I read this and I think it just sucks to see when a bad economy leaves educated people without a decent job.

Reminds me of a study I read in a Mexican magazine that in 2006-2010 there are going to be 130000 medical doctors unemployed in Mexico. I am a doctor!

The future looks dark...

Don't worry, mano, I don't think one of them it's going to be you.

A lot of press blames "offshoreing" but there is another factor which also played in the ~1990 job slump. Companies found that if they lay off 10% of their employees the rest will be so fearful of their job that they will work the extra hours to make up for the missing people.

I am confident that US HMO's are working on how to send patients to Mexican hospitals, but for long term care they may have to go to the Phillipines or China. How can medicine NOT work like the rest of the economy in the long run? Already medical transcription and radiology is done at a distance over internet.

This is nothing new, industry left for overseas a while back, why should this be any different? Computer science is dead in the US.

I'm enrolled in a information science technology(IST) program, which is (or so I am told) the successor to comp sci. They beat the "programming is dead, its going to India. Anybody can do it" thing into us, so it really doesn't suprise me.

"Merchants know no country" - Thomas Jefferson

Hi,
I am from India. But here I am in the US pursuing my masters degree. I have seen both the worlds. I know what's true and what's not. Did someone say all programming jobs have gone to India? Well, let me tell you folks that only the back-end jobs have gone abroad. All programmers really do in India is routine maintenance work, small-scale debugging and all the other "non-glorious" aspects of programming. The real programming, the real research is still done in the US. Does anyone really think that the US companies or the US government will allow other countries to beat them when it comes to technology? So, please lay your worries aside. Things are not as bad as they seem .

I believe this is changing now, rohangc.
I have been reading for quite some time now that tech companies ARE moving research and development jobs over to China, Brasil and mainly India.

So, you might be in the wrong place now...

In fact, in the online magazine I got the article from they have been talking about that for a while.

It will sure be good, I guess, for some third-world countries (like my own).
It's kind of like Japan and Korea that have rised up because of early technology "exposure" that lead to a realization that research is the only way to create a powerful and durable economy.

But what I meant is not along the lines of "jobs are moving here and there". It's what I originally said, that is becoming very hard in some countries to make a decent living even when having a college degree.

I know exactly what you mean. In fact, I have gone through this myself. I struggled hard to find myself a decent job in India after getting my bachelor's degree. Then I decided to do my masters in the US (I am a student of Mechanical Engineering, not computer science). Now, it seems that things are tough here in the US. It looks like hardly any research is taking place here, which might be due to the bad economy. But I should say that I am in a fix. I don't know whether to be happy or sad.

The biotech sector is very depressed as well. Much R&D and manufacturing is being offshored to "Second-tier" countries with good general educational systems and less expensive standards of living (Canada, Ireland, others). For jobs left in the states, recruiting companies are becoming exceedingly popular, even in companies that have high quality in-house HR.
The rebuttal is that standards of living will eventually drop in the US and become equalized to the point that moving production and R&D offshore will be more expensive than it is worth. This appears to me as if it will take quite some time, and so the US employment market will be bled slowly dry.

I think the lesson to be learned is if you are in the physical or life sciences in college now, get an internship in your field if at all humanly possible, otherwise you will have a hard time getting an industrial position until the job market improves.

Otherwise you will be stuck trying to apply for the few government jobs availible to you, and those inevitably have the most complex and obscure application processes known to man.