[Willie Green]

Related threads:
Is India stealing America's high-tech jobs?
Over 500,000 US tech jobs lost in 2 years

[Support Free Republic]

See that good looking dude on the left? He's got FAR BETTER THINGS to do than conduct Freepathons! Come on, let's get this thing over with.

[hapy]

This is not good, not for me anyways.

between losing my job and losing our men in iraq everyday, Idon't know guys if I can hang on much longer.

The otherside is starting to shape up

[proxy_user]

Someone told me that Verizon was so far ahead of my company, that they'd already sent their IT jobs to India, been dissatisfied with the results, and bought them back to the US.

Can any freeper confirm or deny?

[csvset]

Willie, I start a somewhat "techish" job next Monday, working for in a callcenter for Canon. During the interview, they gave us a tour and told us that it is the only call center that Canon has in the USA for home consumers.

I was tempted to ask about the possibilities of the place closing and the jobs being shipped overseas. I do hope that doesn't happen. I worked briefly for Gateway until their their local callcenter folded.

For the folks that will say, "You'll have to learn new skills", tech support was the new skill I learned after I could no longer work in the ship repair industry due to health (hearing loss).

I'll make the best of it while I can.

[RightWhale]

The hemorrhaging of tens of thousands of technology jobs in recent years

The real technology is scientific management. America was founded on economic grounds and scientific management put America ahead of the next richest country. Ahead of the next five richest countries together. Silicon engineers are just the same as burger flippers: The masses. If you aren't CFR or Bilderbergers, you don't count; enjoy the ride.

[Afronaut]

Sitting here with no prospects for work in the Tech field, I wonder why I read these postings? I get so PO'd. I hope they all go overseas and see what they get. They will be back. If you can get positioned to "fix or troubleshoot" code you can be the king of the world in a few years.

Did you every hear the phrase CHIMPIN'? If you put a bunch of monkey's in a room with a typewriters they will turn out Shakespeare in due time. That's what these companies hope will happen.

Progress is all about Ideas and Dreams. I have not seen any from these parts of the world through out history. There will be a price to pay.

Keep Chimpin'

[Joe Bonforte]

I've been hearing this stuff for years. The India trend began at least seven years ago. And what's the result?

Until year 2000, there were more jobs that could possibly be filled. That, of course, created an artificial bubble. It popped with the dotcom bust late in 2000.

Since then, I know two types of software developers:

(1) Those who are good and willing to learn new skills, and relocate if necessary. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE THAT I KNOW HAS A GOOD JOB. Some of them had to sweat to get it - one friend had to sell his house and move a thousand miles away. But he's the exception, because his area of expertise is more narrow than the others. The vast majority are still right here and doing fine.

(2) Those who were either never very good, or unable or unwilling to adapt. Many of them don't have jobs now. For some that of them, that's actually good, because they were not any good at software development anyway.

Whether you want to face the fact or not, those in category 2 have no claim on a well-paying job, no more than unionized factory workers in industrial enterprises in decades past had such a claim. If they are not contributing value commesurate with their compensation, they need to be doing something else.

We also have to accept that some coding tasks are becoming so routine that they are turning into "industrial" tasks with no significant creative aspect. One way or another, those tasks are going to stop paying as much money. It may be because of overseas outsourcing, but more likely those tasks will be rendered unnecessary by newer generations of development technology.

The answer is to stop whining and learn to create more value. Defining requirements, skillful design, appropriate use of advanced technology - those are where the value is added. Definitely not in pounding out lines of code.

Look, in my current project, we are rewriting an older system for a new generation of technology. The new system has one-third the lines of code as the old one, even though it does way more and is vastly more flexible. The value the development team contributed was in finding a way to write such complex systems with *far less* code. That requires an intimate understanding of both the requirements and the technological possibilities, and at no point in the foreseeable future is that kind of work going to be sent to China or whatever.

This may sound hard-hearted, but it's just reality. Conservatives are supposed to understand that "life's not fair", and deal with that. Not be like liberal whiners who act like the world somehow owes them a living doing exactly what they want to do.

