Slashdot Mirror
U.S. IT jobs Down 400K Since 2001
Cryofan writes "A research study shows that American information technology industry 'lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001, when the recession began, and April 2004.' Over half of those jobs - 206,300 - were lost after the recession was declared over in November 2001. In all, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500, between March 2001 and April 2004. And the bloodletting continues -- as
reported here on Slashdot earlier this year, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
india and china's economy growth is booming :)
no really. it's true.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Doesn't this belong in politics.slashdot.org? ;)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
and outsourcing to other counties doesn't help. ppl need to realize that the IT gravy train is over, it's time to put up or shutup. certificates and degrees no longer hold the water they once did. find a skill, hone it, and hunker down, cause it's going to get windy before there's another round of jobs with the 'wow' factor.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
While the IT job market has shrunk by close to 20%, how does the industry do? Was profit/revenue etc down by similar margin as well?
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
If you work in one of the industries of the nineteenth century, namely farming or steel, the politicians call you "regular Americans" and bail you out with subsidies and trade protections. If you are one of the far more numerous IT workers whose taxes bankroll the nation, you get a shrug and a suggestion you go back to school.
Any idea how many less jobs are available for new grads? This could have a turnaround effect on college degrees as well, something I don't think our pro-outsourcing President considered.
CB*(_)&
free ipod and free gmail!
a lot of roles were filled by bandwagon jumping idiots running IT into the ground with their lack of skills.
ill not shed a tear for them
First it was the Tech Bubble Then it was 9/11 Then it was Iraq Now its the weather. When will this country wake up and realize this administration has failed?
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
But yeah, good job Bush, after losing a bunch of jobs you got some of them back.
The problem with the jobs he's got back is that they are of lower quality than the jobs lost. So, an overall net loss and the recent job gains are in sectors such as burger flipping.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I'm really concerned that the prevailing opinion on Slashdot seems to be that outsourcing is horrible. I hate that it's hard for people to find work and that many IT workers have lost their jobs, just as much as anyone else, but stopping outsourcing is not the solution. We operate in a global economy, if companies did not outsource then they would not remain competitive in the global market and you would all lose your jobs. Despite the temporary hardships of the people who have lost their jobs, this is, in the end, for the good of the U.S. economy. It's just a restructuring of the work force right now.
I'm sorry if anyone here disagrees (and I'm sure there are those who will) but I really think you need to look at the big picture and I hope you'll agree that it's for the best for all of us, despite the temporary problems it's causing for many of you.
Two consecutive quarters of negative growth consitute a recession. That's what the term means, and so there isn't anthing inaccurate about saying that the small recession we had ended years ago, even if the job situation is sucky right now
As for the current lack of jobs and the patchy situation of a lot of americans, you can take it one of two ways.
I choose the second option. Make fun of him all you want, but Schwarzenegger said it best - don't be a girlie-man economist. It used to be that germany and japan were going to crush our economies and that all americans were poor. Then, in the early 90's, many americans bought into the idea that NAFTA was a terrible peice of legislation that was going to send all of our jobs to mexico. There's never going to be a shortage of pessimists and naysayers claiming that now things are different - now, this time our economy is in trouble unless the government can do something to stop it.
They're wrong. They've always been wrong, and they will always be wrong. Don't buy into the pessimism and anti-trade rhetoric out there. If you've lost your job due to oursourcing, of course that sucks. But no one ever accomplished anything by being pessimistic and complaining about their situation. Get out there and look for a job - any job. Don't tell yourself that you can't find one or that there aren't any - negative predictions are self-fulfilling. It's far better to be foolishly optimistic about your situation than needlessly pessimisstic.
The US economy is an incredbily powerfull beast that has brought incredible wealth to millions of people. It's not going to stop working over night. Current trade situations are a result of an economy out of equilbrium. It'll adjust itself, and then we'll be back on track and new jobs will be created and we'll all be wealthier- you'll see.
My blog
You don't think that maybe the failure of all those dotcoms had something to do with it? Pets.com couldn't make it selling dogfood over the internet. How many employees did they have in their IT department? How much did they spend on servers, web site software, custom applications? How many thousand dotcoms also failed, and also laid off thousands and thousands of IT personnel? All of those companies that went down the tubes also bought a crapload of stuff from the carriers. What happened to the carriers? They got stuck with billions in infrastructure, and no one to sell it to. It's amazing that there's only been a 20% reduction. Most companies were living high on the hog from 1995 to 2000. IT departments were spending at record levels. They couldn't spend fast enough.
Cutting 20% seems like a small number to me. And I don't blame it on outsourcing. Sure, there is an outsourcing problem, but the 20% reductions isn't as big of a factor as some make it out to be. I've been part of an outsourcing project, and it's a completely ugly proposition. Yes, there's some programming and lower level stuff, but it's stuff that we either couldn't find in the US, or stuff that no one else wanted to do. We contracted out help desk stuff to India, and it failed miserably. The language barrier was more trouble than upper management believed.
I firmly believe that most companies trimmed a lot of excess fat, and the rest of lost jobs are from dotcoms that simply were bound to fail. End of story.
-- No sig for you!
It seems you pissed off one of those whiney Bush supporters with your post who happened to have gotten mod points. You know the guys with something in their sig about [sniffle] liberals controlling slashdot.
