Lost Your Job Yet?

Frank Hayes' fears about techies bailing out of a declining American IT workforce are already being realized ["ITAA's Job Dream"].

I've done it. I concluded that IT is largely a dead-end career for Americans and opted out so that my wife could pursue advanced degrees in education and move up in a field that can't be so readily outsourced or filled by guest workers. I rebelled at my former employer's "wage compression," outsourcing and use of H-1B and L-1 visa holders.

One year ago, I resigned my IT job at NCR Corp., a Fortune 500 company based in Dayton, Ohio, because I was too disgusted and demoralized to continue working in a profession I enjoyed after my employer made it evident that American workers are disposable and replaceable no matter how loyal, productive, competent or well educated. I concluded there was no future for me at NCR or in IT. Like many other corporations, NCR was indifferent to its employees and American society. And, like many other companies, it has thoroughly embraced the policy of outsourcing.

NCR's outsourcing partners are HCL Technology and Saytam, which provide an IT workforce in India. NCR also has a contract with Accenture, and it has an Indian subsidiary that is also hiring a non-American workforce and isn't subject to American taxes or workplace laws.

Unlike Frank Hayes, I don't believe that it's widely possible to dodge the offshoring bullet by building up business skills and increasing face time with users. This sounds good, but techies are very busy with responsibilities. And I've noticed that IT writers seem a bit uncertain about how techies should remain competitive. Not long ago, we were being urged to gain new technical skills. How certain is anyone that broader business skills are now the answer to job retention? The truth is there really isn't much certainty regarding the actions to take or the skills to acquire to prevent outsourcing job loss. After all, many of us in the IT workforce have learned the indisputable truth that outsourcing and use of IT guest workers is really all about slashing labor costs, not increasing the quality of products and services.

I came to these conclusions long before the most recent ITAA study, which was the subject of Hayes' article. The public statements and actions of people like Harris Miller of the ITAA, Carly Fiorina of Hewlett-Packard, Sam Palmisano of IBM, and Lars Nyberg and Mark Hurd of NCR made it abundantly clear that there were declining opportunities for American IT employment. Many of us in the IT workforce saw the writing on the wall. I'm just more fortunate than most in that I was able to walk away altogether.

Though people like Miller and Fiorina deny it, America's displaced IT workers don't lack for skills or education. There is no urgent need for guest workers and no internal shortage of technically trained workers. Technology hasn't made American IT workers outmoded. Access to cheaper, more submissive and more manageable non-American labor has just made American IT workers undesirable and frequently unemployable.

I am not a person who expects others to manage my career or provide me lifetime employment. But on the other hand, I don't expect my government or powerful multinational corporations to conspire to undermine my employment opportunities and, more broadly, eliminate job opportunities for Americans. As I told Bob Herbert of The New York Times ["Dark Side of Free Trade," Feb. 22, 2004], I'm a moderate conservative now alienated from the Republican Party and the Bush administration because of free trade, outsourcing and the H-1B/L-1 visa programs championed by free-trade ideologues. People such as me are often disparagingly referred to as "disgruntled IT workers" by both politicians and many in the news media. Our arguments are dismissed as sour grapes and we are told to face reality. In other words, shut up and get another job because outsourcing will continue and it's part of doing business today.

Offshoring isn't the only way that American jobs are being eliminated. Many companies are also insourcing, importing low-wage, nonimmigrant H-1B or L-1 visa workers into the U.S. These visa programs are championed by people like Harris Miller and the member companies of the ITAA and are used by hundreds of multinational corporations intent upon cutting labor costs.

As with outsourcing, many in the media and politics make inaccurate statements regarding the H-1B and L-1 visa guest worker programs. These misrepresentations provoke frustration and anger similar to that evoked by the latest ITAA study. For example, The Washington Post's editorial "Cap on Hiring" states, "It isn't possible to argue that the holders of these visas bring down American wages. No one doubts that they do jobs for which there are clear, well-defined shortages of Americans." This is complete nonsense. Such statements are totally at odds with the reality of how these programs are used to replace American IT workers all over the U.S.

