I hear you; economic times have been tough for a lot of people here and around the world. I've been very fortunate myself, although am less secure about my future than I'd like -- many people have been cut from where I work. I'm a programmer in our Integrated Technology department, we have less than half the number of employees that we used to, and some of the people in other areas think that the company could save money by eliminating my department and contracting with outside companies to provide the services we do.

I know that wouldn't work, because with the exception of one vendor, I don't know of any outside software development contractor that has provided a working program in the originally estimated time or on budget to our company. In addition to problems with the vendors themselves, the people who want programs sabotage their own projects, not intentionally, but because they don't start out with a clear vision of what they want, so they keep changing the requirements throughout the entire development cycle. Software development is, in its simplest terms, process automation, but the people who who request a program often want to implement a new process and have only a vague idea of what they want. Pinning them down to specifics is very difficult, and often comes down to having to define the process details, writing an implementation, presenting it, and having them say, "I know that's what we said, but we didn't think it would work this way. Change this, redo that, make it look different, and add a bunch of reporting options." And so it goes through several cycles, with them complaining that they thought it would be done by now, even when we're still on-track with the original project schedule.

Internal developers are familiar enough with our company's existing programs/systems that we can anticipate and avoid a lot of the problems -- external contractors aren't. We're also focused on a single customer company, while contractors are frequently trying to service several company clients, resulting in many different (temporary worker) sub-contractors being assigned to a project -- the loss of continuity causes a lot of problems with software components not working correctly with one another. I could continue to describe problems, but it doesn't really matter. If they decide to eliminate IT and go with contractors, I would be out of work -- it doesn't matter to me that they'd eventually realize it was a mistake, and that it would cost them a lot more to recover, because I'd be gone by then.

I did say they had success with one contractor; he ran his own company and did the work himself. They convinced him to take a full-time position; he's my boss, and is a fantastic and talented programmer. I'd say that he's the main reason that the IT department continues to function with so many fewer people. He is a workaholic with an amazing skill set -- He's doing the work that used to take 3 DBAs, an email administrator, 3 network people, and 3 programming supervisors (two of those supervisors reported to the other one). In addition, he accomplishes more programing/coding than any of the remaining programmers, including myself -- it's not unusual for him to still be working from home at 2AM. Granted, some of the roles were eliminated by distributing tasks to the remaining developers -- I do my own database work instead of working through a DBA, and while my primary role is that of a programmer, I also administer a few remaining HP-UX servers and assist in maintaining a new Ubuntu Web server. We've all has to step up, but he's done a super job of consolidating and coordinating -- he's the best boss I've ever had, and while they say "nobody's indispensable", I don't think they could replace him with less than three people.

I've gone far, far afield from my original intent of agreeing that we're in some very uncertain economic times, and saying that I've been very lucky so far. I could say that I've made some of my own luck by being willing and able to adapt to changes, but I've seen a lot of folks who I knew were working hard (and had been with the company for decades) catch the ax. I see stories about how things are in Western Europe, but really haven't heard anything about how things are in Eastern Europe. I'm sorry to hear that you took a 25% salary cut -- that's gotta hurt, but you're still working, so things could be worse. I hope things improve for you, as well as for for all the other Scrap Yard members who have taken pay cuts, are under-employed, or are unemployed right now. I've been lucky this time around, but looked for work for most of a year before deciding to retrain and get my degree. I was fortunate to have some savings and low debts, which made made going to university an option, but I know that things can feel pretty desperate.