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Lowering the Odds of Being Outsourced
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld points to a study by the Society for Information Management, which concludes that the best thing young IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is beef up their management skills. The article quotes Thomas Tanaka, a recent computer engineering graduate, describing a recent job interview: 'While the Santa Clara, Calif., resident has generally been looking for entry-level software jobs with IT vendors, he recently had an interview with a financial firm looking to fill an in-house IT position. That's where his lack of business background was exposed.'"
eventually we'll have too many managers and have to outsource them too :-0
on a side note I just got promoted and a 16.change% pay hike Yea me!
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The person responsible for the first post has been outsourced....I guess they didn't read the article.
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
Professor Weinstein, if you want to know his name.
And a lot of people listened to him and minored in business. The problem is, when companies require x years of experience managing or in engineering/IT to get a job, where will we get those people?
I don't get it.
not that we have enought manager who think they can manage but have absolutly no management skill. Now tons of IT people who also have no management skill are forced to manage too. Oh holy manage-o-runi!
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
from replacing your job.
Even the overseas marketing skills.
It all comes down to the economics. If you want to stop it, you either have to affect the demand side (by corporate reforms, limits on L1/L2/H1B visas, or a dearth of skilled workers worldwide) or the supply side (by say, making it so Indian tech workers start getting paid more, as is already happening).
Me, I love working for the feds in medicine. That works a lot better.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Isn't that sort of like saying "stop being an IT worker and start being a manager"? Seriously, if tech skills aren't their number one selling point, why are they even trying for IT-specific jobs anyway? I guess someone with management/negotiation skills AND IT skills would be a good manager in an IT department, but if you've got management/negotiation skills, that opens up doors to many departments.
No- really. For anybody who has been out of college for more than 2 years, that's what the article recommends. No advice if you're not a people person, hate people, and went into computers to avoid working with people. No advice if you're not a natural entrapreneur running your first ecommerce site before you've left the dorms in college.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
So the best way for a technical worker to survive in the current environment is to not be a technical worker. Great!
You ever wonder what's at the finish line of the race to the bottom? I think that eventually we're just going to get to the point where everything in the world is owned by Americans and nothing in the world is produced by Americans, such that if you're an American, either you're (1) managing the people in the third world who actually make things, (2) selling the things made in the third world to other americans, or (3) doing nothing at all.
That we are -ALL- going to be managers.
It is really sad to see them lying to us (and maybe even themselves) so blatantly.
Many of our outsourced positions now include outsourcing the project lead level as well.
The only thing that is going to save our jobs is higher wages overseas.
Why should you spend $50 grand and 4 years of your life to get a degree with NO FUTURE?!?
Sure if you are a genius- go for it. But if you are joe average "B" / low "A" type person- there are many easier degrees with better job prospects than IT. IT SUCKS.
No respect, no pay, no security, rampant age discrimination, constant retraining- and even then you have to be "lucky" to get experience at the hot new technology or you are out on your kiester in as little as 2-3 years.
Don't listen to the propaganda/lies that are suddenly being pushed over the last few months (in conjunction with the H1B issue oddly enough... HMMM!).
Lots of poeple can be hard workers.
Not many people can be good manager types.
Not many people can be hard workers for -LESS- than minimum wage when they are trying to pay back a $50 grand debt that they -CANNOT- declare bankruptcy to get out of when they get the shaft.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Check.
Everybody did notice that they study was for Information Managment, no? People think that we will keep managment here, while sending the tech jobs elsewhere. Not likely. In fact, as the tech jobs go, so will the managerial jobs. Anyinterface position will be those that can live in both cultures easily.
Personally, I would argue if you really do not wish to be outsourced, then become a marketer or become the company owner.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
...outsource yourself! See the world, earn big dollars tax free!
Or something...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
The best thing a young IT worker can do to avoid being outsourced is re-train for a career in health-care. For some reason, nurses and pharmacists have a much harder time phoning their work in.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
is to get into management? doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of getting into IT? That's kinda like saying the best way to avoid losing your job in the steel mill is to get a degree in medicine.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here's one easy to google for.
i cle10.htm
... article continues...
Search for "Lakh inflation salary programmer".
Lakh is one of the currencies in india (about the same as our dollar?).
http://www.the-week.com/25dec04/currentevents_art
At 13.8 per cent, average salary hike will be the highest in India
By K. Sunil Thomas
Charu Malik is a quick learner. After finishing her master's at the Delhi School of Economics last June, the 22-year-old joined Pipal, a research firm in south Delhi, at an annual salary of Rs 4.8 lakh. If Charu thought she had landed a decent bundle, there were more, nicer, surprises in store--the company had two appraisals every year. This meant her salary went up by a whopping 40 per cent within six months, and that is not including the chunky bonus she got.
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When their wages reach 40 to 50% of US wages then the outsourcing will be less of an issue and -maybe- wages and job security will recover here in the States.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Own the company. Unless you actually own at least part of the firm's capital, IP or bricks and mortar, you are either going to have to compete with foreign white coller labor or illegal blue collar immigrants. You just invest your money in what gives the best return.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
That's like saying "If you can't have bread, eat cake"!
MBAs are quickly becoming the most diluted degree you can get. Lately, it seems that everyone is getting an MBA, and they are becoming increasingly easier to obtain.
"Get an MBA" is the new mantra because everyone assumes managers can't be outsourced. I think that's a load. Yes, if you're an American company, then by definition you're going to need at least a few managers in the US, but the more you outsource your workers the more of your management will have to be moved offshore as well.
Hell, if McDonald's can outsource drive through order takers, I don't think any profession is really safe.
India Aims to Tame Soaring IT Wages is the headline for anyone too lazy to click.
Man, you really need that seminar!
That's why most of us can't do the management thing, and why we probably won't be able to do anything else.
Those of us with Asperger's (or below average social skills that don't reach the level of Asperger's) will be unemployable. I wonder, when we turn to a life of crime, what's going to happen? I mean, will there be a huge increase in hacking attacks, or just lots of weird people sleeping on the sidewalks like you see in NYC?
>> best thing young IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is beef up their management skills
Yeah, that and taking an 80% pay cut.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
Not to pick nits, but a lakh just means 100,000 of something. So the girl in the article, being paid "Rs 4.8 lakh," was being paid 480,000 rupees per annum.
At about 40 rupees to the dollar, you can see that her pay in dollars -- $12,000 -- is quite low. Even though salaries in India are rising dramatically, they've still got a long way to go before they close the gap with US salaries (especially in fields like tech, which are on the rise even in the US).
And now for my spot of commentary:
In the long run, those jobs that can be outsourced effectively, *will* be. The corporations that form the basis of our free-market economy are compelled BY LAW to reduce costs as much as possible, in order to increase margins and enhance shareholder value.
As one would expect, not every job can be outsourced efficiently. At the moment the pendulum is swinging TOWARD outsourcing, as greedy CEOs experiment with new ways to lower the bottom line. However, there have been (and will continue to be) numerous incidents where jobs are inappropriately outsourced. Given a few decades, the economies of "insourcing" countries will rise as money floods in, corporate types will learn which jobs need to stay in country, and the system will reach equilibrium.
Those who don't like what the future has to hold can choose to move to a country with a controlled economy, or find a protected niche such as health care, palm reading or burger flipping -- none of which are amenable to outsourcing.
I find the Related to links interesting here
Related to this topic
> Aging Workers, Automation Portend IT Hiring Problems
> Microsoft security chief to step down
> Government offshore report becomes political hot potato
> Senate Bill Seeks to Raise H-1B Visa Cap to 115,000
> Dell will double staff in India to 20,000
I especially like the last two which seems to say that if you want to lower the odds of being outsourced closer to zero, then stay out of IT! Of course the young don't need to hear that from me, they're already avoiding IT like the plague compared to years ago.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
No, lakh means 100,000. Rs is an abbreviation for rupee, which is the currency. Right now, there's around 45 Rs to a dollar.
Maybe that will mean that those same IT people who also have no IT skills will be forced to manage too. If you have an incompetent person, is it better that they are in management, or IT?
I'm a technical consultant and am the "bad guy" in a lot of places. No matter what anyone says to the contrary, the final decision almost invariably rests on cost. I can deliver a solution to many companies for far cheaper than in-house IT staff. For example, I've had to deploy an email solution to a 50+ employee company. I was able to do the job for $6K, plus cost of hardware. Their IT guy -- who gets $60K/year -- had already invested a month on the task and didn't seem anywhere close to completion. I did the job in two weeks.
And I see this in many places. There was a time when I would work closely with a company's IT staff (or person) and count on him/her being technically competent. I would come in only because their IT support was too busy. Part of my duties would be to train the staff and then leave. Not anymore. Now every day I meet IT workers who are inept and only concerned about making it to retirement. And all I hear, day in and day out, are complaints from the IT staff. They browse the Internet for two hours a day, have two hours of breaks (1 hr lunch, 1 hour at the coffee machine, chatting about video games), then complain about the amount of work they have to do. Here's a clue -- spend an hour a day doing the work and it'll be a lot less work left to do.
And of course I'm not speaking for every IT department. I know that management has absolutely no clue about what you do. Management doesn't care about people, no matter they tell you. If you want to keep from being outsourced, make damn well sure that the alternative is much more expensive. Keep your customers happy and they'll come back to you. Works for me.
If I read the article correctly, it talks about business skills, whereas most of the comments so far relate to management.
They're not the same thing. Many of us would hate to be managers, and/or would suck at it, and that's o.k.
Entrepreneurship is a lot like that part of a MMPORG in which you go out and get the gold from the monsters; management is like keeping track of your inventory of potions & arrows. If you like the former and hate the latter, don't worry .... you're normal. You just need to admit you like being an entrepreneur, even if it's within the confines of your cubicle.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Then you are missing key skills. Do you think companies like workers that are missing key skills?
C++!
Ensuring indespensibility since 1983!
Now with even less keywords!
May the Maths Be with you!
I've had this running theory about the the results of outsourcing and globalization where america basically becomes a nation of managers over the other countries where cost of living is cheaper and so the labor. 3rd world countries would become the business departments in a global business. That is until the giant spagetti monster-aliens visit us and we find some way of exploiting them too.
____ plex
IT is to enable people to make money, not to make money in of itself. If you can't come up with technical solutions which drive that goal, it doesn't matter what you can do technically.
I know, I know, you didn't think you were going to 6 years of school to help Bob in sales increase the stock value. You thought you were training to make all of your 1337 virtual networks interface in new and creative/exciting ways with the latest database. You were wrong. Nobody cares about your network. Nobody cares about your storage. Nobody cares if you use Linux or Windows. They want to know how you can help them "do", which in most cases is make money. IT is somewhere in the social hierarchy around Janitors: "Don't tell me what shoes leave less scuff marks, just clean up the damn spot!"
If you can't express how you are able to leverage technology to help them make money, you're applying for the wrong job, I would recommend a job in higher education. Lots of tech jobs where the newest, latest and greatest gets applied to making newer and greater.
"For some reason, nurses and pharmacists have a much harder time phoning their work in."
