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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.""
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 :(.
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"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.
Unfortunately Gartner has beat you to the punch!
Anything with the name "Gartner" in it automatically has a taint(not the area between a man's genitals and his anus, though that may be an accurate description of Gartner). It's just hard to swallow their credibility. They seem to keep on coming up with research that says, "Offshore everything! oh and by the way, we just happen to have a large offshore consulting division, what a coincidence". If they are a research firm then they should stick to just research, anything else tarnishes their credibility....
Monstar L
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.)
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
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.
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I wouldn't blame the Bush administration on the Bubble Bursting. The Clinton Administration was the one who opened to doors for all this outsourcing. And if you actually looked at the market near Clintons final years the Stock Prices started to fluctuate and many of the Dot COM start to Dot Bomb. But I wouldn't blaim the Clinton Admistration much for their actions also. Because at the time Tech Workers were is so much demmand they needed to open the gates to get the work done. Who you should blame is all the greedy new investors hoping to jump onto the Next big thing. Over and Wrongly Evualiting all the new companies out there. I dont care what you say Pets.com is not a Tech Stock!!!
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
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.
So about 30,000 visas a year? Big deal. I hear they are running out too quickly so the quota needs to be increased. Note that there are laws that regulate H1-B visas. For example, an employee on an H1-B cannot earn less than the prevailing wage in his area. Evidently, continued demand for H1-Bs means the local talent pool is insufficient.
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Outsourcing has been going on for years before the Clinton administration. It has simply become more popular because it is more viable with improved communication technology. Bush however, giving tax breaks for outsourcing doesn't help.
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.
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?
Anyone complaining that "experienced" developers are hard to find either 1. hasn't looked, or 2. is being too picky.
Obviously there are many factors, but let me relate the experience our company had in the last few years.
We decided to bite the bullet and hire some good/experienced developers and pay them what they were worth. We looked for quite some time and ended up hiring four people. Out of the four, two were what I would call GOOD, experienced C++ developers. The other two had some skills, but were nearly impossible to get along with. Since hiring these developers three have left. One because she didn't like the location, one because he was unproductive and one because he couldn't get along with anyone.
I'm sure there are many factors that go into our experiences, our location, the economy at the time of our hiring, etc... OTOH, in my experience, it can be difficult to find top quality individuals in any industry. The grandparent is right, the best software developers already have jobs and are paid well, if you want to hire the best you have to be willing to find these people and pay them what they are worth. If you aren't willing to do that you need to lower your standards.
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What most readers of WSJ are woefully ignorant of is that most companies require machinists to own their own tools. Not the multi-hundred thousand dollar CNC machines, but the general everyday measuring instruments, clamps, jigs etc that can add up to $20,000 to $50,000 of tools over a lifetime. When these guys retire, part of their retirement income comes from selling off their tools. When they get laid off, many sell off their tools as well. Just like car mechanics, machinists have a huge investment in their own tools.
So all the guys who know how to do this stuff are retiring, or were laid off when their jobs were offshored. Even if we as a country somehow woke up and paid attention, it will take a decade or two to recover from our current insanity. It is the same with engineering and software development.
As a country, we seem to be taking the Grasshopper approach to life, instead of the Ant approach. We've combined the eat the seed corn along with the naked emperor approach. However, we've also adopted the "why do you hate America so much" mantra when anyone points out the nudity of the emperor.
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.