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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.
It's just that all these qualified people getting blinded by seeing the IT section of slashdot...
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Guess I am ready for a new operating system.
Click HERE
I'm not the only one living with my mom again.
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!
I thought Bush has created more jobs, and that the recession was over. I can't believe the Washington Post would try to sneak such false statements into the transcript of the Presidents address at the RNC. They must be French owned.
BTW, Here is a login for the Post.
And before anyone get's pissy, may I remind people that flamers are joyless, humorless, SOB's. Don't trust a person who can't laugh.
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.
You know, I was really starting to buy into some of the arguments about how sourcing some of these jobs overseas was actually a good idea if you looked at it just so....... Well, I had no idea that the scope of the loss was this big and that the overall job market for such workers had shrunk. How can it shrink? I think something stinks here....
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Where does that leave us?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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!
Learn a trade. I think I'll become an auto mechanic. a plumber, or an electrican. Anything but a code-monkey button-presser. But not until after I sit on my butt for six months and collect my unemployment. This economy makes me need a vacation.
Before anyone cries out "foreigners are stealing our jobs", read this.
They are doing to us IT workers what they did to advanced, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs in America (as opposed to "assembly jobs"): they spirited it away to Asia. And we could have stopped it with trade barriers. But they sold us on neoliberal trade policies with $24 worth of trinkets.
....
....
Read here:
>>>>>>>>
commentator Eamonn Fingleton speaks bluntly about what he sees as the frittering away of the United States' manufacturing base and what he regards as the consequent stagnation of the American standard of living. For those who believe in the superiority of the current U.S. postindustrial strategy, a reading of the OECD Economic Yearbook makes for a distinctly chastening study. As Fingleton puts it: "The United States trails no fewer than eight other nations, all of which devote a larger share of their labor force to manufacturing."
Fingleton, who distinguishes between high-end and low-end jobs, insists that the former, advanced manufacturing, must be reconstituted if the United States wants to remain a superpower. And what are these eroded industries? Semiconductor materials, ceramic packaging for semiconductors, charge-coupled devices (CCD), industrial robotics, numerically controlled machine tools, laser diodes and carbon fibers, to name only a few.
Where did the manufacturing of these items go? In most cases, Japan now dominates the more advanced areas of these industries, says Fingleton, who lives in Tokyo. Moreover, he argues, by dint of superior know-how and large capital investments Japan now enjoys a global lock on key manufacturing processes.
Fingleton recalls an America where men and women went to work and made the nation great, the old-fashioned way, by producing products people wanted and needed. And he juxtaposes the loss of advanced manufacturing jobs in this country with what he regards as the overvalued dollar, America's compulsion to borrow huge sums of money to fund its deficits and an illusionary U.S. prosperity based on unsustainable debt. For now Japan and China, both running huge trade surpluses, pay the United States' bills, he says. Where does this leave the American worker? He puts the answer simply: Out of work!
It is not true that Japan is in dire economic straits, Fingleton maintains. In a recent article in the London journal Prospect entitled "Japan's Fake Funk," he writes: "The Western consensus is that Japan is a basket case: It is not. That is a misreading by the West."
Meanwhile, he says, ill-conceived U.S. policies have failed to protect home-based American industries, leading to the transference of the most advanced technologies known to mankind. Fingleton says flatly that Japan has built up its industrial base at the expense of the United States, and that China now is chomping at the bit to do the same.
Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.
Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.
much more here: http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htmEconomic
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I think I speak for everyone (except Indians) when I say. Outsourcing, HURRY UP AND F%&$ING DIE. I can only hope this bubble bursts soon as tech support compaints rise and software quality declines.
At least Windows will always meet our IT expectations. And cause IT pros to keep getting hired for tech support. Programmers have to move to india.
This process actually accelerated under CLinton. Clinton was a better Republican than Eisenhower, or maybe even Nixon.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
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.
During the same time period there was an explosion in H-1b and L-1 visas. The impact on US programmers, particularly the older programmers -- you know -- the guys that actually founded the Internet -- is near Great Depression levels. And yes that includes the ramping up of employment in the few years leading up to the dot-con implosion.
Seastead this.
Additionally, there were so many idiots in technology by 2000. Sysadmins that didn't know the dif between Cat3 from Cat5, programmers that didn't know what a for-loop were getting 100k Java jobs, etc, etc, etc. I don't know if there were 400k, but I do think that a lot of people lost jobs that didn't deserve to have them. Also, I have had a lot of very smart friends out of work that did.
Even in 2000 and 2001 there were still tech areas hiring. I really wonder how many of those 400k were jobs that should never have existed in the first place?
Just some random thoughts on the subject.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I did a quick search on /. and didn't find it, but I thought I saw an article awhile back saying jobs have finally started coming back up.
One thing I've noticed in the US though is a lot of education-related companies are hiring. If you're in the Minneapolis area (and would like a job), just look at the listings for my company - some of these have been there since July!
As it stands, a lot of brick and mortar based colleges are expanding into online ventures - with that comes the need for a knowledgeavle staff to support that industry, might be a good time to start learning some online courseroom software and see if you can't get lucky!
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Not good for some people. But this may be what we need to filter out the clueless lusers with paper degrees and certs. No more gravy train, only those with skills need apply.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I've seen estimates much higher.
Read some of Paul Craig Roberts columns on http://www.vdare.com/roberts/all_columns.htm. I agree with his assertion that we're exporting jobs that provide ladders of upward mobility and importing poor people. He makes the case that this is not free trade but global labor arbitrage.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
With a combination of outsourceing and people starting to get a little bit smarter ( very little on average) haveing computer skills is no longer a specialtiy skill but a co requisit to maintaining/getting a job.
It's a pleasant day to take a break: step outside, get some vitamin D and experience the full power of Shiva's spear.
One of the expectations of outsourcing programming jobs to lower wage countries is that the number of higher paying, project management jobs will increase. Anyone out there who made the leap from programming to project management (or know someone who has)? If so, how did you go about it?
And is there a greater demand now for project management jobs?
On a similar note, it seems to me that the number of consulting and professional services jobs have increased as of late. However, many of these jobs do not pay salaries comparable to programming jobs during the late 90's. I could be wrong about that though.
eom
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
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.
If anything, new college students should be told how many people in the 90's picked computer science as a major because some magazine which ranked salaries said CS was #1 in pay and projected growth. Better to study something which is interesting than to go for the money. I knew a guy in college who was an english student. Everyone asked him, what are you going to do with an english degree. He shruged his shoulders, and said "dunno, but i like reading". After college, he got a masters, then found a teaching job. He makes more than some of the CS people I knew, and he gets the summer off. The kicker is he is doing what he likes. And he was supposed to be the poor one.
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
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
What? You want to send my job to India? How about I strike for higher wages instead?
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
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!
I mean, we all know about the Dot-Com bubble bursting, but why hadn't the economy recovered by November 2001? Did some kind of event negatively affect the economy a month or two before that?
Can't figure it out...
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Accounting majors jumping on the dotcom bandwagon because the companies would hire anybody that touched a keyboard? The problem is the economy was oversold in IT. There was no need for grocery2you.com. They hire 300 people and the business plan sux so boom ... 300 accountant/programmers out of work. Now the snowball effect... Sun can't sell as many systems because tiddlewinks.com went caput and their servers are on ebay for 0.02 on the dollar. Same for cisco/nortel/lucent...etc. The market is beginning to stabilize.
Outsourcing is an issue and it needs to be addressed. I think it will end up correcting itself in the next 3 years as the true global economy takes shape.
In 1999-2000 things were out of control. Consultants cost $220-$300/hour and people were paying it.
Zoid.com
Both political parties claim that free markets require the free exchange of goods and services (which includes labor) between the USA and other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains the free market in the USA. Unfortunately, the politicians are just playing a verbal game with economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market -- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say, China). So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However, Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive government intervention has damaged the markets in those economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons.
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. The underemployed Chinese are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces (in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal game that politicians play is to simply define the USA to be a "free market", ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico. Similar comments apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages, the government is damaging market forces.
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
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.
See my home page for ideas on how the Europeans used strikes to build their welfare states.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
This is only looking at a segment of the IT industry -- software developers. Sure, it sucks if you're one of them and out of a job (been there, etc).
On the other hand, the demand for sys admins, security specialists, DBAs, etc seems to be increasing. Pay rates vary all over the board depending on experience and particular skills (and how cheap the company is), but this is nothing new.
Locally I've seen a big turn up in demand starting about six to nine months ago. And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearance. (And you know those jobs won't be outsourced.)
-- Alastair
the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
Yet nearly every business uses computers. The entire economy is practically based on computers, yet there are fewer than 800,000 software engineers? Glad to see all that time (and overtime, and weekends, and vacations) spent learning as much as possible about technology was completely wasted.
Nope, no free market here either.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
it's down 48%.
Thanks, George. You useless freakin Dork.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Obviously the apex of the biggest speculation bubble in one industry for a century is the minimal baseline that all other times and circumstances must be measured against.
Any deviation from that state of supreme normality is evidence both of evil and massive conspiracies, and the need for massive government support of the Entitled IT Masses.
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.
The thing I don't understand is why people are complaining about undoing the smoke-and-mirrors of 1999-2001. Businesses which had no business plans to speak of thus no long-term prospects were given millions of dollars of investment capital on some lofty marketing hype of being able to create profits out of thin air. Just because you put money in doesn't mean you were going to get money out, even if you have a catchy domain name, and investors have finally wisened up to this. Personally I'm glad the industry has, for the most part, gotten over its investment adolescence and can move on. You don't hear of people in the catering business complaining that things were so cushy before the donut crisis of '97 when people were coming in droves just to buy donuts.
Damien
The Exporting Jobs Scam
Service versus Manufacturing Economy
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.
Once upon a time, specializing in railway engineering virtually assured you a fantastic job. Unfortunately, times change. To think that a new field like "software engineering" would remain uncommoditized is wishful thinking. Code is code, no matter where it is written. And the world is full of brillant coders. My solution was to start jump fields and start a niche company that (hopefully) will be enjoyable to run for years. Heck, any unemployed software engineers out there looking for a career in the film industry? ;)
Economic Fallacies: Is America In Trouble for Lack of Manufacturing?
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 $100,000 a year. You used to be earning 1/10 of what I made, but now it's 1/100th. The gap between us got bigger, but so what ? You're still a hell of a lot better off than you were. Does it affect you, in any way, shape or form, how much money I make? No! All that matters if how much you make and what you can buy with that money.
The 'gap' is probably the best example of class-warfare claptrap that's being spread about by economic naysayers. The fact is that any 'gap' is irrelevant, as long as everyone is getting better, which they are. Even the poorest of the poor have cell phones, air conditioning, automobiles, refridgerators, color TV's and 2000 calorie diets. They don't have to worry about dying of typhus, malaria, diptheria, diaherra, the flu, measles, mumps, smallpox, or rubela. A man can work just 40 hours and a week and easily support himself. Roman Emperors couldn't possiblly have imagined the life of luxury that the poorest of americans enjoys.
So yes, the gap between rich and poor has been growing. Does it matter? Not at all.
My blog
...dropping all that money on dot bombs missed a pretty good steady monthly income when they FAILED to run the last mile of fiber to all the places in the US that *don't* have it. Look around outside of urbania-see all them satellite dishes? the ones ontop of almost every home of any size, from the smallest single wide to the largerst multi story mansions? Thats 50$ a month, multiplied by millions of homes, that went to the satellite companies just for television. Now imagine if they had run the fiber instead, they would be able to offer more channels, telephony service, and internet/data and video on demand.
How much is that potentially worth? Getting a steady check from millions of places a month for say 100$ for Tv/phone/net service is chump change?
Naw, the carriers are dumb for going for the quick cheap buck for a few years, and ignoring the tried and true long term buck that comes from long term business thinking that hasn't been adled by massive cocaine and booze usage, which is part of the dot bomb phenomenon that no one wants to remember I guess. Too many business decisions built on chemical hysteria and delusions of grandeur and get rich quick schemisms combined with stock market casino tulip mania, instead of just regular old-fashioned sober boring work.
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.
in case you aren't sick of hearing it: network, network, network.
almost all my jobs have come from friends or fellow alumni of my college. (from which i didn't even graduate) It's particularly key for people who have trouble getting past the HR weeding process.
My employer's hiring, but not in Virginia.
Don't make me take out the poking stick!
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.
Having spent the last year working as a project manager for a graphic design firm, coming from a development background, I think I now understand why: you must be task oriented, not system oriented, and you must have no aversion to telling someone (not something) else to do something, rather than doing it yourself, and finally, keeping schedules and budgets is not immersive work, it's work that requires lots of shallow and responsive handling.
Programmers are inherently system oriented. When there's a problem to fix, they want to build something that solves it, or enables someone else to solve it. The old saw about the programmer who will spend hours to write a script that could do something (perhaps tedious) that he could have done in 30 minutes is what's at work here.
Most of the programmers I know also have no problem telling a machine to do something -- or even talking about how an organization should run. But when it comes down to telling someone what they should be doing and when it needs to be done by -- that's a whole different thing.
Most programmers I know like immersive tasks... something you can sit down, focus on, mull over, work deeply in, and then deliver. PM is about turning lots of shallow details fast. There's a lot more task switching (which is why if you try to do some of the work yourself, you're doomed to failure, because immersive tasks and having a large volume of shallow details to take care of don't mix at all).
These are problems I share, and it didn't take me long to realize what they were, but it took me months to get over them (and also, to get the organization to stop thinking of me as a person they could *also* give web dev work to as well). I've gotten much better, but it was a hard haul the first six months, and sometimes I'd rather be back making cool things rather than dealing with this.
But: the good thing is that most programmers are skilled at breaking a problem down into smaller, more easily solvable problems. Their systems thinking can be a great strength if the project allows enough slack to let them set the system. They're introspective enough they can self-improve. And if they've got deft enough social skills to get people to do what they're supposed to, they can become quite succesful.
Tweet, tweet.
Y'know, the recession isn't entirely to blame here. IT is the red-headed step child that NO company really wants to spend money on, and won't if they can possibly get away with it; At very least as little as possible. It doesn't help that IT is becoming a saturated market, much like all the A+ and MCSEs. Those are a dime a dozen these days and it doesn't help that you have a lot of wannabes out there to.
Frankly, you've got two strikes against you before you even get to the economy these days, which, according to every other indicator, is recovering. It just doesn't come as a huge surprise in either case.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
You may, but I don't. I know the company I did support for for over seven years has outsourced almost all support. From what I can tell, most of the techs laid off still haven't found work in over 18 months. Back before the mania for oursourcing, we couldn't hire techs fast enough to keep up with demand, so at least some of the dot-bomb refugees ended up with us for a while.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
also this and this explains how that happened
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells, "The Outline of History"
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.
This story is interesting and I don't want to have to go to politics.slashdot.org.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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
Those among the Hijack-All Rich and the Sell-Out policy makers are seeding or acceding to capitalism, but ceding our (or their own nations') security and stability (by imperialistically taking markets, seeding insatiable materialism, and then absconding when the shit hits the fan.
Long Version, as applies to the US in my jaded view (yeh, I was born and raised here, served for here, and paid taxes here, so I can kvetch as ruthlessly and non-physically as I choose):
Rant mode on:
Look, **outsourcing** in and of itself is not a bad thing. While outsourcing (where corporate 'meriku is solely or primarily interested in the bottom line and the employee can be expensive, and the company SENDS the jobs away) it is not exactly the same as migrant/seasonal workers coming here to pick vegetables and fruits in hot-assed weather (where most 'merikuns would not dare go), outsourcing has been going on for decades.
