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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."
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.
They were with my missing sock.
Another article on it at The Register.
In before everyone starts pointing at Bangalore.
Don't blame India for our political failures.
That's all.
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
Great. This is like saying that a semi truck is running people down (GTA-like), but it's doing it slower now than before.
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!
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
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
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.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Good bye $$$.
Michael Loves Me!
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'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.
He's talking about a couple stories that have come out about Deibold, now in the electronic voting machine business, where some local elections have experienced bizarre errors, often in what some call Deibold's favor.
> "They" aren't out to get you.
Swallow the pill, Quaid.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
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.
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.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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?
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.
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.
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.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
But mostly just the unnecessary jobs were cut, and unprofitable businesses shut down.
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.
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!
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
http://www.freepressed.com/manufacturing.htm
Blue Collar Workers move to China, India to reclaim lost jobs
Mass exodus of manufacturing jobs prompts mass migration of American workers to the Third World.
Kellerman hopes he will fit in at his new job in Calcutta. Free Trade Zone--Thousands of blue collar workers are leaving the United States in pursuit of the 2.7 manufacturing jobs that moved
overseas during the past three years.
Deke Kellerman, a worker at the recently-closed Maytag Plant in Galesburg, Illinois, is moving his family to India so that he can keep his job constructing refrigerators. His pay will be cut from $11.95 to a whooping 35 cents an hour.
"There aren't any jobs here in the states anymore," Kellerman said. "So me and Missy, Deke Jr. and Delyn decided we'd move over there and
give it a shot. I figure as long as they got a Mickey D's and I can catch the Bears on TV, I'll be happy."
The Kellermans are not the only family from the closed Maytag plant that are moving half-way around the world to save their jobs.
Buel Jackson, his wife, Mary and their children Tucker, Conroy and Beldin followed Jackson's job all the way to the slums of Surat in the Western Indian State of Gujaret.
"Sure, we don't have any running water, tuberculosis is rampant and, last week, a couple of buildings in the slum collapsed, killing a bunch of people, but we're happy...sort of," Jackson said.
In the Jackson family's one-room abode, the children sleep on mats on the floor. The youngest child, Beldin, lay on the floor sweating from a
severe bout of dengue fever.
"The hardest part for me has been getting used to the food," said Mary Jackson, as she placed a cool cloth on her son's forehead. "We
can't afford any."
The slums of Surat may be infested with diseased rats and open sewers, but at least it's close to the sweatshop where the Jackson family works
together.
Mary Jackson who used to weigh a portly 180 pounds has lost 50 pounds since the family moved to India three months ago.
She moved about the apartment wearing an Eskimo Joe shirt underneath a Sari.
While the Jackson family used to regularly throw away several pounds of food per week, they now pour a little water into their bowls after they
have had their daily allotment of rice so that they can sop up every last morsel of food.
Besides Buel, the rest of the family also works on the assembly line at the Maytag plant for 12 hours a day eeking out barley enough money to
survive.
The mass exodus of manufacturing jobs started during President Reagan's tenure and gained steam when President Clinton signed the NAFTA free trade agreement, which opened up the borders between the US and Mexico. The creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has led to the further loss of jobs. Both groups have loopholes that allow them to overturn national laws in areas such as safety and environmental standards.
"Increasing poverty and joblessness in the United States is not just an afterthought of our policy; it's the main motivation," said Robert Noriega, an assistant secretary of state. "Free trade is primarily about taking jobs away from Americans and creating economies based on slave labor round the world for the financial benefit of multi-national corporations."
Pittsburgh, PA Steel Worker Thomas Barrett, moved his family to Shuiye Town in the Henan Province of China to work for Huaguan Iron and Steel Co. after his company, Bethlehem Steel, shuttered its door earlier this year.
Thomas and Amy Barrett couldn't ask for better jobs except ones that paid enough to friggin' eat on. Barrett works 14 hours a day in unsafe conditions while his children are schooled at the state-run Communist public school where they are
taught anti-American propaganda and to hate Buddhists.
"Well, we couldn't continued to compete against the slave wages that they pay over here in China so I decided if you can't beat them join them,
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
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.
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
I work in the electronics industry. It works like this, before we did final assembly her in good old usa, so we purchased parts made in usa.
Now final assembly is offshore, so the best is to purchase the parts locally.
First they buy equipment here, and assemble there. Next they build equipment there. There goes all the assembly, machine fabrication, chip assembly, plastic molding, and it goes much deeper.
I was an Electronics Tech, as well...and I know the score!
The Navy is organized for the benefit of the Lifers (those who have been in a long time and have seniority) and officers. Do not join the Navy. THis is Fair Warning!
FTN!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
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.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
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).
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.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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)
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.
Finally. Someone around here who has the balls to speak the truth. Thanks for nothing, Clinton.
G.W.'s finally getting Clinton's bad economy turned around. The economy was already turning sour when Clinton was in office. However, the liberal media spin constantly blames the GOP. Funny. George W. wasn't even in office (or elected, for that matter) before the economy went south.
So George W. is spending all those government budget surpluses, huh? Projected surpluses, actually - based on projections of tax revenue from a bull economy. So, really, there wasn't going to be any surplus regardless of which political flavor was in office.
If Gore won the election, CNN would be blaming the republican-controlled Congress... sigh. How gullible is America?
When millions disappear from earth, it's not aliens, it's the rapture.
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!
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.
The reality is that R&D follows the growth markets. The new markets are in India and China and Western companies are falling over themselves to invest in order to get a slice of the pie.
If anything I think IT in the west will increasingly be near-customer integration and customisation of basic technology developed and manufactured in China/Taiwan/South Korea and India. Companies who started off as sub-contractors for Western companies are waking up and realising they're the ones who call the shots. Just look at Samsung who now control flat screen development and moves by Chinese manufacturers to develop their own standards so that they no longer rely on Western IP.
A lot of programmers are going back to school to get Masters and PhD degrees. My fear would be that they will leave in 4 years time with no more market for their skills than before and just an even bigger pile of debts to pay off.
I have a BSc, MSc and PhD and I'm scared...
The businesses are always in crunch mode trying to push their people which means things like training and self-improvement of their employees suffer. Then they claim they need foreign workers since only they have the latest skills.
The economy is suffering because none of us told the emperorer they were naked during the dot.com bubble. Instead we checked our yahoo finance every hour watching our stock/401(k)'s blossom.
We've built our economy on consumerism which requires a high-standard of living - letting these jobs go overseas is going to hurt if no one has money to buy the items!
How far to the bottom can we race - there has to be a balance - 100% free market just doesn't work.
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
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...
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
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.
Monthy Unemployment Rate
Bureau of Labor and Statistics homepage
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
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!".