What do you think immigrants are for?
--
The "are you a script" word for today is illusion. As in escaping outsourcing is an illusion.
No offense, but I've worked for companies that hired managers with MBAs and I've worked for (the vast majority of) companies that "promote" programmers into management positions. Never underestimate the value of working with someone who is actually trained to do their job. It kinda pissed me off that I went to university, studied hard, passed my exams with distinction and then have to take orders from a guy who came bottom in his class doing the exact same degree. Managers who are not trained to manage are the bane of the IT industry.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You don't have to do anything. The reason that people get outsourced like this is because companies are managed by people who do not value their technical personnel at all, and think that a company that only has managers actually has some value.
If you don't want to be outsourced, work for a company that thinks that they actually need to produce something, instead of some drunken fraternity party managed by drunken frat boys.
Keep pictures of your boss is compromising positions with farm animals. Unfortunately, if you don't have a boss that's really into farm animals, you're pretty much screwed. I also beleive it's just a matter of time before management starts being outsourced too, so "brush up your managerial skills" is a pretty naive response to the problem. Nope, I'm afraid threatening to tell the world about your boss' sheep fetish is really your only hope.
A friend who works at Universal told me that her manager prevents jobs for her subordinates from being out-sourced by requiring all new hires must know the abbreviations for each state.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
which concludes that the best thing young IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is beef up their management skills.
Sure! Let's all become donut-stuffing middle managers! Then we can all make the house payments!
Best thing IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is to reduce their cost of living by moving in to the urine-soaked refrigerator box behind Clem's Seafood Grill at the beach. Don't plan on anything important like health insurance or light. Forget having a family or a home. Just plan on a non-stop string of benefit-less underpaid jobs working for lying fuck rat bastard cheat chair-wedged-ass hairpiece moneygrab space-age-greased greed on wheels. That's the social contract now. Work your ass off getting an education and then get FUCKED OVER UNTIL YOU STARVE OR RETIRE.
This has nothing to do with profits or business. They fire people in order to make them suffer. Management fires people because they can, and it's wrong. Simple as that.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Right with you man!
It would be nice if these articles would useful for the non people, people here. One of the big joys of working with computers is the lack of people.
2000$ a week, plenty of housewives/eyecandy and absolutely no chance of being outsourced
If none of the candidates are populist, then write "Bill O'Reilly" on the ballot.
I'm not sure if switching over to management would be a good idea. If anything, management is easy to outsource. They're so out of touch with the reality of the company's everyday business that they can just as well reside on Mars.
Snide comments aside, the idea of getting management skills up is not so far fetched. I'm one test short of being a certified bank auditor. Add in a well rounded knowledge programming (including ABAP), a bit over 8 years of experience in computer and network security and a few more goodies that can make some impression on my resume. And so far, it's never been a problem to find a well paying job.
If you can "only" punch code, you're replacable. Yes, your code will blow anything created in India out of the water, it's 10x faster and 10x more secure, 10x easier to read and 10x more stable. But it's also 10x as expensive. And your management doesn't give a rat's behind about secure, stable and efficient code. Security doesn't matter (until shi. hits the fan, and by then the client has paid), stability is something the client has to deal with and efficiency is unnecessary when you have machines that have 1000x the horsepower needed to run any office application. Management wants cheap code! So try to have some "additional value". Give your prospective employer something he can't easily hand over to India.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Excellent!
Learned something new today.
If they can maintain 10% inflation, then it would take roughly 7 years for her salary to double to 24k U.S. However, as the article says an unknown portion of her compensation is in bonuses, trips, new cars, and other benefits. My "bonus" last year was about $160.
I have seen (and some part of one of the linked articles in this thread refers to) rates more like 20% referred to. At that rate, it would only take about 4 years to double. So even by those "optimistic" estimates, it will be 8 to 12 years before there is probably no savings for outsourcing.
That is a pretty brutal period for anyone trying to get an IT job with a huge student loan debt on their back. I tell everyone to avoid IT. My daughter went into business.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
* C) The e-commerce Web site he started last year, for which he negotiates prices for his products -- imported herbal supplements -- with overseas suppliers?
Shah's degree and technical skills might land him the interview. But his entrepreneurial skills and business savvy set him apart from the pack
Herbal supplements? So he ran a penis pill spam ring from his mother's basement? And now employers are falling over eachother to hire him?
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Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
I wish I'd had your professor. It took me a while to figure out that, as technology people, our value comes down to two things: how well we can document business requirements, and how good we are in some domain. And if you can document business requirements, your competency in some domain becomes secondary. So the question becomes, how do you get the experience if you don't have the experience? And the answer is: you find whatever the hell you can, fight your way into it, and then hold onto that job for dear life until you have five years and some certifications.
Finding God in a Dog
Are you out of your fucking mind? If we spent nearly as much time with our management skills as we do with our technological skills, we'd not only own your company, but you'd be licking our feet like the gods we already are. You management types should already know by now (and I've been in two management positions already,) that you're too busy trying to keep up with the newest business scam instead of trying to keep up with the exacting needs of network security and technology. Give us a break, quit outsourcing American jobs to India, and give us a fucking chance. Until then, I'm more than content working at a fast-food joint where their 'computers' are 486-DX2/4 touchscreen registers. All I do is cook food and on occasion show a person how to operate the overly-basic touchscreen register, now, and I'm happy, because my skills in computers not only save the franchise that I am working for money, but it also gives me a higher pay rate, even though I'm a mere 'cook/line-worker-on-call-to-fix-register-problems ' employee.
Yea, you heard that right. I get paid more than a Taco Bell manager, and I'm only a line-cook that has more technological knowledge than he has. Isn't that sad, guys? I make $11 an hour whereas our manager only makes $8.50. You all might as well try to hit up the fast food industry, where you can stop fraudulent serving times and fix register problems on the fly since it all runs DOS 6.22+
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The corporations that form the basis of our free-market economy are compelled BY LAW to reduce costs as much as possible, in order to increase margins and enhance shareholder value.
Bullshit. They do it to increase their bonuses. Absent blatant corruption or theft, there's very little the shareholders can do but sue, which they'll do no matter what the officers do.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I interview lots of tech folks. The things that set the best of the best apart are leadership skills, ability to think in a deep analytical fashion that starts with looking at the assumptions, curiousity and ability to communicate with good, articulate answers and thoughtful questions.
Very few techies have these skills - anyone that does is so amazingly useful to us that we'd never be able to oursource what they do.
The problem is that I don't know if these skills are the sort of thing you can just learn. I've seen plenty of techie MBAs that have no aptitude for leading.
Can this stuff really be learned?
We are becoming a nation of suits...
The corporations that form the basis of our free-market economy are compelled BY LAW to reduce costs as much as possible, in order to increase margins and enhance shareholder value.
No, they aren't. Fiduciary duty implies no such thing. Quit spreading misinformation. I'm very sick of seeing this lie.
Corporations are bound to their charter, which may include things such as "no outsourcing" or "no buying foreign copper" or similar restrictions.
Even if it doesn't, there's no law that compels people running a public corporation to always "reduce costs as much as possible". Otherwise it would be illegal to not go with the lowball bidder on every contract, regardless of their suitability.
People running a public corporation have a duty not to blatently waste or steal money, and that's about as far as fiduciary duty goes.
Another extremely important point that seems to get lost on socialists such as yourself, is that most of the companies in the US are not public, and never will be.
And they aren't all small companies either. From Forbes: Cargill, Koch Industries, Mars, Pricewaterhousecoopers, Publix Super Markets, Bechtel, Ernst & Young, Cox Enterprises, Toys "R" Us, Fidelity Investments, Swift & Co., SC Johnson & Co., Boise Cascade, Giant Eagle, Gulf Oil, Hallmark Cards, Levi Strauss, Hearst, Neiman Marcus, Bloomberg, Colonial Group, Kohler, Wegman's Food Market, 84 Lumber, Mervyn's, Booz Allen Hamilton, McKinsey, Perdue Farms, JR Simplot, Wawa, Cumberland Farms, Edward Jones, Gilbane, and E&J Gallo Winery.
And that's just a few.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Let's bring every tax-shelter-seeking company in the world back home... http://www.fairtax.org/
Even before the Age of the Outsource came upon us, it was always a good idea to have multiple skillsets, even within a given discipline. However, I'd say that from the standpoint of avoiding being "rightsized" it's just as important to to keep the people who make such decisions aware of your value. That requires yet another skillset: politics. It's typical of software and engineering types who sit in their cubicles all day to be shocked when they get let go: they may feel (often correctly!) that their value to the company is sufficient to keep them on. What they don't often understand is that it's asking a lot to expect that information to somehow (by osmosis, telepathy or some other more direct means) to float upwards to the decision-making levels. If you're known as the "driver guy" and they can find some Indian dude to do (what appears to be) the same thing for a fraction of the cost ... well. The fact that you not only write drivers, but write proposals and specs, API documentation, user manuals, handle the occasional tough customer problem, help train salespeople and are an invaluable source of product information for everyone from engineering to marketing doesn't make a damn bit of difference if the guy pulling the trigger doesn't know it. Sure, your fellow employees may be devastated after you're gone, hell your entire division may implode without you, but that won't do you any good.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not to rain on your parade, but your logic depends on a system with no rules.
Fortunately for everyone, the system is full of ways to keep all the jobs from being outsourced. The only rational reason in pure economic terms to outsource a job is a wide disparity of resources. So wide that it makes up for the enormous infrastructure costs of exporting it.
What we have here instead are a set of artificial rules we've set up that make stuff from one place much less expensive in tokens than stuff from another place. This is called a trade imbalance.
It's not that your pure laze faire system does not hold truth. It does, but it would never really work on a large scale, because large scale systems depend on order, something that system is woefully incapable of providing.
Now in today's imperfect world the best thing to do is to take a good look at a situation and make some hard calls about what rules we need and want. Want an efficient system for IT? Keep it local unless there is no one who has the skills required and needs a job. Then you allow the jobs to go to the next country over.
We really would benefit immensely from some logical tariffs. The word sounds bad, but then so does global depression, a term we are becoming more and more weary of.
In my experiences on both side of the interviewer's chair, it's the extras. This article goes into some, but I'd say not far enough. If you want to survive in IT, be more than an IT person or be a hell of a specialist.
Being a programmer-turned-Project Manager, that transition makes it painfully aware that being good at a job in IT is often far more than having IT skills (just as good management is more than about basic business skills). My most vivid example was hiring a consultant who had less IT experience than some of the other programmers, but his other skils (management, experience in manfuacturing, business knowledge), let him code more than just good code, he got the code we and the customers needed. And his bug count and need for revision were incredibly small.
The one thing that annoys me is people act like there's a lack of such skills ONLY in IT.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I'm an coder who moved into the business. I have worked with a lot of IT people and I've had business projects worked on by several IT departments. The most important thing a coder can have is an understanding of the business. If a coder doesn't understand the business, I have to write the specifications so detailed they might as well be pseudo-code. If a coder does understand the business then rather than me just describing what I want, we can collaborate to work out what needs to be done, because we share the same language (in my case 2, because I can speak IT and they can speak business). It is much more efficient, problems are found earlier, fixed more easily and ideas come from BOTH business and the coders. IT people are smart, if they understand the business enough to come up with ideas, they're likely to be good ideas.
You wouldn't try coding a web browser without understanding how to use the web. Unless you understand the business for which you're coding, your input to processes will be minimal and you will constantly be reacting to user requests you didn't see coming. If you can gain an understanding of the business, you can take the initiative.
no one has suggested moving to India??
I have people skills dammit! I'm good with people. I deal with the customers so the engineers don't have to. What the hell is wrong with you people???
Most are net negative producers who have never actually done anything usefull.
I worked with an office full of MBA consultants. Most thought it was insightfull to tell us the profit = (revenue - costs).
Never met such patronizing morons in my life.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I grew up in Scotland and for some reason i ended up making a bet with a friend that I could learn the names of all 50 states by the next morning. Wasn't really very difficult.
I'm sorry, but I see this type of solution only as a way to prolong the problem. Logistically, it makes very little sense to have a manager over in the U.S. manage IT workers over in India. The only reason to do so is if there are few people with IT management skills in India (which is currently true).
However, India is full of intelligent IT people, and in 5 years there will be enough IT people with experience to start being managers themselves. When that point comes the U.S. will start to outsource IT management positions overseas for two major reasons: 1) Reduced Salaries for comparable work. 2) Logistical and communication benefits. (A manager works best when working directly with the people he or she is managing.)
The reason the process is sort of start-stopping right now is because of communication limitations and cross-cultural difficulties. As more and more people from India and China gain more IT experience, more and more managers will appear in these countries. In response, the mean U.S. salary for IT managers will steadily drop over the coming years.
Flooding the job market with skilled English-speaking IT workers will behave the same as any other market that gets flooded. The mean price (salary) will drop considerably until the demand once again exceeds the supply. As more cheap labor becomes available, more companies will find ways to exploit this resource. And as more and more companies use up the resource, the price (salary) will again go up. (But I figure it's probably going to be a while before that happens.)
Will you survive in the IT industry by becoming a manager? Yes, but don't be surprised if managers start getting outsourced as well in a few years and your salary starts to slip. The only people I see maintaining their salaries intact are those individuals who have hard-to-find knowledge and experience. Specialized knowledge is, by definition, hard to come by, so the corresponding salaries will be impacted less. (But seeing how this is the internet age, good luck trying to find and keep that specialized knowledge to yourself.)
Basically, to end this rant, it could be bad (very bad) for IT workers over the next few years, but it'll turn around eventually.
So they want you to be fully rounded in every aspect of business, finance, customer service, and technology... and if you can't be, the better choice is to outsource to someone that has a lack of comprehension of all of the above and a language barrier?
-Weird.
Some things in life are free. For everything else, there's extortion.
www.eFax.com are spammers
They will have to keep you around to maintain the complex web of indispensable, mission-critical systems you created, and only you know how to maintain.
;)
And if you leave, or are outsourced, they will have to call and contract your services - for a premium hourly price, of course
Fucked.
Interdisciplinary people are harder to replace. That's part of the reasoning behind the Interdisciplinary Computer Science program I direct at Mills College (in the SF Bay area). The program is aimed at people who have a bachelor's degree in a field other than CS. Our graduates are thus knowledgeable in CS and another field, including knowing how to apply CS to that field. Some popular combinations are CS and business (per the article), CS and education, CS and biology, etc. They're potentially more employable and less offshorable than more narrow computer professionals.
Make it illegal to outsource to
A) Communist countries (china)
B) Immoral countries that still have a backwards caste system (india)
Problem solved
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Right now, there's around 45 [rupees] to a dollar.
Don't tell me Nintendo is making a Zelda MMORPG and selling currency.
There are some weird requirements that companies have for their new employees, including only wanting someone who has worked in their specific industry. I've found investment banks to be the worst for this - they only want someone with x years investment banking experience, regardless of the IT industry experience.
For some roles I can see this being necessary e.g. a forex application developer. I'm in the infrastructure space - which is pretty much the same across ALL industries. Investment banks may like to think that they are somehow more 'mission critical' than other industries, but they're wrong! e.g. medical/clinical systems are far more important IMHO than financials.
What many companies are doing, by insisting on hiring only those people who already work in their industry will be considered, is not allowing the possibility that someone from outside the industry may bring fresh ideas.
"Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"
Run an outsourcing firm!
Preferably have an office in two countries. One where the currency is higher and lower Then when it costs too much, outsource to the other country and save some money.
Its all a numbers game isn't it? Maximizing profit while diminishing employee morale, the future economic well-being of your country all to stuff CEO's pockets so that they can get a "$15,000 umbrella rack instead of using bath tub." (Quoting George Carlin here).
Why is it a key skill for a programmer to need to be able to work with human beings? In fact, I'd think being a people person would be a serious negative and drain on the productivity of the entire team, always visiting and talking on the phone.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Excellent! This is the best news I could get. After finishing my degree I jumped straight into doing my MBA whilst I work. Hopefully this will work out well.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Hmm. Well, ya learn something new every day. However, even if the law only covers fiduciary duty. I could still argue that a CEO who refuses to outsource a job when it would save even 50% of the job's cost and have no foreseeable negative consequences, isn't doing HIS job very well.
At what point do I come off as a socialist? At no point did I suggest that our capitalist system is bad, or that there's a better alternative -- I'm just trying to keep things in perspective. If you want to live with the benefits of capitalism, you must live with the drawbacks as well. Every now and then the market will do something that hurts a bunch of people in the name of efficiency, which will later turn out to be less efficient than whatever it was doing before.
shuts out most Americans who come looking for work.
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/erp/s
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70382-0.ht
I have a feeling that we might see Indian inflation rise even faster in the next few years. Indian companies are actually outsourcing some of their work to China, and a lot of Indian IT workers who moved abroad in the last decade are choosing to return home with (comparatively) huge nest-eggs.
All in all, the Indian economy is quite healthy right now, and corruption in the public and private sector (formerly a huge problem) are slowly dwindling. Growth rates are rising; with growth comes wealth; with wealth comes inflation.
However, I'd still say your conclusion is about right -- don't go into IT for the next ten years, unless you're a hot shot who can make himself irreplacable to an organization.
Funny how almost everybody other than you didn't seem to get the point. I'd even go so far as to say being a people person is a serious detriment to being able to work with computers.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why is it a key skill for a programmer to need to be able to work with human beings?
Because you're working with other human beings to create a product to be used by human beings. Knowing how to work with those human beings is at least as important as knowing the business processes you're translating into code. Probably more so, since the latter can be written down, discussed, and researched.
As for the time communication takes, you'll find that it's more efficient if the people involved are inclined to work with you, instead of resisting and avoiding you.
WTF is with all these slashdotters suffering from Asperger's syndrome all the sudden?!
Would it have something to do with the article Device Developed To Help Socially Challenged?
Were you actually diagnosed by an accredited professional as having this affliction?
I in fact have been. Originally I was misdiagnosed ADHD until high school, when a psychologist who knew about Asperger syndrome met me.
Holy W fuck. This woman gets 40% raise within six months? That's almost exactly how *overdue* I am for a salary-raising review.
Because you're working with other human beings to create a product to be used by human beings.
Sometimes you are- sometimes you aren't. Embedded industrial software is an entire genre of software that has no end user at all.
Knowing how to work with those human beings is at least as important as knowing the business processes you're translating into code. Probably more so, since the latter can be written down, discussed, and researched.
Unless it is written down, discussed, and researched LONG before it ever reaches the programmer, the project will fail. All the rest is scope creep- and any project that has scope creep will run over budget.
As for the time communication takes, you'll find that it's more efficient if the people involved are inclined to work with you, instead of resisting and avoiding you.
I've never met any person like that- ever. All people really are following their own agendas, and it's rare that your project actually fits their agenda.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Let skilled workers be skilled workers (since it's what they do best), and managers be managers. At the very least, put emphasis on being a leader instead of being a manager. Many can manage, few can lead.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Embedded industrial software is an entire genre of software that has no end user at all.
Unless that industrial software is going into machines to be used by other machines on a machine planet, and machines placed the order, you're wrong. Even then you'd be wrong, because those machines would be sentient and you'd have to use the same kind of skills to deal with them. And you've sidestepped the fact that damn near everybody working in this field is working with and for other human beings. Those few that aren't, are also salespeople for their own products.
I've never met any person like that- ever.
Based on what you've said so far, I'm going to hazard a guess that you meet them all the time, and just never find out about their reactions to you and what goes on behind the scenes afterwards. But, it's a guess; it's possible that you're right, and have just lead an extraordinarily sheltered existence.
I'm a programmer, I'm proud of it, and I'm glad I can make a living at it. The head research programmer at my last job was 40, and still hacking Scheme and C. I hope that's where I'll be when I'm 40. Maybe it won't be possible, but if I have to go back to school to retrain, the last thing I'm getting is an MBA. I'm gonna look around for another career I like.
There will still be jobs for people who want a lucrative career in changing bedpans, 'cause as far as I know you can't do that remotely. And we'll all have some lovely filth over here!
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
I don't know what planet you're living on pal, but corporations have been shitting all over the social contract for years. Nobody said anything when it was factory rat jobs like assembly line work or sewing t-shirts that can be trained in a matter of days and hardly require a level of functional literacy. Now that it's office work jobs that require a B.S. in order to get your resume in order to get past the HR drones, that require years of experience as well, people are up in arms about it.
Fuckyouverymuch, but when somebody digs into student loan debt in a society that supposedly values education commitment and runs into the wonderful scenario of seing the job market they focused on for 4+ years outsourced, the origional response is the _ONLY_ sane one to have. We as little worker peons don't set the rules, we just have to live by them. And when the game is being stacked so severely against the middle class, it's time to stop playing and come up with a new strategy.
The truth of the matter is, it's not so much the current IT jobs that are now being outsourced, it's the future ones. People in IT now are either scheming how to move up or move out, or planning a fight strategy to stay in the game. Every bright young freshman mind that looks at all the outsourcing articles and says to themselves, "I'd love to work with computers or biotech, but I better not do any sort of math, science, or engineering degree since I won't be able to eat let alone pay the student loans off" is one more job that gets outsourced before it has a chance to be in the US.
I'm planning a fight. Outsourcing IT is not a cure all for any size organization. In 5-10 years when the pendilum swings back, I'll more than make up for lost dollars (and do it with a smile).
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
NOTE: Sorry for posting anonymously, but I could get into serious trouble.
Absolutely the best way to avoid being outsourced is to bring in an Indian contract programmer and let the current management try to talk to him. The communication gap is more like a canyon, and you'll generally find the skills aren't anywhere near what their resume says they are, either.
That's because their resumes are almost all carbon copies of each other, with someone taking the time to bold the information on the carbon copy that is pertinent to the position for which they are applying. When they finally get in the door, they sit at the desk, and to keep you from coming around too much and asking too many questions, they talk to you. And talk to you. And talk to you. About nothing, about everything. When their voices and accents become too unbearable, people stop coming around, and they simply wait out their contract while the rest of the programmers pick up the slack for their shoddy work.
Oh yeah, and never do a phone interview with them. I'm serious, they'll have someone who speaks English very well on the phone interview, and someone else will show up... who doesn't speak English very well at all. This is by design (see above).
You think I'm kidding? I work with thousands of them in a contract programmer body shop in America, but the owners are Indian. I've seen it first hand. They pay these guys $20,000 a year (which is a lot of money to them) and charge $80/hr to pimp them out anywhere in the US.
So when the Bush administration talks about the "illegal immigrant" problem, I think they need to take a look at the H1B Visa problem first... because rather than hispanics working the jobs that nobody wants, these guys are working the jobs that you and I want. Your tax dollars at work.
It's quite simple, run your ass off for years, do all the meanial jobs (on your own time), make your bosses look great while they trash your credibility. Then, when all the higher ups than you take your credit for doing a great job, leave. When it comes down to your bosses understanding what the heck you did, they will have absolutly no clue. THEN!!, come back as a consultant and make obscene amounts of money off of them. If this does not work, the job was not worth it in the first place, reguardless of the money. Get a clue and move on. God does funny things to funny people, believe it or not.
Look at the market. Traditionally, people say "oh, we're going to need lots of Java developers. I'll go learn Java." Bad plan. Everyone is learning the same thing. If you make yourself a commodity, you will be priced by volume not talent.
:-)
To avoid being outsourced, be exceptionally good at something. People will always pay for exceptional talent.
In the worst of the IT economy most of my peers in the consulting world dropped their rates. I raised mine. I worked a little less, but when I worked it was good work. It was enjoyable, challenging, respected work. When someone really needed to pry open the purse they wanted the best, not the cheapest.
If you make yourself a commodity, get used to saying "would you like fries with that?"
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Is there not one person in this thread that will speak the obvious?
Rise up, risk your pathetic waste of a life and seize the future for yourself!
You whine that you've wasted your life following the rules set by a powerful elite determined to rape you for every last penny you are worth, but what have you done? What do you have to lose?
The truth is most of you would never risk what job security you have left for even a slight increase in your standard of living.
Most of you will die forgotten, an embarassment to the next generation.
Yeah, the world is pretty fucked up. But most of you are cowards who would rather play Quake all day than learn to fight.
If you think for a minute 1,000,000 people could not take over this country in a week, you are crazy. Give up the video games, the porn, the masturbation, and whatever other vices waste your life away. We need to simply mobilize 0.33% of the US population and change will be immediate!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
While the Santa Clara, Calif., resident has generally been looking for entry-level software jobs with IT vendors, he recently had an interview with a financial firm looking to fill an in-house IT position. That's where his lack of business background was exposed.
I see. Go hungry, or eat your brain.
Why stick up for big business?
i'll take getting a job that can't be outsourced for $500, alex!
seriously, why do all you IT people bitch about being outsourced? The USA insources more then we outsouce (jap auto plants in the USA, etc)
if you don't want to be outsourced, get a job in a field that can't/isn't outsourced. yes most are blue collar, but getting up and seeing sunshine will only give your pasty-white skin sunburn for a little while until your body adjusts.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
That is disgusting but it works. so if you want to stick to coding, and you like work in communicatons or realtime or robotics or uh , things that go boom...get a clearance. Of course its the employer who pays for you to get a clearance all you have to do is not have debts, drugs, arrests etc on your record. Oh yes one other thing, now with bush throwing civil rights in revers, you better not be gay either. all the defense contractors have great jobs that go begging for want of people who have a clearance. We just don't outsource secret work to other countries...not even Israel.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK, I sleep all night and I work all day! Sing along!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I'm going back to school to take some biology classes and then I'm going to try to get into med school. Surgery doesn't get outsourced. In fact, the number of med school applications has been declining for the past decade. The hours are longer, but the pay is much better (at least in surgery, and that's what I want to do) and frankly, I think saving lives will be a bit more satisfying than shaving a few seconds off of a sort routine.
I've been programming professionally for almost 20 years. I've done the management thing and I don't like it, so the only way for me to really move up is to move out. It's been a nice career, but it's starting to get stale. The technologies change, but the job doesn't really change that much. Changing careers will keep things exciting and interesting, probably for the rest of my life.
Last thing I want to do is sit behind a desk and listen to Jimmy Lipschitz tell me why his project is late again. Then I have to go to Kenny Pigfauker (my boss) and tell him ProjectY will be late because ProjectX had unforseen circumstances, and this is the last time it will happen. Yeah, fuck that. I'd rather re-write TPS reports.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Only small group has any chance of benefiting from protectionism -- workers who cannot compete with their overseas competitors and want to be subsidized by workers in other industries.
I hear stories constantly about people trying to hire decent developers. Heck, there are few employers that actually won't hire a really good developer given the chance.
The problem is that the competence level is so abysmally low. It's *damned hard* to find someone that really understands what they're working with. An amazing number of developers are simply completely unable to do their work.
As an example -- a guy in the next cubicle over has a project that needs to ship soon. It's not done. The reason why? He hired a consultant to write some basic C++ code to wrap some functions and log each call. Some minimal knowledge of MFC might be required -- that's about it. After two months of the consultant doing nothing but browsing the Web, he finally gave up and found another consultant. That guy can write code, but veeeerrrryyyy slowly. I think that yesterday he may have written two or three wrappers (and buggy, at that). Maybe forty lines of code to do nothing other than print out a few parameters to a file.
I remember sitting and listening to some people interview some other developers. One guy described himself as an, and I quote "expert-level C/C++ developer" and was interviewing for a C development position. An interviewer asked him to implement strcpy(). He was completely lost, even after hints from the interviewer (including having to explain that a char * was a string). He wound up describing the reason that it was difficult to implement the function by saying something about LDAP. Yes, I was confused too.
Probably half the developers I run into get a deer-with-glazed-eyes-in-the-headlights look the moment they hear "static library".
And almost all treat their development environment as a black box. If the debugger gets confused, they have no idea what might be going on. It's like a graphic designer only knowing how to use special effects plugins in Photoshop or something. Over the past week, I've seen three different developers manually unload a dynamically-loaded library containing code that they had a thread executing. Naturally, as soon as the thread starts executing, it crashes...and Visual Studio can't generate a call stack for them. None of them had the faintest idea of what might be wrong or how to track down the issue, even after days of work.
It goes on in this vein. And people that are not competent often simply do not have the grounding necessary to realize how little they know.
The reason companies are outsourcing is not (necessarily) because it's a business fad or anything similar. It's because the number of available people who are actually competent developers in in the US is depressingly small. Granted, in my experience India isn't great either, but at least it's cheaper.
The people I know who know what they are doing have absolutely no trouble getting jobs.
And the incredibly depressing thing about all this is that people in the US are phenomenally wealthy, have excellent educational resources and schools available, most have more than enough time to learn whatever they want...but they don't.
I'm sure that there are examples of competent people out there who have, indeed, lost their jobs. However, I strongly suspect that they are far outnumbered by hordes of people who have no idea what they are doing -- and worse, don't know that they don't know what they are doing. How many people can you think of that would describe themselves as "below average"? Yet, an awful lot of them are going to be in that oh-so-awful-sounding range.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Based on my experience, I'd say forget management as your end goal. Focus instead on your people skills. Realize how much just saying things like "Thank you" and "I don't know, but I'll find out." can make you hyper-valuable to many organizations. The myth of the anti-social IT guy is all too true in many cases. My focus on Liberal Arts in college did me well to be able to understand people's motivations, "read between the lines" on political issues, and forge consensus among people to clear the way for my work.
Yeah, then organizations may try to Peter Principle you into Management, but is that really why you were interested in IT to begin with? To be a manager? For some, yes, but for those who's intense, and fun, hobby became a career, I'd think that, in many cases, the answer is a big "No!"
Sure, some of you think it'd be economic suicide, but given how we've been sold down the river with no true signs yet of economic recovery**, you might as well scrap the current safety nets and redo them under similar models to France. In the current system, there no longer is the mobility that is talked about when you can be dropped at a hat and offshored. You're going to have to do the unthinkable and consider that 1) Allowing offshoring to make up for jobs is NOT sound policy domestically, 2) Removing any hint of selection of students for higher education for "prestige class building", and 3) You will have to deal with displaced workers on their terms if you do offshore. Those 3 concepts allow for obtaining the knowledge to be working in a specific field, but also be able to retrain with no problem of getting stuck with a bad university, on top of being able to know that (in practice) you can move on your terms.
**- Jobless recovery comes to mind, and the Rust Belt isnt exactly looking at you nicely either. Imagine that you wake up and fall a whole floor to a basement. Then you discover there are no stairs out towards prosperity.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
...if you are somewhat articulate and can deal with people. get a cs or engineering degree and forget business. most schools require graduating seniors to complete a design project that requires documentation, meetings, cost analysis, etc., etc.
a business or IT degree would be a total waste, you basically get the long version of the design project -- MINUS THE DESIGN -- why? because you have no design skills!
Exactly! For the most part, IT jobs are about providing a service to a customer (whether an internal department or external customer) to help maximize the customer's ability to serve their customers and provide a better good or service.
If you understand the business needs of your customer, you can provide a better service to the customer than the guy in the next cubicle who may be a whiz, but isn't as valuable because he doesn't fully understand the business needs of the customer.
The people who take the time to develop business skills, and wrap their minds around business problems will carve a role for themselves, no matter what company they may find employment - because they are more than an "IT guy".
People are acting like it's some revelation that you need to have a broader skillset to increase job security. If you do one or two things very well, it's easier for HR to replace you than if you did half a dozen things really well, or did some business function very well. A coder, no matter how good, can be replaced by another coder.
The more you do for an organization the more essential you become.
Unless you're the only guy who can keep their network running, as an IT guy you're replacable. Want to stay in IT but increase job security without going for management? Become an expert in the industry your company operates in. If you know your industry better, you can better tailor technology solutions to meet corporate needs. A coder is a dime a dozen. A coder who knows the business processes and logic is invaluble as they can build better apps for the business, they understand the requirements better. A security admin who understands the regulatory issues and threats associated with a type of business can better protect against them.
IT for the sake of IT doesnt fly much anymore. You can't just be a tech monkey they toss in the back of the server room and expect to be secure in your spot... and especially don't expect to be valued as highly as sales or marketing are. You may provide an essential service, but so does the janitor. You have to show your value to the business above and beyond keeping the machines running. You have to somehow show you can help the company make more money (no, keeping the lights on doesn't count, you have to show how you can make money through process improvement, or new products/opportunities).
That said, for young people in the field, if you want to last in IT, I'd worry more about getting the solid technical foundation first, then worry about business skills. Sure you may bounce around a lot in the first few years as jobs shift around, but it will make you more valuble down the line when you begin the management transition. Most IT managers have no tech skills, and it shows. Be different! Be the boss who has a clue! Build your tech experience first!
Excellent!
Learned something new today.
Thank goodness you had all these highy trained people to research that for you. Lord knows you couldn't have spent 30 seconds to look it up yourself. No matter how many times I see it, I just can't get over somebody who would go out of his way to share his uneducated guess about something when he could easily determine the truth before opening his big, fat mouth.
So, let's see, take a semi-useless new guy and make them more useless by letting them learn management? Why not take it all the way and make them learn VB?
Here's some facts for you.
1. I've made a living as a consultant for more than 15 years -- most of that on my own, without a firm to hide behind. I'm not talking contractor -- I don't take on site gigs paid by the day or week.
2. My primary application focus went through several years of downturn in popularity. Contractor's rates dropped from a high of $90 to a low of around $40. I charge $1500 per day (or $187.50 per hour).
3. I have a home and car, my kids are fed. We did not starve.
4. Most of the peers I know who dropped their rates are no longer in the consulting business.
5. When a client asked me to compete with a price they could get for offshore work, my response was "I will not compete on price with someone who merely has to support something I came up with until it breaks and they can't fix it. When somethings goes wrong and you need help, please feel free to call me." I am still doing work with that client -- and have for more than 10 years.
Be the best at something -- even if its a small thing, or a less popular thing -- and you will be in demand for that. There are times when people want things done right. Outsourcing fails because most customers cannot make good use of it effectively. With outsourcing the curse is that you get exactly what you ask for, not one thing more or less -- and you deserve exactly that.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Supply and demand are making some significant changes in how we do business because of global economic model vs the US economic model. We've been getting our economy out of sync with the world for far too long and we are seeing the results with the trade deficit, immigrants trying to jump our borders, and jobs moving overseas. I'm sure anyone that has worked with a bankrupt airline or is in the final stages of Detriot's breakdown will tell you, throwing up barriers will only prolong the pain. And unfortunately, there isn't anyone jumping up with a clear solution because there is no clear solution that everyone will like. My best guess is that the peak of the US economy is in our rear view.
One thing that should already be clear to every worker is that you are an expense to your company, not an asset. The best way to make money is to solve problems in a way that the value you bring (cost savings or additional income) is noticeably greater than how much you cost the company. And your cost is significantly more than your salary. Try to factor in the cost of office space, HR, taxes paid by your employer, management requirements, etc. People that do this are the problem solvers, those who see what could be done better, and create the solution, sometimes without any support from their company.
The other option is to find a niche where there isn't enough supply. That includes government work with a clearance, a bunch of positions in health care (I recently discovered that pharmacists have their pick of jobs), and the less popular parts of IT. The less popular parts of IT aren't necessarily bad jobs, they just aren't the rent-a-coder jobs that schools keep trying to fill. Rather it's the people that know a complex application or have lots of experience in a unused platform. I've made a pretty good living off of solving problems with a complex application. The next problem I plan to solve involves a platform that you just don't see that often where the existing solution involves an aging mainframe and expensive proprietary hardware.
Maybe the best advise I can think of would be for everyone stuck in the entitled employee mentality to try shifting your thinking with a few good books: Rich Dad, Poor Dad; Think and Grow Rich; and Who Moved my Cheese.
Is that the Tom Christiansen who is a co-author of Programming Perl?
Because you've got to be able to talk to your fellow programmers to make sure the interface between your code and theirs isn't fucked up. Because pair programming actually works. Because you need to be able to ask for clarification of project requirements. Because failing to speak up when there's a problem (for example, some huge bug that will screw up the entire project schedule) is likely to cost you your job, if the management aren't total morons.
Any other stupid questions?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? "
Be the best at something -- even if its a small thing, or a less popular thing -- and you will be in demand for that.
Disney fired 4000 animators who were the best in the world. Absolutely irreplaceable. Like astronauts. They cannot be replaced. Ever. Responsible for well over NINE FIGURES in top-line revenue year over year. Billions in marketing. Billions in merchandising. Billions in foreign box office and DVD sales. Billions in licensing.
Fired.
Careers destroyed along with an 80 year tradition of culture and craftsmanship.
Then Disney spends $7 billion to buy Pixar because they need animation.
So again I say...
Bullshit.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Actually, the GP has a legitimate point. Take a look at the case of Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. in 1919.
That case established the precedent which requires public companies to behave in a manner motivated by profit, not by altruism. This makes sense: the one thing that all shareholders have in common is to invest in businesses for one thing: to make money. Everything else is secondary.
So, in fact, yes, American corporations are, by legal precedent, required to do whatever they can to turn a profit. Cutting costs boosts profit margins; hence, the GP is correct.
Of course, nobody said that profit went straight to shareholders; as you note, boosting the bonuses of the Board of Directors is a major element too which flies under the radar on the grounds that (supposedly) those people at the top have skills which are very scarce, so they can demand such premiums on their abilities. But so long as the company is making a profit, it is within the bounds of that precedent; the real question is "what is the allocation of that increased profit?"...
Of course, privately-held companies can do whatever they like with their profit. That's one of the advantages of private ownership...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
....failed to convince Disney that they were not a commodity. They didn't fail at being animators -- I'll take your word for it and agree they were Godlike in their skills. Still, they sold themselves to Disney by the pound rather than as people. They failed to convince Disney that they couldn't be replaced with CGI for less money. Disney failed in its attempt to do so. They've bought Pixar rather than admit that failure and attempt to recover internally. Those in that group who were truly Godlike animators will have jobs.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
But dealing with other programmers is different from dealing with the public. While one has to exercise some tact in group programming, the main issue is technical, i. e. the quality of the code. As for speaking up about problems, aren't people with Asperger's more likely to make waves in such a case, as they are less sensitive to social context?
...has an interest in restricting the labor supply of plumbers to keep their prices artificially-high, hence your high salary.
What plumber is going to take on and train a bunch of new people who will ultimately wind up competing for his job? That would be asinine (yet we in IT do it all the time!)...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Anyone else see the irony in this? Why did you go into the IT business? It's because you enjoy technology and you enjoy problem solving. And now you're being told the only way to save your job is by going into management?
I work in a company that is very management heavy, where there's tonnes of rhetoric about about developing leadership skills. I've had more than one manager tell me that the heads-down coder who knows the system inside-out has "very little value to the company." They want leaders, not specialists. Unfortunately, most of the managers who spout this nonsense would have trouble leading a horse out of a barn. They're all very good talkers, but once you start listening to what they say, you realize it's all BS.
The best "leaders" I've ever worked with are the ones who would never stand up and call themselves leaders. They're the ones who've worked in the trenches, have been the heads down coders and learned multiple systems inside and out over the years. They're the ones who have developed an instinct for what will work and what won't. They're not the boot-licking smooth-talking managers who promise the world to upper-management and then have to claw back features near the end of development because they had no clue what was involved in the work that they were committing to.
So yeah, if you want to save your job, go ahead and practice these lines "Yes, sir. Coming sir." Just like the kid from the commercial. Go into management, kiss up to your boss and your boss's boss. Learn to be a smooth-talker. In the end you'll be nothing more than a used car salesman in a more expensive suit, but at least you won't be outsourced.
On the other hand, if you want to save your dignity and have any passion left for the job that you originally signed up for, do not listen to the article. If you're at a company that respects the work that you do, then great. If not, find a different company to work for. They do exist.
You've got one life to live. Doing something that makes you miserable just because it will save you from being outsourced isn't worth it.
In the social hierarchy of the corporate world, I see really 4 major layers, from top of the pyramid to the bottom:
1) Executives (people who sit in big offices, work long hours, and fly all over the place in corporate jets being effectively a figurehead representative of a corporation, much like a king or a queen of a nation governed not by a king or a queen, but by a parliament (like Britain))
2) Middle-management (office workers who manage the people who actually do work and sit in meetings to talk a lot)
3) White-collar workers (office workers who generate software, reports, graphs, etc.)
4) Blue-collar workers (janitors, plumbers, construction, etc.)
In the 1980s, when manufacturing was on its way out of the U.S., blue-collar workers were widely told "learn white-collar skills!" White-collar skills became valuable and popular, and helped fuel the boom/bust cycle of IT in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
Now, here we are in 2006, and white-collar workers are being told "learn management skills!" Notice something?
The outsourcing trend is moving up the hierarchical structure.
Now here's the thing to realize: that structure grows ever-narrower in the number of workers needed as you go up to the top -- executives comprise only perhaps a dozen of the people in a Fortune 500 company, whereas the white-collar workers may comprise tens of thousands.
So in effect, we're being told to increase the labor supply of management; this is showing up in the fact that MBAs are a dime-a-dozen now, and top-flight business consultants of the world now suggest that if you don't get an MBA from one of the top 5 universities in the world, then don't waste your time. Lots of people are doing exactly that.
The trouble is, there's no need for all those managers... There will be some demand for them arising out of the need to manage work outsourced to even-larger supplies of white-collar workers in places like India and China -- but will those workers be enough to generate the number of management jobs needed for replacement here?
As there is an exponentially-larger number of people at each layer of lower-level bureaucracy in an organization, and this trend of outsourcing is moving up the bureaucratic structure, not down, it seems to follow that the usefulness of getting a management education will prove to be outdated/useless even more-quickly than the previous waves of migration (blue-to-white collar, white collar-to-management).
In fact, as noted earlier regarding the popularity of MBAs, it seems that it's *already* too late -- the degree has become commoditized as soon as pundits have started recommending it as an alternative to white-collar work.
Making matters worse is that Baby Boomers are going to start retiring en-masse in about 4 years. This reduces American labor supply, driving up wages, and making foreign competition look even more-attractive for outsourcing. (In this respect, that is one argument very much in favor of looser immigration laws -- let the Mexicans in so we can keep our labor costs competitive with the rest of the world and keep our jobs here...)
Prediction? Unless the wages of the rest of the world accelerate even more-quickly -- which, ironically, will only occur through increased trade and outsourcing -- there are going to be a lot of intelligent, hard-working, well-educated, often-wealthy (but not super-rich) Americans becoming increasingly-angry at an exponential rate over the next few years. (It is quite the paradox that what will ultimately save us is the very thing about which we are presently-complaining...)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
There is a new degree out . Its called managment of information technology (it might not be new but was new when i took it).
They mashed together a business management degree and a netwok degree.
It has helped me a great deal and i can see why companies want people with business experience. You can help people a great deal more when you know how business works as a whole. You will get father.
what will you do if they come to their senses and pass something like a national sales tax or the flat rate so called fair tax? Won't that obsolete and make irrelevant a lot of your previous work and work that you have to develop on? It's gotten to the point (they run this every year some place), they stick a few CPAs and IRS guys, etc in a room with the identical theoretical details, invariably they come up with different figures.
That's what happens when taxes become so complex they require computer code, and even experts can't parse them with the code.
How about the CEO/CIO who looses mega bucks on outsourcing. Where I used to work, they replaced 100 American progammers with 500 people in Bangalore. Each person in Bangalore costs that company $70K/yr, which means that they replaced each American with $100K salary (double for benefits to $200K) with 5 Bangaloreans which now cost them $350K/year, and the work done is very shoddy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And people wonder why kids are forsaking CS degrees for management...
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I am awed by the brilliance and courage of your anonymous yet somehow poignant statement.
Let's see...
I contributed the the conversation.
I recognized my lack of knowledge and thanked the person for enlightening me.
Nope- nothing wrong with either of those steps.
Hope you enjoyed your pointless, yet cowardly flame however.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Most careers safe from offshoring and third-world threats are because there are natural or artificial (political) barriers against the 3rd world. If we don't collective do something politically, nobody is going to help us.
Nerds of the US, Unite or perish!
We worked hard in school, worked long hours, take crap from management, learn a new paradigm every 5 years on our own, get punched by jocks; so why should we have to put up with this "soft skills" and bend-over for India shit.
Let's stick-it to the man! Don't let the PHB fuck Dilbert in the ass this time. You can't argue with Congress, so buy the fuckers instead, just like PHB did. We know how to use the web to organize and influence, so let's do it!
Table-ized A.I.
While you are correct to an extent, the article was about how to avoid being outsourced, not how to stay comfortable doing what you like. Every time you apply for a job, ask for a raise, want time off etc, etc, you are in a way 'selling' the other person on the idea of what you want them to do. There is a strong likelyhood that the person making the desicion (a) doesn't understand your technical abilities. (b) can (or thinks they can) get them cheaper elsewhere. Management skills are something they will likely understand better, so adds value to your proposition (hire me, keep hiring me, pay me more, etc).
Since you are going to sell (even if it's only your services as an employee) it makes sense to do it well rather than poorly. My job is not in sales, but I have no doubt that my training/experience in sales is quite beneficial to me in my job. It would work similarly with management skills I'm sure.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Uhm, am the only one who sees the obvious issue of we can't ALL be managers?
And isn't one of the problems of business organizations one of being too management heavy?
If I'm wrong, then correct me, please.
I'm so glad someone made this point. It's like what's being proposed is a pyramid scam. Look at any org chart and you can see that the people at the top will win and those at the bottom will lose.
Then again, there's one obvious reason to want to be a manager: they get to be the ones to decide whether to outsource and who to outsource.
Another excellent point. I don't understand why our labor unions in the US are still so focused on lobbying for higher pay in the US. Saying "we won't take less" is like saying "please get your labor elsewhere". If they had any sense, US labor unions would put their money into creating labor unions in other countries. That's the only way to stop the "elsewhere" from seeming like a good option.
History suggests that once the rest of the world becomes more wealthy, they'll eventually get to feel (rightly or wrongly--it's immaterial--I'm just observing, not moralizing) that it's more of a right than something they should have to struggle for, as happened in the US. Then they'll want their own labor unions or other forms of labor protection to keep from having to be exploited to enrich someone else. And when they do, things will even out. But until then, I suppose one way to view the situation is that the global corporations are desperately racing for the few remaining wildernesses of disorganized workers who are willing to work for less than in the built up countries because what they're offered is better than what they had before. Once they've done that for a while, the offer will no longer be better than what they had and will start to be viewed on an even playing field for what it's actually worth and things will stabilize.
The open question in my mind is whether that inevitably has to take generations or whether the Internet and FedEx and other modern market technology will find a way to speed that up as well.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I never take this sort of article too seriously as the people writing them tend to focus on one particular current short-term issue, which still seems to be outsourcing though I'm sure we're due another bogeyman soon. The last thing I want to do is make career decisions based on following a herd of insecure people who've been panicked into a bad move.
I also don't understand people who talk about IT. If I hear someone say they "work in IT" then I assume they're either not very competent or are in a job only vaguely connected with computing. In other professions people are proud of their specialization and it brings them both status and rewards. For example a neurosurgeon wouldn't go around talking about "working in medicine".
For me its better to have my own set of long term goals and find the jobs that fit in with them. These may well change over time. I used to think I never wanted to do anything except programming. Over time I found that I quite enjoy a mixture of coding and consulting so I moved to a job that gave me this mix.
I guess what I'm saying is to take control of your own career. Lots of people are always claiming that the sky is falling and they're almost always wrong.
Ame
In Ireland, there are loads of big US IT companies. They all seem to have their 'interesting' (i.e. programming on their actual products) jobs in America. So if the jobs aren't in their offshore offices and, from what I read on slashdot, they're not in America, where are these elusive IT jobs?
Reading this I felt like a donkey chasing the carrot. Learning "new" skills is not the solution. Sooner or later the figurehead above you will become enamored with a similarly skilled programmer in India / China and will tell you to sod off.
:-/ I keep having second thoughts about my return here and I seriously consider "outsourcing" myself outta here for good. {sorry guys, but I wanted to let this out somewhere}
The only solution to all this is to force companies to have the vast majority of their tech staff (90+ %) in the same country they are based on. US companies should have (almost) all their staff in the States, French in France and so on.
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You don't see them outsourcing management... management is mostly a non-appreciative bunch of smart-asses patting each other in the back.
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We worked hard to get our degrees, probably harder than they ever did. We live in the same country with them, so we must also make a living out of the hours we put in at their work. They obviously think we ask for "too much" for what we give them.
[inflammatory-lame]
So they keep their income the same (by not going to live in China/India/wherever) but make the programmer accept Indian/Chinese rates, so there's more for them. Of course no programmer in their country will accept such rates, hence the outsourcing.
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What I described is obvious, but reading it like that doesn't make it look very nice (does it?) my fellow colleagues.
But then again, be happy that you have what you have. Consider yourselves fortunate that you don't have to work in the country where I work (Greece), even though I work at a reputable institution
(yes, I'm a programmer with an MSc from a good UK university + certifications + a few years of working experience and Yes, I do have to accept near-Indian rates if I want to keep myself occupied in this bloody country.)
nuff said
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Summary: ".. which concludes that the best thing young IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is beef up their management skills."
Article: ".. the study found that business skills accounted for five of the 10 attributes organizations want from their in-house staffers over the next three years. The other five most-requested skills by CIOs include a mix of project management and technical skills, though the latter are still client-facing."
You've got a bunch of people worked up commenting about management skills, which the summary implies is the 'best' thing you can, and the article clearly says business skills, followed by some project management skills.
This discussion is entirely poisoned by the misleading summary.
Many non-management positions revolve around project management skills, so it's even more misleading to simply refer to it as 'management' in the summary.
I find a lot less friction and a significant reduction in required discusion when my underlings know both the what and the why of it all. The 'what' is easily described in technical terms, however the 'why' can be much harder, especially when your not supposed to discuss bussiness matters with the underlings (not matter how junior or senior you are). It is far better for the flow of work when they somehow feel that they 'just get it'.
Otherwise they question you. And then, when you are not at liberty to discuss why their technically superior solution is going to be a no-go, they quickly become disgruntled, and then they do not produce according to the company plan. So I am torn. It is always in the companies best interest to keep the employie happy with her/his job, as long as its not a detriment to the company, and as long as it facilititates getting the tasks done.
I think I would have to side with: "I think you are filtering out some trouble makers, and along with them some real tallent".
I hate to ride the fence, my job requires I be on both sides, depending on the context. By coincidence, my hair is only slightly pointy.
If I had to make a choice in skills? There is no choice. Do your job, and do it to the best of your ability, right up till 5PM, and then go home. You will be happier.
But now another thought strikes me. Maybe, just maybe, some people dont know what truelly makes you valuable and they dont know how to measure what your doing against potential income. So now your supposed to figure it out.
Just a thought...
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Because that's what happens. Everyone in our corporation was touting management skills over technical skills. Then one day we had way more management than front line workers. Then at that point big layoffs came, and still come, and if you're just a useless middle management person, you got cut.
Also most of the people who want to get into management in IT, are the ones that have poor technical skills, but got into IT because they saw money there. So they end up asking their boss to move them up the management chain and away from the technical work. And I can tell you, those are the worst type of managers to work for, because all they care about is money and they couldn't give a crap about your technical work.
Also MBA's are almost getting to the point where they are a dime a dozen. Who cares now if you have an MBA, are you really -useful-?
My first job paid about 250 USD per month before taxes. I stuck to it because I was a geek with no great academics to speak of, coming from an outside (read as - not from IIT or NIT) college and hadn't got the financial backing to follow up my GRE score. And in about seven months, I'd end up replacing my father in the earning capacity. It was so scary that I was grabbing at straws with my first job - I'd worked for more than 40 days at a stretch, working weekends and taking five days off to rush home every quarter.
So I settled for less for my first job, but that salary was good enough to live in for one person - though not enough disposable income to buy something like a computer for my own. Amidst all this, I went through a lot of personal troubles and ended up losing the only light in my life - out of sheer neglect towards her. After all that my first raise was a 67% - which pulled up my salary to 400 USD levels and that's a huge inflation percentage wise but it was 2500 USD per year for the company. Interestingly that's about 1/4th of what I was billable for to the customer per month.
Anyway, I left that job because I couldn't put up with the shit. Impossible deadlines drive managers nuts. They start ignoring the non-performers when it comes to work distribution and overload the performers. Finally, no matter how brilliant you are, you burn out. I was a charred shell of no motivation when I quit - and people wonder why code from India sucks. Because the rewards of work, is more work and then it continues. In about a year (which is when your first pay review kicks in), you'll probably have lost all of your work ethic and become a lazy slob who realizes he won't get fired if he puts in 1/5 th of the work someone similar in US needs to put in.
The hike percentages look promising, but the reality is that as companies grow - only overhead per actual coder increases, without actual increase in code quality, outputs or schedules. Sooner or later the system has to fail.
The Software Services industry is a nightmare I'd rather not return to.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
At what point do I come off as a socialist? ...close the gap with US salaries... ...greedy CEOs... Those who don't like what the future has to hold can choose to move to a country with a controlled economy
It was somewhat of an ad hominem, but there were socialist overtones in your post.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
BY LAW? Which law? Can you quote that law?
It sure is not Sarsbanes-Oxley. That law is designed to lower profits by adding so many layers of red tape that every IT shop will become inefficient.
Think before you post some unsupported comment.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. There's been enormous pressure due to the dotcom bubble (and it looks like we're going through a smaller second bubble with the same pressures rearing their heads again) to show profitability at all costs. In the short term, reducing costs is a great way to achieve that. However, business are learning that outsourcing is an extremely risky proposition when it involves your core business. Outsourcing your web site, or outsourcing applications used internally, can be a cost savings when you're not talking about your core business tools. But outsourcing software that your business critically depends on, to make money, gives too much control of your profitability to outside sources.
In my (admittedly somewhat limited) experience, this results in a couple of things. 1, the software you develop in-house tends to be more important to the business, which is a Good Thing for IT folks. 2, the pendulum swings back from outsourced development to either in-house development, or purchase of off-the-shelf software (or integration of FOSS in a more progressive shop). And at many shops, OTS or FOSS still means extensive customization and/or system integration work. So in the long run, this is also a Good Thing for IT folks.
Business is about making money, so when management realizes that the short-term gains of dirt-cheap software are outweighed by the long-term cost of losing control of IT-driven business processes, outsourcing can really lose its appeal.
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If they can maintain 10% inflation, then it would take roughly 7 years for her salary to double to 24k U.S
Everything else being equal, if they maintain 10% inflation, and the US maintains 3%, then their currency will depreciate 7% a year against the US$.
Otherwise Zimbabwe (with 650% inflation) would be a bloody rich country.
Moste of the people quoted in the article are from the Midwest - Chicago, Milwaukee, Bloomfield Hills (Mich). They quote one graduate from Santa Clara, and he graduated from University of Illinois. Is he now living in Chicago and looking for a job?
This article would have more credibility if the writer interviewed people across the country, or at least compared differences across the country.
Employees need better communications skills? No shit sherlock! It does not matter if their job is IT, Marketing, Accounting, or picking up trash in the parking lot. Importing people from India or China is not going to solve that problem. Most of those people have poor communication skills in English.
The whole crux is money and power. If you move into management, then you can control who you hire and fire.
Nothing to see here, move along.
The thought never entered my mind until I read your post. In the US, 5% inflation is considered moderate by historical standards. Anything over 10% is considered high. I remember the 1970's, when 16% inflation was very disruptive. Outside the US and parts of Europe, inflation can be alot more volatile. Start pumping lots of cash into India (or anywhere else), and hyper inflation will soon follow. Other than cost reduction, there is no other benefit from offshoring. Therefore, once the incentive evaporates, we should see much less of it.
Well said. I have nothing to contribute. I just wanted to give you a pat on the back...not that you needed it. You said it better than I could have.
Forgive me for saying so, but you seem very personally invested in this particular case so maybe that's not a good example for discussion. If you'd like me to stop, I will. In the meantime...
When I say they sold themselves by volume, what I mean is that the model being used for employment in that industry was to take an entry level job at almost an apprentice level and work your way up through the ranks in a very bottom heavy management structure where there were very view 'top' posts compared to entry level positions -- and the line of entry level animators was so long at the door, that nobody had any feeling they'd be hard to replace. This is VERY similar to starting IT in a tech support role.
The failure was that projects could be assigned to animators in terms of how many man-days would be required from the pool of all available man-days in the animation house. That's volume. They didn't ask "how long do I have to wait for Bob to be available?" Once a few very top level people picked the look and style of the key characters, all the rest could be done by any of dozens in an available pool.
I say again -- if you allow yourself be considered part of an available pool, you're a commodity item not an individual with value.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_02 /b3966074.htm
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
That is about what I made as a programmer the first year out of college in the
mid 90s.
India is a non-free market ? I would disagree . China , yes , but India liberalised its economy in 1991 ( and further freeing up is going on even now ) .
Look at the job boards. Look at what IT recruiters *really* want.
They rarely want degrees. Certifications rarely count for much. They very rarely want MBAs. What they really want is a very specific skill set which varies for earch job.
By "skills" I mean recent, verifiable, experience with specific products: cisco routers, microsoft c#, solaris 10, Oracle 9, SAP, etc. Usually employers want about six such skills, although I have seen job ads that list over 30 such "skills." If you don't list the "skills" the employers are looking for, you won't get past the initial screening.
How do you get started? You don't. The industry is already glutted with experienced people who can't find work. You sure as hell don't get started doing actual IT work by getting an MBA.
The SIM is about *management* that is what the "M" stands for.
Your solution, "Be the best at something," is as unrealistic as telling everyone to go into management. There aren't enough important subsets of programming for everyone to be the best at something.
Yes, things worked for you, but that doesn't mean that the same approach will work for everyone. I've had a really good job for the last 5 years, but I wouldn't advise everyone to follow my career path. Don't confuse things working out with having a foolproof plan.
become competitive or get a job at McDonalds
The idea of being shocked--SHOCKED, I say--that a recent graduate would have to own up to not having business skills is absolutely stunningly stupid. Of COURSE you don't. It's your first job, damn it. It would be laughable that recent grads think they are qualified to do jack shiat coming out of school if it wasn't for the fact that hiring managers seem to be on the same page, both expecting experience from the inexperienced and disregarding experience in absence of a stupid B.S.
When their wages reach 40 to 50% of US wages then the outsourcing will be less of an issue and -maybe- wages and job security will recover here in the States.
Nope - when their wages reach 40-50%, you're going to see outsourcing to different countries. Already there's plenty of outsourcing to South America and soon (already) former Soviet countries because India's getting too expensive. Everyone else is going to have to catch up to our wages before job security comes back to the states as things stand now.
I think the message to take away from the article is not that you should be prepared to move from doing software development to business management, but that to become more valuable to an organization, you should gain some business skills, understand how your business works, what its needs are, etc. From my own experience I know that a highly technical person typically starts out with the midset that technology exists for its own sake. Eventually this changes as one is in the workforce for awhile and starts to appreciate the fact that technology is used to solve business problems. To quote Dillinger, the Sr. VP of Encom in Tron, "doing our business is what computers are for!"
I'm currently doing system administration (Solaris and AIX), database administration (Oracle and DB2) and software development (command-line tool development, software release management, web-based B2C sales, etc) for my company. My value lies not in my technical skills, but in my ability to solve business problems by applying those skills. I know how our company operates, how our supply chain works, how we fulfill orders, how we invoice, what our sales policies are, how we manage product images, etc. By knowing the business, I know what the weak points are and how I can help to solve them by applying technology.
It's fairly easy to find another person who knows AIX or Java, but it's much more difficult to find someone who knows those subjects _and_ the business side of things.
Your post looks good from a theoretical standpoint, but hardly holds up in the real world.
"The other option is to find a niche where there isn't enough supply. That includes government work with a clearance, a bunch of positions in health care (I recently discovered that pharmacists have their pick of jobs)"
Oh sure, so I'll throw away my 25 years in IT, my degrees in math, comp sci, and business, and be a pharmacist. Will that niche still be there after I have completed my studies? I had a top-secret clearance at my last job, it hasn't helped me in the slightest. By the way, you can't just decide to clearance any day of the week, your empoyer has to pay for it ($25K - $40K), and it takes about four to six months.
"and the less popular parts of IT. The less popular parts of IT aren't necessarily bad jobs, they just aren't the rent-a-coder jobs that schools keep trying to fill. Rather it's the people that know a complex application or have lots of experience in a unused platform"
And where do you get all this experience? Look at the job boards, nobody is going to hire you unless you already have the experience. Learn a complex app? You mean like SAP? Any idea how much that would cost.
Im always shoving down my students throats the importance of writing well, doing presentations and listening, she said. They just think Im being weird.
Composition, oratory, and analysis are traditional components of a humanities education. That's what English/History/Anthro minors are for -- to teach you to think and express yourself -- and the fact that our society has chosen to shift wholesale to some airheaded third-rate imitation of that is preposterous.
My other body is also not wearing any.
What you say is true except:
Indians really have an insanely hard work ethic right now. Their education system is like Japan was back in the early 80's-- thousands of high school students commit suicide each year. They don't have "A"'s "B"'s, etc. They have "#1, #2, #3" all the way down. So when they say "#1 to #31 on this test will get into the advanced program" that is exactly what they mean.
Indians had a large pool of -highly- educated talent at the start of this.
Indians speak english (albeit with a heavy accent sometimes) as a primary language.
And even with all those benefits, actual savings from offshoring averaged only 15% when indian workers were making 10% of american wages. That is why the chinese and any other nation which doesn't use english as a primary language won't matter as much.
Right now- if you had a non-english speaking programmer working for the same wages as indians, you would not see the 15% savings you get from indians. They are suceeding because they really are a bargain. And like all bargains- the market is going to bid them up to fair wages.
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From the other post here it sounds like they are burning out too- which makes sense- the ones contracting here were working 60 hours a week and when I asked them they said they were -on salary- with no bonus for the extra 20 hours. They made a fixed bid contract and were stuck regardless of what they had to do to complete the work.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Good point!
o ries/2002040101511200.htm
I hadn't considered that aspect.
Doing a little diggingl:
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2002/04/01/st
in 2001 it was 49 rupee to the dollar.
http://www.blonnet.com/forex/usd.htm
It is now about 44.5 rupees to the dollar.
It looks like the Rupee is appreciating against the dollar long term.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
NB: Grandparent was referring to "salary inflation", not "currency inflation".
It has been discussed that not everybody can be a manager, do you think everybody can get a clearance whenever they want?
First, you can't just decide to get a clearance, like you decide to get an A+ certiification. Your employer has to pay for it - about $25K to $40K. And your employer has to wait four to six while the clearance process takes place. If you get a better job the next day - that employer takes the hit.
Would you be surprised to learn that employers are very - and I do mean *very* - reluctant to do this? For an employer to go through that expense and trouble and risk, you have to have some very special skills.
Also not everybody can get a clearance. If your spouse is a forign national, that can kill the deal right there. Past expereince with drugs, bi-sexual experimenting, can't remember your address and phone number from a room you rented 15 years ago? Anything like that can keep you from getting a clearance.
BTW: I have seen people with top-secret clearances laid-off in droves. Some got jobs right away, others not. Bean counters don't consider how difficult the jobs may be to replace. They just have to make somebody look good by cutting expenses.
The problem with this is as follows: 1. Getting a labotomy interfears with your IT job. 2. You get to "glad hand" with the "people" you can't stand. 3. You always agree with the last thing you hear, which is counter to independent thinking IT demands. 4. Can you really develop a production schedule without facts? Wouldn't it hurt you deep inside? Kinda like being Locutus of Borg? 5. You become just like a banana - born green, live yellow and die rotten. I look forward to the day when every worker is paid the same for the same type and quality of work across the face of the Earth. Only then will management fly to the Moon and Mars to offer rocks our jobs at less wages.
I hardly see how this lowers any odds here. On the contrary, I believe it does accelerate outsourcing, since the point of outsourcing is to have the execution done by external entities, and only keep the management staff within the organization.
So, if we all become managers, we just ensure that outsourcing is going to happen. QED.
Now, if we actually increase our technical skills, beyond being able to write web apps and PHP and JSPs and all the kind of stuff any basic programmer can do, including offshore programmers, we may well increase chances of finding a job where those skills are needed.
I don't know about you guys, but I studied, and got a degree in, IT, because it's what I love doing. I don't see myself spending my days telling people how to design a car insurance claim processing application. Not that there's anything wrong in doing that, if you like it.
Anyway how does an MS in CS speak about anyone's skills in insurance business? Or most other businesses for that matter?
See my point? The issue with outsourcing is that we can't expect the same level of expertise as for in-house/on-site teams, for multiple reasons, including, but not limited to:
- sheer distance and time difference when working with offshore people,
- linguistic and cultural differences,
- in many (most?) instances, the people working on the project are less qualified and less paid
- design and development of complex (I really mean non-trivial) architectures or applications requires frequent, if not constant, interactions between team members,
- etc... I'm sure you guys can find many others.
