Slashdot Mirror
Tech Turnover Rate Lowest Since The 80's
cimmer writes "USA Today, the San Jose Business Journal and the suspiciously captivating monitor thing in the elevator are reporting the results of a survey conducted by Aon Consulting that states voluntary turnover in the tech industry is at 8.9%, 'the lowest in the history of the surveys, which date back to the mid-1980s'. Given all of the talk about an economic turnaround, are we looking at a potential tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market? Aon seems to think so. Interestingly, the results of this study are released just as CNN.com reports that personal income growth is at its weakest in two years. Also of note is a discrepancy in the reported sample size, with USA Today stating the results are based upon input from 595 companies while the Business Journal reports that over 950 companies participated."
There was a global sig of releif.
We made it through guys! Good job!
Where once great herds of IT professionals roamed the valley, only a few clusters remain here and there, each skittish any remote lightning flash of resource realignment or rumble of offshoring.
It is worth considering tho, that Information work is a relatively new thing and where many businesses once spent nothing on it they now would have a staff or contractor responsible for making sure all their technology continues to go and many businesses are still getting a grip on what the right size of commitment should be for their IT needs. As long as staff have improper technology for their particular function thanks to poor assessment of need, there will still be wiggle room for more (or less) tech staffing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
my boss just caught me reading this ariticle on Slashdot and told me to hit the road. Thanks a lot.
Hey, what's this pink piece of paper stuck to my paycheque?
Yeah, right.
Does it mean we've passed the spike... or that most of us have realized that the grass really isn't any greener on the other side of the fence. Of course, I might just be bitter as I found out I'm going through a reorg where I'll go from developing new services to patching services. WooHoo, excitement city.
I've been working as a Technical Support specialist because all you College-educated people stole my job as a Fry Cook.
It's a joke, Honest!
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
I attribute this to the metaphorical "settling of the water". In the 90's people with absolutely no interest in computers, as well as those with no skill, started saturating the market to grab a quick buck. It the past few years, even those with skills have trouble finding employment, and most find themselves working helpdesk at a telemarketing firm, or as a webmaster/designer for a porn site. Those who are still here are the ones that do it more then just for the money... because it is what we were born to do.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
People are staying put until the market sorts itself out. Nothing to see here...move along.
The funny thing is that wages and salaries were up in July, but other sources of personal income were down enough to reduce total personal income. From NASDAQ/Econoday:
But importantly wages and salaries did rise in the month, up 0.4 percent. Other sources of income weakened, including Medicare reimbursements, rental income, and interest income.
... until the next wave.
;)
Tech folks I know are happy to have jobs, even if they're not happy with the actual jobs themselves. Nothing exciting is really happening, and nothing that pays as well as boring, uncreative tedium.
All I know is my corp will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
OTOH, my UT2004 sk33l7_ have improved quite a bit, over what was an admittedly poor baseline
Our director is (rightly) expecting an exodous in droves if the economy continues to brighten. Some of them are employees who just aren't of the "lifer" variety. Others feel used and abused. A few more might really believe there are greener pastures.
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
that's because we're all too demoralised to... oh feck it, I can't be bothered.
Tech in Canada has been non-existent for almost 4 years now (read: tech-bust and 9/11). I only see activity in Texas and some of the other larger states. I honestly think we're in a holding pattern until the Canadian and American economies go through a recession (another 5 to 10 years). Save your pennies folks.. or get into something else. The funny thing is that there has been so much shrinkage that most of the technically sound folks out there are holding on as best they can.. yet the companies want to move forward.
Personally, the pressure has been on for 3 years and I am burning out... are you? That doesn't bode well for the tech industry again.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
I'm on the verge of moving to the US from the UK, to work in silicon valley. The salary is very attractive too, so there's obviously *some* improvement happening. The same company wanted the same thing to happen roughly 18 months ago, and it just wasn't on back then... This is all assuming I can get an H1B in time, of course...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
...is that the low turnover rate indicates seniority positions that survived the crash. More recent tech graduates are likely flipping burgers (or worse), whereas most of the older technical guys I know are still gainfully employed. All the young 'uns got burned in the startup business, whereas the geezers are mostly in much more stable tech environments, thus the turnover is low (since in this business "old" is still well before retirement age). Of course, this is just MHO, I could be missing something obvious.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Both numbers are correct. In fact, about 40% of companies polled had no IT employees at all. (hahaha)
.nosig
I've at-least been able to download further Fry Cook education literature from eDonkey: master SpongeBob SquarePants. When my ex-boss comes calling me at my cubicle laughing at my slumber, I'll tell him I'll be better educated this time around.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
I really should update my signature...
It took me a VERY long time to get back into IT. Prior to this, I worked two other non-technical jobs only after unemployment and the two extensions ran out. During the period of unemployment I can't recall ever actually getting an interview. The crap-job I took at the airport let me to another job less crappy. During that job, I interviewed only a few times. Almost two years later I get this one. It's not the best paying IT job I've ever gotten but it's with a good company and it's stable. I'm not going ANYWHERE. That's the lesson I've learned from my previous years of job-hopping...
Where I work, it was mostly contact worker 70% to direct hires 30% on the order a couple thousand people. They decided to retain some of their intellectual capital that was running in and out the door (sometimes to competitors) and swap the percentages contract 30%, direct 70%. Direct employment is more stable here, better benefits/job security, etc. Something like that as an industry trend may contribute to lower turn over.
Speak truth to power.
When my current Technical Support boss beggs me to not leave, I'm going to exclaim; I was attracted to you first, but after that it's been cold fries since you firewalled the ports in the 6000 block. "I'm going back to the green pastures of employment where I can have my fun and eat it too!"
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Basically, I don't trust these numbers because of who was polled. This was a survery of businesses- and if this recession has taught us anything it's that prvate industry can't be relied on to tell anybody the truth about employment- or even actually the truth after they hire you. My suggestion to anybody taking advantage of growing employment in the tech industry is make sure that severance pay is written into your contract and that it covers at least 6 months of job searching level lifestyle.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'll be making a switch as soon as I can get my own business up to the point where I can support myself. Which hopefully will be in about a year. Maybe 2.
- Dependence on Chinese and Japanese foreign banks to prop up the dollar - how long can ths go on?
