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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.
Sent from your iPad.
Outsourcing is a bad thing: Outsource Australia is a company I've worked with that dramatically increases the value and productivity of a company when they work to refine their procedures, structures.
I think the fear that our [american] economy will collapse if jobs move out of the geographic country is naive, in that it doesn't properly examine whether or not the money actually flows in different directions: if the money still comes into the US eventually, it works.
"Stumble before you crawl"
... If you're concerned about jobs moving overseas, why don't you follow them there?.
There are reasons why democracy does not work nearly as well as capitalism.
-- David D. Friedman
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.
When the jobs moved out of the cities, the cities still survived. Likewise the US will still survive.
I think those who are threatened have to either get more competetive (i.e. work cheaper) or move overseas to get contracts. That way you have a competative advantage in the language department for those great American companies that insist on screwing the trough and hiring cheaper labor from overseas.
If it works for Nike and K-Mart, why not for IT?
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?
All your favorite sites in one place!
"...without shoe manufacturing."
Yeah. Try again.
"...without the biggest automobile manufacturing industry on earth"
Uh huh.
Notice the pattern?
I've heard that the Pasadena, Ca. offices of Earthlink are shutting down and the support will be out-sourced. This kind of cost saving measure could very well destroy Earthlink. I wonder if the new tech people are even located in North America...
Right.
Don't work for companies that outsource guys!
uhh...
n/m
[score: -1 redundant]
As you might expect, this worries me a lot. I'm fairly secure (I think), because they need at least one person here that knows English and Java and can understand the customers and do the face-to-face, but in the long run more and more places are going to look at the savings and ship the work overseas.
I've got two kids, 9 and 12, and I'm at a loss for what direction to steer them in career-wise. I used to think Engineering was the answer, since I've really enjoyed my, what, 20-odd years of slinging code. But by the time my kids are college-age, god knows what will be left in the US besides burger flippers, doctors, and lawyers.
-- ac at work
The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering--even financial analysis.
Many of those jobs are held by immigrants anyway.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
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.
Is this somewhat painful? Yes. Does it help in the long term? Most definitely.
Do you really think that the mid east would be in the situation it is today if there was a wide diverse economy over there?
give the man a mod point!
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.
Blockquoth the poster:
America makes its money by being at the ultimate junction point of capital, intellectual property, communications, and business management. We're the deal-makers and the facilitators. We don't build anything ourselves because we're content to skim a little bit off the top of everything that passes through our hands.
However, sooner or later, all those other countries to which we've outsourced our industrial base will realise that they really don't need us. When they get their acts together, they'll just start dealing directly with each other. And when that happens, watch this Pax Americana come to a screeching halt.
I predict it will happen within the next 50 years, if all things continue as they are now...
I have said it before, and will say it again.
Companies that are moving a lot of their operations off-shore are only making the bad economy they are trying to escape even worse.
They are removing their money from our economy and the hands of the people that will be buying their products.
I could go on all day, but will leave it at that.
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.
On average children/adults overseas are more competitivly schoold and challenged. I'm tired of talking to europeans, third world countries, who's peopel on average speak multiple languages. when american kids all seem to talk about is making it on american idol. AMERICA NEEDS TO INVEST IN IT'S HUMAN CAPITOL YOU HEAR THAT BUSH. AMERICA'S HUMAN CAPITOL IS BETTER SERVED IN OTHER PLACES THAN WAR. I keep hearing stories fo school and community services being cut, while military services get more money and cooprate companies control the governemt. WE NEED TO INVEST IN OUR POSTERITY !!!!!!
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.
.. for the slashdot editors to have their jobs moved offshore. People that learn English as a second language have a much better grasp of it than those *cough* *taco* *cough* that grew up speaking it.
Trolling is a art,
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!
The article is pretty much spot on. By decree of some department head somehwere, 1/3 of the people in each gruop have to be GDC employees (GDC is the termed used for the 2 companies we outsource work to - InfoSys and Tata) - which means if you have 30 people in your group, 10 must be contractors, and 2/3 of those must be off shore.
What's really depressing is that these changes aren't being done to get BofA back in the black or because it's going down the drain. It's so that they can show 7% (or 4% or something, I can't remember) more profit than they did last year.
This is absolutely *killing* morale. People worry about jobs. A lot. Our group has actually lucked out a bit - due to the closing of remote offices and a couple people leaving for their own reasons, we've been spared - Our manager is fantastic, he's doing everything possible to keep from laying any of us off. But other groups aren't so lucky. Quite a few people were laid off today, so the rumor mill says.
It's tough. It's one thing to be laid off for poor performance - it's a whole other ballpark when you're simply getting replaced with somebody a little cheaper.
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.
America will always have fast food jobs available.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
I work in tech support (I know, I'm scum, the lowest of the low etc.) for an outsourcing company and we were actually set up that way from the start. All the customer facing parts of the company are UK based (apart from the US branch but that's needlessly complicating things) along with the network infrastructure engineering types while majority of the NOC/software development peeps are based in India. By local standards they get paid extremely well but in global terms they get paid less than I do, economically it makes sense for both the company and the Indian economy.
Welcome to globalisation people, it's not going to go away.
Here is the scenario...
1) U.S. workers get paid more than than peers in other countries.
2) U.S. companies want to get more for their payroll dollar.
3) U.S. companies open up branch offices for Engineering in India (for example) to enhance profits.
4) U.S. engineers get laid-off because they are too expensive.
5) U.S. engineer goes to India to get a job.
Mathematics is universal, and English is (almost) the standard language of Engineering and Mathematics. So as long as U.S. engineers are willing to adapt to circumstances, who cares whether the U.S. itself changes. The U.S. is only as valuable as the people in it.
After all, did anyone really ever expect this glut of prosperity to last forever?
If it's not one thing, it's Steve's Mother
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.
2) People who are out of work cannot buy things made by corps who are farming out their labor to other countries. Companies see a mysterious downturn in profit and are unable to attribute it to the fact that people don't make any money and accordingly can't pay for things they are making money by farming out labor to fourth world countries, whose major export is dirt. Corps who are farming out their labor fold like sheets at a Motel 6 or move to country where their production facilities are. Now more people are out of work locally.
3) No profit! No company!
4) Repeat ad nauseam
Why do you think we are in the world of hurt we're in today? It's called Lowest Bidder. If you as Foocorp can save a buck manufacturing widgets, you'll save that buck because it means more money in your pocket. The downside is that in saving that buck you're going to put yourself out of business.
Wait about ten years. The results will be one of two things: depression to rival 1929 or bounceback as a result of these companies fscking over the US economy. Forget your interest rates, they mean nothing - the lowest bidder is causing our downturn.
This sig no verb.
Probably alot easier for malicious individuals or groups to infiltrate tech companies in India, work for a few years infesting U.S. banking, healthcare and other outsourced functions (including gov.). Next thing, backdoors everywhere. Bring the U.S. economy to it's knees without a shot.
'Course, I'm just paranoid. It can't happen here.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Who wins? Who loses?
I guess the answer depends on whether the person being asked the question is American or not, doesn't it ?
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?
I don't know if this occurred to the the submitter, but America is offshore and a foreign country to most people in the universe.
From a global perspective, it is not necessarily better that the jobs are in the US as opposed to elsewhere.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
So I am afraid about all the jobs going elsewhere? NO
Am I making sure that I understand the changes that globalization will bring whether I like it or not? YES
You can't stop the future. You can only simulate it by stopping progress.
Learn to adapt or you will not be in a good place.
When the US passed the law in the late 1800s or early 1900s giving corporations the same rights as a natural person, they made corporations extraordinarily powerful.
This is another example. Such trends are not really globalization as such - they are simply a means by large corporations to reduce cost and eliminate tax liabilities in the US.
By employing cheaper labour in foreign countries, they can reduce costs and hence increase profit by maintaining the current pricing levels. Have you ever noticed that the cost of manufactured goods almost never significantly drops in price? How do those 50% off sales work? Well, the company still makes a profit since their markup is 70% or 100%.
Do the workers in foreign countries benefit? Yes, to an extent. There are certainly jobs available that would not otherwise have been there. Does the corporation have any loyalty to those people? Not really - they can easily shut down and move a factory as economic changes happen.
This is not dissimilar to US electronic investment in Europe in the late70s and 80s. European governments were falling over themselves to subsidise huge US plants to stimulate their own economies and keep their workforce employed.
Reverse process is also happening in the US. Chep migrant labour (often illegal) at minimum wage employed on production lines to assemble goods at low cost. Little job security or even basic health/safety standards since the workers are desperate for any income.
Is it something for the US to worry about? Not really. Your corporations are pursuing short-term gain according to economic opportunity. When demand for their manufactured goods or services drops off in the lucrative market of the US because consumers cannot afford them because they have insufficient income or no jobs, then that economy will become restimulated. Whetever the corporations might do, they will not commit suicide by eliminating or disenfranchising their primary market.
Welcome to the 21st century (and the 20th) where humans exploit other humans for profit.
STF
That seems to be the answer for everything. Of course, if you're out of work and can't find a job, tax breaks don't really help. As long as corporations have more rights than citizens, we will continue to get screwed.
Any empire in history has subjugated the poor of other nations in order to sustain it's own wealth. The US is acting similar in this regard. Unfortunately for you and I, we do not get to reap the benefits alongside the corporations, we are merely discarded in the process. The term globalization does not mean that we will all live easier and everyone will have a job, it means that the empire will no longer have a home base, just as corporations have become a faceless entity to complain about, they are becoming a stateless entity that is no longer subject to the free market rules. These new global corporations may cut a large swath of productivity, but they move from third world country to third world country leaving devastation and ruin in their wake.
Today the beneficial country may be India and Singapore, but as wages there begin to climb, those same companies will pack up and move elsewhere to start the whole process anew. There is no ethics in that, and there is no sense of responsibility in global corporations who continue in such endeavors.
Hammer of Truth
I'm starting a new vertical software company. I live in Seattle and I'm going to start it else where because they keep cutting taxes. Trafic sucks here. Schools are being cut. Public safety is being cut right along with those taxes. I have the choice to start-up any where and it will be in a place where the public is willing to fund services.
A lot of us write code and enjoy it, you insensitive clod!
Wow. You really need to ease up on those X-Files re-runs.
voice coaches drill staff on how to speak American English
What do you say we take a relaxed attitude towards work and watch the baseball game? The nye [New York] Mets are my favorite squadron.
-- Apu acts American, "Much Apu About Nothing"
Lower production costs equals lower prices for consumers in the US.
The average American would also benefit further if the goverment would abolish its tariffs on steel and softwood lumber, and stop subsidizing agriculture from everybody else's taxes.
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
... surf with "oldest first", how can the first post (I'm browsing at level 1) be redundant?
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
Hmmm... yah. Can't be. Those inumerable people against globalisation must all be out of their minds.
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...
It brings up the more interesting question: Is there actually a shift going on where what were once white collar jobs are really now blue collar jobs? Is todays web admin really more a job that lines up with the assembly line worker of old, a job that has gotten exported over time?
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
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
Who wins? Who loses?
Winners are CEOs, those who already have money and make the decisions. The other 90% of the lower paid workers may gain or lose, but it will be purely incidental.
Cheers,
e.
I think the days of unions are dead. People just have to learn how to work smarter and cheaper in other words adapt. Just like what happened to teh auto industry with teh infusion of japanese cards american mfgs had to clean up there act and become competitive. Have you seen GM, and crystler lately. The problem is nationalism is no longer contries span the globe and just because their address is in pasadena doesn't mean they are allied to the US. America needs to invest in its infrastructure, it's children make then smarter, allow the right environment for big companies. Then we will always be competitive. It's simple if east asian engineers are better then the jobs will move to them. especially if its cheaper. I remember going to school 80% of engineering dept was from either asia inda or teh middle east.
And that's just off the top of my head. These costs don't show up until you leave the outsourcers. Right now, they're saving $n/programmer-hour, but there are more subtle costs they're incurring en route. Just my 2 rupees.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
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.
So... on the one hand, the foreign workers are serving us by working for us, but on the other hand American business is serving the foreigners by building the plants and employing them.
Projected outcome based on the service-leader principle? American business leads, American workers follow. Same as it ever was. As long as I can remember, the complaint has been that American workers aren't as smart as foreign workers (a Japanese highschool graduate actually knows algebra!).
So, if you want to lead in America don't just be a worker--get a stake in business. This can be a small stake, like owning shares in stocks, or it can be a more personal stake like actually owning your own small business (not for everybody, most people are better off just investing in somebody else's business). I've seen this work time and time again. Set some money aside, invest wisely, learn, learn, learn; but don't count on your job to be your only ticket to success.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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
I'm a poster child of IRC and hooked on phonics. I actually have a degree and concider myself a professional. however typing while pissed doesnt' work for me
Its just another ugly effect of the way the US economy works...
1. Get Educated
2. Get Hired
3. Want enough money from your job to have a life
4. Cost of things you want is driven by the cost of the people who work for the people that sell the things you want
5. Need a job that pays for the things you want.
6. Can't get that demand lower prices
7. the people that sell the things you want need to sell them cheaper
7a. your one of the people that works for the people that sell the things that other people want.
8. They need the people, of whom you are one, that make the things (real, or ethereal like code) they make to make them cheaper
9. Outsourcing of american jobs in your realm happens.
10 Start back at (1.)
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
That's moronic. The problem isn't lack of education or motivation. The problem is that executives are using lax labor and environmental laws in foreign countries to line their pockets. When all of us work at service jobs flipping burgers, how is that going to be good for the economy again?
Can America lose these jobs and still prosper?
What a silly question. If American company XYZ can send these jobs overseas and - by doing so - pay less than it would for the equivalent domestic labor, then 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). These lowered prices will make all Americans better off.
Of course, if you're not a capitalist, you probably disagree with the above statement, but if you're not a capitalist, you're also on the wrong side of history.
Jonathan
Let the jobs go overseas. Didn't we learn about 5 years ago that there would be no more use for programmers anyhow?
It's funny. Laugh.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
I am happy we are moving the support centers away. While they have given many Americans the foot in the door, it is boring work that doesn't fit the American short attention span. I believe that support centers cannot survive in the US, because as soon as someone is trained, they must be promoted to management or will leave for a better job. Very few people are patient or masochistic enough to stay in a support position for more than 12 months.
"mind-numbing digital toil, like writing software code"
Those who believe writing software is mind-numbing should stay out of the business. People whose primary motivation is the money are going to colleges and certificate institutes, learn just enough to get a job, then complain about it. Most programmers with talent just understand computers, would rather have the manual than training, and can outproduce ten of the money-seekers. We program for 20 hours straight because it is what we love to do. But the world needs more techies than are available, so most companies must be (and would rather be) satisfied with 50 mediocre programmers than 2 good ones.
I do not worry about companies who are willing to outsource the information infrastructure, because:
I feel sorry for everybody trying to break into the business.
I do not feel sorry for everybody who was will to put up with the "mind-numbing" work just for a ton of money. Although my performance-tuning business may suffer, the world will be a better place.
OTOH, companies were still complaining about the lack of IT people even last year when the market "was slow". I believe most of the issue was that companies decided to lower the pay rates until we decided it was better to take a year off than work.
Gartner says you need more consulting.
---
My girlfriend says I am not a nerd.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Unlike our unforunate comrades in the software development industry, the hardware people -- sysadmins, operators and lowly techs -- will have a place in the sevice-sector future America is moving towards. The only danger, in this case, comes from cheap labor and Network Admin courses at your local tech institute.
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
There you have it - a clear admittance that free trade globalization as it is currently practiced is based on groundless faith.
The results of this will be a global race to the bottom - once jobs in India & China get too expensive, they'll switch to Chile & Tibet, or wherever. Same goes with manufacturing jobs. The countries with the least wages, standards of living, health care, worker benefits, environmental standards, and interest in corporate affairs win the jobs. Wealth gets enormously concentrated, class and racial divisions are exacerbated, and democracies die. The vast majority of us get fucked.
What is human labor worth? Why should jobs be as transferable as, say, a bushel of wheat? Is this really the most just way to encourage the development of other countries? What sort of society are we creating when we convince people (like me) to get their PhDs, get educated, and then pursue governmental policies to get rid of our livelihoods?
