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U.S. IT Hiring Increases Despite Outsourcing
surefooted1 writes "A CNN article reports that a new study has shown that U.S. tech hiring has increased, despite oversees outsourcing. It mentions that the job market is higher today than it was at the height of the dot-com boom." From the article: "The study suggests that there are several factors in the continued growth in demand for IT workers here. The report said part of it is due to the use of offshoring by U.S. companies, including start-up firms, to limit their costs and thus grow their businesses. That, in turn, creates more opportunities here even as an increasing amount of work is done overseas. The study also said that companies from a variety of sectors in the economy continue to discover greater efficiency and more competitive operations through investment in IT."
This article points out the obvious fact that we are insanely addicted to technology.
How addicted? So addicted that we'll hire people skilled in it no matter where they live.
Don't believe me? Learn how to speak English and get an I.T. related degree. Bam! You're employed.
The United States is a developed nation. What do developed nations do? Just sit around on their hands waiting for the other nations to catch up? Not quite. Industrialized is one thing but to have a solid infrastructure and to lead the world in technological advances is the current goal in the game.
Everything is beginning to depend on computational devices. Maybe they aren't used in the end result but they're most certainly used in developing/researching any and all products. Even farming has many uses for computers. It's the new basis for information exchange and delivery. How much more important can an industry get?
Why then, is it news that the United States has a great job market for IT Workers? This shouldn't be surprising at all. These workers are needed everywhere and anyone who can't see that hasn't looked at the stock market recently.
My work here is dung.
In other words, outsourcing has actually helped our economy and provided new employment opportunities for the displaced, just like almost every respectable economist has said it would, just like it has always done over the years. Yes, perhaps Paul Krugman disagrees, but I said "respectable" economist, which immediately disqualifies him.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
CNN is just re-writing a press release from a pro-guest worker group: The Association of Computer Manufacturers.
Many groups are gearing up to pressure congress to increase the number of H-1B visas. They are spinning a "labor shortage" myth.
There is no such "labor shortage" and no great need to have non-immigrant guest workers.
Perhaps CNN should report on American tech workers trying to get a raise; instead.
First off, it is I.T. it's an acronym not a fucking word.
... [yes, I've said this before...]. Information == content, Technology == subjective. Books are technology. So are cave paintings.
... what the fuck does that mean? In the states? In Canada? globally? What are these new employees doing? Data entry? ...
Second it's a meaningless acronym. Information Technology
So an I.T. specialist could be anything from an archeologist, librarian to a systems admin with 10,000 IBM servers under their thumb.
My larger point here is just the vast sums of meaningless techno babble that swings around in the press. "IT hiring is up"
For the love of god stop over simplifying everything. Yes we use words like "doctor" or "mechanic" but we still acknowledge they have specialties. Why isn't it the same when we're talking about "business". Is it just because it's simpler to hide the truth and sounds more important?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I've seen the effects of outsourcing first hand. I'm fairly senior, and for the last year I've been involved in hiring a team in India to perform entry level tasks. Yes, I went to the dark side, but you've got to feed the bulldog. We're hiring like crazy in the US, because the India teams require a lot more supervision than a US team. So we're hiring manager level technical people. These managers would have been writing code 5 years ago, but there's not much future in writing simple code these days. The jobs are available in design and architecture and going to endless meetings.
I've also seen that we pay quite a bit less for manager level jobs than we did before. I make less today than I used to have to pay a developer five years ago. I know lots of developers that got out of technology because the market was so dismal. Forget being a college kid trying to land an entry level programming job, they just aren't available.
So we're basically eating our children. There's no future in entry level jobs for the US tech worker -- those jobs are gone. By definition, the pool of senior people is getting smaller each day, so those jobs should become higher paying over time. But right now there's a lot of highly experienced people available and even though hiring is up, salaries are not following because the pool of people available is still pretty large.
20 years from now we'll be as dependent upon foreign tech workers as we are today on foreign oil.
Sorry to break it to you slashdot commies but more efficient business creates jobs.
Outsourcing is a good thing (give the work to some other company dedicated to the task) The article is actually refering to Offshoring. taking the work out of the country. If it werent for outsourcing, MANY IT people would be unemployed (think contractors and consultants) Outsourcing is good, it funds new businesses, offshoring is bad
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
The title of the top post in to this article (as I write this) is "Told-ya-so". And, for the most part, I agree with what the ideas in that post. There are other posts conveying the same sort of thing. While I agree with them (in general) they're missing one point. That is that a single area may shrink when something new comes along (e.g. offshoring & outsourcing). But that *OVERALL* (key word) the economy is better.
So for example, the overall economy is better because of the invention of the automobile (*). It has opened up new markets and new ways of doing business and increased productivity in our country in countless ways. But it obliterated the businesses of horse-drawn carriages and buggy whip makers. So, while *OVERALL* the economy is better, that doesn't prevent pockets of the economy from massive suffering.
(*) I didn't say anything about the environment being better or worse.. just the economy.
The same is true with offshoring & outsourcing. The IT industry may be hiring more overall, but that doesn't discount the fact that there are pockets in that industry that are suffering massively as a result. My guess is that coders are the most impacted by this.
