off-shoring is not done due to lazyness in the workforce, it is done due to greed from CEOs and stockholders. you guys cant have enough yachts and golf courses.

I have been in IT for twelve years and I am almost ready to pack it in. Tired of the games companies play we will hire you till we find someone who can do your job cheaper.

If "W" wins in November I am out of this field, pursue a career like plumbing or some other career where you know you have a job the next day.

Also anyone I know that is getting ready to goto to school for It I tell them to avoid it like the plague, unless you want to spend money to be unemployed
Andrew
Fort lauderdale, Florida

Will we ever see the craziness of the .com era again? I hope not. People were being hired if they said they could do any programming at all, and companies were desperate to have warm bodies at least answering the phones. Some of these "programmers" that were hired during this time were completely incompetent, but companies hung onto them because they were afraid of getting some one worse!

I wish it weren''t as bad as it is, and I''d really expected it to have recovered more by now, but finally the riff-raff are leaving the field because they found out that they actually have to work now, and they are expected to perform to get raises - not just show up for work. (This glorification of programmers is thanks to hollywood, not any programmers that I know.) So, they are retraining into pharmacy techs and other fields that show a shortage of workers, chasing the dollars. It''s just too bad that in the process some of our best talented people who really like working in IT are also being forced out.

I do have to wonder about companies that say they can''t find qualified workers. Is it because they are expecting people to move to where they are, in spite of the practice of sending jobs overseas? If a job can be done in Europe, why does a US programmer have to move to Bozeman, MT to get a job, where, if said company doesn''t make it, there is zero possibility of finding another one? Is the mentality that US programmers have to be watched to get work done & overseas doesn''t?

Thank you for your comments, and while I appreciate your passion and accept your feelings, realise that this is not a political forum and future comments such as Mr. Button's may be altered to be more on-topic.

Please restrain yourselves somewhat.

It seems obvious to me, being a programmer in Argentina, that you don't have a clue of what is going on in the world.
You are selling the American dream all over the world, stealing everything on your way with the excuse of "We are the good guys" and now are afraid of loosing your jobs.
Welcome to the club, guys. We''ve been living like this for a long time, thanks mostly to you (I will not understate our own responsibility on this).
Since September 11 you have increased your xenophobia and turned the "Land of the free" in the "Land of the we don''t like you so will launch some bombs on you and your friken oil pumps"

If indeed management 'teams' across this country are
missing the boat by keeping software development inhouse,
this leaves an opportunity for those of us who love
development to open our own companies and show them that
we can do better, at a competitive price.
When their offshore-developed software breaks or is
in need of changes or upgrades, who will they go to ?
The great American reply is to achieve massive success
in the face of other''s myopia.

The point always was to get you to THINK.

You mean that you think people in IT have been treating the subject lightly? Not where I work. We now have ex-coworkers who have been seriously underemployed for nearly three years.

25 years ago no one stood up, instead people just hid their heads in the sand.

Thats not true. The people in manufacturing screamed and shouted until their lungs burst. And the rest of us watched in horror. Please dont repeat the canard that IT workers were contemptuous or dismissive of these people. We were as helpless to do anything for them as we are now for ourselves.

You journalists and politicians and media people have the whole stage to yourselves. You announce what we should be thinking or doing. You prognosticate what is good for the country. You even presume to tell us what we are thinking. And when you mess up  as you all did over the ridiculous Y2K date problem  you blame us.

As crudely mismanaged as the manufacturing issue was, the current situation is going to be worse. Manufacturing workers lost homes and jobs, but (if they were young enough) moved on to service jobs. Theres no stepping stone forwards for knowledge workers. Many people will drop back into personal care jobs but most can expect to jump from one scrap of a job to the next for the indefinite future. Forget security. If youre not flaoting in the top 0.1%, youre drowning in the bottom 99.9%.

The current improvement is based purely on an increase in borrowing. With no substance to base a true recovery on, we are still on the downslope with no end in sight. And no voice.

