Tech Employment Drops Sharply In 2004

Cryofan writes "According to Information Week, the lastest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000 in the last 3 years, and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004. According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."

It's Open Source's Fault

This is what happens when you people give away the fruits of your labor for free. You can't blame anyone but yourselves for this.

Microsoft and others were right about OSS. It destroys jobs and is flatly Un-American.

You people have reaped what you sowed.

Re:It's Open Source's Fault

Yes, FOSS has been around for years, but suddenly it is the cause of job losses - not institutional corruption that has gone unchecked, manipulation of energy market prices which can easily cause the economy to tank (1972 US, or more recently the California economy trashed so that Enron could make some fast money), not downsizing and outsourcing in the financial section after 9/11 and the sector wide corruption at the top of those businesses from the S&L "crisis" to the only partially told truth about illegal trading now.

Was there a big loss in jobs when Sun came into existence and decided to make cheap (compared to the rest of the players in that market at the time) workstations and small servers with off the shelf parts instead of proprietary, custom stuff?

Did the release of perl 5 cause the numbers of programmers to drop signficantly?

New versions of BLAST cause a sudden drop in programmers doing genetic work?

LLNL releasing some mathematics libraries tank the engineering software market?

Re:IT needs professional licensing!

Right - you want the state of California to issue an IT license that requires you to be an expert in Windows.

That would be real good for OSS, wouldn't it?

Get a clue - professional licensing of any industry is controlled by people already in that industry and is used to keep everyone else out of that industry.

Besides, if you REALLY tried to license IT professionals based on competence, the entire industry would collapse - just like most industries. Incompetence is the norm, because you only find competence in the top ten percent of anything - and the bell curve says most people fall below that.

Suits .....

Myself and my hard core old school group of friends call these
ppl suits, because they are typically "dressing for success"
and their technical expertise is at best a joke .

We have 20+ yrs hands on experience with computers, and remember
mag tape and punch cards . These ppl think there has always been a mouse .

When you have someone making decisions about technical material
and they themselves only have a shallow surface level understanding
of it , you are going to get a giant mess .

Technical ppl are usually not allowed into management because they
"talk over the heads" of the suits . Ego in check, and fear of
being made to look like idiots , the techie types are kept out
of the boardroom for their tendency to be blunt and call it like
they see it .

Techies make this fear real by being blunt, and calling dumb
ideas dumb with no sugar coating, and no window dressing .
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, we call it a duck .

The boardroom wants slick willys that can sweet talk take sweet
deals, and and resell the same subroutines in different forms
and different apps as separate packages .

They want plastic personalities and want a professional image ,
not some bulky linux admin pagan that dresses like he got
his clothes from goodwill .

Even though more often than not that is the person at the "soul"
of the operations, keeping the blood of bits pumping .

Yet the garbage man of the company gets paid like a garbage man,
because it is a thankless job at "most" companies .

If it is a Engineer owned or built company it is usually better,
but even companies like Cisco grow to a point where they
lose their tech management soul, and become victims to the
marketing mantra of maniacs .

The sales rep, marketing rep, management type goes out and sells
that image and a bag full of promises they "forgot" to mention
to the technical ppl til a week before deadline .

The suits are not about good engineering, they are about lubing up
the customer for a first rate reaming .

It comes down to the usual common denominator, "money", period .

They want to make the customer think they are getting a great deal,
and then find the best way to get as much money as they can,
and lock themselves into that company so getting rid of their
solution is as painful as possible without making it obvious .

The marketing types and management types in alot of places are
about image, and giving the feel good, and ego massaging, and
orchestrating a grand play to make things look like they
should to the other suits in the other companies . Think of it like poker .

The company that can balance this, have good engineering, and
good slick willy management wins .

I hate it, and I decided to work for myself, and be a oncall
technician that does onsite and drop off .

Corporate drones, watch Office Space, it makes TOO much sense.
Tech corporate insanity can suck the life out a person .
May your god whomever he be, save you from this fate .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

OR...

Could it be that IT professionals have moved up in organizations, and are now VPs, and such, thus they may not consider themselves IT when in fact they are, just with better titles? This is the case for me, where I started out being the only IT guy 10 years ago, and now considered more, but still doing IT work as well.

I don't really call myself an "IT Professional", even though I run the network, and in the middle of producing new applications for the business. I am sure this is not all of it, but I can't help but think its not all doom and gloom.

Of course, that must be it

A company that sacks 500 programmers needs 500 more VPs to manage all those progra... oh wait that doesn't make sense at all!

I think you'll find the CIO calls himself an IT professional too, and that you are the exception rather than the rule in calling yourself non "IT Professional".

Even if it does represent people climbimg the corporate ladder, its not a ladder, its a pyramid with fewer jobs higher up than lower down.

So even then, it would represent fewer jobs.

AND

I've noticed that IT skills are now necessary requirements for roles in other areas. Employers are less often looking for just a programmer, but a statistician who can program, or a physics graduate who can program, or a graphic designer who...

Where once you would have hired a programmer to implement the specialist's work, you now expect the specialist to comprise the IT specialist's role as well.

I'm currently doing some work in data analysis, but they want me to do the SQL work on the databases myself (the cheek of it!)

That point made though, I don't think this accounts for major falls in IT work availability. I think if there are such falls then they are more a result the market being flooded with muppets who think they can program (done the correspondence or the nightschool course) and that less and less work is needing to be done from scratch. We have MS Office, we have Postnuke, we have Dreamweaver templates and anything else you might want, requiring only the barest customization.

