Yme:We want 40 hours a week, we want benefits, we want 6 to 8 weeks of vacation.
Barbarian’s response:Hahahahahaah! Dude, trying lowering your expectations to a realistic level.
Alternatively, move to Europe. 40 hours plus 30 days paid leave? That’s pretty much a standard over here.
Oh, I should clarify that my last post was primarily addressed to CalMeacham.
McDuff:
And what is standard for the unemployment rate in Europe? Seems like it’s closer to 10% than 5% (for the US).
Its not even about having to adjust your salary expectations. If the jobs are not in the US then it doesn’t matter if I will work for $10 an hour. What are you going to do when every job of every type that is not flipping burgers gets outsourced? Lower your expectations? Go flip burgers? Leave the USA?
I am sensing alot of hostility from non techs in this thread due to the 90’s tech boom. Did you feel left behind or something when your social science degree wasn’t worth as much as a EE or a CS? And now the techs are getting hit hard so you just say “So what? Tough shit?As long as I can by a 13” TV for $100 I am happy?"? Like we are getting what we deserve or something.
FTR, I will take ANY job that will pay me enough money to live comfortably. Sales, teaching, whatever. It is kind of a moot point because I am going into the AF, but if I wasn’t I would take whatever job came my way that let me pay my bills and left me some money at the end for retirement.
Do I think I should have to live in a one bedroom apt just because no one WANTS to pay me? No. I think I am worth more than that. Do I think that I deserve a mansion? No. I just want to be able to buy a fucking 3 bedroom/ 2 bath house, work 40 hours a week, a couple weeks vacation a year, buy a car made in the new millenium, and take care of my family.
It stops when wages reach a new price equilibrium…just like in Econ 101. Somewhere between Sony’s cheepness and your greediness, there’s a price where both you and Sony can agree on.
Actually it’s getting passed on to Joe Blow Shareholder.
Look, no one was complaining 3 years ago when kids right out of school were pulling in $75,000 to program and anyone with a resume was getting calls 5 times a day from headhunters. I didn’t hear any complaining when IT people would quit their job after 6 months to take a 10% raise somewhere else.
It sounds to me like the computer industry is catching the same “Americanworkeritis” that hit the automotive and steel industries. I am talking about the attitude in this country that because we are the USA, we deserve higher pay than people who provide a less expensive, higher quality product for lower pay. It’s like getting mad at the Japanese because Mo-Town creates big clunky gas-guzzlers that no one wants to drive.
Its not even about having to adjust your salary expectations. If the jobs are not in the US then it doesn’t matter if I will work for $10 an hour. What are you going to do when every job of every type that is not flipping burgers gets outsourced? Lower your expectations? Go flip burgers? Leave the USA?
I am sensing alot of hostility from non techs in this thread due to the 90’s tech boom. Did you feel left behind or something when your social science degree wasn’t worth as much as a EE or a CS? And now the techs are getting hit hard so you just say “So what? Tough shit?As long as I can by a 13” TV for $100 I am happy?"? Like we are getting what we deserve or something.
FTR, I will take ANY job that will pay me enough money to live comfortably. Sales, teaching, whatever. It is kind of a moot point because I am going into the AF, but if I wasn’t I would take whatever job came my way that let me pay my bills and left me some money at the end for retirement.
Do I think I should have to live in a one bedroom apt just because no one WANTS to pay me? No. I think I am worth more than that. Do I think that I deserve a mansion? No. I just want to be able to buy a fucking 3 bedroom/ 2 bath house, work 40 hours a week, a couple weeks vacation a year, buy a car made in the new millenium, and take care of my family.
Well, with an undergrad liberal arts degree I made (in 1990) roughly the equivalent of today’s $10/hour working for a nonprofit. It was a choice I made, because I knew I could have made more in some mindless admin job, but I wanted to do work I felt had meaning. Again, I don’t begrudge tech folks their higher salaries, if they can get them; my friends bust their asses in IT. The ones who are still employed in IT, though, generally work much more than a 40-hour week, and are compensated accordingly. So do most attorneys, and consultants, and other people in high-paying jobs. I’m a paralegal by choice; I could have gone to law school instead of getting a grad degree in the liberal arts, but I didn’t want the lifestyle and long hours that usually come with being a private-sector attorney. For that matter, I could have gotten an engineering degree, since I knew that (then, anyway; I graduated college in 1989) it was likely to make me much more money, but money wasn’t as important to me as doing work that I liked. I always got straight A’s in math and science, too, but it wasn’t what made me happy. Happiness vs. money is frequently a tradeoff.
