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Exporting Myself?
sennomo asks: "Years ago, I was told that I needed a degree to get a programming job anymore. So, I went to college. A couple of years and thousands of dollars later, there was still no job for me, in spite of my all-powerful B.A. in C.S. The most common explanation I get is that jobs are being exported out of the country. So, I've decided to export myself. Moving to higher ground, so to speak. I have heard a few others discuss this, but how many are actually trying it? And how is it going for them? Are there any hotspots for American expatriate programmers?"
i graduated with my bachelors last spring without having a job lined up. my main avenue of search were the websites of companies in my area and my school's biannual job fair, and those didnt go well. i didnt want to, but I sucked it up and put my resume out on careerbuilder and monster. found a job in less than a week after graduation. and it pays well too!
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Why not just accept less money than you've been asking? Look for non-profits and similar who need programmers but can't pay competitive salaries. Then, when you build up some experience, you might be worth something more than the paper the degree is printed on and won't have trouble if you decide to look elsewhere for work.
Go for a design job. There's plenty of those if you're good (did you have good grades in your CS classes?). Lean towards the Science part of your degree instead of trying to pimp the programming skills you learned as a side effect. Who wants to be just a programmer anyway? It's like manual labor for your fingers.
Also, be an example for others. You are living proof that you should get a BS in computer science, not a BA. Yes, employers notice, and also, the background courses for a science degree will actually relate to real world exprience in your field, where the types of employers you're looking for probably don't care in the least about the non-CS stuff you did for your BA.
Plus, you will make 1/3 what you would working the same job in the U.S.
Write your congressman. Organize a protest. Find someone to get active with. Boycott companies that use large amounts of foreign I.T. labor (IBM, G.E. & subsideraries are two). H1b visas are just as bad. Boycott companies that use large amounts of technical H1B visas.
Check out http://www.h1b.info/
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Years ago, I was told that I needed a degree to get a programming job anymore.
They lied.
So, I went to college. A couple of years and thousands of dollars later, there was still no job for me, in spite of my all-powerful B.A. in C.S.
Sucker.
The most common explanation I get is that jobs are being exported out of the country.
Awfully convenient explanation, huh? Just in time for the retirement of the "Bad economy" excuse.
So, I've decided to export myself. Moving to higher ground, so to speak.
Or, so to hope. Higher ground. Yep. That's what I'd call a third world country.
Here is the painful truth - if you had anything to offer, you'd be employed. My company is hiring like crazy, but we are extremely selective (about 1 in 100 candidates pass the tests.)
Actually, let me back it up a little and not be so terribly insulting. The situation is this - companies are hiring, but they are scared of repeating the bust. One of the least talked about reasons that everything has fallen apart in the tech sector is the sheer worthlessness of so many of the people in it. I have worked with some of the worst programmers I can imagine over the last three years. These people will be shed, but it will be a painful process.
My advice is this: suck it up, do some hobby programming, build a portfolio of samples (nothing sells a candidate like good sample code), and keep on plugging. You'll have to prove yourself.
The whole expatriation thing is a terrible idea. If you go through with it, have fun.
Anonymous Hoser
I'm in no better of a situation, with my all-powerful BSEE degree. But I am fully confident that no matter where you go, the best opportunities will always be in the U.S. Why else do you think everyone tries to come here to work?
We have an abundance of industries, no bloody civil wars at the moment, a great environment of free speech, and an astronomical average standard of living. Even if you don't get a programming job right now, you'll still be better off than most of the rest of the world. Assuming you could even manage to arrange it, consider the conditions you would have to accept. Work 14 hour days in cramped conditions with 100 people speaking a different language, make perhaps 10% of what you would make in the US, live in a tiny apartment in foreign city, and face termination at any moment because there are 100 more people waiting outside every day to take your place. Yeah, people might joke that it's already this way in the U.S., but that's just not the case. Even if you sell auto parts, or pour concrete, you're still better off.
The economy IS turning around. I'm optimistic even though I was laid off right before Thanksgiving. At this point, 1.5 years of mechanical engineering experience isn't really helping me get an electrical engineering position, but I am confident that I will find something. If you leave now, you might miss out on our next boom. And this one might be real growth, not a bubble of hopes and gambles by investors.
