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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..."
Maybe.... we haven't had a layoff in a few months. No raises or bonuses yet, and we've hired a total of 3 people in my immediate area over the past 3 months.
The real question will be when will we start seeing more hiring to aleviate the huge amount of work loads left on people that held their jobs?
Ah, for the head-hunters to return...
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Free your mind.
If there's a coding job anywhere, I'm down. I'm a CS major at RIT, and in order to graduate I have to complete 4 co-ops. That means I have to work in the industry for 40 weeks, and get paid for it, before I get a degree. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a coding job when you don't have the magic piece of paper on your wall? If there are jobs in Billings I just might go.
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If anyone wants to hire me check my resume in multiple formats at
http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/showArticl
I don't know what this guy is saying, but if the industry was in good shape, I wouldn't have to pimp myself on slashdot.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
After spending a couple years in CS training I was sort of beginning to get worried about the availability of jobs, what with all the horrible news about the IT industry. I still might have to take a callcenter job for awhile first, but hey, it's just a rite of passage.
I am a filthy pirate.
If you believe free software is good (I do)
And if you believe software reuse must come sometime (I do)
Then you cannot think that there will be a strong market for coders for ever - it just doesn't make sense.
Your jobs are secure for only a few more years, then millions more Chinese and Indians will learn C, C++, VB, etc etc and take your jobs.
Software development is like the Mc Donalds job, anyone can do it, theres no shortage of programmers, people outsource now, and with the internet even small businesses dont have to hire you expensive American programmers.
Face it, the jobs are gone, and as soon as your company is in danger and needs to save some money, you'll be laid off.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Why would the upswing happen in the USA? Theres no real reason to hire an American programmer over a Chinese or Indian programmer, face it, we are in an economic bubble and its about to burst. Programming is not the kinda job thats all that special, theres only about a billion Indians and Chinese in line to take your jobs, lets not forget Africa and South America.
Just like we lost all the factor jobs, and the car industry, we are about to lose the computer industry.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Right now the cost of living in the USA is high, everything here is more expensive.
Globalism can never work unless we all use the same dollar/euro/yen combined into one global dollar.
Whats our option? Move to China or India because our dollar is worth far too much for us to ever get a job. We also have high inflation, we need the cost of living to be as cheap as the cost of living in India, and we need a global dollar.
Companies should not be able to scam the system by paying workers in other countries cheaper and keeping the extra cash for themselves.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
"and that pay increases are actually at reasonable levels"
- Speaking as a Graphic Designer who has never been layed off (so far). I have worked at my current company for 2.5 years. Last year we didn't get pay increases - this year we got a raise - 2% flat to everyone... which made my salary go from 40k/yr to 40,800/yr...um so an $800 raise is considered "reasonable?"
Yeah beggers can't be choosers, but things still suck and the tech industry (at least in San Jose) is getting shit on pretty heavily still with Fujistu laying off people every quarter almost and Applied Materials saying they'll cut another 2k jobs... That doesn't sound like "IT sector jobs are not as glum as we make them out to be"
Ave Molech Setting
The deal fell through at the *very* last minute when the city informed the prospective buyer of the building that they would be required to pay the back property taxes on the building.
Yes.
This amounted to no small amount of change. The end result was that the company took its jobs and its money and its tax dollars elsewhere.
Have you ever seen Billings? It's such a dumpy place that I have no problem believing that this story actually occurred (as my father insists that it did). Skip Billings. Go someplace else.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
ANd this week, they run a story about how we don't need to worry. The jobs will stick around.
Hmmm. Let me see...what are there tactics?
First they run a scare story so that all the programmers will buy the magazine or will visit the website (actually, I don't think that story was online right away).
So, then the business lobbies know that their paid-for congressmen will have to knuckle under to an angry and scared electorate, so they pay Biz Week to run the antidote to the scare story. Biz Week makes out! Mo' money...mo' money....mo' money!
Things must be picking up. I get about 3 calls a week from headhunters, whereas even two months ago I was getting none. Those guys (and women) sure are persistent. This one woman, especially; she has this incredibly loud, brassy voice. I wonder how these people survived when things were at their worst?
If you believe free software is good (I do)
And if you believe software reuse must come sometime (I do)
Then you cannot think that there will be a strong market for coders for ever - it just doesn't make sense.
I have to point out that just because the code is free doesn't mean the programmers who understand it have to work for free. Many employers actually develop code and release it as open source, but the developers who do the programming are well paid.
Also, the idea that using open source and software reuse in the future will eliminate the need for talented developers and their paycheck is ignorant.