Bush is a great president, really. You just need to redefine the word "great" to see the truth.
I'm curious. Exactly *how* do you expect the president to get jobs back?
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Do you deny it? Because it's true. The disparity between the rich and poor is increasing in the united states and the world. Incidentally this is a strategy that appears to be a good one for the armed forces, because the poor no longer have a choice; they simply have to join the army, or starve/be homeless/die.
We should respect the poor more than we do. They're the ones fighting for us right now, fighting on the orders we give them.
And is it really any surprise that after the bubble burst jobs were lost? Here's a reality check: those jobs were based on wishful thinking. They had no foundation. No offense to those who lost a job in the downturn, but I've met a number of so-called IT workers who were barely HS grads with an MCSE during the boom.
Color me not-terribly-surprised.
Project management has nothing to do with programming; in fact, I'd prefer managers not come from a programming background, but instead come from a project management background.
Project management is about keeping to schedules and budgets; technical knowledge is very helpful, but the worst project managers often come from the programmer ranks.
That profession's that have been traditionally supporters of the Democrats have been slaughtered, while the professions that have been Republican have prospered?
Obviously, since some are doing very well, the failure of the other must be their own fault.
Yup, nothing to see here, move along.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This little statement (new jobs created are lower quality) gets passed around quite a bit, and I'd like to see a source that confirms it.
The problem with the tech market is too many people got into it. In the late 90s, everyone got in the market, and we all know that many of them were not qualified. Some cab driver learns Word and Dreamweaver, gets a job, and then gets laid off because he never should have been hired in the first place, and he blames George Bush and people in India.
This isn't too complicated: the tech market had a huge boom in the late 90s, it crashed in 2000-2001, and companies cut way back in personnel to where they should have been in the first place, and many people got displaced. The simple fact of the matter is that there were just too many workers, and those jobs are not coming back, because the market cannot support them, and therefore should not support them.
Those lost jobs, are they measured from when the bubble started, the peak of the bubble, a pre-bubble trend line predicting normal growth? India and China's high tech growth, is there a bubble over their? Have we, in typical American fashion, over reacted to one extreme and gone to the other? The only point I am trying to make is that things are far more complicated than a simple statistic suggests.
You name it... radio manufacturing, cars, steel, etc etc the list goes on and on.
Yes, initially there was a significant loss of jobs due to this outsourcing, but then a light at the end of the tunnel.... more jobs in other industries. Industries were created when older industries outsourced to other nations, for instance the IT industry. Once the IT industry becomes outsourced completely and people are done losing their jobs, there is bound to be another industry that arrives which will require new workers and new skills. Everyone will flock to this new industry, which will eventually blow up... leaving people out of jobs and companies will begin to outsource to other countries.
And the cycle continues...
It can only be said that a country that continuously finds ways to outsource it's industries and maintain on the top of the world economic ladder is the country that truly innovates and grows. If we stop outsourcing, we'll stop growing... and stop innovating.
I'm curious. Exactly *how* do you expect the president to get jobs back?
Stop spending $100s of billions on counterproductive wars, farm subsidies, ineffective weapons systems, etc. Oh, and stop pretending that with as much as we spend on Medicare and Medicaid, we don't already have socialized medicine; we just have a form that provides a disincentive for the LMC to work, while imposing an HR burden on every business.
Presidents can't fix the economy. But they can sure screw it up...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
During the late 90's, everyone thought that they were going to be the next big thing in the "computer revolution". Hundreds of thousands of people got on the IT bandwagon. Colorado Institute, IT Tech and others cranked out IT workers. Microsoft was giving anybody with $125.00, who took a 3 day cram class (or used a well known website), a certification. Most were not competent enough to take your order at McDonalds, as witnessed by the numerous complaints about lousy tech support, etc. The fact that many are now back at Burger King is not a bad thing.
If people do not want certain jobs to go overseas, then they should not do business with those companies that operate that way. Convince others not to do business with those companies. They operate that way because most people want cheap services/goods or higher stock price/dividends for their portfolios. It's all about the Benjamins folks, not an evil plot by corporate america to take over the world.
So the gap between the rich and the poor grows - so what? Suppose you earn $10,000 a year and I earn $100,000 year, working for the same company. The boss comes in and says that due to increased sales, you and I both get a raise. I'm now making $10,000,000 a year, while you make $100,000 a year. You used to be earning 1/10 of what I made, but now it's 1/100th. The gap between us got bigger, but so what ? You're still a hell of a lot better off than you were. Does it affect you, in any way, shape or form, how much money I make? No! All that matters if how much you make and what you can buy with that money.
The 'gap' is probably the best example of class-warfare claptrap that's being spread about by economic naysayers. The fact is that any 'gap' is irrelevant, as long as everyone is getting better, which they are. Even the poorest of the poor have cell phones, air conditioning, automobiles, refridgerators, color TV's and 2000 calorie diets. They don't have to worry about dying of typhus, malaria, diptheria, diaherra, the flu, measles, mumps, smallpox, or rubela. A man can work just 40 hours and a week and easily support himself. Roman Emperors couldn't possiblly have imagined the life of luxury that the poorest of americans enjoys.
So yes, the gap between rich and poor has been growing. Does it matter? Not at all.
