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Layoffs at Microsoft, Intel, and IBM
Normally I try to avoid posting straight business news, but I think that these 3 stories combine to something meaningful.
Muleguy noted Microsoft is laying off 5,000,
Mspangler reports that
Intel is cutting 5-6k, while
nonyabidness afraid4myjob submitted that IBM Layoffs have begun with no number, but estimates as high as 16,000.
Fuck. Thank you world economy.
Because culling the lowest 5-10% performing staff is good for the overall business, and now is the perfect time to do that because the story of your job cuts will get lost among all the other stories about job cuts and not cause you as much bad publicity.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Somehow this is all going to be linked to the new Prez, right?
Oh.. Don't worry they can still blame Bush for another 18months...
Some more perspective: H-1B program still going strong, with up to 65,000 visas for 2009! (more if you include the universities, which are exempt from the cap as they work only for the public good, with no self-interest whatsoever.
Step 1 to help employment: stop issuing H-1B visas. Period. No exceptions, no delay.
That's why the role of Govt. is so pivotal - not just in this instance, but also in cases where 'individualistic' impulses will not work for the common good - infrastructure development, for example.
I think it's time for US companies to abandon those oversea cheap labor idea's and bring back those low paying jobs back into the US. I know the whole Global economy is a mess, but I'm a firm believer of "Charity Starts in the Home". There are so many people right now that would take those jobs. There was what, 4000 people interviewing for 150 jobs at Wal-Mart?? Times are going to get tougher and we need to reel that shit in.
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
Once upon a time, a company had loyalty to it's people, and the worker's were expected to have some loyalty to the company. If the company had a rough quarter or a poor year, people pulled together and worked harder. A company USED to do layoffs to avoid going bankrupt. Workers viewed each other as extended family members - it was common for workers to get together at each other's homes on weekends and holidays. Families got to know each other, work was done in a 'team' enviroment; and if you pulled your weight and did your job - you could expect to retire with the company you worked for. 20 years of service was celebrated, opportunties for promotion were biased such that someone who had shown loyalty to the company had first dibs, over someone coming in from the outside.
Today, despite record profits, companies close plants and terminate people - so the few executives can reap huge bonus's. Getting laid off by a plant closing, business downturn, or poor managment decisions punishes employees who were powerless to avoid the mistake - but end up taking full responsibility in that they have to sell their homes, and re-locate to find work elsewhere. With the cost of housing - this means that the 401K money must be robbed today, so they can continue to make mortgage payments while they try to sell their home, and have money to bring to closing when their home sells for less than what they paid for it.
I've been there, I've had my retirment almost depleted because companies transferred jobs to India, a plant closing, terminating a project I was involved with, a company purchased and moved overseas, and a company that failed due to poor managment. Now after 20 years, I finally have solid career.
When did all this change? Why did this change? It certainly hasn't been for the better - for the USA used to lead the world in production, in technology and development. People used to matter, now each of us is just a cog in the company machine. We are all expendable, and will be dropped on a whim. I wonder why.
Do the words "Smoot-Hawley" mean anything to you?
International trade is good for overall productivity, whether we're talking about commodities or services.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's not for private enterprise to try and throw itself on the economic grenade. They're SUPPOSED to save themselves, their stockholders can SUE them if they don't try to save themselves, and having the whole crash next year when you could have cut sensibly beforehand is ridiculous.
The whole point of the capitalistic system is that the individual knows what is best for themselves. They need to act to preserve themselves, just as (in better times) they need to act to increase their gains.
Now obviously, this isn't good for the whole in times of crisis. That is where the government can step in, to pump money into the economy through targeted public works and infrastructure projects. Which is what it's been sorta doing...
This bank bailout crap has been a fiasco in terms of loosening up money, which also needs to happen. The other prong of recovery is often new private enterprise, which is fueled by large numbers of skilled workers who are no longer employed, but that usually requires some start-up capital, and that's problematic right now.
Anyway, socialist chicken little freak outs don't really help either. It's not the duty of the company to provide jobs, it's to maintain themselves. In the long run, that preserves more jobs.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Oh, for crying out loud.
