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A Positive Outlook on the Software Industry
joechang writes "According to this article in Business 2.0, our IT sector jobs are not as glum as we make them out to be. Despite the downturn in the economy, the article maintains that our jobs are as stable as ever, and that pay increases are actually at reasonable levels. In addition, software development is still one of the largest growing industries, and that Billings, MT is a high growth area. Of course, I haven't heard of any of my co-workers taking a job in Billings..."
Government contractor people have had pretty good luck in finding and maintaining IT jobs in the DC area. It also helps if you have a security clearance, but isn't totally necessary. The local economy here failed somewhat with the new .com's along the Dulles corridor, but most government contracting IT shops have flourished (for reasons quite obvious considering recent events) throughout the economic problems. Plus there are actual government contracting jobs that aren't necessarily related to the war machine. Of course, housing prices and the cost of living here are astronomical. People also tend to rent their homes to military personnel for thousands of $ a month rather than sell them since the market is so ridiculous. It all evens out though, I'll take job security over high cost of living anyday.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
If I were you, I'd can all that stuff that has nothing to do with computers, like dry cleaning.
More importantly than that, your list of languages makes it seem like you're more of a generalist than a specialist. What are you an expert in? If I want to hire someone who can code COM in C++, are you that person? Or are you more of a VB guy?
Another thing that is confusing is the conflict between the language skills. You say you know Visual Studio .NET, but C# and VB.NET aren't listed on your resume. C++ is, so does that mean you know Managed C++? VB is on there, so do you know VB.NET?
Since you're a CS student, you probably don't want to specialize yet, and that's ok. I think you should outline the areas of CS you have the most interest and experience in. What kind of projects do you do on your own time? Have you contributed to any open source projects? Those are the things I look for on the resumes I get.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't know what kind of programming you know how to do, based on your resume, so there's nothing that makes it stand out.
Hope that helps.
Right now, my own company is struggling as we have had some layoffs and hiring freezes for a long time. The company is not so much struggling monetarily, it's starting to pick up in fact - but because there is a need for a dramatic lowering of capex costs we can't hire, and thus struggle to produce the software the business needs.
Now, we also spend many, many millions of dollars a year on proprietary software. While some of that software is worth buying, much of it is not - and therein lies the real trend in what you pointed out. With the ability to use free solutions to replace very expensive custom solutions, a business frees all sorts of capital to spend on more workers, so they can get what they need sooner!!
So in fact free software might effect proprietary software quite a bit, but I think that will be more than offset by companies having more money to spend on IT workers instead of very expensive software.
So the real question is when businesses will realize this - it could take a few years to really sink in, as generally people on the business side seem rather dense when it comes to the obvious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I grew up in Billings, MT (and my parents still live there), and let me tell you, those aren't programming jobs that are spurring on the growth. There's a reason me and all of my friends pursuing high-tech jobs moved away. All those growth jobs are in areas like construction. The big industry is cattle ("more cattle go through Billings, MT than anywhere else in the world!"), followed by closely by tourism (close proximity to Yellowstone National Park, etc.). It's a nice quite pace of life (population ~90,000), and you should be able to buy a nice 1500sf home for $100,000. So before you pack up your worldly goods and move to Montana, you'd better already have your coding job all lined up, otherwise you might be stuck as the greeter at the brand new Wal-Mart (although competetion might be stiff for that position, since the K-Mart down the street in closing its doors).
and I haven't had a real full time IT job in 2 years. Help even the rats are fighting over my ramen now!
:)"
It's not that I can't find work, I mean sure, I found a great job bouncing at a karaoke bar on friday nights, then I have another job delivering signs for a real estate office, and a third job goin door to door dropping off these little flyers that hang on a door knob for a pizza joint.
I guess i'm pretty good at putting signs in the ground, breaking up fights, and hanging shit off peoples doorknobs..
WTF am I saying? I didn't spend 8 years teaching myself all this stuff to be doing this right now. Even when I wasn't working, I still kept my skills up to date with constant reading, and playtesting on my machines at home.
According to everyone I know, I'm smart enough to do anything. I could have been a doctor they say. Fixing computers, learning about them in the process, fixing networking, it was the only job that I just felt that perfect fit in.
Now I do these useless shit jobs, I do get an occasional call for some consulting work, but it's never steady and never anything more interesting past "Something crashed, my e-mail won't work" I want to get paid for doing something cool again, I want to get paid for running a network that just keeps on running, where the servers never crash and most of your problems are with windows tcp/ip issues.
Companies are tightening their belts. They're outsourcing IT only using it when it's needed and they aren't buying new hardware. I'm sure there is a lot of 2+year old servers out there, that are starting to just fall apart from use, and some poor hapless junior engineer at a consulting firm is having to explain to some CEO why his mail server keeps crashing without telling him "You're running on outdated hardware and MS software"
And I say "MS software" because it's a fact most companies with over 20 employees use MS exchange.
A freind of mine, who still happens to be working at a consulting firm, recently burned the midnight oil to show the president nagios/snort running on freebsd. He explained the whole open source idea to him, BSD licensing, GPL, ect. The president, being in sales instantly saw the potential for being able to tell the customer "The software is free, we just charge you for customizing it
The customer inquired, "How many unix admins you got?" The company just has 1, my friend. "How much would it cost us to find a qualified unix admin in case we break our relationship?" How would they?
