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."

Comments

Jobs Lost?

[tarquin_fim_bim]

That seems to give the impression that they were carelessly mislaid, or accidentally cast aside. Far from it, they were purposefully relocated to a more hospitable economic environment. Free market, free trade, free information, free software and free beer, what more could a philanthropist ask for?
OK, free love, but that always comes with a price.

Re:Jobs Lost?

[Brataccas]

Free food, free rent, and free utilities.

Re:Jobs Lost?

[pla]

Free market, free trade, free information, free software and free beer, what more could a philanthropist ask for?

Job security at a liveable wage?

Hey, I personally don't mind sacrificing a small bit of comfort to bring large portions of the world forward into the 19th century. But when a company ships jobs to places where environmental and labor laws allow them to simply replace good workers with people treated little better than slaves, I have a problem with that.

Re:Jobs Lost?

[dpilot]

Someday somebody will figure out that many American execs are super-paid and don't really know their own business. (They know MONEY, not the products their companies make.)

Then since the executives do the outsourcing, they won't outsource themselves, the places they've outsourced to will go into business for themselves, and drive the American companies under.

Re:Jobs Lost?

[D-Cypell]

It is easy to blame outsourcing, and I do admit that this plays a big part.

However, we must also remember that during the late 90's and the early 00's thousands upon thousands of tech jobs just sprung up out of thin air. Any fool with a business plan penciled out on a napkin could get millions in VC. As the remenants of these companies finally disappear in true darwinian fashion, the jobs that were created will obviously be lost.

I would be interested in seeing some stats on how many jobs were created in those few years compared to the losses recently. It sounds like it could be a case of just ending up back where we started from.

Re:Jobs Lost?

[unixbugs]

they can export the manufacturing of parts and source code, but they cant export the jobs installing and configuring it here yet.

nuts, bolts, and cables. gotta love 'em.

In before..

[Anonymous Coward]

In before everyone starts pointing at Bangalore.

Don't blame India for our political failures.

That's all.

It's slowing down.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Great. This is like saying that a semi truck is running people down (GTA-like), but it's doing it slower now than before.

Yet slashdot advertises for outsourcers

[Serveert]

Very ironic. Not much we can do, if they want to take advantage of lower living standards and lower taxes due to not having an FDA, EPA, USDA etc etc.. fine!

One, Uncomfortable, Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Aside from overseas outsourcing, how much of these job losses stems from the increasing use of open source software? How many hard working American programmers have been put out of work, their families going hungry, thanks to the "good will" of the open source community? Yes, this is a hard question, and I fully expect to moderated down for asking it, but it has to be asked.

Re:One, Uncomfortable, Question

[civilengineer]

good question. Think about it this way. We have IIS and we have Apache. Everyone knows which one is better and used more. So, many techies who know the better one found lots of jobs based on that skill. That is doing good to more humans as a whole. You cannot get an exact count of how many jobs were lost due to opensource or how many were gained. But, the net benefit to our civilization will definitely be positive due to open source movement.

Re:One, Uncomfortable, Question

[Cajun Hell]

The only thing "hard" about the question is that, yes, it's hard to quantify. We don't even know whether the number is positive or negative.

Too bad some programmers were obsoleted by (social) technology. Too bad they were duplicating effort, trying to carve small markets up into such tiny pieces that none were profitable. Too bad many were doing such mundane work that commodity components were able to compete with them. Too bad none of them were good enough at their craft, that no one wanted to hire for their labor; they were only good enough to produce products that could be sold with lock-in, which nobody wanted.

Face it, capitalism can be a bitch when you have to be one of the competitors.

Re:One, Uncomfortable, Question

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Since the industry is in turmoil, with so many variables changing at a the same time, it is difficult to put a measure on this.

I think likely the biggest % job lost is because the measure was relative to the the dot.com boom (or at least the final days) where almost anybody who could spell computer could get a job. Likely the majority of the job losses can be attributed to that. Next comes the general economic downturn, and next probably outsourcing and open source.

Just like any industry, as things mature they move more to a commoditised economic model. (eg. in the beginning only the industrialised countries could produce low-cost soya beans or corn or whatever, now they're just commodity items you can source from anywhere). The same is happeing with software. Only the very arrogant would suggest that most software cannot be created/maintained etc in India, China, wherever.