Maybe our garden-variety programming jobs are all moving overseas. OK...maybe this is just a natural progression? We used to make shoes and T-shirts here, right? And then the other developing countries said "Hey, we can do that!" and we moved on to more complex and technological things. Now the other countries have had a chance to pick up some engineering textbooks and say "Hey, we can do that too!" So now it's time to find something even more specialized and technologically advanced. I think that the future of engineering in the U.S. is the consulting specialist. Boilerplate work is already being taken over by other developing countries; here we have to target the jobs that are one-of-a-kind, bordering on actual research instead of just application. I may be wrong, but that's one possibility.
Anyway, get some job, or get some more school. All of this engineering talent floating around in the U.S. is a huge untapped resource, and I happen to know that the U.S. doesn't let untapped resources just sit there forever.
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The reason the jobs are being exported is that the cost of labor is cheaper there. If you want to get hired as a local working those lower wages, you might have some advantage since you can set yourself up as the interface with those in the US. But, you will be making local salaries.
On the other hand, if you want to get hired as an expat (making US salaries), you're probably out of luck. The expats, especially the expat geek, who make a ton of money in a foreign land and get quite a few fringe benefits are rapidly disappearing. Best bet to be an expat is to get hired in the US and then get transferred to a different office. Even Saudi Aramco, who once really recruited in the US for expat postings in Saudi Arabia, is shrinking its US expat force.
I have a High School degree with only a couple additional formal education classes. I am currently a Senior Software Engineer with a software consulting company that has me in a long term placement at a large multi-national technology firm.
Most every job I have I got through networking. I am president of a local software development group (PC users group for developers) that I attended for years previously. I always try to work with other people to help them so they know I am a resource. I look for opportunities to present at conferences or other groups. I look for writing opportunities and other avenues to promote my skills and abilities.
Sometimes I have worked for far less then I should have for what I was doing, but the result is I have acquired enough experience that my lack of degree is less important. Be willing to start at the bottom and work your way up. The opportunities are there, if you are willing to look.
As an example, I was laid off about a year ago. I had a new job in 2 days, and 3 or 4 other offers within a week. All the offers were from networking. Most the jobs I get interviews through Monster or other listings they say I am over qualified for. Imagine that.
I would eventually like to go to school and get a C.S. degree. But I imagine that I will get my employeer to pay for most of it while they are paying me to work and apply what I learn. Education is a good thing, but it is not what will get you a job.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
I'm in Spokane, a city suffering from chronic economic problems, and I didn't have any trouble getting a job. I sent out a grand total of a half-dozen resumes, got two job interviews, and one job offer (I accepted). A few major factors that helped me get a job were that my degree was a BS in Math and Computer Science, rather than straight CS, that I'd held jobs (computer programming and otherwise) before, and that I'd been involved in several major freeware projects as a hobby.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
The world keeps turning, you can't expect it to stop because your skillset no longer matches the 'hot' jobs.
I wish that were the problem. The jobs didn't go away, they just got moved to people I can't compete with because it costs less to live in their country than it does mine. 1 Million jobs in a decade is significant.
Moving jobs to other countries only benefits the owners of the company. American workers get displaced and thrown into unemployment while companies in the targeted foreign company go belly up because they can't compete with the higher wages of American countries. Also, a small percentage of the foreign population gets their wages promoted to somewhere between a third world nation and the U.S. The large percentage of people who don't get American jobs loose buying power because of the inflation. It throws them into poverty. Neither country benefits; however, the corp owner cuts his bottom line and increases his profit margin. I'm all for competition and education for myself to compete, but the game is severely stacked against the American worker when companies start exporting labor. Look at what happened with NAFTA in Mexico and how bad it was for Mexicans and Americans.
ALso, It's very very difficult for a displaced worker to take an 80% paycut (difference between I.T. wage and unemployment) and then find money to go to school. I don't know about you, but if I took an 80% paycut, school would be the last thing on my mind. I'd be trying to find enough work to keep my house and car and avoid the failure of bankruptcy. (not to mention the familiar and marital problems that come with that kind of financial shock.)