My blog
All the nerds I know who are smart and experienced and competent are at least as employed as they want to be. I've interviewed a couple dozen people for software development/management jobs in the last 18 months, and didn't see a lot of truly great candidates--by and large the good ones are still working, and we mostly saw marginal candidates.
Times may be bad now but I think the late 90s "golden age" of companies trying desperately to fill seats with warm bodies is long gone. The free ride is over, and if you're not noticeably great at your job, your employer will eventually realize that there are a lot of people out there who can do it just as well, a great many of whom are willing to do it for less.
There are a lot of world-class techs in India and other outsourcing hotspots, and even factoring in the costs and risks some companies report when outsourcing, it's more and more of a numbers game every month.
You don't need a computer science background to program but your code will be shit.
Why should IBM, Oracle or Microsoft pay you 50k just becuase you read "C++ in 21 days" when they could instead hire a chinese guy with a Phd in CS for 5k?
You know those "dotcom assholes who can't program for shit but think they deserve 100k" everyone bitches about? They're talking about fools like you with no education who think because they know some basic C++ and VB that they are qualified software engineers.
Funny, I think the same thing when one of my non-ultra-left-wing comments mysteriously gets modded "Overrated." There is unfairness on both sides.
As for Bush job losses, he's running on the same unemployment rate Clinton ran on. Surprise, IT jobs were lost since 2001 after the dot-com burst. I knew someone, eventually, would bring up Bush in this discussion, but I would be pinning my blame on the ridiculous dot-com investors in the late 90s and 2000 that caused the fizzle-out going into 2001.
A trade that requires proper theory... most "self-taught" programmers just read a "how-to in 21 days" book, and think they are masters. They need to read books about theory, algorithms, etc. (books you tend to read in university) to be a truly effective programmer.
I use the word "most" here for a reason...there are exceptions...just look at John Carmack. But for most "self-taught" programmers, they lack necessary deep understanding.
Computer science and programming are just a different form of Math.
I used to think that Programming is just a "Trade" kind of thing, something that can be learned on your own, until I was getting close to finishing my degree, and started noticing the garbage code produced by "self-taught" SEs...it worked...but it wasn't "good."
One guy I worked with, sent me an email "what is this push() function you are using? I've never heard of this." WTF? That's a History major turned programmer for you....and he was lead developer. (but he is an extreme case)
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I figured someone would try to go political on this. Bush is running on the same unemployment rate Clinton was. As for job losses since 2001--yeah, that sounds right considering there was a dot-com burst going into 2001. It's no surprise at all that there are less IT jobs now than there were at the end of the dot-com bubble.
It's just too easy of an excuse to blame Bush. I blame the dot-com investors.
The tech sector is unique, in that it had hundreds of thousands of employees it had no business hiring in the first place. Companies were too big, grew too fast, and as a result, hired too many people. Reality set in and, surprise, those jobs were lost and haven't come back.
I don't know what results you want: telling companies to hire people they neither need nor want? The private sector created the problem, and the private sector has fixed it. The tech industry right now is very healthy, and doing very well. It's smaller, as it should be, and those jobs are not going to come back, because the industry learned from its mistake.
Instead of giving massive amounts of money to wasteful defense contractors & other government cronies (or having it lost in the rats-mazes of bureaucracy), use all that money to hire LOTS of front-line workers. E.g., teachers, firemen, policemen, social workers, forest rangers, etc. (Note: front-line != bureaucrats.)
Not only does this directly give people jobs, but all of those types of jobs contribute directly to the infrastructure (which makes the general society have a better standard of living & creates opportunities for other non-government related jobs), plus all of those people are going to be _spending_ most of their money, which creates demand for goods & services, which causes companies to want to gear up to satisfy the demand, etc). It also increases opportunities for people in the low economic classes to save their way into more stable existences.
I like to think of it as trickle-UP economics, like nutrition being injected at the bottom of the food chain (which benefits _everything_ in the food chain), instead of "trickle-down" economics which encourages class stratification.
- The report, funded by the Ford Foundation, was conducted for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a Seattle organization that wants to unionize workers at Microsoft Corp. and other technology companies.
Nice how the results play into the very central purpose of the funding organization, isn't it?In reality there are probably still a couple hundred thousand in IT that need to go elsewhere. How many have had the experience of meeting a "former" dot-com tech worker that had great sounding credentials but no skill or work ethic? Sure, good people can fall on hard times, but if there is not a need in the market for 400,000 former tech workers, there is a market-force reason.
My wife is an RN, non-practicing as she raises our three children, and her field suffers ebbs and flows in demand/supply as well. When she was in school there was a shortage of nurse and getting into an accredited program was difficult due to the rush of applicants. Upon graduation the market shifted as there was a glut of nurses and people were leaving the school and the profession for greener pastures. Who were the ones leaving the profession? Ones not wanting to be or capable of being a nurse, generally. Sure some good ones were bypassed during the glut periods, but the determined nurses just kept on nursing.
When I was in college (late 80's) there was a shortage of IS (now IT, previously DP) workers and the classes were flooded with wanna bes. Those, like me, who did this stuff not for class credit but for the love of it, spent time helping our classmates get by (without cheating). During that time I was asked by a family friend if I was worried about the large number of potential competitors that were in the processing of joining the workforce; it was then I realized it did not matter how many competitors I was up against, only how good they were.
