Hey Austin
One of the things is that a lot of the IT work is outsourced to the subcontinent - this has happened massively in the UK, and especially by the US banks in the City. I know, I worked for 'em. A programmer earning $45000 in the UK can't compete with a far eastern person earning $15000 - and well paid locally for that!
A lot of my mates are business analysts who are working on outsourcing projects. there is a reduced need for professionals 'on site'.
Which was why I posed my initial question.
I have good d/b design skills, years of experience in IT in Banks/Financials using iSeries. I'm afraid US work permits are harder to come by than the proverbial snowball in summer (even a UK summer
)
Here is my perspective and I think its a good one.
I am the senior technical person at my firm and that provides financial services. I do high level analyses of competing approaches and lead the technical delivery of the selected approach plus support the other teams in the company and also program artificial intelligence projects. I also do outside consulting looking at firms' cost structures.
My main firm has 7 million customers. We have an IT staff of about 100 people in the US and about the same outside the US plus operations staff of about 200. Many of our inshore staff are from India or the PRC, too.
We lost four good database/java and one good operations people in the last four weeks and all my system admins are getting calls from recruiters. I know I can go into any firm and cut their costs by 25% and I get the hard sell from executives about once a quarter to come help them.
I have a number of friends who were laid off in the last three years. They all went back and got their Java certifications and are employed again. The longest was out of work for 9 months. None of my classmates from college or high school are out of a job.
I can see how if you are stuck in a high tax state things might look bad. But I don't see it from where I sit. I am glad I am in Texas.
Outsourced staff are actually a lot cheaper than you posted. Here is why. It is a service therefore the hiring firm does not have to pay all the overhead required by state and federal regulations. No matching taxes, no workers comp, no unemployment insurance, no HR, no compliance costs, etc. All this works out to about 2.2 x the in-shore worker's salary. So in reality, the cost of outsourcing per resource works out to about 1/10 the total cost. It has to be managed right, and that is the hard part. I do not think it will last for long though as costs for Indian services have doubled in the last three years and Vietname/PRC is starting to show the same trend. But I doubt if it will end in the next 20 years.
Looking at small and medium firm's cash flows the last three years, I find that their biggest overhead items are their 941 non-withholding line entries and workman's compensation/unemployment insurance. For instance, a 20 million dollar firm will pay $500,000 in these areas. And this is in Texas. It far higher in other states. Why have employees if you are taxed to have them?