The only ones who profit under this system are the transnational corporations and the politicians they own. This course wrecks societies and is destroying the environmental health of the planet, which is the ultimate source of wealth. 50 years, tops, before it all implodes.
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
Ceo's affect the botton line of all corporate profits. DId you know you can hire an indian CEO will work for only 30k a year! As a shareholder you need to maximize your profits anyway possible and good hard working CEO's for only a 1/100th of the price is the way to go.
If this trend started you can be sure the offshore madness would stop NAFTA has done nothing but harm world relations.
http://saveie6.com/
on one of the talk shows about the econonmy (being unenmployed means way too much time to listen to talk shows). Apparently the sucking sound has a sucking sound of its own. The fear of outsourcing places like India and Russia is places even cheaper than they are, like China. They mentioned Hungary (Eastern Europe being relatively cheap) losing production of the Xbox to China(even cheaper). See here.
In the long term they won't need the U.S. any more, and we will have nothing but Hollywood to export. The rest of the world might well lose interest in Hollywood when the U.S. itself is no longer dominant. (I lost interest myself long ago.)
it seems like every year finds the nation, and its citizens, further in debt.
The requested URL
here from Hungary's point of view. (sorry the other link was good but this one was better)
If companies want to move their employee base out of the country, taking jobs away from Americans, take away the nice cushy tax breaks that they get from the American government if they off-shore a certain dollar amount worth of salaries. (American not 3rd world salary)
It now becomes prohibitively expensive for them to do so. The only reason they give away jobs to foreign workers is because they'll work for 1/4 the salaries of Americans, so make it NOT worth their while to do so. Easy solution. Watch the corporate lobbyists go nuts.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
When all these high--paying jobs have left the country, who's going to be left over to actually BUY the high-ticket items being made by these companies? I can say with some certainty it's not going to be a $10k a year engineer in India. There's absolutely no chance it's going to be an American ex-engineer who's been reduced flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wallmart.
Maybe it's time to start learning hindi...
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.
Take GM for instance - we lost over 140,000 jobs in the US to Mexico and China - however its easily argued that GM makes the most expensive cars still.
The kicker is Quality. That's the one intangible aspect that can be snuck through the entire process of manufacturing if a company is clever, and knows how to pass the buck.
Witness the PC industry (go ahead! witness it!)... what do you suppose the ratio is of quality PC parts to cheap-ass knockoffs? Resistors barfing all over the place, bad power supplies, bad cooling... these components were manufactured Quickly and Cheaply. The Quality bites the consumer in the ass.
Another example: Volkswagen's move from a German plant to a Mexican plant. Cheaper to buy, cheaper cars. Cheap, in every way.
So while I understand the poster's point about keeping yourself relevant, I think as a country the US ought to try and keep itself relevant in the global arena, in those areas where the US truly innovates.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
We need a political movement, and we need one now.
The reason this sort of thing is happening is because of the vast difference in salaries in different countries, but the lifestyle difference is not as great as one might think. Its just the currency exchange rates make everything much cheaper in other countries. So corporations are taking advantage of this. What will happen eventually is the cost of living will become standardized around the world. So it will not matter which country a worker works in, he will still make the same salary. Unfortunately, because the dollar is so strong we will get screwed until this happens.
Countries with cheap and easily available oil export oil. Countries with cheap and easily available labor will export their labor (which is what we call "outsourcing"). Eventually, if open standards, technology (but I repeat myself . . .), and democracy continue to spread throughout the world, all prices will converge to a single optimum point, and there will be little need for outsourcing but by then, a lot will have changed. Being poor but well educated can actually be a national resource. So the not so smart richest country better get ready for some change (and before you flame me out of national pride, understand that I am an American).
Or, what? You thought an OS monopoly (OS, being everything your computer could POSSIBLY do) and a large nuclear stockpile of weapons was your key to a comfortable life? In case you haven't noticed, these other countries have been better investing their hard earned money, and we are just starting to feel the results.
In capitalist economies, only price is king. Kneel before your king.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Jesus fucking christ buddy, you are, I presume, supposed to be an educated American? I mean sure, you're an engineer, but most 6 year olds in my country can spell better than you. You are a living testament to the American education system. To think that most of the American people can't afford the "privilege" of attending one of your institutions of higher learning....thank god.
In 10 years, those jobs will be sucked out of India too. As technology progresses, (and becomes more widespread) these jobs will move to cheaper countries. The way to combat this would be technological innovation, to create a new definition of "high tech" and the corresponding "high tech jobs".
Now... how can we stimulate/reward innovation?
I cannot believe you used MS as an example of American software design? Can you prove they designed ANYTHING?
If you want examples, point to IBM in the NorthEast and Colorado, or the game companies in Maryland and around San Francisco. Most of the big name software products are still completely written in the US; the rest are in Canada and Europe. Would most slashdotters know the name of any software package produced primarily in India?
From my experience, most of the design work (specification writing) is still done here in the US.
Then the first draft of the code is written in India.
Then the project falls apart because nobody here can get the software to run, and it is swept under the carpet.
[OK. I usually write code, or lead projects with Americans, Canadians, and a few Europeans. Just lucky? Or is it because I discriminate, willing to turn down projects if I have no confidence in the management?]
---
My girlfriend says I'm not a nerd.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Someone who might have joined Microsoft in 1989, and enjoyed the 90s overwhelmingly, and expected their monopoly to remain indefinitely would certainly despise Linux, FreeBSD and other Opensource software. See, monopoly can get very comfortable and later, its loss might feel just wrong despite its associated political correctness.
See, this planet as a whole is basically an extremely competitive place. Combine that with the fact that there now seems to be more population than natural resources, competition at every level becomes a matter of life and death for individuals and nations. In any competitive environment, monopoly exists for sure. But rules that break monopoly makes things interesting and takes the competition to a different level.
The western hemisphere grabbed that monopoly about 500 years ago, just like Microsoft did with Windows 3.1. Of course, the western civilization did very well indeed, which is why its going strong 5 centuries on, compared to Microsoft which is showing weaknesses. Other regions, Asia, Africa etc did try to push on with their own older economies and societies, but just as Microsoft grabbed the market share, the western civilization found the Scientific Method which was a far superior way of gaining knowledge than anything else out there. Asia for one has given way now. Many indians speak, read and write english and the chinese by the millions are glued to english written O'Reilly books. This is not too different from Linus copying UNIX ideas to make a UNIX clone.
Now the turf levels up. Globalization initially will make life tough for the nations that own the top 50% of the world's economy. However, Bill Goats was wrong. Linux will not destroy competition and bring down the whole software market to a halt. Wonderful things will happen as people will have options they didnt have in the past decade. The world's overall economies will surely boom, with the percentage of the world's population under the poverty line decreasing.
You know what that means dont you? Frustration that drove the 19 Pakistanis and Saudis to fly Jumbos into NewYork buildings, and millions to cheer their acts will disappear. Where nations can compete economically, they will not have to resort to extreme methods. We will see Operating Systems from Finland, Iran, Malaysia, Kenya, Apps from Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Korea, Chile and Processors from Ukraine, United States, India, Taiwan. Imagine the competition. Imagine the prices. Imagine the quality!
Many years after the start of such large-scale globalization, an american geek can logon to dice.com and search jobs, and will recieve far more offerings in many more countries than just his. And one country's dot-com bust will not bring the global tech economy down.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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
Wait, let me get this straight. I'm assuming that your four-man operation replaces a three-or-four man operation in the U.S. Let's say salary costs are $50,000 per U.S. programmer, $15,000 per Indian programmer. A four-man U.S. team is $200,000 a year, while a one US, three Indian team is $95,000, for a savings of 48%.
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.
Further, the U.S. is the top market for high technology products, because we have the extra cash to spend on them. Increased employment in other countries raises their GDP, which means they can better afford high-end toys, which means they get cheaper and better for us, etc. etc.
Take a look at the numbers - globalization has been in full swing for a few decades now, and the U.S. has the lowest unemployment rate in years - lower than they thought possible a decade ago! Almost everyone wins when the people that can make a product the cheapest are allowed to do it. The only ones who lose, in the short run, are those who are displaced by the production move. The remedy for that is short-term government support, and the best way to get out is to acquire new skills.
Tell your children to become engineers. The problem-solving skills you learn will help them easily jump from career to career, as needed. Encourage them to take some liberal arts classes, too, to make them think more flexibly and excercise that right brain a little. May I suggest an economics class?
Not only is the economy being affected by the loss in jobs nobody seems to be asking what kind of security risk this is posing. Foreign workers who are in the U.S./Canada are at least accounted for by our immigration laws, but we have no way of checking out and tracking workers overseas. This is particularly bad because we are allowing people who we have no idea about to work on our software. God knows who else gets a whiff of our stuff other than the people hired to work on it. I don't mean to be paranoid but we are talking about countries with emerging economies with a history of corruption at all levels of business and government. Petty bribery and kick backs are a way of doing business in some of the places our software is being made and it should be of no surprise if it gets passed around for 'nominal fees.'
On the upside though, I find that when times are hard that's when everyone is forced to use their ingenuity to come up with stuff that can't be done by anyone else but us. Time to put on your thinking caps...
And the USA has never been stronger.
That's because we in the West recognize economic truths and acknowledge them, biting the bullet unlike, say, Japan, who pretend nothing is wrong until the whole house of cards collapses for, what 15 years now? and Russia who - well, never mind Russia.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Check out this Google search, and this other link over here.
In the West, it's far less clear who will be the big winners and losers. But we'll soon find out. Big winners: Millionaire CEO's. Big Losers: Everyone else. First blue-collar jobs went Mexico. Now white-collar jobs are going to India. Who does that leave working here?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
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.
I don't mind living on $10,000/year as a Sr. Software Engineer! Only thing is, when I was making $120,000/year I kinda bought a few toys on credit. I know, my bad. Didn't realize my industry would die only 18 months later.
So, I'm just going to have to go bankrupt before taking my new Bangalore-style salary. Oh yeah, my student loan? Sorry. No can pay. Ironically, Bank of America is going to have to eat alot of that. Too bad!
So as you prepare to bend me over, better check your own ass. Did I mention that I vote? All my friends too. We're edumacted, see (thanks again for those student loans BTW).
We also know how to spell "rayce to tha bottum" and we're very, very pissed off.
Bye bye.
Glin
A lot of people are pointing the old debates about the US's prosperity to the heavy industrial and later automobile industries moving off shore to what is going on now. I see the point, but it is more complex now than it has ever been. Consider:
When we move parts of industry off shore, its because we've gone on to "bigger and better" things. When we perfect automated manufacturing, we can move it offshore and concern ourselves instead with R&D and/or innovative design. Our country's greatest minds turn away from the practical (in a field) and turn toward efficiency, new technologies, and new ideas that ultimately lead to a complete social change. After the car, consumer goods like Televisions, VCRs, Computers, and now what?
We might just be in a transitionary period just now-- but we need to move on to "bigger and better" things that can drive the economy. What I mean by that is the point at which an item becomes a commodity here, it usually isn't growing in revenue or market penetration anymore, which has been our basis for economic growth. Maybe it'll come working on hydrogen technology-- or protein sequencing (for our own food production)-- or whatever, but it does scare me to see our real "thinking" jobs (what has become the basis for our bread and butter industies since before 1900) are moving out of our hands. Our culture is getting odd... American scientific people just don't seem to be as radical, unorthodox and brilliant as they seem to have been in the past. It seems to me that that in first world nations, especially the US, the people should have a chance to truly excel as human beings, all working toward a brilliant, thoughtful and happy society.
Instead, most people seem to worried about their jobs, the bottom line, profit margins (and therefor their family and others they care for) or what I'd call "day to day" concerns. This is a different set (in the movie set sense) than third world nations-- but are their day to day concerns about survivial really that different from the corporate culture you can read about in other posts here?
Tom Peters, a respected management consultant wrote in Time Magazine that:
"I believe that 90% of white-collar jobs in the U.S. will be either destroyed or altered beyond recognition in the next 10 to 15 years. That's a catastrophic prediction, given that 90% of us are engaged in white-collar work of one sort or another. Even most manufacturing jobs these days are connected to such white-collar services as finance, human resources and engineering."
As he points out later in the article, there is a lot more political power in white-collar workers and there is potential of stronger anti-globalization sentiment as a result.
In any case, it is happening across the board today. My fortune 50 employer has stated that up to 40% of our engineering work will be "globalized" within 5 years.
As always though, continuing education, flexibility, and functional excellence will be key. Your only job security in the future will be your commitment to constant growth and a virtual global reputation for doing hi quality work.
Yes, as the rest of the world comes barging in into the world economy where rich countries have hitherto reigned supreme, there will be some growing pains. However the gains will be enormous. The kind of world economy we're building now will have possibilities and prosperity beyond our imagination.
If we start actiong protectionist we will have less resources, less cures for cancer etc and will be less better from it.
Of course that is not much consolation if you're stuck in a vortex of job shifting on a global scale. Maybe we will need to prepare us for wages in the future that comes plenty but in spurts, and compensate for this with either private or government insurance.
Less free trade would make the US and the EU into open-air museums and the life styles we lead aren't even sustainable in the long run in the first place. We need to innovate and work ourselves into a better future. There is no way back.
euliberals.net
"Tell the corporations that if people are much cheaper to hire in Bangladesh or India, move your management and marketing types there, too, not just the people that do real and honest work"
:)
I wish I had some mod points for you.
The jobs moving overseas are the IT industries' own fault to a degree. The "hype", the overpaid incompetent IT workers, the billions of dollars lost by US companies during the "boom!" on moronic projects and badly thought out "concepts". Basically, the IT industry in the country "burned" the companies that depend on it.
The forces driving fundamental change are several, including regional cost differentials, market power relations, and globalization of IT industry. Most importantly, however, the U.S. IT industry has become an amazingly capital-intensive economic sector that no longer has access to capital. The floodgates have been opened. I doubt they can be closed.
This is nothing new, this happened to blue-collar workers years ago, and now it is moving up the chain.
The only way I can see to compete is thru advancing the technology in the field you are in, and keeping those technological advancements as industry secrets. You will have to create BETTER products in LESS time if you want to compete with people who can be paid tremendously less than yourself. Sending work overseas has an inherent cost, and language barriers, and assorted other problems, but unless you can create something significantly better, you are going to watch the jobs go away.
I am not claiming I have any solutions, just agreeing that it is a scary fact. I think if it becomes a huge issue, you will see the middle class rise up in anger and fight it tooth and nail.
My name is Robert, and I am a software developer.
This free flow of jobs, or capital, out of the US and other western democracies, is increasing the divide between the wealthy and poor at a documented and alarming rate. Many of the jobs that are being lost, manufacturing, service jobs, encompass the visceral substance that is the middle class in a developed country, leaving a vacuum in its place. As in where do we work now???
And now even high technology jobs are spreading around the world. This shouldn't be surprising given how much easier it is for a developing country to educate elements of its workforce and provide a sexy price tag to a foreign corporation, than for a developed country to compete on price given the considerable costs it must cover.
As these jobs drip away - what do we have in their place? Certainly high end management jobs, lawyers, doctors, 7 Eleven attendants, and Walmart cashiers will not employ a country, nor do they make up a middle class. There is nothing substantive in its place - no immense new industry (can you say Railroads?) that can hire the teeming masses that we are and will be losing as manufacturing, and other industries, flee.
Warren Buffett, and other influentials, has spoken on occasion as to how America can confront this coming crisis and how the developed nations must innovate to survive. They speak of how since America, and to a similar extent the West, cannot compete on the cost of production, it must find other ways to compete. Certainly the Internet provides vast opportunities for job creation - but how vast? On the level of the hundreds of thousands of jobs around the country that the mainstays of agriculture and industry have? Likely not.
Not that we've lost all of our manufacturing or service or technical base - but the process is, indeed, quickening - ever expanding into other "traditional" industries. For that matter the US is littered with the skeletons of once living, breathing cities supported by the very manufacturing jobs that have dripped away over the last handful of decades.
Clearly the loss of these jobs raises concerns - the trade offs of globalization certainly benefit the cheap production of goods, and the ever-tantamount corporate profit. But the cost to the very nations, the very people, who have built the infrastructure and innovation for a global economy raises serious concerns. All of these concerns can be summarized in one question:
What are we going to do about it?
