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Dot ComBack, Or More Of The Same?
adamsmith_uk writes "The FT features Wall Street's renewed love affair with dotcom stocks on Monday with the latest in a $6bn string of acquisitions that has helped set light to the once-defunct online commerce sector. Could this be the signs of the tech ComBack ?" But hold onto your hopes; ekarjala writes "According to this CNet article, a recent survey by theInformation Technology Association of America indicates that IT hiring in the US is expected to remain flat or decline slightly over the course of 2003. The main drivers are lack of demand for IT products/services and outsourcing IT functions offshore."
Who fails to see how a buncha people buying/selling shares will determine if a company sells things or not?
Its not a comeback for some, just some more growth: Not all those DotComs were DotBombs. Look at Ebay, quite possibly one of the most successful internet businesses ever.
IT hiring in the US is expected to remain flat or decline slightly
Just because people are not being hired in the US does not neccesarily mean the industry itself is going downhill. I know the US is a large chunk, but the IT industry could stage a comeback in the rest of the world while staying flat in the US, couldn't it?
I'm just about to graduate. This may have come at just the right time for me. I thought McDonalds might be looking at a new employee for a while! :)
Even if the economy starts growing faster, it'll still be a while before companies start hiring. That's usually the last thing that gets better after growth resumes. Even now there are signs that things are getting better, but there's still a hell of a lot of people without work. That sucks. I didn't work between August and December of 2001, and that was bad enough.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Make up your mind people.
/. Nothing to see, move along :)
Just pointing out the humor of two (sorta) contridictory stories here on
OK it's a boring day
I wear pants.
Looks like someone's got their eyes on Slashdot.
Up 22% today...Hmmmm.
(Yes that's right, Slashdot's ticker symbol is LNUX)
I used to work for what could be termed a .com company that is listed on the NASDAQ.
.com boom are probably more likely to survive in the future as they have had to re-work their business plans and be more conservative about their growth prospects and, as such, not leading (misleading) the market makers into over-valuing their stock. This then generates these companies some respect and their stock rises.
:-)
I got made redundant with 2000 or so shares which I still happen to keep. Those shares have risen 80% or so since I left the company late last year.
I realise that I can't place my experience as the norm, but it is at least one example of a company recovering and nearly reaching profitability.
Overall, in my view, the companies that have thus far survived the crash of the
Go figure
It is not possible to send all jobs overseas. There are real limitations such as communications, schedules, culture, and language differences that serve to mitigate the cheapness of labor. Also, the more jobs that are sent to India, for example, the higher the price labor will demand there. There's not that many places in the world where you can find large supplies of high quality programmers, so once you exhaust a particular region, you have to move on. At some point every company is faced with the fact that they can get better programmers for a lower total cost right here at home.
It sucks to personally lose your job because it went overseas. But there's no reason to panic about all jobs moving overseas. It just can't happen.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Seriously, it's a matter of stocks getting back to realistic values. Investors are taking a look, and seeing a realistic chance for profit--so they're returning, albeit cautiously. Where there's money, the market will follow, eventually.
Your not... you're a student, you're sposed to either work for a Prof, or flip the big macs while volunteering your time to projects so you can build a portfollio/resume and have something to set yourself apart once you do graduate.
There's a new group of companies that are doing a lot of the same things as the original dotcoms did, they're just not hiring 100 people to implement online want ads or make an invitation web page. A small amount of individual angel investors are willing to sink a couple hundred grand into starting a small company now that you need something better than a business plan drawn on a napkin. Most are under 10 people and either profitable or have immediate revenue.
It's not like 1998-2001 showed that internet-based companies can't be successful, it just showed that you don't need to be a publicly traded company to sell mail-order dog food.
can be found in my little rant in this thread right here.
Back in the day, before globalization, before the demise of family-wage jobs, before the unions were smashed flat there were other possibilities.
One of the purposes of tariffs and trade agreements, back in the day was to keep jobs from leaving the country.
But that day is past. The race to the bottom has been enshrined not merely as a matter of current policy but the cornerstone of international law (cf. GATT, NAFTA, WTO and so on). Here in the States most educated White men vote Republican. Most IT people educated White men. If we voted against our best interests we have nobody but ourselves to blame.
