"These are the rank and file IT jobs they're replacing, not the high end google coders." ...
Hrmph. How uncivil. You shouldn't call them rank, though google's and Oracle's and SAP's and FB's business plan and strategies may well be.
"Coders" are a concept I first ran across among early bodyshoppers, when the managers of the bodyshop (long on excessive self-estimation and short on intelligence) thought it would be more economical and produce better software if they took over all of the design, and left implementation to the lowly "coders". Of course, because they lost touch with the details the designs were rotten, and the "coders" were prevented from learning good design, so they turned out a lot of garbage... but the B-school bozos loooovvved them.
This is well-trod ground.
Whenever there's a remote possibility of cutting government blubber, they whine and wail and scream about "massive cuts", and then trim not the fat, but the things which will most severely impact large, more or less precisely targeted sub-sets of the public.
They'll trim a bunch of the people actually effectively inspecting imports at the ports, the Border Patrollers who are actually actively guarding the borders (but not the less-productive support personnel), the embassy and consulate guards, but not the first 3 tiers of political appointees who regularly dine on lobster, steak, pate and champagne with the corrupt foreign dictators. They'll skimp on armor and ammunition to front-line troops (so that they will write home to relatives about the terrrrible cuts), but not skimp on the plush office suite remodelings of 3-4 layers of generals over-populating certain bases (don't get me wrong, good generals are to be prized and praised but too many these days are purely political sycophants). They'll send out press releases about cross-training the former Twinkie bakers... in classes operated by the union bosses' cousins, but shut down or cut repairs on the interstates to try to get the public to cry "Uncle Sam".
This is often called the "Washington monument" gambit or scam after the "park service's" penchant for threatening to shut down their most popular tourist sites every time there's any threat that they won't receive the full desired increases in funding. (It is also telling that many of those very sites were initially funded by voluntary donations, but now from tax-victims and increases in federal government debt.)
Yah, good tactic "advocate_one", but there are dysfunctionalities even there.
It used to be that employers planned on flying in US STEM workers for interviews, relocating them, 2-12 weeks of new-hire training, 2-4 weeks of retained employee training, and sponsoring a citizen new-hire for a clearance (at a cost $10K to $50K) and giving them some training and productive work to do during the 2-8 months that could take.
Since H-1B, the process is more about fabricating excuses/pretexts on which to declare all US candidates "unqualified" regardless of intelligence, knowledge, and experience while avoiding genuine interviews. They don't want to fly people anywhere (and, besides, who wants to with all the ridiculous, unconstitutional non-sense related to air travel these days), they don't want to provide relocation assistance let alone actually relocate people and provide temporary housing. They want you to "hit the ground running" and do your own continuous learning on your own dime and time. And even contractors at Dept. of Energy, NSA, etc., try to avoid sponsoring new security clearance applications.
Why? Because of the glut of STEM talent. We've got literally millions of unemployed and involuntarily out of field US citizen STEM workers these days. But just a few million unemployed and under-employed US citizen STEM professionals is not enough to satisfy those who yearn for ever more cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics.
But the bigger the number, the higher the odds we'll end up with more like Faisal Shahzad, Mohammed Atta, Omar Abdel Rahman, Farooque Ahmed, Hanjuan Jin, Sergey Aleynikov, Mr. Liew, Lee Lan, Ge Yuefei, Tai Wang Mak, Fuk Heung Li, Chi Mak, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, Ming Zhong, Fei Ye, Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, Ning Wen, Katrina Leung...
we hold the execs (in business and academia), and the immigration lawyers, and their lobbyists to what they said they wanted, and only admit the genuinely "best and brightest"... say 1,000 per year for up to 10 months.
A: "an employer who treats their staff well will find that staff will do the same for their employer" ...
B: "where is this magical land you speak of? tell me. tell me!"
It's not so much "where" as "when". Before H-1B. Firms used to fly US citizens in for interviews, used to cover relocation costs and give you a couple weeks of temporary food and housing while you found a place and settled in, and 2-12 weeks of new-hire training.
