Slashdot Mirror
More Than 500,000 High Tech Jobs Lost in 2002
stoolpigeon writes: "A study, released today by the AeA, shows that the U.S. high-tech industry lost 540,000 jobs in 2002, dropping from 6.5 million to 6.0 million. However, a preliminary look at data for 2003 shows that the decline in high-tech employment has slowed considerably this year."
Another article on it at The Register.
The government has been announcing both an increase in total jobs and a decrease in unemployment filings for a few months now. Neither necessarily precludes a reduction in high-tech jobs. The spin-meisters claim the economy is improving, just not for us.
The problem with getting a honest accounting of the state of our economy is that there is no measure which is not inherently politicized. It is very easy to consider/ignore factors to bolster your numbers. That fact itself has become highly politicized, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times (watch as my liberal bias comes out) has reported recently.
It's difficult to say. Recent figures indicate that the real GDP, consumer income, and corporate profits all rose inq3 2003, but at the same time, the dollar is falling to new lows against other major currencies, which will eventually make it difficult to attract the foreign investing the US needs to balance the trade deficit.
Take a look at this very recent article. This article points out that American IT management is way over-priced compared to Indian management, and hence management will be the next thing to go off shore. As it says in the article, this is American IT self destructing.
My experience last year was exactly the same and I have a degree. The only two interviews I got were through personal references.
Well, you certainly won't get an accurate accounting here.
But I can tell you that the unemployment rate only considers people who are working, or actively looking for work as the total population. So if a former software engineer goes back to school, he/she is no longer considered 'unemployed'. Similarly, if you set yourself up as a consultant, you're also no longer unemployed, even if you're not making any money at it.
There's some other cats that are only now just peeking their head out of bags:
1. Real savings cost of outsourcing to India is less than 20% with VERY strick management, with a HUGE assumed risk
2. Reports of Indian companies selling "confidential" data are starting to appear
3. Possibility of conventional or nuclear war between India & her neighbor
4. huge incentive for people in India to lie about capabilities/qualifications/background checks to land work (interesting aside: owner of U.S. recruiting business who is immigrant to U.S. from India has told me there is NO WAY to perform background check on people whose only work experience is from India, so he won't hire them without verifiable U.S. work experience of some sort)
A lot of productivity "improvements" are hugely detrimental. For instance, a company says a few cents per call by having a voice automated telephone help system. It cuts the time taken on their end to deal with a call by 20% or so. However, it can increase time wasted for caller by several hundred percent, but this is thought not to matter since nobody measures it. Or your doctor insists you come in at 10.00 and then makes you sit around for 20 minutes, you are seen by a nurse for no reason, and then a doctor 20 minutes later. It saves money because the nurse is paid a fraction of what the doctor earns and it shaves a few minutes off his time by having you see a nurse first no matter what. The clinic is not measuring the time it wastes for you, and you are not in a position to charge them for that.
These false productivity improvements are not the main problem though. The real issue is that society cannot spend productivity improvements on extra leisure or higher living standards owing to an insane monetary system. Capitalist society as a whole is like a company that grows and grows but almost never pays dividends to the shareholders [mankind]. Unless people are earning, spending and most importantly, borrowing money, nothing can happen. There is something strange and surprising going on which would take ages to explain, I recommend "The grip of death" by Douglas Rowbotham if you are interested.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Their results (amazingly enough) were out today as well. Only, they don't feed stories to slashdot. :)
w age.11142001.news
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.toc.h tm
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/history/oc
It isn't so rosy this year, but it isn't all doom and gloom.Overall, employment in Computer and Mathematical went from:
2000 2001 2002
2,932,810 2,825,870 2,772,620
But average wage was something else:
2000 2001 2002
27.91 29.02 29.63
So, we lost 53,250 people, mostly in straight computer programmers, 501,550->457,320, although Software Engineers lost as well.Amazingly enough, Network and Computer Systems Administrators gained ~5k people, and Network Systems and Computer Data Communications Analysts gained ~7k! Analysts are up almost 20k, as are support specialists.
If you want to see who's really getting hit by this, check out the results for management:
2000 2001 2002
7,782,680 7,212,360 7,092,460
I think they've lost more than techies.
Jason Pollock