Actually they haven't. According to the federal government's Bureau of Labor Standards, over the past 35 years, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage has actually fallen. In other words, people make less money (inflation-adjusted) than they did 35 years ago.
1) Go to the BLS web site 2) Click constant dollars to adjust for inflation
3) Click retrieve data 4) Change from tab to 1968 5) Click go 6) Remember to have adjusted for inflation (step 2)
I think the people selling Horatio Algers stories or making Amway pitches should stick with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. You guys sound like you're hyping a pump and dump dot-bomb so it goes up to 100 before collapsing again. The data is not in your favor, not in terms of wages, hours worked, savings and debt, comparison to the productivity of European workers and so on.
Nor is the rationale in your favor if you want to look at the Forbes 400 richest list and see how many of them inherited all of their money and the like.
Any of you who have clicked on the link after 9:30PM EST on May 29th will notice that the software is missing from Nullsoft - shades of Gnutella! No worries, I downloaded it so anyone who wants it is free to grab it at my web site.
Never let the facts get in the way of a diatribe
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 2
I see a lot of comments here about high debt and a bad savings rate and how "Generation X" has brought this on themselves. Well, they have in a way but not in the way these people are speaking of. Everyone is speaking of these vague notions without referring to economic data, which at least Fortune refers to to some extent. Also, everyone is speaking as if ever American GenX'er was a Java programmer or worked with Cisco routers. This may be true for themselves and their immediate circle of friends, and maybe people who live in their yuppie neighborhoods, but it is not true for every American Gen X'er.
Why are Americans in debt more than they were thirty years ago and not saving money? Household debt has gone from 65% of post-tax income to over 100% in the past thirty years and saving rates have dropped. Well, one reason is that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago. You can see the raw data at the government's BLS web site, or check out LBO's nice graphs of the same data. This is a very important piece of economic information, but one rarely, if ever, mentioned in the news. The fact that Americans are making less money per hour (inflation-adjusted) than they were thirty years ago sheds a lot of light on why savings are down and debt is up - they are making less money and thus have less to save and thus by food and clothes and so forth on credit cards.
Some people, for whatever reasons, would rather stick to their own conclusions about how people are indulging themselves too much and this will cause them repercussions. This seems to be a tenet of Christian thought, and since Christianity dominates American society so heavily perhaps that's why people prefer their "faith" view over the scientific and logical conclusions one would draw from economic data. Or perhaps, as I said before, they and their circle are all white collar Java professionals and they apply what happened to them as what's happening to the Gen X janitor who sweeps up late at night in their offices, however falsely. Even in this case I'd disagree, as Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. bankrolled the ITAA to modify laws such as the H1-B cap, FLSA overtime provisions, section 1706 IRS tax codes etc., in an attempt to lower IT wages. An attempt which was largely successful. Of course, that just played a part in lower IT wages and higher unemployment, the bigger tidal wave of the economy helped lower wages as well. But again, to hear some people talk about it, it sounds like "the economy did it" is like we're all farmers and our crops were flooded and people say "it was just the weather". The economic system is not some foreign, alien force we have no control of, like the weather. The millions the ITAA spent on lobbying efforts, plus larger scale forces manipulating the economy are what caused this. All I hear here are a bunch of people whose solutions to everything is to tighten their belts (and increase their skill level so they'll be more valuable specialists). It sounds a lot more meek and submissive than what the dock workers in San Francisco have been doing - men who have more secure jobs and are paid more than a lot of IT techies, and who probably used to beat these meek little techies asses and could this day still probably beat the meek, submissive techies asses. Quite often reading comments here, I get disgusted by the attitude of many of the posters. The important thing is, those of us who think as we (or I) do have to band together and push things forward, as these toadies never will. Efforts are already being made - Washtech/CWA,
the Programmers Guild and so forth, they just need more people on board to start reaching critical mass. We can't wait around for the pansies, we have to get out there and get things moving ourselves.
It's frightening to me to see this kind of ignorance on Slashdot. If this is how people who read Slashdot think, the ignorance of the average person in the USA must truly be massive.
> You wanna be scientific? ok, answer this: > 1. Where do we come from?
We evolved from apes. The universe was created by the big bang. As time goes on, our understanding of these two things grows deeper - we understand more about the similarity between human and ape DNA than we did in Darwin's time for example. I'm sure as time goes on, the big bang theory will be expanded and our understanding will become deeper. It may even change a little - I am certain it will not be changed to that a magic man in the sky created everything, including a talking snake in a garden who had a profound effect on everything.
> 2. What are we doing here on earth? (What's our purpose of living?)
Everything we do on earth should be preparation for the "next life" after we die. Uh, wrong. There is no next life, this is it, you can't take it with you. People who spend all of this life in preparation for some next life which won't happen are the real fools. I'm going to enjoy this life while I have it, not worry every minute that I'm not obeying some ministers interpretation of the bible so if I don't obey what he says I might wind up not in "heaven" but in "hell" eternally. People who spend their whole life preparing for something that will never happen instead of enjoying life, and spend every minute worrying over whether they are committing some sexual sin like lust or whatever are big fools. Fools who not only waste their own lives in submission to some fundamentalist leaders dictates, but who try to ruin everyone elses life as well. It's like Mencken said, a Puritan is someone who has "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".
> 3. Where are we going after death?
We burn in hell eternally if we have pre-marital sex? *We* are going into the ground or having our ashes scattered post-cremation. Our children and their children are going to keep on living however. It's selfish and immoral to only be concerned about yourself, or be like Reagan's fundie Secretary of Interior who said "We don't have to worry about the environment, the day of judgement is at hand". Yes, we do have to worry about the future even after we're gone for our children. We can't live this life obeying some ministers or priests commands which he claims are from his biblical interpretation, in preparation for some "next life" which doesn't exist.
It is true that the 14th amendment says American laws apply to everyone on US soil, and does not use the word citizen. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has not been interpreting the Constitution to mean this recently. For example, undocumented worker Jose Castro was last month
denied back pay, even though under US law he has a right to it. As the dissenting opinion on the 5-4 opinion stated, by denying him back pay, this just encourages more employers to hire undocumented workers.
The people who set up the original H1-B program set it up so the workers were indentured servants - they couldn't switch companies, if they displeased the boss in any way they were fired and had to go back to their home country within a week, they were worked longer hours than American workers and via loopholes paid less, yet the people who are *against* this are the KKK racist ones? Whatever. What do you think, the corporations who are fighting to get $2 an hour Mexican drivers on American highways are doing it out of the benevolence of their heart?
Immigration programs designed to screw over domestic workers do create racism. We do not have open borders - we have a very specific immigration law with H1-B tailored to screw over the IT workers in this country. I guess in your mind, anyone who doesn't allow Microsoft, Intel and so forth through their lobbying arm, the ITAA, write the immigration laws in this country is a "KKK racist". That whilst I have been fighting to better the job-switching conditions for the H1-Bs ona green card application already here, which the employers are fighting against because they'd rather have slave-like indentured servants unable to switch jobs.
You're talking out of your ass about something you know nothing about. This is whether the citizens of this democratic republic are the ones who write the immigration laws, or whether corporations (who I'm sure have the *best* intentions and concern for everyone) will write them. Anyone who isn't on their knees in submission to the corporations is a KKK racist. Whatever. The reality is - you and the people who support the H1-B program are the racists. Your arguments are weak which is why you'd rather your side and our side throw out all logical arguments and start hurling the racism word at each other. And people like you who want to go back to the days of indentured servitude *are* racists.
Yes, this poster is being a little ridiculous. "You're looking out for yourself (and other IT workers working in America currently - including H1Bs)!" Well who isn't, what do you expect, Saint Francis and Jesus posting on Slashdot? The ITAA sure as hell is looking out for the IT employers who finance it like Microsoft and Bill Gates is wallowing in his billions - so we're supposed to apologize in trying to keep a roof over our head and food on the table amidst our 60 hour weeks and oncall? I'd like to say your comment qualifies as the stupidest thing I've read in this thread, but unfortunately I can't.
I had to punch in my hours at my last job so I know what I worked. I worked an average of 60 hour weeks, in addition to 24/7 oncall, and my beeper went off quite a lot - in the middle of the night, on weekends, when I was out at dinner and so forth and so on. So on a per hour basis, please multiply by 50% against the average 9-to-5, 40 hours a week worker, and then tack on oncall time.
Also tech workers often had to live in the Bay area or other high cost areas where rent and so forth was a much higher cost than in say, northern Mississippi. When you factor in the hours worked, the areas required to live and so forth, the numbers change when compared to the average worker.
You are absolutely correct. The ITAA's sole purpose is to screw over IT workers at the behest of IT employers. Being that so many IT workers are disorganized and stupid, the loads of people here who are happy that wages and jobs are being cut being an example, this has made their jobs easier for them.
The ITAA is responsible for:
Bringing in hundreds of thousands of H1Bs
Getting rid of overtime pay for "computer operators"
Keeping section 1706 in tax code which forces independent consultants into body shops
and so forth...