First of all, the bulk of the freshly-inflated money that those geniuses on capitol hill are giving away is going towards keeping unprofitable ventures in business, not towards building roads. Secondly, every dollar that the government taxes, borrows or inflates is a dollar that's taken from private parties and spent on things that those people have not chosen to spend it on. Government can not "stimulate" an economy by increasing government spending, as Hoover and Roosevelt thoroughly proved during the first great depression.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Agreed, partly. 1) That doesn't mean we should be providing tax incentives for businesses that outsource to India, either. 2) H1-B visas aren't trade per se. 65,000 H1-Bs for IT workers means 65,000 domestic IT workers without a job. 65,000 TVs imported from China, OTOH, create more jobs than they cost.
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Jack Welch, when he took over GE started the whole 10% of your under-achiever hog-wash.
Now, if you have poor achievers in your company, who have been there for decades - as GE had - perhaps a 1 time 'cleansing' is necessary. But, if you are doing your interviewing competently, and are teaching and mentoring your new hires - to continuously 'fire' 10% of the workforce is not only stupid, it's counter productive.
Consider, how long does it take a person to learn his job function and all the nuances that take it from being merely fulfilled, but where he can then magnify it? Given the proper motivation, a below average performer can become a top-performer. If a person knows what's expected, is shown how to do this, and is encouraged - he will either refuse to conform (termination case) or he will improve. I've seen this, I've done this and it works.
Other employees see this, and morale improves. People do not want to leave that group/company. Motorola USED to be like this. When Samsung came into town, they had to offer 20%+ salary bumps to attract Motorola employees to leave. Why? Because the people at Motorola knew that they were 'safe', that they had a career and a future with the company. Then Hector Ruiz came along and killed Motorola, before moving on to AMD and killing them.
I do not subscribe to the 10% cull; because you very quickly come to the point that you are cutting good people, and replacing them with good people who you will fire in a year or so. This creates a hostile work environment (why should I welcome you, help you or agree to work with you - if I'm competing against you to keep my job?), slows projects down (people shift departments constantly, at the slightest rumor of a reduction in headcount in a particular division), and you spend a great deal of your time where 90% of your employees are waiting for 10% of the team to come up to speed with their job requirements.
Show me a company that embraces the 10% cull, and I'll show you a company that is on the way down the tubes. Companies that terminate the poor performers, not due to some obscure quota, but do to performance - tend to retain their employees for the long haul. IBM used to be famous for this, and they rose to world domination. Motorola used to embrace this, and they used to have a world-class semiconductor market, communications division, automotive parts, space, micro-controllers and cell phone groups. The people make a company great - not the managment. Management has never made a company great, but poor managment has certainly killed more than a few.
And, to be even more clear, damn near every company can lose 5-10% of its workforce without impact.
Layoffs are the perfect opportunity to get rid of the people who you don't really want there but don't want to go through the hassle of actually firing.
Anyone who has gone through the process of making the list knows that its not random, not last hired-first-fired... when its individuals in a group and not the whole group, its "who have we wanted to get rid of and actually can now without giving them multiple warnings and dragging it out for months?".
To be fair, it was Hoover's fault.
Hoover screwed up, but Roosevelt continued and compounded Hoover's mistakes. It's quite interesting to dig up Roosevelt's speeches from the campaign against Hoover, where he correctly lambasted Hoover for all the things that he later referred to as the "new deal" and promoted.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Previous economic discussions on Slashdot have included several posts with the sentiment: "I'm choosing to ignore this recession. I still have a job so I'm going to continue as before. The only economic problem we have is psychological."
Are you still so certain that your job will remain when another 5% of your customers are about to become unemployed? Are you still so optimistic that you could easily find a new job with a million other educated and experienced workers back on the job hunt too?
Even if this recession were purely psychological, it has set a wave in motion that will splash around for a while causing layoffs and bankruptcies. If there is a rational basis for the economic shrinkage then it could be even worse. I wonder how long it will take to return to growth and optimism.
I'm looking forward to this line:
"U.S. Government announces it will layoff 50% of its staff and use the excess money to payoff the national debt & eventually lower income taxes." Of course that will never happen; either in a bad economy or a good economy. Politicians don't know how to reduce spending.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Wrong. Government DID stimulate the economy out of the Depression, and Roosevelt essentially prevented a revolution (Hoover, though, did nothing useful). It's true, though, that Roosevelt's pre-war stimulus plans were too small. It took WWII and pretty much unrestrained government spending to get us fully back on track.
