U.S. IT jobs Down 400K Since 2001 1049
Cryofan writes "A research study shows that American information technology industry 'lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001, when the recession began, and April 2004.' Over half of those jobs - 206,300 - were lost after the recession was declared over in November 2001. In all, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500, between March 2001 and April 2004. And the bloodletting continues -- as
reported here on Slashdot earlier this year, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
no really. it's true.
Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Aliens (Score:5, Interesting)
Both political parties claim that free markets require the free exchange of goods and services (which includes labor) between the USA and other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains the free market in the USA. Unfortunately, the politicians are just playing a verbal game with economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market -- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say, China). So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However, Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive government intervention has damaged the markets in those economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces (in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal game that politicians play is to simply define the USA to be a "free market", ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico. Similar comments apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages, the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly [billoreilly.com]
vice-president: Tammy Bruce [tammybruce.com]
There are other ways of viewing it (Score:4, Insightful)
India, China, and many other such nations also have a huge demand for infrastructure growth and development. Before they get greedy about the foreign markets, maybe they should take care of building up their local business market?
Wouldn't that also help get a few more people employed in those countries instead of merely sucking jobs from other nations?
Maybe we need to find ways to work more efficiently as well, and put more of our resources into actually doing our job instead of wasting it on IP lawsuits.
Can you imagine starting a business nowadays? Before you could even think about approaching potential partners, you'd have to spend months or even years just working out how you're going to defend against Microsoft, SCO, and other overly-aggressive companies.
It may sound trite, but imagine how much more actual work and revenue-generating business enhancements could do with, say, the money IBM has spent defending against SCO so far?
Re:There are other ways of viewing it (Score:5, Insightful)
The people in the IT sectors are making money for countries like India. The Indian government has put a lot of money into educating people and now the Indian IT sector is taking off. This will bring money into India and from those taxes generate revenue for the govt to pay for infrastructure etc. With a global economy Indian business men are just taking advantage of supply and demand, at present the supply side of things (heaps of people in India with IT skills) is larger than the demand (companies wanting to outsource) and therefore the price is dirt cheap.
You saw the same thing with steel and cars. I remember when if you were looking at cheap/crap electronics you could be guarenteed that it came from Taiwan. Over time the reputation of Taiwan has improved and higher value goods are being produced there. Cheap electronics now typically come from China. Same thing happened with cars and Japan. I would like to see the look on a car sales person face in 1980 if you told them that Japan would be producing some of the top of the line cars, and that Toyota and Honda would both have Formula 1 and Indy cars.
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Insightful)
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Seriously, I've said the same stuff about the situation with India and China, just got finished mentioning it before I saw this post. But, and this is a big but, your conclusion makes abso-fscking-lutely no sense whatsoever. Bill OReilly can't keep left and right straight, much less understand how the hell to deal with pushing Fair Trade instead of Free Trade.
How would an anti-Union, pro-Corporate shill for the right do jack to help the American Worker?
I was really expecting to see you throw support to John Kerry, but WTF? Did I miss a joke somewhere?
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Informative)
"I was a couragous soldier in Vietnam!" "What do you mean everyone else that was with me says I was a coward and an idiot! SHIT the truth is out!"
All of the claims by that Swift Boat group that ran those ads have been thouroghly debunked. One of them even got the same award Kerry did from the same incident. And ask the guy Kerry pulled from the water if Kerry was a coward?
It's also been well-documented that that Swift Boat group consisted of mostly Republican activists who had, if not direct/illegal ties to the Bush campaign, at least a wink-wink-nudge-nudge ties.
The fact is that you wing-nuts can't stand it when someone who served in Vietnam criticizes the Bushes, but let's look at the record.
Bushies say: Manchurian Candidate - fathered a child with a black woman.
Bushies say: He's unpatriotic because he thinks Homeland Security workers ought to be able to unionize.
Bushies say: Didn't earn the medals. Wounds not sufficiently serious. Vietnam vets had their "feelings hurt" when Kerry testified as to the war crimes that soldiers were ordered to do.
Yeah I want a guy that cant make up his mind and lies about is service duty. And you cant say Bush lied because its all there. Even though they try and make something out of his record theres nothing there to bash him about. :) I love liberal media.
Nothing to bash Bush about? Let's look at the President's "record"
His business record is no better.
And as to the "liberal media", they have given Bush a free ride for a long time now. They held Al Gore to far tougher standards of "truth" then they've ever held Bush, and they're doing it again to Kerry. If you want to continue your delusional right-wing thinking, go ahead, but don't go crying "liberal media" whenever they bring up inconvenient facts which challenge your pre-conceived notions.
bad advice (Score:4, Insightful)
People vote with their wallets. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares why Indians and Chinese are willing to work for less? It doesn't matter. If their governments are willing to force their people to sell their labor for cheap (an assumption I disagree with, but let's run with it anyway) that's just good for us.
Americans want their own jobs protected, but then turn around and buy the imported item that's cheaper. And that *IS* a free market - Americans are deciding that saving a few bucks is better than employing other americans, and THAT is why jobs are outsourced.
Because Americans WANT jobs to be outsourced.
Just not theirs. But they lose that vote.
Re:People vote with their wallets. (Score:4, Interesting)
That is something the medieval history major that runs HP and others like her forget to take in account.
Kind of like the only people who are supporting all the illegal immigration are those that live in gated communities and/or have their own compounds and private security.
I also suggest you look up and see who the insurer of last resort is for all these overseas factories. HINT. it is the US Taxpayer.
Yuan is fixed to the dollarr (Score:4, Informative)
If an equal number of yuan and dollars had the same buying power, things would be a little different.
there are other factors as well, but the exchange rates do make a signifigant difference
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure I understand how the influx of cheap labor would be any worse for the U.S. than if China truly did have a free market.
If China had a truly free market, and your assumption about this improving the Chineses domestic job market was true, then who would all these workers be employed by? Chinese companies. And who would these Chinese companies compete with? American companies, which would have a competitive disadvantage since American workers are more expensive than Chinese workers, thanks to high living costs.
The American companies would then lose business, forcing them to trim their workforces.