Now, if I have to compete with top tier developers (the fame and fauna of IT) I'll be the first to break a sweat. But I have never worried about finding a job as long as I have been in this business -- not because I'm so good but because this is what I do. And I always find someone who needs done what I do. It's uncanny. But, ancecdotal evidence is very weak, of course. Just that in my limited experience I've met many DP/IS/IT workers who should be doing something drasticly different. Some examples:
- The MCSE-candidate proud that he was "earning" his certifications via braindump and braindump alone; he hated computers and could not install a reference implementation of Exchange 2000 in 2 weeks; whee.
- The Perl programmer who spent months trying to get a SPARC-compiled executable on a RedHat Intel box; he left to become a peace officer
- The Perl hacker who surfed eBay looking for neat stuff for his BMW he bought after getting his first Perl coding job; he never actually wrote a line of code in the 3 months he worked at this first and last Perl job
- The VB/VBA programmer who couldn't stop making MADD mad
- The 25 member development team responsible for sinking an otherwise profitable company by switching to a prohibitively expensive Oracle-based system without producing a viable product in over 24 months; they were replaced by a two-member team that ran circles around them
- All the EDS, Lockheed, and other SDLC-style development teams I ran across while working solo or with small, agile development teams.
Anyway, I am highly suspicious of a Union-funded study that perfectly matches the union-line.One other thing: the very fact that Unions want to organize tech workers means, emphatically, that there is too much fat in IT. If everyone in IT today belonged in IT there would be no need for "organization" -- what a joke!
Put the same cynicism we exercise against ADTI, Mindcraft, Gartner, etc., toward these kinds of "studies."
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
bush has put american in such a recession, not to mention his spending on iraq which put america in a huge debt, he could have used that money right here, to fix problems in USA.
Here here. There was a great chart recently (in the New York Times I think) that showed how the money we 've spent in Iraq could be better spent here on home... on things like better border security, more cops on the street, etc. Very sobering.
Bush has completely screwed up in the war on terror. He left things unfinished in Afghanistan, Bin Ladin is still at large, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, increasing violence in Iraq, rising anti-American sentiment throughout the world, and strained relations with our allies. The Bush administration keeps beating the drum about what a steady and determined leader he is... but is anyone paying attention to where he is leading us?
In Bush's convention speach he went on about all the stuff he would do in the next four years. Reduce the deficit, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, protect the environment, and make us safer from terrorism... but he had the last four years to accomplish that and he did the exact opposite. He rolled back environmental protections, ran up a record deficit, adopted an energy policy drafted by Enron, and engaged in a illconceived, preemptive war that has become a recruiting poster for the terrorists. And we are suposed believe he will do better in the next four years?
The Bolachek Journals
Stop spending $100s of billions on counterproductive wars, farm subsidies, ineffective weapons systems, etc.
All of those thing provide jobs. So what is your point again?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I remember lots of grumblings about Gore being more "tech-friendly" than Bush, around that time. To me the recession seemed to follow the election's outcome quite fittingly. Remember the slap on the wrist Microsoft received in 2001? If economic logic holds that competition makes for a healthy economy, then Republicans (based on behavior alone) are quite anti-healthy economy.
;-)
I've lived in third-world countries enough to know that the very poor are kept in poverty by the very wealthy -- who hold, not just most of the wealth, but most of the power. What my armchair-economist opinion says is:
1) Robin Hood would have made a good Democrat and a great economist. To tax the rich to support the commoners (Welfare, Healthcare, decent Unemployment benefits, Social Security, etc.) forces money to "flow".
2) When one cuts taxes for the rich it cuts off the flow of money -- plain and simple.
3) "Trickle-down Economics" is pure myth. There is no such thing. It's a nice idea and, like a lot of get-rich-quick schemes, is based on a few grains of truth.
Wealthy people *hoard* money. It's in their nature to do so. That's why they're wealthy. You have to incent them to invest their money. Taxes make for a great incentive to "shelter" one's money -- through investments. Use it or lose it! Ever wonder why VC's are being so stingie these days? Their money is much safer, today, from taxation. The most important factor in converting a stagnant economy (as found in so many 3rd world countries) into a bristling one is simply to get one's currency to flow!
It's easy to think a recession couldn't just happen so quickly; Easy to think the resession was "inherited". But economic policies have very real, fast-acting consequences. If you don't believe it, then you haven't watched the reactions on Wall Street on the days when Allen Greenspan speaks.
Well, I guess the earlier poster was right. This *does* belong in politics.slashdot.org
A thought on outsourcing. The latest industrial boom, the IT sector, seems to be following the same path that previous industrial revolutions have. Manufacturing & assembly line workers faced the same challenge when manufacturing of consumer goods shifted to the far east. While many who were unable to adapt found themselves unemployable, the population moved on. It created. Thats what we're good at. Much of the entry level IT work, in many ways, the modern day equivalent to the blue collar manufacturing jobs of the past. I believe that while much of the grunt work will be shipped off to the lowest bidder, the majority of the creative end will remain where it began.
