Slashdot Mirror
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.
...why I feel insulated from this thing... it can't last forever. More and more of our friends are starting to have problems with credit cards, mortgages, evictions, etc. etc. And here I am still blowing $300 a week on weed and doing fine. Yes I think I will check the AC checkbox now.
Because our economy appears to be driven by bubbles after the 1970's, different recessions seem to sock different professions. Programmers got hit in the 2001-2003 poppage. This time finance people are getting smacked by bubblenomics.
We all get our turn.
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
That's good news for both of them!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
To be fair that is only one area out of a huge country and it might not even be true of that whole area as I assume you don't go door to door and poll ever IT worker.
Secondly, working the help desk is fairly easily stuff. Anyone can do it. In fact, the latest trend in IT is to train monkeys to do help desk work. It's even cheaper than out sourcing, keeps wages in the country and there is little difference between the monkey's performance and any other help desk technician.
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
Companies are delaying/canceling IT projects all over the place. My company had a client last week, whine about needing a server upgrade, but cant do it because we actually charge for that shit. Says, if we would be willing to do the work for free, we can make it up on follow-on work next time around. We don't work for free, so his org will pound sand, or find some starving IT workers on Craiglist to do the work for Top Ramen. Fuck em. (yeah you, asshole, I KNOW you read Slashdot. Don't call me when your cheap-ass SATA-driven MOSS server goes tits up, baby.)
Nobody is willing to spend any money, which will only cost them down the road. IT requires investment in systems, people and maintenance. Skip on one, pay double for the others later.
IT is not just employees. Consultants are taking it in the shorts too.
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.
But most special apps are not designed to work this way. We find that Cytrix is still buggy technology. Graphics-intensive apps are also poor ran remotely. It's a great dream, but we are not there yet.
Table-ized A.I.
I disagree with you.
Helpdesk has nothing to do with it, on the base. You forgot that cost of living varies drastically across the entire country.
$12/hr might be survivable in Virginia or Texas, but in Chicago people have a hard time surviving on $18-20/hr.
When the cheapest food to survive a day runs around 1-2$ (thus about 4-6$ a day foodwise) and gas runs almost 4$, trust me that 12$/hr helpdesk job will not keep people afloat, even if it was $12/hr cash.
Don't forget that employers employ people to make a profit, not a loss; thus $12/hr is probably turning about$20-50/hr profit.
Helpdesk itself varies from company to company. I know on mine some ofo the employees are borderline retarded and helpdesk has to show them anything more complex than what a mouse is.
Why pay another company? Well, ever heard of Unisys? Lets just say you pay for what you get. Those suckers can barely speak english, and about 1 in 20 of them are competent. Their managers are good IT helpdesk. The rest don't understand you, don't listen, don't know how to do their job, and good luck understanding them.
Guess how many companies offshore to unisys? Tons.
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.
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?
Because inevitably when you take something that your business relies on and outsource to the lowest bidder, it gets done badly and your business suffers (sometimes irreparably). Take it from someone who works on a system that was outsourced, then insourced again long before outsourcing became trendy.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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
We have the smart people. We just need to find a way to encourage them to go to school, if they haven't already. But when people look at their older more experienced peers losing jobs, and salary levels staying flat or going down, they look for other career paths when they are at that age where the choices are easy. If over the next N years, all those older peers were hired back and a true shortage of people came to exist (as opposed to the fake ones being promoted by certain big companies to sway Congress to allow them to hire cheaper workers from overseas), then younger people would be seeing technology as a rewarding career path. It's all about confidence in the future, and businesses are not putting that in IT right now.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That is an absolute lie.
John McCain has been nothing but a cheerleader for the Reaganomics that has caused this debacle. He's been for privatization, deregulation and tax cuts. In fact, there's a video going around on YouTube the last few days where John McCain is giving very energetic (as much as he can be energetic) support for the privatization of Social Security.
