Posted on 11/02/2002 1:13:06 AM PST by Bobby777
Vehicle sales plunge in October
Big 3 automakers’ figures drop over 30 percent vs. last year
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DETROIT, Nov. 1 — Auto sales fell in October, despite stepped up interest-free financing and other discounts, amid tough comparisons with an unusually robust performance a year earlier.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
Hey FL, read the post before you reply. I am my own boss.
For example, plane fares inside of Japan are extremely expensive, because jet fuel in Japan is extremely expensive. A ticket from Tokyo to Sapporo will cost you as much as a ticket from Tokyo to New York, or at least Los Angeles. Domestic airlines pay a bonus for fuel, and that bonus is turned into a fuel discount for steel companies, who are able to sell cheap, extremely high quality steel to Japanese auto manufacturers, who have yet another way to undersell our products by doing things which would land one in jail in the USA. They then proceed to wipe the floor with us while folks go on about lazy Americans and diligent, thrifty Japanese.
The Japanese economy is designed so that even if the average Japanese worked twenty hours a day, seven days a week, and had to pay thirty thousand dollars a month for a capsule hotel to sleep in, and twenty five thousand dollars a month to eat one rice ball covered with seaweed a day, they'd still be wiping us out. Neither would their population protest much beyond drunken grumbling after work. That's how their economy is designed. I know, I lived there and paid Japanese taxes for ten years.
No, your boss are your clients.
Excuse me? Where I have said it isn't?
But in the 90s, another game was going on, that shoved that sort of pay at 24 year old Java programmers with 2-3 years of not terribly demanding training (in the 80s, they would have earned 1/5 as much for 5 years as junior programmers until they learned how to actually do useful things), or Oracle systems analysts who added practically no value (never on time or budget or as advertised, ever), or Arthur Anderson consultants who probably destroyed it. And these folks were just involved in a great scam of taking money from gullible stock market speculators and feeding it to corporate insiders, whether as promoters or just employees being showered with their cut of the take.
Plenty of people saw ridiculous salaries in relation to the real value they were adding. That is one of the consequences of misallocations of capital, which all large scale unsustainable price movements inevitably leave in their wake. Those sorts of people may well have developed completely unrealistic expectations of the value they actually add, and therefore the ordinary salary they can expect at their level of technical knowledge and experience.
For anyone actually in that situation, the first thing he needs to know, before all else, is that is was based on a temporary illusion (on the part of speculators) and that it is over. And to stop waiting around for it to come back, and get on with the more prosaic task of earning an honest living. There was a reason, after all, that jobs disappeared in certain industries. It was because all of the money being thrown at those high priced workers was not paying back to those doing the throwing, anymore, as soon as the stock market stopped looking like a moon-shot. Said workers were not really adding the value they were being paid. And that is why those jobs don't exist anymore, and are not coming back.
I live in the real world, where men take care of themselves and theirs whatever the world throws at them, and where waiting around for government to do anything for you is a recipe for pointless failure. I don't live in a world of talking-points, memos, lobbying, and spin.
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It seems you and I have had run-ins before. Your real world and my real world don't agree with each other. I still say what you posted was a fairy tale.
I agree that in the very late 90's (actually, for 1999 and 2000) that some IT jobs were clearly highly compensated due to the high demand, and this has now shaken out in 2001 and 2002. But I am not sure what you mean by earning 1/5 as much for 5 years as junior programmers. Take for example a salary of $100K, which would be considered reasonable for a Java programmer with a 4 year CS degree and 5 years of experience. Is that "highly compensated?" CS degrees are one of the harder undergraduate degrees to achieve - maybe not as tough as EE degrees, but still pretty tough - much harder than business or liberal arts degrees. (Reason - the foreign students who have to be in the top 2% in their nation to get permission to come study in the US gravitate towards these degrees and drive up the relative grade curve - a good thing because they make everyone else in class study much harder just to keep up.)
Anyway - the 4 year CD degree and 5 years of experience is not easy. And compared to "programmers" in the 80's where the main skill was COBOL - there is no comparison. Modern programming languages and envionments (n-tier architectures, web services, databases, different operating systems, different types of software servers, EAI, CORBA, etcetera) - it is just much harder to gain all the knowledge and be an effective developer today than it was when programming was COBOL in the CICS/MVS type environment.