Early on we thought that we would be safe. Steel and textiles might go overseas, but not high-tech. Then semiconductors moved away. And consumer electronics. That's alright, we said, the engineering and design, the programming and the day-to-day business of managing information will stay here. They followed. Because jobs like those are even easier to move - you don't even have to absorb the fixed costs of a factory, just phone lines.
And the jobs that stayed? Wages are sinking there because we weren't politically active. We let the big employers pervert the H1-B visa program EXPLICITLY to cut our wages and job security.
The action by Sun employees to fight back against job destruction fell off the screen. Largely because we didn't keep attention on it.
So look for a recovery in the IT industry. But don't ever look for a recovery in salaries or security. At least not until people pull their heads out and undo the disastrous effects of the Reagan "revolution" and its sequels.
For a couple good if older references take a look at "America, What Went Wrong" and "America, Who Really Pays the Taxes".
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Lets just pretend that this dotcom come back is really happenning and there is no possibility that it won't.
Did the rookies and experienced dotcommers learn anything from their experiences or those of others; or, will they do the same thing - make a little money, think they're all that (no offense to all you failed dotcommers) and hire people to do things they could easily do themselves and buy a bunch of equipment they have no need for? Thus putting them into dept which they will never recover from and putting their dotcom on that big server in the sky.
A few years ago, pundits said anyone who didn't perceive the internet's magical power to mint money "just don't get the internet."
Shortly before the first dotcom boom went bust, I saw an enthusiastic stock analyst on one of the financial news shows. He defended his extravagant valuations of companies that had never made a profit and had never articulated when or how they intended to start making a profit. Profit and loss statements and P/E ratios were archaic and obsolete relics of the old economy, he said. "Now it's all about branding."
Who didn't get it?
It's likely that the bust left some tech stocks undervalued. There may be some bargains to be had. There are undoubtedly opportunities for real businesses that figure out that the interenet, like the telephone company, lets a company communicate with its customers. That doesn't change the fundamental fact that a company still needs to find some way to actually make money.
(Personally, I don't think we've let all the hot air out of the bubble yet. Time will tell.)
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
There isn't going to be a second boom like 1999. The collapse took out all the smaller weaker companies and we're pretty much left with the survivors: Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, heck toss Microsoft, AOL, Dell, Apple in there. Now it's just time for the big companies to pick and choose what stragglers that are still left treading water (which, implies they have something worth owning) and buy 'em. We're just going to see the bigger companies get bigger. Sometime in the next century there will be another speculative boom but I'll doubt it'll be web-based. Anybody pumping net stocks today probably lost a crap load the last time 'round and is bitterly trying to make up what they lost ... or they're just dumb.
Political correctness is all well and good, but don't let it blind you to reality. I'm getting the bulk of my telemarketing calls from Newfoundland and India (try asking sometimes, before you hang up), and calls for support seem to be going out of country too. How much of the stuff you buy says Made In USA on it these days?
Of course the IT industry isn't immune. We ought to fix things by requiring companies who use foreign labor to pay equivalent U.S. for each overseas position into a fund used for improving living conditions in the countries these companies are abusing (or similar causes).
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
"These are jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S."
Why?
The thing is, 'sending jobs overseas' is seen as negative. Why is that? Why shpould they be saved for US citizens?
If I fixed your job (and, if extended to everyone then everyone's job) for life, you would get no productivity increases. You would therefore get no pay rises. Where are the increases in revenue for your job if everyone is like you?
Research would achieve nothing, as if everyone is fixed, we'll never have anyone to increase productivity.
So... if you don't want jobs sourced overseas, then equally expect no change in job, no productivity increases, no economic growth.
Do not earn more than your father... be condemned to a life of what has been achieved before.
The shame is, economists post Ricardp have realised... IF YOU OUTSOURCE YOUR JOB TO SOMEONE WHO CAN DO IT CHEAPER (not only increasing their standard of living) YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ELSE EVEN MORE PRODUCTIVE (unless you are a leech upon your workforce and refuse to change). This ACCOMPANIED WITH DISCOVERY (research) results in ECONOMIC GROWTH.