I don't profess to know a way out of this at an industry level, but I think you can at an individual level. The computer/electronics industry is about change. Keep learning. When I left University with a Computer Science degree, I had COBOL and FORTRAN and PASCAL under the belt. I taught myself everything else I know and have specialised in firmware development/OS software. Everyone needs to find their own path and walk it. To stagnate is to fall victim to commoditisation.

Re:I think I speak for most everyone when I say...

[corebreech]

Nafta, GATT... H1B visas.

The nation being promised on the one hand that free trade would bring better jobs to the U.S. while the other hand was busy making sure those better jobs ended up anywhere but here.

Read the news sometime. There's more to it than Dilbert and the lingerie ads.

In Other News: India Gains 500k Tech Jobs

[The Turd Report]

Good bye $$$.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, maybe because the economy has been in a recession? Also, the computer tech sector is one of the most volatile, and also one that requires less formal training than some of the other hi-tech industries. It's the price you pay for going into a field that's accessible to many people. If you don't want to lose your job to overseas workers, go into chem or particle physics or something.

Re:My Experience

[pudding7]

You've had an open position for a developer for 6 months? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but either you don't really want a developer, you don't really need a developer, or your hiring standards a bit out of whack.

Where's the end of this cycle?

[saihung]

First we were farmers.

Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.

Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.

But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.

Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?

Re:Where's the end of this cycle?

[Theatetus]

Learn how to pasteurize your own milk

Don't bother. Raw milk is safer.

Re:What happened to the economic recovery?

[Dynamic Ranger]

It's still a recovery. When companies can hire & fire at will they can grow & contract with the market. That improves their botto line, and therefore their stock values, which equals economic recovery. :) In ten years, we'll all be working for a few months then not working for a few months, so learn to save your earnings for the downtime.

A better set of questions

[PureFiction]

1. How many jobs gained during the "bubble" of the late 90's (that was unsustainable) are factored into that count?

2. How many H1B visas that are unrenewed are part of that count? (Exploitative consulting agencies? They loved to pump up the numbers)

3. How many psuedo-engineers have rightly left the CS/IT job market because they dont have the skills?

I worked with a guy briefly in 2000 that got paid $75/hour, 60 hours a week, for a whole month (before jumping ship to greener pastures in Silicon Valley) to write some horribly broken and incomplete perl CGI code.

Yes, nasty perl CGI that didnt work. It was obvious his skills were at tech college freshman / skilled high schooler level, and yet he was able to pull in an insane wage due to irrational exhuberance.

You hear these stories, and it doesnt really sink in until you see it first hand. Things were severely out of balance.

We are almost out of the hangover. If you are truly skilled, you can find a job with some elbow grease and effort 98% of the time. You may need to relocate, you may need to settle for something less than ideal, but they are out there.

The tech services (specifically programming / engineering) are picking up and we are on course for a return to semi-normality. But against the backdrop of insane compensation and free flowing VC cash, even normalcy appears spartan.

The best thing you can do for a career in IT is to truly love it and find it fascinating. This will keep your skills sharp as you experiment and play with cutting edge technologies on your own, and maybe on your job, and also provide the motivation needed to obtain a deeper understanding of the many details associated with programming, system administration, engineering, etc.

If you are in this field for the money, you wont have the drive to stay afloat.

Re:A better set of questions

[Dazhel]

The best thing you can do for a career in IT is to truly love it and find it fascinating. This will keep your skills sharp as you experiment and play with cutting edge technologies on your own, and maybe on your job, and also provide the motivation needed to obtain a deeper understanding of the many details associated with programming, system administration, engineering, etc.

Amen to that! My work is currently interviewing for a programmer position with the prerequisites of a bit of analysis and design experience, knowledge of the Windows operating system and C++ coding skills. Pretty average commodity skills one would think.

Our interview process basically involves a series of questions about how past experience may relate to the job description, and a very basic C/C++ coding test on a few sheets of paper. We realise that in an interview situation it's not always possible to get 100% on the coding test so that's not what we're looking for. However the amount of candidates that *completely* fail the coding test (i.e. every question wrong) yet purport to have 10 years of experience with C and C++ programming is amazing. These aren't hard questions. In terms of C what does dereferencing mean? In terms of C++ what does public, protected, private mean? What is the value of a variable at the end of a tracing a textbook for loop?

Those who truly have a passion for their software development work should be able to fly through this little practical quiz and move on to impressing the interviewer in other aspects of their career development. If those that apply can't pass our simple test then perhaps they don't belong in any sort of C or C++ software development role at all.

FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

FACT 2: There is a limited demand for your job.
FACT 3: For practical purposes, there is an unlimited supply of people who can learn your job.

