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Programming Jobs Losing Luster in U.S.
alphapartic1e writes "Yahoo! News writes "The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005. Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis. "If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research.""
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Hey! Maybe I should start an IT consulting company. I'll call it the "Smart-Ass Group"!
The short future is projects managed in US but implemented abroad - the far future is too scary to think about at all - they're gonna take all our jobs :(.
Pay girls to strip!
"If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research."
Actually, if this describes you, and you are creative and business savvy to boot, then you are perfectly suited for starting up your own software business.
Outsourced!
"The real jobs are in business bullshit" and not "algorithms and code".
This of course begs the question... WHO is doing the real programming work then?
I wonder which company paid for Gartner's study. The software industry is just waiting to drop wages for programmers, I bet.
If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day there are a shrinking number of jobs for you...
But if you want to become a sailor and program from a cubicle hundreds of miles out to sea... your set!
http://www.sandstorming.com
so I should not strive to live the office space life ?
is middle management. Everything else can be outsourced.
Entry level positions aren't necessary. Knowlege of how computer systems behave and are operated isn't necessary. Intelligence isn't necessary.
All you have to know is how to play petty office politics and sell people on useless shit. And run an office (either well or poorly.)
The jobs are going overseas, but not in the "there taking are jorbs!" way. Rather, the United States is simple becoming a follower of technology rather than a leader. The real leaders are in Europe and Asia, with Europe leading the way with standardization of services and Asia with cutting edge technology releases.
Americans are very happy living with their one or two generations old technology. They have various excuses as to why it would be impossible to implement standardized systems in the US (size of the country, unregulated bandwidth, etc), but I've yet to meet an American who wasn't impressed by the breadth and depth of technology available overseas that isn't available at home for them.
As an aside, I find that people who think Apple iBook screens acceptable are typically totally unaware of the quality of screens of most other makers. The iBook has one of the worst screens in today's lineup of laptops. But this type of blinder is typical of American technology consumers.
So if you want to make programming your job, look into studying up on your Asian languages.
I thought this happened years ago after the
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
What was considered IT back the good old days of the 20th century was information Technology, with the emphasis on Technology. But after attempting to build an economic structure purely on technology we fond out the old rules are still in place and valid, and technology is only one of many tools in the business arsenal. As well the average person is becoming more computer savvy, so jobs like "computer operator" are becoming passé. Now that we have the Technology to enhance information, and it is affordable and easy to use, we now have to Manage our Information Systems to make all this cool stuff actually work right and also fit in the business needs. Sure Video conferencing is cool and all but does it actually help improve profit, No, not really. Or a high end Cisco network for 20 computers, nope that is not profitable either. IT workers are not supposed to be separated from the business that they work for they are part of it and they are being paid to help the company not just worried about tiny technical details. If it takes you twice as long to make a mid size program 50% faster, It would be cheaper to buy a computer that is twice as fast, and run your slower program on that and still have increased speeds. These are the issues business faces. Business don't want people who get loss in the technology they want people who know technology who also know how to use it to improve their business bottom line.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As a Biology major, if this is to be believed At Stanford, career experts are urging engineering and science majors to get internships and jobs outside of their comfort zones -- in marketing, finance, sales and even consulting. Then it looks like many hard science majors are going to be competing for jobs that they are arguably less qualified for with people (Communications, Econ, Marketing majors) who are often looked upon with condescension for their "easy" majors.
That the remaining jobs are in areas where geeks are typically short in skills.
The good news....
It IS Gartner, meaning there's a damn good chance that analysis is a steaming pile of BS.
I wonder how many of those programming jobs 'lost' were actually promotions to managerial positions, and the vacancies left behind were farmed out?
No work for me, even though I write some grotesquely long and complex code. I feel like I've come a long way in 22 years since my early days of print rockets, but it seems like the industry is saturated. I've sent out thousands of resumes, but my only jobs I've gotten was a pity job from my university, and a job through my exgirlfriends dad.
I have only one last hope at the best game design job in the world before its back to the salt mines(minimum wage:soul crushing work.) And to be honest, its almost better not having a job at all than working for minimum wage after you spent a lifetime of blood sweat and tears in your field.
God spoke to me.
Then again, in what other industry do those struggling to pay for college or to get through unemployment amuse themselves by giving away the very craft that they think they're going to sell if they're ever employed later? Don't blame it all on outsourcing. Some of the lessened market demand can be traced straight back to free software. You can't give away huge quantities of something that has intrinsic value and expect it not to have an effect on market pricing.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
No SHIT we didnt notice this did we?
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
If we all become managers, get MBA's, focus on corporate strategy/direction, and financial analysis. WHO THE HELL IS GOING TO MAKE THE PRODUCTS?? Top-heavy boats tip over.
Manufacturing jobs "lost their luster" a long time ago because a combination of many destructive forces converged on blue collar workers. Corporations with loyalties to no one, not even the stockholders, union bosses who wanted blue collar workers to live middle and upper middle class lifestyles, politicians hell-bent on judging their job performance in volume of regulation and prison/quasi-slave labor in countries like China all conspired to destroy those jobs. Now we are simply progressing toward the inevitable destruction of the white collar job market for anyone who isn't a business major in college.
One thing is certain about the job market. If the starry-eyed socialists would stop regulating our economy into the second world, we'd not be losing jobs the way we are. American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification, allowing people to sue merely for being offended rather than telling people to deal with it, the constant threat of corporate-to-corporate lawsuits over nothing and things of that nature.
The bottom line is that if you want to actually have a job and a society that produces wealth rather than living off of the wealth of bygone years, you'll vote for the Libertarian Party. The LP is the only party that actually wants to create a regulatory regime that works for everyone. The coin-operated Democrats and Republicans only care about giving back to those who put them in power and don't care about making the system work for the rest of society.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Let me think...
Long hours. Hard work. Decent, but not great pay (let's face it, only a few become millionaires).
Stinky, unshowered people, and hardly a womam in site.
Why am I not surprised?
Bryan
Sorry, I'm incredibly negative towards the IT industry right now. I was even advised by an older timer (I've been in IT for over ten years) to get out.
So basically the the job spike created by the dot com era has retraced to where it was before the boom started.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
... where the IT job market is booming.
5 630672%5E15317%5E%5Enbv%5E15306,00.html
http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,1
"The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004"
;-)
Not surprising if it took more than a year to calculate that.
And this is why I went for a business degree instead of a IT/MIS degree in college. I hope that being deeply a geek but also with a solid business background I'll be able to manage the offshore team when they ship my coding job over. Working for a GE subsidiary I see more and more back office and tech jobs slipping away to Mexico, India, and from what I hear China too soon. This is the price we pay to get the "ultra" low prices in many goods and services we buy now. I for one do not welcome our new offshore overlords! :) I'm sure in time things will balance out and there will jobs coming back to USA once companies realize you can't outsource everything. For example Dell pulling their Corp Help Desk back.
Some of us really are nerds at heart and strive to learn new "Stuff that matter" ;).
the economy shifts all the time. What you like to do and where you can add the most value do not always coincide.
I am reading the writing on the wall and using software as an entry into other technical areas where I can gain experience. Software as applied technology, a means to an ends. Which, ultimately, makes sense. Software for software sake doesn't seem like a growth industry. My advice, and it is worth little, is get proficient in something else. If you like software, you can always use software towards that something.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Entry level positions aren't necessary.
So is middle management willing to pay extra tax so that recent graduates who would have otherwise taken entry-level positions can go on welfare instead?
IMO, a huge part of the problem is literally the value of a dollar. While a programmer in the U.S. is making $65 per hour and his Indian counterpart is making $20 per hour, the Indian is much better off in comparison. From what I hear, that amount of money is enough to hire servants in India. Even though the amount of money is less, it goes much further there than it does here.
Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis.
The problem is that IT didn't start as a business facing department. They started as a bunch of people who thought (correctly) that they could improve the business with computers and software. Their budgets increased and they became incredibly large. Eventually, the IT department started determining the direction of the entire company. 5-10 years later the business is finally trying to reclaim control of IT. This is why the most secure jobs are "business-facing."
PS: Anyone who bashes Gartner is just afraid of the truth.
- * - * - * - * - * -
Brought to you in dvorak at 17 WPM and climbing.
I'll call it the "Smart-Ass Group"!
You could also call it the Smartner Group. Here is your ad campaign:
Is your company staffed with improvident lackwits?
We'll show you how to Smartner up!
Share and enjoy!
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
But perhaps you should have considered to brawden you business skills, Management, Marketing, Sales, while you were at your last places of employement. So that way you will not be suck as a programmer but have options for other well paying jobs. Heck a Sales Man at Raymore and Flanigan can make over 50k a year. Sure it would be nice to stay as a programmer but you need to advance to keep active.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It's great for users, but bad for maintaining the real value of software and the idea of paying people to write it.
We are trying to hire experienced C/C++ developers in the PDX area, and they are really (really) difficult to find. The truth is, that in 95% of the cases, good software engineers already have a job. Outsourcing might have made the lack of jobs for non experienced developers bigger, even if the level of quality you get from outsourcing is even lower than the one you might have got if you'd have given jobs in USA. In a few words, outsourcing stinks, and we better off importing the 1% of good developers they have oversee, and leave the remaining 99% junk in the wild. You get what you pay for dude, and the company I'm currently working with, is crudely facing this reality.
The joys of outsourcing and free software programmers.. Both devaluate programmers worth on the market.
I've been dealing with (mis)management ass-holes who never seem to get a clue that, when you've planned out a project if you cut the staffing and/or the budget for it, you still get what you pay for (meaning the original projections go out the window.)
Its not rocket science but the way these guys manage, it's more like voodoo (and about as effective as 'gris-gris' in warding off AIDS... NOT!)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
You're not interested in playing the political game, you're not going to have a job. That's corporate life
So if somebody is a great coder but has a mental disability that prevents him or her from effectively playing the political game, what should he or she do for a living?
Bullshit! I've worked with some fat, lazy, incompetent and completely useless Indians. I've also worked with some very intelligent and productive ones. This is just spin/FUD/propaganda that outsourcing company execs spew to American pointy-haired bosses to get buy-in...
It's the same in every labor market. Up until the 70's, blacks worked a lot of the blue-collar labor jobs in the U.S. Now, Mexicans have moved in and taken over the labor market for half the wages. I guess you can thank NAFTA for that.
Now, when greedy corporate execs want bigger bonuses, they invent a shortage of qualified resources to get H1-B visa caps raised. Suddenly, you are training your replacement who works for half as much.
They only way to shake up corporate america is to vote with your wallet. Don't buy into the consumerism trend. I bet if everyone in America didn't buy anything for one day or went to the bank and withdrew as much cash as possible, the entire economy would crater.
I would hazard that its not just "stay in your cube all day" programming jobs that are losing out - its ALL fields where that can happen. Call center, medical tests, auto design ... the list is growing every day.
That isolated cube can be awfully far away!
Plus IMHO those who do well in those kind of jobs tend to have little business / political clout. So they get the shaft. Life blows sometimes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know that there are some good firms overseas that probably can provide a legitimate savings without some of these headaches, but businesses expecting a panacaea may come out the worse for outsourcing. Caveat emptor, YMMV, etc.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Racist!
This does disturb me a bit, as I see the real technical job opportunities at my company diminishing. Based on my first hand experience, I tend to believe that the study's results are true, and that "programming" jobs will continually become scarce in the US.
even with the dollar depreciated 30% from about 4 years ago we still have the outsourcing going on. People have to realize that most of the competitive disadvantage has nothing to do with skills. Its basically currency manipulation primarily from Asian countries. The Asians buy the treasury bonds to prop the dollar up to make services and products made in the US more expensive. The congress retaliates by going spending crazy which drives the dollar down along with the trade deficit. But the Asians just print more money negating the trade deficit. They are doing the same thing to the Euro. Its supposedly a Nash system because they need our consumers. But China and India will not need our consumers since they have billions of people.
