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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."
There are TONS of IT jobs in Washington, DC. If you are willing and capable of getting a security clearance, you can get a job. Getting your first clearance job will be a bit of a challenge, but once you get it, you are set.
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
...I'm planning to migrate to Canada. I hear access to the internets is faster there.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Having read the article in the Post, the guy the story is about is an ex-mechanic who got into IT during the boom. He live in the Midwest (not exactly a hotbed of IT jobs). A perfect analogy would be someone looking for water in the desert. He isn't moving to one of the coasts, so he's kind of stuck. Living in the DC area, there are loads of jobs, but you have to get here. He'd be better off signing up with one of the big contracting firms (EDS, SAIC, etc.) if he's looking.
He and his family are well known to the staff, and as a result they tend to leave extra power-pills under the bed to get them through the night.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I hate the Information Technology label. If anybody asks me if I'm an IT worker I say "no". Even data entry jobs are IT. I wouldn't even call myself a programmer, though I write code. People who do hiring know the difference between the types of people that get lumped into the IT category, so why can't the trade rags, marketing departments, and mainstream media figure it out?
And for the record, even though IT jobs are down, software engineering jobs are up. Especially in the Operating systems and Device Driver areas. If they didn't lump unskilled workers and skilled workers together in the same category they'd be able to tell the difference.
Really, there's no demand for people who know how to use a computer. Everyone knows how to use a computer.
I'm tired of reading "poor me! I used to make 100,000 a year because I knew Lotus 1-2-3, and now the only work I can get is data entry for minimum wage" stories.
We all know how it works. The IT industry is rife with deskilling. What is today a marketable skill (I don't know, configuring LANs by hand, for instance) is tomorrow a useless one (autosensing switches and DHCP, etc). New technologies are constantly being created to replace IT workers.
So if you want to stay with the computers, you have to constantly acquire new skills to stay a step ahead. People who think they can just sit back and live the fat life and let their A+ certification take care of them are dead wrong and deserve what they get.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The late 90's were an aberration that drew many unqualified people into IT. Think paper MCSEs and IT managers that could barely send email. What we are seeing is a deabsorption of these people (e.g. many of them out of work). Watch the allied health (medium skilled) fields do the same thing in a few years.
Unless we see something new, IT jobs are going the way of plumbers. Every town will have a few and if a company needs IT support they'll call one out. The rest of the time their computers will just work.
That is the problem people look at people using computers they go IT. It was the same durring the late 90s tech boom they sell products on the internet then they are a tech company (I am sorry Pets.com was not a Tech company it was a Pet suply store that happends to be online) To put Pets.com as the same type of company as say Sun Micrososystems is just plane stupid. Now That the echonmy dropped they are still saying that all of them are IT staff. So to say that IT is down then the real question where is it down? Is it in the application Programmers, The Web Developers, IT Technical Support, System Administrators, Network Consultants, ..., ..., ... There are tons of jobs that fall under IT which require different disiplins and skills. Most Colleges have seemed to realize these differences thus make a difference between Computer Science, Computer Engineering, MIS, Information Technology Systems, ..., ..., ... But the general public doesn't seem t want to make the seporation in their mind. Sure we use computers for more then wordprocessing and spreadsheet, But after that the simularites get far more seporated. Saying IT jobs are being loss at the nation average is like saying, Office jobs are being loss above the national average. While only a couple of office jobs have been dropped.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, the first statement applies to Clinton perfectly, as does the second one to Kerry. But I'll be a monkey's uncle if I'd think that they looked alike.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
had NO business being in IT in the first place!
They knew what the interweb was and could spell HTML yet, somehow, commanded over 50k a year.
I was glad to see the "people rake" come through and get rid of some of the dead weight.
Of course, you have to deal with a complete lack of anything resembling broadband, which is probably why they have the shortage in the first place; no techie wants to move somewhere 256kbps is considered broadband and worth paying $50/month for.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
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
and while I don't know much about the economy overall I can say this much: it seems like the older It guys who survived the .com implosion are kinda burning out and looking towards different types of IT employment. Many are willing to give up high-paying (and/or high-pressure) jobs miles away in the city in order to be near home and, in many cases, a new child or wife. I know it's not unique to our field but I do believe that most IT people tend to think a bit differently about this and come to the decision that money isn't the be-all. I recently put a listing in the local paper for a desktop support guy, $10-$20/hour. I got an amazing number of responses from people who were *already employed* making way more money than I was offering and were clearly over qualified. Number one reason was to be closer to home. Number two was traffic.
At first I chalked it up to people who were lying about already being employed but after talking to them on the phone I'm not so sure. I'm near Washington and our IT scene isn't as bleak as other places so this may be a local trend.
Actually, about 32.47% of statistics are made up right on the spot.
It's not nationwide. There are definitely areas where the job market is considerably better and there seems to be pockets where certain types of jobs are more plentiful. I recently moved from the PNW to Chicago for this very reason.
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.
Oh well, I have a good job now, and I got it because all of the idiots out there made me look so much better. Hell, the guy that I interviewed with left because he didn't know what he was doing, and now I do his job and mine. Maybe if there were more qualified people, I would have a new coworker... because we are looking, we just cannot find anyone who is competent.