- reliance on non-sustainable consumer debt spending - how long can ths go on?
- realization that our great material life style will naturally slide a bit as third world countries out-compete us in some areas
That said, I am an independent consultant, and it seems to me that business has really picked up in the last year - so I don't think that it is all doom and gloom on the economy - it is just that things might not be as great as they once were.-Mark
I wonder how big of a salary cut it's ok to take, if you think you'll like the new work better, or if the company sees more stable, or has other intangible benefits...
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
There's a nut loose on the keyoard.
Here's a better link for those who want to read this story and not go blind.
1 69214&threshold=-tid=187&tid=126&tid=98&tid=21 8/
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/31/
Moderators!!!! Yellow on a white background is a bad thing!!!! Take a hint.
Fear is the enemy; the one true enemy. {Sun Tzu-The Art of War}
When you laugh at me, you laugh at CowboyNeal; because he's my prime client. Jared at Subway nearly starved to death until the Masonic Alliance of Food Preparers suggested baking lard into the subway bread given to Jared at Subway so his poor sould wouldn't waste away. It's Fry Cooks like us that keep America well-fed. Jared at Subway nearly starved because you College-educated ignoramouses pushed the hard-working people out of our industry.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
I actually just switched jobs a week ago. Took a mediocre IT job two years ago after a round of layoffs, and just stayed because it was work and there was nothing else available. Now I found a decent tech company that is a much better fit.
Doesn't it make sense that a low turnover is correlated to a low wage growth?
I don't think it's common place to get big increases in salaries without moving on to a different job. Seems to me that most employers sqwauk at giving out even miniscule inflation raises (2 - 3%) where as, often times I find hiring employers are willing to pay more "for the right person", who will usually only leave their job if they get a better deal.
I don't know many people who would leave for a lower paying job, unless there is some esoteric reason, or much better overall compenstation package (i.e. health benefits, private yacht, etc).
Which gets back to my point, the only way to get large raises is to move around. Remain stagnant, and your raises will too.
Today will be another bad day for SCO.
Can't be too good for the employees either. They haven't many more people to shed.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
those with skills ... find themselves working ... as a webmaster/designer for a porn site.
And those are those the Lucky, geeks, because they are working, right?
Basically all the disgruntled folks will pack their shit and walk (that's another side of fire-at-will contracts, I can just pack my bags and go if I want, too). This is great for everyone. Senior people will get more interesting jobs, low level people will regain the opportunities to get to senior level (hard thing to do if senior people don't go anywhere from the team). People who are in IT by mistake and who managed to survive layoffs will finally find other jobs. Everyone will get better salaries, bonuses, you name it. I don't expect anything dramatic, though. But any bonus is better than NO bonus.
All of this, of course, assumes that the economy really picks up, which is something I'm not seeing.
What a load of BS.
The 90's people have already left. It's now 2004 Are you still going to use them as an excuse for world ills when 2007 rolls around?
"Those who are still here are the ones that do it more then just for the money... because it is what we were born to do."
People aren't "born" into their professions. Another reason has nothing to do with "love" and more to do with the choice between no job, or hanging onto the one you have. That's not "love" that's survival instinct.
I'm making 50% less than I was three years a go. I can barely make my house payments. All of my spare time has been going into getting a college degree. My current employer offered me a 'gracious' 3% raise last year mixed with criticism for not following all of the rules (this compares with 10% annual raises and 10% yearly bonuses plus praise for being a maverick). Gee.. Do you think that a change in the hiring market may affect my employment. Yes... It IS all about ME!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Yup folks, the musical chairs is over. If you get up, you risk being replaced very easily. The big bucks, billionaires for Bush types are calling the tune, and the workers must dance. American labor mobility will return when there are restrictions placed on America's wealthiest companies abilities to import special "indentrued servant" style labor.
Considering slashdot is a indispensable resource when working on IT, i would say the new IT theme colours on slashdot are reason enough for many people to switch activity.
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
This was posted earlier today.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I've always thought of how many mis-placed people there have been and learned from their experience as though an Elementary School. When they feel abused and diminished because the Superior Official employs them for tasks menial in contrast to their previous accomplishments, the stain of their employment history settles in hard to depression. I know this one guy who was a Programmer and couldn't secure a Technical Support job as I did; being layed-off as I, he fell flat on his face in the various construction businesses and having not much physical strength yet above-average Building Code knowledge he nearly rotted away his career for almost 8 years. He didn't know the right people to get re-hired, in addition to this wicked California job resession, I'm happy he got a job back in Engineering and is only 2/3 the job he once held.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
I hate to break it to the slashdot crowd, but people do get legitimately fired.
They also get legitmately let go do to better staffed businesses that are more tech savvy.
Other reasons tech jobs are lost:
Better quality computers
Better maintenance habits by users
More automated processes on computers
Hardware is pushed more consumer oriented (very noticeable in networking)
A lot of IT workers just don't do good jobs and have bad rapport with staff they serve
A lot of IT workers do their job for money and not for enjoyment - money & job logevity come if you enjoy what you do
Some people are actually realizing Microsoft and maintenance are not necessarily the best solution and turing to Macs or specialized devices to do work = need for less IT staff
I like how the author of the article had to get the subtle Bush bashing in the comment.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
This article pretty much states the obvious for me-
I'm in a job, working for a fairly stable place. I've had friends who had 5 or 6 jobs in the past 5 years. They've gone from the high of "wow, I'm makin' a shitload of money!" to the low of "damn...unemployment won't even cover my car payment".
Until things get really good, I won't be leaving my SECURE job.
So nobody else will be sitting in my chair (turnover) until you pry my sweaty, greasy ass off of it.
No reason to lie.
It's hard to be impressed by "lower turnover" when there so many people not eligible for turnover because they're still unemployed...
At first glance I thought you said Fry's something [I'll leave the other word up to other imaginations]
If you're looking for a job, here's their online app.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Also of note is a discrepancy in the reported sample size, with USA Today stating the results are based upon input from 595 companies while the Business Journal reports that over 950 companies participated.
The 950 number is the correct one, according to the AON Press Release and the (AON-owned) Radford Surveys benchmark study overview.
Not sure where USA Today found their numbers...