And, as other posters have pointed out, the quality of work outsourced to overseas is generally quite poor. I know two local companies who tried it and gave it up. As with all trends, it's subject to reversal. That last thing we need is some ham-handed government "solution" to a problem that will almost certainly solve itself over time.

[Joe Hadenuf]

There still leaving home? I figured they would all be gone by now.

[Sabatier]

"They even enjoy living on the cutting edge -- taking courses in advanced computer languages, getting experience in a variety of business disciplines, and endorsing a philosophy of continuous improvement, he said."

Uh, how exactly is this life on the cutting edge supposed to work? Let's say you as a young person spend four-plus years in university to get that tech degree, during which time you learn a bunch of generalized theory, meanwhile run up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, then if you're lucky get a job in industry where you learn the specialized skills the employer needs, then get downsized and it's time to retrain because your specialized skills don't apply anywhere else, but hey, you've already racked up those tens of thousands in student loans to get to this point, so retrain where and for what exactly and by "getting experience in a variety of business disciplines" does that mean learning how to say "do you want frys with that shake?" and "Welcome to Walmart"? There's a mismatch between the way students are educated here and the reality of the marketplace.

[Rockitz]

Unless you are involved in an export controlled product, work in national defense, manufacture products with a high ratio of retail price to shipping cost, or provide services to those who are left, your US-based job is evaporating before your eyes. We're talking major deflation spiral in the works. This is gonna get ugly.

[nutmeg]

ping!

Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.

[lelio]

Pryor said. "It frees up people and dollars to do much more value-added strategic things for clients."

The "let them eat cake" defense. What's more likely is that the person that's trying to get into an entry level tech job will now be freed up to strategically clean a pool.

[MelBelle]

Thanks for the info. I'm collecting this info for my unemployement meeting on Thursday. The unemployement office wants to discuss my job search. When they say may title on the form "System Security Administrator" they should have saved me a damn trip and let me to a phone interview.

[MelBelle]

What do you think the odds of me finding another $70,000 a year IT job or my husband's hard rock band getting signed to a record deal.... probably about the same so I've decided to become his manager/promoter. Thank goodness we built our home recording studio before I lost my job! Now I just need to figure out how to create our own record lable and we'd have it made. I've been up late studying!!

[VOA]

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[Cowboy Bob]

Question: If all the jobs are getting sent overseas (high tech and manufacturing), who will be buying the finished product in the US? One doesn't have much disposable income when they work for McDonald's.

[FoxPro]

I have 20 programmers in Russia. Since I can’t get a “real” job in IT, I am their salesman now, and it is working quite well.

They do the following for between $10 and $20 per hour:

People Soft, Oracle 7-8-8i-9i, MS SQL Server, Windows NT/2000, C++, UNIX, .NET, J2EE, Java, C#, HTML, DHTML, XML, WML, _JavaScript, Perl, PHP, PL/SQL, _VBScript (WSH, ASP), Win32 API, COM+, OLE/ActiveX, TCP/IP, DirectX, .NET, Framework, ASP, ASP.NET, EJB, JSP, JDBC, JFC, SOAP, UNIX (Sun Solaris), Linux, MS SQL, MySQL, FoxPro and many others.

We just inked a deal for 2 massive projects for one of the arguably largest retailers in the world. This was done for a fraction of the cost of doing it here. My customer commented that if they did these projects here, they would probably end up paying $100,000 for smoke breaks alone. The Russians learned English studying American computer documentation, so their technical communication skills are excellent, and they never bitch about anything (and the don’t allow woman in their office building).

It is all about relationships and understanding each other’s humanity. If you don’t understand the lives of the people you are outsourcing too, it probably isn’t going to work. It took us over a year to put together our team, most of which are former nuclear and rocket scientists for the crumbling defense industries. Nobody codes like Russians, who are very accurate and attentive.

Am I taking jobs from Americans, yes, do I feel bad about this, yes, do I have any other choice other than waiting tables, no.

Should I mop floors to keep an American in a cubicle, I don’t think so.

[Bob J]

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[VOA]

bump