Unemployment rates are severely under tracked.

[HappySqurriel]

richardhutnik said:

HappySqurriel said:

 

Being that the unemployment rate for Computer and mathematical occupations was 5.1% in June 2010 I think the loss of those jobs to India is heavily overstated.

(http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea30.pdf)

I don’t doubt that currently far too many students are graduating from post-secondary institutions and working in fields completely unrelated to their education; but if you actually looked at the data you would realize that these are mostly individuals graduating from fields where there is no clear career path in the first place. Unemployment among Computer Science, Engineering, and Management graduates (and some graduates from the natural sciences) are actually very low; but degrees in the Social Sciences, Humanities and many of the Fine Arts end up leading people to work as baristas at Starbucks.

The beauty of some degree fields (Computer Science is one I know this applies to) is that even graduating more individuals than the field requires is not necessarily a bad thing, because some people who have obtained a worthwhile education in these fields will create the jobs for the rest of the graduates. As an example of what I mean, if you take software developers who have several years of experience and take away their jobs a significant portion of them will start their own projects/companies, and of those companies a significant portion will be successful enough to sustain the individual who started them, and of those self-sustaining projects/companies a significant portion will be exceptionally successful.

The reality of the computer field is this: The earnings differential between a BS and a Masters degree is the LEAST of any fields.  In addition to this, it changes so rapidly, that employers will tend towards people who worked with the most recent version.  The field is also increasingly going the contractor route, and if you don't have the right skill mix, you get serious put behind the eight ball.  Here are the words from multiple recruiters in the IT industry: If you have been out of work over 6 months, they can't place you (your career is over).  And if you end up with a company like IBM, you get internal technology you work with that has little value.  Another IT recruiter said this about the industry: it is either feast or famine. 

I would also say the belief that somehow excess labor will create jobs, is pushing it.  It is like R&D spending.  In it, you hope something comes through.

I don’t know where you’re getting your information from, but it is not representative of what I have seen as a software developer. I work with an individual who was hired after a 2 year sabbatical, most companies seem to be reluctant to adopt technologies which are not well established (read: several years old), and (as silly as it sounds) knowing obsolete technologies seems to be a great way to find work; there are always postings for individuals who know COBOL or can maintain/extend a java servlets/JSP application, but very few companies are looking for people who have experience with modern/new APIs.

Even on the support side, you’re far more likely to walk into a company that is running Windows XP on their desktop then Windows Vista or Windows 7; and more often than not the software these companies are running will be several iterations behind the latest version because of the costs/risks associated with upgrading across an entire company