My advice is to get good at a supplementary field (maths is always good) and get yourself into something that requires more skill than the college course kid can fake in an interview. Go for jobs with people who take things seriously, not the ones who are looking for someone cheap and can't tell the difference between you and the muppet.

Thankfully...

...everyone is losing their jobs in nice, whole numbers. Keeps the statistics nice and pretty that way.

Re:Job "loss"

These former "IT Professionals" sound like products of the certificate mills. Everyone knows that a true programmer (geek) could never switch to marketing. We don't like talking to people. Heck, we don't like people.

Re:Disappearing IT jobs...Duuuuuhhhh!!!!

The number of jobs in any market is not finite. There is one "one pie" that once job is taken, is empty. People create their own jobs. People start new businesses and create new jobs all the time. You statement reflects "zero sum" economics, and sorry, but it doesn't fly in a capitalistic economy.

Re:It's just "Turtles All The Way Down," huh?

suppose I was one of the 131K SW engs who got laid off this past 3 months, and I take your advice to just "work my ass off". But you seemt o forget that there are also 131K other Software Engineers also laid off, who you say should do the same thing--just work their ass off.

I find it interesting that you would quote exactly what he wrote, and then baldly mischaracterize his statement in the rest of your comment. He most pointedly did not say "just 'work my ass off.'" He said, "taking risks and working your ass off."

In other words, he's not claiming that you and the 131K should all merely compete against each other for the same corporate jobs by working hard. He's saying you have the ability to take a risk and start up your own business. And that if you are successful, you will not only employ yourself but in all likelihood several of the 131K unemployed tech workers. Jobs don't just exist in the ether. Someone had to create them. And the next someone could be you. And if it's not you, some of your fellow unemployed group will have an entrepreneurial drive and will create jobs. It'sl likely that when all is said and done, more jobs will be created than were outsourced or destroyed. That is how the economy grows. How do you think all those computer jobs came about in the first place?

Re:It reduces to the same dynamics, anyway

Why would it matter if the harder work involves working for someone else, or working for yourself?

It matters because if you work for yourself, you're creating at least one job, probably more. And if there are more jobs than people to take them, salaries go up for everyone.

As the neoliberal policies continue to decimate the job base and increase the unemployed

I find it interesting that few IT people complained when each one of our jobs were effectively replacing dozens of secretaries, accountants, and whole departments of low level paper pushers. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, we expect the world to cry over our misfortune.

Re:yeah, maybe in 50 years it creates more jobs

So we should all just give up, and not try then? Should we all worship the quitter, the one that was too afraid to take risks?

No thanks, I would rather fail while trying, than cry and die because I may fail. Guess what: life is full of risks, I would rather decide my own risks, rather than be a drone in a company where the risks are there but hidden from my eyes.

Yes, most start up businesses fail in the first few years. What you didn't mention was that most businesses fail from mismanagement, not circumstances. So the answer is that no one should start a business? No one should take risks? We should all abandon all hope and just go "get a job"?

No thanks. I choose to not live with such a doom and gloom outlook on life, making myself a "victim". Life has thrown me many curve balls (which I won't cover, because they are irrelevent, we all have challenges and mine are no more important than yours), but I have come out swinging and done fine. I am not better, smarter, better educated or luckier than anyone else. I just refuse to roll over and die, and willing to make the sacrifices for something that is important to me. Its more about attitude than anything else. I choose to not give up.

History is full of people who faced more adversity than you or I know, and the ones that gave up, we don't know about as they are forgettable and forgotten. The ones that sucked it up, worked harder, took risks, and succeeded in spite of the odds, should provide enough inspiration for the rest of us.

Abe Lincoln is the best example. Go read about all his failures, lost elections, failing law practice, limited education, for decades before becoming president. Just about everything he tried before becoming President was filled with failure, yet it was his unwillingness to quit that best defined him, and presented him with the opportunity to become argueably our most important President ever.

Re:yeah, maybe in 50 years it creates more jobs

History is full of people who faced more adversity than you or I know, and the ones that gave up, we don't know about as they are forgettable and forgotten. The ones that sucked it up, worked harder, took risks, and succeeded in spite of the odds, should provide enough inspiration for the rest of us.

What about the ones that sucked it up, worked harder, took risks, and unfortunately failed (as that's what happens with risk). They don't make for good copy, so the successes get more attention.

Abe Lincoln is the best example. Go read about all his failures, lost elections, failing law practice, limited [snip... see parent]

Please read this [snopes.com]. I generally agree with what is said; namely, that Lincoln's achievements do not need embellishment with "glurge" to stand up.

BTW, I agree with some of what you said, but not the "risk-takers always win!" gloss you put on it. Sometimes you have to go in with your eyes open, accept that you might get squashed, and go ahead and risk it anyway.

a few remarks

- during the dotcom, a lot of folks called themselves 'IT professionals' but were hardly anything like it at all.

- the number of it-pro's itself is completely irrelevant : maybe they learned something new and make a living now. What counts is the percentage of unemployed it-pros versus all it-pros, and the number of unemployed it-pro's versus the global unemployment percentage

summary : this article doesn't mean shit.

Re:a few remarks

"and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004. According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."

These numbers are regarding the first 6 months of 2004, and April-July 2004 respectively. Did pets.com just experience another layoff? The boom has been over for some time -- I'd surmise these lost jobs had zero to do with the boom being over. I think the self-reassuring comments about "Well these are all Devry grads" or "These were just holdovers from 2000" can be just about completely put to rest, sorry folks.

