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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..."
Business magazines are written for people that buy into the business lifestyle and don't see it as a necessary evil. For those people, who latch onto the cocks of their managers in a lamprey-esque way, the future in business is always bright. For those of us with minds, the future usually sucks. Such is the way of america.
'ta
I'm still hearing about layoffs, about the horrible time people are having in trying to locate a job. Friends and co-workers feel no sense of job security. Apparently, they need to put a caveat in their article: "Your mileage may vary."
Overrated Moderation: This posts sucks... because.
Duh! Everyone knew that the market was fine. It's better and growing.
And everyone knew that IT was still strong.
It's just that the jobs are changing hands over to our friendly nontaxed foreign visitors.
...
Your manager is salivating already, just think how well a programmer could live on 70% of your salary. Billings vs San Jose.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Or.. "There are jobs in Billings, MT.. if you're an H1B that's had a job description tailored to your specific resume?"
Which is it? I wonder.
Just had one of those meetings this morning, more pink slips due G W's oil war, I think we're in for another great depression, read the news it ain't rocket science. MM
Or wishful thinking. Many journalists and the like seem to think that if they predict something long enough, it will happen. How many publications became smug after the recession began -- they had seen it coming years ago.
So now their logic is to start declaring the that Tech Bust is over, and....eventually....it will be.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
The .com boom got a lot of people into programming in IT because the "wisdom" of the time was telling them that's where the money was.
.com boom, and watched my classes fill up with people who had never used a computer, had no passion or interest in them, barely passed their courses, but were just sweating it out for that big paycheck at the end of the tunnel.
I was in university during the rise of the
Myself, I've always been 'into' PCs, since I got a C64 as a wee kid. I have a passion for it, I enjoy it, I consider it my calling.. I couldnt imagine doing anything else.
So when the bubble burst, I'd imagine the people who got into computers who didnt care about computers simply left. They went and started new careers doing whatever. Some are slow to learn, as we've had a steady stream of employees who have absolutely no interest in doing the job. But they're eventually learning that the free lunch is not to be had, and they're moving on.
I'm still here. I get paid to do what I love (write code and troll on slashdot). I'm not worried about losing my current job, it's in an industry niche that wont go away. But if it came down to it, I'm confident I could find another.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Business 2.0 is a half assed tech magazine that pretend to be some kind of business magazine. In reality, it was born in the dot com bullshit boom, and somehow they've managed to survive as others around them are crumpling. Their writing is bad, their stories are often paid for, and I expect that this story is simply optimistic, because without tech workers, their magazine is bust.
As an EX-EDSer myself, I CHEERED when I saw this news yesterday. This is the start of the end of the relentless pursuit of the cheapest labor possible (Read: INDIA).
Dick Brown was a scourge of the IT industry. I hope his $55 million from last year and $38 million in severence serve him well while he's frying in hell for his deeds.
I'm glad I was able to leave EDS on my own accord, and I don't care WHO they put in there, I'd never work there again.
Visit this site:
http://www.edslawsuits.com
LOTS of hatred there.
I just switched industries completely (doing Process Control Engineering now). While I will always have a fondness in my heart for IT/Computers, I will NEVER miss the long hours / piss-poor environment, non-appreciated by everyone-ness that permeates almost every IT shop I've ever been. I never realized how overworked and underappreciated I was until I got a "real" job in a non-IT function --- and realized that 60 hour weeks and staying up until 2am to meet deadlines are NOT THE NORM IN BUSINESS.
Now, don't get me wrong, I put in long hours -- when I need to. But they warrant some kind of specific need. In IT, everything seems to be a specific need so people wind up working crazy hours "to get things done".
It's absurd. You don't see that kind of craziness in any other functional area (marketing, HR, finance, etc). Only on rare occasions. However, within IT, I would be SHOCKED if I walked in at 7pm and half the staff was actually gone for the day. Unfortunately, we (IT folks) have come to accept that 60-80 hr weeks are the norm.
You don't have to live that way. There is an alternative.
Yep. It's one thing to lose fair and square. But to be targeted by our own government is the height of unfairness. Why is programming ( along with low-pay agricultural work) singled out for special competition from guest workers? If you think there's a future in "cotton-picking", then by all means keep studying Visual Basic and Perl.
