The Laid-off Techie 810
LazyBoy writes: "ZDNet News has this article entitled "The world of the laid-off techie". Yikes! Things have been bad in New Jersey for a while (telecom slump). How are they elsewhere?"
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The Laid-off Techie
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What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey
Things in London... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Things in London... (Score:5, Informative)
I've got a feeling though that over the next six months, systems are going to start going wrong or need to be updated and a lot of companies will realise that they do need some people with some skill. IT is so fundamental to the way companies operate these days - it's not going to go away any time soon. There has, in the past, been a problem with IT being regarded as an end in itself - resulting in millions of $ being spent on systems which don't actually help companies very much. This will have to change.
Re:Things in London... (Score:3, Informative)
You can either be a wage slave for EDS and their ilk or find another career.
A good deal of bread and butter contract development has gone (and more is going) to body shops in India and Eastern Europe. Try competing with those guys (C++ development at £15/hr).
I'm off to Cornwall to open a arts and crafts gallery with my wife (also a former software developer). Fuck programming for a living!
Re:Things in London... (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem is that things are probably going to get worse rather than better - big companies are still shedding, the remaining dotcoms are running out of money, there are no really BIG ideas out there for companies to focus IT investment on - I dont see a REAL recovery until mid 2003 when Im hoping 3G will pull the market back up. *sigh* In the meantime at least I get to read a lot more than I used to
Globalism. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to evoke Schadenfreude either, but what is happening to the tech industry is the same thing that happened to all other production and manufacturing jobs over the past couple decades: the value of their work decreases as productivity of systems increases, as markets saturate, as margins thin, as processes become easier to automate. In a recession, the people who are really worth their weight in gold are people who can grow demand. That's why sales organizations, and those who work at a strategic level, get compensated so far beyond the rank and file, modulo a handful of hotshot engineers. I think it's wrong, mind you, but it's pretty much inherent in the way of things.
But that link definitely moderated any sense of sympathy or pity I had for the lay-offees - and made me grateful for the fact that I'm enjoying a standard of living and security that, frankly, I don't inherently deserve.
Re:Things in London... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is the problem. The Indian programmers are not paid that much. Hence they cannot afford to train themselves and are totally reliant on the company. They also have the problem of not being able to buy the hardware that we have.
Result? Programming comes back. Even India now has competition from China. India is becoming too "expensive".
As an example of labour coming back no further than Canada. There are plenty of hightech companies in Canada? Why because labor is CHEAP! A very good programmer in Canada makes about 90K CDN, which translates to about 55K USD. This wage is good in Canada, but buys you very little outside of Canada. But that is what a Canadian programmer makes (hence why many Canadian programmers work in the US).
What does Canada offer? Great education, safe country included healthcare, etc, etc. A country like Canada makes it very hard for India to compete.
Hence my original comment is that jobs will come back, but you have to lower your expectations. BTW the "Indian threat" has been going on for a decade now!!!
Re:Things in London... (Score:2, Informative)
To add to the mix I know of at least two situations where the person recruiting is so busy that he hasn't had time to interview people - catch 22.
Companies seem to be cut right down to the bone by redundancies, now that they need people it seems that they are having problems either justifying the new bodies, or finding the time to do the legwork of recruiting.
Burning cash (Score:3, Funny)
How did that happen? $401k in 8 months? Am I missing something here?
Maybe he should try relocating to find a proper job.
Re:Burning cash (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I'll bite.
A 401(K) is a savings plan that many employees use to place a small percentage of their income into. Generally, they're tax-sheltered accounts that allow you to invest in a variety of stocks, etc. in order to let your money work for you a bit rather than burn a hole in your pocket.
So, he could have easily had as little as a few thousands dollars in his account that he was forced to live off of while out of work.
Re:Burning cash (Score:2)
Re:Burning cash (Score:2)
You don't have to drive too far to be reminded that you are in North Carolina, after all.
Re:Burning cash (Score:2)
Re:Burning cash (Score:2)
Re:Burning cash (Score:5, Informative)
I'm assuming that you're not American, a 401(K) is the mechanism used to save for retirement. In UK terms, it's a bit like a private pension, but it's also like an ISA, because you get to choose directly what goes into it. But it's not like an ISA because there is no maximum limit.
You can access the money in your 401(K) for a number of things, off the top of my head, education and buying a house, and I guess unemployment too.
Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of these people are MBA's vice-presidents of marketing or business analysts.
They don't mention anything about out-of-work programmers, sysadmins and webmasters. I'd think that a lower percentage of real techies are out of work.
Replies welcome any out-of-work C coders. Anyone?
Re:Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:2, Interesting)
Guess again. All the people I know out of jobs are hardcore geek types. The marketing people I know actually had no trouble finding new jobs.
Re:Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:2)
Time to go to school again while the economy rights itself.
Re:Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Perversely humorous item: I went over to itmoonlighting.com, entered my vitae, and let it do its search for temporary jobs. Exactly one turned up--it was pretty obviously a college student who wanted someone to do his homework for him and was willing to pay $200 for it. (In case he or she is reading this--write your own RPN calculator for polynomials, OK?)
Re:Laid off MBAs and marketing (Score:2, Funny)
no
making less money coding c/c++ then I would if I was pumping gas?
yes
envious of the local tech's that got laid off allready?
yes
why?
They got the first dibs on the jobs at the local gas stations and quicky marts.
my pay has been going down rapidly in the past year while my work load, and amount of crap I
have to put up with has increased.
Re:Job hunting is a full-time job (Score:3, Funny)
These are not techies (Score:5, Insightful)
"Here I am throwing mail with an MBA"
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager "
"write scripts for now-defunct Web soap opera The Spot"
"quality assurance (QA) job "
"product manager for software development "
With the possible exception of the QA job, none of these sound like techie jobs. They are all just fairly unskilled jobs that happen to be in a technical company. This article is very misleading.
Re:These are not techies (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you an idiot? These people were working tech jobs prior to losing their tech jobs and taking non-tech jobs.
The jist of the article is that while "unemployment" is over 5%, the uncounted "UNDERemployed" is an ever-growing mass because unemployment benefits run out quickly (8+ months is quick? It is when you're holding out for a job!)
These people HAD to take non-tech jobs because there was nothing else! They are underemployed because they are skilled people in unskilled positions. I would say that the article is right-on and you're just not reading very carefully... typical though -- trying to read just enough to make it seem like you know what you're talking about so you can post a comment on Slashdot...
Try again!
Re:These are not techies (Score:2)
Re:These are not techies (Score:5, Informative)
Geez, you only have to read the first line.
He was working in an unnamed position at Nortel. The article goes on to describe that he's got an engineering degree from Texas A&M (one of the best) and while he was operating with an MBA (probably because he wanted to move into management where more money was) he still has a tech background and is a direct victim of the tech slow-down. And in this case, since he was working for Nortel, it didn't matter if he was pushing a broom under their roof, it was a tech company he was released from.
Reading the following details, you will see that it's an artical that illustrates that it's the tech 'industry' that's failing, not merely tech 'jobs.' And again, these people still have 'tech' backgrounds. As managers and leaders, do you think the people under them kept their jobs or do you think they fired management and kept the underlings?
Peter Peets has a different take on layoffs. The Chapel Hill, N.C., resident took a job in December 2000 as product manager for software development in a regional office of Cisco Systems. He got laid off four months later in a downsizing that eliminated 8,500 Cisco positions, and he spent the summer fretting about his mortgage and how he'd fund the college education of his three children.
Again, a person showing technical ability but happens to have been in a managerial position... why? Because most people (not you) realize that when management gets the axe, the people under them have already gotten it.
It's not misleading, you're misreading.
I suspect you're quite comfortable in your position..? Don't fool yourself into thinking they axe management and marketting before they lay off the "line workers." It's the "workers" who get axed first. They show management getting it because it's more dramatic though they ASSume the reader understands that in some of these cases, hundreds and thousands of people below them got the axe first.
Re:These are not techies (Score:4, Interesting)
In my former company I was a techie (coder + sysadmin skill needed), front line (level 2 support, 3 spoken languages). And I was in the second batch to get the axe. The first batch were the ones that spoke only 1 language.
The quasi-moronic manager didn't get the axe until this month, or so I said.
Now, living underemployed. And I'm happy to make $10/hour. It could be much worst. Like making $0.00/hour.
:/
Re:These are not techies (Score:5, Insightful)
His first degree was in Engineering, so I presume he simply mentioned the MBA because it's a graduate degree and world emphasize his point.
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager "
From the article: She is versed in programming, account management, and customer
"quality assurance (QA) job "
At many software companies, new hires would start in QA before moving to bug fixing, then adding features, then real new coding...
"product manager for software development "
... and then to product/project management or system architect.
They are all just fairly unskilled jobs that happen to be in a technical company. This article is very misleading.
There is a great deal more to the production of software than just typing funny words into a text editor.
Take off your techie "blinders" (Score:3, Informative)
From the article: She is versed in programming, account management, and customer
You may be horrified to hear this, but not all programming is computer programming. In this case it probably means organizing marketing programs.
Re:These are not techies (Score:3, Interesting)
Like any other university grad, I started my career thinking project management, documentation, and QA were just for people who "couldn't program." The past 15 years in the industry have taught me that real design documentation, project management, and QA are critical to the success of a project. It's only the little one-person jobs that don't "need" those features, and those tasks are now the domain of office automation software, not development teams.
On the downside, the first areas of a development team to be hit when there are budget cuts are QA, design/documentation and programming teams. Good managers hang on because they have a knack for getting the most done with their ever-reducing resources, but the poor ones are out the door as quickly as the rest of the team.
Many people have mentioned that some staff get retained because they "get along" with people in management. Where is the surprise here? If you don't get along with anyone except hard-core techs, how can you hope to collect business requirements (from people who don't speak geek), follow up on bug reports, or convince anyone that your work is important? Take the arrogant hard-core computer geek attitude and you just alienate the people you're supposed to be servicing.
While I'd rather program for fun, my job is servicing business needs. It took the first few years of my career to learn that, and that bit of experience is the main reason most placement agencies want people with 2-3 years experience or more. Working on part-time jobs during your education that are one-person development projects doesn't develop those skills and understandings, which is why interviewers only want to know about the work you did after graduating.
Re:These are not techies (Score:2)
The fact that he also has an MBA would make it very difficult for them to get a job in a technical subject as there is always the thought that they don't really want a technical job, they really want to be a manager of some kind.
And I've known several marketing people who claim to know some programming, but you wouldn't even consider them for a technical job.
I did say QA was an exception.
My point is that none of these people are good candidates for getting a techie job. I wasn't intending to doubt their qualifications, but just to say that it's hardly suprising to me that these people would find it difficult to get the kind of job being described here.
Re:These are not techies (Score:2)
"sharpening her resume as a marketing manager" ;)
She is versed in programming,
So SHE *IS* a coder! (Of course, with a name like that, you'll never get a tech job; people will associate you with the other Katz
Hardly. The quote was: "she is versed in programming, account management, and customer acquisition and retention; she has led marketing campaigns for direct mail, trade shows, events, advertising, branding and positioning."
I think it's pretty clear from context that "versed in" means that she is able to insert enough related buzzwords into her speech to convince other technically ignorant marketroids and PHB's that she has some clue as to what it is she's trying to sell.
The QA person seems technical, and the unspecified Nortel employee MIGHT have been technical, but that's it.
Re:These are not techies (Score:2)
The only positive thing I can say is that it does give me time to work on personal projects and I've been able to opensource quite a bit of code. I'd really be happy if I could find a job/sponsor that'd pay me to continue writing opensource code even if at a very low wage (~$100/wk).
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
It was quite hard to keep in a good mood but I went through by doing as many benevolent work as I could (development, Acorn/RiscPC User Group, continuous self-teaching of things like web development, GNU/Linux hacking...).
As these activities involved lots of professionnally valuable material, I ended finding a job as a Macromedia Director teacher for unemployed, then as an interactive devices developper, then as a webmaster...
The hardest thing was gather some money to buy some book but I benefitted from my bro's Internet access, in the university and I could print many many RFC's, man pages, etc.
So, my advice is that one should remain busy learning interesting potentially emerging new technologies so that this unemployement period appears to be constructive, after all.
Re:My experience (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes a huge psychological toll [...] Imagine making $100,000 a year and then foaming lattes for a living [...] they're taking jobs that aren't glamorous, but they've taken the first step.
To become who one is requires a lot of risk taking and looking at hard truths. A lot of dot-commers spent there time in pursuit of money; a lot of geeks in the pursuit of tech.
The slump is an opportunity to do other human things, for example, philosophy.
What is my role in society?
What can I hope for?
Who am I and what is my destiny?
Is it tech? Is it being rich? How can you be sure?
don't be ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
feed your kids.
EVERYTHING comes after.
studying philosophy should come at a time when
survival is easy.
Re:My experience (Score:3)
I'd mod you up if I could. Actually I'd start three new accounts and write brilliant poetry from each of them so I could use them all to mod you to 5. If I had the time.
Few things sicken me so much as the resource-entitlement mentality that shows up around the printers at university campuses. I was happy to see that most have finally begun aggressive charging for the paper students use. When I was in school in the 80s it was really a disgrace. Everyone had an allotment well beyond what they'd ever need. So at the end of the semester people would work out their academic frustrations by printing off reams of crap just to get their "money's worth." Really piggishly shockingly disturbingly destructive behavior.
am i now screwed too? (Score:3, Interesting)
Even more troubling, where does that leave me once I graduate with a BS in EE?
~~as one famous philosopher once said: GADZOOKS!~~
Re:am i now screwed too? (Score:3, Insightful)
You're in trouble if you are graduating soon. I won't bother trying to raise your spirits. We had an Engineering Career Fair here last week and it was truly pathetic. Few companies bothered showing up (though they registered months ago), and the ones that did were only hiring a few people (if any). And no, this isn't a small school out of the way--this is a Big Ten University, with good rankings in engineering.
So, if you are graduating soon, you should really try to find yourself in grad school. When all this blows over, you're going to be much better off coming out with your Master's (if not your PhD). In EE, a BS just may not be enough to get you doing whatever it is you want to do. Many big companies hire BSEEs just for marketing and uncreative tech work. If you want to actually design things or lead others, you need an MS--though an MBA works, too.
Just make sure that you get a support offer from a professor before you apply to a school. If you've already got a job, you are nearly guaranteed to get accepted (even with a low GPA, okay test scores, etc). The main limiter to how many grad students there can be in a given department is the funding. If funding has been found for you, you're golden.
Good luck, though, with all your studies. Also, if you're interested in the material aspects of EE, there will be more jobs for you as they are still in reasonably high demand. Same with the analog design jobs. And microwave design. If you can, transition yourself into these types of specialties. There aren't nearly enough people who can do well at it, and they aren't quite as sensitive as the IT, programming, or even digital logic careers.
That must have been it (Score:3, Interesting)
"techie"
Kinda answers the whole question of the importance of the software engineer, doesn't it?
The rest of the rant would be redundant. It's all been said before. The only people who matter to a business are management and the HR department. Everyone else should just be prepared to watch their kids grow up in poverty right under their college degrees on the wall.
Let's get a few things straight (Score:2, Interesting)
2. If you're over 25 you are obviously "burnt out" and of little
use to any company.
3. If you have 5 years experience of exactly the API that your
future employer seeks then you might get the job as long
as you don't try and fuck them over by asking for a decent wage.
4. In the UK I.T. is obviously booming as our IT minister still
insists that everything is rosy and let's get that cheap labour
in as fast as we can, as well as training up toilet attendants
to do Y2K work.
Bitter? You bet
Unemployed? What do you think?
Experienced? Only 20 years but hell I'm not 25
and don't know every parameter of every function in the J2EE spec so I'm screwed.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Sydney is... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think my resume is quite good. I have electronics/telecoms/computing back to the late 80's including defence and stock exchange network support, but now I need to resort to getting certifications to get work.
In Sydney, no MCSE, CCNA, etc, no work.
The market is saturated with newbie wanabies who have plenty of cert but almost nil experience, so it's hard to get noticed when companies are expecting cert.
So, I'm fixing that now but I kinda wish I would'nt have to. Most MCSE's I've met would'nt know a kernel if it blue screened on them.
Re:Sydney is... (Score:3, Insightful)
same here... unless you are guru level unix/linux. but the problem is that I made a very bad career move in 98 - managment. worst mistake ever!
I had teams of people that were all guru's in their own right - and still are - that worked in my departments (linuxcare founders among others) - and i was the mis/it mgr... and I was good at it. very good... but I had to spend way too much time managing - and all the good work went to the people on the team. (as it should) but in this market I cannot find a thing... and the longer you are out of a job - the less likely the companies are to hire you, as they see the gap in work a very bad thing (tm).
problem is that most of the people doing the hiring are clueless and scared.
too much more can be said on this issue...
.
Bad times for techies (Score:2)
Nowadays, finding an IT job is *difficult* , especially as opensource techies. Not a lot of company are hiring. Either they already have their technical staff, or they moved to external consultancy services.
There were plenty of new jobs because there were a lot of new companies popping up everywhere. Now, it's over.
I'm looking for a job for weeks with no success...
Re:Bad times for techies (Score:2, Funny)
Try looking for jobs at companies that actually have a revenue stream
Re:Bad times for techies (Score:2, Informative)
Delusions (Score:4, Interesting)
On another note: is it my imagination, or do most of the people in that article seem like the same marketing wonks who should be the first people to be 86'ed from a failing organization anyway?
Re:Delusions (Score:2)
I dunno... my last job was heaven to me; I worked my ass off, and had a great time doing it. Going anywhere else is going to be a painful experience. But I was fully hoping to spend 5/10 years there.
And then the layoffs started happening. Again and again and again.
I think it's the same thing; you can't expect to keep the same job year in, year out because everything has become a commodity. People don't want to hire, because they need to be able to jettison staff fast if their earnings dip, so it's all turning into short-term contracting work.
Kind of sucks really.
Si
Re:Delusions (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this attitude interesting - if a company is in trouble it's usually because it has cashflow problems. The "techies" will refuse to accept that there are any problems with the product, and maybe there aren't. But the people who get money into the company are the salesmen and the people who work out what you can produce that the market would be willing to buy (and at what price) are in marketing. At the end of the day, a bad product with good marketing will have a much better chance of its company surviving that a company with a good product but lousy marketing.
Original poster was correct (Score:3, Interesting)
As for my own experience, in any company I've been at I would have said laying off lots of the marketing and middle management types would have been a lot more healthy than laying off the technical staff. Almost all technical staff I've worked with have been very productive and done good work, which I've seen a lot of slacking or just simply inept (some actually creating MORE work than if they were not there through needing to fend off poor ideas on the tech side) marketing people in my day.
Safety versus Risk (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm lucky. I got a programming job at a 2-year college in 1982. I grew through the ranks and am now in charge of a 25-person tech support team. (Management sucks, but that's for another /. story comment.)
My pay is around $50K and I sat by in my safe job while others I knew, many of them my students from my evening classes I taught, some my former employees, many friends, flew off and made huge bucks and taunted me endlessly about what a fool I was to stick in my "low pay" job.
I've also known a lot of them to use their income to buy $40K+ cars, huge houses, and saddle themselves with all sorts of debt.
As for foolish me, I will be able to retire in five years with a full state pension, medical benefits for life, and still be just 47 and able to do some of those high-risk high-return jobs later.
A bit of gloat? Yeah, perhaps. Human nature. Doesn't mean I don't feel bad for them nonetheless.
However, tech is still the future and the job market will turn around and the big rewards will return. So while it might be necessary to throw mail around and make $13/hour for a while, just don't fall behind in your tech skills. One day they'll pay off big again.
My advice, however, is next time around (or if you still have a fat job), squirrel away some cash for a rainy day, keep expenses down, and stay out of debt. Then next time a dry period blows through, you may just have enough saved to not have to work, go back to school and learn those new skills you've been wanting to get, and then come out the other side stronger and end up in the long run, much better than I am. Because everyone knows, intelligent risk taking, while it often has short-term losses, over the long run, pays off much better than the guy (like me) who plays it safe. No one gets rich playing it safe...
Re:Safety versus Risk (Score:2, Interesting)
Undoubtedly- except not in the West because we're way too expensive. You can get highly skilled developers and designers to build your software from India, Asia and Russia for a small fraction of the cost of a US or European developer. And they'll be doing hardware next.
We've had the good times and we've priced ourselves out of the market. It was cool while it lasted.
Re:Safety versus Risk (Score:2)
Worse than that... they are outsourcing other services to India, et al, as well! I get collection agents calling me from India about car payments being late. The booming telecom industry made that possible.
Dull old internal IT vs dot-bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
I took a slightly different (and slightly more profitable, in the short run at least) tack. I stuck with a dull internal IT network management job. We're about as far as you can get from high-tech, dot-com, but I've managed to keep my hands involved on internet tech and UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD) in addition to the typical Windows stuff, whiny end users, and so on.
I *did* have a state University job before I came here, and I kind of regret not getting a full lifecycle on that gravy train. 25 year retirement w/full bennies sounds awesome. But when I had that job, I felt kind of trapped -- the money absolutely *sucked* relative to my living expenses. And too many people I worked with said "private industry while they'll still take you", since they felt that too long in a state job meant weak private industry hiring prospects. Glad I made the switch -- a slight reduction in security for a definite increase in earnings..
I always felt a touch jealous of the dot-com people, the money they were making and the whole dot-com lifestyle. Now that these people are delivering my interoffice mail or whatever, I don't feel so bad anymore.
Re:Safety versus Risk (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I won't argue. But in 5 years I'll retire and collect $25K+/year plus full benefits for sitting on my ass doing nothing. At that point, no matter what road I go down, I'll always be $25K/year ahead, even if I get laid off from my future post-retirement gigs.
I can't up and quit now because I would have to wait until 62 to collect my state pension (if I go before 25 years service). That's 15 years of $25K pension out the window. Not small change.
p.s. It's Delaware. For those on the West Coast, there are shitloads of banks here all needing tech personnel still. All of you who are unemployed and spending up the credit cards, guess who is making big bucks cause of it? You won't make $100K+ a year but you can also buy a nice detached 3-4 bedroom house in the suburbs for $150K too... Decent 2 bedroom apartments in gated communities are all well under $1K/month. I squatted in a safe 1BR apartment two years ago saving money for a house down payment. Had a private entrance and inside washer/dryer. $585/month. Plus there is no sales tax here and you can register a car for $20/year no matter how much the car is worth (one time 2% tax on transfers though, but still, no sales tax on purchase)...
Try non-IT sector (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're still looking for an IT-job, the smart thing to do right now is to be searching for an IT job in a non-IT sector. Think banking, insurance, consultancy, ...
According to Gartner, the only IT-sector that is currently booming, and that will continue to do so with almost absolute certainty, is the anti-virus sector. Jobs over there are however relativily scarce as there aren't a lot of (big) companies in this sector. Not something to place your bets on.
All in all, take what you can for the time being. While searching for the perfect job for over a year shows a lot of tenacity, corporations usually value things like experience a lot higher.
Re:Try non-IT sector (Score:2)
Shortsighted? Dumb, even? Very possibly. Reality? So my out-of-work friends tell me.
Keep your chin up, make your own path (Score:4, Interesting)
It's enough to make sucessful business people puke, to hear the lame ass excuses people who have supposedly been trained to TAKE CHARGE, and generate PROFIT, for a company come up with.
After years riding high end, high speed networking jobs, using my expertise and experience to the max, I got caught in the Nortel 'halving'... I had spent the last 5 years of my career kicking ass, and taking names doing high end routing, high end security, and integrating optical technology...
Unfortunatly for me, jobs like that are now hard to come by. Luckily, I started out small, with my own ISP, and find myself somewhat gainfully self-employed supporting a lot of small 'mom-and-pop' ISPs,(and thier new crop of high speed customers, who cant stand the customer non-service of the larger carriers) who find that thier conservatice business plans are now paying off in spades. (ie, thier 'smarter' competition ran themselves out of business trying to do DSL for the same price as the phone company)
I believe that doers do, and whiners don't. My last day at nortel was in december, and I am very grateful to them for treating us like human beings, and letting all of us down easy. I know that hasn't been the case for a lot of people who got 'down sized'.
I hope someday to return, but in the meantime, I will continue to bust my butt, and make my own destiny.
(PS. Health insurance for the self-employed is remarkable affordable, if you shop around)
Agreed times are hard but hope looms... (Score:2, Informative)
In the UK at the moment there seems to be a shortage of real-time software engineers with a number of companies I know having a shortfall in that area.
However in the IT support, web development, etc. areas then I agree times are very hard and not really showing signs of recovery despite what our blinkered politicians try to say.
Well, look who they talked to.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well. No wonder the article is full of stories of people out of work for a year. Hell, if you interview people who are "vaguely looking" for tech jobs, of course it's going to seem like there are few jobs. Employers can tell who is "vaguely looking" -- these people have weak resumes to begin with, they don't follow up, and they're discouraged easily. What employer wants to hire people like that?
Now, that's not to say that it's wonderful out there. As an employer, I've been used to begging for resumes for the last 3 years. When I had an opening 3 months ago, I was seriously inundated with resumes. The job market is swarming with candidates. Of course, quite a good number of the candidates I saw shouldn't have been in the industry in the first place. It was obvious from the few hundred resumes I went through that the layoffs throughout Silicon Valley have been mostly about letting go of dead weight. But even that is bad news for qualified people. Think about it: even if you're a genius, your resume is buried in a pile of 400 other lackluster resumes. If you want to succeed, you'll need to be aggressive.Re:Well, look who they talked to.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true. There are three ways of getting a job - personal contracts, through an advertised position (direct or agency), or cold-calling. If you are looking for a job you must be doing all three, especially in the current employment climate. After you have a lead the next thing the prosepective employer sees is your CV. Most CVs suck really badly. You must (and this really cannot be overstated) get information on the first page of your CV that makes the reader interested in you. If you do not get this interest you will not get the job.
Common Mistake 1: Having a shopping list of abilities on the first page (e.g. Languages: A, B, C...).
They don't care that you know these languages - if they are needed for the job then you won't get the job without them, but don't use up prime CV real estate with a list. Instead, descibe what you have done with those languages and make sure the description brings out the abilities you are trying to sell - these abilities are things like problem solving, project management, tenacity, being methodical, broad range of exprience etc.
The first page of the CV should be a pen portrait of what you have done and why your skills are relevant to the company you are approaching. It must make them interested in you, or it'll go in the bin.
Common Mistake 2: Having one CV.
Your CVs job is to sell you and get you to the interview. When approaching a company you should not be afraid of customising the CV to make make a better match between your skills and their requirements. For example, if you are proficient in both Java and Perl but the company your are sending the CV to is a Perl shop, then your all-important first page should be emphasising the Perl side of your skills.
Common Mistake 3: Lying.
Never lie. If you are caught in a lie (and it is quite likely you will be) then you will not be hired. This also includes the hobbies section - if you don't read books, don't say you do - an interviewer will ask and you will look shifty. He may not even realise that you were lying, but you won't feel quite right to him, and that's you canned before you start. Lying about technical abilities is even dumber - here they will know you are lying.
There are lots of other tricks you can do - for example research the company and find out who you'd be working for and contract them - don't contact HR. When you contact them, explain why you would be a good choice for them (briefly) in a cover letter and attach your CV. The CV (or at least the first page) should be printed on high quality thick paper for two reasons: it gives the first impression of quality and care before anyone has even read it; and it looks good even after being passed about a dozen people.
Happy hunting.
Re:Well, look who they talked to.... (Score:2)
A job search and interview is about marketing yourself. If you can't convince someone else that you can do the job, you expect them to hire out of a sense of charity, to pay your bills? Or use ESP to determine that you are indeed qualified? You expect a "direct mail campaign" of hundreds of resumes to get a response rate better than junk mail (i.e., a few percent)?
I've never been in a job interview that was meant to be torturous. I've given job interviews that might have been perceived as torturous, but were merely my effort to determine if the people I was interviewing were right for the job. I wish those candidates had been much better at marketing themselves, so I could tell they were right without torture!
Marketing means finding out what the hiring manager needs, and demonstrating that you have what it takes. "Techies" may complain that requiring this is somehow "unfair" or "pointy-haired behavior." Wake up. People, unlike computers, are convinced to make decisions by people, not by lines written on a piece of paper.
Furthermore, they have to work with the people they've hired, not the resume. If you are surly and suffering from a sense of entitlement, you might not be so pleasant to work with, so why take the chance of hiring you?
Slump in Denver (Score:2, Informative)
Colorado seems to have this tendency to put all of its eggs into one economic basket. Before the telecom crash, there was the petroleum industry crash, and other economic downturns before that.
I'd have to side with the pessimists. Many of the jobs during the golden years are gone forever. And forget the crazy salaries! $110K for an NT admin?! Sheesh.
using the free time to retool? (Score:2, Interesting)
One of the problems is finding where the jobs are. In the economic boom, the recruiters helped everybody out. But although I consider myself a savvy job hunter, I'd had difficulty figuring out what companies are out there. National job boards are mostly useless because only a small percentage of companies need to advertise heavily to find a suitable candidate. Individuals need a good directory of company links in their local market.
IT people are used to thinking of themselves as belonging to an exclusively IT company. In actuality, a lot of non-IT companies need help managing their network. Not as glamorous maybe, but at least it's a job.
The real problem with IT unemployment is that people are reluctant to accept non IT positions. Why? You stop gaining new skills and quickly lose touch with what skills are in demand.
I'm a technical worker out of work for 9 months, partly by choice. I used some of the time to update my skills. If only I had a crystal ball that allowed me to see what skill will be necessary for my next job, that would simplify things. As such, I'm busy learning about everything. A job interview revealed my ignorance about Win Active Directories, so I check out a book on the subject. Another job interview asks about XWindows, and so I pick up another book. Learning about this stuff is not very painful, but it's frustrating not having a clue what skill will land you the job. It's also frustrating trying to balance the time you spend job searching with the time to update skills.
Is anyone spooked by all the defense jobs out there? As it turns out, I can't qualify for security clearance because I'm seeking dual citizenship. But if you looked at the postings, you'd swear that a good 50% of job opportunities are related to defense contractors.
I had a good job with Dell; they treated me very well and there were lots of perks. In a day I'm going to a job fair for contract Dell tech support jobs, probably without benefits or job security. Hey, if it pays the bills, I'll be happy. (Just cancel that trip to Mexico for this year).
truth and whining (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, I also know plenty of good people who got let go "just because". They were adequte to stellar performers, who were in the wrong business unit at the wrong time.
If your skills are marketable, and you're lucky, you'll find a job. Bottom line. If you have so-so skills (see oddtodd.com for a good list of so-so skills) then you won't find a job. A professionally polished resume doesn't matter if everything "interesting" you did was for a bunch of fucked companies that didn't deliver anything.
I think that's the crux of the biscuit. All the badass experience doens't matter if everyone looks at it and says, "but this company didn't *do* anything, and it failed". OTOH, if you delivered (more or less on schedule and at budget) a (blah blah blah buzzword) then you have something. You'll find work. Software is still being developed, web sites are launched, the world is still turning.
We're just at the bottom of a cycle. At the end of the hype, everyone was saying "XML this" and "Web Services that". Well no one really knew what to do with all that. Once people start to figure out how to hook up the latest tech with the consumer/end user, the same way Netscape brought the web to the masses, you'll see it pick up. It may take 2 years, or 5. But it'll happen. The VC will go back to insane spending. All the MBAs and "Director of Multimedia Development" types will work again. Don't worry.
Just make sure my latte is right, OK? Working in the NOC takes good Joe. It won't be long before you're bossing me around again.
Give Gov't a try (Score:2, Informative)
The company I work for makes equipment for telecoms and we've been hit HARD the last few months with no sign of letting up (at least not for another 12-18 months...maybe).
Say what you want about working for The Man, but The Man will provide me with a salary 1/3rd greater then I'm currently making (have clearance, will pay). Its a 5 year contract so unless I'm fired, I'm safe from layoffs. How many others can claim that right now?
If the market improves, then maybe I'll go back private sector. But right now, gov't work is safe.
Re:Give Gov't a try (Score:2)
In the mean time, I'm in at a major place via Manpower Technical, 6 month contract-to-hire (but I had to take a 30% pay cut). Still, it's better than the alternative, so I'm not complaining.
I'm living the fun (Score:3, Interesting)
Before the bubble burst, I had a measly B.A. in Spanish, but I still got hired at startups for various jobs, mostly web-oriented stuff like search engines. I made as much as $650/wk for a short while, which ain't too shabby for where I live.
Since the bubble burst, I'd got a non-technical temp job at the county tax office. When I got laid off from that job a friend got me hired at a convenience store, where I do 9-hour shifts with no lunch break for $5.50/hr. I've lost my wife and son because I am unable to support them on a near-minimum-wage part-time job. I'm living with my parents because I can't even afford to support myself. Oh, yeah, and I have about $20,000 of college loan debt to pay off.
So, I've decided to use up my remaining financial aid (even though it will add to my debt) to return to college for a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm hardly learning anything, since I already learned plenty on the job. (Unfortunately, my university does not count life experience for college credit.) Some professors have even told me that I am capable of teaching their classes, but that won't get me out of the credit requirements.
I'm planning to get my B.S. in Spring 2003, and hopefully by 2004 I'll be seriously working and living with my wife and son again...but who knows. I don't want to get optimistic.
By the way, I'm not alone in my neck of the woods. My best friend is in a similar situation. He has 12 years of programming and network administration experience. However, he has no degree, so nobody even wants to interview him. He's pushing 30 and has just entered college as a freshman.
Ride the wave of prosperity!
Re:I'm living the fun (Score:2)
Re:I'm living the fun (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see how you could "lose" a wife and kid because of that. Did she move back in with her parents? And they won't let you stay there? That's really sad considering that there's people on welfare that manage to keep the family together... I'm sure there's some way you could work it out.
Mediocre people can no longer get good jobs! D'oh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am CEO of a small company which specialises in web development. It is still true (at least in my part of the world) that many "web design" companies have staff whos only qualification is to have taught themselves to "program" in HTML. Many of them are from non-techy backgrounds, often design or Mickey Mouse degrees like Media Studies. These companies often offer all types of services (such as those that really require real programming or project management skills) which they don't have the skills and experience to offer. So if these people are being made redundant and having a hard time finding new jobs - well, tough.
To get a good job is hard. Always has been, apart from temporary crazy blips like the dot-com boom. Just because it is now hard to get a good job does not mean that good jobs do not exist, rather it means that the brief period of crazyness when mediocre people could get good jobs is over!
Out in California (Score:3, Insightful)
Over the summer of 2001 the City was flooded with laid off tech workers. For several months you literally could not hire a moving truck from any Bay Area rental company. Every one was hired and heading back east as yet another dot-commer left the City.
Its not all bad news, however. Housing costs in San Francisco are falling back from the ludicrous heights they reached a year or two back. Its now possible to rent in the City for less than $1000 a month. You can now buy a decent home for less than $350,000. Neither was possible two years ago. The City is also becoming more civilized again as the white heat of the boom years cools down a little.
Its also possible to detect a very slight improvement in the job market. This is partly because so many people have left the local market: noticeably fewer people are competing for the few jobs that come up. Its also true that as the economy slowly, slowly begins to come alive again, a few companies are starting to hire again.
But it will be a long time before we truly recover. Anyone remember the mid 80's?
Massachusetts is (Score:2)
Picky Wimps (Score:2, Funny)
I feel lucky... (Score:2)
6 months unemployed (Score:2)
I wouldn't have believed it possible a year ago, but I've been out of work since my last employer went bust in August 2001. OK, I'm not a hardcore CS-grad C programmer - I'm mostly a Perl programmer, with a minor in "anything-todo-with-security", and basic (NT, Linux, BSD) sys-admin skills. I'm not asking an insane salary. I've never been unemployed since starting in IT professionally in 1995, and this is now the longest I've
MBA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Delusions of Grandeur for Some... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm an adjunct at a local major university in New Jersey and part of my duties include teaching classes in the CS department's continuing education arm. At times, it is difficult for me as an educator to make students face reality. Many students that enroll in our certification programs believe that all you have to do is sit through some classes to become a tech wiz and get a great paying job. The reality is that many of them don't have what it takes to become a good technologist. A student recently told me that he was very discouraged in his job hunt because he "spent three years making between $65K and $80K as an HTML coder". He now seeks a similar job with similar pay, but the fact is that he's has not demonstrated to me that he's even worth half of that salary in any technical position. While I am often tempted to use a "Here's a dime...use it to call your mother and tell her you'll never going to be a lawyer (or techie)" speech, I still must encourage my students to work hard to improve their skills. But it becomes difficult trying to get them to believe that they'll no longer get high-paying short-returns in this over-hyped market.
Yes, times are bad. A lot of people out of work - even the good ones. But the moral of the story is that many so-called techies need to re-evaluate their career path and their place in the industry.
I can't believe it!! (Score:3, Funny)
Why, oh, why, don't all of you out of work open source hippies try to sell your software!!!
How is it, then . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong--I'm not a xenophobe, and see nothing nefarious about the idea of allowing people from other countries to fill positions for which there are no Americans available.
But it doesn't make sense to provide jobs for outsiders when our own can fill them.
At this point it's pretty obvious that the purpose of the H1B program has all along been to depress IT wages and skew the job market in favor of corporate employers. Employers have been making up "special skills" or listing jobs with low salaries to show an "effort" to hire a U.S. citizen, then hiring indentured H1Bs for 1/2 to 2/3 the salary. This should come as no surprise, since the same employers used the same tricks to not pay the market wage for U.S. electrical engineers in the 80s.
The program needs to be ended now. Current H1B visa holders should allowed to stay to the end of their terms, then they should return home to bring up the level of IT skill in their home nations, as the lobbyists and Congress said would happen.
Re:How is it, then . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe me, that's your worst nightmare if you're worried about American jobs. Would you rather have the H1Bs working in the US economy and paying US taxes and spending money on goods and services in the US, or back in India/Russia pitching wholesale offshore outsourcing to Corporate America? Rather than actively supporting the US economy and indirectly providing jobs for Americans, the result would be permanent destruction of American jobs.
Re:How is it, then . . . (Score:3, Insightful)
The H-1B program only requires that the visa holder be pay above the average wage for the kind of work they are doing. Check out the US Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The first problem is that all computer programmers are lumped together by USDLS into a single "computer programmers" category. This fails to take into account highly specialized areas that employers are claiming that Americans do not have and that they need to hire H-1B workers for. Assuming they found such skills in a foreign worker, they only need to pay that worker the average salary measured over all computer programmer jobs. This loophole is one of the big flaws of the H-1B program ... you can hire someone who is trained in specialized area, and pay them as if they were not. Then on top of that, you can force them to work extra hours and on weekends because they can't go switch jobs to a decent employer, and always have the threat of being sent back home.
While the smaller businesses probably are paying decent to H-1B workers, and probably treating them more fairly, the big corporations do know how to work the system. This is where the wage problems are. While I don't believe the figure of 1/2 salary, I do believe 2/3 could very well be happening in many scenarios.
The smaller companies do genuinely hire for talent. The larger companies often hire for warm bodies ... cheaply.
Good time for entrepeneurs? (Score:2)
Right now the economy is depressed, but has been so for long enough that people are at least starting to look to the future. Now is the ideal time (imho) to start ones own business. Obviously, nobody is gonna be handing out huge piles of cash like they were 5 years ago, but if one can make a frugal start of a company with a solid business concept (not a portal!!) and realistic ambitions, then that company will be extremely well positioned to take off running once the economy starts to lift again.
The first web company I worked for was started at the end of 1994, when the economy in the UK was pretty depressed. I also work with a company that has recently changed concept completely, and so has all the same problems and opportunities of a start-up. Times are tough, but we're hanging in there and the signals are that as long as we can keep it together for another 6 months or so we should be in an excellent position to do some good business.
Not everyone is gonna be able to start their own company of course, but don't discount the idea just because the angels aren't handing out ridiculous sums of money any more.
Part of the bloody problem (Score:3, Insightful)
A tad exaggerated maybe.. but thats where its going. I got a job april of last year, and the conditions are less than ideal. I come in making as a UNIX administrator what I made as a helpdesk rep at one of my first jobs. I felt insulted. [but, i didnt have much choice].
How bad things are in New Jersey (Score:3, Interesting)
You cannot, cannot, cannot get a tech job unless:
- you get it through personal networking (before the job is "posted"), or
- you have done the exact job before.
I know a software development project manager (a real techie with assember, C/C++, and VB coding experience behind him) who looked outside telecomm and applied for a job in the pharmaceutical sector. Forget it; there are so many unemployed techies out there, the employer was looking for a certain set of skills and experience in the sectorI know another company that needed people to support a certain telecomm software system. They could afford to ignore everyone who could come up to speed on it, and hire only former developers of that system.
I'm still employed. If I'd been laid off last year (and I ducked two bullets by inches), I wasn't even going to look for a job; I was going to live off my wife's salary and write for a while.
You bet, though, if both my wife and I had been laid off, I'd be flipping burgers with the rest of them
Buffalo. (Score:2)
As an adopted citizen of Buffalo, things are pretty rough up here. On the up side, though, there's a recession coming up.
Hey, when your city's been in a depression for the last thirty years, a recession is actually a step up.
--saint
Geez, what self-righteous putzes (Score:5, Insightful)
This pious "I have a job, they're easy to get and keep if you're as good as me" mentality smacks of a selfish immaturity drawn from too little interest in others' situations. These same people that are saying things like:
I believe that doers do, and whiners don't.
A lot of the people I know were "paper techies" who used to brag about how much they made. Well, who has the job now?
All the people interviewed in that article are wimps.
I'd bet if (when?) these people lose their jobs, they won't be blaming themselves, but instead the President, Congress, Alan Greenspan, bad managers, stupid customers, El Nino, anti-technology conspiracies, and anything else that might lessen the impact on their over-inflated egos.
Give these people a break. You may need one yourself one day.
Re:Geez, what self-righteous putzes (Score:4, Interesting)
- Teacher's assistant
- Assisstant professor
- Professor
- Department head of university
- 7-11 night shift clerk
I dare you to guess at what point during his career he moved to Canada. Go on, guess. The guy had something like two full Masters with graduate work, and he was applying for a $12 CDN cable monkey job.Build your career, not just skills (Score:2, Informative)
I was lucky at that time to move into another contract, and even fortunate enough to keep my $100k pay rate. This contract though was not in my core skill set, and I was not doing a good job at it. I used my networking skills to learn of another project at the firm that was having trouble and that needed my skills. I consulted on their floundering project a bit while I floundered on mine, and eventually got myself transferred. Now nearly a year later we're fielding a groundbreaking project that's going to have a big impact on a national pharmaceutical distribution firm.
Alas, that contract is done, and I'm being pushed into the market again, at still a worse time. I've seen this coming though, and I've spent the time to know the market. I know what people are making. I know that there are over 100 other contractors in my field applying for every job that I see. I know they're getting $15-20/hr less today than last year on bill rates. I know some of them have been out there for months.
That's why I've done the same calling, the same web searching, the same drive-by interviewing. I've done the planning for when I'm done here in three weeks and am a month from selling off the car and the house to downsize my own liabilities. I've spent the last couple of months making giant payments on other things to lower monthly outlay. I've started my wife looking for a job and daycare for the two-year-old boy.
And today, I've heard from old colleagues, I should hear that I'm being offered a position that is at once a career step up and a salary step down. From being a highly paid contractor I'm going back to corporate life as a senior business analyst, the guy who whips sales people back to reality and IT folks into a frenzy to keep sales people selling. It's what I want to do, but it's not going to pay me as well. And I'm goign to be working in a couple weeks, which is a good thing.
I've gotten that position by managing my career in the local IT environment. I keep in touch with old colleagues and managers. I read in the papers and keep up on the firms. I know their challenges and their objectives before I go in for the interview. I find out who the managers are and I learn who they've worked with, who they've promoted, and who they've canned. I know whose coat tails they're riding. I find out what technology the firm is using, and what technology battles are going on. If you can't find out which side of those your prospective manager is on, you've gotta find a comfortable spot on the fence and find out which way to lean when you can.
The bottom line is that Skills Are Not Enough! At least 75 of the 100 people applying for the job have the skills. Fifty are probably experts. To land the job you've got to offer more. You've got to show insight and planning. Today you've got to be an industry expert, not just a technology expert. You've got to show them that you're going to keep them from making the same mistakes that you made at your last job. Most of all, I think, you MUST make them believe that you're taking the job not because you're about to lose your car and your home, but because you want to be a part of that firm. You need to be part of the firm because that's what's going to make your career grow. And if that's the case, then you're fortunate. If you're up on the local scene you're more likely to find that.
How to get used to it (Score:4, Insightful)
Periodic bouts of unemployment are a feature of the modern lean and mean, just in time economy. It's inefficient, wasteful and demoralizing but it's not likely to change anytime soon either.
The trick is to prepare for it while you're working.
Turn the inevitable periods of unemployment into growth opportunities. Learn new skills or expand old ones. See if you can find a worthwhile volunteer job in your skill set. Read widely. Remember that having and keeping a job confers no moral superiority so your feeling of self-worth must come from somwhere else.
Things are horrible in NJ (Score:2, Interesting)
IT Job jumpers more likely to be laid off. (Score:4, Informative)
Read this article [computerworld.com] about the sort of folks more likely to be laid off. Here's its headline:
Techies becoming school teachers (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not so bad if you kow where to look (Score:5, Interesting)
First off, I agree with most posters that this article doesn't really describe techies, but those who probably are unemployable in thier fields. How many of us worked someplace where more than half the people there were not qualified to do thier job let alone get the saleries they were getting? From what I have been able to see so far, this "recession" is a massive house cleaning. Unfortunately, some very talented, hard-working folks also got the shaft.
The article also states that some of us are "settling for contract work without benefits." Uh, I've actually been doing FAR better contracting this year than I had been last year making over $80k. And suprisingly, getting work is far less complicated than you might think.
Here are some tips that have helped me out:
Thats just my two cents. After my former employer stole my 401k money and failed to pay us our last 2 pay check, things have improved greatly for me. This advice has gotten me off unemployment and I'm now on the road to recovery :)
I found this very suspicious (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying some fields are having a hard time, but I find it VERY odd that someone with an engineering degree from Texas A&M AND an MBA is having a hard time landing a job other than sorting mail. I would love to know the answers to the following:
Have you look for work in other states? I have a stepson going to Texas A&M this school is about #5 or 7 in the nation for engineering. They also have a strong networking foundation as well as a lot of alumni in business locally. I can't believe he couldn't come back to Texas and find an engineering job. You can't just look in your town or even state. Sometimes you have to move to where the jobs are.