Even someone as far conservative as George Will today has said that John McCain has just been an utter failure on economic issues and has done nothing but sputter and froth when we really need someone who's going to be a little more thoughtful. If you don't believe me, go watch the video of today's This Week on ABC. Listen closely to what George Will says.
Sarah Palin has become little more than a circus sideshow. She's actually become the candidate (out of the main four) with the LEAST approval. She slid 10 points in public approval in just three days last week. There is evidence that having her on the ticket is losing votes for McCain in more than one swing state. His Hail Mary Pass has fallen incomplete. Now that the convention "bump" after the RNC Crystal Night has passed, all the polls are trending Obama, including the most important electoral college numbers.
My only fear is that the only Hail Mary pass that the GOP has left requires a body count.
By the way, did you know that on Sept 18, just a few days ago, George Bush extended the national state of emergency that he put in place on Sept 23, 2001 for another year? Go to whitehouse.gov and look at the daily press releases and executive orders for Sept 18. There it is, big as life. Who even knew that we have been under a state of emergency since 9/11?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I disagree, even working first line tech support requires a lot more knowledge than that, and in most places (outside of the typical IT "hot spots" like San Francisco) there is enough competition for IT jobs that a lot of first line techs for ISPs will have a lot more knowledge than what is required to do their jobs but will still come off as dimwitted when talking to users since management doesn't give a crap about supplying them with information,
I've experienced an ISP changing the type of CPE they use and not providing tech support with any information about this until customers started calling in about it and the tech support team complained and asked for information about the new CPEs. And even then the only information given for several months was "Yeah, it's a xxx brand converter, model yyy", detailed technical information (and pictures and sample units) wasn't given until almost six months after the introduction, and by then we'd pretty much figured out everything by the answers given by higher-level techs in tickets and just keeping track of what information we could get from the customers.
This btw, was not an isolated incident, many companies simply don't supply their tech support departments (or outsourced tech support) with enough information to do their jobs properly, and then when something goes wrong they blame it on incompetence from tech support. I don't know how many scheduled outages (maintenance) I've seen reported to the NOC only to have someone from upper management send a department-wide email essentially telling all the techs that they're idiots for not knowing about the planned outage even though no information about the outage was given, or when upper management refuses to put information about any outages on the ISPs website because that would be admitting that there's a problem...
A lot of what one does when working tech support or helpdesk is to constantly try to figure out how things work since no one bothers to tell you anything (and why would they, everyone knows that tech support is just a bunch of high school dropouts, err, what? most of you guys are college educated? That can't be... LIES! I will not let reality interfere with my preconceived notions! Shut up or you're all fired! Also, keep smiling, here at MajorISP Inc we all like our jobs! It's company policy damnit!).
Yes, I'm bitter, I've had way too much contact with endusers and unreasonable management over the last couple of years, and not just in one company either, it seems to be an industry-wide trend.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
A few phrases that should never be uttered again in American public life:
"Free Markets"
"Deregulation"
"Privatization"
And the name "Milton Friedman" should be never be spoken in business schools again, except to show just how wrong someone can be. Turns out "Free Markets" were nothing more than a mechanism for squeezing wealth out of the lower 95% of the population and pouring it into the pockets of the top 5%.
It's amazing how suddenly socialism looks good when rich guys are looking at losing a lot of money.
I truly hope that whatever bailout package gets approved includes some very punitive measures for the Wall Street CEOs and CFOs who got into this mess. Anybody who stands to gain from this bailout should be forced to go to the same credit counseling classes that regular people who file bankruptcy must attend. Also, several hundred hours of community service would also be appropriate.
Do you know that the executives from Lehman Brothers and AIG are still going to take home multi-million dollar bonus packages this year?