I’m just saying that with a higher salary comes an inherently higher level of risk that someone, in the U.S. or elsewhere, will find a way to use competitive advantage to take a crack at winning the work that comes with the higher salary level. It comes with the territory.
There are lots of teaching jobs, especially in math and science; most major cities are desperate enough that they will waive the teaching certificate requirement, at least temporarily. There are all kinds of options out there for people with brains and ingenuity; most of them involve tradeoffs, especially at the entry level.
I, too, want a 3-bedroom house and a decent car and money to put away for retirement; however, due to choices I’ve made, nearly 14 years after finishing my B.A., I’m still living in a 1-bedroom apartment. I accept responsibility for the results of the risks I’ve taken, and I don’t begrudge the successes of hardworking people who have done well for themselves financially, whether they are American or not. I just wish the people who were expecting the sun, the moon, and the stars fresh out of college can accept the results of the risks they have taken. No career path is ever guaranteed.
50-60K is an absurd amount of money for a entry level bachelor’s degree job. 50-60K is more than many school teachers will see after a lifetime of work. It’s more than a beginning college teacher (with a PhD) makes. 50-60K is a salary that many law students would be happy to get fresh out of school. I know it sucks that your not gonna bank on the big bucks after graduation, but guess what- neither is anyone else. I’m about to graduate with a film degree. I may make it, I may end up flipping burgers. Any education is a gamble- even a tech education.
Stink:
Did you take any Economics classes? I think my house is worth $2M, but if no one wants to pay me that, what difference does it make? It is “worth” exactly what the market says it is worth.
You are exagerating when you say there are NO jobs. You may need to get creative geographically or career wise, but there are jobs out there. As you said, you are going into the Military. Not a bad move. Having that on your resume will be very good for you long term. But you need to realize very soon that no one OWES you a job. Start your own company if you have to.
And, BTW, I do work in the tech industry, so I’m not some jealous liberal arts guy. And as I’ve said in previous posts, I’ve seen lots of ups and downs throughout the years. Ride this downturn out in the millitary if necessary, but you can bet things will eventually imporve. The US is still where the major inovations are hapenning. Markets may shift, say from PCs to Biotech, but I doubt if the 3rd worlders are going to be on the cutting edge any time soon.
Ok. Let me clear up a couple things here. I am not a young student. I am a 26 SWM. I currently have a job making $40k/yr in the tech industry as a telephony technician. It is basically an IT job. I have already put 5 years into the USAF and I am about ready to do it again, only this time until retirement unless the market changes drastically. After that, I will probably end up working in gov contracts because that is where stability and decent income levels are at now adays.
I am not saying anyone owes me anything. I am saying that the reasons for outsourcing these types of jobs are bullshit. If these companies would stop paying there top level executives 7 figure salaries that they don’t deserve, while at the same time laying off boatloads of in house technicians, there would be no problem paying people a decent wage to do the work in america.
As far as $50K a year goes, that is not an absurd amount of money. Hell, even the AF is going to be paying me right around $44K starting out and I will be at just around $60K within my first 4 years as an officer. Decent money yes. But here are alot of sacrifices that you make when you are in the mil that no one in the private sector makes. You are reminded of that everytime you put on your gas mask during exercises in the gulf.
Well it’s absurd if you are using teaching jobs in as a comparison. That’s why i never went into teaching. 50-60k a year is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
The article in the link is a little ridiculous anyhow. It reads like articles in the 80s that warned how the Japanese were using their powerhouse economy to buy up America. No one is worried about the Japanese economy now except the Japanese.
The net effect of globalization wil be good for the US. When third world countries have more money to spend, that will create new markets for American companies to expand into. That means new jobs for everyone.
