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Technology Stocks : IFMX - Investment Discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: @jim who wrote (10176)	4/7/1998 4:29:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

Jim, Guess I pushed all your buttons, too. Sorry. When you said the "Informix" name was so bad an engineer must have chosen it, and that a marketing person never could have, you pushed mine. Anyway, lets move on. One note: You said: "On the other hand, the world is changing and companies are looking for IT superstars and starting to pay them what they are worth." This is flat wrong. Since in 1960's, in inflation adjusted terms, the salary of senior programmers has fallen around 50%. Companies hire the young and anyone else they can get to work cheap and discard their senior people. They just gave work permits to another 50 thousand engineers from overseas, additional grants to train more programmers to the universities, and programmers over forty are often having to find (mostly have found) work in other, sometimes less well paid areas. Meanwhile as much work as possible is being sent to code farms in India, Manila, and elsewhere. The theme is not quality, nor preserving American careers, families and jobs, it is cost cutting. The only thing that keeps this disaster from being noisier is that these are indeed intelligent and flexible people who are able to start businesses and otherwise make it fairly easily, in the main, in less technical positions. Fortunately I have not had to do this yet. But I am preparing my way for the seemingly inevitable transition to other work, although I could be a productive engineer for another 30 years. There is nothing good for the quality of technology the user gets from this. Most programs continue to be written by people with insufficient experience to bring in projects bug-free and on time. So products come out buggy, because they need to be on time. Meanwhile people who need to save for retirement (at the age of 70 plus) are being displaced by people who aren't being paid enough to support the Social Security system. This probably saves 10% at the bottom line on projects on the face of it, but in the end it will be very expensive. These are very serious issues and much larger than our little spat. Cheers, Chaz You object to the word 'suits'? Take it up with the culture at large. It's short for 'empty suits', by the way, not anyone wearing a suit.