Yes, I'm talking about Class Warfare. As Warren Buffet famously said: "There's Class Warfare, and my side is winning." In fact, it was the rich and the GOP who declared class war on the rest of us back when Ronald Reagan took office. Well, now it's time to show them what it feels like to be in a war.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
The government will literally be buying up debt. They'll take ownership of various mortgage related securities. Ok, well this means that what they get depends on what happens with a mortgage. If the person defaults and doesn't pay anything, well then the government is going to lose money, especially if the property isn't able to be sold for much. If they pay off the mortgage, the government will make money.
You have to remember that it isn't as though all these mortgages are going to default, or that the property underlying them will suddenly become totally worthless.
So I certainly wouldn't expect the US government to come out with a net gain on this (though it'd be amusing if they did), but the net loss is going to be far less than the upfront cost.
One can make a cogent argument that too much government regulation is bad, and you might even be able to make a fair argument that the current crisis was not caused by too little regulation, but there is no reasonable argument that can conclude that the current crisis has been caused by too much regulation.
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.
Put a ticket in.
John McCain has been nothing but a cheerleader for the Reaganomics that has caused this debacle. He's been for privatization, deregulation and tax cuts. In fact, there's a video going around on YouTube the last few days where John McCain is giving very energetic (as much as he can be energetic) support for the privatization of Social Security.
Yeah, a bunch of banks have failed and some people are losing their homes that they couldn't afford, but:
a) The commodities sectors are doing well. If you work in farming, oil, coal, iron, copper or gold, then, those sectors are all doing very well. Even the moribund alternate fuels sector is shaping up in spots. Biodiesel maker Nova Biosource Fuels is actually running its Seneca refinery profitably and if it gets some financing, this penny stock is going to absolutely kick ass.
b) Now we find out that IT workers are doing well. In fact, it looks that like that Lehman's data center is going to be purchased by Barclay's more or less intact. Not only that, but Intel and Microsoft, both industry leaders, are not only making record revenues, but Intel is actually paying dividends.
c) If we turn to the housing situation, we find, shockingly, that more people in the USA actually own their own homes than ever before. In short, despite the banking losses and the bankruptcies, at the end of the day, a bipartisan policy designed to encourage lending to put as many people into homes as possible actually WORKED.
The tell tale sign of a real recession or economic downturn is high unemployment and falling commodities prices. Neither has taken place. Instead, what we have is moderate unemployment and high commodities prices and this suggests that demand is high, rather than low.
Now, I don't doubt that some people are hurting in this economy but those people tend to be concentrated in blue states that have been stupidly run for way too long. Michigan's government has basically made it all but impossible to do business in that state and Ohio is as nearly as incompetent and corrupt, particularly in the manufacturing centers and Democratic bastions of Cleveland, Toledo, Akron and Youngstown. Red states, on the other hand, big producers of food and fuel, are doing rather well.
Bottom line is, this economy isn't falling apart, and never has been. Instead, wealth is shifting from those who make raw materials and products from those who make up financial services around them. WE have lived a lie that said that a bunch of paper is more important than the coal that it represents and it simply isn't true. Bush's economic policies have worked, free trade has worked, and if the market has decided that a program that does something with a car is not as valuable as the steel that makes it well, you are just on the wrong side of reality.
The irony is that Obama's policies are actually going to shift this economic advantage to red states any more. Bush's economic policies, at the essence, have allowed the market to refocus on the basics of materials and manufacturing as the value drivers of the economy. When Obama goes and enacts all sorts of environmental legislation, he's only going create even more scarcity. Suddenly, that old copper mine in Arizona or dying oil well the gulf are going to be even more valuable than it is today, when you can't get permits any more for a new one, and yes, those states that push back more against the Obama administration are those states that are going to have the biggest advantage, economically. They will make more, while the blue states make less, and as a consequence, they will wind up with more money. The future is passing from Chicago where the corn is traded, to the belts where the corn is made, from New York where the cars are traded, to the south where the cars are made.
This is my sig.
. 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.