Re:a few remarks

Truck driving seems to be a big thing with a real shortage. Not as slack-sounding as an IT job leading to dot.com rockstar wealth (like the commercials seemed to say) but hopefully it'll draw some of them away.

I, for one, welcome our 18+-wheel Devry-trained highway juggernaut overlords. (Something has to prey on the SUV populations.)

Wow

According to Information Week, the lastest Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that the number of Americans calling themselves IT professionals has decreased by nearly 160,000 in the last 3 years.

In other news, the number of IT professionals getting laid has increased, mainly due to lying about their geek stereotyped profession ;-)

Get a Democratic President

The number of jobs is always created at a faster rateaverage annual percentage growth) under Democratic Presidents then Republican Presidents [dailykos.net]

Here's another chart with the same data [nytimes.com]

You can get the raw BLS Establishment survey data here [bls.gov]

Re:Get a Democratic President

But since economic factors can take years to drag out, maybe it was all the measures the Republican president put in place that improved things a few years later when a Democrat was in power?

Neo-Cons and 'Starve the Beast'

There is a neo-con strategy called "Starve the Beast," whose goal is nothing less than to push the government to near bankruptcy so that it is incapable of governing. The rationale is that this will force the government into laissez-faire policies. Bush's slash and spend policies are in line with this policy, rather than the traditional policies of conservatives, which is to match tax cuts with spending cuts.

But even the traditional policy can lead to disaster. Infrastructure requires constant maintenance. Think of a loose shingle on your roof. Replacing it will cost 50 dollars. If you leave it, the others around will will also come loose. Now you have to spend 500 dollars to fix it. Let this go, and you suffer water damage. $5000 to replace that section of the roof. Ignore this, and the water may get into the house, into the wiring, and cause a fire. Then you lose the whole house. Costs delayed are costs increased. Ignore the state of your highways, power grid, environment, etc, and the costs that you incur when you can no longer ignore it will be crippling.

The danger of 'Starve the Beast' should be obvious. The economy runs on the rails of infrastructure provided by the government; highways, police, courts, regulations which protect business as well as prevent unfair practices, etc. Without the ability to do this, capitalism itself will collapse. Corporations are, first and foremost, legal entities sanctioned by government authority. Their very existence is made possibly by the efficacy of government. And we haven't even touched on the military yet. A bankrupt federal government will mark the end of America as a Superpower. All of this is why large numbers of old school conservatives are furious with Bush.

I still haven't touched on the liberal arguments against what Bush is doing. Those who have little money left over after necessities pay a much larger proportion of their income in taxes, through sales tax. There is no tax on securities and stocks, and the financial slight of hand that uses tax shelters is available only to those with a large surplus of capital. When Henry Ford paid his workers an unheard of amount of money for common labourers, he created a large working middle class, with disposable income which allowed them to buy the products of their own labour. This rendered obsolete what was probably the only legitimate claim of Karl Marx: that when workers could no longer buy the products of their own labour, the markets would collapse. The result of Ford's policy eventually spread to most of the American working class, creating the most powerful economic dynamo the world has ever seen. The decline of the middle and working classes make the pie smaller for everyone. The rich may get richer for while, but they will be fewer in number. It is only a matter of time before they feel the pinch. The wolf that grows fat on the poor will soon go after bigger prey.

Both the long term and the short term consequences of Bush's policies are disastrous. It doesn't matter what your political affiliation is. It may be disastrous for the Democrats if they win, because they will inherit such a mess that it will be hard to wow the crowd. America cannot afford four more years of Bush. And even the conservatives are beginning to realize this.

Re:Get a Democratic President

Largely the same thing can be said about Stock Market returns: higher under Democrats, lower under Republicans.

http://morningstar.aol.com/PoweredBy/doc/article/1 ,,113806,00.html?CN=NSC123 [aol.com]

Re:Get a Democratic President

"Yeah, how dare they put national security above political expediency?"

I didn't say tap it, I just said stop filling it during a time when oil is very expensive and supplies are tight. There is a lot of oil in the reserve already, it would be nice to stop filling it until Yukos and various other problems are sorted out.

"I see you and Michael Moore share the same definition of "fact"."

Uh what are Republicans for then. They are overwhelmingly the party of rich white men and corporations. Those people care about profits and wealth accumulation to the exclusion of just about everything else. They do sucker a lot of less affluent whites into support them but its using sucker social issues like religion, militarism, abortion etc. They have to because there aren't enough rich white men to win an election.

"Yes please, save me from the tyranny of Walmart's low prices. I also understand there's this product called "Linux", created largely with foreign labor, that's cutting into the profits of real American companies like Microsoft and SCO."

The point you are trying to make here is completely lost on me other than I assume you are trying to slam Linux and troll using Microsoft and SCO. Didn't work. Your statement is just bait still dangling on a forlorn hook.

"Corporations don't pay taxes"

Well then why do the Republicans keep howling about the corporate tax burden? You glossed over the basic problem, why should a corporation be able to make money, not pay taxes on it and then dole it out share holders as dividends who also don't have to pay taxes on it. They didn't do any real work for it, they just had money and they made more money and they don't get taxed. Sweet job if you can get it. Meanwhile someone scraping by working for a living can't escape payroll taxes or income taxes and they end up increasingly carry the tax burden.