My experience these last few years has been an interview on occasion but no takers.
I've always enjoyed using open source. But there are economic realities. I can think of a few examples:
1. A large corporation gives a donation to an open source project. The corporation gets the tax break. The open source project releases free code which destroyed the software market for a particular segment. The large corporation gets its free code and then outsources the 'service'.
2. A university professor works on an open source project. The open source project releases free code which destroyed the software market for a particular segment. I pay the professor with my tax dollars.
3. Many tech companies are just market sales shells with an outsourced component. Maybe, a token engineer to do a check on the code. Code quality extremely questionable. It just has to barely work.
I suppose things will just get more screwed up. I remember the 80s when people wanted to work together more to save the US market. Alas, its all globalism now. Globalism: if we did that here we would be breaking the law. Lets do it over there instead!
I just program as a hobby now. I certaintly do not give code out nor communicate ideas.
Our problem is not lack of jobs, it's lack of qualified people. I've been in touch with folks in cleveland, chicago and denver and nobody can hire talented folks fast enough to keep up with growing demand \ businesses. It aint quite the late 90s, but demand is up folks.
If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you
Thanks in large part to the a**holes at Gartner, who's lit major IT analysts continue to misdirect pointy hair bosses nationwide. "Outsourcing is the future!" says Gartner. And so it becomes, not because it makes any kind of real financial sense, but because corporate America is full of incompetent managers who justify their decision making by waving official looking industry reports around.
There should be a maxim about managerial competence: competence is inversely proportional to the weight accorded Gartner reports. That goes for slashdot editorials as well. "Ooooo, Gartner said something!" Big fucking deal.
Fresh out of school, this guy lands a career as a "consultant".
What the hell does he know that someone is going to pay money for?
Also "At Stanford, career experts are urging engineering and science majors to get internships and jobs outside of their comfort zones."
Go to school for what you love so that you can do something else!
Only an idiot would aim for a job with shrinking pay and demand, while outsourcing is increasing. I should know. We can smell our own.
Consider:
To the pessimist, this can only mean: We're all doomed!On the other hand, the optimist might observe that the West [USA, UK, Japan, Korea, Taiwan], in conjunction with China, and India, is laying the foundation for a 21st century of staggering, unprecedented economic growth, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Outsourcing in a country like india is suicide.
It ' like a couple of years ago there was a major flood in taiwan so the prices of chips and ram increased because production stopped,,,nobody thinks about those facts when they outsource in country that are plagued by harsh weather, bad political climate. Here the risk are very low, back there what will happen when one of those IT sweat shops falls in a earthquake? where will be the support a company needs when all the satff is buried under a thousand ton of debris?
Unless it's so cheap that even with the remote possibility of a major disaster , it's still cheaper to outsource there.
Some of the lessened market demand can be traced straight back to free software.
Certainly, there has always been a small segment of programmers (mostly system, development tools and database and network infrastructurel programmers) who were hired to provide the type of software that is open source code. However, so far as I can tell, there has been only an increase in demand (overall) for high-quality commercial software in that space, and one would suppose therefore, an increase in demand for best-of-breed programmers who practice that arcane business.
Notably, there is a lot of open source code, other than system-level and network operations code, out there, but very little of it is useful out-of-the-box for many applications, without --yes-- hiring coders to adapt it.
In other words, notwithstanding the large contribution of open source in some spaces, those simply weren't the spaces in which most programmers practiced. In the past, we weren't seeking people to HACK gcc and MySQL, but rather to use gcc and MySQL to implement business and enterprise applications. Open source was more a source of opportunities, at end, than it has been a drag on employment.
The problem isn't lack of jobs building development software, I think. Rather, it is the loss of jobs USING that software to implement business applications.
Your company can get 90%+ of the value it needs out of a prepackaged IT solution and a handful of on-site customer-service monkeys. Techs can be brought in as-needed when something breaks.
Your company doesn't need to host and manage its own email, web or even database servers, and may not even have much advantage in managing its own file servers. Once the infrastructure's in, there's not much need for guys to run cables (and if they've moved to a wireless network, there's even less need, although that opens up an entirely different class of problems). There's an excellent chance that your company does not need its own development group. Outsourcing these functions saves the cost of employing a bunch of IT monkeys, maintaining a certain amount of infrastructure, software maintenance, and a load of other costs. Granted, you're paying someone else to do it for you, but someone else should be able to gain some advantage from economies of scale. If they're worth bothering with, the security, bandwdith, and many of the compliance issues become their problem.
In the end, the major things many companies need on-site IT folks for are IS functions. They'll need folks to setup and support desktop and laptop computers and userspace software and the like. Welcome to the brave new world. I hope your school loans aren't too big.
Canthros
I have eight years of C++. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get a progamming job since 2001. You think that would be a problem?!?
All businesses, governments, individuals are going to have to face up to this.
The Information Revolution has made sure that digital information of any sort is not a scarce resource. It can trivially be copied and distributed, therefore the inherent economic price (not to say value) is going to tend towards zero. Attempting to try to make digital information of any sort a scarce resource is doomed to failure, the ecomonics guarantee that and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a dreamer.
Software development then is a service. And that includes business analysis, software design and coding itself. Some people will do the business analysis and design themselves and ship the spec over to India to have the coding done, some will do the analysis and design and code using rapid application design systems and build it out of off the shelf components, like free software.
Fundamentally, coders are going the way of the blacksmith. They're going to have to become engineers rather than blacksmiths if they want to make a living. Those who don't, won't or can't will have to find other employment.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
When you open your network to the third world, you are putting your data at the mercy of the third world mentality: desperate people getting paid next to nothing, government bureaucrats getting rich off rent-seeking behaviour, and legal systems that display a remarkable flexibility in the direction of those with ready cash or influence to spend.
Will this change? Eventually, but it will take a great deal of time, and when developing world mores reach developed world standards, the economic gradient between the areas will be insufficiently steep to stimulate the use of distant labor. So I see no reason to expect that the security concerns will dissipate.
I'm not trolling, but I do know it may sounds as if
I am.
Why do we have all this panic about the layoffs? Who remembers all the people flooded the market before 2000?
Many of those people were unskilled. They were in the industry because there was plenty of money to be made. They were not in the industry because they loved programming computers(or whatever your vice of tech is).
That type of person gave the rest of us a bad name. They made it hard for companies to hire the real programmers. The companies learned their lesson. They now have stronger hiring filters. They now must get rid of the bloat they hired on in 2000.
One person in the industry because he or she loves the industry can do the work of 5-10 people in the industry for the money. I say good riddance!
Any "career" in this list is in jeopardy. GATS: General Agreement in Trade in Services. http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/serv_e/serv_se ctors_e.htm
Hmmm.. US has largest growth in Software Patents; US has shrinking software industry.
<sarcasm>No connection, surely?</sarcasm>
I wonder how the employment rate for lawyers employed by US software companies is doing? That would make interesting reading.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
I see a lot of talk in this thread about outsourcing. Did you guys just completely forget about the dot com crash that was still happening at that time?
Hahahaaa a Liberatarian talking about creating a regulatory regime? Isn't that a bit like the organization Rock Against Drugs?
Nobody's regulating the software industry, and yet you blame socialists for job loss?? I'm sorry, that's the second most moronic thing I've heard a Libertarian say. You really think lawsuits and diversity are the root of industry job loss?? Maybe you should team up with the KKK. They have the same problems.
The only thing LP members want to do is build their own stock portfolio. They'd watch you starve to death while eating blueberry pie and blame it on "market forces". And I will give you a 100% guarantee that the LP Party would reward the people that put it into power if that were ever to occur. Does the party discuss taking over Wyoming's senate vote solely for power or to help the people of Wyoming?
I discussed this in detail in this article. The combination of offshoring, issues with the business cycle and corporate sponsored immigration policy is deadly. Just in case you thought the H-1b issue was over, there are _still_ over 65,000 visas per year being issued(the ones at major universities are exempt from the cap)-about half of which are for IT workers. On top of that there are L-1 visas that are specified in trade agreements like the recent Singapore Chile Free Trade Act that lock the US into substantial numbers of L-1 visas. An industry that is creating no jobs for Americans has no need for these visas.
...economy will crater.
I nominate you for the Rodney King Neighborhood Improvement Award. Burn, baby, burn!
Don't you guys know by now that the Garter group is full of so much crap??
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Next month I will have been a programmer for 40 years. This is not the first bust I've seen in programming employment, but I'm not sure this is a cyclical change as much as a structural change. The task cannot continue "as is" in the face of advancing technology. Thirty-five years ago there were predictions of software being written by software, and we're on the verge of a BIG explosion of software. (Just look at all the submissions at Freshmeat.)
However, there is a severe shortage of thinkers. Face it, any moron can write code, even good code, if the design is done well enough. But if 9 out of 10 software projects in the US are cancelled before completion (apparently due to cost overruns and design problems), then there is a tremendous pent-up demand for good, creative design implemented in affordable software! The new possibilities that could be addressed by a multitude of programmers freed from writing accounting reports and database forms could change our world in terrific ways!
Unfortunately, the low education level in the US has produced a bunch of code peasants without the vision to use the tools they now have. These are persons whose main interest is getting a paycheck and going home to the bottle or TV.
It took 40 years for the railroad to substantially change our lives. Same thing, 40 years, for electricity, automobiles and aircraft. Don't cry for buggy-whip code jobs. Those are something we had to get through to get to the chance for jetliner opportunities. Larry Ellison said (back in '96) that computing power had increased a millionfold in the last 20 years, and if it continued like that for another 20 years it would produce a future he couldn't even imagine. Back in '79, when Cincom Systems was building one of the best database managers to run on IBM mainframes, they had presentation that included this one fact: Back in 1940 the telephone companies had all the technology necessary to handle all the telephone calls made in 1979, but it would have taken every man, woman and child older than 14 in New York City to handle the calls! (Anyone else remember the days when you picked up the phone and got an operator? Oh, wait...there are places like that in Argentina and India.) Routine jobs will always be downsized, eliminated or automated, and any job becomes routine with progress. Some researchers are predicting huge unemployment in the unskilled labor market in 25 years. Robotic machinery will handle routine skills like cooking fast food, housework, framing homes, etc., but somebody will have to build and design those machines. I say we have a great opportunity to get there before the Chinese! I say , "Bring on the automated programming!" There is no end to the things I could build if didn't have to hire lazy, unreliable and expensive wetware to do the routine tasks.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Basic journalism tenents state that you do not ask anyone for their 'expert opinion' that stands to make money off of what they say.
It's the same as letting a company ghost write a review of their own product and the portraying the review as objective.
I see these kind of reports and i just dont get it. The company i work for has like 10 opening for med level to senior .NET (C#) guys who live and want to work in the NYC / Long Island area.
We are having a really hard time filling these positions with qualified candidates. So if anyone here is interested in messing up the statistics of this report and lives in the area (no resumes from India please) then send me your stuff to webcontact@yahoo.com.
Isn't there a critical shortage of us?
Aren't we supposed to be driving kids into this stuff, like they are in high school, regardless of the interests of the student.
Isn't this always going to be a great career?
How can you call me a racist for stating facts and using the words "Blacks" and "Mexicans"?
Grow up!
WHile some of it is just off shoring, the other aspect is automation. First realize that the main role of IT is to automate, and that includes programming tasks. While software quality is not where it should be, the tools we have now; in terms of application tools, development tools and OS; are much better than they were 10 years ago. Hence you have greater productivity. Even MS has improved.
The trend is more toward selecting commercial off the shelf products which meet business needs (which require business process modeling and requirments gathering) rather than in-house applications or hiring a vendor to create an application. This is where the 'business facing' aspect comes in.
