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2010 Salary Survey Highlights IT Woes
CWmike writes "Trapped between flat salaries and ever-increasing workloads, IT professionals are about to explode. That's the top takeaway from Computerworld's 2010 survey of nearly 5,000 IT workers. 'Bonuses and benefits are way down, and workloads and work hours have increased. Meanwhile, salaries are stagnant (rising just a microscopic 0.7% on average), and — not surprisingly — satisfaction is on the wane.' Another finding of note is the shrinking female IT workforce. Have a look-see at how IT fared in your neck of the woods with this smart look-up tool."
career experts say you have to take a strategic approach to your job search and application process. The best candidates are always taking steps to manage their careers...
I fully agree. If you sit passively and wait for your next raise, you may be waiting for a while... But if you are proactive, good things eventually happen to you. Contribute to an open-source project. Become the co-founder of a cool iPad app or whatever cool idea people are trading nowdays...
It doesn't pay off instantly, but a year or two later, your resume stands out from the crowd, and more importantly, you may not even need a resume anymore to get a great job!
Maybe they are going into a better paying industry.
http://newsone.com/nation/news-one-staff/more-women-considering-stripping-in-struggling-economy/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Really?
What jobs are you talking about?
Most of the jobs that actually pay a salary don't give a rat's ass about any F/OSS projects you've worked on. Recruiters want to know what your paid experience was. If you're applying for your typical corporate IT department (read a MS shop), no one really gives a shit. They want their laundry list of skills and at least 2-3 years experience with each.
I would be astounded if someone post a job description that says FOSS experience a plus.
What was the inflation rate last year? Zero? Slightly negative? As long as your wages increase faster than inflation, then your purchasing power is going up. And .7% is better than the 0% raise I got.
In addition to developing your skills for your current job, you need to focus on your NEXT job.
Where do you want to be and how do you plan to get there?
If anyone wants a good Java programmer in the Bay Area email MillionthMonkey at gmail...
This is exactly what happens when you have non-technical accountants and marketers making technology-related decisions. Look at the executives for nearly any American company. You'll find the number of technical people at or near the top is virtually none.
Accountants are concerned with one thing: the next quarter's numbers. Software and IT infrastructure, on the other hand, often takes longer than that to properly implement and to see their benefits. So these accountants ignore IT, and often do what they can to deny funding, especially if it won't result in a near-immediate balance sheet gains.
In the past, when America still had some manufacturing base, engineers often had a prominent place within the leadership of most companies. They could think beyond the next quarter's financial results, and saw how technology could make their companies more efficient in the long run. Unfortunately, these people have retired or been forced out.
America now generates its "wealth" not through the creation of tangible goods and improving productivity at existing enterprises, but rather by creating and selling a variety of bullshit financial instruments. Things won't improve until technical folks are making the calls, rather than accountants and marketers.
That's not what you said when I spoke to you last week.
My sister has been a nurse for many years. I once suggested to her that more men would be willing to work as nurses if they just changed the named. The name "nurse" (also a synonym for breast feeding) is clearly emasculating. There are plenty of men in every other of health care. My sister actually agreed.
But on the plus side, I get to work from home where naps are a daily event and pants are optional.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I love this survey. I write software; it's what my degree is in, and it's what I do.
I can choose "Software developer", "Software engineer", or "Programmer/analyst". I like engineer. It sounds fancy; that's what the concentration was in school.
Salary went up in my region by 6.3% -- that's better than I've seen in 3 years. But what if I choose developer. That's what I call myself on my resume. My salary went down 1%.
That's why this survey is laughable. And they use average. Everyone else in the statistics community switched to median years ago. Where's your sample size per category? And seriously, 10 years experience as the first hurdle? No standard deviation either?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
So many unemployed IT workers, yet according to tech sector managers we don't have enough and need to raise the cap on visas again.
My pay nearly doubled in 2010. Maybe it has something to do with me working on my skills portfolio for over a decade and pent up demand for those skills.
One thing for sure - if you want to make more money, you need to ALWAYS be thinking on what skills you could acquire to achieve that goal. Any retard can poorly code up a web page - why would anyone pay a pretty penny for that?
Another life's lesson - if you want to grow, you need to move. Don't sit on your ass in the same job for a decade. Change teams, companies, industries, roles. If you don't do this, the best you can hope for is a 5% merit raise, and that's in a fat year.