And we used to put in 80-100 hour work-weeks as product release dates approached. Part of our motivation was that we were developing great apps, though. At one firm, our apps were helping other firms manufacture better products, so there was a multiplier effect. (Some French firm owns the source, now.) Most of what I see being churned out these days is either downright evil, or minor little toys that millenials get all flighty over; nothing of substance.
When things started to unravel, I gave them something like 8 months of notice, and even that was in the form of "Either you can transfer me by then to any of the firm's software product dev groups where I can better use my knowledge and abilities, or I'm going back to university full-time to re-tool, because you're wasting me here." And then I got several things to a point and others prepared to the point where I could hand them off by that date, instead of immediately jumping ship.
Now, they ask, "When can we expect you to have moved yourself and all your belongings to within a few blocks of this particular one of our hundreds of offices around the USA and then schedule an appointment for a gauntlet/barrage of trivial pursuit tests to find a pretext on which to declare you 'unqualified' for this 3 month gig at 60% of what you used to make per month (in a less expensive and higher quality of living location), because we have to fabricate justification for bringing in this cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics who faked his credentials and doesn't know squat, instead?"
STEM job markets recovering hardly at all since advent of H-1B ...
"As of the end of Q4 of 2012, the unemployment rate for [computer science and mathematical] professionals was 3.3%, holding steady from Q3..."
...compared with 1.8% in 1983, 1.5% in 1990, 2.7% in 1991, 2.6% in 1992, 2.7% in 1993, 2% in 1994, 1.8% in 1995, 1.3% in 1996, 1.1% in 1997, 1.2% in 1998, 1.8% in 1999, 2.2% in 2000, 3.6% in 2001, 4.9% in 2002, 5.5% in 2003, 4.2% in 2004, 2.9% in 2005, 2.4% in 2006, 2.1% in 2007, 2.6% in 2008, 5.2% in 2009, 4.1% in 2011, and 3.6% for 2012.
So, it's between 2 and 3 times the unemployment rates for these occupations during times of full employment.
"The unemployment rate for DBAs is 1.5%, lowest among all tech-job categories..."
...compared with 3% in 2000, 2.6% in 2001, 2.9% in 2002, 6.6% in 2003, 2% in 2004, 4.4% in 2005, 0.4% in 2006...
"For software developers, a relatively new category in this survey, the rate is 2.9%..."
...compared with 4.6% in 2010, and 3.6% in 2011
and, for software engineers, 1.7% in 2000, 4.2% in 2001, 4.7% in 2002, 5.2% in 2003, 3.3% in 2004, 2.4% in 2005, 2.1% in 2006.
"followed by computer systems analysts at 3.3%..."
...compared with 1.9% in 1983, 1.5% in 1990, 2.6% in 1991, 2.7% in 1992, 3.1% in 1993, 1.8% in 1994, 1.9% in 1995, 1.3% in 1996, 1.1% in 1997, 1.3% in 1998, 1.7% in 1999, 2.3% in 2000, 2.8% in 2001, 4.4% in 2002, 5.2% in 2003, 3.9% in 2004, 3.1% in 2005, 2.7% in 2006.
"Web [weavers, another relatively new category for this survey] (3.5%)..."
...compared with 5.1% in 2010, 4.8% in 2011Q1, 5.6% in 2011Q2, 3.6% in 2011Q3, 4.7% in 2011Q4, 5.9% for all of 2011, 3% in 2012Q1, 4.3% in 2012Q2, 3.5% in 2012Q3, 4.2% in 2012Q4...
"Network and systems admins...4.3%..."
...compared with 1.3% in 2000, 2.1% in 2001, 6% in 2002, 5.3% in 2003, 3.4% in 2004, 3.9% in 2005, 2.5% in 2006...
pointy-haired "computer and information systems managers at 4.3%..."
...compared with 1.6% in 2000, 3.3% in 2001, 5.6% in 2002, 5% in 2003, 4% in 2004, 2.5% in 2005, 2.1% in 2006, 1.3% in 2007, 2.1% in 2008, 4.2% in 2009, 1.6% in 2010...
"programmers have an unemployment rate of 4.6%..."
