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Engineering Careers Short-Circuiting
8BitWimp writes "Today's edition of the Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article discussing the current plight of the U.S. engineering profession. One 29-year-old engineer recently caught in Nortel Network's layoffs said "I spent seven years in school, and it resulted in a six-year career." The article goes on to say a California computer science professor has statistics to show that a programmer's career is not much longer than a pro-football player. What do other Slash-Dot readers think of this situation as related to their programming and engineering careers? Would you pursue the same career path again?"
Knock on Wood here, but I start my career in 91 during the last recession and am still doing fine. Of course I've changed 4 - 6 languages by now (RPG -> VB -> C/C++ -> C#, ASP, JavaScript, XML, HTML, etc ). My rule has been always try to stay current and not comfortable. If you feel comfortable, then you are on the way out of a job.
When I got laid off right after the September 11th attacks, my Job was shipped to India.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole economic problem we're having is due to many companies doing this same thing, exporting our high paying jobs to other countries. It saves them money in the short run, but in the long run its taking money out of our country and slowing our economy.
But then, I'm not an economist, and eventually, I did get another job with another company. But I was unemployed for a year, thats 1 year of my salary that I was unable to produce because my job went overseas. If you add that up over all the people in the industry who are in similar situations.
It was grim, being unemployed for a year. I even contemplated switching industries, actually thought about becoming a Truck Driver to sustain my family. But for me, my job is more of a love than a carreer. Its what I do. Its my hobby, its my passion, and I really don't want to do anything else.
But the guy in the story wants to give up on his job because he got laid off from one company, thats sad. Maybe for what he does its necesary, I don't know, but there are other jobs out there, and who knows.
Anyway, thats my 2p.
I enjoyed a programming "career" for 5 years following high-school. I am self-taught, and managed, developed and implemented databases at an ISP, a TV Broadcast Company, and for a Freight Brokerage.
Although I have not attended University or College for training in the field, I made a substantial income.
I observed many of my co-workers and friends whom had gone through University and such, and their careers ended just as quickly as mine.
The common problems we all faced were that management did not understand the nature of the job performed, and ended up hiring a large agency to take over our "home brew" projects.
I have reformed my future, and am becoming a Special Ed teacher for the Blind and Visually Impaired... because the IT industry has completely collapsed, not resulting from poor economy (I live in Canada, and our economy is quite strong right now...), but as a result of poor management and planning.
My suggestion to anyone considering, or currently working in IT, is to educate themselves in another field, and use their skills as an addition to their qualifications.
I write small applications to make programs like Excel more accessible for the Blind, as there is little, or no support for Text-to-Speech software, while at the same time performing my other duties.
20 years ago. And NOT to protect the incompetent. More along the lines of professional associations like the AMA, the ABA, the MLBPA or the NHLPA.
Fresh kids out of college know current technology, have the lowest starting salaries (so you can get more of them), and willing to work ungodly hours without extra pay. With the competition for engineering jobs ramping up in India and other lower cost countries, I realized early that I may like technology, but without having the desire to go into management or get a doctorate (to get access to career engineering jobs), then I needed to get into another profession.
There is no safe career to be had in any profession today. The dream of being a 'company man' that the baby-boomer generation had just doesn't exist. People do not get a job, expecting - or able to - still be working for the same company thirty years later. Transient workers were once regarded as flighty and unreliable; today it's the norm. In some professions (science, programming, some engineering disciplines) it's even seen with suspicion when somebody stays at the same place for long.
Forget job security, defined skill sets and straight career paths. This uncertainty is here to stay.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Almost every career can be viewed through this narrow minded window.
Similar reasons can be found for almost any career being short, and statistics can be shown to support that (as well as almost anything you can think of.)
Problems with the current economy shouldn't cause one to abandon a career.
Maybe we're too paranoid. I've seen burn-out, and lemme tell ya, it dosen't need to happen, and most people I've heard complain about it are really NOT burning out.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I've been an engineer for 28 years. My Christmas bonus from the company this year was to get laid off. In my local area (Phoenix) There are hundreds of engineers who have been tossed out in the last 6 months with no end in sight.
I'm not sorry I became an engineer but I have no desire to return to the field even if there were some jobs, which of course, there are not.
All of the companies are moving to small management teams and are outsourcing everything, mostly over seas to Taiwan and India. This country will never learn. First we did it with manufacturing and now we are doing it with engineering. Douglass Adams was right, we are going to be nothing but a bunch of Phone Sanatizers and we will all be in the first arc to go.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Waiting out a recession is never enough. There's always jobs for smart people. I would suggest that people in school forget about timing the job market and start thinking about doing the classwork necessary to become a good entry level devloper.
http://www.kylefreeman.com
"After slogging 60+ hour work weeks for 10+ years and still not a millionaire, I've learned my lesson."
Alot of people do the exact same, becoming a millionaire doesnt just come from Y number of hours for X Years, expectations sometimes are just unrealistic, the vast majority of people in this world will work their entire life and never have near 1 million in the bank.
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There seems to be a common misconception that programmers and often times IT professionals are the typical engineers, similar to how the term "computer scientist" is incorrectly applied to programmers. To me, that seems a broad application of the title, similar to calling car mechanics engineers as well. I many times looked over the classifieds section in the paper in the 90s and saw jobs requiring a BS in computer science when they were simply database programming jobs, for which one really only needed a trade school education.
