CIO.com: No Americans Need Apply
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No Americans Need Apply
Daniel Soong, who lost his programming job to Indian offshore companies, is willing to relocate to India. But Indian officials have told him they don't hire Americans.
BY BEN WORTHEN
DANIEL SOONG GOT his first computer in the fifth grade, a Timex Sinclair that used an audiocassette player for a disk drive and the family's black-and-white television for a monitor. It cost about a hundred dollars at Radio Shack and wasn't good for much more than writing a few snippets of code in Basic. But that was enough to hook him. By the time he was in high school, he was taking calculus and advanced mathematics. He declared computer science as his major after his first semester at Sacramento State.
When he graduated in 1995, information technology was booming. The Internet was on its way to commercialization, and entrepreneurs were looking to capitalize on the growth potential in IT. For Soong, a job in the field was a natural next step on a journey he'd started when he was 10. "I wasn't looking to get rich or anything," he says, just searching for a steady job doing something he loved.
Now age 30, Soong doesn't even have that. He has been out of work since January 2002, when ChevronTexaco outsourced his job to India. And like millions of other Americans, he can't find work in IT. Soong doesn't see his situation improving anytime soon, and you can hear the despair in his voice. "There's no sense of hope," he says. "No hope for college graduates, no hope for people looking for a job, no hope for any of us."
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For the complete story, please go to:
http://cio.com/archive/090103/people_sidebar_1.html
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No Americans Need Apply
Daniel Soong, who lost his programming job to Indian offshore companies, is willing to relocate to India. But Indian officials have told him they don't hire Americans.
BY BEN WORTHEN
DANIEL SOONG GOT his first computer in the fifth grade, a Timex Sinclair that used an audiocassette player for a disk drive and the family's black-and-white television for a monitor. It cost about a hundred dollars at Radio Shack and wasn't good for much more than writing a few snippets of code in Basic. But that was enough to hook him. By the time he was in high school, he was taking calculus and advanced mathematics. He declared computer science as his major after his first semester at Sacramento State.
When he graduated in 1995, information technology was booming. The Internet was on its way to commercialization, and entrepreneurs were looking to capitalize on the growth potential in IT. For Soong, a job in the field was a natural next step on a journey he'd started when he was 10. "I wasn't looking to get rich or anything," he says, just searching for a steady job doing something he loved.
Now age 30, Soong doesn't even have that. He has been out of work since January 2002, when ChevronTexaco outsourced his job to India. And like millions of other Americans, he can't find work in IT. Soong doesn't see his situation improving anytime soon, and you can hear the despair in his voice. "There's no sense of hope," he says. "No hope for college graduates, no hope for people looking for a job, no hope for any of us."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the complete story, please go to:
http://cio.com/archive/090103/people_sidebar_1.html
