My experience exactly. In fact, I think my download speed has decreased steadily since 1998 (when I was on a T1 at work) and 2001 (when I was in a more rural cable network). Today I often get nearly 30 second delays in downloading web pages on TimeWarner's network. I'm paying a recurring, high price for a gradually worsening product. The upload and download advertised times are not even close to reality for both TimeWarner (cable) and BellSouth (DSL) to my townhouse.
Then you actually get to the cable network and it drops to superslow. Seriously, the whole hype thing is overdone. Anyone who's tried to use cable 7x24 knows it drops toward 30 second latency on web pages on a regular basis. The cable networks are probably overloaded/under designed. What good is superfast when the actual throughput is supersucky!!!
That's the dorkiest comment I've ever read on slashdot. Linux is in almost every single way superior to Windows. I turned off my last Windows box almost a year ago and never missed it a bit. There are things you can do with GNU/Linux that you cannot dream of with Windows. Add to that the time savings in messing with installs on Windows whereas the Linux stuff is point, click, run. DELL has the writing ont he wall and just is trying to milk its wholeseller discount while still not missing the market on the future. Windows is like driving a mini to the hardware store. It'll get you there but you're going to need to rent a truck to bring anything home!
Yep, Austin is a good place. I'm working for TEKSystems (part of TAC). Very good group although I'm not sure of their presence in AUS. Looks like the market is tightening up in the Java space. With the vaporization of the young programmer over the last 5 years and the mad dash to M$FT.net koolaid, the real work is left without anyone knowing how to do Java, C++ and other backbone technologies. Stuffed resumes seem to get the jobs. I guess it is different there as this area is multi-industry. Lots of biotech, financial, and other industries built IT shops here so there is alot of big business software. Since the Fortune 500 are raking in the money with a bulldozer, of course there are jobs. About 40% of the jobs are tech and about 40% are IT for big business. Another 20% are coding automated trades, builder upsell websites/software, and other small startups.
Here in Cary, NC (edge of Research Triangle Park). It's the #2 place in tech after Silicon Valley but much better standard of living. No comparison. I'm doing Java/J2EE stuff. If you know Java then I'd be happy to pass along your resume. Send me an email and I can give you more information. timjow at unitedswe.com I can also pass it along for.net as the contract company I'm working through is looking for those too.
Here are tons of good jobs. Takes about 1.5 months to land one but the pay rates are not bad. Morrisville and other nearby cities have lower priced housing than Cary. Cary is made up of relocaters from CA, NY, Connecticut, and other places. Raleigh is a more relaxed professional city. Chapel Hill is more eclectic. And Durham is more blue collar in general. Traffic is very less. Several very good colleges in the cities too. Chapel Hill even has two public Chinese emersion schools. Public schools! Overall, very happy with it here.
Very interesting observation. I have met some Americans who are not creative as well. Has to do with their parents being over-protective. I think in China the government controls your life so you do not learn to try, fail, and try again. I think but have never been there. My experience with offshoring is its like the game of gossip (telephone). The more layers the less people really care about the goal. It's like that when you run a company too. The guy on the bottom isn't paid enough to care and is just as likely to jump ship anytime.
I've never seen offshoring be any better than onshoring but I'd also say I've never seen consulting companies do better than qualified employees. Like you say, its politics and not business. The way to make money is consulting is to nickel and dime the fixes. I've bid state contracts where the competitors bid below cost. They know once they deliver crap then the state will have to pay them to fix it. Offshoring, like consulting, is a game of managers having no clue what they are doing. Similarly I take my car to the auto shop because I have no clue how to fix it myself.
But its no different with any contracts. Frantz Automotive here in Cary has been paid twice to fix my heater and it still does not work. He knows there is no real retribution for a job failure and my voice is too quiet to affect his business. That sort of failure is normal. The oil change place was putting the wrong oil in my Honda even though the oil cap boldly shows 5W-20! Fortunately I was standing there.
