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The fixed quantity of programming fallacy

Ever since I struck the chords of some of my libertarian friends with my Libertarian Alliance piece entitled The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy, I and several of the friends have been on the lookout for new uses for the phrase “fixed quantity of [insert new something whose quantity is not fixed] fallacy”. Well, here is another. See title above.

The beauty of the FQ?F is that all you have to do is state it. Much of the argument is made simply with the phrase. Jobs. Happiness. Travel. Linoleum. Blogging …

The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it. And when economists talk about demand, they are not merely discussing potential consumers standing about with stupid plackards and stamping their feet and getting in a rage – as in political ‘demand’ – they mean actual ‘effective’ demand, demand that counts for something, demand with cash to back it up.

Just to get the linking thing out of the way, I here give thanks to two recent articles which stirred me into saying what follows, one the already much linked-to Wired piece about how Indian programmers are now turning Silicon Valley into a dust bowl, and the other being a piece in today’s New York Times in which you can see the beginnings of the dawning light in the Western Official Mind that this might not all be entirely bad news after all.

So, let us think about this Fixed Quantity of Programming Fallacy. It applies, of course, to the row now raging about the way that those sneaky Indians are stealing all our – I use the words “sneaky”, “stealing” and “our” ironically – computer programming jobs.

Now I do not doubt that there are many computer programmers in the West who will, in the short run and maybe if they can find nothing else to do in the longer run as well, suffer severely. But it is also true that the availability to the West of much cheaper Indian programming power will create massive new economic opportunities in the West, and everywhere else.

Basically, what it means is that Western computer experts will have to stop writing programmes and start, well, demanding them. In less florid language, they will have to switch from writing programmes to writing specifications for programmes, from making programmes to saying what a new programme must do.

At the moment it is simply assumed that ‘writing a computer programme’ is something that only someone very rich can afford to finance. Suppose you have an idea for a computer programme, for something you want your computer to do, which you would think it could do, but which it now, apparently, cannot do. Well, your first step will be to check if a programme along the lines you envisage already exists, so you ask around. On the internet. At parties. You ask your nine-year-old daughter if you are lucky enough to have one. But what if the programme you want does not exist? What if it does exist, but will cost you half a million quid to get anywhere near? Or what if there is a regular programme which ought to include the feature you want, but does not, and you want someone to cobble it together for you and stick it on the original programme, and then not only use this thing yourself but also sell it (or sell your knowledge of it Linux style) to anyone else you can interest in it?

But what if you are a regular person, rather than some ‘venture capitalist’ with more money than God? As of about one year ago, you then hit a blank wall. Could you hire a programmer and tell him what you want? Good luck mate. Chances are your programmer would say something like: “[noise made by car engine mender contemplating malfunctioning car engine] … well it might work, I suppose. But I really can’t be sure.” Plus, of course, inevitably: “And it’ll cost you.” You want a programme? It will cost you but it will not work.

But now all that changes. As I say, as soon as you read the heading of this posting you probably started thinking along the lines I am just about to argue, but bear with me, while I spell out what now happens, just to make the point unmistakably, to those who are not now as keen to get all this as you are.

You announce your new programme which you have ‘invented’ (i.e. you say what you want it to do) and instead of a silent chorus of contemptuous and happily employed Ferrari drivers all saying: “[noisy intake of breath, malfunctioning car engine etc.]”, you get an instant queue of a thousand Indians at your virtual door, all saying they will do it for less than all the other guys, and quicker, and better. Instead of a bunch of arseholes in expensive suits wanting fifty grand upfront, you’ve got this crazed guy from Mumbai of whatever they call it now saying he will have it on your desk by next Friday for fifty single solitary separate pounds. Well, he’s probably deluding himself, and it will end up costing nearer a hundred and will have bugs in it at first, and even the bug-ridden version 1.0 won’t be ready until the following Tuesday afternoon (damn these duplicitous good-for-nothing Indians), but what the hell? What have you got to lose? And a whole new industry is born.

Okay, this will all take a bit of organising. The usual cowboys and fantasists will have to be weeded out, as happens with all new-born markets. But basically what we are talking about here is a whole new Golden Age of computerised creativity. And if you are one of those Ferrari guys, you can get in on it all, not by going to Washington to ‘defend’ your now non-existent existing job (if you get my drift), but by making a new job for yourself thinking of new things for computers to do, and by finding out who the really smart, good, cheap Indians are, as opposed to the incompetent fantasists. Maybe you could go over there and get in on all this by setting up shop in Mumbai, making use of your knowledge of Western Culture. You know better than other people what the ‘next’ programmes ought to consist of, if only the cost of writing the damn things could be a bit less. Well, guess what, it just got a lot less. So get thinking, and get organising.

