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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."
Two of those half a million jobs were mine. Sucks to lose one job, get a new one, then lose that a few months later. No, it wasn't anything I had done wrong. One place cut back 40% of the workforce and the other company sold the division I was in. The buyer only wanted the intellectual property, not the team. Bastards.
-- Will program for bandwidth
The government says the economy is improving and more jobs are appearing! Who's telling the truth here?
I was an electronics tech for the Navy. Did maintenance on comm gear and other electronic equipment. Went through a variety of schools. I feel the education is very good and the hands on experience is great. I worked with a variety of test equipment, receivers, transmitters, communication gear, etc.
.mil, of course these are the ones you never hear about until they're released to civilian use.
:-)
When I was in, the most technologically advanced jobs were CTM (Crypto Tech Maintenance), ET (Electronics Tech), DS (Data Systems), among others (more specialized).
One individual I met while in was a Senior Chief ET at Treasure Island. As far as I know, he was one of the people to first develop laser listening devices for civilian purchase, or at least one of the first that I've heard of. I didn't see a working model, but he explained what it was and how it worked to me.
At yet another installation, I met a group of Navy Petty Officers and Air Force Sgt's that were developing a means to render video to CD, at the time, it wasn't common place (I hadn't even heard of the technology at the time) to find video on CD's.
There's many "cutting edge" tech gadgets being used in the
It's like the old story about the guy that invented the first "radar gun" for highway patrolmen, he also invented the first "radar detector" for civilians.
This was earlier in the Crash, so after she'd been laid off with notice from her previous company, she'd accepted the best-looking of the jobs she could find. A week later she got laid off in the morning, and was working at the second-best-looking job in the afternoon.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I could have *sworn* that the political PR machine has been pumping out stories that the economy is improving and has been since November 2001 (!)... gotta love revisionist economics! 8P
/. readers could). What I'd like instead is an honest accounting of where our economy is, is going, and what the heck is being done to make sure we keep it moving in the right direction. Then when that data is available, I'd want to get good answers about why we are or aren't on target. I'm just fed up with all the crap^H^H^H^Hspin being put out on news feeds about a recovery that (obviously) isn't happening yet... or, at least, not to the degree that's being reported.
;)
Of course, this news goes with my experience; I know plenty of talented developers/tech-people who've been unemployed or lost a job to outsourcing with nary a replacement in sight.
I could rant about the loss of jobs (as I'm sure many
Nope... instead I'll get to read in news papers 3 years from now how there never was a recession between 2000-2003 (or 4). >8(
Doh... that wound up being a rant, didn't it?
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
I wonder if anyone has taken the time to put this statistic together with the number of jobs that were created during the "dot com boom"... I'd be willing to bet that we're still far ahead of where we were in the early nineties. A lot of those jobs were in the technology and communication manufacturing sector, and manufacturing as a whole has taken a pretty big hit in the recession. The fact that R&D and testing jobs increased leads me to believe that efficiency is also partly to blame...
I've been in the market for a good developer for over half a year now. As part of the standard interviewing process, I give the applicant my laptop, with a series of programming problems that should take no more than 15 minutes to solve.
Without exception, everybody fails or takes WAY too long to solve. This, in my mind, is a sign of incompetence, the reason of which I still have not filled the position.
The vast majority of the applicants got their BS in CS or CSE because they thought it would be a good way to make money; very few of the applicants have been truly passionate about technology, and those that were, were incompetent.
For all of you who bitch and complain about how hard it is to find a job, perhaps you ought to sharpen your skillset and seek out the employers who will appreciate it. And for those who got into computing because you heard that there was good money in it, but you'd rather be out windsurfing, get out of computing, get a job windsurfing, and leave room in the market for those who actually have skills, so resume reviewers don't have to waste time with you.
This could have been an Indian, Chinese, whoever.. this is the future where we cannot hold anyone in the third world accountable yet we expect them to handle sensitve information and intellecutal property.
/ ch ronicle/archive/2003/11/12/BUGI52VMQR1.DTL&type=bu siness
I'll get modded down but here's the article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
Breaking her silence for the first time, the Pakistani woman who threatened to release UCSF patient files on the Internet says she had "no choice" but to breach the hospital's security after being cut off by the Texas man who'd made her the final link in a long chain of clerical subcontractors.
Lubna Baloch said by e-mail from Karachi that she is "not an opportunistic person who willfully did that to gain some attention."
She said she is instead the "worst sufferer of this situation" because she was only trying to secure UCSF Medical Center's help last month in obtaining money that she was owed.
"I feel violated, helpless," she wrote, adding that she is "the most unluckiest person in this world."
Doctors at U.S. hospitals routinely dictate notes about patient visits, consultations, operations and discharges. Those notes in turn are frequently handed to outside firms that specialize in transcribing them into written form.
