Have you noticed that nobody has developed the right shorthand to refer to this, the first decade of the third Millennium? The best I've seen is John Perry Barlow's "the uh-ohs" which does a good job capturing most peoples experience since 2000. But we've has the 50's, 50's, 70's, 80's and 90's (in my lifetime) -- what do we call this current decade?
From my perspective, this has been a pretty dark era in terms of people being able to make progress. Unless your a Wall Street financial engineer or hedge fund huckster, or a wingnut welfare analyst at the AEI, it's been challenging to find steady footing -- in business and in life.
This has been a dark decade for a cadre of professionals who are now in or approaching middle age -- the symbol analysts who unleashed the most successful and sustained increase in productivity in American history. The 90's were an era of unprecedented acceleration of business processes, and GDP growth mirrored that growth in productivity. Of course the overall societal trend toward greater wealth concentration that started with Reagan in the 80's continued -- though slowing slightly -- but the sense was that the bigger pie that we were creating through creative adaptation of new technologies and the general adaptability and energy of the professional workforce in the US would ultimately benefit all. Or so that was my belief.
Of course as The Onion pronounced on January 17, 2001, "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over." Although the underlying forces that have resulted a large and growing number of IT workers in facing a future of sustained, systemic underemployment are not entirely political, they do result from the same shortsightedness and flat out greed that has infected the "leadership class" in this country. Employees no longer became a resource to invest in, they became costs to be cut. The financial engineering mindset saw assets and cashflow merely as tools to be leveraged into profit -- not investments in plants and equipment. How much of the recent record boom in corporate profit growth has resulted from reinvesting cash into speculative instruments that have paid off? I suspect a large portion.
What this says is that companies that used to make money by building and selling things, now make money primarily on reinvesting their cashflow and reaping the profits. Of course there's a downside to all this apparently riskless profit -- the world IS inherently risky )which some seems to have overlooked) -- and when risk intervenes, havoc ensues. Corporations drunk on fat profits -- which they kept reinvesting in exotic financial instruments after already making cash from labor market arbitrage -- suddenly have to pay the piper. The result? MORE layoffs.
We are caught in a perverse, unprecedented cycle of wealth concentration. It seems to be the raison d'etre for both corporations and the government at this point. It's a zombie philosophy born in the bowels of places like the AEI and Club of Growth, and has infected the brains of far too many in the "leadership class".
My point is this: I've has my own 10 month odyssey of un/underemployment -- not through outsourcing, but in the inability to convert solid experience into stable consulting work. I chose the independent path, and I guess I have to follow it through, because there are very few good paying jobs for experienced IT generalists in today's market. These positions haven't necessarily been outsourced; they've just been cut. There's no room for somebody with the skills to step back and analyze, to take stock, to make connections among disparate, disconnected pieces of information -- the kind of thinking that spurs creativity of innovation. That's R&D, and that's been outsourced too.
The problem I see is that an increasing number of corporations are but brittle shells, dependent on lawyers and financial engineers to maintain market advantage while maximizing their capacity to exploit. Of course this leaved them vulnerable to acquisition by "vulture" funds, which even further zombify them, stripping away all that expensive and unnecessary patina of "culture" that seems so quaint.