Some in Congress do believe there is a problem of job loss related to the H-1B and L-1 guest worker programs. On Feb. 4, 2004, the House International Relations Committee held a hearing called "L Visas: Losing Jobs Through Laissez-Faire Policies?" The testimony of Michael Emmons, Sona Shah and Patricia Fluno provided firsthand evidence of how L-1 visa programs are used by corporations to systematically replace Americans (and those who hold green cards) while abusing the imported visa workers. (A video webcast of the hearing is available.)

The H-1B visa program has long been used as a tool to facilitate outsourcing and circumvent the labor costs of American IT workers. Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, has written extensively on this subject and testified before Congress about how the H-1B program has injured American IT workers. He is clear that the H-1B program is premised on misrepresentations and false studies. He has a new article on the subject in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform.

I have direct knowledge of these issues through my experience with outsourcing and guest worker replacement programs at NCR. I watched non-American (Indian) workers enter NCR facilities in the U.S. and receive "knowledge transfers" from American IT workers. Then the Indian replacement workers usually returned to India to do the work previously performed by the Americans who had trained them. On other occasions, the replacement workers remained in the U.S. on H-1B or L-1 visas and continued to perform necessary IT work in the same buildings in which the Americans had formerly worked.

This is not an urban legend; I watched it happen. It has occurred all over the U.S. Understandably, Americans who remain in IT jobs often work in fear of job loss since employers now have ready access to low-wage guest workers and have displayed a ruthless lack of concern for the American workforce. Most of us who have gone through this experience have finally realized that we are competing with a Third World wage scale while our employers continue to charge U.S. prices. It's not fair and it's not just, but thanks to the actions of the U.S. Congress and successive presidents, it is completely legal.

Free-trade and outsourcing proponents publicly hold out the option of retraining into other professions, but these other professions are mostly unidentified. The reality, as I told Bob Herbert, is that there aren't any new middle-class postindustrial jobs for displaced Information Age workers. There are no opportunities to leverage our experience into higher-value-added jobs. Instead, there are persistent credible accounts of software engineers taking low-wage unskilled jobs just to survive.

Health care is often cited by outsourcing and free-trade proponents as an area in which new jobs are available. Free traders don't care to mention that many white-collar workers would see dramatic decreases in their earnings (wage compression) even if they could afford to undergo the time-consuming and costly retraining necessary to enter the health care profession. In any case, software engineers changing bedpans and giving injections would be a waste of resources and educational capital. What a loss of skills and knowledge to our economy! What a costly betrayal of workers!

There is no employment rebound for IT workers. Recent college grads or new entrants into IT can't even get jobs on help desks, which are now increasingly moving offshore. The reports from companies such as Challenger, Forrester and Gartner all point to increased IT outsourcing and use of IT guest workers. "Global competitiveness" sounds good in corporate boardrooms and political speeches, but the reality is that increasing numbers of American IT workers are suffering and losing confidence in our political and business leaders. We are locked in a merciless, unrestricted competition with low-wage workers of the developing world. This is ultimately an unwinnable competition. American IT workers, like many in the middle class, are learning that education, skill and hard work are no longer indicators of success. It's all about cheap labor -- a fact not lost on Harris Miller, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and Sam Palmisano.

Global free trade is ultimately an emperor with no clothes. As Paul Craig Roberts has discussed in "Clarifications on the Case for Free Trade" and "The Harsh Truth About Outsourcing", the premise for free trade to be beneficial to all parties is that some comparative advantage must exist for all parties. This is not possible with the full worldwide mobility of labor and capital. The U.S., its workers generally and American IT workers in particular have no comparative advantage in the world today. Nations such as China and India command an "absolute advantage" over the U.S. This situation is more than just the result of what Frank Hayes calls the "ITAA's fumbled efforts to hype the benefits of offshoring," and if it leads to an IT staffing nightmare for American corporate HR departments, my response is, "You reap what you sow."

John Pardon is a former technical writer, software engineer and database administrator who has worked for a number of software development and IT corporations. Since his departure from NCR in early 2003, he has written on the topics of outsourcing and the H-1B and L-1 visa programs, inspired by his own experiences and those of other U.S. IT workers, notably Scott Kirwin, founder of the Information Technology Professionals Association of America, and Michael Emmons. Emmons' story was told in Computerworld's sister publication, CIO magazine [ "The Radicalization of Mike Emmons"]. Pardon can be contacted at jpardon@worldnet.att.net.

