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Dismantling the Myth of IT Being a Dead-End Career
Lam1969 writes "Robert Mitchell says CIOs and other IT managers continue to bemoan what they claim is a shortage of good technologists. He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment. Mitchell also says the threat of offshoring is overstated; rather, the problem is industry and the media have been 'complicit in propagating the myth that IT is a dead end.' From the story: 'First, the dot-com crash shattered the illusion that those in high-tech jobs would always emerge from economic turbulence unscathed. Now, students are hearing that a four-year degree in programming or engineering doesn't matter because all of those jobs will eventually go offshore to foreign workers at very low wages. A generation has been dissuaded from pursuing what is in reality a very promising career choice.'"
Surely this is no different from any other career? I.e. if you're good, then you'll do well - if you're no good, it's a dead end.
Oh, and first post!
yay
i work for free
Keep your mouth shut!
We worked so hard to scare all those damned paper MCSE and brain dumpers away. Last thing we need is for them to come back and lower the avg IT wage again...
You have to ask yourself - is the job you're doing/going to do - does it require your actual physical presence? If not, then it can be offshored.
The trouble is, in IT, all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs). All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development - which CAN be offshored. It's the very jobs that need a 4+ year degree which are the ones that can be offshored. The jobs that someone could leave school at 16 and be trained to do by their employer tend to be the ones that can't be offshored.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
On the other hand this is a good thing for the computer science departments of universities, for less students means that they can do less job training and more actual computer science. If you aren't convinced that real progress in computer science isn't being made any more I encourage you to watch this video. In it you can see all the aspects of the modern computers that we know and love being demonstated oh so long ago, only with less polish. Sadly research hasn't proceeded much beyond this in terms of software. The problem is that the typical student in a computer science course doesn't want to learn computer science, they just want to learn some Java/hot language of the momement and get out into the workforce. This is where bad programmers and bugs galore come from. However if those who simply want a job leave then a computer science degree will once again have meaning, and better software will be produced. Trust me on this one, I'm surrounded by CS majors who think Java is the best language ever, and are unable to program in anything else.
Philosophy.
Reminds me of the joke that was going around Red Hat when we were going through a series of CIOs:
"CIO == Career Is Over"
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
If your idea of "making it" is babysitting servers or approving the purchase of new computers, then IT is absolutely not a dead end. It's the peak, baby!
If, on the other hand, you want to run a company, running the servers may not give you the best perspective of your company's business model, so you'll likely be passed over time and again for promotion to COO in favor of the top sales guy.
What's your goal?
Whilst much of industry looks to hire youthful IT staff rather than older workers, it has the ironic effect of putting people off a career in IT. As not many people want to work in an industry where finding a job when you are past forty is difficult.
Encouraging older workers will also encourage new young workers. BTW. I fall somewhere between these two groups.
It's because you can't get dates studying "IT". Say you are in medschool or a doctor and they're all over you and it.
All three slashdotters who are married do not need to reply and tell me I'm wrong.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
IT is this same thing that is helping oursourcing. We all know that outsourcing survives only on demand. Yes cost cutting is an advantage of outsourcing too, BUt it is secondary. Companies in the USA and UK are forced to employ H1B visa candidates and are forced to send projects to offshore programmers in India only because there is demand for quality IT professionals. http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outs ourcing/story/0,10801,105969,00.html
"U.S. Senate yesterday approved up to 30,000 additional foreign-worker visas a year in a program popular with technology vendors. "
and the main reason
"Technology trade groups have called for an increase in the cap, saying they can't find enough workers with specialized skills."
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
They should tell them the truth - bosses will want you to constantly work overtime for nothing, you'll burn free time keeping up with your specialty, you'll be expected to be on call _every_ weekend and holiday.
You'll jump a foot in the air when your pager goes off because the idiots who own the production system that you don't have authority over (but some-fucking-how are still totally responsible for) can't understand why there are nightly issues moving data between 6 different vendor and legacy systems - and you not only get to diagnose and solve the problem via a conference call of useless IT management idiots but then you'll have to re-live every painful detail before the tribunal the following morning and write up a post mortem and a "root cause analysis" and still try to get all your other work done.
Yeah, promising career... only if you are one of those assholes who walks around doing nothing but saying "I only do J2EE".
Of course the mainstream media poisons the potential tech youth in the West. The antidote to that poison is hip, weird, nerdy-geeky sites like this one. e-rant.com
One of the things that always troubles me with the Outsourcing debate is how it regards IT and software development as an entity in itself, rather than one that must deal with others. By this I mean both dealing with the business you are in and also the other departments in your company. By making IT a commodity, it can be offshored or outsourced easily. When it's a specialty, that becomes difficult to impossible.
If you are developing a piece of medical software such as an EEG recorder, you need to have some understanding of the science of EEGs and the medical background in which they are used. Likewise, a piece of financial software requires detailed knowledge of financial systems and the rules and regulations that govern them. This sort of knowledge keeps the development "in-house" and keeps you employed. I do agree that simple development jobs should be done by the most efficient and appropriate people, normally either recent grads or outsourced developers. I mean, you wouldn't waste the Technical Architects time getting them to write basic code.
Someone looking for a career in IT needs to be constantly challenging themselves by learning new skills, and not always IT related ones so that your specialty keeps you needed. IT has never been an industry that rewards those that keep still (hell, if it did I would still be bashing out BASIC on my Vic 20!) but those that stay ahead of the game. Do this and you will have a career.
I've heard it all before. Managers scream 'skills shortage' whilst lots of good IT workers sit on unemployment queues.
There is no shortage. Never has been. It's because managers want to define the exact skillset... '20 years Java version 1.4.1.13 service pack 2, and preferably 17 years Visual Studio 2005' they refuse to believe that people can actually learn new stuff (and their requirements are sometimes completely ludicrous - I actually left an interview when someone said I didn't have enough java experience.. they wanted 8 years - in 2000. That manager is proabably still screaming 'skills shortage' today).
Now I'm involved in hiring I've found completely the opposite... the market is *full* of good people... if you factor in a few weeks for them to get up to speed they're fine (that's just training budget - remember when companies had those?).
I "pull...cat5 through walls, swap...out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing" quite a lot. I also install and maintain the uber-expensive and high-end Telco-grade equipment at the data centers and generating stations belonging to the very large power company which employs me. The gear I'm working on is a big step up from, say, Cisco equipment.
Is my position likely to be outsourced? Not anytime soon...the desires of the company accountants are secondary to the fear of the penalties should all the lights go out.
Guys who refuse to pull cable or otherwise get their hands dirty deserve to be outsourced. They're only "better" than the rest of us for a short while. Then they are unemployed.
From the article:
>The H-1B visas that enable foreign workers to take high-tech jobs are often
>viewed as a threat to U.S. workers, rather than the stopgap measure they
>are.
That's nice. I'll be sure to tell all of my over-40 friends who used to be in tech support and programming that they must have been mistaken.
when i was in 3rd year in uni
;) thanks to personal determination and great interest in my Soft Eng course (that was few years ago, things are alot better now)
/. every so often and not have to cook burgers for some snotty kids
i was making average 500euro a day
in the meantime my friends from commerce and arts where working in local supermarkets and mcdonnalds (some of them still do )
as an added bonus i get to work rom home now and read
I got a pretty decent entry position into a tech company with little formal experience and 1 year of college. I've been trying for years and when I'd pretty much given up opportunity knocked. Now we're hiring 3 more technicians with various backgrounds that don't really relate to what we do, but we need people badly.
One thing I've learned from my experience here is that I SHOULD be able to get a system/network admin job just about anywhere in Iowa. Many of the people I'm troubleshooting with on a daily basis couldn't tell you the difference between DNS and SNMP, much less what a VPN tunnel is or how e-mail works.
But there's always that "bachelor's degree required" barrier for those jobs. It's pathetic.
You're nothing; like me.
I'm sick of coming across people who got into this industry without any interest or aptitude because they thought it was a gravy train and didn't like us geeks getting all the money... I'd be happy to see a return to the glory days of unwashed pizza eating nerds -- jeek
For the fresh nerds out in the market, looking at IT strictly from the financial-return viewpoint, this can limit his vision of wanting to do stuffs that matters to him. What they can do is study lessons of the boomers like Jobs, Olsen, etc. and spend a little more time on the conservative side of things. It may not look attractive (now), but patience and diligence always have its own fruits of satisfaction - dealing with conservative ideas.
It is good that now we are seeing IT panning out to a wider mainstream adoption and outsourcing and its effects. On this aspect, do not position yourself in direct competition with this inexpensive labour. Ride on this wave but keep spending your time studying this phenomenon. There ought to be a new angle to this and this is where the next wave will come from - of course you want to be the first to ride on it.
You need to re-adjust your vision of having a career as a nerd. Don't get carried away by hackers-syndrome or big-money-league-game (Google). Success and fortune is merely a happenstance event under the shadow of a greater play of the spirit. This is not to be misunderstood. You may vet this statement by listening to the boomers - if you know how to.
IT like any other careers, is here to stay - in fact it has more leverage potential than the others, as they are crunching stuffs under the IT umbrella.
But it should be filtered a bit to prevent toes being stepped upon.
The video seems interesting, and if you compare '70-s folk to '90-s folk there will probably be a difference hinting towards what the poster described.
This is probably more a sign of the times: computers are commonplace now and therefore of much more commercial interest than they were in the '70-s.
In that sense, you will want to have a more commercial view on the job you are going to do. This is not necessarily a bad thing. There will always be geniuses in the sense that certain people will dive deep into the computer science world.
These people are probably researcher-material and will rather pursue their Phd than a commercial job.
There doesn't seem to be a clear career path across different companies. The same job title at one location can have a vastly different salary than another. I have seen 'Developer' jobs advertised at very high rates and then 'Architect' / 'Consultant' roles at lower levels. The term 'senior' can be attached to any of these and not have any affect on the salary. To add further confusion there seems to be very little difference in many of the job descriptions - most of them just requiring that a candidate understands a list of TLAs.
It must be very confusing for anyone entering or considering entering the industry to see what the career path in IT is. In other areas (electrical / civil engineering for instance) a career initially progresses until chartered status is reached, this is understood by these industries and is a requirement for a more senior jobs. Such a qualification is available for IT (I am in the UK - not sure how this works elsewhere) but not considered valuable when looking for jobs.
all the jobs that require your physical presence are generally 'IT technician' jobs - pulling cat5 through walls, swapping out hard disks in PCs and that kind of thing - the lower paid end of the IT spectrum (although there are higher paid network engineering types of jobs).
There are still a lot of companies which value face to face communications. If you think that any IT job can be offshored, try getting a web programming job at a local community college on the other side of the US. Chances are, they'll want you to be onsite. Maybe that job will be offshored eventually, but for small and medium sized businesses, they want SOMEONE to physically show up at the office, eat lunch with their coworkers, etc. Maybe this desire is irrational, but there are some costs in terms of poorer communication which makes some offshoring more expensive.
Besides, very few good paying jobs of any kind technically require a person's presence. Look on the dark side of things. Why not have a doctor's office with a few nurses, a video setup, and some nice Philippine doctors on the other end. Samples can be sent off to foriegn labs. Same with teachers, as long as there's someone in the room to make sure people behave. Or do we only offshore those things where customers won't be immediately aware that the job is offshored? IT is not particularly less safe than most other jobs, if you want to take outsourcing to an extreme. The difference is that it tends to be more cutting edge than other fields, and the most exposed to innovation and change.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Surely, if there is a 'shortage of good technologists' then salaries would naturally tend to rise anyway.
And if they're not, is it not the case that the same CIOs who are beating their breast at the continued lack of qualified staff, are using bogeymen such as outsourcing and offshoring to repress demands for higher salaries from the qualified staff that they already have? [Now that's a rhetorical question!]
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
For the most part there are two distinct groups in IT: true geeks, and the people who think they see a lucrative career opportunity.
True geeks don't really care as much about the "prospects". So long as they get to do interesting stuff, and play with the cool toys, they'll mostly be happy.
The other people buy an MCSE, work helpdesk for a few months, then either sleaze their way into management, or go back to selling insurance, once they see that IT requires a certain amount of dedication and aptitude.
The fact is there are two always-parallel ladders: tech and management. As the money-chasers climb the tech ladder, the going gets touger and tougher, until they are forced to leap over to the management ladder, or fall off the tech ladder, once they hit the level beyond which they lack the ability to develop further skills. This generally happens sooner rather than later.
Geeks can usually keep climbing the tech ladder forever (or until retirement/outsourcing/etc), and so in general don't have or want to leap across to the management ladder. Those few who do it usually regret doing so, and try to leap back to the tech ladder again.
(Applies to Italy, but maybe to other countries too).
I'm near my Bachelor's degree in CS, and I'm as glad to enter IT as to enter a pool full of hungry sharks. If I'm able to, I'll take some other job; journalism, for example, or become a teacher. Why?
Of course, money isn't the problem: you earn quite well, at least compared to the standard factory workman. Rather, it's because IT (at least, here in Italy) don't do anything related to my fields of interest. Most of them offer consulting via new technologies (but that is a lot far from being IT), some web application development, a little bit of Java here and there, and no real challenge. Mostly, they deploy pre-made systems (often Microsoft or IBM products), and just stand there watching other - foreign, mostly US - companies steer the wheel at their leasure.
I mean: a lot of engineers are glad to become DBAs, or to do remunerative jobs programming cell phones applications with J2ME. Most of us CS students, however, have an interest in software engineering, for example, or algorithmic complexity, in compilers, operating systems, networks and so on.
Sadly, innovation in the IT field is almost as stone dead, here in Italy.
We need some spark of interest to enter IT, not just building boring systems to manage a warehouse. Bring in the innovation!
So: IT *is* a dead-end. Doing paperwork and SQL for the rest of my life? Writing Java applets or Flash actionscripts? Are you kidding? It's not work, but slavery.
As many, many others born in the first half of the '80, I remember writing BASIC games like Snake on lonely Saturday evenings, when a child. Playing with LEGOs and reading a lot. All this is lost for the new generations... both due to increased complexity (when the model you grow up with is Final Fantasy two-thousand-fifty, who's going to program a Tris game in console?) and changes in our society (general disinterest, maybe because scared by a too complex world).
42.
dude, you're right, my job hardly ever required my actual physical presence.
so i offered my boss to lower my yearly income by 30% if he'd pay for my relocation.
that's why i outsourced myself to a far off island with a decent IP connection - i'm typing this from a hammock overlooking the beach.
Our company thinks it's great to let the developers behind the software be part of the demonstrations and learning of the software we make.
I think it's not just about human-hardware interaction deciding who may be offshored, but also about the opinion in the company on how valuable the human-human interaction is. Sure, some may still have their developers just sit in a cubicle and work all day, but on many companies they don't, and actually interact with the world, and then it's tough to have these guys in India and just easily accessible face-to-face by some laggy Internet conference.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment."
Why not just start employing people?
After 25 years in IT, I was let go a few months ago because they "didn't need my position anymore", and was "replaced" by someone earning about half of what I was getting. This, after helping the company grow from 10 people to 85, and from sales of $100K to over $20 million a year. After creating a serverfarm which increased the capacity of our systems from 5 trnasactoins/second to over 20,000 transactions a second. I joined as Director of IT. In the beginning it was very hands-on. But management never listend to my requests for help, so I was stuck helping people via phone all over the world, maintaining and building the server farm, doing all the support on the PCs, etc. When I finally got help, it was help intended to replace me, which it eventually did. They then hired someone to "assist" my replacement. I've spent three months looking for a new job. So many of them have extremely specific requirements, so specific that there is no way I could even be considered. So now I've left the field. I spent the last 20 years not really liking my jobs and not realizing it. Having left, I finally realized that I wasn't happy before, because of the non-recognition of IT by the rest of the company.
Good software requires close proximity. I've never seen good software come from offshoring.
From what started as a career for me with British Telecom in traditional analogue telecoms (AC15 signalling, point-to-point circuits, PCM, etc) has now ended up with VoIP & SIP. I've become a UNIX & Linux expert (even an RHCE), know my way around pretty much any Windows system, I've worked on CTI, voice recorders, voicemail, predictive diallers, programmed shell-scripts, C & Perl, written web sites in HTML & CSS, advised customers on network security...
I've achieved all this just because I'm a technology geek who's always prepared to go learn stuff "on the fly" as I need to know it, rather than insist on traditional training and certifications. This type of work is as much about knowing your limitiations and who to ask when you need help, as it is about knowing stuff yourself. Always learn & always be prepared to tech someone...
All-in-all, it's a great career, I earn enough to enjoy a comfortable life & I'll die happy with a laptop in front of me and a screwdriver in my hand. :-)
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The stuff that's interesting, like forensics, security and code innovation, just isn't associated with the term IT because the term is so general it means everything and therefore nothing.
