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A Website Dedicated to Computer Professional...and some not so Professional |
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650,000 Lost IT Jobs That May Never Return Douglas Chick 
I get a lot of e-mail from university students and teachers asking me how they can a get a job when they graduate. I’m never sure what to tell them. I certainly don’t want to write back a computer science professor and tell him or her that his students wasted 4 years and thousands of dollars only to never have a chance at a computer job because it was outsourced to India. When people from India e-mail asking what they need to know to get a job in America, I don’t know what to tell them either. I like Indians, all the ones I've met are smart, very mathematical and polite. Not in one movie theater have I ever had to give the evil eye to and Indian on the cell phone. But I also don't want anymore of my friends to lose their jobs. So I'm forced to make a choice between helping to save the jobs of my friends and families, over people that are on the other side of the world. I have a lot of readers from India that are not going to like reading that, but they understand. Protecting ones community is natures way. India’s prime minister last week said that Western workers’ opposition to the outsourcing of jobs to India would hurt their companies and the countries economy. No, losing 650,000 computer jobs is hurting America. Perhaps if corporations outsourced senior executive positions to India, American companies would have enough money in to not have to lie about their annual earnings. CEOs in India will probably work cheaper than today's CEOs in the U.S. and my bet is that they are better at math. But who is really behind sending American tech jobs to other countries? Some believe that the fault lies within the computer professional community itself. By the very act of purchasing product from companies that practice overseas outsourcing. And the only way to bring jobs back is through commercial product boycott. I believe that Charles Seaman is one example. He has a website, www.onshorealternatives.com that lists every U.S. corporation the practices Overseas Outsourcing. Not only does he list tech companies, but he has a list of every type of company. I was surprised at just how many there are. The 2004 elections are soon upon us and it is that time when politicians turn their concern away from big business and remember the little people. And right now the little people have lost a lot of their jobs to overseas outsourcing. When I first began reporting this over a year ago, many computer people didn’t think it was going to happen to them. Now that it has and these same people are out of work, they don’t have the spending power of a large company to use as leverage anymore. Most may never rejoin the IT field again. What they do have left is the ability to vote. 650,000 votes could easily decide the fate of the next president, senator or congressperson. If you still have a job you can support American jobs with your company purchase orders. If you w like the 650,000 unemployed IT people, you only have a voice every 4 years.
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What if you were one of the 650,000 computer people that lost your job
and was told that you would never again return to a career that you love
because your job is no longer being hired in this country. What career type
would you fall back on? Would you want to be a construction worker, because according to news reports the housing market is on the rise. Perhaps you’d like to be a nurse;
nurses are always in high demand. After all, you've already developed some
fine people skill working with computer users, what's a few bed pans? I've
heard other reports that the U.S. is experiencing a jobless economic
recovery. Although, to me that's like telling your accounting department
that their crashed server experienced a data less recovery.