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The Almighty Buck News

More Than 500,000 High Tech Jobs Lost in 2002 663

Posted by Cliff from the and-that's-the-good-news dept.
stoolpigeon writes: "A study, released today by the AeA, shows that the U.S. high-tech industry lost 540,000 jobs in 2002, dropping from 6.5 million to 6.0 million. However, a preliminary look at data for 2003 shows that the decline in high-tech employment has slowed considerably this year."
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More Than 500,000 High Tech Jobs Lost in 2002 More

More Than 500,000 High Tech Jobs Lost in 2002

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  • Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tarquin_fim_bim ( 649994 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:46PM (#7515634)
    That seems to give the impression that they were carelessly mislaid, or accidentally cast aside. Far from it, they were purposefully relocated to a more hospitable economic environment. Free market, free trade, free information, free software and free beer, what more could a philanthropist ask for?
    OK, free love, but that always comes with a price.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Brataccas ( 213587 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:55PM (#7515715)
      Free food, free rent, and free utilities.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:56PM (#7515728) Journal
      Free market, free trade, free information, free software and free beer, what more could a philanthropist ask for?

      Job security at a liveable wage?

      Hey, I personally don't mind sacrificing a small bit of comfort to bring large portions of the world forward into the 19th century. But when a company ships jobs to places where environmental and labor laws allow them to simply replace good workers with people treated little better than slaves, I have a problem with that.

      • FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:09PM (#7515862)
        FACT 2: There is a limited demand for your job.
        FACT 3: For practical purposes, there is an unlimited supply of people who can learn your job.

        Now justify your standard of living.

        Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.

        Unless you're doing something that only you can do, expect your wage to fall to a level that is attractive only to the poorest people in the world.

        Moral: learn to do something remarkable, or accept that you don't deserve more than three meals a day and a warm place to sleep.
        • People deperately need to learn this lesson.

        • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by John Courtland ( 585609 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:40PM (#7516151)
          If you can't provide a livable wage for jobs that need to be done, your economy won't last too long. Certain work HAS to be done, there's no sense in only paying what amounts to barely enough to eat and pay rent for it. It's annoying work too, so in essence it's just as hard. Why do you think we have welfare? (Note that I assume you live in the US, but it's the same in the UK and the Dole Queue) Not because certain people don't work, but because there's no way for a lot of people to make enough to live on. You can beat the education and brainpower drums all you want, it doesn't change the fact that the economic standards of an area GREATLY affect the crime rate, and therefore, YOU. You should WANT everyone to be better off, even just for the sake of you not getting mugged when you go to the Opera or whatever you do.

          Not everyone can be "remarkable" you know. Some people just don't have the skill or ability. But there are some that do, who just can't get a break, who you dismiss. C'est la vie, but things have to change, or else once the poor get sick of being poor, they will revolt, and I would not want to be at the top then.

          Note that I am just trying to get a point across and am in no way attacking you. I do accept your points as the way things are now, but I'm just pointing out they need to be changed.

        • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by bwt ( 68845 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:59PM (#7516333)
          Speak for yourself.

          If all you do is programming, then I suppose that your job is not hard. But if your job includes analysing your company's business and using information technology to solve business problems that affect the bottom line, then your job is very hard, very valuable, not exportable, and very secure.

          There are many good programmers that don't understand business and want to be handed clean coding tasks. These are the people that are whining incessantly because their requirements documents aren't right. They want somebody else to do the hard part. The simple fact is that if you A) understand the business and B) can read the code that drives it, then you are better positioned than most people in the company to actually create revenue enhancing process changes.

          • There are many good programmers that don't understand business and want to be handed clean coding tasks. These are the people that are whining incessantly because their requirements documents aren't right.

            My god....someone else who gets it. When I was a coder (internal apps for a fund accounting firm), I sat down with the people who did the job I was to assist/automate with code and LEARNED TO DO THEIR JOB. By writing my own requirements doc, I could craft a better end product.

            Then I move up to being
        • A government that doesn't dispose of techies over the objection of 82% [ieeeusa.org] of the public, simply to get political donations [opensecrets.org]. Americans deserve leaders that don't sell their office as did Bush, Gephardt [betterimmigration.com], Kerry [betterimmigration.com], Lieberman [betterimmigration.com] and Edwards [betterimmigration.com]. The polls predicted that what has happened would happen.

          The claim that people that are rich get rich by doing remarkable things is bogus--some do, far more simply lie, cheat and steal effectively. Money is a poor measure of someone's contribution. Look at Kary Mullis-he built and

        • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by fermion ( 181285 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @09:32PM (#7516535) Homepage Journal
          The fact is that the work I have done is not so hard, and many people could do it, and the work has not in any absolute sense been worth the money I was paid. That, of course, is only because money really has not worth until it is normalized to the fiction of the people who use it.

          That said, the standard of living is justified based on the culture of consumerism. Someone needs to buy those $100 pair of sneakers, or that $200 gaming system, or that $400 mp3 player. And to do that you need cash. You need enough cash so the opportunity costs of such purchases are not so great that you will decide these things are not a good value. If you have a job that brings home $1000 a month, and you need $400 for rent and $200 for food and then clothes and transportation to work and medical care, these other things are not going to seem so important. I mean you might start downloading music over your $300 used computer and your $15 dial-up connection, which are justified by your kids educational needs, instead of paying even $1 for the track.

