If you apply to 759 jobs and get 0 is it you or the jobmarket?

[pitz]

Quote from tradestrong:
LOL...I frankly don't believe you at all. Where are all your friends looking? On the same street?

Applying to tech firms in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Applying to the local firms who haven't hired for years and have been rapidly dissappearing as the technology industry consolidates to Silicon Valley and offshore.

Sorry...but that's pure hogwash that you claim to know people with technical degrees that have spent "years" without getting hired. I think you're lying out of your teeth. [/B]

I most certainly am not lying, and the only hogwash is what's coming out of your mouth right now. You have no clue. Do you honestly think that Silicon Valley can drop its employment from 2000 levels, replace 30-40% of its domestic workforce with foreigners, and not have a massive impact on new college grads such as what I've experienced? Of course not. The numbers don't lie. And if there was demand in the tech industry for more labour (ie: hiring of new grads), then salaries would have been growing this past decade, which they most certainly have not.

 

[Trader666]

+1

Quote from tradestrong:

Maybe it was you...not the job market.

 

[tradestrong]

Quote from pitz:

Applying to tech firms in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Applying to the local firms who haven't hired for years and have been rapidly dissappearing as the technology industry consolidates to Silicon Valley and offshore.



I most certainly am not lying, and the only hogwash is what's coming out of your mouth right now. You have no clue. Do you honestly think that Silicon Valley can drop its employment from 2000 levels, replace 30-40% of its domestic workforce with foreigners, and not have a massive impact on new college grads such as what I've experienced? Of course not. The numbers don't lie. And if there was demand in the tech industry for more labour (ie: hiring of new grads), then salaries would have been growing this past decade, which they most certainly have not.

You do realize that the United States is much bigger than just silicon valley don't you? And that there are many, many technical jobs besides just internet startups...right?

So maybe that's your problem and your friends problem...their short sightedness in not recognizing that finding employment at a stable company with a real business model is probably a better alternative than trying to catch a ride on the next hot startup.

 

[pitz]

You do realize that the United States is much bigger than just silicon valley don't you? And that there are many, many technical jobs besides just internet startups...right?

Right. But the secondary tech centres have shrunk as well dramatically, and larger businesses have been offshoring most of their IT work at a ferocious pace. Go into a modern IT department in a large business, its mostly Indians. Plus we're all competing with the tens of thousands of engineers laid off from the US manufacturing industry.

So maybe that's your problem and your friends problem...their short sightedness in not recognizing that finding employment at a stable company with a real business model is probably a better alternative than trying to catch a ride on the next hot startup.

The 'stable' companies haven't been hiring in the past decade, and have been offshoring as much as they possibly can. Don't you remember the 'jobless recovery' of 2003-2005? Even in 2006-2007, they barely had begun to pick up the slack of the people laid off previously, nevermind brought any new talent into the workforce.

There is nothing wrong with me or my friends; we are all perfectly employable. Its just that, like the girl in the original post, the jobs don't exist, or they're being given to foreigners.

 

[pitz]

Quote from Trader666:

+1

In the greatest economic downturn and the worst decade for jobs ever, its really, really mature to blame job seekers for their own unemployment. Really mature. Do you like kicking people when they're down?

Just admit it, the system is broken. Employment of college educated people hasn't grown in the past decade, and the jobs have shifted heavily away from engineering, technology, and manufacturing, and towards finance, which uses a different skillset. There's really not much room in finance for the sort of people who excel at engineering/technology/manufacturing, unfortunately.

 

[tradestrong]

Quote from pitz:

Right. But the secondary tech centres have shrunk as well dramatically, and larger businesses have been offshoring most of their IT work at a ferocious pace. Go into a modern IT department in a large business, its mostly Indians. Plus we're all competing with the tens of thousands of engineers laid off from the US manufacturing industry.

I work in modern IT department of a top 50 Forbes List of best Information Technology companies. We have hundreds of employees, and the percentage of Indians is less than 20%.

The 'stable' companies haven't been hiring in the past decade, and have been offshoring as much as they possibly can. Don't you remember the 'jobless recovery' of 2003-2005? Even in 2006-2007, they barely had begun to pick up the slack of the people laid off previously, nevermind brought any new talent into the workforce.

