More Tech, STEM Workers Voluntarily Quitting Their Jobs (dice.com) 167
Nerval's Lobster writes: New data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) suggests that more tech professionals are voluntarily quitting their jobs. In August, some 507,000 people in Professional and Business Services (which encompasses tech and STEM positions) quit their positions, up from 493,000 in July. It's also a significant increase over August 2014, when 456,000 professionals quit. Voluntary quits could be taken as a sign of a good economy (Dice link), hinting that people feel confident enough about the market to jump to a new position (likely with better pay and benefits), if not strike out on their own as an independent. For tech pros, things are particularly rosy at the moment; according to the BLS, the national unemployment rate among tech pros has hovered at under 3 percent for the past year, although not all segments have equally benefitted from that trend: Programmers, for example, saw their unemployment rate dip precipitously between the first and second quarters of this year, even as joblessness among Web developers, computer support specialists, and network and systems engineers ticked upwards during the same period. If there's one tech segment that hasn't enjoyed economic buoyancy, it's manufacturing, which has suffered from layoffs and steady declines in open positions over the past several quarters.
retirement? (Score:4, Interesting)
You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.
People tend to job-hop when pay is rising the fastest. It is during recessions that they hunker down and stay loyal.
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Informative)
Pay us well and treat us well, and we won't keep job-hopping.
People tend to job-hop when pay is rising the fastest. It is during recessions that they hunker down and stay loyal.
To be fair, it's when pay is rising fastest *in other companies* that that people tend to job-hop, yes?
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Interesting)
You got it!
Company offers a 2% raise, competitor offers 30% more pay and better benefits. No contest.
Actually, I went to my boss and explained that I could get 30% more by getting another job. His response was "I don't believe you, times are tough and you should be thankful you have a job." He was surprised when I turned in my resignation 48 hours later. Seems the listing company jumped when I sent in my resume, interviewed me same day and offered the next morning.
i've been at the new job a year and love it!
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, and it's during the boom times companies whine about "employee loyalty" and all that shit they destroyed. Yet during recessions, they can't do the layoffs fast enough.
Boo fucking hoo.
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Bullshit. Good STEM workers are not primarily interested in money, or they would have chosen a different field. Of course, it has to be still enough to make a decent living, but otherwise other things are more important. Not all people are like the modern "manager" species that does not understand anything except money, and that only with a short-term view.
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Actually that is exactly how it panned out. If it didn't pan out for you that way, then you must be doing something wrong. I don't even take calls anymore from numbers I don't recognize because I get about 1 to 3 recruiting calls and two to five recruiting emails daily.
Re:You like our workLocation? (Score:2)
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(maybe do more public relations and github, if you don't)
This. Being able to point to your work in a public repository for a project actually doing something useful speaks volumes and cuts down the effort needed to evaluate you enormously. Establish some open source cred and the world is your oyster.
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Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much this.
Management and other small-minded folks like to blame employee dissatisfaction on anything but the real causes: mistreatment by management, mandatory unpaid OT, expectation of being on-call 24/7 and very few opportunities for promotion and advancement for tech workers who choose to stay at one company.
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Seconded.
Don't forget (Score:5, Informative)
Sometechcompany has contintuity and visibility. The Company writes policy, press releases, public relations statements, etc. So, year after year after year, The Company keeps reiterating how great they are, and how unappreciated they are.
The techs who have worked for The Company in the past and the present have no such outlet. Their reasons for leaving aren't publicized. Two, or six, or twenty people might know your real reasons for leaving, but none of it is publicized. Outside of your immediate freinds and associates, no one knows how shitty The Company has been treating you.
And, it is the job of HR to ensure that your reasons are twisted, perverted, and/or hidden from public view. Often enough, it would cost your freinds and associates their jobs to make any attempt to set the record straight.
So, when all is said and done, The Company just gets away with whatever the hell they please, and you have no recourse other than leaving.
