@carachel2 I have seen lots of this offshoring first hand. It happens all over for “cost savings”. My DH. Was with a big name firm- and it is not pretty. The company goal is 80% international hires. And yes they have to train the replacements.
Recently CS San Francisco laid off many in its tech department for a firm in India.
It just smacks of hiring for low cost - a sort of white collar low wage slave. Some employees come to the US and earn half of what a US employee earns, others work remote from India.
And thanks to all of you who agree that this layoff thing stinks- cause it really does. It has been rough and has really been a damper the college search and FA process. It is hard to be 50+, over qualified for every job and not have a degree in the field - because 35 years ago you couldn’t get a degree in computer science .
@youcee some defense work, we are in the North East. - but he was in IT for banking and securities - they don’t always have a lot of cross over.
@5redheads --we were in those shoes just three years ago and it still feels like yesterday. Every time H comes home early I do a low-key freak out. We always realize it could happen again (his new company was bought out by a huge company just a year or so after he hired in). Hang in there.
@5redheads - sorry to hear about your husband. I am in IT and there is lot of demand with right skillet. BTW my employer is doing the opposite, past 4 years we’ve hired 10K IT staff to in-house all IT applications from Vendors.
@5redheads I’m so sorry. It happened to my DH five years ago, after 26 years in CS at a university. It was a very scary seven months, and the job he got was with a contracting firm, so we didn’t know how stable it would be. Fortunately, the national firm they sent him to loved his work, and bought out his contract. I’m crossing my fingers and toes for your H!
@5redheads, sorry to hear about the job situation and the stress it has caused for your family. Hopefully, a new opportunity will happen soon!
Life has been so busy lately, was way behind on posts! Congrats to all with great news and scholarship offers…so impressive. Good luck to everyone who will be making final decisions over the next several weeks. While catching up, I noticed that some people heard about national merit scholarships…had S check the website and there it was! Yay!
@RightCoaster Wondering how your family liked the revisit day. We are planning on going in 2 weeks - and would love to see dorms, but they have not shown them recently (unfortunately). Curious if the revisit cemented your son’s choice.
Just wanted to post an update that Son17 has decided to become a Northeastern Husky and will be traveling to London for his first semester. Pretty crazy! I don’t think we even contemplated it all during our college search process, so it came out of nowhere and frankly I’m still amazed how it all played out so fast. He’s really happy. He loved the admitted students day and immediately bought a t shirt and sweatshirt. When the session was over he promptly filled out all of the paperwork and put down his deposit. I’m relieved to be done with this process and getting a positive result, and I’m genuinely excited for him.
On the comp sci and jobs discussion: I’ve learned to be utterly skeptical about massive pushes along the lines of “We don’t have enough people to fill all the jobs in XYZ, so we have to encourage more and more kids to get into that field so that our country’s economy can survive!!”
Over and over, this sort of thing has happened, and it all too frequently has the effect of producing an oversupply of people qualified to fill those positions, resulting in power shifting from labor to capital. It happened with higher-ed jobs, it happened with nurses, it happened with lawyers (the collapse of the legal job market, in fact, is maybe the case study on this), it happened with forensic science, it’s happening with K–12 teachers, and I worry about it happening in comp sci and engineering. (In fact, there are signs it’s already happened in some sectors of comp sci and in aerospace engineering.)
Basically, any time somebody says kids who go into some particular field are certain to have solid job prospects, look askance at the advice.
@dfbdfb good points about over-saturating certain jobs sectors. I teach technology to K-5 students and all anyone wants to know about is coding. I’m fairly certain there will be a glut of coders in the next decade and if there are enough jobs for them, I doubt they’ll be high paying. It sounds like a lot of the jobs will be akin to assembly line jobs of the past.
@dfbdfb I saw the frenzy for IT workers during the dot-com gold rush before the bust in 2001. Any IT person with a pulse was hired at way inflated salaries. After 9/11 and the crash, I was in NYC for a federal job fair. I spoke with former IT workers on Wall Street who were making $150k for basic sysadmin jobs, and they were asking if the government could match those salaries. I could only sympathize and explain how much the government was willing to pay (at less than half their former salaries). I see the same thing in CS now, and you saw the bust in petroleum engineering.