But, the heinous part about outsourcing of the 90's is the RATE or INTENSITY of it. More and more local or regional competitors are driving down profits, and the almighty-dollar-lovin' boards of directors demand response, hence increased outsourcing.
But, that is GOOD, since it does what I call "raising the boats with the waterline" so the other nations don't get swamped and sink. This is a problem we're creating and driving and going to pay for. Materialism has its price.
As degrees become less influential, and as jobs increasingly become automated or go overseas, the inevitable outcome is there will be less work for shitloads of people --educated or not.
This "free enterprise" system could (technically), might (via recklessness), and probably (for moral/karma rectification reasons) should come screeching to a halt, and I predict the government will have to -- and better goddam get on the ball with this -- start paying people just to stay out of trouble, printing money to keep souls out of malaise, low-wage doldrums, and downright incensed. Materialism can only go so far, and when the consumers run out of money, the rich will be the first in line to cash out of their bank before OTHER RICHER person gets there to do the same.
I don't at ALL blame India or Filipinos or Taiwanese. It's the "sell granny for a buck if we have to" types who program the markets to hell and then abscond when the shit hits the fan. We need to put the brakes on the persistent "irrational exuberance" that is causing insane increases in property values, nearly inexplicable increases in stress and stress-related diseases and injuries, and just FIX our tottering, ambling system.
So, if politicians don't want their asses hung, strung and slung (I wouldn't participate, but I wouldn't rescue most of them either, with the way things keep going when they sell their souls for a buck), they'd better start redrafting the next Great Experiment:
-- Resuscitating America After the Materialism Dream Implodes.
So, it won't matter if it's pink or plastic food stamps or benefits currency, or if it's green. I figure I don't care if somebody is counterfeiting, since the government is the largest counterfieter a nation can have. THink about it: BILLIONS of US dollars get printed and shipped overseas to influence others and endear them to 'merikun power, stability, and more. But, corrupt dictators, monarchies, shahs, premiers, emperors, and more (no better, not much worse than the cadge/cabals we have had and STILL have in office right now), and the money ends up sequestered in some goddam vault in case a dictator needs to make a quick, rich getaway after 'merika or some other nations' intelligence forces depose, or attempt to decapitate, a now-unpopular "leader".
So, if we can allow this system of ours to print, ship away, and lose track of uncirculated cold, hard cash that WE could be spending, but the program it for others, then when it is NOT in circulation, it is either ignored, or it's replaced with yet more cash. That being so, what the HELL is wrong with the government
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
We went from the "agriculture age" to the "industrial age" to the "information age", which was supposed to be where all the manufacturing experts were to "move up the value chain". Now that age is ending also. But what the hell is the NEXT age???
Potential candidates:
* Walmart Sales Clerk Age
* War Age
* Unemployment Age
* Welfare Age
* School-is-useless Age
* Brains-are-a-cheap-commodity Age
* Marketing-guru-or-death Age
* (your suggestion here)
Table-ized A.I.
Bush's real reason for Job losses was due to his extreme hatered twoards nerds and for being a greedy little troll with ideas of making BUSHLAND theme parks all over the world.
Huh? How exactly is India or Mexico not a "free market"?
1. Gov subsidize fields of expertise they feel will give them an economic and/or military advantage.
2. They purposely undervalue their currency because exports are more important to the gov than cheaper local consumer goods.
Table-ized A.I.
- 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
That's what happens when everybody decides to go into a field to make big bucks. You have an oversupply of labor. And when that labor won't take lower pay because the market value is lower, you get unemployment. Luckily, I ignored the advice and didn't go that route.
My mistake was focusing on the web after I got out of school.
I have a B.S. in Mathematics, for a good foundation in theoretical stuff. Everything from C to Java and the scripting languages that start with P, and by 2002 I had 8 solid years of experience. And I still spent a year and a half unemployed (and I didn't find a job as a programmer -- I'm managing artwork projects for a graphic design company).
Though there probably are better programmers in the world, I'm probably a litte more qualified than average to do software development... and certainly far beyond a cabdriver who learned Dreamweaver. But it's still a nightmare to try to get a job.
Tweet, tweet.
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
do those numbers suggest that 856,000 of 1,743,500 "high-tech workers" are Software Engineers? (as of April 2004)
I farted
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
Didn't a story a few weeks ago say that total IT numbers were up? It claimed that more "software engineers" made up for losses from offshored "programmers".
Table-ized A.I.
Likewise, it would take courage to face up to America's worsening financial situation.
Sayeth the governor of California:
"There is another way you can tell you're a Republican. You have faith in free enterprise, faith in the resourcefulness of the American people...and faith in the U.S. economy. To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!"
This year, both parties have shown a real genius for propaganda. If you dare to face up to the realities of the U.S. financial system...you are an "economic girlie man." Real men just take it as an article of faith that the "resourcefulness of the American people" will somehow override the laws of economics...
Except for a few cranks and Don Quixotes such as Pete Peterson, Ron Paul and Laurence Kotlikoff, no one in Congress, academia, the administration, the Republican or Democratic parties, nor in the Federal Reserve has the courage to face up to any of America's looming debacles.
Americans get poorer by $2 billion per day. Who even mentions it?
The American government has run up $44 trillion worth of obligations - with no way to pay for them. Who cares?
Americans now absorb as much as 80% of the entire world's savings - not to build a profit-making economy, but merely to maintain current levels of consumption against a backdrop of slipping real incomes. Who warns them?
American workers now face stiff competition from 3 billion foreigners who will work harder, longer and for a fraction of the pay. Unless he tightens his belt, saves furiously, and learns to produce higher quality goods and services...the average American is going to lose ground in the years ahead. Who has the guts to tell him?
U.S. householders owe more money to more people than ever before in history. A financial collapse will not just affect rich speculators...instead, like the hyperinflation in Germany in the early '20s, it will reach down to the bedrock of American householders...and upset it badly.
Germany was so unsettled by the financial calamities of the '20s it welcomed a whole new team of scoundrels. Italy welcomed Mussolini largely because the nation was bankrupt. The Argentine generals launched the Falklands war in order to divert the public from its financial catastrophes.
And now, the "Nation of Courage" itself...lumbers toward its own wussy ruin...
"I don't see how anyone with an IQ over 70 can be anything but utterly pessimistic about the long-term outlook for the U.S. economy..." writes Marty Whitman of Third Avenue Funds. "Everybody's - and I mean everybody's - emphasis is on the short-term outlook. Nobody, but nobody is focused on solving real structural problems, organic structural problems that exist."
No. That would take courage, the one thing the nation most needs and most hasn't got.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
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
OK, the funding organization was the Ford Foundation, not the Union, but the study was done FOR the union. I don't know the organizational relationship between the Ford Foundation and the union, but my cynicism remains intact based on the benefactee if not the benefactor.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If only it had been 401k, then it would have been much funnier. Maybe even ironic in an Alanissy kinda way.
Shit. I hate to say it, but that might solve TWO problems for us:
1. Loss of tech jobs
2. Osoma's existence
Table-ized A.I.
Time to start our own businesses, form co-ops, and stick it to the outsourcing bastards age?
Seriously, I've been toying with the idea of a nationwide tech co-operative to provide consulting services, provide tech services, etc... A large enough co-op with the right people joining in and spearheading it, could seriously compete. No corporate bullshitters or middle managers skimming off the top. And we could outsource things ourselves when we can't beat an outsourcing company.
While I can envision it, the idea is bigger than me. I just wish I knew who to talk to about this. I have 5 grand of my own money I'll put up to get started and I'm willing to bet, provided a real plan to make money exists, I could find 100s if not 1000s of others with their own money(maybe not as much as I have) to put up. It's either we go this route, or go unions, or else we're all going to continue to get nailed to the door.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
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.
At this point, I'm willing to take almost any job. I just don't want to end up on the "B" ark.
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
.
So much more could be happening with IT but we're stalled.
During the 90's, the world's leading computer scientists, including Jean Paoli and Adam Bosworth of Microsoft, went most of the way towards solving the single biggest challenge in IT, interoperability, by developing and standardizing protocols for communication and data translation among disparate systems. The result is XML, an acronym that even CEOs and CFOs know but one which has not been widely productized.
Why hasn't XML lead to a new generation of innovative products?
1. XML technologies are not supported by the monopoly browser.
2. "The industry" hasn't invested to develop XML platform products and bring them to market.
Could you sleep at night knowing you failed to invest $56b?
We could crush all of the robots in the factories that make cars. It'd create a ton of new jobs. Of course cars would suddenly become a hell of a lot more expensive and less reliable.
If you have a problem with capitalism then don't whine, propose something better. If you believe that capitalism is as good as it gets then read the following quote. If not, check out Parecon or read about some of Noam Chomsky's theories.
In the future there are two roads. One is to look backward and hang on to what we think we're entitled to. The other is to recognize what has made America. Our virtues lie in a flexible and open, technology friendly, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, market-driven system. This is exactly the same type of challenge farmers went through in the late 1800's, sweatshop workers went through in the early 1900's, and manufacturing workers did in the first half of the 80's. We've got to focus on setting in motion a debate that pushes us into new sources of job creation rather than bemoaning the loss. There are Republicans and Democrats alike who are involved in this protectionist backlash. They're very vocal right now, and they need to be challenged.
Stephen S. Roach, managing director and chief economist of Morgan Stanley
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Those figures certainly agree with what I've experienced. In April, I was laid off from my decade-long software engineering job in the North SF Bay area. I quickly noticed that every week, *hundreds* of other local guys were being laid off also. Some from big places like HP, Agilent, and Autodesk. Some from little shops like the place that I was at.
From talking to other people in my situation, it seemed that the rule of thumb was that you should expect to search 1 month for every $10K that you expect to earn. Based on that, plus the nasty cost of living in northern California, I beat a hasty retreat from the area. Thankfully, I'm gainfully employed elsewhere now.
Slashdot: come for the pedantry, stay for the condescension.
Uh.. who pissed in your coffee? I'm talking about the "Big 7" consultants not the Jo Blow consultant. If you are a Joe Blow consultant and are charging $200/hour and you get any jobs at this point then you must be Ada Lovelace.
Zoid.com
Who really believes that the recession ended in November of 2001?
My company is hiring developers. I interviewed a few of them this week, and none of them met the bar for a medium level position. Coworkers and I would give them some simple coding problems, stuff like merge two arrays, reverse a linked list, reverse a string in place, and none of them gave a satisfactory answer. And some of these questions have been published in several books - do these guys not show up prepared? Going beyond coding, it was clear none of them really understood the software business despite claims of 5 to 15 years experience.
I don't doubt there are some good people out of work for too long, but even with all the outsourcing going on, there are companies hiring as there will always be software development done in the USA. All these custom applications by small firms will forever demand local employment, just as one example - Billy Bob isn't going to want to deal with a bunch of Indian devs across the world for his inventory tracking system, he's going to stay local.
As others have stated, first ask yourself if you really are a good developer, and if you default to "I have X years experience," rather than enumerating your accomplishments, the answer may very well be no. If yes, you'll find something soon enough if you use some saavy in your search. Just keep an open mind and be prepared to make some adjustments, including but not limited to moving.
right up until you proposed writing in Bill O'Reilly for president.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter...
Seriously, drop me an email, I'd like to know a bit more about this.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Don't worry, unemployed SW engineers can apply for jobs sweeping up in untaxed churches. It doesn't pay much, but you never have to worry about testing anything ever again.
--
make install -not war
Yes, and no. It does take clever marketing skills, but you don't have to lie. The reason these corps lie half the time is they really don't understand their products and they don't have decent products.
If we had a nationwide co-op of local IT professionals contracting with local businesses under one nationwide brand name, we would have pooled resources to engage in effective marketing. Marketing that wouldn't have to be done by each individual. Marketing that could be done in nationwide publications like businessweek and the like. This type of campaign would deliver huge mindshare to local members of the organisation and would allow them to focus on what they do best, IT work.
It's all an idea right now, if someone out there has any suggestions on who they think I should talk to about this for pointers on getting started, let me know. I think this could work, but the idea is much bigger than me.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
for those of us still in college. I'm going into a computer science major and I will kill myself (or marry my indian friend which would result in the first choise) before moving to India. I can't wait for all of those outsourcing companies to see the bad effects of it though, such as us not being able to understand a damn word their "tech support" people say. And even if we did understand them, its not like it would help because they tell you to do what youve already done 20 times in a row instead of listening to you or making sense. ...I'll calm down eventually but I'll always hate India
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
"463,000 H-1Bs were employed in the field, as of 2002"
The H-1b quota was reduced in 2003-but the L-1 visa program has even fewer controls-and is now effectively uncapped.
After years of "huge economic rises" and years of "it's a new economy" is anyone surprised? The so called tech boom created thousands of new tech jobs, many of them software engineers, for stupid start up companies who thought they could ignore how the economy really works.
So, four years after the dust settles we're still going to see the backlash of what happens when you hire too many non-qualified people and too many people looking for the quick gold rush buck. Of course there are less jobs in this area, because perhaps we didn't need them anymore once the "new economy" evaoporated.
Hint: There never was a new economy, it was a farse.
I'm somewhat stumped by people blaming Bush for this. The economy didn't shrivel because he became president, it was already going down before then, tech companies IPO'ing without a major project, or a product that in todays market is just pathetic will cause stuff like that. Tons of money tossed into "new avenue markets" by big venture capitalist firms instead of going into current growing markets that have a proven track record.
It's not Bush, heck it wasn't Clinton, the jobs are gone, they even deserve to be gone. Now everyone just needs to find out why everyone else is so dang surprised.
You wrote:
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
THat is not what is happening. What is happening is that an ever-decreasing percent of the population (Group A) is obtaining an ever-increasing amount of money (Amount M) . And conversely and ever-increasing percent of the population (Group B) is obtaining an ever-decreasing amount of money (Amount N). That is the very essence of neoliberal econonics/lasseiz faire economics/corporate capitalism. It is a system designed to place an ever increasing amount of wealth in a ever-decreasing number of hands. Witness it happening before your eyes.
Yes, the overall pot is increasing because Amount A is growing faster than Amount B is decreasing. But so what?
Also, since this is The Law of Jungle, i.e., that is the basis of Neoliberalism/Lassiez Faire economics, we can see what effects this will have by looking at animal behavior when the balance of power shifts dramatically. What happens in the nest of certain types of birds when one of the chicks gets bigger than the other chicks? The bigger chick pushes the smaller one out of the nest. Or when one of the young male lions gets bigger than the others? It runs off the rest.
So when some humans get more resources than the others, they exploit the ones who have less resources. There is no "rising tide lifting all boats," but instead suddenly powerful entities that inexorably impoverish, enslave, and eventually push out of the nest, all the little ones. THe means of control are many. Wherever there is animal entity that gains more power than its competitors, it uses that power to improve its own position. And when these powerful entities exist in a democracy, they use propaganda to lull the lesser humans, to fool them by whispering sweet, lasseiz-faire nothings into their ears. "Hey, Little Red Riding Hood, look at my Cornucopianism Religion I created for you. A rising tide lifts all boats, Little Red Riding Hood. I would never hurt you."
They do this with a vast array of think tanks and foundations that have been created with over $2 billion dollars of funding over the last 30 years or so. Read Tentacles of Rage from this month's Harper Magazine to find out more.
I used to be under their spell, too.
You wrote:
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.
