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bsharma writes "The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering--even financial analysis. Can America lose these jobs and still prosper? Who wins? Who loses?" News.com has a related story about outsourcing.
"Who wins? Who loses?"
The American People do. The American Corporations win. Just as they always do.
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Not to suggest that everyone is employed all the time, but even though there are some talented people having trouble finding a job, overall, even with globalization, all developers aren't going to be out of work.
You can farm out your projects to India or China, but the reality is the time zone, cultural and geographical issues, coupled with the fact that few pieces of software are truly shrink wrapped means that there will always be ample work for some people locally. Keep your skills up to date and you'll be fine.
As always, we screw ourselves, as long as we continue to support companies that outsource to other countries for jobs that should go to us. It's amazing how prices of products aren't cheaper despite outsourcing to foreign countries. If people continue to buy products front countries that outsource, then badly needed jobs are going to continue to slip away. If enough people could be rallied, an organized boycott against those companies should be implemented, after all, if they are going to cost the American people money, then they in turn should start costing the companies money. It could be like a union, but of consumers instead of employees.
The bottomline: If we don't send jobs abroad and reduce our costs, we'll end up sending customers to other countries!
Wouldn't that be worse? Let us say there is a law against American companies having their work done by foreign workers. Let us also assume that we stop all immigration, since most people who want the former want the latter too. That would make American products much more costlier.
So, foreign companies will develop the same products with lower costs and end up hijacking the marketshare. Is that really better for American prosperity?
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In an economy where being able to constantly pull
the wool over the eyes of the 99 percent of the
populace that's doing all the work for the 1 percent
that own everything, it's a liability to have
smart folk around. If they can outsource as many of
the smart people (more likely to question authority)
or at least crush the spirits of the smart people
that are here by giving their jobs away, there will
be a higher contingent of the nascar loving,
reality tv watching, wrestling, Jerry Springer fans
that we need in this society to watch the
the commercials and buy the crap necessary to
fuel our economic model.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Whether jobs going offshore is bad or not for the economy depends on whether economics is a win/win game or win/lose game.
If it's a win/lose game, then yes, jobs out means nothing coming back in.
But in a win/win game it may very well mean lower prices for everyone, with the added benefit of more exports out to those who now have more money and wish to consume American goods.
The key to the later is to keep producing solid American goods that people outside the country want. I think we've done a pretty good job so far and it'll probably continue.
It should be no big surprise. As we keep pushing things out of the US we have less and less real value.
We, as a nation, actually build very little on our own shores.
Besides the Natural Resources for Farming and Mining there is nothing here that needs to stay here. As we look for ever cheaper methods of production and higher profit margins, we will move the work to other nations.
We don't actually make anything of any value anymore. We are a nation of lawyers and marketing types. All we need now is an army of telephone sanitizers and we'll be all set.
Isn't it always good to be able to produce something for less money? Since the country that does the outsourcing is obviously still able to pay the money, it can't be such a bad thing. If the country couldn't afford it anymore, it would go back to producing the things itself. It's just a balancing out, but it seems to me that the standards of living can't sink below a certain threshold that way. Ie the US won't fall back into the stoneage because of IT outsourcing.
The only people who are perhaps in danger are the people in the country that is being outsourced to - if they can produce cheaply because their living conditions are poor. Like child labour etc.
Will there be U.S. Steel plants? Refineries? Agriculture? No. Will any durable good be manufactured in the U.S. No.
The only thing that other countries can't compete with the U.S.: the creation(in the loosest sense), distribution, and consumption of U.S. made MassMedia.
The war on terrorism is already a poor excuse for a reality-TV show, the war on drugs is an effort to direct your 'escapes' to more profitable, advertising-rich video and movies; the war on piracy is nothing more than a giant squeezing blood from a stone.
When all that is real has been lost to a soft, dehumanized, videodrone people - that is when the countries who have made the shovels, dug the ditches, grown the food, built the roads and cities in the U.S. - that is when those countries will walk in and quietly pick up the fallen reins of America, and sense may return.
I think I just choked on a pretzel.
I posted a dupe! I'm ready to be an editor!
We need a tech union. I don't know why there isn't one, Safeway has a workers' union, auto workers have unions, hollywood types have unions, even dock workers have unions. Doesn't it seem like we might be getting the long, hard one here?
Synergy is your friend
If you don't like seeing companies leave to US, why do you not spend more time considering the role of higher taxes in forcing companies to make the exodus? On a smaller scale, we are seeing people leave California due to high taxes and the cost of living.
The US govt. needs to get spending under control so it can stabilize it's tax base. Also, implimenting a "Flat Tax" would eliminate the 100,000 pages of our broken tax laws and take the politics out of paying taxes. Much of the power in Washington is directly tied to the trading of tax favors for campaign contributions.