Re:Don't forget (Score:5, Funny)
you have no idea. The year my company was named to 100 best to work for...they reprinted every god damned piece of letterhead, envelope, notepad...anything with our logo on it now had the 100 best to work for logo.
the funny thing was apparently that was illegal and within a month we got cease and desist from whoever grants 100 best to work for. Now we had zero paper for anything we could use and corporate wasn't buying yet another company wide paper buy...yeah they do anything to claim how great they are
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This is a slow road to irrelevancy though: Because all the good STEM workers will leave, and only those that have no other prospects will stay. IBM is in that fix at the moment for example, they do not have many good engineers left. Same with HP or Yeahoo. Sure, giants die slowly, but once they are moribund, nothing can safe them.
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I completely agree. One condition of getting me to work for you is that every minute I work is on the clock and gets paid for. Otherwise, overtime (which in a sane environment is reserved for emergencies only) becomes a tool management uses to compensate for their mistakes.
Re:You like our work? (Score:4)
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not share you numbers? An efficient labor market cant operate without a good flow of information.
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Numbers are meaningless without location.
Junior level candidates in Silicone Valley can start at what senior level candidates make in, say Colorado. But the crazy cost of living offsets that completely.
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The second part of the statement, I agree with. But in this case numbers aren't worth as much as names. We need to start naming and shaming the companies that are abusing basic labor laws first. We know there are vast discrepancies in salaries already, but salary discrepancies aren't inherently illegal.
(Don't worry, I know you didn't think it out further than trying to call what you probably erroneously assumed was a bluff, I was just trying to help the discussion as a whole by salvaging the important pa
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Naming and shaming - that is what glassdoor.com is for. Everybody needs to sign up, share their salary info, and comment on the quality of their employers.
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Ah, yes. Supervisors that think _they_ are doing the important work....
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OTOH, when they retire that last mainframe running RPG, you'll be first on the RIF-list.
IBM introduced a new mainframe this year that can "process 2.5 billion transactions a day (or the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day, according to the company)."
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/z13-mainframe/ [wired.com]
Re:You like our work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Loyalty is priceless. Unfortunately, the MBA scum that swims to the top these days does not understand that.
Re:You like our work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Many companies fail to understand the cost of turnover. Normally when turnover happens it will cost 150% to replace an employee. Because of the time it will take them to settle in and get use to the process (The informal one, that isn't written down, such as avoid these departments, as their manager is a jerk, work around this director because he is useless). After about a full year of learning then someone usually comes truly productive in the institution. So that is a big cost to the organization to have people leave.
While employee salary is the biggest expense for an organization, it is also a vital key to its infrastructure, and it shouldn't be skimmed. Studies show if someone is getting paid more than they feel it is worth, they will work harder, if they feel they are getting paid less than they feel they are worth, they will not work as hard. The calculation for happy employees isn't hard.
Give them good pay: on par or better than your compensation.
Give them predictability: They will need to feel that their job is steady, and they can plan a life outside around it.
Give them opportunities to grow: Make sure they have a path towards promotion, ability to learn other things. A lot of businesses feel tuition reimbursement will just train people to be overqualified for their job. However if you can promote the person once they have the new education, they will stick around, and you will have someone in that higher position who knows the business with the latest skills.
Avoiding any one of these causes turn over.
Under par pay: You may get employees when they are desperate, or with a promise of the other two where they think they can work up really fast. But any thing that causes them to lose trust in the organization and they are out, as soon as they can.
Lack or predictability: This could just come from a volatile attitude, where you may be friendly one day, and yelling and screaming the next. Where your job in under pressure that YOU may be next on the layoff. Down times do happen, but you can make this more predictable letting people know who is getting canned, and why, allowing them time to prepare, and perhaps using your organizations resources to help them find new work. This can also mean unpredictable hours, granted all work isn't 9-5 but, having a good scheduled and shared out of office duties so people can live their life.
Lack of growth: As they continue on the job, the gain insight on what needs to be done, not allowing people to grow, in terms of rank, or getting choice jobs. Also the organization will have an overly simplify ranking structure.
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One more thing with many jobs is that when a person walks out, they can take irreplaceable information with them. Most of us probably aren't given time to really document what we do, so when we leave, all the "whys" and "designs" go with us. Where I am now, I'd love to know why several things were done like they are because I think they need to be changed but we don't dare for fear of breaking something important; but we'll never know why as the people who coded it ar
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Employer: You signed a blanket non-compete. If you leave we have the arbitration judge on your payroll sue the shirt off your back
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Correction: your->our
Hewlett-Packard effect (Score:5, Interesting)
At HP, there are a LOT of people leaving, as morale is at an all-time low. Those with marketable skills would rather leave on their own than get a dreaded "offer" to work at Ciber or Modis at 30% less pay, reduction in benefits, and a loss of seniority - and finding they can make more at a company willing to actually offer reasonable compensation increases on a regular basis.