The question then becomes - do you want to pay someone who has to get a 4 year degree and then spend years continuing to learn? The old joke about COBOL was that a COBOL programmer with 5 years of experience had 6 months of experience 10 times. That is clearly not the case in today's far more complex, ever changing, and sophisticated environments.
The big problem is managers who don't know anything more about it than the acronyms and what they read in CIO magazine (meaning, not much). They make the hiring decisions, and all too often it is based on who can say the right buzzwords who offers to come to work the cheapest. Of course they get what they pay for - but often they are too ignorant to even understand the differences in results, and since they are going to change jobs internally every 6 months to 1 year, they don't really care about who they hire anyway as long as they are the cheapest people they can get.
The Dilbert cartoon used to be funny - until it became the norm. Remember the Peter principle - people get promoted to their level of incompetence? Well the Dilbert principle is - promote the incomptent, the others are needed in their current jobs because they are doing them well. And in fact this is exactly what has happened. And once the pool of incompetent management grows so large that it is no longer just a few jokes but the majority - well, scratch a manager, find a DEMOCRAT!
As for COBOL, last time I saw it was in middle school...
Today however - let's look at a hypothetical example. Suppose a corporation has grown through merger and acquisition. They now have a dozen divisions that each used to be separate companies. Each division has merged their corporate functions. Now for sales, accounting, etc this is not so hard. But for IT there is all that legacy infrastructure - hardware acquired from different vendors, different software supporting ERP, manufacturing, etc. - with dozens of standards. This is all very different from the state of IT in the 80's. So - lets say some guys implement web services and EAI. By doing so they can reduce costs by millions of dollars. Is it worth it to pay the guys that do this 6 figures. Duh. Yes.
So, things are very different today - and programmers with the skills to do the above are worth the money.
The sad thing is that in many companies, they don't integrate the divisional IT costs and lose millions. Too bad for their shareholders, so sad. The managers still pull a steady paycheck even though they are costing their shareholders millions. Big suprise there (not). Who will watch the watchers and all that.
Um, right. Try, the insiders sell some snake oil to speculators about how just in time management and integrated IT systems have cut their costs dramatically, allowing profits to double on relatively flat sales. Then they have their AA accountants dump all of their costs into "capital spending", "one time" this and that, "off books" partnerships, yada yada.
Stock goes up on "stellar earnings", options cashed, insiders happy. To do this, sure they need to throw money at all of the IT people brought in at step one. But they don't need to worry about whether it will really pay off, because they aren't recognizing the costs with real accounting, and don't care about the corporate coffers anyway (that is stockholder money, not their own), only the stock price and their own options.
The financiers and accountants are middlemen in all of this. The speculators get bilked (their greed gets them, as always in such matters, with a liberal dose of willful blindness and a pinch of outright lying), employees and insiders get their money. For a while, then it goes kerflooey. (I was, incidentally, doing finance in this period - on the buy side - not programming. I had to avoid the "mines").
Did they -try- to truly improve things? Sure. But it is heads they win, tails the speculators lose. Salaries can easily run 2-3 times the real value people are adding while that is going on. As for the value really added by programmers back in the 80s, it was collosal, but was not seen at the time. That collosal value showed up as total returns from the Suns and MS 's from the moment they went public.
Sure, I've been in IT centers that were only costs - I once consulted at Navistar, the successor of International Harvester, in Chicago in the 80s. They were a basket case about tech. I mean, total basket case - several floors in a corporate tower full of programmers, maybe three of whom could actually write working code. Others dealt with it better - CAT for instance. Not the brightest bulbs- their in house people were trying to do everything with Lotus. But at least their managers had the brains to realize going outside made sense. Overall they were vastly more professional at the time than Navistar.
The point is, there is a general correspondance between salaries and what value people add, but only general and only in the medium term. In the short run, plain not knowing, or financial games, can lead to wide differences between them. Which is one reason wages for single job types aren't monotone increasing things. They only look that way if you average a lot of them - then you will see overall productivity and will average out all of the up and down noise of these differences.
One man's observations, for whatever they are worth...
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