A profession is an activity where one is treated as such. IT is not such an activity. We all know why. If you are going to spend 4 or more years in university, then get a degree in a profession, where you will be treated as such and not like an idiot in an open plan purgatory chicken battery like most of us nowadays. Also, professionals don't create solutions using patently wrong methods which were recognized as such 30 years ago. Schools are teaching interesting stuff these days, only in a real world business environment they are useless.
What path is there for the it professional in later life? When you're 40, 50, 60 even 65-70 with retirement ages rising what do you do? There is only a finite space for manager/director roles so what do all the older people do?
The bad news is that married /.'ers can't get dates too!
May Peace Prevail On Earth
The jobs that someone could leave school at 16 and be trained to do by their employer tend to be the ones that can't be offshored.
Well, then, to become an IT technician job trainer I go!
High Cowboy Neal - Long time viewer, 1st time poster (I think).
I can't speak for anyone else, but...
My issues with this career are as follows:
-Busted my butt for 4 years as a help desk and field technician, with a 4 year degree in something else and a 2 year in CIS. I would meet paper McSees making twice what I made and didn't know squat. Then they fired me because I made more money then the other two monkeys there.
-Couldn't find a job making more then $12 an hour in IT. So I moved.
-Got a job with a real company only to realize that there is no such thing as an IT person over 40. Where did they go? As an IT person I am told on a daily bases how important I am and how I "saved the day". Meanwhile, my boss went to a meeting on the issue of redoing our external website only to have a department manager say to him, "I have checked into this and we can save a lot of money if we just use FrontPage." Time to try and get a job with the government (state, etc...). At least there is some protection there. My pay is low as it is (Can't afford a house), so how bad could it be? Really?
I'm here, down in Christchurch, New Zealand - sure, not exactly 'silicon valley' but ok none the less; Where are the IT jobs? Here are my pet peeves so far with job searching:
1) When a person applies for an IT job at your organisation, do the curtious thing and actually get back to him, thank him for his resume, and actually make a decent effort to setup a interview - you might actually find that he or she will be able to expand upon what they told you in their CV, and will give you the opportunity to probe them on their knowledge.
2) When you advertise for a position - how about listing what the requirements are; case in point, in Christchurch there was an advertisement I replied to that simply said, "IT GURU WANTED!" then further down, it went on about a system administrator wanted - all very nice, I followed it up, sent a resume in, and low and behold, I receive no reply, followed this individual up - I didn't fit the criteria; to which I said, "there was none" and gave him the link; he was quiet.
He said I lacked "MacOS X skills", to which I said, "I classify those as UNIX skills; had you spent a little time picking up the telephone receiver and actually calling me, we could have gone through the CV together, clarifying any possibly misunderstandings".
3) When a person such as I, give 5 different forms of contacts, there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for not being able to get in contact with me, at all.
Right now I am back at university (again!), studying a Bachelor of Commerce, Majoring in Management - am I going to get a job afterwards, no bloody way; I'm starting my own business, and all I can say, is when I hire people, I won't be relying on 'recruitment agencies', I'll hire them myself, I'll interview them myself, and I'll actually take a damn interest in interviewing each one who replies - and those who I need to question in reference to their resume, will actually get contacted!
Even with no offshoring, IT is a dead end career. You can reasonably expect to top out within 4 or 5 years, and after that, the only way for your career to grow is to go into management. And if management is your interest, you would be better served studying business in college, rather than IT.
Being in the middle of a reasonably successful career in IT, I think it is a fine path to pursue. But lets be honest, if you work in IT you are going to have to admit that many, many of the people you work with are dead end people. There are many fine ones too - but pound for pound we seem to have more than our share of people who, for whatever other fine and noble aspects of their personality they may have (and however well hidden), are certain to only rise to the level the incompetence of their management will allow.
any of the market driven, electronics centered industries is short term, computing or telecommunications. Unlike most other 'trades' these are subject to extremely rapid change and keeping up usually takes more time than most people have. Contracts are often short and companies seem to be constantly evolving and shedding people with each change in direction.
Compared to other trades, computing is a dead-end job, or you burn out trying to keep up with the changes.
I was just thinking of leaving IT because I came to realize that in Brazil, big money from IT only comes from sales. Yes, there's a lot of clueless pointy-haired people selling flashy stuff. Which is really annoying because most of the times the programming staff takes the hit, since the sellers end up promising way too much more than the software can actually do.
In the other hand, customization does not pay nearly as well because commercial programmers are extremely cheap here, since managers DO refuse to increase the pay of these professionals -- think as an implicit cartel run by the companies to fix wages in a low level. Also, incredible Brazilian taxes make it very hard for companies to keep good, seasoned programmers in their permanent IT staff, so we usually end up with the mediocre ones, as the really bright ones switch fields (most of them) or go work abroad.
1. " Students have always poured into the most lucrative and promising careers. If IT salaries doubled tomorrow, college students might give IT another look and start switching majors; the flow of newly minted technologists would quickly increase ."
The above quote is factually correct and describes how a free market works. In the labor market, a shortage of labor is a power force that boosts wages and improves working conditions. Eventually, wages rise sufficiently high that new workers enter a particular labor market (e.g. the market of computer programmers).
However, certain politicians oppose the idea of a free market for labor. When a labor shortage arises in the market for high-tech labor, such politicians attempt to damage the correcting force of the shortage by injecting H-1B workers into the market. When a labor shortage arises in the agricultural sector, such politicians attempt to damage the correcting force of the shortage by injecting illegal aliens into the market for unskilled labor. Both actions damage the ability of the labor market to function properly and, hence, suppress wages and working conditions.
A shortage of labor is not something that needs "fixing" by government intervention. The government does not intervene when there is a labor surplus -- like the surplus in the automobile sector (which is undergoing massive layoffs). Why does the government intervene when there is a labor shortage? Shortages are never permanent and require no government intervention in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens.
That observation takes us to the second quote.
2. " Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett has stated that wage differentials aren't the issue and that Intel would hire more U.S. engineers if it could find them ."
That quote is a bald-faced lie. There is no shortage of engineers at the proper salary. Intel management can find plenty of American engineers if Intel management doubled salaries and boosted working conditions by, for example, eliminating the bell curve that managers use to "grade" employees. See quote #1 above. Quote #1 contradicts quote #2.
Intel simply does not want to raise salaries or to boost working conditions.
Intel's lie takes us to the third quote.
3. " That sentiment was backed up by IT leaders at the Premier 100 conference, where 70% said that they hire the most qualified workers, regardless of citizenship ."
This quote is accurate. Contrary to the stated intentions of managers wanting to increase the H-1B cap, most managers do not hire Americans even if they are qualified. If both an American applicant and an H-1B applicant is qualified for a job, the manager will choose the applicant that is more qualified. That approach directly contradicts the stated intentions of managers from companies like Intel: the stated intention is that a manager will hire an American applicant meeting the qualifications but not necessarily offering better qualifications than a qualified H-1B applicant.
The H-1B program is a way for American companies to suppress wages and to avoid improving working conditions. The H-1B program damages the correcting force of shortages. A shortage in a free market is a normal force that requires no intervention by the government to "fix".
H-1B workers come from countries like India and China, which do not have free markets. The Indian and Chinese governments have damaged their own economies by suppressing free markets. H-1B workers represent indirect intervention in the American free market by the Indian and Chinese governments. Their actions damage how the labor market should work in the American free market.
Washington should allow
Not all jobs can be offshored. I'm outsourced to the government, and, because of the data I work with, my job can never be offshored. I suspect, thats true of some banking information, and probably true of a few other paranoid businesses, but I have no proof to that effect. So paranoia and security can, and will continue to keep some enterprise grade software firmly onshore.
Small companies are becoming increasingly IT aware. We're seeing the first of the IT generation reaching management posts in Mom and Pops, and Citywides. It used to be that the price of the hardware was the problem, now its the cost of the developers. For small to medium sized business the cost of offshoring is too high... unless you broker.
There is also the question of trust. Small companies rely on trust over legislation and buying buying power. It's difficult to build trust with a 7 hour time difference and a telephone (although Match.com would probably disagree). The small companies I know would rather deal with other small companies where they might be able to get preferential buyer treatment and loyalty, than cheaper multinationals.
To me this stinks of profit. Doing lots of small jobs for small companies (customising OSS, a Ruby on Rails web shop) plus maintenance is the new electronic frontier.
Western technologists can compete. We have the home team advantage: meet and great is more important than ever. We are, hopefully, well educated and well informed, giving us the ability to adapt and create new technologies that make us more effective and cheaper. But, you have to be able to deliver.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
The reason why people bemoan the lack of good technologists is because IT is not a real profession. Rather than accepted standards, as there is in any other field like architecture or engineering, in the IT and especially the software world we have vendor oriented bullshit with billion dollar companies wanting to sell you more shite than you already have.
.Net, Java, SQL Server etc. etc. skills on their CVs but people then find out that they cannot design a database properly. The amount of databases I've seen where everything is in one table is staggering. Basically, IT (and especially software) as a profession needs to grow up, otherwise the situation will continue.
The world is also filled with MCSEs, people with
Then I'm sure that Robert Mitchell won't mind hearing that I will no longer be getting my tech news from ComputerWorld, but http://www.siliconindia.com/ . Rog
Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off then on again?
One of the reasons that employers have problems filling positions is that they want highly specialized skill sets that hardly anyone has. They won't take someone close and let them come up to speed. So jobs go unfilled. Specialization is a serious concern in IT. I am a program. Technologies that are valued change over time. The problem is that employers are not particularly interested in people who have proven track records doing one thing and letting them ramp up on something else. Even if you spend time at home getting good at a programming language and the framework employers base salaries on how many years you have on your resume doing a certain skill. They care less how good you are. This is problematic for long term careers. Employers reward specialization than when that specialization is not valued slap you down. Also, H1-B work typically are the lowest paid members of the team. I have worked with very good H1-B programmers who did not get a raise for 3 years and worked all nighters(the Americans refused to do it). Keep in mind even though technically employers are supposed to pay H1-B visa holders the 'prevailing wage'. There is no real definition for this and there are no penalties for not doing this. So they drive down wages. I would feel better if there were laws with pnalties requiring H1-Bs to make the same money Americans do. This way we compete on a level playing field. The big danger is L-1 or L-2 visas. Large companies open up offshore development shops. Then 'transfer' people here for up to a year and pay them in offshore wages. I have been with companies that do this. This is primarily done with programmers. They fire or do not hire Americans and bring in the cheaper offshore labor. Again we are not competing on a level playing field. There are alot of short term programming jobs where its ok that the guys from India will just quit and get more money when they get home. Employers are not honest when they are offshoring jobs. I quit a fortune 500 company 2 years ago because of offshoring. No one was losing there job at the time, but you could google them and see they were hiring 1000s of people in Bangalore and had people here for training. When I quit managers gave me a hard time because 'why should I worry about it until it happens'. Well because I don't want to waste my time and I don't want to have to find a job with 2 weeks severance pay and being unemployed. 1 year later they laid people off. So they were BSing people to get them to stay until they wanted to dump them. Another problem with IT is contracting. I hate contract recruiters. I get lied to by them all the time. They also drive down wages. Programming jobs are becoming more and more migrant. You need people for short periods of time, then these lifecycle is over, get rid of them. So they use contractors. Contract companies are middle men. They get paid for forward resumes. Its not uncommon to see the exact same job advertised 5 times by 5 companies on the same job site. All will lie to you and tell you why you should be submitted by them(Smart people look for the highest rate). Sometimes you are required to go 2-3 levels down. So there are 2-3 levels of middle men getting paid before you which drives down wages more. You also know you are in trouble when only one contract company is allowed to bid on a spot. They will often take bids on rates and only submit the lowest rates. If the rate is even in the ballpark, I typically take the interview. Get the contact info from the client, impress them, then tell them I want more money. They tend to get pissed, but one time I got my rate increased by 25%. The contract company ate it. Another problem with IT, is that its hard to move up into management. Like any profession, the bulk of the rewards for compensation are in executive management. So why would I want to stay at a low level? Companies are reluctant to promote their best programmers because they have to be replaced. This makes many jobs dead end jobs. This is why I job hop. I see no reason to waste my time if someone else will pay
Um, it's not a myth. The pending offshoring of the vast majority of IT jobs has been documented repeated, on this website in fact. Combined with the fact that most IT jobs now provide little autonomy and lots of tedium, stress, and responsibility, you can see why so many college students can think of better things to dedicate their lives to. IT execs have only themselves to blame for IT's lack of appeal since they are the ones causing it.
Actually, I do. You want people who can sell the results of CS working on the IT side, but can we at least educate people the difference between the TV commercials for "how to program and test your own videogames" and the ITT "tech-support degree" commericals and the real degree programs (not that ITT and some others don't have valid degree programs, just you gotta pick the one for the career you want to actually DO).
This is actually what I want. BadAnalogyGuy statedI've been telling my wife for a year now that I want to minor in pre-eng and then go back to school for my MS for some field of engineering. Reckon where I can get one of these CE/SW+HW-eng degrees? MIT, Berkely, somewhere a little cheaper?
I know I know, masters programs != cheap.
Really, I only intended to say, "I agree that students who want to learn java should goto a community college. Thanks for the encouraging words from a fellow student". Can those students read assembly code?
2^3 * 31 * 647
I'm a graduating senior, and I'm one of those who was afraid to pick an IT major. Can /.ers actually in the field right now tell me why I _wouldn't_ expect my job to be outsourced?
/.ers can tell me about being in IT and securing a job; because I don't want to get into a field, however interested I may be on it; where I won't be able to secure a job and make a living for myself.
Anything I can do, a 25-year old Indian can do for a 1000% less salary. I have really been wondering about this for a while, a few contacts of mine who are in the field were usually negative about it. So, I'm honestly curious on what
It's a pretty straight forward situation There is a "skills shortage" because the paymasters want local people at offshore rates while we (The people in the IT industry) want pre 2000 rates. Until the two meet in the middle people will continue leaving the industry and paymasters will continue to cry "skills shortage" Though also paymasters have to become more realistic, just because the last person they had 8 years of X, 4 years of Y, 6 years of Z.2 does not mean they need that for their replacement...and just because the offshore company claims its people do have this, it is not likely to be the actual truth.
I think we need to look no further than this video to understand why doing what we do is so important.
There are two sorts of people in IT - slightly malodorous techies and scheming, devious managers. If you want a career where you can make serious money and earn respect for actually doing the job (rather than plotting ways to stop other people doing it) go into law or medicine.
I'm currently a contractor working for large IT company (1) on a greenfield project in Leeds in the UK. A little less than two years ago I quit working for large IT company (2), where I had been TUPEd in from my previous employer (UK employment regulations that basically state if a company outsources services, the service company cannot lay off the company's staff). In the last year large IT company (2) have laid off a considerable percentage of their technical staff, including many of those people who were transferred in from other companies. Large IT company (1) outsourced their field support staff to large IT company (3) and considerably reduced their permanent technical staff. In the meantime, both large IT company (1) and (2) now have to employ contractors to run their services. This is primarily an accounting ploy, but indicates the lack of thought prevelant in the upper reaches of management, who seem to believe that the actual nuts and bolts of building systems is done by magic. All three companies are respected names in IT but all want to be management companies and as such seem to have forgotten what the core of their business is.
A frequent consequence of this is that customers rapidly tire of the lack of expertise and support available to them and decide to insource their services again, and people like me go and help them do that.
Add to that the multitude of government projects that are ongoing, quite possibly for ever, or until a different party gets elected, and there's plently of work to be going on with.
In the meantime, all three large IT companies keep landing big contracts, find they don't have the staff and have to hire people like me to keep going.
What's wrong with this picture?
When a labor shortage arises in the market for high-tech labor, such politicians attempt to damage the correcting force of the shortage by injecting H-1B workers into the market.
Or perhaps you need to realise that the labour market is now global, and not local. The countries where you want to sell things are labour rich. So they buy American goods, in exchange for labour.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Step #1 to dismantle the myth of IT being a dead-end career is to actually make it NOT be a dead-end career.
To the six people who think they've got a good IT job right now, have you thought about where that jobs leads you when you're 30? 40? 60?
In the labor market, a shortage of labor is a power force that boosts wages and improves working conditions. Eventually, wages rise sufficiently high that new workers enter a particular labor market (e.g. the market of computer programmers).
For IT jobs, this mechanism is breaking down. Instead of increasing wages, companies turn to outsourcing. IOW, the mechanism only works if the pool of workers is limited to a single economy [1].