There may be other companies, not as high profile as HP, where this is also occurring. Obviously, there are many companies "below average" (Kind of has to be that way), but the disparity is pretty high - when people start shopping around, they quickly realize they are underpaid, and the rest of the pieces start falling into place.
It can't go on forever... which is all the more reason those people confident in their ability to place at better companies are going now, rather than waiting.
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in the SF and Valley areas, as well as on the east coast (Boston, NYC, etc), the average "half life" of a software engineer before they quit to go elsewhere is ridiculously low. Between 1 and 2 years depending on the city.
There's a lot of reasons and theories for it... "just because they can", "its easier to jump ship than wait for a promotion", "you get bigger raises that way", "seeing more companies make you a better engineer", etc etc etc.
Its almost an habit at this point. Not sure its great for the indu
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Services is dying. IBM, MS, Dell, etc. just about every big services company is cutting back. Anyway, a friend who works at HP said they are starting to lift the hire freeze for developers and his project has hired one and looking for another. So check their postings. Of course that is just a datum, so do some research if you are looking.
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They are selling the silverware, i.e. are burning substance. You can do a nice straw-fire for a few years that way, lasting just enough for the predatory C-levels to cash in their stock options, and then it leaves a burned-out husk that will linger a few years and then die quietly. That is what is currently happening at most of these companies.
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Just not their services divisions. I understand Oracle business services are also having problems.
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At HP....morale is at an all-time low.
That is really saying something!
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They hired a clueless, cross-dressing Ben Franklin to run the company. I hear they saved enough money with their crappy policies to party for the rest of the year in London. If its anything like last year, they'll be rubbing it in employees' faces with daily e-mails about how much fun they are having on the company dime.
maximum suckage (Score:5, Insightful)
And doing what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: And doing what? (Score:2)
It's a different life when you're no longer on Internet time. A normal life.
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Re: And doing what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is just called solid engineering. Most companies would benefit a lot from it, but it is a long-term effect that the current crop of MBA idiots-savant "managers" do not understand.
Incidentally, I know one bank large enough that you would have recognized the name that recently nearly died because they did away with that redundancy to reduce cost. They were very lucky the incident happened on a Friday or they would be gone by now. A large competitor had the same problem a few days later(same network services supplier) and they only had a 30 minutes outage because they have a fully redundant infrastructure.
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d) Smart enough to play the game to win. Saved till there was enough F.U. money for me to not worry about having steady employment ever again.
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Fed up (Score:5, Interesting)
I see more and more people in IT leaving their jobs to work on something else.
People are fed up with low pay, crazy schedules, lots of pressure -often times for no reason!- and technology changing at Formula 1 speed (just take a look at the web: what was good and trendy 2 years ago is proscribed today).
To top that up, add off-shoring: today you are key, tomorrow your job is in India, Vietnam or who knows where. People do not like job insecurity.
What are they moving to? Everything else: law, gardening, plumbing, cake shops, teaching, whatever with a more relaxed schedule, people not discussing about hourly cost and difficult or impossible to offshore. Really.
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And lack of vacation. I've only quit three jobs in my life, and all three were to get time off. I worked from college until I was 35 without a single week off, and it sucked. I quit that job so I could go on a cruise. Now, my current employer has a no vacation rule until we release, and we're three years past that original release date now. Yes, there's a massive developer shortage so there's more work to do than can possibly be done, but too many companies just don't get that it costs less to let some
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Aren't H1B visa holders required to leave the country for a couple of weeks every year? That was my understanding when I worked at a company, years ago, that had a few.
Maybe it was all BS, but the company I worked for was based in the EU. So they wanted the H1B folks to come work out of the EU offices during that time rather than go home for a few weeks.
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I'm sorry to hear that. Obviously you picked the wrong employer (s). I've worked for the same company for almost twenty years in a variety of IT related departments and I think there was only one year (2008 maybe?) when I didn't get a raise (although it's not necessarily a large raise every year) and I am pretty much required to take my full three weeks of vacation every single year plus all personal days and official company holidays. They start nagging people if you don't schedule all your vacation time.
