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
'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.
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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!
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.
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 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.
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
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!!!!
"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
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!
Bah, I'll show you 40 people that can't. They're our in-house development staff.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
I disagree. I think literacy and problem solving skills are more important to the software engineering community than the fast food industry. Sure anyone can write software that has been trained to. I think the costs associated with training a fast food employee versus a competent software engineer are beyond compare.
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
Well yes that's true in general, but it doesn't work out well in the programmer field. I consider myself fairly talented. I know a few other people in my area that are also on the "pretty damn talented list", and all of us have had serious job/money troubles in the past couple years at one time or another due to the job market. I gaurantee we're in whatever top X percent constitutes being good enough that you shouldn't have to worry, but we're still getting hit.
Part of this can be explained away with the notion that a few good people will always be lost in such a major wash, and that they'll recover hopefully (and I did recover, so have most of the others). But another part of it, I think, is in the nature of good programmers... A large number of the good programmers out there are the geeky-introvert type, and a large amount of the mediocre to crappy programmers out there are regular extravert joes with social skills. So when the job market squeezes, guess who makes all the good connections with the suits, and guess who's sitting on their ass at home with their 1 friend, a bottle of mountain dew, and their dwindling bank account as comfort? In a highly competitive scare-job time, the lower end programmers have superior job-seeking and people-networking skills to leverage over our heads.
11*43+456^2
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.
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
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.
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!
In most corporations, "Good attitude" means taking whatever shit you're fed. Yes, people only get ahead in most corporations when they kiss ass. Sometimes they have to be good at their jobs, too, but sometimes kissing ass and not complaining about anything is all it takes.
If you're good at your job and disagree, you will not get promoted over someone that's incompetent and an ass-kisser.
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?
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
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!