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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.
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/
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!
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.
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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
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
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'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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
All politicians are liars. I'd rather have Clinton as president and get a balanced budget instead of national health care versus a talking chimpanzee promising whatever he's promising and getting "National Security".
I've been recommending people to FactCheck.org to see past all the political spin and really learn about the issues before the election. Factcheck is a non-partisan voter advocacy group that does a great job of separating fact from fiction in the midst of all the mudslinging going on.
The Bolachek Journals
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.
...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.
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.
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
Funny, I think the same thing when one of my non-ultra-left-wing comments mysteriously gets modded "Overrated." There is unfairness on both sides.
As for Bush job losses, he's running on the same unemployment rate Clinton ran on. Surprise, IT jobs were lost since 2001 after the dot-com burst. I knew someone, eventually, would bring up Bush in this discussion, but I would be pinning my blame on the ridiculous dot-com investors in the late 90s and 2000 that caused the fizzle-out going into 2001.
A trade that requires proper theory... most "self-taught" programmers just read a "how-to in 21 days" book, and think they are masters. They need to read books about theory, algorithms, etc. (books you tend to read in university) to be a truly effective programmer.
I use the word "most" here for a reason...there are exceptions...just look at John Carmack. But for most "self-taught" programmers, they lack necessary deep understanding.
Computer science and programming are just a different form of Math.
I used to think that Programming is just a "Trade" kind of thing, something that can be learned on your own, until I was getting close to finishing my degree, and started noticing the garbage code produced by "self-taught" SEs...it worked...but it wasn't "good."
One guy I worked with, sent me an email "what is this push() function you are using? I've never heard of this." WTF? That's a History major turned programmer for you....and he was lead developer. (but he is an extreme case)
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I am ! I am ! Hell I even have experience in the porn industry as a technician. I can also act if the female lead agrees :p
BTW I am serious about getting into the porn industry (anything from acting to digitizing the porn, maintaning porn sites, clustering for bandwidth intensive porn downloads etc). Any tips would be usefull. Maybe post this in ask slashdot ?
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
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.
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
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.
Disagree. You're looking at wages from a nominal standpoint, not a real (inflation-adjusted) standpoint.
Because if I were a businessman and knew that both of you were making more money, I would raise the price of my products. Especially if they were luxury goods, which you would be inclined to buy, but the lesser-paid guy might not (due to a lower income).
And thus, we get inflation. Once that occurs, the real value of your money declines; you're able to buy fewer goods/services.
It's the same effect you see with minimum wage levels (and which is why minimum wage laws are stupid) -- if everybody's wage is known to be $5.25/hour, then why should McDonald's sell burgers at an old price based (at least in part, via their demographic analyses) on the old minimum-wage rate?
Anyway, were I a businessman in your town, I would likely notice that you are spending more with your newfound wealth. I may not know for certain that you are much-richer now, or by how much, but I can detect an increased level of wealth based on your spending habits, and as a result, I will find that I can raise my prices...
That said, I agree w/ you and Schwarzenegger wholeheartedly, that people should not be "economic girly-men." He is quite right to promote policies of economic growth rather than government handouts.
And you are dead-on in your comparison of the modern life of the poor to where people used to be (the comparison to Roman Emporers is a good one).
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I remember lots of grumblings about Gore being more "tech-friendly" than Bush, around that time. To me the recession seemed to follow the election's outcome quite fittingly. Remember the slap on the wrist Microsoft received in 2001? If economic logic holds that competition makes for a healthy economy, then Republicans (based on behavior alone) are quite anti-healthy economy.
;-)
I've lived in third-world countries enough to know that the very poor are kept in poverty by the very wealthy -- who hold, not just most of the wealth, but most of the power. What my armchair-economist opinion says is:
1) Robin Hood would have made a good Democrat and a great economist. To tax the rich to support the commoners (Welfare, Healthcare, decent Unemployment benefits, Social Security, etc.) forces money to "flow".
2) When one cuts taxes for the rich it cuts off the flow of money -- plain and simple.
3) "Trickle-down Economics" is pure myth. There is no such thing. It's a nice idea and, like a lot of get-rich-quick schemes, is based on a few grains of truth.
Wealthy people *hoard* money. It's in their nature to do so. That's why they're wealthy. You have to incent them to invest their money. Taxes make for a great incentive to "shelter" one's money -- through investments. Use it or lose it! Ever wonder why VC's are being so stingie these days? Their money is much safer, today, from taxation. The most important factor in converting a stagnant economy (as found in so many 3rd world countries) into a bristling one is simply to get one's currency to flow!
It's easy to think a recession couldn't just happen so quickly; Easy to think the resession was "inherited". But economic policies have very real, fast-acting consequences. If you don't believe it, then you haven't watched the reactions on Wall Street on the days when Allen Greenspan speaks.