Personally, just from looking at the numbers from my high school, I would guess that there will actually be a shortage of engineers (i.e., electrical, material, chemical, aerospace, etc.) in the next couple decades. With the boomers retiring and decreasing numbers in my generation going into engineering (because science and math are too "hard," and they have been taught very poorly in the last 20 years by the public school system so they opt for law), the US is losing its engineering workforce. One of the best observations I have heard was from a professor at MIT who observed that 50 years ago engineers outnumbered lawyers by far, whereas today the opposite is true.
Just because Microsoft and Oracle are hiring foreigners to do the programming doesn't mean that the other traditional engineering fields are waning as well. Think of how much software engineering is design versus implementation. The implementation workers are really akin to skilled factory labor, and that is why they are replaceable by cheaper foreign labor. Erecting barriers to immigration will just cause companies to leave the US.
I am not a programmer. However, I work with several programmers, engineers and designers. We have discussions about work all of the time. A couple of years ago programming and engineering seemed like great careers. However, with global competition (e.g., China and India) my colleagues are under a lot of pressure. You can cut the stress with a knife. Here are some of my thoughts on this.
1. These people enjoy stress. They spend so much time at work, it is insane. Yet, at the same time, this type of stress is different. It is inter-work stress, not intra-work stress. That is, it isn't stress related to solving interesting and complex problems. They are having a hard time dealing with it.
2. The impact of offshore competition is really starting to gain ground in most companies. Small companies, large companies, high technolohy companies, low technology companies. Especially if you are in IT, this is no joke. The global economy has arrived. Many workers never thought it would hit them, but it has. This means adjustments in salary expectations, job prospects, networking with others, and more.
3. In my opinion, most development companies outside of the U.S. don't realize the economic and social impact they are having on U.S. workers. They are relatively ignorant of how they are extracting money and jobs from U.S. workers. This isn't a complaint against these companies. It is merely an observation. (I'm curious what others have to say about this, especially developers from India, Eastern Europe, and other such places.)
4. The main competitive advantage for U.S. workers is their "sfot skills" in areas such as business analysis, communication, creativity and project leadership. A friend of mine recently interviewed with a company. They were entirely uninterested in his Java, Lotus / Domino, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. skills, but they were very interested in his ability to communicate, his analysis skills, his writing skills, and so forth. In other words, they cared that he had a clue about how people actually work, versus just being a code monkey.
5. Most technical workers I know don't enjoy technology. Instead, they enjoy the challenge of technology: creativity, problem solving, analysis, puzzles, etc. Therefore, leaving technology wouldn't be such a big deal for most folks I know. One guy wants to be an English professor, another guy wants to drive a truck, still another guy wants to build houses. This is amazing to me because these guys are diesel. I mean, they are seriously good with technology and it would be a shame to see them go.
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to the unemployed phyisicist?
"Would you like fries with that?"
It's a bit of cruel, sick joke, but the more so because of its truth. In some respects you should be greatful if you get several good years in your major field. Most people don't you know. The real crunch is going to come in about 4 years as the univerisities are really just cranking up the "mill" to turn out programers and CS grads.
Odds are these people will never work in the field at any high level capacity. Code grinders maybe, if they're good, and if they're lucky.
An education is still a good thing you know, for its own sake. Really. And just because you end up in the plumber's union by the time you're 30 doesn't mean you can't still code and enjoy everything that the *act* of coding gives you.
If you didn't get into CS because you love it, *that* was your mistake. Coding is one of the few remaining fields in which you can still do top grade work in your "spare" time and with the internet even in cooperation with groups of like minded individuals.
Real hacking is like poetry really, a creative art form. Guess what? The poets have been used to having to be plumbers for thousands of years.
KFG
In the CS business they have this weird fetish for youth. It's like they were recruiting for a football team, not an engineering department.
I think it is because we are at the same stage in software engineering that medicine was in when the guy who cut your hair was the same guy who set your bones.
We don't know shit about how to program computers, you know. Not SHIT.
Software engineering is so grossly inefficient that only kids have the stamina to weather the hours that it takes to do anything robust and useful.
I am a software engineer but I'd be ashamed to show my face at a mechanical or civil engineer convention - the buildings and machines they make don't blow up all the time, repeatedly, for no reason at all.
I am right now on the eighth floor of an eleven floor building. I'm eight stories up and there's still a thousand tons of concrete and steel over my head. I have a great deal of confidence that if I don't make it out of this building alive it won't be because it collapsed on me.
BUT - if this building were a computer program I'd be freaking terrified at all times UNLESS it had been around for a long time (and therefore rebuilt over and over after falling on other people.)
Also, this business, which no one understands, is changing at a high rate of speed.
It's as if you became a doctor and 2 years later no one had a liver anymore. They all upgraded to a new organ, about which you know nothing. All the learning about the liver you did and the exams you passed on it mean nothing.
Now all the hospitals are hiring young new doctors who know all about the new organ, never mind your years of experience.
Now you get to sit around in unemployment, watching these kids make all the intern mistakes again. Swell.
