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U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
An anonymous reader writes "As painful as February's big job cuts were, they're even more painful since many of those jobs are never coming back as U.S. employers in a wide range of industries move more and more jobs overseas. CNN has the story." Salon has a good piece detailing how job requirements are changing, asking more and more for less and less pay.
Sure fire ways to make a living in the USA, providing the trend continues:
Farm. People have to eat. If americans can't afford the food, someone else can, there's always a buyer, if you can afford to set the right price. (Sound unethical? You're probably not a republican then)
Become an entertainer (something about americans dancing and singing on a stage works for extracting money from the pockets of everyone else in the world. As of yet americans still make what the world wants to buy in terms of image.)
Own an overseas company, employing locals for a pittance, and selling goods and services to anyone, anywhere who can still afford them. China looks like a good place to sell, it's got one of the few growing economies.
Go into politics. If americans can't afford your price for selling out your country, someone, somewhere will and hopefully you know how to keep your payments away from prying eyes, not that the public really cares anymore, but they might.
Cynical? Why not. You can't expect the current administration or house to insist upon a tariff on imported services, can you?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have no doubt that some have gone overseas, but without a doubt, the worst problem is the economy. No company is going to hire anyone until this mess with Iraq starts to straigten out. Once that happens though, look for mega job listings to start appearing. There has to be a lot of pent up demand out there considering that everyone has been stalled for a couple of years now.
Yup, it's a sad sad day when college graduates in America are losing jobs to those overseas (particularly India). I was doing Tech Support for Dell for awhile (I know, I know....it paid) and during that time they started outsourcing most of their tech support and customer service to call centers in India. I can't even count how many customers I talked to that were hung up on, or couldn't understand the person, etc etc etc. It might have saved them a few bucks, but it goes to show these companies don't really care about their customers.
This is hardly a revelation. When the supply of some good (labor) exceeds demand (jobs), the price of the good (labor) falls. Big shock. Having been a programmer in the 1980s, I well remember when you were lucky to get $25,000 for a programming job. When the number of jobs increases (when we stop insisting the world admire our mighty power and get back to real work), labor prices will rise again.
All of this reminds me of Schumpeter's famous phrase "creative destruction". What has happened is that there was an enormous swell in the demand curve for IT workers in the late nineties with the tech boom. This drove wages up, as the supply curve lagged. As new people entered the field, the supply curve slid out to accomodate demand.
Here's where it always sucks for those workers. The demand curve contracted sharply after the tech bubble burst, so the wages dropped correspondingly. This of course is what every sector (except for the government sector, unfortunately) faces from time to time. A micro-example is the set of jobs created for building a house. Suddenly the house is finished and demand falls to zero.
So what's the long term prognosis? Unless some new wave emerges that causes another correspondingly large shift in demand for tech workers, wages will be where they are, and probably fall further with international competition.
The bright side of all of this, and it's hard for us tech workers to see, is that everyone else gets cheap software and information services. This is the way the system works. The alternative is to chase demand curve shifts and change careers every ten years or so, which is probably not such a bad idea from a spiritual point of view anyhow.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Actually the economy is very close to the late 1930's towards the end of the depression. The stock market has been down 3 years in a row and has not recovered. This only happened once during the 1930's in American history. Unemployement is rising near %10 and is alot higher for IT workers.
The situation I think is worse then anyone relizes. I am willing to code c++, java, or do webpage design for 8/hr with no medical benefits. I am that desperate yet, still viewed as overvalued. I have a friend who use to make $70k a year who now makes 12k designing webpages and is about to lose his job to an Indian outsourcing firm for less! ITs silly.
An Indian can work half that wage and miminal wage laws prohibit making under 6.50/hr. Indians have free health care and a very low cost of living so they can work cheaper then Americans can.
I am not an ego maniac and would love to work for under 20k ayear. The fact is even people with many years of experience also are willing to work for about that price while CIO's are getting woodies. Its very sad.
But you know what really gets me? Microsoft and Sun are lobbing for more h1b1 visa's and are outsourcing to India and Singapore at the same time. Go read any of the jobs being offered at Microsoft's website. Most of them are at Microsoft India.
May American IT work r.i.p.
http://saveie6.com/
We have a team in India doing basic database monitoring and support (mostly to back me up, as I'm a finite resource).
They are cheap - about $1000 US a month for their services.
From their resumes and other clients, you would think that they are well trained and efficient.
Unfort, I don't find their work that valuable.
First, while their English is good, it's not good enough. The communication barrier has caused several problems, resulting in database downtime that need not have occurred.
Second, while they advertise themselves as DBAs, there is only one that I marginally trust. We have had to create detailed instructions for doing simple things. They take days to do what I can do in hours, and often fail at what I consider simple, bread-and-butter DBA tasks.
Third, we don't have much of a stick over their head. Should they walk off with our data, our schema, our code, or just trash our site, there is little if anything we could actually do.
An article (recently posted on Slashdot) mentioned that the larger the company, the more likely they were to move IT jobs overseas. In the long run, this is a counter-productive move. Firing a bunch of people will lower the demand for your goods and services; the unemployed don't have the money to spend. And you create a group of seriously pissed off people with time on their hands.
The Salon story mentioned a website called a site where people post these ridiculous jobs. Perhaps someone will come with a site that will list companies that have fired local workers to ship the jobs overseas.
The whole thing makes me wonder if it's time to start thinking about a new career. It's kind of scarey to wonder if tech jobs will become as scarce as those well paying manufacturing jobs of the 50's and 60's (you know, the ones that are now in China, Taiwan, and Mexico).
