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Tech Employment Drops Sharply In 2004
Cryofan writes "According to Information Week, the lastest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that
the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000 in the last 3 years, and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004.
According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
Could it be that IT professionals have moved up in organizations, and are now VPs, and such, thus they may not consider themselves IT when in fact they are, just with better titles? This is the case for me, where I started out being the only IT guy 10 years ago, and now considered more, but still doing IT work as well.
I don't really call myself an "IT Professional", even though I run the network, and in the middle of producing new applications for the business. I am sure this is not all of it, but I can't help but think its not all doom and gloom.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The number of jobs is always created at a faster rateaverage annual percentage growth) under Democratic Presidents then Republican Presidents
Here's another chart with the same data
You can get the raw BLS Establishment survey data here
by education levels. Are the programmers who were laid off college educated or did they take, "ITT teaches you how to write a web page and use visual baisc" type programmers? Is there demand for a masters/phd? The numbers probably mean very little of themselves without a breakdown of who is employed/unemployed. Maybe demand for college graduates has increased, but demand for Devry/ITT flunkies has plummetted. Hard to tell.....
But while you wait for those wonderful free trade jobs to be created, you can get pretty skinny during 50 years of flipping burgers or being unemployed.
In the end we all die, so let's just ahead and keep the jobs we have now, instead of waiting for some magical free trade, lassiez faire, Ayn Rand, globalization outsourcing bonanza. Huh, whattaya say?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
My Computer Science degree in the UK is accredited by the British Computer Society (BCS), which is a Chartered Engineering Institution, so I would be classed as an engineer upon graduation, though my degree isn't a typical degree in engineering.
Here goes the last of my karma...
I think the whole open source movement is part of the cause.
What other industry would provide its services for free, then act surprised when that industry no longer generates enough money to justify lots of workers and high salaries?
In the long run, I suppose things are cyclical. The industry will shrink to a level small enough to support itself in a "free products" environment. This will probably lead to somewhat fewer people working on opensource products, thus increasing demand for IT people again... and so the sysle will continue.
I've noticed that IT skills are now necessary requirements for roles in other areas. Employers are less often looking for just a programmer, but a statistician who can program, or a physics graduate who can program, or a graphic designer who...
Where once you would have hired a programmer to implement the specialist's work, you now expect the specialist to comprise the IT specialist's role as well.
I'm currently doing some work in data analysis, but they want me to do the SQL work on the databases myself (the cheek of it!)
That point made though, I don't think this accounts for major falls in IT work availability. I think if there are such falls then they are more a result the market being flooded with muppets who think they can program (done the correspondence or the nightschool course) and that less and less work is needing to be done from scratch. We have MS Office, we have Postnuke, we have Dreamweaver templates and anything else you might want, requiring only the barest customization.
My advice is to get good at a supplementary field (maths is always good) and get yourself into something that requires more skill than the college course kid can fake in an interview. Go for jobs with people who take things seriously, not the ones who are looking for someone cheap and can't tell the difference between you and the muppet.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
You wrote:
>>>
Success is not a RIGHT. It is earned through taking risks and working your ass off. Not every plan pans out, but I would rather fail trying than sit around and wait for somebody to "give" me a good job.
>>>
OK, just suppose I was one of the 131K SW engs who got laid off this past 3 months, and I take your advice to just "work my ass off". But you seemt o forget that there are also 131K other Software Engineers also laid off, who you say should do the same thing--just work their ass off. That worldview of yours is the Achilles heel of globalization/neoliberalism: we are all just supposed to "work harder" each successive round of outsourcing. But you seem to forget we are all competing against each other! And the numbers of laid-off increase with each round of outsourcing! Hello?? Ponzi scheme, anyone?
Are you familiar with the "Turtles all the way down" anecdote that describes a certain logical fallacy? For the edification of those who have not heard it, here it is:
>>>>
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a
public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the
sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection
of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at
the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish.