The outsourcing craze is just that: a superficial remedy for the failure to produce enough home-grown programmers. The industry needs more programmers but what are they doing to solve the problem other than shipping jobs over to India?

This is not so much an artical, but rather pure editorial opinion. He seems to be implying that American programmers are getting what they desserve. Sure - there were prema donna programmers who had agents and demmanded some respect from management. The DotCOM ventures were offering outragious perks to attract the best tallent and many brick and mortar buisinesses found themselves offering similar perks just to keep a minimum IT staff.

Wearing cassual clothes to work, I think, is nessesary in order to put in 12 to 24 hour days. I would sometimes sleep under my desk for a few hours before the other employees came in. When my boss would see me getting coffee at 7:00 AM he would comment "You''re here! You must have stayed all night again"

What most managment and apparently this author doen''t realize is that there are good reasons for many of the strange work habbits of programmer. About the casual clothes - if I am not dealing with the public, why should I sit in front of my computer all day and night with a noose around my neck. Or wear shiny, painful leather shoes fermenting fungus and funky ouders. Is a wool suit appropriet attire for sleeping on the floor?

My favorite shift was to come and leave two hours late. I would get more programming done in those last two hours than the whole of the previous eight. Why - because the other worker and management think programming is just data entry. That I can program for a few minutes, answere the phone, program, fix the printer, program, attend a meating, program, go to lunch, program, train a new employee, program, etc. If the few minutes, here and there, of programming add up to, say, four hours, that four hours of programming should be finished. They think of programming as a commodity, requiring skill, but no art or craftmanship. They wouldn''t let their doctor or dentist or even a carpet cleaner do work for them in such a peace-meal fashion.

I understand why offshore outsorcing is an unstoppable phenomenon, but why is our own government making it even easier to displace American programmers by importing Indian workers through H1B and L1 visas?

20 or 30 years ago the big job crissis was heavy industry moving offshore; steel, clothing, shoes, furniture, electronics assembly, etc. Our governments response was to re-train the displaced workers for the "Information Age". Now that those IT workers are lossing their jobs, what new "Age" are we to train for.

Here in the LA/Orange County area people are so discuraged by the lack of jobs for IT worker that they are staying away from IT education en-mass. At the junior college where I am re-trianing attendence in CIS and CS classes is down by about 50 percent. Last semmester they had to cancel 50 percent of the classes offered, just to attain the minimum people required to keep classes open. This semmester they offered about 50 percent less classes and still had problems filling many.

What will happen to America in a few years when the "Offshore Outsorcing" bubble bursts just as the DotCom bubble did? How will they convince smart Americans to return to IT?

Oh - you didn''t realize that there is an irrational rush to outsource "just to stay competitive". Businesses are throwing causion to the wind to get the same cost savings that their competition is already getting by outsourcing.

As the U.S. Dollar continues to drop in value and forien workers demand higher pay rates, those forien job shops are finding it difficult or impossible to complete their contracts at the prices quoted. Maybe they should start offering trampolines to attract tallented workers.

Well, it was interesting to scan through comments. The tone of the article was clearly ironic, thus I would not take it so much seriously (''the corporate greed''...).
It seems most of commenters understand the situation pretty well, and my comments are not needed for them.
But for a few others, I can tell that I''m from the Eastern Europe, where quite a few American (and European) companies have directed the outsourcing jobs. Thus, my position seems to be different, and you might be interested to hear how it seems from the other side of barricades. :-)
First, I would recommend to look around to see what happens in other industries. It''s a common practise in all areas to look for lower operating costs, and software development should not be an exception.
Software development is just another kind of industry- and the rules of game still applies (that was proven by so many dot-coms which crashed because of ignorance of any business logic.).
I assume, because of famous dot-com boom, a demand for programmers was so high that people got accustomed to the idea of being ''exceptional''.
There are no exceptional people- if you are, then I would suggest to start your own business to make the most money out of your skils - even I myself realize that one day the outsourcing stuff we have today shall move further to the east (eg., Russia, Ukraine, etc.). I see no problems with this- that simply means, that one day I shall have to do something else- as outsourcing is just one kind of things that programmers can do.
The same is with jobs in the US- not everything can be outsourced, that''s simply impossible. Even if jobs market has shrunk, it still remains there. Simply everyone has to evaluate his skills and ajust them to the market demand.

