In the Salon article From programming to delivering pizza, there are many tales of woe. These are stories I have heard often in the media, especially online, which act as some sort of scary boogeyman for those who may want to join the high-tech field. What’s ironic is that we keep graduating fewer IT-related college majors, and yet we have plenty of jobs for them. We just want the jobs to pay no more than they pay in New Delhi.
I see these stories and I contrast it with my own experiences. Since separating from the military, I’ve had no particular difficulty finding steady employment with a decent paycheck. There was that period of two months when I was on terminal leave that made me nervous, but it was no big deal in hindsight, especially when placed beside these people who have been unemployed for two years.
Of course, there’s also the problem of underemployment, particularly for college grads who need to pay off their loans. It’s all well and good to tell people that any job is a good job, but if you actually require a minimum of 30 thousand dollars per year to pay off the long-term debts you acquired in college, 6 bucks an hour won’t cut it.
I can’t help but wonder if this unemployment problem in the IT field is really there or if there are some isolated cases that make good stories. I know I’ll probably never want for work, because I have a clearance and those jobs will never be outsourced. But if I wanted to get out of defense contractor land, would I be making a big gamble, or is it much ado about naught in order to sell advertising space?
Oh, and the idea of a programmer delivering pizzas just makes me think of Hiro Protagonist. But that’s me.
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Apparently, the issue of programming jobs really does exist. An old friend of mine spent a year out of work pounding the pavement before he was finally able to get work. According to a recent CNN.com article, the problem exists because many US companies are now farming out a lot of their IT work to places like India, where there is a huge pool of fresh new computer graduates all needing work, and willing to take pay in the vicinity of half or less what the companies would pay an American counterpart. So a lot of programming and tech support now happens in India. In fact, if you call Dell today because your new Dimension is acting up, you WILL be talking to someone in India. Companies just don’t see why they should pay someone $40-45 an hour to write code, when there’s someone in India willing to do it for $15-25 american. Tech support doesn’t, apparently, HAVE to cost Dell $30 an hour, when they can farm it out to somewhere else for $10, making it easier to give it to the consumer for free. The article said the result of this, is that there is a marked trend in American programmers and technicians taking jobs for what they consider “a severe cut in pay”, just so they can get any work at all. And new college grads are now filling job slots, being willing to work for $20 an hour, instead of demanding twice that. So, I guess if that trend continues, IT people should start planning on retirement about, oh, age 40.
You have a CLEARANCE, you retard. Even the biggest moron with the least experience could get a job like yours with the magic “oooh, ahhh” clearance.
If you didn’t have one, though, you’d be stuck making 6$ an hour like the rest of us.
And Microsoft pays people in India around a buck fifty to do their technical work, including programming, and they don’t have to provide anywhere near the job sanitation and safety that’s required here. Haven’t we been over all this before?
Repeat after me: not all IT jobs are programmers.
Sure, programming is a job which can be performed anywhere. So is telephone support. But there are a number of jobs which require a physical presence. The question is, are there enough of those jobs to feel confident? I’m not planning on being a programmer, so those jobs don’t concern me directly.
And the clearance is a wonderful thing to have. Worth thousands of dollars easily.