I've been "in the business" for almost 30 years as a programmer, Analyst, engineer etc... and I have NEVER seen the IT sector so bad. Usually it would take me between 4 and 8 days to get a new contract. After my last contract ended at Lucent in April 2001, I ended up free-lancing for an entire year, finally finding a job with a military contractor in April of 2002. Many I know in the industry haven't been as lucky. Agents who were getting rich during the 90s, are calling ME asking for leads. In actuality, things are worse than the media is making it out to be. People are losing their houses. People are losing their minds. People are compromising to pay their bills. I know a highly skilled Software Analyst who made $200,000 during the glory years, take a job where he has to commute an hour for $50000 working as an in-house network admin... These are not isolated stories. When I was at Lucent in Holmdel, there were some 7500 people in the building. Last I heard, there were 800 left, and there were stories that Lucent was going to give the building up. (That huge building in Holmdel used to be symbolic of the glory of Bell Labs).
It's bad. It's very bad.
Software development is like the Mc Donalds job, anyone can do it,
... and 20 million Chinese graduate high school every year ... plus 15 million Indians ... you don't need calculus to do the math here. The problem facing software developers is not that their job is easy, it's that their job is portable. You can email a spec to Shanghai in 10 seconds. And when the development and testing are done, you can email the source code back in 10 seconds. You don't even have to go thru customs. Shipping costs zilch.
Of course this is crap - only a small percentage of the population, maybe 2% or something like that, has the aptitude to develop complex software.
But the world can use maybe 100,000 software developers
This will be until your are required a license to practice like mechanics, lawyers, doctors etc. Overnight, the pool of "programmers" dries up like you wouldn't believe. Sorry, unless you are licensed, you aint getting write access to CVS....
Tell my friends who are unemployed, at last count more than 5... Tell the people like me who were unemployed for a year, and finally landed a job making half of what they were before. Tell the people like me who have been trying to get lower interest rates on some debt, and the company asks "Why did you run up so much debt so fast?" and all you can do is wonder if they had been paying attention lately. Tell the people who have had to sell their hobbies, so they could pay for their child's daycare. The situation flat out sucks, and is not getting better. But sure, we can blow billions on a war no one needs and 75% of the WORLD doesn't want. But fsck the schools and jobs, and fsck the taxpayers. Fsck the economy damnit, we want WAR!
1. It's been written FOR business management types (it's in "Business 2.0", a management rag) so you can't expect it to say "The IT industry is now dead, because management has decided that what jobs aren't going to be outsourced are going to be replaced by H1-Bs". No, that would sound like BLAME, and what suit would ever accept any of that? Suits want to hear how they haven't really hurt anyone, and how they're running their companies well -- not how they're running them into the ground, regardless of which perspective is more accurate.
2. Remember that suits care about only one thing more than profits: P.R. and prestige. They're not going to pay for a magazine that makes their pet initiatives (outsourcing and layoffs, etc) look like bad ideas. They would be outraged if one of their favorite magazines took them to task for their decisions. So, this isn't going to happen.
3. Because this magazine is written FOR suits, BY suits, you can't expect it to NOT have tons of pro-suit propaganda. What sort of propaganda would a suit write up? Basically, stories like this one, about how H1-Bs, layoffs, and outsourcing really haven't hurt anyone and how everything is really just peachy. Gotta keep that consumer confidence up, even if you're going to put them out of their homes in a month or so, take away their livelihoods and ruin their lives. They might buy stuff in the meantime!
4. If the article was honest about how bad company policy has made things for people, it might -- gasp! -- influence politicians, who might -- double gasp! -- DO SOMETHING about the problem. Can't have that! So we've got to keep saying things are just fine.
Overall, this article was a puff-piece love-letter to American business. And, coming from this magazine, how can you expect anything else?
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
And then another then next day, and another after that... and then all of the emails later on after the software has shipped that meets the specs but solves none of the problems it was built for are all quite fast as well.
What you can't easily do is understand what people really want as opposed what they say they want. That involves a lot of face time, and is the reason why corporate development is still the vodoo art that it is.
Simply put, if a company cannot really put down what it wants on paper ahead of time, remote development efforts are doomed to varying shades of failure. Most cannot, so on the whole outsourcing only IT does not work - the only thing that would really work is to outsource whole companies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think collectively we are all afraid our jobs in IT (or in software, period) are becoming commodities: cheaply paid programmers outside the US are replacing us, open source software is drying up the revenue streams traditionally associated with software.
But it's not all hopeless. There is a way out, a way to prevent becoming the victim of commoditization. There's one skill that almost by definition will never be a commodity, and strangely enough, I had a friend at Microsoft put the idea in my head. The only way to succeed in software (or services, that tag-along so often accompanying software revenue) is by focusing on innovation.
It's that simple. Think about it for a minute: are you maintaining a bank withdrawal application for a large bank, or are you creating protein folding algorithms to run on a massive grid? Are you building the latest revision of the corporation's brochureware website, or are you designing a web-based logistics tracking system for a freight carrier? Are you working for large body-shop, or did you finally decide to start the consulting business you've always wanted? Pick the job opportunities by their potential for tapping into your capacity to innovate, and you'll never go out of style.