1: 'economy' being loosely used here as 'a region in which salaries are roughly equal'
Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett has stated that wage differentials aren't the issue and that Intel would hire more U.S. engineers if it could find them
If both an American applicant and an H-1B applicant is qualified for a job, the manager will choose the applicant that is more qualified. That approach directly contradicts the stated intentions of managers from companies like Intel: the stated intention is that a manager will hire an American applicant meeting the qualifications but not necessarily offering better qualifications than a qualified H-1B applicant.
I don't see a contradiction there. They are offering a fixed amount of money, and looking for the best qualified candidate for that money. Barrett is claiming that they cannot find enough US engineers at that salary.
Washington should shut the Indians and the Chinese out of the American market until both the Indians and the Chinese establish free markets in their own countries.
Washington imposes quotas on H1B visas. In a truly free market, there would be no quota on H1B visas either. And American companies would be able to sell their goods in India (most of them can sell in India, the ways in which they can retail is currently limited and even that is being opened up).
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Your way of reasoning is too incomplete to follow:
" However, certain politicians oppose the idea of a free market for labor."
It would be nice to say why, but arguably not necessary.
"When a labor shortage arises in the market for high-tech labor, such politicians attempt to damage"
emotional language. Lose a point.
"the correcting force of the shortage by injecting H-1B workers into the market. When a labor shortage arises in the agricultural sector, such
politicians attempt to damage"
Again, use of emotional 'damage' without any reasoning behind why it's 'damaging' and not, say, 'fixing'.
" the correcting force of the shortage by injecting illegal aliens"
illegal aliens? You are really going to need to back this up. You are claiming that politicians add _illegal_ aliens to certain areas. A reputable link please.
" into the market for unskilled labor. Both actions damage the ability of the labor market to function properly"
emotional, although technically not incorrect.
" and, hence, suppress wages and working conditions. A shortage of labor is not something that needs "fixing" by government intervention."
You just jumped to this. Obviously some politicans feel it does not fixing. Why? You just made up this conclusion without any support at all.
"The government does not intervene when there is a labor surplus"
Why not? Does it need to? What suggestions do you have?
"like the surplus in the automobile sector (which is undergoing massive layoffs)"
What should the government do exactly?
"Why does the government intervene when there is a labor shortage?"
Well if you don't know why then why are you making statements about how good/bad those reasons are?
"Shortages are never permanent"
Why?
" and require no government intervention"
Again, obviously someone feels it does require government intervention. Why?
The other is to accept the facts and surrender to the new reality. Move up in the chain. Learn another language, so that you can communicate better with THEM in their language, and can still manage the project. Keep them still dependent on you, instead of THEM learning your language instead *and* your skills and eliminating you from the equation completely.
So what are we to become? Nations of Project managers? There is a limit to what you can outsource, and if you have any kind of sense there is also a limit to what you should want to outsource for all sorts of resons ranging from security to limiting knowledge transfer to potential future competitors. Of course greed has a way of disabling people's Common Sense Processing Unit, especially in managers. Low end tech jobs and certainly also some high end ones are going to be outsourced, there is a certain advantage (Mesured in money of course) to being able to contract consultants and let them go, sort of like the 'Just In Time' logistics principle preaches, rather than having, say a Sysadmin or an Oracle DBA permanently on staff. Businesses are going to spend some time finding out the painful way just how much staff to keep on permanent call and how much to outsource. The suggestion that you can run a business in the USA using entirely IT staff based in some IT-sweatshop in India for every single conceivable IT function that needs to be performed is idiotic, you will need a mix. Workers her in the west are going to have to get used to the fact that there will be no such thing as a secure job for life (yes, there are still people who believe in that myth), they will spend the rest of their life obsessing about where to go next and keeping their skillset marketable and that if necessity demands they will have to be willing to move clear accross the country or even to another country if that's where the jobs are. This is also the reason why the subject of 'Economic and Job market reform' is causing such panic in places like Germany and France where there are still people who believe the 'job for life', with the same corporation, in a calm static jobmarket is a practical proposition for the majority of the population. The thought of a job market in total flux scares the shit out of them and I won't say I enjoy the place myself but I have adapted to what is happening now and am not banging my head against a wall of memories of how things used to be.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Shortages are never permanent and require no government intervention in the form of H-1B workers or illegal aliens.
Alleviating the shortage via the 'free market' (mainly by convincing students to switch majors) takes years. Immigration allows the shortage to be alleviated faster, which is good for the economy. Which is why the government is interested in going this route.
>" the correcting force of the shortage by injecting
>illegal aliens"
>illegal aliens? You are really going to need to back
>this up. You are claiming that politicians add _illegal_
>aliens to certain areas. A reputable link please.
Inaction equals an action. By refusing to deal with the illeagle alien problem, politicians are basically "injecting" them into our society.
Yea baby now that is what I want my kid to grow up to be.
Surely that line you wrote is doublethink?
A truly free market for labor would mean that H1-B visas wouldn't even be required because there would be no immigration controls and people could just move in as they pleased without worrying about visas. There would be no such thing as 'illegal immigrants' or 'illegal workers'. Immigration law is massive government control over the labor market.
So criticising government inteference in the labor market while at the same time supporting immigration restrictions is classical doublethink.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
But it's a different story today. I bill a lot of hours fixing "Bangladore Spaghetti" code, in one case costing more than a clean build would have cost. Even when the work was acceptable, and that was the minority, the language barrier was a constant complaint. While that was going on college students were bailing out of IT programs when the economy was in an expansion mode.
It's a different story out there today. The bonuses are back, the perks are back. It's not quite as insane as the late 90's but not bad. And the best part to me is that there's a bonus for people who can work in either Linux or Windows environments.
And to all you project managers who thought you were SO smart outsourcing those expensive projects and the companies that thought they could replace their IT director with a bean counter...NEENER, NEENER, NEENER! LOOOOO-HOO-HOOOOOSSSSERRRRRRS!!!!! (/., raising the level of dialogue in IT)
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's all well in good that all these companies say they have an IT shortage, but for the past three years I have not seen any good software development jobs near me for college graduates or those without much experience.
.NET programming (although these are far far far and few in between). Companies are not interested in what languages you learned on your own in college, what projects you did, etc. they want to see it fleshed out in your resume as a bulleted point at a previous employer or they do not see it. Recruiters and human resources at company tell me this fact, that they are interested primarily in the work experience and seeing their specific requirements fleshed out in the screening stage. Short of starting my own company to do projects for myself, I just don't see how to get this specialized experience.
.NET (ASP Interfaces) and mostly writing Transact SQL queries/stored procedures. It is a small company that will not pay for college courses/professional development courses and it is not about to change its technology or require more .NET programming. Essentially it is a start up that wants to rape you for your skills to get the owners rich and does not care about professional development. So essentially my career is screwed.
Almost all of the C/C++ jobs want 5-7 years experience with C++, but since none want less how the heck do you get 5-7 years professional experience with C++?
Most other software development jobs I see want a ton of different technologies and ask for 2-4 years experience, the problem is of course that you need a job to get experience
The main problem is that the companies around me (Northern New Jersey) seem to want to buy a programmer/network analyst, drop them into their current technology without training, rape them for their skills, and then fire/rehire when they move [at least the smaller companies].
Most of the bigger companies want to hire a contract employee with the skills they seek, rape them for the skills for a year or two and only then hire them full time (in which case you qualify for education classes).
It is all well and good except that without taking a chance on new employees and without being willing to train them there will eventually be a shortage of these 2-4 years, 5-7 years of specialized experience people in demand.
Really most junior jobs that I have seen are SQL Server "programming" with a bit of ASP.NET. At best the junior jobs that I have seen are
By the time the proper junior position comes by with one of these technologies, I will have enough corporate experience and moved on enough in my life that I will either be too over experienced for the job or I will not be able to afford the paycut. So essentially I am stuck with SQL Server/.NET for the rest of my career unless I find a company willing to take someone with no C++ professional development experience and train him as we go. Because there is definitely something gained from using the programming language for 8-10 hours a day 5 days a week that practicing at home or even a few school projects will not give. I can understand why people want 5+ years of C++ experience, because the langauge does have its facets and many of the applications are business critical, but maybe when all the older people die out, the jobs will be there to train new C++ developers.
Even java is tough, because I do not see junior developer jobs for that language either, most want 2+ years professional experience with java, the best want 6 months. But since my current company is not switching to java, I am screwed there too.
My current company has a bit of
I say this to you companies, if you see a "shortage" of technologist then get off your asses and open the lower level jobs to train people into the senior developers/network engineers/system administrators that you want. Otherwise yes there will be a shortage, especially as the older generation retires, and I hope you all go out of business!!!!!
All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development(...)
Please define 'require'. In my book there is no hard requirement to be physically present. However, I have noted that projects that I am involved in are more successfull if and when there are short and direct lines of communication between developers, testers, analysts, end-users, etc. Projects where there was much 'distance' seemed to foster a sort of 'us-and-them' (or rather 'us-against-them') feeling.
Human beings have evolved living and working in clans; we 'want' to belong to groups (even a lot of those who say they do not seem to hang out together). We are social beings. It is logical that we function at our best in a 'clan', which means we can see, smell, touch and hear the other members of that clan. Being 10000 km away from the rest of your team/clan makes us not 'feel at ease' in the primitive parts of our brains.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
After reading the umpteenth article on outsourcing by an economist where they say outsourcing may not be good for workers but it's good for the economy. So is war (defense spending) so I guess we're doubly blessed. Wait, Hurricane Katrina was good for the construction industry. So everything bad is good really. I wonder how their outlook would change if they oursourced economists. But we'd probably would never know because all the "outsourcing is good" articles would be written by foreign economists instead.
I keep propogating this myth to help my own job security, so far it has worked pretty well.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
You're more than likely wrong when you state that Intel is offering a salary and cannot genuinely find any US engineers at that price point. It is standard practice in most Western countries, especially in the IT arena, for companies to deliberately place job adverts with agencies at a rate well below the market level with a view to getting in an immigrant. When, surprise surprise, the vacancy isn't filled they can then apply to bring in the cheap foreign worker to fill in the skills shortage.
Everybody wants to be CEO. I've got bad news for all you soon-to-be-college-grads - you're not going to find that ad in the paper, and you're not going to get promoted into it working 40 or 50 hours a week. You're not going to make your daddys current salary in the next decade.
Oh sure, there are a select few who will be in the right place at the right time. If that's the job you want, go buy a lottery ticket. Your chances are pretty even at either one.
No, the sad news is that the world needs ditch diggers, too, and you may just be one of them. Oh, you won't be literally digging ditches - you'll be babysitting server farms, or doing engineering calcs, or drafting for a large company, or running a machine, or welding, or whatever. The thing is, you'll never be CEO and retire a millionaire in most jobs you get trained for, and unless you're a lucky one (and, yes, I put lucky entrepreneurs in that bucket, too) you will never get to "the top."
Not everyone can be rich and successful. In fact, most people can't be successful. Sorry, but its true. To have a top there must be a bottom - and most of you have to be in the bottom. That's the way the world works. Now quite griping about it and get back to work, damnit. That ditch needs to be 3' deep by lunchtime. Or else.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
All you have to say is "National Security" and the job won't go overseas. This is, in fact, why some countries around the world are taking a good look at Open Source -- it removes the yoke of an American company: Microsoft.
The current situation is the result of a purposeful effort by business and IT management to get IT salaries "under control". The fact is that they just couldn't bear to see the big $$$ getting paid to technical professionals because of *what* they knew. Offshoring was their trump card, but the roots of this go back further with things like tax code provisions that favor agency over direct employment. Well, they've succeeded. Salaries have been depressed, and direct employment opportunities have dwindled. Now they don't like the result -- the flight of talent away from tech and the consequent depletion of the reserve pool of people who can actually get the job done (as opposed to simply reporting on it). The pendulum is swinging back in our favor, friends. Let's all keep that in mind when the rollercoaster ride starts again.
Me too, I like to rile up Microsofties by calling their pet language C pound...
Move along.
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
In my experience of the industry, many managers become very small minded, particularly with regard to their choices of technology spread. They will often refer to consultants for 'new knowledge' or new ideas. The problem is not so much that of Informatics being a dead end industry, nor that it is taught badly really. The problem is a fundamental lack of understanding -accross the board- of systems thinking methodologies. It is this fact that brews all of these forum junkie crap 'technologists'.
Many of the cultures of the industry (arrogant barragement, wide-cryptic slang, and rapid-spread misunderstanding) cause the biggest source of these issues, and along with a lack of correct ideology (brought on through a lack of systems understanding, typically) leads to poor choices and increased misinformation.
The proof is in the pudding, almost every technology that has succeeded in this industry in the past has not been the advanced or 'smart' choice, but either the most (immediately) cost effective or simply the most 'popular' by word of mouth. The IBM-PC (versus many highly capable 680x0 based systems), the (dos-based) windows operating systems (could have been replaced many many years ago, and yet how many consultants still find win9x machines running core infrastructure, such as PoS printing?), the X windows system (not the fastest or best designed of the options that have gone past over the years, and there have been many, if you don't know about them, that's testement to my point about the way the community spreads knowledge, check wikipedia for more info). The list can go on and on...
As with world politics, the real source of productive change can only realistically come from a major shift in social paradigm, along with a genuine and heart fealt passion to GET IT RIGHT this time round. No more half knowledge or assumption, you need to start to understand not just the application layer, but have a clear understanding from electron, to macro distributed software if you are to understand enough to be a "competent technologist".
Now they are complaining. Tuff shit. These companies got their monetary crack-fix two years ago by dumping thousands of jobs offshore, dropping their operating costs, and causing a snowball effect for their competition to follow. Now they bitch and whine they can't find anyone to work for them. I wonder why.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Oh? So where's the corresponding article about Oklahoma?
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
The more of this generation that's discouraged from going into computers, the more sought after I'll be.
I'm in Denver, Co.
.Net experience preferred. Experience working with Microsoft SQL Server and/or MySQL. IVR development, design or quality assurance experience a plus
Like most places in the USA there is a huge shortage of nurses. There are full-page ads in the newspaper offering $15K sign-on bonuses etc. There is also a shortage of truck drivers, companies have huge banners outside their facilities advertising for truck drivers. I know nurses that make over $100K/year. According the news, truck drivers are making over $75K/year.
IT? Funny thing, no full-page ads, no sign-on bonuses, no big banners. In fact, it's quite the opposite. What jobs there are advertised are usually short term contracts with no benefits. There are few ads for IT guys, and fewer still give salaries, but the following describe a few ads I've seen (I swear I am not exagerating):
- MCSE wanted for one day deployment (setting up PCs), salary $16/hour.
- Experienced Web-Developer, PHP, MySQL, salary: $6.50/hour (Costco pays workers $17/hour, Wendy's pays $8.50/hour).
- Experienced Web-Develper, HTML, salary: $0.00/hour, but you are provided with beer when are finished.
- Web-Develper, HTML, salary: $0.00/hour, you are supposed to work just for the benefit of the experience.
I occasionally see a few jobs for helpdesk and technicians for about $10/hour.
Of course some jobs pay more, but good lord do they want qualifications. Consider this "entry level" job that is still on craigslist. No salary is given (typical) but the "entry level" part should give you a clue (I will bet real money that the janitor earns more) :
- Entry Level - Application Developer Call Centers
Strong background in object oriented application design, development and debugging. Java, Perl and Visual Studio
Date: 2006-03-15, 7:37PM MST
http://denver.craigslist.org/tch/142288447.html
Image how much better you would do if you put your efforts into a real career field such as law, medicine, aviation, or for that matter, driving a truck.
>>>Without H-1B visas, companies like Intel would be forced to significantly boost both wages and working conditions.
Actually, the H-1B salary must be greater than or equal to the "Prevailing Wage" in the area. The only way this can affect the average salary is upwards.
Of course, there is the slight inconvenience H-1B's face if they want to practice free market by changing jobs, and that might have some adverse effect on the bottom line.
If you want a career in I.T. you must be prepared to swallow not spit for your bosses, metaphorically speaking.
;)
And to stay behind after hours will really make management feel 'satisfied'.
Of course, I'm referring to the installation of new servers
didn't intend to mod this...
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
I know this is probably a bit OT but out of interest, what's the average starting wage for the IT sector? I'm talking grad positions here. And preferably places in the mid-west.
In Ireland, starting wages tend to be between €23 and €27 grand which isn't great but it's about average for people starting fresh out of college. Of course, after about 2 years you'd expect to be on over €30 grand.
What is surprising about this story? The pretty people of the world, be they professional managers or television anchors don't want the nerds to get over on them. The stories of offshoring a nice way the threaten the IT workers and make them accept lower pay or just keep them in their place.
Of course I am oversimplifying, but what genetically blessed person wants to lorded over by the likes of us nerds? Who can blame them for trying to keep us down?
