Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

Social Aspects of Working in IT

Notes: Those pages are written by people for whom English is not a native language. Some amount of grammar and spelling errors should be expected. This is a Spartan WHYFF (We Help You For Free) site. It cannot replace the best teachers and the best books. The site contain some obsolete pages as it develops like a living tree... Some links on older pages are broken. Please try to use Google, Open directory, etc. to find a replacement link (see HOWTO search the WEB for details). We would appreciate if you can mail us a correct link. Search Amazon by keywords:     Open directory Research Index

One major aspect of programming is creativity. And it used to be a really creative job for the most part of previous century. But IT radically changed during the last decade and especially the last five years.  From a very nice environment with a lot of talented people it became an environment dominated by fear of outsourcing/offshoring populated with toxic managers, especially micromanagers and infected with high level of stress.

This pattern, perhaps surprisingly, is the same for wage offers to students who accepted jobs in the computer science field. Entry level wage offers peaked in 1986 at $39,005 (in 1998 dollars), fell to $36,321 in 1989, and bottomed out at just $33,434 in 1994. Thus, employer wage offers to computer science employees fell 14%, or $5,571, from 1986 to 1994. Wage offers in computer science have bounced back, particularly since 1997, but it was not until 1998 that employer wage offers for computer science personnel returned to their prior peak in 1986. It should not be surprising, then, that enrollment in computer science programs declined in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

John Mashey, current custodian of the California "UNIX" license plate, presented an overview of where computer technology appears to be heading in 1999 Usenix conference.  He compared us with people standing on the shore when a large wave comes rushing in to crash over us.

Mashey began with a definition of the term "infrastress," a word that he made up by combining "infrastructure" and "stress." You experience infrastress when computing subsystems and usage change more quickly than the underlying infrastructure can change to keep up. The symptoms include bottlenecks, workarounds, and instability.

We all know that computer technology is growing: disk capacities, CPU speeds, RAM capacity constantly increase. But we need to understand how those technologies interact, especially if the growth rates are not parallel. The audience looked at a lot of log charts to understand this. For instance, on a log chart we could clearly see that CPU speed was faster than DRAM access times.

Most (all?) computer textbooks teach that a memory access is roughly equivalent to a CPU instruction. But with new technologies the reality is that a memory operation, like a cache miss, may cost you 100 CPU instructions. The gap between CPU and disk latency is even worse. Disk capacity and latency is another area where two technologies are growing at different rates. Disk capacity is growing at a faster rate than disk-access time decline. We are packing in a lot more data, but our ability to read it back is not speeding up at the same rate. This is a big concern for backups. Mashey suggested that we may need to move from tape backups to other techniques. One interesting side comment had to do with digital cameras and backups. Virtually everyone in attendance probably has to deal with backups at work. Yet how many people bother with backups at home? Probably very few, since most people don't generate that much data on their home systems. Yet the proliferation of digital cameras, we can expect that home computer systems are going to become filled with many gigabytes of irreplaceable data in the form of family snapshots and photo albums. Easy and reliable backup systems are going to be needed to handle this.

The slides for this talk are available at <http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix99/>.

Old News ;-)

Amazon.com The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead James Phd Waldroop,Timothy Phd Butler Books

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful: If you are fired or in a career rut, read this, January 4, 2004 By  Jaewoo Kim ">=)" (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews    Some books are Godsent for those who are perplexed and truly want to know the answers to their problems. This is one of them. If you have been recently fired or are in a career rut, and don't completely understand why, then buy this book and read it cover to cover. The odds are VERY high you have more than one of the 12 bad habits which is killing your career. As always, it takes some humility to admit your own flaws and correct them. This book provides solid basis for starting the path to your own career enlightenment.

 

247 of 253 people found the following review helpful:

Overcoming Bad Thinking Habits to Improve Career Performance, September 19, 2000

By	Donald Mitchell "a Practical Optimist" (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead (Hardcover)

Think of this book as a psychologically-based opposite to Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

The authors are both business psychologists, executive coaches for those with career problems, and directors of MBA career development at Harvard Business School. The book is well illustrated with examples of their concepts, drawn from actual cases they have worked on. I suspect you will recognize people you have met, as well as yourself, in these cases.

As the authors are well aware, a major flaw can sink someone who is otherwise a top performer. Improving an area where the person is strong will do less good than getting the substandard area up to normal or better.

Based on their years of experience they note, 'The ways people fail in their careers, however, are quite limited. People fail in the same ways, for the same reasons, over and over again, from one industry to another, from the lowest level to the highest . . . Moreover . . . many . . . people are amazingly unaware of the patterns of behavior they exhibit that are resulting in failure.' Talk about unconscious incompetence!

Part I of the book identifies 12 behaviors that can hold you back.

1. Never Feeling Good Enough (acrophobia or fear of career progress)

2. Seeing the World in Black and White (meritocrat or not seeing the relevance of loyalty, self-interest, or personality)

3. Doing Too Much, Pushing Too Hard (a hero, with an Achilles heel from overdoing it)

4. Avoiding Conflict at Any Cost (peacekeeper, who avoids even healthy conflict such as that required to overcome misconceptions)

5. Running Roughshod over the Opposition (bulldozer, a male role similar to an offensive lineman in football)

6. Rebel Looking for a Cause (rebels, who want attention more than results)

7. Always Swinging for the Fences (a home run style swinger who strikes out most of the time)

8. When Fear Is in the Driver's Seat (a pessimistic worrier, a naysayer out of fear)

9. Emotionally Tone Deaf (Mr. Spock from Star Trek, low emotional intelligence)

10. When No Job Is Good Enough (Coulda-been, who moves on because they feel inadequate, but don't want to face up to that)

11. Lacking a Sense of Boundaries (People who talk out of school)

12. Losing the Path (Alienated people who have lost their career vision of what they want from a career)

Each chapter in Part I contains a description of the dynamics of each pattern, how that role plays out in an organization, what the origins of the pattern are, and how to break the pattern. In the last case, the advice is sometimes different if the pattern is your own versus when you are trying to help someone else (such as a subordinate or peer) to do so. These are at least two examples in each section, evenly balanced between women and men.

In Part II, the authors look at the four psychological causes of these 12 behavioral problems:

1. Having a negatively-distorted self-image.

2. Not seeing the perspectives of others.

3. Not coming to terms with authority.

4. Not being comfortable with using power.

The authors describe in the chapters of Part I which of these base causes are involved with which patterns, and chapter 16 gives you help with examining your self-image. There is also a good section in Takeaways for ways to make the needed changes. The chapters also contain useful material to understand your own perceptual style from a Jungian perspective.

I found all of this material clear, and usefully directive.

But something more important was missing. I did not feel any strong desire to change, even where I could identify weaknesses. If you are like me, you will need to talk this through with your spouse, a close friend, or a colleague to help create the motivation to change. If you can afford and find an executive coach, that would be a good route also. If you cannot, you will have to rely on self-help. In this regard, you might find it useful to read or reread a book like Anthony Robbin's Awaken the Giant Within, which is excellent for helping to create the necessary self-motivation to change.

