Yes John, because pointing out that the government has a role to play in creating the technical workforce the nation needs to maintain its edge in the global marketplace is exactly equivalent to calling American workers stupid. Besides, we all know that the government cannot under any circumstances create productive jobs, and that anyone who claims otherwise is a lying liberal jerk, don’t we now?
Your cogent prose clearly proves that America needs no national technology and tech worker policy. Our open, smart market will crush all nations that foolishly engage in such government manipulation of supply and demand. Things will continue to be as they should be, if we just maintain the purity of our ideological fluids.
That’s because more and more people are seeing that the benefits of offshoring are not as great as you keep saying they are. Offshoring fanatics are making a very poor case based on very wrong “facts” and people are noticing that.
And whatever you do, don’t take John Mace’s “Americans are too stupid” tact too loudly or you’ll only alienate even more people.
Got a question for you about that: what would you learn besides “do what the team in India tells you to do”? Plus this in, download that program off USB sticks, do this or that checklist. They don’t necessarily have to tell you why you’re doing what you’re doing. I’ve never done such simple-minded monkey work, so please help me out here: I’m not seeing the skills improvement flowchart from this line of work.
You mean disk imaging as in data disaster preparedness and recovery? Jeez, if that’s the line of work you’re talking about, I pretty much pay Iron Mountain to do that for me.
Bah. I can imaging disk imaging is highly vulnerable to the proverbial rising tide; if you want a job in that field you might as well get connections in law enforcement and skill-up into forensics and call it a career. There’s one that won’t go overseas, but I’m not sure of the job growth potential.
That seems to be the consistent saw that corporations whine about: not enough qualified people. (Yet we used to have tons of IT grads from college who can’t find work, until people started to give up on those majors.)
That doesn’t sound right. Why wouldn’t you train while you had a job? That’s what I did when I begged and begged my employer to let me quit on good terms (instead of saying “fuck it” and walking out on the management team) so I could start my own business.
Your own cite says that Google’s global workforce has swelled to 23,000, with a capacity of 17,000 at this new facility. That’s nothing to sneeze at. But your cite ALSO indicates that the GOVERNMENT (aka NASA Ames) is involved and that this is a Government project that Google is working on. There’s even a lot of red-acting involved in the FOIA requests regarding this project. Squink actually came pretty close with the manned moon project thing: essentially predicting the need for Government projects to stimulate job growth.
Uhm, I have a question about that.
In the military we are competing against badasses like Russia. Competition in this arena is life-or-death, especially where encryption and data security is concerned. I would certainly not trust a cell phone computer to protect me from multiple enemy targets launching AMRAAM-equivalent missiles from beyond visual range (which Russian fighters most likely can do).
From googling the F-22 Raptor I can tell they transmit at 500 mbits/second and receive 1gb/sec of data and they act like a WAP in the air. As the article says, they’re like mini-AWACS systems.
Oh and this stuff (fighter avionics included) is produced by corporations under contract with the military, if I recall. The Government is only partially, at best, producing any of this. As far as I can tell.
So you basically reached the fine line between unemployed and long term (6 months) unemployed. Even with your level of work experience. Wow.
And this is the whole point of the thread: where are we getting the new generation of engineers?
Congratulations. You have actually come up with a solution. And a good one, at that! The space industry, due to its national security issues, is a domestic job-creating miracle if pursued properly. The sheer number of domestic technological improvements already brought to the private market by NASA (Tempurpedic, anyone?) alone is justification enough for spending tens of billions on manned space exploration.
You globalists keep confusing obsoletion with jobs moving overseas. Why do you keep doing that?
So why do you guys keep bringing that up?
What harm can be done to a nation that resists that? You mean the harm that’s done by keeping your unemployment levels lower?
Actually, laissez-faire and globalism are an even wronger-headed cult. You’re seeing increased opposition because so many of us are seeing the gaping errors of your ways and the damage that is being done. Our numbers are increasing… yours are not.
Protectionism is more than just a cult - it’s the way China does things. And they have been EXTREMELY successful at growing their economy as a result. So was America back in the day - it was how we got to be successful.
People who shun protectionism forget what made their country successful. Funny, how as SOON as you let go of protectionism, the middle class starts to shrink. We’re literally in the LATE stages of middle class erosion. Hmmmmm.
You run around here complaining that “Americans are too stupid to educate themselves”. Au contraire, we are educating ourselves; it is you who are frustrated because you are finding it harder and harder to sell your cult of globalism to America. And, being the world’s most prosperous market, your increasingly dismal failure to make a credible case is going to be very, very costly to the globalist cause.