More will go as outsourcing increases, until so many are gone that people over here are willing to work for as little as those in the Far East
You could make more at Starbucks. Comparable wages? I don't see IT guys working for $12/day, I'd like to think that most of them would adapt to the new market. I might be delusional, my job can't be outsourced. I'm also a freelancer. While I've never had the industry fall out from under me, I've had to re-invent myself a few times to keep up with current local market needs. I can't imagine the hardship of having your career disappear out from under you, but as technology moves on, it is inevitable in certain fields.
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
India, China, and many other such nations also have a huge demand for infrastructure growth and development. Before they get greedy about the foreign markets, maybe they should take care of building up their local business market?
Wouldn't that also help get a few more people employed in those countries instead of merely sucking jobs from other nations?
Maybe we need to find ways to work more efficiently as well, and put more of our resources into actually doing our job instead of wasting it on IP lawsuits.
Can you imagine starting a business nowadays? Before you could even think about approaching potential partners, you'd have to spend months or even years just working out how you're going to defend against Microsoft, SCO, and other overly-aggressive companies.
It may sound trite, but imagine how much more actual work and revenue-generating business enhancements could do with, say, the money IBM has spent defending against SCO so far?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Uhhhh.... I was with you until this:
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Seriously, I've said the same stuff about the situation with India and China, just got finished mentioning it before I saw this post. But, and this is a big but, your conclusion makes abso-fscking-lutely no sense whatsoever. Bill OReilly can't keep left and right straight, much less understand how the hell to deal with pushing Fair Trade instead of Free Trade.
How would an anti-Union, pro-Corporate shill for the right do jack to help the American Worker?
I was really expecting to see you throw support to John Kerry, but WTF? Did I miss a joke somewhere?
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
Considering that the dot.bomb came out of the Clinton administration, I really can't blame Bush too much. I know that will cost me karma, but my honesty won't let me blame him just because it's the karma-enhancing thing to do.
I'm not a Bush supporter. I did not vote for him last time and will not vote for him this time. But that doesn't mean I have to kick him in the nads for something he didn't do. The tech industry crash might not have been caused by Clinton, but it started on his watch. Considering that it was a market correction, I can't blame Bush for not getting us back into an artifical bubble of paper millionaires.
Our IT jobs are going overseas because we spent most of the Clinton years wallowing in six-digit salaries and stock options while the average worker didn't have half our income. We priced ourselves out of the market. We demanded pool tables and laundramats in our workplace, and we got them. I'm not talking about the top people in the field, I'm talking about Joe-Schoe the code monkey. Starting salaries were in the $50-75 range.
I'm not blaming Bush, I'm blaming the collective "we".
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yes there is. When you have passion for your work, it shows. Back during the boom, when I was interviewing candidates (Oh, to be hiring again!) it was pretty easy to tell the guys who loved it from the opportunists. That's not to say we never hired any opportunists. But when you get two CS guys in the same room who both love it, they ID each other pretty quickly.
Look for the guy whose eyes light up when he talks about tech. Look for the guy who's well versed in a number of technologies that he's never had to use on the job. Look for the guy who makes time to work on open source projects.
I convinced my manager that the last bit was one of the best indicators. A guy who programmed in his spare time and gave the fruits of his labor to the world must really love what he does.
You're recommending we send a delusional hack, who aspires to an imaginary childhood in Levittown, NY, to the White House? What, do you work for the Chinese? If you hate what's happening to the American workforce, go to a union, and ask them how to help organize your fellow info workers. That's the only politics that's ever protected American labor. It's no accident that such a successful movement would send O'Reilly into a spasmatic fury.
--
make install -not war
I can't help but wonder how many cabdrivers and their ilk, who asked me in the late 1990s how to "learn computers", are counted in those unemployed "IT workers"? Corporate management spawned thousands of HTML "programmers" who learned from books for "Idiots". How many graphic artists are still kidding themselves into applying for programming jobs, or at least saying so on their unemployment forms? The entire IT industry was destroyed by Baby Boomers who always believe everything they see on TV, and stayed glued to market-watch programs that peddled anything that said "Internet". We turned the profession into a joke, with no necessary qualifications, and now the joke's on us. Too bad we can't even distinguish the unemployed programmers from the unemployed fauxgrammers.
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make install -not war
And people buy the least expensive item possible.
Who cares why Indians and Chinese are willing to work for less? It doesn't matter. If their governments are willing to force their people to sell their labor for cheap (an assumption I disagree with, but let's run with it anyway) that's just good for us.
Americans want their own jobs protected, but then turn around and buy the imported item that's cheaper. And that *IS* a free market - Americans are deciding that saving a few bucks is better than employing other americans, and THAT is why jobs are outsourced.
Because Americans WANT jobs to be outsourced.
Just not theirs. But they lose that vote.
paintball
Nothing is valuable to employers except the money grab.
You can either be worth more to an employer than what they pay you, or you can start your own company and pay people less than what they are worth to you. Your call, but that's what makes the employment universe go around.
BTW, I'd advocate the second option, but most people are too lazy for that.
paintball
Now, wait a minute, I work for one of them wasteful defense contractors, and the paycheck is very nice. The money being spent is an important part of fighting threats to our citizens and our values. Plus it is also one of the few IT jobs that won't be outsourced.
