If Tech Companies Aren't Hiring, Who Will?

nytimes.com:

The disappointing hiring trend raises questions about whether the tech industry can help power a recovery and sustain American job growth in the next decade and beyond. Its tentativeness has prompted economists to ask "If high tech isn't hiring, who will?"

Read the whole story: nytimes.com

Comments

[peaceandfreedom]

09:35 PM on 09/08/2010

If Tech Companies Aren't Hiring, Who Will?

Do you want cheese with that answer...

[OldTulsan]

09:27 PM on 09/08/2010

Here's the viewpoints of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama on the H-1B visa issue:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/tech-industry-analysis/clinton-mccain-and-obama-h-1b-visas-830
Clinton, McCain and Obama on H-1B visas | Tech industry analysis - InfoWorld

"...Hillary Clinton

"I also want to reaffirm my commitment to the H-1B visa program and to increase the current cap. Foreign skilled workers contribute greatly to our technological development. That is well understood in Silicon Valley."

John McCain

"I will continue to support H-1B visas, but, I'm telling you, the American peoples priority is, either rightly or wrongly, and we live in a democracy, is that we secure the borders first."

Barack Obama

"We can do better than that and go a long way toward meeting industry's need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigrationsystem comprehensively."

80% of H-1B visas are used by Indian IT companies such as Satyam, Wipro, etc.

They are not the best and the brightest. The O-1 visa was designed for those who are

http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=550
H-1B Hogs Swindling ‘Average’ Americans

John Miano was the founder of the Programmers Guild.

There is a FREE Job Destruction Newsletter at:

http://www.jobdestruction.com/

[peaceandfreedom]

09:36 PM on 09/08/2010

Yep. It's reverse offshoring!

[vmlinux]

05:04 PM on 09/08/2010

I work for one of the largest IT consulting companies in the world. I was recently rebadged from a company I worked with for 10 years to this consulting company. Each year they lay off around 8 percent of the local workforce or lose them to attrition, and move it overseas. The simple fact is they can hire 8 people to do the same job as me and come out financially ahead.

Americans have 2 options. Work for less, or be 8 times as productive. This may sound difficult to do, but if you talk with some folks who have worked in IT shops in India it's not a stretch to work 3 to 4 times better than one of them just because of the lack of a lot of the red tape, VPN latency, etc.

[Lorianne]

05:00 PM on 09/08/2010

U.S. To Train 3,000 Asian IT Workers offshore
http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/integration/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226500202&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Now It's Armenia: USAID Funds IT In Eurasia
http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/disaster_recovery/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=226600094

[Lorianne]

04:59 PM on 09/08/2010

U.S. To Train 3,000 Asian IT Workers offshore

[mashtoe]

12:37 AM on 09/08/2010

Why won't anyone talk about H-1b?

[bryanzth]

01:07 PM on 09/08/2010

Hah, because no one wants to be "outed" as an employer of in-sourced labor when in the same suburban areas are hundreds if not thousands of unemployed IT citizen workers.

BZ.

[peaceandfreedom]

09:37 PM on 09/08/2010

But think of all the great Indian food place that always open up right after.

That's worth it, right?

[OldTulsan]

09:35 PM on 09/08/2010

The same reason nobody mentions offshoring on TV since Lou Dobbs left CNN.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pacificare-unitedhealth-20100908,0,6380098.story
California regulators seek up to $9.9 billion in fines from PacifiCare - latimes.com

"...Policyholders, meanwhile, inundated the Department of Insurance with complaints about PacifiCare losing their records, some of which were shipped to India, where they were miscoded and could not be retrieved. Many customers said the insurer denied claims for covered procedures and then ignored requests for help..."

[marijam]

06:34 PM on 09/07/2010

To the contrary, if you go to career builder and enter hardware as your keyword and click on search, 160 pages of jobs come back.

[mashtoe]

12:39 AM on 09/08/2010

Hardware is a very specialized field. And it comes and goes. It's feast and famine.

[Lorianne]

05:02 PM on 09/08/2010

Try to enter the word 'architecture' (if you're looking for a job in architecture ... like building design).

You'll get thousands and thousands of hits .... but no architecture jobs.

[ThePeacemakers]

04:36 PM on 09/07/2010

And tech companies are still busy working on robots to do more jobs.

Imagine that.

[alreadybad]

02:52 PM on 09/07/2010

One of the biggest myths being purported in the country is that qualified help can not be found in the U.S.of A. Total B/S by design to keep sending those jobs overseas, stop falling far the hype people, it's outright disgusting.

[Erdgeist]

01:04 PM on 09/07/2010

Here is a list of the future jobs America will need (data from BLS). Retail sales persons, registered nurse, cashier, general office clerk, truck driver, managers, janitors, nurse's aids, food counter workers, waiting tables.

So get that college education so you can wait tables or be food counter workers! Remember folks this is what free-trade has brought us. I can't wait to see what the next jobs will be twenty years from now!

[sonoffestus]

04:44 PM on 09/07/2010

Yup, welcome to WalMart Nation, the home of the fearful, ignorant and proud.

[peaceandfreedom]

09:38 PM on 09/08/2010

He left out a big one--The Military.

We will always be at war with someone, somewhere.

[Jond0]

06:02 PM on 09/07/2010

We still have to invent the new jobs -- might as well read 'the secret' than go to college now.