Sorry for so many caps... just ppl either don't understand basic common sense or are so lazy they want to preverse their present position without thinking al all.
Part of the web revolution was supposed to be low overhead. Guess what, low overhead also means less workers. There's simply no reason, when you're focused on-line, to hire a marketing guru, HR guru, caterer, DJ, masseuse and all that other useless crap the .coms got into. What's being found out is these days you have one guy doing five different jobs and he'll do it, because he's paranoid about getting laid off. Did you know all the cool logos that change every day at Google are done by one person? Back in the day, you would have hired an entire design department, each person earning 70K to do that. Seriously. Times have changed ... for the better, in some ways.
Here is the letter...
Dear Sir / Madam,
We are pleased to introduce ourselves as software-coders, consultants, programmers and allied services providers, based in India, providing software coding and development services. We already have clients in India, Germany, Switzerland, UK and the UAE to whom we provide the best quality at very low costs as outlined below.
SERVICESWe provide software services ranging from complete software development of a complete project to providing pure coding services based on a previously analysed and prepared structure. This thus includes the complete spectrum of software development, be it custom or Internet software development. The various software services that we provide are -
Custom Software Development, Internet / Intranet Software Development and Website Designing and Development Database Maintenance and Handling Testing (Manual) Documentation (Help, Tutorials and Manuals, Demos) Customer Support Services via E-mail and Customer Correspondence Management Representation in India for various purposesPRICING
Other Services:Software Coding and Development: We offer rates depending on the nature and complexity of the work, but to give an indication we have per man-hour rates varying from US $ 1 to US $ 18. For bulk assignments the rates are worked out accordingly. Generally speaking, the rate for pure coding job is less than a programming job.
This depends entirely on the requirements and services required.
LEAD AND DEVELOPMENT TIME
Other Services:Coding:
For pure coding assignment, when the program structure is clearly defined and outlined, the lead-time is about 7 days and after that a daily update can be sent.
The lead-time and development time depends on the labour involved and complexity of the software project.
TECHNICAL SKILLS AND KNOW-HOW
OS:Microsoft Windows 95/98/2000/NT/ XP, RedHat Linux 6.2 and above .
Programming Languages:
Java, C/C++, SQL, Basic, Fox Pro, PL/SQL
Internet/Intranet Technologies:
TCP/IP, Servlets, Applets, Flash, Shockwave, ActiveX, COM/DCOM, SSL, CORBA
Java/J2EE Technologies:
Enterprise JavaBeans, JDBC, AWT, RMI, Servlets, JSP, Swing, JMS, Applets, JNDI, JNI, JavaMediaFramework, JavaSound, JComm, Image handling and processing, JavaMail, JAXP
Scripting Languages:
JSP, ASP, CFML, JavaScript, VBScript
Markup Languages:
HTML/DHTML, CSS, SSI, WAP/WML, XML/XSL/DTD
Application Servers:
BEA WebLogic, Macromedia ColdFusion, MS Internet Information Server, Apache Web Server, IBM Web-Sphere, JBoss, Macromedia JRun
Tools:
Application Development:
Visual Basic, VC++, GCC, Developer 2000, Delphi, Power Builder, MS VJ++ 6.0, Oracle JDeveloper , Borland J.Builder, Sun JDK 1.0.x - 1.4, VisualAge Java
Web Development:
Macromedia Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDraw
DBMS and Database:
MS SQL Server, ORACLE 7.x-8.1.x, mySQL, Sybase, Informix, MS Access, ODBC, JDBC, PostgreSQL
GUI Systems:
Win32 API, MFC, AWT, JFC
Software Libraries:
MFC, ANSI C++ STL, ATL
We are sure that you would find these rates very competitive and our services up to the mark. However please let us know if you need any clarification.
Thanking you in anticipation,
Yours faithfully,
Navdesh
beta infosoft services, # 741, Nelson Square, Chhindwara Road, Nagpur , Maharashtra, India 440 013
Email: betainfosoft@sify.com
Everything can be done elsewhere. There is nothing special about where you live to make it possible to do something ONLY THERE. (Ok, there might be a few exceptions)
:) Wow I got offtopic there.