Now given that, had the current President acted responsibly after 9/11, we could have been pooling the resources of the world to fight terrorism and not needed to waste so much money doing it alone. Any fool could have "led" the American people to bounce back after 9/11. But only a fool could have turned a world of countries united to fight terrorism into a coalition of the "willing" (aka bribed). Had the President not alienated the US from most of its allies and nearly all of the rest of the world, we could be spending a fraction of what we are now on defence, triming the budget, and actually giving the working class a real tax break.
Or fix social security. Bush on social security, Muskegon, Michigan, Sep. 13, 2004: "And baby boomers are fine. We're in good shape, you know. The people who aren't in good shape are the children and grandchildren in this country..."
I agree with you about trickle up, but also believe that the debt we are leaving our children and grandchildren will criple this nation. Paying interest to debts gives our tax money (that could be paying for the front-line workers) to rich domestic and foriegn investors.
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market..
The problem is that most people in the USA like to believe that this statement is true. If the USA is is isolated, it would **NOT** be self-sufficient in all areas of the economy - including technology workers. The reality is that, when isolated, the US relies on Mexico, China, India etc. for all kinds of work - unskilled, military and technical.
It is not very wrong for these other countries to demand their pound of flesh.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Really, I am. You see, for years I've been putting up with "I'm a techie, too!" people. The kind that have no idea what they're doing.
They're people who go to a two-week certification class. They're people who take a 6-month class. They're people who go to ITT for two years. They're people who learned everything on their own. And they're even people with four-year degrees.
For every 100 people that say "Yeah, I work with computers, too!", I'm lucky if I meet three or four that actually have a clue, and (here's the important part) actually have any marketable skills.
Yes, they're the ones that whine and moan that "the market is flooded", "you can't get a job in (insert state name)", "it's all these people willing to work for nothing", or "the economy is so horrible."
I know a lot of people who make their living with computers. And while "the economy was bad", I can honestly say that the job difficulties they faced were inversely proportional to their expertise. The better they really were, the less trouble they had.
When we put an ad in the paper for a programmer who (a) has used Perl in a CGI environment, (b) has some knowledge of SQL, and (c) has some knowledge of HTML, you'd be amazed at how many applicants we get - literally, hundreds. And again, literally, without any exageration, over 85% of the applicants do not meet those requirements in any way, shape, or form. We're lucky if we get three or four people out of 150 applicants that can really say that they're proficient in those three areas - and to me, that's not asking much at all.
The sad fact is that the tech job market was massively, grossly over-inflated during the "dot-com craze", and is now back at a more reasonable level. Yes, I know, that makes it tough for all of the "But I want to be a programmer, too!" people, but that's just fine. They've been making it tough on the rest of us for quite some time.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how the influx of cheap labor would be any worse for the U.S. than if China truly did have a free market.
If China had a truly free market, and your assumption about this improving the Chineses domestic job market was true, then who would all these workers be employed by? Chinese companies. And who would these Chinese companies compete with? American companies, which would have a competitive disadvantage since American workers are more expensive than Chinese workers, thanks to high living costs.
The American companies would then lose business, forcing them to trim their workforces.
The problem here is that if we try to compete with other countries in the unskilled or lesser-skilled labor markets, we will lose every time. In the long run, there are only a few things that we can do if we want to keep our jobs:
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.)
b. Keep on moving into new markets as the old markets become dominated by companies that rely on cheap labor.
c. Do something about the high living costs in the U.S., which are making this country extremely hostile to the working classes.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Much as any politician would hate to accept, the economy is now well and truly in the hand of the Corporates, not the political forum. Anyone getting elected to the presidency will hardly make a difference to the economy. Consider the strength of the Chinese and the Indian economies, and consider for a moment who's been in power in those countries for some years now....
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Ok, when I was growing up I had to help pay the electricity bill for my mom with the money I earned from my own job. I have a great career now, that I built with sheer willpower. I worked hard every summer, I bought a car for $100 and learned to maintain it myself. I got scholarships for college (my parents paid probably less than $1000 total, the rest was loans and grants) and worked my way through college as well until I was out. Then I spent months finding a good entry level IT job (that was a few years before the boom and it was pretty hard then).
Don't tell me the poor have it so bad and they are stuck. I worked my way out, through education and a whole damn bunch of HARD WORK. Anyone can do it, if they choose to do so... I did have one advantage, I had a great family that really helped me learn and motivate me (though my parents were divorced before I went to college).
I firmly believe the "GAP" is there in part because the people are TOLD there is a gap. If you cease to believe in a gap you can do whatever you like instead of being trapped in your own situation. Sure there is a real advantage for people that have money - but those kids generally squander that opportunity anyway and leave very large holes for those willing to try outpacing them.
The message that being poor is an insurmountable barrier is a terrible reinforcement for the populace at large. It's hard to pull yourself up when you're constantly told it's too hard to even try. If something sucks, that should motivate you to work all the harder to escape it, not force you to live with it forever and just endure it because no-one else will help pull you out. A few summers working grounds maintenance at a golf course taught me that I'd rather be working with computers for a living than working grueling hours outdoors for minimum wage, and I made that happen myself.