There is nothing wrong with me or my friends; we are all perfectly employable. Its just that, like the girl in the original post, the jobs don't exist, or they're being given to foreigners.

You think a company with a highly critical IT infrastructure and sensitive data is going to "outshore" not only the responsibility, but also the IP?

That's the myth of outshoring. Jobs that have been outshored are non-critical jobs that a monkey could do. A company that had a highly valued and critical infrastructure is not going to be outshoring that. If the clients of the company I work for found out that all of a sudden all their private data was being managed offshore, and that all of a sudden we had a critical business failure that required "calling up" our outsourced help to fix the problem, we wouldn't be in business too long.

Like I said...the US is much bigger than just outshored html and javascript programmers for internet startups.

 

[pitz]

You think a company with a highly critical IT infrastructure and sensitive data is going to "outshore" not only the responsibility, but also the IP?

Absolutely. They do it all the time.

That's the myth of outshoring. Jobs that have been outshored are non-critical jobs that a monkey could do.

That's not true at all. Entire IT departments get sold off to Accenture/EDS/BearingPoint, and they ship as much of it as they can offshore. Critical business functions in many cases. And the amount of value being captured by the outsourcers/offshorers continues to increase unabated.

A company that had a highly valued and critical infrastructure is not going to be outshoring that. If the clients of the company I work for found out that all of a sudden all their private data was being managed offshore, and that all of a sudden we had a critical business failure that required "calling up" our outsourced help to fix the problem, we wouldn't be in business too long.

Maybe your company doesn't do it, but outsourcing firms such as Tata, Satyam, etc., have been getting huge doing exactly what you describe -- offshoring critical and private data and business processes overseas. The effect on IT has been brutal, and new grads have been hit disproportionately.

Like I said...the US is much bigger than just outshored html and javascript programmers for internet startups.

And offshoring is far larger than that as well. Which has meant no jobs for grads in the past decade. Maybe you can find a few isolated cases, but if the labour market was good, salaries would have risen along with costs in the past decade, and they have not. Firms would not be receiving literally hundreds of resumes for each job they advertise. And people like me and my classmates would be getting calls from recruiters for each job applied for, and not be ignored.

 

[Trader666]

Times are tough but this is NOT the "greatest economic downturn and the worst decade for jobs ever" and the system's NOT "broken."

Your attitude sucks and is holding you back more than anything else. Either you can adapt and prosper or continue blaming everything external to you and fail. Your choice.

Quote from pitz:

In the greatest economic downturn and the worst decade for jobs ever, its really, really mature to blame job seekers for their own unemployment. Really mature. Do you like kicking people when they're down?

Just admit it, the system is broken. Employment of college educated people hasn't grown in the past decade, and the jobs have shifted heavily away from engineering, technology, and manufacturing, and towards finance, which uses a different skillset. There's really not much room in finance for the sort of people who excel at engineering/technology/manufacturing, unfortunately.

 

[CommunistMonkey]

Quote from pitz:

And I graduated in 2002 with dual EE and CS degrees from a top-20 university and spent years not even getting the time of day from corporate HR or from recruiters when I sent them my resume. I was at the top of my class, have some good publications/projects under my belt, work experience, and I was 22.

First off your problem may be that you're an argumentative pain in the ass more than any lack of CS/EE skills/experience.

Care to name this top 20 university? I work in the Mountain View area and on the software side and a big chunk (25-50%) graduated in the last 5 years. You experiences don't mesh with mine at all.

 

[sumfuka]

Quote from pitz:


If there was a significant amount of hiring, then salaries would have risen, which they mostly haven't in software or hardware development or operations. The salaries being offered today haven't grown since the 1990s. In some cases, new grads are being asked to work at salaries that would have been more typical of the 1980s.

This is the problem for the people that wants to get into the IT industry. They are competing for the same jobs against hundred of millions of other IT people, it is such a globalized occupation, that corps can hire CHEAP indians, chinese, koreans, australians, africans or whoever for the job. But they are hiring, no doubt about that. So these grads better learn another skill other than programming.

Also after 9-11, the army was begging for IT people to join. They won't outsource those IT jobs.