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This is definitely the case. 20 years ago you would occasionally see people leave the industry to try to turn a hobby/passion into a business (starting a restaurant, etc.). Now you see people leaving the industry out of pure frustration. I don't blame them either. I've been writing software since I was a child and I imagine I'll be writing software for the rest of my life. I love writing software but loathe the modern software industry.
On the bright side, the toxicity of the modern software industry is
"Tech, STEM" a redundancy ? (Score:3)
STEM: Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics
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Science Engineering Mathematics Environment and Nature would be seen as sexist.
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But S.E.M.E.N. is useless without females.
Well, of COURSE they're quitting their jobs (Score:5, Funny)
They've finished training their H1-B replacements, after all.
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Re:Well, of COURSE they're quitting their jobs (Score:5, Funny)
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It must be the influence of a cold climate or something but the habit of some Americans of bathing infrequently gets very disgusting once they visit a place where snow never falls.
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I started in 1979 - I think tech is getting worse (Score:5, Informative)
I have seen ads for jobs as desktop techs, asking for a masters degree in engineering.
Costco starts out at $20.00 an hour. Walmart truck drivers make $82K a year. I see ads for developers, asking for a degree, and five years experience, for $14 an hour. I see ads for interns that require five years experience.
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Honestly, if I thought I could get scheduled 40 hours/wk at Costco I'd turn in a resume. That's probably about my current salary if you divided it by my overtime.
If I could get a consistent schedule, I'd pick up a second part-time job to make up the difference. Probably do a bit of open-source dabbling on the weekends once programming stopped being work and started being something where I can solve problems and have fun.
Reality is, though, employers these days shit on all their workers by scheduling them p
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I just got into an argument with someone over this being the reason we have to keep minimum wage. You give companies the ability to use peoples desperation for work as an incentive to for less and we will quickly see wages drop to sweat job levels in just a few years.
Re: I started in 1979 - I think tech is getting wo (Score:2)
Re:I started in 1979 - I think tech is getting wor (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is that the minimum wage can actually work against all of us if the wage isn't properly adjusted for inflation. Otherwise a minimum wage eventually leaves a full time worker living in poverty and requiring medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance just to get by. It sets an artificial baseline that employers will try to aim for. So if semi-skilled workers get minimum wage, skilled workers get minimum wage plus a bag of peanuts. An artificially low minimum wage drags down wages for all workers except those that assign their own compensation - those executives that sit on each other's boards of directors and, like monkeys grooming each other, mutually decide to keep increasing each others pay regardless of whether the company is profitable or failing. Meanwhile shareholders have been conditioned to expect returns that fall below inflation (when they aren't negative), and workers have grown accustomed to just trying to keep whatever job they have rather than believing they deserve a reasonable share of the profits they produce. The collective fear of the workers makes sure that those few who may have the audacity to make demands can easily be replaced by a more agreeable and subservient employee.
When the minimum wage is a living wage, every worker can have confidence confronting employers about working hours, working conditions, or even ask for more pay, knowing that a worst case scenario is they have to get a job elsewhere that pays a wage that they can manage to live with. Workers higher up on the pay scale can afford to take chances with their careers knowing that in the short term they can always fall back to a lower paying job if their plans don't work out. It's ultimately better for the economy as a whole. Satisfied workers are more productive and less likely to leave, even if the short term cost to employers is to pay more. But as all employers would be paying the same they wouldn't be going out of business from paying better wages.
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Take it up a notch. Pay everyone a Basic Income, sufficient for a basic but not awful existence. That way no employer can use the collective desperation of the masses to pay them shitty wages - they have to offer something that's better than nothing, instead.
They say "a rising tide lifts all boats", but most of us don't have a boat. If you give everyone at least a life-raft, then offering someone a life-raft as an alternative to drowning stops being a thing. You have to offer someone a boat.
Re:I started in 1979 - I think tech is getting wor (Score:4, Informative)
I have seen ads for jobs as desktop techs, asking for a masters degree in engineering.
That should clue you in that the company doesn't want to hire American workers.