The case involving UCSF's patient files represents the nightmare-scenario- come-to-life for the medical industry. For about 20 years, UCSF has farmed out much of its transcription work to a Sausalito company called Transcription Stat.
Transcription Stat outsourced many of the hundreds of files received daily to a network of 15 subcontractors. One of these was a Florida woman named Sonya Newburn, who then outsourced the files yet again to a Texas man named Tom Spires.
Spires outsourced the work one more time to Baloch in Karachi, who agreed to do the transcribing for a small fraction of the amount UCSF originally paid Transcription Stat, thus allowing everyone in the chain to walk away with a modest profit.
But on Oct. 7, Baloch attached two patient files to an e-mail and contacted UCSF. She demanded that the medical facility assist her in squeezing outstanding funds from her employer, Spires.
"Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet," Baloch wrote.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Far from it, they were purposefully relocated to a more hospitable economic environment
This is not always true. Not every job that was "lost" was moved to a more hospitable economic environment. I know many people that lost jobs because the company had lost customers, got bought out, or just otherwise no longer needed the service of said employee. Of course *some* people lost jobs that were sent to more hospitable economic environment, but it is silly to say that all fit in that category.
man
No manual entry for
was Re: Military: good jobs, good training
There was a thread about technical job training in the military here on Slashdot a few days ago.
At my work we layed off several people and thos eof us that stayed were given 2% raises (for me it worked out to about $800 more a year) I'd honestly rather have more coworkers than $800/yr more that I don't even notice.
Ave Molech Setting
And in other news, the primary job of a soldier is to be a soldier. Yes, they train you to kill people. Maybe that's because that's the purpose of the military, to wage war.
I mean I realize this is the modern military under preasure from the flowerpower movement, but when it comes down to it, the military has one primary purpose and that is to wage war.
BTW, all that money you're bitching about being spent in the military, ever consider a breakdown of where that goes?
Salleries, food, shelter make up a huge chunk of that.
Then there's research and development, which suprisingly enough, even though it's research into how to kill more efficiently, it still benefits modern society. Or have you forgotten GPS, radar and jet engines? Perhaps you don't like using the internet? You would be truely suprised how much of the money spent on the military is going to something other than putting bullets into bodies.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Funny thing is, I started out in this field because I'm a natural programmer (doing it since I was 8) and it looked like I could make a decent living and pay back my college loans. I'm good at what I do, and I made it my career to go beyond the call of duty and ensure that today's product had hooks for next year's functions. Twice that habit has saved the unit's ass. I'm also a good technical writer, and have no trouble communicating with our international colleagues.
Today I was told by IBM that I have thirty days before I become a permanent layoff. Supposedly my skills aren't what IBM needs these days: WebSphere (3/4/5), J2EE/EJB/JDBC/SOAP/XML, DB2/Oracle. Hmm, that seems to be precisely the software IBM is selling. And last year I was told that my compensation is exactly the competitive market average for my skills, i.e. I'm not overpaid.
I'm afraid your optimism about IT is unfounded. Sure, there are jobs: in the IT departments of companies that make concrete products (not computers though). But the big players who are focused solely on computer hardware/software are hell-bent on turning their developers into a white-collar servant class. "Do all this stuff, for less money, or we'll just move your job across the Pond."
This is not pessimism but realism: you will not be able to make a living wage on your Jedi skills alone. Get the hell out of IT before the tsumani takes you and your family with it.
I saw it coming months ago and will be enrolled in a real engineering program soon. And I'll be one hell of an engineer too, since I have no trouble automating complicated problems. And I'll tell you what: If I ever see IBM across the table in my second career, I'll tell the rep to go fuck himself.
Great, so we're in a situation so overpopulated that *everyone* should live like crap and feel the same - that they are expendable, are no better than any number of others at anything, and whose worth is no more than the cost of replacement...
This of course applies to everyone except those few who happen to be deemed "exceptional" in some way, either because they can monkey according to an arbitrary set of rules (sports) or because people find them most attractive (celebrity) or because they can be vicious and single-minded enough to screw everyone else over in favor of money.
Yay, that's the world I want to live in (maybe we already do)
The claim that people that are rich get rich by doing remarkable things is bogus--some do, far more simply lie, cheat and steal effectively. Money is a poor measure of someone's contribution. Look at Kary Mullis-he built and entire industry and got $20K for a patent sold for over $100 Million(he got the Nobel Prize and Japan Medal-but that was inspite of Cetus management, not because of it).
Troll!
STFW! The single biggest company that feels threatened by OSS software is Microsoft. They are also the single biggest user of H1B labor. Oracle, who many put in the 2nd place for biggest software producer in this country has been outsourcing programming to India for years.