My web page has information on this organization and how to join together with other engineers to combat them. Your career (and my career) may depend on it.
This is the third question Norm Matloff answers in his very well-researched paper "Debunking the Myth of a Software Labor Shortage", I'll just cut and paste from that -
Question: The industry claims that if it cannot bring H-1B workers to the U.S., it will be forced to move software operations to where the workers are overseas. Is this true?
This is a bogus threat, an obvious contradiction: Why does the industry want to bring Indian programmers to the U.S. as H-1Bs in the first place? Why not just employ those programmers in India? The answer is that it is not feasible to do so.
The fact is that, although a small amount of work is done abroad (largely old mainframe software), this will not escalate to become the major mode of operation of the industry. The misunderstandings caused by long-distance communication, the problems of highly-disparate time zones and so on result in major headaches, unmet deadlines and a general loss of productivity.
Just look at Silicon Valley. This is the most ``wired'' place in the world, yet those massive Silicon Valley freeway traffic jams arise because very few programmers telecommute. They know that face-to-face interaction is crucial to the success of a software project.
Since this whole topic pisses me off, I like to use the word bullshit a lot. This "market cycle" stuff is bullshit.
Guess what? The ITAA (the organization funded by IT employers) has been riding both sides of this bubble. On the way up they were talking about the massive need for workers, and spent millions getting H1B legislation passed. We had 200,000 H1-Bs come in in the last year, despite falling wages and people being laid off - this is technically impossible with the law, but it has enough loopholes and lax enforcement to allow this.
Now that we're on the downslope, the second strategy kicks in - employers cutting wages, unemployment rising and so forth. And the ITAA still issuing reports saying there will be 1,000,000 new jobs. Well hell, I guess we should raise the number of H1Bs from 200,000 this year to 1,000,000 in that case, the ITAA would never tell a lie!
You talk about why they're rich - they're rich because they have been united in fucking us over for years. And here we are with our wages cut, unemployment up and people are smiling and just accepting that this is the market and super-genius, hard workers like them will not be unemployed (although their salary will be cut and they'll go from working 60-hour weeks with 24/7 oncall to 65-hour weeks).
There's only one solution - team up like the employers team up in the ITAA. Most engineers I talk to don't want to collectively bargain like a union, so the solution is a professional association like doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. The best organization like that is not IEEE who have sold out to the employers as well, but the Programmers Guild.
Well, thanks for your insight that the job cuts only cut out the losers as you say - now can you please give us some insight into why it's good that our salaries have been universally cut? I was working for a consulting company which placed me at a Fortune 100 financial company and they announced across the board pay cuts for every worker - I quit, but those who were married or who had just relocated or so forth were unable to do so.
As far as the ITAA report which said IT jobs will grow - bullshit! The ITAA is the *enemy* folks, they're the ones who lobbied to bring in hundreds of thousands of H1B's, they're the ones that did away with overtime laws for "computer operators", they're the one fighting to keep section 1706 in tax code (which drives independent consultants into body shops) and so forth. The ITAA is lying - the ITAA is who was talking about shortages for years before the current glut. Don't you people see the commercials on TV talking about a technical career while everyone is being laid off or getting pay cuts? Don't you all realize there is a massive deception going on - wonderful careers in IT are being advertised for while things for the profession get worse and worse?
I can't believe that the same BULLSHIT that that the ITAA has been saying for the past several years has made it to the front page of Slashdot. I know it is on dice.com's front page and other places - they made their bullshit report recently to counter things like Representative Tancredo's legislation that would tie H1B caps to the unemployment rate (which is the highest in 8 years).
So you morons who think you're some kind of programming super-genius who is a "hard worker" and is some kind of socially retarted dork who puts all his self-value in how much computer skills he has - can you please explain why not only jobs are being cut but why salaries are being cut? It's called supply and demand, folks, and the ITAA has been at the forefront of raising the supply of workers, hours worked by them, and their mobility (especially that of H1Bs or those who would like to be independent consultants).
Now, most IT professionals I talk to don't want to form a union (collective bargaining association) which leaves us with one solution - a professional association, just like the doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. No, not the IEEE, they've sold out to corporate sponsors when they had efforts to lower the H1-B cap killed. The Programmers Guild is the best organization I've seen of this type. Joining together and fighting for our profession against the ITAA is the only solution.
My web page, the Oncall Guild, has more information about all of this, mostly links to good sources of information about non-technically related things to our profession. If you want to be part of a million individual super-genius hard-working dork programmer lemmings headed off a cliff, be my guest, if you want to join together with other engineers and fight the employer-financed ITAA in a non-union association, join the Programmers Guild and read the information on my web site.
I have a reply prior to this with regards to the problems I see with the IEEE. As far as the ACM, they fall into one of the categories I mentioned in my first post with the old associations - they are born of academia and too close to academia, and their association covers little to do with the modern IT professional. For example, from what I can see, their Washington lobby is mainly concerned with interests serving people working in academia, such as more government financing for scientific research in academia. There is some crossover, but they are not concerned with the interests of the modern IT professional in general who is either a programmer or administrator (systems, database, or network).
You mention two things in your post - H1-Bs and professional standards. I do think the H1-B cap issue should be dealt with, and associations like the Programmer's Guild do deal with. H1-Bs already in this country get mad with me when I tell them I want the cap lower. I have no idea what attachment they have to the cap since they already made it in. So I ask them, why do you want 195,000 *more* people coming in this year competing with you for a green card? Usually they wind up agreeing with me, a high H1-B cap is bad for me and them. H1-Bs are unhappy with the restriction that keeps them from changing jobs while applying for a green card, and I support them, I'd like to see that restriction removed as well. This is another example of something in my and their interest. I have nothing against H1-Bs, all I want to see is a lower cap. Which as I explained before, is a positive thing for the H1-Bs in this country since it increases their odds of getting a green card.
As far as professional standards and certification - I believe engineers in these associations should discuss this in these associations and decide what's best for them. The Programmers Guild discusses it's ideas regarding certification on it's web page - it says it feels certifications are currently run as money makers (something I agree with) and that it thinks money-making test preparation books and multiple choice quizzes are dumb. That is an interesting idea and I agree with it somewhat. Really, part of the best possible certification would be several technical interviews by guild/association members based on the certifee's resume. That's *real* certification.
This is the thing - current certification scams are so bad that the words certification and professional standards make most people cringe, including me. Certification has gotten such a bad rap (deservedly, as it is currently) that I wouldn't even say we would do certification, I would say "we will do certification unlike any certification you have ever heard of or done". I think putting it this way would make people cringe less upon hearing the word certification. Professional standards are important to the Programmer's Guild as well, and just like the new "non-scam" certification, our discussions of professional standards will revolve around, what will be good for us, and our profession, what standards can we have that will do more to help us than to get in the way?
I think the Programmers Guild is probably the best association with regards to these things that exists currently, and I list my thoughts on other various associations on my web page which the URL of is in my original post. And as I said in my first post, I think joining or organizing groups like the Programmer's Guild is important, but just educating yourself about the issues that the Programmers Guild and the group I am in, the Oncall Guild, and then educating other programmers/administrators about it are a good thing. We can form coalitions to help block or push through laws in Washington, we can do surveys about salary and other things, we can do *real* certifications, that really nail down skill levels, we can help facilitate the creation of consulting companies owned by the programmers who worked at them and so forth.
I agree that IEEE has some good points, especially in terms of discussion of technical issues. It also has some very glaring bad points with regards to professional issues other than increasing technical knowledge. Although a reform effort in IEEE and IEEE-USA would be helpful, reforming this century-old association is an enormous task, and associations like the Programmer's Guild can do a lot more in the meantime while that reform effort is underway.
Norm Matloff pinpoints the problem with IEEE so well in his excellent research paper "Debunking the Myth of a Software Labor Shortage" that I'll just excerpt from that:
In 1998, the engineering professional organization IEEE-USA (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers-USA) had lobbied Congress strongly against the H-1B quota increase which was proposed that year. (It had been a major critic of the H-1B program in the past as well.) As an organization of over 200,000 members nationwide, it was a force to be reckoned with.
However, as a result, IEEE-USA then came under enormous pressure from corporate and academic interests in the parent organization IEEE to moderate its position. IEEE-USA then hired Paul Donnelly as a consultant, whose job was ``to help wean the organization from its outright opposition to immigration.'' (The New Republic, June 19, 2000.) Donnelly is the former staffer with the Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform described in Section 2.3.4.
Around the same time, IEEE-USA greatly toned down its Web site. It removed its ``Misfortune 500'' file, a compendium of 500 engineers, mainly older, who were having trouble finding engineering work in spite of the alleged high-tech boom. It also removed from the site its report on a 1998 Harris Poll which had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the H-1B increase.
Donnelly convinced IEEE-USA to support his proposal - similar to one formulated by Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform as mentioned above - under which industry could bring in foreign engineers and programmers on an expedited basis, giving them ``instant green cards'' and bypassing the H-1B stage. This new stance on IEEE-USA's part was counter to its previous view that industry should hire/retrain American programmers and engineers, but apparently the organization felt that its new position would relieve the pressure brought to bear on it by the parent organization.