I'm all for competition and everyone getting paid for their sacrifices and risks, but the only one winning with foreign outsourcing and h1b visa's are a small percentage of executives and large corp. owners.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
I've thought about what I'd consider doing if my job were outsourced...something along the lines of this.
If I were in your situation, I would get some tech experience (of any kind, even the low paying sort), find a partner or three (ah, there's the rub), and form an outsourcing company yourself. That is, land and manage gigs, and get some outsourced help to do some bulletproof coding for you. You will succeed if you stick to the 'commoditized' projects. You'll need lots of design skill, lot of management expertise, QA experience, and a committment to nothing less than excellence. You need to have a reputation for never fucking up, and admitting it if you do. Then , and only then, can you think about landing serious gigs.
Sure, you need more experience, but you could hone some of those skills working on open source projects in the meantime.
I'm sure I'll be flamed for generalizing and simplifying (of course I have a bit), and hear anecdotes of 'my company spent $xMM outsourcing a component to india and it sucked' but frankly, this is what people have been doing for years, just (mostly) inside U.S. borders. I personally have taken a couple of $80k jobs away from big firms by doing just that. I recently managed a job with a developer in New Zealand, and the 'client' in Chicago, London, and Moscow. (I didn't just land it out of the blue though, and that's another post entirely.)
Of course, I'm not talking about stealing the Ebay rebuild project from IBM, but something smaller, more manageable, with a good chance of success. To put it another way, think the Doctor/Pharmacist role. If you have a serious malady, you probably don't want to use a Doctor on the other side of the world, but once you get your prescription (in this case, a bulletproof technical spec), you don't really care where it gets filled, do you?
With that said, the protectionists may now commence flaming...
A BA in Computer Science is not going to get you a job. I don't know where you got that idea. I recently graduated so I know several people who have a BA, BS or even an MS in computer science and they are terrible programmers. All the degree means is that you took a bunch of courses so you might know something about the Science of CS. It says nothing about your ability to produce quality code though. What got me a job offers are my previous 3 years of web development experience and also some networking - the degree was essentially there for looks.
So what now? Go get an internship or get some sort of experience no matter how little pay because if I were an employer, I would not hire a CS person without some solid experience or who can at least show some good code.
Why does everyone immediately start up the old "those evil foreigners are 'stealing' our jobs and the even eviler bosses are letting them!" argument? For years the USA has been getting a free ride on exchange rates since everyone has to have dollars to buy oil. An overly strong dollar makes all imports (including foreign programmers) incredibly cheap, but makes exports expensive and hard to sell.
The dollar has plummeted on currency markets, so steel workers and programmers should start being thankful that their work is more competitive.
And everyone can be thankful that they have a chance to be patriotic and "buy American" now that all those pesky imports have become so expensive again.
I find many of the replies I've received interesting.
I purposely limited/changed some of my information to try to get more general answers from people than if I had been specific and entirely accurate. For example, I already know what country I'm going to next, but I wanted to see where people thought I ought to go.
I was surprised to see how many guys mentioned working in India. AFAIK foreigners are not allowed to be hired there.
It cracked me up how much people harped on how "crappy" the standard of living is in other countries. The fact is the worst home I ever has was in Pennsylvania, complete with cockroaches, mold, and even sulphur and fecal matter in the water. One guy said that I was "naive"...well, the fact I didn't mention that I have lived in other countries before doesn't mean I didn't.
I also didn't mention that I started working professionally in programming in 1998, after a few years of hobby programming--I'm no spring chicken. I've continued to program as a hobby during my downtime. I signed up with Monster in its first year, and it's never been any help to me.
I didn't mention that I have a son. For me, working isn't all about glamor and a huge $30K salary. (Yes, that is good money for where I live.) It's about making enough money to live on and support him. I'm afraid the local mini-marts don't provide that kind of paycheck.
The one piece of advice I keep getting that seems to ring true is about personal networking...which is why I'm looking forward to relying on nepotism, as soon as I find an influential relative.
(And less relevant, but to be accurate: I have a B.A. in Spanish and a B.S. in Computer Science.)
I don't hold it against anybody who gave me useless advice because I didn't tell them everything about myself. But like I said, I was looking for general answers, and I largely got what I wanted.
Thanks for your comments.