A recent study suggests that IT people really don't seem to like their jobs very much. Apparently, only 4% of IT people found themselves "highly engaged" with their jobs -- a number that has dropped from the still low, but not as low, 12%, two years earlier. There are concerns, of course, for what this means for companies and their IT staff. It certainly raises some questions about whether or not this is a potential issue going forward, and how companies might deal with this. Are the problems caused by the way IT people are treated? Or does it have more to do with their own worries about the future of the IT profession? And given that so many people in IT aren't particularly enthusiastic about their jobs, how can that be dealt with?
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/itinnovation/articles/20100216/0318428178.shtml
At least according to this report. Can't really say I disagree. Of the friends and family who do have jobs now, I think mine is the best. Maybe not in term of money, but certainly in a money-to-suckiness kind of way.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
>>>it is undeniable that healthcare is the wave of the future in the United States
Except that the U.S. government is paying LESS than actual cost of procedures, so many doctors are quitting the profession due to increasing losses. You're better off to stay in a profession that doesn't have top-down price fixing (i.e. commercial, engineering or programming).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The problem with your logic is that writing code is fun. Changing bedpans or dressings or being around sick people is not fun.
You work with Mr. Creosote?
love is just extroverted narcissism
The nursing crisis isn't going to change because people going into nursing misunderstand where the need is. The whole reason the nursing crisis exists is because we have a bunch of aging baby boomers who need someone to take care of them when they get old and decrepit. A whole ton of people have heard about the nursing crisis and decided to go back to school for nursing. The problem is, most of them are going into Labor and Delivery nursing, which is not where the need is. Nobody wants a career cleaning up incontinent old people, they want to take care of cute babies. So, I predict you're going to have a bunch of disgruntled nursing graduates complaining that they can't find work while nursing homes and other providers of geriatric care complain they can't find enough qualified nurses.
If you want to be guaranteed a job for the next 30 years or so, go into geriatric nursing. Unfortunately, you'll be spending the next 30 years changing diapers for 90 year olds, but at least you'll always have steady work. Depending on whose IT department you work for, this may or may not be an improvement over your current situation.
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men. However, it is undeniable that healthcare is the wave of the future in the United States; aging population and an entitlement mentality ("I deserve free healthcare as a Gaea-given right") means the demand for healthcare will grow and grow and never stop growing until the nation is bankrupt. So men should suck it up, go back to school and get a medical degree, and leave the codemonkeying to the Indians.
This seems to hold true for many professions where it is male dominated. Look at the physical sciences in academia. Very few woman are stupid enough to do 60 hours a week working after spending 10-15 years of advanced schooling and then 3-6 more years of advanced training and only get paid 80k a year if you're lucky. The job application is a pain and very competitive plus once you have the job you're no longer doing science but spending all your time writing to get more money so others can do the science for you. Not to mention putting off childbearing until their thirties or later.
And yes I am a man and stupid enough to go through this crap. I'd rather do this then deal with MDs. Hell I'd rather open my wrists then deal with MDs most of the time - quicker, cheaper and more efficient.
In a perfectly competitive market, the price of a commodity equals its marginal cost.
When that commodity is you, "marginal cost" -> "subsistence mode of existence".
Just hope that you die before our imperfectly competitive economy reaches this particular state.
I really need to get out of this field.
Secretary became "adminstrative assistant". Or admin for short.
Maybe nurse can become "doctor's assistant".
Or docs'ass for short.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My SO is taking nursing classes right now, in a class that is mostly female with a handful of males sprinkled in. It turns out that hospitals need a certain number of male nurses for specific tasks (heavy lifting, if you will) and the relatively small number of men going into the field means that those men that do pursue a career can have their pick of jobs.
I'll just stay here and keep grinding code though.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
brb, blocking that piece of crap misinformed survey site from our HR/CxOs. According to them, my salary is right on track.
The report there lumped where I am now (Alaska) with the job hell I just left (Oregon/Washington). I'm looking at an 18% raise for next year and I still get almost three months off.
I moved up here and had three offers within a month of getting here and had one of the places I turn down call me back and offer 5% more.
I figure by 2011 I'll be able to get another 20-25% in salary.
This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while. So you're basically telling anyone that is in the field to drop what they are doing, retrain for a new field where virtually none of the college credits they currently have will do jack for them...pushing them further into debt all because IYO health care is the wave of the future.
People in the IT field are closer to the BIOtech field than medical health care. Talk about brain drain...telling a bunch of bright people to stop what they are doing so they can service others. Do you honestly want that a**hole that took your phone call at tech support to be responsible for the care of your mom or dad when they get older? Customer service is a joke in the IT field for a reason...personality does not mix well with others. And your solution is to have them all jump on the medical band wagon?
