June 27, 2003
Posted on 06/28/2003 11:23:30 AM PDT by sten
Home > IT Worker News > Tech Industry News >
June 27, 2003
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In little time I found that both my options and expectations tumbled into freefall.... Finally, I was hired for the deli job - for $8 an hour.
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Tonight I'll mop the floor in the deli. It is not really my job - it's Gary's. But Gary can do little with his right arm due to a devastating North Vietnamese rocket attack at an airbase outside of Saigon some 30 years ago. The attack left him severely injured, and he nearly bled to death. But military surgeons made saving the young captain's life and his badly-mangled arm a priority. Years of physical therapy, however, have left him with little use of it. Most of the time it hangs limply at his side at an unnatural angle. His injury, in fact, is remarkably similar to that of another war veteran whom Gary admires - former Kansas Senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole.
Gary and I work the same late shift at a grocery store deli in a suburb outside of Seattle. When we're not slicing sandwich meats or cheeses or brewing mochas for impatient customers, we clean and restock. The pace is fast - and there is always work to do. There is also a good deal of reaching and carrying that Gary has difficulty doing. During rare moments when we have time to talk to each other, we sometimes reflect about how life's vagaries led us to this place.
I used to be a technical writer. Most of the last decade I spent ensconced in a windowless office at Microsoft's main corporate campus, where I wrote online Help files or sections for user manuals. During my tenure there I worked as either a full-time employee or as "contingent staff,"; where I was employed by a temporary employment agency rather than the company itself. In June 2001, after my last assignment on the Windows XP team, I decided to take a break after having worked several months on an exhausting release schedule. Microsoft requires members of its "contingent staff" to take 100 days off after having worked at the company for a calendar year. I felt fortunate to be able to time my break with the summer. My required "break" ended Sept. 8, a Saturday. That meant I was eligible to take another Microsoft assignment Sept. 10, 2001. The timing turned out to be monumentally bad. I have not worked as a technical writer since.
I began looking for other jobs. In little time I found that both my options and expectations tumbled into freefall. I responded to job ads for a security guard, barista, carpet cleaner, airport shuttle driver. I rarely even got an interview. Other job seekers responded to the same help wanted classifieds by the hundreds, sometimes even thousands. My unemployment benefits ran out last November, soon after Congress and the Bush administration nixed Democratic proposals to extend them. I began to pound the pavement, canvassing blocks of businesses at a time, filling out job applications. Finally, I was hired for the deli job - for $8 an hour.
After returning from Vietnam, Gary retired from the U.S. Air Force and returned to school, where he earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering and was subsequently hired by the Boeing Co. Like me, Gary came from a working middle-class background, where we were taught that with hard work, education, and determination, we could achieve the comfortable, even affluent lives we sought. For Gary, a disabled right arm - although a hardship - was little more than an inconvenience in his work. He trained himself to write with his left hand. Unlike his father, a German immigrant who ran his own delicatessen, Gary was able to earn his living solely with his intellect. With a head for science and numbers, he excelled at weights and measures. He built his career on teams that designed some of Boeing's latest and best examples of military and passenger aircraft. Along the way he bought a home, raised a family, saved for a secure retirement. He believed in Boeing's future, and he invested much of his retirement savings in the company, as well as with Microsoft, another stalwart of the Northwest's - indeed the nation's - economy.
Often, however, events occur that derail the best laid plans: Stock market corrections. The events of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing recession. Both Gary and I understand this, and we've done the best we can to cope. Not long after 9-11, Gary lost his career due to layoffs, when Boeing sent much of its work to contractors overseas or eliminated jobs altogether. His stock portfolio and retirement savings were savaged when the market went south. Along the way, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. His military and company medical plans aren't what they used to be, so he sold his home and most of his assets to pay his wife's medical bills. At age 61, he is forced to live in a rented two-bedroom apartment, where he also raises a 4-year-old grandchild. His military retirement pay and what is left of his retirement savings at Boeing won't pay the bills. He was forced to turn to the only other thing he knows that he could make a living at - working in a deli. It is union work, so he is eligible for medical benefits. Both he and I now make less in an entire six-hour shift than we once earned in an hour.
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I've sold nearly everything I had of value, and my 401(k) and IRA have been eviscerated. I have very little debt. Still, I can barely pay the bills. I haven't seen a doctor or a dentist in nearly three years.
