I'd believe it if I had not been seeing the truth with my own eyes. Many of the calls being made now are from TCS and the like. Even I got a call from an Indian recruiter the other day and he was asking me about a .NET architect job in Columbus. The pay...around 37/hr with no benefits. I just hung it up. I talked with a Comuter Horizons manager the other day. He was saying that wages for programmers have been going down and they are finding it hard to compete with the Indian companies. Cut rate competition from the Indian companies, like TCS and Infosys, is so strong it even moved AIC to merge with CHC. Now, the outsourcing is even moving closer to home, though. Many Indians have been recruited up in Canada and now Montreal is being a hotbed for "local" outsourcing. I don't know if costs are cheaper up there or not but I suspect they are or else they wouldn't be going there for outsourcing. One of the CM managers working for me is a "canadian". He is doing his green card through Canada. I always kid him about his "home" country...as he never knows the Canada holidays. I bought him a Canadian calendar to help remind him. He's from Hyderabad(sp?) but refers to himself as someone from Canada, and a Canadian. He's never lived more than one week in Canada...and that was to visit his Uncle. You better believe that outsourcing has led to wage decrease...and layoff. Just look at IBM and HP of late. Not only wage decrease...wage wipe out when you are laid off.
Re: Re: Offshoring not lowering IT wages And I've seen the other end of the spectrum. At my office we have not not laid off a single member of our software development team in the past four years. In fact we have hired several QA test engineers and a couple of analysts. And yes we have also contracted out projects to Indian firms. Regardless, our wages have risen plenty during this time and a friend who works at Richard Rita (an employement agency that specializes in IT) tells me that business is very good in the Tampa Bay area. I see so much of this incredible overreaction toward a meager economic downtrend from some people in IT. Its unfortunate that this overly negative spin is also the squeak of the wheel. I post the positive news about our industry because someone needs to balance out the negative exaggerations that are plaguing this forum and the news in general. Its obvious that the industry has turned around as I've started to receive unsolicited interview offers from our competitors (including Microsoft.) If the talent on the sidelines was as vast as you proclaim, why are they trying to lure me away from my incredibly generous salary at Sage Software??? Your portrayal just doesn't ring very true with me.
Re: Re: Re: Offshoring not lowering IT wages Meager economic downturn? You mean we had an upturn at some point? American business just whirls and churns and has done so for years now. It's good to hear some positive news from you. There are some jobs starting to open up JoannP38. That's seemed obvious from the calls I had been getting. When you get deeper in the process you often find that 80/hr job becomes a 50...then a 40. They tell you anything to get your interest then try to jack you down after that. (I notice that many of the higher level IT jobs started to dry up on Monster a few weeks back, though. I spoke with a CSC manager last week at a conference. He told me that this is the wackiest market he has ever seen for trying to get a decent wage on folks. CSC is a bodyshop like the rest but I believed him). Maybe what you think is generous isn't generous in my ballpark. I don't know. If you are happy with it then that is what counts. Right? It's great to be happy. I feel pretty good where I am at. Although, we have had people retire and they don't replace them. They bring in many inexperienced TCS contractors instead. I can't even hire in an employee these days and all my interviews are done via a sub through TCS or Infosys. I work in a fortune 500 and it's what I see a lot of in that rank for sure. (I was just at another company, about the same size as mine, doing a partner discussion. They had the same stories to tell as we did. ) Just make sure your skills are up and don't quit learning the latest tricks. If times are good at your company LEARN well. You are doing a good job getting your CS degree and now an MS. Ask for every training deal you can get at your company. You live in Florida right? The market down there has always seemed to be lower wages in IT and jobs a bit more competitive. Just met with a vendor today from VA Software. He moved from Orlando to here. He told me that the cost of living was higher there and the wages lower. Don't know if it is different in your area. I will say that I had been hiring in CS people from college in the upper 40's. Now, I can bring a TCS guy in for 28/hr...no benefits(the TCS model is to get an inexperienced guy in and have the company train them. then, once they become any good, they transfer the guy to a higher paying gig and bring in a less experienced again) . And yes...there are a lot of talented people on the sidelines. Many are trying to decide now whether to stay in IT. (just heard today that about 100 people here at Lockheed are getting whacked...all IT. stay out of the midwest if florida is great)
Yes you are right Yes Bing you are right on the money. For some reason people don't want to believe that a corp. will sell anyone out for a buck no matter how unethical the act might be. It's called living in lala land. This lady right out of school apparently knows it all after less than a year on the job. She is getting all these great offers because things are relatively good right now, she is young, and being female doesn't hurt either. She hasn't been through a down cycle where strangely enough the H1B's are never cut to near 0 no matter how high the unemployment rate might be. I work in FL for a decent 60/hr rate. You are right about the low wages. The majority of contract jobs down here pay a whopping 40-45 dollar an hour range. That's about the same as was paid to average contractors ten years ago and is less than many full-time equivalent jobs with full benefits. So you tell me about the law of "supply and demand"? You are exactly right, there IS a shortage of people willing to work for nothing and hence the imports! I work in Defense which was very out of fashion in the 80's when I started. Now it is much more in vogue because the work is largely immune to outsourcing. It is not immune however to foreign competition. My client United Defense was bought out by BAE Systems (British) recently. I also have worked contract for INDRA a Spanish based Defense corporation. So even in Defense if the jobs are not being outsourced the corporate profits funded by US taxpayers are flying overseas. A lose-lose situation no matter how you look at it. Maybe this youg lady will do great. Maybe she will be mopping her companies floor a few years from now? Only time will tell but those with little historical perspective should think twice before extrapolating fleeting observations to reality.