Look, it is clearly true that management and engineering have NEVER gotten along. Witness all the "Pointy-Haired Boss" jokes, the disrespect that MBAs are treated with by engineers etc etc (I''m an engineer, btw). Engineers frankly like to code, and in their honest moments will frankly admit that they don''t give a rats ass whether what they are working on makes the company money.

This wasn''t caused by the dot com: it''s been this way since the 70s at least. Programmers are not business people.

So now, with electronic communications networks giving them access to a workforce that''s cheaper, management is only too happy to give their american programming workforce the boot. This is as much a cultural decision as it is business one.

Ladies and gentlemen the piece is SATIRE!

A parody if you like.

The whole point of what I wrote was to get people to think about how we have gotten to where we are and what if anything can be done about the endless loss of jobs in this country.

If I wrote a similar piece 25 years ago the parody would have been directed at union workers. Focusing on their endless work, the all-powerful union representative and their Mafia corruption.

25 years ago no one stood up, instead people just hid their heads in the sand. The blame was assigned to greedy management and cheap foreign labor and slowly we lost the American manufacturing base.

Today in America we have over 10% of our working population - thats 15 million people classified as the working poor.

These are the people who would have been working in our factories if we collectively decided NOT to BUY our televisions, automobiles and dare I say, computers jam packed with components made in foreign countries.

The point never was how many people brought a pet to work or worked from home. The point always was to get you to THINK.

JDJ loses credibility with every "article" you write. I hope you''re half joking, but your writing is so horrible, I''m not completely sure.

Interesting comments about developer''s attitudes - though I agree with some of this view, I truly believe that the source of the problem lies in the quarterly driven corp greed factor that is persisted by execs and mgmt in companies who only seek to increase their own pockets by keeping labor costs flat and rather than keep product prices flat, they increase product prices and profit margins. When was the last time you saw product prices stay flat or decrease because of lower labor costs? You won''t because the greed factor of corp execs won''t allow it - that is just fewer dollars that they get to split up between themselves while they lay off more workers who really DO need the jobs. I wish I knew a way to outsource corp exec jobs! Maybe then someone at the top would listen and know how it feels to have your company turn your back on you and give the money to someone else who is not a US citizen!

This article was certainly mistitled! Looks like just a reason to vent about developers. None of that has to do with outsourcing, does it?

I don''t know about everyone else, but I never "demanded" anything, the companies put it out there. My job hopping was because of these companies fading away, while our management took the cash (and ended up in jail in one case)! God forbid a company make an enjoyable workplace that keeps people humming along.

Moonlighting for dot coms? You read too many industry reports, that''s such a tiny stereotype. The vast majority of us worked late and had huge workloads, not to mention agreements that made the company own everything done onsite or off, related or not.

And I''ve had it with this working at home "envy", it''s just silly. Learn to measure productivity instead of counting lines of code and you''ll be much happier.

Wow, finally to india. We do need some good viewpoints on this (not this article). Just a silly management idea by people that think developing systems is like assembling jewelry. Send data entry, internationalization, and maybe porting there, but that''s about it. I''ve not had a good experience at all yet.

I read the article expecting an objective view of the problem of outsourcing and was diappointed at the conclusions.
As a developer here in Europe ( Belgium, France and Luxembourg ) I never got a trampoline but have had to recycle my skills SEVERAL times !
We don''t really have the outsourcing problem you have in the States ( how many Indians speak Dutch and French ? ), moreover developers ( even contract like myself ) are treated as part of the organisation.
I seriously don''t believe you guys took pets to work and feel genuine sympathy for people displaced by corporate greed.