"But isn't it funny how the left howls..."

You seem to be operating under the delusion that I'm left or Democrat because I'm not a Republican. Believe it or not there are more than two sides in the world. I'm half arch conservative and half populist. I like my government as small as possible which means I'm not really left or democrat, but if you are going to tax I want you to tax the people that can pay first which makes me populist.

Social security was simply a dumb idea in its inception. When it was passed most people didn't live to retirement age. Now everyone lives 20-30 years past it and its eventually going to be untenable, now its just a huge burden on the young. Since the early eighties when the taxes were jack up its been mostly a regressive tax on the young and both parties are to blame for looting. I really just want the money I put in back, with minimal interest, instead of gambling I make it to some ridiculously high retirement age or that there is even any program left when I'm that old.

"Sort of true, except that the Iraq war wasn't intended to show a profit. If we wanted their oil, all we had to do was buy it (like France); that's far cheaper than paying to blow stuff up and paying again to rebuild it."

Excepting of course it was embargoed and only being sold through the corrupt UN oil for food program. The invasion did manage to put it back on the open market at least during the periods their pipelines aren't burning.

Its pretty native to paint it as either we did to take their oil or thats not why we did it. It is telling the Bremer spent a couple percent of the U.S. funds for rebuilding and he spent every bit of Iraq currents and near future oil revenue and most of it on U.S. companies like Halliburton.

The U.S. is in Iraq because the U.S. wanted a permanent military force in the heart of the oil rich Middle East. They had it in Saudi Arabia but the Saudi's put to many constraints on the U.S. military based there. In Iraq the U.S. has a compliant puppet government and can use Iraq as the base for future intimidation or invasion to insure control of oil

Re:Get a Democratic President

Private employment increased by 21.7 million under the Clinton adminstration.
Private employment has decreased 1.8 million under the Bush adminstration.

I can't figure out how to link to these other statistics directly, but go here [bls.gov] and choose "Total Private Employment - Seasonally Adjusted" or whatever.

Re:Get a Democratic President

I'll admit he got very lucky. The tech jobs graph looks like it was rigged for Clinton and against Bush. But the thing is

1. Even ignoring tech jobs, the job sitation was pretty good under Clinton, and still not break even under Bush
2. Eventually you have to come to the conclusion that either Democrats are all very lucky, or that they're doing something better.

As for the Internet, this seems to indicate that the bidding for the ARPANET contract started in 1968, under the LBJ adminstration.
Here [wordiq.com]

Re:Get a Democratic President

Of course Democratic presidents create more jobs - more government jobs. Thus the size of gov't increases, and so does the tax burden on those of us who don't have gov't jobs. Number 1 employer in the US - gov't. Number 1 employer in most socialist/communist countries - gov't. Can you see the correlation? Just don't try to get a gov't job unless you know someone, that's the only way in now, unless your female, minority, etc.. (Just my white male rant!).
FYI: Government spending under Bush >> Government spending under Clinton(on both defense and non-defense)
To answer the grandparent, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Economics is a still largely a mystery, we can measure a lot of things, and explain some others, but it's a lot more complicated than most people(such as yourself) make it out to be. I see a lot of people(and I myself have indulged in this on occaision) who really over-simplify economic theory(free trade is always good! All regulation is evil! We need to protect American jobs! etc)
That correlation should not be the reason you are voting for John Kerry. I am supporting Kerry because he will show fiscal responsibility(unlike our current president), put a lot of money into research for alternative fuel sources(though he hasn't mentioned making trains a replacement for domestic flights, but hey, you can't win 'em all), his willingness to volunteer to go to Vietnam(he inspired me to look into joining the Army), and his courage to protest the war after it, his plans to reduce health care costs, and the fact that he is respected in the rest of the world. I have traveled abroad and met a lot of people who like America, but loathe Bush. I do not want that man representing our country, and I think we have found a great replacement for him in John Kerry.
Now that I have stated my beliefs, I will don my flame retardant suit.

Re:I will not for for a MA liberal.

How amazingly childish. Seriously, grow up, names like "dumbocrats" are not likely to win anyone to your side. I enjoy engaging in political debates, but not with people who have the emotional level of a 7 year old. Grow up. You just repeated a bunch of rhetoric without offering anything new or insightful. You say that democrats aren't even human, hardy har har.
When you are a big boy come back and maybe we can talk.

I wish they would have broken down the numbers

by education levels. Are the programmers who were laid off college educated or did they take, "ITT teaches you how to write a web page and use visual baisc" type programmers? Is there demand for a masters/phd? The numbers probably mean very little of themselves without a breakdown of who is employed/unemployed. Maybe demand for college graduates has increased, but demand for Devry/ITT flunkies has plummetted. Hard to tell.....

Consolidating markets

It doesn't really surpise me. Y2k is long gone and, frankly, there's been no huge advances in desktop IT in the entire period.

Most computers are being used in offices and in homes. These are folk who, three years ago could get a PIII 700 running Win2k and Office. What reason do thy have to upgrade? What new features are on offer?

Hardware may be moving with leaps and bound, but at the desktop application level we aren't seeing that sort of progress. Nonetheless, things like 64bit computing with faster processors and obscene quantities of RAM will open up real-time desktop video editing to the masses - that might see a whole wave of upgrades. VOIP might see some big changes to POTS, but only if it can offer something new to encourage folk to upgrade. And, of course, we still haven't seen reliable speech processing, possibly the killer app but is there really a huge improvement from ViaVoice of 1999 to the software on the market today.