This is simply the result of an accretion of knowledge. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And by the way, a lot of the basic research to obtain these improvements were funded by taxes. But the profits were taken by corporations. Hmm. Sounds like a peculiar form of socialism to me.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
it's not that americans are being ambushed in the parking lots or whatever. it's that at least some of the jobs being "taken" are manual, untrained labor. the people who desperately need money (ie - jobs) are having at least part of the employment market shut down because there are fewer entry-level positions availabe. you don't see CEO's or execs getting pissed off about this issue, because if they can pay workers less, that means they can bathe in yet more money. the people that are getting screwed by this situation are the ones at the bottom of the proverbial pecking order.
Along with having too many workers, the skills companies need from workers has changed. Most places aren't building new stuff from scratch anymore- they just need folks to maintain what they have and maybe upgrade to the latest, greatest thing. The network is in place, the web page is designed, and so forth. Maintaining a system takes less workers then designing it and setting it up.
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
Outsourcing has definately put a dent in the US job market, and while this: http://www.criticalconcern.com/satire-president-ou tsourced.htm Clearly Satirical Article is but humourous and entertaining, I thought it would be a refreshing laugh for those slashdot readers suffering from this sad state of affairs.
Also, Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liers who Tell Them presents a wonderful point-by-point analysis of where Bill O'Reilly lies in his books.
O'Reilly really is a whacko and God help us if he is ever elected to presidential office.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
The main difference is bush has already prooved himself to be a moron. Now its kerrys turn.
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
Bush's tax policies - specifically, accelerated depreciation - have encouraged companies to spend their money on *stuff* rather than on people. Companies can presently write off *half* or more of the cost of a purchase in the year of purchase, rather than writing it off over 5 or more years. That's a pretty hefty incentive.
In the past, spending money on *stuff* would boost hiring of people who make, service, and run the things purchased.
Now, though, the *stuff* is probably made overseas, so no manufacturing jobs. And the service probably consists of disposal and replacement for many things, rather than skilled work, so service jobs are less necessary. Some things don't require more workers to run them, or they might just be operated by the same person who ran the old one.
And some of the *stuff* bought are expensive software packages which help companies cut down their staffing requirements even more. Or they reduce the amount of inventory that has to be kept on hand, reducing the amount
of stuff they buy.
So, ironically, Bush's tax cuts may have reduced hiring!
Luckily, the accelerated depreciation provisions are expiring next year. So, with luck, 2005 will see more hiring.
That is, unless rising healthcare costs, reduced consumer spending, and other influences conspire to slow the economy and hiring.
They do note that overall, Silicon Valley is down 1500 jobs in the long run though... however that figures...
-----
"Cogito Eggo Sum: I think, therefore, waffle."
Right, because somebody who writes a book called "Lies and the Lying Liers that Tell Them" [sic] is a good person to go to for unbiased reporting.
Uh, or not.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Think again. I know there isn't a simple cure or cause. However, there were a lot of people working in the industry who shouldn't have been. Unfortunately now there are people who should be working in the industry who aren't. Partially that has to do with companies having a sour taste for overbloated IT staff that were undertrained--they've now cut back to less than they probably should for their business needs (I know we have).
My own company went through bankruptcy. I live in a small town with very few software engineering jobs and it was a bit dicey for a while there. But my current job is due to effort I made, along with a useful college degree (not a MS certification), and a good dose of luck. I'm not saying that if you lost a job it was all your fault. But in the aggregate, we are in the normal oversupply stage of post-boom.
Don't even bother... this troll is about as old as the one about Stephen King being dead... Though that one actually scared me, since he hadn't finished the Dark Tower then...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
Change your title and department to anything not related to IT. Stay the hell out of customer service though. Marketing and Finance are good hiding spots. HR is solid gold but you WILL go to hell in the end.
Unfortunately to many Amercians, everyone from the Middle East is an Indian (and muslum).
It isn't intentional ignorance, it is simply that we are in a huge country cut off off from Europe, Africa, and Asia by a lot of water. Proxmimity plays a major role. What goes on in the neighboring states is generally more relevent to the average American's life than what goes on in countries they will likely never come anywhere near.
Unforunately, we are also really damn loud, so the opinions of our most ignorant citizens gets broadcast everywhere.
Whoa 80K, where did you go, MIT? 15K here and I'm was the same situation as you are. I'm getting out of IT. I'm currently taking undergrad chemistry clases and hope to pursue get into an MS program in chemical enginering, or possible pharmacology. I considered science but ruled it out because it seems like you get one shot and if you screw up or it wasn't your original major, you are out for good. The NIH/NSF only have so much money and search committees aren't going to give it to some hack that took his undergrad classes at a lower tier state school four years after he graduated. Hopefully chemical engineering is not like that. The worse I have heard about chemE is that it can be boring. Well, better bored that broke! Yes programming is fun when you are working on interesting projects, but lets admit it, most jobs are just programming boring business logic and eliminating paper. Where's the fun in that. Perhaps I can put those programming skills to use somehow with the chemical engineering or pharmcology degree.
:-| ) I guess we aren't as special as we thought. Good luck.
Sometimes I feel that peopld like us got the short end of the straw, but it happened with civil engineers in the 60s/70s and with aeronatical engineers in the early 90s. Thing that really stings is I know idiots who I graduated high school with who pursued non technical fields who are faring better than I. Perhaps the situation will be different in 5 years. I have close relatives in the science field and they don't do it for the money although they make a decent amount(granted it took them 15 years after graduation and I am about 5 or so behind. Perhaps I can start having a life around 40
Now you know why i wash windows
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.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I don't have a newsletter, I'm just a guy with an idea, but I'll be sending you an email.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!
Yaz.
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.
I just quit my job(IT) for an IT position that's 3x my current pay, work from home with no end user support required. not only that but i am beating the work off with a stick i have as much as i can handle. thats because i don't program in crummy java or do windows NT sysadmin crap. learn some real computer skills people, and you won't have trouble finding a job or getting outsourced.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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....
Before any one starts trolling about how great Bush is here is a pre-emptive rebuttal. The economy wen't down on Bush's watch. Terrorists struck on Bush's watch. Overtime got cut on Bush's watch. Outsourcing increased due to tax incentives on Bush's watch. Both the House and Senate are Republican controlled. Now you can argue its not his fault. Wrong. By being the commander and chief one has a exacting duty to this country and responsibility to do every thing possible to maintain balance, peace and prosperity.
Finding your email address is difficult. Drop me a line, if you have the time and it is convenient. The address is my slashdot "name" at the domain specified in my "home page" URL, sans the "www". I'm a self-employed consultant and partial owner of an LLC (with two other members), providing IT services and consultation to businesses in a local market. I don't know if I have anything valuable to add to the conversation or not, but I'd certainly like to hear your perspective re: your prior message. Odd way to try and reach you, I know-- hopefully you'll see this.
The Attitude Adjuster, I hate me, you can too.
There was a story on the local news (NHK) the other day about how Japanese manufacturers have been moving highly skilled, key manufacturing back to Japan and out of China. The main reason given was being tired of teaching the locals how to run their plants and processes only to see them run off to set up and become competitors. This is especially a concern given the low priority given to intellectual property by the government in China.
It wouldn't really surprise me to see something like this happening to software R&D in the near future either.
I can't figure out why the so called bubble ended up busting. How did all those companies fail when Moore's Law garentees that profits will double every 8 months ?
We have 9-11-2001 to thank... No matter what the Dems say...
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
just curious - where do you go to get qualified as a politician, do you send 'em all to a special school over there in the US?
pick a sig, any sig
Getting a job right out of school, experience or no, is going to be very hard in this job market where there are more senior people looking. I doubt a business degree would serve you much better, though.
I'd rework the resume and keep trying; consider relocating if you can. I've been hearing of a lot of people who have jobs moving to better ones lately here in L.A., so the market has to be looking up.
Well, I still remember a course I did in first year where during an introductory lecture, when the lecturer was talking about how programming languages have advanced from the 1s and 0s initially to asm to high level languages we have today, and finally ending off at a slide showing a computer on a pedestal and titled, "Self Programming".
:(
So is this our future? Eventually these damned things get so clever that they can program themselves?
Anyhow, doing a CS degree in this time and age sure stinks
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
You're missing a big piece of the picture here. Putting aside the fact that America isn't a free market and hasn't been for quite some time, let's pretend for a moment that the entire world - every single country - is happily following Adam Smith's theory as closely as possible.
What happens? The overall wealth of the entire world rises, probably markedly. The system as a whole benefits from free market economics. Let me repeat that: the system AS A WHOLE benefits from free market economics.
This DOES NOT MEAN that EVERY NATION benefits from this situation. All free market economics guarrantees is that the world, taken as a whole, will be wealthier than it was before. Some areas will see their wealth increase by vast amounts; others by lesser amounts; and some areas will actually see their wealth DECLINE. But when you add them all up, the world - as a whole - will be wealthier.
The free market doesn't distribute wealth fairly nor equally, nor should it. That's what socialism - the antithesis of the free market - tries to do. It could very well be that even if every nation in the world were as close to the free market as possible, that the U.S. could end up being one of the losers while many other nations wind up being the big winners.
The free market doesn't guarrantee an increase in wealth for every part of the system, just for the system overall. Smith himself mentioned this but saw it as a good thing, standing apart from national interests to give a (mostly) objective rendering of his theory.
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. But seeing as how I'm an American and I don't have any hankering at all to be a Nigerian, my primary focus is on increasing the wealth of AMERICA. It would be incredibly stupid of me to sacrifice my own rational self-interest - along with that of my countrymen, my relatives, my friends, and my children - to argue for free-market economics in a situation where America stands to lose and others stand to gain. Deliberately depriving yourself, your friends, your family, and your chilren of opportunities, shipping them overseas for others to take advantage of, isn't 'altruism'; it's foolishness bordering on the criminal (or the insane).
Oddly enough, both the Democrats and the Republicans argue that this is a good thing and that we do all this in accordance with the 'free market' (again, despite the fact that America isn't much of a free market). That selling out American workers is fine and dandy because it upholds the mantra 'free market', and that in some magical fashion all the jobs lost will eventually be made up through the invention of new technologies. In the interim between the old economy and the imaginary new one which has yet to come, we lose more than 2 million jobs, 1.1 million of which are replaced by jobs which pay nearly $9,000 less than the ones which were lost. Unemployment is still higher than it's been since the recession year of 1983, but so many workers have been off the unemployment rolls for so long the government no longer counts them - and therefore, in some bizarre bureaucratic fashion, they're no longer unemployed.
(How all of this innovation is supposed to occur under the new IP laws is beyond me, but that's a discussion for the next RIAA/MPAA/Disney news item.)
As the parent poster mentioned, the situation becomes even worse when you embark on free market economics with nations that themselves don't practice anything like the free market. Massive government intervention along with vastly lower standards of living almost assures movement of jobs from the free market (or pseudo-free market) nations to the non-free market nations. Exactly what we're seeing right now, actually.
The only way to stem the tide is
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The tech industry crash might not have been caused by Clinton, but it started on his watch.
I'll agree with you on this point. But there are smart things you can do, as president, to minimize the impact of such a crash, and then there are dumb things you can do that will only exacerbate the situation.
Do you think the Japanese motor and electronics industries have got where they are today by whining to their Government? They got there by making what people want to buy.
I work in the UK and Sweden and the job market for IT people is pretty damn good.
I'm reading a lot of comments by Americans here and it's all negative. Are there any Europeans reading this who want to confirm/deny that the IT market - after a prolonged recession - is good?
At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I can't help feeling it's because European management has recognised that throwing the requirements over the wall and some dude in India coding them is not a great business model. Programmers need to sit and talk to the business people.
Even the feverish hacks at The Economist seem less certain that offshoring will change the IT landscape. Compare:
"The shift of service jobs to low-cost countries has only just begun"
(The Economist, Relocating the Back Office December 13, 2003)
with:
"So even the bullish-sounding projections about 'infrastructure-management services' hardly suggest a revolution either in the global outsourcing market or in the structure of India's information-technology industry: not so much one big wave; more a rising tide."
(The Economist, After the call-centre, now the IT department is off to India, September 10, 2004)
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
No, free trade helps both countries. Just look at how hurt many industries were when Bush raised protectionist tariffs on steel: the steel industry was happy, but the rest of the country got hit with higher supply costs.
The overall wealth of the entire world rises, probably markedly.
Why should that be? I agree that the free market is one way to reach an equilibrium where any further reduction in cost on one side will lead to an increase somewhere else so that there's no net gain. But this state is always in accordance with the rules of the game. Change the rules and you'll get a differen situation.
For eample take the transfer of goods in the European Community. At the moment, it's very profitable to truck half finished products from one country to the other. German potatos will get shipped to Italy for peeling, slicing and frying and then sent back as chips in bags to Germany.
If the freighters now would have to pay more for the upkeep of the roads, because communities see no business case in maintaining highways - for local traffic a dirt road is good enough and gives the people a good reason to buy a SUV, probably the free market will kill the idea of shipping potatos twice across the Union. Building a smaller frying plant will be cheaper.
In all of this, the free market doesn't create any wealth, it distributes it only in an unequal fashion. It makes no difference, if the transport workes make a good living or the corrupt local gouvernement, except naturally to the transport workers and corrupt politicians.
Just like every superhero has his pet arch-villain, the free market has also an opposing force, just as strong: Peoples desire for a happy life. The forces of free market can make people's life miserable up to a certain point, after which the rules get changed. With new rules, the free market will find another equilibrium.
In the above example, this could be some Austrian communities sitting between Germany and Itlay being fed up with all those potato-trucks and deciding they won't maintain those roads for the benefit of German couch potatos any more.
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
I have mod points but the category does not exist. Arrogant point #1: "millions of underemployed Chinese", most people in China work the entire time it is daylight just to eat and stay warm. Just because they don't have a clock-card does not mean they are "underemployed". Arrogant point #2: USA Inc. has been steam-rolling most of the world for the last 50 yrs by "government intervention" at the expense of everyone including thier own population. Now you start crying and squirming because the world is starting to insist you play by the rules that were mainly invented by yourselves. Arrogant point #3: "When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market". Go tell that to the sugar farmers in Australia who were recently shafted by the US, they are just one very small casualty of USA inc. From an overseas viewpoint, it makes sense that an arrogant punce like you would live in the USA and hero-worship Bill O'Reilly. What would make me really laugh is if you and Bill ended up begging for an Indian "green card" after your economy implodes.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That's pretty much how lawyers and doctors started out. After awhile they decided that they had enough members and needed to restrict new entries. With state sanctions they drew up requirements which tightened over the years, and also were awarded the ability to boot their members (with no alternate organizations as recourse) whenever those members didn't toe the party line. If those booted members dared to practice their profession, the professional organizations would cry 'foul!' and the government would come along to thump the miscreant.
So tell me: how long will it take your organization to go the same way? Or do you honestly think that unlike the doctors, the lawyers, the plumbers, the electricians, the psychiatrists, and all the others that have gone before you, you'll somehow be exempt from the same sort of greed and corruption?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I'm not sure what to think of so many pro Kerry people seemingly fine with the concept that Bush is responsible for hurricanes...
"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?
..as long as the employees that were fired don't file for unemployment-benefits, nobody gets any worse of it:
- The industry cleans out bad coders
- Less bugs
- More efficiency
- Less wage-costs
- The economy still gets income from the unemployed - they need to eat now don't they ?
No no, this is not meant as a troll - just a reminder of how some people see these figures.