Much can be said about the very stability that free trade and globalization have brought the world. Were we to step on the fire hose, halting the spray of jobs moving from the developed to the developing world much of this stability could be jeopardized. Were we to consider enacting barriers to the free flow of capital and the transfer of jobs to the developed world - what affect would that have on this supposed stability?
Indeed, it raises many questions, one oft-raised criticism of globalization is that it creates a disincentive for the developing world to develop. Rather, free trade and the free flow of capital incents keeping the costs of producing goods as low as possible - benefits thought sacrosanct in the developed world are shied away from in the developing as they are a deterrent to capital. God forbid a company choose to do business in another state or nation because your state has enacted a minimum wage or the right of workers to organize.
But the most pressing question in my mind, the question which inspired this very letter, is what will happen in the developed world when the job base is truly global and the jobs have fled. Will innovation save us? What kind of innovation could do it?
We need a new kind of industry - perhaps information is that industry - but as of yet I don't see it. For now information and information technology is driving up productivity, but this productivity is allowing for the elimination of jobs, more so than the creation of them. Communication technologies (from the telephone to the internet) are allowing, even, small companies to decentralize to offices in multiple countries - having software engineers in India and management and Sales in the US, for instance. Companies are automating formerly un-automated disciplines - ERP systems, e-Business, EDI, and more - all to allow the efficient processing of business transactions. But these are not so much new industries as niche, sub industries. They will not fill the void left by the mass employers of the 20th century.
The problem is, indeed, complex and involves incenting the developing world to continue to develop, while avoiding a zero sum loss of development (translated to JOBS) by the developed world. It will require new innovative approaches to job creation at all levels and that cannot translate to a swath of minimum wage, benefit-less, jobs. Perhaps it will require regulation by governments to combat the loss, or maybe it's too late, but the dialogue needs to happen and we need ideas - dammit.
Unless you can impose duties on imports, the long term will be a country full of poor people who buy items/services/high-tech from countries like china and india. In the future, they will be the most high-tech and developed countries, use the example of how the US eclipsed the UK in the 20th century. One way is to develop nanotech replicators (think star treck), where everybody has their material needs met, there is no "I want to be the next super rich geek" mentality..everybody can have enough material stuff to keep them happy, when that happens, the urge to get more stuff and money just will evaporate and people can just be people, however, over-population on earth could be a problem, so establishing colonies on the moon, mars and orbiting space stations etc..
...and mind-numbing digital toil, like writing software code...
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Start your own company and outsource most of the labor overseas where possible. If we're all going to be either rich or impovereshed then do all you can to get on the right side of the fence. Survival of the fittest people!
Or, move to India, take a 90% pay cut but get a killer pad with the equity from selling your house in the USA. I hear they've got good Chicken Tandoori over there too. Then, every 10 years, move to the next up-and-coming nation (China, Philippenes, Africa, Afghanistan, Haiti, etc.), repeat until death.
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!
People want to benefit from the US economy (rewarding) without contributing to it (expensive). They want to be parasites, but what happens when all there are are parasites, or at least everyone who can become one has become one?
Hmm...maybe cancer is a better analogy?
Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
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.
Tons, and I mean tons of money goes into many of those countries for oil and industries related to oil daily. Where does it all go? To some rich prince's pockets, or some other theocracy equivalent. And we all know where it comes from: the West.
But yea, losing jobs here in our well managed, established nation for the sake of saving some CEO somewhere 5% is really going to help the Middle East solve it's economic problems. Note the burning scarcasm.
And then, when us Europeans try to protect our workers against such odd behavior, you call us f*cking communists or other charming names ?
Whatever, just continue this way and let's talk about it again in one or two decades,
I find it interesting that no one is considering the effect of outsourcing on EU companies (which are clearly mentioned in the article, but not the header. Oh, wait).
If you're a multinational (Siemens is mentioned in the article), and you have jobs in the US, the EU and India, which are you going to outsource first? The EU jobs, where benefits are mandated by law, and taxes are high, or the US jobs, where companies aren't forced to pamper their workers?
Plus, the EU has the former Second World to deal with, and all the issues of integrating all the Eastern European countries and workforces. I suspect these two forces will make life interesting for everyone in the forseeable future.
All that having been said, I do believe that all this will be good in the long run. The more good jobs are available, the more there will be demand across the board. The entire premise of the EU, NAFTA and the FTAA is that more trade means more prosperity for everyone. I see no reason to believe that will stop being the case.
Several major sectors of the US economy is slowly dribbling out of the borders, mainly due to perceived cheap labor/recourses.
.younger ones wont even know what it used to be like, and just assume this is 'normal'.
In the long run it only causes problems as if there are not enough consumers in the US, then the companies cant sell the products.. even at a reduced rate.
Then with out those sales it just drags down the whole system even more then 'just" people loosing their jobs/carriers..
People in their 40's are going to bet hit hard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Compare the UAW with the Candian Auto Workers. Since they split in the 80s, the CAW has seen a net growth of full-time, union, automotive manufacturing jobs.
They make it a priority and the members of the CAW are mobilized enough to make it happen. It wasn't but a few years ago that they occuppied a factory to keep GM from removing key pieces of machinery. GM buckled - the factory is still there.
So unions CAN oppose globilization. It does take a degree of activism by union members and engagement with other social forces so that the unions aren't isolated but it can be done.
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I live in Derry in Northern Ireland. This is a part of the world which was a bit like India for a good few years. What I mean by that is a lot of American companies set up operations here as it was cheaper. Near me we have Prumerica (Prudential) and Northbrook (Allstate) doing software and up the street we have a massive DuPont plant. There is also a load of call centres, MSN used to have support for its American operation based here. These are fairly safe purely on the grounds of the geographical location which is good for Europe and America.
Another sector that was established here was clothing and textiles. In the early 90's Fruit of the Loom set up several factories here, at considerable cost albeit offset by some government grants. So did Lee Aparell and a few other big names. Fruit of the Loom opened two plants near me and 3 over the Irish border a few miles away in Buncrana, Donegal. This was in the early 90s, only one plant is left and that is at risk of closing. Most of the plants that closed didn't last 5 years. The reason? management got uppity at staff joining unions and wanting better conditions and they were afraid of the upcomming minimum wage. So they shipped all the work off to Morocco, where the costs were 25% of the costs here. Even taking in to account the costs incurred building new factories here only a few years earlier it was still cheaper to move to Morocco.
This is where the weird logic kicks in, what happens when the Morrocan workers decide they want better pay, which will inevitably happen? Pretty much the same thing which happened here, management will not like the unions causing trouble and they will move somewhere else.
When will big business learn wages are not the only thing to think about when trying to make more money. A happy workforce with job security is a productive workforce, a productive workforce cuts manufacturing costs, lower manufacturing costs means more profits. Well at least I think thats how it works.
Ok, I read this article and was horrified. I am a late 20's computer professional soon to be going to college to get a degree. Computers I thought. That would be great. But after reading that article, I was scared shitless. I think that whoever puts forth this whole notion that "it hurts, but will do good for everyone" is fscking retarded! Give me some cold hard facts here. Yes it does help the IT people in India if I am unemployed and 3 Indians get hired. But what the FSCK is the eventual outcome? Will the company eventually move to the third world and provide services to India when all Americans loose their jobs. ....... Well whatever, they will pay us. We will control their resources.
Well here's my solution. All these places that we have troops. They will now become colonies of the United States. Also, all the places that are thorns in our sides. Iraq, North Korea, fscking Iran. Their goverments will be wiped and replaced by United States representatives. These "Colonies" will pay the US a monthly fee for our
Now, my fellow americans, we will live off of the fat tit of our colonies. Education will be completely subsidized along with medical care. You will have a monthly dividend that the gov't will provide to you due to the last 150 years of suffering to support the rest of those 3rd world countries and even 2nd world (France, England, South Korea, Japan.) Basically, you're jobs will be to loaf and to consume. You can go to college if you so desire. Otherwise loaf.
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
I think the optimistic viewpoint is that the world is heading for an equilibrium. Think European Union only world-wide (I guess the currency would be the Eartho?).
The main problem in the world right now is unequality from place to place. Consider thermodynamics...where does the heat go? In chemistry, where does the higher concentration go? I know it sucks right now, but we really have to hope for the long term (as long as Gulf War II doesn't screw everything up). Once the Earth reaches equilibrium, then all we'll have to worry about is the cheap jobs going to Khronos or something (the real optimists hold out for universe-wide equilibrium).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Well, no.
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 CEO may well see the relationship you outline, but for the company, it is better to lay of than to refrain. If he didn't, the economy would still tank due to everyone else laying off, so of course he will too.
A 7 or 8 figure CEO ought to understand more about the macroeconomic nature of the US, and bear partial responsibility for it.
And that's where you (unfortunately) are really wrong. A CEO (or a boardmember) has a responsibility only to the company's owners (the shareholders). They do not have a responsibility towards the national economy - in fact, if they did take it as part of their responsibility to the detriment of the company performance, they could get sued by their shareholders for mismanagement, or would get fired themselves at the least. This is the result of allowing corporativism emerge as the dominant flavor of capitalism today.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It's a given that IT work will go to cheapest workers. What should US IT workers do now?
a) Spend less; Accept lower salaries.
b) Create new technology without VC funding.
c) Change to a job you love.
d) Go back to school.
e) Switch to biotech or nanotech
f) Try to find work that is harder to outsource.
g) Start an outsourcing quality management company
h) Become an outsourcer yourself.
It is waste of time to say that outsource is bad or good. This discussion will not help or hurt the trend. We have to start taking about what we should do to thrive despite outsourcing. Accept outsourcing and find a path to success despite of it. Change now or be forced to change later.
What will you do when your layoff has been announced? Plan now. When you find the way maybe quiting would be better than waiting.
They have an interesting piece on globalization right now. And they are trying to do something about it.
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Everyone considers the internet an incredible invention connecting people in far lands, but one of the side effects in connecting people is that the cost-savers can employ people on the other side of the globe. In good times i've heard companies say they can't find any employees and in bad times i've heard them say they they can't afford to hire local employees.
Globalization is only going to increase, and is that not what we intended? One world united? I wouldn't be worried about those offshore, for they are just workers, like you and me. Think more about those seeking to maximize profits, and how to compete with them. History has shown how the dependents fare.
The only way to improve the standard of living in other nations is to offer them jobs. If we want other nations to move beyond just farming and manufacturing we *must* make sure that we share the way we make wealth with them.
Ack, you complete twit! I don't happen to want to give my job to people in poorer nations, and I don't happen to care if they get ahead or not. No, I really don't. My first duty is to the country I live in, us peons and the twits who have the money and run the place, but mostly the peons. I could really care less if any other country ever comes out of the stone age and if they continue to sell us cheap raw materials and buy back expensive finished products made in my country by our industries and our technology, great, keep it coming.
I think the US should only import products and services it can't get locally, and if people want to import things that can be made locally, tax 'em so highly that their ears pop from the altitude and the pressure. And what the hell is this dealing with dictatorships and communist freedom-hating land masses deal? Why? Greed. Fuck that, let's give them some incentive to make their people free and stop trading until that 'human rights and freedoms' thing improves.
Do you really think that the mid east would be in the situation it is today if there was a wide diverse economy over there?
Maybe not, but that's Islam's fault, with the whole "if it agrees with the Koran it's redundant and if not it's heretical" attitude which caused Omar(?) to burn down the library at Alexandria and has kept them in the stone age ever since. They'd be even worse off if they weren't lucky enough to have a critical natural resource in plenty. And yes, I'm happy to buy oil, refine it, and sell back the resulting plastics etc. at a huge markup, and it wouldn't bother me much if the upcoming war was over oil if only people were honest about it, although I wouldn't place bets on Saddam not trying to stockpile weapons and go out with a bang (for great justice and many virgins with Allah).
We still own the companies in these other companies that produce this stuff. We hold the stocks on them so even when we dont make them, we still as a people are reaping profits from them.
In the next millinium be sure you hold suffieient quantities of stock in these companies, or you will be left behind. Dont let this crash make you think you can live without owning a piece of these multinational corporations.
And we do make quite a bit of IP these days.
America is the holdings company of the world.
I dunno. It seems to be the most effective tagline for everyone else, so I thought I'd steal it.
The way the situation is now, I have a problem with companies outsourcing skilled white collar jobs to India. We still have to be here sucking dust while the CEOs drive by in phat limousines.
If they outsource CEOs' and marketroids' jobs too, then I don't have as much a problem with it. After all, there are plenty of foreign students with MBAs from top American universities too. If a foreign programmer with an American CS degree can steal our jobs, then so should that MBA student have the same opportunity.
Alternatively, they could let us invade the Indian market and take away all their jobs. I have no problem with getting paid 20 times the average local wage. Spending power is all relative, and they say Goa is nice.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And global exchange rates have nothing to do with it?
When the ruble and the rupee gain in value relative to the dollar, the global outsourcing trend will slow at least a little.
I'm just amazed this never comes up in news reports.
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 can't mod you up, but I can reply.
It's a fact that when the playing field is levelled, not all parts of it stay high. We can only hope that the average standard of living continues to rise around the world. Personally, I don't think that a worsening economy here will be the doomsday scenario people predict; our society is carrying load of economic cruft that it could stand to do without: big homes, big cars, big insurance, big money all around. Very little of this is necessary or even necesarily desirable to the workings of a free, healthy society.
"These new global corporations may cut a large swath of productivity, but they move from third world country to third world country leaving devastation and ruin in their wake."
Actually, I think they will leave when wages are no longer relatively low, which is really good news for the locals. And this process will continue until all world wages are equalized, assuming free trade continues (and if it doesn't, now THAT would be devastating).
If you have a problem with this, don't complain to me.
Complain to contemporary Economic theory on International Markets. They take criticism more constructively than I do.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Well said!!! Technology workers need to write their congressman
Calvin Coolidge said that. It sounds trite, but nothing could be truer. Learn it. Live it. Or be left behind.
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.
Setting up 'Tech Unions' here would only cause corporations to outsource more vigorously.
:-)
No, we need to send branches of American Unions like the AFL-CIO to India - that would be the best thing for US engineers in the long run. (outsource the Unions
"Engineers of India UNITE! Stop working for slave wages! Stop working long hours! Join the Union!"
...are scary. Think about it. They have more power than many countries, and answer only to their shareholders, and mostly to their wealthiest shareholders. Their existence is completely selfish and without a moral base. They sway governments to their cause through corruption.
Eventually, the distinction between government and corporation will disappear. Government "of the people and for the people" will be replaced by corporate decree.
These behemoths prefer democracy only so far as it helps their bottom line. Beyond that, the democratic voice is an annoying insect to be swatted.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Who wins?
I do.
Since I got my last two jobs, including the current one, from American companies outsourcing to "near shore development" (ie Canada and Latin America), I'd be lying if I said I didn't benefit from it. I was able to negotiate a huge raise over my last job (which I still had at the time), knowing that as much as they'd be paying me, they'd STILL save tons of money.
The fact that my last two employers were outsourcing work to Canada is great for Canada and bad for the States, no doubt about it.
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The book How Americans Can Buy American by Roger Simmermaker explains this from a consumer/taxpayer perspective. The book's main idea is that manufacturing companies, regardless of where they manufacture, pay most of their taxes in their country of headquarter , so consumers should buy from companies owned domestically. Then it lists several thousand brands and corporations and their country of headquarter. It's a neat book to bring to the store, but it's also scary to see that companies like Universal Pictures, Stanley Tools and Chrysler are foreign owned. I suppose in the book's next edition we'll see more Indian brands in the IT section.
"But now the holy dollar rules everybody's lives.Gotta make a million doesn't matter who dies!".
If the government can not or will not do anything to keep "knowledge work" from being shipped off to other countries, then I'm going with it. I'll compete off shore wiht my skills, experience working and dealing with American business, and the all important understanding American culture (such as it is). I refuse to let the political interests that control our media-nation force me into becoming a college educated burger flipper or (worse) a worthless corporate ass kisser.
Leaving the U.S.? I'm right behind you.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
If the average yearly income in India is $500 and you can make $10,000 a year as a subcontractor, it seems to me that our standard of living would increase temendously if we moved to India and accepted the wages being paid to Indian contractors.
... just some food for thought.
My standard of living at $100,000 a year isn't that great. Is it worth it to live here? Everyone might be better off if we emigrated to a lower cost country.
I hear tell that for the typical male geek, there is a much higher supply of cute, uninhibited women in many of these third world countries, so perhaps there is a silver lining behind the cloud.
Maybe many of us would be a lot better off if we moved
D
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.
A U.S. company(consisting of a single person) will need to create a piece of accounting software. This it(or rather he/she) will do by completely outsourcing the work to India since it is cheaper. When the product is complete it will be sent back to the U.S. were the company will then sell it to a U.S. accounting firm. That accounting firm (consisting also of only one person) will then send the product back to India because that company outsources it's work to India too... Do I really need to tell you were the people who utilize the accounting services live? (Hint: India)
In reality what will probably happen is western companies will get so used to outsourcing to other countries that they will become dependent on it. At that point, the deptartments in those other countries will then begin to raise the price of their services till they are comparable to (and eventually surpassing) western prices. Realizing their mistake too late, western companies will then start looking back at home for western white-collar workers only to find that since there was no longer a job market for those services here, they all left to get jobs in those other countries.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Oh, it's about the Ross Perot type of giant sucking noise. For a moment I thought that Lewinsky and Clinton were at it again.
by it's very definition, globablization is precisely about 'outsourcing' jobs to lower income / less restricted areas/regions/countries.
Free Trade Zones/Treaties is exactly what is generally implemented for such activities. A sweat shop or manufacturing plant in Central America (for example) is what it's all about.
When companies such as Oracle boast about having a large amount of their workforce in India, paying them 10 times less than they're US counterparts, how can one question 'if'. The real questions are 'when' and 'what can we do about it'.
When, is ASAP. What we can do, is a lot. Free Trade is good, if we use the definition provided by the rhetoric: such as dropping of tarifs on both sides, no protectionism. But this assumes an already level playing field. Free Trade rhetoric is rarely adopted until there's a clear advantage for the big guys. There is plenty of historical evidence: read British Empire followed by the US Empire.
We can vote, we take part in active decision making, make sure that the people in positions of power are really after our vote and not corporate lobbyists. It's called Meaningful Democracy.
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
Is any of this backed up by anything more than the fact that you don't know where your local factory or processing plant is ... please!
;)
* Heavy Manufacturing is no longer done here.
Total Bullshit.
* Assembly is not done here.
Bullshit.
* Hi Tech Manufacturing is long gone.
Bullshit.
* Material processing is not done here.
Bullshit.
* Software design is on it's way out
Total Bullshit
* General Services are on their way out
Bullshit.
* Research is parting ways with use too.
Total Bullshit.
"We don't actually make anything of any value anymore." -hahahaha, please!
No more! You're making me laugh. Just cause my job got moved to India doesn't mean *every* job in *every* state in the *whole* US is gone. Take a deep breath and think about it for a minute.
And be thankful you can at least still get a job on the farm or in the mine
Those people that are doing this are those that are already financially secure. What do they care? They haven't seen middle class since they were a child, or perhaps even never. They could all quit their jobs right now and live off the interest alone. But that doesn't matter, enough is never enough. They are FUCKING their middle class neighbor and the result will be the middle class becoming the poverty class and rising up against them. History repeats itself AGAIN, unfortunately we don't have an ocean to sail across to find new hope. The faith part is that we, in the United States and the UK will move on to bigger and better things.. that used to work, but not anymore.
BTW, why do you think this is true?
"But by the time my kids are college-age, god knows what will be left in the US besides burger flippers, doctors, and lawyers."
Who will have the money to pay for a burger or a job that has health insurance to pay the doctor? And the job of the lawyers can go on out the door as well, as shown by the courts of the world. You don't even have to be in a country physically to be sued these days.
As always, the answer is a union
True. The problem is that it was a stupid question.
There are other ways to undercut the corporations than trying to pass laws about where they can do their hiring. While there are economies of scale, there are very different ways projects of the same scale can be structured. The most obvious to everyone reading here is open versus pyramidal. Sure, there are great things IBM can do if you have them come in and set you up with Linux. And a high percentage of the people here could set you up just as well, and way cheaper. But there's not someone who can do that for you well remotely. Proximity is still everything in certain sorts of business. So do you fly in IBM consultants for temporary proximity, or use the Linux-head next door? Cheaper is efficiency. The Linux-head isn't paying any tax to IBM - even though Linux has some IBM-developed aspects slipping in now.
... well, the economy is whatever game most people choose to play. Nothing less, nothing more.
The economy consists in whatever people are willing to buy from each other. Large corporations are no longer so willing to buy your labor because they can go overseas. Fine, all job growth comes from small companies anyway. The Fortune 500 over time contributes just about nothing, by way of net new jobs. Yet they've gotten so big because smaller businesses haven't been smart enough to compete against, say, Wal-Mart. So find a way to enable your local small businesses to thrive. Do you really think Wal-Mart is so brilliant that their generic approach can't be beat in local markets with local knowledge? Most of their price advantage comes from advanced computer inventory and procurement programs. Are you really so incompetent that you can't put together an even smarter system for your local merchant? Computers, used right, can bring individuality back to American small businesses, and by covering their weaknesses, allow their natural strengths to come out against the larger, mostly stupid and blundering firms. Meanwhile those large firms can help develop the Third World by frantically exporting jobs to compete. That's not really a bad thing for them to do on the way out. And most of them, in the next 10-15 years, will end up where the big airlines are now. Computers make smaller-scale distribution of control just too much more efficient than top-down ever can be. But whining for guarantees of corporate jobs not only isn't the way to change things, but diverts talent that should be working to bring on the next wave of more open, more human-scaled businesses into work that supports the current corporate pyramids. Time to build to a new design. If we all take our business elsewhere
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
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.
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...
It seems to be a very emotional issue because it affects almost all of us. I heard one Russian guy saying that America as an industrial nation is finished. And this guy actually brought his company from Russia to America. They are making high power lasers for industrial applications.
I think however it might be not all doom and gloom. On a smaller (i guess, much smaller scale) some relatively big companies went through several outsoruce then bring everything in-house cycles. I had several friends telling me stories like that.
Capitalism is a system with a very strong positive feedback. It's just the way it is. That means a lot of things get overdone or done too much. Like for example in telecom (where I work) I think a lot of companies got closed down a little bit too soon because investors got scared pulled thier money and run awy. Well that's a different story though.
I think with outsourcing it could be the same thing. Let's take a look. First of all world economy was never before globalized to the extent it is now. Second, and this goes to the very big companies, very often large corporations are not loyal to the countries they originated from, they are loyal to themselves. It is natural for them to go for cheapes labor force in the world. Nowdays smaller companies are trying to follow their fit. And of course, i'm almost positive, they are overdoing this. Not everthing can be outsourced effectively. And even if you can there are right and there are wrong ways to do it. And probably at least 50% of it is done in a wrong way.
The problem of course with this picture is that it is possible that when next "bring everything in house" swing comes in you are ready to retire from your Burger King job.
But I have to say that there is one feature that I think specific to the American companies. It is the shortsightedness of their leadership. Performance of a CEO usually measured exclusively based on how the company finished this quarter. And this is one of the reasons why are they paid so much. And boards of directors do not even try to see what is going to happen in 5 or 10 years. There are exceptions of course. But this I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. But I think this shortsightedness is one of ther reason that "outsourcing" is such a buzz word.
- Back off man. I am a scientist
If we want to keep the jobs in the USA we should look at making use of USA resources and not looking at who else can do the job.
M.
The first round of globalization took place during the '80s. It was the free trade agreement between Canada and the US, followed shortly thereafter by NAFTA. Throughout the negotiations, Canadians bitched and whined that we'd lose our jobs to the cheap labour in, first, the States, and then Mexico. And from the blue-collar perspective, that was basically true. At the same time we complained about brain drain, where all our best engineers would end up stateside pulling in massive salaries.
;-)
The fact of the matter seems to be that American labour, while slightly more productive than Canadian, has also become much more expensive. True, many well-educated Canadians head south for the moula, but most stay right here, enjoying a lower cost of living at the cost of a little less take-home pay. Not to mention the lower likelihood of being shot.
No surprise that well-educated offshore engineers will make for stiff competition when you can just scp the night's code back to the US. All that being said, it still remains somewhat true that the most ambitious foreign techies all eventually end up heading for the States, where the opportunities are considered to be better. It's all about the American Dream, baby!
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
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.]
When your typing in 40 columns? Hello, 1978 called, they want their vterms back.
"Peace - countries with close business ties almost never go to war."
India & Pakistan seem pretty mad at each other these days.. we're cool with both of them but what happens if they go to war with each other? All of those jobs that moved to India get wiped out when the first nuclear bomb hits...
You completely missed my point.
Everything you say is true - in the short run.
I simply assert that to earn really big bux, a CEO ought to understand the long run, the tragedy of the commons, participation in society, enlightened self-interest, and all of that stuff.
Raping society for short-term profit is easy, getting away with it a bit harder. But neither require the talent that a true long-term perspective requires.
Did it take an idiot to realize that dot-com was an insand bubble? Alan Greenspan knew it, said so, and tried to do something about it. But the dot-com'ers thumbed their noses at him. THEY'RE the fools, and WE'RE left holding the bag.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Sure, all the thinking jobs are moving overseas, but right now it's impossible to move face-to-face service jobs out of the country. So we're fine. I think Repo Man said it best:
"There's f**'n room to move as a fry cook."
That'll be America. A nation of fast food workers servicing the needs of corporate managers. God bless it.
--You have it exactly, and that's why it will destroy the US middle class, and do it within this decade we are in. example-china. China does NOT generally speaking buy mass quantities of american goods EXCEPT for tool making machines and similar. They are buying tools to make tools to make-EVERYTHING. They buy the stuff needed to work at, to actually produce, to aquire wealth. Like we used to work, that was successful and bbuilt a diverse robusrt economy. We were sold "globalization" as the "two billion armpit" theory, that if helped china along they would continue to "buy all our stuff" in ever increasing amounts. This hasn't happened, all that's happened is a HUGE balance of trade and short term profits for *some* people and massive loss of jobs. Our balance of trade deficit is simply staggering, we have gone from the world's largest creditor nation the world's largest debtor nation in 20 years, with the bulk of that within the last ten years, and it's growing increasily worse. THAT's all the proof required.
After (china primarily) have their full vertically integrated industries setup,(close now) they not only won't need to buy our stuff, there's no way any of our stuff would be cheap enough for them to bother with, because they will have a large enough internal market. all they will need to trade with then is for oil and other raw materials. And this goes from agricultural products all the way to high tech and everything in between, they won't need us, not a nickles worth. They will continue to export as much as possible, but only to places that have actual hard currency of value or have the materials they need. Our dollar is dropping in relative value. although till used widely, it is and will continue to be devalued, especially if gold backed currencies become required for international balance of trade payments. The current balance of trade numbers prove this with no shadow of a doubt. Other numbers I have seen have china as potentially surpassing the US around 2015 or so, although I personally believed that mass global warfare will occur before that time, basically over resources and who controls the planet. In fact I would maintain world war 3 is already in progress.
The US is living on credit and inertia and a severe case of the denials right now, we are en-screwed. As will be pointed out around the thread, people take a cavalier attitude and say theoretically it's a 'good thing" - until they lose their jobs and start the cycle that millions are on now, lose job, hunt for job, get job paying less, lather rinse repeat until you hit a brick wall with NO job.
The job loss stats are SO bad, they stopped reporting them, claiming they ran out of funding, which is a political dodge. this was a major story that didn't get much coverage, but is important for everyone to take a look at.
url to my last statement
http://www.bls.gov/bls/mlsdiscontinued.htm
text, short and to the point and anyone should be able to read between the lines here
What is the status of the Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program?
The Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program has been discontinued. Since 1994, the Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration funded the MLS program. That funding ended on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been unable to acquire funding from any alternative sources and had to discontinue the MLS program as of that date. Limited historical data and documentation will continue to be available on the BLS Internet, at http://www.bls.gov/mls/.
Last Modified Date: January 2, 2003
Jobs in the US are NOT being replaced by the numbers, nor are wages going up, speaking in general terms, we are dropping, and fast. It's being manipulated to appear like theyare going up slightly, and even that is a scam, theypulled food and fuel from the consumer price index for example. They are lying, avoiding real numbers, basically pulling an enron accounting modal on an across the board obfuscation to this system to not panic the herd. They are doing the same things with the major market indices, in particular they remove tanked corps as fast as possible to keep those numbers artificially inflated. If you were to do (now timeframe) an historical records match, and keep the tanked companies over the past few year period and reconfigure the indices those charts would look a lot worse than they are now.
IMO
This is an extremely involved subject but the gestalt is we got shafted by literal traitors. Internationalists who are loyal to no one beyond their own power and greed and to whichever global cartel constitutes their gang. This was done on purpose to further a heinous (ultimate) agenda of a global two class fascist society, which I term technofeudalism. It is akin to wolfpacks fighting themselves, but all united in staying wolves over the herds.
I had these same arguments on forums years ago, I was saying the same thing then as I am now. I have personally since heard from people who vigorously disagreed with me then, conveniently when they were sitting fatcity on their dotbomb poker chip improbable beyond belief stock portfolios and a great paycheck. Now, a lot of them have changed their viewpoints 180 degrees, because they got bit, and bit hard. their stock profits turned out to be mostly vaporware and so were their jobs, and not even new jobs then, old jobs they had. Industry after industry has been destroyed or reduced to ridiculous levels. And not buggywheips, critical strategic infrastructure.
That is almost the only way for some people to get from casual ho hum academic styled discussion to back down on the ground in the real world, to just have it shoved in their face up close and personal. THEN they understand better the full ramifications of what's going on..
...is the constant use of the term engineer in this article. Using the term IT-engineer does a diservice to all of us who put in the many long hours for a solid college education. Your piddly 30 day ceritification doesn't make you an engineer.
And did it ever occur to you that increasing profit margins = good thing?
What good is a higher profit margin to me if I loose my job?
Yay, the CEO & stockholders made a profit, but now I'm scrounging for work. Even if I owned some stock in the company, it's doubtful that the dividends would be greater then the salary lost.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Which of course brings up the phenomenon of sensationalization. If news isn't exciting, it doesn't get airtime.
If there was no violence, it would not even make that little scroller bar on the bottom of CCN Headline News.
It's kind of self defeating. Media either focuses on violence and sensationalism, or doesn't focus at all.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
After reading the same comments over and over on this subject, and seeing the analogies to manufafcturing that has been lost to other countries, there is one big difference. By and large, the manufacturing jobs that have been shipped to low cost countries are low level, production line type gigs that require little more than putting screw A into hole B. The workers that lose those jobs have little else going for them in terms of education, marketable skills, etc. (with a few exceptions). And that's the difference - we're talking about highly educated and skilled people that are now losing jobs. Although it sucks that it works that way, it seems to me that techy type folks should be able to parlay that experience and eduaction into other areas. And those techies that haven't focused solely on hard tech skills and are more adept at some of the softer "people" skills are going to be much better off as jobs are moved off-shore in greater numbers.
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."
* when the cost of handling/steering developper in too many country with timezone change overcome the win of having cheap people * overall when too much riches are otusourced to other countries (job,firm, products) at a certain point the economy cease to profit from it. Why ? because for the simple reason that if there is too much people too dirt poor to buy something in a country, then firm don't sell even if their outsourced product are dirt poor. In other word, when too much perople locally lost their job, even if you sell dirt cheap product because now you produce them from India, then you still won't sell a crumble. Except maybe to indian.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What happens when all the world is "First World"? Then global inflation occurs correct? Prices skyrocket, and then the Class Wars truly begin. Thoughts?
--your examples, 2 out of the 3 "backup employment" examples-- mcdonalds is posting it's first ever loses and is closing restuarants, and kmart filed for bankruptcy. A lost job is a lost paycheck is NO CONSUMING so no service jobs are needed for that person. Now magnify that by the millions, add in the peripheral and collateral effects. It ain't pretty.
The original Luddites were hosiery and lace workers in Nottingham, England, in 1811. They smashed knitting machines that embodied new labor-saving technology as a protest against unemployment(theirs), publicizing their actions in circulars mysteriously signed signed "King
Ludd."....
English government officials, after careful study, addressed the Luddites'concerns by hanging fourteen of them in January 1813.
- William Easterly
"The Elusive Quest for Growth"
The moral of the story is, "things change". Your job will not be here forever. You've been born with more privledge than any other country in the world.
Re-train, learn, adapt, or get hung.
A "business case" can be made for outsourcing: it costs less.
Those from whom the jobs are taken can never make a business case for the alternative, since all they can offer is a "better" product, which plays right into the hands of skeptical management, who will ask "what makes you think your product is better?"
This is an unanswerable question. They aren't interested in the answer, they just want to see a quick tap-dance and a few beads of sweat before they say "no."
(For those of you watching at home, the correct answer is "thanks for the coffee.")
LadyStar - Your Magical and Mysterious Adventure Awaits
It's called a bubble. You think the software industry can maintain 200% growth indefinitely? I agree that we have lost jobs in some sectors, but the original post was a load of crap. Trade deficit? I thought we were talking about jobs. Trade deficit means we can afford to buy all the cheap crap back cause the dollar is strong. Weak dollar, no trade deficit, expensive over-sea goods. Each one has a positive and negative side ...
This is an idea that I have thought about for some time but not dared to mention.
So could global corporations recruit refugees and say "Send me your tired, your poor and your hungry"?
Could there be a special legal structure for "refugee corporations"? - an equivalent of the GNU General Public License? If it could work why stop at refugees?
Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too
Employers hence want to maximize surplus value (they ever want greater profits to prevail in their struggle with competitors), and they may do so in one of two ways:
1. add more hours to the working day and hence increase the number of hours creating surplus value (this Marx calls "absolute surplus value);
Yes, been there
2. introduce technical innovations that make production more efficient and thus, by providing more items for sale in a shorter period of time, reduce the proportion of the working day devoted to making up the value of wage costs and enlarge the proportion of the working day producing value above and beyond wage costs (this Marx calls 'relative surplus value'). "
Done that
3. Reduce the worker's wage by move the job to coutries that have lower wage. Marx didn't live long enough to see the "surplus value" resulted in this strategy, shall we call it "alienated surplus value"?
Workers of the World, Unite!--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
In economic terms, cheap overseas labor is the same thing as the MMPM. It's disruptive for those folks -- like us -- who find themselves replaced by the machine, but the net gain will be realized across the economy.
Doesn't mean the procecure won't hurt, but it certainly won't kill.
"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."
Wealth begets wealth.
Yes, there's quite the imbalance between my salary and a Fortune 500 CEO's, and that's not changing much. What is changing is that people in other countries are ending up with more money to spend individually, and end up with their marketplace infrastructures being upgraded. India has Internet connections. FedEx delivers in India. The same countries getting the jobs are also becoming consumers and export markets. There is temporary pain like this for us, but there will eventually be ROI. It just sucks when you're the individual out of a job.
And what happens to us Americans if and when the US faces disaster? I'm not loyal to the US so much as I am loyal to a country that provides:
If the US crumbles in this endeavor (which I doubt), it will do so while a few other countries outdo the US in the areas listed... some would argue that there are other countries that already far exceed it in the areas that matter to them.
You too can play the globalism game.
> But who wants to live in Idaho?
Unemployed software engineers whose jobs went to Bangalor, India, whose diet is pizza and chinese food, whose social activities are online chat, nline porn.
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
So what? The ultra-rich who live off of stock dividends have more money, and that's who you (and your government) ultimately work for. If you're not one of the ultra-rich, then you can just fsck right off. Same goes for your kids. Got it?
Finding God in a Dog
Frankly, I have been expecting this for about a year or two: if you can/could telecommute, what prevented your employer to outsource your job?
The developed countries have been outsourcing blue-collar jobs to developing (really low-wage) countries, thanks to the development of international transportation for moving the goods all over the world. Those jobs go now wherever the workforce is the cheapest
Every single part of computer hardware you have in front of you, has been made in Anywhere But US/Europe/Japan(TM). I hope you enjoyed playing/working with your computer, because karma is a b*tch.
Today, the internet allows the transportation of knowledge, voice and data all around the world. Of course, your job will go elsewhere.
Heck, if you think about it, you can see that no one is really safe from this:
- lawyers (you just need some meat in the court house, everything else, including C&D
:), is outsourcable paperwork)
- doctors (the remote chirurgy we dreamed about with Internet2)
- teachers (online schooling anyone?)
- people in the movie/entertainment industry: Bollywood could cripple Hollywood (Selling low-priced non-crippled CD and non-DRM DVD should be straigthforward for the Indian majors)
Here is some food for thought:My predictions are:
So, what does it mean for me?
I don't give a flaming fuck about other countries. Let them deal with their own problems. Thats why we have countries to begin with.
Don't worry, when everyone is out of work, you will undoubtedly be amongst the first to be robbed.
Anyway, nice troll.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
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 $$$.
So in otherwords, they don't care about my well being, and I should suck up
One reason to protect myself and help get myself into a position of power like these ultra-rich folks is to join a trade union. Power in numbers.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I am suprised that so many people see globalization as a problem and not an opportunity. If others are capitalizing on it why can't you dummy?
How you might ask?
If your a whitecollar worker who's job can be sent over seas do this, find a friend who lives in india that will do you work for you. He works for 50 % of your wage so now your making half your wage, but are doing no work. so get another job and make half your orignal salary plus your new salary.
If you've already lost your job, you know that buisnesses are moving jobs overseas so make a buisness that specializes in setting up companies with foreign workers.
You've got to stay ahead of the curve. Look who's benifiting and why? Then capatilize on your knowledge. The world is more productive than it has ever been. Quit your whining and Adapt you poor fools.
breath
The concentration of wealth nationally was balanced by the organization of labor. When Teamsters in Oakland CA go out in support of dockworkers in China we'll be moving in the right direction.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
If an american programmer isn't better (on the dolar) then an indian programmer, then the american programmer dosn't deserve to work. It's that simple. I'm not going to spend my money subsidizing crappy american programmers, chip designers, or accountants.
Someone in india or china has just as much right to a job that you or I do.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If everyone thinks the way you do, then everyone plays "I got mine - the hell with everyone else." It's exactly that kind of thinking that drove the great depression in the thirties. Every industrial country had its own demagogue spouting exactly the same "save our jobs" solution and the result was that world trade tanked.
The solution to your unemployment is to start thinking about selling something that has value - not whinging about how your job just went overseas. Produce and sell something other people want to buy and you'll do fine.
Your post is a classic example as to why engineering majors should be required to take liberal arts courses like History and Economics.
After WWII US dollar became the only currency left standing -- every other country that had an economy good enough to support international trade in its own currency was devastated, US remained ok (because it was separated from a war by the oceans, and please shut up about what others "owe" to the worst military among allies in WWII).
What followed was a horrible abuse of this "de-facto international currency" status, the (number of dollars abroad)/(amount of products traded abroad for dollars) was significantly lower than the (number of dollars in US)/(amount of products traded in US). In other words, everything was cheaper abroad and expensive in US, so US simply printed dollars (or, to be more precise, created them as Federal Reserve loans) and injected them in this system. The system worked through osmosis, it became easier to buy products abroad, sell them in US, pocket the profit and call yourself a rich company while producing nothing, and merely exploiting the slowness of trickling of dollars abroad by making it a bit faster.
Of course, due to this difference in prices, and efficiency of non-export parts of foreign countries' economies, US citizens could hear blood-curdling stories about low salaries abroad, when they were counted against US dollars, however it was nothing but a propaganda trick -- the prices difference was not taken into account, and the lack of reliable currency conversion rates for countries and products not involved in trade with US allowed for absolutely ridiculous numbers. Just look at GNP figures and think, how is it possible to have such a disparity, yet people don't starve everywhere abroad. So for US citizen there was no visible difference between indeed starving people in Cambodia and rather prosperous people of India.
However everything comes to an end. "Osmosis economy" can't run forever, and just buying stuff while racking up trade deficit becomes more dangerous, and other currencies (mostly Euro) issued beyond the US control are becoming used in international trade. However US companies can't expand the production within the country -- educational system and media prepared only consumers for them, there aren't enough people that can and are willing to produce something, they would rather accept sliding quality of life for themselves. So US proclaims itself to have "service economy" (aka doing each other's laundry) and "high technology" (aka having a lot of engineers). The problem is, "service economy" is big fat zero unless it supports production of something, and engineers in US meet just as much competition from foreign engineers as US workers did before, therefore all the outsourcing you can see.
So US as a whole became an arrogant, unskilled and incapable of supporting itself nation by abusing currency machinations -- something that often happened to individuals and now happened to the country as a whole. And here is the sucky part -- crook that lost his money does not harm millions of people that ARE capable of productive work yet happened to live in a country where the macroeconomic processes deny them this work.
If US wants to restore its currency system to something usable, sooner or later it must significantly devalue dollar, and possibly tie it to valuable commodities (say, gold) and stop the "osmosis" forever. If US wants to restore its production capability it must rebuild its educational system. And if US wants to get people capable of doing productive work now and not in 20 years, it must reduce barriers to immigration. All of those measures will without any doubt decrease "quality of life" -- at leasr temporarily, and at least for some parts of the population. However the only alternative to them is accelerating slide into poverty, and turning the country's economy into an equivalent of giant failed dotcom, like flooz.com x 1e6.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It is called LAMP (I must stress P for Perl, since that is primarily what I have been using recently). I also use gretl (for econometric analysis), which is also under the GPL.
My relatively luxurious American life has allowed me to accumulate skills in finance, programming, and Japanese. This "skill set" allows me to create "unique" inventions within a small niche. But since I don't need any capital to operate (other than a computer and Internet connection), that niche is good enough for me.
Just my experience . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
"Excuse me, Mr. Jones, but would you rather pay 600/yr for your auto tags, or 30/yr?"
In it one of the themes is American impoverishment due to the collapse of the info economy. Intellectual property is easily be copied therefore worthless to its makers, many white collar jobs can/will be eventually automated/moved offshore.
All this forces will leave America with no competitive edge.
I mean, is there really that much of a diffrence between moving to SF to get a job and moving to bombay? English is a pretty commonly used language overthere, and I'm sure indian companies doing the outsourcing would love to have people who are proficient in it.
With all the bullshit going on in the US it might be nice to move to a place where they have bigger things to worry about then pissing on the constitution. You might make less money, but the cost of living is far, far less.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If the greenback drops in value, the net cost of your labor will drop and the net cost of those proverbial Indian programmers will increase.
US exports become more competitive, imports get dearer, everybody is happy.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
One of these days, Chairman Mao is going to call the President of the United States and tell him to surrender.
Chairmain Mao will explain that Chinese Corporations are the subcontactors to the subcontractors to the subcontractors of the Department of Defense Subcontractors and furthermore; China now makes ALL the key components for ALL of America's military weapons and machines.
Then he will let out an evil sounding Chineese Laugh! (The kind you hear in James Bond movies.)
How can the US maintain it's power if all it's strategic manufacturing capability is located offshore? Recently, we nearly lost the US Steel Industry and it's not over yet.
Sure we have rules and laws which on paper prevent this sort of problem, however as the FDA recently found out in the "Tainted Strawberry Harvest", these rules are not always followed. In this specific case the FDA had rules that all food used in school lunch programs must be grown in the United States. The subcontractors decided to ignore the rule and subcontract from Mexico and imported 1.7 million pounds of Hepatitis laced frozen Strawberries. The good news is that the fraudulent company was the lowest bidder and we saved tax dollars.
I won't even comment on the strategic technology which has been leaked to other countries by defense subcontractors.
Greed will destroy us!
Asside from the dip caused by the bush economy, almost all of those things are way up. You're just an uneducated idiot.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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....
"Wages equalize?"
/., economists are Nerds too, you know. Why are there so few of us hitting slashdot? Why am I the only one posting comments straight from Adam Smith here?
Yes, that is how markets work.
"Ha, as soon as 3rd world country X's wages begin to rise, and all the companies bail out, who is going to be left to pay these higher wages?"
No, markets move gradually towards equilibrium and then stabilize. Besides, why would a market only go to ONE country to get cheap labor. Logic would dictate that they are going to ALL poor countries at the same time and the poorest wages of the entire world will be raised simultaneously. Where do they flee to after those wages are raised?
"How many years before the workers will be willing to take a paycut under their original wages just to have a job again?"
0, already happening. Part of the equalization process will mean the price of U.S. wages will decrease.
"This cycle will continue throughout the third world as companies ravage each country one by one. Once they're done with their first circuit around the world, the country they started with would be just about ready to start over again."
You make companies sound like the BORG. Remember, markets are guided by an "invisible hand" towards equilibrium. Companies will stop leaving the U.S. as soon as the relative price abroad is greater or equal to the domestic price of wages. At that point there will be equilibrium.
Okay,
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Well, the rest of the world's got the US beat on some of those too. Creative accounting practices? We're way late to that game, and there's lots and lots of competition? Monopoly Building? The French and Brits invented their versions of it, and the Indians learned it from the Brits - think about VSNL, the World's Least Competent Big Phone Company. Entertainment? India's got a similar size movie industry, though a smaller export market. Some of the rest of those are still Yankee-dominated though.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
the premise of this book is that trade is a non-zero sum game. as trade increases, everybody benefits. many of these posts represent fear and misunderstanding, not to mention a bit of good ol' amerikan--i want the easy life. germany for example did not lose its textile industry. why? because they chose to develop new fabrics and methods, creating new markets. the book is by robert wright (the moral animal), and this link has some decent reviews (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067 9442529/qid=1044055265/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_2/102-79729 59-6884123?v=glance&s=books&n=507846).
The planet simply can't sustain the entire human population if they all have the same consumption rates as Americans do currently.
:-)
As downward pressure is placed on us, it will fuel pressure on us (and by extension the companies that we buy products from) to create the same standard of living using fewer resources. If my house is just as warm, my car just as nice, etc. as it was before but it costs me a fraction to operate, then I can cope with the competitive pressure that globalization will create.
With any hope globalization will cause this kind of 'same with less' thinking. In fact, if American companies can get off their asses and start thinking up the technologies and products that make that possible, we can then export them to all those other countries that will be dealing with the same problem 20 years from now. The Japanese have already figured this out, which is why the only hybrid fuel cars on the road are made by them.
The Green Revolution of the 21st century will by technologies and products that let humans lead a western lifestyle on a tiny fraction of the resources that we currently consume.
At least, I hope.
IT is basically built on hand-crafting little gems. That's slow and expensive.
Shifting production off-shore just stuffs an oily rag in the entry wound and staunches the hemmoraging a bit but its not the right way to do it. The patient's long term prospects are still a flat line.
I don't even want to save most of the crap jobs that are being jettisoned. They are using entirely the wrong approach.
We need to start making software a componentable, art-by-the-yard factory where the principles of the product line, the concepts behind it, are applied to software generation based on comprehensive models.
The ones with the best models win and generate lots and lots of software for everybody to use.
The art comes in knowing how to craft models. The skill comes in knowing how to tweak a model. The money comes in marketing and delivering software modeled on and tailored to a specific market.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Perhaps that's the goal, but there can be varied ways to go about it, and not necessarily at odds with the rest of what you say.
Case in point - the Internet
I was on a corporate network back in 1980, in a primitive way. By 1982 I was using a corporate network in a way that seems "modern", except that it was all text mode. During the years I saw several attempts at PC networking come and go. I've been on CompuServe, AOL, several BBSs, and a brief trial of Prodigy. NONE of them survived in their original incarnations.
The issue is quite simple: Do you want to own a small pie, or have a share of a giant one. Most sane people would look at the size of the small pie, look at the size of their piece of the giant one, and choose the latter. One could argue that nobody knew ahead of time how big a pie the Internet would turn out to be, and there is some merit to that. But it doesn't forgive the way business now wish to "own" the Internet, imagining that they can skim a fraction of a cent out of every packet. They miss the fact that non-ownership is a fundamental part of the success, past and future, of the Internet. They're choosing to make a giant pie smaller so they can own it.
Short-term thinking.
Personally, I have a similar cash-view as you. I like food to eat, a roof over my head, and a few perks. Beyond that, our family has made choices to bypass more money in favor of what we feel is a higher quality of life.
I suspect a lot of others out-of-work don't think the system works just fine the way it is.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
After that, simple service work, like processing credit-card receipts, and mind-numbing digital toil, like writing software code, began fleeing high-cost countries.
I see -- programming is "mind-numbing digital toil"
Damn right. A couple of years ago someone made an interesting observation: no two countries with McDonalds restaurants have ever gone to war against each other. It illustrates your point very well. :-)
But the dinghies can get off the sand bar long before the luxury liner.
Eventually, the distribution of wealth (or is that poverty?) will even out.
The rich will have gotten far fewer but very rich indeed, and we, the masses, will all earn squat, own squat and get processed into "Soylent Green" because it cheaper than retirement.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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)'
Sure, they need guidance, but it's not up to you to set the direction in their life. You'll provide a firm foundation and make sure they grow up "right", but where they go with it is ultimately up to them.
I've got two kids, 9 and 12, and I'm at a loss for what direction to steer them in career-wise.
Have them do what they love to do. If they don't know what that is yet, help them look for it. It's better to be a great artist in a bad market for artists, than a bad lawyer in a great market for lawyers.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Why isn't there a moderation for "Ignorant"?
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
First of all "secular government"??? Do we live in the same ocuntry?
... employers are becoming ever more organized consolidated and stronger with globalisation, and employees are becoming ever more weaker. This results in lower salaries over all, and (i apologise for the cliche but it is true) in ever greater separation between rich and poor, employees and investors.
But all joking aside, there is a serious problem with the "we all get richer" argument.
The problem is that other people get richer not you. And i am not talking about indian workers either, because they are not getting payed very much. The people that do getr richer are the investors, of large companies, and those guys are unlikely to stimulate the economy because they have reached their peak consumer good purchasing long time ago.
My biggest problem with globalisation is not that i will have to compete with people from the developing world. It is that forces lower salaries for both me and the guy in the developing world.
People keep talking about supply and demand in relation to jobs, but the reality is a bit different. Most of the time it is not about supply and demand it is about bargaining power.
And the bargaining power comparison is simple
And that is the problem.
It's these clowns and voters that agree with stuff like this or just dont live in a real world that cause problems like this.
Every year more and more students from overseas fill our colleges and in most engineering US students are in the far minority. Last month I went with my fiance to go with her to sign up for her last year on her BSEE and guess what. I think she was the only american there.
And seriously some of these people may not like the united states but come here for the education and go back to thier countries and use it against us.
Where do you think Iraq's scientists went to school?
Aside from that what scares me the most is my generation that has no clue about the world and sit around thinking everything is going to be fine. Do you think you'll be able to command a 6 figure engineering job when they can get 4 people for the same price overseas?
But if you think about it and no offense to any hispanics the middle and far east is the cheap labor of the tech sector like mexico and other countries are cheap labor for Textiles and heavy manufacturing and other products.
Outsourcing white collar jobs and reducing the salary of the rest will result in lower house values as fewer are able to afford servicing their mortgage and are less motivated to live in a given area. This means that both capital formation in banks previously reaping the profits from those loans and governmental tax structures predicated on a given level of cash flow will collapse.
In other words, expect California all across the US.
The only way out is to outtech everyone else.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
It helps being old enough to remember recent history.
Back in the '80s, the US IT press was full of stories about how the Japanese were going to take over America, with both money and computer technology. The Ministry of Trade and Information (MITI) was touted as the all-knowing agency masterminding the invasion, with tools such as Project Z, aiming to produce the definitive fifth generation computer language.
The popular media was running alarming stories about how the Japanese were buying up golf courses and hotel chains, and owned more of the United States than any other foreign country.
But along the way, a few things were overlooked. The measure of ownership was comparing recent Japanese purchases to older book value purchases by other countries. In fact, Denmark owned more US properties than Japan ever did, correcting for inflation of market values over time.
And the technology project flopped. It was a triumph of central planning, a brilliant piece of work from people who believed a command economy could work for software. It resembled Open Source in no manner at all, nor did it resemble any capitalist company.
At the same time, the Japanese economy remained mercantilist, producing strictly for export, and went into a ten-year depression. While we recently went through one of the longer periods of economic expansion in our history.
So I see some parallels here. I hope for India's sake that they avoid the Japanese mistake, and continue to have a multi-lateral market. That would be quite good for all sides. If they don't, it'll be their loss; a permanent imbalance will send them into the same tailspin Japan went through.
But if they start attracting technology jobs persistently, with a free society and open markets, they'll promote themselves into a First World county, with a standard of living just like ours. And expenses of living, just like ours. And after they're up at our level, the job flow will balance right back out.
While it could be a little rough during the transition, there are some things to remember. Top talent with people skills always has its pick of jobs. So be good at two things: Some piece of technology, and dealing with people. Those are always your edge with a remote low-cost provider.
Remember the saying, "Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick any two" ? The other person has cheap nailed. You have to win on the good and fast attributes.
Companies win because they can produce products more cheaply, and therefore, sell them at a more competitive rate. Therefore, consumers win because they can buy products more cheaply. The ones who lose are the people who will have to accept a lower salary or lose their jobs because their jobs are being outsourced. After a while, this will balance the standard of living throughout the world by taking advantage of the talent around the world that has been wasted because the local economies couldn't take advantage of these people's skill sets.
Vote for Pedro
If she floats, she's a witch.
Increasing profit margins is only a good thing if you think you will benefit from that. The VAST MAJORITY of people in America and on the rest of the planet really couldn't give a flying f*ck if these companies became more profitable from this activity.
It won't trickle down to the consumers OR make American companies more competitive. The extra money will just be pocketed by a miniscule number of people at the top (like Enron).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Could it be that what we are witnessing is a distribution of wealth thoughout the connected world? Technology is the enabler here.
This is a very BAD thing of course for the 1st world countries if wealth is a limited resource.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
We're humans, not vulcans. How you will remove the human emotion of desire is a good question. I desire a larger house and a larger car and more of both.
I think we'd do best to work on technologies that can provide what everyone wants without wrecking the planet rather than to simply ask everyone to consume less.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If intellectual labor is considered a commodity just like steel or agricultural products; the government can just simply levy a tarif on it and problem solved. It'd be pretty easy to look at the balance sheet of a company and see whether they imported "code" from India or T-shirts.
This is of course not to suggest that I agree with the policy. In the long run protective tarifs bite you in the ass (except maybe strategic industries). IMO if you're lucky to be born in the US and grow up with computers from an early age, you ought to be a better choice in the labor market than a poor Indian 5000 miles away. You have no excuse !
Now that I've argued on both sides let me just point out that this whole thread demonstrates again that being a programmer is slowly becoming a shit job, like working in a textile factory.
The best part of this is that these companies pay no dividends. So the workers get unemployed, and the stockholders get nothing. Who profits?
Philosophy is discouraged in the US.
:)
It certainly seems to be. While it feels like everyone around me is switching to business, finance or marketing, I decided to go with physics. They all talk down to me like I'm crazy, but I'm simply not willing to sell my brain off for a few bucks. No amount of money could buy for me the knowledge I'll gain (and use!) pursuing intellectual interests.
"Scientists don't get paid crap!", they say. Who gives a rats ass? If I had a bazillion dollars, I would study physics. The good news is that I don't need a bazillion dollars to do it, and that's what matters.
For that reason alone, I can never be outsourced --- I'll always work cheaper than the next guy just for the sake of working.
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
On the other hand, I don't know that there's an obvious solution. Models change over time, especially ones which are under more human control, and the extremes are the things that are most likely to change. That's still not a good answer though.
after a fair trial of course
How To Keep Your Job
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
Talk about naive. Try taking a tour of all the US towns with deserted factories. See how many people are on unemployment or have taken service jobs at a fraction of the pay they made previously. We have had entire industries leave this country. And this does not help workers in low-wage countries. They are just as poor as they were. The companies make more money or sometimes just break even.
The US now mostly exports raw materials and imports finished goods. Our balance of trade gets into the red more every year. We have a term for a nation like that - banana republic.
A service economy creates no wealth - it just shuffles it around.
The US most certanly does not let you just walk in and start working. I don't know what India's immigration laws are like, but with so many people leaving I doubt they would have to much of a problem letting people in. (I can't even find any iformation on google, due to the fact that so many people immigrate the other way)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
With all these jobs going to Asia and Americans jumping ship in search of a better life, I've often wondered what it's going to be like when I'm the last American, to drive all the freeways at 120 mph, to have the choice of every house in the country to live in, to not have to pay bills anymore. Enjoy your time in India.
And I did not speak up because I was not a factory worker
Then they took the jobs of the IT workers
And I did not speak up because I was not an IT worker
Then they took the jobs of the scientists
And I did not speak up because I was not a scientist
Then they took my job-
and by that time no one was left to speak up
Yes, it's probably been done, and better too...
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....
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
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!
Warren E. Buffett agreeed with Greenspan as well. Now he seems to be collecting IT comapines.
now, and the U.S. has the lowest unemployment rate in years - lower than they thought possible a decade ago!
Sorry 6% unemployment is bad, and in fact the highest it's been in years.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
My theory on a lot of this is that the goals of both business and the stock buying public have changed. Originally everyone was seeking a reasonable profit while keeping things like local employment, community activities, worker loyalty and other commendable traits in mind. However, during the 90's the goal changed to MAXIMUM profit. Everyone wants to squeeze out those extra few tenths of a percent in growth because that's what the stock market and the CEO's of the world expect. Companies have to constantly increase the dividend and profit, not just return a dependable profit. To be rock solid and steady is interpreted as failure in today's climate.
This space for rent.
I can't belive people think this stuff is true. The US is huge in manufacturing, and it always will be. What do you think, that all the farmland in the US is just going to lay follow with nothing growing on it?
Just because you don't see something first hand dosn't mean it isn't out there. Christ.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Go make your union. A bunch of VB and perl coders who think they're worth $60k a year. I'd rather move to India.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'll AC this one. (And I know I'm too late for precious moderation points here.) Maybe someone will see thing and find the thoughts useful.
... of the ABC Manufacturing Corporation?
I work at a US based company that a regular company would outsource IT work to.
Right now, the company is in the middle of herding all the cattle into a single pen. What do I mean?
Before, all the different employees were split into small groups -- regionally, or by customer, or some other means. Now, everyone is being split into a small number of groups which are defined only by the primary skillset.
Example: You're not in the Oracle team for the ABC Manufacturer account. You're now on the US Oracle Team. Instead of having 5 coworkers who know Oracle (and some SAs, and some middleware, and so on), you've got 250 coworkers who know Oracle.
And they tell them that, "Once you document what you do, you are free to work on other stuff here and there." It is a wonderful statement that some of the cattle actually love. "Show us how to let someone else do what you do, and we'll let you do what someone else does!" (Anyone see some funny logic there?)
At the same time, they're working to create new procedures and new policies so where everyone does everything in the same way. Insert your favorite early 2000 buzzword or fad for this. Be it a internationally recognized standard. Or a clever piece of software that will allow one person to do the work of five men. "Document your work! Show us how we can make other people do it just as well!"
So much of this is laugable in many ways. I'm getting a kick out of the software that is supposed to augment the ability of one employee to do the work that five used to do. The catch? They've got to hardwire in an impossible level of detail into the system. Oh, and their clients are going to have to use it, too, if they're going to get the full value out of it. (They haven't quite gotten to figuring that part out yet. They will. It is a hoot.)
So, if you ask lower management, "This is going to be complete hell for the first year, trying to merge everyone together?", they'll quietly, but unequivocally say yes.
You see, before they can export the jobs, first, they have to get everyone on the same page. So, say you have 250 Oracle DBAs spread though various accounts in the US. Now, you've put them into one big group. But, they've still got to serve totally different customers with completely different ways of doing things. So now you've got to attempt to create new standards all around that'll work with different accounts with utterly conflicting ways of doing business.
Oh. And you've got to keep things focused on the customer. Nevermind, of course, that those 5 Oracle DBAs are no longer focused on the world of ABC Manufacturer. Nevermind that you, as the leader of the Oracle group, are not focused on the customer anymore (Which customer, anyhow? There are hundreds of them!).
Oh? And remember those employees who you are trying to corral? Well, as soon as they get a strong smell of the upcoming slaughterhouse, you better hope the economy doesn't turn around. Or all your business knowledge will be running out the door. Then who will you have to populate your database with the Oracle Procedures for System #12's second database, System #13, System #14, System #15, System #16, System #17
Oh! Don't worry! We'll have client executives to manage the relationship to make sure that we're focused on the customer. Uh-huh. Basically, once the increasing number of screwups are escalated, they'll be given attention. Sounds marvelous.
So you get the drift of where this is going. And we haven't even gotten to the part where we start the outsourcing to India. That's the second year. And you can imagine "how much better" they will be at coping with this insane new model of customer service.
I have faith in my company's CEO. Complete faith that he knows that the best way to run the company is to eat away the core of the company. To succeed in this new century, we must drive away from our old core competencies which distinguished us, and embrace providing commodity style service.
After all. The customer wants the best price. Really. And so this is our new business model.
Another xenophobic story about 'danged furriners takin all me jobs'. Outsourcing, removing obstacles to immigration, and generally allowing people to hire who they want where they want has been shown to be such a universally good thing for all economies involved. I'm getting tired of people whining to the government for new laws because they are undereducated/unmotivated. This is just too convenient of a copout.
Come back and tell us when you've been outsourced and aren't allowed to work for 15 months despite putting out over 1800 resumes.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Because that's exactly what you're asking for.
Anyway, it's not like american companies only sell things to american people. If it really was a zero-sum game like you seem to think, those companies could sell their stuff to the indians or chinese they hire.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
That's why we have massive unemployment in the tech sector while desirable jobs are going to overseas workers in impoverished countries.
Yeah, god forbid any 'impoverished' people ever get a job programming. They should be working in the fields like a good poor person while we all get paid $60k a year for shitty VB code.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
And Asok has an intern named Dilbert.
Thats the problem with democracy. Most people aren't going to pick the best long term solution. The founders of the US knew that and thats the reason its a Republic and not a Democracy. Its also why top judges get their job for life and why majority doesn't win in many cases. Most serious things require 2:3 or in a few cases even more because "the majority rules" concept quickly wipes out the minority.
Lets face it
i) corporations can be either efficient or effective
ii) Most MBAs I know personally, are not the sharpest knives in the drawer
iii) Large corporations routinely reject producing products because there is only a 5-10% profit.
Smaller companies can be profitable with the same product line that the large corp rejected because there is much less management overhead.
Smaller companies can also out turn the larger corp, and in some cases be more productive in well defined areas - ie, the members of the small company need to share a common vision. This is unlike the vision statement that most of us have come to know and laugh at.
Course of events as will hopfully play out:
1) Corporation outsources jobs to wherever
2) Those who are outsorced get together and form a small agile companies to compete indirectly with the large corporations
3) Despite what Mr. Gates says, the fittest companies/corporations survive (not the fastest). Haven't we already seen some of this in the bursting of the DOT-COM bubble.
I have no problems with outsourcing low-skilled jobs, since it forces us as whole in society to be more educated. I really don't see anything good coming out of outsourcing high-skilled jobs. Come on, people spend thousands of dollars getting a college degree and for what?...To hear that spending 4 to 6 years getting that CompSci or Engineering degree, pulling oh those countless all-nighters, wasn't going to be worth a dime out on the job market. Hmm, not only will we lose more jobs in US, we're going to be pouring more money out of this country...Can anyone else see our economy going to hell? I don't care if you invest in the stock market, or whatever investment plan you have in mind, no one but those damn greedy CEOs will benefit from this.
I think it is great that india and china have an educated workforce that can save major corporations lots of money to sell their high priced goods to me.
I predict that it will even get better when their soil is so poluted from industrial waste that they can feed their own populations (well, I guess we are seeing that several can already), and the streams are so poluted that they destroy their fisheries. I suspect that we would see alot more of this happening if these societies were a little more open.
Lets face it when you kill off the bottom end of the food web, the top end dies as well.
Increased 3rd world-level spending power forcing green manufacture? Hmm, could work. I think more likely though is that green-built stuff won't become cost effective until current-method materials are much scarcer; ie, we'll get to greenness only after the damage has already been done. But what you say is thought-provoking.
Someday we'll all be negroes
It's not the how the 1 percenters got there, it's
how they keep their gains whether they be ill gotten
or righteous. There is a moral issue because THEY
make it a moral game by taking the moral highground
when attempts are made to call bullshit on their
practices. The 99 percent don't owe anything to
anybody because they are wage slaves at this point.
I wonder how much the American Indian feels they
owe the 1 percent, or how many of those original
native Americans comprise that one percent. Your
post reeks of the kind of mentality the british
had for marching right on in and ruining perfectly
fine societies. They actually believed they were
doing the people they slaughtered, jailed, and
diseased a favor by giving them the 'british
system of order', saving them from their perceived
savagery. It's a country. It's a people. It's
supposed to be about an idea called America.
America isn't SUPPOSED to be run like a company
like you seem to suggest. I doubt the original
founding fathers envisioned a future where
marketers compete to brainwash people through all
forms of media in order to peddle worthless
products in the name of progress. Communism was
highly flawed. Capitalism looks awesome on paper,
but is very flawed. We still have a system in
place that rewards the worse kind of human
behavior, and encourages outright selfishness
in spite of progress. Greed. The manufacturing
of devils and scapegoats to justify the wants
of the higher authority (School of the Americas).
Keep the people fat dumb and happy, keep churning
out "respectable" people from "respectable"
families that still have those horrid 1950's values
that the Govt seems to love so much. Keep "people
like us" behind the wheel. Keep our stranglehold
on things. My only hope is that 6 or 7 generations
down the line, after all the babyboomers have
finally died, that all that 1950's mentality will
finally go away like it should have decades ago
and the regime pulling the strings doesn't fuck
things up as badly as they have.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
number 3 above should read...
2. Don't pass the savings(caused by using cheaper labor) on to middle class Americans, thus causing money to move from the middle class, which is getting laid off, to the utlra-rich.
First they came for the Jews
Someday we'll all be negroes
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.
If (1) is true, then why would corporations invest in the USA (7)? In fact, corporations are sinking money into facilities overseas where they can get a greater return in their investment for dollars spent. This reasoning implies (8) and (9) are invalid also.
Okay, this "globalization" is probably inevitable. However, why can't the government let it happen *gently* instead of suddenly? We can kick out *all* H-1B's (or at least stop new ones) until the economy improves, and then discourage students from majoring in easily outsource-able careers. This can keep jobs for the current crop of technies, but prepare the next generation for something else.
The government *can* do this. But it is not doing such because corporations have congress by the balls. It is us *voters* who are supposed to hold their balls, in theory.
This plan is a fair compromise that minimizes the distress, but still allows gradual progress.
Let existing geeks fade with dignity, please.
Table-ized A.I.
"...And We Thought That Nation-States Were A Bad Idea"
"publicly subsidized! privately profitable!" that's the anthem of the upper-tier (the puppeteer untouchable). we focus a moment, nod in approval and bury our head back in the bar-codes of these neo-colonials while our former nemesis (ah, the romance!): the nation-state, now plays fund-raiser for a new brand of power-concentrate. try again, but now we're confused- what is "class-war"? is this class war? yes, this is class war. and i'm just a kid- i can't believe that i gotta worry about this kind of shit! what a stupid world! yeah, this is just beautiful... absolutely no regard for principle. what a stupid world. (we're): 1) born 2) hired 3) disposed! where that job lands, everybody knows and you can tell by the smile on the ceo's that the environmental restraints are about to go. you can bet that laws will be set to ensure the benefit of unrestricted labor-laws (all kept in place by displaced government death squads). they own us. they produce us. they consume us. can you fucking believe this? what a stupid world. fuck this bullshit display of class-loyalties. the media and "our" leaders wrap it all up in a flag"
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
...and I'm sorry, but it's becoming very clear that you get what you pay for. The expense of the salaries may be one third what it is here, but the quality of the work is maybe one tenth.
Maybe I'm in a unique situation, but I find it extremely frustrating to have to do double work to fix the work that they are doing over there.
If you run the numbers, someone who lives modestly at only double the average income (1k per year), works 10 years in IT and invests at 10% their investment income equals their earned income at the end of 10 years and they retire with an investment income of over 220k and a nest egg of 2.4 million dollars. Staying in their IT job essentially doubles the income and the nest egg at retirement.
This isn't to say that they're going to do it but they can and a minority will leave a surprising amount of capital to the next generation.
The history of high capital concentration societies is one of envy and eventual revolution. Your scenario doesn't merely require heartless plutocrats but dumb heartless plutocrats who don't study history and don't care if they end up hanging from the lamp posts.
I find that unlikely.
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.
But I am hoping Japanese and being a CPA will buy me some time.
.).
Yes, I may eventually have to work for 20k, but if enough time has passed, other prices will have deflated as well, and my quality life will be minimally effected (remember, not just wages are cheap in India . .
If my current skill set doesn't cut it, I can simply enhance utilizing infrastructure far superior than what they have in India.
Competition forces everyone to be better at what they do. You can either complain along the way or accept it as part of life's challenges. Regardless of which way you take it, it is inevitable.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
in history now.
Total usa debt is > GDB ($33b) (see www.financialsense.com)
everyone is living of credit, and its all gona go BOOM
You can never have 0% unemployment, unless your economy is super ineffficient with heaps of red tape (as is usa govt now) fors forms forms for everything. Theres always some people that can't or don't work. People under 14 usually dont, people over 70 usually dont.
When all those 60m baby boomers retire, and get old sick, ask for coupons, us kids are gona pay for it all with 75% taxes (ie if you include sales+income+fees+excise+hidden+CG)
Remember the USA currency is not govt owned, its owned by the http://www.federalreserve.gov/ which is a collection of PRIVATE central banks.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
But this is capital availabe to eveyone that frequents slashdot, and Americans have great access to infrastructure to develop "specialized knowledge" capital, more so than people in countries like India.
I just don't understand why so many people get angry with having to compete with the rest of the world, even when they clearly have an advantage . . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
In the end, outsourcing will deal a critical blow to US corporations.
Already, Cisco is sueing a Chinese company over products that have the exact same bugs, messages, and functionallity. Wonder how that company got Cisco's source code - either outsourcing or via an H1-B/L1.
Four chinese people have been arrested and/or charged with selling military grade technology from Silicon Valley to China.
We are sending software over to the biggest bunch of pirates ever known - repeatedly our lawyers bitch at their governments to stop copying this and that.
We are just beginning to see the fall of intellectual property rights....
It should be an entertaining five years from now when the outsourcing bubble bursts, while American valuable technology is copied and pirated to the cost of media.
Just as Microsoft used IBM to fund their work, one can bet the far east is going to do the same. Then they will be not working for the US, but competing directly against us.
But without the oft mentioned worker rights rules, environmental rules, etc. that make the level of living in the US that much better.
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.
I would like to point out that, for all of it's faults, Economics at least sets an objective framework for creating theories on how markets work. For instance, your post does not utilize any Economic principles I can think of and basically explains how devasting it would be to ALL national economies if jobs (capital) were to leave the U.S. I will only say that the integrity of such claims would be quite dubious if you lived anywhere outside of a 3rd world country. But sadly, I can only understand the logic of your post if you are American.
If you do not heed the wisdoms of Economics, you should at least be aware that historical events have proved your theory wrong, many times over.
However, suppose we assume you are right and implement a complete ban on companies outsourcing? What kind of paradise is it you imagine? I personally imagine a hell of super-generized foreign corporations, utilzing a massive human resource of artifiicially cheap professionals, totally undercutting and out performing our domestic suppliers.
You can either flow with the market and adapt to change, or you can try to control the market and bear the full force of its spite.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Lets see...
:) As an AC said already, you
Take off the tinfoil hat my friend. I don't know if you've been exposed to much government, but let me tell you, they don't have the desire, motivation, or courage to be part of any grand design like that. Government workers are, by and large, very poor, unmotivated, and won't do anything to jepoardize their meager existence. Grand designs like these are right the hell out.
Ok, so finding some evidence of "grand design"
effectively moots your point on this one.
Iran Contra
Kangaland Spills The Beans
I could go on but I don't see the point.
Ok, that's one for me. They don't seem like lazy
Govt workers fearing for their jobs now do they.
Then you said:
Maybe you'll then say that it's not the goverment but the wealthy fueling your conspiracy. Well, considering that of that 1% you're talking about, only 10% of their children will manage to do anything but piss that wealth away, I don't see a successful continuation there either. And what you're talking about implies generations of development.
Ok. Got a little creative with some numbers you
can't possible produce anything to back up. Lets
see what I can produce other than the obvious
trend for a whole bunch of presidents coming from
the same families that have had a ton of money
since the beginning of this USA experiment:
The Breakdown
The best part of all this is that my "this makes
sense" post was kinda sort supposed to be taken
as a joke. Shameless flamebait to stir up the
nuts. I never assumed I'd hook someone from the
other extreme. I seriously don't understand you
guys. Is it a "white guilt"? I mean, I made a
bundle the past 15 years. That doesn't change the
fact that I know things are heavily skewed in
favor of "pretty white people". Hell, I've counted
on it a number of times when negotiating with
venture capitalists. But I mean, how many evil
dictators that just happened to be funded/trained/
put in power by the USA do we have to pick a
fight with in an election year to clue you in?
Does another president have to be publicly
executed to raise your suspicions that there just
might be things going on that nobody in their
right mind would want to know about?
As for my URL, why not try actually going to it
and see what it is. Understanding it's more in
character for you to exert all your energies into
crafting a high quality "flame" instead of
actually taking the time to know what you are
talking about.
should feel pretty stupid.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
They already have a 86% profit margin on the OS.
But your point is correct for non-criminal non-monopolists.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Companies are taking your advice to the next logical level and saying, "Fuck the rest of Americans."
All I can say is that some people measure the progress of our species by calculating the average wealth per capita. Others measure our progress by the wealth of the poorest amongst us. Neither methods of calculation change the overall happiness of our species, but they certainly do effect the happiness of the one doing the measuring. Maybe you should make some Indian friends, and your view of this matter will change.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
join them. Outsourcing tends to benefit the cream of the crop (ie large shareholders, ceo's and other senior management, partners, etc). Sure, things suck for those less capable individuals who happen to be replaced by cheaper solutions overseas, but for those few hardworking, gifted and lucky people who rise to the top, nothing is as sweet as capitalism.
for my case, unlike its creator, the actual language itself is not too picky about the cases, as long as you are consistent (For instance, @perl, @PERL, $peRL, $PEARL, and many other combinations all seem to work). But to be serious, even Larry uses both PERL and perl for slightly different meanings (something about language verse the implemention or something else I am not 7331 enough to grasp at this point)
However, the tragedy hear is not that I have failed at geek etiquette but that you have completely missed my point.
Compare me to any fulltime programer of perl, and I completely suck at Perl. My programs use very basic Perl syntax that any programming geek would rightly scoof at. That is not my point. These programs are implementations of complex financial concepts that most programmers would have a very hard time creating by themselves. Futhermore, even though my understanding of Perl is limitted, what I know puts me light years ahead of the Excel and Crystal Reports clicking idiots that are my financial peers. Then, finally, my foreign language skills have further helped me to burrow within a niche.
But why do I bother? You were not reading my post, you were merely interpreting it.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I don't have a job.
Then get one before you start lecturing those of us who contribute to the economy.
Now explain to me why I should care more about you then about someone in India. Explain to me why people should subsidize you and your family when the same money could go to 3 Indians to write 3 times as much code?
So that Americans, like you and your family, will have decent jobs when you need them.
If all you care about is yourself and your family, then all I can say is fuck you, you selfish bastard.
Go fuck yourself. I care more about them than I do about some loser living off mommy and daddy's money while he steals music using the college LAN and runs a porn link server out of his dorm room. Mom and dad must be real proud when they see comments on your web page like "She must be in her mid-fifties. Granny boobs, whoa."
First they came for the useless,
But I was not useless,
So I said nothing.
Then they came for the incompetent,
But I was not incompetent,
So I said nothing.
Then they came for the idiots,
But I was not an idiot,
So I said "thank God the useless incompetent idiots are gone!"
For those of you who didn't catch Slashdot's recent interview with IT journo Dan Gillmor, it contained what I consider to be a very insightful comment:
"It's definitely cheaper to send work offshore, and it's also getting easier. Whether it's sufficiently easy -- or ultimately all that cheap when companies account for the hassles -- is unclear for the moment, though the long-range trend is not good for the U.S.
The cultural differences, not to mention time zones, are always going to be something of a barrier. I've spoken with folks who have tried to manage international engineering projects, and they tell me it can be hugely difficult.
But the communication/collaboration tools are getting much better. English is becoming a default language of business and technology. And as people outside the U.S. get better technical educations -- even as America keeps killing its own educational system -- we're going to see more and more competition from abroad. "
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
America was not built on a free market economy, it was built on slavery. After slavery ended it was built on segragation and the natives would make the immigrants do all the work while the natives were CEO.
First it was the Blacks and Native Americans doing all the work, then add the Irish, the Mexicans, the Chinese.
This worked in America because all the work was still done by Americans. The Money stayed in America and all of America improved when railroads were built etc.
How the hell does improving India and Africa help America? When you have a free market economy but you dont have a one world government, the free market economy concept doesnt work, you are paying other countries and draining money from your own.
Fuck that.
With the free market economy, Ill be forced to move out of the USA and into India to get a job, and thats bullshit.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This cant work, because there is no global minimum wage.
A programmer in India should make the same as a Programmer in America Period.
There should not be bullshit about the cost of living in india being cheaper to justify them getting paid unfair wages.
ALL LABOR SHOULD BE EQUAL IN WORTH. Then I will agree with Globalisation or else its just another word for slavery of the masses.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You cant move away from your parents in the USA until your mid twenties or married. You need a degree to get a decent job period.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There average rent in boston is $1000 a month, theres no chance in hell you could live on $7 an hour unless you live in a homeless shelter.
Its expensive as hell to live in the USA unless you already own land, apartments are not cheap at all.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
what the hell does food have to do with software?
You'd pay $300 for Microsoft windows no matter who wrote it, guys in India or guys in the USA the only difference is, when its in India, Bill Gates gets more money.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Less tax dollars. The government should make it illegal to outsource.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
How does having a high salary hurt the consumer who buys a product they dont really need? So you should lower the salary so consumers can buy shit they dont really need like DVD players and TVs while millions of IT workers starve?
You are fucking stupid, and I'm ashamed if you are an american. I hope you get fired and a worker in south africa who works for 1 penny an hour takes your job.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
They can have their own wealth and their own economy in their own country.
I mean unless we have global minimum wage, a one world government, etc, how the fuck is this supposed to work? We just give them reparations?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
And lots of cheap places exist in the US. You just aren't willing to live there -- either in the cities that are cheaper, or in the neighborhoods that are cheaper.
And on a different note, I believe in Calcutta about two million people leave the city on the weekend, commuting back home, returning the next Monday. In don't know how many people commute each day, but I saw a program about the train system there and they were talking about a dozen people dying in train accidents each day in just one city (New Delhi, I think, but it sounded like that was typical). The things people do to get to cheaper housing, or to get to a job from their home...
Who gives a fuck about cheaper when no one has a job? So things are cheaper but you have no job and no money, how is that better?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The outsourcing is happening everywhere, either in terms of work being moved abroad or cheaper workers moving into your country. It won't be stopped until people realise that it neither serves the foreign workers well over time - anyone remember the so-called Asian Tiger of the 90's? - or the local workers. Globalisation means basically being put at the mercy of large corporations, who care for neither the foreign workers nor you.
I don't know what the answer is because heavy state control doesn't work either and massive military spending in order to shore up foreign conquest only increases budget deficits. Maybe in 50 years we'll all be looking for work in Bangladesh, who knows?
As everyone moves to the rest of the world where $2 a day is actually worth something.
