Um, might want to edit the title - not sure what offhoring is or whether it has anything to do with killing prostitutes...

"Offhoring": taking trips to Thailand for, uh, business purposes.

Apparently people are drawing these conclusions by looking at the national unemployment data and drawing the sweeeping conclusion that offshoring is not a problem.

Sloppy thinking, sophomore thinking.

Not only are many American workers being hurt by offshoring, there is a significant UNDERemployment issue in both white collar and blue collar jobs that must be considered. There are regional issues, there are industry issues, etc.

If a college sophomore made this kind of sweeping generalization we would saturate the paper with red ink.

"..and life was never the same again."

At least one thing is the same: rustbelt is still trolling his unsubstantiated claims of underemployment.

Tech employment remains substantially below where it was in 2000, and in fact has barely budged off it's lows of 2004. No doubt they can't fill these openings, but that is because no one wants them anymore. The pay is not that good and the employment is extremely cyclical and temporary. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. If you want a career, you need to enter a field not subject to offshoring. You can call that progress at least.

Lord said...
"Tech employment remains substantially below where it was in 2000, and in fact has barely budged off it's lows of 2004. No doubt they can't fill these openings, but that is because no one wants them anymore."

Where are you getting your data from? As the article pointed out, tech recruiters have more openings than they can fill. That directly contradicts your suggestion. My own personal experience (I'm a 15-yr software engineer) is that the recruiter is correct: there aren't enough skilled engineers/technicians to fill the openings.

I ran a IT services firm for many years, and I can tell you (only from my experience) that there are many IT jobs that are difficult to fill, and yet there are lots of un-employed IT people. How can that be? One way to look at it is that the un-employed choose to be un-employed because they won't work for the salary that's offered. I guess that's their own fault. But there is no doubt that salaries have fallen for people in a wide range of skill levels. Who can blame them for feeling angry about needing to learn a new field, when they thought their livelihood was safe as long as they stayed current in their skills?

PS, I got out of the business because I couldn't compete with the Asians.

more openings than they can fill

There are always more openings which for any number of reasons cannot be filled. The pay or benefits may be bad, the conditions or environment may be intolerable, the duration or tenure may not be worthwhile, the location may be unacceptable. The criteria is not unfilled openings but openings that are created to be filled. The days of posting openings to be filled are long past. No one ever filled them anyway. Rather, they network to find the people they want and create the positions to be filled. Recruiters without networks have largely been made obsolete.

Ex-IT

The un-and-under employed techies I know are almost all over the age of 50 - seems turning 50 marks the end of a career, despite competence.

KWO

Try a Google search, or just skim a dozen newspaper a day as I do, and read economics incessantly. Lots of data.

Several replies, and still no data to back up the claims of IT unemployment due to offshoring.

I don't have any data either. But I'm a working professional in the field whose personal experience is that there are more good jobs than good applicants. That's anecdotal evidence and unpersuasive I know, but that's where I'm at. You wanna convince me otherwise, you're gonna need something more than "search google".

Ex-IT: There was a point four or five years ago where engineering jobs were a bit scarce. I know of a couple skilled engineers that went several months without a good offer and thus switched careers at that point. That was quite a while ago. I'm currently not hearing of anyone having to switch careers because there's no good openings for skilled engineers. Maybe it's happening and I'm not seeing it, but I've got plenty of friends in the business in my area, they don't seem to be seeing it either.

And for the record, my company currently outsources some of our programming and testing. I expect by the end of the year that the programming will come back in house, because the offshore programmers aren't getting the job done.

Actually it bottomed three years ago. I agree, there are more jobs than applicants since seekers have long since realized applying for them is for the inexperienced or uninformed. No one is hired on that basis anymore and it is a pointless waste of time.