Rules for bailout:
1. Crappy product
2. Unnecessary industry
3. Heartless executives
I can dig it.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I've got news for you, kid: After firing the 10% worst-performing staff, a company STILL has a 10% worst-performing staff, along with newly lowered moral.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Well psychology is a real experimental science. Economics isn't. That is why economics is strongly affected by politics. Do you ever hear of liberal and conservative chemists? Or even psychologists? Furthermore, economics doesn't want to acknowledge the findings of psychology, so it is just plain wrong on many things. Economics is a social science like sociology. It is a discipline that attempts to be reasonable, but is ultimately not guided by the discipline of experimental results or even the need to only propose testable ideas. There is a lot of sophisticated math in economics, but without experiments that is just a rich toolbox to make up any story you want about anything.
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Perhaps you should take your close minded judgmental bullshit back to the 20th century where it belongs? Or instead, we could realize that locals get priority over foreign workers in other countries and the US is one of the only ones where its citizens don't seem to give a damn about their neighbor and yet care deeply for someone else on another continent who wants their neighbors job.
Yes, you're not confused, it is crazy that companies with raving profits are dumping employees, and it is heartless.
What defines the beginning of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is wild speculation on everything. They wildly speculated on the tech bubble, housing, oil prices, and credit.
Now, they're overspeculating (overreacting) yet again, this time on a potentially sour 2009. However, it is only going to be a sad 2009 because of how they're acting.
Knee jerk reactions got us into this mess, it is like quicksand to keep speculating like a madhatter and freaking out over everything.
Welcome to the Great Depression part deux, caused yet again by your own panic. The first long & great depressions was caused by overspeculation in the railround companies, gold, and 48% tariffs on all imports (an example of governments freaking out). All of which led to the same self-bleeding that is happening now.
History repeats itself, and you're still all morons this time around even with all your technology and ingenuity. You can't even help yourself, why help anyone else.
Stabbing Westward - Save yourself
You cannot save me, You can't even save yourself.
I cannot save you...I can't even save myself.
Save yourself, So just save yourself.
Well then it's a pity that the majority of the economists that appear on mass-media to enlighten us with their opinions are of the bullshit armchair types.
Advanced enconomics may win Nobel Prizes, but it seems that those running the actual show prefer the bullshitters when making their decisions.
Do the words "Smoot-Hawley" mean anything to you?
Do the words "trade balance" mean anything to you? Before cheerleading what you learned one day in Econ 101 about "free trade", you might want to check the footnotes (unless, as often happens, your text was such a blatant propaganda piece that it omitted them). The footnote should point out that even the theoretical advantages of free trade only occur if trade is balanced (oops, did you forget that detail?). Another footnote should point out that severe, sustained trade imbalances lead to financial crises. Ever heard of the Asian Crisis of the late 1990's? Caused by trade imbalances.
"It's like claiming that if we forced all the Mexicans to go home, that Americans would take the fruit-picking jobs."
If it were more affordable to live on a piece of property big enough, in a good climate that can support citrus trees, more Americans might pick their own fruit. Excuse me while I go out and grab some oranges off my tree, I need to make some marmalade.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And here I am looking for a job at IBM, Intel, Sun, . . . . Maybe I should take the in-laws up on their offer to let their son-in-law with a CS PhD live in the basement for a few years.
> IBM is at a 20 year high for employment; the highest since it dropped 150k workers in the 90's.
Yes, but where? We've done a huge amount of hiring in India, Argentina, and Brazil, and have been laying off US employees left and right.
We are absolutely cut to the bone in the US, and have been mildly dysfunctional for the last couple years as a result. Every time you try to get anything done, people have either been laid off or reorg'ed to death, and no one knows who to talk to anymore. Last year I was reorg'ed four times, and I can't even tell you who I report to beyond my first-line manager (seriously - I don't know off-hand).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Uhh, if the government pays a salary of $100,000 and then collects $30,000 in taxes, you can't say that not paying the salary is a loss of $30,000 in taxes. It's a gain of $70,000 via not paying the salary to begin with.