However, Donnelly was up against his rival, Rick Swartz (again, see Section 2.3.4), and up against Swartz's allies representing the computer industry, who apparently wanted to retain the ``indentured servant'' nature of the H-1B workers. Those lobbyists dismissed Donnelly as ``anti-immigrant,'' in spite of his work as a consultant to immigrants and as a longtime advocate for relieving the greencard backlog for the spouses and children of immigrants. (Wired News, May 15, 2000.)
Meanwhile, Swartz had acquired a new client, the Immigrant Support Network, an organization of H-1Bs who were hoping to get Congress to alleviate the ``indentured servitude'' problem. (See Section 2.4.)
Donnelly still tried to get Microsoft to support the ``instant greencard'' proposal. However, Microsoft's counsel and lobbyist, Ira Rubinstein, simply stalled, saying that he may support the proposal in the future but now wished to concentrate on H-1Bs. Later Rubinstein tried other stall tactics as well. (Personal communication with Paul Donnelly, June 17, 2000.)
Personally I do not support the Donnelly proposal, because although it would fix the problem of H-1B ``indentured servitude,'' a worthy goal, it would not address the problems of age discrimination and so on which are being fueled by the influx of foreign programmers. Nevertheless, the industry's continuing rejection of the Donnelly proposal, which would bring in the workers they say are needed and would reduce paperwork and trouble for the employers, shows that they do indeed wish to retain the indentured-servant nature of the H-1B program. And the personal attacks on Donnelly are uncalled for.
I have been a systems administrator for over six years. I also know a lot of DBAs and network (Cisco etc.) admins.
Let me tell you something about administration and the aforementioned burnout. Administrators carry a beeper. When things go down, you get paged. You get paged on the beach, you get paged in restaurants, you get paged when you're asleep, you get paged on the weekend, you get paged while you're fucking your girlfriend, you get paged when you just sat down with your burritos and gorditas at Taco Bell. Being paged all the time sucks. I'm sure once in a blue moon programmers are beeped at 3 in the morning by someone who tells him that the program he wrote has a memory leak and it crashed. But they don't get paged nearly as much as administrators. An environment which does not crash often has more to do with luck than good administration, from companies where I was the only tech, to Fortune 100 companies I have worked at, the reasons for me being paged were often my control. Hell, I'd have every damned machine with one RAID 5 array for use, and three spares in case there was a problem, unfortunately, resiliency and redundancy is usually a low budget priority - why pay, when they can just beep you at 3 AM and fix it.
Before considering a career in administration - remember the beeper.
The article begins "Become a dentist, CPA, or lawyer and odds are you'll be practicing that profession on a more or less daily basis till the day you retire."
Yes, and dentist's have the ADA, accountants have the AICPA, and lawyer's have the ABA. What professional association of the magnitude of the ABA or AMA represents modern IT engineers? The answer is, there is no professional association with any weight behind it that represents engineers.
We do have a well-financed association or lobbying group financed by the employers of the IT profession (Microsoft, IBM etc.) called the ITAA, which has been making war on our profession for years. Their sole purpose is to flood the IT labor market in order to drive up IT unemployment and drive down wages. They also despise worker independence which is why they love H1-B restrictions (forcing H1-Bs to stick with rotten companies during green card applications) and support section 1706 in the tax code (which forces independent consultants into body shops).
The first high-rated post said "we can all become managers!" Um, no, we can not all become managers, most of the IT departments I've worked at have had anywhere from 10-30 people under a manager, so when one of them goes on to be a manager, what becomes of everyone else. Also, good programmers don't necessarily mean good managers, and mediocre programmers can be good managers. I could go on, but the article is true that 24/7 oncall for years on end, constantly working weekends and 60 hour weeks can lead to burnout, and that many companies don't like hiring people over a certain age.
From a personal standpoint, I believe the failure of engineers to form an association that can counter the ITAA's war on our profession in Washington, as well as the failure to form consulting companies which are geared more towards worker-ownership and worker-control (although there are some, like
RMPCP) is due to the fact that many of the people in this profession are the stereotypical socially retarted dorks, who are unable to socialize normally with other human beings, and who place their entire self-worth in the idea that they are the smartest programming super-genius whose skills are better than everyone else, who works harder than anyone else and so forth, so why would he have to have an association like the ABA or AMA with other engineers like every other god-damn profession does? Believe me, doctors are not stupid, cutting someone open and operating on their beating heart is a lot more complicated than opening up a computer and adding more RAM to it. They're not stupid, many of them are very smart actually, and we should follow their example and form a professional association.
For my preference, I like the
Programmer's Guild, if you don't like them you can form your own or join a different one, although I'd hope if there were several associations they'd work together in fighting the ITAA's attempts to steal our intellectual property and drive us out of work in Washington. There are engineers working on this and have been for years, but our numbers are small and we need more engineers to just cursorily educate themselves about these things, and then spread the word and educate others about these things, just a few more people on board and it will reach critical mass and we can get the word out more. To me, it's not just about fighting for my profession, it's a principle thing, I'm sick of being kicked around by Microsoft (and IBM, Oracle etc.) via their ITAA yap dog, and I'm glad that I'm actually doing something about it.
My web page that deals with all of this is the
Oncall Guild web page. We're not a group that seeks paying membership, anyone can be a member, just educate yourself about this, spread the word and join organizations like the Programmer's Guild or similar good organizations to do something about it. Some of the older engineering organizations are discussed on the web page, both the problems (corporate-financed to the point that they have killed campaigns that oppose the ITAA with threats, too academically focused, created decades ago and not focused on the modern IT profession and so forth) and good things (surveys about salary and other matters, allowing engineers to network with each other).
I was curious about this so I decided to call Best Buy.
First I called 1-888-BESTBUY and connected to customer relations. I told her I have a news mailing list and was interested in a comment with regards to this. I asked her about the incident and she said she didn't know anything. She suggested I call the store or corporate headquarters's PR department.
I called corporate headquarters, 952-947-2000. They closed at 5PM CDT.
I called the store at 770-939-7660 and connected to customer service. I mentioned my mailing list and the arrest and she asked if I wanted background information and I said yes. She came back in a minute and told me that she couldn't comment and that I'd have to call corporate PR.
With the store directing people to corporate PR, and customer relations not knowing anything, I guess people interested in writing news items about this will have to wait until tomorrow morning to get a response from Best Buy's corporate PR department.
Have they already decided not to press forward with fraud/trespass charges? I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
The ITAA, the anti-engineer lobbying group which is bankrolled by Microsoft, IBM and others, did away a few years ago with FLSA laws for "computer operators" which require overtime pay.
From government statistics, we know that Americans have surpassed even the Japanese in the hours worked per week and per year - Americans work more hours than people in any country in the world. This is very good for those who own the companies - the 1% of the US population that owns 42.2% of the stock. How about everyone else though?
Well, as the average working week gets longer and longer over the past thirty years, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has dropped. Anyone who has a pulse can see what's been happening in the IT field lately - layoffs (with those over-burdened people still around picking up the "slack"), frozen wages, falling wages, ever expanding workloads requiring ever more hours worked.
If you work for yourself, and thus all work you do will profit you, then yes, hard work *does* pay off. If you're a wage slave working for someone else, all the unpaid overtime you work, all the hours on call you work are just making your boss look good, and the people who really own your company more wealthy. By really own I mean the people who really own your company, not the 1000 shares of underwater options you get that vest over 4-5 years and which are 0.000001% of the total shares, minus the strike price.
Sorry, I hear enough of this stick-and-carrot stuff at work, I hear people say it here and I have to say, BS! I wish I had listened to the guys at the Programmer's Guild during the bubble when they were pointing out how rising H1-B caps and the destruction of FLSA laws. If one looks at the industry polls which show engineers getting farther and farther away from the 40 hour workweek, it becomes apparent how many suckers there are in this industry. When somebody *aside from yourself* is getting your labor time for free, than you are the sucker.
I didn't mention the word union anywhere, I said a professional organization like doctors and lawyers have in the AMA and ABA. How come every time I tell an engineer we need to educate ourselves and organize into a professional association, they start telling me how much they hate unions? Engineers by-and-large don't want a union. Professional associations like the ABA and AMA don't bargain collectively like unions do, they just look out for the profession's interests. If associations are such a bad idea, why are all the IT employers associated within the very well-funded ITAA, which regularly pushed anti-engineer legislation through Washington? The employers know something engineers don't. Engineers need to organize less for "aggressive" reasons, and more for defensive reasons - to defend themselves against all the crap the ITAA gets away with. Unlike John Miano of the Programmer's Guild, I didn't have my epiphany of the murder the ITAA gets away with against engineers until the current slump, he had the foresight to start working against it during the "bubble".
With hundreds of thousands of H1-Bs in Silicon Valley, and 200,000 more on their way each year, the ITAA has won it's victory against engineers (aside from their doing away with FLSA overtime requirements for computer professionals, or overturning repetitive stress injury laws). It's never going to be the same for engineers unless they start educating themselves and supporting professional organizations of the like that doctor's (AMA) and lawyer's (ABA) have.