Doom and gloom talk. Most of my customers who I visit and sell to in the Midwest are increasing IT staff. Now, a lot of the low-level/helpdesk jobs that involve basic troubleshooting are outsourced to India, but much of the network administration, server support (hardware especially), information security, deployments, etc has to be done in the USA and is not outsourced.

Companies don't see IT as an essential component of their business, they see it as a service, like the landscaping or plumbing that they contract out. They don't see a software engineer emptying bedpans as a waste of human capital - they just don't believe that the expensive work he was doing made enough improvement in the profitability of their business to justify keeping him on staff as a permanent employee.

By and large, IT has failed to convince American corporate management that it is anything but an expensive, hard to manage luxury.

I'm currently overworked and very much underpaid, but adding significantly to my resume. I've become completely mercenary in my outlook, and will sell my services to the hightest bidder. At least, that is my plan until I land a job with a company I care to stay with. I might add, I'm contacted by head hunters on a fairly regular basis.

I suspect that people like Pardon would be better off taking the view that the grunge jobs can go to India, while upgrading their activity to things like software specification, software design, project management that still need to be done here and are more creative activities than programming.

my friends in IT are busier than ever right now.

IT infrastructure has a lifespan of between 3 and 5 years. So all that equipment that companies bought EN MASSE for y2k is at its functional end. The recession and stagnant market are a result of companies squeezing every bit of value out of those systems.

We're now at the maximum end of that 3-5 year lifecycle so companies have to replace, expand and upgrade now. That takes people resources.

I agree. I am in IT for almost 15 years, and an outsourced software project would have to go flawlessly to not crash and burn, trying to get bugs fixed and software revised from across the globe would be a huge headache. That said, I can see outsourcing call centers or support. We aren't assigned our jobs by the local party official, if you aren't good enough at something, choose something else and try it. I have thought about going to india myself and trying to start a company. If the trend is as hot as the media says, it would be a cinch. hmmm

I also don't think IT is a dead end. It has been and will continue to be a career field with lots of opportunity for Americans. However, anyone who gambles that they will always have a high-paying job is foolish.

If you live like you make $30,000 a year, it won't kill you if you all of a sudden lose your $70,000 a year job and have to take a job paying half of that.

By and large, IT has failed to convince American corporate management that it is anything but an expensive, hard to manage luxury.

It professionals need to learn how to measure their impact on the company's bottom line. Right now, they can't give any sort of metric (either in cost avoidance or productivity gain) to the bean-counters.

Which is amazing, considering how many people in companies today use IT resources. RoI is simple for an IT pro to justify when he/she properly cites how important it is to have systems up 99.999% (the sacred "5 9s") of the time. A 1 day outage of a network because of an attack, power outage, system outage, router going down, whatever, can cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars when you factor in:

Delayed customer transactions
E-Commerce
Employee data entry and productivity (Essentially your employees come to work for a day, but can't work for a day. You pay them for sitting there).

Personally, I find it amazing that companies dump so much funding into new unimportant IT hardware (say those pretty $600+ 19" flatscreen monitors, when 19" CRT monitors @ $250 would do the same function for employees) and not the personnel to support the hardware/software and people.

I watch Lou Dobbs daily.....his efforts to teach America what is occuring, ranges from Highly credible too moral enlightenment.

Lately Lou has had *Big Giant Heads..[Pun on 3RD Rock from the Sun]..
so ya..BGHD's explaining that Lou and the rest of America are infact..ignorant of reality and benefit of outsourcing.
The spin is unique..the trump card laid down forwards that in one month..the Bush Admin created more jobs than all lost previously to outsourcing.

Of course..Lou contested that..but BGHD's just smirked confidently : )

All is spin..
From Gas prices..State Taxes to outsourcing.

Like a Lawyer firm that blitzes the other with paper....
The Gov overwhelms you with stats,
In the end...you are confused and moving in a new time window of promise,..

Business Fatwa's..issued by the Money Mosque.

Take your shoe's off.....you are on Holy ground : )

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