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Techies Migrate in Search of Work
prostoalex writes "Tracing the story of one family where the father is employed in the IT field, the Washington Post discusses the current unemployment in the information technology field. For a good reason - for the first time in 30 years the IT unemployment rate exceeded the national average unemployment rate, implying that you have a better chance of getting a job if your field is something other than IT. The journalist does offer a disclaimer, saying that the term 'IT worker' is applied equally to a top-notch scientist in a research lab, to a dot-com startup billionaire, and to a local HTML guru. Relevant employment statistics also shows that layoffs in the IT field were up 60% in the third quarter of 2004."
Here in Silicon Valley, the SJ Mercury News recently put out a report on the "improving economy", as measured by the declining unemployment rate.
In other news, the unemployment rate in this area is declining because IT workers have given up trying to find work, and are leaving Santa Clara County in droves.
Thereby reinforcing the finding that 90% of statistics are worthless.
I thought for sure this would be an article about IT workers moving to Canada where they're actually hiring people
Well, as a non-U.S. citizen working in D.C., I can assure you that cuts both ways.
I get to pay for Social Security without the hope of getting any,
get taxed without representation, and am also without hope of being trusted with any security clearance, not even one shared by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people in this area.
Oh well, fortunately knowing what you're doing counts too.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
for the first time in 30 years the IT unemployment rate exceeded the national average unemployment rate
And pro-work-visa lobbyists, such as ITAA, still claim there is a "shortage" of IT people.
Table-ized A.I.
Man, was that story depressing. Guy has a family and kids. If you don't feel compassion for that guy's story, you're not human.
Personally, I think the country is going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, which is one of the reasons I choose not to procreate. If life got intolerable enough, I can always say "Screw you guys" and check out. I have lived a good life and have absolutly no fear of any after life.
But with a family, well, you just can't check out while your children still depend on you.
I know, I know, that's the way it's always been. But for me, particularly in this society, it still gives me strength to know that if life gives me the old "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" trip I can always say "Fuck that shit" and make the Big Trip.
So, for those of you who don't have kids, please, don't do it. Contrary to popular opinion, procreation is one of the most selfish things one can do.
Think of the future. Globalization. That means a leveling of resource use and wages, and let me tell you something: yours are going to go down more than Habibi's in the Middle East is going to go up. The powers-that-be have mastered the art of groupthink and know how to sway popular opinion that the power will only get more oppressive.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
I work with people in career transition. A lot of them go to technical schools because they hear ads claiming that they'll double their salary. Most of them graduate making $9.00 and hour doing tech support phone work and $10 -$20K of debt. I work in the IT field but have a business degree so I have some level of security but it bothers me that these students receive little or no business training. You'd think that with all of the automation now taking place and the commoditization of computer hardware the schools would be responsible enough to explain that computers aren't a panacea.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
If the US adopted the EU's strict data privacy laws, then we wouldn't be hemorrhaging as many jobs to India, China & Eastern Europe. Since many IT jobs involve working with applications and databases that contain sensitive financial, medical and demographic data. I really think the Democrats dropped the ball on both the data privacy and off shoring issues, but that's what you get when the party elites are all out-of-touch-millionaires.
This happened to a good friend of mine. Back in the Summer of 2002 when the Dot Com boom was just about busted, a friend of mine lost his job and ended up taking contracting gigs. He lived here in Colorado Springs and ended up doing gigs in Ft. Collins (2 hr drive) and in the Denver Tech Center (1 hr drive). Having a mortgage, wife and child, it was a lot for him. In November 2002, he ended up taking a job in Salinas area of California, not too far from the bay Area and its high cost of living. The house got sold, no equity left from it. He always talks about wanting to come back to Colorado but like most palces, the high tech job market is in the shitter. He had a clearance but it was already the past the 2 year mark of where it was easy to reinstate or resubmit paperwork.
Today, he is living near Santa Cruz in a small 1000 square foot house costing $2500 per month. He has two kids and pulling in $40k per year. He cannot even buy a house since even the junky houses are a half-million -> high mortgage payment.
With his situation, more than likely, if I lose my job here, I would have to move and leave Colorado even with the upside of have very little debt - car payment only and house is paid off. Washington DC is doing good but cost of living is awful.
The official policy of the Bush administration is to give foreigners willing/able to displace American workers a shot at citizenship/permanent residency. Just look at the platform-the Republicans want to expand use of H-1b/L-1 visas to match "any willing worker" with "any willing employer".