Offshoring is the same problem. It's not based on culture or country but simply a fact of how people interact. Only owners, religious zealots or brainwashed soldiers will be truly committed to their cause. I estimate you can cut commitment and productivity in half with every level of outsourcing. My experience with Wipro and HCL is their offshore teams are 1/4 or less productive: it takes 4 people in India to do the work of an average level programmer in the USA. Nothing to do with India but all to do with the mechanics and psychology of too many layers. In the end, I often choose to change my oil and brake pads (back when you had to) myself because the risk of fraud and failure is too high and the cost of doing it myself (an hour) is not much more than the cost of paying them (30 minutes+money).
So, the smart managers are going to hire onsite company workers. The job sites say 75% of jobs are never advertised. I think that's because you'd hire your buddy if you had a good company. I know I'm trying to talk to my Java/J2EE buddies about coming here. Good pay. Great work conditions. And opportunity for growth. (Not too challenging but we can do that on our side projects).
You should have outright rejected everyone. Then they would send you the Americans. I had this problem with Saphire consulting. They put in their cheapos and once those are rejected then would submit me. Egg on their face because by the time I got to the interview I had a job through TEKSystems. I'll never work with Saphire again I don't think and very, very highly recommend TEKSystems.
BTW, you could also send a job req to the local universities. Might find several Ph.D. candidates who had to go that route because of no jobs. I thought it was funny when one of my buddies in the Ph.D. program moves over to Chemistry. Now I see how wise he was.
Dude you are so right! Did you look at the federal income by tax perhaps? I analyzed it a few years back. The lower 50% basically pay zilch (I think it is 5% or so of total). I know. I'm getting a FULL REFUND this year as I made so little. Probably close to that next year too as my wife is pregnant and health insurance is a mess. Thankfully I finally got another contract. The old company wouldn't hire me as I asked for more than their H1's and L1's. One L1 has been there for years and manages nobody! HCL.
Government income from taxing Companies has dropped from about 50% of total income to about 5%. Basically the government has decided not to tax the company owners. Well, that figures since those are who run the government!
The situation is exactly as the founding fathers predicted. The rich folks took over the government and give handouts to the poor to keep themselves in power. Hard to see how to beat that system other than somehow becoming rich.
Man, I'm right there with you. We need to bind together rather than let the aristocracy continue to be reinstated. The aristocrats are trying to return the world to the pre-industrialization class system (successfully trying that is).
One thing we really need to do is force the INS to list all L1 and H1 jobs in a clear, public job site. The L1 scams have to be stopped. I expect from your email there are quite a few H1's making more money than you.
Second of all, the market is tightening. I think the businesses will get their come-uppitance. I think it will be the absolute worst conditions for them. Why? #1. They have flipped off techies for 1/2 a decade #2. The USA government has flipped off techies for 1/2 a decade #3. Old timers have quit and have no interest in returning after working with wholly unqualified people. #4. Few smart kids have studied tech over the last few years. The kids who have received tech degrees are now flipping burgers. #5. The veil is off on the Indian false resumes. #6. Businesses have not tried hard enough to develop tech feeder programs in Africa and South America. #7. Technology has become integral to our society. #7A. All things require computers now. #7B. The old people who knew how to do things without computers are dieing. Young people require computers to live. (E.g. they cannot barter as they do not know how. They cannot farm as they do not know how. They often cannot even do math in their heads.)
So, I'm optimistic. Am I sucking on the exhaust pipe of the tech bubble? Yes, of course. But I foresee brighter times. We need Java/J2EE folks here and all we are getting are not qualified. At this point I plan to mention to my manager that I can train some college grads. Give me an MS CS any day. At least I can say anyone who graduated MSCE from my university (University of South Carolina class of '94) can code circles around 90% of the people I have to work in on various jobs. And that's not even getting into the total BS factor of doing the wrong thing because these people have no engineering analysis skills. Don't get me started on "portlets" for operational systems! SWArchitect I got the hell out of CA. No standard of living there. Picked Cary, NC from the list of top cities and am very happy about our move. Turned down Boston and Ft. Lauderdal as those are more LA's and Mobile as its more for retirement.
There's a whole lot more to SC history than that but, yet, the loss of textiles to even cheaper labor areas was a deadly blow. Takes money to make money ya know. Or as my Dad told me: you gotta have a car to get to work.