USA Today makes the distinction that it was 595 tech firms that had the 8.9% voluntary turnover rate.
The Business Journal states that it was 950 companies that responded, but even it states that the 8.9% voluntary turnover number was arrived ONLY from Tech Companies (i.e., not from ALL the companies that responded):
From the Journal Article:
Voluntary turnover among surveyed tech companies is at 8.9 percent, according to Aon's research.
Let's read a little closer before making assumptions, shall we?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Right here - "Chief executives at U.S. companies that shipped jobs overseas won a 46 percent pay hike last year, more than five times the average CEO raise, while ordinary workers' paychecks barely budged, a study showed on Tuesday."
I have no idea how they can find that the tech turnover rate has declined..
It's all Bush's fault! There is NO increased income! None! It's all bad! It's allllllll bad!!!
Whew, thanks. I was possesed by the collective spirit of Slashdot there for a second.
Wait...spoke too soon! Feel....Microsoft.....rant....coming on.......
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It the past few years, even those with skills have trouble finding employment, and most find themselves working helpdesk at a telemarketing firm, or as a webmaster/designer for a porn site.
Why would a programmer do something... like... oh, wait: You're not talking about technical work at all. You're just talking about sysadmins, web-monkeys, VB/Perl users, or whatever.
Well, duh! Folks like that are a commodity. There's no reason to hire one rather than another. Anybody who can tie his shoes can power-cycle an NT box, and anybody who can do that can power-cycle a Linux box or a Solaris box. You could teach a dog to do that.
Tech jobs are a different situation. Those of us who have actual skills are doing fine. It's there that the quick-buck crowd are falling off the sled. The "hire any warm body" days are over in development teams: It's now very difficult for a sysadmin, Perl monkey, or the like to pull an "upwardly mobile" and BS his way into a real job. If by some chance he succeeds anyway, he'll simply get fired in a month or two, because managers can no longer afford to keep Linux kids and other incompetents around just to pump up the head count.
But none of that affects me at all; I switched jobs a year ago and it was a breeze. Better yet, I don't have to put up with the team hiring any flatliners to increase the head-count. I always hated that during the boom years: You'd have to work with these idiots who simply couldn't do the job, so if you weren't wasting your time fixing their code, you were wasting your time trying to shunt them into some corner of the project where they couldn't do any harm. Usually, the trick was to tell them to "research the issues involved in doing a Linux version of the product". That was perfect: They loved that stuff. They'd go off and chase their tails forever. For some reason, all those flatliners were big Linux fans (you know the type: The ones who try to cast a char * to an integer and can't figure out why they keep getting the address of the string, rather than the result of strtol()).
I can't imagine why they bothered posting this silly story on Slashdot; the situation it's talking about doesn't have any effect on technical people at all.
"I've been working as a Technical Support specialist because all you College-educated people stole my job as a Fry Cook."
Were you able to adjust to the paycut alright?
I'd also find it interesting to see the average age of employment, change in marital status and size of family. Perhaps the number of turnovers goes hand in hand with my theory that the tech sector jobs are now held by an aging crowd.
In the early days of a tech career it is certain that they will move to find better paying and better suited jobs. But as the tech gets older they're putting more value on stability. With mortgages, children's college tuitions and retirement being more of a factor it leaves less room to take the risks of moving from company to company.
Put simply I don't find the one set of numbers very conclusive.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Just like another urban legend that many jobs will go unfilled as the aging boomers retire and insufficent genX and genY follow. Well, boomers are going to hang on forever as their pensions, social security and health insurance disappears as well as everyone elses.
That's because there are almost no open tech jobs left. eventually, there will be no jobs here in the us. oh, that's right, that's the way you stupid Libertarian/Republican Dog-Eat-Dog/Survival-Of-The-Fittest jerks prefer it. They both believe that you are worthless if you're poor. to them The rich does no wrong, and the poor can do no right. So fsck the Libertarian & Republican Parties.
Sheez, yes. Major league burn out. Some days I dream about getting fired. I don't spook at the distant rumble of outsourcing, I relish it. Resource allocation? Go for it. Hasn't happened yet. I even told them one day, straight up, that I was really burned out and needed a break. Didn't work. Some days I feel guilty that I'm not more appreciative. Anyone else?
I've got a non-tech sideline ready to go but I think it would be fun to start a firm to help people transition off of MSFT products to Linux/OSS and provide contract administrative services. That would be fun and profitable.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Working as an Engineer as I, before my Technical Support specialist job, was a verry full-filling and difficult job. Engineers are the persons innovating new technology, while the pseudo-Engineers with MCSE certification are the persons implementing or slandering the fruits of your labors by holding false-authority. Can you imagine how much techology some corporations run through and have utterly destroyed because they didn't comprehend the profit increase (that means saving money too). It makes many people wonder how Microsoft profits with having the highest specialized Technical Support inter-company employment per capita for its Operating System and Application software against other companies whos products don't need many technical support agents because their product serves its purpose as stated on their retail box.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Well, if he had stopped Osama -- but hindsight is about 20/40, and you did put a smiley on your joke.
There's no jobs. Thanks to outsourcing our economy is in shambles (and getting worse daily). If you're lucky enough to get an IT job, you keep it. Otherwise you get stuck with blue collar work (until Bush's work visa program hits, then expect to lose those jobs too).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Supply-side economics is grossly overhyped, though less so than Keysianism, socialism, or any number of other voodoo nostrums, but your attempt at linking cause and effect is pathetic.
There's a point where the political-partisan mentality descends from "dumb" to "vegetative", and you've found it. Congratulations. You should ask Ann Coulter out on a date; the two of you would have a lot to talk about.
I was forced to move out of my apartment and into a condominium. In a condominium, you can't just call the manager down the hall and tell her to pull up her skirt and get on her hands and knees to fix the Garbage Disposal Unit. I'm the one bending over (missionary style) to fix that noisy thing.
I am the nightmare of nightmares.
Contractors are in high demand because of corporate emericas addiction to "project planning" (instead of IT Planning in general) and thus i highly doubt that querying corporate america is reflective even of a few percentage points of the entire market.
Those with highly demanded skills usually have a high turnover. I quite being "full time" myself because all i could get was a year, maybe 2 in full time before the job was turning me into something i wasn't.