Frankly there's no reason to upgrade, and unless there is there's going to be a dwindling source of jobs in a consolidated market.

Re:Consolidating markets

What reason do thy have to upgrade? What new features are on offer?

Some of the new viruses require at least a 1.5ghz processor ;)

But yea, my mom doesn't need anything faster for email and web surfing. She has a 2.0 Celeron box from Dell that I bought her (live 1300 miles away, wanted the support for her) so she is not likely to need anything faster until it dies. The only reason "regular" people upgrade is for games. Hell, I went and upgraded my video card yesterday just to play Doom3.

The problem with computers isn't speed, its software. I setup a webserver to talk to my X10 modules here at the house, so I can turn lights on and off from anywhere in the world. I had to patch together all kinds of software to make this happen, as I haven't seen any packages that could do everything my kludge of packages can do. Home automation doesn't need powerful computers, it needs software. We are underutilizing the hardware we already have.

Part of this problem, of course, is the fact that manufacturers will not agree on standards for appliances to talk to each other. Each demanding a proprietary system, thinking it will protect them, when it only makes the irrelevent. This is one of the reasons I am pro-OSS, as open standards are what will bring us the really cool software that we could have run on P3/500s had it existed at the time.

Am I unreasonable...

Am I unreasonable to see a lot of this as an overdue correction in the IT labour market? For a while here in Australia at least it seemed that someone with a 6 week vocational computing course could earn $50K+ doing front-line support. That wasn't a realistic or sustainable situation, and is certainly not reflected in any other industry I can think of.

Re:Am I unreasonable...

No that is part of the problem. Back in the 90's IT Professionals got greedy. And they scared managers with buzz words like e-business, http, Y2k, and a bunch of other stuff. A lot of stuff with very easy to do and could be done by anyone with a 2 week course. So as time went on and people learned how to do these things with out the help of an IT staff. And started laying off IT staff unfortunately they grouped all IT into (same with the internet businesses they labeled them all as tech companies, I am sorry pets.com is a pet store not a tech company!) one area. So even if you are a system administrator and have been keeping the place running for 30 years you got laid off with Mr. HTML only programmer. So now the the economy is starting to turn a bit they realized that they cut all the fat and a bit to much of the lean as well, Unfortunately some companies don't realize this and that is why they are getting problems left and right combined with aging hardware and no real IT support to help with long term management of the IT. But a lot of them are starting to realize this now and letting some of the IT people back. It wont be like in the 90s with a programmer can get 100k a year or 50k out of collage. It will balance with the rest of the other industries out of collage a good job at 30k-35k and maybe you can get up to 50k after 5 years or so. which is a honest wage. The 90s were a blip in the economy and some people knew it so the took advantage of it while it was there but a lot figures that this will be there for ever (Kida like I told them what they said back in the 1920s) and they took advantage of the economy too but they didn't plan for slow times and then they just fell off the face of the earth.

Re:Am I unreasonable...

Yeah, some people got greedy. But so what? For all the people on slashdot happily talking about how this "correction" is just a part of the glories of Capitalism: laborers have just as much of a right to be greedy as managers.

Look at the realities of many IT jobs, perhaps nearly all of them:

• You're expected to work far in excess of 40 hours per week. Just as an example, for six months I was working over 70 hours per week, week after week.
• You're actually on-call, even when you're not working. If the website goes down, even the lowly HTML programmer can be called up at 2:00 AM to help fix it.
• You're required to have up-to-date skills, and no every new technology your managers can think of.
• As a developer, you have to take bad business ideas and translate them into working software.

And the list goes on. I was up till 1:00 last night (yeah, Saturday night but my wife was working next to me), working on learning Smalltalk. I won't be compensated for it, its part of the job. Is there anything wrong with thinking, gee, even though its part of the job, I should be paid for the extra time I spend learning?

IT workers may have been greedy, but not as greedy as management. Why should someone with an undergraduate Human Resources degree, limited hours, very little need to learn new skills, etc. earn the same amount of money as a programmer who has to do the above list?

Managers became afraid that finally, a group of educated and independant individuals were entering the work force and demanding to be paid what they worth. The nerds had entered the palace! And now, managers are delighted because the nerds are on the run... things are back to the way they should be, with accountants, mid-level managers, human resources staff, and others earning more than those geek-ass goobers.

A lot of people weren't qualified to be IT...

I know a lot of former coworkers who have lost their job in the last year or two, and almost half of them are no longer doing tech work. Is it because the market is that bad? No, its because they were hired into technology even though they were underqualified during the tech boom, and now that its over and there isn't insane market pressure to hire anyone who can string lines of code together they've moved on.

I'd suspect thats the biggest group of people no longer in IT. I have most visibility in design and software development these days, but I'm sure the same is true for network/system administration.

There's not necessarily anything wrong with it, either. Most of the people I've known who did the major career shift after being layed off are much happier now. In a market where the people getting the jobs are reasonably qualified, its got to be hard to go to work knowing you can't really do what you need to well.

Perhaps true, but some industries took a pounding.

I'm a former Northwest Airlines applications programmer/analyst with a BSCS and 15 years of pretty solid experience who has been looking for a new permanent place to work for over 2.5 years now, and my local area (the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro) has had a number of large companies lay off a large number of people over the past few years including my former employer (NWA), Unisys (which has a heavy airline/mainframe presence in the Twin Cities), Lawson, IBM, Qwest, Verizon, and a number of others.