Now justify your standard of living.

Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.

Unless you're doing something that only you can do, expect your wage to fall to a level that is attractive only to the poorest people in the world.

Moral: learn to do something remarkable, or accept that you don't deserve more than three meals a day and a warm place to sleep.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[John Courtland]

If you can't provide a livable wage for jobs that need to be done, your economy won't last too long. Certain work HAS to be done, there's no sense in only paying what amounts to barely enough to eat and pay rent for it. It's annoying work too, so in essence it's just as hard. Why do you think we have welfare? (Note that I assume you live in the US, but it's the same in the UK and the Dole Queue) Not because certain people don't work, but because there's no way for a lot of people to make enough to live on. You can beat the education and brainpower drums all you want, it doesn't change the fact that the economic standards of an area GREATLY affect the crime rate, and therefore, YOU. You should WANT everyone to be better off, even just for the sake of you not getting mugged when you go to the Opera or whatever you do.

Not everyone can be "remarkable" you know. Some people just don't have the skill or ability. But there are some that do, who just can't get a break, who you dismiss. C'est la vie, but things have to change, or else once the poor get sick of being poor, they will revolt, and I would not want to be at the top then.

Note that I am just trying to get a point across and am in no way attacking you. I do accept your points as the way things are now, but I'm just pointing out they need to be changed.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

"FACT 1: Your job is not hard."

Depends on how you define hard. I can drive a truck, and I'm sure most of the people I work with can too, but I doubt there are many truck drivers who are capable of doing my work effectively even with training.

"FACT 3: For practical purposes, there is an unlimited supply of people who can learn your job."

Are you sure of your facts here? Supposing that it's true, there is a cost associated with education, but that's not even the biggest issue. The big issue is one of experience. You can outsource the work, but you better be prepared for your new workforce to make a lot of mistakes and to have to re-learn many lessons that the old workforce already understood. In my personal experience this is a very large cost, and one that is completely ignored when making these decisions.

Fact 4: Once the new workforce becomes educated and gains experience, they will expect higher compensation. Rinse and repeat.

"Now justify your standard of living."

Standard of living has less to do with career, than it does with nationality. I understand the point you are trying to make, but other than #2, I don't agree with your facts.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[bwt]

Speak for yourself.

If all you do is programming, then I suppose that your job is not hard. But if your job includes analysing your company's business and using information technology to solve business problems that affect the bottom line, then your job is very hard, very valuable, not exportable, and very secure.

There are many good programmers that don't understand business and want to be handed clean coding tasks. These are the people that are whining incessantly because their requirements documents aren't right. They want somebody else to do the hard part. The simple fact is that if you A) understand the business and B) can read the code that drives it, then you are better positioned than most people in the company to actually create revenue enhancing process changes.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[fermion]

The fact is that the work I have done is not so hard, and many people could do it, and the work has not in any absolute sense been worth the money I was paid. That, of course, is only because money really has not worth until it is normalized to the fiction of the people who use it.

That said, the standard of living is justified based on the culture of consumerism. Someone needs to buy those $100 pair of sneakers, or that $200 gaming system, or that $400 mp3 player. And to do that you need cash. You need enough cash so the opportunity costs of such purchases are not so great that you will decide these things are not a good value. If you have a job that brings home $1000 a month, and you need $400 for rent and $200 for food and then clothes and transportation to work and medical care, these other things are not going to seem so important. I mean you might start downloading music over your $300 used computer and your $15 dial-up connection, which are justified by your kids educational needs, instead of paying even $1 for the track.

Of course all these are way overpriced. We pay middle men, ad men, men in suits, and men in trucks to get the product to us. Certainly if we lowered our standards, bought locally, and only what we needed, then prices would fall. We could make $1000 a month and afford all we need and a few extras. Of course without ads, we would not know we may not know we need a new pair of sneakers. If we do not know we will not buy. If there are no ads, there is not TV, radio, internet. If we do not buy, there are no jobs elsewhere, unless wages in those areas go up high enough to support the infrastructure.

of course, we could buy everything used. But someone would have to buy new. So how many people would that take. 10%? 20%? Would 20% of the population have remarkable skills that would justify a high wage. Could they buy enough to support the world economy and give us their hand me downs.

It is a house of cards. No one deserves the standard of living. No one deserves to be told if they do not movies and music at full price they are killing the children of hard working artists. No one deserves to be told that if they do not spend their little expendable income on a dinner at McDonneld's or a new pair of sneakers that are they are depriving their child. Unfortunately, that is what people in the U.S. are told. Unfortunately we are told that we must spend, while the jobs that allow us to spend are shipped off to other countries.