John Mace, your “Amricans are too stupid” comment is quite telling. You want to run around here claiming that you know better than the rest of us but the truth is you’re downright frustrated. You’re frustrated because America is increasingly unwilling to buy into your Cult of Globalism. We have seen the damage that globalism has done. We have called you out to show the benefits of globalism and you have sorely failed to show this. You’re losing ground and all you can do is stamp your feet and say “Americans are too stupid to get it”.
Get used to the opposition - we’re growing stronger and we will eventually force some reform upon this race to the bottom scam you call globalism. Either that or we’ll just keep printing dollars to service the debt until globalism collapses under the weight of changing currency exchange rates.
There are jobs constantly being created in places like Silicon Valley, NYC and Boston. Those are mostly for smart people though.
Well, computer forensics and electronic discovery has provided me with a six figure career for about six years now. A managing director in a major consulting firms can make over $225,000 a year.
But a lot of that work is being performed by small vendors these days. A project manager in one of those firms only makes about $75 k.
Okay, now that is one way to do it. So you worked your way up through a company instead of doing forensics consulting on your own? I’ve only casually looked at that field and it looks like a growth industry to me. Why would you sign up with a company to do computer forensics vs being a consultant? Is it because the company has the necessary authorization to work with law enforcement or something like that? Like I said I’ve only casually looked at the industry.
Only? $75K/year is a king’s ransom if you tell the Joneses to fuck off and live within your means. And not live in NYC… or Silicon Valley. Ok, that’s a lotta if’s, granted.
Still, you can take a chunk of that and sock it away in a 401k (at least until the sucker’s rally is over) and have one HELL of a retirement.
FYI: if computer forensics explodes as fast as cybercrime is growing, that’s incredibly good news. It’s hard to send overseas and, God willing, it requires a LOT of people.
I’m not necessarily selling the benefits of outsourcing. I’m saying it’s an economic reality and trying to fight the tide will only make matters worse.
Needless to say, your impression of these jobs roles is quite inaccurate.
In the case of analysts and consultants, it would be more accurate to describe them as deciding and directing what the outsourced programmers would be doing.
In the case of hardware / networking jobs, it would actually require collaboration between the two teams, not a heirarchy.
Finally disk imaging is more about rolling out the exact same PC setup (but with certain things “instanced” or customized) across a network of machines. To be honest, it does sound dull, but most jobs sound dull to me. The point is, it’s in demand and seems to pay rather well.
That’s true everywhere. There’s always a lag between what industry needs and what people perceive as valuable skills, let alone what people actually want to do.
Plus every employer wants to have their cake and eat it. They all want people trained up in the latest systems, yet few are willing to provide such training.
Part of what annoyed me about programming was having to learn new systems in my own free time.
In my case I wasn’t enjoying my job at the time, and I could do a postgrad degree twice as quick by doing it full-time.
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Because there is some similarity. It’s like if someone invents a machine that can do your job for a fraction of the cost. In that case, the writing’s on the wall: you need to retrain in an area where a skilled human being is still valuable.
You do not waste time and slow the economy by saying that such machines need to be banned.
Protectionism has always been popular. However, you won’t find many economists among the ranks.
China’s protectionism is a different animal, and was only useful because of the poverty with which China began. It would be wrong to say that it is this protectionism that was responsible for china’s success: the big picture is they had access to a huge, cheap labourforce and invested in the right areas.
But despite China’s huge untapped population (btw, who do you suppose has the higher unemployment?), wages are increasing, as is domestic demand.
Most economists believe that it would be hugely in China’s benefit to relax its markets now.
Some believe that outsourcing will move on to cheaper locations, like africa. And interestingly the canny chinese are investing in the region in a big way. Initially just to acquire raw materials but now some chinese companies are outsourcing manufacturing there.
I don’t think you need any particular authorization. For me it I would just rather have access to the resources and clients of a large firm. Most of the work I did was corporate - Enron and Madoff type stuff as opposed to say, child pornography. Many people in the field do have law enforcement backgrounds but accounting, computer science and even government intelligence backgrounds are also common.