Well, I guess the earlier poster was right. This *does* belong in politics.slashdot.org
A thought on outsourcing. The latest industrial boom, the IT sector, seems to be following the same path that previous industrial revolutions have. Manufacturing & assembly line workers faced the same challenge when manufacturing of consumer goods shifted to the far east. While many who were unable to adapt found themselves unemployable, the population moved on. It created. Thats what we're good at. Much of the entry level IT work, in many ways, the modern day equivalent to the blue collar manufacturing jobs of the past. I believe that while much of the grunt work will be shipped off to the lowest bidder, the majority of the creative end will remain where it began.
More will go as outsourcing increases, until so many are gone that people over here are willing to work for as little as those in the Far East
You could make more at Starbucks. Comparable wages? I don't see IT guys working for $12/day, I'd like to think that most of them would adapt to the new market. I might be delusional, my job can't be outsourced. I'm also a freelancer. While I've never had the industry fall out from under me, I've had to re-invent myself a few times to keep up with current local market needs. I can't imagine the hardship of having your career disappear out from under you, but as technology moves on, it is inevitable in certain fields.
never drink kool-aid from a big vat
You go tell that to someone in a trailer park near Saint Louis or Detroit, then if you live you can come back and tell us the tale of how it went.
The gap does matter, because when a significant proportion of the population becomes richer and the rest doesn't or not as much, large items such as houses, access to private health care, private education and even cars become a lot more expensive and you have the making of deprived neighborhoods where everyone is a tenant in a shabby house, and then crime flourishes.
In the US there is a lot of crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of people under a federally declared line of poverty who live a short and dangerous life that a Roman Emperor certainly wouldn't have chosen for himself.
This is also true of most countries in the west. In Australia where I live Aboriginal people on average live 20 years less than non-aboriginal, even in the middle of Sydney. A lot of it is due to poor sanitation, lack of education and general poverty.
There are poor people in the US and elsewhere who are not given a fair deal in life because they happen to have been born in a poor neighborhood and I can tell you that it does in fact suck.
I'm pretty damn certain you wouldn't want to take their place next to the beautiful cell phone they have so please stop patronizing, you are insulting a lot of people.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
--
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.
This isn't limited to IT professionals, its part of the real world of engineering.
When I graduated in 2000 (peak of the tech bubble), anybody with a CS or EE was picked right up. Myself and some friends of mine weren't CS or EE, and struggled to get jobs. I was lucky I got a good job offer before graduation; but one ChemE friend became a database administrator. Another was a MatSci major and had to accept a contractor position doing material testing until this year, and another was an aerospace engineer who had to get a job doing some mechanical simulations.
The IT industry has come back down to earth, and qualified people might not be able to get a job in IT, just as qualified people in other engineering professions can't always get their preferred job.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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
There's no other way to say it. YOU ARE WRONG. Not just a little wrong, but really really wrong.
.06%. In the previous 8 recoveries, since the Great Depression, the average growth was split at about 13.9% corporate profit and 9.9% labor with private wage growth of 7.2%.
It matters, it matters a lot. Concentration of wealth is the single greatest threat to our democracy and the American Revolution. Go read the Federalist Papers. This "class-warfare claptrap", as you call it, is real. Perhaps Marie Antionette or the Bolsheviks could give you a little refresher. Your example is crap to boot. The current recovery has seen corporate profits grow by 62.2% while private wages have fallen by
There is a point, which can't be defined, where the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the probability that the wealthy will wind up in a losing deal falls to such a point that there is no way to get ahead. New growth is dominated by the wealthy (see the cronyism of 90's IPO's), those without wealth have no choice but to scramble for scraps from the table. This results in defacto tyranny and lack of opportunity. It results in stagnation of innovation, just like when property was controlled entirely by royalty and the church in Europe.
The purpose of the Revolution was to ensure that no citizen is forced to live the life of a slave (obvious exception for slaves, who weren't citizens). When you don't have choices, you are a slave. It doesn't matter if that lack of choice comes from government or private means.
Some men can work 40 hours a week and easily support himself, but there are millions of Americans that can't. The number of people living below the poverty line has increased by 1.4 million in the last year alone. Your argument is like saying the serfs were better off because their lords protected them from roving gangs of bandits. The facts disagree with your estimate of the welfare of the poor in this country.
Go look up Noah Webster, he wrote on the side of the Federalists and either Madison or Hamilton's request (can't remember which). Your arguements are nothing more than straw men. Go read some primary sources, look at the whole picture and apply some logic.
Wealth is real power. If the scales become tipped too far, our entire country will fail. The parent isn't insightful, it's naive. It's a modern version of "If they have no bread, let them eat cake!".
