cogitoergosum
2010-09-07 12:33:44 UTC
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American Computer Coolies Need not Apply
Posted on September 7, 2010 by navanavonmilita
http://chopshoptopcop.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/american-computer-coolies-need-not-apply/
Jobless Rosamaria Carbonell Mann
Catherine Rampell
Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: September 6, 2010
For years the technology sector has been considered the most dynamic,
promising and globally envied industry in the United States. It
escaped the recession relatively unscathed, and profits this year have
been soaring.
Leah Nash for The New York Times
“I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many
jobs,” said Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, a software engineer.
But as the nation struggles to put people back to work, even high-tech
companies have been slow to hire, a sign of just how difficult it will
be to address persistently high joblessness. While the labor report
released last week showing August figures provided mildly positive
news on private-sector hiring, the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent.
The disappointing hiring trend raises questions about whether the tech
industry can help power a recovery and sustain American job growth in
the next decade and beyond. Its tentativeness has prompted economists
to ask “If high tech isn’t hiring, who will?”
“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out
there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van
Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic
research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous
insecurity.”
Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent
one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill
fields.
Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet
publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like
data processing and software publishing has actually fallen.
Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer
programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the
second quarter of this year.
While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant
joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than
the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.
The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be
increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor
overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not
enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and
too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at
lower cost.
That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers,
whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off,
given the dynamism of the industry.
“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere
within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a
software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed
its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.
Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that
with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-
Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed
engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find,
but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.
Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are
struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United
States.
“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner
of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief
executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling
homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re
still chasing them, not the other way around.”
He added, “If there’s the one enclave that has been completely
unaffected by recession, it would be Stanford computer science
students.”
Meanwhile, an earlier generation of engineers is scouring for jobs,
and having to compete with a more globalized pool of talent. There are
no definitive statistics on how many jobs are being moved overseas.
But economists who follow highly skilled employment say that some of
the most prominent companies that laid off workers during the
recession, like I.B.M., are expanding their work forces abroad.
“Certainly a lot of these I.T. services firms plus the core software
firms like Oracle are globalizing their work, or, as they put it,
‘rebalancing’ their work forces,” says Ronil Hira, an assistant
professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
In the past, the American jobs most susceptible to being shipped
abroad were lower-skilled positions. But now emerging economies have
been harvesting their long-term investments in math and science
education and attracting high-tech firms — and not just textile
factories or call centers — to their shores.
These higher skills have become commodities, said Catherine L. Mann, a
global finance professor at the Brandeis University International
Business School who studies the outsourcing of jobs. The programming
language “C++ is now an international language,” she said. “If that’s
all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who
will do the work for less.”
In addition to lower wages, developing countries offer significant
consumer growth, giving businesses a reason to make more products
closer to the buyer, and hire locally.
And increasingly, these new, lower-cost research centers, while
perhaps initially intended to adapt products for local use, are
becoming sources of innovation themselves.
“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work,
that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would
stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to
emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at
Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce
Development.
“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and
more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part
of this bottom-up push.”
The narrative is familiar to Ms. Mann, the unemployed software
engineer. She said her employer, International Gaming Technology,
initially told her office that it was opening a branch in China to
work with the company’s casino clients in Macau and Australia.
She said she was told that the new branch would be tailoring products
to local needs and doing some back-office work. But a year later it
absorbed all the operations once performed by the Corvallis staff.
International Gaming Technology, based in Reno, Nev., did not respond
to repeated requests for comment.
This is the second time, Ms. Mann said, that an employer has sent her
job abroad since she received her master’s in computer science more
than two decades ago; the last time was in 2001. This week she starts
a yearlong program to upgrade her programming skills, paid for by a
federal program that assists workers who have been displaced by
international trade.
The experience of Ms. Mann and others like her suggests that the
technology industry may not be the savior of the American job market
and a magic bullet for a moribund economy — even though the Obama
administration has called for a revival of math and science training
and emphasized the need for American companies to take the lead in
fields like clean energy.
Instead, some economists and policy makers are looking to health care
to lead an employment surge. They point to the field’s growing demand
for new services, the need for physical proximity for many patient
procedures, and a bureaucracy that entails layer upon layer of jobs.
Because these jobs seem more secure, Ms. Mann said she briefly
considered making a move into health care. “That’s something that
can’t be outsourced as far as I can tell, but it’s not for me,” she
said. “I don’t do well looking at people’s blood.”
Rampell, Catherine.
Catherine Rampell writes about economics and edits the Economix blog.
Before joining The Times, she wrote for the Washington Post editorial
pages and financial section and for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Her work has also appeared in Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Village
Voice, USA Today, NPR, MSNBC.com, The Miami Herald, The Dallas Morning
News and various other publications.
Catherine grew up in South Florida (the New York part) and graduated
from Princeton. She can be reached at ***@nytimes.com
…and I am Sid Harth
This entry was posted in American Economy, American Government,
Chinese Economy, Economy, Technology, World Economy. Bookmark the
permalink. Edit
← The God for Hindutva Dummies
American Computer Coolies Need not Apply
Posted on September 7, 2010 by navanavonmilita
http://chopshoptopcop.wordpress.com/2010/09/07/american-computer-coolies-need-not-apply/
Jobless Rosamaria Carbonell Mann
Catherine Rampell
Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: September 6, 2010
For years the technology sector has been considered the most dynamic,
promising and globally envied industry in the United States. It
escaped the recession relatively unscathed, and profits this year have
been soaring.
Leah Nash for The New York Times
“I apply for everything I can find, but there are just not that many
jobs,” said Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, a software engineer.
