After reading the recent article on Microsoft’s H1B VISA pink slips. You can read the complete article here I was compelled to write this post.
Things seem to be getting more and more grim on the economic front. From the perspective of the huge, multi-national tech corporations who have already seen their first bubble go bust, this is another blow.
Hemorrhaging cash and unable to access credit to fuel entrepreneurial efforts, many small and mid size companies are sure to be engaging in more and more layoffs in the future. As smart people who have lived through hard times know, the only thing they can’t take away is your skills.
Those who work in the IT field may want to start looking somewhere other than job placement agencies, headhunters and temp agencies for work. In fact, it may be a good time to innovate an entirely new model of doing business. Tech did it once already, with the web. It seems that the coffers of the corporations are not a reliable source of pay anymore.
Time to innovate again.
Many of the IT companies have been in a constant mode of complaining about the outsourcing of tech jobs overseas and the effect that outsourcing has had on American workers and their wages. The remedy for this situation doesn’t seem to be forthcoming from the companies who stand to profit from that outsourcing.
The remedy is to be found in the creative application of the skills so many people have obtained working in the tech industry. An oracle programmer can explore working on Oracle’s latest Fusion technology or Oracle Apps Release 12, where there is a lot of demand in these times,
A PHP programmer can still program PHP whether they have a regular job or not.
The other day I was at the Stanford’s Vlab venture networking meeting where I met four amazing entrepreneurs who shared their experiences about building their startups. Each one of them had a similar story to tell. They all more or less started their companies from their apartments.
It used to be a selling point that technology made the home office the new workplace. At one time, this was mostly marketing fluff. Today, it’s very real. Your blackberry, cell phone, laptop, and broadband connection all constitute the resources offered to employees by most employers. Your apartment is probably bigger than your cubicle. These technology resources are incredibly cheap these days and easy to come by.
Maybe, instead of lamenting the end of the economy as we know it, it’s time to build something new. Those who have worked in the trenches of IT, who are veterans of the first fall of the tech market and who have suffered the constant changes in employment characteristic of programmers and IT pros may, if they take the time, see a pattern in this data:
The only thing one can rely on is the skill of the people who build the technology. Skills always have value.