<p>Haven’t read the whole thread. DH in IT has seen many many jobs outsourced overseas and many H1B visa folks in jobs that could be filled by US citizens. The salary discrepancy is narrowing, from what he is seeing.</p>
<p>Of course I’ve had minimum wage jobs galore and worked for money for someone other than my father since I was 10. my 5 yr contingency plan to is to continue working. I’ll work til I drop.</p>
<p>But imagine having a minimum wage now with one one in college, a HS senior about to go , and a HS freshman, a middle class home, suburb - safe and with roots of 23 yrs. Minimum wage job would tear that asunder. It will buy food, but not put it on the table. THere is a cost for that table -like the property taxes of the house, our only asset other than the 401k which has already been earmarked for college. If my nest were empty I could live with this.</p>
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<p>We are not on the same plane. We already established that we are not in the same state (your employment rate was half ours ; btw, what state are u in; maybe I WILL look there; I am already considering missing 90 pct of my HS sr’s and freshman’s lives by remotely telecommuting weekly.)</p>
<p>Agreed that we want to keep politics such as bush-bad/good; obama-good/bad, nader-bad/good out of this thread, BUT THis is the OP’s dirty little tech secret, - IT’s grounded in politics (and a little bit of economics; attempts to separate the two are not possible. )</p>
<p>As someone said earlier, a solution might be to adjust the H1B levels and to possibly provide some kind of incentives to employers who hire USA instead. This, too, is the realm of politics. </p>
<p>It is important for the younger Hitech folks to try to see the bigger picture and what may lie down the road for them as they start their journey on it. I recommended to my son to try engineering as it is a fitting work for his talents and predilections. Also, this country needs more hi tech , not less. we are already giving up way to much to other countries as it is. My wife and a friend of ours who was also axed (computer pgmr ) with the same age kid is adamantly telling her kid not to pursue this path.</p>
<p>just quoting nader - not arguing for how many angels can dance on head 
--that wd be in the politics forum of the parents cafe…</p>
<p>“If you don’t turn on to politics, politics will turn on you”
[Amazon.com:</a> Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender (9780312302580): Ralph Nader: Books](<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Party-Corporate-Government-Surrender/dp/0312302584]Amazon.com:”>http://www.amazon.com/Crashing-Party-Corporate-Government-Surrender/dp/0312302584)</p>
<p>Politics is like physics - it is everywhere.</p>
<p>That is my quote, an amalgam of what my son’s AP physics teacher said about physics when I met with him recently and my 52 yrs of experience on this earth.</p>
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<p>This path isn’t necessarily all bad. But in the midst of outsourcing, individials must behave like businiesses. Ask yourself: how can I offer a company equivalent value to three offshore individuals. This is very hard to answer but one way is to develop non-CS domain knowledge. Having bioinformatics/data mining skills or being a researcher in a high-demand area may allow you to deliver such value.</p>
<p>And non-CS jobs can also be outsourced. As for liberal arts professors, one can argue that there is a constant demand. However, the creation of high stress and low-paying adjunct positions has satisfied those demands. If a position cannot be outsourced, it can still be deemed less important to the core business function if budget cuts are implemented and can be axed. Teachers, fire fighters, and police officeres, for example.</p>
<p>And if tech leaves the US for good, we will no longer be a first world country. Companies will move out. I don’t think that this will happen.</p>
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<p>The real estate market is really ****ty and this is why people are afraid to move and lose the equity on their home purchase (which they will likely never get back). And since qualified people refuse to move, there are some areas where there are job vacancies but not enough qualified people to take them.</p>
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<p>I didn’t get my college degree until I was 31. Finances were very
tight when I was growing up and we basically had to look at options
that were free, low-cost or we had to pay for it ourselves.</p>
<p>Life is always uncertain. Imagine growing up as a small child and
living through ethnic riots where the violent majority didn’t want
you in their country.</p>
<p>One of our residences in the US is located in an area where the median
household income is below $40K. That’s basically minimum wage
territory with dual income earners with slightly more than one job
each. We could basically sell our other residence and just live in
that small residence.</p>
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<p>See my signature.</p>
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<p>I participate in the politics forum regularly and try quite hard to
keep the politics there and out of the other forums.</p>
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<p>There’s $1 trillion in foreign profits that companies would like to
repatriate at lower taxation levels in return for greater investments
in the US. Intel and Cisco are leading the charge here. Washington is
in gridlock and nothing is happening. That’s all I’ll say here.</p>
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<p>I guess that I see a different side of engineering.</p>
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<p>Yes, but we’re supposed to bite our tongues outside the politics forum
when we’re in this house.</p>
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<p>But we seek to minimize this uncertainty, even when it means we earn less or whether. Why do people want permanent joobs?</p>
<p>“There’s $1 trillion in foreign profits that companies would like to
repatriate at lower taxation levels in return for greater investments
in the US. Intel and Cisco are leading the charge here.”</p>
<p>Wow, stop the presses, corporations are leading the charge for lower taxes! Who could have seen that one coming? Intel is full of it. There was recently an article in The Hill about Intel whining how they can’t find enough qualified American engineers… yet absolutely no mention in the article of the engineers they laid off and outsoruced.</p>
<p>Homer,</p>
<p>I know a few people at Intel…they are looking for engineers in the USA…but they are not easy to find…not everyone with a CE or EE degree is cut out for designing computer chips.</p>
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<p>There is efficiency to be gained from certainty. You get a job, get a home nearby, learn where the shopping, schools and other services are so you know what to do when there’s a problem or when you need services.</p>
<p>I think that the best time to explore different jobs is when you are young. Try out several jobs so you can get an idea of the type of job and type of employer where you could spend a longer amount of time.</p>
<p>Your concept that certainty has a cost is spot on. This is options expirations week. If I were long Apple stock and wanted to protect against downside risk, I could buy a put that would guarantee that I wouldn’t lose money if Apple stock went down. Of course that put would cost me something.</p>
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It seems like one needs years of experience to do that???</p>
<p>Intel commited to spending $4 to $7 billion in the US for new and upgraded plants if they got their tax concessions. They didn’t get them so they upgraded a plant in Israel for $2.5 billion. I believe that means 500 direct new jobs in Israel.</p>
<p>Intel also builds compilers and software libraries. They also make a rather nice product called VTune. So Intel does do software. They (along with Microsoft) fund university research in parallel computing and auto-parallelizing compilers.</p>
<p>Maybe Intel can’t get “qualified” talent because they are not willing to pay for it. According to the DOL’s H1B databse, they are paying their H1B programmers as little as $19.21 an hour and engineers as low as $38,000 a year.</p>
<p>Also, one important point that nobody addressed is that Intel, while claiming a shortage of workers, has laid of THOSUANDS of workers, even before the recession began.</p>
<p>Homer,</p>
<p>Was that production workers or engineers? Also Intel has many opening for engineers.</p>
<p>It was a quality engineer position.</p>
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<p>You clearly know little about tech.</p>
<p>Intel increased hiring along with all of the other tech companies during the tech bubble. When it popped, other companies laid people off. Intel didn’t. Because it had a monopoly. A few years later, AMD came out with better processors which hit Intel’s bottom line. They regrouped and came up with an answer in 2005. After that they decided to trim their staff in the process that other companies went through years earlier.</p>
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<p>What are the educational requirements?</p>
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<p>Am not a 100% sure. But I would think it sounds more like a job for someone with a A.S./B.S in Electronics Technology.</p>
<p>I am closing this thread. It appears to have degenerated into an endless loop of repetitive discussion.</p>