Posted on 09/22/2002 7:21:38 AM PDT by RCW2001
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:41:01 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Jobless and broke, Bryan Clouse sits among the dwindling possessions in his studio in San Francisco's Fillmore District getting ready to leave what he once thought was a computer nerd's promised land.
In a week, the 35-year-old programmer will load up a rented SUV and say goodbye to the city that has been his home for the past nine years. He will go to live with his grandparents in Brooklyn, Mich., a tiny town of brick storefronts and clapboard houses a few hours west of Detroit. There, with no rent to worry about, he will look for work.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I have literally considered starting a Programmers Union.
Lots but let's not do this in public. Do you have Yahoo Messenger? My name is Lazamataz over there.
Go figger. ;^)
BTW, I have a friend in Plano who got a job last week as a programmer. He had been out of work for 11 months, and is having to start over financially from scratch. He is in his 50s.
The truth written.
Don't think of it as having to start over from scratch, think of it as an opportunity to start over from scratch. Oh, by the way, I checked, all the positions at Home Depot have been filled.
And it is not looking better anytime soon.
My condolences to your freind. Starting over from scratch financially in your 50's is a horrible prospect. I have a buddy out of work for 13 months now who is in the same boat, except he's in his late forties. He's basically screwed, engineering-wise - no one will hire a person of his age.
Which is why my wife and I are hunkering down big-time. We are blessed enough to have a job. We are saving every single thin dime to put together 9-12 months of income in a separate savings account (this does NOT include any retirement funds whatsoever). Bottom line for us - no cable, no cell phone, no magazine subscriptions, no unneeded clothes, and dining out maybe 2 times a month. Looking at how long people are out of work now, it is foolish not to save up.
This is what's killing many of the professional technical fields (not physicians or lawyers or architects, of course, but basically everybody else). When people over fifty are given the boot, where are they gonna go? McDonald's? BK? Wal-mart? Temp firms? Nope. As soon as those folks see the employment history and education, there's no way even an entry level job at Mac's will be offered.
I get a call about once a month from one of my friends from grad school about finding a job. He's been looking for work for two years. We've kept in touch over the years because we're colleagues and friends (I helped him edit his dissertation and he helped type mine). He lost his position at DOE during the Clinton downsizings. Private industry won't hire him because he's too old. He can't get on at Mac's or BK or even ride the garbage truck (he applied for that) because he's too educated. Last time we talked he said he was thinking of going to tech school to learn welding.
I'll tell you, this country is in the process of throwing away everything that made it great. We've thrown away our industrial and technical infrastructure and now we're throwing away intellectual resources. We're going to be left with two markets. One group of people (agents) will sell insurance to the other group, and the ones buying (lawyers) will be suing the agents for misrepresentation (or whatever they can think of).
But you're right about our country throwing away its talent. And those freepers on here who proclaim it's capitalism at its finest, I respond that it is corrupted capitalism run amok. Corporations have shafted engineers so long and so hard that nary a student is willing to enter into the field. Why should they when they see engineers get laid off at forty while lawyers and other professions make out like bandits? Why should they go through the effort of slugging through semesters of differential equations and electromagnetics when it is clear that American companies do not value home-grown talent?
Profit's the name of the game. Corporations have already made their loyalties clear; and those loyalties are NOT with America. CEOs and Boards loyalty is for profit and personal gain, even at the cost of endangering America. Corporate attitude is best summed up by another two of our 'great American' companies (Loral and Hughes) selling out to the Chinese - after all, it's all about the bottom line, right?
Good money - even if the job is very difficult.
But people in the other technical fields are getting slaughtered, especially the older workers. I've seen companies demand a 25% increase in profits each year from their divisions, and when they don't make it, the bean counters just do a head count, and start lopping what they consider excess heads. Invariably, the axe falls on those with the e-cubed sysndrome: educated, experienced, and expensive. So they're out pounding the pavement in their fifties, with not even an entry-level offer to be found. And once those people leave their fields, their expertise is gone, often forever, because that kind of talent, too long dormant, eventually decays. I saw essentially the nation's entire reserve of intellectual resources in breeder reactor technology thrown away when Clinton's anti-nuclear goons cancelled the IFR project at Idaho. All that expertise in fuels technology, reprocessing, neutron transport, sodium coolant technology, and many other fields was thrown away because all those people were given the gate. They all left the business. Hazel O'Leary was DOE secretary at the time and she made a big deal of "no net loss of jobs at INEL". Right. They threw away all the expertise in the technical fields and hired forklift operators to bulldoze all the buildings those projects occupied. Its not a pretty sight out there.
Bullsh*t. Plain and simple. Your ignorance is showing here. I'd like you to come around to my labs and show you the innovative stuff the electrical engineers do. I've got buddies that design 20 million ASICs for Cray supercomputer - they regularly deal with mathematics of modeling that you couldn't even fathom. I'd like you to look at our software engineers code and see the quality of real-time embedded systems code used to control weapons systems on a major US military platform.
Your statement is utter BS because it flies in the face of reality that American engineers are skilled and dedicated. Look at Sandia national labs. Look at the Vought missile plant in Grand Prarie. Look at any company where the engineers are valued for their knowledge and innovation rather than resources to be cut at whim.
The H-1B visa program was a con game. Corporations wanted to squeeze out more profit and lobbied congress to open the borders. It is corrupt capitalism and cronyism at its finest. And it spells the death of American ingenuity and industriousness.
absolutely false ... if you're talking about nebraska, iowa, etc. (the 'blue counties'). put the scores of high schools in any, ahem, how shall i put this?!? no, i won't. already on jim's s**t list.
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