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Increasing the Value of the Domestic IT Worker?
KoshClassic asks: "To state it simply, in today's global economy, the IT worker in America is in direct competition with IT workers in countries such as India who are willing to do the same job for less. Much of this willingness has to do with standards and costs of living in these other countries, and without lowering ours or raising theirs, the American IT worker can not compete on even terms if the only consideration is cost. What should American IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts, to add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits that will make it worthwhile for them to keep these jobs in the US? I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, but I am convinced that the answer lies in trends and industry wide changes, rather than just individuals polishing their own resumes. When an employer decides he needs to fill a programming position, what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered"
Be the guy that translates non technical business logic into a detailed enough functional spec that the Indian IT people can code to it. Learn how the Indian IT people communicate and learn how to translate user requirements in a way that they are understood. Learn project management so your outsourcing project doesn't fail like a high percentage of them do.
Me, I despise project management so you are welcome to those jobs.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
For those working in a one-location company, do not hide in the IT room. When a user sends an e-mail asking for help, walk out to their desk rather than e-mail back. That way, you can see exactly what they're seeing on their screen, and you can also get a feel for what's going accross their desk while they're trying to interact with the systems.
That's one thing IT workers will never be able to duplicate...
Along these lines, I recently attended a rountable discussion of career trends in IT with several CIOs of large companies. They identified a few key things:
1) They know that what they are asking for now are "purple squirrels". What this means is that they are asking for something they know is very hard, if not impossible to get.
2) They stressed the importance of understanding the BUSINESS. They felt that knowing a business and IT makes you invaluable.
3) Get a higher degree. I go to one of the few graduate level Schools of Information Science in the country (http://is.cgu.edu). Or, if you already have IS skills get an MBA.
4) Most of the CIOs believe that outsourcing is just a passing trend, and that we truly have hit rock bottom of IT hiring. They feel it can only go up from here.
5) Everyone who attended this roundtable (which included people who were IT professionals but not CIOs) agreed that outsourcing is just another tool and not suitable for everything else. Knowing and learning what "everything else" is, is therefore the key to getting a job.
Just a few musings, maybe they'll help. -6d
To answer the question, I'd say become a rennaisance man. Learn to use both sides of your brain. Take an interest in the arts, you never know how it'll inspire you to look at technical problems from a different angle. It works for me, gets me hired every time. See the link in my sig for a discussion about this very theme.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Do what you can do get a security clearance. I've got one, courtesy of the USAF, but friends of mine with no military background whatsoever left telecom jobs and were able to get a security clearance. You got that, you're gold.
I could quit my job simply because it's Monday and have 5 offers by the time I hit the turnstiles on the way out. The pay is great (contractor, not gov't employee), it can't be outsourced, and as long as I don't lose my clearance for something stupid, I'm all but guaranteed a job.
Hard to do? Yes. Impossible to get? No.
It's not about loyalty. Employment is a contract between employee and employer. Neither needs to sign if they don't wish to, and nothing is owed that isn't in said contract.
The companies inflate prices, they inflate wages to higher the best talent and as a result the cost of living also increases. To maintain living in a particular area wages must go up, period. Employees were not at fault for this.
What is happening now, is employers have been over the course of 3-4 years been demanding more productivity. This means people doing MORE work than they used to at the same or less pay. The cost of living has not lowered in most areas, it's gone up. This means, that now that jobs are coming back people are job hopping because their employers squeezed them as hard as possible with threats of ending their contracts and sending them to the unemployment line. Why stay at a company that had you doing the work of 5 of your ex-coworkers when you can now leave and get paid the same or more and do less?
It's a vicous circle and is why we are always focused on GROWTH. The bubble that burst was a growing pain. They have existed as long as economies have and will continue to exist long into the future.
