Posted on 10/12/2005 4:20:14 PM PDT by spintreebob
Immigration vs Out-Sourcing has been the choice I've presented here in the past. Just a couple updates.
It is ever more difficult to find American IT workers. I'm 62. Many in my generation are retiring with no American to replace them.
Watch for companies to do more outsourcing of IT jobs to domestic consulting firms. Those consulting firms will be as unable to find Americans as their client companies have been. Those domestic consulting firms then have the same choice their client had: Either hire immigrants or sub-contract/sub-outsource to India.
Either way, the client companies that need the work done will increasingly insulate themselves from the bad publicity associated with their employees being raided for lack of proper immigration permission.
Their only other choice is to kill those espensive IT projects and manage a profitable contraction of their business by reducing the big overhead that is IT.
One young person I've mentored via email with no degree and 1 year of experience has been offered a 6 figure position solely because the company is desperate to find someone/anyone and nobody else even remotely qualified has applied, despite spending a lot of money on many different approaches to recruiting.
Of course, I'd like to take the credit that it was my advice on how to write a resume, how to get the interview, how to interview, etc that landed the job. But the reality is that the companies out there are desperate.
Would the presence of honest differences of opinion be disruptive of the event? Or maybe in Alinsky style organizing, an "enemy" is needed.
Will Rauschenberger attend and find his Sister Souljah ? You'll remember Clinton won the primaries in '92 by proving he was more reasonable than a wack-job nobody had ever previously heard of.
Someone is exaggerating. Nobody gets a 6 figure position on one year of experience with no degree. Didn't even happen during the height of the tech boom, and it isn't happening now. If you have 1 year of the hottest skill on the market maybe you can fetch $75k from a desperate company, in the rosiest scenario imaginable. Someone with 5-10 years of experience, an uncommon skill, and good presentation can get $100k.
I'm a Unix Administrator with over fifteen years of experience.
I can agree with you on at least one point - companies are desperate for qualified IT employees.
I’d be tempted to agree. I do know that we had a female working in HR in a training/development function. She got picked up by a tech company in 2002 and was reportedly offered in the $220,000 range.
She was a 26 year-old staff manager at an international company for ~3 years at the time though. Had a business management degree too.
Easy solution. Control the borders, then let the Labor Department set immigration quotas based on vacant jobs.
If you're a software engineer, or a bricklayer, or a machinist, or a nurse, etc. we don't care where you're from or what color your skin is- come on in! We got jobs- lotsa jobs. Take your pick!
Not qualified in a job we need right now? Sorry, can't use you. Better luck next year.
But how do you find a 'desperate' company?
How many people illegally moving in from Mexico have IT degrees and/or experience?
Sounds like a unique individual, an anomaly in market terms.
Absolutely agreed. One of those "good gig if you can get it" deals.
We have had a couple-dozen people that I know personally retire early an go to greener pastures.
Lately they tend to field offers between 350 and 550.
These are people with degrees and 15 - 25 years experience though. Most of them are HR types with safety, labor, or training/dev experience.
I suspect theyr'e being systematically head-hunted because it's always one of three (mostly) companies that lure them away.
I don't begrudge them their good fortune though. That's the way it works. I'd be gone too, were I in their positon.
Not easy. The job market is very dynamic, moves fast, changes fast. Any government bureaucracy is slow and would be managing immigration for last years fad.
Better to have no quotas, but pass laws that no immigrant, legal or illegal, gets welfare (by whatever name). Then only workers will come here and not parasites. The parasites already here are a much bigger problem than hard workers even if they compete with me for a job.
That is a good question. Why do some jobs on computerjobs.com and similar sites seem to never be filled? Others are snapped up in seconds.
I wanted to stay in Chicagoland. There were, and are, many high paying jobs in Chicagoland I could do (eg IT fire fighting). But none were my "cup of tea". So I went to cornland where where I love it; perfect fit for my skills and interests. This job had been open over a year with the company aggressively trying to fill it. It has ben unable to fill other positions either because other people are not willing to work in cornland nor in a satelite city on the edge of cornland.
(The job of the person I mentored is in no way related to my situation.)
P{reviously in Chicagoland the person in the cubicle on one side of me was a geek with low self-esteem who worked for %15,000/yr. He would have done it for free. He loved what he did and was good at it. On the other side of me was a guy who made $200,000 to advise the company on future IT direction... and all he did was plagiarize magazine articles into Word without credit to the authors. There was no rhyme or reason to the articles he presented as his own ideas. My income was in the middle.
Some people are lousy negotiators and don't recognize their worth, or their ability to sell themselves. Others are great negotiators and sell the sizzle. Life is not fair.
There are plenty of illegal immigrants (especially in IT) from places other than Mexico. Why no obsession with the illegal IT workers I've worked beside from Canada, Ireland, Australia, and especially India?
Although IT has higher pay rates than middle income construction or low income cleaning office buildings, I've seen exactly the same employment dynamic in those and other sectors outside IT.
One of my underemployed school-dropout semi-literate American tenants was unable to pay his rent. (I rented to him precisely because his underemployment was the National Guard. I had been discriminated against as an Army guy in the '60s.)
I suggested he take a well paying unskilled construction position for a 2 year project that was unable/desperate to find workers. His response was that he didn't do "spic" work. Sure enough, after many ads in the paper and pleas to the local unemployment compensaton office, the only people the project could find to work were (illegal) immigrants... but not Mexicans.
The same is true of the illegals who clean office buildings. When I worked in Chicago's loop, it was mostly illegal Poles cleaning offices. But you would never know they were illegal because the local Democrat political machine sold them Social Security cards, Drivers licenses and voter registration cards for cash ... and the obligation that they vote for the Democrat machine candidate in every election.
Do you have any words of wisdom for these people? My husband is a very under-employed IT guy, and I'm trying to help him find more satisfying employment, but he is very hesitant to 'sell himself'. He underestimates his skills and doesn't like to talk about himself. He's not very articulate when it comes to social situations, but computer talk just comes naturally to him; I know he'd be an asset to any company, if he could just get past the interview. Any thoughts?
Maybe the point is that the current job market is the anomaly... there is no large number of cookie cutter, asembly line jobs any more. Individualist workers are needed who have the self-initiative to see what needs to be done and do it. They need neither a management boss, nor a union boss, to hold their hand and baby-sit them, and negotiate their wages and benefits in some contract that defines static work rules.
The UAW-Delphi and UAW-GM and Machinist-Airline jobs that have those static work-rules are obsolete and can only be kept on life support for a little while longer.
I believe that all techonology workers from other countires are legal immigrants.. All the Canadians/Irish/Indians I have worked with are legal and all pay taxes. Never heard of illegal IT immigrants...
I doubt that your information is correct..
Youre proposing open or near open borders. Dont be surprised when people disagree.
I can only speak for mainframe shops in the midwest where I've worked at many of them. Many, many IT workers are in the "Don't ask, Don't tell mode". A few came here illegally. But most of the "illegals" are on, or overstayed a student or tourist visa and don't have permission to work.
Companies insulate themselves by contracting with a consulting firm, which in turn has a sub-contractor and a long line of plausible deniability.
But yes, in terms of sheer numbers, Mexicans win.
... and I'm not at all surprised by people disagreeing with me. People need a scape-goat.
To paraphrase Pat Buchanan "There is a mess in Washington ... and its all the fault of illegal immigrants."
People who dont support open borders are scapegoating illegal immigrants? Thats a new one.
Lately they tend to field offers between 350 and 550.
How can I get a piece of that????????? :-0
Cheers!
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