If there is a shortage of "skills" (as seen by employers) it's because the "skills" people have are regularly invalidated by changes in technology which serve only the narrow economic interests of the technology manufacturers. In most forms of engineering, technology develops in such a way as to make it possible to build bigger/better/lighter/stronger/faster. Indeed, in the field of computing, the development of silicon has pretty well followed this model. In software engineering, though, each new "innovation" (.net, C#, Java, Windows Vista...) makes only a marginal difference (if any) to what could be achieved with a previous generation of technology - whilst imposing a huge cost in terms of training and redundancy of previous knowledge. It's as if every three years there was a decree such as "OK, you can't use steel for building bridges any more: the new material is antelope carcases".
Which is why "skill" in IT is not usefully defined as a knowledge of PHP or ASP or C++ or how to write a Linux device driver. Expecting a recruiter to understand this is as futile as expecting him to return your calls, though.
I enjoy working in IT.
Every day I help proactive organizations leverage collective synergy to think outside the box and formulate their key objectives into a win-win game plan with a quality-driven approach that focuses on empowering key players to drive-up their core competencies and increase expectations with an all-around initiative to drive up the bottom-line.
You should try it.
This is not an automated signature. I type this in to the bottom of every message.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://ds c.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/about/about.h tml&e=9797/
And Kari had better be involved somewhere along the way.
http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=mozclient &ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=mythbusters%20kari&sa=N&tab=w i/
:)
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
That is no joke. A least here in Denver. Costco workers make $17/hour.
By all indications the Chinese and Indian economies are doing great under perhaps a too ambitious management by their respective ultra-nationalist governments. This is a fact which would remain even without that ammount of offshoring that the contries are hosting. So that's a bad point in your argument right there.
Even when countries don't want to import work from other countries it happens. I.E. the phillipines realised about 15 years ago that their biggest export was people, because most of the people who left for work were sending monthly stipends home and that in itself was creating GNP totally outside thier control (unless they forced citizens to stay in the country).
Secondly it's not a free market economy if companies and people have limits on the number of people they can hire a year. There's a limit to the number of national graduates available by year, so if you wanted a free market you'd have no cap to H1B or Green cards.
Thirdly the politicians that are enabling the import of labor are thinking about it in a non-isolationist manner. If the UK France and Japan can hire well educated nationals in ample supply at 3/4 the cost of what a US company can hire nationals, then until more persons can graduate in the US (takes numerous years to create an upswing) the US companies are at a competative disadvantage. This is why companies like Google, MS, IBM etc. are quick to setup shop everywhere for the local talent pool. They can't afford to miss out on the smart folk now, today, this minute.
This doesn't always work. IE Sony had a design HQ in NJ. Theoretically close to New York where they hoped to learn what made US/NY design so saleable in the global markets (not that Japanese designs don't sell well). The division was too far out in NJ and required relocation to an area where Sony would be your only employer for the forseeable future. They didn't attract much NY talent, learned little, and eventually closed the glorified Japanese enclave. US companies can be similarly insular, and it hurts them globably when they are.
You have to ask yourself - is the job you're doing/going to do - does it require your actual physical presence? If not, then it can be offshored.
In an ideal world management wouldn't dream of offshoring their IT services. However the world is not ideal, and many of not most IT guys are major contributors.
I've been there, I know it's not easy. You don't have the resources you'd ideally have. You have more on your plate and your management peers think nothing of doing things that will mess up whatever shreds of a plan you might have had. People don't want to listen to your concerns, but they want you to listen to theirs at the drop of a hat. You have deal with their staff treating your staff as if they were furtniture -- or worse, as an emotional punching bag to work off their frustrations.
Doing your job in that situation involves all kinds of things that don't come automatically to a person who is attracted to a career in IT. Mainly it's seeking out, and making good use of face time. It's cultivating customers and selling them. It may even mean learning how to play golf.
If you don't do it, then the sales guys for the offshoring firms will.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Great post. But I can't bring myself to vote for someone who believes that the first amendment should be reserved exclusively to those who are paid professionally to exercise it.
While people are familiar with the general idea of the Peter Principle (we get promoted to our level of incompetence), the Peter Principle has two exceptions. And you hit on one.
The super-competent won't get promoted. You have to jump from organization to organization.
The super-incompetent will get bounced pretty quickly, if you are legally allowed to (France, I'm looking in your direction).
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I have a BSCS and part of a Masters in CS as well. I was going to go for a doctorate in CS but I got bit by the dot-com bug. My current boss told me that I was the first BSCS that he ever hired that was capable of producing software. He preferred to hire BSEE and the like as software people because they brought engineering rigor to programming.
Personally, I think that since he is an EE himself that he prefers folks with an EE background because he relates to them better.
A BSCS from a school with an ACM or otherwise certified/endorsed curriculum is very hard to get for many people. The math is simply too hard. The theory too abstract. That, in my opinion, is a good thing. I like that because it means very few people have a BSCS.
What I don't like is the common theme I hear that BSCS is worthless, doesn't prepare the degree holder to create software, or is otherwise not the best degree for someone who wants to make software. Excuse me?
I have worked at huge companies with thousands of software engineers, I've worked in tiny shops with five software engineers, I've worked as a "developer" and a "programmer" and I have never had a boss with a BSCS. I've had bosses with mail order degrees in MIS, degrees in English, degrees in EE, and one with a doctorate in Linguistics. None have a BSCS or equivalent. Why is that?
If we want IT to be a "lifetime" career field then we need to fix the problem that produces career IT people that are not schooled in IT. If you can see a clear path from schooling to career, to a stable future then people will follow it. If people see a field with no clear path to success they will shun it.
Is the shortage of IT leadership because this is the first generation of people who could make a life long career in IT? I don't think so. I think that was the 80s. So what gives?
I think the dot-com boom hurt IT badly and we're just seeing it now. There is no logical connection between choices made by people who joined the dot-com boom with BSCS or without and those who are still working in the field today. It makes no sense.
I did an interview recently for a new software engineer position they've added to my department. I asked an interviewer what degree he had. When he answered BSCS (he was a newly minted grad) I asked if he had taken "Data Structures" when he answered "No." I knew something was up. I can't prove it but after more questions about basic programming I determined that either his school was terrible or I had caught him in a lie. I would prefer to think he it was a lie that he had a BSCS and that no school would graduate a student with BSCS without a "Data Structures" class under their belt. "Formal Linguistics" is important... but not a clincher... "Data Structures" is deadly important.
Only half my staff has a technology related degree. Oddly, I'm the only one who thinks that hiring people with technology degrees is important. I even have a coworker with a doctorate in computer science and has taught as a professor (not my boss btw) that doesn't think IT degrees are important.
If this is the pervasive attitude amongst American IT workers then it will be a miracle if IT stays in the US. I guarantee our competition thinks education is important. So am I alone towing this line that the BSCS or a Software Engineering degree should produce a higher caliber Software Engineer than someone with a High School diploma or a degree in Electrical Engineering?
[signature]
I'd say it's about time nurses get paid top dollar.
And I don't do IT because I want to get rich, I do IT because I like it. Getting rich is about doing the stuff you don't like if your the type to be passionate about a craftmanship or something simular.
I'm in the process of founding a Ltd. in order to do some financial tricks and generate turnover. Hopefully with the sideeffect of making some 'backstockable' revenue (read: make money, get rich). It's an entirely different game. Infact it involves actively RESTRICTING your time in which you do the stuff you love: programming. And putting the time into stuff people usually hate doing: Paperwork and throwing out the stuff that isn't cost effective - which sometimes means throwing out the fun stuff.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It was in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago where insurance companies are sending patients for non-emergency surgury over to India. The quality of care is actually superiror to the US because the patients get more one on one care, they can stay longer in the hospital, the doctors are American trained, and after the hospital, the insurance company does mind if you spend another week on the beach, and it's a third of the cost of US care - oh, yeah, you can bring someone with you - on them!
Lawyers are being recruited in India too. The Indian legal system is also based on English common law. The lawyers over their don't demand big offices - (the article said that if an Indian kid can't make it as an Engiineer, then a doctor, he'll have to settle for being a lawyer). So what's ahppening? Legal socuments are being emailed to India and Indian Lawyers are going over them and sending them back.
So, no one is "safe" from globalisation!
If your job is to work behind a computer, your job can be sent anywhere in the world.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Yes, Intel is lying through its teeth. Pre-2001 there were 500K electrical engineering jobs in this country. Now there are 400K. A growth industry, hungry for new talent? HARDLY! The only place that's growing is hiring outside the US.
I've been a programmer, professionally, since about 1990, but like a lot of people on this site, I'm sure, I started programming as a hobby long before then. I've loved it as a career and it's been great. That said, as a software developer, I more or less peaked some time ago. I will never advance much further from where I am now (unless I want to go into management. Been there, done that, don't want to do it). But when it comes down to it, it's simply not what I want to do with the rest of my life.
About 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to change careers and spent that time trying to decide what I wanted to do. Many ideas have come and gone over that time, but one continued to keep popping up and I finally made my decision just a couple of months ago.
I'm going back to school to pick up a few classes that I'm missing and then I'm going to try to get into med school. It's something that I think I could enjoy even more than programming and more importantly, it's a way I can help people in a very fundamental way. It's also something I think I would be really good at.
It's seems very strange, at my age, to be going back to being a full time student, building up student loan debts and starting from scratch. But it's also very exciting and I'm really looking forward to it.
In some ways, I think computer programming has actually helped prepare me for this. I certainly have lots of experience working insane hours on very little sleep. And software development gives you a lot of experience in diagnosis. A different type of diagnosis to be sure, but not entirely unalike. So all-in-all, I think that my experiences in both work and outside of work, over the years, will actually have prepared me quite well for this path. We'll see.
I was laid off over a year ago due to offshoring. I know what everyone goes through. I have no degree. I grew up on computers and taught myself everything I know. I had a hell of a time finding a new job due to market over saturation. I was told my many head hunters that employers will overlook my resume 10+ years of exp as an admin simply because they get so many applicants. I was told they sort through looking for people with degrees and then go from there. I know I know get a degree.. This was not a concern since I had a great job great pay at a great company.. HOW QUICKLY ALL THAT CHANGES. anyway back to my point. While looking for a new job I saw 100's of add of people wanting 10 years of exp as a win2k server admin. 10 years of exp on an os that was 5 years old. I know what they meant but its still funny to read. I think the hardest thing about finding a new job was that MOST of the companies didnt even know what they needed. I would go into an interview for an admin position and they actually needed a developer. Anyway the market is WAY oversaturated thank god people are quiting school for IT. Most of them are retards anyway and have no idea how to troubleshoot anything. Offshoring IS REAL and it can happen to you. Hell the company I used to work at has over 150 developers working there. Rumor has it they are now going to outsource ALL developement. They already started with outsourcing older apps.
MISSING - Sig file. 2 years old black and white and very funny. If found please email me.
1) Stop associating IT with Development Engineering. The two are completely different fields. Almost every post here immediately goes into a diatribe about offshoring of programmers and developers.
2) Make this actually not BE a myth, because it most certainly is.
I find this story to be double relevant to my specialty which is software QA. If there is one good way to make sure management never wants to move you around, it is to do a good job at QA. It is so hard to find people who want to do QA and understand how computers work, can do scripting and basic programming, and uncover truly insightful bugs, that when they do find one, your stuck, and I mean bad.
I got into the QA position mostly as an entry point. I didnt have alot of formal programming experience, but I managed to impress the company I interviewed with and they hired me. 4 years later, they love me, I have helped improve the quality of the system, caught terrible bugs before production, implemented automated testing with code I had to write, and generally kicked alot of ass.
So, I express a desire to explore other avenues in the company such as programming. I get the run around, and they placate me with 5 hour assignments, and then something needs testing, and who is gonna test it, well, I am.
And add to all that, I make less after 4 successful years than our extry level mostly inexperienced programmers.
Wake up managers, a QA engineer is a valuable valuable employee, and you should NOT ignore them, or you will be stuck trying to replace them, and finding it quite difficult.
the job you're doing/going to do - does it require your actual physical presence? If not, then it can be offshored.
Dead wrong. It's not whether or not the job requires your physical presence - it's whether the business and team organisation does.
Offshore, outsource and other buzzwords of "cost cutting" ignore (in bad companies) or consider (in good ones) that teams need to meet to discuss details, and not only within themselves, but also with marketing, customer support, upper management any anyone else in the food chain.
The proper question would be: Can your job be done in a small square room with minimal outside contact?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Hmmm, looks like another IT BS article to me. The CEOs are just bemoaning the fact that they cannot fool enough people in the U.S. to go into IT so that they'll have a nice pool of cannon fodder. If people ignored the all too real offshoring of IT jobs, then the companies would have a deep pool of well qualified candidates to hire. These people would then be hired, work hard on big projects which once completed could be handled by far cheaper overseas hires. The domestic workers would then be laid off and go back into the talent pool so that we can repeat the cycle. Nevermind all of the hardship and disruption this causes to the cyclically unemployed and having to climb the ladder over and over again. The companies would love us all to do that, to follow their script.
The problem though is that most people are smarter than that, and don't want to play the lay off game. So they avoid careers that will put them through the kind of meat grinder I've described. As a result the pool of talent may have fallen below the critical mass needed by the companies who want to play this game. They always say it's not about the money, but that's just BS, it's always about the money which means U.S. employees simply cannot compete.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I recently made the move from engineer to security analyst. I can tell you that with HIPAA and SOX the IT security field is just starting to ramp up and will not go away until the regulations do(never). It pays more and is less stressful. I also see a big increase in the need for good business systems analysts. This too can be a very lucrative position.
We are always going to need the Uber Geek on site to actually touch stuff, but I see more stability in IT jobs with more of a business flare to them.
Dobo
Sorry about what's happened. I'm in the same boat, only it was longer. I think you're right about leaving the profession - not because of you, but becuase of state of the industry.
After a few months of looking, I started hearing (second hand) that "if I was any good, I wouldn't have been out of work for so long." I started thinking that, maybe, they were right - after over ten years of being in the field. I'm thinking of starting a non-IT realated business.
Saturday is April 1. Slashdot will be shut down. Sorry for the inconvenience.
In the labor market, a shortage of labor is a power force that boosts wages and improves working conditions.
.gov has an interest in avoiding that scenario.
While I agree with many of these points, you are overlooking one major factor: Time.
The government does have a job interfering and "correcting" the shortage, because new IT professionals don't grow on trees. Yes, the market will fix itself. But it might take a decade or two, and a lot of companies might go belly up in that time, dumping a lot of people unto the market, and on wellfare. And that's paid by the government, so the
And yes, the IT workers in the bancrupt company will find a new job quickly if it was a shortage in their career path that caused the whole thing to go down. But for every IT worker thus "freed" for the market, there'll be 100 non-IT workers. They're the problem.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Technically speaking, there is exactly enough trained IT talent in the U.S. market to fill all available positions at the current salary levels.
(emphasis mine)
The problem isn't the availability of jobs, it's the salary levels. Those levels haven't changed much in 6 years, despite a steep increase in measured (energy, food) and non-measured (USF recovery fees) inflation. Only 6 months ago did I finally start making more than I did in 1997. Would you go into an industry where real wages have been dropping steadily for a decade?
If one of my kids were to tell me he wants to do with I do when he grows up, I would vigorously discourage it. I've been doing this professionally since 1995. What does that tell you about the state of the industry?
You like working on things? Become an auto mechanic. You like gee whiz technical stuff? Go to law school and become an IP lawyer. There will not be a middle class in IT when you (or my kids) graduate from college.
Ironic considering the editorial in today's WaPo: Will Your Job Survive Globalization?
The moneyshot: "A study last year by economists J. Bradford Jensen of the Institute for International Economics and Lori Kletzer of the University of California at Santa Cruz demonstrates that it's the more highly skilled service-sector workers who are likely to have tradable jobs. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of jobs in the United States that require a college degree will rise by a measly one percentage point -- from 26.9 percent in 2002 to 27.9 percent in 2012 -- during this decade."
What is music when you despise all sound?
It's because managers want to define the exact skillset... '20 years Java version 1.4.1.13 service pack 2, and preferably 17 years Visual Studio 2005'
Have you tried just actually applying for these?
I've had good success by just figuring out if I'm right for the actual position, then more or less *ignoring* the stated requirements and applying anyway.
Degree? Oh well, apply anyway. VB apps? Yeah, I could just *never* figure out how to use VB with *different* objects (I do have ASP.NET/VB experience). Apply anyway.
For the job I start next week, I was initially told that the manager wanted me but his team didn't like that I had so much tech writing experience. I could have gone off in a huff, but instead I just patiently explained why this was value added, particularly if they were serious about good communication skills, ability to meet with clients, etc. It worked.