I don't need to read a chart about dwindling salaries, bonuses, and etc with increase in hours, this is already the same with every business out there in down economic. Save the box of Kleenex because there aren't enough to go around IT guys.
As someone with several family members in nursing, one of whom does research on the factors that are driving nurses to leave the profession, I wanted to correct some of the misconceptions in your comment. First, there's still bullying in nursing, sometimes from patients, sometimes from management, sometimes from co-workers; second, there's plenty of stress, since most hospitals assign enormous patient loads to their nurses to cope with the nursing shortage or to keep costs down; and third, there are definitely long hours, with shifts that can last twelve hours or more. Don't think the shortage will necessarily improve pay or benefits, either, which are currently on par with salaries in IT. Nursing jobs don't go to India, but hospitals fill the gap by importing nurses from overseas.
Well said. Also, if you're a hot female...why even work. Just marry some rich guy, spend all day at the spa or boinking the pool boy...wait 10 years, take half his shit, and collect alimony for the rest of your life.
Firstly, IT workers != computer programmers. In there are support staff, data entry people, helpdesk, admins and so on. For some of those, the writing is without doubt on the wall and your pay/conditions per work unit is going to carry on dropping. For others, the annual pay rises may have slowed but the trend is accelerating. What else would you expect from a still infant industry heading into its teenage years?
:(
If I were a betting man, I would say that anything which isn't tied to locality and is not specialist/niche in nature is doomed to become as crappy as any normal job. Locality is real important because boilerplate services which are not niche such as auto maintenance are highly localised to the customer, and hence a mechanic or plumber in a rich neighbourhood will tend to earn loads for identical work done elsewhere. Compare auto maintenance costs between Berlin and Addis Ababa for example.
As my daddy said to me many, many years ago, the secret to high earnings and excellent work conditions in the free market is to be perceived by those with money as being able to do something valuable which is perceived as hard to find elsewhere. I know a guy who fits spiral staircases - he's good at it, but his talents are hardly unique. Yet Elton John had him fit a spiral staircase in one of his houses a few years ago, then the other celebs saw it and suddenly he's putting in spiral staircases all over the world and charging six or seven times the normal cost. In the end, it is cheaper to pay seven times the odds and avoiding finding your own worker when your opportunity cost per hour is like US$500!
The second thing my daddy said to me is to leave the free market when you start thinking of having children. The free market will throw you away if you get sick or you lose your reputation which someone influential can easily cause. He suggested a highly unionised public sector job where if you feel a bit peaky you can just go on sick leave for twenty years. Personally, I wish there were some middle ground between excellence being rewarded and the dead but safe hand of guarantee, but we as a society are still too torn between the old Babylon myth even after all these millenia later
I would also say that from my personal perspective as a specialist IT consultant, work is still paying US$750-1000/day upwards but the recession means that there is simply a lot less of such work, so much so that you have to find other sources of income which are usually totally unrelated to IT as so to prevent reputation damage. However in my subjective opinion there is certainly no pressure to reduce payments for high quality specialist work, if anything in some fields the rate is actually rising as more skilled professionals quit permie jobs for their own IT consultancy business. At the top end things keep on getting better, and at the bottom they keep on getting worse. Just like the wage gap in all Western countries since the 1980s!
Cheers,
Niall
I am not in IT but my employer is doing the same: increasing costs of healthcare contribution, decreasing benefit packages and vacation time, and skipping raises.
But, I have to point out that the cost of living has generally decreased according to the Obama admin.. And, while many of us are doing more work, an even greater amount of us are doing the same amount of work - in some cases, less. I question the ideology that one gets a raise simply for putting in time. The cost of labor is a huge problem for American companies causing them to leave (move jobs from) major states and the country altogether. I would prefer to keep my job at my current pay than to lose it.
Wow, seriously? Do you know anything about nursing?
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida, more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
There are plenty of reasons to not go into IT. Nursing pays worse (IT 5 years experience = 50k; nursing 15 years experience = 50k), the hours are usually worse (no such thing as 9-5s or holidays, and everyone is "on call" almost all the time), constant bitchiness and "office politics" cattiness (if you want to hear someone lie about someone else, listen to an orderly...), and (very likely) increased hours + shifts with decreased pay in the very near future (on account of the increased burden that will be put on healthcare due to recent legislation).