You're not creating wealth by taking the $100,000 from other people as taxes and then giving it to the worker. Claiming his spending represents a positive economic activity is kind of silly, since the money was already taken from other people.
Repeat after me: government does not create wealth. Even if it makes some men wealthy.
Government can only create wealth if it gets into the business of making & selling something, which is generally a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, e.g., socialism doesn't work.
Yeah right. Im sure thats true a certain percentage of the time but the scenario "why pay someone 80k when we can get a slave for 24k" plays itself out too.
The problem with H1-Bs is that both of you are right. You're giving two extreme sides of a continuous spectrum of arguments. Increasing supply of labor with constant demand will lower equilibrium price, so yes you can get wage slaves. Likewise, decreasing supply will raise price, so you'll get Americans demanding $10/hr to tend fields.
Neither of these scenarios are wrong, it's a comparatively simple market situation. But the government is going to have to clarify what it means by "no available person" to fill a job. At what price? It's the law that's out of touch with economics.
Is it damn near impossible to get a job? Are the job listings on Monster, etc. really empty? My experience suggests not. Unemployment is higher than it has been in a long time, but it is still less than what is normal for Europe.
It's just another recession, man. Don't buy the media panic. Fear is their business model.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I had a boss who thought like that. He wanted to annually cut the bottom 10%. The problem is defining who that bottom 10% is... some of his buddies were jerks who deserved to disappear, but no chance they would go. Not to mention this constant mentality of "we have to fire people" is horrible for morale.
Basically the people who get fired are the ones farthest from the boss who wants to do the firing. He just tells everyone they have to fire 10%, and then he gets to sleep well at night, while everyone else suffers the agonies of the damned.
Reganomics is dead, pass it on.
If you think there is exactly one problem that caused this whole mess, you are wrong. Like any good engineering failure, this was caused by multiple little failures all concatenated to create a nice big one.
Personally I will never hire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place.
I'm not willing to categorically eliminate tens of thousands of people like that. I've worked in enough organizations to realize that no matter how fucked up a company may be, any individual working there can still be competent.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Government can, however, get useful productivity out of people who would otherwise be unemployed. Better to have people working for government funded projects than to pay them the money as welfare checks instead.
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My recollection is that the IBM layoffs of yesteryear focused heavily on senior staff, cutting many of their jobs to avoid paying pensions. They hired a lot of the people back as contractors afterward. I wouldn't bet on the junior staff being at the heavy end of the cut...
I suggest you study advanced economics more critically. Having a PhD in economics from a top-tier program, yes I agree that armchair economists are much different from real academic economists. However, I also think there is a tendency for many economists to place too much reliance on ornate mathematical and statistical models and not enough time spent stepping away from the computer, looking out the window, and asking whether or not those models are realistic. Note that looking out the window and seeing what people are actually doing is NOT the same thing as running 10,000 regressions to try and prove your model is correct. Common sense has no substitute.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Bullshit. The money that governments are currently spending on bail-outs and stimulus programs is not coming from any private parties. It is coming from the future.
It is coming from the future in the form of debt. It is based on the faith that eventually there will be enough wealth to cover the tremendous costs of yesterday's bad decisions and today's corrective actions. These debts are high risk since there is no collateral to back them. However, if these become bad debts, that means we're screwed anyway. We'll be back in the day when it is more valuable to know how to clean a pig sty than to know Python or even the Pythagorean theorem.
It isn't like we've got much choice in the matter. Marketplace decisions for the last few years have left us with trillions more dollars on paper than there is real wealth to back, and with all the risk management schemes, there is no way to attach the shortfall to any one region or segment. It's now a general system failure. We're screwed if we don't act, and we might be screwed no matter what we do.
It would be nice to see those who were responsible for watching the marketplace who should have raised the alarm about this five years ago hung screaming by their cojones in a Texas desert. That wouldn't help us out of the bind the world is now in, but I and others would feel a bit better if that were to happen. Which should count for a little something.
Just because they're doing it wrong this time doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, nor that government's have never got it right in the past. Look at Germany's rebuilding after both wars, or Japan. The government played a pivotal role.