Now, do these wacky job ads drive some people away? I'm sure they do. So if you don't let them drive *you* away, that's a plus :)
When did it become vital to "have a career?" I can't say I've ever wanted one. Why does it make me better to bounce from one company to another, making money for someone else who can't do what I do, so they can pay me as little of it as possible and trade me for a college kid because he'll work for even less (same rationale as buying a cheap Dell then paying through the nose to keep Windows going?)
I gave up one prestigious career (nuclear Navy) because of the lifestyle and because, in the end, atrociously bad management hurt more than the occasional good could compensate (the people I've respected most and least in my life were in the Navy, BTW, and I'm happy for those who fit in and like it.) I'm currently programming for a small company in a small town. They pay me well, but they're in permanent survival mode, so there's no security and no chance whatever for advancement, in case I wanted any.
I figured out many years ago that I want nothing to do with management: I'd rather work in a factory if programming work dried up. I have no plans to leave my current job: I might if offered more money/security doing the same thing, but I'm okay where I am and don't enjoy looking. It might be cool to own my own company, but I'd have to have help to run it from the kind of people I don't like to be around.
It's called SLACK, guys. I actually enjoy my life, most days, and I don't even own a suit.
if microsoft were a city the official fire department would be an afterthought but so tightly integrated that it's removal would be impossible. You could get your own, but you could still never get rid of the one provided. You could also pick from any of several police departments, (though until recently there was none provided in the basic city services, despite the fact that there were gangs roaming every neighborhood looting and pillaging) but even then you would have to buy different protections from different departments. You would only be protected from break'n enter if you bought break'n enter protection... Lastly the roads department would make it illegal for anyone else to publish maps, and those maps that they did sell would intentionally leave some roads off the map. This makes it very difficult for the services you are paying for to work correctly and all the time.
If IT is so great as a career field how come the IT department is the first to get laid off when the company "restructures" or "rightsizes" or whatever claptrap buzzword is used to mean dump jobs.
-- Believe your Justice!
Bear in mind that the UK National Average is £22,000 - £24,000 (depending on which report you read) This was a job I was given details about today: Salary: £18,000 - £22,000 depending on experience Location: Shrewsbury, Shropshire Job Spec: ASP.NET / SQL Web Developer - Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Automotive company based in Shrops require an experienced .NET developer. You should have at least 18 months experience using ASP.NET and SQL-Server and 3 years experience of e-commerce. You will be developing web-based applications so knowledge of e-commerce development and object oriented design are also essential. It would also be beneficial if you had experience with Javascript, AJAX, .NET Server Controls or have been involved with the entire development lifecycle. This is an excellent opportunity to start using some cutting-edge programming tools and a great chance to advance your career. Please send your CV ASAP - urgent!
After 10 years, I finally have a way out. I hope to be getting into Graphic Arts within this year... working for the same company. (Geez, I love my company *sniffs*)
IT is dead. Milk it for the money (yea right) and networking (get your head out of the IT gutter... I meant social) and then do something worthwhile.
This company I am with is the first company that appreciates what I am doing now as their SysAdmin. I know I could be here for 30 years doing what I do. But since I have burnt like a cheap hooker by the ups and downs of the IT industry (cost me a marriage, no less), it is time for me to pull the ripcord.
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
"Robert Mitchell says CIOs and other IT managers continue to bemoan what they claim is a shortage of good technologists."
Darn it, we're running out of workers to exploit!
It's more of a hash of Java, though there's some C scrambled in. They just couldn't call it Java# for trademark reasons...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Companies complain about labour shortages because they too understand 'supply and demand', they WANT schools to crank out an excess of qualified workers to increase the demand for their jobs and in turn the wages they pay.
Even in the darkest last few years of IT (2002-3) schools push (Go into IT! - they're a business and want your tuition). Companies also have pushed "Breaking the Myth of low IT growth!" relentlessly.
If there was a legitimate shortage then wages would climb.
"As not many people want to work in an industry where finding a job when you are past forty is difficult."
To play devil's advocate. Just how flexiable are older workers to new methadologies? Hell, even the young one's poo poo the new stuff on a regular basis, instead of just buckling down and learning it. That's one of the reasons outsourcing works. Not only is it cheaper, they're more willing to learn new things because they realize it's essential to staying in business.
In my last full-time job (around the year 2001), everybody at the company got pay cuts. I left shortly after to pursue my own web programming and consultant business. Every year it is getting harder to find people that will pay me rates that I was getting when I first started this. I find working for myself to not really be worth the hassle anymore... and usually what work I get ends up being trying to fix whatever mess some Indian programming team has made of some project. People don't like paying the clean-up guy so much because so much has already been spent on initial development. And guess what, next time they'll jump right back to the Indian guys to make their next big mess. Working in IT has been a very depressing journey for me.
Meh.
The parent is one of those rare articles that I wish I could mod up past +5. The blatant abuse of the H1-b system (I have been on the receiving end of that) is an effort to reduce programming to a McJob (and, as Cringely observed, is just another way of discriminating against older programmers). It is an effort that I expect to substantially succeed by the end of this decade, which is why I am building a business selling and repairing violins and other stringed instruments, and teaching violin lessons.
I advise my students (I occasionally teach community college CS courses, as well as private courses) to avoid (or leave) software engineering, simply because it really is a dead-end career.
I am now being paid a salary about half of what I was getting in 1999 (and lucky to be working at all after 3 years of un- and under-employment); another 10% decrease, and the musical instrument business will pay better (I can get about $40/hour to teach violin lessons, although it's hard to get more than 20 hours a week). Plus, playing my fiddle is much more enjoyable than enduring management that talks the talk, but won't walk the walk. Or users who can't understand why a non-standard change to a GUI is a Bad Idea.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
I have been saying, and I'll say it again, in some areas the shortage is real. I live and work in the Philadelphia area and it's an extremely tight labor market. I've been off the job hunt for 3 months and I still get 2 or more calls and emails a week from recruiters. Every one of them that I talk to says the same thing: "We can't find enough people to fill the positions we have open".
I'm hearing the same thing from friends in Maryland
I appreciate there are areas where IT workers can't find a job, but that's not all of America.
I'm an experienced web developer, meaning PHP/Perl/SQL... you're rates are right on target, maybe a bit better than here in Canada... yes, it's depressing.
Meh.
" The problem is that how are companies supposed to know that you know more? Take your word?"
I think his problem's deeper than just being certificate phobic. It's the overall smug attitude "I'm better than you", that smacks of elitism.
"We worked so hard to scare all those damned paper MCSE and brain dumpers away. Last thing we need is for them to come back and lower the avg IT wage again..."
Practically screams "hire me", doesn't it? Now who elected him to be the judge, jury, and executioner of who should, and shouldn't work in his profession?*
*in his head that is.
I'm not sure what you're smoking but you HAVE to have some kind of immigration control these days. Would you still think this way if we had about 10,000 terrorists walk in and carry out a simultaneous strike? Idealism doesn't work.
- Get rid of the business casual/formal dress code since most IT workers work internally and don't interface with customers like salesman. Salesman get rewarded well and can afford the expensive clothing. If IT workers are expected to dress in expensive clothing, pay them the same money as sales since they support their success.
- Don't require IT workers to attend many useless meetings such as when the CEO gives himself a pat on the back and to show how wonderful he is. In my company, I hate worse are the late Friday afternoon "all hands" meetings.
- Don't require them to do mundane task such as inventory, accounting. Even though I am a Unix Sys Admin, I get bogged down doing crap like inventory and budgets.
- Budget some money for workers to go to conventions such as two per year. It is an expense the company can spend especially when they bring knowledge back and use it for the benefit of the company and themselves.
- Flex time is a wonderful thing - cost nothing and great for morale. If I come in several hours early or work several hours late - outside the typical 8am to 5pm business day, I can get quite a few things accomplished without interuptions and phone calls.
- Generous vacation time, not only for IT but for everyone. Do it without restrictions such as not allow for time to be used during Summer or around holidays.
- The most important item, respect is the key. Treat the employees well and don't play favortism games.
Treating your IT workes decently goes a long ways !I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I used to love it. I started into computer at 8. worked for my local city government at 15. now im 27 and still in IT. A number of years ago i worked for coldwell banker in los angeles. we assembled their network uniting 60 branches. the company said it was time to cut costs and made us compete for our jobs. they would constantly raise the bar and can the person with the least number of closed tickets. towards the end there was a guy out in ventura who was wiping down computer cases with alcohol wipes trying to create more tickets to keep his job.
I used to love IT now i f*cking hate it. They took something i really liked and destroyed it. I have other hobbies now which i am trying to pursue into a business but im trapped because IT still is the only thing that will make me enough money to keep me from collapsing into a pile of debt i created during periods of cyclical unemployment.
I have a vendetta against Cendant Inc. they were the ones responsible for my complete failure of company loyalty.
I swear to God, I will never respect another company as long as i live.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
The problem is not the lack of careers, the problem is that most of regular corporations (not hi-tech like Google, and such) have no career path for technology people. You become a programmer, maybe a project lead, but after that you either go into some pencil pushing job and start using some stupid process methodology (like CMMI), which basically means paperwork and more paperwork (and no additional benefits), or you are stuck!!!
Linux, please.
There may be a lot of desperate headhunters out there, but their inventory is junk. I've been getting on the order of 15-20 spams a week for "6 month contract in Milwaukee, WI" and the like.
Also, the NYC tech market sucks IMHO. It's either contracting for banks or media, or really shady stuff that's trying to start up.. I interviewed with a company that sells adware and another that wants to sell web proxy servers to ISPs so they can run their own interstitial ads when their customers browse.
I am in the process the fsck out of high-tax, lousy-work, lousy-commute, overpriced NYC.. Wish me luck..
In our area, bench technicians feel lucky to make $8/hr. We have kids coming out of High School that can do the job and have no problem working for that rate. How does it make the PC guys in my division feel, probally really nervous. These guys have 15 - 20 years of experiance and cost about $26/hr, with no capability of moving beyond their position because of a lack of education. They were top dogs, because no one else could do their jobs, but now their skill set is pretty common. They are watching people with better educations then them come in to work at a lower rate, because the job is now an entry level possition. It is called progress.
Working in a corporation of 3,300 employees, I will need to have people to touch the PCs and answer the phones at the Helpdesk, but it isn't that hard to find people who can do that. We buy applications off the shelf and use consulting services for the 'heavy lifting' of customization. What I need is people who can implement a project on time and under budget. I need problem solvers that have good people skills. Just give me management majors with minors in computer science and I will be happy.
I have use for network engineers and server maintainance persons, but that is still a limited selection of staff. We have a server farm of over 300 servers being maintained by 4 guys. We manage quite a few database servers (Oracle, Microsoft, MySQL, and Sybase), with 2 guys and 2 girls as DBAs. Our network is managed by 2 guys and we contract all the 'heavy lifting'. Need a new segment ran, call the contractors. We contract out every bit of the menial project tasks, like running cables because it is cheeper to do and we get better quality, because our contractors do it a heck of a lot more then we do. It is called effective cost management.
When one of our server guys or network engineers leave, we replace them from the PC Group with one of the sharp computer science majors who used the PC Group as a entry level into such a role. It is the nature of the beast.
In God we trust, all others require data.
If you're work is customer facing, you'll have half a chance and will probably go far in IT.
If you work to support the customer facing employee, the corporation will eventually outsource you.
The supporting roles are usually the first ones to go.
"So I studied physics and now am writing computer programs for a bunch of oceanographers. The work (to me anyway) is much more interesting though I wish I were doing more science rather than "put pretty GUI on already written algorithms" but there are interesting, non-DBA, non-webapp, non-sysadmin jobs out there.[emphasis mine]"
Ladies and gentlemen, we've just found out why OSS GUI's suck. It's not a lack of technical talent, but the attitude that "pretty GUIs" are the grunge work that needs to be done so we can get to the good stuff.
I wonder if Myth Busters would do a show on whether or not IT was a dead end career field.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
In the almost 8 years that I have been in the IT field as a software quality assurance engineer its been a rocky road of peaks and valleys. After the dot com crash, and after Y2K things got real bad in my field which was blamed on outsourcing, but that wasn't the only reason. Company's budgets got tighter, projects got canned etc.
The past 3 years I have been laid off once each year between 1 month and last year was laid off 8 months! It was hard on me but somehow pulled through it. Things do seem to be picking up again, as for once my contract ends next Friday but I pick up at a new location April 3rd. SO that worked out for once, and also had been getting a lot more calls and emails from various recruiters.
That said however, outsourcing will always be a threat especially for companies who want a lower bottom line, but outsourcing isnt really to blame more than the companies themselves in the end.
Often times your Supervisor,Manager, or whatever choice word you want to use can't give you the increase you deserve after having put in a number of years.
If you like where you are working now and have the oportunity to leave and do something else that would make you even more valuable than you already are give it a try. In my case I went back to my employer after having gone to work for a client(taboo but it was politically allowed) with a >100% increase in salary.
When it's a new hire they have a lot more flexibility and skipping the interview process is definately a plus!
DISCLAIMER: If your employer doesn't share your opinion of your worth then this won't work.
3 to 5 years? Are you %$#@%^#ing kidding me? A typical contract is for 3 to 6 MONTHS, not years. Staying a whole year at a company as a senior programmer, software engineer, architect, etc. is a long term. My typical job is only 9 months and I'm considered extremely successful among my peers.
Why am I successful? Because unlike 90% of the IT workers in Florida, I don't have any gaps on my resume. Here's the moral of the story: as soon as you get a job, start looking for the next one.
As for IT being a dead end career... You bet it is. I would not let my children enter this field. In 20 years there will be NO jobs for American and European programmers.
Well for one thing, a lot more government regulations on who can sell what and work for whom and how.
I'd say it's about time nurses get paid top dollar.
:)
With all respect, that wouldn't make sense. It's not that good nurses aren't a vital part of a smoothly functioning health care system. Rather, it's that the work often doesn't require a high degree of skill or training. (I'm excluding ICU types, etc.) Watch what they do sometime when you're in the hospital. They're doing what higher-order types (e.g., nurse practitioners) don't have time to do. In these cases, sh*t flows downhill (literally). It's called a "code BROWN."
I'd hardly call "a four-year degree in programming or engineering" I.T.. When I was in college and graduate school, IT (aka MIS) was for people who couldn't cut it as real Computer Science or Engineering majors. IMHO, true CompSci and Engineering careers are still available here in the US although they're grossly underpaid people. IMHO, IT has become so commonplace that it's no longer the exclusive domain of highly trained professionals. In the film industry, wire removal used to be a well-paid job here in the U.S. but with the advent of fancy tools (developed by CompSci & Engineers, BTW) it's no longer a highly paid skill and can therefor be sent overseas.
I don't have a problem with issuing more H-1B visas to attract more qualified individuals. What I do have a problem with is that it seems to be a flat out excuse to bring people from India and China over to the U.S. for peanuts. I haven't heard a single peep about importing IT talent from Europe or other areas of the globe.
If that is in fact the goal, we should at least be adding incentives to keep these people here. If the long term aim is to recruit talent, where are the "Turn in your H-1B for U.S. citizenship" programs? Where are the incentives to make them stay in the U.S.?
But all the evidence points to a convoluted method of paying IT workers low wages. The huge downside to this is that if we keep "training" foreign workers like this, pretty soon places like India and China will have IT businesses of their own that don't suffer the exhorbant management costs that American companies do. What American managers don't seem to realize is that outsourcing the IT grunt work is only the first step. In five years their job could be overseas as well.
After all, how wasteful is it to have the manager and the workers in separate parts of the world? Onsite managers are more cost effective and better for overall communication.
I just wish they had the same amount of speed/courtesy that they expect their applicants to have. Instead, I feel they are looking for supplicants.
Simply put: I'm great at what I do and am in demand. I'd like to leave contracting because you never get to do really interesting stuff like implement process change and watch a company's IT solution set become world-class. It's all fire-fighting and implementation. Nice, but there's ultimately no ability to build.
Under no circumstances, however, am I going to sit on my butt for 8 weeks hoping the 2 perm positions I applied for will call me back. *shrug*
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Couldn't help but respond on the obviously incorrect statement.
/year which is the net effect of the program on the labor force. About only half of those will be in tech positions the rest goes to business, finance, sports, education etc. So you are looking at about 15000 jobs annually being lost. Considering the pace IT is generation jobs this is hardly a killer to the regular tech worker.
H1-B holders are about 50000 a year and they are for a limited time -6 years. Not considering the increase a few years ago, every year the same number of h1-b expire every year as are granted. of course some of these holders will acquire green cards in various ways on average about 25,000
The only trouble with h1-b is that several indian companies with presence in the US are abusing the system quite a bit and hiring exclusively h1-b workers ( which fills the quota ). The h1-b dependent employer rules have helped but need to be a little more stringent.
why would someone who is driven to be a performer, or gambler, or health provider, "choose" to work in IT?
i wonder if there are there statistics on how many people choose careers based on money rather than their personal interests.