[aaaarrrggg]

12:11 PM on 09/07/2010

Here is a funny story about 'offshoring'. A 'business mogel' from India was hired to do our programming (no re-write, just update the existing code as needed) and a bunch of the programmers were told they could join the offshore company or be layed off. It was 50-50, half took early retirement and half started working for the company from India.

About 2 years later we all stopped getting our paychecks. It turned out that the 'business mogel' was really a con man. The address of his data center in India was really a hole in the ground. Really, the Indian police went there and the hole was about two stories deep. No data center. The Director who had implemented the offshoring was this guys cousin, so he assumed it was all good.

The comapny we worked for eventually came across with everybodies backpay, while the 'mogal'
was last seen in the Canary Islands. Beleive it or not, the Director is still with the company. I always thought he would be charged, but it all just 'went away'

I'm still under the impression that this 'offshoring' really is just a scam to build in a few more levels of corruption. Sure, it may work for call centers, but its just unneeded levels of complexity in the programming world.

[marijam]

06:36 PM on 09/07/2010

Whoa, what a story.

[ResearchtheFacts]

10:59 AM on 09/07/2010

The design industry is hiring. Plenty of jobs if you are an illustrator, industrial, graphics, visual, web, informations graphics, art director, interactive, packaging, motion and user experience designer, to name a few. The creative field has many, particularly, at the senior design--art director level.

Apparently, America still creates the best designs. If you look at our packaging and information the graphics are always good. From Hollywood movie beginnings, billboards, magazines, book covers, newscast motion graphics, point of purchase displays to package inserts. America does design well.

[ScoutandBuckGoodDogs]

11:07 AM on 09/07/2010

That is, unless you don't HAVE this type of experience but yeah. All good.

[jdevans]

11:14 AM on 09/07/2010

How long until design moves overseas to join all the other formerly American jobs? Any job that can be done over the Internet is going overseas.

[ResearchtheFacts]

11:20 AM on 09/07/2010

Have you looked at some of the overseas designs. Order something from China and look at the packaging. Particularly, the product insert documents which have instructions. Yeah, right and hold that thought. They don't have the knack for design like we do.

Graphics did however originate in Germany. America has perfected it to "a fine art form". Ever bought something and wanted to keep the packaging? They are hiring us to design from Asia. They can manufacture it and knock off someone else's design, but, when it comes to the actual thought process of designing it...we got that.

[Erdgeist]

10:24 AM on 09/07/2010

Apple Inc. employees 275,000 people, 25,000 are in the U.S. The profits of the company go to shareholders who may or may not be Americans. It should be apparent from this example that what is good for many U.S. corporations like Apple Inc. is NOT good for American labor -- high tech or low tech. The problem we are facing now is that free-trade is not working. But Washington D.C. doesn't want to change its economic policy of free-trade because it BENEFITS U.S. businesses -- NOT the America worker.

What is needed is hardcore protectionism (unless you love the PRC). Think this is a bad idea? Then you don't know jack about economics or U.S. history.

From 1869 to 1900 tariffs were over 40%. From 1969-2000 they were below 10%. From 1869 to 1900 GNP quadrupled. Real wages increased 50%, and retail prices dropped hugely. A century later, free-trade, which benefits only U.S. businesses, real wages DECLINED. In fact, real wages of most Americans peaked in 1973, they have never once gone up. And now we learn there has been ZERO net jobs growth for the last ten years. Things are only going to get worse.

[MrBadExample]

11:43 AM on 09/07/2010

How do people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates become iconic figures when they're throwing American workers under the bus?

[bryanzth]

01:11 PM on 09/08/2010

Jack Welch, too?

BZ.

[KarolinaReiss]

10:18 AM on 09/07/2010

Outsourcing and H1B visas are the poison to the American tech sector and therefore jobs. Think about this: if you bring in engineers on H1B visas, there is no incentive to train your own population in science. As a result, they can't compete for those tech jobs as they are unable to perform the task without basic analytical skills. What happens as a result? The companies bring in more H1B visa holders. A vicious cycle.

[King Keith]

10:40 AM on 09/07/2010

This is the million dollar answer! Bravo, fanned and favorited. This is very sad, our engineering grads here in the states are really victims of this system. I really hate the H1B system, how can these companies say they need the Visas because they cant find enough worker in America...

[drymartini3]

10:39 PM on 09/07/2010

These H1B employees are only in technical fields. These American companies are not hiring women's studies/Philosophy/Poetry/Anthropology majors. There are plenty of americans with those to be hired from...oh wait !!

[FoonTheElder]

04:22 PM on 09/07/2010

Many employers will require the employees who are going to be terminated to train their H1B replacements.

If you want a long story look at Nielsen (the ratings people) who built a new building in Florida (with local tax breaks) and sold themselves to a private capital company. Their intention was to outsouce everything they could to Tata. All sorts of H1B people were hired in the U.S. to be trained for the jobs other people were going to lose.

All of this so the company could go public again, which they did recently and pay back the private capital company and provide big bonuses to the execs.
http://thingrayline.blogspot.com/2008/06/media-spotlight-catches-nielsen.html
http://www.topix.com/forum/business/retail/TIH9E8VI09NJLSBBQ

[izzat7]

10:17 AM on 09/07/2010

lol... and they wonder why people are frustrated with dems.

[Jond0]

06:07 PM on 09/07/2010

On topic please...

[bryanzth]

01:13 PM on 09/08/2010

And who are supporting corps that out- in- and cheat- source? Hmmm?

GOPers, boy.

BZ.