This crap has been a long time coming. It is a direct result from basically two sources. 1. Easy credit for everyone! Our imaginary money economy was bound to implode at some point due to the unbelievable irresponsibility in both consumers and the companies that were trying to get rich quick by extending risky credit to everyone that would sign on the line. The housing market is imploding because a $500,000 mortgage (multiplied out) has a much larger impact than the same people multiplying out 10-30k in credit card debts. 2. I want it and I want it now! This is both the consumer buying everything with imaginary money they can't afford as well as the God awful business practices surrounding the immediate infinite growth model. Every company is trying to build monsterous immedaite returns every quarter. So they do stupid shit stacked on stupid shit stacked on stupid shit and then collapse. The company that did the bookkeeping for Enron was started by a cutthroat accountant. "Our responsibility is to the auditors, not to our clients, because when our responsibility is to the auditors, our clients will always be taken care of correctly." He built a tremendously large and successful company by this mentality. As soon as the company started cooking books for fun and profit for more immediate gains they imploded.
My real bitch is that over the last 20 years of predominately Republican control they have encouraged this insane business model of "don't worry, fuck up all you want, commit whatever crimes you need to maximize your profit, we promise not to step in as long as you make it worth our while". Not that Democrats are off the hook for this crap mind you, but it was predominately Republican approach to not getting involved at any cost. Now, the house of cards is collapsing and the Executive branch is acting on its own buying out all these companies. (Quick history check...go look up that form of government that involves the government owning all the businesses...they are definitely earning their colors as the Red Party with the secret laws, secret prisons, warrantless spying, voting problems, and now government owned business). Also, as previously mentioned, Bush was acting on his own as of 2003 to try and remove the regulations that were in place that were supposed to help prevent this meltdown, when he started positioning the Fed for this bailout it became clear that they could go balls the the wall and if they failed they would get a bailout package from the Fed and all would be ok. He poured on the gas and started smoking until it became that burning tower you mention.
These assholes have murdered almost every conceivable form of science and demonize intellectuals. This includes their apparent piss poor understanding of economics. I want to slap these assholes every time they say lower taxes to increase revenue. While it can most certainly increase revenue if you are on the correct side of the maximization curve, it most certainly does not work if you are already below the revenue maximizing number. Oh...that and it doesn't fucking matter if you maximize revenue if you spend more than the difference between the previous spending and previous revenue point.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Not to keep George "Fucktard" Bush in power longer, of course, since the Constitution does not allow that, but just to give him more power while he's there. I'm not necessarily in favor of it, unless it is necessary in helping certain parties to understand (such as with a bullet to the brain) that it is not considered socially acceptable to blow up Mariotts in Pakistan.
Anyway, here it is.
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 18, 2008
Notice: Continuation Of The National Emergency With Respect To Persons Who Commit, Threaten To Commit, Or Support Terrorism
RSS Feed White House News
On September 23, 2001, by Executive Order 13224, I declared a national emergency with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701-1706). I took this action to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the grave acts of terrorism and threats of terrorism committed by foreign terrorists, including the terrorist attacks in New York, in Pennsylvania, and against the Pentagon committed on September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks against United States nationals or the United States. Because the actions of these persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the United States, the national emergency declared on September 23, 2001, and the measures adopted on that date to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 23, 2008. Therefore, in accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency with respect to persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support terrorism.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.
GEORGE W. BUSH
THE WHITE HOUSE,
September 18, 2008.
What debate? Here on this side we have science, and over on this side, unfounded conjecture based on a 2000yr old book that is little more than a documented game of telephone because i heard it from a guy who heard it from a guy who was there I swear. There is no debate, one is science, one is not. Pure and simple.
There is a british scientist that has a video floating around that shows the progression from light sensing to eyeball very well with example critters all along the way. So that irreducible complexity bullshit is a complete joke. In fact, Ken Miller has an amazing 2hr presentation on the whole Intellitent Design where he absolutely eviscerates their silly arguments, and is a Roman Catholic, so it science and intelligence goes beyond religion.