The economy is a reflection of a country's state, whilst the government is a reflection of a country's future.
In a recession people panic and do not spend, they save their money causing economic deflation.
This is just blatant historic revisionism, as another poster pointed out, Roosevelt didn't go far enough with his stimulus plans. It took WWII and taxes as high as 80% to right the US economy.
The problem with your rather out-dated monaterist beliefs is that supply and demand can balance out at a level where unemployment is still at very high levels. No economic growth == no new jobs.
Governments can, and have in the past, stimulated an economy by taking money people would otherwise be hoarding in fear, and spent it on projects that provided jobs.
You can argue that the current government's stimulus plans suck, and that what they're spending on is pointless. What you can't do is say that such plans haven't worked in the past, that's just rewriting history.
Unfortunately most companies have a terrible record of cutting away the muscle along with the fat when doing a big downsizing.
The truth is, the way it usually goes is that:
Personally I will neverhire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place.
s'okay. Fortunately for the world, with an attitude like that, chances are high that you'll never be in a position to make that kind of decision.
Well, I've seen it once, and I can guarantee you it didn't work. In our case, we had already had pretty massive layoffs, so any deadwood was long gone. The basic problem is that you probably aren't going to get rid of the lowest performing 10%, you're gone to get rid of the 10% that the boss doesn't know or doesn't care about, regardless of how valuable those people are.
And on a basic level, I strongly object to the idea that it's a good business practice to just keep turning up the heat on your employees. I worked for many, many years for a very successful company that thrived because we kept a strong, informed staff that knew how to work together. We were acquired by a "high pressure, gotta deliver now, fire the bottom 10%, no time to do it right just do it!" company ,and the result was dismal failure after dismal failure. So to say the least, I'm not impressed.
Well it's not going to be the boss's lunch buddies. Probably one of those annoying asocial guys who claims to do work.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
For some companies the hiring process is a form of masturbation. Rejecting a high percentage of people makes them feel like they select only the best, which implies that they are the best too.
When I was hiring we spent only about an hour with each candidate and hired people who worked out fine.
There's a fine line here. Being a nation of immigrants is one thing. Bringing in tens of thousands of people from overseas to do work at lower pay than U.S. employees so that U.S. companies can make higher profit margins is another. I'd be amazed if there were truly a single H1B job that couldn't be filled by a U.S. citizen. Companies just don't want to pay what it costs to fill them that way, as it usually involves relocation expenses and stealing someone away from a different type of job that pays more.
I'm strongly of the opinion that H1B visas need to be given careful scrutiny, and that for every H1B issued, the company should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the position can't be filled by someone local. A good start might be advertising the position for two years and not getting a single applicant who meets the base qualifications. If a company hasn't done that, it's a safe bet that the company is abusing H1Bs.
As for whether H1B visas are trade, the answer is pretty clearly "no". There's a nearly perfect trade imbalance. We're employing tens of thousands of people from countries that employ pretty close to zero people from the U.S.. This is not a very efficient way of doing things. If Americans can't do the job, we need to fix our education system so that it spits out people who are qualified, not Band-Aid® the problem by bringing in foreign workers to do it.
And FWIW, you can't tell me that there are any IT jobs that Americans can't do. I might be convinced about some esoteric systems programming job (in which you want to hire the person who wrote a particular chunk of code originally), but IT jobs? No way. The employers just don't want to pay the rates needed to hire and retain Americans who would otherwise lean towards higher-paying programming jobs. That's not sufficient grounds to grant them an H1B. We should tell those companies to suck it up....
Again, I'm not saying Americans can replace all of the H1B workers---there are probably a few places where they can't---but right now, people seem afraid to even ask the question, which IMHO is just as shortsighted as the people who scream "throw them all out". The key word here is "balance", and companies that hire more and more H1B employees as they cut American workers by the thousands are pretty clearly on the wrong side of the balancing beam.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Some companies keep fake openings circulating just to stir up the waters. The question then becomes: are those openings real or phantom? I have no idea if MS does phantom openings or not, I'm just saying that it does happen.
- doug
we need Pyramids!! Look at Egypt... the governments that built pyramids are still getting tourist traffic 5000 years later! That's an investment.