One good analogy I can come up with is the railroad industry. Up unitl about the late 1940's each railroad often built their own steam engines. Each engine was specialized to a specific task such as narrow gauge, long haul express, high speed passenger, locals etc. To support this you had mechanical shops with hundreds or even thousands of metal workers, boiler makers, welders etc. Then along came diesel electric trains and all those jobs dissappeared to be replaced by a few diesel mechanics and electricians, and some mechinical and electrical engineers to design and refine the engines.
It is heading the same way. You will have people working on the business end defining requirements. Sometimes they will find COTS software and technicians will paste it together with some, but not much cutomization (and then OUTSIDE of the application). In some cases a custom job will be needed and so high end programmers who are good at solving new problems may come in. But the numbers will drop. It is inevitable as the industry matures.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"Software for software sake doesn't seem like a growth industry."
It's called Open Source Software.
Speaking as a hiring manager, and one who has friends in the recruiting profession, the market for tech skills is actually not that bad. It feels like a roughly balanced market--with any edge probably on the side of employers, albeit a slight one.
I say this because I've hired several positions in the last 2 years, and there just aren't that many qualified candidates out there. As the AC said, the good ones are employed, and that is the sign of a healthy, balanced market.
I've personally written the job descriptions to hire my employees in the last 5 years, and I typically separate the years of experience from the skills--seasoning is different from the toolset. And, like most skill lists, the skills are just "desirable qualities," not at all a comprehensive list of mandatory skills. Yet I find few good candidates (on average).
You're right, an HR department can be terrible at throwing away the wheat and giving you the chaff, but I disagree there as well. Since I have friends in the recruiting biz, they have helped me considerably with hiring over the last few years--and they *do* hand over just the bits of wheat they are able to find.
I've even seen very good candidates decline reasonable offers, because they had good offers elsewhere. Again, that's a sign of a healthy (or healthier, at least) job market, and certainly supports the ACs comment that good people are fully employed. They are not only fully employed, but they have options when they switch.
Finally, the recruiters that I know have told me that the last few months have been crazy busy, contrary to typical trends for this time of year. Plus, when year over year comparisons are made, about the last 15-18 months have been far better for them than the prior 15-18 months. And economic recovery does typically hit recruiters early in the game, as they are direct recipients of the benefits of companies feeling flush enough to not only hire but pay a premium for it.
I have been in IT for almost 15 years and *every* job I have had was a business facing job. Being able to sit down with an accountant, salesman or an AA for that matter and understand their needs and requirements and turn that into code is the basic function of most IT jobs. Most programmers don't work for software firms. Most of us work for companies that have bought a canned package. We spend our time tweaking it and value adding reports and interfaces for the end user. Understanding the business you are supporting is just as valuable as knowing how to code.
Offshoring is a fad, like bellbottom jeans. Even Sony offshored their volunteer customer support reps because paying Indians to do the in-game customer support was more fashionable than free guides (who only got a free subscription and free expansions). There is no rational business reason that actually paying someone wages can be cheaper than a bunch of suckers/slaves who got $13/month for 6+ hours per week of unpaid labor (oh, go ahead and laugh at me for being a guide for 2 years). Yet that is why offshoring is done: it looks good in the press, no matter if it screws the business bottom line and the country's bottom line.
Developers, develop ....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Engineering used to be a good middle class job.
Now it's a job for immigrants, many of whom are here on non-immigrant visas.
Yeah, yeah, the Roman citizens of the late Republic
bitched about slaves from Germania and Africa,
but the Senators "needed them for innovation".
Besides, Romans wouldn't take the jobs (for
the wages offered). The Republic degenerated
into an Empire (the "globalism" of its day).
So. Fast Foward to the decline of the American Republic: engineering is going the way of manufacturing.
Word to the wise : have a trust fund or go to law school. That's the way to stay or get ahead in our new Imperial society.
e.g.
U SD&to=INR&amt=1&t=5y
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=
The dollar has lost around 20% of it's value against the Indian Rupee over the last 5 years. Americans are now 20% cheaper to employ compared to Indians than they were 5 years ago.
That trend's going to continue until it isn't worth offshoring anything anymore. In the meantime the US standard of living hasn't changed much. The Indian standard of living has increased substantially, it'll continue increasing and they'll continue getting more expensive.
China is a problem. The problem with China is that they fix their exchange rate to the dollar.
Compare the Chinese chart with the Indian chart:
U SD&to=CNY&amt=1&t=5y
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=
This is why all the manufacturing has headed to China, guaranteed lower costs, for as long as the exchange rate is fixed.
You say they'll just offshore to the next cheapest country, well it's not that simple, language and education are huge barriers. The Indians have the language thanks to the British Empire and they have the education, it's easy offshoring there. The Chinese have the education but not the language, offshoring service jobs there is far more difficult. Most of the other developing countries have neither.
The key will be to get the Chinese government to allow the Yuan to float on international currency markets. International pressure on China to do this is rising.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Here the risk are very low, back there what will happen when one of those IT sweat shops falls in a earthquake? where will be the support a company needs when all the satff is buried under a thousand ton of debris?
ummmmm... You do know that silicon valley is in prime earthquake terrritory, don't you?
ATOAJBW
Yep, good thing Silicon Valley is not in an earthquake prone area :)
XML UI Browser/Platform
We are talking about working with tech in a business. It's easy for us tech folks to assume that what we are interested in doing with tech matches a company's goals, but this is rarely so. A company is not interested in technical brilliance if that is not their core business, they are interested in using the tech to help them make money. You can't do that sitting in a cube, and only people who can talk to non-tech people in business and figure out how to use tech to help them will be useful to these (non-high tech) companies.
You can either complain, or do nothing. You don't get both.
"It only has value as a product when you intruduce artificial constraints to the market such as various forms of intellectual property law."
It's called "The GPL".
Anyway it's safe to say that OSS is having an influence (the community is depending on it). It's equally likely that it can have negative influences (you all are depending on that too). However OSS isn't that good a weapon as far as restrained effects.
Business gets lawyers to figure out how to ignore these laws.
Further, if you thing that H1-Bs are paid "prevaling wage" you need a lesson in economics.
"Prevaling Wage" is a LEGAL concept, not an economic one. It's supposed to be the equlibrium wage rate.
BUT, my increasint the supply of labor, you decrease wages.
Nice platitudes from the defenders of the H1-B non-immigrant guest worker cheap labor lobbying people, but this policy is dangerous to American workers and dangerous to our nation's defense.
Wanna see a bunch of people shit themselves? Just talk about the Pakistan-India nuclear issue, and the fact that they don't have good real-time intel on each other. There is no "red phone" between Islamabad and New Delhi, let alone an equivalent of Norad for each of them.
What is it? Musharraf is out of the picture and we BELIEVE Pakistani nukes are inbound? Who do we call!? How do we verify? Should we retaliate now?
It may sound farfetched, but this is a real indemnity issue when investing in India (and for that matter Taiwan).
Back to the original topic, I believe the Gartner report fails to paint an accurate view of the situation. Here in the midwest there are programming jobs. No they don't all pay 70-80k a year. No they aren't sexy. Yes you're going to have to wear business attire. Yes you're going to have to leave the west coast.
The outsourcing spurt of '01 to '04 seems to have slowed, and in some cases is actually reversing due to remote project management costs and lack of satisfaction with the resulting product. And no, I'm not talking out of my ass; I have experience with three Fortune 100 companies that have had to yank some projects/functions back in. I know a freshly graduated kid who got picked up the other day with a 2.3 GPA in I.T. (no, not CS or Eng) at 55k. That's real money in my neighborhood, folks. Are they going to abuse him? Probably. Is he working and does he have bennies? Yes.
It's not the starry-eyed socialists that are the problem. It's the Business controlled Democrats
and Republicans who bend over backwards to help bring in as much foreign workers as possible.
All one has to do to stem the job loss is to actually make real restrictions on the people who
come over here. There is a real premium on working closely with the client, on site; and there
appears to be absolutely no restrictions on this.
For example, one would think that, with the H1-B visas currently being at their limit that this
would restrict things, right? Nope, not at all.
I've recently seen, at Cisco, a bunch of guys literally walk right in from India via Wipro on a
moments notice. No H1-B difficulty whatsoever; they probably came in on an L1 visa.
So it seems that the visa limit is a complete joke; and only for the rubes who don't know how to get around this.
When companies can bend the rules with impunity, and no concern about being caught, you're going
to keep seeing a lot of job loss. If you've ever worked at Cisco, you'd know that it is heavily
involved with bringing offshore people onsite.
I wish there was something which could be done. But the Feds certainly aren't watching.
Let people compete offshore; I have absolutely no problem with this. But keep them there. Instead,
what we're doing is bringing in cheap labor here
Sounds like everyone has given up.
I think techies could get together and come up with their own compelling offerings based on the practices they wished they could use but couldn't because of management pressures. Instead of walking away, programmers should network among themselves and cooperate to offer carefully engineered, quality solutions.
Failing that, start another web company. Keep your staff small and don't expect to get rich off of it, but you can continue to do your deep coding.
In either case, outsource your sales, marketing, accounting, etc.
I cannot believe this is news. After several years of depression and economic downturn, everybody should know this by now. If you think that you can have a job that requires you to write code and nothing else, be ready to move to India or somewhere where code monkeys will live.
However, the IT is not dead; the face is different. Right now there is a demand for customer facing professionals who know technology. Believe it or not, it is very hard to find people who know programming languages -- at least on the level where one can communicate about them without problems -- and provide excellent customer service. Knowing C++ is one thing; being able to look at a customer's code that integrates your product with their product and find out a bottleneck is a different beast. How about talking to the customer and coming up with something that improves their business through technology? I have met many excellent software engineers who could not keep a conversation on any topic but programming. Most of them were seeking employment. The real world says: your technical skills are obsolete unless you can translate them into business.
If you want a job, focus on how a particular technology can be integrated with the rest of IT world. Learn to know who your customers are and what they do. Suggest the most effective solutions, do marketing and show that your technical skills can bring in money. As long as you contribute to profits, you will have at least some sort of a job security thing going on. If you sit in the cubicle waiting for the specs, make sure that you can do something else. Plumbing, construction work, etc., pay pretty well.
Finally, I find that many people do not take geeks for serious because of the way geeks look. You can walk through an office and tell who does what by their haircut, clothing that they wear and attitudes. Unfortunately, geeks can be singled out right away (just as sales guys, but the latter get far more respect). If you don't take care of yourself, if you don't change your attitutes and adapt to the global economy, then you're screwed.
Who says disappearing jobs have lost their luster? Gold is precious due to its scarcity. US programming jobs are exactly the same.
--
make install -not war
I recently had to hire a developer. The position wasn't super specific, just a mid-level developer with at least 1+ years experience in C#. I got over 80 resumes, about half of which I liked. But, when I sent out a skills assessment to test their knowledge, I got only 10 completed assessments back. Only 10 out of 80! The test wasn't that hard either, just basic knowledge of writing SQL and C# code. I'm surprised at how many people apparently just blew me off. If I gave them a task to do and they don't do it, why would I hire them?
If you want the job, go the extra mile to show the hiring manager that you're willing and able do the job. Don't just solely rely on your resume.
Yes and no. I've had some experience with outsourced projects. Many of the programmers I have interfaced with are good at what they know. They are getting trained in the skills that are currently markettable on outsourced projects. They tend to know .NET and J2EE. When you get outside that, many of them are lost. Many of them are very, very green. Yes, some of them are smart and motivated and will be really good after just a few years of experience.
In the early 90's I interviewed someone for a job here who outright lied to me about some skills. I wasn't the hiring manager. I was just a team member. And our manager continued to be snowed. I was the guy who picked up the slack because this in-duh-vidual was on my team. I had the responsibility for the estimates, milestones and deliverables.