Nurses get no respect, either. Orderlies get more, from what I've observed. It's a similar situation to IT (not programming, IT), where you're in the position to have responsibility but often have no ability to do anything about it. Doctors treat nurses like shit, typically. Administrators are similar to IT management: they haven't a clue what's going on but damn it, they're going to tell you what to do. Except with nursing (unlike computing) the balance of life (or health) and death often hangs in the balance, and stupid mistakes made by others often do directly fall on your shoulders.
In fact males should also go into nursing, but constantly being made fun of (such as being called Gaylord Focker) might be too much to take for most men.
No, the biggest problem would be having a predatory and/or inherrently bitchy (female, not that it matters) jerking you around for stupid political reasons.
There's a good reason why nurses have the highest percentage of illicit drug use in the country by career. Their jobs suck. I'd rather go into law enforcement.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Here is a quick look at the work experiences of real US IT pros:
http://techtoil.org/doku.php?id=articles:news_and_commentary
sysadmin is "administrative assistant of systems"?
If you're female there is no reason to go into IT... nursing pays better, comes with better benefits, better hours, way less stress, no bullying from male coworkers, no worries about your job going offshore to Inida (sic), more respect from the general community, just a better future period.
Yeah, but the challenge is that in some areas, it's nigh to impossible to get into a nursing program unless your grades are in the top 7% of the applicants that year (or some incredible number). My sister has been trying to get into a nursing program in Oregon for quite some time. Perhaps if the teaching positions for nursing paid more, there would be a greater number of instructors, resulting in higher enrollment capabilities, and so on (trickle down).
Of course I'm not an expert in this field (I'm an IT guy, too) and perhaps my sister's experience is unique, but that's not the impression I've been getting.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Great troll, except nursing has plenty of rough schedules, doesn't always pay well, and is frequently hectic. Patients are often demanding, not to mention contagious (I'd rather have RSI than MRSA, TYVM!).
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Really, what is this IT sector. Does it include EA? Id? IBM? The guy who fixes the printer? The help desk retard who tells you to reboot?
If you read some slashdot posts, you might almost think that programmers do not belong in IT at all. Or at best are a minor influence.
So, whose job is going down the drain?
I can only speak from my own experience in Holland (un-employment rate 3.9%, that is socialism for you, suck it yanks) and yes, some people are loosing their jobs and finding it hard to find new ones. But having done my fair share of interviews, I am not entirely sure these people belong in the industry anyway.
Come on, what developer can't answer the question of what a join is? What debug tools do you use?
I got jobs from intern to senior but I expect you to be worth your salary. Don't come to me demanding a senior salary if you fail questions I knew when I was a junior. And no, I don't care if you don't know every function or the correct order of parameters. I want to know you understand the concepts behind the tools you use and that you know how to test that what you build works works as it should and how to start tracing problems.
Is that to much to ask? Well, yes, for a lot of people it seems to be.
So I am not surprised with current situation in the US. We had this before, in a recesion the dead wood is sorted out and salaries for the barely adequate settle down. The rest, the few who actually are any good at their job do fine. My own salary has been steadily rising. Not because I am a genius, far from it, but because I am an above average coder. And yes, that does mean that I am on occasion dealing with outsourced work, testing it and fixing it. Can't blaim them. It is not that we don't want to hire western developers, but there just aren't any. Not good ones.
Please tell me that expecting a medior web developer to know what a join is, is not to much to ask.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
if you have seen a 10% raise any time in the last ten years? Gods know I haven't (hell, I'm making less now then I was in 2006).
Up nice and high folks so I can see em!
~Generic IT girl.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
The problem with your logic is that writing code is fun. Changing bedpans or dressings or being around sick people is not fun.
This depends on the point of view. Nurses might find helping injured/sick people fun, too. If not fun, then at least emotionally gratifying. Meaning that they like that they are able to make someone's life better (or less painful), save a life every now and then or see someone being brought to intensive care and see the same person walk out of the hospital a while later. After a working day a nurse could go home knowing that there's one guy that survived that day because the nurse was doing her job. Is that really so different from a programmer finishing some fancy feature of a web app he/she had been working on for a while? At the end of the day they both feel that they have accomplished something, or made the world a better place for everyone.
My job history is a nightmare, constant job AND career switches and I got no problem finding decent work that pays well.
It is about being able to sell yourself. An employer only wants to know one thing about you. "Am I going to make a profit with this guy."
That is it. And if you can't sell yourself without resume's or a portfolio, then yes you need that. But only if you can't sell yourself.