The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant
tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is
the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever, but you can't fool me,"
said the old lady. "It's turtles all the way down!"
>>>>>>>>
That type of flawed logic is the basis of globalization/laisseiz fair/neoliberal/free trade economics; and it really just amounts to a system of concentrating as much wealth as possible in as few hands as possible.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I'm a software guy. I lost my job (along with a lot of other people) a couple days ago. My only talents involve tech and software. I'm not going to become a mechanic or a soap salesman and nobody is going to hire me for such things.
Not exactly true. If you are software guy, then you can probably manage a network for a small company, helping them become more productive, while developing new markets. Let me give you an example:
XYZ, Inc. sells hot tubs on the web, they have 12 employees. You are brought in to manage their computers. You setup a system to better manage leads and sales. You write a CGI interface to allow their potential customers to fill out a credit application while online. It auto mails them, formats the application for credit, auto faxes it to the finance company, and creates a database entry for the customer. Now, XYZ can have their one credit dept. person handle 3x the applications for credit, so they advertise more to create more interest. They get more sales. They upgrade systems. They want a nicer web site, with manuals online for potential customers, to make the site "sticky". This keeps going on, building for years.
This is EXACTLY what happened to me (not hot tubs) over the last 10 years. I showed them ways to increase sales and increase productivity. I was not trained to do what I was doing, I learned it on the fly, but I was willing to go outside my field, while applying skills from my trade as a secondary source.
There is opportunity out there, but you often have to go parallel to your skill sets. You usually have to wear many hats, with only one being your "skill". This is not so bad, to me, as I love to learn new skills anyway, since this makes me more valuable. You don't have to work for a "software company" just because you are a software guy. Other companies need software guys, and the vast majority of new jobs are in small businesses. There are many companies that can not afford an IT dept, a software dept. etc., but they WILL pay you good money if you can be the entire software and IT depts for their more modest needs. Its cheaper to hire you to wear 4 hats, than to farm out the 4 tasks to other companies.
This is one tiny example, but the possibilities are endless. I can easily promise you that once you open up your mind to other possibilities, you will find opporunity. Small companies are opening all the time, and while the risk is higher, so are the potential rewards.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
I don't know about the US but in India the mass of the IT *pros* are in it only for the money. They have no real enthusiasm for technology or IT. Even most students take up IS/IT engineering courses here only because it pays so well and not because they really wanted to know anything about computer science or IT. The so called IT companies (Wipro/Infosys) also hire programmers from all engineering courses - civil, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation. All graduates (that is undergraduate for you) except fine arts and commerce are hired as programmers in India!!
Just my two paise worth
I'm a former Northwest Airlines applications programmer/analyst with a BSCS and 15 years of pretty solid experience who has been looking for a new permanent place to work for over 2.5 years now, and my local area (the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro) has had a number of large companies lay off a large number of people over the past few years including my former employer (NWA), Unisys (which has a heavy airline/mainframe presence in the Twin Cities), Lawson, IBM, Qwest, Verizon, and a number of others.
:-)
In the case of NWA, many IT people were laid off based on the organization or project they were affiliated with, and whole trees of people were lopped off from the manager on down. I know several folks who I considered top-quality techie types who were let go in October 2001 because they had moved to a project that was more technically interesting or high-profile a few years ago, but which was considered a non-critical project by management in the post-9/11 airline environment).
In other cases (such as in my case), cuts were made based purely on seniority, and my 13 years put me on the bottom of the ladder compared to the remaining folks I was working with in Flight Operations (I survived the major IT cuts in late 2001 only to find myself nickel-and-dimed out a few months later when we all thought it was over).
Given the experience level of my peers I was a logical choice, at least by that measure, but I'll frankly put my general level of technical acumen against anyone here. Or there, for that matter.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the measurement used. Ability rarely factors into such choices, as two layoffs in the past 15 years have taught me, particularly when the layoff parameters are being determined mainly by bean counters rather than technical management.