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I consider myself luckier than Gary. I don't have a family, so medical insurance has not been a paramount concern (so far). True, the lifestyle that included a Porsche and a waterfront house on Whidbey Island is gone. I've sold nearly everything I had of value, and my 401(k) and IRA have been eviscerated. I have very little debt. Still, I can barely pay the bills. I haven't seen a doctor or a dentist in nearly three years. Once companies bid for my services. Now I'm in my late 40s and a veteran of software technical documentation. Apparently, those are not very marketable commodities. In virtually every case I'm aware of where I interviewed for a job, the person who eventually got the job was both younger and less experienced than me.
Of course, now there are significantly fewer technical writing jobs available for which to apply. Certainly there is technical documentation to be done. IT experts from META Group believe companies are holding off for now, but when conditions improve a lot of pent-up demand is expected. But the hot trend in IT is offshore outsourcing. Forrester Research reports that millions of the IT jobs lost will never return and have been - or will be - outsourced to outsourcing giants like India. I've been told by other American technical writers of Indian origin - also unemployed - that they could have all the work they wanted if they would return to India and accept the equivalent of $12 per hour, which they tell me is a very good wage there.
At least I have a job. For that I am grateful, although it relegates me to the ranks of the so-called "working poor." The irony is that while Indian workers make $12 an hour (the equivalent, an Indian tech worker tells me, to about $40 U.S. dollars) and considers that a living wage, Gary and I make only $8 an hour and are struggling to make ends meet. It leaves me to ponder what this says about the priorities of American big business and the lack of concern, or even understanding, of our elected officials.
Often customers who wear the infamous T-shirt or jacket brandishing a Microsoft logo come in to purchase sandwich meat and cheese or fried chicken and a salad - something easy to prepare for a late dinner. I once told one such customer that I had also worked at Microsoft. He just shot me an odd look for a moment, and then he grasped the pound of roast beef I had just sliced for him and hurried off in the direction of the grocery department. I often wonder what he must have been thinking. Did he find it hard to believe what had happened to me? Was he afraid that what had happened to me, Gary, and a growing number of others could also happen to him?
I also wonder what will happen to the U.S economy as the number of members of the so-called middle class continues to grow smaller. Under our current circumstances, neither Gary nor I can afford to buy homes, large appliances, or new cars. We don't go on shopping expeditions to Bellevue Square or to Costco. Buying a $3 latte is an uncommon treat. We are the dropouts of the American consumer economy, and more join our ranks every day as jobs disappear in the U.S., many of which reappear in places such as India, Indonesia or the Philippines.
How will Boeing executives sell planes to U.S. carriers when the number of Americans who can afford to fly dwindles? What plan do Microsoft's leaders have to maintain their company's revenues as the number of those who can no longer afford to purchase new operating systems or Xboxes grows? What becomes of the United States as a world leader as other countries surpass our expertise in aerospace and computer technology? These are questions Gary and I sometimes ask one another as we scrub down the deli at the end of the day when we have a few moments to ponder.
Since leaving technical writing, David Beckman has returned to his journalism roots and is a regular contributor to TechsUnite -when he is not working in the deli.
Ohh well... I live a spartan lifestyle, and now have more time to ride my bike.
I'll bet there were a lot of buggy whip manufacturing workers who lost their livelihoods when automobiles came into being a couple of generations ago.
If you lose your job like this fellow, you should have yourself a good cry, take stock of your God-given talents, research what skills and workers are needed, and re-tool yourself to meet those needs.
What a load of crap... Folks WERE 'retooling' themselves a few years ago for the IT boom that has now busted.
Explain to me the 'sense of fairness' in employing 5k per year engineers in India that were schooled in US universities on freebee foreign student programs? We've been sold out by greedy multi-corps who use the US military for protection and then screws the US citizens.
I would ask: Do you shop at the most expensive grocery store in your neighborhood, or buy the most expensive item (when you have several alternatives)? I would think not, unless you have unlimited finances.
Our unemployed IT workers are the buggy whip makers, or transistor manufacturer employees, or steelworkers of earlier generations. People must re-tool, relocate or resign themselves to obsolescence. This is fact. The government is not going to step in and forbid companies from sending jobs overseas.
Be creative and flexible, and don't give up.
I have no intention of giving up... but I am certainly taking stock of the current paradigm that reduces a man to a 'least common denominator' serf.
An economic whirlwind is coming, and I only hope that marxism doesn't win because the capitalists got too damn greedy.