...compared with 3.1% in 1983, 3% in 1990, 3.5% in 1991, 3.1% in 1992, 2.7% in 1993, 2.1% in 1994, 1.8% in 1995, 1.6% in 1996, 1.6% in 1997, 1.4% in 1998, 2.3% in 1999, 2% in 2000, 4% in 2001, 6.1% in 2002, 6.4% in 2003, 5.8% in 2004, 2.3% in 2005, 2.4% in 2006...
"among computer support specialists, the rate is now 4.9%..."
...compared with 3.4% in 2000, 4.2% in 2001, 5.4% in 2002, 5.4% in 2003, 4.6% in 2004, 3.4% in 2005 and 2006...
and, for computer hardware engineers (which are not included in the aggregate figures for computer science and mathematical occupations) 1.8% in 2000, 2.9% in 2001, 6.5% in 2002, 7% in 2003, 2.1% in 2004, 1.4% in 2005, 1.5% in 2006, 9.3% in 2007Q1, 1.5% in 2007Q4, 2.5% for all of 2007, 1.5% for 2008, 13.9% for 2009Q1, 0.2% for 2009Q2, 1.9% for 2009Q3, 4.6% for 2009Q4, and 5.2% for all of 2009, 14.3% for 2010Q1, 5% for 2010Q2, 2.8% for 2011Q1, 2.2% for 2011Q2, 1.9% for 2011Q3, 2.2% for 2011Q4, 2.3% for 2011 over all, 4.4% for 2012Q1, 0.5% for 2012Q2, 2.8% for 2012Q4 and 1.9% for 2012 over all... which nicely shows the volatility of this data-set.
Read the BLS disclaimer, again, and pass it along:
"Typically, we will not publish percents or medians for occupations or industries with a base of less than 50,000 for annual averages and 75,000 for quarterly averages. However, estimates based on such small denominators may appear in these unpublished tables. (For example, you might check the labor force level to see if it meets these criteria before using the unemployment rate. The labor force -- the sum of the employed and experienced unemployed in an occupation or industry -- is the denominator of the unemployment rate calculation [which means that it neglects those involuntarily out of field and those not currently --
No, it means you get squeezed out at 35 and the "recruiters" stop returning your calls, but you keep on sending out resumes. Your killer system becomes superannuated, but you keep on sending out resumes; your car dies because you can no longer pay the repair shop or buy or lease a new one, but you keep on sending out resumes; you can't pay the rent, but you keep on sending out resumes; you lose your personal library, but you keep on sending out resumes; after a few months the relatives show you the door, but you keep on sending out resumes.
And all that time you keep on working and hoping for an end to the Bush-Clinton-Shrub-Obummer economic depression.
"As for Zuck and the other wizz-kids, they didn't get where they are by working for a boss, they got there by selling new ideas to a new generation. The keys to that kind of success are; the right place, and the right time." ...
The biggest key for the FB and Google and Oracle scammers is weak/flexible ethics... and the cash to develop the scam to the point you can bring in VC and leverage from there.
OK, and the ability to make some critical mass of others think your corrupt scam is an exciting new idea, even when it is not.
At 40, we still have an average of 40 years of life ahead -- 60 for some, 10 for others. ...
At 50 you shouldn't have to be making mortgage payments anymore. It should have been paid off. I've been reading some economists, and 5 year mortgages used to be the norm. OTOH, people planned against the risk of having to go into debt for medical expenses.
How badly over-populated the world is, is irrelevant. ...
Hard currency, with some inherent rarity, as opposed to endlessly inflatable scrip, would be a huge improvement.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a bit of history, yesterday, which mentioned that Marco Polo was impressed by Kublai Khan's abuse of scrip. He was powerful enough to get away with murdering anyone who would not accept his scrip, and sensible enough to limit how much he issued. OTOH, as soon as he died, the scam fell apart.
The story has been repeated many times, whether it was scrip or debased coinage (made from cheaper metals).
The government has floated this dollar coin idea several times because the coins stay in circulation longer than paper. But they made a huge design error. People were still aware of the near-full-bodied silver coins that had existed before. They might get away with Johnson slugs -- copper-nickel alloy masquerading as silver small change -- but they keep insisting on trying to make the copper-nickel dollars essentially the same size and thickness as a quarter.