I know for a fact that several departments within IBM (in the US) have sent down employees to Brazil and India to train those who wouldd eventually take over their jobs.
So in the strictest sense, yes, it is a resource action to fire "duplicate" services or make the company run leaner. However, it is disengenious to say anything other than this was planned to occur as early as Q1 2008. Simply put, IBM artifically inflated their employee base so that they could transition services to a less costly (to the bean counters) and fire the ones in the US.
They will "get away with it" only so long as the company sees no penalty in their actions. They didn't fire anyone until after Christmas and after their quarterly earnings. So to many investors they are doing good things.
The only way to combat offshoring is: a) as a US customer, demand goods and services that originate in the US; b) US gov't remove any tax benefits to a company that has X percentage of the workforce in other countries. It doesn't penalize a company (ala tarrifs) but does reward companies that are American in employee base with tax incentives.
Personally I will neverhire an ex-Microsoftie; they don't have morals or ethics that are worth a damn, or they wouldn't have worked there in the first place. I beg to differ with you. While that may be true of their marketing people, I have known many very talented engineers and wonderful human beings who have gone on to work at Microsoft. So many that it continues to puzzle me why Microsoft, which such a huge talent pool to draw on, still continues to churn out crappy products. My best guesses are 1) Too frequent shifts of focus and priority, and 2) development driven by marketing demands, not by engineering or customer satisfaction. Microsoft, IBM, and Intel all share an uncanny ability to continuously re-invent themselves; despite inevitable downturns, I'm sure all three companies will be around for a long time.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Capitalism is by definition ruled by a boom/bust cycle
Capitalism. Noun. An economic system ruled by boom and bust cycles.
Well, not exactly. Not even Wiktionary has that definition. Most people argue that the boom/bust cycle is a result of centralized monetary policy. I'd dig out some articles if I were at home and not on my lunch break.
the bust is bad enough, it can take decades to recover, which is indeed what happened in the great depression.
Depression wasn't just "cyclical downturn crits you for 10." There was another credit crunch during the roaring '20s - people bought everything on credit. Why save up for a radio when you could rent it now for so many dollars a month? Why buy stock outright when you can put 10% down and your broker will give you the rest?
People spent the entirety of their paychecks on what amounts to debt maintenance. A little bump in the great, winding road of economics and suddenly you're wondering if the other 90% will ever appear. Eerily similar to the subprime mortgages today.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Would you be willing to go to an interview w/o reimbursement, for a temporary 6-9 month job?
At this point? Sure.
I'm unemployed, not like I have anything better to do with my day.
Legalize recreational marijuana. Seriously.
As much as I would like to agree, I can't. The problem with this is that you can't just pick some random American and expect him to do some technical job requiring a serious education. Remember, since companies have been hiring H1Bs for so long (since before I started college, long ago), fewer and fewer American students have been going into "hard" professions, namely engineering, and have opted for other professions where they weren't so likely to be laid off at the first hint of economic problems. As a result, when companies want to hire engineers, the only place they can get them is from other countries, where people train in engineering in large numbers (China and India, mainly). When I was in engineering school in the 90s, probably less than half my classmates were American; many were not immigrants, but students on F-1 student visas. In graduate school, the numbers were even worse, as most Americans, wanting to make money (and needing to pay back student loans), opt to go straight into the workforce rather than spend more time starving in graduate school.
If you want to hire someone to do, for instance, deep submicron IC design, or even just "simply" VLSI design with Verilog, you can't just take some laid-off autoworker from Detroit and train him to do this in a week (or a month, or a year, etc.). It would be like trying to retrain some guy to be a physician. These jobs require many years of education. A smart society would value workers with technical skills, and find some way of protecting them from job loss every time the economy turns sour (about every 5-10 years), and reward them well so they don't decide it's better to just become real estate agents or start their own companies installing pools (as engineers I've met have done). Our society isn't that smart. What's the solution for this? I really don't know; they tried a command economy in the Soviet Union a while back, where high-level scientists were kept employed doing scientific work no matter what, but obviously that system didn't work out too well. But our system doesn't seem to work that well either, as it's short-sighted, and doesn't reward people for doing difficult (but non-managerial) technical jobs.