Full timers these days usually get stuck "in the groove" usually doing more political and beaureucratic office day-to-day busy work rather then "technical implementation or design".
Sorry about my spelling but my allergy medicine is frying my b rain today.
It's just a matter of time anyway, but if the economic picture gets that much brighter I'm definitely out the door. I love my job, but I'm tired of living where I do. I know well over a dozen other geeks who either had to relocate somewhere they didn't like or indefinitely postpone plans to go elsewhere. The poor economic conditions made a dislike of the location seem like a silly reason to leave/not take well-paying jobs.
Pretty much all of us still want to be wherever it is we wanted to be when everything went down the crapper. If the opportunity knocks, I'm sure most of us will answer.
Game... blouses.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...how this affects the Bush campaign.
Oh ye of little experience..."Why just yesterday, a study came out showing that in the tech industry..mmhm the tech industry, job security is at its' all time highest."
Most companies are loath to admit how many jobs they are sending overseas. They might brag to Wall Street and other lack of clue people about "reduced costs" but they still hide the offshoring in public and to government for fear of a backlash.
The accounting is simple but not honest. They don't move a job, they retire someone and open a "different" job overseas. They can then say they simply did not hire someone they did not need anymore. The fact that job descriptions are identical because the company still does the same things does not bother those who fear public reactions.
Government statistics pick it up as a contraction in various sectors, but even that masks a lot of information.
The Revolution was not televised and things are getting worse.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I doubt this means anything much about whether the market is turning around. If anything it could be more along the lines of just the fact that its a pain to get tech jobs now and people are afraid to lose them.
Presently here, but not there.
That brings up a question: they say that 8.9% is the lowest voluntary turnover since the early 80's, and that the involuntary turnover of 11.2% is lower than it was in 2001. That's hardly a fair comparison, since the 2001 number would be the highest rate (or nearly so). What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
>There was a global sig of releif.
.sig.
>We made it through guys! Good job!
>> Great! You've given me an idea for my new
Chair Air Freshener is already patented. Stop pretending you're in a Tech support job all day and get back to mixing that dohnut mix or you're fired!
-Your Boss
"Neil Bloomgarden, a tech-support worker in New York, has begun job hunting after seven years with the same firm. He says he's burned out by 10-hour days and uncertainty caused by a merger. "You're going to see a lot of people start looking because the economy is starting to pick up," he says."
I guess Neil just became an involuntary statistic. I'm really hoping he didn't use his real name.
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
The more projects my company outsources, the more they find they NEED the techies in house ... We have the same number of techies, but mostly we oversee outsourced projects ... and the company isn't going to let go of the only people who understand the technical processes and who can communicate with the contract workers what is needed.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
welcome to 4 months ago.
The republican agenda is to push many in the middle class down into poverty - making people nervous about their livelihood (not to mention up-and-down terror alerts to generally make people scared) is the ideal formula for maximizing the profits for the rich.
Egad, you're on to us!
Next he'll suggest the tried and true solution of Carternomics ...
The old axiom back when I was in college (96-00) was, "If you don't change jobs in the tech field at least once every 3-4 years, you won't move up." The idea behind it was that after 3-4 years on a particular job, your skills should have increased to the point that the technology sector deemed you 'worthy' of a higher-paid, higher-responsibility job.
Of course, this got blown out of the water in the Burst Bubble(tm). Techies like myself have hung onto a job (if we have one) if it's stable and provides because there aren't any other options open sufficient enough to make a logical move. I've seen a few jobs that look more interesting than mine but the pay rates still aren't in the neighborhood of what I would like to have to make a move (pay or benefits, for that matter).
So, the economy comes back. Businesses level off and then start expanding again, hopefully this time at a bit more controlled level. Jobs will start opening up and depending on the saturation of the market, wages will go up for techs. The offshoring of tech will only continue to a particular point; it'll become part of the factor that will control wages and job availability, so it's less likely to bounce back quickly. But the time will come when jobs will open up that are at a pay level, benefit level, and stability that sensible techs who have been sitting tight will feel OK to make a move.
And they will. I just don't know as though you're going to see a large rush of this happening, as most of us are gunshy and are unlikely to follow in mad chaos on the latest trend again. (I said most...there'll always be the few oddities.)
Blog,Twitter
Well, this is an interesting theory and I say Aon is right, however, partially. The oversight he's making is that there aren't even enough techs to justify what little turn-overs there are because our jobs are constantly being "redefined" then out-sourced. The rate of turn-over relies on people actually leaving the company where a position is hosted. If my job (IT position) were redefined as virus removal of the bathroom floor, I'd still have a job, my title, but my function would be entirely different. Since I work in a different department, maintenance, I am technically no longer referred to as a technician, therefore, my job is eliminated and I become a statistic of the "blackhole". This is an entirely legal practice and is being carried out all over the nation.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I feel truly sorry for anyone desperate enough to be suckered by their spiel about how, with their training, "anyone can land a well-paid job in IT".
I myself feel truly sorry for anybody who can watch those commercials without realizing that somebody there is making a buck -- and that you can do the same, if you'll just get out of your rut and chase the money down like a man.
Nobody has a divinely-guaranteed right to keep on doing the same thing in the same job at the same salary (adjusted for inflation) until Hell freezes over. What makes you think otherwise? Jesus, 10,000 years ago, people had to KILL ANIMALS if they wanted a square fucking meal! You have NO idea how easy an unemployed web-monkey's life is compared to the lives of his distant ancestors. They NEVER had the option of showing up at 9:00, going through the motions until 5:00, and then sitting on their fat cro-magnon asses in a bar until closing time. They had no welfare, no National Health, no retirement fund, no defense establishment, no cop on the beat, no nothing. Just raw balls and a pointed stick. Yet still they conquered. Compared to any sort of absolute baseline, the risks you're required to take and the struggles you're required to engage in are nothing, they're kids' stuff -- and you're still complaining! Well, that's bullshit. You are a human being, evolved to struggle like a motherfucker against the forces of nature and the morons in the next cave just to stay alive. You are the heir of thousands of generations of brutal, remorseless killers, filtered by the magic of natural selection to be more brutal and remorseless every generation. It is well within your capabilities to go out and wrest a living from the world. So you have to learn a new skill, be it forging checks, peddling your ass, teaching worthless "skills" to hapless dole-suckers, or whatever -- so what? Would you rather learn a new skill, or take on a cave bear in your skivvies with nothing but a stone axe? Given that you are DESCENDED from people who DID take on that cave-bear AND WIN (we drove those toothy fat fuckers into extinction, did we not?), should the former option really be all that intimidating? No, dammit! NO!