My suggestion is that you think about a situation that will probably happen in the future that you will regret for the rest of your life if you do not change. Maybe you'll have to move to another country to get a new job, and be cut off from your parents at a time when they need your help. Or perhaps your struggling teenager will have to move at a bad time in his or her high school years, harming your teenager's development. You know better than I what the risks are in your life and what you would regret. But do take the time to create a specific, realistic fear to replace the unrealistic one(s) you have today.

[Jan 17, 2007] Are Open Source Programmers Programming Their Way Out of a Job?

Dec 2004 ( orangesoftware.net )  Imagine a world were everything is free. Many open source programmers believe in such a world, they work nights and weekends and then give their work away. Wouldn't it be cool if not only programmers, but lawyers, carpenters and everyone else worked for free too? That would be cool, but that isn't how the world works.

This article was written using a program called Open Office. Along with the more famous Linux, Open Office is one of many programs that are free and downloadable off the Internet. Open source and free software may be good for users and businesses, but is open source good for programmers? When open source means “free software” it may actually be a raw deal for programmers.

While a lot of open source programmers are paid and work for companies like Red Hat or IBM, a lot of the programmers volunteer their time and are not paid. I can't really address the issue of why they work for free, since I don't fully understand their motivations. I did send an email to a famous Linus asking for an opinion about open source programmers compensation and motivation, but received no response. Wouldn't volunteering for organizations like UNICEF be more rewarding then writing free software for the middle classes?

Consider our fictional friend, Freida. For months, Freida spent much of her free time working on Plumware 5.0 – an open source, freely downloadable and free to use software application for plumbers. Late one Sunday night the pipe on Freida's kitchen sink broke, resulting in dish water all over the kitchen floor.

After consulting the online yellow pages Freida called up Jake the Plumber to fix her drain pipes. After the work was done Freida and Jake exchanged the expected small talk as Freida got out her check book. During the chitchat Freida mentioned she worked on Plumware 5.0 and asked Jake if he used it, and what a coincidence, it turns out he did use it. Jake was almost going to give Freida a discount, but he had just bought a boat. So Jake charged Freida the full amount for his services, $175.00, and left with his check in hand.

Am I anti-open source? No, I like Open Office, Thunderbird and Firefox and pretty much anything free. Any emotional accusation that I am anti-open source deserves a preemptive response: don't get emotional about it. Good decision making often requires not letting emotions cloud your judgment.

[Oct 02, 2006] Slashdot Globalization Decimating US I.T. Jobs

"According to Ronald Reagan's former deputy secretary of the treasury in this article in Counterpunch, globalization is destroying US I.T. jobs. From the article: 'During the past five years (January 01 – January 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs in computers and information technology.'" Paul Craig Roberts quotes a number of formerly pro-globalization economists who are now seeing the light of the harrowing of the US middle class. It's not limited to I.T. Roberts quotes one recanting economist, Alan Blinder, as saying that 42–56 million American service-sector jobs are susceptible to offshoring

[Feb 28, 2006] Cafe Hayek Ignore P.C. Roberts' Name-Calling

Eng-i.com JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER  No. 1577 -- 10/35/2006

Paul Craig Roberts wrote an awesome article. He does an excellent job of
dispelling the myths of free-trade and globalism. Among other alarming
trends, he explains how there are more H-1Bs being imported than jobs
created in engineering and programming. This except explains:

Among the fastest growing occupations (in terms of rate of growth), seven
of the ten are in health care and social assistance. The three remaining
fields are: network systems and data analysis with 126,000 jobs projected,
or 12,600 per year; computer software engineering applications with 222,000
jobs projected, or 22,200 per year; and computer software engineering
systems software with 146,000 jobs projected, or 14,600 per year.

Assuming these projections are realized, how many of the computer
engineering and network systems jobs will go to Americans? Not many,
considering the 65,000 H-1B visas each year (bills have been introduced in
Congress to raise the number) and the loss during the past five years of
761,000 jobs in the information sector and computer systems design and
related sectors.


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts09302006.html

Weekend Edition
September 30 / October 1, 2006

CounterPunch Special Report

As Jobs Leave America's Shores...
The New Face of Class War

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Te attacks on middle-class jobs are lending new meaning to the phrase
"class war". The ladders of upward mobility are being dismantled. America,
the land of opportunity, is giving way to ever deepening polarization
between rich and poor.

The assault on jobs predates the Bush regime. However, the loss of
middle-class jobs has become particularly intense in the 21st century, and,
like other pressing problems, has been ignored by President Bush, who is
focused on waging war in the Middle East and building a police state at
home. The lives and careers that are being lost to the carnage of a
gratuitous war in Iraq are paralleled by the economic destruction of
careers, families, and communities in the U.S.A. Since the days of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s, the U.S. government has
sought to protect employment of its citizens. Bush has turned his back on
this responsibility. He has given his support to the offshoring of American
jobs that is eroding the living standards of Americans. It is another
example of his betrayal of the public trust.

"Free trade" and "globalization" are the guises behind which class war is
being conducted against the middle class by both political parties. Patrick
J. Buchanan, a three-time contender for the presidential nomination, put it
well when he wrote1 that NAFTA and the various so-called trade agreements
were never trade deals. The agreements were enabling acts that enabled U.S.
corporations to dump their American workers, avoid Social Security taxes,
health care and pensions, and move their factories offshore to locations
where labor is cheap.

The offshore outsourcing of American jobs has nothing to do with free trade
based on comparative advantage. Offshoring is labor arbitrage. First world
capital and technology are not seeking comparative advantage at home in
order to compete abroad. They are seeking absolute advantage abroad in
cheap labor.

Two recent developments made possible the supremacy of absolute over
comparative advantage: the high speed Internet and the collapse of world
socialism, which opened China's and India's vast under-utilized labor
resources to first world capital.

In times past, first world workers had nothing to fear from cheap labor
abroad. Americans worked with superior capital, technology and business
organization. This made Americans far more productive than Indians and
Chinese, and, as it was not possible for U.S. firms to substitute cheaper
foreign labor for U.S. labor, American jobs and living standards were not
threatened by low wages abroad or by the products that these low wages
produced.

The advent of offshoring has made it possible for U.S. firms using first
world capital and technology to produce goods and services for the U.S.
market with foreign labor. The result is to separate Americans' incomes
from the production of the goods and services that they consume. This new
development, often called "globalization," allows cheap foreign labor to
work with the same capital, technology and business know-how as U.S.
workers. The foreign workers are now as productive as Americans, with the
difference being that the large excess supply of labor that overhangs labor
markets in China and India keeps wages in these countries low. Labor that
is equally productive but paid a fraction of the wage is a magnet for
Western capital and technology.

Although a new development, offshoring is destroying entire industries,
occupations and communities in the United States. The devastation of U.S.
manufacturing employment was waved away with promises that a "new economy"
based on high-tech knowledge jobs would take its place. Education and
retraining were touted as the answer.

