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Im curious about how many of these are contracts (windows 7 deployments) or H1B workers. A ton of places are upgrading their OS to Win7. Unfortunately its short term work. (at least its something)

IT work is getting more and more difficult these days. Companies dont want to hire, dont want to train, and dont want to properly invest in technology. I am currently looking for a perm position in Houston and it’s tough. Im in the sys admin area and companies are looking for skillsets that are rare / hard to find. A decade of pillaging good people from big companies hasnt helped the new guys.

Harley Davidson just gave the boot to their entire IT staff and outsourced the work to a company notorious for exploiting the H1B system. They keep the jobs here but they bring in low cost people from places like India for half the pay of what American workers are used to.

http://news.dice.com/2012/07/30/harley-davidson-infosys/

... I am currently looking for a perm position in Houston and it’s tough. I'm in the sys admin area and companies are looking for skill sets that are rare / hard to find. ...

Part of the game is to define jobs in such a way, no one can fill them. Then lo and behold, a guest worker shows up with all the exotic requirements on their resume. How convenient /sarc. This way the employers can pretend they are not replacing American with CHEAP guest workers who are virtual indentured workers.

This article is just cheer leading for more guest workers. We currently do not create enough new STEM, including IT, jobs for new grads, much less experienced IT people.

Yet we continue to import an alphabet soup of guest workers. At last count we are down to 125,000 new legal workers each month. Those in IT, and I'm certain other STEM professions, also compete with illegals (visa overstays).

A lot of this-style outsourcing is cyclical. I've seen 2 rounds of it at one local company.

12-14 years ago, they outsourced everything locally to contractors. Then, to "save money", they hired the contractors in house. (I was one of them)

7-8 years ago, they offshored and/or outsourced everything to "save money". This devastated their internal knowledge base, as 80+% of the 200 or so IT people quit. (I was ALSO one of them). The effort wound up being an unmitigated disaster, nearly all management from the CIO down was sacked.

The company learned that it took as much money and effort to have internal people micromanage the offshore workers, as it did to actually hire internal people who could do the work. They're now rebuilding, having sacked all of the contractors and/or offshore staff, and hiring people internally again. Actually bringing back a lot of those that were brought in 12-14 years ago. (I'm NOT one of them, I learned my lesson.)

My guess? In a few years, Management will have forgotten what they learned and the process will start all over again.

It's all a cyclical process of destruction and rebuilding. My cynical take on it was that if a company keeps outsourcing to "Save Money", then insourcing to "Save Money" ... then sooner or later enough dough will be saved so that IT will become a profit center. :-)

I had a couple of bad ops with crowds that did not want to train or cram everything at once and leave one to sink (usually) or swim. Daring to ask a question regarding installation of obscure quirky in-house developed software or ask for a few minutes to at least make a note or get a screenshot and get an hour of fire and brimstone sermon about being incompetent at one state agency department.

Another one involved the “head man” coming out to train me to run an electronics resale and refurb department that I had been specificially hired for.

That yo-yo and his minion spent almost the entire week making lists of everything to take back with him to the midwest. I got at most 45 minutes of anything useful. The winning statement was “to push puffed caps back in place and mark them fixed.” This was caught by the PTZ cameras and heard by several others. I was internally dumbfounded.