Doug Henwood Tue, 1 Jul 2003 16:57:40 -0400
> What's showing up now is that job losses have slowed dramatically,
> but there's almost no new hiring going on.
Correct, up to a point. In the absence of more background, one might assume that the lack of hiring is due to the stagnant economy. From traffic on this thread, one might assume that the lack of hiring is due to offshoring.
In fact, the lack of hiring appears to be due largely, once again, to one of the oldest tactics US employers use to drive down wages: immigration. Through the use of technical visas, notably the H-1B and L-1, US business has, since the bubble, managed to import virtually all the IT labor it would otherwise have needed to hire domestically. For more detail, see Norman Matloff's "Needed Reform for the H-1B (and L-1) Work Visa: Major Points"
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Summary.pdf
> currently more than 100,000 U.S. computer programmers are
> unemployed. Many more are underemployed, working in nonprofessional
> jobs such as bus driver, real estate appraiser, and so on. The un-
> and under-employed easily total several hundred thousand workers.
> Meanwhile 463,000 H-1Bs are employed in the field.
Compared to this, offshoring is a relatively minor problem; furthermore, (admittedly anecdotal) evidence suggests that those few offshored projects that have been successful rely on technical visas! Here's why:
>>> Management realized that there is a difference between the quality
>>> of work coming from India versus in-house talent.
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 04:59:42PM -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Hmm, why should Indians be any less able to do good work than
>> native-born Americans?
Matt Tue, 1 Jul 2003 19:12:18 -0400
> I said in-house talent.
Precisely. The following problem affects any outsourcing:
> We're manufacturing, not bleeding edge dot.com, and while 80% of
> what someone may do is documented and understood by others, that
> other 20% is what makes or breaks a system.
In fact, the faster moving the organization, the _less_ likely it is to be well-documented. The more bleeding-edge the group, the more likely its information flows and management are likely to resemble those of hunter-gatherers: when no one has time to document, all knowledge is in wetware :-)
This problem is exacerbated when offshoring. Not only is there no time to document, but now you can't even talk to the geek in the next cube: communications are hampered by timezone and culture differences ... and the suspicion one is training one's replacement. This is why many recent US offshorings (notably Siemens (in FL) and Bank of America (in NC)) have begun with management bringing in employees of the foreign vendor for training by the US workers whom they were to replace! (Note the big Indian offshoring firms, e.g. Infosys, Tata, Wipro, admit that their usage of L-1 has increased.) For more examples, see
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4154071.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Anyway, much more detail regarding IT labor market issues can be found in posts to, and files linked from, a group I all-too-recently set up (shoulda done this 3 years ago)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/itlmi/
It is at the moment mostly a place to which I've moved items from Dr Matloff's non-archived list (clearing space in the old inbox :-) But your content is appreciated, and, if you care about IT labor markets and you haven't been on Matloff's list, you oughta read his stuff! I would go so far as to say that Matloff :: IT labor markets ~= Henwood :: markets in general. Matloff's "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage"
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html
is especially recommended.