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Techies Working for Peanuts
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story about laid-off techies getting desperate and going to work for, well, nothing. No offense to these people, if you're up against the wall you do whatever you can, but I hope they're aware that most of them are not going to get even the slightest compensation for their time.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
All you need to do is take a real Financial Planning Course. Something real is taught by a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) not a CFP (Certified Financial Planner) since I could pass the CFP without studying (I have a degree in Finance). A CFA is like a CPA, you've really got to know your shit.
...) to a percentage that gives you the return you desire at a risk level you're willing to take.
..., there would be a lot less problems in dealing with money. Remember you're smart enough to earn it, you are smart enough to invest it.
Anyone that is investing solely in the Stock Market gets what they deserve. There are simple rules to becoming financially secure.
1: Insurance is the most important purchase you make. (If you get lucky enough to make a few million and then a tragedy strikes all your work is for nothing.)
2: Chose a good career. You can be a success in anything but some fields are easier than others.
3: Save a % of your income always. Living below your means allows you to keep your head above water when the chips are down.
4: Invest in a home (mortgage) before the market. It gives people without their own business one of the few tax write offs, and you're accruing equity instead of throwing money away on rent. (My house was purchased via FHA loan with $2000 down and I got lucky and bought from a buyer that was willing to accept paying closing costs to sell the house at their asking price, which saved $4000+)
5: Don't trust others to invest your money, do your own research and diversify (not stock diversification but REAL diversification, stocks, bonds, T-Bills, CD's, Real-Estate, Tangable Assets (Gold),
If people took 1/2 the care in researching their investments as they do in buying a car, house, dvd player,
6: Don't follow what the street says, if you did you were buying RHAT at 230 and Global Crossing at 180. When things seem crazy they probably are.
7: Continue to learn through out your career. You never know where you might end up. You don't want to be the 50 year old that everyone at work is suggesting the book "Who moved my cheese" for light reading.
8: Don't try to hit a home run with your investments. Sometimes several base hits gets you more runs. (Take the sure thing, instead of the high risk/high reward).
Juste mon deux francs.
The person initially described by the article isn't a techie. She's a product manager, a part of marketing. She's a great example of the kind of person with "soft" skills who made obscene money in the "heyday" and were laid off in droves.
Remember the person who called you 3 times a day to wholly change the design of the product you and your team were developing?
Remember the person who came to work at 10 and whose job seemed to consist largely of kibbutzing?
Remember the person who promised the client the world and told you it needed to be done in 2 weeks, without being able to understand the architecture overhaul that would be necessary to implement the changes?
Remember the person who asked you, the Sr. Developer, why their email wasn't working (assuming you could and would fix it as a top priority)?
I'm sure there are lots of real techies struggling to get by these days. In fact, I know some of them. Let's hear more about these people. That would be more relevant.
But I'm tired of hearing the sob stories of non-technical "soft-skilled" people who fanned the flames of the nascent Internet boom by helping to hype products and ideas that weren't tangible, pulling down 6-figure salaries for spouting off ideas with no grounding in technical realities, and then blaming the technical folks when things didn't materialize (because they couldn't).
You knew India was going to kick the US's ass at coding eventually. Might take a while to get reputations and standards in place, but eventually, it comes down to the fact that there *are* competent coders in that country who *are* willing to work for a lot less. OSS might have accelerated the move, but the existing $90k salaries for "web programmers" was simply not a stable state of affairs. What's more, the shift is just going to increase. If they aren't already doing it, the government or a private organization is going to start a certification program with rankings of various companies to help with B2B contract work.
And you know what? That's okay. Sure, for a brief while software developers were overpaid, and now there's a glut of them. Now things are changing.
What's the effect of all this, on everyone involved? Well, let's see. People in other countries pretty much benefit. US programmers drop down from their bubble-inflated pay. Some of them may be hurt during the adjustment, since they have to compete with a glut of competitors. The average US citizen likely benefits, since his new patterned carpet was fabricated by a machine that was cheap to produce because an Indian coder did all the software work.
So everyone gets trickle-down benefit. Globalization is, in the long run, good for just about everyone.
I'm sure that coders right now that just lost their sweet spot find this not a lot of consolation, but it affects everyone. The next step is using machines to replace fast food workers, and machines with better interfaces to replace phone support and salespeople.
Let me put things into perspective. In pioneer times, the US had a much less globalized environment. The lack of a transportation network meant that each area had to produce its own goods. And that means that things that we take for granted now, like granulated sugar and oranges, were *hideously* expensive. Sure, a lot of people lost in the short term (Peddler Smith, who packed a bunch of granulated sugar on his back, may have some tough competition with the upcoming railroads), but in the long term just about everyone won.
Globalization tends to spread out wealth more evenly, so it's true that some US wealth is going to end up in China or India. But it also tends to vastly increase the wealth of the entire system.
Right now, I can buy a keyboard for $10, and a mouse for $5. Just about anyone can afford a pair. That's thanks to overseas manufacturing of a lot of components -- massive globalization. I can buy almost any fruit I'd like, any time of the year. I can afford foods that used to be only for the seriously wealthy (and of poor quality), like pineapples, mangos, and oranges.
Now, sure, a few things become more expensive for your average guy. Anything based on human labor in the US becomes effectively tougher to get. You might have a tougher time getting someone willing to work as a maid or a chauffeur. But we've been dealing with the loss of this sort of job for centuries now, as the middle class swells up, so that's nothing new.
And what about society producing more goods than it can consume, with all these efficiency improvements, driving people out of work? Well, the US might get more socialized, with more government-subsidized benefits (like Europe). Plus, the human demand for luxury goods appears to be endless, so those with a job end up purchasing more unnecessary-to-survival items that end up employing the others.
Anyway, what the point of all this rambling is, is that moving stuff to India and other countries, opening up competition, reducing barriers to trade, and letting technology replace workers is a good thing in the long run, even if a few people are worse off temporarily.
May we never see th