But as the nation struggles to put people back to work, even high-tech
companies have been slow to hire, a sign of just how difficult it will
be to address persistently high joblessness. While the labor report
released last week showing August figures provided mildly positive
news on private-sector hiring, the unemployment rate was 9.6 percent.
The disappointing hiring trend raises questions about whether the tech
industry can help power a recovery and sustain American job growth in
the next decade and beyond. Its tentativeness has prompted economists
to ask “If high tech isn’t hiring, who will?”
“We are talking about people with very particular, advanced skills out
there who are at this point just not needed anymore,” says Bart van
Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business and economic
research organization. “Even in this sector, there is tremendous
insecurity.”
Government labor reports released this year, including the most recent
one, present a tableau of shrinking opportunities in high-skill
fields.
Job growth in fields like computer systems design and Internet
publishing has been slow in the last year. Employment in areas like
data processing and software publishing has actually fallen.
Additionally, computer scientists, systems analysts and computer
programmers all had unemployment rates of around 6 percent in the
second quarter of this year.
While that might sound like a blessing compared with the rampant
joblessness in manufacturing, it is still significantly higher than
the unemployment rates in other white-collar professions.
The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be
increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor
overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not
enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and
too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at
lower cost.
That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers,
whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off,
given the dynamism of the industry.
“I’m sending out lots and lots and lots of applications, to everywhere
within a 50-mile radius,” says Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, 49, a
software engineer who was terminated in June when her employer closed
its branch in Corvallis, Ore., and sent the work to China.
Corvallis was once a hotbed for tech start-ups. But Ms. Mann said that
with layoffs from other tech companies in the area, including Hewlett-
Packard, the city now has a glut of people like herself: unemployed
engineers with multiple degrees. “I apply for everything I can find,
but there are just not that many jobs out there,” she said.
Nevertheless, many high-tech companies large and small say they are
struggling to find highly skilled engineering talent in the United
States.
“We are firing up our college recruiting program, enduring all manner
of humiliation to try to fill these jobs,” said Glenn Kelman, chief
executive of Redfin, an online brokerage agency for buying and selling
homes that is based in Seattle and San Francisco. “I do think we’re
still chasing them, not the other way around.”
He added, “If there’s the one enclave that has been completely
unaffected by recession, it would be Stanford computer science
students.”
Meanwhile, an earlier generation of engineers is scouring for jobs,
and having to compete with a more globalized pool of talent. There are
no definitive statistics on how many jobs are being moved overseas.
But economists who follow highly skilled employment say that some of
the most prominent companies that laid off workers during the
recession, like I.B.M., are expanding their work forces abroad.
“Certainly a lot of these I.T. services firms plus the core software
firms like Oracle are globalizing their work, or, as they put it,
‘rebalancing’ their work forces,” says Ronil Hira, an assistant
professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
In the past, the American jobs most susceptible to being shipped
abroad were lower-skilled positions. But now emerging economies have
been harvesting their long-term investments in math and science
education and attracting high-tech firms — and not just textile
factories or call centers — to their shores.
These higher skills have become commodities, said Catherine L. Mann, a
global finance professor at the Brandeis University International
Business School who studies the outsourcing of jobs. The programming
language “C++ is now an international language,” she said. “If that’s
all you know, then you’re competing with people in India or China who
will do the work for less.”
In addition to lower wages, developing countries offer significant
consumer growth, giving businesses a reason to make more products
closer to the buyer, and hire locally.
And increasingly, these new, lower-cost research centers, while
perhaps initially intended to adapt products for local use, are
becoming sources of innovation themselves.
“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work,
that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would
stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to
emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at
Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce
Development.
“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and
more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part
of this bottom-up push.”
The narrative is familiar to Ms. Mann, the unemployed software
engineer. She said her employer, International Gaming Technology,
initially told her office that it was opening a branch in China to
work with the company’s casino clients in Macau and Australia.
She said she was told that the new branch would be tailoring products
to local needs and doing some back-office work. But a year later it
absorbed all the operations once performed by the Corvallis staff.
International Gaming Technology, based in Reno, Nev., did not respond
to repeated requests for comment.
This is the second time, Ms. Mann said, that an employer has sent her
job abroad since she received her master’s in computer science more
than two decades ago; the last time was in 2001. This week she starts
a yearlong program to upgrade her programming skills, paid for by a
federal program that assists workers who have been displaced by
international trade.
The experience of Ms. Mann and others like her suggests that the
technology industry may not be the savior of the American job market
and a magic bullet for a moribund economy — even though the Obama
administration has called for a revival of math and science training
and emphasized the need for American companies to take the lead in
fields like clean energy.
Instead, some economists and policy makers are looking to health care
to lead an employment surge. They point to the field’s growing demand
for new services, the need for physical proximity for many patient
procedures, and a bureaucracy that entails layer upon layer of jobs.
Because these jobs seem more secure, Ms. Mann said she briefly
considered making a move into health care. “That’s something that
can’t be outsourced as far as I can tell, but it’s not for me,” she
said. “I don’t do well looking at people’s blood.”
Rampell, Catherine.
Catherine Rampell writes about economics and edits the Economix blog.
Before joining The Times, she wrote for the Washington Post editorial
pages and financial section and for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Her work has also appeared in Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Village
Voice, USA Today, NPR, MSNBC.com, The Miami Herald, The Dallas Morning
News and various other publications.
Catherine grew up in South Florida (the New York part) and graduated
from Princeton. She can be reached at ***@nytimes.com
…and I am Sid Harth
This entry was posted in American Economy, American Government,
Chinese Economy, Economy, Technology, World Economy. Bookmark the
permalink. Edit
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