You have to figure which have a decent likelihood of being done elsewhere. Management tends to stay in one spot, since they don't like to vote themselves to having to relocate, and they wouldn't outsource themselves. Lower levels get moved to cut costs.
Especially if management sees you as a blue-collar worker, you're going to get moved. Unfortunately, programming is often seen by people who don't program as a rather easy process. Ideas go in, program comes out. The programmers are just more people on the assembly line. It's a different kind of factory, but still a factory in the eyes of the management. Factories are staffed by monkeys, monkeys can be hired for cheaper in other parts of the world. Therefore, outsource.
So yeah, the key is figuring out which jobs management thinks require intelligence and skills, and can't be done by just anyone. Programming isn't one of those.
I blame the # of people who tried to prove them right by rushing to get a degree in some computers/tech field and polluting the job pool. If your answer for "Why did you get a degree in X" is "For the money", I hate you. I program because that's what I like doing. I don't care about the money, as long as it's enough to eat. Unfortunately people who got their CS degrees (or whatever your university called it) and might have maybe learned the mechanics of writing programs and how comptuers work, but not how to design programs that work well are the problem. Eventually they'll be fired as the incompetents they are, and the people who know their stuff will get hired/promoted.
At least, that's what I keep telling myself while looking for a job.
at least according to this Computerworld article, "Postwar Iraq seen as big potential tech market."
"Every business-minded person is looking at Iraq after the war because it is a very rich country," said Riad Safar... Iraq's market potential, as it moves to replace out-of-date business and health systems, is bigger than that of many of its neighbors, including Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and perhaps Saudi Arabia....
The senior official at Kuwait-based systems integrator International Turnkey Systems, said in a telephone interview today that he thinks "it's going to be a huge market."
And that's just one of a number of articles I've read lately salivating over the prospects of Iraq as a market for American goods.
Maybe the broadband Internet will be up and running before the water is.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I remember back in the 80's every body who was working on the assembly lines making cars was freaking out because the jobs were moving to asia, namely, Japan. People thought the US would be owned by Japan in a decade.
I take two things from that experience. First, bitching about your job being lost to someone somewhere else for less is futile. It's gone, the company holds the keys to your job, not you. Corporate America cares only about profit and if you and your union job costs ten times what a worker in some third world country will charge; too bad for you. This will never change; politics is corrupt. Hate to break it to you but it's time to move onto a new line of work. So be flexible. Don't expect you'll have one career your whole life. Second, the mighty can and will fall and there is always something else that will rise to take the place of the old. Right now people are scared that India or China will become some economic powerhouse and rule the world ... like the Japanese were supposed to. Didn't happen. Some people are predicting the US economy will run out of steam like we were supposed to in the 80's, or end up like Japan today. I wouldn't bet on it. A turnaround will come from somewhere. Just be ready to work when it happens.
In my area, the engineers that Lucent and Motorola laid off are fighting over $7/hour retail jobs. The guy I bought a suit from Friday had 12 years' experience programming embedded systems (I am really not kidding).
I'll bet those guys are asking the same question you are, only they have families, mortgages and car payments.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The president may or may not be responsible for the current state of the economy. Perhaps he is completely impotent and could have done nothing to reign in the gross corporate corruption that caused the dot.bom, Enron's energy market manipulation and Enron-esque accounting fraud.
However, he is in control of those bills that he writs and sponsors himself. If you think "the very rich" is defined by Bush II as someone who makes more than 50K, then you really need to get your head out of your *ass.
Bush is currently pandering to people that make at least 10 times that much. It's not at all clear that any of that will do anyone else a d*mn bit of good either.
As far as the "war president" goes. Bush II has been riding a war rally wave since 911.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Also, as mentioned in earlier threads on different stories, there are a few real profit-generating (though I think overvalued) companies (eBay & the like) that have a proven business model and have expressed stable, steady growth.
People will still be "eBaying", or something like it in 20 years.