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market..
The problem is that most people in the USA like to believe that this statement is true. If the USA is is isolated, it would **NOT** be self-sufficient in all areas of the economy - including technology workers. The reality is that, when isolated, the US relies on Mexico, China, India etc. for all kinds of work - unskilled, military and technical.
It is not very wrong for these other countries to demand their pound of flesh.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The Tech Bubble happened and burst under Clinton's watch, but thanks for playing.
You other comments have merit though. Well, except the weather one, I didn't quite get that. Did Bush just cause a bunch of hurricanes?
Finkployd
Really, I am. You see, for years I've been putting up with "I'm a techie, too!" people. The kind that have no idea what they're doing.
They're people who go to a two-week certification class. They're people who take a 6-month class. They're people who go to ITT for two years. They're people who learned everything on their own. And they're even people with four-year degrees.
For every 100 people that say "Yeah, I work with computers, too!", I'm lucky if I meet three or four that actually have a clue, and (here's the important part) actually have any marketable skills.
Yes, they're the ones that whine and moan that "the market is flooded", "you can't get a job in (insert state name)", "it's all these people willing to work for nothing", or "the economy is so horrible."
I know a lot of people who make their living with computers. And while "the economy was bad", I can honestly say that the job difficulties they faced were inversely proportional to their expertise. The better they really were, the less trouble they had.
When we put an ad in the paper for a programmer who (a) has used Perl in a CGI environment, (b) has some knowledge of SQL, and (c) has some knowledge of HTML, you'd be amazed at how many applicants we get - literally, hundreds. And again, literally, without any exageration, over 85% of the applicants do not meet those requirements in any way, shape, or form. We're lucky if we get three or four people out of 150 applicants that can really say that they're proficient in those three areas - and to me, that's not asking much at all.
The sad fact is that the tech job market was massively, grossly over-inflated during the "dot-com craze", and is now back at a more reasonable level. Yes, I know, that makes it tough for all of the "But I want to be a programmer, too!" people, but that's just fine. They've been making it tough on the rest of us for quite some time.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA.
I'm not sure I understand how the influx of cheap labor would be any worse for the U.S. than if China truly did have a free market.
If China had a truly free market, and your assumption about this improving the Chineses domestic job market was true, then who would all these workers be employed by? Chinese companies. And who would these Chinese companies compete with? American companies, which would have a competitive disadvantage since American workers are more expensive than Chinese workers, thanks to high living costs.
The American companies would then lose business, forcing them to trim their workforces.
The problem here is that if we try to compete with other countries in the unskilled or lesser-skilled labor markets, we will lose every time. In the long run, there are only a few things that we can do if we want to keep our jobs:
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.)
b. Keep on moving into new markets as the old markets become dominated by companies that rely on cheap labor.
c. Do something about the high living costs in the U.S., which are making this country extremely hostile to the working classes.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Much as any politician would hate to accept, the economy is now well and truly in the hand of the Corporates, not the political forum. Anyone getting elected to the presidency will hardly make a difference to the economy. Consider the strength of the Chinese and the Indian economies, and consider for a moment who's been in power in those countries for some years now....
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
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.
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.
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'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
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.
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!!!
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.
And your contention that the desire to lead a happy life is antithetical to free market capitalism is just plain hogwash.
Hmm, is it really? Free market capitalism is based on the sole drive to maximise Profit for the company and to address all other things only as a mean to reach this goal. Last time I checked, the goal to providing a good life to the unwashed masses was more of a socialist thing, not really on the agenda of free market capitlism.
The people owning the profitable companies will then be able to lead a very happy life.
For a company to achieve the optimum performance, it may also be useful from time to time to allow one's workers to lead a happy life.
But other than that, free market capitalism achieves its highest profits, when they can leech common resources or exploit people that can't defend them.
For this reason, rules have been made in some places, to prevent this, like laws against dumping toxic waste in rivers, bans on children labour, rules about truth in advertisment, customer protection laws etc.
Companies deal with these limitations in different ways. Sometime they invested in treating plants, sometime they just pay off a corrupt water inpsector, sometime they ship the waste to somewhere else and dump there and sometime they move the plant to location with less strict rules.
But in all of this one is certain, living next to a toxic waste dump, children aged 5 sewing sneakers, people getting ripped off by untrue advertisment have a more miserable life.
If the exploitation of people and common resources gets too bad, people won't stand for it and do something about it. this could be getting paid off by the company, have new laws passed against the behaviour or - in the extreme case - civil war.
The assumption, that the welfare of the maximum people and the preservation of common resources is always the best course in a free market capitalism is not based on any hard evidence. Facts supports more the opposite view and that companies strive to achieve short term gains at the cost of smaller but sustained long term profits.