In the case of NWA, many IT people were laid off based on the organization or project they were affiliated with, and whole trees of people were lopped off from the manager on down. I know several folks who I considered top-quality techie types who were let go in October 2001 because they had moved to a project that was more technically interesting or high-profile a few years ago, but which was considered a non-critical project by management in the post-9/11 airline environment).

In other cases (such as in my case), cuts were made based purely on seniority, and my 13 years put me on the bottom of the ladder compared to the remaining folks I was working with in Flight Operations (I survived the major IT cuts in late 2001 only to find myself nickel-and-dimed out a few months later when we all thought it was over).

Given the experience level of my peers I was a logical choice, at least by that measure, but I'll frankly put my general level of technical acumen against anyone here. Or there, for that matter. :-)

Unfortunately, that wasn't the measurement used. Ability rarely factors into such choices, as two layoffs in the past 15 years have taught me, particularly when the layoff parameters are being determined mainly by bean counters rather than technical management.

With such a glut in unemployed techie folks in the local area, many of them quite senior, it's hard for someone with only 10-15 years of experience to get any sort of contract work because there are a fair number of 20-30 year people also laid off who are now competing for a much smaller number of positions. And contract work is almost all there is. A few firms seem to be hiring real permanent employees, but competition is so fierce that one has to be an almost perfect tech-skill+line-of-business match in order to get a first-level interview.

I know several folks who have roughly my experience level who are still out of work after more than a year, and it sure isn't due to a lack of technical ability or a lack of effort. From what I can tell, it's mainly due to a large number of people seeking a small number of positions, and to an increasing tendency for companies to require more and more specialized business and technical skillsets even for general IT positions.

The folks who have "left IT" according to common statistical measures are a mix of all types.

Some fit the stereotype of being "less skilled" or interested only in the financial aspects of an IT career, and I'm in agreement with those who say "good riddance" to such folks, but there are probably at least as many others who are hard-core bit twiddlers or talented designers or whatnot who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who are finding it difficult to obtain employment in IT at a time when companies are hiring specialized short-term contractors in lieu of more generalized long-term employees.

When an IT position isn't available, and when the six months or so of unemployment runs out, a former IT person has to do *something* in order to make ends meet. In my case, it will probably end up driving a truck or doing some sort of generic office work so I can continue to pay the bills.

That doesn't make me any less interested in IT, and I'll still be looking when I'm not working at a lesser position, but for statistical purposes I'll have dropped off the radar and will no longer count as an unemployed IT position. It's a very misleading statistic...

If this comes across as a bi

Re:A lot of people weren't qualified to be IT...

This is pretty contemptible by my experience. Most of my friends and acquantances who were laid off, some of whome have stayed unemployed for quite some time, were very senior with excellent records. I can't speak for the number of script kiddie equivalents out there as those aren't the folks I hang with. But just waving off the bad news claimin that those who lost jobs and did not find new ones weren't acceptable software geeks is a convenient self-assuring fantasy that it can't happen to you.

A lot of commercial software work can be done by any available labor pool with good skills and good work habits. So guess what? Many of the jobs are going to the cheaper labor pools producing acceptable results. Thi is a logical outcome of global free trade. Combine that with an extremely bad market and you have more than sufficient explanation for what we are seeing. Add in a seriously anti science and anti-technology administration and there is no need to posit that all those left jobless simply weren't worthwhile hackers to start with.

The above is not "informative". It is the old blame the victim and assume we the employed are so much better than that. It assumes that having a job is some kind of statement of moral worth or software savvy.

Unemployment numbers

They are really baffled by the drop in unemployment concurrent with a drop in jobs. I think that quite a few people simply said: "Do I want to make lousy wages working 80 hour weeks in a high-stress deadline-driven environment? Or I could work 40 hours a week as a plumber and make more money? Hmm..."

Statistics are like bikinis.

"Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they hide is vital."
- unknown

Stupid stats - read the articles yourselves

The articles themselves seem excessively alarmist, and the slashdot summary is of course much worse.

The plausible stats I saw were:

• A 4.5% decline in the IT labor force since the peak in 2001. (IW article)
• IT unemployment currently around 5.5%, down from 6% recently, and up from 3% in 2000-2001. (IW article)
• "The overall number of people employed in computer-related occupations in the U.S. dropped by about 9,000 people from the first to second quarter." (IT article)

A lot of the other stats are based on random labelling of people (e.g. "computer programmer" vs "computer analyst" vs "software engineer".. the IW articles cites an 8% increase in the latter), and a relatively small sample. If nothing else, the reported 60% increase in IT managers should tell you something about these surveys.

If we're just going for shock-the-readers headlines based on these stats, try this one:

InformationWeek reports that according to recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, there's now one manager to every 1.85 computer programmers. At current rates, managers will outnumber programmers in a few years.

(InformationWeek reports 341k managers vs 632k computer programmers.. but that report based upon those numbers is obviously misleading.)

It's just a name

The folks I work with stopped calling me an IT professional some time last year... using instead the more apt term "IT Asshole".

Burn-out does that to you.

What's an IT Pro to do?

Bottom line: the job situation in IT is absolutely awful. A lot of educated and experienced professionals can not find decent work. Take a look at the job boards, companies are asking for a list of requirements a mile long, and paying a janitor's salary.

I can't believe anybody has the gall to print these alarmist "BSCS graduate numbers are declining!" articles. Companies don't want BSCS's they want slave labor. Such labor can be in the form of:

1) H1B visas
2) Jobs exported overseas
3) USA citizens forced to work for reduced wages.

I wish I had the fore-sight to go to law school and specialize in IP litigation, that is going to be where the money is. Instead of making money by being productive and/or innovative, we'll all make money be suing each other.

I'm open to any career change suggestions. I have a degrees in math and business. But it's been a long time. I've worked in IT for 24 years. There is a lot I like about IT. But, it gets old being treated like a dog to kick around.

Re:What's an IT Pro to do?

Companies don't want BSCS's they want slave labor.

But perhaps the most interesting question is why they are at such a rush for cheap labor. I think blaming "the competition" (i.e., India) is not quite right, and long-winded rants about Reaganomics are really missing the mark. A widespread job market crunch toward the bottom of the wage stack cannot be caused so easily by an American president giving a tax refund.

It's actually the same force that causes companies to be so keen on DRM. There are too few corporations that are too large in size. They don't have normal routes to growth in the marketplace and so they must use "monopoly growth" strategies -- so instead of competing for customers they compete to lower wages, or compete to raise barriers to market entry.

There is probably nothing that can address downward-spiraling wages other than breaking up the monolithic corporations that have gobbled up so much of the economy.

A Colossus With Weak Knees

Paul Craig Roberts was one of the architects of supply side economics under Reagan. He's having some serious misgivings about all this deficit spending and globalization -- 20 years too late unfortunately.

A Colossus With Weak Knees [vdare.com]

By Paul Craig Roberts

If George Bush [vdare.com] and John Kerry [vdare.com] were aware of the problems that await the next president, they would be vying to throw the election, not to win it.

Job loss at home and failure abroad have already written the script which will sweep away the next administration.

Recession could return by the inauguration before the economy ever regains the jobs lost to the 2001 recession. Second quarter 2004 economic growth came in 20% less than expected. The consumer is showing weakness, and crude oil prices have reached record highs. [starbanner.com] Personal savings remain low by historical standards.

On August 3 the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that seasonally adjusted real per capita incomes declined in June to levels below those reached in April. Total personal real spending declined 0.9% in June to the level of last February.

As the Bureau of Labor Statistics made clear in its July 30 report, the US economy is suffering not only from weak job growth but also from a loss of better paying jobs.

Only 65% of the 5.3 million workers who were laid off from long term jobs [vdare.com] during the first three years of President Bush's administration were reemployed by January 2004. That means only about 3.5 million of the 5.3 million laid off workers were able to find new jobs during two years of economic recovery.

Of those who found new jobs, 57%--about 2 million workers--took jobs paying less than their previous positions. About 1.2 million of the workers who found new jobs experienced pay cuts of 20% or more.

It is really disturbing that this job loss may have occurred in the absence of a recession. The conventional definition of recession is two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. However, on July 30 the Bureau of Economic Analysis released the revised GDP data for 2001, and the recession, as conventionally measured, has disappeared. The revised data does not show two consecutive negative quarters, and for 2001 the economy grew 0.8%. Did we experience not only a job loss recovery [vdare.com], but also a job loss nonrecession?

There was no recession in the second quarter of this year, but BLS data show 131,000 fewer American computer software engineers employed in the second quarter than in the first quarter of 2004--a decline of 15% in three months. Employment of computer scientists and systems analysts declined by 51,000 in the second quarter. Employment of computer programmers fell 16,000.

Despite the horrendous job loss, the unemployment rates for software engineers, computer scientists and programmers fell, which suggests that technical professionals are discouraged [vdare.com] and have ceased to search for jobs in their occupations.

The decline in high-tech professions in the US is also reflected in the collapse in computer engineering enrollments in America's premier engineering schools. Over the past several years, M.I.T., Georgia Tech, and UC Berkeley have experienced computer engineering enrollment declines [vdare.com] of 43%.

More unprecedented bad news comes from the Internal Revenue Service. For the first time ever, the real incomes of Americans shrank for two consecutive years. In 2002 Americans repor

Re:A Colossus With Weak Knees

I know this will be marked as reduntdant, but this is seriously the most insightful thing I have ever read on /.
Unfettered free trade is not helping this country, mainly because it isn't free trade. China wants to send stuff to the US, but has no interest in buying US products. Besides the obvious under-valued currency, there are also a lot of other barriers to US goods in the Chinese market. There are huge tariffs and quotas on everything imported into China from the US. If the US tried to impose these quotas on China, China would scream bloody murder at the WTO. In order to even sell stuff in the Chinese market, you have to make a large percent of it in China, and transfer a lot of technology to the Chinese government.
Why is the US standing idly by you ask? Because our leaders don't give a shit about you and I. The huge tax cust is funded China is buying a large amount of the US deficit. We are esentially borrowing from China to buy Chinese goods and making a lot of influential people in Washington very rich.
This is a country who's top general said as recently as 1996 that war with the US was inevitable.
The US is losing the war on communism with Wal-Mart leading the charge!

Screw it; I'm outta here

I've decided to just run a cash register and be poor. It was good enough for my grandfather.

Nothing wrong with the rest of the people, I'm just not very good at being whatever-it-you-call it. Successful. Evil. Whatever. I'm over 30 now and through with programming as a profession or even giving a shit what happens in the industry.

I'm content to be a hobbyist dinking with Linux at night from now on and being a total Rodney Dangerfield. I'd rather just be poor.