Of course, you can go back to medical school to learn the new organ, but two years from now you're going to have to do it again. How long can you keep this up?
The fact is - we are screwed. The industry has not seen it's Newton yet, so all is in darkness.
The creating of Doctors is a science. MEDICINE is an art but CREATING DOCTORS is a science. They go to medical school, they serve an internship, they pick a specially etc.
If a Doctor and his Grand Dad the Doctor and his Grand DAUGHTER the Doctor all got together to discuss becoming Doctors, they'd find they all had things in common, the toughness of medical school the greater toughness of internship etc etc.
Computer programming on the other hand, is like hiring a poet. You never know what kind of poetry you are going to get, so everyone wants an EXPERIENCED poet so someone else paid for the bad poetry they do in the beginning.
There's lamers with PhDs and great coders in high school. What to do?
The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with Clipper, or you're out.
This hurts CS. Can you imagine where chemical, mechanical or civil engineering would be if they got rid of all the engineers over 30?
When CS is a mature discipline you'll see older guys dominating it.
Until then, CS, like Trix, is for kids.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
The Big Three are way ahead of you. Age histograms predate the Web by two, maybe even three years. Microsoft wishes they had a tenth as much iron control of its industry as the Big Three.
Here's a fun gedankenexperiment. Go down to the A&P and pick up a large box of name-brand puffed cereal. Figure out how much grain by weight is actually in the box. Go look up the price for a ton of that grain at the railhead, divide like a madman to get down to the pittance in your cereal box, then compare it to the retail cost.
Someone's making mad Benjamins on puffed grain, but it isn't the farmers and at half-percent margins it isn't the A&P either.
Ponder deeply upon this when you get bored of thinking how rich you'll get washing the dead.
But that line of reasoning often turns into a psychological crutch for chronic whiners. How many posts on Slashdot read something like, "Dammit, I know Logo, BASIC, Pascal, VB, FORTRAN, assembly, Java, C++, and C#... and I still got laid off!" Sure, but how good were you at solving problems? Should an auto shop manager be impressed when a job applicant claims to have worked on Pintos, Novas, Malibus, Mustangs, Explorers, Cavaliers, and Excursions? How many of those cars drove away from the applicant's garage bay with their lugnuts cross-threaded?
Quality software engineering is more than a resume full of hip languages and buzzwords from the Gamma book. The best software engineering is usually done by people who got into the business because computers seemed like a really powerful and enjoyable way to solve engineering or (in the games biz) aesthetic problems. Those folks -- not the language lawyers, tool fetishists, and epicene gnomes of Unix who still have their home page set to schwab.com -- are the ones who tend to have the best answers to the question, "OK, why should I hire you?"
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
I meet computer programmers/enginers every day that are working on a dead end project and can't see it. I see Cobol programs that refuse to learn JAVA and hardware techs that refuse to learn DSP.
Watch whats getting hot. Learn XML, JAVA, the Linux kernel, encryption systems.
If you are holding on to something is this business your dieing and schools can't teach you this stuff. You have to go it alown. If there are more then two books about it on the book shelf at Barns & Noble its too old.
I was an electronics enginer. Now I run the web site for a F500 company.
At one time you wanted to learn the tech stuff. Don't stop. Never stop learning. That is what makes you good.
There are 10 type of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The attitude towards recent changes in employment and wages have been massively passive-aggressiveness. The things done during the 1990's to help sow the seeds of derailing the profession, like the ITAA's legislative (and PR) lobbying, were not met with and now that things are bad many people simply want to walk into some other profession, where, for less pay and possibly much self-financed education, they will be walked all over by the plutocrats in that profession as well.
Some IT people still say "My wages are the same, I have a job, everything is fine except $100k HTML coders are laid off, they're cutting the chaff from the wheat, I'm *happy* this is happening". Well, these people have a very poor view of economics usually. For one thing, in a market economy, unemployment is ALWAYS the decision of the unemployed person (although the minimum wage creates an exception when it cancels a few potential less-than-minimum-wage jobs). This makes rational sense many times though, it is often better to collect unemployment and look for a decent paying job than to get paid part-time minimum wage, leaving you unable to pay for rent, food etc. Another thing about the ridiculousness of this idea by some IT workers is that surveys show wages recently dropped industry-wide - even if you feel you will always be employed, which anyone who will take any wage WILL be (unless it goes under minimum wage), can you explain why wages going down is a good thing? People talk about it like it's the weather "well, it was inevitable wages would go down". Like some alien on another planet pulls the levers of the economy and regulates the IT profession. People truly interested in economics and how they pertain to the IT labor market, and who read and study this will not see these things as alien, like barbarians who saw thunder and said it must be gods who made it since they had no understanding of it.
Anyhow, what's the solution? The solution is organization, be it an association, a union, a guild, an advocacy group, whatever. What is needed is about 2% of the profession to be actively involved in organizing, educating, fighting against bad legislation (like H1-B visa cap raises, FLSA exemptions only for IT workers, section 1706 of the IRS tax code pertaining to IT consultants etc.) which is pushed through Congress by the ITAA, which is paid to do so by IBM, Intel, Microsoft etc. You need 2% of IT workers working on this stuff, and majority support of IT workers for this stuff. I say 2% and majority because that's what a survey of sociological studies says is the percentages necessary to have something successful get done.