Those re H1-B bait (Score:3)
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Actually, I've handled the green card process for one of my employees.
Yes, it's the green card applicant that requires the advertisement process to show that no citizen has applied for the job, however who do you think all the green card applicants are? They are the H1-Bs and the other foreigners, one and the same.
You think people come over here on a student visa or an H1-B, work for several years and then don't apply for citizenship, and just go back home?
Then after the advertisement process, there's a
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My brother-in-law quit IT to drive a truck.
Truck drivers can do very well.
Another sensational headline about nothing (Score:4, Informative)
Are we really extrapolating a trend from a single month-to-month increase? Sure, 493,000 professionals quit in July and 507,000 quit in August. That's actually a pretty negligible change. All the more so when you consider that 510,000 quit in June and 516,000 quit in May.
Indeed, from the report itself:
So once again -- lies, damn lies, etc.
They see the writing on the walls (Score:5, Insightful)
When all of their cow-orkers speak Hindi..
What is big business going to do when the short term payoff HB-1 workers go home and take their new found knowledge with them?
They will cry crocodile tears about how the offshore engineers are beating them at their own game.
They will need more government subsidies and tax breaks to survive!
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When all of their cow-orkers speak Hindi..
What is big business going to do when the short term payoff HB-1 workers go home and take their new found knowledge with them?
They will cry crocodile tears about how the offshore engineers are beating them at their own game.
They will need more government subsidies and tax breaks to survive!
What they do is buy up land in India and set up a shop there where they hire the same people from a contracting company and operate the revolving door to keep costs down. It gets sold as "follow the sun" but really it's a way to need less expensive US based resources. Never mind that shit is always broken, always behind schedule and these people are not innovative, we have a small US team to be innovative and come up with the ideas to have the crap offshore sweatshop implement it. In the US we have typicall
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Same coward here, I forgot to mention that those contractors get to flaunt lifestyle in our face as well.
Here in the US, we're tracked on EVERY SINGLE THING to justify our employment. Break times and lunch duration are all at manager discretion, if you have a good manager they don't care so long as you get crap done, if you have a bad manager don't even think about a break or taking an extended lunch.
Whereas our global contemporaries get to show up to the office(typically a half hour late, but we can't comp
"Big business" doesn't give a fuck. (Score:5, Insightful)
CxO's who run "big business" have only one allegiance, and that's their own profit, nothing else. They don't give a shit about firing thousands, tens of thousands of engineers (Carly Fiorina), the state of the US tech industry, the US as a country or its people... they only care about their own bonuses and then fuck the hell off once the company is screwed. Or the country is screwed.
Please read up about corporate psychopaths. "Snakes in suits" is a good book.
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Don't need to read the book, I've seen it. MANY TIMES!
Company is doing fine printing money.
CEO is squeezed out.
New CEO brings in all his buddies.
Company is stripped of its assets.
Company's brain trust flees.
Production is outsourced.
CEO is lauded as a visionary.
The remnants of the company are wrapped up in a bow and sold to competitor.
CEO cashes in a ridiculous bonus on his way out.
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The business will outsource all their engineering work to a firm in Elbonia who, due to the low cost of living there compared to the US, can hire those former workers for even less pay.
An interesting question to ask would be... (Score:4, Funny)
What are the reasons for the quit? Are they going politely because:
a) A stash of cash as gratuity is being offered
b) There's no point fighting, and they think going politely increases their chances for a new position
c) They are actually going to new/better/better paid jobs
d) Giving up on that type of career
Probably michigan (Score:2)
Right now in michigan the wages are unreasonably low so there is a massive brain drain as most skilled tech people are leaving the state in droves. Why work here for $45K-$65K when the EXACT SAME JOB in Colorado or elsewhere is paying $ $79K-$102K
Plus you can be way away from the cesspool that is known as Detroit.
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From afar that place and New Orleans after Katrina both look like good examples of the the "every city for itself" mentality of running a country is utterly fucked in the head. Detroit was a powerhouse of the economy in the 1950s when it was helping prop up other places and now it's been left to swing in the breeze.
Re: Probably michigan (Score:1)
Posting Anon for reasons that will become apparent within my post below.
I own a development firm of a few skilled developers in the Canadian Prairies. We purchased the clients/accounts of a failing web development/hosting business based out of Indiana a couple of years ago.