The one ounce of silver silver dollars were both thicker and bigger around, so people who are savvy or have been around longer just keep on rejecting them.
At the same time, the feral federal government has been issuing over-priced "medallions", with nowhere near the current market value of silver in them as marked on the face. It's a total fraud... but then, that's the whole idea of scrip, to commit fraud on the little people who can't effectively defend themselves.
Hmmm, that's also why the patriotic western Pennsylvanians used their whiskey in exchange instead of the government scrip, and then tarred, feathered and burned down the houses of the government thugs who tried to extort more from them through Hamilton's hated unconstitutional tax on whiskey.
"that also seems like a bottomless pit of knowledge" ...
I would call it a bottomless pit of trivia -- random schtuff you're required to memorize because of the lack of coherent design and the attempt to jump on every fad, because, if we don't, the other guys will get the patents, control of the standards committees, and lock us out.
More hardware and software designers need to force themselves to always remain aware of the "magic number 7, plus or minus 2".
custom systems design and implementation == programming services == bodyshop
staffing services == bodyshop
software publishing == real commercial off-the-shelf product development == shrink-wrap hardware/software product development
What's your hourly rate? == You'll never ever see anything like your former salary and total compensation package, training, education, vacations, duration of employment...
"I have spent the last 20 years as a unix and network administrator, and neglecting a truly prodigious few, these areas are impossible to master without many years of experience" ...
On the contrary, system and network admin are the sorts of things we used to cross-train receptionists and secretaries to do.
Similarly, you can quickly train a 72+ year old mechanical engineer to wrangle a relational data-base, though it might take a couple weeks to train them in the latest, greatest analysis and design techniques.
"I'm still in my 30's, but I'm old enough to remember that they had to farm a lot of Y2K work out to retired guys in nursing homes because they were the best ones to figure out all the COBOL that had to be updated." Correction: the COBOL that should have been scrapped in the 1970s. The COBOL that their programmers and analysts had warned was an amorphous mine-field with date formats which were unwieldy and obsolete even back then.
But the obsolete B-school bozos put it off, created an hysterical panic, and abused that artificial panic, in part, to ship in hundreds of thousands of cheap, young, pliant foreign laborers with flexible ethics still willing to futz with obsolete programming languages and operating systems.
Meanwhile, those programmers and analysts from back in the 1970s had moved on (I later met some of them), learned new operating systems, new programming languages, new paradigms and design patterns... but were still declared "unqualified", primarily because they were not cheap nor young, nor did they have the questionable professional ethics so much prized by CRM, "social networking", "targeted advertising", "GPS tracking" and other corrupt schemers.
"As for the "stealing American's jobs", we graduate some 5,000,000 people a year from US colleges. Compare that to the 85,000 total H1B visa given out annually, less than 2% of the total job market entries." ...
The US State Department tells us that over 110K H-1B visas are issued each year through consular offices, not 58,200, not 65K, not 85K. 117K were issued in FY2010, an early estimate has it at nearly 130K for FY2011 (though the docs I usually rely on for these figures won't come out until next May or June)... with no changes in the existing loop-holes.
US citizens earned 48,542 C&IS degrees (as the US Dept. of Education calls them) in academic year (AY) 2009-2010, 310,586 STEM degrees, and 2,354,678 total.
From AY1969-1970 through AY2009-2010, US citizens have earned over 9 million STEM degrees, and since then, nearly 12 million capable US citizen STEM workers have been added to the talent pool (based on figures from both DoEd and NSF).
Several studies have shown that only about a third of new US citizen STEM workers with degrees have been employed in STEM work. Unemployment rates in the USA over the last 20 years for STEM occupations have been running 2-3 times their full employment levels (source: BLS).
Also looking at BLS employment/population ratios, the USA now have a jobs dearth of about 30 millions...
That sounds like a lot of minds and a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills going to waste, and a lot of economic destruction.
(oops. Time to stop discussing and back to data retrieval; the new BLS report is out!)