People on can stand that much abuse, and when free market capitalism exceeds that limit, the rules change.
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
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.
Actually, corporations have a legal obligation (under US law) to look after the interest of the shareholders. Any CEO that would put the welfare of the public ahead of profits is breaking the law. (I'm reading this book if you want a reference).
<sarcasm>
What we have to do is to put all our money into stocks, so that when our jobs are outsourced to other countries, we can live of the dividends. These will be very high, as the multi-national corporations will be making record profits.
By then there will be no tax on investment income and we'll be sitting pretty.
</sarcasm>
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
The cost of living isn't controlled by corporations or by any other company, it's controlled by economics.
If you accept that corporations set the prices of all the things that fall under "cost of living," then you must accept that consumers will willingly pay any price for those items, something which we know isn't true. Think about it, when gasoline prices start skyrocketing, some people started buying smaller cars and driving less.
The cost of living is set by both firms and consumers at a price index that both sides are agreeable to. It's often called "supply and demand."
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
"the system AS A WHOLE benefits from free market economics. This DOES NOT MEAN that EVERY NATION benefits from this situation."
Actually, the economic theory of comparative advantage suggests that every nation benefits from free trade, or to be more precise, that free trade produces a Pareto improvement. (See also the wikipedia article on comparative advantage).
The main problem with this theory is not that some nations stand to lose from free trade per se, but that, as the wikipedia article puts it "Workers and capital may not be able to be transferred painlessly from one industry to another." Now whether this warrants supporting uncompetitive domestic industries is for you the US citizens to decide. However, I have the impression that as other people here have pointed out, many have already made that decision. For example, if people have a choice of buying expensive clothes from the US or cheap clothes from South East Asia, what do they tend to choose? Most of them choose "cheap" over "made in the USA" most of the time.
If you are interested in the way modern economists (Adam Smith is great, but a bit dated) see things, have a look at e. g. Krugman and Obstfeld's International Economics.
Can someone explain to me exactly why the government meddles in things just enough, and refuses to protect our rights just enough, to cause any potential jobs to wither on the vine?
I'm all for this "look out for yourself" libertarian bullshit, but make corporate charters temporary, renewable every 2 years, and that they can be dissolved with *no reason* whatsoever. Give me back the 14/28 years of copyright, only with providing an unencumbered version to LOC. The list goes on, but start with those, and I'll start considering that my lack of a job is solely my own fault.
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country.
Frankly: I find this logic (common though it is in the US) to be totally bizarre. It makes no fscking sense. Try this analogy: "I understand that having free trade across county boundaries is good for the well-being of the entire State and even the country but as a resident of King County I put my needs above those of the rest of Washington State and those of America. If I was primiarily interested in the needs of (say) Orange County then I would move there. The job of King county's government if first and foremost to provide for King county residents: the rest of the country be damned."
There are many levels of government and at this moment at the beginning of the 21st century we've somehow deluded ourselves into theinking that the nation is somehow special. During the early 20th century it was otherwise: most people thought that their allegiance belonged to their empire (which was larger than their nation). And before the civil war, many Americans had primary allegiance to their State, not to the federation.
Each of these views was short-sighted and temporary. As yours is. Your allegiance logically belongs either to a community small enough that you can participate and influence it (i.e. municipality) or to all of humanity (based solely on the Golden rule).
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people. Sometimes this will is to "do good" elsewhere. It looks, for example, as if Americans will put George Bush back into power based on his (shaky!) argument that he is going to democratize the Middle East. It is also the case that many Americans criticize the Bush administration for doing nothing in Darfur. According to your theory, there is nothing to criticize because it would be a breach of responsibility for him to do anything. Ditto, I suppose, for the intervention in Europe in WW II.
I am unashamed about the fact that my allegiance is first and foremost to humanity. My local national government has dual roles as the local provider of laws and a tool I use to advance the needs of human beings everywhere. When I look across a border and see human beings on the other side I don't see their needs as being less important than mine by virtue of the fact that they are on the other side of the border and neither should my government. That said: for practical reasons the government must distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and treat citizens differently.
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.
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.
"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.
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
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
I don't know the US state capitals or who is in chage of them becouse such information is useless to me. Ditto for the name of any given tropical cyclone that's on the way. Hell unless it's snowing M-F I am still going to work so 5 out of 7 days I don't care if the sun is shining.
But, DAMM I can code like a god. Now if I could learn the names of the leader of every state in Africa or COBAL which is going to be more usefull in 6 months? Or hell how about 10 years? Shure learning something like SQL may seem pointless but it's saved me a lot more time than it cost me so I think of it a worth while vs learning the names of each state the USSR transformed into.