Many of the accounts are companies based in Michigan, hosting very dated (12+ years old), custom web based applications written in Perl.
We've made a fair amount of money developing replacement software (also web based) for these clients.
Are there jobs available? (Score:2)
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Those people are called applicants. They think there are no jobs available because they get rejected for not having 5 years' of experience in something that's only existed for 3 weeks, and out of embedded C, playing the ukulele and commanding a submarine they've only done two of them.
Those people are called fucking retarded HR twats. They think there are no suitable candidates av
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Refuse to play the employer's game (Score:2)
Tech W2 employment in America is an awful game:
1. Employment-at-will is cruel. Most of the world does not have employment-at-will, it uses the "just-cause" model.
2. Exempt employees put in long hours because of #1. There are no laws limiting working time in the US.
3. Employers are almost impossible to take to court due to binding arbitration.
4. Employees in most states can be forced to sign non-compete agreements or be fired.
5. American employers offer some of the most paltry fringe benefits when compared t
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Re:Leave no H1-B behind! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Oh please. Stop it.
Maybe you were unscathed, but the economic downturn was real. I had a neighbor in banking, who originated certain kinds of corporate loans. His skills were highly sought after, and he was out of a job for a year and a half. When he was hired, it was back into (nearly) the same department, doing the same kind of job. What happened was the bank just decided to no offer such loans till the economy recovered a bit.
I have a second neighbor who lost his job, and opted to go back to school.
Re: Leave no H1-B behind! (Score:5, Informative)
Get off your high horse. I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering just after the Enron crisis unraveled and the dotcom boom went bust. Even though I spent each day applying for every technical role imaginable, I ended up working at Sears for a few dollars over minimum wage. That lasted almost six months until I took a job several states away from my home in Dallas. Many tech workers who are unexpectedly laid off face a unique challenge of being very good at one particular specialty. Even though they can be just as effective with a very different role, employers often seek out a candidate that exactly meets the job specification. So someone with four years experience designing 10kW power supplies will be deemed under qualified or an unfit match for a job requesting five years experience designing 2kw power supplies. A second candidate with ten years experience designing power supplies ranging from 1kW to 10kW would be deemed over qualified. The company then justifies recruiting a candidate from a third world country that will work for whichever wage keeps him employed and allowed to remain in the country. The fact that no one understands his emails, and he has to repeat what he says two or three times before anyone can make out what he's trying to say doesn't seem to matter.
We definitely should bring in talent from around the world, but often times in STEM fields the H-1B visa holders have a very narrow skill set and are expected to work extreme hours for low pay. But it gets the message across and keeps the rest of the STEM workers from demanding too much. Of course when today's technology is made obsolete the H-1B workers are sent home rather than retrained. But by then there are millions trained on the latest trend and they import replacements.
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Many tech workers who are unexpectedly laid off face a unique challenge of being very good at one particular specialty.
I had the opposite problem of being a jack of all trades and a master of none. As an I.T. support contractor for contracts that lasted one day to one year, I rarely had the luxury of picking and choosing my next contract. I've always took whatever came along next. For recruiters who are looking for someone with a minimum of three years in each of the last three jobs, they declared that I've lacked focus. Never mind they were looking for someone to fill a short-term contract.
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Alas, here in the UK a lie on your CV/resume once found out, can result in a criminal conviction for fraud.
a cv is pure marketing, everyone knows that. if company pr isn't held to the same standard then that's nonsense, i wonder if there was a single one you couldn't sue to oblivion after just the first week on the job.
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I'm calling B.S. on that. Some people out of work have completely marketable skills but are fed up with employers having too much power, and don't have to work W2 because they can live off passive income and investments. It's these people which start their own businesses, or decide to contribute in other ways such as writing open source software and creating open source hardware.
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"Nerval's Lobster" is the Dice marketing department account.
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My first wife earned far more than I did for many years and the tables only turned recently (and not by much).
We parted amicably, our only common financial interests were the house (we split evenly because while she earned more, I was more frugal and paid substantial chunks of the mortgage off), and our daughter.
My current GF earns about a quarter what I do but still insists on paying her way equally, which works fine because we both have pretty modest lifestyle demands.
The only kinds of women who are expen