Don't give up. Yes, the run of the mill jobs will inevitably go to the cheapest service provider. But innovation is limitless; that's one of the lessons of the '90s that unfortunately seems to have been lost when the money ran out. And it was the money that ran out--creativity doesn't go anywhere. Innovation: do you got it?
Most of the consumption the author credits (home prices, car sales) have bee ndriven by debt-based consumption. Hardly a positive development. Driving this debt-based consumption is the key initiative of the stimulus package. Bush won't have to deal with the fallout even when he tries to get reelected - most of the debt being loaded up today through refis won't affect the economy drastically in the next two years.
Well, since you believe in open source, I have to believe that you have, unfortunately, succumbed to one of the more egregious pieces of closed source propaganda. Namely: "open source costs programmers jobs".
Research shows that this just isn't the case. The only jobs that Open Source eliminates are those having to do with actually developing commercial software. Such jobs account for about 1% of the market.
And if you count vertical software (which open source doesn't really threaten) as commercial software, the number becomes even lower.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
Programming is no different there from most other jobs: people can do them overseas, and they will. And those same people will also become consumers and increase the demand for software and programming.
Software development is like the Mc Donalds job,
No, it isn't. McDonalds is a service industry job for which you have to be physically near the customer--that can't be outsourced to China or India. Barber, car mechanic, and lots of other other service and professional jobs fall into the same category. If you want a job that can't be moved out of the country, take one of those.
But some software development is indeed like McDonalds in that it is actually a service industry job and cannot be moved out of the country.
anyone can do it, theres no shortage of programmers,
Anyone can also perform surgery, and if we didn't license surgeons, there wouldn't be a shortage of people trying. And that just about sums up the software industry: a lot of bloated corpses left by people who don't know what they are doing. Frankly, I think it's quite healthy if the low-end stuff that "anybody can do" gets moved overseas. The Indians and Chinese can't do a worse job than the VB "programmers" with a couple of years of "experience" in the US.
HanzoSan said, incorrectly: "Software development is like the Mc Donalds job, anyone can do it, theres no shortage of programmers"
To which I reply:
Horseshit.
There are two kinds of *professional* software development:
The first kind is performed by well-trained college grads, who have studied computer science and know how to design and build a project that works. We're talking a B.A. or B.S. at least, maybe even an M.S.
The second kind is done by people who decide that there is money in "computers" and think they can enter the profession by taking a six month course at some certificate mill, or reading a couple of books. If they have a degree at all, it might be in a liberal-arts field.
The first group of people have studied data structures, file structures, computer architecture, mathematical logic... Their work will be efficient and well designed. They know software engineering, they understand OOP... And, they probably really love the field, or they wouldn't have spent all those years in school dedicating themselves to it.
The second group of people ONLY know their chosen language's syntax, plus a little bit about some API they plan to work with. They're just cashing in; they don't care about programming particularly. Their designs are sloppy, and generally turn into maintenance nightmares. The sad thing is, they don't know any better, and can't understand what's wrong with their code.
SO, NO, YOU'RE INCORRECT. PROGRAMMING IS NOTHING LIKE A MACDONALDS JOB.
And, before everyone slams me for being an elitist, how many successful open source projects can you name which weren't created by someone with real training in computer science (not some six month seminar)? And, maybe you can tell me, would YOU buy a house designed and built by an architect who took a six-month course? Would you drive over a bridge built by an engineer who took a couple of two week seminars instead of going to college for six years? Of course not. But you'll swear high and low that "anyone" can build, say, your company's enterprise database.
Fuck... What total and utter bullshit. This guy's a troll.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Will you accept an unstable job, working in constant fear of the next day and the ability to pay rent?
Sure, it beats being unemployed.
Why would the upswing happen in the USA? Theres no real reason to hire an American programmer over a Chinese or Indian programmer,
Except that the American programmer can meet with the customer. And the American programmer can talk to the product manager every day. And the American programmer can attend conferences to pick up cutting edge skills. Some areas of programming don't require any of that stuff. Okay, they'll go offshore. But that isn't all programming jobs by a long stretch.
I simply don't have the time to do a financial analysis every time I make a decision, so yes, sometimes I consider what the national news outlets are saying about the economy. I also consider what my friends and family are saying. Since half of them have been layed off in the last 3 years I'd say we've got some problems. It's possible these problems were caused by someone in the media mentioning the word recession, but I doubt it.
OTOH, I don't doubt that we Americans live in a constant state of fear, which is often fueled by 24-hour news channels and web sites. We simply aren't used to being bombbarded with information all the time, especially when media outlets make themselve so self-important to get ratings. We hear about every layoff, every corporate scandal and every dip in stock price. We're seeing the flip side of the dot-com bubble. Instead of being too optimistic, we're being too pessimistic. It's hype either way.