The field is sort of broken down into various layers:
Large corporate law firms and corporate legal departments - Firms like Simpson Thatcher, Jones Day and Cravath have “litigation support” groups that implement various technologies around ediscovery and document reviews.
consulting firms - The big ones in this field are Alix Partners, Alvarez & Marsal, BDO, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, FTI, Huron, Kroll, LECG, Navigant, PwC, KPMG and Xerox Litigation Services. These people tend to be the most educated and highly paid, but they are also the most expensive. They help companies select and implement technologies, act as expert witnesses, collect and analyze data and other related tasks. You may notice that many of these are accounting or management consulting firms.
Speciality software companies - For example AccessData, Autonomy, Guidance, Stratify, Kroll Ontrack and others. They make the actual products used to collect, process and analyze data. They may also provide consulting and support services as well.
Vendors - Typically smaller companies that are more specific and technical in nature. Basically guys you will pay to image a hard drive and run it through a email processing program or restore a backup tape. Instead of an MBA / CPA at Ernst & Young, these guys would typically have a more technical vocational background.
These are all NYC data points, although my GF and I live just outside of Manhattan in NJ where it’s a lot cheaper. We also own our place and other than some vacations and a penchant for eating out a lot, we don’t spend a lot of money.
It’s all relative anyway. $75k is a lot unless you are used to making several times that. And really by most accounts of people who would be in the know (recruiters, etc), seem to also think it’s very low given my experience and location. Especially if the company is hiring for a junior project manage role but expecting you to bring managing director knowledge and expertise. Then it’s just taking advantage.
I would say the field is still growing somewhat, but not like it was 5 years ago. It used to be a bit of a “suckers ralley” as you call it. My old firm used to be able to charge arounf $2000 per GB of data collected and processed. Now it’s like a tenth of that. Kids right out of school used to rack up huge overtime bonuses just watching a status bar. It’s no longer the case that companies have no idea how to deal with these problems. They aren’t willing to just toss money at them anymore. First of all, these services are expensive. Secondly, it really isn’t rocket science. At the end of the day, you are just sending a bunch of guys to collect hard drives and run them through a software program. Third, companies are still trying to work out where these various services should fall. IOW, do they want to do it all in-house? Outsource it to a consulting firm? Let the attorneys deal with it? And so on. What I’ve seen over the past 2 years is a gradual slow-down, at least in the consulting / high level corporate advisory area. as clients have become more cost conscious and knowledgeable.
Although I suppose the fact that I’ve been able to work, if not steadily, at least consistently over the past two years while many people have been unable to land interviews in their industry as a sign that it is still growing faster than many other professions.
it makes no difference how smart or stupid Americans are. They are no dumber and no smarter than Eastern Europeans and similar of the comparable social class and intelligence level cohort. What does matter is that our managerial class does not hire people for their smarts or knowledge. They hire people for having N years of industry experience in the particular technology they care about. So you can have two identically smart guys, one in Ukraine and one in America, where the Ukrainian got the outsourced job, grew with it and became an expert with a nice resume whereas the American did not. Even if the American studied on his own, did open source projects or whatnot and is in reality quite competent, he still does not have those years of experience on the resume.
Indeed, there is no pipeline for young IT professionals in America to acquire the high end work experience that employers are looking for… in most industries, that is.
Advice to young ITers would be to get a job doing monkey-hear-monkey-do work for your East Indian bosses until you pay your way through computer forensic training. At least do it now before the gold rush hits and the field becomes HEAVILY impacted… as all fields are want to be nowadays.
This thread is drifting ever further from reality.
Yes, America has high unemployment at the moment. Even though all indications are that this is temporary, it’s understandable that people might be worried.
But ideas like offshore workers being higher in a company than the american staff, who are just doing monkey work…or picking a Ukranian over an American employee because she picked up vital skills while outsourcing…it’s pure fantasy.
It’s not happening, and it’s not going to happen because it makes no sense.
The reality is, when outsourcing, you offload simple, self-contained work because it’s inherently risky. (I’ve worked for a company that outsourced a project to India and found after 6 months that they’d basically done nothing.)
As you’re outsourcing to another company they are hardly going to run the show. The American company is hiring the Ukranian company, not the other way round.
Senior jobs in IT, like Systems Designer, are where IT meets with the other aspects of the business. Essentially for Mr Ukranian to get such a job he needs to have knowledge and direct experience of the American domestic market and infrastructure to a better standard than people who actually live there.
And finally, how is the Ukranian going to be going for such jobs at all? He needs a working visa (remember outsourcing is usually about outsourcing to companies). These aren’t easy to come by and the pressure at the moment is to give out less.
It’s anecdotal but my web company is constantly looking for recent grads. I conduct on average one interview a week for open positions and I know co-workers who interview a lot more.
