Discussion: Circling the Drain

There is another story on /. regarding the impending demise of the IT industry in America. I find this endlessly fascinating. Stories like this used to pop up once a year, but now they're hitting almost once a month. There was a distinct current of denial in it for a while. There were a lot of chest-thumping "only inferior coders need to worry about this, not uber-mensch like me" posts in the early days. Now a sort of resignation is taking over. It doesn't matter if you're good when a company can get 8 decent coders somewhere else for the price of you. This reality is only recently starting to cut through the arrogance and bravado of the American IT community. This was not supposed to happen to highly skilled white-collar workers. We're suffering the same fate as car manufacturers in the 70's and 80's and we can see it coming. Some people are trying to jump ship and find a new line of work entirely, some are trying finding niches that will survive the exodus of jobs, many others are just hanging on for dear life. It's quite a thing to see..