In testimony before the U.S.-China Commission,2 I explained that offshoring
is the replacement of U.S. labor with foreign labor in U.S. production
functions over a wide range of tradable goods and services. (Tradable goods
and services are those that can be exported or that are competitive with
imports. Nontradable goods and services are those that only have domestic
markets and no import competition. For example, barbers and dentists offer
nontradable services. Examples of nontradable goods are perishable, locally
produced fruits and vegetables and specially fabricated parts of local
machine shops.) As the production of most tradable goods and services can
be moved offshore, there are no replacement occupations for which to train
except in domestic "hands on" services such as barbers, manicurists, and
hospital orderlies. No country benefits from trading its professional jobs,
such as engineering, for domestic service jobs.

At a Brookings Institution conference in Washington, D.C., in January 2004,
I predicted that if the pace of jobs outsourcing and occupational
destruction continued, the U.S. would be a third world country in 20 years.
Despite my regular updates on the poor performance of U.S. job growth in
the 21st century, economists have insisted that offshoring is a
manifestation of free trade and can only have positive benefits overall for
Americans.

Reality has contradicted the glib economists. The new high-tech knowledge
jobs are being outsourced abroad even faster than the old manufacturing
jobs. Establishment economists are beginning to see the light. Writing in
Foreign Affairs (March/April 2006), Princeton economist and former Federal
Reserve vice chairman Alan Blinder concludes that economists who insist
that offshore outsourcing is merely a routine extension of international
trade are overlooking a major transformation with significant consequences.
Blinder estimates that 42-56 million American service sector jobs are
susceptible to offshore outsourcing.3 Whether all these jobs leave, U.S.
salaries will be forced down by the willingness of foreigners to do the
work for less.

Software engineers and information technology workers have been especially
hard hit. Jobs offshoring, which began with call centers and back-office
operations, is rapidly moving up the value chain. Business Week's Michael
Mandel4 compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001. He found a
12.7 per cent decline in computer science pay, a 12 per cent decline in
computer engineering pay, and a 10.2 per cent decline in electrical
engineering pay. Marketing salaries experienced a 6.5 per cent decline, and
business administration salaries fell 5.7 per cent. Despite a make-work law
for accountants known by the names of its congressional sponsors,
Sarbanes-Oxley, even accounting majors, were offered 2.3 per cent less.

Using the same sources as the Business Week article (salary data from the
National Association of Colleges and Employers and Bureau of Labor
Statistics data for inflation adjustment), professor Norm Matloff at the
University of California, Davis, made the same comparison for master's
degree graduates. He found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for
master's degrees in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical
engineering fell 6.6 per cent, 13.7 per cent, and 9.4 per cent
respectively.

On February 22, 2006, CNNMoney.com staff writer Shaheen Pasha5 reported
that America's large financial institutions are moving "large portions of
their investment banking operations abroad." Offshoring is now killing
American jobs in research and analytic operations, foreign exchange trades,
and highly complicated credit derivatives contracts. Deal-making
responsibility itself may eventually move abroad. Deloitte Touche says that
the financial services industry will move 20 per cent of its total costs
base offshore by the end of 2010. As the costs are lower in India, the move
will represent more than 20 per cent of the business. A job on Wall Street
is a declining option for bright young persons with high stress tolerance
as America's last remaining advantage is outsourced.

According to Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, even McDonald
jobs are on the way offshore. Augustine reports that McDonald is
experimenting with replacing error-prone order takers with a system that
transmits orders via satellite to a central location and from there to the
person preparing the order. The technology lets the orders be taken in
India or China at costs below the U.S. minimum wage and without the
liabilities of U.S. employees.

American economists, some from incompetence and some from being bought and
paid for, described globalization as a "win-win" development. It was
supposed to work like this: The U.S. would lose market share in tradable
manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly
educated knowledge workers. The win for America would be lower-priced
manufactured goods and a white-collar work force. The win for China would
be manufacturing jobs that would bring economic development to that
country.

It did not work out this way, as Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach, formerly a
cheerleader for globalization, recently admitted. It has become apparent
that job creation and real wages in the developed economies are seriously
lagging behind their historical norms as offshore outsourcing displaces the
"new economy" jobs in "software programming, engineering, design, and the
medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal,
accounting, actuarial, consulting, and financial services industries".6 The
real state of the U.S. job market is revealed by a Chicago Sun-Times report
on January 26, 2006, that 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs at a new
Chicago Wal-Mart.

According to the BLS payroll jobs data,7 over the past half-decade (January
2001 - January 2006, the data series available at time of writing) the U.S.
economy created 1,050,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,009,000 net new
government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,059,000. That is seven
million jobs short of keeping up with population growth, definitely a
serious job shortfall.

The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations,
such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, that offshore outsourcing is good for
America. Large corporations, which have individually dismissed thousands of
their U.S. employees and replaced them with foreigners, claim that jobs
outsourcing allows them to save money that can be used to hire more
Americans. The corporations and the business organizations are very
successful in placing this disinformation in the media. The lie is repeated
everywhere and has become a mantra among no-think economists and
politicians. However, no sign of these jobs can be found in the payroll
jobs data. But there is abundant evidence of the lost American jobs.

During the past five years (January 01 - January 06), the information
sector of the U.S. economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work
force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5
per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs
in computers and information technology. Indeed, jobs offshoring is not
even creating jobs in related fields.

U.S. manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17 per cent of the
manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single
manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.

The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a
country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a "supereconomy"
that is "the envy of the world." In five years, communications equipment
lost 42 per cent of its work force. Semiconductors and electronic
components lost 37 per cent of its work force . The work force in computers
and electronic products declined 30 per cent. Electrical equipment and
appliances lost 25 per cent of its employees. The work force in motor
vehicles and parts declined 12 per cent. Furniture and related products
lost 17 per cent of its jobs. Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the
work force. Employment in textile mills declined 43 per cent. Paper and
paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs. The work force in plastics and
rubber products declined by 15 per cent.

For the five-year period, U.S. job growth was limited to four areas:
education and health services, state and local government, leisure and
hospitality, and financial services. There was no U.S. job growth outside
these four areas of domestic nontradable services.

Oracle, for example, which has been handing out thousands of pink slips,
has recently announced two thousand more jobs being moved to India.8 How is
Oracle's move of U.S. jobs to India creating American jobs in nontradable
services such as waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, state and
local government, and credit agencies?

Engineering jobs in general are in decline, because the manufacturing
sectors that employ engineers are in decline. During the last five years,
the U.S. work force lost 1.2 million jobs in the manufacture of machinery,
computers, electronics, semiconductors, communication equipment, electrical
equipment, motor vehicles, and transportation equipment. The BLS payroll
jobs numbers show a total of 69,000 jobs created in all fields of
architecture and engineering, including clerical personnel, over the past
five years. That comes to a mere 14,000 jobs per year (including clerical
workers). What is the annual graduating class in engineering and
architecture? How is there a shortage of engineers when more graduate than
can be employed?