The kind of people breaking immigration laws are people who work in hourly jobs/etc. The engineers who're here are not going to stick around with no job - they can go back home and earn more money with their 'US experience'. And even if they stay here, they cannot collect any dole.
I'm generally against protectionism, but in a recession,
If protectionism is good in a recession, then it must be good all the time! I have no problem with people who oppose free trade. I'll tell them they're wrong, but atleast they are consistent.
The people who are selective in their views on trade are the ones I watch out for - "trade in A, which I consume, is good, but trade in B, which I produce, is bad".
Wishing doesn't make it so.
Near as I can tell, only difference between his assertion and yours was a pretty bare argument amounting to the idea that new private investment is good while new government investment does nothing but take away from that.
There are two big problems with that argument. The first and most obvious being that new private investment is highly limited right now by broken capital markets, and the conventional Friedmanesque tools the Monetarists and some neoclassicists have embraced aren't doing a darn thing, which is why people are even talking about Keynesian stimulus again.
The second problem is the idea that private investment is inherently better than public investment. I'd agree that for many cases market forces tend to correct bad investments more quickly than public policy mechanism. But there's nothing magical about private investment that dictates a person making the capital allocation decisions will automatically make wise growth-yielding choices while a person of similar abilities and education in a public role will make poor ones -- Scott Adams has made a career out of making this very point, sometimes with an economy of hyperbole that's startling.
So the real and big question here isn't public vs private, it's whether or not people making decisions about investments are making good ones that return the genuine value that underlies real economic growth. In short, if a government spends money it took from a valuable private enterprise badly, then yes, there's a net loss. If a government spends money it took from a private system that's barely investing in genuinely valuable enterprises at all on investments of even middling value, then it's a pretty different story.
If all of FDR's spending, regulating, and taxing brought us out of the depression,
The position of a lot of modern Keynesians (including Krugman, who's looking more and more right over a lot of stuff he took crap for 5-10 years ago) is more or less that the spending did indeed help. Some of the regulation and taxation (particularly certain 36/37 tax hikes) not so much.
then why did it last so much longer than any previous depression, when the government didn't have the power for that kind of intervention?
There are certainly a number of suggestible targets: a bigger and less localized collapse, climatic problems on top of economic problems, and some of the tax and trade policy decisions. Spending, not so much.
And which depressions are you arguing were markedly shorter? The "Long Depression" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression ) has been measured from 6 to 24 years. The Panic of 1837 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837 ) is measured at about 5 years. You can credibly argue that inside of 5 years, growth as measured via GDP was on the rise at a rate comparable to pre-crash rates, and inside 8, GDP surpassed peak 1929 levels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp20-40.jpg ). Heck, if the top tax rate hadn't been raised to 80%, they might have even avoided that dip there in late 30s.
Tweet, tweet.
It's interesting how you refer to the foreign workers as leeches because they are anything but that. They pay social security tax and unemployment taxes just as domestic workers do, except they are not entitled any benefits from either unless they become permanent residents. Not to mention the 3-4K visa fees that the employer has to pay for their visa renewal every three years, don't you think that's accounted for in their package. Also a large part of the foreign workforce are people who went to school at some stage in this country, guess how much they "contributed" to your financial aid packages.
How many H1-B empoyees working for 24k do you actually know?
For all those people cribbing about H1B remember we are sponsoring your retirement. We pay social security /medicare taxes every paycheque whose benefits we will never see.
Effectively i pay taxes so i can sponsor someone else's retirement it seems
I don't believe that it is the under-performers being cut. Maybe they are cutting areas that are losing money, or aren't making as much as other areas. That could be due to lots of factors, not just performance.
That "get rid of the bottom 10%" BS has to stop. I know someone who manages engineers @ Intel. When they went through cuts a year or so ago, he had just started managing his team. It was raise time, and he was told he couldn't give raises to his bottom performers. He had hand-built his team, and he argued that he didn't have any bottom performers. He fought for his team, and he won - he was able to give them all raises.
Now if he has to make cuts, he'll make cuts. And he'll have to do it strategically based on lots of things. If a company just uses a blanket statement that they are cutting 10% of the staff as under-performers, they are either full of shit or are managed piss-poorly. You don't just cut across the bottom in your entire company. That's why there's re-orgs, and shifting of people, etc. You do want to keep your best people, but you also have to understand when to change the structure of things.