Hey Shotgun, Yes. Please send me a resume: resume869 at unitedswe.com The positions are JSP/EJB/DAO, WebServices, Struts/DAO and other such Java jobs. You should be able to discern between an abstract class and an interface, to yap about JDBC, and, ideally, have done J2EE before. In Cary, NC, Thanks!
OK, I'll call your bluff if you want to get to brass tacs. How much are you paid? I can show you a.netter with 12-14 years of experience who makes $50K. And that's not even getting into the state workers or the unemployed. BTW, I said HOUSEHOLD INCOME, not Salary. There's a big difference.
My only point is there are 100,000's or even millions of qualified tech workers who are available at competitive rates in the USA. Competitive rates being rates far below what you or I make (I no longer live in SC and did my time on the left coast too).
Keep looking for a job. Never quit looking until you like the work and the pay. There are good jobs out there and sounds like you have enough experience to get another one.
You are competing with resume stuffers. One H1 I worked with showed me his wife's resume. Amazingly she had exactly the same work experience as him. I don't think he ever could answer one technical question raised in the group. Fortunately for him the company was a corporate boondoggle and you could get a job as long as you could fog the mirror and stuff your resume. My honest recommendation to you: call up INS and tell them you are ready to apply for those H1 jobs. Demand a list of the jobs they have advertised for H1s. (I tried this before with the state employment security commission and, in fact, they were also interested in seeing this list as they did not have acces to it). The way it works is they have to deny any American first. What he lawyers tell you is they have some obscure magazines where you can run the ad. I've been in companies in Silicon Valley where I've seen H1 postings which they could easily fill with any MS CS (bang out some Java Swing code). So, if you really cannot find a job then you can surely find a lawsuit there and this country is built on lawsuits. But you can probably find one nowadays. Just be sure your resume has some projects (even if school projects) and lots of keywords. Headhunters don't know whether C# runs in a JVM or autoboxing is an assembler instruction. You gotta have keywords. State jobs are the absolute worst about hiring based on keyword matches. I actually had one Indian headhunter ask me to fake my experience! I never called him back of course!
We are looking for Java/J2EE programmers here in Research Triangle Park (Raleigh, NC area). In fact, in Cary, NC which is one of the top cities in the USA every year. Send me a resume and I'll pass it along if you can code. (rtpjava at unitedswe dot com). Pay is good - what I'd call 1998 rates but better than anything in the last 6 years.
You're 100% right. I left a few years back as did most everyone else. But my point is the "American worker shortage" is just plain bullshit. You have to consider people from very poor backgrounds: the ability/courage/expectation to get a bus ticket and wing it to another state just isn't there. I think you have to get into the lower middle class before you can start to conceive of these sort of actions. From what I've seen. There are things lower class people think about and know how to do and there are things middle class people think about and know how to do. Then there are things rich people know about and know how to do. I never knew how to run a business because I had no personal references. But I also do not know how to go about getting medicare.
You are right. These people SHOULD leave. I think they are tricked/misinformed to thinking an IS degree will lead to a job. OTOH, companies could locate to SC or other poorer states as the pay is not much more (if at all once factors are considered) than India.
I agree with you 100%. I even considered becoming an electrician but am senior enough to make about as much programming and don't want to be a journeyman for a few years. I always tell youngsters not to go into tech for the money. I tell them to be lawyers. That's who runs this country. (And I hate having to tell them that too!)
Don't sweat it. The industry always needs at least a few people who actually know what they are doing. Much less, the economy goes in cycles so in your career you might have a time where you make even more money than people in the mid-to-late-1990s. With the way companies have killed the job market for new graduates it is very probable they'll have a tech crunch fairly soon. We are back to 1995'ish pay levels already. best wishes, TimJowers
Duh, some comment about the AJAX craze is definitely in order here.:-) Of course, many programmers wouldn't trade a rats whiskers for seeing what the customers are really doing with the software. The Internet age makes the client-server era folks look like uber-geniuses WRT operational software. I guess since many >40 and most >50 engineers threw in the towel then the industry is repeating itself. Now let's talk about XML EDI! Clearly learning from the past is not something any programmer wants to do. I think they want to fiddle with the latest framework from what I see.