Of course, many new graduates take jobs opened by retirements. We would
have to know the retirement rates to get a solid handle on the fate of new
graduates. But this fate cannot be very pleasant , with declining
employment in the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers and a minimum
of 65,000 H-1B work visas annually for foreigners plus an indeterminate
number of L-1 work visas.

It is not only the Bush regime that bases its policies on lies. Not content
with moving Americans' jobs abroad, corporations want to fill the jobs
remaining in America with foreigners on work visas. Business organizations
allege shortages of engineers, scientists and even nurses. Business
organizations have successfully used pubic relations firms and
bought-and-paid-for "economic studies" to convince policymakers that
American business cannot function without H-1B visas that permit the
importation of indentured employees from abroad who are paid less than the
going U.S. salaries. The so-called shortage is, in fact, a replacement of
American employees with foreign employees, with the soon-to-be-discharged
American employee first required to train his replacement.

It is amazing to see free-market economists rush to the defense of H-1B
visas. The visas are nothing but a subsidy to U.S. companies at the expense
of U.S. citizens. Keep in mind this H-1B subsidy to U.S. corporations for
employing foreign workers in place of Americans as we examine the Labor
Department's job projections over the 2004-2014 decade.

All of the occupations with the largest projected employment growth (in
terms of the number of jobs) over the next decade are in nontradable
domestic services. The top ten sources of the most jobs in "superpower"
America are: retail salespersons, registered nurses, postsecondary
teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters
and waitresses, food preparation (includes fast food), home health aides,
nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers.9
Note than none of this projected employment growth will contribute one
nickel toward producing goods and services that could be exported to help
close the huge U.S. trade deficit. Note, also, that few of these job
classifications require a college education.

Among the fastest growing occupations (in terms of rate of growth), seven
of the ten are in health care and social assistance. The three remaining
fields are: network systems and data analysis with 126,000 jobs projected,
or 12,600 per year; computer software engineering applications with 222,000
jobs projected, or 22,200 per year; and computer software engineering
systems software with 146,000 jobs projected, or 14,600 per year.10

Assuming these projections are realized, how many of the computer
engineering and network systems jobs will go to Americans? Not many,
considering the 65,000 H-1B visas each year (bills have been introduced in
Congress to raise the number) and the loss during the past five years of
761,000 jobs in the information sector and computer systems design and
related sectors.

Judging from its ten-year jobs projections, the U.S. Department of Labor
does not expect to see any significant high-tech job growth in the U.S.The
knowledge jobs are being outsourced even more rapidly than the
manufacturing jobs. The so-called "new economy" was just another hoax
perpetrated on the American people.

If outsourcing jobs offshore is good for U.S. employment, why won't the
U.S. Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the
impact of the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs? Republican political
appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype
and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the
report to testify before Congress. Democrats on the House Science Committee
are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos
Gutierrez. On March 29, 2006, Republicans on the House Science Committee
voted down a resolution (H.Res. designed to force the Commerce Department
to release the study to Congress. Obviously, the facts don't fit the Bush
regime's globalization hype.

The BLS payroll data that we have been examining tracks employment by
industry classification. This is not the same thing as occupational
classification. For example, companies in almost every industry and area of
business employ people in computer-related occupations. A recent study from
the Association for Computing Machinery claims, "Despite all the publicity
in the United States about jobs being lost to India and China, the size of
the IT employment market in the United States today is higher than it was
at the height of the dot.com boom. Information technology appears as though
it will be a growth area at least for the coming decade."

We can check this claim by turning to the BLS Occupational Employment
Statistics.11 We will look at "computer and mathematical employment"12 and
"architecture and engineering employment".13

Computer and mathematical employment includes such fields as "software
engineers applications," "software engineers systems software," "computer
programmers," "network systems and data communications," and
"mathematicians." Has this occupation been a source of job growth? In
November of 2000 this occupation employed 2,932,810 people.14 In November
of 2004 (the latest data available), this occupation employed 2,932,790, or
20 people fewer. Employment in this field has been stagnant for four years.

During these four years, there have been employment shifts within the
various fields of this occupation. For example, employment of computer
programmers declined by 134,630, while employment of software engineers
applications rose by 65,080, and employment of software engineers systems
software rose by 59,600. (These shifts probably merely reflect change in
job title from programmer to software engineer.)

These figures do not tell us whether any gain in software engineering jobs
went to Americans. According to professor Norm Matloff, in 2002 there were
463,000 computer-related H-1B visa holders in the U.S. Similarly, the
134,630 lost computer programming jobs (if not merely a job title change)
may have been outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates.

Architecture and engineering employment includes all the architecture and
engineering fields except software engineering. The total employment of
architects and engineers in the U.S. declined by 120,700 between November
1999 and November 2004. Employment declined by 189,940 between November
2000 and November 2004, and by 103,390 between November 2001 and November
2004.

There are variations among fields. Between November 2000 and November 2004,
for example, U.S. employment of electrical engineers fell by 15,280.
Employment of computer hardware engineers rose by 15,990 (possibly these
are job title reclassifications). Overall, however, over 100,000
engineering jobs were lost. We do not know how many of the lost jobs were
outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates or how many American engineers
were dismissed and replaced by foreign holders of H-1B or L-1 visas.

Clearly, engineering and computer-related employment in the U.S.A. has not
been growing, whether measured by industry or by occupation. Moreover, with
a half million or more foreigners in the U.S. on work visas, the overall
employment numbers do not represent employment of Americans.

American employees have been abandoned by American corporations and by
their representatives in Congress. America remains a land of opportunity
­ but for foreigners ­ not for the native born. A country whose work
force is concentrated in domestic nontradable services has no need for
scientists and engineers and no need for universities. Even the projected
jobs in nursing and school teaching can be filled by foreigners on H-1B
visas.

The myth has been firmly established here that the jobs the U.S. is
outsourcing offshore are being replaced with better jobs. There is no sign
of these jobs in the payroll jobs data or in the occupational employment
statistics. When a country loses entry-level jobs, it has no one to promote
to senior level jobs. When manufacturing leaves, so does engineering,
design, research and development, and innovation itself.

On February 16, 2006, the New York Times reported on a new study presented
to the National Academies that concludes that outsourcing is climbing the
skills ladder.15 A survey of 200 multinational corporations representing 15
industries in the U.S.and Europe found that 38 per cent planned to change
substantially the worldwide distribution of their research and development
work, sending it to India and China. According to the New York Times, "More
companies in the survey said they planned to decrease research and
development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to
increase employment."

The study and the discussion it provoked came to untenable remedies. Many
believe that a primary reason for the shift of R&D to India and China is
the erosion of scientific prowess in the U.S. due to lack of math and
science proficiency of American students and their reluctance to pursue
careers in science and engineering. This belief begs the question why
students would chase after careers that are being outsourced abroad.

The main author of the study, Georgia Tech professor Marie Thursby,
believes that American science and engineering depend on having "an
environment that fosters the development of a high-quality work force and
productive collaboration between corporations and universities." The dean
of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the answer
is to recruit the top people in China and India and bring them to Berkeley.
No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and
innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of
manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The
newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad,
that is where the cutting edge resides.