Sure, there are jobs that ask for 10 years iPad developer experience. MOVE ON. That is what we in the trade call a RED FLAG. Warning, douche bag HR monkey doing the interviewing.
Go for the jobs where the first interview is done by a techie, who grills you. That means they got work to be doing, if you can do it, then you are solid. No techie will care about your papers because every techie knows people with papers who are useless.
So, not much chance of getting a job at IBM, but then, who wants to work in India anyway? Go for the real tech companies. All I really want to see you on your CV is code. Code that shows me you are worth of hiring as an intern or senior because I can see you got potential.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You're an idiot. You can't have an entire nation of nurses. The nations economy would collapse and no real work would get done. That would be like having a nation of firefighters. How about more efficient hospitals, and a healthier population? We need more Engineers and Scientists who create and develop things that make the world a better place to live in, while making their respective countries GDP go up. Nurses are a dime a dozen, good Engineers are hard to find.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Cost is subjective. Your time is only worth what someone will pay for it.
Citation please. All I've seen attached to this claim over the past several months is anecdotal "evidence" that involves a lot of other factors. Such as doctors who have inadequate controls over their expenses, and bemoan their inability to reduce expenses as the reason they are unable to provide service at the amount paid. Honestly, if we want to get some societal control over medical expenses, we *should* eliminate the practices that can't get by on the same amount of cash other practices prosper under.
There's a practice local to me that was making this claim... but I find it hard to stomach when they drive $85,000 dollar cars, they lease 180,000 square feet for a 2-doctor practice with a lobby (almost always near empty) that seats 30 and has three large-screen plasma TVs. It's an urgent-care facility that has a full suite of rehab equipment that they lease. Seriously... what a waste of cash. People in physical rehab should be going to a rehab center or specialist, not to a general urgent care facility. The only reason I could see them maintaining such a huge facility is if they are receiving payments for the capacity to handle urgent care overflow from the local hospitals. Otherwise, they are hemorrhaging cash, and then blaming lack of income for their negative gross.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Looking at the list i should be making considerable more than what I am now. Granted this is a nationwide statistic and it all depends on your location.
Median salaries across the board shrunk last year. If IT salaries are merely stagnant, that's still better than everybody else in this cruddy economy. I'm happy to be making the exact same thing I made last year. Heck, I'm happy I have a job right now, though I'm not sure how much longer that's going to last. Given what's happening elsewhere in the economy, treading water is a major win. But I guess there just has to be whiners in any profession who will take any excuse to complain...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
When you can outsource them and pay them zero.
If you are working your way up the tech ladder you should really be living as transient a lifestyle as is possible. This means renting rather than buying a home, not buying roomfulls of furniture (harder to move all of your stuff), limiting debt, etc.
Renting rather than buying. Forgoing the one investment the middle class can make to build wealth.
Not buying roomfuls of furniture. Living like a starving student forever. Unable to hold something even as simple as a Saturday barbecue at your place.
As transient a lifestyle as possible. No marriage. No children. No long-term friends. Never putting down roots. Never building a support system. Depending on the company for everything.
You're going to arrive at 40 to find you've sacrificed everything for a career that couldn't care less about you.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'm vastly underpaid, according to this. Anyone in Oklahoma want to hire an exceptional programmer at an average salary($86k)?
Here the jobs dominated by females are the less paid. When a line of business starts to be mostly female-crewed, it means the salaries have gone down enough.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Oh please. The tulip mania had the practical outcome of leaving Holland awash in pretty flowers for centuries to come, contributing to the tourist trade.
You don't think our current financial geniuses and other leaders could come up with something that practical and beneficial, do you?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I think that, one of the reasons, there is a shrinking female IT workforce, is that few guest workers are women. So as guest workers take over IT, the percentage of female workers decreases.
"For example, you can easily see that [(weekly pay) / 60] [(weekly pay) / 40]. "
Agreed.
Also worth mentioning:
(40 + mandatory on-call) > 40, too.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
That is certainly better than what I am reading as overall United States unemployment via calculatedriskblog:
"The current recession has been bouncing along the bottom for a few months - so the choice of bottom is a little arbitrary (plus or minus a month or two)."
The graph on this news blog shows 6% currently, for the United States overall.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/04/percent-job-losses-during-recessions.html
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Slight problem there: nurses aren't doctors' assistants.
sic transit gloria mundi
Procedure for hemorrhoids 20 years ago. 15 minutes with a scalpel in the doctor's office. $50.
