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Job market collapse has people packing
San Francisco Chronicle ^

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 ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; Extended News
KEYWORDS: bayarea; jobmarket
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To: Hammerhead
Always kinda of found it humorous that computer geeks thought (or think) that they are better than a brick layer, plumber, or mechanic.

This is a wonder, ain't it? Prosperity breeds this kind of attitude. If really hard times return to this land a good mechanic will be worth fifty computer geeks.
221 posted on 09/23/2002 9:38:54 AM PDT by RipSawyer
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To: Lazamataz
Thanks for the advice.

I think I'll rework my resume today.

Let me know if there's anything else you think I should change in it.
222 posted on 09/23/2002 9:52:25 AM PDT by The FRugitive
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To: Hammerhead
Computerism is nothing more than a TRADE. A TRADE where you dont get your hands dirty.

I have literally considered starting a Programmers Union.

223 posted on 09/23/2002 9:57:26 AM PDT by Lazamataz
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To: The FRugitive
Let me know if there's anything else you think I should change in it.

Lots but let's not do this in public. Do you have Yahoo Messenger? My name is Lazamataz over there.

Go figger. ;^)

224 posted on 09/23/2002 10:05:45 AM PDT by Lazamataz
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To: fogarty
I was laid off in Richardson twice in one year. Now I am in Illinois. With regard to your estimate of 100s of thousands, I though it was only 10s of thousands. What is your source of information?

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.

225 posted on 09/23/2002 10:09:11 AM PDT by Mini-14
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To: Red Jones
So it is really poor management that is protecting its position and pursuing its ideological agenda and discouraging these good teachers in the process. Then the management is claiming they can't find teachers and they're demanding we import docile foreigners to do the job. We are importing some teachers today because of the alleged teacher shortage.

The truth written.

226 posted on 09/23/2002 10:09:39 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
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To: Mini-14
"...and is having to start over financially from scratch."

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.

227 posted on 09/23/2002 10:18:19 AM PDT by Hatteras
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To: Mini-14
It's closer to 200,000 than 10,000. Alcatel, Motorola, and Marconi alone account for some 75,000 layoffs in the DFW area.

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.

228 posted on 09/23/2002 10:52:51 AM PDT by fogarty
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To: Lazamataz
Sounds like you guys need it. Your scattered all over the place.

You need a lobby group to pressure Congress on all this H1B crap.

Hammerhead (ex. Agent99)
229 posted on 09/23/2002 11:12:45 AM PDT by Hammerhead
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To: Lazamataz
Hmmm, no Yahoo Messanger. I've got ICQ, MSN Messanger, and something else. Heck I guess I could get one more, lol.

I'm heading out now and won't be back untill late, so hopefully we'll be able to hook up tommorow sometime.
230 posted on 09/23/2002 1:17:51 PM PDT by The FRugitive
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To: MarMema
Just got word from a accountant friend of mine at Boeing that they might lay off another 10 to 15,000 people due to a bad economic forcast. Speea folks and engineers might take the brunt of this....., We will see.
231 posted on 09/23/2002 1:23:43 PM PDT by cmsgop
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To: fogarty; Mini-14
He's basically screwed, engineering-wise - no one will hire a person of his age.

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).

232 posted on 09/23/2002 1:43:04 PM PDT by chimera
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To: chimera
Actually there is one career which is looking very good. Nursing and Pharmaceuticals. Especially nursing. My mom, who has been retired for about 3 years now, was offered $10000 to come back part time, two days a week. Those RN's wanting to work full time were being offered $20k.

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?

233 posted on 09/23/2002 2:40:54 PM PDT by fogarty
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To: fogarty
A little more detail about my mom - she was offered $10k to come back as a SIGNING bonus. The part-time rate offered was around $30-$35 an hour.

Good money - even if the job is very difficult.

234 posted on 09/23/2002 2:43:05 PM PDT by fogarty
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To: ComputationalComplexity
Not in my experience.

I guess it depends on the situation. I wanted developers who could think on their own - the indians could not manage this. They were good at reviewing a spec and pointing out problems. But w/o a detailed spec they are lost.
235 posted on 09/23/2002 2:58:26 PM PDT by 13foxtrot
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To: fogarty
There are probably a few career fields that will have relatively stable supply-demand situations. Health care is probably one, because as long as people age and get sick, there'll be a need for doctors, nurses, and aides. There will be a need for morticians because nobody gets out of this alive. So as long as everyone doesn't rush out to nursing, medical, or mortician school, the industries will be on an even keel.

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.

236 posted on 09/23/2002 4:49:43 PM PDT by chimera
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To: VOA
Me too! The Bay Area has scenic beauty, but it's somehow just too uncomfortable in a way that's hard to articulate. And I'm not just referring to it's dominant Left-wing politics. I first visited San Francisco in 1975 and when I had the chance to move from New York to California the following year, I decided to come to L.A., sight unseen, rather than go to the Bay Area. Maybe it's that, to me, SF is a smaller, more claustrophobic version of New York. I don't quite know. But I've never regretted my decision to settle in the L.A. area.
237 posted on 09/23/2002 5:03:15 PM PDT by Wolfstar
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To: Drango
It isn't just the H1B program, it's the fact that today's information systems and communications networks make it easy for a lot of white collar work to be done in other countries. Many jobs from movie-making to information systems technical support are being moved to Canada. Workers there are paid in Canadian dollars, which means they are far cheaper than most U.S. workers doing the same jobs. The day is fast approaching when I wonder what jobs will remain here in the U.S. other than government and service-sector jobs.
238 posted on 09/23/2002 5:10:04 PM PDT by Wolfstar
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To: ComputationalComplexity
So in effect, a large fraction of American hi-tech workers are in fact very unskilled in their profession

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.

239 posted on 09/23/2002 5:29:59 PM PDT by fogarty
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To: BuddhaBoy
"You dont have to be a bigot to realize that Math and Science education in America has gone to hell, and that for the most part, the best engineers, programmers and scientists no longer come from the U.S."

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.

240 posted on 09/23/2002 5:55:09 PM PDT by johnboy
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