It would be 'bad' if these people would actually stand up for their right for benefits or were the best coders the company that fired them had or were the driving force (!) behind the productivity of those still employed ("Hey Pete, you know why blabla doesn't work" "Sure, just change that and that and you're done." == this last remark was done by the fired person, with that remark missing - who knows how long the code takes to finish ??).
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Predicted weather report from Microsoft's Bangalore Campus
Microsoft doesn't have a campus in Banglore.
That outsourcing is the sole, or even primary reason for the reducion in jobs. Notice they cite the fall as starting with the mild recession, not with the outsourcing trend.
.com behind your name and suddenly you were worth investing in.
.com days and expended their lifestyle to match. However they were being paid more than they were worth. That fact hasn't registered, though, and they still act and feel liek they are underpaid when, in reality, their pay has just returned to a level more in line with their skills.
.com boom days where a basic cert and a MS Word wizard resume would have 5-6 figure job offers flooding in. Sorry, not the case anymore in tech, and basically not the case in any industry. IT is just equalising to a state like most other industries where skill, experience, and personal contacts are what get you a job, not a couple of Microsoft certs.
The thing that many people don't seem to want to admin was in the late 90s we had an artifical bubble fueld by overspeculation on the Internet. Any and everything that had to do with the Internet was getting money. Put a
Problem was that the Internet is just a communications mechanism, nothing more. It doesn't create money. Most of these 'net bussinesses had no bussiness plan, no idea how to make money, and often no real product to boot. This was a situation doomed to fail. It was on a downward slide when the terrorist attacks shook up confidence and accelerated it.
Well, this caused a glut of tech workers. All kinds of people were going in to IT and programming because it was seen as easy money. Get an MCSE, get a great job. Never mind if you were any good at it, companies needed tech people badly and would take what they could get. This literally led to situations of kids straight out of highschool making 6 figures in some cases.
So, when the crash came, these people found themselves out of work. However what they didn't realise is that it was more or less permenant. There just isn't the need for that may IT workers espically that many INCOMPETENT IT workers.
Others who have more skill and were able to get job bitched about the lower pay. They had raked in the dough during the
I personally believe this is tha major cause for the "tech crunch". Everyone I know that does IT/dev hiring says they still get floods of resumes but the problem is they just can't find qualified people easily. There are plenty of hacks out there that got in it for the money but lack real skill, however the good ones are much harder to come by. As a corrilary to that, basically all the skilled IT/dev people I know do not lack for jobs. They have one, and have no trouble finding prospects.
So really, I think the big problem is a lot of people long for the
Now this isn't to say there aren't tech workers in the country getting the short end of the stick saliry and/or hours wise, there are. However show me almost any industry, I'll shouw you workers somewhere in this country getting screwed. There are good and bad employers, and good and bad employees.
Just because there is someone telling a sob story about how much they hate their job, or how they can't get a job does not mean that the tech industry has gone to shit (or to another country). It just means that it is swinging closer to some kind of equilibirum.
So yes, outsourcing will cost some jobs here, at least in the short term, but to pretend liek that's the only reason there are less jobs than 1999-2000 is just stupid.
> 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!
I'd like to add that as long as the people keep their money in the market and don't liquidate it , they don't pay taxes.
If your stocks appreciate to 200% of the original value, you get double the money - but the government punishes you with taxes if you try to liquidate and hoard it.
I'm not an economist, but IMHO Income Tax on investment liquidation is an essential part of Capitalism . Tax cuts will encourage liquidation of assets and weaken the economy in general !.
I pay around 28% of my income as tax (India) and I don't like taxes anymore than you do - but they are needed. (oh, and I don't want any of that used to fund a war)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Even if the parent is wrong about the economy and this really is the one time the pessimists are right, he's still right that bitching about it isn't going to accomplish anything. If you sit around and whine on /. that you can't get a job, we'll you'll be right, but mainly because you are sitting around and whining on /. rather than doing something about it.
Even if you believe the pessimists are right, do something about it personally. Get out of IT and work on another field. Computers aren't the onyl way to make money in the world and if you truly believe they are dead end in this country, do something about it personally.
I'm not saying you shouldn't alert the government of your views if you truly believe this will be the crisis that kills our economy but please understand the skeptics:
Doom and gloom is a popular human passtime. You get it on all levels, of all kinds. You get the economic doom and gloom that X event or policy will ruin our economy. You get the religious doom and gloom, that the apocolyps is upon us. You get the environmental doom and gloom, that we are ont he crux of destroying the enivronment. And so on and so on.
This is: They are ALL WRONG. We know this because here we stand. Our economy is not in ruins, it's the biggest in the world and inded in history, we are not all dead, the environment has not entered a new ice age or melted down, etc. All the predictions of doom have failed to some true.
Thus when new ones, that look very much like the old ones, come about, many of us are skeptical. I'm not saying that they might not be right this time, but I hear little in the way of proofs of how this time is different and lots in the way of screaming and misinformation.
Either way: Sitting around and waiting for it to happen gets you nowhere.
Your faith in the "Free Market" looks naive. The US itself is not a free market when it comes i.e. to the steel industry or to the products of agriculture. In these economic sectors the US apply heavy taxation to goods from Cina and other developing countries. It's the greed of the capital holders who is destroying the US and the european economy. The politics and the administration of the public health aren't done in the interest of the people who live in a country but only to serve who can buy them.
However, there were a lot of people working in the industry who shouldn't have been.
There still are. Most of them have C.S. degrees.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Bangalore is farther away from Pakistan than New Delhi. It's land locked , surrounded by mountains and cool dry place. It's the last place pakistan's going to drop the bomb . If the unthinkable ever happens it would be Delhi and Bombay first ... and then Islamabad would be glassy crater by that time . India has a "No First Use" policy for nuclear weapons :)
... (hmm... maybe that's why).
Oh and Microsoft's Hyderabad campus in Summer feels like 45 centigrade with 40 KMPH dry winds whipping dust . If you don't have an AC car and an air conditioned home, you're more likely to eat , sleep and work in office
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
IIRC, John is a EE. As such, he lacks the core theroys and even discrete mathmatics, but he learned a fair amount of math and logic. With a bit of hard work, anybody can get by the rest. And in john's case, I would say he had a lot of hard work.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I had just started university in 1998 when it was really getting in full swing. I started picking up computer support certs not to dropout and go get a .com job, but just because it was easy to do and I'd figure it would help me in the future with jobs. I was correct in this, as many students apply for student tech support jobs, not many have any certs. Even simply ones like the A+ and Network+, which is what I had, were enough to give me the edge.
Well having completed basically all that CompTIA offered at the time, I figured I'd ask the cert company where I ought to look next. I was thinking MCSE, since it was the grand daddy tech support cert at the time, ro so it seemed.
They sat me down with a rep and we talked shop. First thing he wanted to know was what I did, other than school, which at the time was act as the webmaster for the school paper. This was great, he said, because the web was The Holy Grail, and all you needed to be rich. He recommended a couple design and administration certificits (and their training for them, of course). Any time I asked about things liek the MCSE he told me not ot worry about that, maybe after, the web was where money was.
Well I decided not. I didn't really like webdesign enough to make it a carreer, and my roomate was a bussiness major who knew enough about the market to know this shit wasn't going to last. The cert center, meanwhile, was pumping out people left and right with a couple moths training and some peices of paper who were getting quite lucrative jobs as web designers/adminstrators.
So where are we today? Well I don't know any of those any more. All the designers I know are either good graphics/layout people, or good programming/backend people, neither of which I was. Administration is done by competent (usually) tech people, and I'm happily working doing systems and network support.
It seems this crap was hardly unique. In all areas, but the web espically, people were being pused out the door with meaningless certs to find great jobs. Well one knows that just can't last. A peice of paper doesn't mean you do your job well and if I had a nickel for evey "IT" person I've met with a cert but not the skills/knowledge that cert allegedly implies, I'd have a lot of nickels.
I'm sure outsourcing isn't helping the job situation any, but I hardly think it's the cause or major factor.
That is interesting. I know a number of people on H1-Bs on very high salaries. Too high, even. (read: salaries that make the U.S. work force so expensive, that people are turning to India, China and other countries with cheaper labour). I also know U.S. citizens asking for salaries that are much lower than those of H1-Bs.
h p
;), and we all know that can't last. In order for things to continue, they need to remain in the equilibrium. What you see with job shifts is just one small part of that - keeping the global equlibrium.
How are H1-Bs lowering U.S. salaries then? I am talking about a high-tech sector.
Illegal aliens are illegal. We could stop the discussion right there. But I won't. Your ancestors came to country that was not yours, and created the USA. So live with the fact that migrations are something that will never stop, and try to understand who look for a better life, the same way your ancestors did.
Let me quote something for you:
FROM THE AUGUST 14, 2001 ISSUE OF VILLAGE VOICE
ONLINE: http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0132/letters.p
ENTRY LEVEL
Michael Kamber's article "On the Corner" should serve as a wake-up call to
all New Yorkers on the need to reduce immigration to levels that America
can absorb. But it tells only half the storythe people standing on street
corners are replacing American teenagers who need entry-level jobs to
learn how to support themselves.
The city comptroller's office has estimated that New York City's teenage
employment rate is 20 percent, which is 25 points less than the national
average. The reason for the disparity is that New York is overpopulated
due to immigration.
The comptroller's office is advocating public service jobs and tax breaks
to increase employment, and those are good things. However, the number of
immigrants in New York is severely impacting the lives of American
children, with overcrowded classrooms and few jobs. That would make an
excellent follow-up article for Kamber.
Ed Price, President
Tri-State Immigration Moratorium
Manhattan
Michael Kamber replies: There is anecdotal evidence that immigrants do
indeed compete with entry-level American citizen workers. On the other
hand, the wave of immigrants in the 1980s is widely credited with
stimulating New York's economy during tough times. There have always been
movements to close America's doors to immigrants; fortunately, these were
not successful before my grandparents arrived here - or yours.
As for things shifting from the US to Chinas and Indias of the world, I see that as a nature keeping things in balance. Why are jobs moving there? Because the labour in the US is too expensive? Why is labour in the US so expensive? Because people are living like there is no tomorrow: big houses, several houses, several cars, big cars, SUVs, monster malls, tons of air-conditioners, a LOT of consumption, a lot of waste creation, a lot of pollutants, etc. If things were to continue this way, there would be a huge disbalance, a big disturbance in the force
Simpy
It's that there are too few IT jobs compared with the number of well-qualified people, especially in software development, but in some other areas as well.
Demand for people in any field will vary as the US and world economies change. That's inevitable.
But demand (=jobs) is not the whole story. US universities are still producing IT graduates, most of whom will never find a job at a salary that will justify the tuition costs. That is not inevitable. That situation could be fixed by better informing high-school graduates about the employment market. Kids are going into CS courses with the expectation that this is a route to a well-paid future, when in fact it's an expensive trip to nowhere.
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!!!
India also no doubt has a "don't assassinate the prime minister" and a "don't let the parliament get invaded" policy but the practice and the theory don't always match up. I hope the protocols for those nukes are more secure than e.g. the lives of the leaders of the country.
Good strategy, I know a bunch of folks who (unwittingly?) have taken that approach. But scratch HR off your list, it's being outsourced too !
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Guess what, one of my uncle's lives under the poverty line according to government statistics.
Owns a half million dollar home, a few cars, a RV and a pair of nice bikes. His income is practically nothing but he has incredible capital resources.
FWIW, to live in "poverty" in the US is to live better than most of the world. How many people in poverty in the world do you know have televisions, cars, cell-phones, 700+ square feet of living space, refrigerators, and many other items?
Poverty is all relative. In the US the large concentrations of wealth bring better health care to the poor as well. While there are a large number of uninsured people in this country no one is prevented from getting medical care, and a lot of those who cannot pay do not have to pay.
I look at it this way, if you cannot support yourself on 40 hours a week pay then you should try to find a program to teach you a trade so that you can. If you can't do that then get two jobs or find ways to cut your costs. There is no excuse for not being able to support oneself on a full time job. Yeah, if your minimum wage its a bitch but you have to expect to cut out lots of extras and then share the burden with a few others (ie roommates). If that is not incentive to improve then nothing is.
Those foreigners can only do a few things with their dollars. They can spend them on American exports, they can buy American owned assets (such as American owned companies or land) and they can lend the money to America. If they do more of the second two than the first (so that the value of US exports is less than the value of US imports) then the result is a trade deficit.
This is exactly what HAS been happening to the US. My guess is that almost all of the difference (the surplus in the capital account) has been lent to the US - and much of that to the government to fund it's growing national debt. Some asian countries have large dollar foreign exchange reserves, too, which is not so very different from lending.
This can't go on forever; there's a limit to how much foreigners want to lend to the US. The dollar will fall and outsourcing will stop being so attractive.
Unfortunately the increasing borrowing by the US government will push US interest rates up in order to attract more money in from abroad and away from other domestic investments (which means you can expect to see a fall in investment by US companies). That'll help keep the dollar up - but a lot of people still seem to be expecting the dollar to fall quite a lot over the next few years.
This probably isn't going to be too good for the US economy. A lot of people will whine when they can't buy 20 dollar DVD players any more and when higher interest rates burst the (admittedly small by international standards) US housing bubble - but at least some jobs will go back to the US.
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
"When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages, the government is damaging market forces."
But if the government actively works to maintain (if not sharpen) such shortages, it's "OK?"
"Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market"
I just find it interesting how you are able to say "isolation" and "free" in the same sentence. The US is free so long as we keep our borders shut; we'll take your ideas and your money but not your people. Heck, if you want to make sure to maintain those precious labor shortages you seem so keen on, perhaps we should require workers have a government license before they're allowed to have a job.
Consider the current state of the US merchant fleet. US sailors are known as some of the most competent in the world, but also known as some of the most expensive, and as a result they can be as rare as hen's teeth. Congress' solution? Place more restrictions on who can serve on US-flagged vessels and on when US businesses can used foreign-flagged vessels (restrictions dating from the 1920's and 1930's). Result? US-flagged vessels have become as rare as US sailors, and the only time you're sure to see a US-flagged traffic is between two US ports (where they're legally required). If it were possible to get Alaskan oil and Hawaiian produce to the contiguous 48 without crossing international waters or borders, we might not have a merchant fleet at all any more. So much for what was once the largest merchant fleet in the world.
Cheap labor is out there, and closing your eyes and clicking your heels won't make it go away. Higher tariffs won't make the problem go away. Preventing outsourcing of labor is questionable for the short-term and ultimately flawed for the long-term; either US labor prices fall now as US businesses offshore, or they fall later as foreign businesses with access to those labor pools drive US businesses under. The only way you're going to solve the problem is to make the Chinese/Indian/whatever labor pools go away, and to do that you have two choices: genocide and immigration.
Don't like illegal aliens? Don't like H1-Bs? Fine. But make it easier for people to come into, live in, and work in the country so long as their intent is to stay long-term and become citizens. Heck, make it easier to achieve statehood. It will be painful (or at least distasteful) to US labor interests in the short term, but these people would be protected by US labor laws and it will ultimately benefit the US economy in the long term. The developing world cannot tempt jobs and business opportunities away from the US with cheap labor if said cheap labor is coming to the US.
However, it seems that, when confronted with the choice between immigration and genocide, many Americans would rather see the latter than the former.
Actually it cannot really be worse than Bush.
If you have the choice between a total idiot who thinks war is funny, and somebody rather unknown who at least knows that war is the worst which can happen because he fought, then better vote at the current times not for the total idiot, with a bunch of warmongers in his cabinet.