Re: Yes you are right richtx, Perhaps you should examine your own area code because I think you might be singing a couple of solfege notes. I've been in Software Development for 25+ years. Yes I will admit that all of my gigs have been in the Southeast so maybe my experience is atypical. However, I certainly have enough experience in this field to recognize flim flam when I see it. From my vantage, I can see you really can't say the same. Follow bing's pied piper melody of doom. I'll just keep raking in the cash will you are too busy crying in your beer.
We know how you got your start Well Joanne; If you have 25 years of software development experience and a BS only this year one can only wonder how you got your start? Either independently brilliant and self taught like a Steve Wozniack or ... Never mind. Anyway I don't see that Bing is playing the doom and gloom song at all. More like reality to me. This industry is eroding big time. He also has produced some independent, non-talking head research to back it up. I just gave you two examples in the Defense industry. If American companies that have full access to the coffers of the US Congress through high paid lobbyists can't compete, then who can? So what about the rates in FL? I've seen the average new home double in price since 98 when I arrived here. Gasoline has tripled. Contract rates even with the VERY HIGH current demand, about the same. Something is wrong with this equation here folks. This ain't the typical Repugnican "supply and demand" theory going on. Maybe Bing has latched onto some other theory worth taking a look at?
Re: We know how you got your start There have always been far more jobs in software development than graduates with IT degrees. Most programmers do not have CS degrees and many have no degree at all. Some taught themselves to program as kids on their home computer (for me, it was learning Basic and later Commodore Assembly language on a Vic-20). For others, it was teaching themselves basic programming in something like Foxpro or Excel for their non-programming job, which led to more general programming and eventual shift into full-time IT. This is in addition to all the people with math, biology, physics, economics, music, and other non-IT degrees who are programmers. My point is, lack of a degree in the IT field was largely meaningless in 1980 and is still largely meaningless in 2005.
Re: Re: We know how you got your start Agreed. I dropped out of an Engineering Physics program at the University of Tennessee and took a job in sales for a little software startup. However, as soon as I demonstrated that I had an aptitude for programming, I was quickly moved to a development role and I haven't done anything else since. Of course my career took a strong up-turn when I took a position at a consultant firm run by a man who had worked in Oak Ridge for decades and who had a PhD in Nuclear Engineering. I was given opportunity after opportunity to work on some cutting edge stuff (robotics, real-time control, 3-D modeling, etc.) Back then, there were few people who really knew computing so people with some semblance of mathematical or engineering knowledge were quickly given opportunities.
We are fighting the TCS folks at my outfit. Just before I got there they laid out a small fortune for an army of these people. There was still a mess when they left. Senior management is talking about bringing in some more to do some work. But you know, I am a senior .Net weenie. When I came to this company six months ago (to fix the things TCS didn't fix), I inherited a dozen or so mainframers who are watching their industry disappear before their eyes (thanks, in part to people like me). One of them is taking the initiative to learn ASP.Net, and I have committed to mentoring him. If the rest of the department wasn't full of slugs then I'd say that TCS is a problem. But since they are doing it better than the American idiots at my company, I am no longer sure.
Better off qvatlanta, I grew up in the Newark/Jersey City areas and I think that this article's solution is a win-win for everyone
Sounds like below-sea-level New Orleans is well-prepared to be a technology center for the new millennium. Silicon Bayou, here we come!