With such a glut in unemployed techie folks in the local area, many of them quite senior, it's hard for someone with only 10-15 years of experience to get any sort of contract work because there are a fair number of 20-30 year people also laid off who are now competing for a much smaller number of positions. And contract work is almost all there is. A few firms seem to be hiring real permanent employees, but competition is so fierce that one has to be an almost perfect tech-skill+line-of-business match in order to get a first-level interview.
I know several folks who have roughly my experience level who are still out of work after more than a year, and it sure isn't due to a lack of technical ability or a lack of effort. From what I can tell, it's mainly due to a large number of people seeking a small number of positions, and to an increasing tendency for companies to require more and more specialized business and technical skillsets even for general IT positions.
The folks who have "left IT" according to common statistical measures are a mix of all types.
Some fit the stereotype of being "less skilled" or interested only in the financial aspects of an IT career, and I'm in agreement with those who say "good riddance" to such folks, but there are probably at least as many others who are hard-core bit twiddlers or talented designers or whatnot who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who are finding it difficult to obtain employment in IT at a time when companies are hiring specialized short-term contractors in lieu of more generalized long-term employees.
When an IT position isn't available, and when the six months or so of unemployment runs out, a former IT person has to do *something* in order to make ends meet. In my case, it will probably end up driving a truck or doing some sort of generic office work so I can continue to pay the bills.
That doesn't make me any less interested in IT, and I'll still be looking when I'm not working at a lesser position, but for statistical purposes I'll have dropped off the radar and will no longer count as an unemployed IT position. It's a very misleading statistic...
If this comes across as a bi
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Its more than job loss. My brother, who was a programmer and project manager, is finishing his MBA in (gasp) marketing. Many in his classes are former IT professionals who have left IT.
Although I've stayed in IT, I've seen quite a few friends and associates over the past couple of years leave IT for small business (real estate, insurance, home construction, landscaping) or MBAs in non-technical fields.
Why the change? In almost every case, their disgust and reason for a career change was predicated not on the disappointment with IT, but rather the realization that the cost center they worked for was decimated by the absolute posers and morons in alleged profit centers marketing, management, sales, etc. My own 2001 downsizing came despite our IT shop nailing project after project well under budget in a constant death march project. The company couldn't afford the damage from the marketing/sales/corporate spending on extravagant headquarters (complete with a parking garage filled with leased Ferraris and Mercedes), incredible perks for corporate employees, and a general knack for hiring complete clueless idiots (complete with their own staff of at least three or four executive assistants - god forbid a marketing assistant not have someone to get their coffee and bagals).
No, what has inspired so many IT people I know to go into the soft fields is that they're driven to make sure the next company they work for isn't rotten to the core in these areas. Armed with the knowledge that these areas are totally soft and seriouosly lacking competence and drive, they're eager to get going.
Watch for the next career segment upheaval in Dilberts favorite targets: marketing and HR.
One could also point out the correlation between America's major wars in the last century and Democratic administrations -- WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam. Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy/LBJ. So does that mean the Dems should get the 'credit' for wars that cost the lives of over 600,000 Americans? Or is it possible all these correlations don't actually mean much?
I think reality is much more uncomfortable than these explanations: the late '90s boom essentially invented or expanded several new markets (e-commerce, high speed networking, web content delivery, etc). People rushed into these new markets (hence the stock-market boom and wild speculation), and they did so with primitive tools and knowledge. Almost a decade later now (9 yrs from the Netscape IPO this month) our tools have matured, and more importantly, after the bust they are now affordable.
After the widespread adoption of IT in the '90s, most computer-related jobs were either infrastructure (IT itself or operations support) or computer-based analysis. Well, guess what, our infrastructure tools are now much better and cheaper: it just takes fewer people to administer the same number of machines or put together the same level of in-house apps.
On the other hand, business intelligence software has matured for the same reasons (cost, efficiency, maturity) and it takes fewer analysts to go through the same volume of data.