The middle class can only be squeezed so far... Then they break out with the guillotine.
We are sold out by the govt. that allows this change to occur. It is easier to promote "freetrade" and "international cooperation" and "most favored nation status" than to stem the torrent of job and manufacturing losses we are seeing.
Realize that the american worker - both white and blue collar and small business owners are supporting the global economy with the sacrifices they are making.
My loss of business ( as a woman owned - small business manufacturer) to China, Singapore or Mexico is a "sacrifice" being made for me by the feds. The Congress is buying the silence and and global peace by paying off cooperating countries by allowing cheap imports to poach on the american economy.
We are all supporting "global peace" by allowing the chinese to produce, without EPA OSHA IRS or FDA oversight, products to sell in the US for cheap. Without govt. interference the US would be as competitive as the foreign pirates and wage-slave employers.
I guess we can call ourselves heroes for being the sacrificial lambs of the new world order.
Today that same tekkie works for me as an employee for far less money, but still significantly more than some of the offshore programmers I use - and yet I'm looking for the first opportunity to give him a raise because, due to cultural factors, he's extremely productive compared to his foreigh counterparts.
There are two sides to this coin, and if there's anything at all to be miffed about it's that technology was touted by the government as being the mecca for employment for the fifteen years learing up to the bust.
I worked for a billionaire (they still want me). He's Chinese, with $30 million in petty cash in various stock broker accounts. They couldn't keep track of the money, so I said I'd start a database/accounting packge to track the transactions. I explained that there could be very large savings and profits in automating the whole buy/sell/accounting process. Because I was flat broke, I said $2500 to get this started.
200 hours later (one man month), I had a near working program. Including monthly office rent of $700, some outside database consulting expense of $300, my potential profit is $1500. They refused to pay the last $600, even though originally I had told them I was doing this on the cheap to get over a cash flow hump.
It gets better. I put in another 300 hours developing most of the rest of the automated trading/accounting system. I tell the CFO they could save hundreds of thousands of dollars, and have a new business if they fund me. I tell them I know of SAP installations that have ballooned from $10 million to $20 million. The CFO tells me they bankrupted a company the same way, went from $20 million estimate to $30 million for software, but he can't give me the last $600 because it just wouldn't be right. He says if I finish the last little bit, we can put this on a proprietary mainframe that a subsidiary owns (I figure, poof, my code is off to China the minute I do that).
Questions for Freepers: Guess who still owns the software? By the way, I am not making any of this up, the CFO called me up just Thursday. I have been in other situations like this too. IT people get dumped on, I am sooo tired of it. Real Estate, here I come.
AND they have enough money to send home to relatives in Mexico. What's the difference? How come they seem to be thriving whereas others are not?
If you are consulting, you have to charge that much to cover (Tech Books, Tech Courses, travel time, medical, people who don't pay, taxes, accounting and bookeeping time, billing, etc.). Don't pay your conmsultants enough and they will quit, like I'm doing. Then you have to hire them full time, complete with coffee breaks, lunch time, education sabbatical time, etc.
I now require retainers up front and cut clients loose when they become slow or no pays. The est lessons in life are learned the hard way.
By the way, the wealthier the client (I have found), the bigger the pain and the more likely you will be left holding the bag (or an unpaid invoice) in the end. I supposes that is how they got rich; they never gave any of their money to anyone else.
Ohh sure... Private Contracting.... but the flip side is that most of my IT career I schlepped for a Fortune 1000 at about $35/hr that they billed for $125.
Even 'internally' which was it's own sorta slushfund/tax-writeoff.
Idealism is for dummys. And pure unbridled capitalism is as corrupt and anti-human as anything that Communism, Feudalism, or Nepotism ever dreamed up.
But managed through pragmatic means, it is our only hope.
It is not competition to have US companies under this costly regulation and paying taxes that amount to confiscation.
I *am* a engineering consultant and have been for twenty years (and before that I was an areospace/defense contractor working at NASA). I've trained astronauts, devleoped firmware to guide cruise missiles and simulated the most sophisticated radars on the planet. I've developed the firmware for the GE radar system that detects windshear at the end of every major runway in the nation. I've managed (and manage) projects for more Fortune 500 firms than I care to count. Today I am an independant consultant who hires other consultants, and I know exactly what reasonable consulting prices are - and, except in special cases, they are well below $90/hour.
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