Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Pay off your student loans before you buy a Mercedes, loser! Readers respond to Katharine Mieszkowski's "From Programming to Pizza Delivery."
Feb 4, 2004 | [Read the story.]
I worked for 20 years in technology. I built my career up, brick by brick, starting as a salesman in a mall computer store, working my way into a gig at Apple, then corporate IT, then finally management. As IT director, I did a bang-up job. Our systems ran so well that, when the recession hit, my company's management decided it didn't need those seven people in the IT department. They made me lay off my own people, then killed me.
Laid off and near 40 years old, I could not find any work. I sent literally thousands of résumés out. Got five interviews, all of whom loved me but didn't like that I had so much experience. I guess they want their systems to suck. That was over two years ago. I wasn't making $50 an hour, but I had a decent, middle-class living. I didn't drive an SUV. I couldn't afford a house. I didn't take vacations. I rarely ate out. But I always thought the biz would support me. I can't tell you how angry I am at the computer business for throwing out good employees.
Know what I'm doing now? I'm working in a computer store for $9 an hour. How's that for a slap in the face? I can't afford shoes now. Never mind getting that timing belt replaced in my 9-year-old Honda. So it's not just high-priced Web-enabled Java programmers. It's good old-fashioned systems geeks too -- people who have made computers our lives for decades. I think your article made a good point, but it focused too much on the highest flyers, for whom nobody outside of the biz really cares. Me? I was just a day-to-day working stiff, and I got hosed too. Frankly, I don't see a future.
-- Rob Oakley
Why do we always think of how bad or well some Americans are doing? Why can't we think in terms of the global economy? For every one American programmer earning pizza/burger money, 10 or 20 Indian programmers who were earning nothing are making decent middle-class wages (still much less than $8 per hour).
Even today most Indian engineers who work as programmers don't own cars; they travel one hour by badly crowded bus/trains and live a lifestyle much inferior to American burger flippers.
Jobs are leaving America because of the American minimum wage act. Tell politicians to scrap it. Tell employers you will work close to what Indian programmers charge and live a lifestyle close to what they live.
Eventually that's what will happen. How many pizza/courier jobs are there anyway? Most will be full and then you will find Americans working "illegally" below minimum wages since it's better than no wage at all.
Just like Indians traveled to the United States, worked on H1 visas at lower wages than Americans, why can't Americans do the same: go to Bangalore and undercut Indian programmers by say 30 percent? Isn't it better than selling pizza or working as courier?
Or is it that being an American gives one the right to the highest-paying jobs at a salary many times what the job is worth?
When American politicians reduced the H1-B visa cap to 65,000 from 200,000 they shot their own foot. All H1-B visa holders were living and spending in the American economy, which was money staying in the American system, creating American jobs. Now you closed that window and the world outside figured out how to do those jobs sitting in their country and spending money in their own country/economy.
-- Vipul Shah
I do have a lot of sympathy for high-tech workers who are having trouble finding a job (I am a 61-year-old programmer with almost 40 years of software development experience). However, it's difficult for me to empathize with the couple who spent a lot of money to learn programming languages, then went broke and declared bankruptcy. Competent programmers understand that you can't have somebody teach you C++, or Java or C#. To be any good at these languages, you must have the passion to learn them on your own (which isn't difficult) and keep learning every day. These people made some bad decisions, and the likelihood is that there are reasons beyond just the market conditions that they are not working. I think this weakened the otherwise interesting story.
-- Frank Cooley
It's interesting that in every article about tech jobs disappearing offshore, you always equate "tech jobs" with "programmers." While it's true that many programming jobs are going offshore (there is no physical proximity requirement at all for programming), many, many high-tech jobs stay local for the simple reason that they cannot be done remotely.
My job, system administration, is a perfect example. While the people who wrote the software I administer may very well live in India or Bangladesh, in order for the software to function properly in a real-world environment and produce the results required, a knowledgeable high-tech worker must be present on-site. Hardware and software incompatibilities, database maintenance, and conditions that vary day to day all require someone who can physically look at some behavior and try to determine what the cause is. It is possible that some of the work can be done remotely, but if one of the problems is your network connection (for example) the sysadmin in India is pretty useless to you.
In short, programming is not the end-all and be-all of the tech industry. In fact, programming skills are reasonably minor, easy-to-learn skills that can be applied almost anywhere, hence the ease of shipping such work offshore. Programmers who lose their jobs to offshore work should look at some of the other IT fields -- system admin, system analysis, implementation and troubleshooting, database admin, etc. -- for their new work. As long as companies depend on complicated computers running complicated software designed to perform a complicated task, there will be a need for local, hands-on tech support.
-- Lyle Bateman