This trend is not just going to go away: company spending on IT or IT-related fields is going to stabilize (if it hasn't already) and be treated just as any other infrastructure expenditure, same as office space or health insurance. IT has finally become a commodity, and as great that is for society, it kinda sucks for IT workers. There is no escape, other than to get involved in fields whose commoditization is still far into the future, or at least far enough to get you into retirement.
We saw this with railroads in the 1800s, Radio and Automibiles in the 1920's and now computers at the end of the 20th century.
We are also hit with this outsourcing phenomina at the same time. It sucks and there is nothing we can do about it.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
Look at the realities of many IT jobs, perhaps nearly all of them: working in excess of 40 hours per week, being on-call, needing up-to-date skills, having to take bad business ideas and translate them into working software.... And the list goes on. I was up till 1:00 last night, working on learning Smalltalk. I won't be compensated for it
I'd like to see some statistics that include self-employeed IT. Several of my peers and co-workers from before/during the burst made it through only by working freelance or starting their own businesses solo (like myself). And let me tell you, all of your points just increase exponentially when you are self-employeed.
- working in excess of 40 hrs/wk - I don't think I've worked fewer than 70 in the last 18 months, even over holidays, and I have been known to pull multiple 100+ hour weeks in a row.
- always on call - it's one thing when you have your office call you when there's a problem. It's another when it's your responsibility to notice the problems as well.
- need up to date skills - because when you're self-employeed, you're not only trying to please your boss, you also need to be competitive in a tight market, no matter what solution the client is looking for
- have to take bad ideas and turn them into working software - ditto, except since I've been unemp^H^H^H^H^H self-employeed, my clients are actually coming to me for advice on how to improve their bad ideas. Yuck.
And self-employeed workers also need to act as project managers, upper management, self-promotion / advertising, etc. in addition to their IT duties. And yes, I speak from experience. I was working until 4:00 last night (fortunately for her, my wife went to bed at 10:30 or so). As a self-employeed IT, I not only get to write code, I get to write contracts. And press releases. And..and..and..and....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Right - you want the state of California to issue an IT license that requires you to be an expert in Windows.
That would be real good for OSS, wouldn't it?
Get a clue - professional licensing of any industry is controlled by people already in that industry and is used to keep everyone else out of that industry.
Besides, if you REALLY tried to license IT professionals based on competence, the entire industry would collapse - just like most industries. Incompetence is the norm, because you only find competence in the top ten percent of anything - and the bell curve says most people fall below that.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Have you considered teaching?
If so, I think We are looking for pt computer science instructors. It beats driving a truck.
ctown at inverhills dot edu
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I can't have much sympathy. American companies have regularly outsourced to many countries such as Canada and Ireland, yet Americans only complain about Indians.
Mainly because the cost of living in India/China is much lower than Canada or Ireland, so there is no way that workers can compete on salary. And that it is possible for Americans to get permits to work temporarily in Canada and Ireland.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
And exactly how are you going to test "IT professionals" in a field that diverse? No single person on the planet understands all of "IT", and it's constantly expanding. I assume your proposed licensing exam will include everything *you* know about and nothing you don't know about. I'm a member of the IEEE, and I've looked at the material for their proposed software engineering "license", and it's just not comprehensive, IMHO.
Myself and my hard core old school group of friends call these .