I am not saying this is right or wrong, good or bad, necessary or not. I am just saying that I do not believe it was India or China that made MS or Nike or McDonalds rich. I believe it was citizens of the US that did that. And now that they are done with us, they will continue consuming resources elsewhere. Someone needs to buy the products at the inflated prices. Someone needs to have the wages to afford it. If it is not the US, then it is someone else. And that someone else will have deserve it no more of less than those who had it previously.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[pla]

Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.

I can see you have a poor grasp of sarcasm, so I'll spell it out for you...

We currently live in the 21st century. Not the 19th.

The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the lives of those they go to. We destroy the land the local populace used to at least manage to survive on, make them wage slaves for a pittance far below liveable, and when Nike, or Union Carbide, or Walmart, or whatever company, finally gets bored and moves elsewhere, they leave slums and wastelands.


Now justify your standard of living.

Okay, I will do exactly that.

What does Nike make? Shoes. Expensive shoes. Can a typical sweatshop laboror, whose life you seem to think Nike enhances greatly, buy those shoes? No. I can. You probably can. Most Slashdot readers probably can. We "justify" our standard of living simply by having it (or did some religion's imaginary friend wave the "US propserity and world hegemony" wand to give us our standard of living?).

Had you not decided to karma-whore (as an AC? not very useful...) with the "I feel so sick of whining programmers" card, you might have noticed my point - That we don't "help" third-world countries by forcing the local populace into corporate slavery. We lower our own standard of living without raising theirs.

I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living. Paying someone less than their food costs them (regardless of physical location) does not accomplish that.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Anonymous Coward]

With the exception of Union Carbide... ask that sweatshop laborer why s/he is at that job. Ask them if they'd rather NOT have it.

You really think they're better off without ANY work?

Get off your high horse.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Prof.Phreak]

FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

Hmm... You'd be surprised how many people find it next to impossible. I teach this stuff in college, and I must tell you, that there are those who find 'this stuff' easy (about 1% of the population), about 4% who find it challenging but interesting, and about 95% who will never understand binary numbers.

Now, in a corporate environment, is it also true. Only 1 out of possibly 10 or so developers actually knows what they're doing! (most got into the company because their uncle has a friend in HR).

Notice that most "Jobs Lost" exlamations don't really say "productivity is down"... in fact, I bet that in most companies, you can fire half the developers (worst half), and nobody would even notice that they're gone.

So why shouldn't someone have a high paying job when they can do something a vast percentage of the population cannot? (they may pretend to be able to do it, etc.,)

While it is very sad when a good developer cannot find work (I've been in that boat myself), I find it amusing when someone who only knows HTML/JavaScript (or read one of them Dummies books) is complaining about not being able to find a job (or that their salary is too low).

Hopefully, the "jobs lost" doesn't apply to most true computer geeks - but to those "3 week VB class" (or Lean C++ in 24 Hours) people.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Otter]

I think you have an *extremely* romanticized notion of the joys of plowing a rice paddy with a water buffalo (if you're lucky) and harvesting it by hand. Nobody is "forced into corporate slavery". That's nonsense. People take those jobs because they're an improvement over their existing options.

In fact, when Nike sells a pair of shoes for $130, I agree that there is something highly disturbing about the fact that LeBron James pockets a larger share than does the person who made them. But thinking about that issue isn't served by making up fairy tales about happy farmers forced into factories by Mr. Burns and the Monopoly guy.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Tablizer]

If all you do is programming, then I suppose that your job is not hard. But if your job includes analysing your company's business and using information technology to solve business problems that affect the bottom line, then your job is very hard, very valuable, not exportable, and very secure.

But, for some odd reason, companies don't seem to give a flying flip about domain experience. They will happily toss out 30-years-on-the-job Cobolers who know the company like the back of their hand for some snot-nosed kid who happens to know FadX. They don't want to pay for training and "seniority" and know they can work the snotnose for 55-hours-per-week because he/she hasn't burnt out yet and doesn't have a family yet.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[bwt]

And business understanding is only valuable if it leads to results. It's unlikely that Cobol is the source of the next breakthrough. If you are lazy and expensive, expect "but I understand how our business works" to be met with "what have you done for me lately?".