In a company of 6 people, only 1 of them is what I would call Unix qualified. The rest of them, are all a mixmash of MS and novell qualified people with no idea of how to move around in a unix shell.
Out of all my geek freinds (about 5 of us) only myself and this cat are unix qualified. So if I were to take the total number of admins I know personally and professionally, only %20 of them know unix!
If definetly tough out there right now for any type of admin. *nix admins will find it especially tough, because companies perceive a higher cost for unix admins over their windows/novell only counterparts. This in spite of the fact that I would GLADLY commute 20 miles to work right now for an $8 dollar an hour Unix admin job if it was 40 hours a week. (Hollar if you're as desperate as me!)
Boy, this is turnin into a long post.
Now I don't want to stray OT here, but I have to mention this war going on.
1. It will cut the number of tech jobs due to war funding.
2. It will cut down on the number of younger less experienced people applying for jobs as they head for war.
3. Large corporations are leveraging off-shore IT pools in foriegn countries.
From what i've seen over the last 2 years, the pace of companies dying from a lack of funding is greater than that of people leaving. Net result, no real job boom, just a steady decline in the number of "admin wanted" positions.
No, it's not getting better, it's getting progressivly worse. Maybe i'd support this war if I had my old job back.
The logic proposed is a tautology: employers don't reprice labor because their competitors would snatch up their employees.
By definition, this means that the aggregate price of labor has not changed! I think a more insightful approach to the problem is that labor has become monopolistically competitive, especially in the IT market.
What the hell does monopolistic competition mean? It means that while there may be alternatives similar to a product or service, there is nothing that is exactly like it. You can buy hamburgers from dozens of places, but you can only buy a Whopper from McDonalds. It's the same with IT workers: I can employ programmers anywhere, but I'll have a really difficult time finding another programmer with a background in SQL, assembler and the obscure graphics package we chose to use because he knew it.
The economic logic the article proposes applies to commodities. As frustrating as it seems in the IT market, most labor is highly specialized and is therefore not a commodity.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I've been looking for an IT job for 2.5 years now. I've applied at numerous places, sent off countless resumes, and had very few interviews in that time. So many of the people I know have been in similar situations. I can't count how many people I know across the US who have lost their jobs in the past year or 2. Most of them haven't found new IT jobs. Some haven't found worthwile jobs at all. People going from making 6 figures down to nil.
Maybe some people in better jobs at big companies may have some sort of security, but I wouldn't exactly bet on it.
Disclaimer: I am an Indian.
I don't think the outlook is that bleak. How many good software products have you seen come out of India or China or anywhere in the east. Or how much of software innovation do you see happening there. I am sad to say this, but somehow all the development work happening in India is usually outsourced and the sad truth is it's not managed very well either.
I don't see the industry shifting to India permanently in a hurry. I think the computer industry will thrive and sustain itself in the west for a while to come.
Just my opinion.
To quote Drudge today & some analysis:
DOW HAS BEST WEEK SINCE 1982...
DOLLAR HITS MULTI-MONTH HIGHS..."
OIL PRICES PLUNGE... with US crude at $26.30. This puts it at about the same price back during the heating oil crunch of 2000. Business Week figures that even the recent spike in oil prices will not lead to a recession, because of usage cutbacks & OPEC surplus.
GOLD DROPS BELOW $330... where it was back in december. And even at the recent peak, it's lower than it was in 1995, the start of the boom.
In about a month, the war will be over. Not only will we have thrown out a bloody dictator (freeing his citizens from harm), but we open up their nation for economic progress. Not only will we rebuild what we've destroyed (which if you've noticed, a strong effort is being made to keep this minimal), but we will upgrade them to modern technology. Power plants, water systems, industry, hospitals, roads... all of this means american jobs & products. With embargos removed, Iraq can produce at it's true output, flooding the oil market (destroying whatever little power OPEC & the saudi's have left) and the free markets win. Everyone benefits, the economies boom, and life goes on!
(On a personal note as an Electrical Engineer, my company's 2002 average was a 3.5% pay raise plus a 4% bonus)
Make it mandatory to pay H1-B prevailing wages, and contribute to the tax pool, e.g. social security, etc. the same as you would an American.
It's already law that H-1Bs must be paid the prevailing wage for the position. Likewise, H-1Bs have the same deductions on their paychecks as Americans.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The industry (at least in the USA) was already quite unstable before the 9/11 attack. After that, it started to really hurt. I know tons of folks out of a job, who have never been out of work for more than a week or two, who've been looking for anywhere from 6 months to a year. Contract work is helping some of them, but even that is scarcer, and the money is down by a *lot*. Headhunters have been hurting, too - even the good, honest ones.
Perhaps the author was trying to be Dave Barry. If so, they failed abysmally. Otherwise, they merely failed miserably.
After being out of work 8 months, I found an excellent job. It's an excellent job, and pays well. I'm extremely grateful, and in fact the envy of quite a few former co-workers from several companies here in town. You see, they're still looking - or expecting to be doing so any day.