The point about the Fixed Quantity of [fill in the blank] Fallacy is that people facing a price plummet spot one consequence immediately which is a very definite win-lose situation, but they fail utterly to spot the other massively more huge benefit, which is an equally definite and far bigger win-win situation. Yes, it is true, a lot of programming jobs are already disappearing in places like Silicon Valley, which is nasty. And yes it is true that the costs of existing programming activities, the ones that were going to happen anyway only more expensively, will go down, which is nice. But think of all the fantastic things which are now becoming possible, which before would not have been possible at all, for anyone, thanks to those clever and industrious Indians. Many, many more specifying, inventing, imagining jobs are going to become viable as a result of the Indian Programming Miracle, not just in the temporarily depressed parts of high-tech USA, but everywhere.

And, as we already know, the ‘economic impact’ of computers is absolutely not confined to the mere job of building and programming them and the money that changes hands during all that. Just imagine what computers, thanks to these wonderful Indians, are now going to do?

27 comments to The fixed quantity of programming fallacy

  • Bombadil

    The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it.

    Small bit of nitpickery – in economic terms, ‘demand’ is the amount of a good or service that will be consumed at any price … its a curve, with price at one axis. That means price is already factored into ‘demand’. Therefore, changing the price doesn’t change the demand at all – it merely moves you along the curve to a different point.

    Better to say: “The point is that simply altering the price of something will cause its consumption to increase or decrease.”

  • mike

    “The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it.” – No, changing the price changes the QUANTITY demanded. Changing anything else changes demand.

    Pedantic mode off.

  • Who says economists ain’t fun?

  • Rob Read

    The Technical Spec/Design IS the programming part, all the rest is code-monkeying.

    But then very few people can “program” IMHO…

  • Monsyne Dragon

    I don’t worry about this sort of stuff (I do enterprise systems programming for a living) If there is any fundamental rule in programming, it is that more programs mean more programmers. Computers are universal machines, the demand for programs (and programming) is almost literally infinate, in the long run.

    The more code you have out there, the more programmers you will need to maintain it, integrate it with other code, etc. The only thing that slows down the growth of the general codebase out there is costs of development of new systems.

    Besides, I think Silicon valley has more to worry about Austin, Texas, etc, at least to begin with. S.V. is horribly expensive, and that drives up the cost of salaries.

  • David Gillies

    I’m not so sure that moving development to India etc. is going to drop the total cost of acquisition of software all that much. The real cost of writing software, per Rob Read, is design, not implementation. And even if the cost of creating software drops ten-fold, that still leaves it out of the reach of most people (right now, software is seriously expensive – figure on $100,000 – $300,000 for each man-year of work that goes into it).

  • ed

    Hmmm.

    1. More programs = more programmers *where*?
    If they’re in India that doesn’t look so good for the domestic UK programmers then does it?

    2. More programmers = more demand.
    Umm. Demand for what? Business software? So in essence what you’re implying is that more programmers in India will result in more demand for more programmers in India. Since the cost issues still apply to use of domestic programmers. So it still doesn’t look good for domestic UK programmers does it? After all if it costs far more to use a UK programmer than it does to use 3 Indian programmers, then increasing the number of UK programmers doesn’t seem to make much sense then eh? On the other hand perhaps it does. Maybe the thing to do is convince about 200,000 college students in the UK to convert to a CS degree and see what happens.

    If they all end up jobless or flipping burgers, we’ll take that answer as a “no”.

    3. So if you change the price then demand will rise?
    Ok. So let’s say I create a company in India that employs 1,000 Indian programmers for the same cost of 250 UK programmers. Now I’ll get a lot of demand for my programmers because of the lower cost ( lower cost = more demand ).

    So how will this result in more work for UK programmers? Couldn’t I simply hire more Indian programmers? Aren’t my costs still far lower than the UK’s? So this does what to the UK programmers? In order for UK programmers to compete, won’t the costs have to drop? How can costs drop sufficiently in country with labor laws and an expensive welfare state? And, while we’re at it, just how politically dangerous is it to suggest that people making $50k per year are actually better off making $10k per year?

    That’s quite a sell job btw.