          Of course all these are way overpriced. We pay middle men, ad men, men in suits, and men in trucks to get the product to us. Certainly if we lowered our standards, bought locally, and only what we needed, then prices would fall. We could make $1000 a month and afford all we need and a few extras. Of course without ads, we would not know we may not know we need a new pair of sneakers. If we do not know we will not buy. If there are no ads, there is not TV, radio, internet. If we do not buy, there are no jobs elsewhere, unless wages in those areas go up high enough to support the infrastructure.

          of course, we could buy everything used. But someone would have to buy new. So how many people would that take. 10%? 20%? Would 20% of the population have remarkable skills that would justify a high wage. Could they buy enough to support the world economy and give us their hand me downs.

          It is a house of cards. No one deserves the standard of living. No one deserves to be told if they do not movies and music at full price they are killing the children of hard working artists. No one deserves to be told that if they do not spend their little expendable income on a dinner at McDonneld's or a new pair of sneakers that are they are depriving their child. Unfortunately, that is what people in the U.S. are told. Unfortunately we are told that we must spend, while the jobs that allow us to spend are shipped off to other countries.

          I am not saying this is right or wrong, good or bad, necessary or not. I am just saying that I do not believe it was India or China that made MS or Nike or McDonalds rich. I believe it was citizens of the US that did that. And now that they are done with us, they will continue consuming resources elsewhere. Someone needs to buy the products at the inflated prices. Someone needs to have the wages to afford it. If it is not the US, then it is someone else. And that someone else will have deserve it no more of less than those who had it previously.

        • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by pla ( 258480 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @09:40PM (#7516592) Journal
          Note: "I am American, and thus entitled to living better than 90% of the world's population." is not a convincing argument.

          I can see you have a poor grasp of sarcasm, so I'll spell it out for you...

          We currently live in the 21st century. Not the 19th.

          The jobs we ship to people "willing" to work cheaper do not, for the most part, improve the lives of those they go to. We destroy the land the local populace used to at least manage to survive on, make them wage slaves for a pittance far below liveable, and when Nike, or Union Carbide, or Walmart, or whatever company, finally gets bored and moves elsewhere, they leave slums and wastelands.


          Now justify your standard of living.

          Okay, I will do exactly that.

          What does Nike make? Shoes. Expensive shoes. Can a typical sweatshop laboror, whose life you seem to think Nike enhances greatly, buy those shoes? No. I can. You probably can. Most Slashdot readers probably can. We "justify" our standard of living simply by having it (or did some religion's imaginary friend wave the "US propserity and world hegemony" wand to give us our standard of living?).

          Had you not decided to karma-whore (as an AC? not very useful...) with the "I feel so sick of whining programmers" card, you might have noticed my point - That we don't "help" third-world countries by forcing the local populace into corporate slavery. We lower our own standard of living without raising theirs.

          I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living. Paying someone less than their food costs them (regardless of physical location) does not accomplish that.

          • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @10:40PM (#7516902) Journal
            I think you have an *extremely* romanticized notion of the joys of plowing a rice paddy with a water buffalo (if you're lucky) and harvesting it by hand. Nobody is "forced into corporate slavery". That's nonsense. People take those jobs because they're an improvement over their existing options.

            In fact, when Nike sells a pair of shoes for $130, I agree that there is something highly disturbing about the fact that LeBron James pockets a larger share than does the person who made them. But thinking about that issue isn't served by making up fairy tales about happy farmers forced into factories by Mr. Burns and the Monopoly guy.

            • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @11:37PM (#7517153) Homepage
              In fact, when Nike sells a pair of shoes for $130, I agree that there is something highly disturbing about the fact that LeBron James pockets a larger share than does the person who made them.

              What I find disturbing is the fact that people would consider a cheaply made shoe that cost less than $1 to make worth paying $130 for.

              For $350 I could buy a pair of English hand made brogues which would be considerably more comfortable. Since the point of paying $130 for a pair of shoes is to advertise the fact that you can afford to pay $130 for a pair of shoes a pair of Church's would work far better.

              If you want a pair of sneakers then buy a pair of Kirkland trainers at Costco for $12.

              Quite why anyone would believe I would think more highly of them because they are a victimg to a marketting scheme that sells $12 pairs of shoes for more than ten times that amount is beyond me.

              Contrawise I really don't know why Nike can't get a clue and start paying their workers a fair wage. The cost of doing so would hardly register. Some day they are going to discover that they have lost the next Jordan or Tiger Woods to a competitor because their management does not want to be tainted by association with Nike. Arnold Palmer did very well by turning down a lot of second rate endorsements early in his career even though they would have paid a lot more than the endorsements he did accept. Later on endorsers sought him out because of his previous association with Rolex etc.

          • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by thesilverbail ( 593897 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @01:24AM (#7517676) Homepage
            I fully support raising the world-wide standard of living. Paying someone less than their food costs them (regardless of physical location) does not accomplish that.