Tell an American to do something stupid and many of them can find another job (making cabinets for instance). Tell another culture and they may say "yes" to everything. (You know who you are!). Simply economics. They need the job bad enough to sell their soul. Poor Americans would do that too but they can sell their soul elsewhere for more money. So, BS managers with no tech qualifications feel a ton better working with a "Yes" culture than with Americans who actually have studied the things they are pretending to know.
That's the truth. Real programmers don't stop programming. Period. Even when out of work they are programming some great idea or the other. That alone can separate the men from the seat warmers.
One problem I've seen is students have focused on Microsoft.net but in reality there are very few jobs there. Most large corporate systems rely on more standard technologies. Here in RTP we cannot find decent java/j2ee folks. Lots of posers who cannot answer basic CompSci questions... I hate to say it but I really question that some unscrupulous people from India may not even have the tech degrees they advertise. At a past company I asked the offshore team (HCL) to do a design document and even stubbed out the entire thing. They could not, within a month, produce anything worthy of even a D in a 102 CompSci class. I assume HCL actually has them staffed on 50 projects as the offshore team so they do little to nothing for each project. That allows HCL to have an L1 "manager" at each of the 50 projects who is really an individual contributor in fact. I saw Wipro doing this in the late 1990's too so it must be a common technique among the Indian contractors. Americans cannot compete because they send in resumes with real experience rather than hypothetical experience. Give me an MS from an American University any time over some poser claiming expertise in the latest fad technology.
When someone asks me who I want to win some sporting event I reply that I care almost as much about their sport as their leading player cares about technology. When was the last time some sporting idol was known to be a fan of a new computer, cell phone, or software?
Slashdot Mirror
My experience exactly. In fact, I think my download speed has decreased steadily since 1998 (when I was on a T1 at work) and 2001 (when I was in a more rural cable network). Today I often get nearly 30 second delays in downloading web pages on TimeWarner's network. I'm paying a recurring, high price for a gradually worsening product. The upload and download advertised times are not even close to reality for both TimeWarner (cable) and BellSouth (DSL) to my townhouse.
TimJowers
Then you actually get to the cable network and it drops to superslow. Seriously, the whole hype thing is overdone. Anyone who's tried to use cable 7x24 knows it drops toward 30 second latency on web pages on a regular basis. The cable networks are probably overloaded/under designed. What good is superfast when the actual throughput is supersucky!!!
Windows Scripting Host (WSH) was released in like what? 1997? How is PowerShell any different than what you could do with WSH?
That's the dorkiest comment I've ever read on slashdot. Linux is in almost every single way superior to Windows. I turned off my last Windows box almost a year ago and never missed it a bit. There are things you can do with GNU/Linux that you cannot dream of with Windows. Add to that the time savings in messing with installs on Windows whereas the Linux stuff is point, click, run. DELL has the writing ont he wall and just is trying to milk its wholeseller discount while still not missing the market on the future. Windows is like driving a mini to the hardware store. It'll get you there but you're going to need to rent a truck to bring anything home!
I've used the drivers on on the shelf webcams and they work great. Not sure why they have not been pulled into the kernel.org.
A truly impressive and gratious feat.
Thanks!
(I'll donate if ever I make any money with Linux. I have still to learn how to sell.)
Yep, Austin is a good place. I'm working for TEKSystems (part of TAC). Very good group although I'm not sure of their presence in AUS. Looks like the market is tightening up in the Java space. With the vaporization of the young programmer over the last 5 years and the mad dash to M$FT.net koolaid, the real work is left without anyone knowing how to do Java, C++ and other backbone technologies. Stuffed resumes seem to get the jobs. I guess it is different there as this area is multi-industry. Lots of biotech, financial, and other industries built IT shops here so there is alot of big business software. Since the Fortune 500 are raking in the money with a bulldozer, of course there are jobs. About 40% of the jobs are tech and about 40% are IT for big business. Another 20% are coding automated trades, builder upsell websites/software, and other small startups.