Companies don't care about domain experience, they care about business results. Be the kind of IT worker that generates these results and you have nothing to fear.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[Zeinfeld]

In fact, when Nike sells a pair of shoes for $130, I agree that there is something highly disturbing about the fact that LeBron James pockets a larger share than does the person who made them.

What I find disturbing is the fact that people would consider a cheaply made shoe that cost less than $1 to make worth paying $130 for.

For $350 I could buy a pair of English hand made brogues which would be considerably more comfortable. Since the point of paying $130 for a pair of shoes is to advertise the fact that you can afford to pay $130 for a pair of shoes a pair of Church's would work far better.

If you want a pair of sneakers then buy a pair of Kirkland trainers at Costco for $12.

Quite why anyone would believe I would think more highly of them because they are a victimg to a marketting scheme that sells $12 pairs of shoes for more than ten times that amount is beyond me.

Contrawise I really don't know why Nike can't get a clue and start paying their workers a fair wage. The cost of doing so would hardly register. Some day they are going to discover that they have lost the next Jordan or Tiger Woods to a competitor because their management does not want to be tainted by association with Nike. Arnold Palmer did very well by turning down a lot of second rate endorsements early in his career even though they would have paid a lot more than the endorsements he did accept. Later on endorsers sought him out because of his previous association with Rolex etc.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[bigmammoth]

I think your missing a lot of information here, for example US agro buizness unloading Goverment subsidized crops onto developing nations at a cost lower then it is fesable to produce them. The joys of plowing rice paddy is not a option for people when the market is satrurated with a product payed for by US taxes and sold for less then cost of production.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[pla]

As an Indian in the IT industry I resent your charecterisation of us as starving slave labour

Though Indians may count as the most obvious example of US companies outsourcing from the point of view of a Slashdotter, I do realize that Indians do fairly well, not in any way "third world".

I also did not refer even to tech, specifically, limiting my text basically to the sort of sweatshop labor US companies use in Central America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe for that one), and a few former-Soviet countries. Yes, I mentioned Union Carbide with Bhopal in mind, but would you honestly say that all of India does as well as the engineers in the cities?


Well guess what? A thousand dollars a month is a very comfortable salary in India.

Unfortunately, your government (unlike my own, which grants H1b's at the drop of a hat) won't let me follow my job to your country, where I too might live well on a thousand or so per month. In the US, a thousand barely pays rent on a crappy apartment (and in the major cities, it doesn't even come close to rent).

So yes, I sincerely feel "good" that a quarter of my previous salary makes you able to live comfortably. I'd gladly take the remainder, though, making both of us able to live comfortably. That I consider a fair compromise, rather than you working for what a US employer laughs at you for accepting, while an American worker (myself included) remains unemployed.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[thesilverbail]

also did not refer even to tech, specifically, limiting my text basically to the sort of sweatshop labor US companies use in Central America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe for that one), and a few former-Soviet countries. Yes, I mentioned Union Carbide with Bhopal in mind, but would you honestly say that all of India does as well as the engineers in the cities?

good point. I was refering only to tech in reference to this article. and bhopal brings up another point - stories i heard about how multinationals would dispose of their toxic chemicals in the african countryside taking advantage of lax government regulations. That sort of thing is evil whichever 'side' you're on.

Unfortunately, your government (unlike my own, which grants H1b's at the drop of a hat) won't let me follow my job to your country, where I too might live well on a thousand or so per month. In the US, a thousand barely pays rent on a crappy apartment (and in the major cities, it doesn't even come close to rent).

granted that is unfair. unfortunately, following your job here wouldnt help you much either. yes you might live well here, but at some point you'd want to go back to the US, and your savings wont be much then. You do plan to save dont you? :-)

So yes, I sincerely feel "good" that a quarter of my previous salary makes you able to live comfortably. I'd gladly take the remainder, though, making both of us able to live comfortably. That I consider a fair compromise, rather than you working for what a US employer laughs at you for accepting, while an American worker (myself included) remains unemployed.

A fair deal, but how are we to get it working that way? Ultimately it's the greed of the companies and the managers involved that decide these things. Maybe the govt. could step in and make some sort of legislation, that if a company moves more than a certain percentage of its jobs offshore, it looses the privelege of being a registered US company. That might help and be a fair deal for offshore workers as well.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[pmz]

If you have no education and no skills, you won't get far...

There are jobs that do on-the-job training. There are some jobs that will pay for school in exchange for work (nursing, for example). There's the military, which has very good training options. There are community colleges, which are very affordable. There are libraries.