What can I say? That's capitalism for ya. Media outlets make big money by getting people to watch.
Damn, you slashdot geeks are a whiney, negative bunch. No wonder none of you have jobs.
Why don't you move to somewhere else in the country and actually put your energy to use.
The glory days of the tech boom are over; no longer will companies hire people that can breath as the only qualification to do technology work.
If you can't get a job right now, I suggest you find another career, because there are plenty of jobs out there.
Did anyone else click on the "Find out what you're worth" link in this article?
WTF? Almost every job in the "Software" area indicates a pay decrease in the next year. How is this positive for the software industry?!
This is pretty stupid. Unless you're going to buy an old used trailer to live in, the cost of living in a certain area is going to be pretty well dictated by the level of demand in that area. So living in an area with a lot of professionals causes the price of housing to be fairly high.
Just because people would prefer to live in a nice house instead of a dirt-floor shack doesn't mean we have "excessive consumerism". It means we as a society prefer a higher standard of living, and that's what we as professionals spent our time and money going to college and fighting for a high-paying job for. If you'd prefer to go back to living in caves and wearing a loincloth, have at it. Just don't expect anyone else to join you.
Quoth you, basically:
I can't believe you're telling me I live in a shack (caves and loincloths, etc.) in order to survive in my profession.
I believe that's called a "Straw Man" argument.
Generally, when people talk about "excessive consumerism," they're not talking aobut living normally, or even about having nice things. They're talking about people doing stupid things like getting into enormous debt to "keep up with the Joneses." My sister, for example, has a well-paying IT job. She could easily have money put away and not be in debt, except that she thinks she's got to have a Dodge Durango to fit in in the area she's living. (At least she's buying instead of leasing this time. Ack.)
Everybody has the ability to not do that, and nearly everybody (those above the average salary, especially) has the ability to put some cash away for a rainy day.
"Living in caves and wearing a loincloth." Sheesh.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Again, history is a useful guide, and it shows that even during the steepest recessions, the majority of workers don't lose their jobs; instead, they get raises. Yes, even during the Great Depression, prices fell much faster than wages, so many workers actually saw an increase in their real income. From August 1929 to March 1932, factory workers still on the job saw their real income jump by an annualized rate of 4.3 percent, which was two and a half times the rate of increase they enjoyed during the Roaring '20s.
This is an interesting point, and forces me to reconsider that maybe the Great Depression wasn't as bad as everyone says it was! Sure, lots of people are out of a job right now, but if you weren't laid off this month, things are great because none of your laid off coworkers can afford milk and the stores have to lower the price, which increases your spending power! If you think about it, the economy is great! This month, anyway. I hope I'm not laid off next month.
Of course, things aren't as simple as they were in 1930. The economy has some problems it didn't have back then:
-massive consumer debt
-trade deficits
-increasing corporate reliance on previously inaccessible cheap overseas labor
-a housing bubble
-a huge federal deficit
The federal deficit is worthy of more attention than it's been getting. The government has rung up a deficit of $194 billion dollars in just the first five months of the 2003 budget year. In February alone we pulled out the Visa and racked up charges of $96.3 billion. A 10 year $1.35 trillion tax cut has to come from somewhere. The Bush Administration will politically leverage its wartime popularity surge to get another tax cut for People Wealthier Than You for $726 billion during a fucking liquidity crisis. At least the Senate lopped off $100 billion to pay for the war. Think about that. You could have six more wars and still have $26 billion of tax cuts left. I just hope these rich bastards who are getting all this money immediately invest it in ventures that put Americans to work! Although they're not stupid and will probably buy bonds with it.
According to Keynesian theory, unemployment and inflation are supposed to be mutually exclusive- each is supposed to prevent the other from happening. The disproof of that theory came during the 70s and was named stagflation. Things suck when everyone is out of work and milk still keeps costing more than it did last week. I hope the financial markets don't notice these Reagan-sized deficits anytime soon! All this unemployment might not count for much. At least the Fed can increase interest rates to control it, I guess, since they've pushed them down to artificially low levels in their futile attempts to reignite the boom. If you have a house be sure to refinance now while interest rates are so low, because they're going to go up.
I want to know why everyone is talking about a lopsided war with a tinpot Middle East dictator- this shit is the real news.
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.
Ah yes, you gotta love this logic: "Iraq's oil wealth will not go to America, it will go to the people of Iraq. They have already decided to spend it on infrastructure, and the contracts have been awarded to American companies with close ties to the Bush Administration." Feh.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog