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IT Workers Cushioned From US Economic Downturn
DontLickJesus writes "According to the AP, technology has been the least hardest hit by the U.S.'s recent economic downturn. Quote: '"Overall technology employment is up in America and the wages associated with it are up," said John McCarthy, a vice president with Forrester Research.' The article goes on to say that companies realize the worth of their [IT] staff. This paired along with a recent article regarding the value of data centers when selling a company leads one to believe that the business world, while historically not fond of IT workers, is showing its true opinion of the sector."
Perhaps because during 2001-2003 they sliced back so much IT staff that they still have not finished catching up? Also many IT people went into other fields or back to school during that time, reducing the supply, meaning there is less chance of oversupply this time around.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't think that you're cusioned until the government bails you out with $700,000,000,000.
Sorry, I don't appreciate being forced to work for a living with unpaid overtime, while someone else gets free money.
testing out my trending skills
Good luck to all still trying to make a living completely unappreciated - worse than plumbers but just as necessary.
At least the plumbers can't be outsourced.
Well, help desk technicians are worth about $12/hour, honestly.
"Help Desk" is the low-end of the IT totem pole. It's a job that requires few qualifications beyond "Knows how to install software and update drivers".
I think the bigger fear that people with IT careers (myself included) is the inevitable deployment of high-speed fiber networks. For MANY businesses, having nothing but "terminals" that run apps on remote servers (which would probably be running under VMs) would be a huge cost savings, and probably more reliable, too.
It costs a lot of money to have a really reliable network, and the staff to maintain it. Why not pay some other company to do all that, and enjoy the economies of scale that they can offer?
IT professionals have been hit very hard and nowhere is this more evident than in Phoenix, where I live.
That's a great anecdote.
Now how about you show us some information which proves your one data point reflects the entire US economy.
You know, something tangible to refute the Labor Dept and TFA's quote from the VP & Principal Analyst of Forrester Research.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
This is just the start of it. It's way too early to crow.
Our end of the boat may not be taking on water yet but the ship is sinking, the brass band is playing and politicians are fighting over the deck chairs.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
This is the problem with "IT." It encompasses too many positions. IMHO, a help desk tech really isn't IT anymore. That's a common job many teenagers nowadays can do with a little training out of school.
Now, if you want to talk about 'professionals' like skilled developers or engineers I think for the most part they are doing fine (or at least better than average since the economy is pretty crappy atm). For example, my company has a hiring freeze on right now, except for my team. We're trying to find more mid-level software developers. I'm about ready to give up since it seems like no one can actually do anything they say on their resume. /sigh
The reason IT is being the least hit is because it has been the primary target for so long. IT has been viewed as fat, as so trimmed, for so long that there is precious little left.
The "true opinion" is that all the expendable IT jobs are now outside the company.
After outsourcing and offshoring as many jobs as possible, there are few expendable positions left in companies. Many of the positions that are being cut are jobs waiting for backfill and contract jobs.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
We must not allow the Treasure Secretary to receive $700 billion to spend with no oversight whatsoever. The current plan creates a gigantic moral hazard, is inflationary, rewards reckless risk-taking by CEOs, and still results in common people being foreclosed upon. We need to re-institute the Glass-Steagall act, allow highly leveraged firms to fail, insulate common people from the effects of these failing institutions, and regulate the market to prevent this catastrophe from happening again.
Manual labor manufacturing jobs are going away. I think schools should be teaching people to use technology. Instead people should be getting trained to operate the manufacturing tasked computers and robots that American tech companies will be leaders in. We need more smart people, stat!
Just because technology companies are not hit as hard by this economic downturn, that does not mean technology workers (programmers, engineers, network admins, system admins) are equivalently immune. One problem here is the Labor department is classifying things badly. When the payroll of a technology company goes up, they interpret it as benefiting technology workers. It could be they are just hiring more sales people (I've seen it done). And a huge amount of IT is done in non-technology companies, including financial companies. And even if these companies consider their data centers to be of value, the IT workers own none of it, and few of them would be considered vital employees.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The reason we're "cushioned" from the financial nonsense is because there isn't much room to go lower. Wages are crap, yet the nation is inextricably dependent on IT services. They can't pay us any less, and they can't fire us - they've already outsourced all the jobs they could.
The title may as well be "Wage slaves cushioned from US economy downturn". The only reason an IT guy gets a raise is because his supervisor's been getting too many phone calls checking references.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
CRA is being trotted out in a last ditch attempt by Republicans to salvage this fucking disaster of 8 years and blame this on Democrats.
Excuse me, but who has been in control of the house and senate for the past four years?