Do these organizations have to be created out of thin air? No - these organizations already exist, the forums for education and coordination already exist and so on, they just need more critical mass, more people coming on board. People already have compiled all the information you want to know about, say, the H1-B visa issue, you just have to look for it. Campaigns are already working on the issue, you just have to join them. And with more support they will have more successes. Or you can turn tail and run when kicked to another profession, where you will be treated exactly the same way.
Well, as someone who actually thought a little bit about this potential problem *before* the dot-com bubble burst, I'll add my two cents and that students these days could do worse than to do what I did:
BA in English/Comp Sci
MA in Comp Sci
MFA in Fiction
The result? Lots of jobs. I switch between technical writing, article writing, and programming. I've published stories, am working on a novel, and just sold a one-act play to a regional theater. I code in ASP/CF/PHP and C#. And I love every bit of it -- coding, writing, and thinking. It all comes from the same place deep inside my brain, and I often tell folks that there's not much difference between writing a short story or coding a project under a deadline. The adrenaline flows, the creative energies get harnassed, and the subconscious does some wild and wacky shit.
And all of this came about because of an off-hand remark I once heard in a VAX assembly language language class by the prof: he assured us (eager college freshmen) that math and science students in particular should put their egos in check and their noses in books -- non-science books. Stuff like Plato and Milton and Dante -- the so-called "useless" stuff that most compsci students poopoo and claim they don't have time to read. Four years spent reading the "boring" stuff can lead to all sorts of minor and major personal epiphanies.
I'm not saying this is the answer, but it certainly is a solution. The coolest part about it is that people are actually impressed when you tell them you can code in C# and are writing short fiction as a "side project".
Everybody in the tech industry seems to want writers -- folks who can understand the technical side and then explain it simply and clearly. In fact, people go out of their way to express their admiration for this sort of talent.
Now, I'm not here to fan the flames and start another liberal arts versus sci-tech debate. But I will say that having my feet firmly planted in both sides has made things a *lot* easier. There is no shortage of jobs, people respect me, pay me well, and call upon me when the hardcore compsci folks can't get their brains out of "tunnel-vision" mode and their creative energies revved.
*shrug*
Why do you deserve that engineering job and not him? If he's willing to do the same job for less than why shouldn't he get it? What makes you special? Oh you're an American.
I've been doing this since '84, and my career is stronger and more lucrative than ever. I've managed to dodge the "moved to management" bullet, yet now make more money than many V.P.s and C.E.O.s ...
The problem is that those entering college are encouraged to study engineering and computer science, yet because of this, there is now a flood of so-called engineers entering the workplace. The majority of these are "academic" engineers, with no real-world experience, and who don't have a real love of the craft. They're just looking for the big paycheck.
I'm sorry to burst the bubble, but unless you have a passion for this, look at it as a creative endeavor, and would program computers with or without a paycheck, you're simply not going survive for long against those of us who DO have these traits.
It isn't a memory leak. It's an object life-span issue.
I've been a degreed software engineer since 1990. "Back in the day" software engineers/software developers where those wizards that knew how to talk the "Crazy moon language" of computers.
Now everyone and his brother can develop and maintain computers, and so can there kids. Add to that the fact that industry caught on and has created a number of technologies that allow for cookie-cut software development.
Most software problems are VERY simple. Get info from DB, Present to user, allow input, perform calculation, put info back into DB. This describes 90% of the software solutions out there. This is EASY. If it's hard to you, you're in the wrong industry.
Most of the SW jobs out there are for maintaining and small incremental features on the above type of software. This is where the commodity programmers live. If this is all you are qualified to do, life is going to suck for you until there is a greater need for that kind of work. This work does not pay very well (It used to, during the boom, but no longer).
The remaining 10% of the work has to do with innovation or Very Hard Problems. Innovation is where you get paid to think up new things. This describes 50% of what I've been working on for the last 6 years (VOIP for me, there are plenty of other innovations out there).
This is HARD work. Enjoyable, but not easy. You get asked daily, "What's today's bright idea, smart guy?" or "Do you have the prototype complete for your GREAT IDEA?" If you can't keep 'em coming, you're out the door. The pay can be very good.
The other 50% I've worked is the pure "Hard Problem" stuff. Multi-Treaded debugging (deadlocks, data corruption, etc...) Performance, Reliability (5-9's), etc and the testing/verification of all these. These are problems that "regular programmers" can't solve. They are HARD. Most projects today created so that these don't happen and the regular programmers don't need to debug them. The projects that need these type of SW engineers are willing to pay for them and respect the capabilities of those engineers. These jobs pay well.
If you're a commodity engineer in today's market, life is not good. If you are a seasoned engineer with a proven track record, finding a job may take a little time, but won't be that hard. But then, if you're a seasoned engineer, you probably already know this and aren't too worried...
=Shreak
as a dev, there's one thing I can say in response to "would you choose the same career path". When I look out the office window and see construction workers out in the sun, moving loads of dirt or piecing together brick walkways or welding up bus stop overhangs ... that's a better job.