This is all really a massive program of corporate welfare. Corporations pay _nothing_ for these immigration rights that have considerable economic value.
The hypocrites in the left don't care because they expect immigrants to vote democratic in time. The hypocrites on the right are being bought with promises of federal funds for faith based charities and educational vouchers.
The market in SoCal seems to be picking up, too. I ended six months of unemployment in January with a comfortable job, but starting about four months after that, I began receiving a number of calls for job interviews on varying topics -- NOC engineer, server specialist, entry-level Cisco, desktop support... pretty much the whole spectrum. I figured that the industry as a whole, which I'd heard from friends across the country was way off, was beginning to recover, since California is usually last to react to economic changes (our economic cycle lags a bit behind most of the nation, so while we're usually slow to end profitable cycles, we're also usually slow to get back into them).
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I have stopped looking for IT work. No, I was not one of the people who jumped in during the boom either. I am very good at what I "did" on the Network and Systems level, there is simply nothing out there to try for where I live. It is over, and I don't even miss it. Now, I do projects that are personally interesting / rewarding, and avoid the endless cycle of IT madness.
One final thought, we did this to ourselves. How many of us were making much more in salary than the traditional business people who had been working for 10 years at the company? Corporate America hates us, for the greed, the failure of products we recommended, for endless ugrage cycles, for jumping ship for an exta buck, etc. They don't want us back in the capacity we were formerly employeed. Get used to it.
Also, the job sucks anyway. Sit in front of a screen all day, go blind, get fat, be overstressed, see if you don't die young.
When I started uni, the IT market was hot and no one was having trouble getting work. In fact, I probably would have been better off getting a job right off the bat instead of dropping the price of a small island in the south pacific on going to school. I spent an entire year out of school looking for IT work...mostly focused in one city, but toward the end of my search I just wanted a job. I must have sent out hundreds of resumes and had a few interviews but nothing solid. The company I'm now working for called me out of no where...I believe they got my resume from Monster, although I hadn't updated that resume in years as I have a serious loathing of monster.com.
I don't think we can blame the dot com bubble bursting on the serious lack of IT jobs in the country...outsourcing may be to blame, but that's typically helpdesk sort of work. Also, the guy that posted about DC having an array of IT jobs...believe it. Northern Virginia has a surplus of IT jobs most of the time...I grew up there and hopped around to a number of great positions even before school. I would've gone back if I didn't hate the area so much.
Good luck with the job search to all you unemployed out there.
Some civil service jobs require a clearance; your agency will get you one. To get you working early, they may grant an interim clearance.
Government contractors who create or handle classified information have to pay for a clearance for each employee that needs one, except for those who have had an equivalent or higher-level clearance in the previous 2 years.
The last I heard, from a job recruiter (YMMV), a SECRET clearance costs $80K and there's a 250K person waiting list. No wonder contractors will stop just short of kidnapping to get cleared employees...
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Lots of IT work in London at the moment. If anything there is a shortage. I certainly get a stream of responses for my cv (resume). Also there is a lot of money to be made in Dubai currently, especially in IT - like with Dubai Internet City". Zero tax, massive ecomonic growth, people from all over the world there, safe friendly environment for all westerners, and the best of everything - they are currently building the world's tallest building in Dubai too.
The process itself is painless:
1.) Get a job with a defence contractor.
2.) Fill out a detailed personal history. For some levels of clearance, people you know will probably be interviewed.
3.) You can usually get a provisional clearance within a week, unless there is shadiness in your past.
4.) Final clearance can take two to twelve months to come through.
OTOH, the military assigns a (usually) low clearance to all it's personnel and this makes it relatively easy to be promoted to higher levels of security once you're out in industry.
Random fact: one in seven Americans has some sort of government security clearance.
Wish I still had my mod points to mod this up to "insightfull".
I recently had to invite tenders to outsource a particular discrete piece of work. We spread the net wide and got quotes from several reputable firms in Russia, the US, UK and India (were UK based). The Russians were the cheapest, followed by in order the US, India and then the UK. Quotes were in the region of 5000 - 200000 Pounds Sterling.
The Russian teams quote was half that of the US co's quote BUT THE US QUOTE WAS CHEAPER THAN THAT OF THREE INDIAN BASED FIRMS!!
