't apply here. The fact that there's not regular market clearance to Government bureaucracies is what helps lead to all the gross inefficiencies there, IMO.
It's business cycles. I don't think they've been abolished, contrary to what some were saying a few years ago. I liken it to winter. Winter does make it hard on a lot of life for awhile, but it sets the stage for Spring.
It does seem unfortunate that those on top in market economies (CEOs and Board Members) are the most insulated from business cycles, with their golden parachutes and other benefits. But, this is like how mankind is more insulated from winter when compared to most of the animal kingdom. It's good to be on top of any food chain, I guess.
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.
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
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
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.