Sure, sure, the grass is greener, etc. They still have jerk bosses, just like us. They still have idiot program managers that are bent on ruining everything, just like us. And on cold, wet, sore, days they look at the office windows above and wish they had our jobs.
Whatever, the truth is they have better jobs.
It seems like I truly enjoyed this stuff back when I was a kid writing stuff on the Apple2...and ever since then it's been a slow progression steadily away from joy.
Alas, I have mortgage, wife, kids, etc...and so although I've very much enjoyed being laid off I'll probably start up the grind once again within a couple more months. I'm too young for semi-retirement just yet.
Did you know what you wanted to build things for a living when you were 8 years old? Did you constantly get in trouble for taking apart your toys? Did you have a burning desire to understand things and build them? If not, you are at a disadvantage. Like atheletes, engineers are born. If you picked the field for the big money and not getting your hands dirty, you will never be able to compete against those of us who were born to it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
They're not the brightest, just the most greedy.
Exactly! When I was a chipper, geeky first-year CS student back in the very early 90s, I was surrounded by a class of similarly-minded people--people who enjoyed coding, figuring out problems, loved the all-nighter culture and did just swell.
Years later, as a TA at the height of the dot-com revolution, the first-year class was full of fucking fratboys, dumbasses each and every one of them, there because 'dude, this is where the bucks are!' They had no love for it, no dedication to their craft, no doing it for fun at home even after weeks of slaving on assignments. They were there to get rich. It's those people that we're currently purging for those that truly do know what they're doing, people who do love what they do, and we'll be a stronger workforce for it. In a few years, the cycle will begin again.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
I hope that you're an engineer, because as a manager, you have a lot to learn.
Gone are the days when you could get some four-letter-acronym certification and get a job in the industry. You won't get hired anymore if your main source of knowledge is books like "X for dummies", "Y unleashed", or "Teach yourself Z in 21 days". Those are the people who, for the most part, are being shaken out of this industry now, and frankly, I consider that a good thing. However, in that same category I'd lump the people who went to a decent college CS program and didn't really work in it, barely passing, just to get to the job market. That's scarcely better. Don't become one of those people. Dig deep into the field and learn everything you can. Lift the hood and find out what goes on underneath. Remove the engine cover and learn what makes an engine tick. You wouldn't go to a mechanic who had never rebuilt an engine or swapped a radiator, would you? So why should I hire a programmer who doesn't know how a CPU works, or has never scrutinized the output of a compiler?
Learn computer architecture. Learn how a CPU, cache, and RAM work. Learn data structures. Learn why you'd want a tree in some situations and a hash table in others, and the consequences of each choice. Build a compiler from scratch. Learn parsing and grammar recognition. If you want to work on networks, learn queueing theory. Learn how an operating system works, what a virtual memory manager needs to do, how copy-on-write works, what a semaphore is. Et cetera.
If you know the entire foundation of the profession, you can pick up anything new that comes along with ease. You won't be so quickly cast aside when times get tough. And you'll have one-up on all the opportunists who learned from silly books or certification classes. They'll only know how the latest fad works. You'll know *why* it works, and you'll be much more able to set things right when it doesn't perform as advertised.
-----Chaz
No one in this world is guaranteed a successful business model, a successful product, or profit in any form. We have a free market economy. That means you have to provide something people want, at a price that they're willing to pay, and deal with constant competition. If the market changes, you have to change with it or die.
Your problem is not open source. Your problem is you're denying the nature of the market, and refusing to change with it. If it wansn't open source, sooner or later some other market entity would come along and do the same thing to you for the same reason. Guess what? That's business. Deal with it. Adapt to the constantly changing market or die. It's obvious which of those options you have chosen.
-----Chaz
People have said this for decades, and the middle class has not disappeared. That's not to say it never will, but the record of these predictions is very, very poor.
Well, these things happen very slowly. If you look at the general trend over the past 20 years, there has been a collapse in the number of high-paying skilled manufacturing jobs, living standards and job security for many professionals are declining, and the fastest growing sector is "service" jobs like Wal-Mart and McDonalds. The growth of information technology and programming was maybe the only exception to this, but it is not looking so good now. There is still biotech which seems to be the hot thing now. However, I think the worst fears anyone expressed 'decades' ago have generally come to pass. But people expecting a rapid and devastating catastrophe will probably continue to be disappointed.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I've never posted to /. before but feel compelled to after reading this thread.
I've been a generalist in the computer field for 20 years. In addition to being a generalist, I have good programming and databasing skills.
I currently work in a Fortune 100 company as a SysAdmin / Programmer / Project Manager. I make a good salary for my geographic area and am not in danger of losing my job (knock, knock).
I'm compelled to post because there are so many FUDs and misinformation in this thread it's not funny. But there are a few tidbits of genuine wisdom:
1. The computer pond is shrinking, but that's because it's been overstocked for quite a while. The talented, smart, crafty, dedicated fish will always be in demand, the ones who are simply looking for a paycheck will be walking an unemployment line.
2. (This is related to #1.) If you genuinely love to craft software and hardware solutions, then you will strive for excellence, regardless of the pay. I simply couldn't be happy doing another type of job.
3. There is much garbage code out there, largely caused by too many people coding "Fast Food" type development tools. Can somebody please tell me why it takes a 2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM to show me my appointment calendar? Then crash while I'm looking at it?