With the current exchange rates it isnt going to be long before its cheaper to outsource to the US rather than the usual suspects...congratulation on becoming a developing country!!!
Generally it means a "glorified programmer" who does more design, project managment, or analysis work instead of just coding.
Ditch the management part, and you've got it. The quasi-management techies will remain unemployed. The ones that get their hands dirty and leave the scheduling to somebody else all have jobs.
The specs are relatively clear up front. You you email the specs to India and have the results back for pennies on the dollar.
That has to be the funniest thing I've read all day. If only it were true, my job would be much easier.
Regardless, as a device driver writer and an operating system engineer I can tell you that a little over a year ago I was averaging one headhunter call every six months or so, and now I'm getting two or three a week. Pay is up too. A year ago offers were in the $70k range. Now they're in the $100k range. I'm not just talking about the Boston area (where I live) either. I've gotten calls from companies in the San Fransisco area too.
of reading this thread while consulting for a client who appears to literally be running their own H1-B breeding facilities. I am, I kid you not, one of 10 non-Indians amongst a sea of HUNDREDS of indian programmers for a major financial institution's back office... in New Jersey!
I mean really, how the hell do these dips$@#$ pull this off? Not enough qualified programmers for the job? I still remember sitting next to a mainframe guy at a client's site in Valley Forge as he was getting laid off. They set up a "training center" downstairs STACKED with indian programmers and shuttle bussed them to and from work. His biggest concern was how he was going to pay for his daughter's school.
I've read the arguments and considered teh situation, and the opinion of the majority of economists is dead wrong. When your at the top of the pile and the rungs under you are filled with poor, hungry, willing to kill for a buck foreigners your quality of life and income WILL decline.
Mark my words folks, your seeing the return to 1900 all around you. Until organized labor is willing to draw blood and go into these semi-demcratic (or just plain dictatorial) countries and create a homogeneous labor body worldwide we are going to see a widening split between rich and poor. It will, I kid you not, be NO DIFFERENT than it was during the worst parts of teh industrial revolution.
And the funny part is the Republicans will probably still somehow convince the begger red states who suck money from the rich blue states to accept more tax write offs, refunds, and general give-aways to big corporations.
I am the Darl of my reality... help me.
-rt
The reason your "creditworthiness" plays a role in determining your clearance is because people with bad credit are more susceptible to exploitation by foreign operatives - the guy/gal who is in a really bad situation financially is more likely to succumb to monetary bribe.
There's an ITT Tech on every corner, DeVry spewing ads all over the place, and tons of other companies/schools still trying to convince you that you should get a degree in technology just because you can program your VCR. The problem is that nearly anyone can get a college degree. Getting a job, showing some sort of drive, knowledge, and dedication is another problem. I graduated on October 28, 2003 from DeVry. Everyone told me things would be fine, etc. I realized when I saw class mates graduating with me who had 3.0 averages and did not even know how to program anything, much less how to even create a web page... things would be sad. These same people would be arriving in troves to try and get a job, throwing bull in the interview. You know what? It took me two months, but I got a job as a software consultant. Also, in those two months, I had 30+ interviews. When I'd ask my classmates how many interviews they had, they would tell me none. None. Why? I spent 40+ hours a week looking for work, took it very serious. I showcased my talents, learned new things, and worked hard. These people sit at home looking for work on Monster.com and expecting someone to just throw money at them. Two of my classmates I keep in touch with both work $8.00 an hour jobs, doing nothing related to their degree. I am quite pleased with this because both of these people had no idea how to do anything, just used others for help, never learned anything technical besides how to memorize answers before a test. Unemployment rate high in IT? Good. They deserve it. If you are good at what you do and you get fired, you should be able to get a job. If you can't, you are not trying hard enough. I view this all with the quality and quantity of the IT workforce - low quality and high quantity. It's just trimming the fat. Oh yes, within six months of being a consultant I got a senior analyst/admin position with a major insurance firm. So there's a second job even.
Agreed. I just interviewed for a job last week that needed a clearance, they are plentiful. I have a Clearance in the not so distant past so I know the rules. The big stumbling blocks are non-citizen, having relatives in a foreign nation especially one hostile to the USA, a bankruptcy, a criminal record, or having had a clearance revoked for some reason. If you are a citizen, never been arrested, have decent credit and no foreign relatives you can get a Secret level clearance but you are going to be waiting 18 months to 2 yrs. Anything above Secret and the rules get much tighter. At very high levels they ever ask about your lifestyle!
That being said, it wouldn't take too much to change it. Combine raising the retirement age with increasing the payroll taxes would do a lot to take care of the issue.
Raising the payroll taxes is just plain punitive though - especially for low income earners and the self employed. Raise them enough and you'll see a lot more tax planning to take advantage of the Sub-S corps like Edwards did or less reporting of that kind of income (a loss either way for the treasury). Raising the phaseout for payroll taxes (currently around 83K or so) would also help, but not as much as raising the payroll taxes.
"Means testing" is another option - if someone was wise enough to save for retirement we can penalize them for doing so. This probably wouldn't fly because one of Social Security's selling points is that if you pay in, you get to draw out. Remove that lock in and you'll loose support.
Probably the best bet is to raise the retirement age. We're already seeing people who are retired for as long or longer than they worked, and it's also not uncommon for people to work well into their 70's. The retirement age was initially set so that most people die before drawing it because most people were doing hard manual labor. These days, the nature of work has become more safe (desk jobs and even factory jobs are safer) and people live longer. I think that retirement age is currently at 67 or so. That could probably be raised. (Besides, you don't get old until you retire - look at the people you know and you can see it happen!)
Sorry to write so much. I don't know that there is a good answer. What will probably happen is that Bush wants to allow people to take a portion of their 14% Social Security tax and place it into a "private account", so he'll probably be able to get it by raising FICA 3% or so (split between the employee and the employer - the only ones who would really see this are the self-employeds).
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Except that the idiots with useless degrees from no-name colleges are the ones that stuck around -- because they figured out how to schmooze the bosses, just like they figured out how to play the game to get them into the job in the first place.
The people who get cut are the system administrators that management never sees working (hint: if the sysadmin is kicking back with his feet on his desk, that's a *good* sign) and the programmers that rock the boat by insisting on things like maintainable code and nightly builds. I've seen it happen in every company I've ever worked at: in good times, the company hires people, at least half of which are deadwood, and in poor times, the company lays people off, 3/4 to 90% of which are productive employees.
Really, the only solution is to start your own company -- do consulting, create an innovative product. Otherwise you just get shafted.
Yeah, as someone who graduated a year too late to get a decent programming job, I can say that 'entry-level' is a thing of the past. I did get a job, but it is dead-end. Companies are still living in 2002 and think they can get PhD's with 20 years experience for $40k. I see many mid-level job positions with hyped-up requirements that go unfilled for 6 months or more. Only now are workers starting to burn out from being overloaded by this employment gap. The pendulum is about to swing back in a big way.
Medicine however has been quite successful at keeping everybody alive much longer. As you get older you need more medicine to stay alive, or sometimes to just -want- to stay alive. In this way medicine seems to do a good job of perpetuating it's own existence.
Will medicine eventually destroy quality of life as the number of retirees encroaches on the number of workers? Pushing the retirement age higher, taxes higher, benefits lower.. Will viagra save the world by allowing pensioners to continue producing offspring until their deaths allowing the long lifetimes to be leveraged in some meaningful way against this tide? Will a new standard of raising children have to be adopted for that to make any sense whatsoever? What the heck? Help!
Problem with him and all the other "free market" economists is that they fail to recognize that it's impossible to allow corporations to be licensed by, and provide campaign financing for, government and have a free market at the same time. Thus we have not had a free market for 140-160 years, or thereabouts.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Gee, this is news? Yeah, I know all about the IT job losses this 3rd Q of 04...especially as I was laid off from my old job. I wound up getting a similar job--in West Virginia. Nevermind I was working in Michigan.
But then it doesn't help that the IT field has attracted so many idiots. At a previous job I was interviewing for a Jr. UNIX Admin, and we had a guy in for a second interview and my boss loved him. I was there for a tech interview--found out this guy knew nothing--yet demanded a large salary--just cause he somehow managed to get a Master's in CS. I even quized him on some basic things, and all I usually got in response was a blank stare. *sigh*
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
I guess people who lose their jobs suddenly or get hit with huge medical bills are irresponsible?
I don't work for people who wildly pass judgement on others.
Yes, in the *late 90s*.
The boom has been over for quite awhile, and there have been plenty of stories right here on slashdot (as well as many other information sources) showing job trends for "IT" and "Software Engineers" have generally been pretty dismal over intervals as recent as Jan-June 2004.