As for the war on terror, if it is fought like that, than you cannot win. Face it over here in europe we have a long tradition of terrorist groups. Spain, the UK Germany and others had to face terrorist acts in the past. Plain fightin is only the fighting of symptoms which makes things worse. Where are the causes? Lets face it it is the current neoliberalism which triggered the trend. Whereas in parts like Europe or the US lots of people are unhappy but calm because things are not that bad, but get worse very swiftly. But look at the third world, neoliberalism or generally the current monetary focus gives billions of people not a lot of perspective, add to that the usual hardliners which you can find everywhere and you run into the situation.
Now you might say, removing some dictators helps in this regard, it does not, you have to focus on raising the living standards of the average people and that is a long task which neither can be accomplished by war nor by removing one government and adding another by force. Violence only will add fuel to the warmongers who insist on killing the evil (which in their eyes is the west who is responsible for their miserable living situation - which is only partially true, but that is another issue).
You cannot kill terrorism by brute force, history has shown that over and over again. Terrorism only can be dried out by killing off the feeding grounds, which are in this case poverty, religious fanatism and hate.
But in the current climate of corporations becoming bigger and bigger and taking away local structures and livestock of average people, and governments who think they can beat a hydra by slaying off the heads, I dont see any way out.
But isn't this how free markets work? I'm not an economist and I'm not generally biased to right but isn't that just what global economy is?
Production moves to the place where it's most economical to do. This is good in overall economy since the market is global, even if it is bad for a certain part of the world. Not paying extra for producing something leaves the saved money for other investments. Raising trade barriers would distort the markets, yielding lower overall gain even if a certain part of the world would gain more now.
The problem is that there seem to be many people who want a global market with their own rules, not the rules of a free market. They want to ensure that they won't ever lose, that it's always the others that lose (developing countries, other low-economy countries with poor standard of living). But it's not a free market anymore, if such intents realize.
It *is* intentional ignorance. The information is out there. The Internet exists. We can't hide behind the whole "cut off" crap any more. Hell, phone calls to India run about 6 cents per minute. Hell some of them are free, just call a support 800 number for Sallie Mae Loan Servicing.
Case and point: Name the last 3 tropical cyclones that Mexico and the rest of Central America have had to deal with. You can't can you, without looking it up. And they are our neighbors.
The real problem is there is profit in our isolation. Ignorant people can be controlled. Look at our school systems. 12 years of teaching and you can't immediately tell me where Djibouti is.
And as for neighboring states and their relevance: Get a sheet of paper, right down your neighboring states, then write down the names of their Representatives and Senators. Governors? Counties?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
BRAVO!
There are 10 types of cliches in this world. Those that are new, and those that aren't.
That may be true, but there's also a much simpler explanation: saying that someone working a 70 hour week will be twice as productive as someone working a 35 hour week is simply wrong. In fact, as good management has long known, most people's performance degrades fairly dramatically not much beyond those 35 hours; you can do it for a short period in a crunch, but it's not sustainable. Moreover, the diminishing returns start to become negative after a while: someone who works 70 hour weeks regularly is likely to make so many mistakes that they become counterproductive, actually eating into other people's time to fix the problems they create.
Can anybody remember the study (from Switzerland, I think) where a company dropped its work hours to 9-3 Monday-Friday and insisted its employees did not work significant overtime? Their staff were more focussed because they had limited time to get the work done, and because of the earlier finish they weren't always worrying about collecting kids from school, getting to the shops/doctor/dentist/post office, etc. Their productivity rocketed. I saw several reports about this, around the time of the tech boom when many companies were pushing for ever longer work hours, but I can't find a citation now...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
it's down 48%.
Thanks, George. You useless freakin Dork.
Why on Earth do you blame the President? What do you think a President can do that would have made anything different? Do you even know what a President does, vs. what Congress does? And do you think that from Government all blessings flow?
Just like you don't need good communication skills to be a software engineer but your documentation and intra-company communications capabilities will be incredibly stunted.
...but then, what do I know, I've only had my "Director" title for the last year of my software engineering past.
It sounds like you have problems with someone in your life that you decided to take out on the grandparent poster with no regard whatsoever for their situation.
"because they know some basic C++ and VB" - I wish our PC tech knew some coding, even if it was basic VB, C++, AND perl. I don't see the grandparent poster asking for a software engineering job, and frankly I wouldn't hire them for one, but there are a multitude of jobs that they could fill (possibly well, no way to know that) where knowing even basic coding principles would be of immense usefullness.
I am not self-taught, and I agre that a college education will help you have a broader theoretical base (and programming is really just applied theory), but at the same time I remember the people I graduated with. Especially the ones that graduated without truly understanding any of the theory we were talking about, or without enough understanding to implement those theories.
It's obvious you have some pent up rage, but taking it out on the grandparent poster with little to no real provocation only shows your lackings, not theirs. Personally I wouldn't hire someone that acted as uncouth or disrespectful towards another party simply because they had not had a college education, especially if they leapt to possibly erroneous conclusions so swiftly on so little input...
Whee signature.
We've seen that moving into new markets isn't necessarily changing anything. Some of our newest markets (tech) are going off shore just as quickly as old markets (manufacturing). We need to find a way to cut the cost of living, which isn't going to happen because that is controlled by corporations.
Dude, you're quoting Village Voice to someone who wants Bill O'Reilly as president? That in itself deserves the moderation: '-1 Futile' ;-)
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
"they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons."
Can someone explain to me exactly why it's the government's function to "provide" me with a job?
No, seriously.
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.
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.)
I don't think this will work. There are a lot of very intelligent and well educated people in the East. There isn't really that much that the west can do with software developemnt that people from China, India etc can't also do.
Also, it's just not possible to breed loads of amazing graduates and post grads without also creating more average ones. You'll just end up with the same ammount of software engineers and the same mix of elite, very good, good and average coders. Unless you enforce a very strict, "less than 95% average mark in your first year and you don't get to go to the next year rule." Which I doubt will be very popular.
It's the problem with a global workforce and one that requires unions to solve, not neo-liberal ecconomists.
Israel and Ireland are big software/IT exporters and have been that way for a long time. India is relatively new to the game. Manufacturing offshoring happened long back and there is very little of it that goes to India. India has opened up its economy since 1991 in a very big way and is more of a free market than not. Foreign Direct Investnment has been on the rise in India since 1991 as a consequence of the economy opening up. I can comment on telecom that the job growth in Indian market is commensurate with growing telecom demand in India. I monitor telecom very closely and the Asia Pacific region is hot in terms of demand. So the telecom jobs are being created in India and China to meet the demand there. (not all of them but a significant percentage). I think India is competing and complementing the global markets in a fair way tapping on skills that it has. What this kind of behaviour deserves is respect and not derision and hatred. Compare that to whole host of nations that either have their hand out or are breeding ground for terrorism. Indians arent only cheap labour by any stretch. The quality of Indian academic strength is established. Look at Intel talent search awards this year. Indian diaspora in US that comprises probably less than 1 % of US population had 8 kids amongst the 40 awardees; a whopping 20 %. Indians who come to the US (at least in last 7-8 years) are truly top quality professionals that can compete with the best. I think US is doing what it has done best always, provide an great magnet to attract the world's best talent. I wish India were able to create this system that would attract world's best talent. Indian salaries are already going up in the IT sector to a level where the cost advantage is levelling out. So unless there are other drivers jobs wont move out. I do think US government should take care of its citizens by making changes that benefit its population but economic changes arent typically that simple in cause and affect and economic policies do not stay in the economic arena but affect every arena. Let the chips fall where they may. just another perspective.
Are you out of your mind?
The average US citizen pays nearly 50% of their yearly earnings to government through federal, state and local taxes combined. A purely free market requires that individual participants in the market retain 100% of their wealth and 100% control of that wealth -- each individual deciding for themselves if, where, and when to spend that wealth. This is anarcho-capitalism, and it doesn't exist at this time (and never has). The opposite is communism, where government owns 100% of all wealth and property and retains 100% control over where to spend that wealth, and the individual has absolutely no ownership of the fruits of his labor.
So, do you think we're closer to a free market, or closer to communism? The answer is, of course, neither. We're just about in the middle -- you could say "half-free", or you could say "half-communist", but there's no way you can sit there with a straight face and claim "relatively little government intervention". In the US, the truth is that government is deeply entangled in the market.
You seriously think *John Kerry* is going to be against outsourcing? Hahahaha.
And you think Bill O'Reilly is pro-corporate? Have you ever even *heard* him? If you've listened to him for more than like 15 minutes you'd be bound to hear some anti-corporate blathering.
No offense, but you're pretty ignorant.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
While the IT job market has shrunk by close to 20%, how does the industry do?
You're right to point out that other issues need to be considered when looking at the statistic.
Many things are contributing to changes in the industry. The prevalent peer-group reaction of blaming job losses solely on outsourcing abroad is pretty blinkered. It may indeed be one factor, but then open source is another factor -- we will certainly be needing to employ fewer and fewer competent techies as the repository of quality reusable or easily customizable/modifiable components and applications becomes ever greater. It's still early days of course, but it's already undeniable that you longer need to hire developers to code a project from scratch.
And I think that that is a good thing, despite the ever-larger effect it will have on employment, my own included. One has to adapt.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
>To me the recession seemed to follow the election's outcome quite fittingly.
Except the recession didn't "follow" the election. Hint: Nasdaq fell from over 5000 to under 1650 during the end of the Clinton administration.
>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.
Oh I see, so if it happens in the 3rd world, then obviously the exact same thing must be happening in the USA. In spite of the fact that the USA has a completely different economic and political systems, and completely different results.
The US is not a free market. More free than China, yes, but definitely not a free market. The first prerequisite of a free market is that the individual retains 100% control over his wealth and where to invest that wealth. Today, the average US citizen pays nearly 50% of his yearly earnings to government through federal, state, and local taxes and fees combined. You do the math.
It's far worse than the picture you paint, I'm afraid. Why, it was just a few days ago here on slashdot, where they were talking about raising retirement age to fix social security... everyone that's hoping to find a job now, will be competing with 65+ yr olds for work. No retirement means less job openings.
BTW, and idea what our kids are supposed to be going to college for? We were told that when the manufacturing jobs left that we need not worry... we'd all be switching over to a service economy. Computers, management, whatever. IT and even what middle management is necessary, seems to have been exported now. Are we all supposed to be day traders or something?
"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.
There's no shame in being a pariah. -Marge Simpson
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.
The same great Japanese economy that has been in the tank for almost a decade (just starting to recover now)? The same Japanese government that is a major financier of US debt (in order to keep the exchance rate favorable to their exporters)? I think the Japan example is instructive!
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Should individuals not go into IT? If in IT, sould they look to get out? Are some IT fields safer than others?
BTW: In deference to the article, I don't consider this to be a temporary setback.
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.
>> Those foreigners can only do a few things with their dollars. Umm nope: You forgot the big one: Most of them convert it to their local currency and send it home.
I know I'm planning on exiting IT within 5 years. I personally know a few others who have done so.
IT job = stress, long hours, lots of complaints, constant re-education, sometimes repetitive
I reset my case.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market.
Correct.
But there a several interesting features you neglect.
First, the most important aspect of China is that they insist on pegging the yuan to the dollar. That means that our trade deficit with China does not automatically get corrected by the devaluation of the dollar relative to the yuan. It also means there is a strong tie between the two countries in fiscal and in monetary policy.
People wonder why the hell there was a "jobless recovery" in the US when the Fed took rates down to a 45 year low. Well, there wasn't a jobless recovery. It's just that all the jobs were created in a specific economic region of the US - China. This regional growth disparity is just like what happened when US companies decided they could produce more efficiently in the SunBelt a couple of decades ago. Inflation never was a big problem with the low rates, either. Why? Because it was economy in China that was in danger of overheating - not the US mainland.
The obvious non-free market aspect in China is that there is only one legal trade union and it is under the control of the Party. The corruption (where workers haven't been getting wages, etc.) puts that model under stress (and should have the so-called leaders in power embarrassed to call themselves a worker's paradise, Marxists and representatives of the proletariat). It will be interesting to see if there's political unrest because the leaders of the China don't provide a natural evolution of needed changes in workers rights.
Finally, the free market works best when there are lots of buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, the labor market doesn't always fit into this category. Some examples of why include:
IMHO, government policies worldwide will need much greater coordination in the future because both labor buyers and labor sellers will tend to take advantage of disparities in national government policies worldwide. Employ workers where their wages are the absolute lowest, accrue profits where taxes are the absolute lowest, market products where prices are the highest, etc. Whether the workers, the buyers of products and people in general benefit from this situation, or only a small minority of people that own shares in internationally mobile companies, is a matter that will inevitably cross borders.
The dramatic shift in the US fiscal landscape over the past several decades, where corporations now pay much less tax than individuals, and the shift in corporations transferring profits to overseas subsidiaries from where their business is mostly conducted, where some countries have expensive compassionate social welfare policies (health care, pensions for the old and infirm), policies to prohibit unrestrained damage to the environment (expensive to companies) show that the system needs some fixing on a larger scale than "one nation at a time".
We're all in it together and the sooner we realize it and develop coordinate policies the better we'll avoid needless stress of disparities.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Ok people say it with me, Bill O'Reilly is a POPULIST, he is neither Democrat or Republican.
If you watch or listen to him you can readily see he comes down with the majority opinion on virtually every issue.
He is not a corporate schill, but he may be anti union, and yes I believe it is bossible to be both those things.
The Iraq war didn't make a difference to the economy?!
bring it on! --- JFK
The late 90's tech boom served to employ anybody and everybody that had even looked at a computer (or knew how to spell 'computer'). This was unnatural. The money pumped into the tech market in the late 90s attracted unqualified workers motivated by greed more than anything else.
Think about how many people you looked to in the late 90s, early 2000's and thought "how have you managed to stay employed?!".
Part of the contracting phase of the business cycle involves the shake-out of the inefficient firms from the market. Those are the firms that waited for the early-adopters to get the results of their litmus test of the market, and upon seeing positive results, entered the market and tried to capitalize on their status as late early-adopters. When their particular market turns south, the early-adopters of technologies remain (mostly because they really believe in their technology) while the late early-adopters are shaken out (by the lack of demand for product) and move on to another field. This is normal!
I view the decrease of tech jobs in a positive light. I know construction workers, electricians, and even day care specialists that went into the computer industry in the last 7 or so years. They made some cash, didn't really bring much value (because they lacked expertise), and now that the market is harder, they're going back to their old jobs. This is good! What you want is a computer industry with highly skilled workers. You don't want a computer industry where every person in the US is a candidate.
Yes, jobs have decreased 18.8% since 2001. But if the job count was 2000% higher than what the market could support, 18.8% doesn't seem so large anymore.
On a side note - look what happened to NASA in the past 40 years. NASA used to be a place where only the best-of-the-best were employed (back in the 60s). Very few people could go work for NASA, and terms like "rocket science" were used as a form of respect. Nowadays, NASA is a cross-section of the US population, unmotivated, bloated, and over-weight. NASA is stupid these days, and can be looked at as a laughing stock. Why? Because NASA opened their doors to everyone (not just the elite) and the influx of stupidity forever dumbened the culture. Now we have shuttles that fall out of the sky, satellites that burn up on entry into orbit due to metric to english conversion, and 3 years worth of science "wobbling" and "tumbling" it's way back to Utah.
Do you want the computer industry to become what NASA has become?
