Working on your own as a contractor IS difficult work. The main problem being that you have to prove/sell yourself with every client - and it becomes more sales and marketing than technical/engineering.
Large organizations DO accumulate dead wood, I agree. However, there is also great value in having long-term employees in many cases.
That said, there is little incentive to keep employees. In many organizations, for many reasons, not the least of which is regulation, bureaucracy and liability - being an employee has little more security than being a private contractor.
As overhead increases on each employee forces companies to cut perks and benefits, employees will come to realize that they really ARE contractors for all intents and purposes - and some will start behaving that way and do as you have done and become 'hired guns'.
You cannot do anything about software development in India, or manufacturing in China. It's not going to stop, so if you find yourself competing in those arenas, I understand why you have the opinions you do, but directing your angst at all people who have longstanding jobs with big companies is hardly productive.
evolution and innovation is what has always driven this economy. If you have a better idea that will put big companies out of business, and all those long tenured employees, I'm all for it and wish you well.
Until then, you should think of those guys in big companies as 'customers'.
On that we disagree. It will stop, and my interest -- only from the inertia of liking what I done before and a want to continue doing that -- is in making it stop faster, and with less aggravtional efects to my family, neighbors and countrymen.
Americans are good at things intimately and intrinsically part of manufacturing, systems, engineering and sofware that just can not be found in any measure in other countries. However the these unique abilities are very much obscured and cut off from circulation by gross accumulations of "fat" -- they require either leaness in the economy or better yet a proper seperation of fat and lean.
I can not describe too well but what Mark Twain did in his corpus of opuses pretty well gets to them. The Connecticut Yankee, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, etc.