I see you hate your country, why not just leave now?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Thats where we will all be living. We all will be in Asia.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Since our country wont matter in 50 years when China with its billion people dominates the world, we should just put all our money in education right now so we can still have jobs in 50 years what good is the military when there will be no economy in 50 years.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The good news is that those jobs will require specialized skills and training... probably at the 2 year community college level... and they'll have decent wages. But they won't a major job source for the unskilled, they won't have a need for high school kids.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I'm not receiving any money from my parents, despite your idiotic assumptions. Not that it matters, my financial situation has no baring on your selfishness.
... I care more about them than I do about some loser living off mommy and daddy's money...
In any event, let me give you an example. Suppose Bank A charges a $1 ATM fee, while bank B charges a ten cent ATM fee because they outsourced their IT. Now, using bank B saves me money that I can use on other things, and makes my life more comfortable. Why the hell should I spend my money so you can have a comfortable life instead of some Indian guy?
So that Americans, like you and your family, will have decent jobs when you need them.
I assume you buy only American products, right? If you don't, you're a hypocrite. Where was that PC made, huh?
Sorry to disappoint you, but the world doesn't owe you anything for being born in America. That's just the way life is. Asking for a handout in the form of an over-paid job is lame. Demanding one, and getting all indignant when people call you out is just pathetic.
Well, duh. We've already established that you care more for them then anyone else. This is what makes you a selfish bastard. And this is precisely why I have zero sympathy for you. All you are is a winy bitch crying because other people are willing to do what he does for less money.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Considering the minimum wage is not an income you can survive on.
Look, I wouldnt care about this if i could get a job at minimum wage at mc donalds and pay my rent and bills, but i cant!
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Remember the Bush speech about the tax cuts, how it will create new jobs and help our economy, blah blah blah.
Well, if he does cut taxes and companies are outsourcing with these tax cuts, well whos economy is improved? Not ours. This is why the Bush stimulus tax cut garbage has not helped the economy in the past and will not help now.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The ultimate question is: who are your friends? Who do you really care about? Who really cares about you? If life is about nothing more than lots of "stuff", then global capitalism is the most peachy-keen notion ever to have intruded into the dull wet-ware of homo sapiens.
But the fact is, I want my neighbor to have a job because he and I live in the same neighborhood. Sometimes people who have been brought up and educated to see themselves and the world entirely in economic terms find this concept hard to grasp.
----------
Manifesto for the Peoples of the Third Millennium
What stops these countries from developing their own economies, industries and products? Why must we give our wealth to them when they are perfectly capable with their billions of people of doing it themselves?
Now I agree I dont believe we have a right to just take all their resources like we do, but i dont think we should just hand over our wealth to them because we have developed most of this technology ourselves, why give it all away.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
My family had no choice but to be poor, How the hell can you say we choose to be poor? How the fuck do you think this society works? Some people are born rich, some people are born poor, no one chooses what they are born into you ignorant snob.
Assholes like you piss me off more than anything, if its not poor people such as myself choosing to be born poor, its us being poor because we are too lazy to be rich. I work harder than you, I've had a harder life then you, my family is poor, I'm poor, but we survive because we work twice as hard as rich snobs such as yourself who never have to work hard in life.
Rich snobs such as yourself seem to think that theres some sorta control over luck and fate, if lucky you are born rich and if unlucky you are born poor, but it has nothing to do with you as the individual,
If you are poor you can work hard and become rich in the USA, but it takes ALOT of work, a hell of a lot more work than your lazy ass is capable of doing.
A hell of alot more work than bill gates or any of these silver spoon born rich got richer sons of bitches who never had to work in life but continue to get more and more wealth.
T3kno please just shut up and dont post a response to this, if you do I will pick apart every single line you post.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I am poor so I'm going to tell you. Yes there are some poor who are lazy, but this is a very small fraction, this small fraction of lazy poor end up in jail, dead, are on drugs, or have mental problems.
Then you have the OTHER poor, the majority of people who are poor, the ones who have to struggle through school because they are poor, slowly work their way through the fucked up highschool system, work their way through community college, work their way through university, come out with a bachlors degree, go to graduate school, work their way through graduate school, come out with a masters, work their way to a PHD.
This is how poor people move up the ladder, its a long long road. Oh and I forgot to mention, its going to cost around a half million dollars to get a PHD, so the price of education is not free, the poor can either go in debt, or join the military.
There arent many ways out of it, you start poor and you usually end poor, unless you work EXTREMELY hard from the day you are born to the day you die, just so your kids can grow up middle class or upper middle class.
When globalism happens it doesnt have an effect on the upper class who already have wealth, the CEOs and upper level management do just fine, its the people who do all the work in this country, the poor, who now cant move up the ladder because theres no IT jobs.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The difference is we dont need walmart, we need food and housing.
Without a job we cant even eat.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
well, you should have. Even now what makes business profitable is teh outsourcing thats happening...ask your CEOs. Companies arent run or its employees, they are run for profits.
Outsourcing is the only way to go when I can actually see that teh average Indian worker is a little more commited to his work than most US based workers with monday blues and friday party expectations.
lastly, no one ever cribbed when the boom happened...yeah, the Soviet Socialist Republic of the United states...when the going goes bad...
get used to the new deal...party less, work more, be entrepreneurs, thats what america is famous for...
I wasnt born there thats why. People are forced to live where their parents live. What am I supposed to do? go to some strange place where i dont know anyone? Have no support from friends or family?
People are born into the society they are born into, you cannot just up and leave.
You are right $1000 isnt alot when shared 5 ways and thats the only way I can live in boston, I plan to do something like that after I get my degree.
Fact is, 5 people in a small studio apartment sucks.
Sure theres cheaper places than boston, its also cheaper to live in Africa, doesnt mean you want to leave everything you know and start all over.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
If state (or federal) intervention (including taxes) is driving wealth away, then state intervention should be stardardised across the whole world. This is fully consistent with the neo-liberal globalisation agenda.
Abolish national borders.
Hold your doom saying Chicken Little!
Anyone with anything longer than the media's memory will remember the same type of things being said about electronics, automobiles, manufacturing, etc.
Fundamentally, the key driver of American economic greatness lies in a cultural, educational, and economic environment that offers unmatched support for innovation and entrepreneurship. India and China may both have large, cheap, and now, in some ways, well educated work forces, but can they match the Americans for the ability to innovate?
Now, notice that I said ability, as I'm sure than any Indian or Chinese guy has just as much capacity to innovate as any Joe, Jose, Abu or Jing American. However, behind every Hewlett or Moore stands a team of multitalented and innovative workers, a well informed and wealthy capital market, a government that balances freedom with encouragement and regulation, a base of wealthy consumers ready to spend money on new things, and networks of individuals that provide knowledge and access to all of the preceding. Getting all that requires a pervasive culture of freedom in thought and expression, tolerance for different cultures, ethnicities and viewpoints, research institutions that are capable of excellence in multiple discipline simultaneously, well connected financial and legal networks that serve investors and innovators, institutions, regulations and laws that have been refined over decades of experience. You won't find this in India and China, even with the free flow of expertise and experts in the modern global marketplace, it will still take decades for either to build anything resembling what we have in America today. Historically, by the time that nations arrive at that level of development (read Europe and Japan), wages would have become on par with those here in America.
So, how should we regard the obviously painful current state of the IT industry? Once again, we can turn to history. In the past, during each round of economic expansion, new ideas, new services, leading edge products, et cetera, inject wealth and jobs into the American economy. On subsequent rounds of contraction and adjustment, more mature industries begin shifting their work to cheaper overseas sites as companies become more efficient, domestic labor markets become more favorable to employers, and financing and infrastructure becomes cheaper, setting the stage for the next round of expansion. Usually, during these transition periods, a great number of domestic employees in mature industries loose their jobs. Almost all of these people eventually get jobs either by joining more competitive outfits, applying their existing skills to up and coming industries, or switching professions after a period of re-education. Overall, after each round of expansion and contraction, the economy achieves net growth.
Now, there are caveats to this generalization.
A. Markets are not perfect, and the market, as we have seen, can be rife with fraud, monopoly, faulty loans, ignorant or stupid investors, etc.
B. Social pressures during the transition can cause unrest or the enactment of unwise policies.
C. The human productive lifespan is finite. Since modern industries often require professionals who have spent much of their lives in school, when industries mature, many of those professionals may find themselves unable to recover from the huge amount of lost time and capital investment that they spent educating themselves for a profession that no longer requires them.
Perhaps point C is most poignant with the Slashdot crowd, and it represents a real and worrying trend that is likely to exacerbate due to the increasingly complex and specialized nature of modern technical fields. Historically, the services sector (sales, real-estate, support, education, etc.) has provided a safety valve for displaced technical professionals. Often, people would spend a decade and a half working in industry, be laid off, and spend the rest of their lives selling houses or teaching. However, now a days people who want to work in technology have to spend so much time educating themselves that they may never be able to recoup their investments. Over the long term, this may undermine America's lead in technological innovation and entrepreneurship by discouraging future generations from pursuing careers in science and engineering, but I think steps can be undertaken to avoid this.
1. At the undergraduate level, universities should concentrate on teaching widely applicable mathematical and scientific problem solving skills instead of merely instilling knowledge related to set major. This is already taking place at many of the best universities but need to happen on a wider scale in more campuses.
2. Science and engineering education should become more multi-disciplinary and research driven to prepare the next generation of innovators for the convergence of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computation (think nanotech, bioinformatics, designer pharmaceuticals, engineered chemicals) that are beginning to take place today and will likely drive the economy of the next century.
3. Enact regulation to protect pensions so that future generations will not have to face the prospect of having worked 80 hours weeks for a decade only to end up with a pile of worthless stock options.
Also, as the recent spate of corporate failures have shown, there are still significant market failures that need to be addressed.
4. We need to better regulate the accounting and investment industries and reform corporate laws to allow more transparent and reliable accounting.
5. We need to better educate investors about the source of value and the basic economics of the stock market.
6. We need more independent, better staffed, and more skilled regulatory agencies.
7. We need to acknowledge the need that there are key basic industries that are essential to national security. When necessary, we need to protect these industries, to a degree, against market trends.
"Fact is, 5 people in a small studio apartment sucks.
You know the conditions you describe sound like what people in India live in. Seriously.
Unless your an upper caste you sleep in a dirt floor with a million other people. 7/hr is huge because it affords you your own studio apartment in Bombay! Think about it? If one of us took that kind of pay for an IT job here in the US we would actually live in worse conditions then an Indian would in India!
Come to think about it, why are we talking in these terms to describe supposedly white collar jobs? The Burger King down my street hires at 7/hr and no college degree and years of experience are needed. I find this value of what we are worth insulting. Don't you?
I am a former techie out of work and I am willing to work for about 7 or 8 an hour myself at this point. I lost my girlfriend, my apartment in New York, and all my possesions and moved back in with my parents in Las Vegas. My former employer outsourced to China. Life sucks and when I read stories like this I get really pissed for obvious reasons! I hope at least some people have college degree's. Since I do not have one any white collar job is out of the market for me. It pisses me off because I got skills but HR wants peaces of paper from a university for any job beyond a custodian. I am planning on going back to school next January. The question what should I major in and what jobs will not be outsourced to India? A physchologist, lawyer or doctor are the only positions I can think of. All the other professions can be outsourced for minium wage. I picture whole companies where only a handfull of employees remain at the corporate headquarters in the US. The other %90 are in India or China. We need a protective tarrif on services and not only goods now!
http://saveie6.com/
Yeah thats why I'm in college right now, I cant even survive without a degree. I plan to go for a PHD and becoming a college professor, those jobs never will be outsourced, the average india cant speak proper english.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Says you -- I would point out that when a supermarket chain decides to automate their checkout system, the more they pay for that software development, the more you pay for groceries. If Windows does not get cheaper as it gets cheaper to develop, this is a sign of a dangerous lack of competition, not a sign that you should be overpayed.
I'm pretty amused that you presume to tell people what they do or don't need, and what should or shouldn't be cheap. I'm even more amused that you take your own opinion about what should be overpriced as a defense of your own inflated salary.
Quite seriously: why is your `right' to an inflated salary more important than the benefit to many more people than just you of lowered prices of groceries or growth in their 401k plans?
After all, that's the point here -- you're arguing that you should be paid more than others are willing to do your job for. Tell us why this should be so, given that a higher salary for you means higher prices and lower investment returns for many others?
...on a personal scale you can live without credit, and/or over extending it to a ridiculous level, rather easily. On a national scale when two for-profit criminal gangs hijack the government and run it as a perpetual jobs and graft bank, with their hands out to international pirates, it's almost impossible to keep your nation fiscally sound.
The executive pay circle jerk only exists because shareholder rights are still in the stone age. If you could offer electronic proxies on individual issues and you could vote the shares you hold in mutual funds, I think that the circle jerk salary hikes would end along with a lot of what else is wrong with corporate america.
From 2001-12, William Grieder writes A
New Giant Sucking Sound where China defines the bottom in "the race to the bottom".
(This is not per se about China, but globalization
policies and who benefits.)
As industries around you shut down in the face of
$1.00/day competition from overseas, your local economy turns into a *extraction* industry, where
what you make at your $7.50 an hour job at McD's
goes via WalMart to child labor in China. Until
McD's shuts down too.
It's not simply about ROI or how it sucks to be
the one affected, because everyone on the street
is affected when anyone on the street suffers.
ROI talks about things on the balance sheet and
income statement; if the business can dump poison,
murder employees and corrupt the government, none
of that shows up on the balance sheet and none of
that is reflected in ROI. Except maybe positively
because of the private benefit from public cost.
Eg the costs are externalized. Like power plants
in midwest dump crap into the air that makes the
air in Maine some of the most polluted in country.
Doesn't show up on their balance sheets/ROI, just
in our ozone days and health stats.
I live in Maine, and I'm watching the demise of
the local dairy, fishing and wood products
industries. When Monsanto is done with the local
dairy industry, there will be none and we will be
forced to the GM/antibiotic trough. Some people
might say that is "choice". Not my choice.
It's not a rising of the bottom but a ripping of
the top of the *labor* market. The CEO won't
take a cut, but he will get x $millions more for
exporting American jobs to China.
If the CEO only earned ten or even 100 times more
than the lowest paid worker, that might be ok.
ROI my ass. (BTW I am a CEO)
I have an idea, why don't we declare tree leaves as our national currency, then EVERYONE will be rich!
Dan
Unemployment is normally a measure of how many people who in fact can work but aren't working. So it excludes people below the minimum working age (there's one in Australia, don't know about the US), students, pensioners, etc. So 0% unemployment would mean everyone who is able to work is actually working, which in theory should be possible.
keep the profits?"
"We've got their customer lists, we are their business procedures and workforce. Who needs their 'corporate leadership'?"
What's going to stop them? Loyalty to their US employers? They know that as soon as they start to demand and get a better living standard, that these corporations will close down the plants and move the jobs elsewhere. Someone pointed out the example of Ireland.
The difference between now and the last wave is that this is the first time US Fortune 50 companies have been outsourcing this much of their core functionality. If everything is outsourced except the executive suite and a few marketdroids, where is the value-add that makes US corporate leadership more valuable than anybody else's?
I don't see it and neither will the Indians. There are Indians just as greedy, short-sighted, and stupid as the ripest examples of US CEOs. Why not let them have a chance at the top of the corporate tree?
The difference... the CEOs will get some sort of platinum parachute as their corporations disappear, unlike their workers.
Tech Public Policy stuff
With extra priveledges should come extra responsibility. If you want to increase their priveledge, then you should make them 100% liable for whatever their company does. I think that this would be a good thing. The thought of being completely bankrupted would provide at least some incentive for the Ken Lays out there not to screw people over.
Hanging out drinking beer with nekkid chicks isn't much fun either, but at least its not work, eh?
Personally I love working on computers, learning and building new things with technology I'll probably never completely understand. That's fun. But some people call it work.
Maybe not, but that's Islam's fault, with the whole "if it agrees with the Koran it's redundant and if not it's heretical" attitude which caused Omar(?) to burn down the library at Alexandria and has kept them in the stone age ever since.
No one really knows for certain what happened. There's some evidence that the above story isn't correct. See, for example, this link.
And the 'stone age' comment -- are you really that ignorant, or do you just play one on slashdot? Where do you think the knowledge that sparked the European Renaissance came from?