More recently, I was responsible for some of the work that was done here with some code written in Lower Wage-istan. Nobody had any doubt which documentation was up-to-date and correct. That came from me.
I don't believe that the current methods for distributed projects are the final picture. There are communication and coordination costs. Open source projects have driven most of those out in ways that aren't completely viable for close source, proprietary code. The big one is that open source projects rarely have release dates set in stone in advance. The Agile/Extreme Programming community has demonstrated how valuable close communication between a small group of developers and with management and customers can be. To the extent that outsourcing continues to be based on the model of throwing specs over the wall to a bunch of coders, the quality of the results and the success rate are going to be similar to what we've seen in the past.
Honestly, I still see the real tension not being between me and some group of experienced, talented group of Indians working for a fraction of mine salary. The ones that I want to see shaken out are the ones grabbing the programming jobs in India and China who have no more aptitude for it than a lot of the wannabees that I've met over he years. Managers need to factor in risk of cost and schedule overruns and project failures into their analyses.
Its likely they put out all these unemployment stories because they don't want interest rates to be raised at the fomc meeting which is at the end of the month.
most finance news is complete disinformation.
Very few competent people have *all* of the qualifications that these jobs typically require. The resumes of these people are tossed out by HR for not having every single qualification and all you get passed on to you are applilcations by poseurs. Your sampling technique is flawed and there is no basis for your characterization of the talent pool.
OK, so I know "black" isn't too politically correct (even though "white" seems to be good enough), but what do you call someone from Mexico?
Protectionism is by far the most short-sighted trade-related endeavor a nation can embark upon. It is far more beneficial in the long term to subscribe to free and unrestricted trade.
Think of it this way: The business world is tired of paying for IT types in one ivory tower and management types in another. Imagine if nearly everybody you work with could do their own analysis. Jeez, we won't require them to be able to ping a server and report the results (I mean, let's not get carried away!), we just want them to be able to use a spreadsheet for more than making right angles for word documents. And when somebody says "Sure, I have that all in a database!", let's actually see a database, or at least a quasi-normalized spreadsheet.
I could go on, but I have already trimmed this for length a few times. Imagine if peoples' "computer literacy" included comprehension of file formats (just the highlights), a slew of handy excel formulas (yes, it's no OpenOffice, but what is?), and the ability to troubleshoot connectivity problems and application errors at least enough to eliminate the first five minutes of your typical support call.
Imagine if the people who make decisions (and I'm talking things like "how many of those items should I order for next week based on experience plus my hunch factor," not "Should we acquire that other corporation?"), just imagine if the people who make all the little decision everyday had the knowledge and the skills to do their own analysis. Imagine!
Before you accuse me of sounding like John Lennon painting my utopian vision, keep this in mind; it WILL happen after you and I lose our jobs, and companies finally decide it's cheaper to cross-train a manager they already have than it is to keep you or me around.
NOTE TO SELF: Look into a job in IT TRAINING FOR MANAGERS.
p.s. If you think I'm exaggerating, you must work in a real geek-filled office. I envy you.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
We have 9 open positions currently for C++ developers. We have high expecatations in terms of developer skill. This means understanding the language at some depth..
0 2017&AVSDM=2005-05-27+10%3A07%3A53&Logo=1&opt=go&s ort=rv&vw=b&cy=US&brd=1,1862,1863&rad=50&q=quickof fice
We can't find 9 people in the Dallas area (or willing to relocate) to fill these. I've done around 50 interviews in the last 4 weeks. Of those 90% have been foreign workers needing H1B's. We've extended 2 offers. If there are a lot of out of work American programmers, we can't find them.
For anyone who might be interested:
http://jobsearch.monster.com/getjob.asp?JobID=294
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
I find that in any job anymore you have the likely hood to get screwed out of your "career path". Lets face it...Skill trades where the cats pajamas..then IT ...so on and so on. Please look for easy money. This can come from "technical schools" that will take your money to supposedly make you money and tell you its easy. Now managers, being the bang up guys they are at judging people, hire these paper pushing people and the industry gets flooded. Since that industry looks like its on the up...said paper pusher makes a good amount of dough. Next thing you know flooded market hit rocky ground and companies pull out the huge "abort" button and nix a bunch of jobs. Industry slowly repairs itself and we see the people that really want these jobs get them at a wage they should really be making.
Now I'm a sysadmin and not a coder so I don't know anything about 70-80 hours of code in a week but I have this feeling that us that stick around will see some rebound.
I keep hope alive cause I like IT and I got into it cause it excites me. So even if shoveling dog poo paid 100 bucks an hour I would stick with my IT job...no matter the pay.
I wonder if some of the 16% that were lossed moved to somewhere else outside the US, or if they just found a new career? ;)
this makes a difference since this could just mean qualified people go where they make more money (eg. India, China, etc.), and it could just be a "brain drain". after all, these people have to learn programming and best practices from somewhere. You can't learn those things by reading a Gartner Group report
India is a very large country. It has areas with severe weather, and areas without. It has geologically active areas and geologically inactive areas. You can't make that sort of generality.
It's like us in Europe saying we won't buy American stuff because there's earthquakes in California. If the widget you are buying is made in New Jersey, it's not important.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
American technical fields will suffer from this trend, but business professions will benefit from an influx of hard-sciences majors. Some people get into communications and marketing because that's what they want to know and do well, and some people go there to duck effective systems of evaluations - tests, right answers, the possibility of failure. There just aren't enough of the first type of person to fill the demand for marketers and finance guys, so companies end up with a lot of deadwood.
Enter a horde of science types with basic business and communications skills....
Now companies can simultaneously reduce their percentage of deadwood and increase their intellectual diversity. Bingo!
welcome our new unemployed underdogs.
Wait, that came out wrong...
Ok so it is! i just checked, but by comparison unless you count mount st-helen, there isnt much large scale destruction caused by weather! even with California resting on shifting tectonic plates.
Or maybe Canada should set up a free trade zone for expat US programmers. They'd end up with all the top tech talent in the US who doesn't need them apparently.
I'd like to know, if the number of programming jobs has decreased that much in three years time, who is getting the work done? Are the rest of the programmers working longer hours? Are the businesses just getting along with no new applications or maintenance on their existing applications?
In this age of technology, who do we expect to do the programming work if there are fewer and fewer programmers out there? Does this report take into account consultants and temporary contract work?
Obviously some types of businesses probably wouldn't need a full time programmer on their payroll, but thats how its always been. The big corporations that are constantly developing newer and better applications (especially software companies themselves) wouldn't be able to function without their programmers.
And they said zombies weren't real!
"Employers are starting to want versatilists -- people who have deep experience with enterprise-wide applications and can parlay it into some larger cross-company projects out there." I'm sure employees who have worked for years at multi-national national companies will be thrilled with the insights of a recent college grad who found his summer internships "too focused or localized, even meaningless," and is now ready to be injected into a company at a higher level.
As the cost of the goods goes down ( thanks to outsourcing manufacturing to China), the cost of services needs to go down too. As more and more of programming jobs get outsourced, obviously the salaries will hit the rock-bottom. It all starts with YOU shopping at Walmart.
- Sh!t
I was in a grad program (MS in CS) at a US University, with the majority of the program filled with students from India. They all lived together, studied together, exchanged homework with each other (in class, and from different semesters), and also exchanged exam answers with each other from semester to semester (since it appeared that the questions didn't change much). Finally, a large group was caught cheating together during an exam.
The odd thing, is that as a Grad Assistant, when I was in charge of hiring new GAs, every student from India lied outright on their resumes. Everyone of them said they were experts in all areas of MS networking, applications, and all of them were engineers. As soon as I asked any questions about something relatively simple in networking, not a single one knew the answer.
Maybe before we outsource (and I dont' think we should), we need to check to see who is actually doing the work, and doing some testing to see if they can do what they claim. Isn't it more efficient to write better code once, than to spend all of the extra time troubleshooting and rewriting code that never gets written correctly (even if they charge less to do it)?
Yes, the chinese may be pegging their currency, but eventually this will lose its effectiveness. In the end, their monetary policy will just cause inflation in their country until the good's real price rises to that of worldwide levels. Welcome to macroeconomics.
"Instead of walking away, programmers should network among themselves and cooperate to offer carefully engineered, quality solutions."
Unfortunately, there's no MARKET for carefully engineered quality solutions. You'd starve trying to put in the extra time and effort it takes to make apps that are robust, reliable and easy to use.
Look at almost any Fortune company's website. This is the stuff right on the front line facing the customer 24x7. Chances are, you can't login even using Lowest-Common-Denomiator web access (Windows/IE), the most important page is offline, it's impossible to request critical services, etc. etc. etc.
I'd name names, since it's only slander when you can't demonstrate it's true, but there's so many of them out there, why bother?
And the really sad thing about these junk sites is among the prominent offenders are famous high-tech companies who - if anyone - should have a commitment to quality.
After all, if their customer sites are this bad, why expect quality from their products?
Again like i replied to that other person...How many major earthquakes in that region? not much, even if you count the last big one a couple of years ago!
,unless we get chemically sprayed, doesnt bother us much!
;).
How many times do you see each year on the news ab out severe weather/flood/hurricane in India...a lot more than here! And there is still the political and plague factors that
Unfortunately i'm in Canada where major tremors caused by earthquakes are usually non-existent and when it happens,we associate those tremors to passing trucks,train or body functions
--Also, i'm no geological expert--
The US standard of living hasn't changed a lot but it will *sometime soon*, and that's because the US consumer (and government for that matter) has been on a massive credit binge. Credit based on equity in their homes primarily. There's a reason that the congress lately passed a law severely limiting bankruptcy for private individuals, and that's because these credit issuers smell it coming, bigtime. it's just math after all..
A lot of people now are so strapped, but still wanting to maintain an illusion of prosperity, that they have no principal mortgages,and are only paying interest in perpetuity on those notes hoping that sometime they can sell out and still make something, and that is only because of the unrealistic bloated housing bubble.
The old expression "eating the seed corn" when starving people ate the seeds they needed for next years crop in thew winter, is also similar to a blue collar tradesman pawning his tools on friday night. Rich for the weekend, come monday he's hurting, then no way to go from there, no work. We've pawned our tools by offshoring still useful jobs. We (the fatcat bosses "we") are in that "rich for the weekend" phase right now. That's our economy, and they keep destroying or transferring wealth producing jobs in exchange for wealth re-arranging jobs.
It is unsustainable in the medium and long term, and it will cause a severe economic crash, especially once the flight from the petrodollar picks up more speed as masses of foreigners realise that they will get stuck with worthless paper IOUs. But the people (high level business leaders and politicians) doing it could care less, they will have gotten theirs ahead of time and probably look forward to being mega-rich in a US reduced to second world nation status, as they can enjoy the lifestyle they now have to travel overseas for, ie, the ultimate power over other humans lifestyle, with all that that entails.
That's my take on it anyway. It's planned to happen this way on purpose.
My dad always told me one thing in life, "Always have a backup plan."
It amazes me that as smart as all you people think you are, you are down right stupid when it comes to the basics things in life.
Right now I'm a programmer and DBA. I make good money and love what I do. I ALSO hold a mortgage broker's license and was a mortgage broker for a year before I got into programming. Why you ask? Because I knew that at some point the IT industry would tumble like it is doing and I had to have some sort of backup plan if I got fired. With my license I can walk into any mortgage office today and hang my license and have a job. Everyone needs money and the quickest way to get it is to borrow against your home. You want job security, get into real estate. Do mortgages, sell properties, get into rentals, something, anything, but at least have a backup plan.
Tell you what: why don't you get together a group of geeks who all refuse to write free software. I'm sure I don't need to tell Kent M. Pitman how that'll work out. So, what's your point, or your suggestion for a better way? Ultimately, you're complaining about the fact that there are 5.999 billion people other than you on this planet, competing quite fiercly, in all sorts of ways for all sorts of resources. I'm guessing you had a very sheltered childhood in which this reality was hidden from you, and it's taking an inordinately long time for the truth to sink in.
