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To: Conan who wrote (8240)	1/20/2003 8:58:10 AM
From: J. P.	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 306849

Panic in US over IT job loss report, India cautious hindustantimes.com

To: Conan who wrote (8240)	1/20/2003 5:25:07 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

But Immigration = good is too simplistic an argument. I don't think of it as good or bad or maybe to be more accurate it is both good and bad. What I do know is that as long as people in the US have a standard of living that the majority of the world wants to have it's almost a given that it will continue. The alternative to less expensive labor coming here is companies leaving the US, which has a much worse macro effect. Immigration keeps a lid on wage inflation and everyone benefits from lower inflation, rich and poor. As for engineers having short careers, this is true of many professions. In the field I work in (design, advertising, publishing) if you are 45 and you don't own the company or you don't have some level of power, you can expect to be replaced by someone in their twenties who wants to work 50-60 hour weeks. Most middle aged people don't want to and don't expect to, they think they've earned a high salary and more time off. What almost nobody ever tells you is that your peak earning years are in your thirties and early forties. If you haven't achieved some level of control over your own job by then, you are at the mercy of being replaced by someone younger. There are almost no foreign workers in my field yet the same thing happened to almost everyone I've worked with over the years, as they passed 45 they were replaced. At the height of their careers they found themselves quietly out of a job unless they were already in management or owners of their own firms. Or like me, an expert at a job that is ceasing to exist while I'm still trying to adapt to the current permutation. It's easy to start blaming the H-1Bs for this, but it's been this way in other fields for a long time. People tend to get conservative with age and they are less willing to put in long hours as they get older. Then there is the awful side of rising health insurance. The older your workforce the more the company pays for it's health care costs. Companies don't want to take on older workers with pre-existing health problems. Add in fear of litigation if they decide to fire you later if you can't keep up. There are any number of things working against middle-aged workers. Most of the complaints I've heard about IT people and software engineers being replaced with foreign workers were from people in their forties and fifties. I'm not saying it's right, it just is. Businesses here in the US don't hire for life. If they can find a lower cost solution or someone who will work harder they will take it. Employees in every field have to think of their jobs as a business and treat their continuing education as a capital investment. The days of working for one company or even one field are over. Technology changes rapidly whether you are ready for it or not. I worked in the darkroom with technology which is basically unchanged over the last hundred years, yet a simple digital printer is obsolete in about two years. I have an enlarger in my darkroom that is still in service and it is over fifty years old, but I have computer gear sitting in a heap that is less then five. If the tools are changing this rapidly, just think how fast the labor force has to adapt to that change. It all comes down to employers wanting to hire those that are the most hungry and the rest of the world is a great deal hungrier than we are.