You do make a good point.
I will just wait out the next 50 years for this to impact me and then I will be in the money! Then I can go out and by a solid gold helicopter! 
I don’t know how Eva Luna got the idea that I think IT engineers should be exempt from the laws of economics. What my friends are upset about is political – the extension of the number of H-1B visas. Eva seems to think this unlikely, my friends fear it’s very likely. Certainly companies are lobbying for it. And what is particularly grueling is that the arguments made on behalf of this are that there aren’t sufficient IT engineers in the U.S., when there is, in fact, a vast pool of unemployed and underemployed engineers. The main advantage of visa holders seems to be that they work more cheaply. Yet significant salary reduction isn’t a real optiob for these people. Nor is emigrating.
My fear is that we will lose our native talent pool (who will go into this field when they see they can’t get a job?) and loss of R&D effort (which sems to have evaporated in recent years).
Did you read Eva’s post a ways up? The immigrants under the H1B visas aren’t getting paid cheaper because in order to get the visa, the company has to at least pay them the prevailing wage at their company or in the country for equivalent positions, whichever is higher.
So it’s not that they work more cheaply, it’s probably because they are better.
I should also mention that H1Bs need to be sponsored by their company, apparently at a significant cost.
Good point, msmith.
I’d also like to address the teaching pay scale thing. It really depends on where you are working. For example, Corona-Norco School District in Southern California pays its teachers a minimum of 43,000 a year. That’s just the minimum, though; a friend of mine may be starting there at 47,000 straight out of Cal State Fullerton. The average salary is something like 53,000.
Orange Unified School District (just down the road) pays a minimum of something like 35,000.
However, these are in relatively affluent communities. I couldn’t tell you what the teaching rates are in poorer places. I was just showing that you can make a decent living as a teacher straight out of college. And a lot of places need teachers…
[minor clarification]
For an H-1B, the prevailing wage is calculated not only nationally by occupation, but for each Metropolitan Statistical Area, as defined by the U.S. Department of Labor. These are generally the same as a metropolitan area, but not always. I won’t bore you with the pedantic statistical details, but if you’re curious about what the Labor Department thinks you should be making, here’s a fun and exciting link for you to explore:
http://edc.dws.state.ut.us/owl.asp
INS will also accept alternative wage surveys, provided they meet very specific statistical criteria, or you can use a prevailing wage determination from a state Labor Department for a specific position. (We like surveys, though, just because it takes too darn long to get a prevailing wage determination.)
Depends on the country. France, Germany, Italy are around 9-10%. England is about 5%. Norway and Sweden are about 3.5%.
Got any State by State breakdowns of unemployment in the US? I can’t find any, but I’m imagining that there’ll be similar kinds of disparity to work the numbers. Problem is, I can’t find overall figures for the Eurozone or the EU, and there’s that nebulous idea about what you call “Europe” anyway.
Of course, those relatively affluent communities probably have higher cost of living, so those teachers might not be much better off than a teacher in a poorer area making $25,000 a year.
H1-B’s are typically hired for one reason - because there is no one else available to do the job.
This fact gets masked when you just look at the whole pool of ‘IT’ talent without drawing a distinction between different skill sets. But IT is not IT. If a company needs someone with experience converting Wang software to VMS machines, or a FORTRAN programmer who can write Fast Fourier Transforms, it does them no good if there are 30 local guys with MCSE’s and six months of experience writing Visual Basic apps or maintaining SQL Server 2000.
Our company has an open hiring policy, because we’re always short of development talent. But there’s also significant unemployment in the IT field. We don’t hire those unemployed people because either A) they’re no good at what they do, and it shows in the interview, or B) Their skills are in areas we don’t need.
And yes, we outsource a lot of development to India. We have to.
McDuff:
In Silicon valley right now it’s about 6-7%. Used to be 2% (essentially zero). I’m not sure state by state, but you don’t see much difference in benfits state by state here as you do country by country in Europe, so it’s probably best to just look at overall US unemployment rate. If it hit 10% here, there might be riots in the streets…