Part of this, I know, is due to a mass exodus of people from IT jobs after the dot-com bubble. I know that when my hourly rate when from $80/hour (which was ridiculous for what I was doing) to $10/hour, I left. It wasn't worth it. I'm done with IT. I now run my own business 100% unrelated to IT, and I'm not going back. I still get offers from headhunters that I knew back in the day, but I'm gone. Maybe I'll go back one day once the market for my work isn't so crazy, but for the short term (5-10 years), I, and many other ex-IT people that I know simply aren't interested any more in that kind of work.
I don't respond to AC's.
Compare the Chinese chart with the Indian chart:
http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=U SD&to=CNY&amt=1&t=5y
Perhaps you should have checked Yuan, not Yen. Yen is the Japanese currency, Yuan is the Chinese. Here's the Dollar/Yuan chart.
People have been quick to point out in this thread that "well this is bullshit because we currently have a dozen high level programming positions open, so they are wrong". Well, yes and no.
Sure there is a market for people with a decade of experience in 3 or 4 specific technolgies, but what about entry level? People with less than 3 - 5 years of exp? How does one expect to create a base of programming talent if they can't get hired into jobs to begin with?
Its the low level jobs that are getting offshored and making tech an unattractive industry. Especially since now most companies (in my experience) only count "experience" as time spent working in industry, not independant study or freelancing.
So really, how are we going to fill the ultra-experienced positions in the future if we don't hire people into entry level type positions today?
"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong" - Dennis Miller
My programming skills are extremely valuable compared to my classmates when we graduate in less than a year. A lot of the industry is simulation based or robotics based, both of which require extremely good programming skills.
The sad part is how lacking the Aerospace and Mechanical programs are at most universities (including mine) when it comes to emphasizing this. Many aspects of engineering are becoming more and more software oriented and many software developers could find alternative work in engineering teams if they knew where to look.
Subjects for those interested to reference include Feedback Control and Mechatronics.
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
"Who you should blame is all the greedy new investors hoping to jump onto the Next big thing."
Funny how everyone's memory suddenly goes all selective. There were a lot of geeks who jumped on too. Some as investors (voluntary or not), and some as very highly compensated workers. But yeah, let's blame the entire situation on other people's greed.
"It's like us in Europe saying we won't buy American stuff because there's earthquakes in California. If the widget you are buying is made in New Jersey, it's not important."
It's not the same thing where you, as a consumer can choose to buy elsewhere or another brand if it becomes unavailable due to disaster. But When your company's technical help is crippled and you rely only on that, your screwed!
Companies need to suck it up. Maybe you would like to have an experienced developer, but the answer to a shortage of talent at that level needn't be whining or outsourcing. The experience threshold seems to be a reaction to the complete hacks hired into IT in the late 90's - by enforcing minimum experience, you reduce your chances of hiring a nitwit. The correction that needs to happen is that companies need to learn to filter and find qualified, inexperienced applicants. Companies aren't willing to invest in entry-level enough to create the mid-level talent that is needed. It's going to get worse before it gets better - I see new grads branching into other careers when they can't find a job, so there's even less new talent coming in.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
I was just talking to a (liberal) aquaintance yesterday who IIRC was reading a book (does anyone know the name from this description?) on Nuclear Power and how they do it in France. (furthermore, all this is what I heard from him, so it could all be BS). They have 200 reactors, all of identical design. When they find a flaw/safety problem/problem in one, they fix it in all 200. The USA has (?) reactors, no two have the exact same design.
In the USA two of the most desired and honored professions (things parents want their children to grow up to be) are doctors and lawyers. In France it's doctors and engineers.
Any similar tendencies here also? Or is it like that only on America?
I'd hate to find out that by the time I graduate, all the programming is done in India (or something like that). No, I've nothing against India, I just don't want to be sure the profession I am acquiring has a future.
"Robotic machinery will handle routine skills like cooking fast food, housework, framing homes, etc., but somebody will have to build and design those machines"
yes, but not nearly as many people will be employed doing that as wil be displaced.
First, if I have a robot that can do menial work, then I will only need to hire someone to build the first robot. The rest will be robots made by robots.
Second, Not many of the people fliopping burgers can also design robots.
Third, you will only need a few designers per company. Maybe enough to acount for 1 shift at the burger chain where the robots works.
Forth, There will be a lotm of secondary people put out of work as well. People who supply goods and services to the now unemployed.
The first round of industrial robots needed a lot of maintainance, were difficult to build and there operation was finiky.
Today, not so much. Looking at the nubers todays robots do not create as many jobs as the replace. What happens when they can flip burgers? What do we do with the poeple who can not design and build robots?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
i am delighted to see gartner saying these things, that reinforces my impression that they are almost certainly wrong
;-)
gartner is quite consistent in mis-predicting the IT field; chances are the 'deep coders' will not take "front-facing" jobs [what a stupid characterization, btw, as if all other jobs sit in the corner and think about how bad they are], they'll start their own companies - and not in India or China.
the news of the demise of the US IT industry is greatly exaggerated
granted, corporations stupidly outsourcing their heart, lungs, and skeleton makes for a short-term drop, but this kind of weapons-grade stupidity is not sustainable, i.e. it is self-correcting in the longer term
I'm a programmer and I actually don't see this as bad news. I know a lot of people who took some PHP training course and got a job doing PHP, but they weren't programmers, they may have been able to hack PHP code but don't leave it to them to design anything or you will have one hell of a hack job. I hired a guy to work with me who was simply incapable of working, period. I know a lot of people suffer from that, but programmers in particular like to just sit at their computer and browse the net all day. *gasp* Look at the time, gotta get back to work.
The less programmers there are, the more us *real* programmers get paid.
while that sounds nice, we can't all have cushy university jobs... the leasurely-paced environment of academia is inadequate for most of the things the real world needs done... having myself worked in a university lab, i suspect you're overpaid in relation to value of your output when compared to the pay/output ratio of those in commercial settings... so while it's admirable that you value things over money, it's a bit disengenous considering how parents have to work so hard just to afford today's insane tutions... tuitions which are justified, in part, by the costs of your employment.
some version of chicken pox?
I guess the egg is on the faces of all my friends who think that economics is a worthless minor for a computer science major.
Ahh yes, history repeating itself before our very eyes...
This is simply more proof that the U.S. is on it's way down in world status. Don't give me that krap about wage parity either, because the Asians will for the forseeable future, have much more abundant labor force that is better educated than our (ahem...) immigrant labor force.
Forget the fact that more and more R&D will be done in China and India, but ALL the manufacturing will be done there. Americans and our ridiculously non-patriotic and money-grubbing politicians live in a fantasy world of a 'service industry' panacea. We'll live in a country of cooks, cleaners and corporate crooks...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
It'd be interesting to see how that would change if we actually paid people in proportion to what they're worth.
If a very skilled senior developer is 10x more productive and preventing serious design flaws, are we willing to start paying entry level guys 30K and that super-star 300K?
People want mid-level guys because a decent percentage of fresh kids are next to worthless for six months. I was pretty much in that category when I started.
"If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research.
My guess is that Diane Morello knows nothing whatsoever about programming, or even about the problems encountered during programming.
Gartner is known for its dubious research.
HAHAHAA..
NO ONE is equal...deal...
It's an incredibly hard, thankless work if you choose to do it right. About 90% of it is mundane key-punching, about 50% - stupid boilerplate code, or writing libraries that will allow you to somewhat reduce this percentage. Very rarely do you have time to do something "the right way".
I enjoy my hobby programming a lot more than my development job.
Right there, that's 90% of the reason you want to start a new software business, especially with an online service orientation. It's also the best way for the founders to make money in a medium-term timeframe. All the big companies like to buy up tech that they themselves do not possess the agility and drive to develop (yes, this even includes Google, our patron saint of searching).
Just an aside, learn a bit about the business before you spout of a full paragraph of total bullshit.The barriers for entry are not low. Software still requires a significant and non-trivial cost.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
"No I'm not a doomsday crank."
Y'know, if ya gotta state that, then you are...
As well the average person is becoming more computer savvy, so jobs like "computer operator" are becoming passé.
Somebody has to actually do the administrative tasks day after day week after week. Some computer operations has basically been replaced with help desks. Someone has to maintain the printers, replace desktops, actually have the backup tapes and mail them off site, be there for day to day systems issues.... Whether you call that person an operator or not is irrelevent.
I'm exactly the kind of guy you're looking for, and I spent almost a year unemployed in 2002. You didn't have a chance to hire me then, and you won't have a chance to hire me next time I'm available. I've never found a job through anything other than personal contacts. Unless the system changes, I expect that to hold true for the rest of my life.
The next time I'm looking for a job, I'll send out half a dozen resumes a week, just like last time. But you'll never see them. Neither will anyone else in your position. I simply won't make it through the filters. No Oracle, no Windows, no CORBA, no Peoplesoft. I can say I have "X experience" for only about two dozen X, and I can say I have "3 years X experience" for only three or four X. Three years ago, I was even worse off than that. In the whole year, I saw less than half a dozen job listings that I was technically eligible to apply for.
Here's a hoot - find Andrei Alexandrescu's resume and see how well he fits the "requirements" in your job adverts. Maybe he wouldn't even make it past your HR filter.
I'm an engineer and we outsource some of our projects to India. And I spend most of my day revising their "Curry Code" as I like to call it. Sure, $20 an hour is much cheaper then the $65 for Americans, but you get what you pay for.
It was funny, because I had just read an article talking about the rising demand for folks with computer science degrees. Then I looked more closely... This Gartner study measures 2001 (you know, the .com bust was just starting to cause masses of people to lose their jobs) against 2004 (industry just starting to recover). No surprise there has been a decline in jobs. Sigh.
sigs are a waste of space
Oh, no, 7000 jobs lost, someone call the Po-Po! 7000 jobs is a very, very small portion of the actual number of programming jobs out there. There will always be a job for the best programmers, and if you're not that, why aren't you working harder!?
I think that you're right on the mark. 2 years ago when I graduated college and the economy was poor, I still saw a large number of jobs that wanted 3-5+ years of development experience with some huge array of qualifications that no one could honostly have.
... better to just outsource I guess.
Mean while, the number of entry level jobs was virtually zero. It didn't make sense that you'd have 10 jobs at 90K a year and yet not a single one at 30-40k. I count myself forunate that I did find a good job SE job but I know a lot of good college grads that moved into management because the engineeering entry level jobs just weren't there (not just SE, EE too). Now that they economy is better, could they move out of management and into engineering? Probably not because most HR managers wouldn't consider someone who doesn't have experience.
Most companies just aren't willing to spend a dime training a new employee it seems or to hire someone who doesn't have a perfect match to the skills needed.
Most software is developed for internal use. The fact that developers in India can do this for an American company as cost-effectively as on-site developers is a sad, sad sign. There is practically no connection between corporate developers and their users. New versions of intranet applications roll out regularly with no contact between IT and the users except training on the new system. Setting aside a few exceptional people, the ideas of observing the users work and asking them questions about their workflow are just that - ideas. This is sheer incompetence, by managers and developers. If corporate software development were done even halfway competently, it would be impossible for developers on the other side of the world to compete. Anyone care to explain the reasons behind this absurd situation?
Remember the whole H1-B mess? During the dot.com boom, all the IT managers were screaming that there weren't enough skilled workers available here in the US. dot.com go boom, and suddenly there was an overabundance of tech workers who were no longer employed. Despite these conditions, IT managers start to look at outsourcing, and many take the bait, reducing staffing requirements even further. Just not 1 month ago, I saw an article claiming that there would likely be shortage of candidates working in the IT Field within the next few years.