If anything, reusing prior code is much _harder_ than developing from scratch. It takes experience and skill to understand how the parts from an open source package are to be stiched together into an application. There is no magic open-source button that will make it work for free.
This sort of attitude that "all the software has been written" is a lot like the idea that the patent office should be shut down in 1899 because all the ideas have been thought of.
1899 quote refererence
I lived in Billings, MT for 5 years, and am on the verge of moving back there. The place is growing, almost as fast in some respects as the Phoenix/Gilbert/Chandler/Mesa AZ area (where I've lived for the past year and a half or so.) It might not be a huge town yet, but it is indeed growing, and at a rather rapid (and, I must say, disconcerting; but then, I was born in a town of 500 people) rate.
About IT jobs, however, I have no idea. I personally know of a number of equipment manufacturing companies that have started business in the area, including one that does devolopment for CNC manufacturing equipment. But what with the needs of modern business, just about any sort of company can benefit from the services of a skilled IT dude, so it stands to reason that there might be a few positions open, eh?
But then, what do I know. I'm only a welder/machinist/plumber/housebuilder who codes video games as a hobby.
There are gov't contractor jobs all over the country, not just in DC. I work in the Omaha area for Northrup Grumman who is the #2 gov't contracting company (now that they have just bought TRW) behind Lockheed Martin. Boeing is another big one, and there are many other smaller companies out there.
Not all of these jobs are all that boring either. For the next several years I am likely to be working on modernization efforts to convert old Fortran, C, Ada, and other code to Java. Not bad work at all.
Best of all, most of the people I work with are old. Many are my parents age or older. Looks like job security through attrition to me...
This article points out that a series of negative news stories in the New York Times led the nation to believe the economy is worse than it really was.
This led many people to change their behavior which actually made the economy worse.
My question is: Does the mention of the word 'recession' by a national newscast lead to changing business plans, changing spending, which eventually leads to lower spending by individuals and corporations, which eventually leads to recession?
Is it right to change your spending plans based on hearing the word 'recession'/'downturn' enough times?
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
I know a similar story, where someone who was skilled in his time as a Sys/36 RPG programmer was making six figures. Now he's on welfare. But I have no sympathy for him. He was absolutely unwilling to learn anything about the PC's that shoved the Sys36 out of the office we were at. And I mean nothing. He would have absolutely no contact with them.
In other words, he's obsolete. But he didn't have to be.
It's a fast paced world. You gotta stay current.
The politicans will never help you. Ever. Get that through your head and move on.
The only hope is that more and more of the IT industry is done by independents and small consultants, and very small wholely owned companies. If you have "suits" in your company, you should be cultivating all those people (annoying as they are) who want to pay you $20 to fix their windows machine. You should be looking for small useful software to write and offer support for or sell as shareware.
It's better that way anyway -- the small independent consultant and businessman is the Jeffersonian farmer of this century. These huge organizations are inherently incompatible with a free society.
This story's got more holes than swiss cheese:
"Last year construction employment declined by 1.3 percent, transportation and public utilities jobs shrank by 2.8 percent, and manufacturing employment slipped by 3.5 percent....Services employment went up 1.5 percent, and finance, insurance, and real estate increased almost 1 percent." In other words, lost jobs in three of the highest paying, productive, employement sectors were partly offset by jobs in the lowest-paying sector (services), and in sales and paper-pushing. If contruction jobs are down and real estate jobs are up, doesn't that mean we have less product(buildings) being peddled by more salesmen(real estate agents)?
Another positive indicator he cites is rising home prices. This may not be so much an indicator of prosperity as it is of insufficient supply. Sure, it's great if you own a house (or two or three), but if you don't and prices are rising faster than your wages, that's not good news.
As for the average salary increasing by 3.7 percent, is that figure skewed by CEOs giving themselves and their VPs huge raises? Did the average guy in the trenches really get his 3.7 percent?
His figure of 2.8 percent growth sounds respectable, but how much of that is real growth? Economists include just about everything in this figure, but investing in prisons, enhanced airline security, etc. does not make us any more productive. Not that it's not worth doing, but counting it as growth is misleading.
It's funny what you can do with statistics. I can't say this article is wrong, but there isn't enough real information there to draw any conclusions.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I am an American citizen. (I can hear the flames already. No, I'm not pro-war.)
I believe the H1-B program, as it is currently being implemented, is just plain wrong for the U.S.A. for the following simple reasons:
- Paying a foreigner less than an American just because you can is immoral and racist.