And aren't you just buying the media feed about what it's like to live in the US? I was living far under that "line of poverty" but managed to escape without turning to a life of crime or peddling crack.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You need to read a bit of history. The Japanese economy enjoys some of the strictest governmental protectionism seen in the First World. They use that protectionism to excellent effect, keeping their industries vibrant while effectively co-opting big chunks of business in other nations.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
What has happened is now that all of the failed companies and wacky business models are out of the market, these marginal tech workers are returning to the industries they were trained for. Yes, lots of good, highly trained programmers and analysts got caught up in the crash, because even the lamest of DotComs had to have someone to do the real work. But I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of technology jobs "lost" to outsourcing simply represents a shift of these cross-industry workers back to the areas they are trained in and a decision by US industries to pick a lower cost (and therefore, lower risk) alternative for staffing these lower end tech positions. Why pay $75k and full benefits for an informally trained web developer in the US when you can get the same skills (likely formally trained) offshore?
I'm not defending the trend, but I think that it IS fair to point out that a lot of people were working in the tech industry, far outside their areas of expertise and far ahead of their skill levels and that imbalance has simply been corrected. To call it a loss and to blame that loss on outsourcing is to ignore the incredibly rapid gains that preceeded it.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I'm curious how many people who are quick to blame the White House for economic woes know who their congresscritters are, let alone who they're running against this November.
What a refreshingly accurate assesment of GWB's leadership of the US from someone in the US, not a hint of the infamous arrogance. What should have been a carefull international -criminal- investiagtion of 9/11 is rapidly turning into GWB's self-serving belief in armagedon. The world was very sympathetic to the US against the Taliban & AQ after 9/11 and still is. GWB squandered that good will by attacking Iraq. The speed that the Whitehouse tuned on the still mourning Spainards was blinding. US sympathy for THIER bombing evaporated with THIER election. GWB seems to think terrorisim is new in Spain but the Spanish (like the British) have been dealing with it for years. The Spanish people kicked the sitting Govt out power because they -lied- about the bombing (blamed it on Basque sepratists when they had evidence to the contrary). The opposition had campained for the troops to withdraw before the bombing. For the US to then chastize the Spanish and blast the media with the message "the Spanish caved in to terrorists" is the height of arrogance. I live in Australia and we have John Howard as prime minister, he swayed the last election by lying about refugees (children overboard scandal). His lips now require urgent surgery to remove them from GWB's arse. The opposition is campaining on "troops home by Xmas". I hope in October we tell the US where to stuff ALL thier wars on social_problem_X. War is a zero-tolerance "solution" to social_problem_X. War is a major social_problem_X. "Let's see now. Cat won't eat mouse...plus...Mouse won't eat cheese...equals...IT JUST DON'T ADD UP!" - Dog from WB cartoon.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The system is broken.
We keep playing the game like it's an open system, and it never was, and now we are quickly discovering the end stops.
Designing an economic model which awards wealth to those who grow, is doomed when a company, any company reaches market saturation.
The American economy no longer exists, American business is multinational, global, and not limited to our borders. It finds cheap labor and brings the saving in production back to the U.S. where American consumers rejoice at the low cost of service and goods. Sadly it's all a sham. It's as unsustainable as a constant diet of junk food. It tastes good while you're eating it, but it's slowly killing you. It's all take and no give, the dollars fly out of the country faster and faster, until the nations fundamental wealth is gone, and the citizens of the nation notice they are now the collective bag holders.
* Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure. * Money that leaves undermines U.S. labor, costing jobs and quality of living. * The growing gap between haves and have nots in the U.S. suggest a growing economic instability. Loss of jobs starting with manufacturing, but now quickly moving up through intellectual "white collar" professions, points to a growing joblessness with no end in sight. As the government services fail (and if you haven't been reading the paper or watching the news at 11:00, local government everywhere in this country is on the verge of collapse), the means to manage and provide basic life needs to the growing disenfranchised evaporates. The middle class vanishes. We are all reduced to the same level of living enjoyed by billions of starving people all over the world. Already 3% of our population owns 75% of the wealth, this is the greatest desparity in wealth in our history. And still the insanity accelerates. This is just the beginning ladies and gentlemen. What will you do, when your kids fresh out of college, with hundred thousand dollar college loans to pay, can't find work. What will you do, when you haven't received a raise in 4 years, and the boss says "Sorry, the work is heading to China."
I've personally spent the last 6 months looking for work, I've had my resume tuned, I have 25 years of technical experience, and I've made it clear I'll do almost anything, and I have not had a single interview. I'm not alone, I have a couple hundred friends and acquaintances who've been unemployed for between 2 and 3.5 years.
I keep hearing neocons mouthing the lines of Scrooge from a Christmas Carol... "the surplus population shold just get on with the business of dying...", or some variation of that. It's not bad yet. It may well get there. If it does, our government, is going to have a very bad time. Our society is going to have a very bad time. We need to begin addressing sustainable business practice from an economic, environmental, and ethics based context. To simply let the train go where it will is to insure a crash none of us will walk away from.
Genda
The cost of living isn't controlled by corporations or by any other company, it's controlled by economics.
If you accept that corporations set the prices of all the things that fall under "cost of living," then you must accept that consumers will willingly pay any price for those items, something which we know isn't true. Think about it, when gasoline prices start skyrocketing, some people started buying smaller cars and driving less.
The cost of living is set by both firms and consumers at a price index that both sides are agreeable to. It's often called "supply and demand."
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
"the system AS A WHOLE benefits from free market economics. This DOES NOT MEAN that EVERY NATION benefits from this situation."