For instance, there's a bill in Congress,
HR 3222, which links the number of new H1-B visas granted to the unemployment rate. What professional organizations are pushing to get this bill a hearing? It's pathetic that IT worker's are less organized than doctor's, lawyers or even steel workers (who just got a nice present from Bush in terms of tarriffs). Until engineers start educating themselves, and then their fellow engineers, and joining or forming organizations like Washtech, CESO, AEA and the Programmer's Guild, this post-boom slump will last a long, long time. Same old 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall, but for less and less pay.
I have seen this happen to people I know. The standard contract has these provisions. When people ask about them the company says they're just protecting themselves and not to worry about it. Yet they are given the legal authority to hold it against you and sometimes do.
For almost every problem I've seen engineers face, someone says, "Well you should have negotiated that with your contract". Well, I know a lot of engineers and the number I know who work full-time and have intellectual property or overtime issues negotiated in their initial employment agreement I can count on my hand. The reality is, if they're handing you something to sign from their lawyer's boilerplate, instead of vice versa, they have the upper hand.
Most professions have professional organizations that look out for their interests, lawyers have the ABA, doctor's have the AMA. Who looks out for IT workers? There are some ancient associations which are more-or-less owned by the industry employers (IEEE, ACM). The professional associations that truly look out for the modern IT workforce - the Programmer's Guild, Washtech and whatnot, are new, small organizations. They do not have the history and well-funded organization of the ITAA, the IT employers association. The ITAA has not only rammed through H1-B legislation but legislation which overturned FLSA so that computer workers don't have to be paid overtime. Section 1706 was lobbied into the IRS tax code to drive independent consultants into body shops. Because the professional organizations are still small, most engineers don't even know this, and know the ITAA is attacking their livelihood down in Washington.
What do most engineers say? Well, they always think they're the smart, hard-working ones who are unaffected by the laws of supply and demand. In some ways, they are a bit of the engineer stereotype, putting their personal self-worth into how "skilled" they are, and think being skilled is a panacea for everything. Luckily for them, this requires no backbone as the boss has no problems with engineers spending what spare time they have improving their skills. Unfortunately, laziness is endemic in the profession and a few engineers will have to deal with these issues, defending against the ITAA's attacks on the profession while a lot of other people lazily sit around and criticize them. Hopefully there will be enough counter-force, I'm not too optimistic however. I think in 15-20 years there will be a lot of carpal-tunnel afflicted (another bill the ITAA killed) guys who have spent the last 20 years working 60 hour weeks, oncall 24/7, and who are burned out, having problems with their families who they don't spend time with and are over-the-hill and less and less employable. I see this because this is what I see now with a large percentage of 40+ programmers today. Luckily everyone I meet thinks they're a unique super-genius who is too smart for all of this, lucky them. We're so smart we don't have to organize like doctors and lawyers do, so we don't even need an organization warning us about the ITAA like the Programmer's Guild and CESO and Washtech do. I'm afraid as time goes by, I am becoming more concerned about the thick headedness of American programmers and that the ITAA will succeed in making everyone a low scale wage slave, I thought this recession and widespread wage freezing, cutting, long hours of unpaid overtime, 24/7 oncall, unemployment and so forth would do it. I'm actually planning a professional exit strategy while I'm still in my 20's as being an American programmer 15-20 years from now looks like a bad deal, I'll be fighting the good fight 2-3 more years however hoping things will start looking like they might turn around until then though.
Corporations are secretive by nature and for the most part unaccountable for their actions. So yes, before they chose to announce this, this all was a secret, and we didn't even have an idea that they would claim it happened because of unpaid bills.
Organizations who take drastic actions that affect a wide number of people (hundreds of thousands in this case), and do so in secret without any accountability are prone to spread ideas of some type of conspiracy. When an organization operates in secret, the only way people can guess what is happening with it are through postulation. Thus, these conspiratorial ideas are due more to Kazaa's previous silence than due to people guessing at what had happened.
It should be noted that in it's evolution since the Nullsoft Gnutella 0.56 server/client, modern Gnutella servents have reduced traffic and improved network scalability by means of
- routing pushes instead of broadcasting them
- caching pings/pongs, and even queryhits
- use of UltraPeer/leaf relationship, which increases the speed at which traffic is routed
There are other ideas that Gnutella developers like those at Limewire have been kicking around, which are similar to ideas that publishing networks like Freenet and MojoNation have, such as data specialization (ie. queries are directed to those likely to have the data, not broadcast to the entire world).
I'm glad whenever mathematicians or people with specialities like traffic analysis examine existing p2p systems, or give their ideas on p2p systems - they might come up with some good ideas or give a good critique that clarifies elements of a p2p network. This paper is certainly less arrogant than ones with names like "Why Gnutella Can't Scale. No Really". A hypernet is an interesting idea, although I can think of a number of reasons why current p2p sharing networks would not implement them. Namely, because authoritarian networks like Napster were shut down by trade associations like the MPAA/RIAA, while more anarchic networks like Gnutella are more immune from such actions - we must consider not only the survival of the scaling network due to technical constraints like Dr. Gunther does, but also it's survival due to legal constraints orchestrated by large corporations. Then there's the question of how many peers the network is designed for - scalability is just one factor in the reasons why I would use a particular p2p client. Luckily, we will have competition between p2p networks like FastTrack, Gnutella, Freenet and MNet (Mojonation), and perhaps different ones will be used for different purposes, just like Usenet, distributed.net and so forth.
It perplexes me why there is always the assumption that the files being shared are propietary. As if everything being shared over Napster, Morpheus and Gnutella is propietary, and thus p2p only exists for a black market.
"Well, a lot of copyright violations go on". Well guess what the top 3 words on search engines like Google are - sex, mp3 and warez. Sounds like plenty of "copyright violations" are going on over the web, should the web be shut down as well? There is too much tacit acceptance that p2p is somehow criminal. The first major p2p application I can recall, the distributed.net rc5 cracker, had a flap over whether it was exporting encryption or not. It seems you can barely stand up and take a leak without some corporation or army telling you what you're doing is illegal. I've used Morpheus and Gnutella to download many speeches. I've used MojoNation to download (and publish) Gutenberg texts. Freenet (and Frost) allows web page publication and chatting over it's p2p network.
I spend a lot of time developing p2p apps. I am not doing so so that 2 kids can trade the latest Britney Spears mp3. I see networks in two forms - authoritarian and democratic. In an authoritarian network, you pay a web hosting outfit money to host your stuff, and the more popular it is, the more you pay. If this is the situation, you have no choice but to commercialize whatever you created in order to distribute it. In a democratic network, there is no authoritarian middleman between you and others. Most of the network is authoritarian, and large, powerful corporations are trying to shut down networks where people deal with each other directly. Note - they are trying to shut down the networks, not go after people who deal with each other directly. I guess American corporations have sold this mentality to it's citizens through good PR, but now they are using their muscle to shut down P2P networks based in other countries like FastTrack. It's quite a shame, if they win it will just be back to where only those with money can publish, and any small person who wants to publish will have to go through an authority and be charged a lot of money. People who want to deal with each other directly are accused and tainted with criminality. This is an old story, far older than the rise of p2p networks.
I'll probably be modded down to -1 for this, but I'll call it as I see it. I think that the image of the engineer as a poorly socialized geek with no backbone and who lacks the masculinity to attract the opposite sex is being demonstrated here.
If you want to improve your viability, what's the one thing you can advocate, yet still be a sycophant to your boss? The answer is skills. In fact, most bosses would be delighted if all their workers spent their free time polishing up their knowledge of C++ or Solaris memory or whatever.
That's the only thing I hear here. "Oh, well this will only effect lower skilled people". I'm 28, but I have been programming (originally in BASIC and machine language) since the early 1980's. I have enough knowledge to work as a DBA, network admin, system administrator or programmer. Of course, I only specialize in one so that I do it on a "senior" level. Nonetheless, the idea that your skill level is a panacea to everything is a lot of ca-ca. It goes against economics 101. If it didn't, why has the ITAA (and NTSA) made a war against engineers for the last few years for their paymasters? Bringing in 900,000 H1-Bs, doing away with FLSA for computer professionals, sticking section 1706 in IRS tax code to screw over independent consultants and so forth?
What's the result - people working 60 hour weeks, with a beeper oncall 24/7 for not that high of a salary and thinking that's normal. I guess if the geek stereotype I brough up is true, and you have no social life, you won't mind being a sycophant for your boss because you have nothing better to do. You sure will never be able to have a normal social life under such conditions. Pay freezes, pay cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs. Even if the less experienced people are being laid off, that's still a workload that you're going to have to pick up.
I can not fathom why people who consider themselves professionals do not have organizations to represent them like lawyers do (ABA) or actor's do (SAG, a union actually) or doctor's do (AMA). The ITAA is in Washington, DC changing the law so that IT workers get paid less, get their overtime increased where it doesn't get paid for (with FLSA) and have a higher unemployment rate. And because of the NTSA IRS tax code change, are financially forced to work for body shops instead of independently. The only reason I can come up with is that the slam that a large percent of engineers are socially retarted and wrap all their self-value in the idea that they are the greatest programmer is true.