- Throwing a citizen out on the streets, because you can pay a foreigner less, increases the burden on taxpayers, both by taxpayers paying more to support the unemployed, and by the employer contributing less in taxes.
- Corporations, by increasing the burden on taxpayers so they can make an extra buck, are causing the economy to crumble even further. Cities and States must raise taxes to make up for it, increasing the burden on taxpayers even more.
- These same corporations, by exacerbating the recession, ironically, are causing themselves loss in profit. Corporate accountants don't see it that way. This loss doesn't show up on the books, so it is invisible to them. Their view of the world stops at the edge of the ledger.
What to do?
Either:
- Get rid of the H1-B program altogether.
-or-
- (preferred) 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.
That would solve the problems of corporations abusing H1-Bs in order to bilk the taxpayers and pocket the profits. There's nothing wrong with making a profit. There -IS- something wrong with making a profit by ripping other people off.
Oh yeah, any of y'all got your money back from Ken Lay yet?
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
That doesn't make any sense - the government is about to drop bags of cash on the defense industry and homeland security, both of which rely heavily on technology.
> 2. It will cut down on the number of younger less experienced people applying for jobs as they head for war
Also false. The younger, less-experienced people headed off to war were never applying jobs because they already have jobs. They are fulltime military personnel. As for the reserves, they'll be back pretty soon.
> 3. Large corporations are leveraging off-shore IT pools in foriegn countries
According to the article:
Speculating for a moment, I think you may be disproportionately feeling the effects of the recession, more so than other IT jobs. It seems to me that admin type jobs would be the first to go. I've read more than a few /. posts boasting about the posters ability to write shell scripts that do 90% of the administration while they play CounterStrike. Conversely, if a you've had some layoffs in your company and your sys admin is overloaded with work, you could probably suck it up and hold out for a while longer. But if you absolutely had to get your product to market because it looked like the ecomony was turning around, and you don't have the programming staff, that's simply not going to work, you have to get more programmers. In short, the consequences of not enough admin staff are less severe than the consequences of not enough programmers.
Of course that's all speculation.
"It's Dot Com!"
Noone modded this AC up, so I'm just gonna quote him word for word:
" 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!"
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Nope. The opposite actually - during the waves of layoffs beginning in the late 80s, the senior engineering people were kept, while the mid-level people kept getting cut. With each wave, the next crop of junior people that had edged up to mid-level was cut. This is a major structural problem with large government contractors. They act (axe) under the assumption that it's better to keep the senior people who "know a lot" or "deserve their jobs" more than mid-level people, while junior engineers fresh out of college are cheap & desirable. This might be a reasonable set of assumptions for a one-time cull, but over time it ensures that nobody learns anything within the company - all the accrued knowledge resides in the senior people who eventually disappear through attrition. The company is thus doomed to repeat its past mistakes.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I couldnt imagine doing anything else.
Eh, there has to be something else you could imagine doing, if, say, there were zero programming jobs left (there are still about eight or nine in the U.S.). What kinds of things do you code? Systems-level programming? You might also enjoy designing hardware. GUI hacking? You could try engineering consumer products like car dashboards or washing machine controls. Games? How about inventing a new board game or an RPG expansion set, or writing a book, or becoming a college math professor (for those 3D graphics coders)?
In general, I think if I lived between 1750 and 1950 I'd be some sort of engineer, 1600-1750 and I'd be a scientist, and before that I'd be fighting just to survive like most everyone else in the middle ages or prehistoric era. Unless I was an Egyptian or Greek, where I would hopefully get to be one of the intellectuals and not part of the unwashed masses.
By the way, I got my C64 for my fourth Christmas. It took me years to figure out what PEEK and POKE were, but that didn't stop me from typing in games from Compute's Gazette.
I'm not hitting up HR people for a job, and right now HR people see employees as evil. I'm a quick and dirty project person. I solve your problems and go away. What most people (HR and managment types that is) don't realize is that the problems never go away, so they keep calling me back to work on new things.
Haveing a good network of friends , working hard, solving problems, and having a wide skill set all help a lot too.
I was let go 3.5 years ago from my last full time job. I came home early one evening, and my wife asked what was wrong. I told her I was let go. She asked if it was a good thing or a bad thing. I said good :-) I had my first contract in 2 weeks, and have not lacked work since. The irony is that I do a lot of work for my previous employer, at a much higer rate.
For the record, I don't work on any databases or surveillance schemes. There are legitimate combinations of government and technology that don't involve trespassing on people's personal rights.
Some really smart people argue against your assesment for instance this Oxford professor.