            As an Indian in the IT industry I resent your charecterisation of us as starving slave labour. You just compare our salaries on an exchange rate basis without factoring purchasing power parity and then say that we're being made to work for a pittance. Well guess what? A thousand dollars a month is a very comfortable salary in India.

            You're just desperately trying to find some excuse so you can oppose outsourcing "in principle" when all you're really worried about is your job.

            I feel sorry for people in the US hit by outsourcing and the job crunch. But it's hard to feel bad about it seeing the good things it has done in my country, giving it a chance to come out of its poverty and maybe into some kind of economic parity with the first world.

            • As an Indian in the IT industry I resent your charecterisation of us as starving slave labour

              Though Indians may count as the most obvious example of US companies outsourcing from the point of view of a Slashdotter, I do realize that Indians do fairly well, not in any way "third world".

              I also did not refer even to tech, specifically, limiting my text basically to the sort of sweatshop labor US companies use in Central America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe for that one), and a few former-Soviet c
              • also did not refer even to tech, specifically, limiting my text basically to the sort of sweatshop labor US companies use in Central America, parts of Africa (more Western Europe for that one), and a few former-Soviet countries. Yes, I mentioned Union Carbide with Bhopal in mind, but would you honestly say that all of India does as well as the engineers in the cities?

                good point. I was refering only to tech in reference to this article. and bhopal brings up another point - stories i heard about how multin

        • Re:FACT 1: Your job is not hard. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Prof.Phreak ( 584152 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @10:03PM (#7516726) Homepage
          FACT 1: Your job is not hard.

          Hmm... You'd be surprised how many people find it next to impossible. I teach this stuff in college, and I must tell you, that there are those who find 'this stuff' easy (about 1% of the population), about 4% who find it challenging but interesting, and about 95% who will never understand binary numbers.

          Now, in a corporate environment, is it also true. Only 1 out of possibly 10 or so developers actually knows what they're doing! (most got into the company because their uncle has a friend in HR).

          Notice that most "Jobs Lost" exlamations don't really say "productivity is down"... in fact, I bet that in most companies, you can fire half the developers (worst half), and nobody would even notice that they're gone.

          So why shouldn't someone have a high paying job when they can do something a vast percentage of the population cannot? (they may pretend to be able to do it, etc.,)

          While it is very sad when a good developer cannot find work (I've been in that boat myself), I find it amusing when someone who only knows HTML/JavaScript (or read one of them Dummies books) is complaining about not being able to find a job (or that their salary is too low).

          Hopefully, the "jobs lost" doesn't apply to most true computer geeks - but to those "3 week VB class" (or Lean C++ in 24 Hours) people.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:02PM (#7515788) Homepage Journal
      Someday somebody will figure out that many American execs are super-paid and don't really know their own business. (They know MONEY, not the products their companies make.)

      Then since the executives do the outsourcing, they won't outsource themselves, the places they've outsourced to will go into business for themselves, and drive the American companies under.

      • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by randall_burns ( 108052 )
        I think you are correct. A lot of the people that have played prominent roles in the outsourcing and H-1b/L-1 fads will find themselves in VERY lonely positions. I used to work at Sun. I was proud to work at Sun. At this point though, I can't say I would trust McNeally at all. Any manager that has been signing lots of H-1b/L-1 visa requests, particularly the last year, isn't someone that I will trust.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by D-Cypell ( 446534 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:03PM (#7515794)
      It is easy to blame outsourcing, and I do admit that this plays a big part.

      However, we must also remember that during the late 90's and the early 00's thousands upon thousands of tech jobs just sprung up out of thin air. Any fool with a business plan penciled out on a napkin could get millions in VC. As the remenants of these companies finally disappear in true darwinian fashion, the jobs that were created will obviously be lost.

      I would be interested in seeing some stats on how many jobs were created in those few years compared to the losses recently. It sounds like it could be a case of just ending up back where we started from.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rubbersoul ( 199583 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:06PM (#7515822)
      Far from it, they were purposefully relocated to a more hospitable economic environment

      This is not always true. Not every job that was "lost" was moved to a more hospitable economic environment. I know many people that lost jobs because the company had lost customers, got bought out, or just otherwise no longer needed the service of said employee. Of course *some* people lost jobs that were sent to more hospitable economic environment, but it is silly to say that all fit in that category.
      • http://www.freepressed.com/manufacturing.htm

        Blue Collar Workers move to China, India to reclaim lost jobs

        Mass exodus of manufacturing jobs prompts mass migration of American workers to the Third World.

        Kellerman hopes he will fit in at his new job in Calcutta. Free Trade Zone--Thousands of blue collar workers are leaving the United States in pursuit of the 2.7 manufacturing jobs that moved
        overseas during the past three years.

        Deke Kellerman, a worker at the recently-closed Maytag Plant in Galesburg, Illin

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jagapen ( 11417 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:06PM (#7515823)
      Outsourced management. I'm sure there's a CEO over in India who'd run the company for less than a quarter the compensation an American CEO expects. Plus, he'd be close to the workers!

      • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ploppy ( 468469 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:54PM (#7516281)
        Take a look at this very recent article [upi.com]. This article points out that American IT management is way over-priced compared to Indian management, and hence management will be the next thing to go off shore. As it says in the article, this is American IT self destructing.