4. Management IS NOT where it's at. I've been in my current job for 11 years now. In that time we've gone through 6 managers. None of them really knew what I.T. was all about.
5. We recently were accepting applications for a vacant position. We were FLOODED with resumes from web developers. They all went in the trash. Why? Because they were a dime a dozen and didn't have the overall skills to support our customers. We wound up hiring a guy with good GENERAL skills, because those can be broadly applied to our diverse environment.
What I'm getting at folks is that there was a huge wave of expansion in the computer industry which introduced a lot of flotsam and jetsam. Now the wave is receeding and those not prepared for it are left high and dry.
My advice: Use your knowledge of the industry to forecast where it's going, decide if you want to go there, then position yourself (with skills and interpersonal networking) to ride the next wave.
If you give up just because "times are tough" you never were meant to be in the field in the first place.
As for complicated arguments revolving around free trade, I once had a physics professor who told us routinely that if we were not able to explain a concept to an average person using normal language (no math, physics jargon, etc) then we did not understand that concept ourselves. He tested us based on that principle, also. Every test included an essay section requiring us to explain what one of the questions was asking and what the answer meant. Passing the essay section was required to pass the test. This is a good way to distinguish potentially good arguments from clear BS. Complicated arguments require complicated logic, and most people (including academics) are just not that good at doing complicated logic. The vast majority of complex arguments full of fancy terminology and authoritative jargon can be torn to shreds in seconds by anyone who has studied formal logic. This is not to say that everything is obvious and that nothing that is complicated can be right. It just means that if your first reaction to an argument is that it is a load of shit, it probably is. The clear, consise argument using normal language should always be preferred.
Good for everyone except those who are left without a job. Or left earning 25% of what they used to. The US may be the wealthiest contry on Earth, but that only applies to the country as a whole, not the idividual citizens. The people of the US are not even close to being the wealthiest on the planet. A small percentage control the vast majority of the wealth and skew the averages. Free trade, or rather the form of extremely restrictive trade that is passed off to us as being "free," only makes the situation worse.You can moralize all you want about the virtues of free trade and you can throw out every diversionary argument you can think of. But in the end, I don't care about any of that. I want to be able to feed my family and live a good life. Any political system that rewards the few at the expense of the many and cloaks itself in the language of morality is doomed to failure. If you think that the US is immune to this, I suggest you crack open a history book.
Ok, I've been doing it for nearly 20 years. The first 6 years, I felt like a damn hamster, too.
;-) But I also know their assumptions exist because they are so very ignorant about what it really takes to do this job. (Like end-users assuming an application was easy to build -- "So, why so many bugs?")
Started developing hardware, firmware, then drivers, and finally end-user apps.
Started doing junk projects no other Engineer wanted to touch, moved on to small projects, then larger projects, and finally project management.
Started with work I thought was horrid, moved on to fairly rewarding work, then work that was fun, and finally some critical, full-recognition development -- stuff still used by users around the world.
That's the way it goes for virtually any career worth pursuing!
Even rock-and-roll artists take ten years, on average, to become an "overnights success". Many scientists don't get any recognition whatsoever until they've specialized in a field for thirty years or more.
Six measily years on the job is nothing. You were just getting out of diapers! Now it sounds like you're going another direction... What a waste.
Right now, I manage people. That took me about seven years to get right -- as good as it's going to get. The people I hire have about five years of experience, on average, and it shows. I alwayse sense they think getting where I am in my career should be easy. I take it as a real compliment because, to me, it means I've learned to make it all look easy
If you really want to look back (when you die) and feel like you've made something of your life, the only way to do so is to stick to something. Invest a significant portion of your life toward that one thing.
Yes, he's an American. And as a result, if he were to try to do the same job for less than his Indian counterpart, he would be unable to pay his rent. Hell, he'd probably be unable to pay for his car, much less his apartment.
The cost of living in the U.S. is much higher than it is in India. That's why his Indian counterpart can get away with being paid so much less. It has nothing to do with what the guy in the U.S. is unwilling to do and everything to do with what he's unable to do.
There is a huge injustice in all this: companies are able to shop around and find the cheapest source of labor worldwide, but the labor is not allowed to move in response to the shifting demand. So the person you're responding to can't move to India to take advantage of the greater demand for talent there. Despite his years of training and experience, he can't offer his services competitively because immigration laws of other countries prevent him from doing so, just as immigration laws in the U.S. prevent many from attempting to satisfy the demand for labor in the U.S. (not that there's much of that right now).
For the "global economy" to truly work, people must be able to move as easily as the demand for labor does.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
>My company has lost around 10000 customers ever
>since an open source version of our project was
>released.
Add value then. Provide a better solution. Compete! Don't just give up. Geez, what do you wanna be... a monopoly?
Whatever.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
http://www.radiofreenation.net/article.pl?sid=02/1 2/03/0426254
also at: http://www.altnewsring.com/jobs.html
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Story telling time:
Back when Henry Ford was starting to build cars, one of the famous things he did was to yes, work his workers hard, but he also gave them wages far above what was normal for the day and age. This was to help prime the pump of demand for his product. If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well.
