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IT's Last Hope — a Job In the Boonies?
GMGruman writes "Offshoring, cloud computing, automation, 'do more with less' — all of these have been chipping away at US IT workers' ability to have a job. But some companies now dangle a new possibility: Move to rural areas for lower-paying 'onshoring' jobs that can compete with lower overseas salaries. InfoWorld's Bob Violino talked to IT workers who've made the move and discovered that although it's no 'Green Acres meets Big Bang Theory' experience, a move from the big city to the hinterlands appeals mainly to just some IT worker segments, even as it provides new opportunities for others."
Rather than take a crappy on-site job somewhere, I'd rather have an even crappier off-site one... and a lower cost of living. No commute whatsoever is a big feature.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Offshoring, cloud computing, automation, 'do more with less' — all of these have been chipping away at US IT workers' ability to have a job.
The only thing here that is a problem is offshoring. Cloud computing, automation, and doing more with less is our job.
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What companies want are cheap slaves. They want to use them like batteries and toss them aside when they get old or sick.
That's why they had laws passed which say labor laws don't apply to computer people (specifically in washington, california, and texas that I know of).
They want 12 hour days.
They don't want to pay benefits.
They want the work to be accurate.
The executives want no employees, yet still want a mass market they can sell to and get big salaries themselves.
That's ending as the mass market hollows out. Increasingly under 1% of the population takes most the money and doesn't share it. They are destroying their own market by not contributing any employee/customers to it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I actually recommend this choice to people whom I have had to let go. It was pretty clear they didn't possess the wherewithal to continue growing and contributing in this industry.
One guy went out and started a consulting business. He advises people on drainage plans for their new homes. As a programmer, he stumbled through the code and introduced as many bugs as he fixed. I think we picked him up as a resource sometime in the late 90s when we were hiring like crazy. 10 years of experience, and the only real thing I think we figured out was that he was a pretty mediocre programmer. But now he is doing very well as a drainage consultant.
You shouldn't stay in a job you suck at. And your manager shouldn't keep you once you've shown no particular aptitude for the work. Go do something you're good at. You'll feel much better about yourself and you won't have the sword of Damocles always hanging above you.
What the hell do you think they were doing before the plant opened? And what do you think prevents them from quitting and moving to the city as rural people have been doing for 150 years? People in towns that these companies move into are free to keep on doing whatever they were doing before the plant opened, or take a job at the plant. That is choice.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"Going rural" isn't really a new concept. For decades now anyone that's been willing to work in an area that few people are willing to work in can usually get the job pretty easily. My wife's medical class talked frequently about who was going to go work in the farming communities and make 'the big bucks' doing what no one else was willing to do. Sure you're fairly isolated from your typical peers, but those people are genuine and attempting to do real work to provide for their families. Supporting their medical, technological, mechanical, whatever, needs has to be more rewarding than supporting the bulk of urbanites who just want to get paid while they surf their favorite forum / news aggregate and wait to slowly die.
And in many fields you get paid more in remote areas as well, due to the lack of people willing to head out there.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The executives want no employees, yet still want a mass market they can sell to and get big salaries themselves.
That's ending as the mass market hollows out. Increasingly under 1% of the population takes most the money and doesn't share it. They are destroying their own market by not contributing any employee/customers to it.
They believe that they can sell to developing countries and that will save their asses. Unfortunately for them, they are also under the impression that after off-shoring industrialized manufacturing and development, they will also be the ones making the stuff. Nope, technology will transfer and local firms will take over. Eventually, companies like Intel, GM, and any other big American corp that has moved pretty much overseas (except for mgt) will be made irrelevant. All those foreign scientists, engineers, accountants and other knowledge workers will wise up, start their own firms, and destroy the old stodgy firms.
What will I do? Buy the foreign cheaper products - I have no choice. My standard of living is worse than my Grandfather's. My Grandpa had an eighth grade education, 5 kids, a stay at home wife, middle class home, a car, and had no problem paying the bills. He retired with a great pension and never had to worry about eating, keeping the house, and he still gave out $10,000 a pop to his kids. My Dad supported 3 kids, a house, two cars on one salary. You can't do that anymore.
That American dream is dead, dead, dead.
We're spiraling down to the lowest common denominator: poverty stricken people who will work 14 hour days - 7 days a week and thank their personal god that they can do that because the alternative is far worse.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
On second thought, it's horrible here. You wouldn't like it. Trust me. Stay on the coasts.
Umm...yeah! What he said. It's AWFUL out here living on a little farm and getting to do whatever the hell you want. Why, you have to travel a couple hours to get to a modest-sized city. You city folk would hate it here. Stay where you are.
So you're a salesperson. Fine. Why insist that engineers be salespeople as well? And if you're NOT a salesperson, and you're selling, who's doing the engineering?