Slashdot Mirror
...
Hrmph. How uncivil. You shouldn't call them rank, though google's and Oracle's and SAP's and FB's business plan and strategies may well be.
"Coders" are a concept I first ran across among early bodyshoppers, when the managers of the bodyshop (long on excessive self-estimation and short on intelligence) thought it would be more economical and produce better software if they took over all of the design, and left implementation to the lowly "coders". Of course, because they lost touch with the details the designs were rotten, and the "coders" were prevented from learning good design, so they turned out a lot of garbage... but the B-school bozos loooovvved them.
...
And it's not only Indians; it's also people from Red China.
This is well-trod ground. Whenever there's a remote possibility of cutting government blubber, they whine and wail and scream about "massive cuts", and then trim not the fat, but the things which will most severely impact large, more or less precisely targeted sub-sets of the public. They'll trim a bunch of the people actually effectively inspecting imports at the ports, the Border Patrollers who are actually actively guarding the borders (but not the less-productive support personnel), the embassy and consulate guards, but not the first 3 tiers of political appointees who regularly dine on lobster, steak, pate and champagne with the corrupt foreign dictators. They'll skimp on armor and ammunition to front-line troops (so that they will write home to relatives about the terrrrible cuts), but not skimp on the plush office suite remodelings of 3-4 layers of generals over-populating certain bases (don't get me wrong, good generals are to be prized and praised but too many these days are purely political sycophants). They'll send out press releases about cross-training the former Twinkie bakers... in classes operated by the union bosses' cousins, but shut down or cut repairs on the interstates to try to get the public to cry "Uncle Sam". This is often called the "Washington monument" gambit or scam after the "park service's" penchant for threatening to shut down their most popular tourist sites every time there's any threat that they won't receive the full desired increases in funding. (It is also telling that many of those very sites were initially funded by voluntary donations, but now from tax-victims and increases in federal government debt.)
Yah, good tactic "advocate_one", but there are dysfunctionalities even there. It used to be that employers planned on flying in US STEM workers for interviews, relocating them, 2-12 weeks of new-hire training, 2-4 weeks of retained employee training, and sponsoring a citizen new-hire for a clearance (at a cost $10K to $50K) and giving them some training and productive work to do during the 2-8 months that could take. Since H-1B, the process is more about fabricating excuses/pretexts on which to declare all US candidates "unqualified" regardless of intelligence, knowledge, and experience while avoiding genuine interviews. They don't want to fly people anywhere (and, besides, who wants to with all the ridiculous, unconstitutional non-sense related to air travel these days), they don't want to provide relocation assistance let alone actually relocate people and provide temporary housing. They want you to "hit the ground running" and do your own continuous learning on your own dime and time. And even contractors at Dept. of Energy, NSA, etc., try to avoid sponsoring new security clearance applications. Why? Because of the glut of STEM talent. We've got literally millions of unemployed and involuntarily out of field US citizen STEM workers these days. But just a few million unemployed and under-employed US citizen STEM professionals is not enough to satisfy those who yearn for ever more cheap, young, pliant labor with flexible ethics.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/polinaut/archive/2013/02/poligraph_klobu_4.shtml?refid=0 Unfortunately, most of the media and legislators are ignorant about the subject (as with many other subjects), so they accept whatever press releases they get from the executives, immigration lawyers and their lobbyists.
Why not give every immigrant and IQ test and require them to pass with a 160?
Plus, pass a proper background investigation.
But the bigger the number, the higher the odds we'll end up with more like Faisal Shahzad, Mohammed Atta, Omar Abdel Rahman, Farooque Ahmed, Hanjuan Jin, Sergey Aleynikov, Mr. Liew, Lee Lan, Ge Yuefei, Tai Wang Mak, Fuk Heung Li, Chi Mak, Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, Ming Zhong, Fei Ye, Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, Ning Wen, Katrina Leung...
we hold the execs (in business and academia), and the immigration lawyers, and their lobbyists to what they said they wanted, and only admit the genuinely "best and brightest"... say 1,000 per year for up to 10 months.