Motley Fool
CEOs Still Raking It In
Monday April 19, 10:17 am ET
By Selena Maranjian
Has corporate America learned anything from Americans' outrage over CEO compensation excesses, fueled by the likes of erstwhile Tyco (NYSE: TYC - News) CEO Dennis Kozlowski? Not too much, it seems.
BusinessWeek has once more surveyed executives of major corporations, and the folks at United for a Fair Economy (www.ufenet.org) have used its data to calculate that the average CEO collected $155,769 per week, compared with the $517 earned weekly by the average production worker. This means CEOs took in $301 for every dollar earned by rank-and-file employees.
Are such executives really 301 times more valuable than average workers? It's hard to imagine that's the case with so many major corporations not exactly performing in stellar fashion. Sure, some CEOs, such as Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A - News)(NYSE: BRK.B - News) Warren Buffett and eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY - News) Meg Whitman, take home relatively little in relation to the return their firms deliver to shareholders. But then, as BusinessWeek pointed out, you have Larry Ellison of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News), who took in some $750 million in total pay in the three years from 2000 to 2003, while his shareholders lost 54%. And then there's Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - News), who took in $35 million in the same period while his shareholder return was -84%.
Has the picture been improving any over time? Well, yes and no. The high-water mark for this survey came in 2001, when CEOs raked in 531 times what average workers did. That dropped precipitously in 2002, to 282, but has clearly inched up a bit since then. (The wide spread is largely due to the swooning stock market, which took with it the value of many bigwigs' stock options.) In 2003, the average surveyed CEO earned $8.1 million in total pay, up 9% from 2002. Meanwhile, the average production worker's salary increased just 2%. Step back further and the situation is grimmer. In 1982, CEOs took in just 42 times what average workers did.
Believe it or not, average Americans are not the only ones concerned about this. Back in 2002, The Conference Board issued recommendations on improving corporate compensation and governance, featuring some thoughts from Warren Buffett himself. Buffett pointed out that compensation committees often act like lap dogs, rubber-stamping CEO requests for pay increases, as CEOs strive to keep up with each other.
What's needed? A little more backbone in the boardroom, for starters. If you're paying a CEO $5 million per year and he wants $6 million, can you really not find someone else who's talented and would be happy to do the job for $5 million, or perhaps even $2 million? Let's see a little competition for these plum posts.
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Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway, eBay, and Sun Microsystems.
Private morality, world morality. Since man no longer believes that a God is guiding the destinies of the world as a whole, or that, despite all apparent twists, the path of mankind is leading somewhere glorious, men must set themselves ecumenical goals, embracing the whole earth. The older morality, namely Kant's [categorical imperative], demands from the individual those actions that one desires from all men - a nice, naive idea, as if everyone without further ado would know which manner of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is, which actions were desirable at all. It is a theory like free trade, which assumes that a general harmony would have to result of itself, according to innate laws of melioration. Perhaps a future survey of the needs of mankind will reveal it to be thoroughly undesirable that al men act identically; rather, in the interest of ecumenical goals, for whole stretches of human time special tasks, perhaps in some circumstances even evil tasks, will have to be set.
In any event, if mankind is to keep from destroying itself by such a conscious overall government, we must discover first a knowledge of the conditions of culture, a knowledge surpassing all previous knowledge, as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. This is the enormous task of the great minds of the next century.
my comments
Sadly, Nietzsche naively believed this problem would be solved in the next century... Yet, people still focus on the simple aspect of free trade not realizing how small an issue it is in the grand scheme of human progress. Nietzsche wrote that nearly 140 years ago, and ultimately the same simplistic morality still reigns. "Everything will work out in the end" they say, all the while ignoring how rapidly our civilization is declining.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
At least not book smarts. However there is a difference between being educated in the sense that you know a lot of theory and being educated in the sense of being able to relate that theory to the real world and use it to solve problems.