The denial of jobs reality has become an art form for economists,
libertarians, the Bush regime, and journalists. Except for CNN's Lou Dobbs,
no accurate reporting is available in the "mainstream media."

Economists have failed to examine the incompatibility of offshoring with
free trade. Economists are so accustomed to shouting down protectionists
that they dismiss any complaint about globalization's impact on domestic
jobs as the ignorant voice of a protectionist seeking to preserve the buggy
whip industry. Matthew J. Slaughter, a Dartmouth economics professor
rewarded for his service to offshoring with appointment to President Bush's
Council of Economic Advisers, suffered no harm to his reputation when he
wrote, "For every one job that U.S. multinationals created abroad in their
foreign affiliates, they created nearly two U.S. jobs in their parent
operations." In other words, Slaughter claims that offshoring is creating
more American jobs than foreign ones.

How did Slaughter arrive at this conclusion? Not by consulting the BLS
payroll jobs data or the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics. Instead,
Slaughter measured the growth of U.S. multinational employment and failed
to take into account the two reasons for the increase in multinational
employment: (1) Multinationals acquired many existing smaller firms, thus
raising multinational employment but not overall employment, and (2) many
U.S. firms established foreign operations for the first time and thereby
became multinationals, thus adding their existing employment to Slaughter's
number for multinational employment.

ABC News' John Stossel, a libertarian hero, recently made a similar error.
In debunking Lou Dobbs' concern with U.S. jobs lost to offshore
outsourcing, Stossel invoked the California-based company, Collabnet. He
quotes the CEO's claim that outsourcing saves his company money and lets
him hire more Americans. Turning to Collabnet's webpage, it is very
instructive to see the employment opportunities that the company posts for
the United States and for India.

In India, Collabnet has openings (at time of writing) for eight engineers,
a sales engineer, a technical writer, and a telemarketing representative.
In the U.S. Collabnet has openings for one engineer, a receptionist/office
assistant, and positions in marketing, sales, services and operations.
Collabnet is a perfect example of what Lou Dobbs and I report: the
engineering and design jobs move abroad, and Americans are employed to sell
and market the foreign-made products.

Other forms of deception are widely practiced. For example, Matthew
Spiegleman, a Conference Board economist, claims that manufacturing jobs
are only slightly higher paid than domestic service jobs, so there is no
meaningful loss in income to Americans from offshoring. He reaches this
conclusion by comparing only hourly pay and leaving out the longer
manufacturing workweek and the associated benefits, such as health care and
pensions.

Occasionally, however, real information escapes the spin machine. In
February 2006 the National Association of Manufacturers, one of
offshoring's greatest boosters, released a report, "U.S. Manufacturing
Innovation at Risk," by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe.16 The
economists find that U.S. industry's investment in research and development
is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing, because it
is rapidly being shifted overseas: "Funds provided for foreign-performed
R&D have grown by almost 73 per cent between 1999 and 2003, with a 36 per
cent increase in the number of firms funding foreign R&D."

U.S. industry is still investing in R&D after all; it is just not hiring
Americans to do the research and development. U.S. manufacturers still make
things, only less and less in America with American labor. U.S.
manufacturers still hire engineers, only they are foreign ones, not
American ones.

In other words, everything is fine for U.S. manufacturers. It is just their
former American work force that is in the doldrums. As these Americans
happen to be customers for U.S. manufacturers, U.S. brand names will
gradually lose their U.S. market. U.S. household median income has fallen
for the past five years. Consumer demand has been kept alive by consumers'
spending their savings and home equity and going deeper into debt. It is
not possible for debt to forever rise faster than income.

The United States is the first country in history to destroy the prospects
and living standards of its labor force. It is amazing to watch
freedom-loving libertarians and free-market economists serve as apologists
for the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the America
of old an opportunity society.

America is seeing a widening polarization into rich and poor. The resulting
political instability and social strife will be terrible.


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 [Nov 30, 2006] Tales of the Rampant Coyote My Favorite Job Interviews

(www.rampantgames.com) One of the most intimidating aspects of a programmer's career is the job interview. Unless you go the purely entrepreneurial route and never work for someone else (even as a contractor) , you are going to be in the situation where you are going to feel like you are being sized up like a slab of beef by a panel of judges, all the while trying to sell yourself without coming across as a conceited jerk.

The worst cases are the ones where you think the interview went very well, but you don't get the job. You second-guess yourself, trying to figure out what went wrong. You are never told that one of the other three finalists is actually an old college friend of the team lead - instead you sweat over what you must have done to blow the interview.

I've been on both sides of the interview process more often than I can remember - both within the videogame industry, and outside of it doing "applications" for businesses. Many of the job interviews were not very pleasant. Sitting at a table being grilled on nuances of the Java language isn't exactly a great way to spend a lunch hour. Some have been pretty fun. Two jobs (one for a videogame programming position, one for an Artificial Intelligence-related job) had me do some puzzle-solving so they could analyze my problem-solving strategy. Those are stressful but entertaining. Interviewing a person with ZERO social skills is also entertaining, but not in a good way.

Here are four of my favorite job interview experiences. All were with me in the interviewee position, and ended with me accepting the position, which is probably part of why they are my favorites. I thought these might be at least entertaining. I provide some helpful tips at the end, though I'm not a job interview expert or anything. There are many sites online with more valuable tips. But I thought these might be helpful, and demonstrate that not all job interviews are created equal.
 

[Aug14, 2006] LABOUR ECONOMICS I Is the threat of 'outsourcing' overrated

A recent article in the New York Times, "Why ‘Outsourcing’ May Lose Its Power as a Scare Word" (August 13, 2006), reports some studies done on the effects of outsourcing on the US labor market. Many studies found that only a handful percentage of jobs have been taken away from American workers by low-wage foreign workers overall, and that many more jobs are created for domestic workers than those lost even in sectors where outsourcing has happened in significant numbers:

In December 2005, the McKinsey Global Institute predicted that 1.4 million jobs would be outsourced overseas from 2004 to 2008, or about 280,000 a year. That’s a drop in the bucket. In July, there were 135.35 million payroll jobs in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thanks to the forces of creative destruction, more jobs are created and lost in a few months than will be outsourced in a year. Diana Farrell, director of the McKinsey Global Institute, notes that in May 2005 alone, 4.7 million Americans started new jobs with new employers.

...

There is evidence that within sectors, lower-paying jobs are being outsourced while the more skilled ones are being kept here. In a 2005 study, Catherine L. Mann, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, found that from 1999 to 2003, when outsourcing was picking up pace, the United States lost 125,000 programming jobs but added 425,000 jobs for higher-skilled software engineers and analysts.

So it does not seem that outsourcing is going to devastate workers' and their families' lives in developed countries, at least in the US, as some claimed.

[Sep 25, 2006] Holders of visas often picked over U.S. workers

Lisa Perry wanted to leave Washington D.C. and come home to Maine after living there during the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, anthrax scares and the Beltway sniper shootings.

She quit her job designing databases for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and moved back to the Portland area to live with her parents, returning to Maine after 13 years away. She worked on personal projects and took care of her parents' home for about a year, then started looking for an information technology job in the fall of 2004.

She put out a number of resumes, and one ad in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram caught her eye. It was for a $72,000 IT position, with applications to be sent to the Maine Department of Labor. She applied for what she thought was a job with the state.

But the labor department was actually forwarding those resumes to a temporary staffing company that had applied for a green card for a foreign worker. Advertising the job was part of the process to ensure that no qualified Americans were available to fill the position.

The staffing company contacted Perry, and she recognized the name: BCC USA Inc. She had seen other ads for jobs with BCC and hadn't bothered applying. Job seekers had to apply by snail-mail, and that was a warning sign for Perry.

[Jun 20, 2005] Slashdot Programming Jobs Losing Luster in U.S.

"Yahoo! News writes "The U.S. software industry lost 16 percent of its jobs from March 2001 to March 2004, the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute found. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that information technology industries laid off more than 7,000 American workers in the first quarter of 2005. Gartner researchers say most people affiliated with corporate information technology departments will assume "business-facing" roles, focused not so much on gadgets and algorithms but corporate strategy, personnel and financial analysis. "If you're only interested in deep coding and you want to remain in your cubicle all day, there are a shrinking number of jobs for you," said Diane Morello, Gartner vice president of research.""

[May 15, 2005] Spell it correctly! It's SweatSHIP, not SweatSHOP.

[Feb 7, 2005] Exporting America An Interview With Lou Dobbs

[Oct 7, 2004] FRB Speech, Ferguson--Free Trade What Do Economists Really Kno

More recently, the outsourcing of service jobs to developing countries has come under the spotlight. The increasing use of computer programming talent in India and other low-wage countries has, understandably, struck a chord of anxiety among American workers. For years, the response of pro-trade advocates to the loss of low-wage jobs in manufacturing has been that they are being made up by the creation of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs in the service sector. The loss of highly paid programming jobs to lower-paid workers abroad now appears to suggest that there is no place where American workers can hold their own.

Yet, as in the case of import competition more generally, we must not exaggerate the importance of outsourcing to the nation's overall employment picture. There are no conclusive data, but a prominent study puts the number of jobs displaced through services outsourcing over the next decade or so at fewer than 300,000 annually, or less than 2 percent of the 15 million in total gross job losses I noted earlier.¹⁸ Moreover, only a fraction of those jobs represent high-skilled, high-wage jobs; these numbers are quite difficult to pin down, but one study puts the number of software jobs lost to India since 2000 at fewer than 50,000 annually.¹⁹ Finally, we should remember that the United States gains jobs through what is often referred to as "insourcing," that is, performing service jobs for other countries. In fact, the United States has consistently run a surplus in those categories of the balance-of-payments associated with trade in business services.

[Sep 14, 2004] Slashdot U.S. IT jobs Down 400K Since 2001

"A research study shows that American information technology industry 'lost 403,300 jobs between March 2001, when the recession began, and April 2004.' Over half of those jobs - 206,300 - were lost after the recession was declared over in November 2001. In all, the job market for high-tech workers shrank by 18.8 percent, to 1,743,500, between March 2001 and April 2004. And the bloodletting continues -- as reported here on Slashdot earlier this year, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."

[Mar 09, 2004]  Outsourcing A New Occupational Hazard By Paul Craig Roberts

Who does Bill Gates think he is fooling? Microsoft’s Chairman spent the last week of February on the college stump trying to talk up computer engineering. But nothing he can say can overcome the fact that students have been reading announcements from every American high tech company, including Microsoft itself, about thousands of engineering and research jobs being moved to Asia.

On February 16 the Associated Press reported that Siemens announced that the firm will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the US and Western Europe to India, China, and Eastern Europe.

“Siemens has recognized that a huge amount of software development activity needs to be moved from high-cost countries to low-cost countries,” explained a Siemens managing director. [Siemens Plans Huge Jobs Outsourcing]

According to official US statistics, at the end of February 2004 the US economy had 229,000 fewer jobs in computer systems design and related disciplines than in January 2001, a decline of 17.2 percent in three years. Architectural and engineering employment lost 33,000 jobs during the period, a decline of 2.6 percent (the data are from the BLS payroll surveys). With the economy shedding more knowledge jobs than it is creating, new graduates face poor prospects.

[Mar 08, 2004] John Robb's Weblog

IBM is basically a big blue job destruction machine.

The WSJ rips IBM's claim that it is adding jobs to its US workforce.  Basically, the slight of hand works like this:  a company outsources thousands of IT jobs to IBM.  IBM quickly moves to offshore them and radically cuts the pay/benefits of those that remain.  The net result is a net gain in jobs (from the few that remain after the offshoring).  IBM is basically a big blue job destruction machine.  For example:

Bonny Berger, a computer programmer in Elizabeth, N.J., had worked for AT&T for 21 years when she likewise was moved to IBM in 1999. Within four months, the project she was working on was moved to Canada and she was put to work updating software used to collect unpaid bills. After five months, she says, she was told that work would be moved to India and that she would train a replacement. Ms. Berger moved on to yet another IBM task. But in March 2002 she was told to retrain a replacement from Canada, after which she got a layoff notice.

NOTE:  remember that each good IT job outsourced destroys up to 4.5 other jobs in the general economy. 

NOTE2: The speed of this realignment in the economy is something that should concern everyone.  Prayer at the alter of the invisible hand is misguided.  The invisible hand is a vengeful god that rains economic destruction down on the non-competitive.   It has no special place in its heart for Americans.

[Sep 28, 2004] Dollar Diplomacy, Outsourcing, And The Iraq War by Paul Craig Roberts

( VDARE.com)The US might be a superpower, but it is not a country that controls its own fate. Delusion does.

Much of the US public is deluded about the invasion and occupation of Iraq and its consequences and about the state of the US economy.

Just as Americans are deceived into believing that Iraq was involved in the September 11 terrorist attack on the US and threatened America with weapons of mass destruction, Americans are deceived into believing that they benefit economically from outsourcing, offshore production, and an unprecedented trade deficit.

The deceivers emphasize the lower prices, not the lost incomes and destroyed careers, that result when American workers are replaced by cheaper foreign labor. The deceivers allege that the trade deficit means that we get to consume more of the world’s goods than we produce, with the added benefit that foreigners pay for our excess consumption by investing in America.

The truth of the matter is that "foreign investment" in the US today consists of Asian central banks, mainly Japan and China, using surplus earnings from massive trade surpluses to prop up the US dollar by purchasing US government bonds.

By propping up the dollar, Asians keep their goods and services cheap, thus worsening the US trade deficit. Washington goes along because Asian countries use their export surpluses to finance the US budget deficit.

Propping up the dollar undermines investment in factories or businesses that produce jobs for Americans. Stephen Roach, chief economist for Morgan Stanley, reports that in 2003 net investment in the US business sector was 60% below the level in 2000.

The US has become the world’s largest debtor, in hock to foreigners for one-fourth of our Gross Domestic Product. The ratio of US external debt (what we owe to foreigners) and US exports is approaching the crisis ratios of banana republics.

 [Jan. 19, 2004] U.S. jobs jumping ship

 (CNN/Money) - As painful as the labor market has been lately, what's even more painful is that many of the 2.5 million jobs lost in the past few years are never coming back.

That's because U.S. employers in a wide range of industries are moving more and more jobs overseas.

That may be old news for manufacturers, who have been cutting jobs and moving them offshore for decades, but it's starting to gather steam in services, especially information technology, formerly one of America's best-paying industries.

"By 2004, more than 80 percent of U.S. executive boardrooms will have discussed offshore sourcing, and more than 40 percent of U.S. enterprises will have completed some type of pilot or will be sourcing IT (information technology) services," Gartner Inc. (IT: Research, Estimates), a technology consulting firm, said in a study late last year.

In fact, some of the biggest firms in the United States have been seriously discussing outsourcing recently. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that officials at IBM (IBM: Research, Estimates), the world's biggest computer maker, discussed saving about $168 million beginning in 2006 by moving thousands of programming jobs overseas, according to internal documents the paper obtained.

An IBM spokesman wouldn't comment on the documents, according to the journal, but acknowledged IBM plans to move about 3,000 U.S. jobs overseas this year.

In July, a labor group called the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers published on its Web site a link to a Power Point presentation given by Microsoft (MSFT: Research, Estimates) Senior Vice President Brian Valentine on July 2, entitled "Thinking About India."

In the presentation, Valentine cites all the advantages to moving operations to India, including the chance to "leverage the Indian economy's lower cost structure," where a company can get "two heads for the price of one."

Valentine's presentation said several firms -- including Cisco (CSCO: Research, Estimates), General Electric (GE: Research, Estimates) and Dell Computer (DELL: Research, Estimates) -- already "have this religion" and that it was "time for Microsoft to join the party."

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake told CNN/Money Valentine's presentation was simply an effort to encourage employees "to think globally and explore ways to improve our customer reach."

"We will continue to have the majority of our core development work in the United States," Drake said.

IBM told the Times it was simply trying to invest "around the world, including the United States, to build capability and deliver value as defined by our customers."

A developing taste for offshore labor

U.S. businesses, battered by the recent three-year bear market in stocks and an economy struggling to find its footing, have already developed a taste for super-cheap labor in developing countries, where workers are increasingly better-trained -- especially if they've spent significant time working in the United States on temporary visas.

Microsoft, in fact, was one of the industry leaders in this regard, having opened facilities in Shanghai before other competitors.

A February survey of 145 U.S. companies by consultant Forrester Research found that 88 percent of the firms that look overseas for services claimed to get better value for their money offshore while 71 percent said offshore workers did better quality work.

That's news that can't stay quiet for long, and companies like Hewlett-Packard (HPQ: Research, Estimates), Intel (INTC: Research, Estimates) and CNN/Money parent company AOL Time Warner (AOL: Research, Estimates) already are responding.

"Over the next 15 years, 3.3 million U.S. service industry jobs and $136 billion in wages will move offshore to countries like India, Russia, China and the Philippines," Forrester analyst John McCarthy predicted in a 2002 report. "The IT industry will lead the initial overseas exodus."

How will it affect the economy?

Though Gartner has said the impact of overseas outsourcing could be "significant," many economists doubt the trend is big enough yet to disrupt the broader U.S. economy. Imports of business services account for less than 1/20 of 1 percent of gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the nation's economy.

But economists are starting to take note. "If it's not a big story yet, it could become one," said Josh Bivens, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that focuses on labor issues.

At the least, it's not doing much to end the longest U.S. labor-market slump since World War II. More than 9.3 million people are unemployed, giving employed workers less leverage when seeking a raise. As a result, wage and salary growth has begun to slow, threatening consumer spending, which fuels more than two-thirds of the economy.

IT workers feel the pain

In few areas has the competition for jobs had a bigger impact on wage growth than in the IT industry. In the 1990s, it seemed all one had to do to buy a ticket to Easy Street was learn a programming language or how to manage corporate computer networks.

Those days are gone, with unemployment rising, IT spending in a slump and software services moving offshore.

What's more, some IT professionals and immigrant groups complain that U.S. employers manipulate H-1B and L1 visas, which let college-educated people from overseas work in the United States temporarily. They're supposed to be paid a "prevailing wage," but many employers pay them as little as possible. With such cheap labor available right here in the United States, there's even less reason for IT wages to rise.

"I talked about salary with a company last week (in March), and they were paying between $30 and $35 an hour," said Donna Bradley, an IT specialist in Mesa, Ariz., who's been out of work since August 2002. "In August I was making $45 an hour."

It didn't matter; Bradley, 49, didn't get the job and is selling her house and moving to Maryland to live with her daughter while she continues to look for work.

"The irony is that I was a single mother, and I raised five kids by myself and put myself through school," Bradley said. "I bought my first house in 1999 -- that was a very big deal for me -- and now I have to sell it, only because they won't hire Americans. It's devastating."

[Sep. 1, 2003] Outsourcing - The Destruction of the U.S. Economy - Reader Comment - CIO

(CIO Magazine) Working with the IT environment over the past 20 years as a technical specifications writer, I will UNCATEGORICALLY state that offshore development is NOT cost effective when considering the enormous business-culture barriers. This results in enormous inefficiencies and substantial increases in time and in number of participants. The REAL reason for the success of offshore development is the ridiculous and completely unfair tax advantages GIVEN to work done offshore by OUR government (if work is done in India, they pay a maximum 15% income tax rate!!!)

[Apr. 2000 ] Wired 8.04 Why the future doesn't need us By Bill Joy

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.

By Bill Joy

From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.

Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.

I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.

While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.

It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.

[Mar. 4, 2000] SJ Mercury- Greed undermines benefits of digital technology

"... greed has overcome the public interest when it comes to intellectual property."

"The entertainment and information industries are leading the charge. They make no secret of their ultimate goal -- a system where consumers pay each time we read, view or listen to anything. Today, sadly, the forces of greed have the law on their side."

"The patent system is a total mess, as I've said in this space before. This time, however, let's look more closely at where we're heading with copyrights. The direction is dismal..."

"The worst impact is looking more and more probable, and you can trace it back to another 1998 law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."

"The movie industry has come down like a ton of bricks on programmers who reverse-engineered a program that unscrambles the information on entertainment DVDs. The programmers who did it say they were trying to make it possible for DVDs to be played on computers running the Linux operating system. The entertainment industry, wielding DMCA, has convinced at least two judges that this activity is illegal because it can also be used to make copying of DVDs easier. The music industry, meanwhile, is trying its best to stamp out MP3..."

[June 30, 1999] Slashdot: Cringely's take on Pirates of Silicon Valley (See also additional links Steve Wozniak Comments on the Pirates of the Silicon Valley and  Robert X. Cringely.

Please note that all paragraphs cited below are taken from different contibutors to the Shashdot and represent view of different people):

...What I have heard from most people who I would not think of as in-depth computer enthusiasts, geeks, nerds, or the like, is that Bill Gates came off looking like a sociopathic theif, and Steve Jobs a big jerk.

...One thing that Woz and  agree on: the portrayal of Steve Jobs was good. In fact, Woz said that Jobs' tyrades and abuse of his employees was much worse than in the movie. The movie makes him out to be a real asshole with a messiah complex. Maybe it was all of the acid he dropped, I dunno....

... I can't take anything this man[Cringely] says seriously. Here is a liar and a fraud. Triumph of the Nerds misrepresents stuff just as badly as "Pirates of Silicon Valley" did. For example, did you know that Xerox had a huge investment in apple. That is why apple was brought to Xerox. Steve jobs didn't even want to go. Also, the lisa interface was taken from the mac project before steve jobs even started working on the mac. Somewhere on Cringely's site there is a letter from the origional mac creator (not steve jobs) where he writes something to the effect of: oh well, fake man, fake history.

...I think for this movie, the atmosphere was much more important than the facts. The producers seemed to be trying to capture the mentality and competitiveness that surrounded these two icons of the computer industry, and I think they did a good job of it. So what if a few of the events were slightly askew or out of order. My mother actually commented to me after watching that movie that she would love to destroy her computer after realizing how much of an asshole both Gates and Jobs are. Although that is obviously overkill, I think it is a important attitude. A lot of people in American society idolize Gates and Jobs (and many others), and to be honest, these guys really are not very good ideals. This movie helps show that.

...I gave up submitting new Cringely columns a while back 'cause it either never got posted or it was posted several days late from somebody else, but he's had quite a few worth reading in the past few months. I thought the interesting thing about this one (which will probably be superseded within 24 hours, they usually come out late on Thursdays)was the part at the end about AOL getting in bed with Hughes instead of some other satellite company. Cringely comes across like a Steve Thomas standard generic preppy PBS host clone on TV but his columns are often interesting and insightful observations and theories about where the computer biz and culture is heading and why.

What I found interesting was the part where he unplugged that guy's computer in the middle of the night. From what i understand it's essentially true, except i think the circumstances were a bit different. I think he pulled the plug on someone's computer who was working on the Liza (or is it lisa?) after he came up with the idea for the mac, killing hours of work, all because he had just come up with the next insanely great thing. IMHO the man is a complete and total nut, who gets a lot of credit for being a revolutionary which he really doesn't deserve. I think the only reason people like jobs and hate gates is because gates won and jobs lost. If things had turned out the other way i'm sure we'd have steve jobus of borg, and the revolutionary bill gates who got cheated out of his work by that big bad apple company. As far as I can tell, woz is one of the few people who actually did anything of importance regarding the technical details, and he gets virtually no credit for his accomplishments.

As for cringely, i think he's just mad that triumph gets no recognition beyond geeks, where pirates was aparently popular among those "normal people." He's just jealous, that's all. And with regards to the historical inacuracies, it's a movie, not a documentary, you know "base on a true story," those types of things are never perfectly accurate. Real life seldom makes a good story, or atleast a good story that can be compressed into a 2 hour (probally more like 1 when you factor out the commercials) period.
-matt

...Two books to read:
(1) "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" by Randall E. Stross
(2) "Apple (The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders)" by Jim Carlton

(3)Triumph of the Nerds Video Get it at the PBS website.. http://shop.pbs.org/products/A1808/

See Also

• Open Source Software (slightly skeptical) annotated Webliography
• OSS_in_developing_countries
• SDNP Links

• GNU/Linux/FreeBSD use in Education

• Softpanorama Copyright Links

• Overload Annotated Webliography

Recommended Links

Internal

Open Source in Developing Countries

Orthodox Religion

External

• Coalition for Networked Information

  • Coalition Information Resources

• The Impact of Technology(Surveys, Bibliographies, Literature Reviews) -- www.mcrel.org

• Impact CS -- Links to Sites on Social and Ethical Impact

• SlashdotNews for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.

• Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR)
• Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• Centre for Computers and Social Responsibility (De Montfort University)
• Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
• World Ethics Codes
• The History of Computing (Virginia Polytechnic and State University)

• Internet Society (ISOC)

  • Internet Society (ISOC) All About ISOC Conferences - INET'99

• Foundation for Information Policy Research -- The Foundation for Information Policy Research is an independent body that studies the interaction between information technology and society. Our goal is to identify technical developments with significant social impact, commission research into public policy alternatives, and promote public understanding and dialogue between technologists and policy-makers in the UK and Europe.

• ACM Computing Research Repository

Papers

CS-EP 142 Computers and Society Articles Collection

Slide 1 -- Shawn Ostermann's Outrageous Opinion Session Talk

Social Impact Characteristics of Computer Technology

Social Cues    Kiesler (1986) describes how the social effects of computers may be greater and more important than you imagine. Main point: [p. 46] Computers have social effects, cut down hierarchies, cut across norms and organization boundaries.

Educational Journals - Social Science

Networking's potential impact on local daily life

Report from Ground Zero: Silicon Valley by Po Bronson (May 1998).

New Technologies and the Ontology of Places by Michael Curry (March 1999).

Technology and Social Change: The Effects on Family and Community by Jan English-Lueck (July 1998).

Distance Learning: Promise or Threat? by Andrew Feenberg (February 1999).

Risk Management is Where the Money Is by Dan Geer (November 1998).

Exposing the Global Surveillance System by Nicky Hager (December 1996).

Advanced Information Technology and Social Change: The Worksite Connection by David Hakken (June 1998).

Students' Frustrations with a Web-based Distance Education Course by Noriko Hara and Rob Kling (July 1999).

N30 (essay on the WTO protests in Seattle) by Paul Hawken (January 2000).

The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age by Henry Jenkins (July 1998).

Virtual Landscapes by Chandra Mukerji (June 1999).

Digital Diploma Mills:

• The Automation of Higher Education by David Noble (October 1997).
•  Part II: The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction by David Noble (March 1998).
• Part III: The Bloom Is Off the Rose by David Noble (December 1998).
•  Part IV: Rehearsal for the Revolution by David Noble (November 1999).

Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals by Andrew Odlyzko (July 1994).

Copyright and Censorship: Past as Prologue? by Pamela Samuelson (April 1999).

Killer Applications by Dan Schiller (June 1997).

Cultures of Voting by Michael Schudson (March 1997).

Television and the Internet by Ellen Seiter (July 1997).

Community Level Socio-Economic Impacts of Electronic Commerce by Charles Steinfield (October 1999).

Cyberspace as the New Frontier? Mapping the Shifting Boundaries of the Network Society by Fred Turner (June 1999).

Participatory Design in Economic Terms: A Theoretical Discussion by Vivian Vimarlund and Toomas Timpka (September 1999).

Edison's Front Page News by Charles Bazerman (October 1999).

From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World by Christine L. Borgman (March 2000).