Back at the U, I heard from a member of Shockley's family that he was a bit of a racist, which is confirmed by an ixquick of the web.
...
B: "where is this magical land you speak of? tell me. tell me!"
It's not so much "where" as "when". Before H-1B. Firms used to fly US citizens in for interviews, used to cover relocation costs and give you a couple weeks of temporary food and housing while you found a place and settled in, and 2-12 weeks of new-hire training.
And we used to put in 80-100 hour work-weeks as product release dates approached. Part of our motivation was that we were developing great apps, though. At one firm, our apps were helping other firms manufacture better products, so there was a multiplier effect. (Some French firm owns the source, now.) Most of what I see being churned out these days is either downright evil, or minor little toys that millenials get all flighty over; nothing of substance.
When things started to unravel, I gave them something like 8 months of notice, and even that was in the form of "Either you can transfer me by then to any of the firm's software product dev groups where I can better use my knowledge and abilities, or I'm going back to university full-time to re-tool, because you're wasting me here." And then I got several things to a point and others prepared to the point where I could hand them off by that date, instead of immediately jumping ship.
Now, they ask, "When can we expect you to have moved yourself and all your belongings to within a few blocks of this particular one of our hundreds of offices around the USA and then schedule an appointment for a gauntlet/barrage of trivial pursuit tests to find a pretext on which to declare you 'unqualified' for this 3 month gig at 60% of what you used to make per month (in a less expensive and higher quality of living location), because we have to fabricate justification for bringing in this cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics who faked his credentials and doesn't know squat, instead?"
...
"As of the end of Q4 of 2012, the unemployment rate for [computer science and mathematical] professionals was 3.3%, holding steady from Q3..."
...compared with 1.8% in 1983, 1.5% in 1990, 2.7% in 1991, 2.6% in 1992, 2.7% in 1993, 2% in 1994, 1.8% in 1995, 1.3% in 1996, 1.1% in 1997, 1.2% in 1998, 1.8% in 1999, 2.2% in 2000, 3.6% in 2001, 4.9% in 2002, 5.5% in 2003, 4.2% in 2004, 2.9% in 2005, 2.4% in 2006, 2.1% in 2007, 2.6% in 2008, 5.2% in 2009, 4.1% in 2011, and 3.6% for 2012.
So, it's between 2 and 3 times the unemployment rates for these occupations during times of full employment.
"The unemployment rate for DBAs is 1.5%, lowest among all tech-job categories..."
...compared with 3% in 2000, 2.6% in 2001, 2.9% in 2002, 6.6% in 2003, 2% in 2004, 4.4% in 2005, 0.4% in 2006...
"For software developers, a relatively new category in this survey, the rate is 2.9%..."
...compared with 4.6% in 2010, and 3.6% in 2011
and, for software engineers, 1.7% in 2000, 4.2% in 2001, 4.7% in 2002, 5.2% in 2003, 3.3% in 2004, 2.4% in 2005, 2.1% in 2006.
"followed by computer systems analysts at 3.3%..."
...compared with 1.9% in 1983, 1.5% in 1990, 2.6% in 1991, 2.7% in 1992, 3.1% in 1993, 1.8% in 1994, 1.9% in 1995, 1.3% in 1996, 1.1% in 1997, 1.3% in 1998, 1.7% in 1999, 2.3% in 2000, 2.8% in 2001, 4.4% in 2002, 5.2% in 2003, 3.9% in 2004, 3.1% in 2005, 2.7% in 2006.
"Web [weavers, another relatively new category for this survey] (3.5%)..."
...compared with 5.1% in 2010, 4.8% in 2011Q1, 5.6% in 2011Q2, 3.6% in 2011Q3, 4.7% in 2011Q4, 5.9% for all of 2011, 3% in 2012Q1, 4.3% in 2012Q2, 3.5% in 2012Q3, 4.2% in 2012Q4...
"Network and systems admins...4.3%..."
...compared with 1.3% in 2000, 2.1% in 2001, 6% in 2002, 5.3% in 2003, 3.4% in 2004, 3.9% in 2005, 2.5% in 2006...
pointy-haired "computer and information systems managers at 4.3%..."