This should have been your response after the 2nd round
"Please pass me through to your supervisor. Whover is writing your support script has made an error"
1st level techs are highly scripted and you need to know how to break out quickly when the problem is something that isn't going to be in their scripts.
In the socio- and anthropological fields it is pretty much accepted that the United States is a Third World country that basically won the lottery. I won't provide statistics, but check out (a) Literacy rates (b) Infant mortality (c) Homicide rates (d) % of population below the poverty line, and (e) the gap between the rich and poor. A large middle class running in hamster wheels does not a First World country make. Also: Labor unions are a reaction against the insane exploitation of the 19th century. If the need wasn't there, they would not have been formed, 'cause Americans hate that shit. And in pure opinion, I believe it has less to do with Democratic myopism and more to do with some extremely rich people pulling the ladder up after themselves. Figuratively speaking.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I can't believe that everyone didn't see this situation coming. It is the logical path of a world controlled by corporations in an emerging global economic system.
For the corporations the equation is always simple and, for the most part, always the same. The path that reaps the greatest profit is the path to follow. Period, end of story, no appeals allowed.
Out sourcing work to cheap labor increases profits so it will continue. There are three ways that jobs may start coming back to the US.
1. We lower our wages to compete. (Not a good option)
2. The legal system does something that impedes jobs from being outsourced. (Not a good option)
3. It becomes more expensive to outsource than to keep jobs in the US. (The best option)
Option number 3 will slowly occur as the living standard rises in the countries where the work is currently being outsourced. As the workers wages rise and come in line with the wages in the US costs of producing goods in those countries will rise.
This could take a long time, however, and one of the big questions is: When the cost of production comes to parity where will the factories that produce the goods be located? We may be loosing jobs for a lot longer if there is no incentive to move the jobs back to the US. The startup expense is one thing that is keeping some factories in the United States but once moved it will be the same startup expense that will keep them out.
It will be interesting to see how politicians deal with the effects of selling out the American people to the corporations.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
This is affecting a lot more than just "web designers" who had no skills beyond that covered in "MS Frontpage for Dummies."
My extended circle of friends and I all have solid educations and lots of experience covering pretty much every aspect of IT that you can name, but no potential employer will give us the time of day. It's not a matter of demanding unreasonable salaries either - if we call their bluff and say that we're willing to accept a low salary just to pay the mortgage, we're told that we're out of consideration since the boss is sure that within a month the economic fairies will come around and we'll bolt for a well-paying job at a new startup.
Finally, my connections on "the other side of the fence" have told me that the ridiculous requirements on these lists are there for a reason - the powers that be want to give the appearance of looking for an employee, but they have no intention of actually hiring anyone. The way they hid this is by creating lists that no single person could possibly satisfy, then offering a wage far below what such a mythical person would actually accept.
If somebody actually had all of that experience and was desperate enough to accept the salary, some overlooked requirement would be discovered. E.g., for a while a popular overlooked requirement was that you had to speak fluent Japanese - and have spent several years in that country.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I know I may get modded down for this, but I'll stand up for this particular point. If one looks back at all of the technological innovation in the past 50 years, the vast majority of it has come from within the United States. Telecom, semiconductors, software, you name it - if it was commercially viable, that commercial viability pretty much originated here. Now that the expertise is being outsourced, what will sustain further development of it here?
If you look at all the new grads coming out, they have been told time and again that technology is their ticket to success. They've been pushed through universities like cattle, but they never expected the slaughterhouse to be right at the exit. Now that there's a glut, economics is dictating huge competition driving down salaries. Tech suddenly isn't as sexy any more, and people are flocking to jobs at more traditional companies. Tech companies keep outsourcing more and more.
But let's move this one step further. People coming into university see this. They stop coming in. Innovation and research starts slowing down. Nanotech and biotech research vaporizes because the capital base that is partly cross-subsidizing it vaporizes slowly. There is no killer application driving the tech economy. We can do with what we already have.
What we may end up with is the majority of our technological manufacturing and knowledge base outside the United States. The United States (and, to a large extent, the rest of the Western world) could become dependent on foreign technology the same way it is dependent on foreign oil. Yes, many of these jobs being outsourced are staying within the foreign subsidiaries US companies, but the bulk of the knowledge is not on US soil. Those workers can walk away at any time without recourse for the US companies.
My point is that there are very serious implications for everyone's life in general. If the majority of the expertise and manufacturing ends up outsourced to what are effectively third world countries, we could be subjected to embargoes by cartels in the same way OPEC has power today. It could even impact national security, since overall research into technology could stagnate and the pool of available scientists and engineers dwindles.
If you think it can't happen, think again. It already has in large part. If not for cooperative trade agreements, many of the bulk goods coming into the United States would disappear overnight, from Tommy jeans to Sony TVs. This means that there may be greater reliance on the US military to protect us. Unfortunately, many of these countries possess big weapons that they didn't have 50 years ago. The US won't be able to push them around like they have already, and this will cause a loss of control.
So what can we do about this? We need to vigorously publicize the nightmare stories of outsourcing. We need to show homegrown successes. We need to get these people waking up before we end up hanging ourselves by our own rope. We need to prove that we are better than those working in third world countries. We need to show what made the United States a great country - hard work, perserverance, and a good brain.
OR
We had better give up now and accept a much lower standard of living, and all of the shock it will create. It will be either one scenario or the other. But not both.
So I guess now you can work at a 7-11 and make more money within 2 years than you can with a 4 year degree in computer science? Plus the payback of the student loans. Even if you make more in the long run the payback will take another 5-10 years. I am not sure that we will have any programming work in US by then...go into a trade while you are young and you still can.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...