    Rather curious.

    ed

  • ed

    “Basically, what it means is that Western computer experts will have to stop writing programmes and start, well, demanding them. In less florid language, they will have to switch from writing programmes to writing specifications for programmes, from making programmes to saying what a new programme must do.”

    An amazing statement.

    Look. I could get all sarcastic and point out the fallacies in that sentence but I’ll avoid that. Instead I have only only this to say:

    Your sentence implies that Indians are incapable of taking over the job of designing, writing specifications for programs and “demanding” these programs.

    If it doesn’t imply this then please explain why Indian analysts couldn’t do the same job for, well, less money.

    btw the term “programmer’ does not mean a low-skill code monkey. It’s more a of a generic term. The only people who consider programmers to be code monkies are novice analysts who want to differentiate themselves.

    *shrug* answers please.

    ed

  • Ed:

    To answer your second question first, its not that Indian programmers are incapable of ‘designing’ software; its just that the Indian software industry has not yet reached that evolutionary stage. They will climb the value chain – if they have any sense – which is when the lower cost code-monkey work will move off to a cheaper destination; in fact, that process has already started. Ex-programmers in the UK/Us in the meantime will climb further up the food chain, and concentrate on better-paid higher-level thinking work. At my job, we are currently outsourcing some stuff to contractors – in the UK and India – and I find I now have the bandwidth to work on that niggling design issue I have been thinking about for ages. My boss, in the meantime, is now designing the next generation network architecture, instead of working on an itty-bitty feature enhancement. Greater possibility for innovation is the whole point of globalisation.

    Going back to your first comment, you could legislate to stop call-centre and code monkey jobs from going out – as some US states are doing. But in a capitalist economy, people will only pay what a job is worth. So the lower-value jobs are kept in, but wages are lowered and so are living standards. Worse, these workers are stuck in these labour-intensive jobs, so they have no time or incentive to upgrade their skills and move on to better-paying, higher-value jobs.

  • rsasko

    This is where free trade economic theory meets real life. Of course globalisation will mean more wealth for everyone…eventually. The question everyone should be asking is whether the rising tide will “lift all boats” before the rising waters sink a whole lot of middle class.

    In the 1980’s, when the traditional smoke-stack industries were under assault, many went back to school and went into higher tech computers, telecommunications, informational technology, etc. What are all of the people that are being affected now and in the coming years supposed do go into? At this point, serving coffee at Starbuck’s for $7 an hour seems to be a popular “choice”.

    If job out-sourcing in higher tech isn’t slowed down enough so the middle class can cope, there is going to be one heck of a backlash against free trade.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Excellent stuff, Brian. Of course one of the most useful applications of the fixed wealth (insert) fallacy is education itself. Opponents of private education claim that privately, and usually better, educated folk are someone “stealing” opportunities from state-educated folk. This of course implies that opportunities are fixed. If they were, then the complainers might have a point.

    Rsasko above has a point in that the benefits of free enterprise and outsourcing will be lost on the victims unless economic growth can offer a sufficient number of alternatives to ease the transitional pain. It must be tough, if you have learned computing skills in order to get ahead in a new field, to witness such skills being made useless overnight.

    But pretending that protectionism can be the answer is just dumb.

  • ed

    “To answer your second question first, its not that Indian programmers are incapable of ‘designing’ software; its just that the Indian software industry has not yet reached that evolutionary stage.”

    But I think we do agree that the Indian IT industry will reach that step very very quickly. It really depends on the technologies involved, experienced acquired and opportunities for challenge and growth. Once that trifecta hits it’s stride, India will absorb even more of what IT remains. In essence then we haven’t yet seen the maximum capacity of white-collar offshoring that India can handle. With 1.2 billion people, I expect that India could absorb probably every single white-collar job in American without hardly a burp.

    Which means, to me at least, that there’s literally no end in sight to this process.

    “Ex-programmers in the UK/Us in the meantime will climb further up the food chain, and concentrate on better-paid higher-level thinking work.”

    Really? But what about that part of the Indian IT industry that is entering into the design/analysis portion of IT? Wouldn’t they begin to do that as well? And if the cost/benefit analysis continues to hold true, then wouldn’t the existing design/analysis jobs simply move offshore as well? Would you then ascend to the “next” phase of your career?

    Which is *what* exactly?

    “Worse, these workers are stuck in these labour-intensive jobs, so they have no time or incentive to upgrade their skills and move on to better-paying, higher-value jobs.”

