The shattered American dream
The shattered American dream
Shashank Purandare
Personal computers started appearing in the market during the mid-eighties. Soon they proliferated and costs started plummeting . By mid-nineties many households had PCs as they were called.
But a bigger revolution was unfolding with the Internet. It changed the way we travelled, shopped and worked. Soon everything was getting computerised. So much so, it was soon becoming difficult to work without computers. Businesses became computerised. Banking, travel, logistics, accounting, payrolls, everything became heavily computer dependent. Software industry started booming, providing job opportunities to hundreds of thousands of skilled Indian engineers.
During all this euphoria, a major disaster was looming. People suddenly realised that during the hardware and software development, a major problem was overlooked. When the year change was to happen from 1999 to 2000, majority of the computers would reset back to 1000, instead of 2000. Nobody had thought of this. Some did, but this was corrected in later versions of the computers. But for the old computers the problem of reset on the stroke of 2000 remained. This problem was known as Y2K problem. To reset and rewrite the operating system and related software for
so many computers was huge task. Companies needed to employ large manpower. As a result, everyone who had even a rudimentary knowledge of computers was hired. There was a sudden boom in job market.
Meanwhile, IT market was expanding rapidly. Many western countries including the USA started outsourcing their work to Indian companies. This created huge demand of trained software engineers. Many were sent to the USA for on shore work.
All these years, IIT graduates by and large went to the USA for higher studies and subsequently settled there. Ditto many software engineers.
More and more Indian graduates started going to the USA for doing MS. Initially scholarships were available but soon students started spending their own (and father’s) money for studies abroad. American universities made a killing. Jobs were easily available those days in the USA. Even corona pandemic did not stop this exodus. Most of the pilgrims settled there. They were earning in dollars, had an easy, lavish life style with well defined working hours. They were happy and parents, though with lighter pockets were also happy, travelling to USA every year. All good until recently!!!
Post corona, American debt has risen sharply, now 40 trillion dollars plus. USA always had about 1 percent inflation and plenty of gas for their automobiles. But now inflation is more than four percent, gas prices are high, jobs are not forthcoming and everything is suddenly expensive.
Enter Trump! You all know what has happened. Suddenly, students no longer get jobs, no longer get student and work visas and they are being forced to come back. Add AI in the mix and companies are actually laying off their employees. And now, even if they come back, job situation is equally bad here. Indian software companies are suddenly fighting for their own existence . Sometime back it was possible to get jobs in Europe or Canada, but Trump’s misadventure has also landed these countries in a mess. So, what is the fall back? If you have a family which can support you, good. But if you have gone on student loans and now have no means to pay back, then what??
The way things are, the situation is not likely to improve in near future.
Things become more complicated with AI. It is taking the jobs away. So one needs to pick up new skills to stay afloat in today’s world. You need to think out of the box!
But, bottom line is, the great American dream is shattered!!!!
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