[TriLUG] New member re-location question

[Tom Roche]

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?