IBM fund retrains to fight U.S. job drain

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Tough call

My employers over the last decade have heavily outsourced development (never offshored, but that's another story), so I haven't known the programmers on the bench. There is, or was, a lot of Visual Basic and C stuff developed for the client in the first generation client-server stovepipe systems. This round of upgrade moves it fully to the server and accomplishes quite a bit of integration. So the VB and C is being replaced with J2EE, but is it the same programmers or replacement - I just don't know.

I do know that during my more-than-two-decades with integrators and service firms, the employee was left to fend for themselves; a contract ends, or the client's needs change, and the displaced employee had to find another project internally or with another company. We didn't draw enough overhead to pay for retraining, and contracts usually would not allow costs to be passed on to the customer. This program of IBM's is something the SAICs and EDSs of the world probably can't afford - it seems fairly unique in the industry.

The marketers and VPs that I talk to always have their recruiting hats on, but they tell me volume is at an all-time high. I think they are experiencing a net growth in jobs, although undoubtedly not enough to make up for those jettisoned in the dot com bust.

Posted by: IT_User   Posted on: 03/02/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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