This is probably good for humanity in general. As lesser fortunate countries economically and technically advance they will tend toward democratic processes, equalizing rights to women and children, lesser corruption, etc. Tribalism seems to hold sway with some but I look for the day when the whole world is roughly equal in terms of freedom, economic opportunities, educational access, and medical care for all not just my country, ethnic group, class, etc.
If there is someone out there who can do exactly what I do only cheaper, who am I to complain if a customer or employer chooses them?
My job is to insure that I can provide more value than the competition. This means that I have to do something that they cannot or I have to do something that they can do only better, meaning that I have to do it faster, cheaper, or with better quality.
That's just how it works folks. Deal with it and get cracking.
Unionizing the IT sector is the FASTEST way to make companies send these jobs overseas.
Also, I didn't go to school for four years to join a union. I do some private web development. I would be considered a scab worker if unions took hold. Why should I give n% of my income to a union if I work for myself and have no employees?
Two problems with your two solutions: 1) everyone trying to work cheaper destroys our standard of living and causes a global race to the bottom. 2) you cannot move overseas easily - corporations can, you can't. The lack of mobility of labor is one of the major flaws in theories of global trade as it is practiced today.
What? From what I've read, most of the outsourced jobs, however white collar they may be in the 'States, are passed so that they can lower costs buy exploiting the workers in cheaper markets. Trust me, this was never about economic stimulation in third-world countries. Corporations are certainly more interested in the bottom line, and do you really think for one minute that their motivation is actually triggered by some huminitarian spark in their hearts? Hardly.
Think about all of the jobs in the steel industry and raw goods refining that used to be housed in the US. I was born in a region that housed booming towns that thrived on the steel, zinc, coal and cement in Pennsylvania. I can tell you firsthand that when refining was able to be done for 87 cents in Asia, the companies left town, the towns dwindled, and the equipment sat under 30 feet of water at the bottom of the quarrys. Was this good for us? The people that live there are just simple folk scrounging as best they can in small, dilapidated houses. Yeah, I guess they're only a mile from the nearest McDonald's, maybe they are better off than Hong Kong.
Oh, and guess what? A major factory and headquarters of Lucent (now Agere) used to be housed there, they even built a state-of-the-art Optoelectronics factory a few years ago. What happened when the bottom dropped out of optoelectronics? It was cheaper to manufacture in Asian countries, so tens of thousands lost their jobs. The new plant was sold for $40 Million in a fire sale, the grounds and any one of the many buildings were easily worth that much.
It's happening all over again now. Tell me how that's good for my town, Waterton Man.
--- What
The submission asks who wins and who loses. That's an easy one:
Winners
Overcompensated CEOs
Wealthy stockholders
Non-U.S. workers
Losers
American workers
Paying fair U.S. wages, while complying with U.S. regulations to protect the workers and the environment, costs money. So a company can gain a competitive edge by hiring workers in foreign countries where salaries are lower and where such rules do not exist. If some smoke-belching plant across a border can pay people $10/day and work them for 12 hour shifts, then the company using that workforce can realize lower operating costs and, hence, higher profits.
Folks, this isn't rocket science. All other things being equal, businesses will go with the cheaper source every time. What we need to do, as a country, is to level the playing field. We need tariffs, laws, and fines to discourage firms from outsourcing desirable jobs.
Screw pure capitalism. Unregulated capitalism doesn't work. That's why we have massive unemployment in the tech sector while desirable jobs are going to overseas workers in impoverished countries. And all the while, U.S. CEOs and other executives are receiving compensation packages that rival the net worth of some small countries. It's time we put our feet down and protected the vast majority of working Americans rather than pandering to the greed of multi-millionaire CEOs.
People worry about jobs being shipped overseas. I work for a company where half the development staff is in Bangalore (I've even been to Bangalore) and many of the people I work with used to work for Infosys, which is one of the leading software development firms.
Outsourcing can hurt- people in the US do lose jobs here when jobs go overseas. But for every car, shoe, or software program which goes overseas, some person their gets a job. Their earnings go up. They spend money.
A software developer in India earning $20,000 a year might even have enough money to buy something from the US (OK, maybe they might buy a Daewoo instead of a Chrysler- there are models of Korean cars which are popular in India which are not even sold in the US...)
Do people here who worry about jobs going overseas not want to see the level of prosperity go up in India? In China? In the Phillipines? In Africa?
These considerations don't even begin to take account the benefit that people in America realize when goods and services become cheaper here. Sure you might argue that when living standards go up in Mexico, standards in our country go down towards that of Mexico- but remember that in the 19th century people like Marxists predicted that this would happen, that the world would constantly develop towards the edges. Of course, they predicted that when the edges are exhausted, the revolution begins...
I think that this is a reaction of smart corps on a stupid INS strategy. INS doesn't approve many of H1B application (no need to mention profGC applications) based on the logic: "it's a tough job market for americans and we should protect them".
But it doesn't count the fact that many H1B applcations are for positions which most of americans cannot fit due to limited education and skills. On the other side, smart corps doesn't care about americans - they have a job and they need it done.
So, no wonder they outsource the job offshore, where, by the way, the price for job is even lower. But now a big chunk of taxes is also gone from american budget.
Now I want to aks, who are those people that INS is trying to protect?
Less is more !
As always, I'm amazed at how a website full of intelligent people misses some of the basic concepts of economics and the modern world. Take the time to learn comparitive advantage. It holds true so often that it's almost as reliable as gravity. If it's cheaper to do it elsewhere, they'll do it there. When it gets cheap to do it here, they'll do it here. It doesn't necessarily have to be cheaper in real dollars, but in a comparitive sense. Workers can make more money doing other things in the US, so they do.
If you actually look at the numbers for the economy, it is not doom and gloom, we're in a decent position. America is great at some things and not at others. Fine, let others do those things and we'll do our thing. So we lose a couple jobs here and there to foreign markets. Bonus for them, it helps out their under-priveledged populace. We add jobs in America at a rate that most nations in the world can only dream about.
I doubt that anytime soon we'll all be sitting in cardboard boxes, penniless, with no avaiable jobs and wondering why every job in America is overseas. It's just not going to happen.
That way, american corporations can reduce costs and make more profits so that the US can remain a rich country. In a couple years, the US will be the richest country and 99% of its population will be below the poverty threshold.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
What you so glibly term "Lowest Bidder" is called competition. It drives the country's economy. It's why the US is so successful. Pick up an Econ 101 book, maybe you'll learn something.
The thing is, as more of those jobs move to overseas they bring the standard of living in those countries up. As the standard of living goes up, so does the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor, and have other disadvantages that will make them unattractive to companies (don't speak the language, time zone issues, etc...). I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
I read the internet for the articles.
Here's what I really don't understand about the current move to offshoring, in context. The message I've gotten from virtually EVERY contracting prospect I've had in the last 10 years has been: LOCATION MATTERS and NOBODY TRUSTS YOU OFFSITE. Also, WE DON'T TRUST YOU TO COMMUNICATE UNLESS YOU'RE UNDER OUR THUMB. (caps deliberate.) Email and fax are generally (not always) disdained by most clients as a means to keep in contact on projects. This has been true in my marketing since I've done IC work and it's been the case even if the client doesn't have the onstaff brainpower or management skill to oversee the work. *Appearance* of oversight has seemingly been the main priority.
I tend to work most productively on solo projects when and where I do not have to deal with office disruptions and politics. In the majority of situations in which I've offered to do the work offsite on my generally better equipment, and even when I've offered very high granularity of reporting on my work, the response from prospects has been: DON'T CARE... DOESN'T MATTER... OUR POLICY IS ONSITE ONLY.
But companies today seem to view offshoring as "best practices" and necessary if they are to compete. The need to *appear* to save money seems to greatly outweigh the existing compulsion to "enforce" face to face contact. Things have thus been turned on their head from earlier office-political posturings.
As near as I can tell, offshoring seems to be the current management fad, and managers jump on these bandwagons like lemmings in order to appease their boards of directors and stockholders.
If the jobs are going out of the country, and The Country as a concept does nothing about it, then it's time to go where the jobs are.
I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but if all the U.S. companies are content with the economic sabotage currently going on, I'll move to India.
This is all backwards. You want raw materials in >> refined products out, to keep wealth in the country. Not the other way around.
...
"From what I've read, most of the outsourced jobs, however white collar they may be in the 'States, are passed so that they can lower costs buy exploiting the workers in cheaper markets."
How is offering a good job at a high wage (relative to the local economy) exploitation? Perhaps you ought to talk to some of the programmers who work in India and ask them what their other career options were like.
"It's happening all over again now. Tell me how that's good for my town, Waterton Man."
It may not be good for your specific town. And if that's all you can look at then you have a very narrow world view.
-- this post written by someone who lost their job to cheap Indian labor
Is it a scary time for a techie like me? Yes. But overall this is a good thing.
Because Japan (and now Korea, etc.) started making cars many US employees were initially displaced. But we now enjoy cars (from all countries including the US) which are far better and lower priced than we would have had without competition. (My 18 year old Tercel just crossed 200,000 miles but when I was a kid they didn't even bother with the sixth digit on the odometer.)
We have also enjoyed all sorts of inexpensive goodies like toys, home electronics and clothing that would have cost far more if all made here.
So the Indian programmer makes "only" $10,000 - that's still 20 times the average. His standard of living is probably pretty good. Outsourcing hurts our income but helps keep our costs down.
But there are bigger gains:
Peace - countries with close business ties almost never go to war.
Population - the wealthier a country gets, in general, the lower its birthrate.
Environment - of course the "first world" has a far from perfect environmental record but it is WAY ahead of the third world where fishing by pouring poison or tossing dynamite in the ocean is an accepted method, where "recycling" involves open fires to burn the plastics off of wire and electronics, and where the air is many times worse than in the worst US city. Something about not having to worry about the next meal allows one to consider the environment more seriously.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
It's about making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Mod me troll if you wish, but the highest tax bracket before Reagan took office was almost 80%. That means the government taxed 80% of the income of the very richest people. Now it's down around 30%.
There are more rich and very rich people in the U.S. than in any time before in history, and they hold a much larger share of the wealth pie than the wealthiest few ever held before. NAFTA benefits the rich, and not the poor. The tax codes benefit the rich and not the poor. WIPO, Sales Taxes, "death" tax reductions -- it's all meant to guarantee that once the money is in the hands of the wealthy, it never leaves.
That giant sucking sound isn't the sound of jobs going overseas, it's the sound of money flyng out of your wallet.
In case this isn't completely obvious: there is no guarantee this will happen, and even if it does it will take decades. I need to eat every day and I my blood sugar won't wait for the great wheels of economics to turn.
What really puzzles me is that Republican's aren't more on the protectionist agenda. Losing all this capacity means our military is rapidly becoming dependent on foreign suppliers for just about everything. To be paranoid, I think a day will come when we will find our military completely under the stranglehold of foreign nations just because they supply everything but the bodies.
There's a novel in that idea somewhere. Maybe I can hire a few Canadians to write it for me.
What would you think if you went to a podiatrist mailing list and one of the topics of discussion was a debate over some complex memory paging algorithm for the linux kernel?
l
d en_Orde r/Hidden_Order_Chapter_20.html
The opinion surely come down as: either this is one bunch of smart podiatrists or, this is one bunch of cocky podiatrists who have no idea what they are talking about.
International trade is a difficult subject. Often situations that seem bad for one country are actually beneficial, as first pointed by the great economist David Ricardo two hundred years ago. This holds across the entire field of economics, starting from the fact that trade is a win/win scenario, while most people think its a win/lose scenario.
If you are concerned about the impact of jobs moving abroad, I suggest you read up on economics, so you come to understand, for example, why not all jobs when to Mexico after NAFTA got signed, as Ross Perot predicted.
Here are a few useful links:
http://www.systemics.com/docs/ricardo/david.htm
David Friedman. Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, Harper-Collins, 1996.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Hid
How about CxO's - CEO, CFO, CTO, etc?
They cut costs by outsourcing real workers' jobs, and that's how they earn the big bux.
IMHO, the real problem with CxOs isn't that the pay scale is too high. It's just that in general, today the jobs are being held by a bunch of bozos who are overpaid for their performance.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to be able to see the relationship between laid-off workers and the economy that's prompting furthre layoffs.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to see that health care is a difficult problem, and that at some point we need to just plain face it and begin taclking it. Maybe Clinton's attempt back in 1992 was a mess, but since all we've done is try to ignore the problem, raise premiums and co-pays, and apply too many managers to the problem, sucking up money that should be paying for health care. (Last I heard, 25%-33% of health care money is going toward "management" costs.)
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
My requirements for a CEO at 50X worker's pay are much lower than those for a CEO at 200X+ workers' pay. IMHO some of today's crop isn't even that good.
If these bozos were at pay-for-performance, the US economy wouldn't be in the toilet. Their primary talent appears to be obtaining money.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Interesting point about 1929. The way out of that depression was a war. Not a silly little war, but a huge war that resulted in huge technical advances in the US and Germany, and maybe a few other countries. Except the US bombed the crap out of Germany, so the tech advances continued here. And that drove the economy ahead of every other country for a long time. But why should that last forever?
The lowest bidder was inevitable. Even if we could force everyone in the US to buy American, eventually the same goods will be produced cheaper elsewhere, and no one else will buy our stuff. How many cars does the US export? I think it is simplistic to put the blame only on greedy companies. Its also greedy employees who would not consider working for a wage that would rivial and Indian's. Does every worker in America have an right to have a standard of living 10 times higher than your average Indian? I don't think so. It has been a nice ride, but I think it's coming to an end.
perhaps if the protests weren't so violent and destructive more people would see what they are protesting against. No one likes to property destruction.
Great! Your company now has an extra $105K to spend! Either you get a raise (not likely), or another team can be created, employing 8 programmers where four were employed before (and allowing your company to do more work). Of course, the real ratio is a little higher - you need slightly more support staff (management, office workers, etc) to support twice as many workers, on both sides of the ocean, so it's possible your company could jump from 4 workers to 10, for the same amount of money. Seems like a net good to me.
Wrong. The CEO gets a $105,000 raise.
Next.
no
Anyone with even the most basic understanding of economics should dismiss this article as totally unsurprising and move on. The idea I'm already reading in comments that "jobs should stay in America" is idiotic. I want stuff to cost less, and if producing it elsewhere can do that then that's what globalization is all about! It's the same argument when it comes to trying to get rid of ridiculous farm subsidies. I don't want to pay more for corn just so people can continue to be farmers. Familiar Slashdot argument: if the business model of __________ (like being a programmer or a farmer) is untenable, then get out of it! The Constitution doesn't recognize a right to make money doing the activity of your choice.
Maybe someday, when smart use of technology has finally allowed us a balance between needs/wants and resource scarcity, large numbers of people will be able to say, "I feel like being a farmer" or "I feel like managing servers" and do it. But for now, that's just not how it works. Suck it up!
And by the way, this argument goes both ways. People living in the US just happened to have been born (or have been lucky enough to move to) one of the most resource-rich nations on the planet. How dare we even consider enacting policies that would deny these benefits to the rest of humanity? It's that kind of thinking -- or, at least, the perception by other that that's what we're thinking -- that has all these misguided, ignorant, and extremely poor Muslims trying to blow up our civilization
I think another word for that is "capitalism." We are simply achieving it at a much more efficient level, thanks to technology. We can still invent new technology, you know.
Maybe the problem is not that "higher level jobs" are being displaced but that these jobs are no longer as important, thanks to technology. Penmanship used to be a CAREER until technology displaced it. Maybe it is not good enough to JUST be a programmer anymore. I program in PERL all the time (and admin my own LAMP), and I am a freak'n Financial Analyst (majored in Economics).
But I enhance my productivity by leveraging PERL to "Invent" new tools for financial analysis.
Instead of picking one career, maybe you would be safer picking two. That way it might be easier for you to invent ("you" not necessarily referring to the parent).
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
How many people here drive Japanese cars?
A lot of people here are saying the same things auto workers said in the 80's. They're taking our jobs. Its going to destroy the economy.
You know what's going to happen? Cheaper programmers -> lower costs -> more profit -> corporations expand -> more jobs for both Indians and Americans.
In the short term it kinda sucks, but in the long run things will be better for everyone. Of course in the long run we're all dead anyway (sorry Mr. Keynes).
This assumes that corporations aren't corupt colluding bastards, but that really is a separate issue and would be a problem with or without free trade.
the salary those overseas workers start to command. After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor
Yes, eventually the labor costs over in places like India are going to rise while at the same time labor costs here will fall... An equilibrium _will_ be reached eventually (pictures cities in India looking a lot more like American cities and cities in the US looking a lot more like Indian cities)...
The problem is that it will take a generation or two for this to happen and in the meantime we're going to have a lot of displaced workers here in the US trying to eke out a living at much lower salaries then they pervioulsy made.
Buying work time/expertisement from a company outside USA can be seen as buying a product from outside. Denying it would be like deny imported products, and doing that is a call to others to not import goods/work time from USA. It's ok if you think that a closed country could survive or advance in a world like this.
And buying work from outside because is cheaper enables US companies to do more work/goods, or even exists, things that in fact are good for US citizens.
Frankly, sound a bit like hypocrisy to cry when someone from USA hires someone or buy something from outside but is ok or better it if someones from outside do the same from USA.
I don't see the doomsday scenerio you suggest, rather I see everybody competing on a more even basis and the worldwide standard of living improving.
Well sure, the worldwide standard of living goes up, but that means that the Western standard of living goes down. Take a look at how much the average American consumes (in terms of food, natural resources, etc) and pollutes. Can you imagine if every citizen of India and China did the same?
If you don't think it's us vs. them then you're being naive. No, the real winners will be the countries with oil. Mad Max, here we come!
-a
Sounds like a good reason to try to find work in defense-related IT jobs. For security reasons those are much more difficult to move offshore. In fact, the DoD/CIA/etc aren't even excited about how many non-US citizens work for firms doing defense/intel projects, but they've come to realize there's no way they can go citizen-only and find enough staff.
Keeping an eye on a non-citizen in a secure US workplace is one thing; sending the work out to be done 100% by foreigners on foreign soil is another. National security work is staying here.
Add to this the huge amount of money going into it. Rumsfeld's budget projects DoD spending reaching $500 billion/year by 2009, and a lot of that is for high tech stuff. Then there are billions more from the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security.
Some of us are almost old enough to remember when most of the geeks in the country had defense-related jobs, at least indirectly. Welcome back.
I'm a European and I'm ready to tar you as a softy socialist already.
The American system is far superior to the European system. In Europe, the workers have an unjust amount of power over employers. That's not freedom.
Take France. As you probably know, it's almost impossible to fire someone! If someone can't control their own company, then you're heading into dangerous territory. What encouragement is that for someone to hire someone else?
With France giving parents of three-child families exemption from income tax and helping pay their rent, you are heading for skid row and a MASSIVE tax hike. With French income taxes already the highest in Europe, you really are going to be up shit's creek with a turd for a paddle soon.
I love France, and I'd like to go live there, but with your neo-socialist work policies, I'd have to skip it till I'm rich. The French attitude appears to be 'leech the money makers dry and then give all the money back to lazy assholes who can't keep their pants up'.
With mandatory 35-hour weeks, and unemployment at ridiculously high levels, France is really headed for an economic dead alley.
I'd rather be in a society where I'm based on my effort and work ethic, than one like France's which simply hands over power to the ignorant and lazy.
However, I'd imagine a socialist European can't really get a grasp on basic economic theory, so perhaps it's time to stop.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Their primary talent appears to be obtaining money.
Exactly. But isn't that the goal in capitalism? I don't see the problem as being ignorant masses, like most CEOs. I see the problem as being money, plain and simple. It doesn't matter how many jobs people have, it only matters if we get the work done, if we produce and distribute the products so we can cloth ourselves and eat. It only matters if we work to design the products, not if we take home a few pieces of paper that says we put in 8 hours @ $25/hour. That's the problem with our society. We waste way too much time worrying about insignificant details like a few extra pennies. In the end they don't matter. The only thing that does really matter is our experiences throughout our life. I, for one, would rather not have to deal with the experience of managing money, including interest, taxes, bills, etc. And I'm willing to say "Hey, go ahead and have a free meal, on me." I'll continue working in such an economy as long as we improve the work environment. That's all I ask.
But this is all philosophy and as of right now most people think our system works just fine the way it is. Philosophy is discouraged in the US.
So now that your job is being threatened we should stop the outsourcing rush? When we outsourced clothing, manufacturing, etc. was that ok? The world didn't end? The average American benefitted from this, the workers in those industries were retrained and now provide more economic output than before.
Wrong. The blue collar standard of living in this country is under considerable assault. People who once had good job security and whose job afforded them access to a middle class lifestyle have seen massive downward pressure on both their wages and their standard of living. Blue collar workers in the U.S. in the post-war decades lived better than white collar workers in Europe. Now they live worse than blue collar workers in Europe. While the wealthy have seen orders of magnitudes of increases in their income & wealth levels, the middle class have seen only marginal gains (10% for the average family in the last 30 or 40 years). That 10% has come at the expense of wives going to work, children being raised in day care, less job security, etc. The average blue collar worker (individual, not family just cited) has actually seen their wages decline or hold even over the same time period, depending on who you ask. It was high paying manufacturing jobs after World War II that gave this country a true middle class society in the first place. We are now at a crossroads where we must decide whether that society is the model for the future, or a historical anomoly of a few decades shortly to give way to a more stratisfied, less equal one.
Look at what has happened in Mexico. Immediately after Nafta, the northern border region of Mexico expierienced a boom as U.S. firms moved their manufacturing facilities there to take advantage of Mexico's third-world low wage, low regulation economy and corrupt political system. Shanty towns were erected around these factories where people lived in squander. But slowly wages rose slightly, living standards improved, but alas corporate profits fell. Those companies have begun relocating their Mexican factories to China, where labor is still cheaper and the authoritarian governmnet keeps the labor pool more docile. So much for globalization benefiting Mexico. It is a race to the bottom, pure and simple. Jack Welch once said his favorite kind of factory is one on a barge where he can move it from shore to shore, wherever labor costs are lowest. I expect no more from him than this; he is a businessman. But my government should not be his agent to accomplish this. Moreover, these companies get to be so massive in the first place because of the economic system, rule of law, and infrastructure my government provides and my tax dollars pay for. I am buying something with that money, and it is not the right for G.E. to fire me and replace me with three Mexican day laborers the first chance they get.
Now, if the current trends prove sustaining, the same will happen to white collar workers. Meanwhile, the rich have retired to gated communities and private schools while public schools and other infrastructure crumbles. They control the government through big money donations, thus the never ending flood of legislation favoring their goals.
One final point. The Scandinavian countries tend to have the highest standards of living in the world, and they are also the most "socialist" in Europe. Also, because of the way the U.S. calculates its unemployment rate, it leaves out key groups that Europe does not (for example, people who want a job but have stopped looking because they cannot find one - the number of these people in the U.S. has gone up rapidly in the last few years). If you take into account these groups, our unemployment rate is actually about the same as much of Europe's.
Remember, you do not have to sacrifice all on the alter of capitalism.
One day, may it come soon, Indian customers will want tech support for their questions about MS Hindi Windows. And Philipino hell desk workers will decide that they went into the business because it was better than having to scavenge through the garbage dumps outside Manila for recyclables, but since then their country has turned around, and help desk work is boring, and they want better pay. And when Hungary, and India, and Costa Rica are finally able to provide demand for goods and services and not just supply, there will be few (hopefully none) reserves of cheap labor in the world. Till then, this techie is renewing his EMT license and looking for work in that field. Lord knows you can't outsource ambulance drivers...
This subject of the outsourcing of tech jobs isn't on any politician's radar screen. The general public is unaware of what's happening so it'll be too late by the time this (might) become a political issue - the jobs will be gone by then.
Think about it: When the manufacturing jobs were being sent offshore in the 80's and 90's did you (as an engineer) really care? Some of us were a bit concerned, but not enough to even motivate us to write our congresscritter. Now that our engineering jobs are being outsourced we're getting upset, but who's going to come to our rescue? Nobody, the general public doesn't have a clue (and of course, it can be argued that nobody _can_ come to our rescue).
[as a footnote, it's interesting to note that a lot of those displaced manufacuring workers in the 80's and 90's were encouraged to retrain as software engineers - I've worked with a few of them.]
And I'm really sure that you always pay the extra for the brand name over the generic groceries, buy the triple cost pharmaceudicals instead of the generics, pay premiums above MSRP when buying cars, washing machines & other durables instead of taking advantage of sales...
If you remember your Snow Crash, this is the sort of thing Neal Stephenson was talking about:
Is the use of inexpensive intellectual labor abroad a bad thing? Depends on who you talk to: to a telecom engineer in Dallas who's trying to make payments on a $500,000 house, it is. To someone who can buy cheaper software or services because developer rates went from $150,000/year to $5,000/year, it may not be. And to the population of India, of course, it's a different story entirely.Really, this is the way the game has to be played for the developing world to proceed. After all, the manufacturing and commodity export sectors in the developing world are so competitive across nations that they can't serve as engines for fast growth. The most effective way to move from sweatshop to smartshop is to change the competitive balance and make the developed world compete for their own jobs: the same market forces that give us cheap steel, fossil fuel, and agricultural imports cane be turned back on the markets in which we've previously held both absolute and comparative advantages. Eventually -- and the key here is "eventually" -- this will result in increased prosperity for all, but it's not at all clear that the short-run result will be increased prosperity for us.
This isn't to say that I'm happy about this in terms of my own career (though it is why I'm moving from tech to law), but if the alternative is an ever-larger, increasingly impoverished, and restless population in the developing world -- just the sort of populations attracted to radical terrorist movements -- I'll take the salary hit.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
IT opportunists knew what the risks were going in. The US tech industry, by all accounts, shouldn't have taken you nearly as far as it did, so be thankful and start looking someone else who might be willing to lease your soul for $$$.
I was just thinking, is outsourcing really that great? The first thing that comes to mind when I think of outsourcing is ValueJet. They outsourced almost everything. It didn't work out too well. There is one group in the company I work for that is almost entirely populated with Indians. They also happen to be the group that got the company succesfully sued for over $250 million. Maybe you get what you pay for. In addition I wonder why there doesn't seem to be an even distribution of Indian IT workers in this country. Around here at least it seems a company has 75% Indian developers or 1%. Maybe I'm paranoid but is there maybe some sort of preference here. I noticed that one of the people in this article that was so high on outsourcing to Inida had a very Indian sounding name. Could it be possible he's exiticed about all the males in his family being exectives. "Don't believe the hype!" - Flavor Flav
It seems America will soon be populated solely by burger flippers and super-rich CEO's. And the west thought the days of serfs and nobles was over....
I think what Americans may not realize is that they are pricing themselves out of work and assuming that the rest of the world can't possibly develop the technology, skills and resources to do what America has. That is a shocking bit of arrogance, and likely the cause of the current "crisis". If there is an exec candidate from Bulgaria that will work for a third of what some American then guess which is a better business choice? All things being equal aside from salary demands makes the choice pretty simple.
The other nifty thing about a free market is that change isn't always to YOUR benefit, but it may be for the benefit of the system itself. Its like an ecosystem. You are selecting yourselves out of jobs. Its like a predator that can only eat a certain type of high-quality meat and only if it is fresh and only if variable A, B, C, and D are in place. Guess what? A predator that isn't so damn picky is going to flourish unless something else exists in that ecosystem to keep it in check. You could try to legislate the problem away while the rest of the world learns to adapt, resulting in isolation. The risks are obvious if you look at the issue from this perspective, so I won't try to lay them out further.
The answer could very well be in the CEO salaries, but somebody in charge deserves credit for success. Back to the ecosystem perspective, consider this: the biggest lion gets the most meat. Even if that meat is rotting and the rest of the pride can't survive. Eventually that big lion dies too. Basically what I'm saying here is that I don't entirely disagree with you specifically.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
RE: XYZ will naturally tend to lower its prices (why? because to make more money, it has to sell more goods and the best way to sell more goods in this case is to lower prices).
No it won't. It'll give the CEO a fat raise. Prices come down? You jest. And by the way, it used to be a man could hold a decent job and raise a family. Now the wife has to work too. What do you suppose happens when both parents need to work two jobs to prevent creditors from taking everything, because strangely enough that McJob doesn't pay half as much as that good engineering job he paid a shitload of money to train for? How does XYZ sell more widgets to these people?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Don't forget that the economy in India isn't going to be exactlty Stagnate. As their incomes rise (from Western money) their salaries will slowly rise to match their western counterparts. This is nothing like the Blue collar work that was outsourced to other countries. That required no education.. this type of work requires skill and will eventually build a strong economy in India....
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Do you want to get a sacry glimpse of where this economy is heading in, say, 25 or more years?
Read this book.
Buckle your seatbelts kids, it's going to be a gnarly ride!
P.S. I though the sucking sound was Anna Nicole Smith at an all you can eat restaraunt.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Two comments:
1) The highest paid executives usually run the less successfull companies.
2) Executive salaries are not set in a free market. The executive get together and vote each other raises in a sort of circle jerk.
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
A) People who rather naively say "these aren't hard times". Uhm, excuse me - but even the folks I know who are working -- even in non-IT jobs -- are worried about losing their jobs, they haven't received a raise in a good while, etc. This has also been (in the past 2.5 years, or so) the worst period of "wealth destruction" in the stock market since the 1920's. The pain of "hard times" can be felt in an innumerable number of ways, not just for those (like me) who happen to be unemployed now for the longest period of time EVER in my professional life. If that's doesn't qualify as "hard times", then I'm not sure what does.
B) There's a lot of posturing by some folks who say "I'm going to find a way to add to my value other than tech", and yet in the next breath/sentennce they readily admit they don't have a clue as to what that might be. This is all well and good, but the fact is, most non-tech folks have a very unsophicated view of what a so-called "techie" can do. I really believe this is a kind of unspoken bias -- payback for the good times we had in this country, employers having felt techies didn't really "pay their dues" or were overpaid, so they selectively fail to acknowledge what other transferable skills a tech-oriented person might have. And personally, I find this to be strangely ironic, because in U.S. we seem to be constantly beating the drum of "more math and science education". Well, that's great -- but if you can't get an employer to acknowledge the value of such an education - if in fact, there's a certain kind of "intellectual prejudice" going on -- then what's the use?
I really do have my doubts that this all just about this being "the recession that wasn't quite a recession" or what have you. Granted, I'm glad to see many of the "gold-rushers" gone from the field -- but in some folks' minds at least, tech work can be awfully pigeonholing. Until we can get employers to let go of their narrow-minded, inflexible approach to hiring workers -- the job market is going to continue to stagnate, and probably the GDP along with it.
I wish I were more optimistic, but I think there are a lot of forces at work here that are serving to undermine American workers in general. "That's not the way it works for now", one person said, yet they don't dare to predict when things might, if ever, "even out" and the harangue of gloominess can be thrown off.
The climatic memetic prisoner's dilemma showed it is highly dangerous to mix populations from all over the world but it didn't get into accounting relationships (e.g., 'tit-for-tat') as a way to mitigate disaster except to point out that with Enron, Global Crossing, etc. it is clear that accounting cannot be relied upon to avoid cheaters in the prisoner's dilemma. When all relationships become informational and global, all relationships devolve toward accounting.
As is repeatedly shown by the alterations of historic accounts as well as business accounts by cheaters, the system just can't work if you don't reserve your most severe punishments for the big cheaters. The problem is in the West we have come to honor the con artist as much as northern Europeans used to honor the victor of the fair contest by arms or quest. And the problem can't be avoided by going to civilizations that don't have such a fair contest history -- the honor accorded con artists is no less there.
W. D. Hamilton said it well in Innate Social Aptitudes of Man:
What Hamilton doesn't address is what happens when you "civilize" the entire globe -- no frontiers to which the altruists can escape.
Seastead this.