Posted on 06/28/2003 11:23:30 AM PDT by sten
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.