-c
Do it for da shorties
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.
http://agricoop.nic.in/statistics/stock2.htm
or
http://www.networkideas.org/themes/agriculture/dec 2002/ag04_Farm_Subsidies.htm
or just Google for steel tariff that Bush was forced to withdraw because of EU pressure
H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers.
Really? I am H-1B. Last year I took home a shade over $135 000. Which engineers did I hurt?
Japan doesn't have a free market like the US does. Compare the cost of:
food (higher, although this could partially be quality as they have better produce than we do)
gasoline (taxed above market rates, just like europe, even if it is better gas)
appliances (import duties on foreign manufactured)
electronics (even Japanese; Akihabara is more expensive for Japanese electronics than I can buy them in the US. Even Shimokitazawa seemed high....)
cars (find a Ford or GM car at anything like the price differential of a Honda or Toyota here)
andy
I don't entirely disagree. There are a lot of programmers and self-described software engineers that are bad at their jobs or entirely clueless. My commentary was on the fact that the original poster never once mentioned they were looking for a programming job, yet you (I assume your the same AC) took it upon yourself to berate this user based on your own assumptions of their goals as well as your assumption of their lack of skill.
And your further assumption that I cannot program because I have a "self-described" title of Director is just another bad assumption on your part. While there are a great many managers out there that have no skill whatsoever in the area they are managing, the assumption that any given manager cannot program is a poor use of probability to base a decision upon.
But this isn't a measuring contest or any other type of comparison, it was simply a commentary on your (and others) assumptions and the speed with which you jump to them, building chains of logic on poor assumption. But you can continue to justify your position by pretending I am another clueless manager if you wish, it won't hurt my feelings.
Meanwhile I will go back to being a software engineer (and director), a trade that is followed by first obtaining the fact and needs of the customers before writing the code instead of making blind assumptions based on generallaties or fallacious logic. One of many traits that seperate the Software Engineer from the Programmer or Code Hacker.
Whee signature.
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!
As for distribution of wealth, before the advent of modern financial markets, only the wealthy could own a company, since only they (or a small group of relatively wealthy people) had the money to invest in such a thing. The average person now is much more likely to be a beneficiary of higher profits than before, as more people own stocks etc, compared to before. This trend will only continue.
As a note, the higher wages you talk about in your protectionism scenario would be almost entirely inflationary (no real improvement for the people earning them). One of the effects of outsourcing is to moderate inflation, reversing this would cause a rapid rise in inflation, totally eviscerating any gains you speak of for the average person.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
You didn't read all of his comment, did you?
is explained here
So, -1 Lack of Reading Comprehension Skills.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
On another hand, if I was chinese, I could say: The Chinese, Mexican and Indian markets are becoming more open and free because interacting with the Western open markets.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'Convert' it? They can only do that by selling them to someone else. They can only do that because dollars have value to people selling their native currency. They only have value to such people because someone, somewhere, wants to use them to buy something from the US.
There can be lots of steps in the chain - but you can't escape the fact that dollars are only valuable because they can be used to buy US exports or US assets.
Bingo, the issue isn't a political, corporate, or economic one it's an infastructure one. Over the last 100 years we have so greatly reduced the costs of moving goods and information very long distances (containerized shipping, computerized inventory control, railroads and the internet). Think about how few things were imported (mostly luxury goods) more than 75 years ago. This has tremendous ramifications for almost all aspects of life as we have created a global market place for transactions. This investment will drive up the overall global standard of living tremendously. However, the rewards have already been captured in our location.
To add to the scale of the problem, the original investments in infastructure came from the west (US and western Europe) and as a result those areas gained a disproportionate share of the gains for most of the period. Now other areas are beginning to recognise (and invest) for their own benefit. The question becomes when will the growth in overall global standard of living offset the declines as the West "gives back" the disproportionate share of the gains and shares new gains in a manner that is more diverse than they orginally had to share.
My own conclusion is that land values in the West are likely to decline, as those have effectivly been the method by which we absorbed the gains from this infastructure. As the returns are spread along more countries the value of having land in the areas that have already recieved the benefits is likely to decline. Lower land values will reduce the amount neccessary to live in the US allowing a standard of living that can be accomplished on lower wages.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Since the beginning of the computer age people have been touting computers that maintain themselves, software that practically writes itself, and reusable software. To some degree all of these have happened. At the some time computing systems have been immensely larger and more complex; Instead of one computer per ten thousand people, each person may have several dozen computers when you count all the embedded ones.
When you balance these two factors- better computers verus bigger and more- one might predict an eventual reduction in the number of software engineers needed. It hasnt happened to a great degree yet, but might sometime.
Mostly due to the rules under "No Child Left Behind," some public schools are using a new compensation policy that gives bonuses to teachers whose students have good grades. Where do you think that's going to lead? Higher grades, of course. Nobody fails.
This would have the same problem, simply because the institution has a financial interest in students being enrolled.
-30-
These are the things that Bush* blames for the piss-poor economy. Flew right over your head.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
First of all, the recession started under Bush*, this is a fact, look it up. The points I made (tech, 9/11, weather, iraq) are the scapegoats the Bush* administration uses for the current piss-poor economy. This is the (ir)responsibility administration. What CEO / GM / Coach would still have a job 4 years after all this? You have to open your mind up, read a little, stop watching Fox news.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
The last prospect I got turned down for, I was told they "wanted someone who knew perl". Presumably so I could run a script.pl on the command line, to follow some instructions(which is dumb). My own personal fork of the AWstats web statistics package (written in perl) has features even the latest version doesn't have (someday I have to get around to contributing my additions).
I know that I can't get a programmer job of some sort, I'm not expecting that. But, in response to his rant, I'm not conceding that I couldn't do them. Since when has ability ever had anything to do with it? I don't dress up well, I'm kinda weird looking, and I really need to put a cheap S&K suit on the credit card... even if I am near broke. I'm awkward to talk to, I can't help it. Even when I know the answer better than the other interviewees, there is a pause in my voice, the hesitation.. hell, I can't catch myself at it, but I suspect I stutter even.
Of the jobs I could feasibly be hired for? Well, with phone support, you won't get the stupid script "have you tried rebooting yet" bullshit. I know the proper names for widgets (I'm not forced to say "you know, the button thingy in that one window in the control panel thingy), but smart enough to not expect the user to know them. I've installed not only more, but stranger software than anyone likely to respond to this thread. Hardware, even more so. Unless you know someone that has an ATM155 network at home (Cabletron ZX250 Smartcell switch, PCI Fore cards), I think I take that award.
As for hardware repair, I can replace a mainboard in an iBook in 10m53s flat. Comparable times on most other hardware. Not that anyone does actual repair anymore... it all boils down to unboxing the new computer while not embarrassing your company in front of the client when doing so.
Doesn't matter though... why go to the trouble of finding someone truly competent, when business logic dictates that you plan on incompetence, and hire 3 times as many techs? If the competent tech dies, or is in a car accident, you don't have a crisis of replacing someone hard to replace. I'm screwed, basically... I should have worked on beig a better liar or asskisser, instead of knowing stuff or being able to work hard.
A similar example is natural gas, used for heat in colder climates. Consumers are forced to buy it at the set price and will adjust other spending to compensate. Generally, people can't buy significantly less natural gas because it's expensive. The consumer will merely have less cash for discretionary spending. This has no effect on the seller of the gas/petrol, but will have effects through the rest of the economy.
Some parts of the cost of living are entirely set by the corporations, at least in the short term ( 3 years).
-30-
Based on the comments I should have clarified. These are the SCAPEGOATS the bush admin uses for the poor economy. No responsibility taken by this piss-pooor administration. BTW - the recession started under Bush*, get yo' facts straight. Ask yourself, if you were at a company were the security was grossly breached, people were stealing from the company coffers, you lost your health insurance, and you didn't even know if you would have a job tomorrow, would you support the CEO? Bush* has run oil companies, a baseball team, and now a nation INTO THE GROUND. Wake UP!
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
It's almost as if you believe we big, bad Americans sit around all day trying to think of how we can make life more miserable for people in other countries.
The simple fact is that people everywhere should look out for themselves. It's not my concern how some guy in India is going to feed his family. That's his concern. I am worried about my own family.
Can you not mentally separate the two issues? Just because I don't want to lose the lifestyle that I have become accustomed to does not mean that I don't want the poor in India to have a chance at improving their life. I hope the economic situation in India improves. I hope that they all get access to education and a better life. I just don't want to pay for it. Is it really that hard to understand?
Let me put it another way. Pretend the situations were reversed, and India was the wealthy country outsourcing to the US. Do you think the Indians who were hurt by it would just accept it because 'those poor US citizens need it more'? Or, would they rather want to keep what they have?
In a free market you are correct. That is why the big corps have used the government to try and lock US consumers out of the global markets. DVD region encoding, over-blown FDA restrictions, ridiculous IP laws, and many other government restrictions have closed many markets to the US consumer.
Corporations charge one price in the US and another over-seas because they know that they can prevent the US consumer from buying at the lower price. They want open markets when they are shoping for labor, but closed markets when they sell to consumers. And they are getting both.
XML is the best data format; unless your data needs to be read or written by a human or a computer.
..wow wow that sounds a bit arrogant. You mean it was the english speaking culture that gave us kepler, galileo, socrates, plato, hippocrates, alexander, mozart, beethoven, and the 'arab' numerals. Get your head outta ya arse...The world didn't start with England it sure as hell wouldn't end with the U.S. despite your vainglorious impetuous opinions to the contrary.
All straight things must come to a bend
There are no import tariffs
I think the US Govt will probably need to look at this as a new opportunity to tax goods and services crossing the border.
Of course one wonders how much of a hit those missing jobs have been having on tax collections...
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
The tech bubble was the rancher buying 50,000 wild horses. We now live in the age of the rancher trying to build fences to keep the horses in, and keeping them fed.
Translation: Programming jobs may be down. But security jobs, DBA jobs, Data Entry jobs are still going strong.
Plus -- why keep building new stuff when they can't even figure out how to properly deal with spam, spy ware, and virus issues?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm not sure about that. Personally, I find Bill O'Reilly almost as biased as Michael Moore.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
A lessoning of a restriction on trade creates a "benefit" which can be shared those who participate in the trade, however, there is no guarentee of the proportion of that sharing.
I don't have any desire to defend the steel tariffs, but it is possible in the extreme case that we could have lost our steel industry and enjoyed cheap prices. Woo. This is all good until foreign suppliers of steel cartelize or disrupt the market in some other way at which time we are screwed.
Foreign trade is tricky and needs to be approached carefully, especially in critical industries.
But what I MEANT to say is that the original poster had his economic theory correct and your example simply represents one possibility in the original posters event-continuum.
Pax -- Ob
its not just that the chinese work for less, is the exchange rates. The yuan is fixed by the chinese government to a certain dollar exchange rate.
If an equal number of yuan and dollars had the same buying power, things would be a little different.
there are other factors as well, but the exchange rates do make a signifigant difference
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
case in point was someone who called me recently after working for 20 years at the same company as a coder. he's not some idiot who didn't know his stuff. but surprise, surprise, big company x has decided to close down the office and outsource everything. the sarcastic amongst you will claim he's an idiot for statying with a company for 20 years, but to me these are the kind of victims that you all are not taking into account.
to casually suggest that he just move after being in the same city and raising a family in the same place for 20 years also suggests your own shallow view of the world.
again, get over your view of only unqualified programmers or "cab drivers" (wow, what a generalization) are suffering. i hope true karma bites some of you right in the arse.
Pointers are much easier to understand from an assembly language point of view. Now mind you, when I have **'s and whatnot, I can be confused by just what it is a pointer "to", but I know what they are in theory, and have more than a little fun creating all sorts of weird data structures with them.
How in the hell can you do a linked list without a pointer? What do you do when you need a dynamic array, and the only thing close is a linked list?
Agh, see it didn't even ocurr to me immediately, how do you use malloc() without pointers? Is he declaring everything on the stack? How can you load anything bigger than 1 or 2k that way?
I don't want to call you a liar, but this is absurd, beyond the pale.
The US itself is not a free market when it comes [...] to the products of agriculture.
To be fair, I don't think that many people would support changing this. There are real national security interests in keeping food production within your borders, even if it uncompetitive.
Listening to the diatribe talking points for FOX news I am guessing? The poor are poorer, that middle class continues to get poorer. Its all around in factual data. Fewer people are covered by healthcare, more people are living below the poverty line, and more children in the United States are getting an unsatisfactory education. Minimum wage and the poverty line definition have not changed along with inflation of health care and food.
Its like the U.S. economy is getting solely based on the well being of Wallmart. Soon all products on the market will have to be cheaper in order to sell them to the majority of the population, as they're wages will not cover the bare essentials. Its the exact opposite of the well established Henry Ford style of raising wages so people can afford to buy a Ford motorcar.
On the military population. It is a well known fact that most of the enlisted men are there for one reason, to pay for college. Career military personnel may be different. I know far too many people who went into the military because they felt they simply had no choice. Its kind of funny, U.S. senate, is overwhelming well off comparatively to the population that are representing, and yet only one has a child that is serving in the military. Nations population is largely made up of poor and middle class, but the population make up is noticeably more lower class.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
But this will be effective only when the tax breaks result in substantial savings which are greater than or equal to the savings from outsourcing.A little tax break here and there will not change much and it remains to be seen whether Kerry will be able to make a marked difference with his policies. at the moment he isn't saying much
I had exactly the same reaction. This guy was making complete sense, with a well-reasoned argument, until he ran into the Bull O'Really brick wall.
Computer Systems Design and Related services
$ pr .txt
c la ra.htm
41,500 current, down 1% over last month, down 5% for the year. (August 2004)
http://www.calmis.cahwnet.gov/file/lfmonth/sanj
Computer Systems Design and Related Services
63,300 Peak in February of '01
41,500 Current, August of '04
http://www.calmis.cahwnet.gov/htmlfile/county/s
Well, at least the traffic is better.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Also incorrect.
The purpose of the US Federal government is "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity".
If the purpose was the exercise the collective will of the people, we wouldn't need a constitution limiting the powers of government. We would also have the "mob rule" situation that critics of democracy so frequently talk about.
I do agree that it's more important to advance the state of humanity, rather than the state of American citizens. However, while the latter is the duty of the US government, the former is not. So if you want to relieve famine in Nigeria, end genocide in the Sudan, and establish democracy in Iraq, I salute you and support you. But please leave the federal government out of it, it is not chartered for that sort of thing.
Since I don't pay taxes to the French government, and they in turn don't provide me with public services and protection, I shouldn't care what happens to them economically. But I pay taxes to my local county, my State, and my nation's federal government. That's where my economic interest is placed. As the European Union has tied its nations together economically, then yes, they have vested interest in the success of other nations.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Gimme a break. What about the upswing where everyone and their brother said 'hey! they are making bucks in the tech industry! let's go over there!!' Loss of jobs since March 2001? Why not from january 1994?
/.'s are geeks, but don't we all think that 400k pales in comparison to the numbers of boot-camp weinies that flooded in to make bank? Maybe they all just went back to digging ditches or actually doing Physics/Biology instead of programming...
I was in the tech industry before it was cool and very few people knew what the internet was or that it existed. And I am still here after the great purge of those that joined for the cash. I am here for the enjoyment (masochistic I know).
I know us
-----
You missed what I feel is the most important one. Create jobs, start a business. Become your own boss or employ others. I know not everyone has the leadership or the ambition to do this but that's the great thing about capitalism, you can just hire someone to do that too.
"I was a couragous soldier in Vietnam!" "What do you mean everyone else that was with me says I was a coward and an idiot! SHIT the truth is out!"
