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."
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.
... 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.
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!
There was a global sig of releif.
The single coolest typo I've seen on Slashdot ... ever!
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
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}
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
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.
Right on...I graduated college in '96, worked at a job with solid pay, good benefits, and insanely good job security for 3 years, then left to chase high pay at low security jobs...
Four jobs (two of which were layoffs) later, fast forward to July 2004...I'm back to same company I worked for out of school, now with the same security, better pay, and better benefits.
They're going to have to chase me out of here this time.
"He hated Mexicans, and he was half Mexican. AND he hated irony!"
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
*hand up* :-)
I have an IBM T41 w/ extended battery, 1gig DDR ram, and a couple other little features (dvd burner, etc.) while my boss is on a T20 which barely keeps up with all his power point presentations. For the most part (and FWIW) my company sees the value in giving the DEVs the new stuff (makes the geeks happy and software/VHDL/OrCad all run gobs faster (which really counts). Think of all the time I saved by compiling my app in under 2 minutes rather than 10 (have to compile many times a day to track down those little bugs).
Yup. . . . all that saved time to post on slashdot. . .
At least I'm a happy geek
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
*Raises hand*
Boss uses a 500mhz P3, a Thinkpad T40, and an Ultra 5. I use a 2.4ghz P4 and a 12" Powerbook. I don't have any particular use for an old Sun box, but we have tons of them lying around so I suppose I could take one or more if I felt the need.
Game... blouses.
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.
Somehow I get the feeling that they don't count the massive # of IT people forced to start contracting with a huge turnover rate. The IT people with permanant jobs that pay well are hanging on for dear life.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
And unfortuneately- this is why we can't trust the employer- and worse off, the credit will be just as shot up six months later when the company itself goes bankrupt because nobody was telling the TRUTH.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That is the logic that had George Soros and Warren Buffett shorting the dollar. So far they have been wrong - probably because other economic zones are also in a slump - but in the long term, the $ will have to drop.
Then again, think John Maynard Keynes: 'In the long term, we are all dead'.
As to the third world countries competing: At the moment it is not happening.
One of the reasons is that living to the WTO's rules make it for 'them' hard to stop expensive imports, while allowing 'us' to block 'their' exports.
Another reason will be corruption, which is actively supported by banks in the developed world. Those Nigerian scams have a real-life background.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
All those damned paper MCSEs out there spelled doom for a lot of us.
... they didn't care at all for his experience.
... everything can be made into garbage. If we techies save our money and stand up to this bullshit, we can preserve some dignity in our job base.
I'm going through that now. 19 years of computer work all over the map, and {WHAM} I get outsourced once I sought stability, and now they're telling me I have to get certified. Certified? To do the job I've done perfectly well so far?
I've decided not to comply. They'll have to fire me out of this job. A newbie came by yesterday and I got the chance to find out more about the company that we were outsourced to. As he said it, all they cared about during his interview was that he was A+ certified
I'm not going to let "them" discredit experience. After all, if 19 years experience with computers is worth nothing, then anything can be discredited. Certifications, degrees
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
you are not exactly on the target.
companies have been taking advantage of the "dismal" job market with their IT staff. Increasing workloads and duties while freezing or even reducing wages and benefits. This WILL come bac kto bite them hard in the arse. Personally, I'm the Single IT guy for 4 offices spread out on this 1/2 of the state. They also use me as the only web-app designer guy that knows how to interface to databases well (Oracle MS and MySQL databases one PHP program pulling data from all.) They have over the past 5 years increased my workload significantly with promises of "big plans" and the only reason I am still here was the dismal state of IT jobs.
I'm not the only one, many of the guys from the other states also feel this way. we are IT with IT wages asked to do Programmer's tasks on programmer timetables while expected to not let our regular duties suffer. When the tough times start relaxing there will be a mass exodus of highly talented people from this company. hell I've been pushed to the point that I'm willing to uproot my family and yank my child out of her school (7th grade, the WORST time to move in a teen's eyes) because I am sick of the crap.
Also, these companies are kicking themselves because I regularly tell other professionals that they should NOT work for the company I work for and fill them in on the details. Therefore giving the company a blackballed image making it harder to attract talented IT professionals at the dismal pay scale they have.
Almost 40% of the IT departments around the country that I have contact with all feel the same way... and that is a dangerous thing for any company to have a large portion of their technical staff disgruntled enough to be looking elsewhere and ready to jump ship.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If things really get bad, I expect the US to force (via sanctions if necessary) China to stop from valuating their currency against the USD. Right now China is booming, but they haven't had to put on the brakes because by tying their currency to the USD, they can avoid apparent inflation. China isn't having to make all the hard economic decisions that free markets have to make day after day. While Walmart and other companies continue to enjoy the low low wages for manufacturing, this will eventually catch up and work in the US' favour.
My $0.02 as a armchair canadian macroeconomist wannabe.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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.
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.
Here's a flipside. I took a steady corporate job 7 years ago, fresh out of 3 years of part-time pizza delivery, part time PC repair and Windows support.
I now have completed so much "career development," with 10 years of industry experience, that my resume places me around $65,000 for my regional job market. My company pays me more than 25% below that number. Most of this is from a cumulative 3% raise over the past three years, even as layoffs have happened, workload has increased, skillset has improved, and performance reviews have remained consistently "full to exceeds performance."
So now, with the market opening up, I find myself shopping for another steady, stable job. What really yanks my crank is that despite the games our HR has been playing with compensation, I have a lot of great professional relationships built up inside the company that I am now forced to abandon to acheive "market value." And with the potential for a 25% raise, that isn't much of a counter-argument.
When I sit down and speak candidly with my boss about my concerns about compensation, try to sell myself with what I am tasked with and how my client and peer feedback backs me up, I get a story about how a new compensation is coming... first it was October, now it is next April... and raises are "un-doable" until then.... and besides, teh market is rough, we're all lucky just to have jobs... as he plans the landscaping upgrades to his new-development home and getting ready to trade in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.
I don't have time for this BS. The same games get played in cycles at many, many companies. But for a 20-25% raise, I'm more than willing to play someone else's game. Maybe then I can afford "the BIG Hyundai" when this one's paid off. Steady, stable employment is good, but don't let them convince you that it's worth far less money for "security." We had layoffs again yesterday, and it can happen to you tomorrow for all you really know.
Say we laid off 20% of 100 people in 2001. Now we have 80 people doing the same job 100 people did. Again in 2003 when business didn't recover as quickly or as fully as some had banked on we laid off 11% of the remaining 80 people or about 8 people. Now we have 72 people doing the work that 100 people did 3 years previously.
Unless some of that original 20% had been rehired between the first poll and the second then we're still ultimately down about 28%, not apparently including any numbers from 2002.
Are we seeing businesses being more stable because they're doing better or because they've come to rest at the bottom of a falling tide?
I guess the bottom line is: Were we 28% overstaffed in 2001 or are we 28% understaffed after the layoffs? Or do we know?
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world. It's just a lie you've got to rise above. - John Mayer
Well I'm a little conflicted. /. user id, which puts you into the techno-elite. .75) is a pretty strong paycheck for a hardware tech with an A+ cert or maybe an MCSE with no 4 year degree, depending on where you live (Texas, Florida, Nevada, etc) or not (Boston, California, Seattle.)
.. ok maybe one of the top 12 worst things to ever happen to me was to find out what everybody else in the company made, and that I made less than several people that didn't have college degrees (women at that! how dare they!) Pissed me off for about two years after which I bailed, went to work for another company, struck gold in the tech boom, lost it all in the tech bust, long story short.
You have a four digit
But no mention of a college degree, which puts you with the also-rans (no offense.)
Forty seven comma five zero zero ($65k x
Here's a little secret : companies around you aren't hiring sys/admins or A+ techs at $65k a year. I don't care what the magazine survey says - everybody lies on those, pads them with the hopes of driving up the average so a) they don't feel so bad about what they are making, and b) they can show it to their boss and ask for a raise. You can easily knock 10% to 15% off that number to get closer to the truth. Want to know what companies are hiring for? Check the newspaper, Monster.com.
The worst thing that ever
Forget 'market value' and those surveys. If you are happy where you are, be happy. If you aren't happy, go get a new job. But whatever you do don't spend two years stewing about feeling underpaid, getting nothing done, before you go. Just go. If you can't find another job, then I suggest that you look for reasons to be happy with the one you got.
If you are good, do a little after hours contract work fixing Windows machines, networking, cleaning up spyware and viruses, etc. It would take about $100 per week in cash under the table to match that 20% raise after all the misc crap (taxes) comes out of that 20%. Who knows, you might get noticed by someone that works at a company that needs a better tech, and get hired at a 20% bump.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Actually, I'm finding that self employment is one of the better ways to keep Uncle Sam out of your pocket. Especially if you incorporate yourself, and contract yourself out through your corporation.
A simple example, say you have an "S" corporation. You contract yourself out at say, $100K/yr. But, you pay yourself only about $45K/yr, or an amount that is 'reasonable'. You only have to pay self employement taxes on the $45K. Yes, you pay double (employer half and employee half), but, you get to deduct the extra half you have to pay. And the rest of the money, the $55K doesn't get SE taxed...but, filters through on your personal taxes. Then, you can write off tons of your expenses...percentages of your rent/mortgage, utilities, etc if you work from a 'home office'.
Heck, I'm finding this is about the only way to keep most of your money.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Right now they're playing the "I can find warm bodies in India" card. I expect that one will start falling apart within a few months. Just hang in there and keep looking. :-)
It will be a lot longer than a few months, especially when all the CxOs see these numbers.
A few sound bites:
Greed-crazed MBAs will be trampling each other (and their employees) in their rush to the beach. Offshoring is not going to abate until a bunch of companies get severely burned and are forced to admit it publicly. Offshoring is the next boondoggle after the dot bomb bubble.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
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.
Please don't be ignorant. In 1950, manufacturing jobs were 30% of the US workforce. By 1975, it was 23%. Now it is 11%.
During that time, manufacturing has consistantly been around 15-20% of US GDP, due to increasing working productivity.