Anyhow, the Programmer's Guild, Washtech and CESO are three organizations interesting to look at. IEEE-USA tried to lower the H1-B cap but their corporate funders squashed that. I hope my fellow engineers will look at my web page -
http://www.geocities.com/oncallguild and begin educating themselves, and then joining engineer organizations which are fighting the ITAA's attacks on engineers livelihoods, which unfortunately, too few engineers know about, mostly because there are few engineering organizations, and the few that exist are mostly financed by the corporations how employ them, and thus like the IEEE flap over H1-Bs, ultimately answer to them
Slashdot Mirror
1) Go to the BLS web site
2) Click constant dollars to adjust for inflation
3) Click retrieve data
4) Change from tab to 1968
5) Click go
6) Remember to have adjusted for inflation (step 2)
I think the people selling Horatio Algers stories or making Amway pitches should stick with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. You guys sound like you're hyping a pump and dump dot-bomb so it goes up to 100 before collapsing again. The data is not in your favor, not in terms of wages, hours worked, savings and debt, comparison to the productivity of European workers and so on. Nor is the rationale in your favor if you want to look at the Forbes 400 richest list and see how many of them inherited all of their money and the like.
Any of you who have clicked on the link after 9:30PM EST on May 29th will notice that the software is missing from Nullsoft - shades of Gnutella! No worries, I downloaded it so anyone who wants it is free to grab it at my web site.
Why are Americans in debt more than they were thirty years ago and not saving money? Household debt has gone from 65% of post-tax income to over 100% in the past thirty years and saving rates have dropped. Well, one reason is that the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage is below what it was thirty years ago. You can see the raw data at the government's BLS web site, or check out LBO's nice graphs of the same data. This is a very important piece of economic information, but one rarely, if ever, mentioned in the news. The fact that Americans are making less money per hour (inflation-adjusted) than they were thirty years ago sheds a lot of light on why savings are down and debt is up - they are making less money and thus have less to save and thus by food and clothes and so forth on credit cards.
Some people, for whatever reasons, would rather stick to their own conclusions about how people are indulging themselves too much and this will cause them repercussions. This seems to be a tenet of Christian thought, and since Christianity dominates American society so heavily perhaps that's why people prefer their "faith" view over the scientific and logical conclusions one would draw from economic data. Or perhaps, as I said before, they and their circle are all white collar Java professionals and they apply what happened to them as what's happening to the Gen X janitor who sweeps up late at night in their offices, however falsely. Even in this case I'd disagree, as Microsoft, IBM, Intel etc. bankrolled the ITAA to modify laws such as the H1-B cap, FLSA overtime provisions, section 1706 IRS tax codes etc., in an attempt to lower IT wages. An attempt which was largely successful. Of course, that just played a part in lower IT wages and higher unemployment, the bigger tidal wave of the economy helped lower wages as well. But again, to hear some people talk about it, it sounds like "the economy did it" is like we're all farmers and our crops were flooded and people say "it was just the weather". The economic system is not some foreign, alien force we have no control of, like the weather. The millions the ITAA spent on lobbying efforts, plus larger scale forces manipulating the economy are what caused this. All I hear here are a bunch of people whose solutions to everything is to tighten their belts (and increase their skill level so they'll be more valuable specialists). It sounds a lot more meek and submissive than what the dock workers in San Francisco have been doing - men who have more secure jobs and are paid more than a lot of IT techies, and who probably used to beat these meek little techies asses and could this day still probably beat the meek, submissive techies asses. Quite often reading comments here, I get disgusted by the attitude of many of the posters. The important thing is, those of us who think as we (or I) do have to band together and push things forward, as these toadies never will. Efforts are already being made - Washtech/CWA, the Programmers Guild and so forth, they just need more people on board to start reaching critical mass. We can't wait around for the pansies, we have to get out there and get things moving ourselves.
It's frightening to me to see this kind of ignorance on Slashdot. If this is how people who read Slashdot think, the ignorance of the average person in the USA must truly be massive.
> You wanna be scientific? ok, answer this:
> 1. Where do we come from?
We evolved from apes. The universe was created by the big bang. As time goes on, our understanding of these two things grows deeper - we understand more about the similarity between human and ape DNA than we did in Darwin's time for example. I'm sure as time goes on, the big bang theory will be expanded and our understanding will become deeper. It may even change a little - I am certain it will not be changed to that a magic man in the sky created everything, including a talking snake in a garden who had a profound effect on everything.
> 2. What are we doing here on earth? (What's our purpose of living?)
Everything we do on earth should be preparation for the "next life" after we die. Uh, wrong. There is no next life, this is it, you can't take it with you. People who spend all of this life in preparation for some next life which won't happen are the real fools. I'm going to enjoy this life while I have it, not worry every minute that I'm not obeying some ministers interpretation of the bible so if I don't obey what he says I might wind up not in "heaven" but in "hell" eternally. People who spend their whole life preparing for something that will never happen instead of enjoying life, and spend every minute worrying over whether they are committing some sexual sin like lust or whatever are big fools. Fools who not only waste their own lives in submission to some fundamentalist leaders dictates, but who try to ruin everyone elses life as well. It's like Mencken said, a Puritan is someone who has "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy".
> 3. Where are we going after death?
We burn in hell eternally if we have pre-marital sex? *We* are going into the ground or having our ashes scattered post-cremation. Our children and their children are going to keep on living however. It's selfish and immoral to only be concerned about yourself, or be like Reagan's fundie Secretary of Interior who said "We don't have to worry about the environment, the day of judgement is at hand". Yes, we do have to worry about the future even after we're gone for our children. We can't live this life obeying some ministers or priests commands which he claims are from his biblical interpretation, in preparation for some "next life" which doesn't exist.
It is true that the 14th amendment says American laws apply to everyone on US soil, and does not use the word citizen. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has not been interpreting the Constitution to mean this recently. For example, undocumented worker Jose Castro was last month denied back pay, even though under US law he has a right to it. As the dissenting opinion on the 5-4 opinion stated, by denying him back pay, this just encourages more employers to hire undocumented workers.
The people who set up the original H1-B program set it up so the workers were indentured servants - they couldn't switch companies, if they displeased the boss in any way they were fired and had to go back to their home country within a week, they were worked longer hours than American workers and via loopholes paid less, yet the people who are *against* this are the KKK racist ones? Whatever. What do you think, the corporations who are fighting to get $2 an hour Mexican drivers on American highways are doing it out of the benevolence of their heart?
Immigration programs designed to screw over domestic workers do create racism. We do not have open borders - we have a very specific immigration law with H1-B tailored to screw over the IT workers in this country. I guess in your mind, anyone who doesn't allow Microsoft, Intel and so forth through their lobbying arm, the ITAA, write the immigration laws in this country is a "KKK racist". That whilst I have been fighting to better the job-switching conditions for the H1-Bs ona green card application already here, which the employers are fighting against because they'd rather have slave-like indentured servants unable to switch jobs.
You're talking out of your ass about something you know nothing about. This is whether the citizens of this democratic republic are the ones who write the immigration laws, or whether corporations (who I'm sure have the *best* intentions and concern for everyone) will write them. Anyone who isn't on their knees in submission to the corporations is a KKK racist. Whatever. The reality is - you and the people who support the H1-B program are the racists. Your arguments are weak which is why you'd rather your side and our side throw out all logical arguments and start hurling the racism word at each other. And people like you who want to go back to the days of indentured servitude *are* racists.
Yes, this poster is being a little ridiculous. "You're looking out for yourself (and other IT workers working in America currently - including H1Bs)!" Well who isn't, what do you expect, Saint Francis and Jesus posting on Slashdot? The ITAA sure as hell is looking out for the IT employers who finance it like Microsoft and Bill Gates is wallowing in his billions - so we're supposed to apologize in trying to keep a roof over our head and food on the table amidst our 60 hour weeks and oncall? I'd like to say your comment qualifies as the stupidest thing I've read in this thread, but unfortunately I can't.
I had to punch in my hours at my last job so I know what I worked. I worked an average of 60 hour weeks, in addition to 24/7 oncall, and my beeper went off quite a lot - in the middle of the night, on weekends, when I was out at dinner and so forth and so on. So on a per hour basis, please multiply by 50% against the average 9-to-5, 40 hours a week worker, and then tack on oncall time.
Also tech workers often had to live in the Bay area or other high cost areas where rent and so forth was a much higher cost than in say, northern Mississippi. When you factor in the hours worked, the areas required to live and so forth, the numbers change when compared to the average worker.
The ITAA is responsible for:
Bringing in hundreds of thousands of H1Bs
Getting rid of overtime pay for "computer operators"
Keeping section 1706 in tax code which forces independent consultants into body shops
and so forth...
My web page has information on this organization and how to join together with other engineers to combat them. Your career (and my career) may depend on it.