To sum it all up: Getting ahead may require a little more effort and thought than it did five years ago, but by any sane standards, the amount of effort and thought it requires has merely increased from "zero" to "microscopic". BFD.
So quit whining like a little fucking girl and GO OUT THERE AND WIN! WIN! KILL! KILL! KILLLLL! Holy shitcocking fucking cockshitter, you fool, in the paleolithic EVEN LITTLE GIRLS HAD TO KILL TO LIVE!
People are really disenchanted with the startup circuit. You can't climb the ladder without job changes, but for every thousand engineers who hop jobs, only one ever climbs the ladder. Also people figured out ... again ... that stock options are worthless. The 16 hour days enforced by these startups and lack of raises caught up with the supposed stock options.
If turnover ever increases again like everyone says it will, it's not going to be because of economic improvement. Companies are slashing benefits like nothing else. Health care is gone. Vacations are gone. Raises are going away. As companies start to feel that they're being populated by freeloaders they're going to put pressure on employees to get out of the nest.
In my company this is how the HR work:
1 Post ads.
2 Hire best person from ads.
3 Employee lied about abilities.
4 Employee stops working.
5 Fire Employee.
6 goto 1
In five years my company has only found one employee worth keeping. The rest just work for a week or two, then we have to beg them to do anything. Eventually we fire them and look for more. The problem with this is that we are so busy we can't keep up.
It's too hard to find good employee's. And it's very hard having to pay $500+ each time we advertise for help.
Try finding a webmaster that actually knows what standards compliant HTML looks like. We've been looking for over six months to fill that position.
The above is not worth reading.
Discussed in this recent article.
My experience has been that people with IT jobs that pay anything tolerable are glad they even have a job.
First, the .com and telecom overcapacity meltdown that led into the 2001 recession, then the growing outsourcing trend.
Meanwhile, "do more, better, faster, cheaper" mantra still plays with management and has continued to load too many additional chores onto people with no reasonable alternative in job choice. People have complained about the workload to a management that is completely out of touch with the problems and concerns of their employees.
As others have noted, the pent-up demand will lead to a spike in turnover if the economy ever gets into more than first gear.
More importantly, though, is what's happening right now.
Not a pretty picture.
If I were a CIO I'd be looking to make my org a nicer place to work right now so that my reputation for attracting and retaining good people would be in place when the herd starts to stampede.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Interestingly, there has already been vast speculation that there will be major layoffs after the Presidential election. HP for example, is planning on reducing staff in the United States and has agreed to wait until after the election to perform cuts in staff. All of the bits of news like this one are nothing short of propoganda...or food for starving wishful thinkers.
Slashdot [n.]: a) A website where somebody who can't even spell "you're" has the nerve to call rational people "somewhat intelligent". b) The zeroth circle of Hell.
Thanks for the chuckle, if nothing else.
When exactly will the economy in the U.S.A. turn around? Please provide a 3-sentence answer.
Really, I believe there are many more reasons for pessimism than there are for optimism. Why does everyone assume that this is just part of a cycle?
You sir, should be a speech writer. Inspirational, purely inspirational. Like Gold nuggets falling from the sky.
Carter had to deal with the lingering effects of the first opec oil embargo, and the immediate effect of the second oil shock. You think maybe tripling energy costs might have had an effect on the economy, dumbass? Carter was a decent guy. He was actually a strong president. Quiz: did he raise or lower the military budget? Quiz: did Reagan's increase in the military budget buy any useful stuff? Answer 1: raised. Answer 2: not really. The hugely expensive 600 ship navy was immediately trimmed, with unnecessary ships being mothballed. THey got built, delivering pork, but that's about it. Star Wars is still a pipe dream. He built the B1 bomber, which was an interim solution (of dubious effectiveness even in the plan) until the stealth bomber became available. It became operational AFTER the stealth...and don't even get started on the hammers and toilet seats.
After seeing the Republican shenannigans in Florida, and the complete lack of ethics and honor in Iranamuck, I find the "October Surprise" thesis plausible.
Reagan? Glad he's dead. Too bad for his family it wasn't a stroke and fairly quick, but that fake has a lot of innocent blood on his hands.
Then I ask them to send me 1000 lines of C++ they're proud of. Doesn't matter what it does; I just want to see how they code. Many of them look scared. "Is C OK?" "I'm not really that good at C++". "Can I use Python?".
When someone sends us code, I read it and send comments back. I'm looking for robustness. ("We have received your code sample. Your first buffer overflow is on line 52. Thank you for your interest in Team Overbot.") I'm looking for some basic knowledge of C++. I'm looking for a reasonable level of comments.
I think the number of good programmers out there is declining. There are hordes of sysadmins and low-level coders, more than ever, but most of them aren't that good.
Our company was recently acquired, and I asked about a tuition reimbursement plan (like the prior company had). I was told that in the current market, with low turnover, there is no need to offer such a benefit in order to retain employees. I was not so much shocked by the reason as by the fact that they actually freely admitted this.
But the only part of it that is Clinton's fault is that it didn't hit 3 years earlier. Clinton did a very good job of delaying the *normal*, *cyclical* recession much longer than anyone thought possible. Probably due to him getting religion on reducing the deficit and encouraging low interest rates. (Yes, we can thank the Republican Congress for that too. It was a team effort.)
Truth to tell, the current (just finished?) recession wasn't even that bad, expecially considering how long it was put off. Anyone who thinks it was, doesn't remember the 70s. (Thanx to Bush's short-term thinking, we might all get to relive them, though. Lucky us.)
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
Also, they identified three big gainers out of their pool of 50 leading outsourcers, and those three account for a big chunk of the increase (including Oracle CEO Ellison whose "compensation" went up 103,000 percent from roughly zero to about $40 million; I'm sure basically all of it was due to stock market changes).
FYI, I'm voting for Kerry.