If it weren't for unconstitutional laws, there'd be prostitution. Legalize drugs, and the #1 occupation in bad neighborhoods would be brought out into the open and made perfectly acceptible. For the truly clueless, there's prison.

If we got rid of the minimum wage, ditch digging and sidewalk sweeping would become options, too.

it should be the governments' job to provide these to the people.

The government is failing. Public schools are mediocre and are glorified day care. State universities are seeing double-digit tuition growth. Lotteries are used as excuses to divert education funds to other projects. The government also endorses zero-tolerance policies that punish people for things that aren't even immoral.

The government isn't good at helping people; rather, it is really good at taking people's freedoms away under the guise of help. The war on drugs created the organized black market for drugs, props up dictatorships around the world, and puts thousands of innocent people into prison every year. The Earned Income Credit is a magic fountain for those who don't want to work. The minimum wage makes unskilled jobs unaffordable to those who would want to offer them. Rent subsidies allow landlords to maintain their artificially high rates and allow employers to get by paying too little. These are just the top of the iceberg.

Re:My Experience

[Junta]

So you give an on the spot practical exam, give a hard deadline of 15 minutes for a series of problems, to someone who has enough pressure expecting a typical interview? And whose authority says the problems are together a 15 minute problem? Maybe they would be able to tackle them in under 15 minutes after getting into their groove. Giving a simple pass/fail evaluation of a 15 minute session of problems that are likely ill balanced, i.e. focused in one area. You could end up with a developer who can whip right through those, but turn out not to be well rounded.

What I have seen to be a better selector is strategies where the interviewer puts forth a problem that is technical and high-level in nature, and disallows use of a computer, and ask that the applicant think aloud about the strategy and algorithms they would try to accomplish the task. The interviewer then gets more information. For one, the circumstances are less stressful, so it is a better indication of typical performance.
Also, whether or not they end up at the right solution is less important than if you can see they have a good thought process and good ability to recover from changing circumstances (in the middle of the problem, introduce new requirements).

I do agree that the dot-com crap created a lot of untalented, uninterested people seeking computer jobs simply for 'easy money' rather than a sincere passion, but knowing how very many talented developers I have seen unemployed over the last half a year, I would say either you aren't posting it in any visible spot or that your 15-minute test is a flawed approach.

Sanity check

[danharan]

The sector with the largest decrease in jobs was electronics manufacturing, accounting for more than half of all tech jobs lost between 2001 and 2002. For the first time in the seven years of publishing Cyberstates, the software sector recorded a loss of nearly 150,000 jobs last year. Indeed, the once-thriving software sector posted large increases in employment in all previous editions of Cyberstates.

What? We only started losing software jobs last year? We gained even through the dot-bomb? Now *that* is news to me.

If ./ weren't so US-centric, title might be...

[Glasswire]

"World Gains 500,000 jobs from US"

[IRONY]If you choose to live in a country where nine grand a year doesn't go very far, that's your problem, right? It's not that US techs are paid too much, it's that the cost-of-living in US (and Europe too, for that mattter) is innordinately high by world standards. Until this problem is rectified, US workers can use stopgaps like living with your parents and eating at the homeless shelter and shopping at the foodbank occasionally.[/IRONY]

Detritus from the .com bust

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless, individual stories of people who got fired/layed off/whatever are barking up the wrong tree in this thread. This has to do with macroeconomic supply, demand, and productivity. And I'm going to argue that things are _better_ with these types of market corrections.

First off, I'm just not buying the 'overseas' argument. I think the people hit hardest are web designers and other low-tech technical people (and some niche high-tech people) - en masse, the jobs just didn't need doing, rather than things that needed doing but are easily farm-out-able. The latter set of jobs seems to me to be rather minimal anyway.

Understand that jobs lost numbers are not 'people who lost their jobs', but 'these jobs no longer exist' - it's not necessarily the case that we 'lost' them to someone else.

Question: of the jobs lost, how many of those didn't need to be done? Answer: all of them (when taken in aggregate). Either the companies died, the work the people did wasn't valuable, or the individuals themselves were not very good and others took up the slack anyway.

Taken not in the individual case, but in general - good people get hired to do something else, and the bottom strata have to find jobs in another industry - arguably, they shouldn't have been here in the first place, but they rode the wave. Sure, there will always be individual cases where this isn't true - usually due to people who are not, for one reason or another, willing to go where the jobs are. (Only these last people are ones for whom a 'move to india' (or wherever new jobs are going) actually makes sense).

