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Sunday, July 03, 2005

I'm 50. I'm an IT worker. I'm fucked.
Posted by Jill | 9:22 AM

Now that I've returned home from that testosterone-fueled propellerhead orgy of beer and cool techie stuff known as CFUNITED, I'm in the middle of a nice three-day weekend spent hoping I'm not laid off and feeling lousy that if I'm not, that means someone else is.

But in reality, being a 50-year-old web developer wasn't supposed to be the anxiety-producing situation it is now. When Mr. Brilliant and I got into IT, it was a wide-open field because of the flurry of innovation going on, fueled by the then-nascent internet. Today, both support and applications development have become just grunt work -- no different from being an auto worker. If it can be done cheaper somewhere else, it will be. And once you hit 35, forget it. You might as well be invisible.

Growth numbers in the economy don't mean anything to average Americans. Yes, the financial performance of tech companies has improved, but that isn't translating into jobs -- at least not here:

Responding to booming demand in Asia and in Europe, Wyse is adding new development teams in India and China and expanding its worldwide work force to about 380, from 260. Its profits are recorded here - but almost none of its new jobs.

Amid widespread signs of economic recovery in the region, Wyse is emblematic of its economy, in which demand, sales and profits are rising quickly while job growth continues to stagnate.

In the last three years, profits at the seven largest companies in Silicon Valley by market value have increased by an average of more than 500 percent while Santa Clara County employment has declined to 767,600, from 787,200. During the previous economic recovery, between 1995 and 1997, the county, which is the heart of Silicon Valley, added more than 82,800 jobs.

Changes in technology and business strategy are raising fundamental questions about the future of the valley, the nation's high technology heartland. In part, the change is driven by the very automation that Silicon Valley has largely made possible, allowing companies to create more value with fewer workers.

Some economists are wondering if a larger transformation is at work - accelerating a trend in which the region's big employers keep a brain trust of creative people and engineers here but hire workers for lower-level tasks elsewhere.


It isn't just happening in Silicon Valley. It's everywhere... which of course makes it crazy for anyone entering college to even CONSIDER going into IT. If the jobs aren't here, why spend $200,000 on a college education that will do nothing but make you unemployable? It isn't as if new grads with no experience are going to be hired as high-level engineers.

The rampant outsourcing of the kinds of jobs that make a solid middle class is never going to make a stronger economy. All it's going to do is to further redistribute wealth upward, while moving more and more people into poverty.

Henry Ford may have been a rabid anti-Semite, but he did understand that you can sell more stuff when people can afford to buy it. Today's corporate leaders have forgotten that. Instead, now the emphasis is on just getting through quarter by quarter, trying to please the analysts and Chicken Littles for whom simply exceeding expectations by 5% instead of 20% can cause a stock to plummet.

One of the keynotes at CFUNITED was a case study of MySpace.com; a community site that is the fifth most trafficked site on the Web, developed in Cold Fusion, running on Blue Dragon, an open source server. While this marriage of scripting language and open source is pretty cool to the propellerheads (and even the pseudo-propellerheads like me), the idea of a business like this being built with spit and glue, in the aftermath of the dot-com crash, by a bunch of people sitting for days on end writing code, seemed almost quaint. Imagine building a thriving business without outsourcing.

What the outsourcers don't understand is the proprietary interest that programmers take in their work. Do programmers in Bangalore have a sense of being stakeholders in the work they produce, or are they just banging out code and taking home a paycheck? IT thrived in the U.S. when people working in the field could have the sense that they were doing something that was cool, fun, AND useful. I have to wonder if the companies trying to turn application development into a commodity realize the loss of innovation that's going to occur when they have a workforce that may be docile and malleable and cranking out code quickly for pennies a day, but will never make any suggestions for improving the product, because it has no stake in what it's producing.
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