Women in IT (Aug 3). Online freedom of speech (Aug 5th)

[Christopher Browne]

On 8/2/06, Andrew Hammond <ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > No this is wrong.  I use to think that India would never get decent
> > software engineering jobs and especially not R & D jobs but they have.
> > Oracle has lots of development jobs in India.  Microsoft has a poured
> > lots of cash into a company to do R & D and software engineering for new
> > Microsoft products.  Let's hope Indian software developers are worse
> > than U of Waterloo ones.  Heck Microsoft has poured a lot of money into
> > Indian I.T. period.  IBM is right behind them.  Linux and Unix work in
> > India too.  Check Monster India to see the jobs they have there.  I saw
> > job postings that seem to fit the experience you have.  Nothing like
> > hearing from the business drones in the media "Jobless recovery.". "I.T.
> > sector down 17% in Canada this year."
>
> Large companies that are IT oriented are one of the few cases for which
> it turns out to be cost-effective to off-shore. However since all of Big
> Biz supplies less than 30% of the jobs in IT, that's not a terribly big
> loss.
>
> Furthermore, it appears that while it's possible to off-shore structured
> development such as maintenance coding and stuff like 1st tier
> phone/email support, it is not a good idea to off-shore things like RAD
> efforts, anything that involve much user-interaction, and most sysadmin
> type stuff. Hence my comment about the interesting stuff still being
> local. I will however agree that it has made entry level positions
> harder to find.

Part of that, I think, is business-cycle related, too.

We saw, in this locale, some really excessively optimistic growth from
four notable perspectives:

0.  Y2K work meant that anyone with something resembling credentials
got drawn into an effort that companies didn't want to continue to pay
for one week after 01-01-00 rolled around.

1.  There was an "Internet bubble" where any idiot that could figure
out a bit of HTML and VB could become an ASP programmer with
aspersions on starting an endeavour to try to outdo Spamazon.

2. Combine some "cellular inflation" where every cell company beefed
up imagining they would be The One.

3.  These sets of growth caused Internet "infrastructure" companies
building and selling hardware, notably, here, Nortel, that carried
hardware used for both cellular and Internet networking, to make
spectacularly overoptimistic plans.  Ottawa's JDS Uniphase was
building components for many of the same folks, and got similarly
overextended...

When the overexuberance fell, this led to quite a lot of fallback.  In
Ottawa, the government was in a fascinating situation of growth which
meant that all the ex-Nortel managers were re-minted as government
managers.  Not so for the techies; the government didn't have the
need.  Similarly, Toronto didn't instantly re-absorb the ex-techies.

Those that had been "idiots barely able to write HTML" were wise, if
they had been playing enough politics to make themselves *appear*
indispensable.  The true techies, with less political skill, hadn't
been similarly entrenched...

The result, from 2001 to probably a year or so ago, has been pretty
challenging to those that weren't entrenched somehow.

There being some simultaneous pressure, in large companies, to move
some of their work to India/China/Russia has evidently been mistaken
for being the *only* effect in play.  If all you choose to see is the
"jobs moving to India" effect, then you're choosing a particular bit
of blindness...

> > I guess I might stay here and practice saying "Would you like to super
> > size that?" or I can try and get a visa to India(I think it is tough to
> > get one) and write software for about the same salary as a Fry
> > Technician here.
>
> Currently salaries for non-junior people in India range from 1/4 to 1/2
> what you'd pay a Canadian. Which is indeed close to what you'd pay a
> burger flipper.
>
> > Awww yeah Dorothy, I.T. is going bye bye.
>
> Got any numbers to substantiate that? The numbers I've seen say that IT
> is still growing (albeit slower) in North America, despite off-shoring.
> This has apparently been driven by the small business sector, especially
> in geographic areas which are not traditionally tech-sectors. I wonder
> if that includes Kansas?

The "mature" markets are always ones that are obvious, and, since
their niches are already filled, they aren't terribly open to
newcomers.  That's certainly true of the situations in large
businesses.

Once a large business stabilizes, the opportunities are severely
limited to outsiders as you have only a few kinds of situations:

 - If you're in an area where jobs are relatively stable, the larger
   the company, the *less* the proportion of jobs that

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