Fast forward to the present day, where you have this quote: "We're trying to move everything we can offshore," HP Services chief Ann Livermore told Wall Street analysts.
And you wonder what will be left in the USA if everyone is working in MacDonalds. The USA is the Greatest Market in the World, but not if everyone is reduced to flipping burgers because of the lack of anything better.
The SeeSaw of Economic forces may take centuries to balance out. In the meantime, all we have is the great sucking sound of jobs getting sucked out over seas.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I haven't looked at the other replies, so I don't know if this has been said already. Still, here goes:
Interesting post, if astonishingly racist.
Essentially, if all of the H1B visas were revoked, you could have jobs for all of the unemployed tech workers.
Oh, so it's the 90's. America discovers it has educated a generation of complete fuckwits. Unfortunately the tech bubble is in full swing and even scraping the bottom of the barrel, the tech economy is unable to find enough people to babysit IIS servers and something has to be done. So, H1B gets introduced and America gets access to the fruits of functioning education systems - like India's. Happyness all around since we are now flooded with curry eating geeks know how to do their jobs and are willing to come to work without being given a BMW first.
Remember the calls to get H1B's extended? The calls to get more of them issued in the first place?
Of course, the bubble bursts and geeks are being laid off in their tens of thousands. Oh no! The highly efficient and cheap curry eaters keep their jobs while the ivory league boys, who know the world owes them at least $100k/year, get hoofed out with their stock options shoved up their arses.
Your suggestion? Deport the curry eaters. Brown faced little bastards are taking jobs away from good ol' American boys.
You smug fuckers. I find it increasingly obvious why it is that Mr Bin Laden and Friends choose to pick on you. You can't just invite these people in, make them your friends, make them your colleagues, and throw them back to somewhere that doesn't have fresh running water as soon as it suits you.
Now, this is of course a grossly broad brush to apply to an entire country, and may not actually apply in your case (it's not clear from your post whether you believe in this shit or not). I also appreciate that there are copious exceptions at either end of the bell curve. I've heard some not pretty clueless H1B stories knocking around too.
None the less, the basic thesis is racist.
Bite me.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
If you had a country of poor people, then no-one could really buy your expensive product, and you would never have a mass market. Thus it was in his long term interest to pay his workers well...... [snip, snip] ...The SeeSaw of Economic forces may take centuries to balance out. In the meantime, all we have is the great sucking sound of jobs getting sucked out over seas.
Most of the world lives in dreadful poverty. Imagine what is possible if all of these unemployed or underemployed masses could be put to productive work making good wages.
If more people overseas work, then I have a chance to make money by selling them stuff. Eventually more work gets done worldwide and we're all wealthier.
Even if everyone in the USA is reduced to flipping burgers at McDonalds, such jobs are still waaay better than what most of the world faces. Although its tough to raise a family working minimum wages it is still possible and your kids can still get an education and a chance at a better life. Compare that to the lot of most people in places like afghanistan, zimbabwe, DROC, etc.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
"Steel-toed boots" industries just aren't viewed as being "sexy", though. A lot of people I know beam when they tell people they write e-commerce code. But who brags about writing code system code that monitors valve pressure for a gas plant?
I went "high-tech" in 1995 when I interned at Nortel. The pace of work was insane . And this was BEFORE any dot-com phenomena. I decided back then that the high-tech was probably not the way to go.
So I did a hybrid and worked on advanced tech in the oil patch. Who would have guessed that some of the most advanced technology out there is used by guys who wear safety boots to work? I managed a chunk of one of the world's largest computer networks AS A RESULT OF working in a "lower-tech" industry.
That translated into being a consultant on one of the first projects that de-constructed the @Home alliance. That then translated into doing risk management consulting for a large multinational energy company. And now I am working with a group evaluating computer technology to control down-hole flow within the drill stem. How does that work when I didn't go to school for computer networking, risk management, energy production or business operations?
How come that since the "Bust of 2000" I've had MORE work than in the dot-com heydays AND I make over twice the money? Two reasons as far as I'm concerned...
1) I took control of my own career, instead of allowing some large company to set my fate.
2) I became a registered Professional Engineer, which differentiates me from almost every other computer guy.
My biggest problem now is choosing which project to work on next.
Although I feel for those caught up in the "culling of the herd" (been there, done that), I do believe that the real opportunities aren't in the "pure play". They are in the areas that need to figure out how to leverage high-tech in their favor. People really don't need one-click checkouts, but they DO need electricity and gasoline, and will continue to need these things for a long time.
If you know how to think critically, can prove it, and can show that you add value, there is ALWAYS work to be had.
The Master Plan Always Fails
I'll bite...
Now I fully understand where you are coming from. Put the way you just did, it makes the parent poster's comments seem racist. But...
I feel that it is any government's job to take care of its citizens first. I agree that suddenly revoking visas would be incredibly rude and cause great difficulty for any of those affected and probably should never be attempted. However, imagine that the situation were even more drastic - great depression style. I believe that the government would almost have to do something to make sure the American citizens were first in line for domestic jobs. Tax cuts for companies keeping job onshore would be wise also.
I don't think you can view the idea of revoking H1B's as racist since the people targeted are not of any specific culture/race/age/religion - they are all foreign workers with a specific type of visa. Lame and incredibly inhospitable? Yes. Racist? No.