This is the third question Norm Matloff answers in his very well-researched paper
"Debunking the Myth of a Software Labor Shortage", I'll just cut and paste from that -
Question: The industry claims that if it cannot bring H-1B workers to the U.S., it will be forced to move software operations to where the workers are overseas. Is this true?
This is a bogus threat, an obvious contradiction: Why does the industry want to bring Indian programmers to the U.S. as H-1Bs in the first place? Why not just employ those programmers in India? The answer is that it is not feasible to do so.
The fact is that, although a small amount of work is done abroad (largely old mainframe software), this will not escalate to become the major mode of operation of the industry. The misunderstandings caused by long-distance communication, the problems of highly-disparate time zones and so on result in major headaches, unmet deadlines and a general loss of productivity.
Just look at Silicon Valley. This is the most ``wired'' place in the world, yet those massive Silicon Valley freeway traffic jams arise because very few programmers telecommute. They know that face-to-face interaction is crucial to the success of a software project.
See
Section 9.5 for a more indepth answer.
Since this whole topic pisses me off, I like to use the word bullshit a lot. This "market cycle" stuff is bullshit.
Guess what? The ITAA (the organization funded by IT employers) has been riding both sides of this bubble. On the way up they were talking about the massive need for workers, and spent millions getting H1B legislation passed. We had 200,000 H1-Bs come in in the last year, despite falling wages and people being laid off - this is technically impossible with the law, but it has enough loopholes and lax enforcement to allow this.
Now that we're on the downslope, the second strategy kicks in - employers cutting wages, unemployment rising and so forth. And the ITAA still issuing reports saying there will be 1,000,000 new jobs. Well hell, I guess we should raise the number of H1Bs from 200,000 this year to 1,000,000 in that case, the ITAA would never tell a lie!
You talk about why they're rich - they're rich because they have been united in fucking us over for years. And here we are with our wages cut, unemployment up and people are smiling and just accepting that this is the market and super-genius, hard workers like them will not be unemployed (although their salary will be cut and they'll go from working 60-hour weeks with 24/7 oncall to 65-hour weeks).
There's only one solution - team up like the employers team up in the ITAA. Most engineers I talk to don't want to collectively bargain like a union, so the solution is a professional association like doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. The best organization like that is not IEEE who have sold out to the employers as well, but the Programmers Guild.
My web page discusses these topics in more depth.
As far as the ITAA report which said IT jobs will grow - bullshit! The ITAA is the *enemy* folks, they're the ones who lobbied to bring in hundreds of thousands of H1B's, they're the ones that did away with overtime laws for "computer operators", they're the one fighting to keep section 1706 in tax code (which drives independent consultants into body shops) and so forth. The ITAA is lying - the ITAA is who was talking about shortages for years before the current glut. Don't you people see the commercials on TV talking about a technical career while everyone is being laid off or getting pay cuts? Don't you all realize there is a massive deception going on - wonderful careers in IT are being advertised for while things for the profession get worse and worse?
I can't believe that the same BULLSHIT that that the ITAA has been saying for the past several years has made it to the front page of Slashdot. I know it is on dice.com's front page and other places - they made their bullshit report recently to counter things like Representative Tancredo's legislation that would tie H1B caps to the unemployment rate (which is the highest in 8 years).
So you morons who think you're some kind of programming super-genius who is a "hard worker" and is some kind of socially retarted dork who puts all his self-value in how much computer skills he has - can you please explain why not only jobs are being cut but why salaries are being cut? It's called supply and demand, folks, and the ITAA has been at the forefront of raising the supply of workers, hours worked by them, and their mobility (especially that of H1Bs or those who would like to be independent consultants).
Now, most IT professionals I talk to don't want to form a union (collective bargaining association) which leaves us with one solution - a professional association, just like the doctors (AMA) and lawyers (ABA) have. No, not the IEEE, they've sold out to corporate sponsors when they had efforts to lower the H1-B cap killed. The Programmers Guild is the best organization I've seen of this type. Joining together and fighting for our profession against the ITAA is the only solution.
My web page, the Oncall Guild, has more information about all of this, mostly links to good sources of information about non-technically related things to our profession. If you want to be part of a million individual super-genius hard-working dork programmer lemmings headed off a cliff, be my guest, if you want to join together with other engineers and fight the employer-financed ITAA in a non-union association, join the Programmers Guild and read the information on my web site.
I have a reply prior to this with regards to the problems I see with the IEEE. As far as the ACM, they fall into one of the categories I mentioned in my first post with the old associations - they are born of academia and too close to academia, and their association covers little to do with the modern IT professional. For example, from what I can see, their Washington lobby is mainly concerned with interests serving people working in academia, such as more government financing for scientific research in academia. There is some crossover, but they are not concerned with the interests of the modern IT professional in general who is either a programmer or administrator (systems, database, or network).
You mention two things in your post - H1-Bs and professional standards. I do think the H1-B cap issue should be dealt with, and associations like the Programmer's Guild do deal with. H1-Bs already in this country get mad with me when I tell them I want the cap lower. I have no idea what attachment they have to the cap since they already made it in. So I ask them, why do you want 195,000 *more* people coming in this year competing with you for a green card? Usually they wind up agreeing with me, a high H1-B cap is bad for me and them. H1-Bs are unhappy with the restriction that keeps them from changing jobs while applying for a green card, and I support them, I'd like to see that restriction removed as well. This is another example of something in my and their interest. I have nothing against H1-Bs, all I want to see is a lower cap. Which as I explained before, is a positive thing for the H1-Bs in this country since it increases their odds of getting a green card.
As far as professional standards and certification - I believe engineers in these associations should discuss this in these associations and decide what's best for them. The Programmers Guild discusses it's ideas regarding certification on it's web page - it says it feels certifications are currently run as money makers (something I agree with) and that it thinks money-making test preparation books and multiple choice quizzes are dumb. That is an interesting idea and I agree with it somewhat. Really, part of the best possible certification would be several technical interviews by guild/association members based on the certifee's resume. That's *real* certification.
This is the thing - current certification scams are so bad that the words certification and professional standards make most people cringe, including me. Certification has gotten such a bad rap (deservedly, as it is currently) that I wouldn't even say we would do certification, I would say "we will do certification unlike any certification you have ever heard of or done". I think putting it this way would make people cringe less upon hearing the word certification. Professional standards are important to the Programmer's Guild as well, and just like the new "non-scam" certification, our discussions of professional standards will revolve around, what will be good for us, and our profession, what standards can we have that will do more to help us than to get in the way?
I think the Programmers Guild is probably the best association with regards to these things that exists currently, and I list my thoughts on other various associations on my web page which the URL of is in my original post. And as I said in my first post, I think joining or organizing groups like the Programmer's Guild is important, but just educating yourself about the issues that the Programmers Guild and the group I am in, the Oncall Guild, and then educating other programmers/administrators about it are a good thing. We can form coalitions to help block or push through laws in Washington, we can do surveys about salary and other things, we can do *real* certifications, that really nail down skill levels, we can help facilitate the creation of consulting companies owned by the programmers who worked at them and so forth.
I agree that IEEE has some good points, especially in terms of discussion of technical issues. It also has some very glaring bad points with regards to professional issues other than increasing technical knowledge. Although a reform effort in IEEE and IEEE-USA would be helpful, reforming this century-old association is an enormous task, and associations like the Programmer's Guild can do a lot more in the meantime while that reform effort is underway.
h _s Ec2.5.1
Norm Matloff pinpoints the problem with IEEE so well in his excellent research paper "Debunking the Myth of a Software Labor Shortage" that I'll just excerpt from that:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html#tt
In 1998, the engineering professional organization IEEE-USA (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers-USA) had lobbied Congress strongly against the H-1B quota increase which was proposed that year. (It had been a major critic of the H-1B program in the past as well.) As an organization of over 200,000 members nationwide, it was a force to be reckoned with.
However, as a result, IEEE-USA then came under enormous pressure from corporate and academic interests in the parent organization IEEE to moderate its position. IEEE-USA then hired Paul Donnelly as a consultant, whose job was ``to help wean the organization from its outright opposition to immigration.'' (The New Republic, June 19, 2000.) Donnelly is the former staffer with the Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform described in Section 2.3.4.
Around the same time, IEEE-USA greatly toned down its Web site. It removed its ``Misfortune 500'' file, a compendium of 500 engineers, mainly older, who were having trouble finding engineering work in spite of the alleged high-tech boom. It also removed from the site its report on a 1998 Harris Poll which had shown that 82% of Americans opposed the H-1B increase.
Donnelly convinced IEEE-USA to support his proposal - similar to one formulated by Congressional Commission on Immigration Reform as mentioned above - under which industry could bring in foreign engineers and programmers on an expedited basis, giving them ``instant green cards'' and bypassing the H-1B stage. This new stance on IEEE-USA's part was counter to its previous view that industry should hire/retrain American programmers and engineers, but apparently the organization felt that its new position would relieve the pressure brought to bear on it by the parent organization.