If one chooses to pursue IT as an educational objective based on current, observable market conditions, and then Big Business has another conniption, whose fault is that? I've never seen a more schizoid group..."We need more IT Workers!"..."We have too many IT Workers!"...."We're gonna have a shortage of IT Workers!"...blah blah blah...
2 years ago when I graduated college and the economy was poor, I still saw a large number of jobs that wanted 3-5+ years of development experience with some huge array of qualifications that no one could honostly have. Mean while, the number of entry level jobs was virtually zero.
That is still the case.
/ recent grad with 2 years of industry experience
/ looking for work for the last 9 months
/ only 2 interviews
/ resume is dynamite
From what I've seen in the US programmer's pool:
* People expect that taking night school courses at a community college entitle them to high-five-figure salaries out of the box.
* People expect that playing Halo makes you a game designer / developer.
* People expect that they can misspell words in your resume and simultaneously assert they are a highly talented programmer.
I agree with the majority of posters who state that many companies have unreasonable expectations of skill level, job requirements, and salary levels. Those bean-counter-run businesses have little grip on business reality.
On the other hand, I've seen a lot of skr1pt kidd33z with mad h4X0rz skillz toss (misspelled) resumes over the transom expecting to start at the top. That may get you a job at Burger Wang but not in a core development role.
I think my only hope would be starting my own buisness, but every successful idea I have, someone else develops first..... This is not relevant. What you need to do is make products that are simpler, more streamlined, and effectively digest domain related data for the user. Stay away from commodity software that only brings in $10 per copy unless you can get volume. In line with your statement, there would have been no reason for the Japanese to start building cars in a market throughly dominated by the big 3 automakers. They made them cheaper, better, and more in-line with what domain users wanted. That is the key to success!
Why don't you make some of your projects available for review on your website? I'm talking about the source code, not executables, so it doesn't matter if they're complete or fully working or not. While reviewing resumes for game development positions, one thing I always love to see from someone new to the industry is some example work.
Also, you'll be surprised (I know I was) at the number of recruiters and company HR folk who may find you through your website. I've had several cold calls/emails from people who found or were referred to my website, on which I had a couple of games for download with full source.
It'll offer proof that you have the talent that employers are looking for, rather than them having to potentially waste time and money on what could be a load of hot air.
Since you keep posting this same bad news story 2 or 3 times each month [and who am I to say you are wrong...you get the same 300+ comments each time while actual novel items in security or development get like 7 or 20 comments], I will keep offering the same comment:
"... if you are only interested in deep coding and algorithms,...
get a security clearance...no job shortage there!
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
"Studies show..."
Name one...just ONE....links?...ANYTHING?!?!
thought so...how about YOU do some research, liar
Robotic machinery will handle routine skills like cooking fast food, housework, framing homes, etc., but somebody will have to build and design those machines
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
- Military school Commandant (Simpsons Episode #4F21)
#!/
Eventually US jobs would be lost, as Europe and Japan outsourced to India and China but the US did not.
A rational US software engineer these days should be some sort of Luddite, smashing the fiber lines between the US and the rest of the world.
Any Europeans/Japanese in this discussion? How are you doing?
I18N == Intergalacticization
Here is another issue.
Say you do get offered a nice IT job. The job happens to be in the bay area or silicon valley. You find out that any reasonable housing is going to cost you 1 million + dollars. Would you take the job? Nope. Sure you get the 100K job but then all the inflated expenses. Then the worries of job insecurity and outsourcing. Why expose yourself to the risk? Or are you going to choose to live in a tiny tiny apartement and if thats the case then whats the point?
The fundamentals are even worse because its pyramid economics.
Wow, it used to be that slashdot was the place I saw stories before I read them elsewhere. However, I saw this story in my dead-tree sunday newspaper in Denver... Yesterday! Which means the copy was ready by saturday sometime, and being an news wire story it was likely ready by Friday. Scooped on a nationally syndicated story by a dead-tree newspaper. Oh how the mighty have fallen!
--Shemnon
Was that a stab at irony? You could have just said compounded "OMG, 19% of techies who can't do basic arithmatic have been fired!!!!!" once a week.
I have to agree with this to a degree...but there's something far more important that I've seen that's overlooked.
Everyone wants to hire the expert on everything that they need. On the other hand, nobody wants to grow an employee into what they need. The effect is that this leaves your high-level expertise employed, and comamnding a wondefully high salary. On the other hand, if a candidate isn't that all-in-one expert, nobody wants to train them...or even hire them.
I spent the last 7 years of my professional career as a service-provider network analyst, so I can tackle most stuff from layers 1-3, and am generally pretty good at it. I run a linux firewall at home and have a small Windows AD just for grins and storing my music on.
I had a job interview last week which was supposed to be largely centered on the LAN/WAN side, which I'm good at. However, I got a lot of grilling on the security side and on how to setup a multi-level Active Directory forest. Nothing for nothing, high-end PIX and IDS experience and creating an actual AD forest isn't something that most people can just pick up w/o a home lab of some sorts (which costs a ton of legitimate dollars)...and even with a home lab, w/o experience on the resume, it's a tough sell.
Maybe it's a character flaw, but I just can't bullshit my way through an interview.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
No, because the first time somebody implements that, the 30K employees (which are most of them) will unionize and enforce wage controls where their salary isn't tied to productivity but seniority.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Just curious...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If it was about getting cheaper labor, U.S. companies would have outsourced all the jobs to third world countries 50 years ago when the U.S. was the number one producer of manufactured goods and it's workers were the highest paid in the world.
The reason we are losing jobs in the United States (and it is not just the U.S., the Europe economy is in just as much trouble), is because we have created an enviornment that is hostile to honest buisness and production.
We have a system where is is easier to litigate than it is to innovate - companies that succesfully produce goods and services are taxed, punished, regulated and litigated until they are unprofitable, while other companies thrive by suing for intellectual property, or by having the government give them subsidies and handouts, or lobbying the government to put their competition out of buisness.
We have a system where someone who developes a new product or service for their employer will never be rewarded as highly as the person who sues their employer because a coworker told a dirty joke.
We have created a climate where it just isn't possible to run a buisness in the U.S... Unless your buisness is based on lawsuits, saturation marketing, government subsidies, government enforced monopolies, or local service (like fast food or retail).
This will be difficult to do by the nature of a lot of IT or CS guys. You get a young Turk coming in, and is interviewed by the head programmer, or team leader, or whatever. He'll ask about his projects, and as soon as he hears Perl, or Python, or Java, or whatever, he drops the kid like a rock because he has an innate religious dislike of the tool.
"I use VisualStudio to program."
"BILL-LOVER! Out of my cubicle!"
I don't mean to be one-sided, either. The head programmer has been burned before, when they did take a flyer on some young Turk who immediately came in and demanded that they re-write the whole thing in C++, because that's what he knew well.
This kind of problem will not go away until "software engineering" isn't a ridiculous notion. Analogies are dangerous, but you can compare the current situation to building tradesmen in the far past. The stone masons thought everything should be made out of stone, the carpenters suggested wood, and the brick masons offered bricks. Architects did what they did based on what came before, so the profession developed based on prior work.
Then steel came along, and architects discovered you could just build a big steel frame and glue whatever damn thing you wanted on the ouside of the box. Once we have that framework--which is part hardware that is fast enough and cheap enough, and part software design concepts that are ubiquitous--we can glue any damn thing we want on the outside of an application, and do it cheaply.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is, of course, endlessly debateable.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
But how much do US corporations know about the background of the individual outsourced programmers taking these jobs? Very little.
Yep, I've been in those sort of interviews where the sentence following "hello" concludes with "we were looking for someone a little less senior."
"* People expect that taking night school courses at a community college entitle them to high-five-figure salaries out of the box."
Minimum wage is almost five-figures.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I see people are quick to point at the blame-of-the-month, outsourcing, but without really looking at how things got this way.
See, if there were tons of software jobs out there to begin with, outsourcing would be just a drop in the ocean. But the demand for software isn't increasing. Why not?
Well, try the fact that the only software that's profitable to make is already made by one company that dominates the industry, and its only competitors are open-source freeware.
You're shaking your head. "Another Slashdot anti-Microsoft idiot," you say, as you point your mouse towards the -1 moderation dialogue. Well, so what new e-mail program/web browser/media player/operating system/spreadsheet/word processor/other commonly-used application have you written lately that wasn't Microsoft's or free?
And it's not just Microsoft; look at the game industry consolidation, where a handful of companies dominate. Or graphics, where there were once dozens of companies making PC graphics cards there's now only two major ones (and the occasional intel chipset). Throughout the industry, you're either with the Big Company or you're out of luck. There's no competition outside of webspace, and even that is consolidating.
Or you're saying, "But all those new jobs in a competitive market would be outsourced, too!" Well, only if there's enough supply to meet the demand; if not, the cost of outsourcing rises (including the decrease in quality as fourth-rate engineers are pressed into service to meet the demand) and outsourcing is no longer an issue.
No, we need to bust up the monopolies, for real this time. It's bad for you and me because it means fewer jobs for you and me. It's bad for your boss because it means single-source suppliers can throttle your boss for every dime he has.
It's just another cost of sponsoring a monopoly: Your job.
Think about that the next time you want to buy a word processor.
Some of those years developing operating systems . OS/2 ... Thank-you-very-much. I know the value of IT. I'm just saying - IT'S NOT A GOOD BUSINESS TO ENTER INTO. At least in the forseeable future.
AND, BTW, I received some pretty good grades, especially from professors who grew up in textile towns, because I did plans to keep jobs!
I really resent your ignorance! Sorry, but you do not have a FUCKING clue!
Just a caveat emptor.
...blue collar guy. In the past couple of decades and change I lost two factory jobs that got shipped overseas. Swell,did the ole "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" thing and went into construction. Had to keep dropping my bids down to about zilch, as I couldn't compete in the area I was in with illegal aliens living a dozen to a single bedroom apartment basically. Moved, it happened again. Finally it was so stupid to do it I just stopped doing it, couldn't even afford to keep my tools and gear in shape.. Swell, went into the tradeshow business doing display set up, watched the labor pool get filled quickly to beyond what was needed as so many blue collar guys who had lost their regular jobs got into it, then the dotcom bubble burst, knocking out a lot of the big booths and shows. Then I got hurt on the job and went broke as I recuperated over 6 months time.
Swell, now I am a farm worker and am watching NAFTA and GATT destroy agriculture, as farmers try to compete with regions that have about zero environmental laws, etc. They don't put up with that "save the flying three eyed newt so screw you mr. farmer, eat it raw" stuff overseas, in those areas like South America, etc where we have to compete internationally. The only thing that is marginally "saving" ag is the cost of oil is making international transpo more expensive, and that's it. A couple more "free trade" globalisation moves and laws, that's it, all she wrote, buh bye US ag. The multinational agcos are screwing everyone, they don't care,they just want you locked into their seed and packing house and distribution channels, and it don't matter to them if you name is Bubba, Jose, Abdul, N'kummah or Apu, they are equal opportunity screwers. It's near impossible to be an independent now. And it's a catch 22, if the dollar drops, stuff costs more but ag stuff can still sell,but people don't have enough of the dollars to make it worth while, if the dollar goes up, more overall jobs are lost, but what is left can be exported, but the people overseas still won't want anything higher priced than what they can do at home. So that point is moot as well. If the dollar drops oil and energy goes up, which means your cost of productyion goes up past what you can charge realistically, ag is severely energy dependent. And foreign nations don't really want our crap anyway, no GM foods, but that's about all the big agcos are pushing.