All of the claims by that Swift Boat group that ran those ads have been thouroghly debunked. One of them even got the same award Kerry did from the same incident. And ask the guy Kerry pulled from the water if Kerry was a coward?
It's also been well-documented that that Swift Boat group consisted of mostly Republican activists who had, if not direct/illegal ties to the Bush campaign, at least a wink-wink-nudge-nudge ties.
The fact is that you wing-nuts can't stand it when someone who served in Vietnam criticizes the Bushes, but let's look at the record.
Bushies say: Manchurian Candidate - fathered a child with a black woman.
Bushies say: He's unpatriotic because he thinks Homeland Security workers ought to be able to unionize.
Bushies say: Didn't earn the medals. Wounds not sufficiently serious. Vietnam vets had their "feelings hurt" when Kerry testified as to the war crimes that soldiers were ordered to do.
Yeah I want a guy that cant make up his mind and lies about is service duty. And you cant say Bush lied because its all there. Even though they try and make something out of his record theres nothing there to bash him about. :) I love liberal media.
Nothing to bash Bush about? Let's look at the President's "record"
His business record is no better.
And as to the "liberal media", they have given Bush a free ride for a long time now. They held Al Gore to far tougher standards of "truth" then they've ever held Bush, and they're doing it again to Kerry. If you want to continue your delusional right-wing thinking, go ahead, but don't go crying "liberal media" whenever they bring up inconvenient facts which challenge your pre-conceived notions.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
*Not true*
I decreased the tempature in my first apartment after geting the heating bill. The problem is the price needs to change a *lot* before people change. AKA if gass cost's 5.50/gal then you might not take a trip but 1.50 vs 2.00 is not realy noticeable.
My opinion exactly - except written a lot better. :)
The IT market is like a game of musical chairs. If you wind up without a chair when the music stops you're out. It doesn't matter how good you are or what angle you have. Its just tough these days.
Me, I'm thinking of retraining for teaching math.
Stock up on provisions, find people you can trust, and get ready for the second American revolution. Corporations are not going to fall silently.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Ahh but you could move to france if you felt it was a better deal than the US. I don't know about you but I am thinking of moveing to Canada... Just a thought.
China is only communist in the sense that there is only one political party to vote for. They're not communist in the sense that the government controls production, at least much more than many socialist companies with certain government-run industries (healthcare, power, etc).
paintball
I think part of the reason people pick the cheap products while still insisting on high pay is rooted in the same desire that day trading is: to buy low and sell high. There's a deep seated belief that somehow, if I just work the system right, *I* can get cheap goods AND a high salary. And, just like day trading, it's all those other suckers that won't manage to make it work, but somehow I will.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I don't believe it.
The gap is the wealthy elite and the poverty line. . . the middle class (shrinking quickly, mind you) is not a part of the equation.
I'm not taking a side on any of this, or saying it's impossible to become middle class (or perhaps even wealthy) but that's not the income gap.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
After the call-centre, now the IT department is off to India
-- I don't buy it, I grow it.
To simplyfy: The guy who would have made 135k but made 125k and the guy who would have made 125k down to 115k ect ect.
Also as a market if they are paying you 135k then they may have gone up to 140k after looking for a while and not finding anyone. Forcing everyone else to raise their rates till somone else in college desides to become an engineer and fill in the gap at 45k job's. Over time price and suply go up as price goes up. Also if your sending money home the US economy is lost that capital which hirt's the US economy. Not saying go home but some people would be better off if you had stayed home. Not the person(s) who own you company but the workers lost out.
For many of us, this is an untenable compromise.
I don't love Big Brother. Call me crazy for not wanting to invite him into every aspect of my life
Finally, the process to get a clearance is expensive and difficult, and it's a rare job indeed that will fund your background check.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I know what you're saying; there are maybe one or two companies in the vicinity that I would really be interested in working at, and certainly none is as cool as my current gig.
I saw a handful of truly worthwhile applicants. We hired three, one turned us down (he had a fat telco contract), and the other found a job before we could count the beans necessary to bring him in.
I don't want to call you a liar, but this is absurd, beyond the pale.
;)
So you're calling the GP a liar?
Anyway, I didn't go to MIT, but at Rutgers it is pretty easy to go through the CS cirriculum and not really know about pointers. C is lightly covered in only one core class, although I've heard that they reinstituted C for the OS class. My OS class was Java based. I still learned a lot, mind you, since we spent our time implementing memory managers, etc., instead of wasting time debugging C code that we didn't have a good grasp on.
Unfortunately the dotcom became the dotbomb and all the smaller shops disappeared, which usually had the more qualified, experienced engineers (e.g. with a C.S. degree or similar!). Therefore, there was no competition to face for the big companies. And with tech spending being managable, customers needing complete moderization efforts, dotcom vaporware being replaced with better products (or more vaporware ;) ), the BIG companies had a HUGE advantage with outsourcing, especially with the tax breaks they got into congress during the recession to promote even more outsourcing. And rehiring former employees for 100K versus 30K just make sense to a big multi-national.
Makes you want to outsource oil.
We've been in recession for 3, approaching 4, years. Things look quite bleak for anyone that's been associated with IT, as they've lost jobs, lost wages (or at the very least, not gotten appropriate wage increases to match inflation), or any number of other financial setbacks.
It's kind of hard to start a business when you're thousands in debt, can't find a job to get out of debt, and have living bills on top of that. Particularly when starting a business will always require money to get started.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
So tell me: how long will it take your organization to go the same way? Or do you honestly think that unlike the doctors, the lawyers, the plumbers, the electricians, the psychiatrists, and all the others that have gone before you, you'll somehow be exempt from the same sort of greed and corruption?
Apples and Oranges.
You're referring to professional associations, I'm talking about a co-operative business model. Think about this, why are we being downsized? To save money. They cut a 60-120k job here to pay much less overseas(they're actually cutting even lower paying jobs than that though), right? Well in this case, we would be joining together cooperatively to downsize the non-techie middle managers, non-techie upper management, and shareholders/board of directors. There wouldn't be goldent parachutes in the organisation. Cutting out the real fat, we ought to be able to get decent pay out of our work while being price competitive in the market.
the devils in the details though, I see that clearly. This is an idea right now, nothing more.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
I'm not a Jesus freak, but there is a quote from the bible that has always stuck with me. "it is to you according to your ability to believe". If you believe in a certain outcome before you begin a journey, your faith will work to see that outcome come to fruition.
What do you do when you face opposition in your life? Do you lay down and give up? Do you dig a hole, hide in it, and hope to God the things you fear don't come to pass?
If we were to form a cooperative business model according to the laws of this country, they would be SOL. Any law they got passed they would be under. I'm not talking about a union, I'm not talking about invalidating their corporate charters, I'm talking about a business to compete. As for those good ole boys in the trucks, that's all FUD. You watch to much TV. Ask yourself if somone is a patriot of America to the point they have American flags on their cars, are they going to target their fellow Americans who formed a business to compete under the laws of America? Or do you think they will take the side of corporations shipping American jobs to India and China? I honestly don't know why I went this far, that whole assertion is extremely fear based and way out there. You got to face your fears and overcome them. You can't live your life like that.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Hate to sound like an AOLer, but "me too". I've been out of college a little less than a year, and I've been doing contracting work since then. I have a little money saved up (despite college loan payments), and I'd be interested in doing something "different". I'm not sure how to go about doing any of this, but I'd like to see where this goes.
/. login name, obfuscated, or you can use my real name (Brian) at the domain of my website.
Email address is next to my
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
I hear you. I was an EE at my school, but I took a bunch of CS classes (I wanted the minor, which I didn't end up completing anyway). The vast majority of the programming classes are done in Java. From what I understand the C++ class has now been dropped, and there's now a C# class. When I took it, the OS class was in C++, but it was all Windows-based. Who knows, it may move to C# in the next few years. A friend of mine graduated with a masters in CS from Cornell's 5-year program, and, while he knows his way around C, he's by no means an experienced C coder. Fortunately, he knows enough and has a good enough foundation that he could easily pick up everything he needs to know on his own, but it bothers me that they're not teaching C/C++ as a fundamental language. I suppose it's starting to go the way of assembly. (Amusingly, though I suppose not too surprisingly, I had more exposure to assembly in my EE classes than any CS major I knew.)
Xfce: Lighter than some, heavier than others. Just right.
No, you sound like a real IT guy. Your problem is demonstrating that the fake IT people who have the jobs you want are worse economic propositions than you are. But that means convincing the manager that you're not a threat to their ignorance. The fake IT people are gumming up the works, and the managers are keeping it gummed up by failing to differentiate between real and fake IT people.
--
make install -not war
Hardly, when you factor in the number of new workers entering the work force each month. For there to be a true net gain in jobs, job growth would have to be greater than the number of new workers. Neither Bush nor Clinton caused the recession. The executive office has only a small effect on economics, and it takes time to see the effects.
However, looking at the economy and deficit over the course of Clinton's terms, we see the effect of his decisions taking hold about two years in and reversing a general downward trend caused by the fiscal irresponsibility of the previous Republican administrations.
Bush has resorted to economic policy even his own father called 'voodoo economics,' the tired 'trickle down' theory. Most of his tax cuts went to the wealthy, and he has slashed benefitsd for the poor. With a net increase in well paying jobs, you would think more people would be making it out of poverty and into the middle class, but the numbers show middle class families sinking into poverty. Bush may not have caused the recession, but he and his cronies happily capitalized on it and 9/11 to enrich themselves and their wealthy friends at the expense of the rest of us.
Nice try at pro-Bush, anti-Democrat propaganda, though. I guess the old saying, 'you see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear' is true after all.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You want to talk about too much work? Try getting the government to implement that idea. Then there's the question of how the WTO is going to feel about that.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Overheads have always been expensive. Frankly, I'm amazed it's less than 100% of salary; here in the UK, contractors typically charge out at a rate 2.5x the equivalent salary position as a minimum, which is regarded as a reasonable rate given the overheads they have to pick up as non-employees.
The fact remains that two semi-productive employees with all the incumbent overheads are still more useful than one actively counter-productive employee doing a 70+ hour week.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Newsflash: there is no such thing as a free market.
There are tons and tons of restrictions in the market that keep it from being "free" (what that really means is anarchistic). From insanely high trade barriers in Japan, to slave labor in China, to even the basic rules governing property ownership in the US, the market is governed by rules. Otherwise, there'd be no need for the courts or the police - possession would be the entirety of the law, and that would be determined by who had the most and biggest guns.
So stop buying into the myth that there's such a thing as a free market.
Ever heard the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover"? If you don't believe what he has written in the book, you can actually look in his footnotes and verify for yourself that the information is accurate. The entire point of that book is to refute some of the lies in the books written by people such as O'Reilly. I'm not saying that Al Franken is unbiased (in fact he is biased) but that doesn't make his analytic refutations of the O'Reilly book any less accurate.
Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
Why put a title on a book? It's a marketing ploy. Franken shouldn't be surprised if sometimes it backfires, as it certainly has with me.
I mean, aside from the fact that I think Franken is a whiny prat that preaches to the choir (as opposed to Bill O'Reilly who is an obnoxious blowhard who preaches to the choir), what would possibly motivate me to care what he thinks?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You blew your credibility with that last sentence. I've never heard of any company that wanted a background check that wouldn't pay for it themselves -- would you have us believe they expect the employee to pay for it? (Most large-company sys admin jobs require a background check, although not as extensive as that required for a security clearance.) Further, you can't even apply for a clearance unless you're in a job that requires it (well, the employer applies for you).
As for what Top Secret requires, I can't say. But many of the clearance-required jobs only require Secret clearance, which is nowhere near as intrusive. (I suspect TS isn't as bad as you make it out either, although SCI may be.)
-- Alastair
You know what? For all your anti-libertarian fuming (the "bullshit" comment), I think you're spot on about the undue influence government has had on helping corporations become way too powerful.
Treating a corporation as an "individual" (!! Can you imagine such a thing?!?) is the biggest problem I have with our "free market" economy.
Get government out of it completely! The fake liability stuff of corporations is just as vile as a government feeling it has to "provide" jobs.
Cheney's "more important things to do" including supporting a wife and two kids. Kerry, in contrast, went home after 3 1/2 months in Vietnam and sided with the Viet Cong.
Actually, America's exceptional poor quality of education has been a severe handicap and a major motivator of offshore outsourcing as well as H1-Bs, etc. The only reason we're still competitive at all is that the spirit of individuality allows some to rise above the educational system.
If you've got any kind of skills, I'll hire you.
My dear friendly AC,
Yes, I KNOW it's still spelled wrong. Thanks again. And again. And again.
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
I didn't mean to imply that an employer would force you to fund your own bkgrd check.
What I meant was that most jobs that require clearances aren't interested in paying for one, but getting someone who already has a clearance.
You would have to be extraordinarily qualified and a steal in terms of salary to have a company pay for a bkgrd check.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
yet had to ask me what that little * thingie was.
It's called an "asterisk," silly.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
See, you bastards in Florida didn't vote for Al so he took the internet he invented and went home.
My father is a blogger.
You forgot the line "We don't want to hire someone who is going back to the IT world the second it recovers". I haven't heard that one in a while only because I've left the IT field a while back, but back then I heard it all the time.
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 can't believe this comment got graded "insightful". The reason O'Reilly "can't keep left and right straight" is that he's an independent. He keeps pointing this out but people like you keep not listening. Granted, I think he has a rightward tilt, but he takes the side of the Left sometimes. The main thing he doesn't like is ideology, particularly blind ideology that doesn't let the facts get in the way of it.
Have a sense of humor. O'Reilly isn't running for president (nor will he be), nor is Tammy Bruce. So just give it a rest.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
You're recommending we send a delusional hack, who aspires to an imaginary childhood in Levittown, NY, to the White House?
O'Reilly did grow up in Levittown, despite what Al Franken says. O'Reilly managed to dig up the old title to the house where he grew up, and displayed it a few times on his show (guess you weren't watching). Yep, he grew up there. Sorry you were misled.
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.
And this will help the American IT workforce how? Just because a company is unionized doesn't prevent that company from outsourcing work and putting the unionized staff out of work. IMO, unions work best when they have a "captive audience". In other words, the business has limited mobility. Retail is a perfect example. There's little chance that most of the work in a store is going to be outsourced. It can't realistically be done. Though with RFID coming down the pike, we'll probably see retail stores that need fewer workers one day.
I have a liberal friend who votes consistently Democrat and he doesn't like unions. He's told me why in the past. He's seen how they set up rules to stifle creativity and productivity in the workplace, just so more union employees will be ensured they have (pointless) jobs. But hey, it's a paycheck, right? Since he likes a work environment that encourages creativity and productivity, he doesn't like the environment that unions create. I tend to agree with him.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
To the men in the Hanoi Hilton, Kerry's testimony was a nightmare come true. Imprisoned, tortured and malnourished soldiers were put through some of the worst experiences of their lives to do what Kerry did willingly.
Kerry was simply facing facts, and re-iterating what other soldiers had testified to in front of Congress. Kerry was trying to show that the war was immoral, and that the troops should be brought home as soon as possible, which would then allow the POW's in the Hanoi Hilton to be released.
I don't know what *bushies* you're talking about. I think anyone who has read/watched/heard of these painful experiences can understand the Vets point of view.
