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I am now working on getting projects outsourced to Russia and India. They work for something around $6 per hour. They are very good, and work hard. The reason this is now happening is because the Internet hit about 10 years ago. It took these people 10 years to lean English and Oracle, Java, SQL Server ect. They all learned English by studying technical resources on the Internet. They don’t speak English, but can read and write it very well; since that is the way they learned. They are now teaching their kids to speak English.

I am patriotic, but I sent out 24,000 resumes to email addresses that I snaked from the major job boards, and ended up with essentially nothing. I have a stellar resume. The local shoe store will not even look at my resume because of my work history. I am nearly out on the street, my wife is divorcing me, I am penniless and I am losing my house. In fact the only thing that saved me is the fact that my house doubled in value over 3 years. How long do you think that will last? If you live in the DC area and you don’t have a security clearance, forget about it, your toast. It is time to move on. If you can’t beat them join them.

How long do you think that will last? If you live in the DC area and you don’t have a security clearance, forget about it, your toast. It is time to move on

Indeed it is. What is the problem with getting a security clearance? Some mistake in your past? Those can be forgiven if not too serious. We had a guy in our department, that had gotten caught smoking dope when he was in the Army in Vietnam. (and I don't mean just MJ). He not only beat the dope, he managed to get first a standard clearance, and then a compartmented one. Unfortunately for him, I think he moved over from the defense side of the house, to the IT side. Well, he "knew" that Clintonsizing was coming to the defense side, it had already started in fact, and that the defense group would probably be sold, (it was) I just don't think he saw the freight train coming when he got out of the frying pan and jumped into the fire (to mix a metaphor rather badly. :) )

Hey, why so glum, chum? It's just a matter of perspective, man. TRAIN people to do what you do! There are lots of people who would pay good money to learn what you have to teach. Nobody does that in DC--the world is your oyster!

</sarcasm>

P.S. Don't shoot yourself...that would make some people on this board feel bad. They'd have to sadly tell your surviving relatives, "He should have gotten a job training people."

I am patriotic, but I sent out 24,000 resumes to email addresses that I snaked from the major job boards, and ended up with essentially nothing. I have a stellar resume. The local shoe store will not even look at my resume because of my work history. I am nearly out on the street, my wife is divorcing me, I am penniless and I am losing my house. In fact the only thing that saved me is the fact that my house doubled in value over 3 years. How long do you think that will last? If you live in the DC area and you don’t have a security clearance, forget about it, your toast. It is time to move on. If you can’t beat them join them.

I work for large tech firm in the DC area (not government related - we are in the financial industry). We have 19 openings WE CAN NOT FILL! For programmers! I am guessing you are into FoxPro by your moniker - that could be the problem - old dBase-based languages have been dead for almost 10 years (despite the fact Microsoft bought FoxPro and still ships it with their suit of development tools).

If you have C++, .NET, C#, Visual Basic, SQL Server or Oracle skills - there is work in the DC area.

I was part of a small 12 person company that got bought by a very large company - one of my co-worker/friends did not like the big company environment and left (just last month) and got a .NET-related consulting job and 30% increase (to the tune of $130,000)

I have a friend that is a tech recruiter - he says there are plenty of jobs in the DC area - if you have up-to-date skills - mainly .NET (NOTE: HTML and JavaScript hacks are not programmers – this skews the numbers because these people call themselves programmers and they can’t find work)

I have a friend that is part of a small start-up (still in business) - they sent their programming work to India - it sorta worked but the language barrier made the code nearly impossible to support - so now they have taken back the code and are trying to fix it. India is not producing better code - just cheaper code.

Out sources to India works if the work is mindless - meaning you give them instructions and they follow. The problem is most programming work is NOT mindless so the results from India are mixed at best. The life-cycle of software involves many non-mindless jobs - out sourcing programming work has limited application (but this should be a wake-up call)