However, Donnelly was up against his rival, Rick Swartz (again, see Section 2.3.4), and up against Swartz's allies representing the computer industry, who apparently wanted to retain the ``indentured servant'' nature of the H-1B workers. Those lobbyists dismissed Donnelly as ``anti-immigrant,'' in spite of his work as a consultant to immigrants and as a longtime advocate for relieving the greencard backlog for the spouses and children of immigrants. (Wired News, May 15, 2000.)
Meanwhile, Swartz had acquired a new client, the Immigrant Support Network, an organization of H-1Bs who were hoping to get Congress to alleviate the ``indentured servitude'' problem. (See Section 2.4.)
Donnelly still tried to get Microsoft to support the ``instant greencard'' proposal. However, Microsoft's counsel and lobbyist, Ira Rubinstein, simply stalled, saying that he may support the proposal in the future but now wished to concentrate on H-1Bs. Later Rubinstein tried other stall tactics as well. (Personal communication with Paul Donnelly, June 17, 2000.)
Personally I do not support the Donnelly proposal, because although it would fix the problem of H-1B ``indentured servitude,'' a worthy goal, it would not address the problems of age discrimination and so on which are being fueled by the influx of foreign programmers. Nevertheless, the industry's continuing rejection of the Donnelly proposal, which would bring in the workers they say are needed and would reduce paperwork and trouble for the employers, shows that they do indeed wish to retain the indentured-servant nature of the H-1B program. And the personal attacks on Donnelly are uncalled for.
I have been a systems administrator for over six years. I also know a lot of DBAs and network (Cisco etc.) admins.
Let me tell you something about administration and the aforementioned burnout. Administrators carry a beeper. When things go down, you get paged. You get paged on the beach, you get paged in restaurants, you get paged when you're asleep, you get paged on the weekend, you get paged while you're fucking your girlfriend, you get paged when you just sat down with your burritos and gorditas at Taco Bell. Being paged all the time sucks. I'm sure once in a blue moon programmers are beeped at 3 in the morning by someone who tells him that the program he wrote has a memory leak and it crashed. But they don't get paged nearly as much as administrators. An environment which does not crash often has more to do with luck than good administration, from companies where I was the only tech, to Fortune 100 companies I have worked at, the reasons for me being paged were often my control. Hell, I'd have every damned machine with one RAID 5 array for use, and three spares in case there was a problem, unfortunately, resiliency and redundancy is usually a low budget priority - why pay, when they can just beep you at 3 AM and fix it.
Before considering a career in administration - remember the beeper.
Yes, and dentist's have the ADA, accountants have the AICPA, and lawyer's have the ABA. What professional association of the magnitude of the ABA or AMA represents modern IT engineers? The answer is, there is no professional association with any weight behind it that represents engineers.
We do have a well-financed association or lobbying group financed by the employers of the IT profession (Microsoft, IBM etc.) called the ITAA, which has been making war on our profession for years. Their sole purpose is to flood the IT labor market in order to drive up IT unemployment and drive down wages. They also despise worker independence which is why they love H1-B restrictions (forcing H1-Bs to stick with rotten companies during green card applications) and support section 1706 in the tax code (which forces independent consultants into body shops).
The first high-rated post said "we can all become managers!" Um, no, we can not all become managers, most of the IT departments I've worked at have had anywhere from 10-30 people under a manager, so when one of them goes on to be a manager, what becomes of everyone else. Also, good programmers don't necessarily mean good managers, and mediocre programmers can be good managers. I could go on, but the article is true that 24/7 oncall for years on end, constantly working weekends and 60 hour weeks can lead to burnout, and that many companies don't like hiring people over a certain age.
From a personal standpoint, I believe the failure of engineers to form an association that can counter the ITAA's war on our profession in Washington, as well as the failure to form consulting companies which are geared more towards worker-ownership and worker-control (although there are some, like RMPCP) is due to the fact that many of the people in this profession are the stereotypical socially retarted dorks, who are unable to socialize normally with other human beings, and who place their entire self-worth in the idea that they are the smartest programming super-genius whose skills are better than everyone else, who works harder than anyone else and so forth, so why would he have to have an association like the ABA or AMA with other engineers like every other god-damn profession does? Believe me, doctors are not stupid, cutting someone open and operating on their beating heart is a lot more complicated than opening up a computer and adding more RAM to it. They're not stupid, many of them are very smart actually, and we should follow their example and form a professional association.
For my preference, I like the Programmer's Guild, if you don't like them you can form your own or join a different one, although I'd hope if there were several associations they'd work together in fighting the ITAA's attempts to steal our intellectual property and drive us out of work in Washington. There are engineers working on this and have been for years, but our numbers are small and we need more engineers to just cursorily educate themselves about these things, and then spread the word and educate others about these things, just a few more people on board and it will reach critical mass and we can get the word out more. To me, it's not just about fighting for my profession, it's a principle thing, I'm sick of being kicked around by Microsoft (and IBM, Oracle etc.) via their ITAA yap dog, and I'm glad that I'm actually doing something about it.
My web page that deals with all of this is the Oncall Guild web page. We're not a group that seeks paying membership, anyone can be a member, just educate yourself about this, spread the word and join organizations like the Programmer's Guild or similar good organizations to do something about it. Some of the older engineering organizations are discussed on the web page, both the problems (corporate-financed to the point that they have killed campaigns that oppose the ITAA with threats, too academically focused, created decades ago and not focused on the modern IT profession and so forth) and good things (surveys about salary and other matters, allowing engineers to network with each other).
I was curious about this so I decided to call Best Buy.
First I called 1-888-BESTBUY and connected to customer relations. I told her I have a news mailing list and was interested in a comment with regards to this. I asked her about the incident and she said she didn't know anything. She suggested I call the store or corporate headquarters's PR department.
I called corporate headquarters, 952-947-2000. They closed at 5PM CDT.
I called the store at 770-939-7660 and connected to customer service. I mentioned my mailing list and the arrest and she asked if I wanted background information and I said yes. She came back in a minute and told me that she couldn't comment and that I'd have to call corporate PR.
With the store directing people to corporate PR, and customer relations not knowing anything, I guess people interested in writing news items about this will have to wait until tomorrow morning to get a response from Best Buy's corporate PR department.
Have they already decided not to press forward with fraud/trespass charges? I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
The ITAA, the anti-engineer lobbying group which is bankrolled by Microsoft, IBM and others, did away a few years ago with FLSA laws for "computer operators" which require overtime pay.
From government statistics, we know that Americans have surpassed even the Japanese in the hours worked per week and per year - Americans work more hours than people in any country in the world. This is very good for those who own the companies - the 1% of the US population that owns 42.2% of the stock. How about everyone else though?
Well, as the average working week gets longer and longer over the past thirty years, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has dropped. Anyone who has a pulse can see what's been happening in the IT field lately - layoffs (with those over-burdened people still around picking up the "slack"), frozen wages, falling wages, ever expanding workloads requiring ever more hours worked.
If you work for yourself, and thus all work you do will profit you, then yes, hard work *does* pay off. If you're a wage slave working for someone else, all the unpaid overtime you work, all the hours on call you work are just making your boss look good, and the people who really own your company more wealthy. By really own I mean the people who really own your company, not the 1000 shares of underwater options you get that vest over 4-5 years and which are 0.000001% of the total shares, minus the strike price.
Sorry, I hear enough of this stick-and-carrot stuff at work, I hear people say it here and I have to say, BS! I wish I had listened to the guys at the Programmer's Guild during the bubble when they were pointing out how rising H1-B caps and the destruction of FLSA laws. If one looks at the industry polls which show engineers getting farther and farther away from the 40 hour workweek, it becomes apparent how many suckers there are in this industry. When somebody *aside from yourself* is getting your labor time for free, than you are the sucker.
I didn't mention the word union anywhere, I said a professional organization like doctors and lawyers have in the AMA and ABA. How come every time I tell an engineer we need to educate ourselves and organize into a professional association, they start telling me how much they hate unions? Engineers by-and-large don't want a union. Professional associations like the ABA and AMA don't bargain collectively like unions do, they just look out for the profession's interests. If associations are such a bad idea, why are all the IT employers associated within the very well-funded ITAA, which regularly pushed anti-engineer legislation through Washington? The employers know something engineers don't. Engineers need to organize less for "aggressive" reasons, and more for defensive reasons - to defend themselves against all the crap the ITAA gets away with. Unlike John Miano of the Programmer's Guild, I didn't have my epiphany of the murder the ITAA gets away with against engineers until the current slump, he had the foresight to start working against it during the "bubble".
For instance, there's a bill in Congress, HR 3222, which links the number of new H1-B visas granted to the unemployment rate. What professional organizations are pushing to get this bill a hearing? It's pathetic that IT worker's are less organized than doctor's, lawyers or even steel workers (who just got a nice present from Bush in terms of tarriffs). Until engineers start educating themselves, and then their fellow engineers, and joining or forming organizations like Washtech, CESO, AEA and the Programmer's Guild, this post-boom slump will last a long, long time. Same old 60 hour weeks and 24/7 oncall, but for less and less pay.