You tell me what the fix is because I don't know. I'm competing the best I can, but comes a point you just can't compete with people who can live on 50 bucks a month someplace else. You can't do that in the US. I can re-late to the white collars going through the same thing now, just got many years head start on them, same as millions of other blue collars and I can guarantee you that us guys warned you guys starting years ago it was going to come to you big bucks guys sometime, because the boss class is *the same*, no matter what industry you are in. If you in the US making a middle class salary are replaceable overseas for 1/5th the money or less, they will do it, end of story. Those guys are into it for the short term huge money then get out, they *don't care at all* what happens to you. politicians, globalist business bosses, those guys. what they say and what they do are different, pay attention to only what they do and what happens eventually and you can clearly see it.
In the IT world I have no idea other than to go independent and contract and take any job you can get, bank the loot and/or get out of debt totally as quickly as possible.
Me, I own some solar PV but don't own any big home theater system. We have at least two years of simple food on hand, but I don't go out and blow my cash on movies or entertainments anymore. I can see what's coming and decided on some priorities.
When I grew up I talked to a lot of adults who lived through the great depression. It was bad then but tolerable for people as long as they had the necessities of food/water/shelter, etc. City people really got na
Is that some programming language I've never heard of?
Or is it some new version of 9-Lives cat food that turns cats into hackers?
Or do you mean "DashDash DashDashDash DotDashDot DotDotDot Dot DashDotDashDot DashDashDash DashDotDot Dot DashDashDotDotDashDash DashDotDashDash DashDashDash DotDotDash DotDot DashDotDot DotDot DashDashDash Dash DashDashDotDotDashDash DashDot DashDashDash Dash DashDash DashDashDash DotDashDot DotDashDot DotDot DotDotDot DashDotDashDot DashDashDash DashDotDot Dot DotDashDotDashDotDash" (Secret message inside - convert 'Dash' to '-' and 'Dot' to '.', enjoy)
Exactly. Why, then, do "suits" have any power at all? How can someone with no knowledge of technology run a technological company?
If you had a clue you could have said a couple things to have shut the parent up!
Dumb-ass!
Me .. venture capitalist...me...send you programmer twits to the gutter...me more important and richer than you....ugh!!
Haaaaaa! Haaaaaa! Haaaaa!
I have had a long (since 1975) and checkered/stellar career. I've averaged 1.5 years per employers/clients. (The current one is bound to end soon and then I can get on with my life.)
I got on my own as an independant contractor and into Smalltalk AFTER getting diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis.
People are funny about hiring and firing. They got no HR training and so don't know how to handle it or themselves. Since I keep, uh, off-site backups of all my work, I am always ready to transfer what I know to the next job. (And I have my backups to make sure I still know it six months, or sic years, down the line.)
My 'best' years were in the 1990s when it seemed I could do no wrong and money rolled in.
And I didn't get it that I was dealing with people who were dealing the same problems year after year and they didn't get it either (but a different it.)
These people, though basically mean and nasty, are also sullen, dull and slow. They just can't see what the problems are and so are doomed to repeat them.
That is an OPPORTUNITY!
Its basically a question of keeping your eyes, ears and mind open. And when you see an opportunity, take it for all its worth.
Maybe you get to 'advance the cause of techiedom' and maybe you just keep the wolf from the door, but its a lot better than the alternative; starving to death.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think you have a very good point, for PHB companies. As a counterpoint, Microsoft LOVES to hire fresh graduates. They can get them cheap and easily mold them into the Microsoft corporate culture. And it pays off very well for Microsoft.
cpeterso
"The Capitalization?"
And the biggy: "What's the method that you're going to get cutomers?"
Also, "Why shouldn't I go to India or some other developing country for talent?"
Cop an attitude, like you did with the grandparent, and they (the VCs) will just look at you and send you on your way.
But, You're "right". Go ahead and invest in an IT firm. Anywhere in the world. We are just idiots! Sorry to waste your time!
Amen.
Companies aren't willing to invest in entry-level enough to create the mid-level talent that is needed. It's going to get worse before it gets better - I see new grads branching into other careers when they can't find a job, so there's even less new talent coming in.
Its pretty hard to get your feet in the door. Recently, despite a great geek pedigree, I said "screw IT, I'm going to lawschool."
Open Source Sushi
high-five-figure salaries
Dang those high flying community college grads who think they're worthing of pulling down 10k a year right out of school.
yeah, yeah, I know, there are two way's to parse that...
Heck the demise of the dot-com boom is enough to explain that, and in just the right time period too.
It remains to be seen if outsourcing means the US is getting out of the programming business, or just that the boring jobs are getting outsourced only to be replaced with more creative ones. And short-term small changes like this can be adequately explained by the business cycle.
We have raised a generation of people who are morally bankrupt. Their focus is what they will make today, this week, this quarter. There is no thought of long term profits, or any concern for their neighbors. As long as their portfolio grows today, that's all they care about. Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing... all about greed. Screw anyone to make a few bucks. No concern about what's right. I read the freerepublic, (I know, that won't win me points here), and I see those kinds of people all the time. It's mind boggling, but they just don't care about anyone, or anything but themselves. Ask them what they'll do when they can't sell stuff to out of work Americans and they'll tell you, without shame, that someone, somewhere will be working, they'll sell to them! Pathetic.
I doubt it man. We hire interns, and I had only a year of (not including internships) experience when I was hired. Many of our programmers have only one or two years experience, and it's not so hard to believe that we'd pick up someone with no experience if we ever found one. It seems common that the first year of experience comes from the most recent internship extending for an extra year, though that wasn't the case for me. It was the case for some other programmers we picked up.
At any level, there are too few programmers who really know their stuff. The problem is actually very simple. Allow me to pontificate....
There are some professions that don't scale well with additional people. For instance, doctors, lawyers, (supposedly) CEOs, and (to a degree) programmers. Hiring 10 sucky doctors is not as good as hiring one good doctor, and 10 sucky lawyers won't win a case for you, whereas one good one will. Consequently, when there's a lot on the line (billion dollar lawsuits, your life, the life of a company, or the life of your infrastructure), it doesn't hurt to pay 5x as much for a 10% increased chance of success. This is not the case for ditchdiggers though, 10 ditch diggers probably are better than 1 really good one, so you can't see huge salary multiples for ditch diggers.
So, just like other skill professions, there is a severe shortage of skilled programmers, and a severe glut of unskilled ones. A programmer who is just 10% worse than average is essentially unemployable, and everyone is desperately trying to find that top 10 or 20%.
The fact is that a lot of programmers out there just have no interest in computers. Many of them couldn't really say how one works, how a compiler works, how a DB works, how an OS works, and these are students coming out of GOOD schools. In my classes at school, less than 10% of the students had any interest in computers at all. The instructor at one point spent 6 weeks describing a linked list, and this was an advanced class! I would also point out the dismal quality of the TAs and research papers (if you've studied a hard science and know some comp sci, read a few published comp sci papers once in awhile, it should be good for a laugh. Publishing unresearched tripe like that in any other science would result in a lynch mob), but this probably isn't the place. Like all fads, CS has a lot of quackery. It will eventually settle down, but until then, expect some turmoil.
Any studies on the number of successful
outsourcing vs unsuccessful outsourcing? I'm having a hard time believing they are as successful as everyone wants to believe.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I'm tired of dealing w/ corporations, especially with this sort of mentality:
"If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you"
1st off: A yes, I am more interested in coding something for someone, rather than being a fake-ass corporate-minded tool who is more interested in selling nothing to everyone.
2nd off: I don't work in a cubicle, nor would I, and w/ that sort of 'go ahead, if thats really what you wanna do' attitude is sarcastically disrespectful to those who studied hard, and/or worked hard to establish themselves in such a career.
I'm willing to bet that a large portion of that 16% shortage of I.T. staff is due to 2 issues:
1) Offshore/Outsourcing
2) American Programmers who are fed up w/ the disrespectful attitude of corporations, and/or are fed-up w/ training people oversea's to replace them, and have since (in the last 3 years) gone on to becoming independent contractors, or realizing that they are the backbone of the corporation, and decided to start their own business.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
"person who resides in Mexico"
or
"person who immigrated from Mexico"
or
"person with ancestry from Mexico"
depending on which is appropriate.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
get over it.
hardware will be designed in taiwan, manufactured in china and the software will be written in india.
you [w|y]anks can go sell it to each other in walmart.
No, we need to bust up the monopolies, for real this time.
In America? You propose Federal Anti-Trust actions, in this day and age? Just when we're getting used to Patriot III or whatever? I think you overestimate our chances.
Just as a thought experiment, let's assume (o noble dreamers) that there exists some possibility, however slim, of breaking up large, vigorous monopolies -- specifically Microsoft.
Under this assumption, I recommend an alternate approach: nationalizing the source code. For the good of the country, you understand. Similar to the manner in which Presidents of past centuries have said Coal is a national priority, this strike is illegal, your union is busted, you men get back to work.
But that's just a thought experiment. I think a better approach is abandoning all hope of doing good deeds at the Federal level
-kgj
-kgj
I'm one of the people that Derkec was in touch with (in Denver). I asked him about a month ago if he knew of any GOOD people who were looking for a coding gig. Now, my company is an in-the-black non-VC-backed startup, and we are kicking some ass. We have got to where we are by making sure that everybody that we hire is really talented. Experience is good to have because it makes you seasoned. But experience can also take your edge off and cause a person to think only in terms of what they are used to.
We made a big effort to get resumes from talented people, and we cast the net pretty far and wide. We ended up with a stack of about 100 resumes. Of that 100 we called maybe 10. Nine of those calls were "like pulling teeth"--people are just not passionate about technology, they seem to think that "knowing computers" is enough to get by. We don't want people who want to get by, we want people who want to do awesome things. (The one person that made a good impression in the phone call ended up being a dufus once we met him.)
This is a pretty big problem. The position we were hiring was entry level -- so all you college kids just getting done with school, all you Jedi Masters of codery, where are you? We are willing to hire people out of school because in our experience this has been the best way.
Um, I hate to break it to you, but that is the situation already. At least in my neck of the woods.
if you're in the NYC area, email me your resume.
tjw19@columbia.edu
Even worse, in Holland, student accomodation is now being constructed out of sea containers.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It's called evolution. There are more and more people on this earth, and you have to out-compete them if you don't want to starve. Shortly, most blue collar labor will be replaced by machines programmed by white collar workers. Soon after, there will be uber programmers who will eliminate all but the best of the programmers. Land is too scarce to allow you enough of it to eak out an existence. EVOLVE OR DIE. Get an education or something that not everyone can do, or your lineage will go the way of the dodo.
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
I am an excellent programmer, better then any coworker I've ever had, yet I'm currently unemployed. Why? Because I learned to program because I loved to program. That means I didn't spend money on education, it's too slow for me. I taught myself. Therefore, I have almost zero credentials. (I do have 8 yrs work experience)
I'm also autistic. Which means I think visually, and prefer things well organized and precise. Perfect for programming, but terrible for selling myself, which is a social issue, and as an autistic person, a natural weakness.
This is the same for many other good programmers I've known. Those who are passionate about programming, usually don't have the credentials for the good jobs. If a company wants to find good programmers, they need to test them on their knowledge, not rely on credentials.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
L1 visas are ALSO for "specialized knowledge staff" (i.e. computer programmers).
Know your visa law
Know yourself.
Bashing unfair immigration.
Two different things.
By the way, you are quite out of touch on opinion polls on immigraiton. Most people think it'd be okay to cut back a little.
One think I've wondered: Why not look for people who've worked on open-source projects? A new college grad may not have much industry experience; but if he/she has done some significant OSS work, an employer can get a good indication of the person's talent by looking at the source.
Because people with excellent knowledge of technology often have no knowledge of running a company.
You have a group of techies on one hand, looking over at the suits, and wondering why they "don't get it". In the techies' eyes, the suits are money-grubbing bastards who screwed around in school, engage in a lot of BSing and political play, frequently try to talk about and interject themselves into areas where they aren't knowledgeable or wanted -- especially technical decisions, where they somehow think that their business prowess directly translates to technical ability. Plus, they're are out to get rid of techie jobs, which they view as expendable.
