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

Re:Military: good jobs, good training

[mesocyclone]

Yep. One of the first things they told me in Navy boot camp was that our job was to kill people when necessary.

And that was fine with me, because some people needed killing, in this case, in North Vietnam. I helped do that, although I never was directly involved. I have no regrets. In fact, if I wasn't so old, I go back in because a whole bunch more people need killing if we are to survive in this age of man-portable weapons of mass destruction.

Some people imagine that no violence is needed in the world... that somehow magic will happen and the sociopaths and other bad guys will just decide they'd rather sit around and contemplate their navels.

These people are idiots, ignorant of history, and free riders on the efforts of those of us who pay attention and volunteered to do something about it.

Re:Where's the end of this cycle?

[Cyno]

My theory to fix this is to get rid of money.

Then use our technology to automate all the jobs people don't like doing so we have plenty of time to do all the jobs we like doing.

Then create new jobs by having the people go to a website and tell everyone else exactly what they would like. Kinda like bugzilla, but for everything.

And part of this system would involve changing our media system to promote education, by having many educational channels, no manipulative or dishonest commercials, commercials would consist of advertising the products real specs, etc. Media should promote the general mental health and welfare of the people. Get the word out when a town is losing jobs, getting poor, etc.

Poverty causes people to be unintelligent and miserable. Happy people usually like to do things. So we need to have a bunch of wealthy happy people so we have all the things we want.

Wealth is just owning property. If we shared more property maybe it would be easier to have access to more property and own more property. Make things efficient and do it the right way the first time so we don't have to do it over and over and over again, wasting resources. And go out and collect more resources, if that's what we need.

I think there are answers to all these problems, if we could cooperate and work together to solve them and take care of eachother.

Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

[lucifuge31337]

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.

My god....someone else who gets it. When I was a coder (internal apps for a fund accounting firm), I sat down with the people who did the job I was to assist/automate with code and LEARNED TO DO THEIR JOB. By writing my own requirements doc, I could craft a better end product.

Then I move up to being the dev manager at another place. And I hear nothing but whining from coders who don't have a detailed enough requirement doc, or that I wanted something else even though what they did techincally allowed them to check off every box on their completion crieria. Cittone/DeVry/NameAnotherCrappy"School" never tought them a damn thing about business. I had coders who could run circles around me in raw code. But they had no concept of the practical application of their skills. They will always be in jeopardy of losing their jobs. And they will always be the ones who whine the loudest.