    Aren’t you making a substantial assumption that there are in fact “high-value jobs” available? Isn’t the IT industry, as an example, essentially a career pyramid where the most junior jobs are at the base, and thus constitutes a large percentage of available IT jobs. As you ascend the pyramid the requirements for each job grow intensively greater, along with the reward, but encompass fewer and fewer positions. I.e. there are far fewer CIO’s than junior programmers.

    So, for an example in IT, junior level jobs have been offshored.

    Intermediate coding jobs are being/have been offshored.

    Design/Analysis jobs are going to be offshored.

    What is left? And, if there actually is something left, how could someone graduating today ascend that same pyramid?

    ed

  • Ed,

    You’re assuming the Fixed Structure Of Career Pyramid Fallacy.

  • ed

    *shrug* you might be right “Squander Two”. But the only defense I have is that I have never seen in my 2.5 decades of professional programming anyone attaining a successful senior level career without having paid for it in the lower levels. The experience gained is just too valuable. Perhaps it could be gained through a school project, but I doubt it.

    But what the heck. If it truly is a fallacy then perhaps you could explain how someone, with minimal experience, achieve that kind of jump? Just detail it out, step by step. I’d like to know so I could pass this information on to some people I know who can’t get IT jobs.

    Being serious here, not sarcastic.

    ed

  • Bombadil

    I work for a major software company, and I have had the priviledge of working with Indian IT pros both here in the United States and remotely with teams in India.

    My first point:
    The only comparative advantage Indian IT has over Western IT is their lower wage structure – thats it. They aren’t smarter, they don’t work harder or longer hours, they aren’t more frugal.

    Consider this: an American programmer makes, on average, about $75k (annual). Average wage is approx. $25k (annual) (very rough numbers, I know). So an American programmer makes 3x the average wage.

    An Indian programmer makes $12k (annual). The average Indian wage is $500 (annual). Therefore the Indian programmer makes 24x the average wage. Now who is more frugal, etc?

    All the other stuff, about how Indians are smarter or how they have superior IT processes, etc. is either ignorance or reflex racism. They aren’t worse – but they aren’t better either.

    So as more and more IT jobs move to India, prices for scarce goods and services there will start to rise. Indian programmers will begin to demand higher wages, and their comparative advantage will decrease. The jobs may not return to the US, but they won’t stay in India either.

    My second point:
    all the features in the original spec rarely if ever make it into the released product. As a general rule, I believe that if code can be produced for, say, one third of the cost (allowing for some inefficencies in the process of managing code teams spanning continents) then more features will make it into the final product – but just as much money will be spent on the development process.

    And some sorts of IT really can’t be outsourced. For example, businesses in the US are going to need local computers. That means networks to service those local computers. So network admins, lab managers, sysadmins etc. are going to have to be local. Can Indians do these jobs? Certainly … but they have to live here, and when they do, their comparative advantage disappears.

    One interesting “advantage” that I haven’t heard anyone mention: both Indian IT companies and Indian IT pros seem very comfortable (in my experience) explicitly hiring only Indians – while Western companies tend not to hire that way. This might give Indian coders a market advantage even in the West.

  • Jonathan L

    With 1.2 billion people, I expect that India could absorb probably every single white-collar job in American without hardly a burp.

    One of the biggest misunderstandings about India is that somehow they have jumped the smokestack part of economic development and gone straight to the network economy. Wake up people, most Indians can’t read and write. Just a very small percentage of Indians have the education to compete on a global scale. The idea that they can “steal” all our white collar jobs is ludicrous.

    India is a very backward country run by a bunch of incompetent socialists (national socialists?). Despite recent changes they still have a level of regulation that even the EU would baulk at. The percentage of workers employed in the registered economy is less than 10%.

    Hopefully the success of the IT industry will force the pace of change, create demand for infrastructure and greater educational opportunity. Unfortunately politicians are more likely to puff their chests up and pretend that they had some part in the creation of this success, regulate it and tax it to death.

    As for those suffering in the UK, US and elsewhere, blaming Indians and Chinese for stealing our jobs is stupid. The real culprits are the tax and regulate brigade, who have made the creation of replacement jobs all but impossible.

  • Rick

    In the 1950’s, every American knew that the U.S.S.R. would soon overtake the tired old U.S. and dominate the world economically. They were producing more steel, soon would produce more oil, and launched a satelite before we could. Nobel prize winning economists predicted, in their textbooks, that the U.S.S.R. would soon overtake the U.S. economically. We even had a song, cheerfully lamenting our imminent demise.