Here in Cary, NC (edge of Research Triangle Park). It's the #2 place in tech after Silicon Valley but much better standard of living. No comparison. I'm doing Java/J2EE stuff. If you know Java then I'd be happy to pass along your resume. Send me an email and I can give you more information. .net as the contract company I'm working through is looking for those too.
timjow at unitedswe.com I can also pass it along for
Here are tons of good jobs. Takes about 1.5 months to land one but the pay rates are not bad. Morrisville and other nearby cities have lower priced housing than Cary. Cary is made up of relocaters from CA, NY, Connecticut, and other places. Raleigh is a more relaxed professional city. Chapel Hill is more eclectic. And Durham is more blue collar in general. Traffic is very less. Several very good colleges in the cities too. Chapel Hill even has two public Chinese emersion schools. Public schools! Overall, very happy with it here.
Very interesting observation. I have met some Americans who are not creative as well. Has to do with their parents being over-protective. I think in China the government controls your life so you do not learn to try, fail, and try again. I think but have never been there. My experience with offshoring is its like the game of gossip (telephone). The more layers the less people really care about the goal. It's like that when you run a company too. The guy on the bottom isn't paid enough to care and is just as likely to jump ship anytime.
I've never seen offshoring be any better than onshoring but I'd also say I've never seen consulting companies do better than qualified employees. Like you say, its politics and not business. The way to make money is consulting is to nickel and dime the fixes. I've bid state contracts where the competitors bid below cost. They know once they deliver crap then the state will have to pay them to fix it. Offshoring, like consulting, is a game of managers having no clue what they are doing. Similarly I take my car to the auto shop because I have no clue how to fix it myself.
But its no different with any contracts. Frantz Automotive here in Cary has been paid twice to fix my heater and it still does not work. He knows there is no real retribution for a job failure and my voice is too quiet to affect his business. That sort of failure is normal. The oil change place was putting the wrong oil in my Honda even though the oil cap boldly shows 5W-20! Fortunately I was standing there.
Offshoring is the same problem. It's not based on culture or country but simply a fact of how people interact. Only owners, religious zealots or brainwashed soldiers will be truly committed to their cause. I estimate you can cut commitment and productivity in half with every level of outsourcing. My experience with Wipro and HCL is their offshore teams are 1/4 or less productive: it takes 4 people in India to do the work of an average level programmer in the USA. Nothing to do with India but all to do with the mechanics and psychology of too many layers. In the end, I often choose to change my oil and brake pads (back when you had to) myself because the risk of fraud and failure is too high and the cost of doing it myself (an hour) is not much more than the cost of paying them (30 minutes+money).
So, the smart managers are going to hire onsite company workers. The job sites say 75% of jobs are never advertised. I think that's because you'd hire your buddy if you had a good company. I know I'm trying to talk to my Java/J2EE buddies about coming here. Good pay. Great work conditions. And opportunity for growth. (Not too challenging but we can do that on our side projects).
You should have outright rejected everyone. Then they would send you the Americans. I had this problem with Saphire consulting. They put in their cheapos and once those are rejected then would submit me. Egg on their face because by the time I got to the interview I had a job through TEKSystems. I'll never work with Saphire again I don't think and very, very highly recommend TEKSystems.
BTW, you could also send a job req to the local universities. Might find several Ph.D. candidates who had to go that route because of no jobs. I thought it was funny when one of my buddies in the Ph.D. program moves over to Chemistry. Now I see how wise he was.
Dude you are so right! Did you look at the federal income by tax perhaps? I analyzed it a few years back. The lower 50% basically pay zilch (I think it is 5% or so of total). I know. I'm getting a FULL REFUND this year as I made so little. Probably close to that next year too as my wife is pregnant and health insurance is a mess. Thankfully I finally got another contract. The old company wouldn't hire me as I asked for more than their H1's and L1's. One L1 has been there for years and manages nobody! HCL.
Government income from taxing Companies has dropped from about 50% of total income to about 5%. Basically the government has decided not to tax the company owners. Well, that figures since those are who run the government!