-matt
Good old Lester Thurow. (Or, as others came to call him "Less-than Thorough").
The zero-sum economy is one of those wonderful humanist myths. It comes from the same scientific fatalism that attempts to make every person just a cog in a machine, without any independent choice. (Ergo, the wise, all-knowing leaders who somehow are above this limitation can make the decisions we can't make for ourselves)
Think about it: an economy depends on a collection of individual choices. If enough people refuse to work, or refuse to work as hard as another group, then of course the economy will have trouble. If the government siphons personal effort into non-productive areas, then of course that economony will be strained a little more. But, if everyone works hard, even though they might be "stealing" jobs from one another, the end result is a much more healthy economy than if everyone is carefully protected in whatever mediocre position. It's not rocket science.
In fact, it seems history has proven that the more you limit individual choice, the more you limit your economy. Interestingly, this seems to compare well with work in distributed "swarming" algorithms, etc... in the computer world: you can't absolutely predict the outcome, but it is possible for a swarm of automonous units to do things that could not be accomplished with the old-fashioned 'top-down' approach. (Read Michael Crichton's "Prey", for a good intro to these concepts.).
Thurow isn't the first economist to be a negative boo-hooer. There have always been experts crying that the end is near. Thomas Malthus, back in the 18th century, predicted that within a few decades the world would no longer be able to sustain economic growth, and massive starvation/anarchy/whatever would occur.
These people have all failed to see that through hard work and ingenuity, human beings have consistently managed to do more with less. And, willingness of individuals to work hard, while sometimes affecting others in negative ways, temporarily, has an overall effect of lifting the total economy. Take three people living on an acre of land. If all three till the ground and grow vegetables, they will be much better off than if only one does. If you force the most successful vegetable grower to stop until the others catch up, then the net result is...less vegetables. It's not rocket science.
Anyway, for more than 200 years, Americans have experienced an economic freedom that was unheard of anywhere in the world. For this reason, of course, tough-minded individuals who didn't mind taking their chances emigrated from all over the world to the U.S. I'm not trying to paint a completely rosy picture. Of course there was repression, but that always involved *restricting* personal choice. If we had not repressed women or certain ethnic groups, I am convinced America would be even richer now. But I believe the end result was undeniable: freedom produces more wealth than restriction.
You have made the clasic mistake of assuming because you are lucky everyone else is too. While it is true that too many people got into computers several years ago who had no buisness in computers, that does not mean that there are plenty of jobs for people who are good at computers. Those hiring have no good way of knowing who is good. They have a stack of resumes, and they don't tell you a thing about how good the auther is at programing.
You have a job. Me, and several hundred programers that I know do not. Some of them are in the group who shouldn't touch a computer, but many are good or excellent programers.
I have not giving up on computers. However I need to eat and pay my bills. Since nobody will pay me to work with computers, and I don't have the personality to sell myself (if there are contract jobs...) I've been forced to take a job in construction. I'm not alone in that choice.
P.S. anyone want to hire me?
"Sociology" a complex discipline? Physics as simple? That, frankly, is a load of crap.
I think when you say "complex" you mean "devoid of rigor" or "full of whatever trendy crap someone felt like spouting." Hell, even using the word "discipline" is a stretch for sociology.
The difference between "hard" and "soft" sciences has nothing to do with sociology, which doesn't qualify as either. If you don't understand that, you need to review your definition of "science."
I agree it's like grade inflation but now applied to degrees.
At one time a high school diploma was respectable. Not anything great, but you could actually make a living with one (not some "working poor" job but an actual living where you could raise a family) but now the schools are shot to shit because they graduate any retard.
On top of that these dumb asses take college as a granted. At one time college was a priveledge. If you came from a working class background and had a chance to attend college you took it seriously! No binge drinking and 24 hour quake marathons. You actually studied and tried to learn something. Kids these days think they can just "C" it through college and they are guarenteed a cushy job.
But now since all these retards are schleping through college a BS isnt even worth much any more. The first two years of college are just becoming a remedial high school supplement.
So now in order to get a leg up everyone goes and gets a masters. I mean everyone and their mom has a masters now. And colleges doing these "masters in 1 year" programs aren't helping. They apply the senior year credits to both undergrad and grad degrees. It's basically a scam to get the kids to stay on for another year of grad courses at inflated prices.
I mean what's left? Someday is everyone going to need a Phd just to get some low level coder job? It seems ridiculous but that's where we're headed.
It would be one thing if all these people where actually smart and knew what they where doing. A society made up of 90% Phds, what a glorious utopia! Unfortunatly at the rate we're going they will be a bunch of idiots who just had enough capital to stick out 8 years of drudgery at the hands of some university.
I think people need to bring back a respect for labor workers. Not everyone in the whole society can be an engineer or a chemist! Someone still has to do Real Work. So respect the workers and pay them a decent wage and they won't feel pressured to waste 4-6 years studying something their heart isn't in just so they can afford to raise a family.
Now not to sound to wacky or "radical" but i hope that when the oil starts to run out it will destabilize the current capitalist order enough to usher in some new system because what we have now just ain't gonna cut it in the long term....