Seriously though, good for you man. I hope your good fortune continues, but surely you can’t think the postition you are in is typical or any indicator to wages going forward into GD2?
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Software geeks like SDEngineer won’t have massive issues wrto foreign competition. Because innovation happens everywhere and the startup cost to run a software business is significantly less than say a auto manufacturer worker or even a hardware engineer or a biotech engineer.
The formula for success in software engineering is not how well your write software, but how creative you can be and how unlazy you are in keeping up to be the top of your field. Getting laidoff is part of life, and that sometimes is a good thing for software geeks, because it’s motivation to hunker down and go find yourself a niche market to play.
Someone who is embedded software geek like SDEngineer could be quickly retrained (self trained via internet reading material) into an application developer that could in spam multiple industries from high tech to government jobs to health care to etc. There might be occasional blip in employment here an there, but until we evolve into biological computational devices, flipping bits 0 and 1’s isn’t going away anytime soon.
Consider this as opposed to an auto worker, who depends on the existence of a factory, a complex product…A auto worker simply does not possess skills that can easily transfer into a small business or home based business, because of all the infrastructure that is needed.
The fact is, working at a big cushy software company, you quickly realize how inefficient big companies become in innovating. This is largely in part because you have a bunch of non-techies often that don’t understand what to do and piss time and money all bullshit. The unique aspect of software, is that since the cost of entry is so low, there isn’t really steep curves to build innovative products/services. That’s why big software companies usually gobble up smaller mom/pop software shops…Because these smaller shops can out innovate a 500 pound pig anyday.
10 years ago, it was non-trivial to stand up an enterprise software business.
These days, cost is not an issue. Hardware/services to do it is completely commoditized. You don’t need to run find a datacenter, hire a bunch of operations folks to man your machines….Heck, for initial prototypes and proof of concepts, you could run everything an virtualized cloud computing hardware…Something like Amazon EC2 http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ …Some folks I know run small enterprises on EC2.
Part of the reason for america’s issues is until this year, engineering enrollment in universities actually declined. Call it fear of outsourcing, or more so, as some Stanford students were quoted “I’d rather get paid a hell of lot more with an MBA and work on wall street with Real Estate Enterprises”…Ironic…Inside,I kinda can’t help think recently these days “yeah, how do you them mba’s now, byatch?” Engineering enrollment was up this year…Go figure.