What this means is that the salaries for these jobs have either gone into: something not technical but useful, lower prices, stockholder equity, or higher CEO compensation (or any of the other drains on productivity, like lawyers, or increased state taxes, or whatever).

In 3 of the 4 cases, that's a GOOD thing. Note that CEO compensation, and perques in general, haven't been increased due to the bust, and despite SCO, I haven't heard of Lawyers and such hangers-on's incomes being spectacular.

What this means is that if productivity stays high, the total amount of work done has become cheaper. If productivity goes lower, that means that the lost work being done before wasn't valuable - if it was, then it would still be being done (market forces driving production). Finally, in either case, those who _did_ migrate from one job to another are hopefully doing something 'better' (usually are - most of the 'best work' of a job is done in the first year or two, IMO, and someone made a recent decision that this job was worth doing enough to hire someone).

So, all in all, a decline in jobs isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's very possibly a good thing. It's a "correction" of an inherent weakness, and might make us stronger and more productive because of it.

Yeah

[dtfinch]

But mostly just the unnecessary jobs were cut, and unprofitable businesses shut down.

Net or gross

[magarity]

The article does not mention if this is a net loss or a gross loss. This small detail will widely vary the topic's importance.

Re:I think I speak for most everyone when I say...

[corebreech]

Job losses in the tech industry and an overthrow of the government do not go hand in hand.

Sure they do. These jobs in the tech industry were the ones hailed by Clinton as those that would be aplenty with the passage of GATT and NAFTA. These were to be the good paying jobs that would emerge once we got rid of all those nasty low-paying jobs, or so they said.

Not only does that turn out to be wrong, but it now appears they knew it was shit all along. The same corrupt politicians who brought us NAFTA and GATT also brought us the H1B visa and otherwise paved the way for the exodus of the same new jobs they claimed would be created by NAFTA/GATT.

But, hey... if you really think you can "hack into Access" and prevent Bush from being re-elected in 2004, then I'm your new best friend.

You haven't been paying attention. Chief amongst the exploits being performed against Diebold's "voting systems" are compromising the database used to tally the results, which, incredibly, is MS Access.

Keep up the conspiracy theories, friend. I'm sure you'll prove them someday.

They're already proven! Diebold has already been shown to be corrupt! The exodus of good-paying jobs from America under a policy advertised as securing these jobs instead is a fact! Exactly what conspiracy theory are you referring to here? The one that accuses the government of doing something they've already been proven to do?

Hilarious!

Darwin was right, and we are surprised?

[Bug-Y2K]

For almost two decades, the IT industry, in the form of corporate IT departments have been telling their masters:
"Invest in technology, and it will pay off in increased productivity and profits."

For the past 10+ years, the IT industry, in the form of software and hardware vendors, have seen their profits soar as a result of this investment, and developed the perfect mechanism for milking it for consistent, quarterly results: The Upgrade.

The Upgrade has killed the golden goose. The consistent, repetitive costly upgrade... while padding the bottom line of IT Vendors, has eroded the bottom line of the Corporate World.

Increased expediture, planned and worse, ENFORCED obsolescence, ever-increasing headcounts, etc etc etc.

The CEO's and CFO's have had enough, and they aren't taking it anymore. From their perspective IT is a money pit. An endless drain on financial and human resources.

Ane we are wondering why the tech sector is stagnant at best right now? Technology is immature, yet we kept on praising it as the solution to all problems! Arrogance of our superiority and ignorance of true business needs were the dominant perceptions of your average IT department over the past decade or so. Now is the time for their revenge.

The holders of the purse strings want to see some of that return on investment before they'll spend like that again.

Our profession needs to learn humility, and nothing does that better than a financial ass-kicking.

How many of these were marketing/managment drones?

[heldlikesound]

It always amazes me how middle managers and marketing suits are lumped in and considered "tech" jobs, how much code are they writing, or what new research are they doing. These jobs may have been at tech companies but I would wager most of these jobs were positions that shouldn't have been to begin with.

and also

[MoneyT]

Even the money spent on putting bullets or bombs into bodies isn't always spent on just making a weapon. Beleive it or not, the military doesn't want to kill civilians. Nor does the government for that matter. A lot of money is dumped into research to make safer weapons that not only don't kill our guys, but don't kill the wrong people either.