The concern is that there won’t be enough entry level and junior level jobs where recent grads can gain the valuable experience required to eventually land senior jobs. Le Jacquelope is making a distinction between “low level work” and “dummy work”.
In most industries, there is the concept of “paying your dues”. IOW, before you can land the high level jobs, you spend several years grinding out the more detailed day to day work. Accountants going through journal entries. Programmers writing code. Investment banker analysts cranking out valuations. So on and so forth. This is “low level” work in that it’s tedious and repetetive and thus falls to the junior staff. But it is also necessary work for learning the fundamentals of the business.
Dummy work is essentially mindless work that doesn’t really teach you anything of value. Copying data from hard drives to another location for someone else to analyze it. Mindlessly entering data into someone elses computer model.
Le Jacquelope’s argument is that there will be a shortage of experienced people if we outsource all the low level work that people normally perform to gain experience.
Right, but he talked about “East Indian bosses” and the like. It’s those kinds of misconceptions that I was trying to address.
But you make a fair point. I’d say lack of experienced people in IT is already a huge problem, with or without outsourcing.
It’s a problem because every company wants people to walk in the door with up-to-date skills, and are only prepared to let people who are already experts in a system to use a system.
This mindset causes a lot of problems in a field where new applications, APIs and algorithms are constantly being invented.
As someone who has been a programmer for almost a decade I’m dubious about the implied linear career path that has been suggested. It’s nice to imagine that there’s a simple heirarchy and the best of each level ascend.
In reality, I think if you want a lucrative IT job I’d recommend coming in with other skills. e.g. Do a business degree and learn programming on the side. Then jump in as a Business Systems Analyst, say. Don’t waste years as a grunt trying to “earn” your way to a good job.
The company I work for outsources…with enthusiasm. 3/4 of our ‘workforce’ is in India.
I am probably relatively safe as I have the ability to ‘talk plain’ about the analytics I/we do and that has value because India definitely does not have this ability.
Yet.
They will though. They are smart peeps. In just the few years I have worked with them they have grown by leaps and bounds. In 30 years they will be as good as I am (not these Indians in particular but in general).
As a side digression - there was a woman who worked here that decided that her group could be outsourced to India. She worked furiously and did so…laying off several Americans. She was so proud because her costs decreased dramatically. She received accolades from senior management.
One day, after work at a local watering hole I asked her why stop at her ‘underlings’…why not outsource herself? She would save the company big bucks. She was adament that NOOOOOO…I’m too important to outsource. The company needs me.
Well, you guessed it. 2 years later she was downsized. Her position is now in India. I know because I need to talk to her replacement in the same way I needed to interact with her when she was here.
Now, why stop at whatever level is being downsized at this moment? Why not creep it up one more level? WHAT??? No WAY?! That level is TOOO important to outsource to India…it needs to be done here!
Why?
I could see a point where this creep keeps eating at levels of American workers until it reaches a level that it cannot crack because you have reached senior management…but then that level will crack because the Indians then have the experience doing the business and so they then dispense with senior management and install their own. What would senior management do? They no longer have the skilled workforce to fight it…but the Indians do/will.
Honestly, our CEO makes buckets of money…couldn’t that position be done cheaper with a good smart Indian?
Are you sure the answer is no? If not CEO then why not CFO? Why not…etc etc etc?
Thanks for the concise summarization. That’s my point exactly.
This isn’t about the damage done by offshoring - it’s about what can we do in its wake. The new definition of “entry level” is not really entry-level.
Back in the day I could and did get a single mom with 2 kids into the IT game with a tech support job. She actually learned enough on the job to graduate into blackbox software testing for the same company because she knew the bugs to look for and listened to people talk about it. She went to college on her new wages and got some programming experience and went into glassbox testing. This is the classic ladder of opportunity.
What does the ladder look like now?
It’s not so much simple as it is reliable.
Being a Business Systems Analyst is a good path to becoming a Systems Designer and in fact the two are quite similar.
But being a professional (as in, hired and paid) systems analyst is more than just about programming and an MBA (or whatever business degree you’re looking for). It’s about actual work experience, plus knowing how to do things like interacting with customers so you can learn what they want, from which you’ll do your system planning and write the technical requirements, system development, testing, manuals… yeah, all of that is WELL beyond the realm of programming. You may not even do any programming at all, but rather you may be working with programmers and testers.