Basically lance the hemorrhoid, tweeze the blood clot and draw it out. Hemorrhoid fixed.
Procedure for hemorrhoids 20 years ago. Multiple visits with a special infra-red machine at $500 each.
But the negotiated price with the insurance companies is more like $250 (which is profitable since that's $250 for 15 minutes).
Government probably pays $200.
Doctors are grossly over compensated and don't *touch* the patients like they used to.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
don't *touch* the patients like they used to.
ah, so now we see what this is all about. You know you can probably get your touching fix for significantly less then $250 for 15 minutes, although the doctors outfit might cost extra...
on topic, yes healthcare in the US sounds ridiculous, last year i had bloodwork done, an ECG, an echo, an X-ray and a gastroscopy (honestly, you dont want this...), and a nice bunch of pills. From all the paperwork i've that amounted to a grand total of 160 euros (yet, they didnt find anything significant... stupid sensitive stumach)
People, what a bunch of bastards
Not having a union has really worked for us I.T Professionals. Yep we've been able to negotiate higher pays and generally everyone is so much better off by not leveraging a network of people to represent our interests. Of course the corporations that pays us really do have our interests at heart, that's what they are thinking of when they lobby the government.
How can any of this be happening to us.
Of course it's because we are so much smarter and wiser than everyone else in IT that we don't need unions. None of us are brainwashed, we know unions are baaaaaaaaad.
baaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I hope you're right. I'll probably be on the job hunt soon if things don't shape up well for me in the current job.
I'll give my little anecdote. My wife went to the hospital on my son's due-date. The wanted to do an NST (No-Stress Test) to make sure the baby was fine and perform a quick ultrasound to make sure fluid levels in the uterus were ok.
The NST consisted of a nurse strapping a heartbeat monitor and contraction sensor or something like that to her belly. They came back in after 30 minutes, looked at the charts and said we were ok. Walked to the ultrasound room, guy does a 20 minute ultrasound and says all is well and we could go home. We were there for an hour tops.
The bill? $1600!!!!! $700 of that was the NST. THEY LITERALLY JUST PUT TWO SENSORS ON HER STOMACH AND QUICKLY GLANCED AT THE RESULTS!!! Insurance covered all but $170 of it, but damn! People don't pay attention to the true costs of these silly little procedures. I'd love to see the price breakdown of those two procedures.
I never said that I was for the bailout. In fact, I think that's one of the WORST decisions our government has ever made!
The problem is, the banks and the government are in collusion. The Federal Reserve is going to look out for the interests of those they're closest to, and that would be the bankers and big brokers on Wall Street. They hold all the power, because they control all the wealth. As long as government places trust in the Fed, and treats their word as the "best financial advice" to implement moving forward, we'll continue to see them looking out for their "buddies" at everyone else's peril.
I'm not absolving lenders of their responsibility. But what I am saying is, for better or for worse, we DO rely on a central banking system in this nation. People collectively decided long ago that the barter system was awfully inconvenient, and there were some big advantages to setting up a network of banks that could loan sometimes large amounts of money to people. This requires a degree of a thing called TRUST, for it all to work smoothly.
I'm sure we all know someone who felt (or felt ourselves) that they were mistreated by lenders in the past, because they were so fixated on a FICA score, vs. really sitting down and evaluating credit-worthiness of the INDIVIDUAL. In the not so distant past, a simple handshake agreement held some actual weight. There was an understanding that one's promise and word was something of value, and not to be squandered. These days, all the lenders reduce you to some numbers, purchased from one of several big credit agencies who typically have inaccurate and/or outdated records in their files. People willing to "game" the system can do all sorts of things to artificially inflate those scores and get credit they don't deserve, while others get punished by those numbers, despite having the best intentions and motivation to make their payments on time.
Many things are broken with the current system of lending on BOTH sides of the equation ... and I'm pretty sure you actually have a better handle on the relative risk involved in lending to your poor cousin than the typical bank does on lending to your poor cousin!
If the banks decided to "minimize their risks", they'd simply quit loaning money to anyone but the people with the absolute highest of credit scores and largest incomes. But that won't do us any good. So we demand they do some more risky lending, for the sake of the "people" -- but we get pissed off when they do so and it doesn't work out.
Yah, body shopping has ramped up since the beginning of 1983, with what seems to be an ever steepening curve. Meanwhile, employment of production workers in software product firms has been flat since 2000 (well, not flat, really, it's making a sort of scalloped curve since then, down and then up about to where it was, and then diving down again), while the available talent pool has continued to expand.