    • Re:Jobs Lost? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by unixbugs ( 654234 )
      they can export the manufacturing of parts and source code, but they cant export the jobs installing and configuring it here yet.

      nuts, bolts, and cables. gotta love 'em.

  • Found em. (Score:3, Funny)

    by banzai75 ( 310300 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:46PM (#7515636)
    They were with my missing sock.

  • Story at The Register (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:46PM (#7515637)
    Another article on it at The Register [theregister.co.uk].

  • In before.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:46PM (#7515638)
    In before everyone starts pointing at Bangalore.

    Don't blame India for our political failures.

    That's all.

  • Two of mine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rossz ( 67331 ) <ogre&geekbiker,net> on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:47PM (#7515649) Journal
    Two of those half a million jobs were mine. Sucks to lose one job, get a new one, then lose that a few months later. No, it wasn't anything I had done wrong. One place cut back 40% of the workforce and the other company sold the division I was in. The buyer only wanted the intellectual property, not the team. Bastards.
    • This was earlier in the Crash, so after she'd been laid off with notice from her previous company, she'd accepted the best-looking of the jobs she could find. A week later she got laid off in the morning, and was working at the second-best-looking job in the afternoon.

  • It's slowing down..... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Great. This is like saying that a semi truck is running people down (GTA-like), but it's doing it slower now than before.


    • > Great. This is like saying that a semi truck is running people down (GTA-like), but it's doing it slower now than before.

      Next year it will slow to a stop, reverse, and run over you again.

  • 234,000 tech jobs to be lost this year, don't you feel better now?
  • Very ironic. Not much we can do, if they want to take advantage of lower living standards and lower taxes due to not having an FDA, EPA, USDA etc etc.. fine!

  • Military: good jobs, good training (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Preach the Good Word ( 723957 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:50PM (#7515675)
    I was an electronics tech for the Navy. Did maintenance on comm gear and other electronic equipment. Went through a variety of schools. I feel the education is very good and the hands on experience is great. I worked with a variety of test equipment, receivers, transmitters, communication gear, etc.

    When I was in, the most technologically advanced jobs were CTM (Crypto Tech Maintenance), ET (Electronics Tech), DS (Data Systems), among others (more specialized).

    One individual I met while in was a Senior Chief ET at Treasure Island. As far as I know, he was one of the people to first develop laser listening devices for civilian purchase, or at least one of the first that I've heard of. I didn't see a working model, but he explained what it was and how it worked to me.

    At yet another installation, I met a group of Navy Petty Officers and Air Force Sgt's that were developing a means to render video to CD, at the time, it wasn't common place (I hadn't even heard of the technology at the time) to find video on CD's.

    There's many "cutting edge" tech gadgets being used in the .mil, of course these are the ones you never hear about until they're released to civilian use.

    It's like the old story about the guy that invented the first "radar gun" for highway patrolmen, he also invented the first "radar detector" for civilians. :-)
    • was Re: Military: good jobs, good training [slashdot.org]

      There was a thread about technical job training in the military [slashdot.org] here on Slashdot a few days ago.

  • What happened to the economic recovery? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Not_Wiggins ( 686627 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:55PM (#7515711) Journal
    I could have *sworn* that the political PR machine has been pumping out stories that the economy is improving and has been since November 2001 (!)... gotta love revisionist economics! 8P

    Of course, this news goes with my experience; I know plenty of talented developers/tech-people who've been unemployed or lost a job to outsourcing with nary a replacement in sight.

    I could rant about the loss of jobs (as I'm sure many /. readers could). What I'd like instead is an honest accounting of where our economy is, is going, and what the heck is being done to make sure we keep it moving in the right direction. Then when that data is available, I'd want to get good answers about why we are or aren't on target. I'm just fed up with all the crap^H^H^H^Hspin being put out on news feeds about a recovery that (obviously) isn't happening yet... or, at least, not to the degree that's being reported.

    Nope... instead I'll get to read in news papers 3 years from now how there never was a recession between 2000-2003 (or 4). >8(

    Doh... that wound up being a rant, didn't it? ;)
    • It's still a recovery. When companies can hire & fire at will they can grow & contract with the market. That improves their botto line, and therefore their stock values, which equals economic recovery. :) In ten years, we'll all be working for a few months then not working for a few months, so learn to save your earnings for the downtime.
    • The economy, and our field of work are not at all the same thing. There was apparently a glut of tech jobs before, now there's a lot less. Does that means the economy is down? No, it means there's less of a demand for techs. Loss of jobs != loss fo tech jobs.

    • Re:What happened to the economic recovery? (Score:4, Informative)

      by rotomonkey ( 198436 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:24PM (#7516020)
      The government has been announcing both an increase in total jobs and a decrease in unemployment filings for a few months now. Neither necessarily precludes a reduction in high-tech jobs. The spin-meisters claim the economy is improving, just not for us.

      The problem with getting a honest accounting of the state of our economy is that there is no measure which is not inherently politicized. It is very easy to consider/ignore factors to bolster your numbers. That fact itself has become highly politicized, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times (watch as my liberal bias comes out) has reported recently.