People in 20 years will still go to the grocery store and not buy their groceries online. It's inefficient, and to me represents the sheer economic waste that went along with the dot.bomb.
And will anyone be paid $100/hour to make crappy webpages ever again? I don't think so.
This is the 'interview bible'. This book goes through every situation possible in an interview.
Dolemite
______________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Yes you are completely stupid for wanting to get into IT right now. If you would like to discuss it in detail go to Austin TX, downtown to any of the nicer resturants and order dinner. Ask your waiter what the IT job market is like and I bet you the price of your dinner and a nice bottle of wine that your waiter IS an out of work IT guy.
No shit.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
In an industry where you find it neccessary to have a room full of people scanning medical documents into computers - yeah, outsource that to some other country. It's difficult or impossible to find that many Americans willing to work even minimum wage to do that day in and day out.
But what about the recent examples wherein a bank has an older system and a team of people who have been programming it for thirty years? They realize that soon these people are going to start to retire and want things like retirement and so forth, plus they want increasing pay scales as time goes on. Instead, fire them all (lay them off) and outsource to India. You pay the Indian workers less and you don't have to worry about retirement benefits for the tons of people you just fired. This is what people are afraid of.
Plus the modded-down poster said "jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S." - probably what he really wants to mean is that there are a number of jobs right out of college that can either go to U.S. Citizens or foreigners needing things like sponsorship. It seems like a bad idea to some to sponsor foreigners when so many U.S. citizens are without jobs at the moment.
Schnapple
All protectionist tariffs do is protect a certain segment of the economy (those who make things domestically that are imported and therefore tariffed) at the expense of those who buy them (by making those goods more costly in the market) and those who export goods (scarcity of your currency in foreign markets drives up the value of your currency in relation to other currencies, making export goods less attractive.).
Ahh, a college student. He still thinks the fundamental aspect of an economy is based on the scarcity of goods.
As has been said countless times here and elsewhere, the United States once funded its entire government with tarriffs, and that was when the country was most free. From a purely economic standpoint, tariffs are perhaps a bad idea. But we don't care about economics. We realize that right now, wealth and prosperity is acquired by this thing we call "work". We can't have a society where there is no work, otherwise what the fuck is the point of living? The community is the reason we exist.
The laws of supply and demand work for people too. Right now, the demand for human ingenuity and artistic vision is very very low, so the majority of people are corporate/government bureaucrats, impotent university drones, or modern day servants. This is not a society of which we should be proud. I mean, look at yourself. Maybe if it was your job, your family, your house, on the line you would think a little differently. Do we really want a society where grown men act like children reading ridiculous economics books until they are 30 years old? How is that life?
My advice to you, is get your head out of the economics book and learn a little bit about human nature of life. Your senseless faith in the cult of efficiency that is economics is a disservice to your humanity and society as a whole. We don't need people for purely productive purposes, we have more than enough people to produce whatever we could possibly desire. Lets give our own people that work.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I started out in the tech sector. Unix helpdesk manager was my previous job. After the bubble burst and the WTC went down I quit the desk job and bummed around for a while until I became a bicycle messenger (that's a whole nother story).
Anyhow, because of my new job, I've met a lot of ex-Kozmo messengers (in Chicago). They talk about how great it was to get tipped (messengers generally don't) and how dangerous it was to ride at night (when everyone was at home ordering movies). They talk about the times they spent bumming around their base getting paid to do nothing and seeing the company buy progressively more and more shit that wasn't going anywhere. They saw management buy scooters that nobody used, hire extra messengers they didn't need, and all manner of completely idiot things that management types tend to do.
Coming from this all discussion betwixt the lower ranks is a simple conclusion: the people who started it had no idea what they were doing. It's not a matter of having a business plan drawing a napkin as you say; I mean Kozmo had marketers galore and real potential.
Too big, too fast. How did they grow so much without profit? Enormous Venture Capital flow. Sure, it seemed like a good idea, heck it was a good idea, but greed was the real impetus and thus its downfall.
My point is that Kozmo could have succeeded, like ebay, and radically transformed the world of home delivery options. Unlike ebay, it was grown way too fast because of investors looking for quick returns. And possibly CEO's and VP's wanting to make it to that IPO and cash out quick.