Explaining oil to /.

By now you've all been told how MicroSoft makes all of it's profits on Windows and things like the X-Box are just money losers running as place-holders at the company's expense.

Well oil is to the world economy what Windows is to MicroSoft. Oil is turned into fertilizer [findarticles.com] so all high-carbohydrate crops and the livestock that feed on them are just an "X-Box" from an economic viewpoint.

All transportation, manufacturing, etc. are also 100% dependent on enegy from fossile fuels. All plastics, nylon, etc are made directly from oil.

When oil prices go up it's like Windows ceasing to be the "money printing press" for MicroSoft. The net effect is that the whole world is made poorer.

Who moved my Cheese?

Face it, Your Boss is a Rat

Who REALLY moved your cheese and why!

By: John Shepler

If you think something smells rotten in corporate America, you're right. It's a foul aroma wafting in from the executive suites, where the rats are jumping for joy at the success of their latest manifesto, "Who Moved My Cheese?", subtitled...get this, "An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and In Your Life."

"We moved it," they squeal with delight, "and when we want to, we'll move it again." Why? Very simple. Management has discovered that moving or removing YOUR cheese can be quite advantageous to them. But they've known that for a more than a decade. What they've just begun to realize is that it's possible to sell employees on the idea that this is perfectly OK. I'll elaborate, but first let me tell you how it all began.

It Takes Only a Minute

Management has a Holy Grail and it is known as "the silver bullet," also called the quick fix. It's epitomized in a small, thin book called "The One Minute Manager" by Kenneth Blanchard, Ph.D. (piled higher and deeper) and Spencer Johnson, M.D. (mostly deeper.) The theme of "The One Minute Manager" is that business people, especially managers, spend way too much time mulling over problems, internalizing them, and debating on what to do next. Much better, proposed Blanchard and Johnson, to jump in, collect all the facts that are at your fingertips or can be coaxed out of your subordinates, and make a snap decision in one minute or less. Actually, the primary decision is which employees can best be made to take ownership of the problem, strategically moving the burning acid of responsibility from your stomach to theirs. If things improve, you allocate no more than one more minute to tell them how great they are doing. If the situation deteriorates, you allocate that same minute to making darn sure that they feel terrible about it and will work even harder to keep the problem from returning to you.

A Revolution in Business Thinking

Think this is funny? It's revolutionary. The enabling power of one minute management has caused the entire Fortune 500 to refocus from the concept of stewardship, with a responsibility to the community that spans generations, to a slavish devotion to the needs of the institutional investor, primarily an increased stream of earnings every fiscal quarter. White-collar layoffs, almost unheard of prior to the 1980s, are now a standard tool of expense management. With only a minute needed for problem solving, the span of control for managers has increased as much as ten fold and the number of people assigned to non-producing supervisory functions proportionally reduced. Productivity, as measured by corporate earnings, soared to create the raging bull market of the 1990s. Johnson and Blanchard are lauded in corporate circles. But the emphasis on rapid decision making has led to shortened attention spans. It's already time for something new...

The Big Cheese

The toll of one minute everything is burning out once naive and eager employees, anxious for their leg up the corporate ladder. The abuses of ever increasing demands have created calluses of cynicism that are best portrayed in the characters of Scott Adams' Dilbert. Now everyone sees themselves as an oppressed Dilbert or Wally and adopts a passive/aggressive approach to corporate survival.

Re-enter Johnson, sans Blanchard, with a new silver bullet, this one cleverly disguised as an irresistible morsel of cheese. And who can resist the power of cheese? It's a story that is designed once again to get the onus of action into the mind of the common employee. Without giving too much away, here's how it goes.

It seems that there are two mice and two small people living in a maze. They dine on a seemingly endless supply of cheese provided by an unseen benevolent caretaker. All are complacent and happy with this scenario, until one day the cheese is gone. The mice shrug and take off down the corridors of the maze to find more

political cartoon

sure shows the appropriateness of a recent political cartoon [io.com] from Ben Sargent.

Dot.bubble comparisons considered harmful

Too any job number comparisons are made to the last peak of 3-4 years ago. But that was the height of the dot.com bubble. That was the point where the industry was too crazy to sustain itself. Outrageous money was spent irresponsibly, qualified engineers were hard to find, classic measures of business sanity went out the window. We don't want to go there again. So if things don't look quite so rosy compared to those days, it's because we're not yet at the point of another dot-kablooie. So it's not like "the good old days"? Good.

Everyone was a sw engineer during the bubble years

I had the distinct "pleasure" of working with a lot of people who should not have been let anywhere near a computer, let alone pretend to do anything useful with them. I am not the least surprised there's less people in the industry now.

Re:Software Engineers

My Computer Science degree in the UK is accredited by the British Computer Society (BCS), which is a Chartered Engineering Institution, so I would be classed as an engineer upon graduation, though my degree isn't a typical degree in engineering.

Re:technology ruins lives

No, the practice of trying to make every quarterly financial report add up to the right number by either firing half your work force or doulbing their numbers is what ruins lives. Sometimes it's so blatant the two above acts are only a single quarter apart.

Re:Not much sympathy

I can't have much sympathy. American companies have regularly outsourced to many countries such as Canada and Ireland, yet Americans only complain about Indians.

Mainly because the cost of living in India/China is much lower than Canada or Ireland, so there is no way that workers can compete on salary. And that it is possible for Americans to get permits to work temporarily in Canada and Ireland.