      It's difficult to say. Recent figures [doc.gov] indicate that the real GDP, consumer income, and corporate profits all rose inq3 2003, but at the same time, the dollar is falling to new lows against other major currencies, which will eventually make it difficult to attract the foreign investing the US needs to balance the trade deficit.

      • Eventually just became right now:

        Dollar Tumbles as International Investors Flee U.S. Assets
        http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= 1 0000103& sid=a5A7bcTBC9Io&refer=news_index
        Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar had its biggest decline against the euro in about a month in New York trading after a government report showed net foreign purchases of U.S. securities in September fell to the lowest in five years.

        A drop in the amount of stocks and bonds bought by international investors makes it harder for

    • Re:What happened to the economic recovery? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrCode ( 95839 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @09:08PM (#7516397)
      Well, you certainly won't get an accurate accounting here.

      But I can tell you that the unemployment rate only considers people who are working, or actively looking for work as the total population. So if a former software engineer goes back to school, he/she is no longer considered 'unemployed'. Similarly, if you set yourself up as a consultant, you're also no longer unemployed, even if you're not making any money at it.

  • My Experience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by EmCeeHawking ( 720424 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:56PM (#7515724)
    I've been in the market for a good developer for over half a year now. As part of the standard interviewing process, I give the applicant my laptop, with a series of programming problems that should take no more than 15 minutes to solve.

    Without exception, everybody fails or takes WAY too long to solve. This, in my mind, is a sign of incompetence, the reason of which I still have not filled the position.

    The vast majority of the applicants got their BS in CS or CSE because they thought it would be a good way to make money; very few of the applicants have been truly passionate about technology, and those that were, were incompetent.

    For all of you who bitch and complain about how hard it is to find a job, perhaps you ought to sharpen your skillset and seek out the employers who will appreciate it. And for those who got into computing because you heard that there was good money in it, but you'd rather be out windsurfing, get out of computing, get a job windsurfing, and leave room in the market for those who actually have skills, so resume reviewers don't have to waste time with you.

    • Re:My Experience (Score:2, Insightful)

      by pudding7 ( 584715 )
      You've had an open position for a developer for 6 months? I don't mean to burst your bubble, but either you don't really want a developer, you don't really need a developer, or your hiring standards a bit out of whack.

    • Re:My Experience (Score:4, Interesting)

      by seraph93 ( 560551 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:07PM (#7515837)
      As part of the standard interviewing process, I give the applicant my laptop, with a series of programming problems that should take no more than 15 minutes to solve.

      So what are the problems?

    • Re:My Experience (Score:5, Funny)

      by Cajun Hell ( 725246 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:09PM (#7515860) Homepage Journal
      I give the applicant my laptop, with a series of programming problems that should take no more than 15 minutes to solve.

      Without exception, everybody fails or takes WAY too long to solve.

      Yeah, I lost a job opportunity, but I still think I came out ahead -- whenever I think about the expression on your face when you realized I wasn't bringing your laptop back.

      On the downside, I do hate your DVORAK keyboard layout. It took me 40 minutes to type this post. No wonder any of the other applicants ever finished their assignments.

    • Re:My Experience (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:11PM (#7515881)
      So you give an on the spot practical exam, give a hard deadline of 15 minutes for a series of problems, to someone who has enough pressure expecting a typical interview? And whose authority says the problems are together a 15 minute problem? Maybe they would be able to tackle them in under 15 minutes after getting into their groove. Giving a simple pass/fail evaluation of a 15 minute session of problems that are likely ill balanced, i.e. focused in one area. You could end up with a developer who can whip right through those, but turn out not to be well rounded.

      What I have seen to be a better selector is strategies where the interviewer puts forth a problem that is technical and high-level in nature, and disallows use of a computer, and ask that the applicant think aloud about the strategy and algorithms they would try to accomplish the task. The interviewer then gets more information. For one, the circumstances are less stressful, so it is a better indication of typical performance.
      Also, whether or not they end up at the right solution is less important than if you can see they have a good thought process and good ability to recover from changing circumstances (in the middle of the problem, introduce new requirements).

      I do agree that the dot-com crap created a lot of untalented, uninterested people seeking computer jobs simply for 'easy money' rather than a sincere passion, but knowing how very many talented developers I have seen unemployed over the last half a year, I would say either you aren't posting it in any visible spot or that your 15-minute test is a flawed approach.
    • MC,

      a couple of questions for you:

      * what level of experience does your salary reflect?

      * do you require the problems to be solved in a given (set of) language(s)? if so, which?

      * do your "programming problems" test competency in syntax? programming paradigms? creative problem-solving skills?

      * do you really believe that those who are truly passionate about technology are incompetents? if so, how have you managed to staff previous development positions? isn't it possible that there's a mismatch between
    • How are you hiring?

      If it's via a recruitment agent, I'd be asking some questions.

      - Most agents can't be bothered, or are too incompetent, to hold even the most shallow understanding of the technologies involved.

      - Most agents wouldn't know a proper degree if it hit them in the end-of-month bonus (whether or not a relevant degree is *necessary*, it's certainly valuable).

      - Most agents are nothing more than pattern-matching bottom feeders.