The God discussion belongs in religion and philosophy classes, not science classes. The evidence for "poof magic" is 0, so even though evolution can't trace the exact path for every critter that walks the earth, it at least has evidence.
What she and every other creationist wants is creationist bullshit treated like it is even remotely equal to scientific theory. They tout the "its just a theory" crap because they don't understand the definition of a scientific theory. Even if most kids laugh it off, the fact that they put that shit in the class causes the assumption that there is anything more to it than silly superstition and intellectual laziness.
I'm sorry, but my version of "God" is a hell of a lot more complex than rolling up some playdough snakes and saying "Bamf" its done.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
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.
Many german cars for example are made right here in the US and shipped back out all over the world.
Most of the foreign car factories in the USA are essentially assembly. It's not like the engines and transmissions are actually built in the USA. Just look at the parts origin list of these supposedly "American made" foreign cars. They only do the final assembly here to save on freight. It's like IKEA, but for cars.
This is my sig.
because I just lost my IT Administrator job on Tuesday...due to financial constraints at the company.
I have nothing clever to put here...
The problems we're experiencing today are NOT because of "free markets" at all.
The problems are because of govt. interference and manipulation of the markets for their own motives!
The USA has spent decades in a scenario people keep labeling a "free market", yet in reality, we REALLY have a situation that's just a bastardized version of the concept. A truly free marketplace requires a government that won't pass legislation simply because congressmen or senators have been "bought out" by big corporations.
Certain businesses have gotten ahead of the competition NOT through any normal means as defined by a "free market economy", but rather, by influencing government to give them a guaranteed legal advantage!
As we move more and more to a "global economy", it's also becoming clear that our government's standard tactics to control inflation and regulate economic growth are failing to work as well as they used to. There are probably just too many variables to the equations now. I believe Alan Greenspan made some comments to that effect right after he retired. He admitted that near the end, govt. was really just taking a lot of chances, hoping raising or lowering the interest rates or printing a little more or less money would have the desired effect. They felt they were slowly losing their ability to get a desired result from a specific action.
So Close
Time for a cow analogy
Communism
You have two cows,
the government takes both and gives you some milk.
Fascism
You have two cows,
the government takes both and sells you some milk.
Which one is more accurate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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's not just Phoenix that's struggling. I have a friend in Portland, Oregon who is moving to where I live (St. Louis, MO) because she works in I.T. and can't find a job anywhere out there.
She said HP and Intel both have big layoffs either planned or in progress, and Nike is moving an entire facility out of Portland and overseas (S. Korea or something like that?). The only jobs you can find there right now are "day labor" types of things. Unemployment is something like 12% overall.
Here in St. Louis, I guess we look "good" by comparison, but we've recently had our "world headquarters" Anheuser Busch brewery bought out by the Belgians. Boeing seems to be continuously downsizing. Our Chrysler plant just closed up. Reuters' presence here has been dwindling. A.G. Edwards got bought out too. Meanwhile, I'm watching people going back to our area colleges and universities left and right, because they can't find a job and they decide they may as well just "take out a student loan, go back to school for a while, and hope it helps them get something better after they get back out".
We have a lot of help-desk type positions available here, thanks to businesses like Convergy's, who run 2 big call centers, and telcos who run others around town. But last I checked? Even $12/hr. was pretty optimistic for those positions. They're just "revolving door" jobs paying more like $8-10/hr. in many cases. Our cost of living might not be nearly as high as on the coasts - but I still can't imagine how anyone is able to live on their own at those wages here!
Here in St. Louis though, I often see this odd disconnect with reality. Typically, you'll have a married person who can't understand why a single person with a kid or kids wouldn't just "go work at place X" that has "openings right now paying $12 an hour". Obviously, they're too used to their 2 income lifestyle to realize that $12/hr. means scraping by in poverty level conditions if that's your sole source of income.
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.
The ones that were subject to those government interventions did LESS damage than the ones that weren't. The ones that were under those regulations were constantly warned about that behavior. The ones that were not are the ones that did it more often.