It's my *assumption* that the vast majority of people who were drawn into the tech boom and weren't particularly qualified have been out of the industry since, at most, late 2002. Crazy internet petfood selling startups went under long ago. This constant appeal to "these are the idiots from the boom" is a really weak argument to me at this point
At what point in examining employment numbers are we supposed to finally accept that there are no more "boom-era idiots" still losing jobs? To me, that point already happened some time ago. However virtually any story hitting on job trends pops up numerous comments about the need to wipe out the idiots and whatnot. To these diehards still convinced that the industry is loaded with clueless folks that have somehow managed to keep themselves in the industry after the boom... whens the cutoff? When can you actually accept there's no crazy artificial bloat of boom time morons out there turning any statistic about tech sector employment into a worthless figure? 2005? 2015?
I agree with the concept you are trying to convey. Save money whenever possible.
:-) (Yes it is possible for geeks to get girlfriends)
However, when you take someone who has earned X dollars for ten+ years, let them go and instantly make it impossible for them to get a job except by moving around, and that job only pay 1/10th of what X did, then something is seriously wrong. Now if this happened over say 10+ years that would be bad enough (like the manufacturing jobs) but this happened over two years. That is horrible.
Yes people should learn to save. I remember saving up all week to take my girlfiend out and get breadsticks on the weekend. If I skipped a few meals during the week I could actually afford extra cheese for both of us.
However, when someone with a family looses their job they don't instantly sell their house, all their cars (at a loss mind you) and start farming for food. Normally they will try for a long time to work in their profession in their area, then they will start to lower their standards over time to work just about anywhere, and then at last be forced to make very tough decisions. I have seen many of my friends have to make these tough decisions after being out of work a long time. Thankfully most have found a new job, but some more are about to loose their jobs now. I will say that the difference between now and a few years ago is that people know that the there are no jobs now. They didn't know that a few years ago.
I can tell you that NOBODY wants to hire an I.T. person for another profession. Their fear is that the economy will turn upward again and the person will quit. I have seen a few of my friends try and get jobs a Walmart and others. This has NEVER worked. So they are stuck.
So yes I agree that people should save whenever possible. But for those 35-55 year olds out there that have been "downsized", it is not reasonable to expect them to become farmers overnight. Again as I mentioned above, today is different than two years ago. Today, if you have an I.T. job, you better be saving like mad.
The sad part of all this is that if Kerry would have been smart, he would have played this issue up and made this his core issue. In my opinion he didn't and that is why he lost. Well that and the fact that his past haunted him.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I'm sure being stupid and lazy was Jesus's reason for being poor.
Our company was looking for an application programmer/maintainer. One of the less interesting jobs in my opinion. We've got some new blood now, but it took a very long time and 300+ applications (job applications that is :) to get to the right person if I'm not mistaken.
The problem with the high unemployment rate is that _anyone_ will react on any job offer. It takes a lot of time for a company to sift through all this reactions and seperate the good few from the abundant bad.
A hint; don't go doing nothing but take a low income job and study and look for a job in the mean time. Companies don't trust long periods between jobs as I found out the soft way (I was hired just before it all came tumbling down, lucky me, but they didn't like it).
We'll wait.
Wow. I wish I lived in your pretend world. Maybe you should come live in the real one sometime. It doesn't take much in terms of medical bills to mount up to a financially catastrophic event particularly in these times when companies no longer offer health & medical benefits to their employees.
Even with insurance, a hospitalization of any length can quickly drain finances and many hospitals demand payment in full and refuse to allow you to make scheduled payments.
Several years ago, my appendix ruptured, I had emergency surgery and was in the intensive care unit for 3 days and then spent another 10 days in a semi-private room. Even with insurance, my portion of the bill was something like 14K. When I tried to make arrangements to pay monthly the hospital refused and turned me over to the credit bureau.
After several years I'm within a couple of months of finally paying that debt off but in the meantime, that single event nearly wiped me out financially and still has a negative impact on my credit rating despite not missing or being late with a single payment in all this time.
Does this make me irresponsible? Sure, how dare I become ill and then work my ass off for years to pay my debt.
Has this cost me a job? Not that I'm aware of, thankfully, but it is a possibility that I am strongly aware of.
Thus spake the SysGoddess