      The good news? There are plenty of good agents out there too, and th
    • = your laptop is configured with an IDE that -you- like (my Emacs, VisualStudio+VisualAssist and IntelliJ are heavily customized, I doubt that if you have vstudio you have vassist installed for example) not in a way that the candidate is familiar with.

      = the programming problems you have on your laptop are related to your domain and thus require extremely specific domain knowledge (which the candidate might know but not use during their current day job, hence the need for documentation which you probably wo
    • Unfortunately, the really GOOD applicants are helpfully filtered out by HR departments. There's no question in my mind that I could have passed your tests easily. Yet, when I was unemployed, I rarely even got interviews to the jobs I was applying for. Apparently, my experience and ability didn't count as much to HR depts as that pretty piece of paper that says "BS Degree" (the real meaning of BS is left to the reader). Unfortunately, as long as technology is a "hot market" where lots of money can be made, r
  • Time to slap some chalk on those babied typing hands and ready 'em for sweaty industrial work.

    (1 month later, covered in soot)

    "Oh, God. I know MySQL, not carbon tubing. What am I doing here?"
  • With such growth of Internet, chip scale and whatever in technology where Moore's law applies, growth of hi-tech employment is necessary. Not "double every ten months" of course, but some way up, no doubt. (one admin who hosted 10 sites, may host 100 of them just as easily, but if they want 10.000, it's just too much for one person) In recent years, it was way higher than reasonable, and it results in a drop, to more 'needed' level. But it will continue growing and I think all those people will find jobs ag

  • In related news, a Pakistani extorts US firm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Serveert ( 102805 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @07:59PM (#7515766)
    This could have been an Indian, Chinese, whoever.. this is the future where we cannot hold anyone in the third world accountable yet we expect them to handle sensitve information and intellecutal property.

    I'll get modded down but here's the article:

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ ch ronicle/archive/2003/11/12/BUGI52VMQR1.DTL&type=bu siness

    Breaking her silence for the first time, the Pakistani woman who threatened to release UCSF patient files on the Internet says she had "no choice" but to breach the hospital's security after being cut off by the Texas man who'd made her the final link in a long chain of clerical subcontractors.

    Lubna Baloch said by e-mail from Karachi that she is "not an opportunistic person who willfully did that to gain some attention."

    She said she is instead the "worst sufferer of this situation" because she was only trying to secure UCSF Medical Center's help last month in obtaining money that she was owed.

    "I feel violated, helpless," she wrote, adding that she is "the most unluckiest person in this world."

    Doctors at U.S. hospitals routinely dictate notes about patient visits, consultations, operations and discharges. Those notes in turn are frequently handed to outside firms that specialize in transcribing them into written form.

    The case involving UCSF's patient files represents the nightmare-scenario- come-to-life for the medical industry. For about 20 years, UCSF has farmed out much of its transcription work to a Sausalito company called Transcription Stat.

    Transcription Stat outsourced many of the hundreds of files received daily to a network of 15 subcontractors. One of these was a Florida woman named Sonya Newburn, who then outsourced the files yet again to a Texas man named Tom Spires.

    Spires outsourced the work one more time to Baloch in Karachi, who agreed to do the transcribing for a small fraction of the amount UCSF originally paid Transcription Stat, thus allowing everyone in the chain to walk away with a modest profit.

    But on Oct. 7, Baloch attached two patient files to an e-mail and contacted UCSF. She demanded that the medical facility assist her in squeezing outstanding funds from her employer, Spires.

    "Your patient records are out in the open to be exposed, so you better track that person and make him pay my dues or otherwise I will expose all the voice files and patient records of UCSF Parnassus and Mt. Zion campuses on the Internet," Baloch wrote.

  • Where's the end of this cycle? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saihung ( 19097 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:05PM (#7515817)
    First we were farmers.

    Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.

    Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.

    But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.

    Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?

    • You should become an attorney. Then your job can't easily be outsourced.
    • No answer?

      Nuh-uh.

      The answer is, back to the farms. Learn to grow a garden, to really grow a garden. Also, immediately sell your financed house, and buy something that you own outright: something with a lot of land, and little house, and maybe with a saw for cutting lumber.

      Also keep a computer, for the occasional job that does come by.

      Learn how to pasteurize your own milk, and get (perhaps) 1 cow, or 1 bull if there's more than 25 bull-less cows in the area. [Deal is, trade your bull's serv

  • A better set of questions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PureFiction ( 10256 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:09PM (#7515857)
    1. How many jobs gained during the "bubble" of the late 90's (that was unsustainable) are factored into that count?

    2. How many H1B visas that are unrenewed are part of that count? (Exploitative consulting agencies? They loved to pump up the numbers)

    3. How many psuedo-engineers have rightly left the CS/IT job market because they dont have the skills?

    I worked with a guy briefly in 2000 that got paid $75/hour, 60 hours a week, for a whole month (before jumping ship to greener pastures in Silicon Valley) to write some horribly broken and incomplete perl CGI code.

    Yes, nasty perl CGI that didnt work. It was obvious his skills were at tech college freshman / skilled high schooler level, and yet he was able to pull in an insane wage due to irrational exhuberance.

    You hear these stories, and it doesnt really sink in until you see it first hand. Things were severely out of balance.