.com boom contributed tons of those people, the "Paper MCSEs" being a great example. These were/are people that are book smart in Windows. They know a great deal about it, including lots of obscure little things. Problem is they don't know what they know, or rather don't know how to relate and apply it. So they are rather worthless in the real world since situations often don't follow what was in the textbook, and even if they do require analysis to get to the point of knowing the problem is a textbook one.
Feynman talks about it in his biography, fragile knowledge is I believe how he describes it. For example: He tought in Brazil for a time. He was at an oral test of a student that did quite well. However, after the test he asked the student some more questions to see if he really knew what he was talking about. One question he asked was for an example of a dimagnetic substance. Well the student had defined dimagnetism corretly during his test, so this should be easy. Alas, he had no answer. Why is this? Well it's because to that person, it was all memorization. He had memorized the definition of diamagnetism but didn't understand how that actually related to electon shells.
Now along these lines someone may understand the theory, but not the practical application of something. Try it some time. Challenge people to give you real world examples of theories they supposedly understand. Make them give you more than one. You'll find many people at a loss to do it. The reason is not that they don't understand the theory part fine, they just lack the greater understanding of it's relation to the real world to be able to generate an example.
Problem solving is something else that being smart in the book/school sense doesn't imply. This usually stems from not understanding the overall relations of the theories and not being able to apply them, but in general there are plenty of smart people that can't solve novel problems. They can work through a constrained "problem" when it's just figuring out the result of something, but have trouble when presented with a novel situation where they need to come up with the method, as well as the result.
Soooo (the point to all this), this seems to be more prevalant in the workers in the outsourcing plants than in domestic workers. This is probably because many (even most) of the workers in those plants are doing it for the money, not the love. They did what they were told to do to get a degree so they could go do this. To them, it's just another job like working an assembly line, but one that pays better. Because of that superficial level of learning and lack of care, they aren't going to be the creative thinkers and problem solvers.
Now you, of course, find that in plenty of domestic help. The
Americans have one of the greatest education and industrial combinations known to history. Who else has gone to the moon? Who else has nuked anyone?
IT people have to demonstrate the power of computers by achieving greater profit margins and reducing the amount of manual effort required of everyone to earn the same amount. People should be able to retire at 50, but so many people are worried that they have to work until 80. People should only have to work 30 hours per week.
Why aren't people able to telecommute to the point where traffic isn't a problem? Why can't someone run a robot from home? A lot of people go to school to sit in front of a chalkboard - these people can learn from home.
Computers have come a long way but they have to start doing more things for us automatically.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Being a regular on /., I've found that MOST people here-
1. Hate Apple for OVERPRICED hardware (aka, why don't they release OSX for x86... its cheaper hw you see... commoditize yada yadda)
2. You like Rio cuz they make an mp3 player that is cheaper than the iPod (how'd you feel if you could that iPod 40GB for $99 instead of $599??)
3. You like linux which is, primarily, cheaper than other commercial offerings.
4. You HATE SUN because their hw is expensive (and don't care that its backplane can push 9.2GBps... )
5. "...imagine a beowulf cluster..." you like clusters cuz they allow you to have "CHEAP" computing power.
6. Whined all the way when SUN placed $20 download fee on Solaris x86 to cover bandwidth costs
7. Bashed apple iTunes store for $9.99 album price (what... no CD and still $10!!)
Need I say more ??
Everybody likes things cheap/free. And the dot-com boom produced enough IT workers that in post dot-com era, they're in over-supply... or in short IT workers are a COMMODITY...
Its Indian workers now JUST because internet (yeah!!) made it possible to do work equally well for *most* IT jobs. Sometime ago I was reading about how IM/phone/email has changed mode of communication in office... instead of walking over to co-worker down the hall, you ring/email/IM him/her.... so how does it differ if the co-worker is half-way around the globe... internet just doesn't care!!
If it weren't for the communication boom, you might have been watching cheap mexican workers or H1B workers taking your job...
Face it... everyone likes cheap/free... even the CEOs and PHBs!
- mritunjai