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

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (11978)	9/29/1998 11:52:00 PM
From: AmericanDane	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14631

Uh, anyone have something to say about IFMX?

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (11978)	9/30/1998 4:26:00 AM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 14631

>>> Are you really trying to say that the our standard of living was better when America had huge tariffs to discourage economic trade?<<< It's a little hard to compare the past with the present. However, I think that I would rather be poor or working class in Europe than here. I think the middle classes get a draw. Ditto for Japan. And they all have careful trade policies. I'd also note that in some areas we have huge tariffs and other barriers and prohibitions right now. Out there in the real world we are known as the world's biggest suckers. Sure you need a lot of trade. All you have to do is make sure it works both ways, which we don't do. >>>you sound almost like a pre-Adam-Smith Actually, more like the first Adam Smith, whom I presume you refer to. Read his books, carefully. He was no blind apostle of free trade or the efficient market, but more of a skeptic, like myself. >>>We both know that you don't know what is going on in "many places" at this level of detail, I'm a contractor, and so work in a fair number of places. My friends are contractors, and I'm active in groups like IEEE, IICS and ACM SIGGRAPH, so I have a pretty good seat from which to observe all this. You define "many places" for me, if you wish. >>> How big is the percentage and according to whom? This sounds like abuse and a good point... It was a Rusty Johnson post that had the link to a graph of this, a few days ago. As I recall it, physical therapists was the second largest specific category after programmers, and was 15-30% of the pie, maybe 20%, but I am relying here on a dim visual memory of what that chart looked like from a few days ago. Check Rusty's profile for the post. As far as your post about finding it hard to hire folks goes, I would just say hire now. Not three months ago, not three months from now, but now. As far a Silicon Valley goes, some of the best programmers are moving away. Why? 100K a year is not enough to buy a house in Palo Alto, where they run 500K+ now. I know several people who are married with kids who have moved to Madison, WI, for instance, which is becoming a computer programming center. Salary- 70K, house: 100K. You figure it out. There are even people moving to New York because it's a better deal on housing versus salary. Meanwhile, I also know guys from overseas who share apartments their firms get for them. No wife, no kids, they think this is heaven. This has been going on for a while. I used to work for a contract outfit in the Pacific Northwest that hired lots of cheap overseas programmers. They bought apartment buildings to house them, stacked them in there three to an apartment, and paid them 20K a year. Of course that was ten years ago. Maybe now they get 30K. Talk about chronic labor shortages in programming is what I find overly anecdotal. As is the idea that every laid off defense worker is a 'sob-story engineer.' Try this: Put an ad in the paper at a reasonable salary for the area, say you only want 5 years experience, and offer as a hiring bonus the percentage of salary you normally give to the recruiting firm. That would be about 40 grand? I guarentee applicants. :-) Cheers, Chaz P.S. I will predict this: I don't think there is any way to stop this trend, as telecommuting makes it possible to do the work overseas with no need for a visa at all. So most American based consulting firms and development firms are going out of business in the long run. The industry recently made enough donations to get the big CS schools like Berkeley to ramp up their CS grad output way above replacement levels, and in addition the foreign universities are now able to train pretty well in many cases. All of this will have a dramatic effect on software development, as a huge portion of ordinary development moves overseas. The US-made software business is going to be like the US-made clothing business - niches only. Inflation adjusted salaries for programmers have been dropping since 1970, and they will continue to do so.

To: Hardly B. Solipsist who wrote (11978)	9/30/1998 3:59:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14631

Hardly <OT on this H1-B Visa issue>, Just to talk specifics, I will say this. For many years the primary programming language used inside (and outside) Oracle to develop the apps had no I/O and no debugging functionality at all (this is PL/SQL). I dont need to tell you technical types how long it takes to develop programs in a language with no I/O or debugger vs. one that does. If Oracle really needed to improve their productivity of the programmers they do have, they would have fixed their tools... put some bodies on the actual software development process which hasnt changed in 30 years. They never did that. Instead Oracle tried to hire more and more programmers to pump stuff out with a bad toolset. The point Im trying to make here is that the salaries of programming staff is low enough - currently - to support this kind of "throw bodies at it" mentality. So, I dont buy the Oracle claim that there are not enough workers (no matter what we are willing to pay) and we need to go overseas. Its shortsighted mgmt plain and simple.