A few more examples and I could make a dmaned good case for proprietary software being responsible for most of these job losses!
I think you are correct. A lot of the people that have played prominent roles in the outsourcing and H-1b/L-1 fads will find themselves in VERY lonely positions. I used to work at Sun. I was proud to work at Sun. At this point though, I can't say I would trust McNeally at all. Any manager that has been signing lots of H-1b/L-1 visa requests, particularly the last year, isn't someone that I will trust.
The fact that the job-loss rate has slowed is not necessarily good. It's always pointed to as a sign of economic recovery, when in fact all it means is that the rate of deterioration has decreased.
I think that the layoff rate is going to accelerate again. The fact that the dot-com boom produced hundreds of thousands of 19 year old CIOs means that there are that many people-- young, hungry, flexible-- who are willing to work much cheaper, and perhaps smarter, than old fogeys like me and maybe you. But hey, I'm sure the Bush administration will fix everything...
I'm using this time as an opportunity to go back to school and finish a college degree-- in my case, biotech. I think there's going to be a boom in biotechnology that's going to dwarf the dotcoms, and it'll be a subject that's going to be far more difficult for the average person to learn, both because of subject matter and because of the much greater infrastructure required for learning. It's going to be harder for them to fake knowledge by submitting resumes packed with buzzwords to hundreds of companies knowing that one of the fish is bound to bite.
That is, until Microsoft comes out with gel-chromatography equipment. That's kind of a disturbing thought.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Nuh-uh.
The answer is, back to the farms. Learn to grow a garden, to really grow a garden. Also, immediately sell your financed house, and buy something that you own outright: something with a lot of land, and little house, and maybe with a saw for cutting lumber.
Also keep a computer, for the occasional job that does come by.
Learn how to pasteurize your own milk, and get (perhaps) 1 cow, or 1 bull if there's more than 25 bull-less cows in the area. [Deal is, trade your bull's services for 1/10 of the cow's milk, and 1/10 of the veal, if you eat it.]
Learn how to live cheaply. If you're not sure, start here:
http://www.growbiointensive.org
Want better? I've posted in my journal a way to increase the per-acre yield by 30% over what growbiointensive.org says.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You're close. What will happen is no one will no longer be able to afford the product or service said exec's (said) business provided. At which point the American (sic) companies will go under.
When I was born, there was over a half dozen automobile companies in the US. During my father's life time there were several dozen. Today there are 2. FWIW, I originally wrote about aircraft manufactures, something my father could have waxed poetically about for hours, and the numbers work out very similiarly.
Ads are broken.
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.
You want an example? Mexico. Manufactures are leaving there because they can find yet cheaper wages in China and India. Mexico's economy is in a tailspin right now because of this.
Thus, China or India could be the next Mexico once some other nation becomes a "better target".
Table-ized A.I.
I live in Australia and can provide the flip-side perspective to all this. The US gave the world the free-market economy, for better or for worse, and is now leveraging the system to maximize profits. Back in the late 90s tech boom here in Australia we didn't feel it much at all. Sure, jobs were fairly easy to come by in IT but even with experience and qualifications I couldn't make more than AUD45k (USD29k at the time!) living in an extremely large, expensive city. You simply could not get a real software development/CS job in Australia then because everything was done in north america and there was no market here. Now its beginning to change. We are westernised, speak english, understand american business and are well educated. Plus the exchange rate and standard of living make us almost exactly half the price of comparible american labour. All of this hoo-ha with outsourcing to China and India is one thing; language barriers, poor quality code, etc. I think the real future in moving US jobs overseas is to places like Australia and New Zealand where, for all intents are purposes, you're dealing with americans in a cheaper part of the world. So I get to my point: Americans are overpaid on a global stage and can't compete. But America is the world's bastion of capitalism and competitive edge. I see this all resulting in the wages of IT staff simply coming down to what they are worth on a global stage and everyone everywhere in the world being able to get a job with fair conditions. Fair conditions mean you get your fair share of global resources commeasurate to your skills and contribution on a global scale. Like a previous poster said, being American does not entitle you to a high standard of living. Get over it. Your loss is our gain, and if you're not willing to 'stoop' to our level i'm happy to keep living comfortably from money gained by lost American jobs. At least that's a bit less tax to pay for Israel/Iraq occupation eh? (had to be said).
peace
As an Indian in the IT industry I resent your charecterisation of us as starving slave labour. You just compare our salaries on an exchange rate basis without factoring purchasing power parity and then say that we're being made to work for a pittance. Well guess what? A thousand dollars a month is a very comfortable salary in India.
You're just desperately trying to find some excuse so you can oppose outsourcing "in principle" when all you're really worried about is your job.