Have you read my blog lately?
This concerted effort has been going on for decades actually. As Adam Smith himself said, the bosses and the investors have the time and the means and the smaller numbers, thus making it easier for them to organize.
Only now, with the internet, have many people other than academics been able to obtain and sift through enough information to determine that, yes, there is indeed a vast rightwing conspiracy, and it is the forefront of an information/propaganda war declared on the worker by the bosses/investors/corporations. It starts with think tanks and foundations, and end s with people like Rush Limbaugh.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Quite simply the US economy is not growing as fast as the new entrants to the workforce. A _best_ the rate of decline has slowed down a bit.
Computer professionals have been near the epicenter of recent manifestations of these problems-but many of the problems go back a long time.
I work for one of those massive outsourcing service providers based in Armonk NY and we in the service arm have not actually seen a new hire face who was not a summer intern since maybe 1998.
They tell me the median tenure of the overall workforce is now about 4 years, down from 9 in 1996 which leads me to think that turnover is actually quite high but then you have factor in the Geezer Effect as all the oldies retire out which just forces the average that much lower.
Lower churn? You mean ZERO churn.
Yes, as well as sometimes less than legitimately. But what exactly is your point? How does this relate to fewer people voluntarily leaving their jobs?
Most of these flashy online libertarian websites and magazines are funded by the think tanks and foundations, which are in turn funded by zillionaires like Scaife and by global corporations. Libertarianism is just a marketing ploy by the rightwing neoliberal foundations.
Check out the funding for the Reason Foundation, which puts out Reason magazine.
When most of these net-libertarians get 15 years older and finally realize they aint gonna rich, they will turn left, most of them. Good thing about net-libs is that they are fairly intelligent. And they do have access to the leftist writings on the Net, and with time and self-interested motivation, it will sink in. It sunk in for me. Finally...
For the few Net-Libs that DO get rich, they will of course not change their minds; they will just find good justifications for their hypocrisy. Humans are very at that....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Given all of the talk about an economic turnaround, are we looking at a potential tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market?
One can only hope.
On the other hand, I don't see any increase in hiring in the tech sector so far.
turnover is low! IT positions are now held by indentured H-1Bs which CAN'T change jobs.
Just what the companies wanted: workers who can't quit. Nice. Thank you Congress and Bill Clinton!
Did any of you warning about the cost of living notice that the OP is from the UK? I love the UK, and just as soon as I'm independently wealthy, I'll move there. The OP didn't say where he's from, but if it's the SE then the Valley will be cheaper (and better paid.) The "melting pot" comments are also off base. Yes, there are many people from far-off lands in California on H1B's but the situation hardly compares to London. And don't expect the food to be as good as a top-drawer gastro-pub. Your culture shocks are more likely to be caused by urban planning, because with the exception of a few (very expensive) enclaves, California is a strip mall writ large. (The physical geography is spectacular, of course; the opportunities for outdoor recreation are fantastic.)
The comments about border hassles, however, are spot on. Quite apart from the current security hysteria, coming in to "steal jobs from Americans" often causes problems. Oh, and say goodbye to your five weeks of vacation.
"The good reader is a rarer swan than the good writer."
Bravo! Best thing I've read all day.
What I want to know is, what was the lowest involuntary turnover rate?
From the article:
This marks the third year in a row that voluntary turnover has dropped, and this figure is the lowest in the history of the surveys, which date back to the mid-1980s.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
But I'm optimistic.
thank god the americans are so friendly, like they are to this British guy. I would love to have your advice and opinions when I move to Silicon Valley, when I get my H1B this year. You guys already make me feel so welcome, with all this help you are giving this British guy. So all those stories about americans resenting H1B holders as taking away american jobs are completely untrue.. look how welcome this British chap is.
and he too does not have a job lined up - he's getting a vanilla visa from some no-name comany which will then ask him to look for jobs. So he is also not specifically qualified for a job, and his company too is just creating a dummy job to get his visa approved. Still everyone likes him. Americans are sooo nice.
Writing AI apps in C++ is like cleaning a battleship with a toothbrush.
After graduating with a university degree in math/computer science in 1994, I went to work as a sys-admin at an ISP. Didn't make much money there, but figured it was good for my resume. Later moved out of town when the ISP was starting to fall (like all little ISP's did) and got a job doing Perl web developement, have moved around from start-up to start-up getting Perl or PHP programming jobs fairly easily... but never for much money. Three years ago I tired of jumping around from job to job, so I quit and starting working contracts only. It has been going ok, but not great. If I didn't have a wife working fulltime, I'd have to find a different line of work. Working with computers is the one thing in life I love, but there does not seem be good opportunities there for me.
Meh.
http://ct.com.com/click?q=ce-Sd0CQMsmOoLEVSuTHWz2K eylfecRFor CEOs, offshoring pays
I know I'm paraphrasing here, because I'm at work and don't have the book in front of me.
Here you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place, and well if you want to get somewhere else, you ahve to run twice as fast!
At least if I'm fighting a bear, once I get done and am resting on his corpse I know I'm done. When you're fighting a bear, all that matters is how good of a job you do, not how many suck-ass brownie points you can score, not if you showed up a minute or two late for the fight, not if you call off and stay inside frequently because the facts are clearly illustrated.. if you can kill more bears than your neighbors, your neighbors are the ones that'll be eaten, not you.
we have no such cut and dry lines anymore, and I hate to paraphrase again but the only real motivation at work is to do just enough not to get in trouble. Of course, as someone who personally IS a few minutes late daily, that sucks. Doesn't matter that when I'm at work, I make damn sure that my main concern is doing work, nor that I do my work bettre than the vast majority of other employees -- nosir. Doesn't even matter that I'm a much more personable, intelligent and well-spoken (and well-dressed) individual than them. Basically? Hard work is NOT rewarded.
Take the company I work for. They're more concerned everybody shows up 10 minutes early than they are that anybody actually does any work once they do get here. What the hell? 7 hours 59 minutes of hard work would beat 8 hours of sitting around clucking like hens, but I don't know, I guess that's just me.
That's just the world we live in. It's easy to point to lcok-in times, but to actually observe someone's work and make a subjective analysis that they're a worthless POS? Litigation! Onos that's not fair!