    Meanwhile, if you wanted to buy cheap products, both in the sense of low price and crappy quality, you only had to look for the “made in Japan” label. “Made in the U.S.A.” assured you of the highest quality. Nothing was made in China.

    By 1980 Americans had forgotten that the U.S.S.R. ever had an economy. Those basket-case Communists couldn’t even feed themselves. But the Japanese were about to take over the world. The islands of Japan soon had a real estate market value easily exceeding the value of all the land comprising the U.S., and their stock market was worth more than ours as well. They made everything better than we did, and for a lower price too. It was also noted that Japan produced many more programmers per year than the U.S., so they would inevitably take over the information processing industry. Despite having a much smaller total population that the U.S., economists all agreed that Japan would soon have a greater G.D.P. than the U.S. The only debate was whether Japan would pass the U.S. before the year 2000 or after.

    Now, in 2004, nobody talks about Japan, except to wonder if they will ever pull out of their depression. But we all know that China and India are about to take over the world. China will manufacture everything that the world can possibly consume, and India will program all the computers, producing an infinite supply of genius engineers from the magical IIT’s.

    The sky has been falling all my life, just for different reasons at different times. But I do notice one thing. Life has gotten cheaper and better in the U.S., Japan, China, India, and probably even in Russia. How puzzling.

  • ed

    Amusing but:

    1. People thought the USSR was an economic powerhouse because it was. It stopped being so when accumulated corruption eventually killed it.

    2. Japan was a powerhouse because of it’s industry. What dragged Japan down was due to the Japanese banks making enormous NPL’s due to overinflated land appraisals, for one thing. Japan’s banking system is still causing problems.

    3. China is an economic powerhouse with an annual GDP growth rate of 9.1%. It might be dragged down by it’s completely corrupt national banking system, in the hole for $1.5 trillion and climbing, but who knows when. It’s hard to judge when every company of any note, along with the all of the banks, are owned in part or in whole by the government.

    4. India is an economic powerhouse, no idea what the GDP growth rate is as I’ve been studying China lately, but it’s major problem is the inescapable corruption implicit in every level of government.

    The problem is that:

    a. manufacturing is continuing to move offshore.
    You can see this in the ridiculous anemic job growth rates compared to the massive increase in factory orders. If the factories are getting more orders, but they aren’t hiring, then it’s because a lot of that manufacturing is happening elsewhere.

    b. IT is continuing to move offshore.
    Again the IT industry is contracting, not expanding. Sure there will be positions for administrators and technicians, for now. But we can expect that continuing advances will eventually allow consolidation of even those tasks. The ever problematic PC won’t rule forever. A decent graphical terminal would avoid much of the annoyances that plague PC oriented networks. Who knows. Perhaps Sun might finally make a buck on it’s SunRay line. *shrug*

    c. So what’s left?
    Well there’s porn, service sector work and tourism.

    And just in case this hasn’t been made clear, the rapidity of changes in the last 25 years has accelerated. So now you get to train for at least two, and probably more than that, careers in one lifetime. It wouldn’t be so bad if each career didn’t require a college degree.

    I hope that cured your puzzlement.

    ed

  • ed

    ROFLMAO!!

    Jobless Rate Drops; 112,000 Jobs Added

    Love them quotes:

    “Since August of last year, there have been 366,000 new jobs created,” McClellan said. “The unemployment rate of 5.6 percent is well below the average of the 70s, 80s and 90s. … Today’s report is another sign that the economy is continuing to grow strong and that jobs are being created.”

    In a 4% GDP annual growth economy. Wooo! I-M-Pressive!

    LOL.

    ed

  • Rick

    Thanks Ed. Now I understand. This time the sky really is falling.

  • Gordon

    Presumably porn, services and tourism will be enough to preserve our purchasing power relative to India etc.
    There would be no point in outsourcing any economic activity to India if the market for the product was not in the better paid West since a programmer paid 10k$ per year lives in an environment where pay in general is commensurate. This is just the latest resurrection of Marx’s discredited theory of the inevitable pauperisation of the working class.

    By the way, what is a Turing code in this context?

  • Vincent

    Unless one is talking about a very general piece of code (e.g. a photo editing package), the question of all the design work going to India is not simply a matter of developers there becoming “capable of taking over the job of designing“. Producing a design and detailed specifications for a customized solution for a particular company or industry typically requires a level of specific, detailed knowledge of the problem or need that would be difficult to acquire from afar.