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
I graduated in 2001 and I just took my 3rd job back in November. Thanks to jumping ship I'm making more than twice as much than I was when I graduated from college. That's a big increase in 5 years. I highly recommend jumping early and often. Get yourself a couple recruiters and always have them on the lookout for mo' money.
It's been interesting to see the parade of sob stories over the past few years, ever since the bubble burst. It amazes me how many people seem to have trouble finding work, yet there are posters always saying they can't find anyone decent to work for them. Guess what? We're all from different parts of the world, and things are different in different areas.
I can only speak for Canada (as it can be very difficult to emmigrate sometimes), but I see the same things certainly in the US. Some areas have jobs, others don't. So pack your bags and move! It's certainly more productive than whining about it for months, if not years at a stretch.
Here in Canada we have at least one city where no one can find enough people to work. McDonald's is paying $12/hour. Starting IT wages with a bachelor's degree are in the $50,000 range and up. Hell, construction workers make $30/hour for general labour. Take a 6 month course in certain fields, no previous education or experience required, and have fun turning down 6 figure job offers - and no, I'm not exaggerating these numbers. With our dollar fast approaching par with the greenback, the jokes about Canadian salaries don't make much sense anymore.
Yet millions of Canadians sit on their arse, bemoaning the lack of good-paying jobs. Guess what folks, sometimes you have to put a little bit of effort into getting ahead.
That, or you can sit and complain on Slashdot that you haven't found a job in 4 years.
Guess which one of us is happier.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
You can ask for a law to be passed that prevents offshoring. It will work ... for a while. Eventually, your companies will become non-competitive thanks to not being able to utilize the cheaper resources... which others WILL utilize. And then they will die. Your economy will suffer, and so will you then. And what is worse, with a weakened economy, *everyobody* in your countrey suffers. Not just those working in the IT.
Heavily regulating offshoring into oblivion sure beats a 21st century Tammany Hall* where most (if not all) legitimate US work is gone, and education that would get any "escape-velocity"** work costs you your firstborn. Maybe you need to rethink that idea when you arent living in territory that approximates an economically created Hell on earth. String that with rising education costs with no regard to the incoming students (let alone the inability to break "Prestige schools" with guaranteed acceptance), the lack of income to move to desirable territory, with the 1-2 punch of removing 2 entirely profitable classes of work- you have the result of listening to Mises' siren song.
Unfortunately you will be laughed at and you wont survive the fight that you will not win in the Rust Belt with your policy. The Dubai Ports deal is good proof that regulation can and will happen(as well as being done in favor towards the US). Just a matter of connecting the need to unconditionally provide access and full funding to any place of higher education (where those of the Rust Belt can outnumber the Far Easterns at MIT for example) with the guarantee of not being offshored out of a job, then connect both to the need to have the nation act in the best interest of its citizens.
You don't *have* to take one for the team though, so as to speak. Adapt. Make yourself more competitive to make hiring you. Improve. And keep doing everytime the competition adapts as well. Run the Red Queen's race. Run to stay where you are. It is a harsher world now.
There's nothing wrong with adaptation - it's only a matter of regulation adapting the environment for the times ahead. Before you consider any perceived evil of regulation, it is only from meddling with the regulating authority through purchasing Congress, and selling the constituents' jobs off to places that dont reciprocate. This is where France has it right by their general policy of being worker friendly (despite what some people say on Murdoch's Economic Comedy Channel and Far-Right Mouthpiece), and where Russia has it right by having the outright balls to drop the hammer hard on misbehaving corporations (versus a handslap in the US).
The only way you're going to get globalization (with respect to offshoring) to work is if you start all over only with countries that deal with quality of life seriously (e.g. France) and expand outward, attracting the other countries to join and agree to strictly enforce high product quality and quality of life standards. Then you can attract the countries such as China and India with prosperity in human rights when they cannot just act with impunity towards their own people. When people can move back and forth freely between countries and industries with minimal effort, that is when globalization is done correctly with adequate provisions to minimize difficulty in the transfer. It is not a case of Harrison Bergeron(the incorrect portrayal to justify inequality) or A Brave New World(which is where we may be headed with continued globalization), but a case of adapting the environment to what is needed.
It's a matter of putting our own national interest ahead of selling ourselves down the river to worse times ahead. To take your word for it, "Harsh again. But that is how it is now. Sorry.". You're going to have to live with the idea that offshoring must be heavily controlled if you are to have prosperity instead of an eventual case on the national level of Bonnie and Clyde.
* The political party i
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Then admit that you aren't in favor of a free market in labor.
in some cases, if the boss is a guy and is easily led, your job may go to:
a new graduate who:
1. is female;
2. makes the expected flirty gestures to keep the boss intrigued;
3. can be paid lower wages than you;
4. is territorial, uncooperative and unkind to co-workers and users;
5. is protected at least in the short run because of 1, 2 and 3.
This places women as well as men who do not play the game, at a disadvantage. It tends to embed perverse incentives and bad behavior regardless of skill in organizations. Hence what were once good jobs and good workplaces can go bad as the mix of people shifts.
Female bosses, it seems, less often operate in this way over male subordinates. There may be other personal dynamics. This is not intended to be a dissertation on all the ramifications of social networks at work. If you find a place where it's all about the quality of your work and your ability to harmonize with others, it would be a good idea to do your work and harmonize as best you can, and stay there as long as you can.
Nothing about this is unique to the IT business.
But in the absence of H1B workers, what would the prevailing wage be? If companies can't hire enough workers at the prevailing wage, then the prevailing wage is below the market wage. H1B's may not affect the prevailing wage, but they may still affect the market wage.
And which city is this?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment.
;), yet I haven't had a decent salary in years thanks to techie saturation. I can't get a high-tech job because someone else will do it for half the money, and I can't get a lameass dead-end job because "I'm overqualified". So where's that comfy medium-tech job where I make medium income for medium effort ? The Walmart effect is killing everything in my home town, nevermind that it's the #4 biggest city in Canada.
I always wonder if these reports are really aimed at managers, or just pretty propaganda to try and restore my faith in IT. Some people might call me a wiz, some people might call me an encyclopedia (abridged
What scared me a couple years back is that a whole bunch of techies I used to know are now doing much lesser jobs, like taxi or construction. Ironically, the bad techs who have no real skills, forced to compensate with bullshit tactics, are the ones who still have IT jobs. What a waste of talent to put an experienced programmer in charge of mounting drywall! Most bureaucrats seems to think of tech workers as worthless bags of shit, like we all just got off a short bus or something. It's not that there isn't enough demand for IT staff, I think the corporate world still hasn't figured out how to put IT to good use.
I see lots of people who are looking at a career shift in their early 30's, looking toward IT, or teens who want to be game developers. I take them on a tour of failure, introduce them to some of the people I know.. this network engineer works for a call center.. this hardware tech does outbound sales for some telemarketer.. this C++ developer drives a truck. The lucky ones do QA testing or tech support. One CS grad mods xboxes, sells pirated movies and games with a little dope on the side to make ends meet while he's busy designing a server appliance he plans to market. Meanwhile, Booger from high school has a house, a brand new truck and a 60" plasma TV, because he didn't waste 3-4 years and tens of thousands of dollars on college (and technolust). He even acknowledges the nonsense of how he can be better off than his bright, educated childhood friend.
I don't care about bigger salaries, I care about more new jobs. Progress doesn't happen by giving some old fart more change. Progress happens by spawning new projects and investing funds into new areas of study. You can't take your bankroll to the grave, but you can plant the seeds of innovation for another generation to burgeon.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
for people who fall for propaganda/fear-mongering/whatever-sells that the press pushes. If they can't be bothered to do some real research as to what's a good career and what's not, they reap what they sow.
Anyway, the best IT people are the ones who do it because they like it, not because of the bucks they're hoping to rake in.
And this is all the better for those of us already in the industry.
The thing that is scaring bright technologists away from the field is simple: businesses see IT developers and other technologists as nothing more than factory-line workers of our day. We are interchangeable parts, and therefore not worth as much to the company as upper management is...or middle management even.
So for our careers to grow, ironically, business pushes the brightest technologists to management, leaving an even-larger gap in capable engineers. There is nowhere else for us to grow into (case in point, I've been a Senior Engineer for my entire 10-year IT career, there's no higher technology position to go to).
In fact, development and other complex IT tasks require a type of worker that is not comparable to any other field. They are largely self-managed, and must work out engineering complexities unheard-of in other fields. The bredth of technologies and knowledge are only comparable to the most high-knowledge careers such as law, medicine, and bio-tech.
Further, the work these technologists do, and the quality of that work, directly affect the bottom-line of the technology company. The loss of a single key technologist can have a ripple-effect that is hard to quantify, but that definitely impacts the bottom line. But due to the manufacturing-centric business practices of corporations and the MBA management crowd, these dollars are never realized. Hence, management views these workers as an expense, and not generating any revenue. Conversely, sales staff, who produce nothing re-sellable on their own, and who cannot affect the cost-basis of a company much, are revered by upper-management because of the positive cash-flow realized by landing sales, and their salaries and position within the company are commensurate.
Until IT business management practices catch up to the new business landscape, they will continue to scare off the brightest talent, forcing the best technologists into management or other positions in order to see their careers continue to grow. I think Google and a few other top-tier technology companies get this, but the remainder continue to flounder in the IT landscape.
You can see this ultimately realized by "dad's advice": You don't want to be doing the work, you want to manage. Anyone can do the work.
No. Not everyone can do the work in this field, just as not everyone can be a bio-tech engineer, and until this attitude changes from business to home, IT won't attract a large crowd.
Raises based on social skills and appearance? So THAT'S how they keep the nerds keeping the company running from moving up.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Similar sentiments were floating around in 2000: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jht ml?articleID=18304314/
What's going on is actually warfare. Zombie money is being killed. Unfortunately, there is a lot of zombie money being created all the time because of the way the tax system subsidizes property rights. So the zombie money can kill a lot of people before it finally dies, and if the death rate of the zombie money isn't higher than the rate the government creates it, it can keep killing the people for a very very long time.
Seastead this.
You can still consider it a "free market" even if you have laws that inhibit immigration. Immigration laws have nothing to do with an American Free Market. It might inhibit a Global Free Market, but that isnt what the parent poster was referring to.
By your argument, to have a "truly free market" you would have to be allowed to kill your competition without legal recourse. If laws are in place to stop you from killing the competition, then it wouldnd be a free market.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
%90k is not highly lucrative. You must be comparing your salary to that of your brothers/sisters and parents.
All the high paid jobs that do NOT require physical presence to be possible to do are things like software development - which CAN be offshored
Yes, in a sense software development CAN be offshored. That doesn't mean it SHOULD be, though.
If I'm managing a software development project, I'd rather have the developers in the same building as me, where I can communicate with them in person, than to have a development model where I send the dev team on the other side of the globe an email in the evening, and hope that they interpreted it correctly when I wake up the next morning and look at their work.
IT -is- a dead end career.
You would be much better served with many much easier degrees.
An IT degree is much harder, just as expensive, mostly robs you of the college experience.
But in return, you get:
A good starting salary- and it stays there- others start lower but go higher.
Blatant age discrimination- it starts about 45 and gets really bad about 55.
Constant change- other careers you can master- in IT you can be an expert and then be unemployable 3 years later.
And now... Offshoring.
A company I'm associated with "saved" 30 million bucks recently. How? By paying 70 million dollars to have work done by indians instead of paying (by their own figures) 100 million dollars to have it done by americans.
Let's see... 100 million / 3 years * 100,000 (salary & bennies) =~ 330 american programmers that were not hired (and that did -not buy the companies products, or new houses, cars, etc. Basically about 50 million was shipped overseas and 20 million paid locally to the local indian staff).
Offshoring and h1b visas-- where they bring in someone willing to work for 60k when it takes you 80k just to get the degree (but the same degree at the same quality is a lot cheaper in india until salaries catch up over there).
So I don't know what planet Mr. Mitchell is on- but entering the IT field would be one of the most boneheaded moves anyone could make until indian salaries come up to at least 50% of what american salaries are.
Sure- you -can- make a good income at it for 10 to 20 years. But --clue-- you r working lifespan is more like 43 to 45 years.
If you are a superbrain genius for whom IT comes very easily, then enter the field. Superbrain geniuses are always in demand.
If you are reasonably smart and a hard worker then -enter a different field. You will not be hired because there are millions of reasonably smart hard workers around the world who you will be directly competing with for a job.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As a resident of the northern half of the lower peninula, just let be be the first to give you a nasty sneer and spit in your food at a resturaunt. We hate people from down state who move up here and buy mansions on a lake. Go ruin someone else's backyard.
Do yourselves a favor and don't move to Ohio if you have any plans on having a career in IT.
Count me as one of the college kids who bought into the hype that IT was dying.
I graduated last summer as a computer sceience major and got a job as an investment banker at a bulge-bracket firm in New York.
I now make as much as my dad (a database developer) and I have a wide range of options in front of me after my two-year analyst program ends, ranging from venture capital to hedge funds and private equity.
No complaints so far, and I know I'm not the only one who thought of making the "switch" from IT to finance - two of the seven first-year analysts in my group were CS majors at MIT.
In the 2008 presidential race, write Bill O'Reilly and Tammy Bruce on the ballot as the president and vice-president, respectively.
...what? TAMMY Bruce? I don't know who that is.
Haven't we had enough petulant, sophistic namecallers in the office of the President already?
As for Tommy Bruce as VP, I suppose I could support that. Though his work in writing the early web browser "Cello" has been largely forgotten, his leadership of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School has provided us with an invaluable civic resource.
1) IT should only be an "add-on" for you. Your main skill should be somethign else : Airport system, Warehouse handling, Managing team, physics, math, stats, finance whatever. A "core process" at the firm you are.
2) Only *pure* it is / can be really outsourced without risk. if you outsource your core process you can as well give the key & deeds to the outsourcing firm.
3) profit.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Some companies value face to face more than a labor cost savings. Indian techs can't provide the personal interaction and problem solving skills that me walking over to your desk to help fix your problem can. I know that's not solving it remotely with a remote desktop tool or whatever the rage is, but some fields value personal interaction over impersonal so-called "effiency."
Or, work somewhere that's concerned with security. The supercomputer I run cannot legally be run by someone who isn't a US citizen. We've got data on it that, while not classified, is "sensative" and is not to be released to non-US-citizens.
Pretty much solves the H1B thing right there.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
Hey, stop it. Tell everyone that IT is a dead-end career. Don't go into it no matter what. IT's not going to go away, and if no one new comes in those of us already in the industry can make more money!!!
Find coupons in Greeley
Why not call it D flat?
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I've seen a few programmers and IT folks in general who get hot girls.
/. how they can't get girls.
/. lurkers
The difference?
1) They dress up. Don't need to be metrosexual. Do need to iron.
2) They have interests other than Star Trek. And that DOESN'T mean senior member of the bring back futurama/babylon5 fan club.
3) They exercise. Not just juggling, actual lifting weights and stuff
4) They don't have nerd pissing contests. Getting into arguments about computers is a wee bit more than a social faux pas. It's the equivalent of the redneck ford/chevy debate.
5) They know when to turn on and off the sarcasm
6) They don't think they know everything
7) They have confidence in themselves and don't post to
Yeah, there's probably more, but let's start slow...
Sincerely,
1 or the 3 married
What this report basically says is that CIO's are a group have a very loose connection to the truth. Who really wants to work for a liar-especially when they don't pay well.
The only area of IT jobs that seems to be growing after you factor in corporate welfare of loose immigration is government work. I expect that independent companies will start to pick up at some point. Companies still have real IT needs-that immigration isn't really satisfying, but nobody with any sense trusts corporate management. When the corporate welfare ends, the managers will be forced to negotiate with workers that no longer trust them.
It's funny how we've come to accept as status quo. It's too bad that you don't really even have the option of staying with a position that you like.
Its not a dead end career as long as you are committed to the work, come up with solutions to real problems, promote and run with new ideas and most importantly let people know about it. It's funny to see people are still whining that IT is a dead end for reasons that are not unique to IT. All industires are outsourcing and there simply aren't enough management jobs to go around.
Some people seem to think they deserve to get promoted or get a big raise. It's those idiots in management that don't realise how brilliant or vital to the companies success they are. That's not the case and if it is your probably as much to blame as anyone else. People, who don't promote themselves, come up with more problems that solutions or who sit around goggling all day are not going to get ahead.