    We are almost out of the hangover. If you are truly skilled, you can find a job with some elbow grease and effort 98% of the time. You may need to relocate, you may need to settle for something less than ideal, but they are out there.

    The tech services (specifically programming / engineering) are picking up and we are on course for a return to semi-normality. But against the backdrop of insane compensation and free flowing VC cash, even normalcy appears spartan.

    The best thing you can do for a career in IT is to truly love it and find it fascinating. This will keep your skills sharp as you experiment and play with cutting edge technologies on your own, and maybe on your job, and also provide the motivation needed to obtain a deeper understanding of the many details associated with programming, system administration, engineering, etc.

    If you are in this field for the money, you wont have the drive to stay afloat.

    • Re:A better set of questions (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Funny thing is, I started out in this field because I'm a natural programmer (doing it since I was 8) and it looked like I could make a decent living and pay back my college loans. I'm good at what I do, and I made it my career to go beyond the call of duty and ensure that today's product had hooks for next year's functions. Twice that habit has saved the unit's ass. I'm also a good technical writer, and have no trouble communicating with our international colleagues.

      Today I was told by IBM that I have

  • Sanity check (Score:2, Insightful)

    by danharan ( 714822 )

    The sector with the largest decrease in jobs was electronics manufacturing, accounting for more than half of all tech jobs lost between 2001 and 2002. For the first time in the seven years of publishing Cyberstates, the software sector recorded a loss of nearly 150,000 jobs last year. Indeed, the once-thriving software sector posted large increases in employment in all previous editions of Cyberstates.

    What? We only started losing software jobs last year? We gained even through the dot-bomb? Now *that* is

  • Yeah it's shitty (Score:3, Interesting)

    by greymond ( 539980 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:14PM (#7515922) Homepage Journal
    At my work we layed off several people and thos eof us that stayed were given 2% raises (for me it worked out to about $800 more a year) I'd honestly rather have more coworkers than $800/yr more that I don't even notice.
  • "World Gains 500,000 jobs from US"

    [IRONY]If you choose to live in a country where nine grand a year doesn't go very far, that's your problem, right? It's not that US techs are paid too much, it's that the cost-of-living in US (and Europe too, for that mattter) is innordinately high by world standards. Until this problem is rectified, US workers can use stopgaps like living with your parents and eating at the homeless shelter and shopping at the foodbank occasionally.[/IRONY]

  • Detritus from the .com bust (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:19PM (#7515977)
    Regardless, individual stories of people who got fired/layed off/whatever are barking up the wrong tree in this thread. This has to do with macroeconomic supply, demand, and productivity. And I'm going to argue that things are _better_ with these types of market corrections.

    First off, I'm just not buying the 'overseas' argument. I think the people hit hardest are web designers and other low-tech technical people (and some niche high-tech people) - en masse, the jobs just didn't need doing, rather than things that needed doing but are easily farm-out-able. The latter set of jobs seems to me to be rather minimal anyway.

    Understand that jobs lost numbers are not 'people who lost their jobs', but 'these jobs no longer exist' - it's not necessarily the case that we 'lost' them to someone else.

    Question: of the jobs lost, how many of those didn't need to be done? Answer: all of them (when taken in aggregate). Either the companies died, the work the people did wasn't valuable, or the individuals themselves were not very good and others took up the slack anyway.

    Taken not in the individual case, but in general - good people get hired to do something else, and the bottom strata have to find jobs in another industry - arguably, they shouldn't have been here in the first place, but they rode the wave. Sure, there will always be individual cases where this isn't true - usually due to people who are not, for one reason or another, willing to go where the jobs are. (Only these last people are ones for whom a 'move to india' (or wherever new jobs are going) actually makes sense).

    What this means is that the salaries for these jobs have either gone into: something not technical but useful, lower prices, stockholder equity, or higher CEO compensation (or any of the other drains on productivity, like lawyers, or increased state taxes, or whatever).

    In 3 of the 4 cases, that's a GOOD thing. Note that CEO compensation, and perques in general, haven't been increased due to the bust, and despite SCO, I haven't heard of Lawyers and such hangers-on's incomes being spectacular.

    What this means is that if productivity stays high, the total amount of work done has become cheaper. If productivity goes lower, that means that the lost work being done before wasn't valuable - if it was, then it would still be being done (market forces driving production). Finally, in either case, those who _did_ migrate from one job to another are hopefully doing something 'better' (usually are - most of the 'best work' of a job is done in the first year or two, IMO, and someone made a recent decision that this job was worth doing enough to hire someone).

    So, all in all, a decline in jobs isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's very possibly a good thing. It's a "correction" of an inherent weakness, and might make us stronger and more productive because of it.

  • Yeah (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dtfinch ( 661405 ) * on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:20PM (#7515990) Journal
    But mostly just the unnecessary jobs were cut, and unprofitable businesses shut down.
  • The report said the big losses were in electronics manufacturing and telecommunications. Telecom's no surprise - we were a big part of the crash, after being even more radically overoptimistic and overbuilt and overspent than the web+advertising+software game, but manufacturing is more interesting. It sounds like some of this is a statistical problem - the category sounds like it includes electronics manufacturing companies, so losing developers gets lumped together with losing physical assembly work beca

  • Net or gross (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:24PM (#7516023)
    The article does not mention if this is a net loss or a gross loss. This small detail will widely vary the topic's importance.