...compared with 1.6% in 2000, 3.3% in 2001, 5.6% in 2002, 5% in 2003, 4% in 2004, 2.5% in 2005, 2.1% in 2006, 1.3% in 2007, 2.1% in 2008, 4.2% in 2009, 1.6% in 2010...
"programmers have an unemployment rate of 4.6%..."
...compared with 3.1% in 1983, 3% in 1990, 3.5% in 1991, 3.1% in 1992, 2.7% in 1993, 2.1% in 1994, 1.8% in 1995, 1.6% in 1996, 1.6% in 1997, 1.4% in 1998, 2.3% in 1999, 2% in 2000, 4% in 2001, 6.1% in 2002, 6.4% in 2003, 5.8% in 2004, 2.3% in 2005, 2.4% in 2006...
"among computer support specialists, the rate is now 4.9%..."
...compared with 3.4% in 2000, 4.2% in 2001, 5.4% in 2002, 5.4% in 2003, 4.6% in 2004, 3.4% in 2005 and 2006...
and, for computer hardware engineers (which are not included in the aggregate figures for computer science and mathematical occupations) 1.8% in 2000, 2.9% in 2001, 6.5% in 2002, 7% in 2003, 2.1% in 2004, 1.4% in 2005, 1.5% in 2006, 9.3% in 2007Q1, 1.5% in 2007Q4, 2.5% for all of 2007, 1.5% for 2008, 13.9% for 2009Q1, 0.2% for 2009Q2, 1.9% for 2009Q3, 4.6% for 2009Q4, and 5.2% for all of 2009, 14.3% for 2010Q1, 5% for 2010Q2, 2.8% for 2011Q1, 2.2% for 2011Q2, 1.9% for 2011Q3, 2.2% for 2011Q4, 2.3% for 2011 over all, 4.4% for 2012Q1, 0.5% for 2012Q2, 2.8% for 2012Q4 and 1.9% for 2012 over all... which nicely shows the volatility of this data-set.
Read the BLS disclaimer, again, and pass it along:
"Typically, we will not publish percents or medians for occupations or industries with a base of less than 50,000 for annual averages and 75,000 for quarterly averages. However, estimates based on such small denominators may appear in these unpublished tables. (For example, you might check the labor force level to see if it meets these criteria before using the unemployment rate. The labor force -- the sum of the employed and experienced unemployed in an occupation or industry -- is the denominator of the unemployment rate calculation [which means that it neglects those involuntarily out of field and those not currently --
...
That sounds like MSFT's perma-temp scam.
Awww mannn, there goes my Hobby Hut plane.
I think it's a design problem.
I guess you'll have to hammer those spikes later.
"Ham. It's what Christmas is all about." But Chanukah not so much.
...
No, it means you get squeezed out at 35 and the "recruiters" stop returning your calls, but you keep on sending out resumes. Your killer system becomes superannuated, but you keep on sending out resumes; your car dies because you can no longer pay the repair shop or buy or lease a new one, but you keep on sending out resumes; you can't pay the rent, but you keep on sending out resumes; you lose your personal library, but you keep on sending out resumes; after a few months the relatives show you the door, but you keep on sending out resumes.
And all that time you keep on working and hoping for an end to the Bush-Clinton-Shrub-Obummer economic depression.
...
The biggest key for the FB and Google and Oracle scammers is weak/flexible ethics... and the cash to develop the scam to the point you can bring in VC and leverage from there.
OK, and the ability to make some critical mass of others think your corrupt scam is an exciting new idea, even when it is not.
...
At 50 you shouldn't have to be making mortgage payments anymore. It should have been paid off. I've been reading some economists, and 5 year mortgages used to be the norm. OTOH, people planned against the risk of having to go into debt for medical expenses.
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Hard currency, with some inherent rarity, as opposed to endlessly inflatable scrip, would be a huge improvement.
Coincidentally, I was just reading a bit of history, yesterday, which mentioned that Marco Polo was impressed by Kublai Khan's abuse of scrip. He was powerful enough to get away with murdering anyone who would not accept his scrip, and sensible enough to limit how much he issued. OTOH, as soon as he died, the scam fell apart.