Generally speaking the reason the other guy was promoted was that he was better than you not that he kissed more ass. Management don't have a secret vendetta against you, there are no plots or secret pacts, how could there be no one knows who you are or what you do. That said if things aren't working out and you don't think they ever will, of course you should move on if you can, sometimes management are idiots but its not usually the case.
I was a sys admin / security contractor for a few years, turned that into a consultancy business, sold my client list and now work for a bank. I can't say I get all the promotions I go for but there are lots of opportunities you just have to persuade people you deserve them, there's nothing unusual about that.
I've been working in IT since 1998.
This is in South Florida, so that's an exception.
since then, I've not had a stable job for more than a year.
in 2002 when I decided to up my skillset and became LPIC2 certified, I figured I would land a nice permanent position.
since then, I've been labled as a gun-for-hire in Linux. My longest contract has been 2 months.
I'm constantly struggling to find work here.
The reason isn't me, though I've long considered that.
The reason is management's view of IT.
If I'm doing my job well, there is no need for me.
Management can't "justify" paying me a salary for sitting around I.C.S.H. (in case shit happens)
They can't comprehend that I'm preventing shit from happening.
And sometimes the IT staff get blamed if shit happens. (sometimes it's their fault)
Is IT a shitty career? YES
Why do I do it? I love the work. I'm a second generation computer tech.
The article is like trying to convince a goldfish it's better to be flushed than live in a bowl.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Wait a minute. This guy was not writing his senior year political science thesis, it was just a post to Slashdot. Asking for references is okay, but saying that his post is incomplete just because he didnt cite his sources is wrong. If everyone did that, my 30" monitor wouldnt be enough to see 2 posts on the same screen.
"The government does not intervene when there is a labor surplus"
Why not? Does it need to? What suggestions do you have?
He answered all of your questions in his post. He said that a free market corrects itself without intervention. He said that the government doesnt have to do anything except for to foster the free market system. It is okay to ask him to elaborate or give proof, but it was not an incomplete post. He couldnt possibly cover every single angle of the issue in one Slashdot post.
You can respond and ask questions without attacking his logical reasoning skills.
politicians attempt to damage"
Again, use of emotional 'damage' without any reasoning behind why it's 'damaging' and not, say, 'fixing'.
The reason he used the word "damage" instead of "fixing" is because he does not believe that it is fixing the problem. He believes that it is damaging our economy. And he has given reasoning for why, it is because it floods our workforce with extra workers that the workforce did not need. Which then increases unemployment or at least lowers wages.
You can say that he is wrong, but at least give examples of why. You attack him for not explaining himself, but you do not even try to explain yourself. You are simply attacking him with no basis for your arguments.
Sounds alot like the pot calling the kettle black.
--
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
I know it's harder than it sounds, but if you can get a defense job you don't need to worry about outsourcing because most of that work can only be done by US citizens. Plus if they give you security clearance they have an incentive to hold on to you since they invested so much money into clearing you.
I'm currently leaving my job at a web-app/consulting company to take on a job at a defense company, so you can guess that I'm totally psyched about the job security it will entail, not to mention all the cool technologies I'll be working on. Sure, layoffs are possible if a large contract falls through, but that's a worry at any company. You just have to minimize your risks where you can.
If you live near DC especially, I recommend looking into the defense industry. As long as you don't have any moral objection to supporting the military-industrial complex it's good way to go. At least you can have the satisfaction that you're working for a stronger America (economically and technologically, after all military and aerospace tech are some of our biggest exports).
Call center jobs are hardly IT and certainly not a career. The turnover rate for Call centers is extremely high.
They're using their grammar skills there.
people keep forgetting to look into civil service jobs. I am a network technician at a library. I make $50,000 a year and I am on a union so i have job security. Ther is also room for me to move up there are about 6 or 7 higher jobs titles that I can move onto in my county alone . For each one you have to take a test. People also keep forgetting that for every job that moves to india you need a network person here in the U.S. that keeps the required links and phone systems running that conenct that office in india to the U.S.
IT is typically not a main revenue stream. IT is a cost center. Big business treats it as such and thus seeks ways to reduce cost.
Even so I'm sure that these natural drivers carry no weight. There must be some other reason for why the last three places I've worked have decided to outsource their IT.
Sure, no one should believe in a secure job for life.
But the banks sure believe in 30 year mortgages. And if you are out of work long enough,
you will default and join the ranks of folks who have a tough time getting mortgages.
You pay a hefty transaction fee if you need to relocate to stay employed.
At one time, those in the know said: Don't worry about the US losing all those manufacturing jobs, the future is in technology.
So now we have lost a bunch of technology jobs. Some to slower domestic and world-wide demand, some to outsourcing.
I thought I was on the high end of skilled technology workers. Then a Fortune 25 company
cut me loose.
Am I adapting? Sure. Do I like it? No.
I don't think many people expect a job for life. But it would be nice if
you had some idea if you could continue to afford the house payment
for the length of the loan. It must be worse for those who want to start a
family. Sure you can afford it now. But what about after the next big
management trend?
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
You remind me of those dipshit AT&T commericials in the late 1990s, where you saw things like yuppies sitting on a beach tapping on laptops, while the voiceover said something like "Did you ever imagine sending a fax while at the beach? YOU WILL.", etc.
Of course, those commericials weren't real, so that's very similar to you, since your situation isn't real either. Telecommuting is still a vanishingly small portion of the workforce. Such things will remain in the province of the elite, while 98% of the workforce will still have to slog through traffic for an average 60 minutes commuting each workday.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Less than a year is fine in plenty of cases - there's plenty of IT jobs that have to do with time based projects or "at will" contracts.
Some contracts last a few weeks and some continue for as long as you provide value to the company you're contracting to. I've never had an employer call anyone moving from contract to contract a "job hopper". If anything, they like it when they hear that the project was completed successfully before you moved on.
>.- Experienced Web-Developer, PHP, MySQL,
>salary: $6.50/hour (Costco pays workers
>$17/hour, Wendy's pays $8.50/hour).
The good paying web development jobs don't list a salary (usually). They just say "DOE" or "market", if they say anything. It's up to you to negotiate a good rate. So, yeah, the ones that list a rate are poor.
I've done *way way way* better than anything that you have listed here, pay-wise. Jobs found through Monster and Dice. And I don't have a degree, or any certs.
Also, maybe it's just where I live, but I've never seen a craigslist job posting that wasn't absurd.
Search tip - set up indeed.com search feeds on bloglines ("{skill} in {some town near enough to me}"). Awesome.
Calgary, Albeta - although nearly every major Alberta town and city is experiencing similar times. ESPECIALLY if you're willing to live in the middle of nowhere for a few years.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
It normally takes them about 6 weeks to discover I'm a competitive rate with the rest of the industry, with broader experience to boot.
Anyway, no sense pissing and moaning about it to you, you have people to hire ;)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
if you're good, then you'll do well
Not if industry moves offshore. Consider that manufacturing once employed hundreds of engineers (mechanical, industrial, electrical, etc.). It doesn't matter how good of engineer you are, if all of the employers leave, your job is gone. Time to retrain.
I got an electrical/electronic engineering degree in the early 1980's, thinking that I would design consumer electronics. I didn't recognize that the industry was all moving offshore. There is only a very tiny consumer electronics industry left in the US. Except for marketing and sales.
Students would be well advised to consider the state of the industry when chosing a field of study. Right now the IT industry doesn't look very promising long-term. Those chosing to avoid pure IT careers are using solid reasoning.
Hello folks.
Summarising some comments so far and adding my two cents:
1. IT is a short career.
My 2c: yup. Advice:
(a) while under 30, jump frequently; contracting is best because there's no bullshit, no office politics, and some professional respect. You also learn a _lot_.
(b) Once over 30, find an SME out of the city and _stay_there_ because you won't get any more contracts. Expect to be let go at 40 with a paper-thin excuse. Save some money for retraining in a job which can only be done onshore: plumbing, plastering, welding and so on. Find a niche market, develop software at home and become an ISV.
2. In IT you are low on promotion prospects.
My 2c: yup. Advice:
Make a choice whether you want to program or become a faceless middle manager (assuming you're offered the choice).
The real reasons for being let go (in no particular order):
* You're expensive, especially compared to a worker elsewhere in the world.
* You're approaching the age of qualifying for the pension they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money.
* You're approaching the age at which you'll need the health insurance they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money.
* You're getting opinionated and developing bullshit intolerance.
Thanks for your time.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." Dave Clark, IETF
I went for an assoc in CS hopefully to get started somewhere enroute to doing programming. Got the assoc and got nowhere. ...Nope.
Did I keep going for a higher degree?
By that time I was seeing lots of long-timer programmers (10-20+ years in, yet 10-20+ years from retirement) getting out of IT entirely, because their depts were getting shredded in the name of outsourcing. And I saw lots of job ads posted asking for things like "masters deg. with several years experience in X, Y and Z...".
Asking for the very types of people who had just bailed.
And all the while, I heard ads for tech schools saying "there's still lots of IT jobs to be filled".
Oh well.
IT remains a suck field to enter: on graduation, if you're lucky enough to find an entry-level job, you had better start educating yourself for your second career since, once you hit 40, you are guaranteed to be unemployed and unemployable.
CIO=Career Is Over
Agreed. However, is that a bad thing? I personally like directly interacting with customers and showing them how to open a file. I get great satisfaction from taking a dead laptop from a tearful employee who thinks they've just lost a years work and returning to them, a few hours later, with a new laptop already set up with all their data. It's fun. It's satisfying.
I do this work for about USD$66K per year with good insurance, decent time off, reasonable autonomy, and a retirement plan that will, when that day comes, pay my basic expenses and continue to provide insurance. Is that a bad deal?
Here's my thought on that - Back in the day, I was thought of as some sort of Unix Wiz (I wasn't, but I was a good sysadmin) and I turned down several offers that would have tripled or quadrupled my salary. Those jobs would have also required me to wear a pager, work 60-hour weeks, and, frankly, would have ground me to a pulp in short order. Some people have an "always go for the money" attitude and might think I'm crazy. I hope what they do works for them. I, on the other hand, am quite happy with the path I chose.
Of course, something can always bite you on the butt. I will probably be laid off soon. This will occur close to the time that I'm eligible to retire. If it happens before I'm eligible, I'll receive a years pay for severance and a taxable lump-sum distribution of my retirement account (which would amount to about another years pay). That wouldn't be good, but I'd recover. If it happens after I'm eligible, I'll have a reduced annuity (barely enough to live on but certainly enough to act as a "personal safety net") and good insurance for life. Even my involuntary exit strategies are not all that horrendous.
In order to get to where I now am, I've given up a great deal of income over my life. I like the way things worked out. So is it a sin to aspire only to an "IT technician" job at "the lower paid end of the IT spectrum"? I don't think so.
Because I'm not sure I can make the change!8-))
seriously, in my opinion, IT would be the last thing in the world I would want to do in the computer industry.
Karma: Bad is the liberal way of saying this guy won't drink the kool aid here on slash dot. I wear my Karma with pride
Institutions that offer IT training do turn out subpar students. Then there's just hiring the wrong people: you don't hire a 20-year programming veteran who can setup his own home wifi LAN to run an IT department. Less than half of the IT professionals I know I'd consider competent.
Cases in point:
I've gotten of IT and computers, albeit I still enjoy developing OSS, and going into medicine. It's hard work that pays more and has more demand.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Yep. Took a vacation last summer to Alaska. Met an awful lot of teachers and civil service folks who'd put in their 30 years and were looking for summer houses. Everyone makes their own lifestyle choices, but based on what I saw there, as a driven late thirties guy who likes working with small dynamic companies, my advice to kids nowadays would be to find a place you like where you can afford a house on a civil service or post office job, something low stress that gives you free time on evenings and weekends, take the money you would have spent on college and buy a few rental properties, when your thirty year pension comes up, go have fun.
If you're driven to program, do small vertical software as your side business, rather than real estate. If you're driven to do something else, do that something else. But make your career something simple and with a defined retirement goal, and do the thing that you love on the side.
Because, let's face it, even if you do it that way you'll probably end up spending more time programming (or whatever else it is you love doing) than if you'd gone into it as a career, spent lots of days in meetings and digging through crap code, and been burned on it by the time you've put in your 12 hour a day six day week.
Numerous reputable journals have published articles detailing the strangling anti-free-market regulations in India. "The Economist" recently published one such article titled "Reform in India -- Democracy's drawbacks".
Numerous reputable journals have published articles detailing the strangling anti-free-market regulations in India. "The Economist" recently published one such article titled "Reform in India -- Democracy's drawbacks".
I have to call bullcrap to that one! I have lost 2 jobs in the past 5 years to outsourcing to foriegn companies. The last job was a pretty dang good job. I don't see a lot of IT management getting outsourced, just those of us in the trenches... any bets the people making the claims that outsourcing is over-blown are also the management types that magically keep their jobs through every round of layoffs and outsourcing?
op said: "like the surplus in the automobile sector (which is undergoing massive layoffs)"
you said: "What should the government do exactly?"
The WSJ had an article a day or 2 ago featuring the government-sponsored retraining programs used in Denmark. (Sorry that I can't be more exact, since the article is sitting at home on my coffee table.) There's a good start to what a government can do, instead of constantly acting like a massive Corporate-Profit Support Agency.
Actually, I contradicted myself, since a government fostering an environment of retraining has a certain benefit to corporations and other businesses.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
2. " Former Intel CEO Craig Barrett has stated that wage differentials aren't the issue and that Intel would hire more U.S. engineers if it could find them ."
That quote is a bald-faced lie. There is no shortage of engineers at the proper salary. Intel management can find plenty of American engineers if Intel management doubled salaries and boosted working conditions by, for example, eliminating the bell curve that managers use to "grade" employees. See quote #1 above. Quote #1 contradicts quote #2.
Intel simply does not want to raise salaries or to boost working conditions.
Intel's lie takes us to the third quote.
I'm a hiring manager for a company in Dallas Tx. Let me assure you that we can not even BEGIN to find enough qualified applicants to fill our programming positions (c++) in this area. We've had positions that have taken more than 8 months to fill. Our resume-to-interview ratio is under 10% (most resumes we get are VERY weak) and our interview-to-hire ratio is about the same. Meaning that even when we get a candidate that meets even the most basic of our qualifications they very rarely have the knowledge we need in our developers.
This is not an experience issue. We've hired multiple developers more or less directly out of school (along with several developers who have many years of experience). We simply look for smart people who truly understand the science of software development that can actually apply those principles to their work. The pool of developers that meet that basic criteria is VERY small from what I can tell. If they where out there, we would hire them (We're currently trying to fill 3 linux positions right now).
This phenemenon is not isolated to the U.S. Our London office is having similiar issues, finding qualified people is nearly impossible.
It is interesting to note that the H-1B visas do very little for us. We have 1 H-1B employee (holds a doctorate in computer science) and have screened quite a few. For the most part our results with H-1B have been very much the same.
The point being, there is a real shortage of competent programmers.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
Maybe I wasn't clear. My point is that these types of articles are cr@p. How do I know? Common sense. Just look around.
It's easy to tell what careers are in high demand, and which are not. Sure, some IT pros make big $$, but that is a matter of being in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills - you can't count on it, no matter how good you are.
For example, as a lawyer, with a little experience, you can realistically expect $200/year. Put the same amount of effort into IT and what can you expect? $70K? Also, IT is famous for zero job security, and you often become less valuable as you get more experience. Especially IT experience often doesn't transfer from one job to the next.
The tech industry as a whole (I'm talking not just about IT, but also electronics and, more specifically, electronics engineering and manufacturing) has only itself to blame for what is a very real problem.
As at least one other poster has pointed out, the idea of job stability in the long term (as in staying with, and progressing with, a single company for one's entire career) has gone straight out the window. What companies have forgotten is that many people (myself included) WANT job stability as part of the package.
It's a vicious cycle. Offshore workers in engineering and manufacturing don't pay taxes in the US, they don't send their kids to school in the US, and they don't buy their groceries, homes, TVs, or whatever else they want in the US.
This means a lot fewer tax dollars for the very educational institutions that are supposed to be turning out science and engineering graduates. Fewer graduates means that tech firms feel they have to resort to hiring in India, China, or wherever the talent they need is (and why they don't make use of local engineers and techies who have ALREADY been laid off is a complete mystery to me), which means even more offshore workers, and the cycle continues.
A few months back, Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote an editorial in one of the electronics industry trade journals, moaning and complaining about how our schools need to do a lot better in turning out the engineers that Intel and the rest of the industry need.
The very next day, I read a small sideline article in the business section of the local paper, saying that Intel was opening a new engineering center in India that was going to employ at least a few thousand locals.