I'm talking about the so called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth." Their second ad had all these vets saying how Kerry's testimony made them "feel bad". The problem is that these vets never faced up to the fact thet they were ordered to conduct an immoral war. They should have "felt bad", and then they should have been angry that their leaders had betrayed them. But a lot of people cannot handle this fundamental assault on their belief systems, so they instead choose to blame the messenger. And as to the torture doled out at the Hanoi Hilton, if they were indeed covering up war crimes, then they should also blame the commanders who ordered them rather that the whistleblower, but I can certainly understand their anger.
The main point I was trying to make (which you totally missed or ignored) was that Bush did not serve in Vietnam (and was not going to), and used his family connections to avoid that service, thereby sending someone else to Vietnam in his place. He and his cohorts have run incredible smear campaigns against three highly decorated Vietnam veterans (McCain in 2000, Cleland on 2002, and Kerry in 2004), yet Bush says how much he respects veterans and the military. If he really respected them, he wouldn't allow those kind of campaigns to be run. but since Bush has no record to be proud of (certainly in comparison), he's got to tear down the other guy.
I can't help but wonder what kind of campaign Bush would run if he were running against Eisenhower.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
OK, Cheney had a family to support. So do many of the Reservists and Guard called up to serve in Iraq. And then stop-loss orders, and calling up former actives to further stress out these families. But Cheney's like the Soup Nazi - "No deferments for you!" even though he got them himself. And remember, a deferment for Cheney (and Ashcroft, etc.) meant that some poor schmuck without family connections or money had to serve in his place.
However, the point is not Cheney's deferments alone, it's the deferments and his hawkish stance on Iraq and other conflicts. Simply put, these neocons are a bunch of chicken-hawks. They found excuses not to serve themselves, but they seem to love wars of choice.
And that Kerry comment is just a weak troll which only highlights your historical ignorance.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure
Actually it does support infrastructure to some extent, since foreign profits often come back, one way or another, as support for our government debt, which can then be used to finance infrastructural improvements, if our government chooses to use it for that purpose. A significant portion, though I don't think the majority, of our federal government's debt is financed by foreigners. In fact, China and India both have significant holdings in U.S. government bonds, as did Japan more than 10 years ago.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
I'm not saying slums don't exist, and everything is rosy - I appreciate your evenhanded response. I would say the majority of my friends have done well, many of them are not rich but I would say most are pretty happy. Some people just choose not to join the rat race but are otherwise doing just fine.
I'm really trying to say only two things. One is that constantly telling people that poor people have to have help to succeed, is a message with the effect of retarding success (that's the most accurate word I can think of to describe the effect, please do not take it as a negative connotation for those being effected).
My second point (which I'm not even sure I made really but I was thinking) was that I'm not sure a "gap" exists to the extent it might look like on paper. In a world where more and more credit is being offered to people, even poor people can indeed live like kings - almost indefinitely. Now I don't think that's healthy, but I do think that's affecting all levels of society, so to some extent almost everyone shares a common pain in that regard. The very original poster had a great point I thought that just about anyone really can live a life of semi-opulance with a nice TV and $49 DVD player to placate them. I'm not saying that's good either, just saying that basically the effect is like an opium for the masses. One that I'm not sure people will ever awake from, even if the gap does widen. Why would you revolt if you are going to miss Oprah? And that goes for the mdidle class too!
I also very much disagree with the middle class shrinking. I think companies everywhere are really working to make everyone "middle class" - otherwise you have no consumers. Thus the extension of credit willy-nilly to all who care to hear the siren song.
In a way, is not the giant extension of credit really far more a danger to the people on the "rich" side of the "gap"? The next revolution, if there ever is one, is going to be everyone at once saying "screw my credit card bill". Now that would have some powerful effects, all without the kind of french-revolution style beheading of aristocracy. I don't think America will every see that kind of thing happen, we've grown too weird for that.
In short I think there is not a gap like people think there is, certainly not one having the effect they imagine it does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
face it, there's not much you can do about this trend (layoffs, no jobs, outsourcing, etc.) short of the ballot box. sure you can get training, study up, and make yourself more valuable in the field, but no guarantees. you can also do a career change (such as myself after 17 years in IT) or seek other types of work. but there's no avoiding it, outsourcing will continue to happen, competition will be tougher, layoffs will continue, and budgets will be tighter. do something about your particular situation or you will be left behind. people have to get smarter and more skilled. that's just evolution. i would suggest a solution to the government to intervene in this way: ---- Dear Corporation: For every person you lay off, the money you saved from that person for one years time, will be put into training/retraining of said person for new skill(s) of their choice. ---- What do you think? I mean I'm sure there's ways that companies can fool the government on this, but I'm sure the laid off person will keep them in check.
Funny thing is, I know for a fact that Austria has toll stations that charge German trucks going to and from Italy. Probably some of that money goes for road maintenance. And even so, whole-EU taxes will theoretically distributed to build roads where they are need.
This is mostly correct, and Autrians would like to charge a lot more, but lost in the European Court. A further problem is that the money goes to the Austrian gouvernement while those people living next to the roads in Tyrol get nothing. Quite a few people there would be quite happy, if the roads, bridges or tunnel across the Brenner pass had a big accident that made it unpassable for trucks.
If the EU would finance a 10 lane highway across the Brenner, it would only worsen the problem. Those roads bring nearly no benefit to the people living next to it while reducing their quality of life tremendously. This is one of the viles of democracy, when a majority decides to make the life of a minority miserable.
Put trade barriers, your most important commercial partners are China and Mexico.
We will all hear the US economy collapsing, unfortunately the aftermath will affect the whole world (because that little world of yours in which each nation can decide to close its borders, which are not more than a social artifact, has ceased to exist in practical economic terms around 15 years ago with the collapse of the USSR).
For all practical purposes the economy is one and its size is global, any attempts to fight that reality will be met with the relentless mindlessnes of the market.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Most US regulated companies (and in many other conutries) have many legal obligations that preclude the interests of the shareholders.
If your hypotetical CEO would brake those laws he would (theoretically of course) be legally liable and the defense "I did it for my shareholders" would mean squat.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And you will do anything?
Man, start an outsourcing company with all that people and undercut your Indian and Chinese competitors.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Come on pal. Sober up and get with the program. The divide increasingly is not so much between those who have and those who have not, but those who know how to use what they have and those who do not.
Does it go on forever?
Damn straight... The divide increasingly is not so much between those who have and those who do not, but those who know how to use what they have and those who do not.
Does it go on forever?
The divide increasingly is not so much between those who have and those who have not, but those who know how to use what they have and those who do not.
I agree totally with that statement. Part of the reason why "the rich get richer" is they are tought how to properly work money.
But then the question is, what are the implications of this? People do realize when they need to know something, or at least that it would be good to be on the other side of that gap - witness the sucess of shows like Suze Orman and others as people try to educate themselves.
I'm not sure that kind of gap has the same kind of social downside as a true peasant/king mix, or what the negative implications are. It does allow for an industry (like credit companies) tailored to feed off such people.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
H1B hurting salaries for engineers? Last time I checked, H1Bs were paid about the same as normal developers. In fact, I've seen H1Bs making 15% more than a similarly qualified american.
The H1B program actually helps the american programmer: Without it, all of those H1Bs you see around here would be working for outsourcing compaines in their home countries, competing with you with an even smaller salary. In effect, the US can use the program to make the best foreign programmers compete with you in a more even ground, all while they are paying medicare and social security taxes, just like any American does. Given equal skill, I'd rather compete with someone that might make only 5% less than I do than with someone that makes less than half of that.
.... you prefer that your taxes are heavily raised in order to pay for the old timers' social benefits?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In your scale:
Country: % of state control
North Korea 100 Communism
Vietnam 80
China 70
Europe 60
US 50
??? 50
What about if being in the middle is absolutely the most one country could do.
Then the expression used by the original poster ("relatively" is the key word) would be preety valid IMHO.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... based in your anecdotal evidence we should generilize?
:-P
Did you also study statistics in your free time?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Thank you for pointing the exceptions to the rule.
Obivously the IT world is so easy to grasp that any person can just start working in the field without any formal preparation (funny you talk about Gates, I don't think his man talent is realted to the IT field but to marketing, for which obviously he was also completetly unprepared:-) ).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I know, trade barriers, the last hideout of the statist, isolationist, populist.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Like not wasting tax payer's money invading countries that have done nothing to yours?
Just suggesting.
How much is that going to cost you? 70 billion?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Surely you jest - but I'll bite.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If a company needs to fill a position, and they can't find someone already with a clearance, they will hire somebody and have them basically just sit at a desk until the clearance goes through.
Of course they'd prefer not to, but I know quite a few people who have gone through exactly that.
It isn't so much the "paying for the bkgnd check" that they mind, it's paying for an idle employee until the clearance comes through. But if it's between that and missed deadlines and contract penalties because they're understaffed, well...
None of which alters the fact that there is a big demand for qualified IT people, where "qualified" here includes a clearance or a high likelihood of being able to get one (eg by having previously held one).
-- Alastair
Since I don't pay taxes to the French government, and they in turn don't provide me with public services and protection, I shouldn't care what happens to them economically.
This implies that the only ties between human beings are those of the exchange of cash for goods and services. That's a sad view of life.
I can sympathize with your position. I'm in the same boat. During the 90s I wasn't even helping the "Internet Revolution" along. I got my CS degree, and wrote client/server apps. for enterprises. I can write a mean GUI-based or command-line-based database app. in C or C++, but no one wants to hire me for that. I've learned some HTML, and I've even delved quite a ways into C#, Windows Forms, ASP.Net, and ADO.Net, but I guess that disqualifies me because "I learned it on my own". I can't say that I've created an n-tier application, or an enterprise app. that uses SQL Server. Maybe that does disqualify me at this time. I've been to .Net user group meetings though with people who are actually using it for their work, and I know more about .Net than they do sometimes. Only thing is it's awfully difficult to convince an employer that I'm even minimally competent in these skills, because I can't point to a paid job where I've used them.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
That's stupid. You have 25 "years of experience" and made it clear you'll do "almost anything". Have you looked on DICE.com? I hate it when people complain about being qualified and employed yet they don't want to relocate from SmallTown, Kentucky.
If you're that motivated, how come you haven't started your own consulting business with your extensive work experience. I've seen very unqualified people get interviews (and jobs) mostly because they were MOTIVATED to learn, work, and serve the company. I haven't even graduated college yet and I've gotten job offers that I haven't even applied for. That's not because I have tons of experience, but because employers are BEGGING college students to work for them practically. It's nearly the same feel as it was back in 98/99, except they're not giving out free BMW leases.
This idea of the "post-DotCom" economy is over. The market is back and employees have the upper hand now over employers.
As a neocon, I will say this economy and world is about survival of the fittest. While it seems that you have been pampered the last 25 years of your life, I've been busy MAKING IT. I too live in a non-IT town, but there are still contract jobs in the big cities that I take.
Stop complaining already. Waiting for the government is not a good idea. I have a family to support and thats what I'll do.
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.)
I did an analysis recently on the corrolation between job losses and big events that occurred at the time.
From the start of the job losses in March, 2001 to 9/11 we had lost about 1 million jobs. This is attributable to the recession. From September, 2001 to December, 2001, we lost more than 1 million jobs, most of these attributable to the 9/11 attacks. The Enron scandal broke in this time period as well, though just from what I could see of the timing of the Worldcom scandal, at the end of June, 2002, corporate scandals "sting" in the job market, but the bad effects don't last long. My best guess is we lost 111,000 jobs in July, 2002 due to the Worldcom bust. And several hundred thousand jobs were lost in the leadup to the Iraq war.
At the "bottom" of the job market in August, 2003, we had lost 2.7 million jobs. We are now down to a net "deficit" in the payroll survey of around 1 million jobs. 1.7 million net new ones have been created in the last year, and I hear that about 900,000 of the new jobs are in the public sector (ie. government).
If 9/11 had not happened, we would probably be "breaking even" today. The Iraq war might not have happened at the time that it did either (though this is pure speculation), so one can only guess where we'd be now without that.
So even though you may think all the jobs created in the defense sector are useless, national security is very important to the economy. The Iraq war cost us jobs, but in relative terms the job losses due to 9/11 were worse. Yes, there's waste in the defense structure, but where in the government is there not waste??? The budget is always in effect formed by committee, and you know what they say about committee-based efforts.
The most jobs that the economy created in the 90s was around 300,000 per month. That's what we were getting in the first quarter of this year. Granted the job creation rate slowed to a trickle during the summer, barely worth writing home about, but it's picking up again. I heard somewhere that one reason for the slowdown in the growth of the economy during the summer had something to do with Europeans taking their summer vacations, sometimes lasting as long as 6 weeks. I dunno. :)
I remember a couple years ago listening to an interview with a big technology company's CEO (I think it was Intel), who said that in the past the tech sector led the economic recovery. He said that this time it was going to trail the recovery. Other parts of the economy would recover first, and then the tech recovery would come later. Perhaps that is the pattern we are seeing. It's too soon to tell, IMO.
"So remember the new number: 0118-999-88199-9119-725...3"
So what were the causes of the crash?
- Silly business models attracting large amounts of money, which was lots of fun but obviously unsustainable. What really happened was that new technology promised radical changes in business, and it took the market a few years to determine the real values. For instance, most of the business models depended on web advertising to make money, and nobody knew what web advertising was really worth, and the number of people diving in to find out what the hype was about kept the value changing for a couple of years. Now the market has a much better idea of the value, and it's somewhere between the most optimistic believers (who got killed) and the most pessimistic (who missed opportunities.)
- Moore's Law caught up with economics - the telecom technology changes meant that for a couple of years, it looked like putting fiber in the ground was a gold mine, so lots of people invested in it (and in the companies that sold equipment to them), but DWDM has meant that any fiber out there has near-infinite capacity, and demand for bits was growing rapidly but not that rapidly, so prices went into a death spiral, and haven't pulled out yet. It's happened somewhat with CPUs as well - Microsoft and Linux keep writing bloatware to soak up any available horsepower, but the only people who've actually needed the last five years of CPU progress have been gamers and a few scientists.
- In January-February 2000, Alan Greenspan kicked up interest rates about six times, which was a major blow to a capital-intensive economic boom. You can blame this somewhat on Clintonomics, since Clinton made government spending look much better by refinancing old Reagan/Bush federal debt at much lower interest rates, especially short-term but also somewhat long-term. On the other hand, it's hard to see moves that aggressive early in an election year as other than politically-inspired manipulation, and it _was_ the economy, stupid.
- And then there's the Microsoft anti-trust suit, which is Clinton's fault. The main dot-com VC cash-out strategies for startups were to sell the company to the public in an IPO or sell it directly to a big company (usually Microsoft for software/services companies and Cisco for hardware), and the threat to break up Microsoft meant that all of a sudden, they were no longer a potential customer for a couple of years. Therefore, VCs, who'd been on a feeding frenzy since Hotmail sold for $400M, had lost one of their three main markets, and the public was already getting skeptical about IPOs for Dogfood-on-line.com, and the New DotCom Economy already assumed that you wouldn't actually make Profits, at least in the short term, and with interest rates going up they needed a much higher probability of winning to make investing in startups worthwhile.
And it all pretty much happened at once, which is why it tanked so hard.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
http://www.johnkerryisadouchebagbutimvotingforhima nyway.com/ because most anybody is better than Bush. Even though john kerry is a douche bag, it's NOT the right time to play some social experiment and vote for a 3rd party. Because, let's face it, only free-minded people would consider voting for a 3rd party, which weakens our base as a whole against the republican lemmings. so just vote for john kerry please. god damnit...
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Clinton did not create the .com boom, nor the layoffs which followed, have a look at Kondratiev long wave cycles if you want an answer.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD