Red China has bought...
"China has bought IBM PC division"
Suckers!!! Bwa ha ha ha ha.
That kind of makes up for them stealing the guidance system hardware back in the 1990s via Litton. Here, have Windoze 8 and 9, .net, and c#, and we'll throw in the source for IE; no charge. It could handicap them for decades.
They can have all such garbage they would like, but let's keep our good tech away from them (e.g. hardware and software design tools and simulators, research lab management systems, research methodologies, vehicle and weapons and delivery systems designs, fabrication systems...).
As to "permanent jobs", no one really expects "permanent".
If they are conscientious workers they should be retained and trained on a regular basis because they are required for the company, so long as the execs are honest, to thrive.
But, as you point out, that's not the case, today. Today, the rule is to milk talent, paying only a fraction of its worth, and then dump it and walk away as quickly as possible, letting a few people pocket the arbitrage. And they only get away with it by deception, by distracting people from examination of the long-term total compensation package but looking only at one aspect of today's compensation. I've talked with CS students a couple times and it's difficult to believe I could have been as naive as they are.
But, when you're starting out, you're unsure of your ability and the quality of your product. You expect to have to work extremely hard to prove yourself with the expectation that then your compensation will rise. Today, it doesn't. About the time you start getting significant raises in total compensation, you get dumped at age 30 or 35 or 40 and declared "over-qualified" or "unqualified" or "out of date".
The weirdest cases are where the dumped programmer then gets work as an adjunct at a university or training program, trying to get the guest-workers up to the point where they can begin to be productive in the latest buzz-words. Sure, he or she knows his stuff inside out and can do it on the job better than, as well as teach it to, his replacements, but is still declared "unqualified" and "out of date". Welcome to wonderland, say Alice and Bob.
It's not just the last 5 years, more like the last 25 years, based on the archives, that the profession (and he US economy) has been being actively made worse and worse and worse.