Re:Those aren't programming problems

[twiddlingbits]

I look for more generalized problem solving skills, and creative solutions. Thus the second problem is fair game and the solution to use the Unix sort command or awk or sed instead of C++ would give them an A in my book. The first problems should be caught be a good compiler with the warnings set to a high level. The unsafe cast would be flagged, the destructor and wrong kind of delete may or may not have been. I would guess the parent poster was looking for a C++ guru not just a programmer as those type of errors are not trvial to find!

Re:My Experience

[bussdriver]

Well, #2 is actually a good one. Would filter out half my students with JUST THAT problem!! (programming is prereq) You think you have it hard...

#1 is for a fluent C++ guy. I've not touched it for 5 years, such details have faded from my memory. Hope you warn them about the test before hand, so they can prep.Bet they try for other languages they know too. It seems a bit unfar to me. A great C++ programmer might take a while to get back into gear.

I would ask some habit type questions. Good coding practices, and real understanding of OOP would be more important. I don't care if the guy was GOD at hacking out C++ code, if he did not comment, did overly complex unelegant coding, or could not learn to adapt to something new, I would not want him. So what if he/she knows STL or MFC by heart, if he can't use/pickup other stuff he is worthless---too many coders reinvent the wheel to "save time".

Show me the problem

[uptownguy]

companies don't seem to give a flying flip about domain experience...They don't want to pay for training and "seniority"

I think it would be more accurate to say that companies don't want to pay what you think they should pay for training and seniority. They (that is, the market) value(s) it, certainly, but they aren't willing to paid the absurd premium prices they were paying for it in the late 90s. Tough luck. The market adjusted to reflect the actual supply and demand. And that actual supply includes offshore workers. Get over it. If you actually have tech skills, they are still willing to pay for those skills, just not at the price you expect. But you can't change reality by whining about it. And setting up artifical contols on prices or wages won't change that reality.

If you really want to work in IT, price yourself accordingly and realize you will be competing with offshore workers. So, maybe you'll have to take a job for half the salary you expect, but I bet any programmer could find some job for $28,000/year. That's still a liveable wage. Show me the problem...

A well crafted troll doesn't put people down, it elicits responses...

Re:Show me the problem

[cayenne8]

Dude, don't know where you live...but, that would not even pay my basic bills...much less anything left over. $28K is about $2333 monthly...not even considering taxes taken out. But, with that figure lets go

-$1025 (rent/water)

-$250 avg (electricity)

-$384 car payment

-$178 motorcycle payment (ok..a luxury there)

-$260 insurance (car, bike, renters ins)

-$400 food (and I rarely eat out)

-$32 phone

-$49 basic cable

-$88 gas

That gives me a negative $83 I'm in the hole each month....and thats not even considering that in reality, I'd have had near 30% of the $2333 taken out in taxes before I got it.

Maybe its cheaper where you live....but, this is not by any means living the high life in New Orleans (high A/C bills in 8 mos of hot weather). And this is for a single male...Lord help anyone who has a wife and family. And you sure aren't getting any good dates on -$83/mo.

:-)

Re:Show me the problem

[Kombat]

I live in the suburbs (because I can afford a house there)

Thanks for making my case for me there. Sort of the whole point, isn't it? I buy $50 meals in restaurants each night... because I can afford it. (Not really) That doesn't exactly prove that eating out costs $50/night.

Uh, you just made his point for him. You say people should forego a car and take public transit. But that implies that they live in an area that is built-up enough to warrant public transit, which means their housing costs are tremendously expensive (much moreso than if they'd bought a car).

BackWater, TN doesn't have bus service, but the houses are cheap. Seattle has a great transit system, but do you think you can find housing for $100,000? Not likely!

It's an "either/or" situation, my friend.

you are a commodity

[gubachwa]

The root of the problem is capitalism. IT personnel are nothing more than commodities. They can be pigeonholed with long lists of "skill sets" that are akin to the feature sets of VCRs and Microwaves. Until we learn to treat human beings as human beings instead of products, the present state of misery will continue.

hmmmm....

[mantera]

What's most troubling about this offshore outsourcing trend is that it seems to be becoming an anchor strategy for the creatively-challenged professional manager, in much the same way downsizing was many years ago.

It used to be that when you're screwing up, unable to come up with a relevant and viable product or service that people want, and your business performance is less than impressive, your safe and thoughtless way out of the mess was to downsize, kick out a few employees and glee with a grin about the cost-cutting you have achieved, the boost in efficiency that you'll proudly present as elegant numbers on sheets that'll increase your profits and shareholder value.

Now it seems that offshoring is heading that way; "have problem, will offshore!".