And I can tell you from talking to my friend, and because I interviewed at Intel in the past, they analyze EVERYTHING and are very data driven. It sucks that people are getting laid off, because there really isn't anyone out there hiring. It is the harsh reality of this economy. Hey I know, let's spend a few trillion more dollars by invading another sovereign nation for no good reason, that'll fix things.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This is the same as the brilliant GE management philosophy of Jack Welch. This man was one of the most ignorant, self-serving CEO's of our time. I say that because he ALWAYS went after the short term gains and that's part of why GE sucks so bad right now. He left Immelt with an impending corporate meltdown (ie, a big business that was primarily a bank with some other smaller ops). Any manager that buys into any of Welch's BS should be publicly humiliated.
I worked with an aggressive, high-tech, medical electronics company that prided itself on running lean and mean and we exceled. Certainly there were times when we were over-whelmed, but we almost never had any layoffs of any significant number of employees. That's because management understood how to avoid becoming too over-staffed and sloppy. We were all paid fairly well and had great benefits with some phenomenal perks (wine coolers and beer on tap in the cafeteria, an incredible fitness room, and company parties that would blow the doors off anybody else's). Then we were bought out by GE. What an incredibly assinine management philosophy they have! In no time at all, a company that was number one in several product areas was destroyed and morale was in the toilet.
Firing the bottom 10% is a horrible, dim-witted concept primarily because of the damage it does to morale. If a company wants to cut costs, they need to start at the top. Travel only if absolutely necessary. Learn to use telecons. All execs take a pay cut. No bonuses. (I believe there shouldn't be bonuses for anyone making >100k. First of all, they are getting paid that much to do that job. Second of all, if you can't make ends meet and still set money aside, you need to see a financial counselor. Third, it increases potential for a huge division between workers and management and sets the stage for a union intrusion.)
And don't even start telling me about how bonuses are necessary to remain competitive. That is an absolute line of trash that is promulgated by other execs that serve on each others boards. These guys want that lie to prevail so they can continue to justify obscene bonuses. Meanwhile everyone else loses their jobs. It's time to hire execs that want to do a good job motivated by the desire to create a secure business that will result in job security for the employees and a good value for the customer.
Be embarassed, American businessmen. Be very embarassed. You were all contributors to this financial mess just as much as all the sheeple that just had to have that big SUV or that bigger home or the second 4-wheel ATV or the Prada purse (excuse me, "handbag"). American culture is in the trash heap along with its TV reality shows and American Idol. We've become a society of victims that always wants someone to do things for us and always wants more "stuff" or wants instant fame just because they think they can sing or dance. If we had any backbone we would have stuffed the immoral execs in the trash heap of history and sent all the materialistic dolts out for psychotherapy or spiritual counseling.
Hey, Barack. As far as I'm concerned, there damn well better be change, but not by coddling the already infantilized American citizen. We need to re-establish a sense of real ethics and values. What the American citizen needs now is a hard smack up side the head and then get all the lobbyists out of Washington. Put THEM out of THEIR jobs. And reign in the greed that is so prevalent amongst our business executives. Don't let businesses and consumers run our country. Let's take it back. Of the people, for the people, by the people. Does anybody remember that concept?
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Also remember that they came here for a reason, quite often it was more money. If they have savings it is quite possible they will go further in the country they came from. This is especially true if they have been sending money home to their families as is quite often the case. You go home to a warm welcome and see the place and people you have been missing while abroad.
If all you could get was low skilled work of the kind that illegal immigrants are stuck with why stay. You will probably have to vastly change your life style anyway as you could not afford the same rent and outgoings on below minimum wage as you could while doing a highly skilled job that got you an H1B in the first place.
No, most illegals overstay student visas or just jump the non existent fences. They are the people willing to clean your pool for a pittance, not they guy who has been working as an architect, software developer, engineer, doctor or accountant.
I dont read
It's probably the use of the word "sheeple."
It's slang for "I'm far better than you" and tends to put people off. I know I stopped reading right there, which was a shame because the post was good up to that point.