The situation is exactly as the founding fathers predicted. The rich folks took over the government and give handouts to the poor to keep themselves in power. Hard to see how to beat that system other than somehow becoming rich.
Man, I'm right there with you. We need to bind together rather than let the aristocracy continue to be reinstated. The aristocrats are trying to return the world to the pre-industrialization class system (successfully trying that is).
One thing we really need to do is force the INS to list all L1 and H1 jobs in a clear, public job site. The L1 scams have to be stopped. I expect from your email there are quite a few H1's making more money than you.
Second of all, the market is tightening. I think the businesses will get their come-uppitance. I think it will be the absolute worst conditions for them. Why?
#1. They have flipped off techies for 1/2 a decade
#2. The USA government has flipped off techies for 1/2 a decade
#3. Old timers have quit and have no interest in returning after working with wholly unqualified people.
#4. Few smart kids have studied tech over the last few years. The kids who have received tech degrees are now flipping burgers.
#5. The veil is off on the Indian false resumes.
#6. Businesses have not tried hard enough to develop tech feeder programs in Africa and South America.
#7. Technology has become integral to our society.
#7A. All things require computers now.
#7B. The old people who knew how to do things without computers are dieing. Young people require computers to live. (E.g. they cannot barter as they do not know how. They cannot farm as they do not know how. They often cannot even do math in their heads.)
So, I'm optimistic. Am I sucking on the exhaust pipe of the tech bubble? Yes, of course. But I foresee brighter times. We need Java/J2EE folks here and all we are getting are not qualified. At this point I plan to mention to my manager that I can train some college grads. Give me an MS CS any day. At least I can say anyone who graduated MSCE from my university (University of South Carolina class of '94) can code circles around 90% of the people I have to work in on various jobs. And that's not even getting into the total BS factor of doing the wrong thing because these people have no engineering analysis skills. Don't get me started on "portlets" for operational systems! SWArchitect I got the hell out of CA. No standard of living there. Picked Cary, NC from the list of top cities and am very happy about our move. Turned down Boston and Ft. Lauderdal as those are more LA's and Mobile as its more for retirement.
There's a whole lot more to SC history than that but, yet, the loss of textiles to even cheaper labor areas was a deadly blow. Takes money to make money ya know. Or as my Dad told me: you gotta have a car to get to work.
Hey Shotgun,
Yes. Please send me a resume: resume869 at unitedswe.com
The positions are JSP/EJB/DAO, WebServices, Struts/DAO and other such Java jobs.
You should be able to discern between an abstract class and an interface, to yap about JDBC, and, ideally, have done J2EE before.
In Cary, NC,
Thanks!
OK, I'll call your bluff if you want to get to brass tacs. How much are you paid? I can show you a .netter with 12-14 years of experience who makes $50K. And that's not even getting into the state workers or the unemployed. BTW, I said HOUSEHOLD INCOME, not Salary. There's a big difference.
My only point is there are 100,000's or even millions of qualified tech workers who are available at competitive rates in the USA. Competitive rates being rates far below what you or I make (I no longer live in SC and did my time on the left coast too).
Dude... can you code Java/J2EE? We are looking for good people here in RTP.
rtpslashdot at unitedswe.com
Keep looking for a job. Never quit looking until you like the work and the pay. There are good jobs out there and sounds like you have enough experience to get another one.
You are competing with resume stuffers. One H1 I worked with showed me his wife's resume. Amazingly she had exactly the same work experience as him. I don't think he ever could answer one technical question raised in the group. Fortunately for him the company was a corporate boondoggle and you could get a job as long as you could fog the mirror and stuff your resume. My honest recommendation to you: call up INS and tell them you are ready to apply for those H1 jobs. Demand a list of the jobs they have advertised for H1s. (I tried this before with the state employment security commission and, in fact, they were also interested in seeing this list as they did not have acces to it). The way it works is they have to deny any American first. What he lawyers tell you is they have some obscure magazines where you can run the ad. I've been in companies in Silicon Valley where I've seen H1 postings which they could easily fill with any MS CS (bang out some Java Swing code). So, if you really cannot find a job then you can surely find a lawsuit there and this country is built on lawsuits.