As I'm sure you can tell I'm very sick of, and fed up with, the state of the job market. No room for good honest hard work, not a single good and decent manager to be found anywhere (they've all lied and blackmailed their way up the ladder step by step and now that they've made it to where they can order others around only use their authority to get out of actually doing any work themselves and instead just spend their time staring at walls and yelling at employees for taking 1 minute too long to walk back inside from a break, as they're on their way in from their own break that they left for 48 minutes ago.
Yes, that's certainly better than just throwin yourself in a cave with a bear and seeing who's better. At least with the bear, there's no stressful bullshit to deal with, just one angry bear that might eat you.
Please, GIVE me a bear to fight instead of all these worthless, petty stressful jobs.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
So right on: ... tech turnover spike as individuals leave positions they have stayed in only because of a dismal job market?
Couldn't have said it better. Far too managers in this business smoke crack and piss on their people to cover their asses. This business is best off without too much arogance and the best way to control it is with a good job market.
Just waiting my time to move on...and causually looking for a company with managment that wants output and not butt kissing competition.
OMG There are so many people siding with Bush on this post. Do you not find it ironic that these "happy data" are flying out at the time of the republican convention.
It's the same thing when Regan kept the prisoner CIA agent in jail until election time. Bang, all of a sudden he's found and Regan is a hero. Woohoo, everyone vote for him again. Conspiracy 101... it's pretty weak.
criticizing the economy? You economic girlie-man!
Yes, I'm contractor. I've been sure and steady at my current project. I've seen two guys come and go in this one year (yes, which I know is nothing to write home about), but they want stable dependable people where I work. I do my work, I do it good, and it doesn't break. Therefore I'm rewarded with a raise. I'm in the middle of trying to get my second raise for this year, but I'm not counting on hit since I've already had one this year already and I hear about people getting canned left and right, but I'm in a position that they need me. I'm doing the work of two people and they LOVE ME! THEY REALLY, REALLY, LOVE ME!
Manufacturing in the US did not start declining until 1975 or so. Service sector jobs may have been increasing too, but the bad news started in the mid 70s.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sure, boo hoo why feel sorry for the ex-dotcommie. I got a lot of that, especially from HR folk and interviewing managers.
.gov email address, owning root and learning how do to data modeling.
The fact of the matter is that I gave enough of a rats ass to see the value of relational databases and unix networks 16 years ago. When 99.99% of the world was happy to buy a dead tree book and use snailmail I was on my first
I actually 'got it' when gopher was still the coolest way to browse the waves of text and Archie was a decent way to do searches.
So, I got lucky and the rest of the world got a massive hard on over the internet. Next thing you know I'm jed clampett and people are throwing money at my feet to babysit rooms full of servers and bounce the occasional database... riiigghhtt
I worked my freakin ass off for 12 damn years and at the peak I was a project manager for a dot com incubator bankrolled by a major telecom. All of it without a fancy schmanzy deegree or nuttin.
And what do I get at the end of it? Stock that ain't worth 100th of what it once was and a bunch of semi-envious onlookers just waiting for me to hit bottom.
It's been one hell of a 'learning experience' and I for one have learned an awful lot about it.
Quick lesson... (bad side first)Companies do not give a rats ass about the well being of their employees, co-workers will not pause one second before knifing you in the back and the only person that you can really depend on is YOURSELF!
Oh yeah, on the good side... There are actually some decent people in this world (and I appreciate the hell out of them) there is no better learning experience than humility, and all of that technology that I have hard-wired into my being has become the life blood of the society that we live in.
Cheers!
p.s. if you are not spending time bettering yourself, then you might as well dig a shallow grave and lay down in it.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Really, I found Office Space really stupid and unfunny the first time I watched it.
But for some reason, it grew and grew on me... eventually I was forced to watch it again and loved it. Very odd. I think it was because of the prophetic qualities it offered, sort of like Hollywood went into a deep trance and suddenly offered a vision of the future in-between action movies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it's an Aeron, it might at least be worth an attempt to hose off... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Opec failed to hold the line on prices, the economy adjusted. Reagan reaped the benefit. It's interesting that you mention Carternomics, and say nothing about Fordnomics, (those "WIN" buttons sure squeezed the inflation out of the system!) or the wage&price freeze of Nixon. Or the voodoo econ of Reagan. It was just like the Vice-Toady Bush the Elder said, until he felt compelled to scrap his principles for a job. I will grant that the fantasist Reagan did have a distant, but existant relationship with reality in that he raised taxes when his experiment busted the budget.
And I know there's not much point in this discussion, but:
if you decide that the winner is whoever the referee says it is, then you are right, Bush won. Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, followed by the Supreme Court, said W. won.
if you feel that whoever received the most legal votes under Florida and Federal law won, then Gore won Florida by thousands of votes. It took a finely tuned machine to exclude enough Democratic votes while admitting Republican votes under the same criteria.
W took office, gotta grant that. Sure helped that his brother was in charge of the vote count, though, din't it!
It's interesting to see what happens to Republican rioters interfering with the democratic process, and compare it to the treatment of center/left-of-center demonstrators who are participating in the democratic process. The thugs sent by DeLay to stop the vote count are not even questioned, much less detained. Try to exercise free speech in Manhattan this week - and no, it doesn't count if you are limited to a free-speech pen.
Of course forcing people to get other offers may not be the best retention method...
Then again, so am I. It's pretty well established that in most environments, paleolithic hunter/gatherers (e.g. the !Kung in the Kalahari) work maybe 20-30 hours/week. This is not true above the Arctic Circle, of course, nor does it appear ever to have been true anywhere near it. Nothing's ever as cut and dried (that's "dried", not "dry"; please master your own native language before bragging about how you're smarter than your coworkers) as it looks on Slashdot.
At least with the bear, there's no stressful bullshit to deal with, just one angry bear that might eat you.
Dealing with angry bears is not stressful? And it's also not stressful that a bear may show up at any time? You don't necessarily get to pick when you fight the bear. This has been said before, but in most of the world "modern anxiety" has replaced stark terror, not some kind of nobly savage inner peace.
And once the bear's dead, you'll have to deal with tribal "office politics" where everybody in the tribe thinks he deserves a bigger share of the meat, and a week later you find out that Gak's been telling everybody he really killed the bear and you just stood around watching -- which is bullshit, but half the tribe believes him. Human assholery is not a modern phenomenon.
