Lee Spain said:
When I was brought into the IT field nearly 20 years ago, employers were willing to train people and help develop their skills. In addition, they were willing to form partnerships with local community colleges and other institutions in order to ensure that training programs were widely available to develop IT skills.
Today, employers are lowing their "cost structures" by zeroing out training budgets, laying off IT staff, and contracting IT jobs out to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder is often an Indian technology firm like Wipro, Tata, or Patni. In other cases, it is an American company with a very large number of foreign technologists on staff.
http://www.programmersguild.org/docs/h1b_abuses_april2005.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh6OLUPSHyE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1z7kiN8-2s&feature=related
As the American economy continues to decline, I ask each and every reader of this post to write their political officials to help stop the continuing destruction of good middle class jobs by restricting the mass importation of technology workers, by slowly reducing the number and type of H1B visas granted, and by creating powerful new incentives for employers to train and hire Americans.
You can easily contact your elected officials at --
http://www.congress.org
While you may merely be a cost to be reduced to business, you are still a constituent to your elected officials. Right now, most of our elected officials largely buy the business line that there are no Americans who can possibly handle technology jobs. This notion is completely wrong. But, in this era of enterprise software, corporate, government, and personal resources must combine in order to develop expertise. Unless you are retired or rich, without a job, you can't buy anything (not houses, not cars, not telescopes, not eyepieces, and maybe not lunch). An American consumer with a job is better than any conceivable bailout program.
i agree with you whole heartedly and will be happy to do my part by contacting my (republican) congressman. Job losses like those you describe are not going to stop overnight, however. America SERIOUSLY needs to re-engineer our education system to make it possible for our bright young ones to outshine the rest of the world like we used to. We also need to make higher education a goal that is easily obtainable by any child regardless of income, so long as the child shows merit. I have always been a big proponejnt of investing in our youth. BTW, scrap NAFTA and CAFTA. Tax the crap out of firms that outsource. Provide incentives to those firms that have already outsourced, but bring the jobs back home. Re-alocate wellfare spending to educating the wellfare recipiants so that they can do their part instead of sitting on their duff and getting a free ride. Wellfare recipiants that refuse, or while able bodied will not put forth the effort can be shown the door. We need to spend some capital as a nation on infrastructure, better, more efficient transportation/goods movement. Put some of those %6.5+ newley unemployed to this task. It takes more than just a shovel to build a road. Call me an isolationist, but this country has enough of a variety of resources, human, technical and otherwize to put the rest of the world to shame, without their help, and make them look up to this country once again.