I have seen this happen to people I know. The standard contract has these provisions. When people ask about them the company says they're just protecting themselves and not to worry about it. Yet they are given the legal authority to hold it against you and sometimes do.
For almost every problem I've seen engineers face, someone says, "Well you should have negotiated that with your contract". Well, I know a lot of engineers and the number I know who work full-time and have intellectual property or overtime issues negotiated in their initial employment agreement I can count on my hand. The reality is, if they're handing you something to sign from their lawyer's boilerplate, instead of vice versa, they have the upper hand.
Most professions have professional organizations that look out for their interests, lawyers have the ABA, doctor's have the AMA. Who looks out for IT workers? There are some ancient associations which are more-or-less owned by the industry employers (IEEE, ACM). The professional associations that truly look out for the modern IT workforce - the Programmer's Guild, Washtech and whatnot, are new, small organizations. They do not have the history and well-funded organization of the ITAA, the IT employers association. The ITAA has not only rammed through H1-B legislation but legislation which overturned FLSA so that computer workers don't have to be paid overtime. Section 1706 was lobbied into the IRS tax code to drive independent consultants into body shops. Because the professional organizations are still small, most engineers don't even know this, and know the ITAA is attacking their livelihood down in Washington.
What do most engineers say? Well, they always think they're the smart, hard-working ones who are unaffected by the laws of supply and demand. In some ways, they are a bit of the engineer stereotype, putting their personal self-worth into how "skilled" they are, and think being skilled is a panacea for everything. Luckily for them, this requires no backbone as the boss has no problems with engineers spending what spare time they have improving their skills. Unfortunately, laziness is endemic in the profession and a few engineers will have to deal with these issues, defending against the ITAA's attacks on the profession while a lot of other people lazily sit around and criticize them. Hopefully there will be enough counter-force, I'm not too optimistic however. I think in 15-20 years there will be a lot of carpal-tunnel afflicted (another bill the ITAA killed) guys who have spent the last 20 years working 60 hour weeks, oncall 24/7, and who are burned out, having problems with their families who they don't spend time with and are over-the-hill and less and less employable. I see this because this is what I see now with a large percentage of 40+ programmers today. Luckily everyone I meet thinks they're a unique super-genius who is too smart for all of this, lucky them. We're so smart we don't have to organize like doctors and lawyers do, so we don't even need an organization warning us about the ITAA like the Programmer's Guild and CESO and Washtech do. I'm afraid as time goes by, I am becoming more concerned about the thick headedness of American programmers and that the ITAA will succeed in making everyone a low scale wage slave, I thought this recession and widespread wage freezing, cutting, long hours of unpaid overtime, 24/7 oncall, unemployment and so forth would do it. I'm actually planning a professional exit strategy while I'm still in my 20's as being an American programmer 15-20 years from now looks like a bad deal, I'll be fighting the good fight 2-3 more years however hoping things will start looking like they might turn around until then though.
Anyhow, here is my web page on this:
http://www.geocities.com/oncallguild
Corporations are secretive by nature and for the most part unaccountable for their actions. So yes, before they chose to announce this, this all was a secret, and we didn't even have an idea that they would claim it happened because of unpaid bills.
Organizations who take drastic actions that affect a wide number of people (hundreds of thousands in this case), and do so in secret without any accountability are prone to spread ideas of some type of conspiracy. When an organization operates in secret, the only way people can guess what is happening with it are through postulation. Thus, these conspiratorial ideas are due more to Kazaa's previous silence than due to people guessing at what had happened.
It should be noted that in it's evolution since the Nullsoft Gnutella 0.56 server/client, modern Gnutella servents have reduced traffic and improved network scalability by means of
- routing pushes instead of broadcasting them
- caching pings/pongs, and even queryhits
- use of UltraPeer/leaf relationship, which increases the speed at which traffic is routed
There are other ideas that Gnutella developers like those at Limewire have been kicking around, which are similar to ideas that publishing networks like Freenet and MojoNation have, such as data specialization (ie. queries are directed to those likely to have the data, not broadcast to the entire world).
I'm glad whenever mathematicians or people with specialities like traffic analysis examine existing p2p systems, or give their ideas on p2p systems - they might come up with some good ideas or give a good critique that clarifies elements of a p2p network. This paper is certainly less arrogant than ones with names like "Why Gnutella Can't Scale. No Really". A hypernet is an interesting idea, although I can think of a number of reasons why current p2p sharing networks would not implement them. Namely, because authoritarian networks like Napster were shut down by trade associations like the MPAA/RIAA, while more anarchic networks like Gnutella are more immune from such actions - we must consider not only the survival of the scaling network due to technical constraints like Dr. Gunther does, but also it's survival due to legal constraints orchestrated by large corporations. Then there's the question of how many peers the network is designed for - scalability is just one factor in the reasons why I would use a particular p2p client. Luckily, we will have competition between p2p networks like FastTrack, Gnutella, Freenet and MNet (Mojonation), and perhaps different ones will be used for different purposes, just like Usenet, distributed.net and so forth.
It perplexes me why there is always the assumption that the files being shared are propietary. As if everything being shared over Napster, Morpheus and Gnutella is propietary, and thus p2p only exists for a black market.
"Well, a lot of copyright violations go on". Well guess what the top 3 words on search engines like Google are - sex, mp3 and warez. Sounds like plenty of "copyright violations" are going on over the web, should the web be shut down as well? There is too much tacit acceptance that p2p is somehow criminal. The first major p2p application I can recall, the distributed.net rc5 cracker, had a flap over whether it was exporting encryption or not. It seems you can barely stand up and take a leak without some corporation or army telling you what you're doing is illegal. I've used Morpheus and Gnutella to download many speeches. I've used MojoNation to download (and publish) Gutenberg texts. Freenet (and Frost) allows web page publication and chatting over it's p2p network.
I spend a lot of time developing p2p apps. I am not doing so so that 2 kids can trade the latest Britney Spears mp3. I see networks in two forms - authoritarian and democratic. In an authoritarian network, you pay a web hosting outfit money to host your stuff, and the more popular it is, the more you pay. If this is the situation, you have no choice but to commercialize whatever you created in order to distribute it. In a democratic network, there is no authoritarian middleman between you and others. Most of the network is authoritarian, and large, powerful corporations are trying to shut down networks where people deal with each other directly. Note - they are trying to shut down the networks, not go after people who deal with each other directly. I guess American corporations have sold this mentality to it's citizens through good PR, but now they are using their muscle to shut down P2P networks based in other countries like FastTrack. It's quite a shame, if they win it will just be back to where only those with money can publish, and any small person who wants to publish will have to go through an authority and be charged a lot of money. People who want to deal with each other directly are accused and tainted with criminality. This is an old story, far older than the rise of p2p networks.
If you want to improve your viability, what's the one thing you can advocate, yet still be a sycophant to your boss? The answer is skills. In fact, most bosses would be delighted if all their workers spent their free time polishing up their knowledge of C++ or Solaris memory or whatever.
That's the only thing I hear here. "Oh, well this will only effect lower skilled people". I'm 28, but I have been programming (originally in BASIC and machine language) since the early 1980's. I have enough knowledge to work as a DBA, network admin, system administrator or programmer. Of course, I only specialize in one so that I do it on a "senior" level. Nonetheless, the idea that your skill level is a panacea to everything is a lot of ca-ca. It goes against economics 101. If it didn't, why has the ITAA (and NTSA) made a war against engineers for the last few years for their paymasters? Bringing in 900,000 H1-Bs, doing away with FLSA for computer professionals, sticking section 1706 in IRS tax code to screw over independent consultants and so forth?
What's the result - people working 60 hour weeks, with a beeper oncall 24/7 for not that high of a salary and thinking that's normal. I guess if the geek stereotype I brough up is true, and you have no social life, you won't mind being a sycophant for your boss because you have nothing better to do. You sure will never be able to have a normal social life under such conditions. Pay freezes, pay cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs. Even if the less experienced people are being laid off, that's still a workload that you're going to have to pick up.
I can not fathom why people who consider themselves professionals do not have organizations to represent them like lawyers do (ABA) or actor's do (SAG, a union actually) or doctor's do (AMA). The ITAA is in Washington, DC changing the law so that IT workers get paid less, get their overtime increased where it doesn't get paid for (with FLSA) and have a higher unemployment rate. And because of the NTSA IRS tax code change, are financially forced to work for body shops instead of independently. The only reason I can come up with is that the slam that a large percent of engineers are socially retarted and wrap all their self-value in the idea that they are the greatest programmer is true.
Anyhow, the Programmer's Guild, Washtech and CESO are three organizations interesting to look at. IEEE-USA tried to lower the H1-B cap but their corporate funders squashed that. I hope my fellow engineers will look at my web page - http://www.geocities.com/oncallguild and begin educating themselves, and then joining engineer organizations which are fighting the ITAA's attacks on engineers livelihoods, which unfortunately, too few engineers know about, mostly because there are few engineering organizations, and the few that exist are mostly financed by the corporations how employ them, and thus like the IEEE flap over H1-Bs, ultimately answer to them