Slashdot Mirror
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..."
Show me a stable job, and I'll show you a...umm......resume.
~ "When I'm of that age I'm just going to live up a tree."
Hey.. This story should've been printed on April 1st.. Too early.
http://dtum.livejournal.com
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
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...
--------
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.
e .jhtml?articleID=7900141
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!
Billings, MT is a high growth area. Of course, I haven't heard of any of my co-workers taking a job in Billings..."
I have several co-workers who took a job in Billings. They didn't even have a choice: they were transferred from Sales and Collections.
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.
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.
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.
...
This is an early article from their April Fool's edition that slipped out too early. Sorry for any problems it may have caused. Billings, MT....come on, who's going to believe that?
IT is just as bad off as you thought. Go back to your normal lives....
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
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
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
Demand for jobs in the rubble-clearing sector have jumped over 400% in the past 48 hours. Unemployed IT workers in Baghdad rejoice.
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
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.
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.
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!!!!
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
Not so loud. We wouldn't want any would-be CSer's rethinking those liberal arts degrees. Too many engineering degrees were spawned by the irrational exuberance of the late 90's tech boom as it is. Remember, its DOOM and GLOOM.
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....
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).
Lately the only place you're going to find good money is drug sales and murder for hire. If you're looking to invest, I'd suggest canned beans and shotgun shells (Obviously get a shotgun too.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
..but it's nice to finally see a positive article about Outlook here.
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.
And boy is it exciting! Woo, ha! In fact, I just got fourteen job offers last week, and I'm a 22 year old recent grad with a crappy GPA.
Anything goes, here in billings. Local culture is primo. I've lived in LA, NYC, but I got sick of all the ugly girls. Come here to Billings, where it's nothing but 100% beautiful people, all the time.
I work in an all Linux shop, writing 3D game engines and debating Libertarian politics. It's great!
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
Let me get this straight. Thier magazine's quantative analysis (they published thier data and method of analysis) is wrong because the people who read it suck thier bosses dick, and your lack of prospects is caused by your analytical skills?
I'm overwelmed to see my fellow Americans using thier critical thinking skills to spread insightful and informed opinions! Yay!
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
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.
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)
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!
2003 Employment Outlook What are you Really Worth?
In a breaking news flash, buzzword2.0 announces that the 2003 Employment Outlook still sucks. To confirm this claim, buzzword2.0 decided to interview all 127,000 people in the San Jose area unemployment line. To our surprise, 97.876 people said that after they got pinked slipped from their web programmer positions, life has truely sucked.
'I tried to get a job at BurgerBling,' states Joe Smith, 'but they said I was under qualified. Something about lack of any real skill. Now I'm here at the unemployment line.'
Jane Jones says, 'The biggest regret I had in college was to switch my major from deep sea basket english to CS (computers and stuff). I could be doing so much more for the world. But at least I'm making more here than at my previous job.'
buzzword2.0 decided to also interview managers regarding Outlook 2003. Most said that they weren't going to implement Outlook 2003 because they were happy with Outlook 98.
buzzword2.0 didn't stop here. We decided to interview upper management. Warren Whitecollar, senior VP of computers and stuff at International Layoff Machine stated, '[I] really don't know why I laid off 30% of my work force... I was golfing with my friend from Federated Slavery at the Kentucky Kountry Klub, and he told me he laid off 25% of his employees. So I just had to lay off more than him, and replace our help desk team with Indonesian Pigmy Chimps. It worked out great!'
Finally, buzzword2.0 interviewed the heart of Outlook 2003 Gloom... Wall Street. Here is the transcript of the interview we had with investment guru Rober Poorman:
B20: What do you think of the Outlook for 2003/2004?
RP: Sucks...
B20: Well, is it going to get better anytime soon?
RP: It's not really supposed to. We're still profiting off of 9/11 tragedy and the dot com boom we invented.
B20: What's that supposed to mean?
RP: It's kind of hard to find new investors, pardon me, I mean suckers to buy the new stocks we just printed up right now. Plus it'll take us at least a year to architect another 'boom', market it, hype it and sell it. This will give us enough time to print out a few million more shares. Rinse, lather, ripoff.
B20: That's horrible...
RP: I know. You want to buy some stock? Because if you're not, I'm late for a power lunch I'm hosting with some single mother's life savings.
b20: No! Well that concludes this article. Next week we'll publish Outlook 2003 2.0.
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.
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
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?!
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.
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.
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.