Nowhere in these articles did I find any mention that Intel was going to go out and rehire engineering or tech people that it had previously laid off. How many ex-engineers and techies -- very highly skilled ex-engineers and techies -- are working as baristas and grocery-baggers these days?
Whenever I hear the name Andy Grove now, one word consistently comes to mind: Hypocrite.
Know what, though? There's a hidden irony, and it is one that is, one day, going to come back to bite the crap out of the companies that insist on selling themselves and our country's manufacturing base out to offshore interests.
The standard reasoning for going offshore is to save money. There are all kinds of 'official' reasons for doing so, but it usually just comes down to greed on the part of the corporate bigwigs.
When you ship work offshore, you start raising the standard of living in the countries that you're opening branches in. You're giving lots of locals a steady job and income, which raises spending and the tax base. Things in that country start getting more expensive (in other words, inflation creeps in as it does with any functioning economy).
What do you think is going to happen when the standard of living in whatever country gets high enough? It's going to get just as expensive to manufacture offshore as it was ONshore. Any savings that were once gained from offshoring are going to evaporate.
I'm just waiting and watching (from a very stable position in civil service, thankfully) for the whole structure of offshoring and outsourcing to implode under its own weight, and I'm willing to bet that the companies that once embraced the idea won't be able to handle it any better than they handled the dot-bomb meltdown.
Break out the popcorn...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I was laid of from General Dynamics in 2001, held a TS clearance, 20 years experience, bachelor's in math/comp sci, etc.
After I was laid off, I applied to all the major defense contractors for years. Nobody was interested in the least.
A truly free market for labor would mean that H1-B visas wouldn't even be required because there would be no immigration controls and people could just move in as they pleased without worrying about visas.
A truly free market requires that *all* participants be engaged in the process. As the OP pointed out places like China and India *do not* have free markets; the process isn't at all bi-directional. Without this sort of bidirectionality a non-free market can easily damage a free one, especially if members of the free market are complicit in exploiting the unequal relationship for short-term gain.
Max
Do you have evidence that the free market does not work? Stop your bitching.
The basic law of economics is that a shortage of a resource (e.g. labor) means that the resource is undervalued.
Oh. Wait. I see the problem. You don't want to raise salaries.
Well, this just means that either your screening and interviewing process is unrealistically strict, or that you are not willing to pay enough to get the best talent. It can be seen all the time in job postings, the position requires the applicant to know everything there is to know under the sun, yet it is a relatively low level position with somewhat low pay. Instead of trying to find people that fit your requirements exactly you should hire people that have the aptitude and the basic knowledge to do what you need them to do. This might require for you to give them some time to learn as well. Of course, you could just pay more and then you would have no shortage of good people.
A successfully completed contract would be a "very good reason" for leaving. Reaction will depend upon what you are applying for, too. It's not hard to get typecast as a "short contracts person" and have someone who is looking for a long term duration employee to view that type of history as an ill fit to his needs. The opposite can be true as well. Then again, a lot of places are so hard up for anyone that can correctly spell "IT" that they don't care about your history.
There are obviously exceptions to every rule, but someone who feels comfortable taking a series of short contracts or hopping more frequently probably doesn't need to read advice in a slashdot comment. Like most things in programming, advice and rules are the things you follow until you know why they should be ignored. A path of working at places for at least years is a good rule of thumb for getting that experience if you don't already have it.
Wanna compete instead of whining? Offer better value (studying instead of partying in the uni) or a smaller price.
Disclaimer: I'm a white western male, I was quite lazy at the uni and I thank god that I've got a nice job without fear of outsourcing.
When a labor shortage arises in the market for high-tech labor, such politicians attempt to damage the correcting force of the shortage by injecting H-1B workers into the market.
You have that exactly backwards! The correcting force is the world market responding. The synthetic limitation on workers is the political meddling. It might be political meddling you happen to like, but facts are facts. The interferer in market forces are the restrictions against foreign workers entering this country not "injecting H-1B workers into the market." (sic!)
C//
Hell I think it's the perfect answer for the perpetual interview question:
What's your biggest weakness?
I'm kind of mercenary.
also good
Giving stupid answers to stupid questions.
Both help weed out tight assed bosses that just don't work for me anyhow. Saves time for everyone.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just want to make a comment here... I feel that a particular aspect of the whole debate is not often addressed. The question should be: why is labor in India cheaper than the US? A few reasons:
1) taxes. There are none in India. Why? because there are no social services, and whatever infrastructure exists is privately owned( in some cases even water is privately owned )
2) cost of living. low because agricultural workers are basically living in a different country. And guess what, one day, probably very soon they will start to seriously ask why that is. These two indias divide typically along religous lines. The muslim situation is likely to be exascerbated by the Asia boom.
The other side to super cheap labor in Asia is super expensive wars waged by the US to keep the peace. It wont last forever.
Let's face it, IT's job is to put people out of work, or to reduce the skill level required to do a job. If we're good at it, we can also put ourselves out of work.
This means a few things:
These things are not true with many other industries. Backhoe operators don't remove other people's jobs. Civil engineers don't cause construction workers to lose jobs. And neither of these groups are doubling their efficiency every 18 months :)
Reasons IT will suffer:
If the average joe does not understand IT complexity, then they don't understand our billing rates and cannot justify our training and salary. IT is still fighting the concepts that software is cheap to make and hardware is cheap to buy and maintain. Clearly, we know that this is not the case.
The Solution:
MCSD.NET != P.Eng.
We need a Professional Software Engineer (or equivalent) designation to even begin the process of justifying our "exhorbitant" salaries and to bring to light the understanding of IT's inherent complexities.
If we are viewed as mechanics, then people will pay us as mechanics. If we are viewed as Engineers (and can deliver as such), then people will pay us as Engineers. MS, Sun and RedHat certs. are only part of the picture, we need a self-governing body like engineers, accountants, doctors and lawyers or we will simply become greaseless mechanics and painters that never get dirty. And we don't get respect for that type of labour.
(not to get too far off track, but O'Reilly seems to like playing with hornet's nests with his stings that he gets too regularly) He's no real shining example of freedom, but he sure seems to like his revenge. The case speaks for itself. Between his railing of France for standing up to globalization and doing a right-winger's cheap shot in return when he got called for something, I'd say he'd have to have all the L^HDiebold machines rigged anywhere just to get a vote (or get Murdoch to buy his state's legislators to agree).
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
"The globalization of IT is an opportunity. [..blah, blah.] The good news is that the next generation of IT professionals will find a global job market with opportunities to live and work in many different countries."
Where does this idiot live, the EU? Out here in the rest of the world, there's this thing called nation-states, which use arbitrary concepts like citizenship, immigration laws, and work permits to control who gets to play in their labor pool. That these won't apply to anyone starting college now, or 20 years from now is a WSJ wet-dream.
Mr. Mitchell is talking out of his ass, and this claim leaves the rest of his propaganda piece suspect.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I am back at University at 24 because after 4 years in IT I really started to believe it was a dead end. Now I am studying secondary humanities education - teaching can't be outsourced and provides much greater stability and benefits in the long run. It is a career that will still be there in 40 years and I couldn't be sure of that with IT.
The way I see it the field is being attacked from two directions. I think that the software is going to get good enough where most of the mundane management tasks will be automated away. It will require a skilled engineer or two to come in and set it up and then it will practically run itself. I think that MS will compete with linux/unix on the server side with a OS that is smarter and easier to manage - and with their resources I think they will succeed at least to the point of needing fewer human resrouces in IT in many oranizations. Their advertising to managment will be something like buy Server 2010 and you will need less than half the IT people. Even that initial setup of this new infrastructure may well be done by the services arm of an IBM, HP, Sun or the like bundled with the purchase of the software/hardware. The lower level end-user support over the phone for larger organizations will be offshored (I worked for a large international bank and that had already happened to their Helpdesk. It was in the process of working its way up from there) and the smaller ones won't pay much for local helpdesk staff.
There will be a few niche jobs where buisinesses either prefer or are required to have somebody local and onsite - like law firms, government or the defense contractors - but in the end I think there are too many competant people out there and will not be enough jobs for them all to remain in the field in 10-15 years time as things progress down their current road.
I hope that I am wrong but I felt not making the change now while I can would be gambling with my career and my future. You can say what you want about teaching but it is much less of a gamble...
"This is not an experience issue. We've hired multiple developers more or less directly out of school."
WTF does "more or less" mean?
Either you hire people straight out of school or you don't.
If you do, congratulations. Maybe other employers will learn from you.
If you don't, then shut up. If there's a shortage of people with experience, it's because nobody will hire people without experience.
Employers seem to think there's some magic way to get experience without being hired first.
You know, I absolutely loved Edmonton and I wouldn't have the slightest problem with the twenty below zero winters as I'm originally from Alaska. But that would be my problem. I'm 'merican would someone in Edmonton hire someone from 'merica?
Not looking for work right now, had to move to Europe for my last job tho' so if the labor market gets tight I'm willing to ship over seas... the problem is connecting with sponsors who would be willing to get you the work permits. So when are we going to get the universal working permit? When will citizenship not matter anymore? I may be willing to go anywhere they need my skills but not everywhere that they need my skills is willing to take me.
[signature]
http://www.computerworld.com/careertopics/careers/ skills/story/0,10801,109600,00.html
is in slip-shod state. Sophistication is rare but where it is embraced and deployed, it's influence and results ripple through the entire scope of IT and its affiliates. This has enable swarm of little guys feeding off it, producing work nowhere near the sophistication, to subsist on it and some making fortunes off it.
The sustenance provided by this sophistication is beyond our comprehension and it lasts lifetimes after lifetimes. The fact that we do not understand this state of affair, makes us novice capitalists truly in need of understanding rather than learning and mastering technology itself. This is the holy grail to our quest for an answer - not just the state of IT, but if you find it, the answer may have the same influence as the question that give rise to it.
"I can only imagine"
No problem - now it's 10% over cost.
To me, it also looks like the car dealership lured the customer back by increasing the price...
A few years ago, I looked at Toyota Camrys.... The standard dealer markup for the lower models was about $2k... But for the XLE model, which only cost 1k-2k more, the markup was $5k. I can only guess that they felt they could inflate the price to make people *think* they were getting something good.
Then again, most car salesmen would probably try to sell ice to Eskimos, with an extended warranty, free ice trays, and taste protection...
For me, at least that holds true. Sure, as many suggested I could get a job in many "trades". And while some of them I would even enjoy doing and make good money doing them, I am not physically able to do them. Construction? Not able to stand on my feet that many hours a day. Plumbing or carpentry? Not able to easily get up and down on my knees if needed (nor excessive bending/squatting for long periods of time).
Basically in college I shot for some kind of desk job. Something that would just pay the bills but allow me to actually do it. Something that didn't require me to be on my feet for 8 hours a day. I mean, literally anyone can get a job at some place like Wal-Mart where they hire anyone from ex-con's to elderly or handicapped people. I could, but I would never be able to do my job as I would need to sit after maybe 30 or 45 minutes.
While I do believe correcting health problems and excersise can fix my health issues in this matter, as Evil said he took time off to do this before going to work. While he was only "on the sidelines" for a short while, it would take me years to get into a position where I could at the very least stand on my legs for 8 hours being a cashier at Wal Mart making my $6 an hour. This is just not an option for some people in similar situations, while it would be more beneficial to your health in the long run, shooting for the job(s) you CAN do in the short term to pay bills and live vs spending a year or more getting into shape just do to a basic job (in which case you'll probably run out of money long before you accomplish that) is the only option you have left.
Which is where I am at. I went to college, and while I didn't get a degree I still say it's the most important thing you can do if you have the time. You don't always need the money, while you may not get grants (money you do not need to pay back) just about anyone can get student loans. In that term if you can make the time you can get the education which in turn gets you the degree.
As I said I went to college, my field of interest was computer science. Not so much IT but IT/Tech. I enjoyed fiddling around the inside of a computer case, fixing hardware, installing new stuff, etc than I did admining a small network. And believe it or not yes you can build a PC/upgrade a PC/repair a PC while sitting down perfect normal as if standing up.
So you know what kind of paper work I needed. At the very least an Associates Degree. Most businesses locally won't even consider your application unless you have a "two year degree" which in this case is an Associates (the lowest you can earn, as most people know) or in some cases a four year degree (Bachelors, Masters etc).
The degree is where I hit a small, personal, snafu. When the RA's and student advisers were explaining what it entails to get a degree, I was fucking shocked. I wouldn't be nesscarily tested on my field of study or knowledge of such field. Instead I would be required to take several extra courses in basically "general knowledge". Such as biology, literature, etc They said colleges do this so students get a more well rounded knowledge of things.
Now while I did understand these courses would be "college level" I was still flabbergasted. I'm not exactly a model student. While I can learn and do not have any learning disabilities, I often require lots of repitition to understand something. So you can imagine how hard highschool was. Now again granted, they were different courses, they still were on subjects I had already studyed and passed in high school. Biology? check, learned all the mitosis meosis and frog dissecting I can handle for a lifetime. Literature? I don't think Dickens or Poe wrote something we didn't get a chance to read and anaylze for weeks at a time (as well as many other authors obviously). While my grammar online may be, lacking, I can easily sit down and write an essay, novella, etc as most tests or classes would require.
Having already aquired over $10,000
Aw Frell this
The original poster claimed he wanted a free labor market, when in reality what he wants is for the government to grant U.S. workers an artificial labor monopoly by excluding the competition. Of course that would be good for U.S. workers, since they could then demand a higher price for their labor - just as any monopolistic cartel can demand higher prices when there isn't any competition. Workers asking congress to decrease/limit H1-B visas is exactly analogous to General Motors asking congress to make it illegal for anyone to import and sell foreign cars because their profits are down and customers aren't willing to pay their asking price when cheaper alternatives are available.
If a business were trying to pull this sort of stunt, most everyone on slashdot would be up in arms about how the companies were just trying to legislate their way into a monopoly because they couldn't handle the competition.
Your final statement about murdering competition is ridiculous. A free market doesn't mean an anarchy with no laws - it simply means that there are no artificial government controls on who is allowed to supply goods/services, who is allowed to purchase goods/services, and what price the goods/services may sell for. Laws against murder only interfere with the labor free-market if you're a hitman.
The article is on the front page of the 2006 March 21 Tuesday WSJ, concerning the Danish system of retraining. I suppose that the reporting could be significantly slanted, and the single detailed example may be a lone success story ... however, since the WSJ is such a pro-Capitalist rag, I'm satisfied that the info is balanced.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
This statement if false. How much "American goods" are the Indians and Chinese buying?
There would be a lot more "good technologists" if companies would post their entry level jobs, and train the people that they hire. Instead, 99% of the job ads I've seen over the last 4 years are looking for people with 5-10 years of experience, and the "entry level jobs" (of which I've seen maybe 5) all require experience with things that could only be had while at the company...
Most of the high value stuff is bought from US companies. Cars (GM/Ford), shoes (Nike/Reebok), computers (Dell/IBM/Sun, Intel and AMD chips), bandwidth...
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
Right on brother!!! ;)
Thank You, you've saved me some typing.
... Russ Feingold. He ain't perfect, but he's the guy who's been consistently RIGHT about pretty much everything since 1990 from globalization to the Iraq War, Russ was right.
My 2008 candidate
Russ is for US!!!!
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And where may I ask are those "high value items made"? Are the Nike's made in San Francisco. Is that GM assembled in America? And what about those computers.
No doubt that it's the suits in the US that are running the show right now. But it won't take long for the foreign suits to realize that they don't need the Americans. Furthermore, I'm not sure the American suits even CARE. By the time the American economy collapses, they will have made their tens of millions and have retired next to a golf course. Their golden years will be comfy with lots of cheap as dirt house labor from people desperate to eat.
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Ultimately labor IS the economy. What you perceive as the "economy" is just the greed of the investor class, most of whom never had to sweat for their revenue.
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The issue here is that American (and European) workers fought hard battles to CREATE those high wage standards. These are political and social institutions. The foreigners are "jumping the fence" and short-circuiting everything the labor movement fought hard to earn.
The answer is NOT the depression of wages in the first world. The answer is the ELEVATION of wages in the 3rd world. This is a POLITICAL issue, not a trade issue. You can trade until the cows come home, the bare facts of the matter is if you don't have the political clout to fight for decent working standards and your proper share of the spoils of your labor, you'll ALWAYS end up with crap.
We cannot make anyone in the world richer by making ourselves poorer. It's time to SCRAP free trade and put up preferential trade systems that reward countries that treat labor fairly and punish countries (through progessive tariff levels) that treat labor poorly (like China, China, China and
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Then again, so many of these are dummy H1-B and LZ-1 ads that are meant to be impossible to fill. They are put down and left there to rot for twelve months so the company can bring in their foreigners. No Americans need apply.
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