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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).