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
"That's why I'm such a big fan of Community College!"
Woo-Hoo, that guy should just go to community college, then he'll be able to find another great job. Isn't it so great when everything is so black and white?
The kind of person who recognizes that when there is a government budget surplus, there is more money available for investment in private industry, just as when the government runs huge multi-trillion deficits between trade and government spending, there is less money for investment in private industry. The first scenario leads to companies making the decision to hire more people, the second leads to companies making the decision to lay off as many people as possible.
Understand now why tax cuts done irresponsibily lose jobs?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The guy's making good money, it's his expenses that are killing him. Having to move frquently and accepting a motel as a home is a judgement call and it's blowing 1800 a month.
He should have his 9 year old set up a bank account so he can avoid the check-cashing fee.
If his wife can work they ought to just move back to Warren and he can commute to Akron, Kent, Canton or the Cleveland area. A three bedroom rental at $1000 and suddenly he's saving $700 / month.
The whole economy is too darwinian, future generations can't defend themselves if they haven't been born yet, and today's financial institutions just do whatever Washington will let them get away with. Shareholders VS society at-large. Temporal mindsets suck.
This guy should be happy he's got a wife and kids. Try PLC or truck driving or become an RN. There 'Service Economy' is inescapable - so he should be happy with what he's got. Sorry to be bitter, but I got my own problems, and $30 an hour aint one of 'em.
'There is only so much room in the economy for business owners - leaving the rest of us destined to being someone else's Em-Ploy-Ee.'
~ Ted Kaczynski, The Unabomber Manifesto
Stuff that matters.
Something dawned on me yesterday. IT is one of the few, if not the only, industry ever created to put its own workers, and the workers of as many other industries as possible, out of a job. That is the purpose of information technology. Kind of sad and kind of neat. IT makes very few truly new products. We create products that do old things a different way (ie. streaming a video over a network, cable or otherwise, so you don't have to go to Blockbuster). So be it.
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.
"Instead of living in an apartment, which in the same area will cost less than renting an entire house, and saving up this family is now crammed in a motel room!"
You're blaming the guy because he chose to rent? Contrary to what many people seem to believe, buying a house is not always a smart financial move. First, I'm glad that you can rent "an entire house" cheaper than you can rent an apartment in your area, but I think you'll find that in many parts of the U.S. that isn't the case. Second, if you're not going to be able to stay in a house for a period of several years before you try to sell it, you can wind up losing quite a bit of money. You have to pay a real estate agent, loan fees, taxes, insurance, maintenance, utilities that might be included in rent (e.g. water and garbage), etc. If the selling price of your house hasn't gone up considerably since you bought it, it can be cheaper to rent. Any financial planner can tell you that. If your employment future in the area is murky, you might be better off renting.All too often, the complaints about "we can't find workers" really translates into "we can't find workers willing to work at those wages" or "we can't find workers with good credit."
It takes 18-36 months for a clearance. If you have great credit, you can get an "interim clearance" which is a temporary one until the real clearance is done. If you have spotty to rotten credit, you can expect to get turned down. Security officers know that, so your credit score is more important in an interview than whether you have a brain.
Not True. The problem has existed for sometime. http://www.factcheck.org/article225.html
Article Quoted:
In fact, tax experts say the incentive has been there for decades - since there has been a corporate income tax. It's not Bush's doing.
The incentive exists because the US taxes corporations at rates higher than most other countries. According to the Institute for International Economics, the effective rate for US corporations was just over 30% in 2002, while mainland China's effective corporate rate was only 11.3%, Britain's 18.2%, Mexico's 15.1% and Indonesia's a miniscule 0.2%.
Losers whine about doing their best
Winners go home and f*ck the prom queen!
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.
Don't buy bread; buy flour, eggs, and yeast and learn to bake your own bread. Don't buy pre-packaged deli meat; buy a big enconomy-size roast, cook it yourself, and slice it up. Don't buy potato chips, buy a big bag of potatos and a gallon of vegatable oil. You get the idea...
Tomatos too expensive? Plant a garden! Even an apartment dweller can raise a significant crop of fresh vegatables in big flowerpots. Go to the library and check out a book on box gardening.
Most importantly, learn how to shop! For example, every supermarket I've ever been in marks down it's meats on the sell-by date. They'll sell it for a few cents on the dollar rather than thowing it out. If you know your store's routine, you can be there waiting when they mark it down. Then, take it straight home and throw it in the freezer. The other thing is to take advantage of coupons and loss leaders! Loss leaders are great if you have the discipline to go in and ONLY buy what's on sale. You may have to go to 3 or 4 stores to get everything you need, but you save a ton of money. Clipping coupons may be a pain in the ass, but it's worth it -- my wife will routinely spend $100 at the grocery store and get $60 of it back in coupons and promotions.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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.
You win the Marie Antoinette award for the week! If you have to live in a hotel, you don't have an oven to "bake your own bread" or "cook a roast". You don't have space to grow your own tomatoes either. You might not even have access to a range top or microwave. It's even worse if you have to live in your car!
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.