So my summary:
- become a business guy to increase chances of outsourcing
- become a skilled IT person to decrease chances of outsourcing
For some reason, I'm almost sure some will disagree... go figure
Read the other slashdot articles and you see what Americans value. "design, ergonomics, real world use rather than artificial spec tests" "relationships with customers" "Sony more trustworthy"
In no headline is a clockspeed or a transisor count or a thermal rating discussed. What Americans want is philosophy and experiences and that's what you should be studying.
you seem very personally invested
I get a little annoyed when good people are treated like shit on purpose.
and the line of entry level animators was so long at the door, that nobody had any feeling they'd be hard to replace.
Because to management, it is only about how much they have to pay. Quality and loyalty to the people who make a uniquely valuable product are meaningless. This is happening throughout the professional world. It's wrong. It has always been wrong, and it will continue to be wrong.
Entry-level animators don't work at Disney. (Then again, no animators work at Disney) Entry-level animators don't make nine figures at the box office.
if you allow yourself be considered part of an available pool, you're a commodity item not an individual with value.
If people who make billion-dollar products don't have value, then I submit everyone who earns a wage is worthless.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Other than basic human rights, nobody deserves anything.
The animators "deserve" exactly what they bargained for in exchange for doing the work. Their value is exactly what they are able to get in exchange for their work. Not more, not less. As is yours, as is mine.
Its all the same thing. If you're perfect at your job, but your job is a commodity -- or is percieved as one by the people who pay you -- you're out on your ass the minute they can find that commodity cheaper somewhere else. That's the way the world works. Does it suck? Its sure sucks if you're a commodity -- or seen as one.
Was Disney wrong to decide its animators were a commodity? I don't know. I don't know anything about the animation business and don't follow Disney's bottom line. They seem to be wrong about nearly everything else I've seen them do for years, so I would tend to believe they were wrong here too -- but that's not proof of anything.
Not one bit of this does anything BUT prove my point. If you are one of a thousand people doing exactly the same thing in a company, and there are a thousand more who can do it also; then unless you can convince someone that YOU PERSONALLY can do it better, you're a commodity. The minute you are a commodity in today's workforce, you'd better learn to speak Chinese or whatever dialect they're speaking in India and get used to eating white rice from a bowl two or three times a day.
Does the corporate world suck because it works that way? Yes, but find me any other system that is as productive, feeds as many people, grows economies as well. Communism is a great idea on paper. We all share the wealth. That didn't work out too well. Human nature doesn't allow communism on a large scale to work well. Humans are opportunistic by nature. That's why capitolism works.
I will say this though - those laid off people are not going to starve to death. It will suck for them for a while, and I don't take that lightly, but our economic system overall has been so unbelievably successful that even where it fails individuals it leaves both oportunity and minimal safety nets the like of which have never before been seen in the history of the world.
I personally do not believe in the "globalization" that has recently played out. Not because I don't believe in globalization in general, but because what we have is manipulated globalization not a true free market, and that breaks the system. Nonetheless, we live in a globalized marketplace. Commodities are going to always migrate to the cheapest source of production.
I'll close by saying what I started with. To save your job, don't be a commodity.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Other than basic human rights, nobody deserves anything.
If that is true (it isn't), then this entire discussion is absurd.
The animators "deserve" exactly what they bargained for in exchange for doing the work.
They can do no wrong can they? According to you, firing someone is always the right decision. You're actually going to defend the wholesale destruction of an entire industry and the thousands it employed. I'm appalled.
or is percieved as one by the people who pay you
Even if they are wrong...
If you are one of a thousand people doing exactly the same thing in a company, and there are a thousand more who can do it also; then unless you can convince someone that YOU PERSONALLY can do it better, you're a commodity.
No, that's absolutely false. You just said so. Even if they PERCEIVE the employee to be a commodity, accurately or not, they're out on their ass. Even if they know FACTUALLY that the employee can do it better, THEY FIRE THEM ANYWAY.
THAT is my point.
Yes, but find me any other system that is as productive, feeds as many people, grows economies as well.
Same system, fifty years ago, when management didn't treat people like dogshit.
To save your job, don't be a commodity.
It doesn't matter. These people were the ultimate anti-commodity; The best in the world, engineers of billion dollar markets and carrying the excellence of an 80 year tradition, and they got fired anyway.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
You yourself say "THEY" and are talking about hundreds or thousands of people. That is, by definition, a commodity.
"Treating people like shit" is a corporate mistake -- but let me tell you something big guy, 50 years ago management treated people at least as bad, often MUCH MUCH MUCH worse.
The good old days, were not. In 1956 you could be fired or passed over without question for being black, gay, or female. You could be fired for dissagreeing with your boss, or for saying no to his amorous advances. You worked more hours, and were paid less (in any adjusted scale) and were treated worse.
The only real difference, was that in that technology marketplace you couldn't outsource high tech jobs to India. In fact, over the years that followed 1956, the trend was to send the lowest wage manufacturing jobs overseas, and to lay off factory workers as you replaced them with better machines (and in the longer term robotics).
Are you like 20 years old or what?
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
...that you can tell someone that being a commodity isn't the surest way to eventually be outsourced.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Oh sure, so I'll throw away my 25 years in IT, my degrees in math, comp sci, and business, and be a pharmacist. Will that niche still be there after I have completed my studies?"
I'm simply putting out ideas, some of which I've experienced first hand, others I've seen second hand. Your message comes across as one determined to sit back and say that everything is wrong and there is nothing that you can do. If that's truly how you feel, I'd highly recommend "who moved my cheese". It's a quick read, so if you don't want to buy it, stop by B&N, get something to drink, and read it there.
As for if what I said would work in the real world, of course your mileage may vary, but most everything comes from personal experience. I'm an independent consultant after spending several years working with Tivoli (a fairly complex app). I'm frequently asked if my clearance is still active after I worked for a few years with the DoD. And coming out of college, the mid size consulting organization that hired me was happy to send me off to 4 weeks of training and had me shadow some other consultants before sending me off on my own. Times may have changed, but many large companies still provide some kind of training and assign you to a complex app or unknown platform if your salary is low enough and your contract states that you'll pay them back for the training should you leave within X months. For the cost of X months of a lower salary, you get the training, experience, and a few contacts in a niche. Long term job security seems worth several months of scraping by.
You yourself say "THEY" and are talking about hundreds or thousands of people. That is, by definition, a commodity.
.395? Isn't that just a little unrealistic? Some people would just like to have a job and a paycheck so they can build a home in peace. They don't want to live "The Apprentice."
There are approximately 1000 Major League Baseball players. Are they a commodity? Employees have to be totally unique in order to keep their job? Everyone has to be Jerry Seinfeld? Everyone has to bat
And Disney animators are not a commodity. Sorry.
but let me tell you something big guy, 50 years ago management treated people at least as bad, often MUCH MUCH MUCH worse.
False. And you know it. My parents' average length of employment was 20 years. Mine is eight months. It is WAY different now than it was 50 years ago.
In 1956 you could be fired or passed over without question
Are you implying that people cannot be fired or passed over without question now? Based on your argument so far, you seem to believe that it is management's perogative to do whatever the fuck they feel like, regardless of the effect on either the employee or the business. According to you, management has no responsibilities at all. Employee lost their job and home? Tough shit. Get more skills. Take a lower paying job. What, you think you've EARNED something because you have a better education than 80% of the population?
Well, management DOES have responsibilities. They have a responsibility to provide stable adequate incomes to their neighbors, because without that basic element, everything else in society goes into a toilet at Mach 3, INCLUDING that company's profits. They're firing their own customers.
It's about ego and moneygrab and fuck everyone else. Nothing more.
You worked more hours, and were paid less (in any adjusted scale)
That's also false. Wage growth now, adjusted for inflation, is zero. From the time my parents bought their first house to their third, their salaries doubled. I knew precisely zero people whose parents were any worse off. Right now, I know one person who is gainfully employed in a full-time job. One.
In fact, over the years that followed 1956, the trend was to send the lowest wage manufacturing jobs overseas, and to lay off factory workers as you replaced them with better machines
That's funny, because in the 50s and 60s, those manufacturing jobs were the reason the standard of living advanced as far as it did. In fact, it was those manufacturing jobs that created the middle class business is now trying their hardest to destroy. It was possible to own a home and raise a family on pretty much any full-time job. Now it's MBA or the highway. I can list two dozen college majors that business would reject out of hand as worthless. Business is wasting the educations of an entire generation of people right now.
Well, a college education is NOT worthless. For a business community that spends all its time whining about being unable to find "qualified" people (whatever the fuck that means), they sure are quick to ignore university educated candidates because they happened to study something the interviewer doesn't understand.
I was told, along with most of the other people I went to school with, that if we got an education and worked hard and got a good job, that we would do as well or better than our parents.
So all of us got educations and worked hard and got good jobs.
And got fired.
This is the first generation in history that will do worse than the generation that preceded it. And the reason is that business just doesn't want to pay for their profits.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
The top small percent of players get what they want in the extreme. The overwhelming majority of players do not, and are let go without so much as a handshake.
Economies change. As barriers to commerce drop, what defines a commodity changes. At one time, skilled factory workers were not at all a commodity. They were in such short supply that we built a school system around the idea of produce more. Now, we have a school system producing factory ready workers when the factory jobs have gone off to economies that are just now where ours was 80 years ago.
Management and high tech (whatever the current version of tech was at the time) were protected from being commoditized to the lowest bidder because they had to be local. Cheap shipping and common currency exchanges allowed factory jobs to go where labor was cheapest. The internet does that for high tech and phone service jobs.
Disney believed that the CGI revolution obviated the need for skilled animators. They may have been wrong. I don't really know. I don't even watch animated things except what my kids have on -- except that half of what I watch now has CGI in it. Still, someone has to draw something at some point I'd imagine.
You keep saying that Disney animators are not a commodity because they are or were so skilled. The proof that you're wrong is that they were let go. Right or wrong, to Disney they were a commodity.
I would imagine the animation business is really in quite a difficult place right now. Nobody is really show just how its going to go. One minute Pixar's computer's are pumping out billion dollar winners, next a few guys with some clay make a fortune over in the UK, meanwhile you're still doing things they way they've been done but you haven't had a really big hit in a while.
Who knows what is going to happen.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
A lot of my managers seem to buy into this idea. I have been approached numerous times with offers for substantial promotions (mostly for lower management but once for senior management) and they are always astonished that I turn them down. I *like* my current position because I'm doing stuff I like and the pay is pretty good for the level of responsibility I have and more than enough to meet my lifestyle needs.
The problem is that we have a lot of diversity in pay scales throughout the organization, and those of us near the top of the salary band don't have any financial incentive to become managers. There is no shortage of people near the bottom of the salary band who will jump at the chance to become managers because they get a huge pay increase. Of course, the reason they're at the bottom of the salary band is because they don't know anything, and when they become managers they inevitably turn into PHBs.
That means that the main way the company recruits more experienced employees into becoming managers is to threaten them with the alternative. It's a case of "if you don't become a manager your next boss will be a PHB from the boonies." That method is reasonably effective - a lot of coworkers have opted to "throw themselves on the grenade" and take on the management challenge (even at a pay cut!) because it was preferable to spending the rest of their career working for a total knob.