[pink beam of light]
...will be when broadband wireless access is universal, very cheap (or free), and "always-on".
When your phone, PDA, notebook, computer, watch, gameboy, or whatever can instantly access the internet, anytime, anywhere, and at high-speed then the flood gates will open.
We're not there yet, but it's not far off.
The Information Technology Association of America. The same group that, in the midst of the dot-bomb bloodbath insisted that there was a shortage in available IT labor and lobied for raising caps in H-1B visa allowances. The same group maintaining that there is a current 500,000 worker shortage and expected to champion maintaining the current temporarily increased H-1B visa cap.
If you really want to improve the trade balance, then increase foreign aid. This seems counter intuitive but is a simple result of looking at the flow of money. We (in the US) would like to do three things (and can choose two, currently 1 and 3):
1. Keep foreign aid low to save money.
2. Keep imports lower than exports, so that we produce more stuff and have more jobs.
3. Act as the Reserve currency for the world. This allows us to largely ignore currency fluctuations. It also means that when we print money that we can buy foreign goods with it.
To provide the Reserve currency, the US has to export dollars (for other countries to use in their transactions). To export dollars, we either have to buy stuff (i.e. import) or give them away (i.e. foreign aid). We choose to maintain a trade deficit. This results in our receiving goods in exchange for a product with a very high profit margin, money (even if we had to print paper currency, the profit on printing money is over 90%; in point of fact though, the relevant transactions are generally electronic; electronic creation of money is close to 100% profitable; the only danger is that eventually we might have to provide goods for the money).
Tariffs won't reduce the trade deficit (unless they lower world demand for dollars). Instead, tariffs reduce *exports*. Why? Because they reduce imports and take away foreign countries ability to buy our goods (since they don't provide the world's reserve currency, foreign countries need dollars to buy our goods; unless we send them some, they can't buy). Since exports are five to ten times the size of the trade deficit, we would stand to lose more than we could possibly gain.
Don't believe me? Perhaps you should take a little look at history. What bill's passage in 1929 led to Black Monday's crash in October? Yes, that's it, the Smoot Hawley tariff act. The domino effect (as other countries responded with their own tariffs) cracked open the world economic system. This was followed by a power struggle between the Fed's Board of Governors (Greenspan is the current Chairman) and the Fed. Reserve Bank of NY, which led to the US money supply being cut in half.
There is only one way to get out of a recession and that is to increase demand. To increase demand, you need to increase the money supply. To increase the money supply, you need the Fed to release more money. To get the Fed to release more money, you need to convince them that inflation is under control. Since tariffs exist to allow domestic products to be priced higher, they cause inflation. Thus, tariffs will make it harder to get the Fed to increase the money supply and lengthen the recession.
There is only one sure-fire way to make a lot of money online. Only one. Start a porn site with an attractive hook, like for example, a webcam about an actual couple which sets up a voyeur-type experience. You'd have to build a solid membership system, of course, which is difficult for people to pirate/crack, and that would be hard. But it's doable. Also you can probably get kick-backs from all the adult-check registration systems (which you'd need, anyway, to protect yourself from liability). You could set up "special events" like a threesome with a barfly, "viagara experimentation", "Roman Orgy Night", etc. Plus, you could sell DVDs of clips, and syndicate your better content to other adult sites.
;)
I'd do this in a second if I could figure out a way to arrange for a female partner (either kinky girlfriend or ambitious non-romantic low-inhibition type). But, I'm a slashdotter -- no girlfriend, no prospects, and I haven't been laid in two years. Oh well... But maybe one of you guys will have better luck.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it thus far.
There are IT jobs that can never be outsourced. Why? Because they require security clearances and those can only be given to US citizens. While they may not pay you top commercial dollar, they will certainly pay you well. However you usually must already have a security clearance, but you can't get a clearance without sponsorship. Chicken and Egg.
However I believe if you are willing to move, you can find a secure job. Possibly even companies that will sponsor you for clearance. Most likely this will mean that you are working for the government or military, and will have to put up with background checks.
But it keeps you employed, no?