Cross-training with other industries is, of course, highly advantageous. But how many years will you devote to school to get an MBA AND become a systems analyst, or become an IT boss in a hospital having acquired a strong medical background?
This may be anecdotal but I’ve seen a LOT of employers in the IT side of the financial service industry asking for you to come in at the bottom with your state insurance license, your series 7/63 broker’s licenses, plus all your network admin certs, and your MBA. Is that anecdotal or is that something common? I’m not seeing any news or reports about these kind of outrageous entry-level skillset requirements otherwise I wouldn’t be asking about that on a message board…
I’m not seeing that here in Britain.
Over here the financial service industry is the one area of IT where you don’t need specific skills. Instead, they just want anyone from a redbrick university*.
But for general IT jobs, yeah, the “shopping lists” are getting obscene.
It used to be the case that I could apply for almost any C++ job. Now, with years of experience under my belt, the majority of jobs are off limits because I don’t have commercial experience of one or more of the APIs listed as ESSENTIAL.
Why hasn’t this happened already? i.e. why haven’t american companies that pay comparitively low salaries to their CEOs outcompeted those that pay high salaries?
“redbrick” = UK equivalent of “Ivy league”
It’s all just snobbish BS though. I have a degree from a relatively humble university and a degree from one of the top redbricks. I found no real difference in teaching quality or difficulty of course material.
Ah yes, businesses do like to cherry pick the very top of the field and the rest can go fuck off. That’s the benefit of a perpetual employer’s market: you can be snobby like that.
The consequence of this thinking is, if you’re not the very top of your field then you don’t deserve to work. How many people can be the very top of any field? (Answer: how many ‘fields’ are there? How many people are there looking to get a job? Hmmmmmm. Methinks society has not thought this one out.)
I don’t mind that an IT company would ask that you be cross-trained. What I do mind is it seems (emphasis) that you need this cross-training at the entry level and that means a LOT of time in school running up ruinous loan debt only for you to graduate into a very low paying job, bills up the wazoo, and then you get laid off in 2 years and you’re out looking for work for 6 months. How do people cope with that?
Off-topic: What’s going to happen here soon (translation: it’s here already) is people are going to be going to school for a degree in a hot field today and the field will be overrun with qualified applicants by the time they get out.
Oh that’s not the funniest part. You know how companies offshore jobs in order to be competitive against overseas companies? If they don’t offshore they’ll be driven completely out of business and all that old saw?
Well here’s the kicker: they’ll be driven out of business anyway by companies that are started overseas, run overseas, and export directly to here. At best they’ll hire salespeople here to deliver the goods and maybe some phone support people in rural America for public relations. This is the most logical move economically speaking: remove the entire American company from the loop and run the whole operation by some lower-paid CEO (who still lives like a king) overseas. Nobody seems to understand how this can happen, but it will. En masse.
Yeah, but I mean they have absurdly specific requirements in mind.
Personally I’d rather hire people on programming ability / understanding plus the one or two key areas that really are essential. Rather than sifting the applicants for who has touched all of the systems that happen to be in my office.
In fact, this outsourcing trend should be showing us that. Because the companies we’re outsourcing to are often training people up, or letting them learn systems on the job. It’s what we should be doing.
Yep. My advice to someone picking a degree now is look at lots of job adverts and try to find a niche that suits you. If you listen to perceived wisdom on what’s a lucrative direction, you’re likely to join something that’s about to be flooded with applicants.
I don’t buy into the doom and gloom though.
You know one developed country that has bounced out of recession very successfully? Germany.
How can this be, given that Germany’s model is based on exporting manufactured goods, and Germans are so much more expensive to employ than the Chinese? It’s because there is fresh demand for BMWs and the like within the quickly developing nations. And it’s because Germany’s carved out several niches for itself in precision engineering, the medical and science sectors etc, all of which are much bigger markets now.
My point simply being: globalisation brings opportunities as well as dangers.
So why isn’t every company on Earth in one single country?:rolleyes:
Who should they pick? The bottom of the field? Do you want someone from the bottom of the barrel operating on you, representing you in court, or designing and building the car your children drive to school?
And not every company wants or can afford to hire top graduates from MIT or Harvard.
You really do engage in some pretty ridiculous binary thinking. Labor is cheaper in India and China so every single job will move there. Companies only hire top graduates from top schools. The economy doesn’t work like that.
My advice is to pick either an industry (healthcare, biotech, construction, finance, etc) or a broad functional area of a company (accounting, marketing, sales, IT and so on). You have many more option when you graduate.
