outsourcing work in America
 

I use Linux for most of my programming. I wonder if programmers in America will always have jobs. I hear lots of times that programmers get paid. I have been told by 2 universities that the average pay for a programmer in America is 52k per year. Is that really very much money? I saw that many of the jobs for programmers were only for so long. One was for ten months. Many jobs require expierence and so much(different languages and other things). Computer Science graduates here to not learn as many langauges as some of these jobs are asking for. They learn the concepts of different types of programming. Are more jobs in America still being moved to other countries, and how will it probably be in the future? This could lower the pay in America, right?

It seems that you "hear" a lot of things. :rolleyes: Talk is cheap, and whereever there's a tree-stump there's somebody to stand on it. Go find out for yourself.

If you find something that you're good at with computers, and if you diligently work to perfect that skill and to sell it effectively, you can always find work. But work will never "come to you" if you sit by the side of the road, wring your hands and say, "oh, woe is me." :cry:

Although I think that it would be a good idea to try to get into something that is hard to outsource ie security or networking.

moved to general

sundialsvcs, tell me something I do not know. A forum is for asking questions and getting help, so if you do not like it, do not come here. Yes, I have heard some rumors, but no, I do not believe them all. Being in school and getting an education is not sitting on the side of a road saying woe is me. I am not looking for a job jackass.

Amen and I bet sundiasvcs is from one of those countries taking our jobs, Or a corporate bigshot sending our jobs overseas, LOL. :p

When it comes to any job in the IT field, you have to take the income that universities report with a grain of salt. Although a natioanl median may be 52K, that is accounting for all of the people reporting for that job. I also rarely see one of these reports that doesn't appear to be a little skewed in the direction that the source requires for their own needs. The thing to keep in mind is the fact that an income of 35K in Louisville, KY (where I'm located) is equivalent to 50K in Chicago. It's all relative.

The best example I can give comes from a 2 year college in my area that commonly runs ads stating that an MCSE (and watch how this is phrased) "can makes upwards of 80K to 100K per year" - this is an accurate statement for my area provided you are on of those people who has been working as an MCSE for a minumum of 5 years and typically longer.

As far as the job of programming itself, if it is something you like, I say go for it. Being a little older, I firmly believe that no job is absolutely secure, but programming and pretty much any IT job allows for a lot of flexibility. You also have a lot of oppotunity for lateral movement. The majority of what I do is train people on using different application software for a large company. It's not exactly as high tech as I could have shot for, but I enjoy it. I chose this direction after retiring from the US Army 3 years ago.

Like I said, find something you enjoy. Become good at that thing. Don't allow yourself to become stale at the thing you choose. The money will follow. You may not become independently wealthy (then again you may), but you will have far fewer days of waking up wondering how you got where you are. Believe me, the world has far too many people like that already...

Programming jobs being outsourced is not common, and even then, companies, whether IBM, Sun or whatever, make provisions for Americans to move to the offshore sites for development. I have seen it here in India, where many American and European companies have a lot of their indeginous (?) programmers working at sites. So it's not that if you are a programmer in US or in Europe, your job opportunities are being compromised. Of course, many Indian programmers work in the US and Europe. So it's quite balanced.

I think this sums it up pretty well. Generally, if you enjoy your work, you'll be good at it and you'll always be able to find a job...programmers have to keep up to date constantly...but its not really that hard...any decent computer science school will teach you the basic concepts you need to know, learning a language is easy after that. The big thing right now in applications development is Java and C#. If a person understands OO, its not hard to pick up Java or C#.

oblivious69 has it right. I make a living doing work on career trends for high tech societies, including IEEE and the American Chemical Society and also including the Sloan Foundation (you can see my stuff for them, including reports from the IT Workforce Data Project, at http://www.cpst.org). A lot of people are ignoring obvious truths, especially the ones pointed out by oblivious. I can demonstrate the truth of what he's saying with hard data on income: there is far more variance in pay among people with otherwise identical jobs, levels of experience, and levels of training than there is between people with different kinds of jobs; if you are good at what you do, you can get paid decently (and you will have a whole lot saner head).

Other obvious but frequently ignored truths: yes, a lot of work is getting outsourced. It's a global employment marketplace now. Americans better get used to it. In some senses we have been at the top end of the scale in the past and so we have nowhere to go but down. But: the trends seem to be moving slowly enough that canny people can adapt and survive. There are no guarantees, but then there never have been guarantees; the notion that good jobs have ever been a sure thing and something that most folks should count on is worse than a myth, it's a goddam lie...

Anyway, kudos to oblivious for telling it like it is.