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
No good. Germany is in an even worse situation in regards to IT employment than the US. While in the US the economy finally seems to take off we over here are far from a turnaround and Germany's economy still is in crisis mode, both spending- and employment-wise
I don't think I wasted their time. If they didn't want to respond, they didn't have to.
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If you think you wasted your time, that's your problem.
No, I think you wasted my time, and yes, that is my problem. But hey, what is Slashdot for, if not wasting time?
However, you are probably a troll, who would post something nasty no matter what I said.
Yeah sure, that's right, I'm a troll.
People like you all over Slashdot are happy to attack details (relevant or otherwise) and ignorantly go off on tangents about which you know little or nothing, while blatantly ignoring or baselessly refuting key issues.
I think you are the one blatantly ignoring key issues. Let's have a little more information, in order to get at why you have had such issues with success.
18 November 2001: I sometimes dream of mixing languages to get the best from each. However, wherever I work, the boss tends to pick out everything for me, which usually means VB on a completely Microsoft platform.
So you were a VB "programmer".
20 November 2001: I used to work for a company whose star product was an AI-drive porn-filtering web proxy. Our biggest prospective clients were the governments of China and Saudi Arabia. They didn't want just a porn filter, though; they wanted to block plenty of religious and political sites, too. Fortunately, the filtering software never even worked in the first place.
So, you had no issues working for people who were doing something that you apparently find immoral, and also have no issues with your employer failing.
22 November 2001: I used to be employable without a college degree. Since last fall nobody will even interview me. Now I'm wasting two years and thousands of dollars in a small university where I'm learning next to nothing, just so I can get a damn B.S. so someone might hire me.
So, as a high-and-mighty VB programmer with roughly 3 years experience at this point, went to college for a computer science degree, thinking you were wasting your time and not learning anything, and were only there to try to get hired.
28 December 2001 Before last year, I could find work without a degree. However, I found that since October 2000, nobody even wants to interview me. So, I'm back in college for a BS of CS. The fastest I could possibly complete it would be in 2 years, but since I'm trying to work at the same time, it will take me 3. C'est la vie.
So you rushed through your degree as fast as possible.
11 February 2002: Before the bubble burst, I had a measly B.A. in Spanish, but I still got hired at startups for various jobs, mostly web-oriented stuff like search engines. I made as much as $650/wk for a short while, which ain't too shabby for where I live.
So, I've decided to use up my remaining financial aid (even though it will add to my debt) to return to college for a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm hardly learning anything, since I already learned plenty on the job. (Unfortunately, my university does not count life experience for college credit.) Some professors have even told me that I am capable of teaching their classes, but that won't get me out of the credit requirements.
So you think you already learned plenty as a VB programmer. I am sure the average VB programmer is qualified to teach computer science classes, yeah right. I suspect that the only thing you are qualified to teach is Freshman Spanish (which would pay $30,000 in the right area, by the way).
Best Slashdot comment ever
I wish that were the problem. The jobs didn't go away, they just got moved to people I can't compete with because it costs less to live in their country than it does mine.
Like it happened to the garment industry. Like it happened to the auto industry. Like it happened to most manufacturing industries.
And what happened after that? Well, now you can buy a t-shirt for less that the price of a Bic Mac and cars cost a fraction of the average salary. Sure, people lost their jobs and whined about it, but eventually they found other jobs and benefited from the improved living conditions made possible by exporting a lot of jobs to cheaper countries.
At the same time there are a lot of countries with booming economies fueled by exports to the west. Living conditions are improving as salaries increase. Hell, if it wasn't good for them do you think India and China would be so busy promoting foreign trade?
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Erm, if you go overseas to work in India or such, your standard of living is going to go way, way, way down.
Not true. Depending on what sort of position he manages to get you can live a life of luxury in India relatively cheaply. A middle class white collar worker can very easily afford a servant to do cooking and cleaning for them. A very nice property is also affordable.
The problem is that once you move there long term, there is no comming back as your life savings will be near worthless in the states. I and my wife have considered moving to India for a few years so she can be closer to family, but while we could both get good jobs there and live well, it would set us back too far in our retirement savings.
India is great for a healthy 20 something yearold, but unless you are loaded to begin with I would not like to try living my declining years there.