How old are you? If you're under 30 you may want to drop the MBA mention unless you're looking for a job in that field. Advanced titles can be a catch 22, i.e., employers think you're overqualified for lower positions, but aren't willing to hire you for the upper level positions because you don't have enough years of experience.
I would add: If you were some dot-commer management previously making a salary way above your experience/job duties from the regional average, I would list my salary as more reasonable if asked. Employers who look and see some 29 year old making well over the norm are going to shitcan the application because they are going to assume that's the range you're looking for.
Yes, these may seem like fudging or leaving out something on the application. However done creatively, this is NOT the same as declaring a degree you don't have.
Safety Vs. Risk 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
On the plus side, I'm still suckin' air.
On the minus side, I haven't earned a dollar in salary since September, '01.
It not for lack of mailing out resumes, getting interviews (even second interviews,) or chopping my income requirements, moving to get my expenses down, cashing in the 401k to get rid of all my debts [actually, they were leaking close to a grand a month before that anyway so it waa cheaper to cash 'em in than hold on to 'em,]
Its just tough out there. I'm in a depression. The economy's in a recession.
Before the crash(es, two planes and an economy) I worked for somebody who believed that systems are maintained by oral tradition, never wrote down things like specs or documentation and was ignorant of the glaring flaws in the system and in her managerial abilities.
This person was a DE-motivator. The biggest kick in the 'nads you can ever get is a whiny voice intoning "But I 'TOLD' you." Yeah, like I have time to listen to every word of your endless stream of conciousness and engrave it in my memory.
I'm poor, going on broke but I'm still better off than if I'd stayed there.
Now I sleep nights (mostly,) and I've stopped worrying about planes and falling buiuldings but I still get nightmares about "But I TOLD you..."
Too Hot for Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
The Associated Press reports [imdiversity.com] that "U.S. companies and other groups applied for 342,035 H-1B work visas in 2001, up 14 percent from 2000, before the economy tumbled.", "The number accepted also rose by 40 percent..." and "About half ... are for computer related jobs." The article cites research by UC Davis Professor Norman Matloff [ucdavis.edu] saying that "wages of computer programmers and engineers working in the U.S. on the visas
are 15 percent to 33 percent lower than those of U.S. citizens".
Mark Shevitz of VisaNow [visanow.com] is quoted as saying, "I think it surprised everyone. All that you hear about in the media is these huge layoffs and the tech industry is just shedding workers."
Finally, the article reports "Bay Area companies Oracle, Cisco Systems, Intel and Sun Microsystems were among the top users of the program in 2000, as were universities such as Harvard and Yale. The INS did not have numbers available on how many applications the companies filed last year amid layoffs.
----
BTW: It is illegal to use the H-1B program to lower wages from the rates prevailing in the absence of the program.
Here's information posted by an anti-H-!B activist at another site [kuro5hin.org]:
Additional information provided by an h1b activist (although I encourage people to avoid political action, there are far more effective things they can do with technology to deconstruct the edifice that did this to us because it is, after all, in existence because of technologists -- the real ones, not the Wired magazine ones):
80% of the US public opposed H1-B expansion [ucdavis.edu]. Part of what makes the bill increasing H1-B Visas so unusual is that it was so unpopular and was passed with very, very little debate.
Zazona [zazona.com] is the most comprehensive site on the H1-B issue. Corrective legislation is now in a US congressional Committee [loc.gov]. The philosophy of HR 3222 has been supported by a diverse group [zazona.com] that includes Buchanan Supporters, Nader Supporters, and the National Urban League [nationalur...esh1-bhttp]. HR 3222 is a compromise-it roles the level of new H1-B Visas back to 1998 levels and puts in place an unemployment adjustment mechanism.
H1-B Visa expansion was advocated by the ITAA [itaa.org]. Organized opposition to H1-B includes:the AEA [aea.org] and the Programmers Guild [programmersguild.com].
You can Look at H1-B applications by company,state,city [zazona.com]. You can write your Congressional representatives [numbersusa.com] if you have a problem with the current H1-B situation. You can also write your state representatives. The only aspect of the H1-B issue that is in state jurisdiction is use of H1-B labor at state institutions. However, state representatives are influential in their parties-if your state representative writes a letter to congress it could mean a lot.
what employers really want (Score:3, Interesting)
I have ten years of OO design and development experience, but I don't have a degree. As you can expect, I've been out of work for a while and couldn't seem to get anyone to even call me back. One company did call me back. After the preliminary interview I had a second one with the CTO and DirEng. When they asked me what I had been doing I didn't have to say "Sitting around on my ass, mostly." Instead I pulled out my latest project, a little portable device built out of off-the-shelf embedded computer components and held together with some C++ and Python I wrote (not unlike the popular car MP3 player projects.)
Guess what? I got a job doing embedded development work at my old salary despite not having any real embedded experience at all! In part because I was able to demonstrate that I am resourceful, creative, and hard-working, even when nobody is holding a carrot/whip over me. That is what employers want.
So write some software, build some hardware, do something, anything, to differentiate yourself from the hordes of people who have been catching up on playstation between jobs.
burris
Re:Experience and talent still count... (Score:3, Insightful)
The reality is that
Welcome back to 1995. Talent counts, experience counts. There are still loads of jobs out there if you have the right experience, if you spent 2 years developing a "cool" website that went under using non-core languages (i.e. not MS, not C++, not Java) then you'll struggle, because the companies who work like that went bust.
The problem, though, is that most peoples' networks are down and dead in the water.
Networking is the easiest way to get a job. Personally, it's the only way I've gotten my jobs in the past (apart from one blip, but that was mostly accidental).
The problem is that it gets really difficult to network your way into a position when everyone you can network with is also looking for a job. Talk about Catch 22.
Experience doesn't seem to count for much right now. Or rather, it does, but you'd better have EXACTLY the experience they're looking for, in stone, that you got employed to have on a professional contract/job basis (which means no ramp-up time either... you can't know the concepts and wing it until you know the API set you're talking to -- you need to know it all now).
Add to that the fact that the market is saturated with all those resume's from out-of-work web developers, perl scripters, VB devs, etc etc. who aren't as experienced -- but are still applying for every job that comes up, and you've got real problems.
It gets even more problematic when the same job is being touted by 15 different recruitment/staffing firms. I got three phone calls in one day, all from different firms, all talking about the same job. My fiancee' then got 4 calls from different firms about the same job.
It's a mess out there. There's thousands of people out of work, and they're all scrabbling down the same avenues trying to get a job.
Take this advice to heart: If you can network, do it. Unless you have a good in, you're not going to be able to get the time of day from most people.
Re:Lets face it, Times are hard everywhere. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are people who have more years of experience than you've been alive, and they are struggling to find jobs. Just trying to inject a little perspective.