  • Darwin was right, and we are surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bug-Y2K ( 126658 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:32PM (#7516090) Homepage


    For almost two decades, the IT industry, in the form of corporate IT departments have been telling their masters:
    "Invest in technology, and it will pay off in increased productivity and profits."

    For the past 10+ years, the IT industry, in the form of software and hardware vendors, have seen their profits soar as a result of this investment, and developed the perfect mechanism for milking it for consistent, quarterly results: The Upgrade.

    The Upgrade has killed the golden goose. The consistent, repetitive costly upgrade... while padding the bottom line of IT Vendors, has eroded the bottom line of the Corporate World.

    Increased expediture, planned and worse, ENFORCED obsolescence, ever-increasing headcounts, etc etc etc.

    The CEO's and CFO's have had enough, and they aren't taking it anymore. From their perspective IT is a money pit. An endless drain on financial and human resources.

    Ane we are wondering why the tech sector is stagnant at best right now? Technology is immature, yet we kept on praising it as the solution to all problems! Arrogance of our superiority and ignorance of true business needs were the dominant perceptions of your average IT department over the past decade or so. Now is the time for their revenge.

    The holders of the purse strings want to see some of that return on investment before they'll spend like that again.

    Our profession needs to learn humility, and nothing does that better than a financial ass-kicking.

  • All Overseas (Score:3, Informative)

    by WillRobinson ( 159226 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:35PM (#7516112) Journal
    I work in the electronics industry. It works like this, before we did final assembly her in good old usa, so we purchased parts made in usa.

    Now final assembly is offshore, so the best is to purchase the parts locally.

    First they buy equipment here, and assemble there. Next they build equipment there. There goes all the assembly, machine fabrication, chip assembly, plastic molding, and it goes much deeper.

  • How many of these were marketing/managment drones? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @08:57PM (#7516318) Homepage
    It always amazes me how middle managers and marketing suits are lumped in and considered "tech" jobs, how much code are they writing, or what new research are they doing. These jobs may have been at tech companies but I would wager most of these jobs were positions that shouldn't have been to begin with.

  • "Slowed" is not necessarily a good thing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by carcosa30 ( 235579 ) on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @10:28PM (#7516862)
    The fact that the job-loss rate has slowed is not necessarily good. It's always pointed to as a sign of economic recovery, when in fact all it means is that the rate of deterioration has decreased.

    I think that the layoff rate is going to accelerate again. The fact that the dot-com boom produced hundreds of thousands of 19 year old CIOs means that there are that many people-- young, hungry, flexible-- who are willing to work much cheaper, and perhaps smarter, than old fogeys like me and maybe you. But hey, I'm sure the Bush administration will fix everything...

    I'm using this time as an opportunity to go back to school and finish a college degree-- in my case, biotech. I think there's going to be a boom in biotechnology that's going to dwarf the dotcoms, and it'll be a subject that's going to be far more difficult for the average person to learn, both because of subject matter and because of the much greater infrastructure required for learning. It's going to be harder for them to fake knowledge by submitting resumes packed with buzzwords to hundreds of companies knowing that one of the fish is bound to bite.

    That is, until Microsoft comes out with gel-chromatography equipment. That's kind of a disturbing thought.

  • Go straight to the dept of labour. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jason Pollock ( 45537 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @02:20AM (#7517856) Homepage
    Their results (amazingly enough) were out today as well. Only, they don't feed stories to slashdot. :)

    http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.toc.h tm
    ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/history/ocw age.11142001.news

    It isn't so rosy this year, but it isn't all doom and gloom.Overall, employment in Computer and Mathematical went from:

    2000 2001 2002
    2,932,810 2,825,870 2,772,620

    But average wage was something else:
    2000 2001 2002
    27.91 29.02 29.63

    So, we lost 53,250 people, mostly in straight computer programmers, 501,550->457,320, although Software Engineers lost as well.Amazingly enough, Network and Computer Systems Administrators gained ~5k people, and Network Systems and Computer Data Communications Analysts gained ~7k! Analysts are up almost 20k, as are support specialists.

    If you want to see who's really getting hit by this, check out the results for management:

    2000 2001 2002
    7,782,680 7,212,360 7,092,460

    I think they've lost more than techies.

    Jason Pollock

  • hmmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mantera ( 685223 ) on Thursday November 20, 2003 @11:17AM (#7519849)


    What's most troubling about this offshore outsourcing trend is that it seems to be becoming an anchor strategy for the creatively-challenged professional manager, in much the same way downsizing was many years ago.

    It used to be that when you're screwing up, unable to come up with a relevant and viable product or service that people want, and your business performance is less than impressive, your safe and thoughtless way out of the mess was to downsize, kick out a few employees and glee with a grin about the cost-cutting you have achieved, the boost in efficiency that you'll proudly present as elegant numbers on sheets that'll increase your profits and shareholder value.

    Now it seems that offshoring is heading that way; "have problem, will offshore!".

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