But you can probably find one nowadays. Just be sure your resume has some projects (even if school projects) and lots of keywords. Headhunters don't know whether C# runs in a JVM or autoboxing is an assembler instruction. You gotta have keywords. State jobs are the absolute worst about hiring based on keyword matches. I actually had one Indian headhunter ask me to fake my experience! I never called him back of course!
We are looking for Java/J2EE programmers here in Research Triangle Park (Raleigh, NC area). In fact, in Cary, NC which is one of the top cities in the USA every year. Send me a resume and I'll pass it along if you can code. (rtpjava at unitedswe dot com). Pay is good - what I'd call 1998 rates but better than anything in the last 6 years.
You're 100% right. I left a few years back as did most everyone else. But my point is the "American worker shortage" is just plain bullshit. You have to consider people from very poor backgrounds: the ability/courage/expectation to get a bus ticket and wing it to another state just isn't there. I think you have to get into the lower middle class before you can start to conceive of these sort of actions. From what I've seen. There are things lower class people think about and know how to do and there are things middle class people think about and know how to do. Then there are things rich people know about and know how to do. I never knew how to run a business because I had no personal references. But I also do not know how to go about getting medicare.
You are right. These people SHOULD leave. I think they are tricked/misinformed to thinking an IS degree will lead to a job. OTOH, companies could locate to SC or other poorer states as the pay is not much more (if at all once factors are considered) than India.
I agree with you 100%. I even considered becoming an electrician but am senior enough to make about as much programming and don't want to be a journeyman for a few years. I always tell youngsters not to go into tech for the money. I tell them to be lawyers. That's who runs this country. (And I hate having to tell them that too!)
Don't sweat it. The industry always needs at least a few people who actually know what they are doing. Much less, the economy goes in cycles so in your career you might have a time where you make even more money than people in the mid-to-late-1990s. With the way companies have killed the job market for new graduates it is very probable they'll have a tech crunch fairly soon. We are back to 1995'ish pay levels already.
best wishes,
TimJowers
Duh, some comment about the AJAX craze is definitely in order here. :-) Of course, many programmers wouldn't trade a rats whiskers for seeing what the customers are really doing with the software. The Internet age makes the client-server era folks look like uber-geniuses WRT operational software. I guess since many >40 and most >50 engineers threw in the towel then the industry is repeating itself. Now let's talk about XML EDI! Clearly learning from the past is not something any programmer wants to do. I think they want to fiddle with the latest framework from what I see.
Tell an American to do something stupid and many of them can find another job (making cabinets for instance). Tell another culture and they may say "yes" to everything. (You know who you are!). Simply economics. They need the job bad enough to sell their soul. Poor Americans would do that too but they can sell their soul elsewhere for more money. So, BS managers with no tech qualifications feel a ton better working with a "Yes" culture than with Americans who actually have studied the things they are pretending to know.
That's the truth. Real programmers don't stop programming. Period. Even when out of work they are programming some great idea or the other. That alone can separate the men from the seat warmers.
One problem I've seen is students have focused on Microsoft .net but in reality there are very few jobs there. Most large corporate systems rely on more standard technologies. Here in RTP we cannot find decent java/j2ee folks. Lots of posers who cannot answer basic CompSci questions... I hate to say it but I really question that some unscrupulous people from India may not even have the tech degrees they advertise. At a past company I asked the offshore team (HCL) to do a design document and even stubbed out the entire thing. They could not, within a month, produce anything worthy of even a D in a 102 CompSci class. I assume HCL actually has them staffed on 50 projects as the offshore team so they do little to nothing for each project. That allows HCL to have an L1 "manager" at each of the 50 projects who is really an individual contributor in fact. I saw Wipro doing this in the late 1990's too so it must be a common technique among the Indian contractors. Americans cannot compete because they send in resumes with real experience rather than hypothetical experience. Give me an MS from an American University any time over some poser claiming expertise in the latest fad technology.
When someone asks me who I want to win some sporting event I reply that I care almost as much about their sport as their leading player cares about technology. When was the last time some sporting idol was known to be a fan of a new computer, cell phone, or software?