The story has been repeated many times, whether it was scrip or debased coinage (made from cheaper metals).
The government has floated this dollar coin idea several times because the coins stay in circulation longer than paper. But they made a huge design error. People were still aware of the near-full-bodied silver coins that had existed before. They might get away with Johnson slugs -- copper-nickel alloy masquerading as silver small change -- but they keep insisting on trying to make the copper-nickel dollars essentially the same size and thickness as a quarter.
The one ounce of silver silver dollars were both thicker and bigger around, so people who are savvy or have been around longer just keep on rejecting them.
At the same time, the feral federal government has been issuing over-priced "medallions", with nowhere near the current market value of silver in them as marked on the face. It's a total fraud... but then, that's the whole idea of scrip, to commit fraud on the little people who can't effectively defend themselves.
Hmmm, that's also why the patriotic western Pennsylvanians used their whiskey in exchange instead of the government scrip, and then tarred, feathered and burned down the houses of the government thugs who tried to extort more from them through Hamilton's hated unconstitutional tax on whiskey.
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I would call it a bottomless pit of trivia -- random schtuff you're required to memorize because of the lack of coherent design and the attempt to jump on every fad, because, if we don't, the other guys will get the patents, control of the standards committees, and lock us out.
More hardware and software designers need to force themselves to always remain aware of the "magic number 7, plus or minus 2".
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custom systems design and implementation == programming services == bodyshop
staffing services == bodyshop
software publishing == real commercial off-the-shelf product development == shrink-wrap hardware/software product development
What's your hourly rate? == You'll never ever see anything like your former salary and total compensation package, training, education, vacations, duration of employment...
SAP, Google, FB, LinkedIn, Siemens, MySpace, GE, Oracle... where corrupt programmers go to violate people's privacy.
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On the contrary, system and network admin are the sorts of things we used to cross-train receptionists and secretaries to do.
Similarly, you can quickly train a 72+ year old mechanical engineer to wrangle a relational data-base, though it might take a couple weeks to train them in the latest, greatest analysis and design techniques.
Correction: the COBOL that should have been scrapped in the 1970s. The COBOL that their programmers and analysts had warned was an amorphous mine-field with date formats which were unwieldy and obsolete even back then.
But the obsolete B-school bozos put it off, created an hysterical panic, and abused that artificial panic, in part, to ship in hundreds of thousands of cheap, young, pliant foreign laborers with flexible ethics still willing to futz with obsolete programming languages and operating systems.
Meanwhile, those programmers and analysts from back in the 1970s had moved on (I later met some of them), learned new operating systems, new programming languages, new paradigms and design patterns... but were still declared "unqualified", primarily because they were not cheap nor young, nor did they have the questionable professional ethics so much prized by CRM, "social networking", "targeted advertising", "GPS tracking" and other corrupt schemers.
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The US State Department tells us that over 110K H-1B visas are issued each year through consular offices, not 58,200, not 65K, not 85K. 117K were issued in FY2010, an early estimate has it at nearly 130K for FY2011 (though the docs I usually rely on for these figures won't come out until next May or June)... with no changes in the existing loop-holes.
US citizens earned 48,542 C&IS degrees (as the US Dept. of Education calls them) in academic year (AY) 2009-2010, 310,586 STEM degrees, and 2,354,678 total.
From AY1969-1970 through AY2009-2010, US citizens have earned over 9 million STEM degrees, and since then, nearly 12 million capable US citizen STEM workers have been added to the talent pool (based on figures from both DoEd and NSF).
Several studies have shown that only about a third of new US citizen STEM workers with degrees have been employed in STEM work. Unemployment rates in the USA over the last 20 years for STEM occupations have been running 2-3 times their full employment levels (source: BLS).
Also looking at BLS employment/population ratios, the USA now have a jobs dearth of about 30 millions...
That sounds like a lot of minds and a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills going to waste, and a lot of economic destruction.
(oops. Time to stop discussing and back to data retrieval; the new BLS report is out!)