No such thing.
None of that really matters anyway. You missed my point. Perhaps I didn't make it clear enough. What you're doing is not analogous to killing a bear; it's analogous to letting the bear live in your cave, and just fending it off a bit with a sharp stick when it eats too much of your food. KILL THE FUCKING BEAR ALREADY.
In other words: You don't like being rained on? Then come in out of the rain.
As far as I can see, you are simply unable to imagine really taking charge of your own life. Can't find a better job in your field? Fuck it, find a new field. Take charge. I know it's not easy, but is it any worse than the way things are now? The importance of your caveman ancestors is that they were the cavemen who survived and bred when others didn't. They competed successfully in difficult conditions, and they had nobody to rely on but themselves and their immediate family. Modern people get used to the idea that if something goes wrong, some higher power will give a damn. Cavemen never had that. If they fucked up, they died, and nobody gave a rat's ass. They thrived anyway. These people were not helpless, and they were your ancestors. Therefore, you need not be helpless either.
You get props for trying to do your job well, but that's wasted effort, right? You're waiting for some higher power to give a damn, and you're in despair because none does. So don't do that. Put your energy someplace where it'll do you some good.
I know perfectly well that you may be in a situation where it is not, in fact, possible to improve things: Say you're working at the only employer in town and you can't leave town because you have to care for your aging and bedfast widowed mother or whatever. That would suck. But most people are a hell of a lot more free to pick up and leave than they think they are. I've done it. Best decision of my life. The devil you know seems less intimidating than the devil you don't know, but that may very well be an illusion, and there's only one way to find out.
Money is still moving through the economy. You can find a better way to grab some as it passes by. What have you got to lose?
> No room for good honest hard work, not a single good and decent manager to be found anywhere.
Obviously, I have no idea who you are, where you live, or where you have worked, but my first suggestion is to look for jobs that aren't inside cities. If you go to a smaller town, the management are generally less asshole-ish. Of course, you'll get lower pay, but you won't be forced to spend 2 grand a month for an apartment or mortgage.
> At least with the bear, there's no stressful bullshit to deal with
Nope, no bullshit. But watch out for bearshit, because you might slip & fall -- in a battle to the death, you don't want that happening. Also, if you are caught by surprise by the bear, there might soon be humanshit. Right in your pants.
"Bush bashing"... ?
Only an idiot who is disconnected from reality wouldn't be interested in Bush spending very little more time as president.
The foreign policy of the current administration will cause every
US citizen to be in greater danger, and please don't waste electrons disagreeing, because you would be wrong.
I must say, it is depressing to know that close to 50% of the American public are complete suckers and idiots ( these are the
people who think Bush has any business being president ).
Daniel Ellsberg did graduate work which involved game theory, and one of the conclusions of Ellesberg's work was that people will continue to believe what they WANT to believe, even after they are presented with FACTS which run counter to their beliefs.
People who would support Bush at this juncture are absolutely in the "don't confuse me with facts" group.
As for me, if Bush gets elected ( you'll notice I didn't say re-elected ) I am moving the hell out of the US, which will only become more of a police state than it already is.
I am American, and I am ashamed and frightened more of those who would "save us".
Bush is a goddamned liar, and a puppet for the multi-nationals who have so much to gain by his "policies".
That's all for now, because I feel sick even thinking about such scum.
good riddance.
/. post Bush bashing or Kerry bashing
I don't want to see a
Need some reading comprehension courses? The parent was asking about INvoluntary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE. html?ex=1094270400&en=69aeb3734cc007ee&ei=5070
Note that 680 late ballots favoring Bush were counted. Gore didn't challenge these were largely from military voters. You don't see that kind of scruple from the Bushies, who OPPOSED the counting of late, overseas, largely military ballots headed to Democratic-leaning counties.
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin. For example, using the most permissive "dimpled chad" standard, nearly 25,000 additional votes would have been reaped, yielding 644 net new votes for Mr. Gore and giving him a 107-vote victory margin."
The article says that election officials would not have uniformly applied any of the 7, so the most perfect recount - which I define not by the result, as the Supreme Court did, but as the most consistent effort to determine the expressed intent of the voter - would not have happened.
I'm a US citizen, but my last contract was with an H1b sweatshop, as the token citizen they have to hire to look like they really hire citizens (in a city with over 5000 unemployed programmers at least as qualified as I am, I was one of *3* citizens in a group of over 150 H1b's). I was there on a Friday evening about 5:15, when the supervisor came in and announced that there would be a mandantory staff meeting at 7:00 that evening. This sort of thing was fairly common, because the H1b slaves, er, contractors, knew that if they didn't submit to this sort of arbitrary abuse, they would be on their ways back to their home countries immediately. Most of them routinely put in more than 12 hours/day.
My reply, in front of all the slaves, er, H1b's, was, "If you want me to be present at a staff meeting, you can schedule it during working hours." Then I left, amid several gasps.
The next Monday, I emailed my supervisor, and his supervisor, a excerpt from the employee manual, which outlined the official working hours (8-5, M-F) At that point, I also quit putting in *any* 'casual' overtime (they explicitly refused to pay overtime on my contract).
It took them about 3 more weeks, but I could see they were carefully "documenting" reasons to fire me. After all, I was setting a really bad example for the serfs, er, 'guest' workers. But since I wasn't an H1b, they had to go to a lot more trouble to get rid of me. They started assigning me tasks that could not possibly be completed in normal 40-hour weeks, and then documenting my "lack of performance".
I quit. There are situations that I just find too sickening to tolerate, and this is one of them.
The company is a "well known telecom company" located in Irving, TX.
If you are coming to the US to work with an H1b visa, that's what you have to look forward to. Be sure to line up at least 3 roommates, so that you can afford to get an apartment walking distance from the job, because you won't be making enough money to afford the use of an automobile -- the 'good' salary they quoted you is not going to be quite as good as you expected. And the walk needs to be a short one, because you will be spending 12 to 15 hours/day at the job.
I'm now selling insurance for a living. Programming is going to be a McJob by the end of this decade, thanks in large part to US government policies that encourage the abuse of H1b workers.
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