There used to be this concept called 'division of labor'. Some people were good at engineering, not so good at talking to customers. You hired them to do engineering. Some people were better at talking to customers, you hired them to do sales or marketing or some other customer-facing task. Now the standard line is that to get hired as an engineer you have to be able to do everything. Well, gee, boss, if I could do it all, what do I need you for? I'll start my own damn business.
At the same time, no one is demanding the salespeople troubleshoot network issues or write code.
For years the American public has been duped into believing that our manufacturing jobs would be shipped overseas, but we would all be retrained for high tech jobs. Poor overseas workers would become richer, we'd be better trained and better paid, and everything would be a free-market utopia.
Oops.
Turns out, you can virtualize all of those servers. Host them physically somewhere like Iceland, with cheap electricity and no cooling costs, and then have them managed by for 10 rupees an hour by a systems engineer in India.
I would suggest we all go back for more job training, but what's left? We could all become brain surgeons, but big business has half this country acting lobotomized already...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
How about hi-tech services like affordable, fast and stable Internet broadband services? Cellphone/Wireless, etc.?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Here is a related book that talks about moving from city to country, including like (for some people) making money on selling a house in the city and then buying cheaper in the country: "Life After the City: A Harrowsmith Guide to Rural Living" by Charles Long. Although it also suggests it may often be a one way trip if city real estate prices keep going up (but the recent bubble has changed those dynamics).
We live in the NY Adirondack Park, which is pretty rural, although we live in the wimpy part closer to shopping. :-) Mostly we made the move because my wife grew up in a rural area and liked it. Also, living in an intact forest ecosystem means things like ticks and poison ivy are much less of a problem than in more disturbed areas. I grew up in a suburb that really was more like a town, and there are parts I do miss about that. But cheaper housing costs (especially, at the time, cheaper land costs) were a major factor -- in our case, by living frugally we'd have to work less and have more time for FOSS projects etc.. And while we could have picked lots of rural areas, there were also family reasons we picked this area (to be closer to a sibling).
Since we moved, we had a kid so that's absorbed much of the time we thought we'd otherwise have for free software (especially as we are choosing to homeschool -- despite it being an OK school district with smallish classes -- for all the reasons people like John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others talk about). But, it was good we were not on a two income treadmill when we had a kid so we could spend more time together, where otherwise one income mainly goes to pay the higher costs of school taxes and related higher mortgages to be in a "good" school district and so on (so, if both people don't like their work, or your kid does not like or thrive in school, what do you get out of having your family split up during the day for financial reasons?). Related:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
We eventually had to pay the cable company a bunch to extend the cable out to where we live to get high speed internet. Although three years or so later DSL was finally put in. I realized a while back that it probably cost the phone company more just to run two extra phone lines to our house when we moved in for dialup than to put in a DSL hub somewhere so we would not have needed the extra lines at first (but the phone company presumably had to put in the phone lines on request due to regulations but could just decide not put in DSL). Good communications really change the nature of living somewhere (for both good and bad -- visitors like the fact there is little cell phone service around here but residents would prefer to have cell phones in case of accidents etc.).
In the case of the Adirondack Park, there is a lot of regulation, but it also has its good side (preserving a lot of the wilderness).
Taxes can also vary a lot by county or town.
Most people do not want to live where we are as jobs are typically an hour to an hour and a half drive away, and we have ice for a lot of the winter (plus lots of snow), and we have a month of biting blackflies and a month of lots of mosquitoes. But April and September are great months without insects and with clear air. And we can see the Milky Way on clear nights. :-) And there are a lot of great neighbors here. So, you have to take the good with the bad.
Still, while we don't plan to move, if I were to pick a place again, now that we have a kid, ideally it would be close to someplace with a big college (like Ithaca) or at least just 15 minutes from a 50,000 person town, and so there would be more stuff to do with a kid (including more homeschool meetups) without driving a lot.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If you were raised in a large city, chances are you will prefer to stay there and will think of all sorts of terrible things about the rural areas. Same situation if you were raised in a rural place. It's purely a matter of preference. Some people like to be in densely populated areas, walking everywhere. They prefer no yard to keep up, the many different cultures around (although I might argue that to see most of those cultures you have to go to the part of the city that they live in, I.E. Chicago's Little Italy, Little Mexico, Little Korea, the "black" part of town). In the rural areas, you get lots of space cheaply, lower crime, traffic, when you drive where you choose there is always easy and free parking. This is just how it is. People almost always prefer what they were raised on, and getting them to change is nigh on impossible.
Your requirements seem eminently reasonable, IMHO. I have no idea why you are getting pushback from the peanut gallery. I can only assume these people are employed at places where their disfunction isn't a major liability. Government, perhaps, or an educational institution. Geographically remote, perhaps. Or they have managed to find technically challenged management to bamboozle into thinking they are essential. The skills you describe have been invaluable in every place I've ever worked, at least the places that were worth working at. The technical people have been top-notch, and were also able to, you know, dress themselves and actually interact with other people. These skills aren't mutually exclusive.