Beyond that bit of obvious fact that has eluded you, note that I blamed both feckless Democrats AND Republicans who could have both acted long ago (or more like, never acted to start with). There were some Democrats with similar concerns as well, but since they were in power they bear more culpability in my mind for doing nothing as the crisis grew more and more obvious. One year ago Fannie Mae was a burning tower of fire for those who cared to look. Even Obama saw it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Software licenses aren't ready for thin clients either in a lot of software. In a computing environment where most of the software is expensive non-office type applications, thin clients will never be deployed widely or effectively.
As more large financial firms and non-technology companies fail for financial reasons, the small and medium companies will dominate what type of computer systems are required. Most of these companies cannot afford the infrastructure requirements of thin clients.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Wait, Palin is a libertarian now? I know that she and McCain are constantly changing their positions on issues, but that's just crazy. How does one go from being a Bush Republican to a libertarian in just a month?
No more changing than any other politican including Obama (e.g. to drill or not to drill). The question is, how do you determine whether they changed their opinion on issues to get votes or whether they legimiately received new information which changes their view on an issue and then telling the public about it? People do change their minds. The question is whether they really changed them or they just said they do.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
. Wages are crap,
Actually, wages are not crap. We're just frigging greedy. WE're in a field that expects to pay us the same coming out of "Chumb MCSE school" the same rate that a frigging doctor makes coming out of medical school. I guarantee you that, on average, IT workers make more money on average than just about every other position, every field, in every other country on the planet earth. If you want more money, you need to own a business, rather than be an indentured servant for someone elses.
This is my sig.
I have not seen an equivalent increase in pay that comes close to the increase in productivity.
This is not unique to IT. It's been a real structural problem in the US economy for the past decade or so.
Well this is just good business and something you should be doing every so often anyways. I find that companies hiring in excess during boom times which makes the cut backs that much harder when times get lean again.
Fixed that for you.
Let's just call it what it is: a recession.
Whenever I listen to international news, they refer to the U.S. economy as in recession. The U.S. media, however, always call it an "economic downturn" or "slow economy" or some other silly thing that basically means recession.
It makes a lot of sense to have energy as the universal currency
It is. The dollar plummets as US oil consumption increases and US's share of world oil production falters. Americans drive less and Bush makes noises about opening up for drilling, puts corn on the market as ethanol, and what happens, but, the dollar slightly recovers and oil prices fall. Energy IS wealth, and conservation is really at best a mechanism to save your wealth for export... but it certainly doesn't create it. To do that, you need to have more energy, not less. If you want the USA to get really rich again, build a load of nuclear power plants and then use the electricity to drive the creation of alternative fuels. Anything else is just making the country poorer.
This is my sig.
I'm paying attention, but you're not really making sense.
Are you proposing that all political systems are "shit" unless they're designed to be foolproof?
I think by the very definition of "government", you're talking about building some sort of system of rules and regulations that's automatically subject to people agreeing to try to follow them.
Put it this way. Is chess a "crappy game" because it doesn't have provisions built into it to prevent someone from cheating by taking more than one turn while the other person isn't watching? Is the game of Blackjack "shit" because it wasn't designed to account for the possibility of somebody keeping an extra ace up their sleeve while playing?
Yes, you want a political system that's "resilient". A minority of corrupt individuals will hopefully not make the whole thing topple. And I think we HAD that in this country, until people started effectively changing the rules. When your own president treats the Constitution like "outdated papers that are largely meaningless", and the Judicial system is able to "interpret" laws to the point where their original purposes are completely twisted around - you have some big problems looming on the horizon.
I think they are not looking for much, except for:
10 years of Guru level Java expert experience with AJAX, Java Beans, Hibernate, Spring, SCJP
With Minimum 10 years of Oracle 10g (yes) experience with DBA skills to match the development skills working on Oracle RAC, Data warehousing and ETL
with great Linux/Unix skills with 15 years of socket programming, general admin knowledge, backup expertise with strong emphasis on korn, bash and C shell scripting
at least 8 years of Perl, Python and 5 (yes) years of Ruby on Rails
Yes, this is a made up requirement, but not too far from what I have seen in last 4 months on job boards when I was looking for a decent mid level development job.
Fret ye not the mods. The whole thing was very arguably offtopic and trollish. And I'd friggin' do it again, too. Mwahahahaha.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Instead of cribbing about your US citizen status, think how you can leverage it.
For instance most federal agencies and NSA require ONLY US citizens. You have a free hand in their IT job process.
Similarly, you can get easily security clearance for sensitive IT jobs as a citizen thus enabling you to move to the more lucrative non-competitive positions.
These Federal, security and sensitive IT positions can NEVER be filled in my H1B visa holders. NEVER. Plus the pay is pretty good.
Grow up the chain and migrate up. If you lie in the gutter you will become filthy. Stop competing with H1Bs. Move up. There's a lot of IT jobs in these areas where by law H1Bs are prohibited-:)