But don't fret too much. There are other jobs that are becoming available now that coding is getting comoditized. And don't forget that the same facility for easily shipping code half way around the world has also given us free/open source software. So, it's not all bad, and *OVERALL* it's good.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
First of all, this article neither proves or even really implies anything in either direction about the general notion of "globalization" - which is really just a codeword for Laissez Faire capitalism.
Pretending it does is utterly and prima facie dishonest.
But since you mention it, the free trade premise is complete and utter bullshit.
Free Trade (sometimes also known as Globalization) just means that if you don't like the laws somewhere, you can go somewhere else to avoid them. If you think it would be more economically advantageous to grow cotton with slavery, you can find a nation where it's legal, and these free traders will happily buy it back where it *used to be* illegal. By the way, do you think anyone benefits from a labor "market" that's so "free" it includes competing against slave labor?
Well, I guess the slavemasters benefit, temporarily. But not even them, in the longer term. But I digress. Now, remember, IT outsourcing isn't cotton picking - but it piggybacks on the imbalances (currency etc) created by the same differences in social and legal policy.
"This is not about slavery!" Of course not. But the reason the example is so upsetting is that it's the perfectly logical conclusion of laissez faire ("free trade"). We used to have laws that would compensate for the legal and social differences between trading partners, so that you could actually have effective legal protections for workers, social safety nets, and so forth. Free trade is a conspiracy to delicately and gradually remove these policies by making them economically unviable through trade policy.
As a more practical matter it comes not to explicit American-style slavery but "working conditions." It's quite respectable in some economic circles to have a society where the proletariat is, from the age of 6-8 years old, forced to work 14 hours a day in a factory for subsistence wages, where when unsafe working conditions result in some heinous injury making them unable to work means they're thrown onto the street, and without any form of welfare they beg and die there.
Without meaningful public education, class stratification occurs and you once again get back to where we started, a hundred or two years ago.
The problem is that even beyond all the outrageous dishonesty in the free trade policy and rhetoric, it's also a stupid idea. The first world's economy is powered by consumer spending - by a big old liberal lower and middle class. It feeds off the innovation, curiosity and energy of a large population of educated people with leisure time and disposable income.
We've already come from Laissez Faire, and we ran screaming into the Liberal's arms, where we found the most incredible prosperity in human history.
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Everyone I know in IT in DC is well-employed now! If you have a security clearance, you can go to jobs fairs where they serve caviar!
In DC, Monster.com lists 255 jobs for "web developer", 225 jobs for "systems administrator", 146 for "programmer", 100 for "tech support", 51 for "web designer".
Perhaps not up to "dot com" era, but then at that point totally unqualified people were being hired. Wrapping nail artists who spent two weeks with "Perl for Dummies" were doing production code work!
This article has been planted by the "trade group" to further their self-serving interests. Their lobbyists can point to it as an example of why the cap on H1-B and L-1 visas should be extended or why all the outsourcing and sweetheart trade deals with foreign gov'ts and companies ain't so bad afterall.
Well, it doesn't jive with the Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to the BLS, IT lost 17% of it's workforce in the US over the past 5 years, communication equipment lost 43% of it's workforce and semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of it's workforce. The US electronics industry has shriveled. Hundreds of thousands of engineers have been unemployed or underemployed (in menial jobs) as a result. I personally know several dozen. No doubt they bristle with rage as they read these rosy assessments of the job market.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I read the New York Times report on the ACM study this morning. All I could think of was that old joke about catching your significant other in bed with someone else. "Really", they tell you, "it's not what it looks like. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes".
My resume is published on my web page. So one way I judge hiring is by recruiter calls (obviously this lacks something in the scientific rigor catagory). The other way I judge this issue is by press reports, which I've collected in an annotated bibliography that is at the end of my web page An Economics Question. Many of these press accounts describe the experiences of other engineers in today's job market. There are a few conclusions that I draw from the current engineering employment environment:
There are still interesting jobs that pay decently out there. However, pay and stock options are definitely not what they were, even in 1992, much less 1999.
Job instability is way up. The days when you could get another engineering job relatively easily if you had a good background are over. This greatly increases the risk of working for a start-up, since you could experience many months of unemployment if the start-up fails and you're out of a job. The problem here is that most start-ups do not compensate you for this increased risk. They pretty much give you the same pay and stock options that you got a decade ago. But in this new environment you stand the risk of losing your savings or even your house because of a long period of unemployment.
Job security is also way down. There remains a big pool of engineers looking for work and employers definitely have the attitude that they can always hire another engineer, so you're a disposable, interchangable commodity. With many software development jobs there is always the threat that your project will be "offshored" or that when you complete it, maintenance will be offshored and you'll be out of work.
While hiring is at best tepid in the United States and Europe, hiring is booming in India. Employment demand for Indian engineers who graduate from schools with education comparable to schools in the US or Europe has entirely outstripped demand. The good news is that this is forcing salaries in India up. But my lying eyes tell me that what is fueling the demand in the Indian job market are "first world" jobs that are being outsourced.
With the ACM report working engineers are faced with that question of "who are you going to believe, the ACM or your lying eyes". My lying eyes tell me that the story told by the ACM does not reflect the employment experience of the ACM membership.