IT's Last Hope — a Job In the Boonies? 470
GMGruman writes "Offshoring, cloud computing, automation, 'do more with less' — all of these have been chipping away at US IT workers' ability to have a job. But some companies now dangle a new possibility: Move to rural areas for lower-paying 'onshoring' jobs that can compete with lower overseas salaries. InfoWorld's Bob Violino talked to IT workers who've made the move and discovered that although it's no 'Green Acres meets Big Bang Theory' experience, a move from the big city to the hinterlands appeals mainly to just some IT worker segments, even as it provides new opportunities for others."
I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
Rather than take a crappy on-site job somewhere, I'd rather have an even crappier off-site one... and a lower cost of living. No commute whatsoever is a big feature.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:4, Insightful)
Arrrg... (Score:5, Insightful)
Offshoring, cloud computing, automation, 'do more with less' — all of these have been chipping away at US IT workers' ability to have a job.
The only thing here that is a problem is offshoring. Cloud computing, automation, and doing more with less is our job.
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:5, Insightful)
What companies want are cheap slaves. They want to use them like batteries and toss them aside when they get old or sick.
That's why they had laws passed which say labor laws don't apply to computer people (specifically in washington, california, and texas that I know of).
They want 12 hour days.
They don't want to pay benefits.
They want the work to be accurate.
The executives want no employees, yet still want a mass market they can sell to and get big salaries themselves.
That's ending as the mass market hollows out. Increasingly under 1% of the population takes most the money and doesn't share it. They are destroying their own market by not contributing any employee/customers to it.
Re:I give up (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually recommend this choice to people whom I have had to let go. It was pretty clear they didn't possess the wherewithal to continue growing and contributing in this industry.
One guy went out and started a consulting business. He advises people on drainage plans for their new homes. As a programmer, he stumbled through the code and introduced as many bugs as he fixed. I think we picked him up as a resource sometime in the late 90s when we were hiring like crazy. 10 years of experience, and the only real thing I think we figured out was that he was a pretty mediocre programmer. But now he is doing very well as a drainage consultant.
You shouldn't stay in a job you suck at. And your manager shouldn't keep you once you've shown no particular aptitude for the work. Go do something you're good at. You'll feel much better about yourself and you won't have the sword of Damocles always hanging above you.
Re:Then you're a prisoner (Score:5, Insightful)
What the hell do you think they were doing before the plant opened? And what do you think prevents them from quitting and moving to the city as rural people have been doing for 150 years? People in towns that these companies move into are free to keep on doing whatever they were doing before the plant opened, or take a job at the plant. That is choice.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you think that? A friend pointed out that, given the amount of sleeping around in our local scenes, any STD would be rampant. Of course, that's perhaps not the common case.
Never mind that every time I go to a small town, they're playing country and I HATE country.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you are misunderstanding the problem entirely. If EVERYONE were a great employee, the need for IT professionals would be even less (because you could do more with less IT professionals) and you'd have even more IT pros out of jobs.
So not everyone is perfect, we get that, that's life. All industries are like that. What seperates IT? It's not like everyone in the sales team has 300% ROI either, but you don't see sales positions being offshored to people in India. That's because your sales person NEEDS to be here. They need to be schmoozing with clients, they need to make the appearance.
Straight up: Not all companies want to pay 10 guys 130K+ a year. Some of them would rather pay 90 people 13K a year. Especially in the positions that simply require bodies: Answering phone calls, debugging, etc.
We went and made Transglobal communication such a simple process that we're now bypassable. Don't get me wrong, IT isn't the only industry that suffers from Offshoring, but it's just ironic that good IT is the reason why it suffers over here.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:2, Insightful)
You'll be sorry in 10 years, when your daughter is the one screwing all the guys because she's bored.
Not a new concept (Score:5, Insightful)
"Going rural" isn't really a new concept. For decades now anyone that's been willing to work in an area that few people are willing to work in can usually get the job pretty easily. My wife's medical class talked frequently about who was going to go work in the farming communities and make 'the big bucks' doing what no one else was willing to do. Sure you're fairly isolated from your typical peers, but those people are genuine and attempting to do real work to provide for their families. Supporting their medical, technological, mechanical, whatever, needs has to be more rewarding than supporting the bulk of urbanites who just want to get paid while they surf their favorite forum / news aggregate and wait to slowly die.
And in many fields you get paid more in remote areas as well, due to the lack of people willing to head out there.
Re:is it really cheaper to live in the boonies? (Score:1, Insightful)
A sky full of stars an grass under your feet makes it all worth it, whatever the cost.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
- Dan.
slashdot category for this kind of article (Score:2, Insightful)
Can we get a new category for articles like these; "labor" or "work" for example. This is classified business, money, and IT, which are fine, but it's about a fairly specific aspect that probably matters to a lot of readers, I'd like to be able to search on it.
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:2, Insightful)
What's surprising? My sales for the last 3 years running have exceeded my annual reach goals and has brought in over 102 million dollars over that period. If there is any reason my employer keeps me, it is because I produce.
When we had to cut costs, it wasn't a purely mathematical decision. We had some people with salaries that weren't in line with their production, but we also looked for personal factors such as eagerness to work, ability to mentor, and the ability to meet with customers without making us look like amateurs. Believe me, there are a lot of people employed as engineers who should *never* be allowed to meet customers. We don't want them here, so we sent them packing.
Your posts reeks of bitterness and a "blame someone else" attitude. You think you deserve a job, but you don't realize that you are the one who must prove your worth to a company.
my brain just exploded with the IRONY there and where this was posted
What better place to say it than to your face?
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
I live in the Piedmont Triad area of NC, (1.6 million people) [wikipedia.org]. I just moved south to a town of 20k people and commute to work instead, so I drive 1.5 to 2 hours per day total, vs. .75 to 1.0 hour before the move. The cost of homes is about 25% cheaper. Restaurants are 25-35% cheaper, plentiful and less crowded. Most everything is cheaper, enough so to offset the additional gas.
If I could find a job here that paid somewhat less but I could drive to work in 10-15 minutes, then yes I would consider it in a skippy minute. I wouldn't want to live in a town of 20k people out in the middle of nowhere, but I'm still less than 30 minutes from downtown Winston-Salem (230k) or High Point (105k), less than 45 minutes to most of Greensboro (260k), and 1 hour from the Charlotte area (1.8 million) so every possible convenience is less than an hour away.
There are significant advantages to moving to a smaller town if you can find decent work, even if it doesn't pay as much. Or commute if it is reasonable. The cost of living is often cheap enough to offset the difference in pay, particularly when you consider the upper end of your tax bracket means that losing $10k in pay doesn't mean losing $10k of bring home pay. Maybe a single 21 year old male wouldn't make the move, but those of us married and over 30 (I'm over 40) see some advantages. Many people also like the idea of raising kids in a more rural setting, and a slower pace of life once you get home. As long as you are relatively close to the other city benefits, it is not as steep of a price as you might think.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that the likelihood of his daughter becoming a sleaze is more related to how much time he spends helping her build confidence and esteem, than it is to how far they live from Chucky Cheese and a water park.
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:5, Insightful)
The executives want no employees, yet still want a mass market they can sell to and get big salaries themselves.
That's ending as the mass market hollows out. Increasingly under 1% of the population takes most the money and doesn't share it. They are destroying their own market by not contributing any employee/customers to it.
They believe that they can sell to developing countries and that will save their asses. Unfortunately for them, they are also under the impression that after off-shoring industrialized manufacturing and development, they will also be the ones making the stuff. Nope, technology will transfer and local firms will take over. Eventually, companies like Intel, GM, and any other big American corp that has moved pretty much overseas (except for mgt) will be made irrelevant. All those foreign scientists, engineers, accountants and other knowledge workers will wise up, start their own firms, and destroy the old stodgy firms.
What will I do? Buy the foreign cheaper products - I have no choice. My standard of living is worse than my Grandfather's. My Grandpa had an eighth grade education, 5 kids, a stay at home wife, middle class home, a car, and had no problem paying the bills. He retired with a great pension and never had to worry about eating, keeping the house, and he still gave out $10,000 a pop to his kids. My Dad supported 3 kids, a house, two cars on one salary. You can't do that anymore.
That American dream is dead, dead, dead.
We're spiraling down to the lowest common denominator: poverty stricken people who will work 14 hour days - 7 days a week and thank their personal god that they can do that because the alternative is far worse.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully you have the same water filtration scheme as the bottling companies.
Re:Can be nice (Score:5, Insightful)
On second thought, it's horrible here. You wouldn't like it. Trust me. Stay on the coasts.
Umm...yeah! What he said. It's AWFUL out here living on a little farm and getting to do whatever the hell you want. Why, you have to travel a couple hours to get to a modest-sized city. You city folk would hate it here. Stay where you are.
Re:Can be nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuse me while I wax my dog sled. -- Crazy Canuck
Re:Then you're a prisoner (Score:3, Insightful)
Manufacturing companies discovered that long ago. Build a big plant in Outer Nowhere (but near an Interstate), become the biggest employer in town, and hire a captive labor force. The employees have nowhere else to go, and you can pay minimum wage and really screw them over. Plus, many small towns will give companies huge tax breaks and otherwise suck up.
You make that sound like it's a bad thing. The alternative is to build a big plant in China (but near an airport/seaport), become an industrial employer, and hire a migrant labor force. You can pay $0.50/hour and really screw them over. Plus, many countries like China will give companies huge tax breaks and otherwise suck up.
So take your pick--jobs stay in the U.S., or jobs go overseas. All this talk about "living wage", "decent jobs", and so forth that has permeated our national discussion of economic growth is a bunch of idealistic rhetoric that has no basis in reality.
Companies will always pay the very least possible wages for maximum work. Employees will of course seek the highest wages and benefits for minimum effort. They meet somewhere in the middle.
The one factor that companies generally can't alter is taxation and regulation. They can sometimes get an abatement from a community hungry for jobs, but local and state governments are famous for reneging on such agreements a year or two later when a new party comes into power and it's too late for the company to uproot and move elsewhere.
Regarding the IT job sector, gradually we are moving toward a much more decentralized system where much of the non-hardware work can be done remotely. Whether it's done by someone working the night shift in Mumbai or a local person 5 miles away is largely a question of money these days.
Wages in IT are definitely depressed compared to 10-15 years ago. That's how it goes. Some other field will become lucrative even as IT becomes commoditized. I don't know what, maybe mobile apps consulting or multimedia installation.
For example, lots of schools are putting in these giant touchscreens, really cool educational devices which undoubtedly come with IT problems to solve. Also, schools are buying iPads. There's plenty of upside left for those who are creative and on the ball.
Good luck to everybody; it's definitely a tough market these days.
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're a salesperson. Fine. Why insist that engineers be salespeople as well? And if you're NOT a salesperson, and you're selling, who's doing the engineering?
There used to be this concept called 'division of labor'. Some people were good at engineering, not so good at talking to customers. You hired them to do engineering. Some people were better at talking to customers, you hired them to do sales or marketing or some other customer-facing task. Now the standard line is that to get hired as an engineer you have to be able to do everything. Well, gee, boss, if I could do it all, what do I need you for? I'll start my own damn business.
At the same time, no one is demanding the salespeople troubleshoot network issues or write code.
Welcome to the Free Market (Free as in Beer) (Score:4, Insightful)
For years the American public has been duped into believing that our manufacturing jobs would be shipped overseas, but we would all be retrained for high tech jobs. Poor overseas workers would become richer, we'd be better trained and better paid, and everything would be a free-market utopia.
Oops.
Turns out, you can virtualize all of those servers. Host them physically somewhere like Iceland, with cheap electricity and no cooling costs, and then have them managed by for 10 rupees an hour by a systems engineer in India.
I would suggest we all go back for more job training, but what's left? We could all become brain surgeons, but big business has half this country acting lobotomized already...
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:2, Insightful)
Is that the same aquifer your septic tank is over?
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
If you lived in the countryside anywhere near farms, you'd never make that statement. Fertilizers are not healthy for livers and it is remarkable how quickly they can poison a well. Water in aquifers moves quite slowly.
Internet and other high-tech services? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about hi-tech services like affordable, fast and stable Internet broadband services? Cellphone/Wireless, etc.?
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
"You'll be sorry in 10 years, when your daughter is the one screwing all the guys because she's bored."
Go to the safe celibate City, where her purity will be preserved, nay, NOURISHED, by the wholesome and caring young men who abide there.
Or to one where safe sex education consists of more than just a video of Brystol Palin screaming "DON'T DO IT!"
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
One, I don't have any daughters, and two, I'm not some fundie prude who would have a problem with it if I did. I expect teenagers to have sex. I did. Everyone I know did. You probably did too. It's natural, and there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, I'd prefer said fictional daughter be screwing every guy in town rather than do some of the other stupid shit kids in the boonies get up to (meth comes immediately to mind).
Big business is not axiomatically in the right. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, they can keep on farming their land (that the town council imminent domain'd from them and gave to the big company for free) or they can keep selling the products of their labor (that the plant now sells cheaper by virtue of using unsustainable resource extraction in other countries)!
Wait... what?
Could it be that real life is more complex than your libertarian wet dream?
Maybe... just maybe... ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL?
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
Any parent who relies on school provided "sex education" to teach their kids the facts of life deserves what they get. Here is the biggest thing people get wrong - you don't have "THE TALK" about the birds and the bees. You have a conversation. One that starts when they can speak, and lasts the rest of their lives. Never lie to your kids about this. Always tell them more than they can understand, and they will come back and ask questions when they are ready.
Re:Can be nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is a related book that talks about moving from city to country, including like (for some people) making money on selling a house in the city and then buying cheaper in the country: "Life After the City: A Harrowsmith Guide to Rural Living" by Charles Long. Although it also suggests it may often be a one way trip if city real estate prices keep going up (but the recent bubble has changed those dynamics).
We live in the NY Adirondack Park, which is pretty rural, although we live in the wimpy part closer to shopping. :-) Mostly we made the move because my wife grew up in a rural area and liked it. Also, living in an intact forest ecosystem means things like ticks and poison ivy are much less of a problem than in more disturbed areas. I grew up in a suburb that really was more like a town, and there are parts I do miss about that. But cheaper housing costs (especially, at the time, cheaper land costs) were a major factor -- in our case, by living frugally we'd have to work less and have more time for FOSS projects etc.. And while we could have picked lots of rural areas, there were also family reasons we picked this area (to be closer to a sibling).
Since we moved, we had a kid so that's absorbed much of the time we thought we'd otherwise have for free software (especially as we are choosing to homeschool -- despite it being an OK school district with smallish classes -- for all the reasons people like John Holt and John Taylor Gatto and others talk about). But, it was good we were not on a two income treadmill when we had a kid so we could spend more time together, where otherwise one income mainly goes to pay the higher costs of school taxes and related higher mortgages to be in a "good" school district and so on (so, if both people don't like their work, or your kid does not like or thrive in school, what do you get out of having your family split up during the day for financial reasons?). Related:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap [motherjones.com]
We eventually had to pay the cable company a bunch to extend the cable out to where we live to get high speed internet. Although three years or so later DSL was finally put in. I realized a while back that it probably cost the phone company more just to run two extra phone lines to our house when we moved in for dialup than to put in a DSL hub somewhere so we would not have needed the extra lines at first (but the phone company presumably had to put in the phone lines on request due to regulations but could just decide not put in DSL). Good communications really change the nature of living somewhere (for both good and bad -- visitors like the fact there is little cell phone service around here but residents would prefer to have cell phones in case of accidents etc.).
In the case of the Adirondack Park, there is a lot of regulation, but it also has its good side (preserving a lot of the wilderness).
Taxes can also vary a lot by county or town.
Most people do not want to live where we are as jobs are typically an hour to an hour and a half drive away, and we have ice for a lot of the winter (plus lots of snow), and we have a month of biting blackflies and a month of lots of mosquitoes. But April and September are great months without insects and with clear air. And we can see the Milky Way on clear nights. :-) And there are a lot of great neighbors here. So, you have to take the good with the bad.
Still, while we don't plan to move, if I were to pick a place again, now that we have a kid, ideally it would be close to someplace with a big college (like Ithaca) or at least just 15 minutes from a 50,000 person town, and so there would be more stuff to do with a kid (including more homeschool meetups) without driving a lot.
People usually prefer what they were raised on (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:5, Insightful)
No one else remember those days when Netiquette didn't allow you to respond just to correct spelling or grammar? Unless it was obviously misleading.
The Internet, and
(written by a Chilean, who types lousy and who's native language is Spanish)
Re:is it really cheaper to live in the boonies? (Score:3, Insightful)
food is more expensive since you have to truck it farther
there are no.... whole foods markets
Seriously? Do you know where food comes from [wikipedia.org]? It isn't the Whole Foods warehouse.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go make an omelet with eggs from chickens a friend keeps on her property, tomatoes from my garden, herbs from my windowsill, and bacon from a farm down the road.
After that I'll go ride our horses while I try figure something to do other than "staying home all day when I'm not working:"
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
Speaking of clean water supplies,
I watched "Gasland" the other day, I'm sure it is totally one sided, but as far as polluting water goes that is some full on stuff you Americans let big business get away with.
I mean, flammable gas imbued in your water, is cool for the whole "watch my faucet explode" but aside from that I'd be worried about moving anywhere that has NG shale under it, for it'll be a short time before you are "frac'ed"
Re:is it really cheaper to live in the boonies? (Score:1, Insightful)
NO STARBUCKS is a pro not a con.
Lol do some checking up on your whole foods, they're mostly mass produced crap. I'll put my home grown (or neighbor grown) veggies against anything you get in your local dustbin whole foods market.
And why would you need 2 cars? I have 20meg down 6 meg up cable for $34 a month. I live about 19 miles for the 3 largest hospitals in my state. I have a 2800 sq foot home with an inground pool that I bought for $149k.
Yeah, I'll take my "Boonies" ANY DAY. Even if I do have to pay for garbage pickup. Fuck my kids being in the top 10% of the earners. If they want that, I'll be sending them to college, earn it.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:0, Insightful)
Filtration??
Good water doesn't need filtration. It's pre-filtered by the ground.
And really, we are in a sad mess of pollution when clean water gets so rare people think it always needs to be filtered. Just a century or two ago, practically ANY water was perfectly drinkable. Even lakes.
Re:is it really cheaper to live in the boonies? (Score:1, Insightful)
Nice to toot your own little horn, but you know what? All of that shit can be taken away from you like THAT. All of that shit you just spouted off is only true because you are EMPLOYED. As in, someone gave you a job. That means nothing at all.
So, keep laughing to the bank, if you will, but realize that it can all come crashing down (including your so-called 'investment strategies') without your one little source of income.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:4, Insightful)
To add to your comment: The other problem is that when it comes to sex, parents have the talk. As in singular. It isn't a part of their regular conversation. We still have issues in the US that make people think it is "wrong" or "dirty" to talk to teenagers about their sexuality, how it is normal to have desires, what the consequences are, that they aren't freaks because they get horny. We are too busy telling them "just abstain", at the point in their lives when their hormones are raging, making them feel like they are doing something wrong by feeling that way. Until we get rid of the idea that sex is dirty, and understand it is a natural thing, we will have these issues.
If you let your kids learn about sexual behavior from watching TV, and that is the largest portion of their sexual relations exposure, well yes, they are going to be disadvantaged, they are more likely to get STDs and/or pregnant. Duh.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:3, Insightful)
You should be much less worried about the NG that is migrating into the aquifers, and more worried about the extremely toxic/carcinogenic cocktail of chemicals extraction companies are using to hydraulically fracture NG wells.
Re:Maybe stop surfing /. all day long (Score:4, Insightful)
Your requirements seem eminently reasonable, IMHO. I have no idea why you are getting pushback from the peanut gallery. I can only assume these people are employed at places where their disfunction isn't a major liability. Government, perhaps, or an educational institution. Geographically remote, perhaps. Or they have managed to find technically challenged management to bamboozle into thinking they are essential. The skills you describe have been invaluable in every place I've ever worked, at least the places that were worth working at. The technical people have been top-notch, and were also able to, you know, dress themselves and actually interact with other people. These skills aren't mutually exclusive.
Re:I'd rather make peanuts telecommuting (Score:2, Insightful)
Evidently your samples are not taken far from the cities, where this kind of thing is likely to occur.
None of what you describe is likely to find in an actual rural setting. Maybe in CA, IL, NY, or NJ, I suppose - the larger, urbanized, and socialized states - but not in the producing states.
If what you're saying were true, a state like South Dakota (not even a million people - quite a few less, in fact) or North Dakota (400k?), where I have personally seen drunk Sheriffs, would be close to the top of the list for these things, instead of the bottom. (Likewise, you'd expect meth use to be higher in somewhere like, oh, Virginia, Alabama or South Dakota than in Arizona and California.)
As someone who lives out in the 'boonies', let me just say this: if you're an urban yuppie, please don't come to stay. You can come to visit, that's fine, but if you come to stay, leave yourself (or rather, your preferred social policies) behind. Things are cheaper here for reasons like: low taxes, small(er) government, and more opportunities resulting from said lack of taxation and government. We've also still got a semblance of liberties remaining (2nd Amendment) which have mostly been destroyed or abandoned in the larger urban areas - resulting in significantly lower crime in general.