Actually, the economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that every nation benefits from free trade, or to be more precise, that free trade produces a Pareto improvement. (See also the wikipedia article on comparative advantage).
The main problem with this theory is not that some nations stand to lose from free trade per se, but that, as the wikipedia article puts it "Workers and capital may not be able to be transferred painlessly from one industry to another." Now whether this warrants supporting uncompetitive domestic industries is for you the US citizens to decide. However, I have the impression that as other people here have pointed out, many have already made that decision. For example, if people have a choice of buying expensive clothes from the US or cheap clothes from South East Asia, what do they tend to choose? Most of them choose "cheap" over "made in the USA" most of the time.
If you are interested in the way modern economists (Adam Smith is great, but a bit dated) see things, have a look at e. g. Krugman and Obstfeld's International Economics.
Can someone explain to me exactly why the government meddles in things just enough, and refuses to protect our rights just enough, to cause any potential jobs to wither on the vine?
I'm all for this "look out for yourself" libertarian bullshit, but make corporate charters temporary, renewable every 2 years, and that they can be dissolved with *no reason* whatsoever. Give me back the 14/28 years of copyright, only with providing an unencumbered version to LOC. The list goes on, but start with those, and I'll start considering that my lack of a job is solely my own fault.
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country.
Frankly: I find this logic (common though it is in the US) to be totally bizarre. It makes no fscking sense. Try this analogy: "I understand that having free trade across county boundaries is good for the well-being of the entire State and even the country but as a resident of King County I put my needs above those of the rest of Washington State and those of America. If I was primiarily interested in the needs of (say) Orange County then I would move there. The job of King county's government if first and foremost to provide for King county residents: the rest of the country be damned."
There are many levels of government and at this moment at the beginning of the 21st century we've somehow deluded ourselves into theinking that the nation is somehow special. During the early 20th century it was otherwise: most people thought that their allegiance belonged to their empire (which was larger than their nation). And before the civil war, many Americans had primary allegiance to their State, not to the federation.
Each of these views was short-sighted and temporary. As yours is. Your allegiance logically belongs either to a community small enough that you can participate and influence it (i.e. municipality) or to all of humanity (based solely on the Golden rule).
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people. Sometimes this will is to "do good" elsewhere. It looks, for example, as if Americans will put George Bush back into power based on his (shaky!) argument that he is going to democratize the Middle East. It is also the case that many Americans criticize the Bush administration for doing nothing in Darfur. According to your theory, there is nothing to criticize because it would be a breach of responsibility for him to do anything. Ditto, I suppose, for the intervention in Europe in WW II.
I am unashamed about the fact that my allegiance is first and foremost to humanity. My local national government has dual roles as the local provider of laws and a tool I use to advance the needs of human beings everywhere. When I look across a border and see human beings on the other side I don't see their needs as being less important than mine by virtue of the fact that they are on the other side of the border and neither should my government. That said: for practical reasons the government must distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and treat citizens differently.
And all this time I though it might have had something to do with my resume sucks because it doesn't look like an HR wet dream. Or maybe something to do with age bias, I'm older than 20. Or maybe that companies are reluctant to hire even when they're severely understaffed. You figure something is up there when you seen the same job posted for over a year.
Look, all the dotcommers who where cabdrivers and pizza delivery guys have long gone back to their old jobs. They have previous experience that allows them to do that. Have you ever tried to break into another trade when all you have is programming experience? I have news for you. You are considered totally unskilled and your competition for the jobs that take no skills are the dregs of the workforce and they are willing to work for a lot less than you are or even can. Ever try to live on sub minimun under the table wages?
There's some kind of psychological factor here that kicks in when bad things happen to other people, that people use to convince themselves it won't happen to them because the people it did happen to somehow deserved it or brought it upon themselves. Nope. It's pure luck. You either got laid off or did not get laid off. Getting a job again seems to be pure luck (though personal connections or having a HR wet dreame resume seems to help). Think otherwise? Go ahead and quit your job and find out.
Unions will screw you over even harder than your boss. Trust me, I've been in one (carpenter's). All the bad things they say about them are true. It's just another good ole boys club. No thanks, I'll take the free market over that any day!
Alternately, degrees can mean just as little. I've met at least one person from MIT, which everyone knows as an excellent engineering school, who claimed to be good at C/C++ yet had to ask me what that little * thingie was. Yeah, a graduate of that wonderful institution didn't know what a pointer was. So really, it's not like getting your degree automatically implies that you have any understanding of what the heck you're doing - even Java coders should understand the fundamentals of memory allocation. I've also known some phenomenal programmers who didn't have a formal education past highschool - I think it depends much more on the person themselves than the degrees/certifications they hold (though I'll agree that the degrees can be a good indicator)
I don't know the US state capitals or who is in chage of them becouse such information is useless to me. Ditto for the name of any given tropical cyclone that's on the way. Hell unless it's snowing M-F I am still going to work so 5 out of 7 days I don't care if the sun is shining.
But, DAMM I can code like a god. Now if I could learn the names of the leader of every state in Africa or COBAL which is going to be more usefull in 6 months? Or hell how about 10 years? Shure learning something like SQL may seem pointless but it's saved me a lot more time than it cost me so I think of it a worth while vs learning the names of each state the USSR transformed into.