[TriLUG] New member re-location question

[Patrick Williams]

If anyone is interested in doing something about this "who stole my career"
scenario then they will have to gather enough votes to overcome the lobby
money interests of big business.  Are you ready to take action or do you
like selling shoes and french fries waiting for the recovery that will never
come for us.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Roche" <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>
To: <trilug at trilug.org>
Cc: <ottw at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] New member re-location question


> Roy Vestal <rvestal at trilug.org> 11 Jun 2003 08:50:40 -0400
>  > Not a good market right now.
>
> ... and not likely to improve anytime soon :-( See
>
> http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20030606S0024
>
> Commentary from Norm Matloff (CS prof and IT labor market expert):
>  > Here is a point to consider:
>
>  >    Rather than using taxes and interest policy to stimulate the
>  >    economy, Tabarrok said a recovery will require time and patience.
>  >    "We'll come out of this in the next six months, although the job
>  >    market may take a little while to catch up," he added.
>
>  > The speaker is equating growth of the industry with growth in the
>  > job market for American workers, which is a false equation. The
>  > pattern in recent years has been that employers hiring workers in
>  > the U.S. are increasingly turning to H-1Bs and L-1s. The Commerce
>  > Dept. estimated that 28% of new programmer jobs were filled by H-1Bs
>  > in the late 1990s; the Federal Reserve Bank reported that that
>  > number had risen to 50% in 2001; and very rough estimates indicate
>  > that the number has gone considerably higher than that in the last
>  > year or so, possibly even to a staggering 80 or 90%. In other words,
>  > if the tech sector does come back, those new jobs will go to H-1Bs
>  > and L-1s, not to U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
>
>  > Now look at this one:
>
>  >    Michael Cusumano, professor of management at MIT's Sloan School
>  >    of Management, agreed that time, not government stimuli would do
>  >    the trick. Cusumano said the tech sector has mostly worked its
>  >    way through the inventory build up that began in 1999 and
>  >    improved geo-political stability has helped. However, changes in
>  >    the IT industry, including "a trend to move IT services sector
>  >    jobs offshore, will slow the tech jobs recovery."
>
>  > There is a lot more here than meet the eye. Cusumano does good
>  > academic work (which I've quoted on occasion), but he is not just a
>  > detached academic. He is a consultant to numerous tech firms, and
>  > even on the boards of some. (See his home page at MIT.) Moreover, he
>  > is an active promoter of offshoring; see his article, "'Made in
>  > India': a New Sign of Software Quality." (Disappointingly, there he
>  > trumpets the ridiculous CMM metric, which as I've said is nothing
>  > more than a nontechnical set of homilies about how to manage a
>  > project). Thus his assessment of the amount of offshoring comes with
>  > some baggage.
>
>  > Cusumano's statement is rather contradicted by the following:
>
>  >    Researchers Gartner Inc (Stamford, Conn.) estimated that
>  >    approximately 6 to 7 percent of the $240 billion U.S. IT services
>  >    sector, including everything from call centers to software
>  >    development, shifted offshore, mostly to India. That percentage
>  >    is expected to grow in the next few years as countries like China
>  >    become more important as an IT services provider.
>
>  >    However, offshore outsourcing remains a small percentage of US IT
>  >    services revenue. Gartner analyst Rita Terdiman said losses to
>  >    overseas companies is "not huge numbers of U.S. jobs today nor is
>  >    it likely to be huge numbers in the future."
>
>  > Remember, even that 6-7% is an overstatement from the point of view
>  > of programmer jobs, as it includes (as seen) call centers, etc. The
>  > Gartner figure jibes, by the way, with the data from the Merrill
>  > Lynch and ITAA surveys.
>
>  > But I don't understand this one:
>
>  >    For IT professionals, however, especially those working as
>  >    contractors, "it's having an impact [on employment prospects],"
>  >    she said.
>
>  > As far as I know, the impact on contractors is no greater than for
>  > others.
>
>  > This one is of course correct, though quite an understatement.
>
>  >    Also contributing to high unemployment among IT workers is the
>  >    import of large numbers of temporary foreign workers by U.S. by
>  >    technology companies. Cusumano said "there are games played with
>  >    some visa categories."
>
>  > It certainly would be interesting to know what else he thinks of the
>  > visa issue.
>
>  > Here is an interesting contention:
>
>  >    He estimated it would be at least five years for new technology
>  >    drivers such as wireless, broadband or nanotechnology to
>  >    stimulate the economy. That means it will take a few years to
>  >    erase IT unemployment, said Cusumano, author of a new book " The
>  >    Software Business: What Every Manager, Programmer and
>  >    Entrepreneur Must Understand in Good Times and Bad," to be
>  >    published by Simon & Schuster in January.
>
>  > I am very doubtful of this. I don't think any of those has much
>  > potential to stimulate the programmer job market, and as I said,
>  > even if the market were to expand, employers would hire H-1Bs and
>  > L-1s instead of Americans.
>
>  > This one is bizarre:
>
>  >    "We need to go through the cycle because people have to sort out
>  >    their careers for themselves," he added.
>
>  > Is that misquote? The low-level of the current tech job market has a
>  > beneficial "career-sorter-outer" effect?
>
>
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