On the other hand, you have the group of suits. The suits are looking right back at the techies, and wondering why they "don't get it". The suits see techies as assholes who keep trying to get their paws on fat paychecks and then screw around on company time and not produce anything. In the suits' eyes, the techies are weenies who like to keep bragging about their (totally inapplicable and irrelevant to how helpful the techies are to the company) degree in some field from a school somewhere -- sort of like an artist that won't shut up about their urine painting. The techies engage in a lot of BSing and when they want something (funding, etc) make technical claims that they don't seem to be able to support, but are too involved for a suit to be able to get an effective counterargument against. The techies keep sticking their noses where they aren't wanted or needed, especially in business, where they absolutely feel that their technical prowess somehow makes them automatically competent in the business world. The techies view the suits as interchangeable, expendable parts, and clearly are after their jobs.
Actually, techies and suits are pretty similar.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"The Information Revolution has made sure that digital information of any sort is not a scarce resource. It can trivially be copied and distributed, therefore the inherent economic price (not to say value) is going to tend towards zero. Attempting to try to make digital information of any sort a scarce resource is doomed to failure, the ecomonics guarantee that and anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool or a dreamer."
:== nothing.
Funny how the word "created" is never part of these "information wants to be free" arguments. But of the three, it's the most important, because if no one creates, then your "It can trivially be copied and distributed..." becomes meaningless. Nothing * (copying or distributing)
that's the spirit! As soon as you can, try to transfer to a rural living situation, even if you primarily do IT/white collar work. land with water is where it's at.. If the economic or social SHTF, it will be "the" place to be. That's why we settled on the farm work, all the normal life necessities are covered, on site. There's no commute. People will always have to eat. Firewood still works. Just this past week we scored a used commercial sized greenhouse. It's dissasembled and transported back here now (THAT was a lot like work in this heat lately), will be assembling it next week or so and already have a local market will take our specialty niche items we plan on selling, like exotic tomatoes, cooking herbs, etc. Those got planted in flats yesterday and today, for teransfer to larger containers later, then into the greenhouse for the fall and winter market. I also plan on trying some modern tech with the installation as well, maybe some indooor aquaculture-fish production, some hydroponics, etc. Who knows, might work out, either way we'll be doing it.
Is it I, or did a great number of "questionable" technology professionals enter the programming field between 1998-2000? Is that not when history majors, Taco Bell workers, and bus drivers thought "programming" had luster and these .bomb companies hired them to developer E-commerce applications? .bomb wave and it makes it tough to filter them out until you interview them. They usually pass the "I did everything" on the resume test. I have faith that "good", creative problem solving programmers are and will always be needed.
My question is, didn't that hurt true computer scientists and information technologists? We have recently be interviewing many candidates to fill some technical positions, finding qualified candidates is difficult because we are still getting those folks that tried to ride the
Brilliant. MOD PARENT UP!
First I could think of is piracy
with people pirating software around it's hard for some companies to be profitable, i know a friend whose company went down because people just pirated the software they created and were not able to keep afloat nor could foot the legal bill to go after those that pirate their software.
Another reason would also be open source, with companies getting their software done for free, they don't need as much programmers to do the work they need... like they would have needed 10 to make a program they wanted but now they just need to take an open source program and have it modified and would only need 1 or 2 programmers.
then theres outsourcing etc etc.
The current situation is getting back to the '70s and '80s, where IT workers were the basement cubicle geeks and they weren't very well off
I'll take even that. Back in the 80's there was no fear of your career disappearing over the ocean line. If you are the type who likes management, you would head that way anyhow.
Last week, I started a job at a Wall Street software company. Even though we have a casual dress code, I had to go buy a suit to wear on field trips to Big Clients.
While trying on suits at $DEPARTMENT_STORE, I mentioned to the sales associate - a middle-aged fellow - that I needed the suit for my new Wall Street software job. The salesman instantly replied: "Consultant, eh? I was a consultant on Wall Street for 34 years. Mainframes."
Erm?
Even though I feared the answer, I just had to ask: "Why did you stop being a tech consultant? What happened?"
I was hoping his response would go along the lines of I made my fortune years ago and now I sell suits because I love clothes (he wouldn't be the first I've met with a story like that).
Unfortunately, it was as I feared. His story went something like this:At this point, I interrupted him to ask "well, somebody has to be doing some programming here. They can't offshore everything, right?" With a wry smile, he repliedAs he said "clicking out functions" he poked in the air at an imaginary Visual Studio GUI. I laughed and said "yeah, that's what I've been doing for the last four years" and then instantly regretted it.
PS - I didn't buy any of his suits
Whenever a career disappears (literally) over the horizon, it seems to get the label "low level", "repetative", etc. This article does it also. This is often used as a justification to let globalization eat away at the variety of careers available.
How is sitting in meetings all day, placating paranoid CEO's, and playing office politics "higher level" than figuring out how to get Oracle to join 5 tables and 2 million records before the nightly batch job deadline is up?
We already traded "boring, low-level" factory jobs for the highly skilled and highly rewarding cashier jobs at Burger King and Walmart. They are just bending language so that they can get away with doing the same thing to tech careers without the guilt.
Table-ized A.I.
But how much do US corporations know about the background of the individual outsourced programmers taking these jobs? Very little.
:-)
But at least they pay less for the same riffraff. Most consider a $400 Yugo a better deal than a $2,000 one. (Well, maybe until you factor in the cost to have it hauled away
Table-ized A.I.
Thanks to outsourcing you no longer can get the experience (as in, resume experience with job references) that pointy haired bosses and HR people want, to begin with.
Even if you're good at coding open source apps you still wind up lacking the workplace experience-related skills the boss is looking for.
But then employers want that kind of experience.
This is part of why fewer people are enrolling in computer science and related studies in college. They see the offshoring, they see the catch-22, and the market (of students paying tuition and seeking degrees) is speaking, loudly.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Please moderators! Futurama rules.
thanks!
...since I listened to Clark Howard, but I agree, he's a pretty smart guy and knows his "cheap". So I am not surprised that his analysis of that is so good.
We do all that stuff now from our regular garden, and have already been doing some winter gardening using "hoop houses" over the raised beds. We can or dehydrate a lot of our surplus, or freeze it if there's room in the freezer.
m l
If you can stand the freight for a hardcover book, a friend of mine has an *excellent* piece he wrote called "Strategic Relocation" that covers the whole US and breaks it down so you can pick an area to live based on numerous critical criteria. Authors name is Joel Skousen and he's very well respected in the preparedness and geopolitical buffs communities. He gets a lot of talk show radio time, etc. One of the smarter people I know personally.
url to book off his website, or probably from amazon or b&n, haven't looked
http://www.joelskousen.com/Strategic/strategic.ht
...actually go out of business that way. They start hiring illegals, take them to all their jobs. the guys pay attention and learn the trade. Then they go off and undercut them and take their clients. Sure, that's the "american way", but it's still weird because they do it by skirting laws, violating local housing regs, etc and the government gives them a skate on it. And they do some other sleazy stuff, here's an example. When home depot first opened up, I was one of the first people at their first store, getting there early to get supplies before going to work. After some time I noticed something, the customer service desk started to get a big line in the morning, with illegals returning worn out hardware and demanding replacements. I was flabbergasted, the stuff wasn't new and defective, it was clapped out, but to avoid charges of "racism" Home Depot just sucked it up and gave them new tools! They do this over and over again. Myself, I just would never do anything this skanky. I guess HD just figures it's a cost of business to them, but all the customers pay for it in the long run.
Neat stuff. I do sorta the same thing in my own basement, only with electrons.
What? Now you're making sense. [Common sense] has no business in political affairs. :)
I sometimes regret my cynical worldview.
I would like to believe that government is like an open-source operating system -- our votes, our participation in the process, would provide the maintenance and drive the improvements.
But alas, it's not so.
-kgj
-kgj
Outsourcing to India is a GREAT idea for the US software industry. While most of the Indian techs seem to do good work, there is usually such a cultural and language barrier, the chance of a project coming off without missing functionality or missed features is nearly 0%. The company I work for learned their lesson with foreign outsourcing. They still hire consultants or contractors, but they are all local folks now.
It's funny because 10 bucks and hour looks sooo damn good on paper, management will usually take the risk of destroying the relationship with a client over the huge margins.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
My advice is to get a degree to help sell yourself. Yes, it might not be all fun and it might not be just, but if you want to have a fun job as a programmer it will help you achieve your goal. Nothing talks like results.
I'm not looking for fun. I've wanted to go to college for the credentials for quite a while. I can't do it on unemployment though, and I've never had the opportunity while working. (pay & time) My parents can't help me out, so I'm on my own.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
How is an infinite recursion a far corner of the spec?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Well, maybe that got your attention....buts its true! Jobs are back for IT people, and just go check out jobs on dice.com, computerjobs.com, and monster. Its a slow steady climb with some big salaries coming back.
Ive read through allot of the comments on this article and agree with nearly everyone's anti-CEO, anti-Indian, anti-offshoring, pro-technology, pro-job stance. ANd so want to add a positive note for everyone....
First, offshoring is failing more and more everyday...read these studies:
http://www.stormdetector.com/essays/us_outsourcing _callingachange.pdf
http://www.stormdetector.com/essays/DiamondCluster 2005OutsourcingStudy.pdf
In addition, east coast tech jobs have shot up almost 40% in some cities the past six months according to another article I read. Demand appears to be high again. Technology jobs, as of end of June 2005 are averaging about 20-30% growth right now, and salaries for some positions are approaching 100k! Its not "booming" yet, but I predict thats coming, with the current trend away from computer science in this country. But, I see this HUGE momentum coming for IT software and infrastructure jobs, despite all this BS about offshoring and erroneous claims that Indian software programmers equal US software programmers and can and will replace them. It aint going to happen, period!!!
And the data shows that, apparently. It just is not the case. Besides, we all should have known, you CANNOT replace an apply with an orange. It takes very VERY creative and experienced and innovative US tech minds to create successful projects from the sloppy mess US business people create at most upper level company managemnet teams. No WONDER IT and offshoring is failing on so many levels. Business still hasnt learned IT nor grown to understand what it is smart IT people have to do to keep the wagon rolling at most companies....it aint easy and those skills still are worth some bucks. It seems we are in a learning phase as regards buisness and that fact, right now.
So, if you are in IT, just go to dice.com tonight, monster or computerjobs.com and take a look at the US IT jobs businesses now are starting to post. There is allot of IT work out there, looks like, and more to come I would bet! Besides, with all of business processes moving into IT dependent scenarios, its going to take allot more that some 21 year old "IT greenhorn" Indians in cubicles half a world away to heal the wounded pocket books and solve the growing IT business complexities found in many companies tofday (and now created by your average IT "illiterate", fat, old and stupid US business manager/executive found in todays companys). I mean, when will these business people give the US Information Technology Professional the respect they deserve? How DARE they assume technology can be given a bright red bow, packaged up, and shoved overseas and they get the same quality with little cost! Thats assuming anyone with some brains and a PC and an Internet connection can call themsleves a "software engineer" and solve complex banking and business process solutions overnight! IT will NEVER be that way...for every automated task they replace with software or an Indian "grunt", ten more companies drop new proprietary software solutions on the stack that someone somewhere has to learn, train on and innovate on. IT is getting bigger and badder with each passing day and so will the jobs and salaries in the US, despite offshoring....and its obvious failures. That will just fuel a fire I see developing in this field!
So, as far as IT jobs goes my friend, and I have this sneaky feeling this time next year, allot of CEO's will be "defrocked", a ton of new expensive IT jobs/positions will be available, Gartner and Forrester especially will be laying off some people for printing predi
U.S. PROGRAMMERS = INNOVATION