The problem here is that if we try to compete with other countries in the unskilled or lesser-skilled labor markets, we will lose every time. In the long run, there are only a few things that we can do if we want to keep our jobs:
a. Become exceptionally skilled workers (not difficult, considering the exceptional quality of educational institutions in the U.S.)
b. Keep on moving into new markets as the old markets become dominated by companies that rely on cheap labor.
c. Do something about the high living costs in the U.S., which are making this country extremely hostile to the working classes.
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:4, Insightful)
If you accept that corporations set the prices of all the things that fall under "cost of living," then you must accept that consumers will willingly pay any price for those items, something which we know isn't true. Think about it, when gasoline prices start skyrocketing, some people started buying smaller cars and driving less.
The cost of living is set by both firms and consumers at a price index that both sides are agreeable to. It's often called "supply and demand."
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Interesting)
What happens? The overall wealth of the entire world rises, probably markedly. The system as a whole benefits from free market economics. Let me repeat that: the system AS A WHOLE benefits from free market economics.
This DOES NOT MEAN that EVERY NATION benefits from this situation. All free market economics guarrantees is that the world, taken as a whole, will be wealthier than it was before. Some areas will see their wealth increase by vast amounts; others by lesser amounts; and some areas will actually see their wealth DECLINE. But when you add them all up, the world - as a whole - will be wealthier.
The free market doesn't distribute wealth fairly nor equally, nor should it. That's what socialism - the antithesis of the free market - tries to do. It could very well be that even if every nation in the world were as close to the free market as possible, that the U.S. could end up being one of the losers while many other nations wind up being the big winners.
The free market doesn't guarrantee an increase in wealth for every part of the system, just for the system overall. Smith himself mentioned this but saw it as a good thing, standing apart from national interests to give a (mostly) objective rendering of his theory.
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country. But seeing as how I'm an American and I don't have any hankering at all to be a Nigerian, my primary focus is on increasing the wealth of AMERICA. It would be incredibly stupid of me to sacrifice my own rational self-interest - along with that of my countrymen, my relatives, my friends, and my children - to argue for free-market economics in a situation where America stands to lose and others stand to gain. Deliberately depriving yourself, your friends, your family, and your chilren of opportunities, shipping them overseas for others to take advantage of, isn't 'altruism'; it's foolishness bordering on the criminal (or the insane).
Oddly enough, both the Democrats and the Republicans argue that this is a good thing and that we do all this in accordance with the 'free market' (again, despite the fact that America isn't much of a free market). That selling out American workers is fine and dandy because it upholds the mantra 'free market', and that in some magical fashion all the jobs lost will eventually be made up through the invention of new technologies. In the interim between the old economy and the imaginary new one which has yet to come, we lose more than 2 million jobs, 1.1 million of which are replaced by jobs which pay nearly $9,000 less than the ones which were lost. Unemployment is still higher than it's been since the recession year of 1983, but so many workers have been off the unemployment rolls for so long the government no longer counts them - and therefore, in some bizarre bureaucratic fashion, they're no longer unemployed.
(How all of this innovation is supposed to occur under the new IP laws is beyond me, but that's a discussion for the next RIAA/MPAA/Disney news item.)
As the parent poster mentioned, the situation becomes even worse when you embark on free market economics with nations that themselves don't practice anything like the free market. Massive government intervention along with vastly lower standards of living almost assures movement of jobs from the free market (or pseudo-free market) nations to the non-free market nations. Exactly what we're seeing right now, actually.
The only way to stem the tide is
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:4, Insightful)
As an American I'm concerned with the welfare of myself and my fellow citizens first and foremost, and this only makes sense. If I were more concerned about Nigeria, it would behoove me to move to Nigeria and become a citizen of that country, since I'm putting Nigerian interests before that of any other country.
Frankly: I find this logic (common though it is in the US) to be totally bizarre. It makes no fscking sense. Try this analogy: "I understand that having free trade across county boundaries is good for the well-being of the entire State and even the country but as a resident of King County I put my needs above those of the rest of Washington State and those of America. If I was primiarily interested in the needs of (say) Orange County then I would move there. The job of King county's government if first and foremost to provide for King county residents: the rest of the country be damned."
There are many levels of government and at this moment at the beginning of the 21st century we've somehow deluded ourselves into theinking that the nation is somehow special. During the early 20th century it was otherwise: most people thought that their allegiance belonged to their empire (which was larger than their nation). And before the civil war, many Americans had primary allegiance to their State, not to the federation.
Each of these views was short-sighted and temporary. As yours is. Your allegiance logically belongs either to a community small enough that you can participate and influence it (i.e. municipality) or to all of humanity (based solely on the Golden rule).
In fact, the *sole reason the government of the United States exists* is to provide for the American people.
That is incorrect. The United States government exists to exercise the collective will of the American people. Sometimes this will is to "do good" elsewhere. It looks, for example, as if Americans will put George Bush back into power based on his (shaky!) argument that he is going to democratize the Middle East. It is also the case that many Americans criticize the Bush administration for doing nothing in Darfur. According to your theory, there is nothing to criticize because it would be a breach of responsibility for him to do anything. Ditto, I suppose, for the intervention in Europe in WW II.
I am unashamed about the fact that my allegiance is first and foremost to humanity. My local national government has dual roles as the local provider of laws and a tool I use to advance the needs of human beings everywhere. When I look across a border and see human beings on the other side I don't see their needs as being less important than mine by virtue of the fact that they are on the other side of the border and neither should my government. That said: for practical reasons the government must distinguish between citizens and non-citizens and treat citizens differently.
Re:Free Market and wealth (Score:4, Informative)
Hmm, is it really? Free market capitalism is based on the sole drive to maximise Profit for the company and to address all other things only as a mean to reach this goal. Last time I checked, the goal to providing a good life to the unwashed masses was more of a socialist thing, not really on the agenda of free market capitlism.
The people owning the profitable companies will then be able to lead a very happy life.
For a company to achieve the optimum performance, it may also be useful from time to time to allow one's workers to lead a happy life.
But other than that, free market capitalism achieves its highest profits, when they can leech common resources or exploit people that can't defend them.
For this reason, rules have been made in some places, to prevent this, like laws against dumping toxic waste in rivers, bans on children labour, rules about truth in advertisment, customer protection laws etc.
Companies deal with these limitations in different ways. Sometime they invested in treating plants, sometime they just pay off a corrupt water inpsector, sometime they ship the waste to somewhere else and dump there and sometime they move the plant to location with less strict rules.
But in all of this one is certain, living next to a toxic waste dump, children aged 5 sewing sneakers, people getting ripped off by untrue advertisment have a more miserable life.
If the exploitation of people and common resources gets too bad, people won't stand for it and do something about it. this could be getting paid off by the company, have new laws passed against the behaviour or - in the extreme case - civil war.
The assumption, that the welfare of the maximum people and the preservation of common resources is always the best course in a free market capitalism is not based on any hard evidence. Facts supports more the opposite view and that companies strive to achieve short term gains at the cost of smaller but sustained long term profits.
People on can stand that much abuse, and when free market capitalism exceeds that limit, the rules change.
Re:Free Market and wealth (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, corporations have a legal obligation (under US law) to look after the interest of the shareholders. Any CEO that would put the welfare of the public ahead of profits is breaking the law. (I'm reading this book [amazon.com] if you want a reference).
<sarcasm>
What we have to do is to put all our money into stocks, so that when our jobs are outsourced to other countries, we can live of the dividends. These will be very high, as the multi-national corporations will be making record profits.
By then there will be no tax on investment income and we'll be sitting pretty.
</sarcasm>
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:5, Insightful)
We keep playing the game like it's an open system, and it never was, and now we are quickly discovering the end stops.
Designing an economic model which awards wealth to those who grow, is doomed when a company, any company reaches market saturation.
The American economy no longer exists, American business is multinational, global, and not limited to our borders. It finds cheap labor and brings the saving in production back to the U.S. where American consumers rejoice at the low cost of service and goods. Sadly it's all a sham. It's as unsustainable as a constant diet of junk food. It tastes good while you're eating it, but it's slowly killing you. It's all take and no give, the dollars fly out of the country faster and faster, until the nations fundamental wealth is gone, and the citizens of the nation notice they are now the collective bag holders.
* Money that leaves never supports U.S. economy and infrastructure. * Money that leaves undermines U.S. labor, costing jobs and quality of living. * The growing gap between haves and have nots in the U.S. suggest a growing economic instability. Loss of jobs starting with manufacturing, but now quickly moving up through intellectual "white collar" professions, points to a growing joblessness with no end in sight. As the government services fail (and if you haven't been reading the paper or watching the news at 11:00, local government everywhere in this country is on the verge of collapse), the means to manage and provide basic life needs to the growing disenfranchised evaporates. The middle class vanishes. We are all reduced to the same level of living enjoyed by billions of starving people all over the world. Already 3% of our population owns 75% of the wealth, this is the greatest desparity in wealth in our history. And still the insanity accelerates. This is just the beginning ladies and gentlemen. What will you do, when your kids fresh out of college, with hundred thousand dollar college loans to pay, can't find work. What will you do, when you haven't received a raise in 4 years, and the boss says "Sorry, the work is heading to China."
I've personally spent the last 6 months looking for work, I've had my resume tuned, I have 25 years of technical experience, and I've made it clear I'll do almost anything, and I have not had a single interview. I'm not alone, I have a couple hundred friends and acquaintances who've been unemployed for between 2 and 3.5 years.
I keep hearing neocons mouthing the lines of Scrooge from a Christmas Carol... "the surplus population shold just get on with the business of dying...", or some variation of that. It's not bad yet. It may well get there. If it does, our government, is going to have a very bad time. Our society is going to have a very bad time. We need to begin addressing sustainable business practice from an economic, environmental, and ethics based context. To simply let the train go where it will is to insure a crash none of us will walk away from.
Genda
Re:Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Ali (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all for this "look out for yourself" libertarian bullshit, but make corporate charters temporary, renewable every 2 years, and that they can be dissolved with *no reason* whatsoever. Give me back the 14/28 years of copyright, only with providing an unencumbered version to LOC. The list goes on, but start with those, and I'll start considering that my lack of a job is solely my own fault.
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Bubbles, there's and ours (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:in other news... (Score:3, Funny)
Bush was right, he IS creating jobs! Too bad they aren't in the US.
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:in other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:in other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
And let's not forget plain, old-fashioned luck. The successful always like to pretend that luck had nothing to do with their success, then blame (either directly or indirectly) everyone else for their failures on lack of character.
But Lady Luck walks hand in hand with you every moment of every day of your life. Sometimes she helps you get a job, sometimes she pushes you in front of a bus; but she's always there, whether you believe in her or not.
Max
Outsourcing is an effect, not a cause (Score:5, Insightful)
What has happened is now that all of the failed companies and wacky business models are out of the market, these marginal tech workers are returning to the industries they were trained for. Yes, lots of good, highly trained programmers and analysts got caught up in the crash, because even the lamest of DotComs had to have someone to do the real work. But I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of technology jobs "lost" to outsourcing simply represents a shift of these cross-industry workers back to the areas they are trained in and a decision by US industries to pick a lower cost (and therefore, lower risk) alternative for staffing these lower end tech positions. Why pay $75k and full benefits for an informally trained web developer in the US when you can get the same skills (likely formally trained) offshore?
I'm not defending the trend, but I think that it IS fair to point out that a lot of people were working in the tech industry, far outside their areas of expertise and far ahead of their skill levels and that imbalance has simply been corrected. To call it a loss and to blame that loss on outsourcing is to ignore the incredibly rapid gains that preceeded it.
Re:Outsourcing is an effect, not a cause (Score:4, Informative)
The Dot bomb started in the spring of 2000, not 2001. It started with laying off the Y2K people. The qualified Y2K people started taking the jobs of the others and the crash began.
I, for one was laid off in June 2000, and found a new job twice that summer. The second one is the one I still have now.
no fscking shit! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:no fscking shit! (Score:3, Funny)
Politics? (Score:4, Insightful)
nice (Score:4, Insightful)
CB
Re:nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh? So, what, 75 hour weeks instead of 70? I'm always glad to see "paying job" described as "gravy train."
certificates and degrees no longer hold the water they once did.
Best way to lower labor costs: raise qualifications to "unreachable" and ignore educational achievements. Now that's the way to build progress! Half of L.A. is illiterate (study released last week), and the other half is saying "so you graduated from college? Big fucking deal. Who gives a shit?"
find a skill, hone it, and hunker down, cause it's going to get windy before there's another round of jobs with the 'wow' factor.
I'd be impressed if there's another round of jobs at all. Skills are meaningless. Nothing is valuable to employers except the money grab.
Re:nice (Score:4, Insightful)
There must be decent work in the US somewhere, and if it's not in IT then maybe too many people did IT degrees. That's not the government's fault, and even if it is they're not going to do anything about it. So either move overseas, re-educate, or find a way to differentiate yourself. Be the person who makes sure projects get done on time, even if you have to ask for help sometimes.
Long hours != more productive (Score:5, Interesting)
That may be true, but there's also a much simpler explanation: saying that someone working a 70 hour week will be twice as productive as someone working a 35 hour week is simply wrong. In fact, as good management has long known, most people's performance degrades fairly dramatically not much beyond those 35 hours; you can do it for a short period in a crunch, but it's not sustainable. Moreover, the diminishing returns start to become negative after a while: someone who works 70 hour weeks regularly is likely to make so many mistakes that they become counterproductive, actually eating into other people's time to fix the problems they create.
Can anybody remember the study (from Switzerland, I think) where a company dropped its work hours to 9-3 Monday-Friday and insisted its employees did not work significant overtime? Their staff were more focussed because they had limited time to get the work done, and because of the earlier finish they weren't always worrying about collecting kids from school, getting to the shops/doctor/dentist/post office, etc. Their productivity rocketed. I saw several reports about this, around the time of the tech boom when many companies were pushing for ever longer work hours, but I can't find a citation now...
Bingo. (Score:4, Insightful)
You can either be worth more to an employer than what they pay you, or you can start your own company and pay people less than what they are worth to you. Your call, but that's what makes the employment universe go around.
BTW, I'd advocate the second option, but most people are too lazy for that.
Re:nice (Score:3, Funny)
LOST CARRIER
Re:nice (Score:4, Informative)
Hold on a minute. (Score:4, Funny)
BTW, Here [bugmenot.com] is a login for the Post.
And before anyone get's pissy, may I remind people that flamers are joyless, humorless, SOB's. Don't trust a person who can't laugh.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a Bush supporter. I did not vote for him last time and will not vote for him this time. But that doesn't mean I have to kick him in the nads for something he didn't do. The tech industry crash might not have been caused by Clinton, but it started on his watch. Considering that it was a market correction, I can't blame Bush for not getting us back into an artifical bubble of paper millionaires.
Our IT jobs are going overseas because we spent most of the Clinton years wallowing in six-digit salaries and stock options while the average worker didn't have half our income. We priced ourselves out of the market. We demanded pool tables and laundramats in our workplace, and we got them. I'm not talking about the top people in the field, I'm talking about Joe-Schoe the code monkey. Starting salaries were in the $50-75 range.
I'm not blaming Bush, I'm blaming the collective "we".
You can still blame Bush a bit. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll agree with you on this point. But there are smart things you can do, as president, to minimize the impact of such a crash, and then there [aflcio.org] are [findarticles.com] dumb [usatoday.com] things [kniff.de] you [cato.org] can [cnn.com] do [bushtax.com] that will only exacerbate the situation.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:5, Informative)
First, I didn't say it was Clinton's fault, I only said it happened during his tenure. Second, the effects of a market correction do not occur instantly, so you cannot expect all economic influences from the time of Clinton to cease the day Bush took office.
I know the chic thing to do is to blame Bush for the bad economy, but from where I stand the economy isn't doing too badly. If the voters follow their pocket books, he'll win the election. The programming side of the tech sector got hit hard, and that probably affets you, but otherwise we're looking at a pretty good unemployment rate.
To put a personal spin on things, I don't have any friends, relatives or neighbors that are unemployed. A coworker whose contract ran out last month has already found a new permanant non-contractor job at a higher salary.
Thanks to Bush we no longer have to put up with booming markets, pool tables and laundramats in the workplace or those silly 75K salaries.
If you were like me, you milked those years for all they were worth. But don't imagine for a minute that it represented the normal state of a healthy economy. Complaining about Bush not restoring a speculative market bubble is rather silly.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)
But yeah, good job Bush, after losing a bunch of jobs you got some of them back.
The problem with the jobs he's got back is that they are of lower quality than the jobs lost. So, an overall net loss and the recent job gains are in sectors such as burger flipping.
Sources please.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sources please.. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sources please.. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.poe-news.com/stories.php?poeurlid=3208
Are we to equate a worker on an assembly line to the punk messsing up my order at McDonalds? Saying fast food workers are part of the manufacturing sector is a clever way to say that America is gaining manufacturing jobs. Too bad it's like Enron filing debits to collectors as assets.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop spending $100s of billions on counterproductive wars, farm subsidies, ineffective weapons systems, etc. Oh, and stop pretending that with as much as we spend on Medicare and Medicaid, we don't already have socialized medicine; we just have a form that provides a disincentive for the LMC to work, while imposing an HR burden on every business.
Presidents can't fix the economy. But they can sure screw it up...
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)
All of those thing provide jobs. So what is your point again?
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm curious how many people who are quick to blame the White House for economic woes know who their congresscritters are, let alone who they're running against this November.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of giving massive amounts of money to wasteful defense contractors & other government cronies (or having it lost in the rats-mazes of bureaucracy), use all that money to hire LOTS of front-line workers. E.g., teachers, firemen, policemen, social workers, forest rangers, etc. (Note: front-line != bureaucrats.)
Not only does this directly give people jobs, but all of those types of jobs contribute directly to the infrastructure (which makes the general society have a better standard of living & creates opportunities for other non-government related jobs), plus all of those people are going to be _spending_ most of their money, which creates demand for goods & services, which causes companies to want to gear up to satisfy the demand, etc). It also increases opportunities for people in the low economic classes to save their way into more stable existences.
I like to think of it as trickle-UP economics, like nutrition being injected at the bottom of the food chain (which benefits _everything_ in the food chain), instead of "trickle-down" economics which encourages class stratification.
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:4, Insightful)
Now given that, had the current President acted responsibly after 9/11, we could have been pooling the resources of the world to fight terrorism and not needed to waste so much money doing it alone. Any fool could have "led" the American people to bounce back after 9/11. But only a fool could have turned a world of countries united to fight terrorism into a coalition of the "willing" (aka bribed). Had the President not alienated the US from most of its allies and nearly all of the rest of the world, we could be spending a fraction of what we are now on defence, triming the budget, and actually giving the working class a real tax break. [findarticles.com]
Or fix social security. Bush on social security, Muskegon, Michigan, Sep. 13, 2004: "And baby boomers are fine. We're in good shape, you know. The people who aren't in good shape are the children and grandchildren in this country..."
I agree with you about trickle up, but also believe that the debt we are leaving our children and grandchildren will criple this nation. Paying interest to debts gives our tax money (that could be paying for the front-line workers) to rich domestic and foriegn investors.
It's the Policy, Stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've lived in third-world countries enough to know that the very poor are kept in poverty by the very wealthy -- who hold, not just most of the wealth, but most of the power. What my armchair-economist opinion says is:
1) Robin Hood would have made a good Democrat and a great economist. To tax the rich to support the commoners (Welfare, Healthcare, decent Unemployment benefits, Social Security, etc.) forces money to "flow".
2) When one cuts taxes for the rich it cuts off the flow of money -- plain and simple.
3) "Trickle-down Economics" is pure myth. There is no such thing. It's a nice idea and, like a lot of get-rich-quick schemes, is based on a few grains of truth.
Wealthy people *hoard* money. It's in their nature to do so. That's why they're wealthy. You have to incent them to invest their money. Taxes make for a great incentive to "shelter" one's money -- through investments. Use it or lose it! Ever wonder why VC's are being so stingie these days? Their money is much safer, today, from taxation. The most important factor in converting a stagnant economy (as found in so many 3rd world countries) into a bristling one is simply to get one's currency to flow!
It's easy to think a recession couldn't just happen so quickly; Easy to think the resession was "inherited". But economic policies have very real, fast-acting consequences. If you don't believe it, then you haven't watched the reactions on Wall Street on the days when Allen Greenspan speaks.
Well, I guess the earlier poster was right. This *does* belong in politics.slashdot.org
Re:Hold on a minute. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what results you want: telling companies to hire people they neither need nor want? The private sector created the problem, and the private sector has fixed it. The tech industry right now is very healthy, and doing ver
How about the industry itself? (Score:5, Insightful)
21st Century Workers Need Not Apply (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:21st Century Workers Need Not Apply (Score:5, Insightful)
how about new grads? (Score:3, Insightful)
CB*(_)&
Re:how about new grads? (Score:5, Insightful)
Join the military. Frankly, that's where the
The
And to be honest, with the discussions flying around about reinstating the draft, it's a great way to avoid being drafted
same thing happened to advanced manufacturing jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Read here:
>>>>>>>>
commentator Eamonn Fingleton speaks bluntly about what he sees as the frittering away of the United States' manufacturing base and what he regards as the consequent stagnation of the American standard of living. For those who believe in the superiority of the current U.S. postindustrial strategy, a reading of the OECD Economic Yearbook makes for a distinctly chastening study. As Fingleton puts it: "The United States trails no fewer than eight other nations, all of which devote a larger share of their labor force to manufacturing."
Fingleton, who distinguishes between high-end and low-end jobs, insists that the former, advanced manufacturing, must be reconstituted if the United States wants to remain a superpower. And what are these eroded industries? Semiconductor materials, ceramic packaging for semiconductors, charge-coupled devices (CCD), industrial robotics, numerically controlled machine tools, laser diodes and carbon fibers, to name only a few.
Where did the manufacturing of these items go? In most cases, Japan now dominates the more advanced areas of these industries, says Fingleton, who lives in Tokyo. Moreover, he argues, by dint of superior know-how and large capital investments Japan now enjoys a global lock on key manufacturing processes.
Fingleton recalls an America where men and women went to work and made the nation great, the old-fashioned way, by producing products people wanted and needed. And he juxtaposes the loss of advanced manufacturing jobs in this country with what he regards as the overvalued dollar, America's compulsion to borrow huge sums of money to fund its deficits and an illusionary U.S. prosperity based on unsustainable debt. For now Japan and China, both running huge trade surpluses, pay the United States' bills, he says. Where does this leave the American worker? He puts the answer simply: Out of work!
It is not true that Japan is in dire economic straits, Fingleton maintains. In a recent article in the London journal Prospect entitled "Japan's Fake Funk," he writes: "The Western consensus is that Japan is a basket case: It is not. That is a misreading by the West."
Meanwhile, he says, ill-conceived U.S. policies have failed to protect home-based American industries, leading to the transference of the most advanced technologies known to mankind. Fingleton says flatly that Japan has built up its industrial base at the expense of the United States, and that China now is chomping at the bit to do the same.
Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.
Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.
much more here: http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htmEconomic
Re:same thing happened to advanced manufacturing j (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, I've been toying with the idea of a nationwide tech co-operative to provide consulting services, provide tech services, etc... A large enough co-op with the right people joining in and spearheading it, could seriously compete. No corporate bullshitters or middle managers skimming off the top. And we could outsource things ourselves when we can't beat an outsourcing company.
While I can envision it, the idea is bigger than me. I just wish I knew who to talk to about this. I have 5 grand of my own money I'll put up to get started and I'm willing to bet, provided a real plan to make money exists, I could find 100s if not 1000s of others with their own money(maybe not as much as I have) to put up. It's either we go this route, or go unions, or else we're all going to continue to get nailed to the door.
More than just outsourcing (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, there were so many idiots in technology by 2000. Sysadmins that didn't know the dif between Cat3 from Cat5, programmers that didn't know what a for-loop were getting 100k Java jobs, etc, etc, etc. I don't know if there were 400k, but I do think that a lot of people lost jobs that didn't deserve to have them. Also, I have had a lot of very smart friends out of work that did.
Even in 2000 and 2001 there were still tech areas hiring. I really wonder how many of those 400k were jobs that should never have existed in the first place?
Just some random thoughts on the subject.
400k sounds low (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen estimates much higher.
Read some of Paul Craig Roberts columns on http://www.vdare.com/roberts/all_columns.htm. I agree with his assertion that we're exporting jobs that provide ladders of upward mobility and importing poor people. He makes the case that this is not free trade but global labor arbitrage.
To be corrected by coming Indo-Paki nuclear war... (Score:5, Funny)
It's a pleasant day to take a break: step outside, get some vitamin D and experience the full power of Shiva's spear.
Any project managers out there? (Score:4, Interesting)
And is there a greater demand now for project management jobs?
On a similar note, it seems to me that the number of consulting and professional services jobs have increased as of late. However, many of these jobs do not pay salaries comparable to programming jobs during the late 90's. I could be wrong about that though.
Re:Any project managers out there? (Score:4, Funny)
And this is Why (Score:5, Interesting)
Programmers are inherently system oriented. When there's a problem to fix, they want to build something that solves it, or enables someone else to solve it. The old saw about the programmer who will spend hours to write a script that could do something (perhaps tedious) that he could have done in 30 minutes is what's at work here.
Most of the programmers I know also have no problem telling a machine to do something -- or even talking about how an organization should run. But when it comes down to telling someone what they should be doing and when it needs to be done by -- that's a whole different thing.
Most programmers I know like immersive tasks... something you can sit down, focus on, mull over, work deeply in, and then deliver. PM is about turning lots of shallow details fast. There's a lot more task switching (which is why if you try to do some of the work yourself, you're doomed to failure, because immersive tasks and having a large volume of shallow details to take care of don't mix at all).
These are problems I share, and it didn't take me long to realize what they were, but it took me months to get over them (and also, to get the organization to stop thinking of me as a person they could *also* give web dev work to as well). I've gotten much better, but it was a hard haul the first six months, and sometimes I'd rather be back making cool things rather than dealing with this.
But: the good thing is that most programmers are skilled at breaking a problem down into smaller, more easily solvable problems. Their systems thinking can be a great strength if the project allows enough slack to let them set the system. They're introspective enough they can self-improve. And if they've got deft enough social skills to get people to do what they're supposed to, they can become quite succesful.
Grr... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry if anyone here disagrees (and I'm sure there are those who will) but I really think you need to look at the big picture and I hope you'll agree that it's for the best for all of us, despite the temporary problems it's causing for many of you.
1 in 5 jobs gone? (Score:3, Interesting)
If anything, new college students should be told how many people in the 90's picked computer science as a major because some magazine which ranked salaries said CS was #1 in pay and projected growth. Better to study something which is interesting than to go for the money. I knew a guy in college who was an english student. Everyone asked him, what are you going to do with an english degree. He shruged his shoulders, and said "dunno, but i like reading". After college, he got a masters, then found a teaching job. He makes more than some of the CS people I knew, and he gets the summer off. The kicker is he is doing what he likes. And he was supposed to be the poor one.
Re:1 in 5 jobs gone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. There has to be something better than studying the cultural basis for medicine, law, science, entertainment, literature, engineering, philosophy and art.
Losses compared to size of bubble? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't be a girlie-man economist. (Score:3, Insightful)
Two consecutive quarters of negative growth consitute a recession. That's what the term means, and so there isn't anthing inaccurate about saying that the small recession we had ended years ago, even if the job situation is sucky right now
As for the current lack of jobs and the patchy situation of a lot of americans, you can take it one of two ways.
I choose the second option. Make fun of him all you want, but Schwarzenegger said it best - don't be a girlie-man economist. It used to be that germany and japan were going to crush our economies and that all americans were poor. Then, in the early 90's, many americans bought into the idea that NAFTA was a terrible peice of legislation that was going to send all of our jobs to mexico. There's never going to be a shortage of pessimists and naysayers claiming that now things are different - now, this time our economy is in trouble unless the government can do something to stop it.
They're wrong. They've always been wrong, and they will always be wrong. Don't buy into the pessimism and anti-trade rhetoric out there. If you've lost your job due to oursourcing, of course that sucks. But no one ever accomplished anything by being pessimistic and complaining about their situation. Get out there and look for a job - any job. Don't tell yourself that you can't find one or that there aren't any - negative predictions are self-fulfilling. It's far better to be foolishly optimistic about your situation than needlessly pessimisstic.
The US economy is an incredbily powerfull beast that has brought incredible wealth to millions of people. It's not going to stop working over night. Current trade situations are a result of an economy out of equilbrium. It'll adjust itself, and then we'll be back on track and new jobs will be created and we'll all be wealthier- you'll see.
Re:Don't be a girlie-man economist. (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, bad logic. You've provided a false dichotomy. Choose the second option all you want, it doesn't mean it's based in reality. NAFTA did send a lot of jobs outside the US, go ask anyone who lost a manufacturing job to Mexico. Outsourcing is a bad deal. It's sending middle class jobs and a strong tax base overseas for what? What has come back? Where are the new industries building on top of this and creating jobs? Why would you even start that industry in this country instead of India?
Your response to someone telling you that you got screwed in a business deal is "don't be a girlie-man economist"? I call it being stupid, but don't take it from me: I Am an Economic Girlie-Man [Motley Fool Take] September 1, 2004 [fool.com]
Free Trade only works among equals. We are not equal to any other country or economy in the world. Free Trade is a one way street for this country where we lose. Fair Trade is the only way we can grow and ensure that the promises of globalization are realized.
The current situation is being buoyed by the floating of our currency by China and other developing countries so that they can artifically lower their currency and keep the growth coming at our expense, literally.
You're solution is to smile while we trade good middle class jobs and quality American products for cheap Chinese crap at Wal-Mart and non-service from India. Excuse me if I hold higher asperations for my country.
Re:Don't believe this stuff (Score:3, Informative)
Disagree. You're looking at wages from a nomina
Re:Don't believe this stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
The gap does matter, because when a significant proportion of the population becomes richer and the rest doesn't or not as much, large items such as houses, access to private health care, private education and even cars become a lot more expensive and you have the making of deprived neighborhoods where everyone is a tenant in a shabby house, and then crime flourishes.
In the US there is a lot of crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of people under a federally declared line of poverty who live a short and dangerous life that a Roman Emperor certainly wouldn't have chosen for himself.
This is also true of most countries in the west. In Australia where I live Aboriginal people on average live 20 years less than non-aboriginal, even in the middle of Sydney. A lot of it is due to poor sanitation, lack of education and general poverty.
There are poor people in the US and elsewhere who are not given a fair deal in life because they happen to have been born in a poor neighborhood and I can tell you that it does in fact suck.
I'm pretty damn certain you wouldn't want to take their place next to the beautiful cell phone they have so please stop patronizing, you are insulting a lot of people.
So how poor were YOU (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't tell me the poor have it so bad and they are stuck. I worked my way out, through education and a whole damn bunch of HARD WORK. Anyone can do it, if they choose to do so... I did have one advantage, I had a great family that really helped me learn and motivate me (though my parents were divorced before I went to college).
I firmly believe the "GAP" is there in part because the people are TOLD there is a gap. If you cease to believe in a gap you can do whatever you like instead of being trapped in your own situation. Sure there is a real advantage for people that have money - but those kids generally squander that opportunity anyway and leave very large holes for those willing to try outpacing them.
The message that being poor is an insurmountable barrier is a terrible reinforcement for the populace at large. It's hard to pull yourself up when you're constantly told it's too hard to even try. If something sucks, that should motivate you to work all the harder to escape it, not force you to live with it forever and just endure it because no-one else will help pull you out. A few summers working grounds maintenance at a golf course taught me that I'd rather be working with computers for a living than working grueling hours outdoors for minimum wage, and I made that happen myself.
And aren't you just buying the media feed about what it's like to live in the US? I was living far under that "line of poverty" but managed to escape without turning to a life of crime or peddling crack.
Re:Don't believe this stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
It matters, it matters a lot. Concentration of wealth is the single greatest threat to our democracy and the American Revolution. Go read the Federalist Papers. This "class-warfare claptrap", as you call it, is real. Perhaps Marie Antionette or the Bolsheviks could give you a little refresher. Your example is crap to boot. The current recovery has seen corporate profits grow by 62.2% while private wages have fallen by
There is a point, which can't be defined, where the concentration of wealth becomes so great that the probability that the wealthy will wind up in a losing deal falls to such a point that there is no way to get ahead. New growth is dominated by the wealthy (see the cronyism of 90's IPO's), those without wealth have no choice but to scramble for scraps from the table. This results in defacto tyranny and lack of opportunity. It results in stagnation of innovation, just like when property was controlled entirely by royalty and the church in Europe.
The purpose of the Revolution was to ensure that no citizen is forced to live the life of a slave (obvious exception for slaves, who weren't citizens). When you don't have choices, you are a slave. It doesn't matter if that lack of choice comes from government or private means.
Some men can work 40 hours a week and easily support himself, but there are millions of Americans that can't. The number of people living below the poverty line has increased by 1.4 million in the last year alone. Your argument is like saying the serfs were better off because their lords protected them from roving gangs of bandits. The facts disagree with your estimate of the welfare of the poor in this country.
Go look up Noah Webster, he wrote on the side of the Federalists and either Madison or Hamilton's request (can't remember which). Your arguements are nothing more than straw men. Go read some primary sources, look at the whole picture and apply some logic.
Wealth is real power. If the scales become tipped too far, our entire country will fail. The parent isn't insightful, it's naive. It's a modern version of "If they have no bread, let them eat cake!".
Let's Unionize! (Score:3, Funny)
What? You want to send my job to India? How about I strike for higher wages instead?
What a misleading summary (Score:3, Insightful)
And is it really any surprise that after the bubble burst jobs were lost? Here's a reality check: those jobs were based on wishful thinking. They had no foundation. No offense to those who lost a job in the downturn, but I've met a number of so-called IT workers who were barely HS grads with an MCSE during the boom.
Color me not-terribly-surprised.
Not the whole story (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other hand, the demand for sys admins, security specialists, DBAs, etc seems to be increasing. Pay rates vary all over the board depending on experience and particular skills (and how cheap the company is), but this is nothing new.
Locally I've seen a big turn up in demand starting about six to nine months ago. And that's not counting the huge demand that exists for anyone with a computer background that also has (or had and can renew) a security clearance. (And you know those jobs won't be outsourced.)
And (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet nearly every business uses computers. The entire economy is practically based on computers, yet there are fewer than 800,000 software engineers? Glad to see all that time (and overtime, and weekends, and vacations) spent learning as much as possible about technology was completely wasted.
Nope, no free market here either.
this same bit of news was on TV just now- (Score:4, Informative)
it's down 48%.
Thanks, George. You useless freakin Dork.
RS
Is it a coincidence? (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, since some are doing very well, the failure of the other must be their own fault.
Yup, nothing to see here, move along.
Get Out Now! (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't too complicated: the tech market had a huge boom in the late 90s, it crashed in 2000-2001, and companies cut way back in personnel to where they should have been in the first place, and many people got displaced. The simple fact of the matter is that there were just too many workers, and those jobs are not coming back, because the market cannot support them, and therefore should not support them.
Re:Get Out Now! (Score:3, Insightful)
All the people at my company who were important and doing work in 1996 were there in 2000 and still there in 2004. People who have real skills are in great demand, especially now.
People without skills are only in demand when they're trying to get investors and want to say they have 100 "Certified" engineers.
Re:Get Out Now! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the WELL EDUCATED workers that are suffering most in this I.T. backlash, not the lower end guys. The people being hired are the guys from the community colleges that are sharply focused... they might be able to code Java well but that's all they can do. They are paid on that level, too... they (that is the H.R. heads) don't want to pay the people with the real knowledge, those that can learn on the fly because they have all the background to do it. It would cost too much.
Wheat/Chaff? (Score:4, Insightful)
Times may be bad now but I think the late 90s "golden age" of companies trying desperately to fill seats with warm bodies is long gone. The free ride is over, and if you're not noticeably great at your job, your employer will eventually realize that there are a lot of people out there who can do it just as well, a great many of whom are willing to do it for less.
There are a lot of world-class techs in India and other outsourcing hotspots, and even factoring in the costs and risks some companies report when outsourcing, it's more and more of a numbers game every month.
Oversupply (Score:3, Interesting)
Fake IT (Score:4, Insightful)
Yep. I'm a fake IT guy. (Score:5, Insightful)
And all this time I though it might have had something to do with my resume sucks because it doesn't look like an HR wet dream. Or maybe something to do with age bias, I'm older than 20. Or maybe that companies are reluctant to hire even when they're severely understaffed. You figure something is up there when you seen the same job posted for over a year.
Look, all the dotcommers who where cabdrivers and pizza delivery guys have long gone back to their old jobs. They have previous experience that allows them to do that. Have you ever tried to break into another trade when all you have is programming experience? I have news for you. You are considered totally unskilled and your competition for the jobs that take no skills are the dregs of the workforce and they are willing to work for a lot less than you are or even can. Ever try to live on sub minimun under the table wages?
There's some kind of psychological factor here that kicks in when bad things happen to other people, that people use to convince themselves it won't happen to them because the people it did happen to somehow deserved it or brought it upon themselves. Nope. It's pure luck. You either got laid off or did not get laid off. Getting a job again seems to be pure luck (though personal connections or having a HR wet dreame resume seems to help). Think otherwise? Go ahead and quit your job and find out.
I'm OK with that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, I am. You see, for years I've been putting up with "I'm a techie, too!" people. The kind that have no idea what they're doing.
They're people who go to a two-week certification class. They're people who take a 6-month class. They're people who go to ITT for two years. They're people who learned everything on their own. And they're even people with four-year degrees.
For every 100 people that say "Yeah, I work with computers, too!", I'm lucky if I meet three or four that actually have a clue, and (here's the important part) actually have any marketable skills.
Yes, they're the ones that whine and moan that "the market is flooded", "you can't get a job in (insert state name)", "it's all these people willing to work for nothing", or "the economy is so horrible."
I know a lot of people who make their living with computers. And while "the economy was bad", I can honestly say that the job difficulties they faced were inversely proportional to their expertise. The better they really were, the less trouble they had.
When we put an ad in the paper for a programmer who (a) has used Perl in a CGI environment, (b) has some knowledge of SQL, and (c) has some knowledge of HTML, you'd be amazed at how many applicants we get - literally, hundreds. And again, literally, without any exageration, over 85% of the applicants do not meet those requirements in any way, shape, or form. We're lucky if we get three or four people out of 150 applicants that can really say that they're proficient in those three areas - and to me, that's not asking much at all.
The sad fact is that the tech job market was massively, grossly over-inflated during the "dot-com craze", and is now back at a more reasonable level. Yes, I know, that makes it tough for all of the "But I want to be a programmer, too!" people, but that's just fine. They've been making it tough on the rest of us for quite some time.
steve
It's down ... from an unnatural high (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about how many people you looked to in the late 90s, early 2000's and thought "how have you managed to stay employed?!".
Part of the contracting phase of the business cycle involves the shake-out of the inefficient firms from the market. Those are the firms that waited for the early-adopters to get the results of their litmus test of the market, and upon seeing positive results, entered the market and tried to capitalize on their status as late early-adopters. When their particular market turns south, the early-adopters of technologies remain (mostly because they really believe in their technology) while the late early-adopters are shaken out (by the lack of demand for product) and move on to another field. This is normal!
I view the decrease of tech jobs in a positive light. I know construction workers, electricians, and even day care specialists that went into the computer industry in the last 7 or so years. They made some cash, didn't really bring much value (because they lacked expertise), and now that the market is harder, they're going back to their old jobs. This is good! What you want is a computer industry with highly skilled workers. You don't want a computer industry where every person in the US is a candidate.
Yes, jobs have decreased 18.8% since 2001. But if the job count was 2000% higher than what the market could support, 18.8% doesn't seem so large anymore.
On a side note - look what happened to NASA in the past 40 years. NASA used to be a place where only the best-of-the-best were employed (back in the 60s). Very few people could go work for NASA, and terms like "rocket science" were used as a form of respect. Nowadays, NASA is a cross-section of the US population, unmotivated, bloated, and over-weight. NASA is stupid these days, and can be looked at as a laughing stock. Why? Because NASA opened their doors to everyone (not just the elite) and the influx of stupidity forever dumbened the culture. Now we have shuttles that fall out of the sky, satellites that burn up on entry into orbit due to metric to english conversion, and 3 years worth of science "wobbling" and "tumbling" it's way back to Utah.
Do you want the computer industry to become what NASA has become?
-c
Re:Thank you, outsourcing (Score:4, Insightful)
Cutting 20% seems like a small number to me. And I don't blame it on outsourcing. Sure, there is an outsourcing problem, but the 20% reductions isn't as big of a factor as some make it out to be. I've been part of an outsourcing project, and it's a completely ugly proposition. Yes, there's some programming and lower level stuff, but it's stuff that we either couldn't find in the US, or stuff that no one else wanted to do. We contracted out help desk stuff to India, and it failed miserably. The language barrier was more trouble than upper management believed.
I firmly believe that most companies trimmed a lot of excess fat, and the rest of lost jobs are from dotcoms that simply were bound to fail. End of story.
Re:Thank you, outsourcing (Score:3, Interesting)
You may, but I don't. I know the company I did support for for over seven years has outsourced almost all support. From what I can tell, most of the techs laid off still haven't found work in over 18 months. Back before the mania for oursourcing, we couldn't hire techs fast enough to keep up with demand, so at least some of the dot-bomb refugees ended
Re:And if bush stays in office it will get worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Here here. There was a great chart recently (in the New York Times I think) that showed how the money we 've spent in Iraq could be better spent here on home... on things like better border security, more cops on the street, etc. Very sobering.
Bush has completely screwed up in the war on terror. He left things unfinished in Afghanistan, Bin Ladin is still at large, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, increasing violence in Iraq, rising anti-American sentiment throughout the world, and strained relations with our allies. The Bush administration keeps beating the drum about what a steady and determined leader he is... but is anyone paying attention to where he is leading us?
In Bush's convention speach he went on about all the stuff he would do in the next four years. Reduce the deficit, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, protect the environment, and make us safer from terrorism... but he had the last four years to accomplish that and he did the exact opposite. He rolled back environmental protections, ran up a record deficit, adopted an energy policy drafted by Enron, and engaged in a illconceived, preemptive war that has become a recruiting poster for the terrorists. And we are suposed believe he will do better in the next four years?
Re:It is not just bush, but neoliberalism itself (Score:5, Informative)
I've been recommending people to FactCheck.org [factcheck.org] to see past all the political spin and really learn about the issues before the election. Factcheck is a non-partisan voter advocacy group that does a great job of separating fact from fiction in the midst of all the mudslinging going on.
Re:Anyone hiring in the Richmond, VA area? (Score:4, Insightful)
I use the word "most" here for a reason...there are exceptions...just look at John Carmack. But for most "self-taught" programmers, they lack necessary deep understanding.
Computer science and programming are just a different form of Math.
I used to think that Programming is just a "Trade" kind of thing, something that can be learned on your own, until I was getting close to finishing my degree, and started noticing the garbage code produced by "self-taught" SEs...it worked...but it wasn't "good."
One guy I worked with, sent me an email "what is this push() function you are using? I've never heard of this." WTF? That's a History major turned programmer for you....and he was lead developer. (but he is an extreme case)
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)