Tech jobs leaving home

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review ^ | Tuesday, July 15, 2003 | Rachel Konrad - THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

[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.

[Lazamataz]

June 13, 2003
Report: Amdocs, Verizon Negotiating Outsourcing Deal

---

Luckily, the outsourcing with Amdocs keeps in-US jobs. Amdocs is a firm located mostly in Chesterfield, MO. So if they did outsource to India, they are now negotiating huge (700 million to 1 billion) deals that keep the business in-US.

[eno_]

The quality of work shipped to India is usually pretty poor. So unless it sucked really badly already, it isn't suprising to find some of that work migrating back.

OTOH, lots of IT sucked really badly while it was here, and management is stupid enough not to know the difference.

[Joe Brower]

"lots of IT sucked really badly while it was here, and management is stupid enough not to know the difference."

Boy oh boy, is that ever the truth! The folks I worked with from India, Iran and Pakistan in the four years I spent at Qualcomm wrote some of the sorriest code I have ever had the non-privilege to witness. Nice folks, person-wise, but their programming efforts redefined the term "spaghetti code"!

[RogueIsland]

of IT sucked really badly while it was here

The biggest problem in IT in general is a lack of enough really good designers, and a lack of management that has enough sense to know how important they are to development. You can have the best coders going, but if they are implementing a flawed design, you'll still end up with a mess -- just a very elegantly coded one.

[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.

[harpseal]

More on outsourcing overseas

[BushCountry]

I need someone smarter than me to answer this question:

What needs to be taught at college level (preferably community colleges) to help the IT industry rebound?

I asked this because, I don't believe that more than 10% of businesses even come close to taking advantage of current technologies. Here is my take. Most college level Associate and Bachelor programs focus on the wrong skill sets. Graduates that come out of these programs are ill prepared and don't provide enough benefit to the companies to hire. That is why IT hiring is coming to standstill, companies are not reaping benefits and are sick and tired of empty promises.

[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.

[Lazamataz]

Verizon surprized me: They are outsourcing, but to a company located in the United States. 700 Million!

[Willie Green]

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).

The only growth career that I'd currently recommend training for is Mortuary Science.
With Baby Boomers approaching their golden years, there is a predictable boom in sight for undertakers and morticians.

If that's a little too gruesome for you, you might be able to capitalize indirectly from this trend by investing in a backhoe. Cemetaries may try to reduce costs associated with unionized gravedigger labor, and you'd be well positioned to provide an outsourced service. Of course the increasing popularity of cremation may reduce the overall market potential, but a backhoe provides flexibility for digging ditches for other purposes as well.

[Joe Hadenuf]

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

[Poohbah]

What needs to be taught at college level (preferably community colleges) to help the IT industry rebound?

Object-oriented design, with the latest refinements in theory.

Good design plus good code equals a good product.

Bad design OR bad code equals bugware.

Bad design AND bad code equals complete garbage.

[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.