Now to be fair...I think it needs different government involvement, not less, not more. Where the government needed to be involved early in that crisis it wasn't (thank you Republicans), and the areas where it was it shouldn't have been (thank you Democrats). I do believe there are a great number of areas where there needs to be regulation, the problem is that we will NEVER get the regulation we need so long as we have lobbyists for every special interest group under the sun greasing the palms of those congress critters. What we wind up with is broken ass loophole ridden nonsense that favors whoever paid the biggest sum when the law was written.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
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
Wow. Just... wow. I can't believe this partisan rant was rated so highly, especially considering that it claims the GP argument was a lie without any proof whatsoever.
Ok, this will probably be modded into obscurity right away, but the GP point was *not* a lie. I won't try to point out way, but here's a link to a Google search on how the Democrats blocked McCain's reform efforts years ago.
You could also do your own research on the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005 before deciding that PopeRatzo's post is "Interesting" rather than a bigger lie than the post he was responding to.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I prefer Surrealism:
You have two giraffes,
the government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
Then why are mega corporations pushing to raise the cap on H1B Visa IT limits if they "love" us US Citizen IT Workers?
I've been out of work since 2002, and many other IT workers I know have moved on to non-IT work as all companies in our area are hiring are foreign IT workers via H1B Visas. I have been turned down for thousands of IT jobs because I am not a foreigner that is willing to work for minimum wage or almost minimum wage via a H1B IT Visa. I'd have a much better chance if I renounce my US citizenship and apply for citizenship in an Asian nation and then apply for an H1B Visa application and then I'd have a 100% chance of being hired as an IT worker in the USA. Of course it would be for a fraction of what I would be paid as a US citizen, but most of us have been out of work for so long, we start to get desperate. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
If you really want to find a "qualified" firmware engineer then then I suggest posting a link. I would also suggest not writing off everyone with less than 10 years of experience and a Masters Degree.
That being said, I believe you when you say you are having a hard time finding programmers of any sort as I have been interviewing candidates for months, for all levels of experience, and have yet to find even a single person worth extending an offer too.
Companies can get workers from other countries IF American workers cannot meet the demand.
The demand is $1/hr tech support people that double as the billing department and moonlight as coders. Americans cannot legally fill this role in America for that price.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I call bullshit, I worked for two banks for over 6 years from 1998-2004. Banks are NOT forced to give any percentage of any race a loan, that is a load of crap and you should really check your facts before you start spreading rumors of things you know nothing about.
How do I know this for a fact that you are wrong? I wrote loan qualification software and that is not one of the criteria our software used or ANY other of the major loan qualification systems used to determine loan qualification. The loan qualification software we wrote and maintained determined loan qualification based on criteria such as debt to income ratio, credit ratings at the big three bureaus, loan to value, down payment, cash reserves, employment information etc. and matched the person to available loan programs based on that info. I have personally written two loan qualification systems and seen the inner workings of three others, not one of them used race as a determining factor.
Banks only take information on ethnicity (which is completely voluntary) as a means of showing that they are not discriminating against any particular group, it has absolutely no bearing on if a person is qualified for a loan or not. The problem was that loans were too easy to get, the entire reason I quit the banking industry in 2004 was because the criteria for receiving loans was so lax that I knew it would blowup eventually.
Just as an example of how easy it was to get a mortgage, in 2002 we were asked by execs are our bank to adjust our software for a new product the bank was offering. It was a stated income, stated assets, no doc loan, with up to 106% financing, with a 680 FICO. In laymans terms it meant that if you had a 680 middle credit score you could walk into a bank tell them you make 300K a year as the VP of Technology at ABC Software Engineering Corp., ask for a 700K mortgage on a house that is only worth 660K and get it, all without proving that anything you said was true. The best part is that the only human validation that most banks performed was when the underwriter checked salary.com to make sure that the individuals stated salary was appropriate for the position they stated having.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN