10 years ago I was working as a contract engineer, making $50 to $65 / hour while going thru agencies (more if direct). Then I started working for Cisco, full time, and "retired" last year. I was planning to make supplemental income by going back to contracting.
Now I'm offered jobs paying $35 to $45 per hour, with much higher difficulty level (technology has advanced during the last 10 years).
I don't know what you did at Cisco, but that sounds *exactly* like the situation we have with software. When I was first working in the 92 timeframe in enterprise software, which was more than 10 years ago, I was making about $65. (or more if direct, as you say). Great money for someone my age, and this led to optimism for an entire generation of people, which led to a booming stock market, and so on.
Now, today, I am hiring people for J2EE and other (more recent) engineering disciplines, and these people are billing out at lower than my 92 rate- which means *they* are getting about 1/2 to 2/3 of that- slave wages. And I am *shocked* at the amount of indian run consulting shops... there are no americans in engineering anymore... plus, the subtle "sweatshop-ish" feel to the whole discipline.
I have little or no patience for CEOs whining about how the USA is losing its engineering base. Obviously the industry doesn't feel like protecting the US engineering talent pool, because this decimation of the business can only happen with the use of foreign work visas which were supposed to augment talent, not replace it. But anyway, whats done is done. |