  • “1. People thought the USSR was an economic powerhouse because it was. It stopped being so when accumulated corruption eventually killed it.”

    Er, no. People thought the USSR was an economic powerhouse because they believed all the made-up economic statistics that were put about.

  • DSpears

    If the USSR was an economic powerhouse, how did over 20 million people manage to starve to death in a country with abundant agricultural resources? Of course a lot of those people were startved to death on purpose, but many through the sheer incompetence of centrally planned economy. Even in the depths of the Great Depression people in America weren’t starving to death.

    I didn’t think there was actually anybody left on the planet who still believed the idea that Communism provided ample economic value to it’s citizens. When the veil of Soviet propaganda (which many on the left in Europe and America WANTED to believe, and apparently still do) was removed, the Socialst workers paradise was shown to actually be a 3rd world nation that enslaved and brutalized it’s own people.

    To suggest otherwise is an insult to the 35 million of it’s own people that the USSR murdered through starvation, slavery and torture.

    True Communism wasn’t derailed by evil men who corrupted it’s true value (Stalin was a true believer, but still more moderate than some of the fathers of 1917, which is why he executed Trotsky who believed that the killing should be accelerated), True Communism made inevitable that a small number of people would have absolute power. Even men who aren’t evil to begin with will be corrupted by such a situation. Labeling it as “corruption” is far too kind a word. It was mass-murder, made possible by a system in which individual ambtion and liberty was considered to be a sin punishable by death.

    If you lived in such a country instead of somewhere in the West, you wouldn’t be worried about your job going overseas, you would be worried about where they took your brother, and whether or not they are coming for you next. You would have lots of time to think about this waiting in line for a loaf of bread and a piece of moldy sausage that the benevolent state was kind enough to give to you.

    Back to programming, the above poster is correct that much of India’s population is barred from education by the Ancient Caste system. These low-priced IT workers come from the wealthiest members of the priveleged classes, many of whom are educated in America.

    You need running water and electricity before you can take over the computer programming universe. The vast understatement of year would have to be “not every one of the 1.2 billion people in Indian knows how to program a computer”. The Indian and Chinese economies are growing at phenomenal rates because they started from almost nothing. I will leave it to somebody else to compute the number of years it would take India at a (unsustainable)compounded rate of 10% a year to reach the standard of living of America or a country in “old” Europe. But then their wages would have also risen dramatically by that point, erasing their wage advantage.

  • The U.S. joblessness report for February 2004 stunned
    observers and investors alike – instead of creating
    the forecasted 125,000 new jobs, the entire U.S.
    economy only managed to produce 21,000 additional
    jobs. That left the ‘official’ unemployment rate
    steady at 5.6 per cent – I say ‘official’, because
    those people who’ve simply given up looking for
    jobs are dropped from the ‘official’ count, and in
    many areas no jobs exist once a big plant closes
    and moves overseas [ergo, there are soon ‘no j
    jobseekers’ there!].

    What with downsizing, jobs being sent off-shore,
    a ho-hum economic recovery, plant closings and
    layoffs, I thought some good folks here might
    benefit from the results of my own diligent search,
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    ‘What Color Is Your Parachute’ Site, this
    book has got to be the ‘Bible’ for all
    serious job hunters!:
    http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/

    ‘Quintessential Job Hunt’ Site. ‘Search jobs!
    Post a Resume!’ Well, they’re enthusiastic, anyway…
    http://www.quintcareers.com/jobhunt.html

    These guys are good! An executive I know had just
    about given up when they took him on, got him
    a job interview with a large company president
    and a solid job offer – all in two days!
    http://www.johnwhitleystrategicconsulting.com

    Monster of a job site! Great resource:
    http://english.monster.ca/geo/siteselection.asp

    Its Canadian ‘twin’…
    http://www.workopolis.com/index.html

    The Riley Guide: Employment Opportunities and
    Job Resources on the Internet
    http://www.rileyguide.com/

    Job-Hunt.org ‘Online Job Search Guide…your
    objective source of the Web’s Best Job Search
    Resources http://www.job-hunt.org/

    RiteSite Executive Careers Service – looks
    pretty helpful, if you’re searching via the Net…
    http://www.ritesite.com

    And if YOUR job hasn’t gone to India or China
    yet, don’t be surprised to find out that it’s been
    secretly packing its bags – 14 million more U.S.
    technical, professional and managerial jobs are
    now estimated to be at risk of ‘off-shore downsizing’!