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ppl suits, because they are typically "dressing for success"
and their technical expertise is at best a joke
We have 20+ yrs hands on experience with computers, and remember
mag tape and punch cards . These ppl think there has always been a mouse
When you have someone making decisions about technical material
and they themselves only have a shallow surface level understanding
of it , you are going to get a giant mess
Technical ppl are usually not allowed into management because they
"talk over the heads" of the suits . Ego in check, and fear of
being made to look like idiots , the techie types are kept out
of the boardroom for their tendency to be blunt and call it like
they see it
Techies make this fear real by being blunt, and calling dumb
ideas dumb with no sugar coating, and no window dressing
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, we call it a duck
The boardroom wants slick willys that can sweet talk take sweet
deals, and and resell the same subroutines in different forms
and different apps as separate packages
They want plastic personalities and want a professional image
not some bulky linux admin pagan that dresses like he got
his clothes from goodwill
Even though more often than not that is the person at the "soul"
of the operations, keeping the blood of bits pumping
Yet the garbage man of the company gets paid like a garbage man,
because it is a thankless job at "most" companies
If it is a Engineer owned or built company it is usually better,
but even companies like Cisco grow to a point where they
lose their tech management soul, and become victims to the
marketing mantra of maniacs
The sales rep, marketing rep, management type goes out and sells
that image and a bag full of promises they "forgot" to mention
to the technical ppl til a week before deadline
The suits are not about good engineering, they are about lubing up
the customer for a first rate reaming
It comes down to the usual common denominator, "money", period
They want to make the customer think they are getting a great deal,
and then find the best way to get as much money as they can,
and lock themselves into that company so getting rid of their
solution is as painful as possible without making it obvious
The marketing types and management types in alot of places are
about image, and giving the feel good, and ego massaging, and
orchestrating a grand play to make things look like they
should to the other suits in the other companies . Think of it like poker
The company that can balance this, have good engineering, and
good slick willy management wins
I hate it, and I decided to work for myself, and be a oncall
technician that does onsite and drop off
Corporate drones, watch Office Space, it makes TOO much sense.
Tech corporate insanity can suck the life out a person
May your god whomever he be, save you from this fate
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I recently graduated from the University of South Carolina with an ME in Compuyer Engineering. My studies were funded with competitive academic fellowships, and my GPA was a 3.95. Previous to the ME program, I worked in IT for 4 years, in tech. support and programming.
....
Now I am looking for jobs, and I have been flatly told by recruiters that my degree *does NOT matter*. My grades, my theoretical and coding experience in school, my side projects on the web (I focus on web and db programming), and in particular the long and detailed record of the fact that I am intelligent and adaptable do NOT matter.
All any employer here wants is for me to fill out a checklist of skills. How many years of (on the job only) experience I have, etc. I feel that I have no choice but to lie, in order to get on the job, where I am sure I will be fine.
I have some hope of companies like Brainbench levelling the field, so that those of us with skills can prove it, whether we have the many years of work experience they require or not. On the other hand, one company down here required several Brainbench tests just to get to the interview stage. The scores I was told to get for two of them would have been the number one score in the state. This is just about as ridiculous as the people asking for 5+ years of J2EE experience.
Grr.
On the other hand, a company that actually pays its employees decently and treats them like real people has a chance to snap up real talent in this market. If only I could *find* that mythical company
I've been telling people this for at least the last 3 years or so! The I.T. industry is basically "melting down" into a skillset employers just expect you to have, coupled with another skillset they claim to be hiring you for.
I watched it happen at a previous job, where the engineering staff were told to start picking up books on Visual Basic and Java programming, and actually started spending half of each week working along-side our software development team. Those who didn't show interest in "playing along" ended up looking elsewhere for work.
Not long afterwards, the "I.T. support" staff was cut - with much of the rationale being, "We've got things to the point now where most users just have thin clients on their desks, and all the control is done at the server side anyway. The engineering staff is the one group of real computer "power users" left who need support on their workstations, and they're learning to do it for themselves now."
To be honest, this trend disturbs me, because I've always considered myself a "hard core I.T./computer" guy. I really don't like math, nor do I really have any desire to try to get into another field at this point in time (in my 30's already). If I was talking to someone just going through college, I'd probably advise them to only get into computers secondarily, with a different primary career choice. But for folks like me, I don't see a real bright future.... No matter, I'm pretty stubborn, and if I become like one of those old TV repairmen still looking for old sets with tubes that need swapping out - so be it. That'll be me.