I feel sorry for people in the US hit by outsourcing and the job crunch. But it's hard to feel bad about it seeing the good things it has done in my country, giving it a chance to come out of its poverty and maybe into some kind of economic parity with the first world.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
I keep hearing people say they think outsourcing to India (et al) is "sensible", conservative, etc. It may appear to be from the management perspective, but it really isn't. There's a huge cost, especially when you're dealing with IT, and the business community hasn't really caught on yet. Consider:
1. Work that is outsourced may be unmaintainable. The outsourcing company may go out of business, they may end their relationship with you, they may make unreasonable demands forcing you to try to find a new vendor... And, when you try to get a technology transfer (i.e. the source code to all that stuff they coded) they might just tell you "no way". You'll have no recourse whatsoever. Remember, US laws only extend to the border.
2. When you transfer all that control to an external source (control of your IT, your data, and your clerical functions is control of your company, make no mistake), you LOSE that control yourself. Do you really trust a bunch of complete strangers to not be tempted by this "opportunity"? There have already been cases of extortion and blackmail. The incidence of this is going to go up, not down. Not to mention that #1 applies here, too; if a company goes under, who's controlling your company NOW? It could be Goodnight, Irene. Would YOU like to be the one to explain this to your stockholders?
3. Outsourced code isn't necessarily going to follow any specific standard, or even the specs you send over. Because, after all, what are you going to do about it if you don't like it? Nothing, that's what; you're ten thousand miles away, you don't have any programmers left on staff to check their work, and anyway, their laws are different from ours and you're not going to get anywhere even if you DO pursue it. You have to accept whatever they decide to give you. And they know it.
4. Three words that should make you drop a load in your pants: "third party tools". You don't know what your outsourcing friends are putting in your code; you don't know if they own licences to it; you don't know if it works or if it'll continue to work past its next revision, and you don't know if you'll be able to maintain it. Tool companies go out of business, too, their assets get bought by companies (like, say, your competitors). This can be really dangerous, especially with all the piracy going on overseas. Do you want to be the guy who has to explain the IP lawsuit to your stockholders?
I could go on but you get the idea. Even using H1-Bs here in this country isn't entirely safe. When an H1-B or an L-1 goes back home, he effectively drops off the face of the earth. Do you think he's going to fly over at the drop of a hat to maintain your code when it breaks? Do you even have him in your rolodex? Probably not. Basically, if it breaks, you're rewriting it with the next crop of consultants, and so on, forever. If this sounds stable or safe to you, more power to you, but it makes my head ache.
It's not as "sensible" or "conservative" as it looks. Companies are cutting their own throats for a short term bump in stock prices.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
> FACT 1: Your job is not hard.
You might be right but it is hard to do correctly.
> if your job includes analysing your company's business
That would be the job of a business analyst! What you're really proposing is one person doing the same job as two people. I guess this mythical person could also make sales calls and help re-stripe the parking lot on the weekends too.
My father used to manage the business affairs of a number of doctors' offices, and we were very close to some of the doctors (one became my father's (and thus also my) primary hunting partner). My mom also used to be an RN (Registered Nurse, the highest level in the US), so I got to understand how medicine is practiced in the US.
You've being grossly unfair to the doctor; he simply can't schedule his time as precisely as you'd like. Or let's turn it around: you have a life threatening problem, but it takes him more time than is scheduled in your ideal world to diagnose. Do you want him to say "Time's up, come back later" (or "Go to the Emergency Room" if he's figured out it's serious enough by then) ???
It's all based on the patient and his problem(s), and the ability of you and the receptionist to do a good enough job of pre-diagnosis. And how much "hand holding" (bedside manner :-) you and/or the condition require.
To bring this to our domain, do you like being told "You have N hours/days to debug this problem" when it's not an obvious defect? (Or insert any of the other scheduling nightmares that doom perhaps the majority of projects to failure of some sort before they've even started.)
I recently got, at a rather young age, a classic case of shingles (be happy if you're in the lucky 80% who don't get it). It took my doctor literally one second to diagnose when he looked at my back (after a few minutes of history) ... and then several minutes of discussion for how to treat. And then several follow up phone calls for pain killer prescriptions. That visit came out under the average, although the phone follow ups cut into his time between examinations.
(In case you're curious, I was off the painkillers in 6 weeks (below average), and within a further month I couldn't really tell I'd had the problem except for some reddish skin on my back. Young, healthy, and lucky, I guess....)
Other times, it can take much longer (e.g. a Fever of Unknown Origin can be really fun to diagnose), and of course other patients with really serious conditions will take quite a bit of a doctor's time to inform, reassure, discuss and manage.
It's a hard job, with constant pressure from insurers and the government(s), and with the highest of stakes; talk to a doctor sometime outside of his office. If you get to know him well enough, talk to him about the patients he's lost, and try to guess how he deals with the pressure....