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Offshore Outsourcing Threatens Offshore Outsourcing
theodp writes "India offshore tech support companies may soon face job losses as U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft explore countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, including Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Concerned that outsourcing might be outsourced from India in the near future, a Bangalore call center owner said 'It's hard to know where it will all end. Is there a country where people will work for free?'" There's a Newsforge story about the same subject.
Oh well. I can always fall back on that SCOX stock.....oh wait.....
It's really hard to come up with anything else to add to this story. I mean, did anyone _not_ see this coming? Global companies will do what's cheapest...and there will always be someone who'll be cheaper than you.
Now, when they start outsourcing management...that's when I'll be happy.
So stop competing on price and start offering a good, high quality, reliable service that people will pay a little more for.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Is there a country where people will work for free? Yeah, the GNU.S.A.
This reminds me of the story of Saudi Arabia and mideastern oil. Way back around the turn of the century, there was no great oil industry in the Arabian Peninsula. They were trying to find something to do with this deset wasteland. Then, the US comes in, offers to pay the countries (then Saudi Arabia was the focus) 1 penny per barrel exported, all drilled by the US, worked mostly by US oil workers. Now, we see what has come of this situation... Should we be as worried about tennis shoes and cheap nylon jumpsuits?
Speak for yourself.
I think there are multiple reasons here...
Most of the countries named have an actual infrastructure. EG I doubt Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic have electricity problems.
Many of the Eastern European countries are not that far away from the Western markets, with some actually joining the European Union.
All in all it just makes for simpler business....
Funny though... (in an ironic sense)
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Ever tried to force an open-source developer to change the design to meet your needs? Especially a large project not in a mode where they are begging for respect by pandering to anybody who will deign to email them.
India offshore tech support companies may soon face job losses as U.S. companies such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and PeopleSoft explore countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor, including Romania, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. American employees hopefully won't lose any more jobs than they have already; but it kinda sucks for the Indian employees who are going to be out of work now.
The biggest problem with a global economy is that it caters to the lowest common denominator. The second biggest problem is, you more often than not get what you pay for. I have to wonder if American IT companies are even concerned with the quality of their technical support anymore?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Kill or be killed. Always has been and always will be.
You can't tell the RIAA to change its business model without by being prepared to do so yourself. Be flexible and keep with the times.
__
Cheap website reseller hosting Dragon Action Figures
Many of these awesome IT and software development jobs are turning more to be like mechanic jobs. Sure you need some training, but just about anyone can do a half-decent job. Half-decent enough for someone to hire you for pennies in a foreign country!
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Free your mind.
> explore countries with even cheaper sources of technical labor,
this kind of thing haunts most developers - and, every company out there who needs to get something done is always seeking for the smaller cost/quick solution for all their projects. its also become common that a lot of developers are lowering their rates just to get work - its not looking good at all..
meanwhile, i perform consulting services - and, i simply refuse to budge from my standard rate for employment. they pay a little more - but, they will get what they pay for. i have had many clients do development in india, then, come to me - and, for a little bit more they get the product faster, of higher quality - and, are very satisfied.
the sooner these companies realize cheap labour has its down-falls, the better of they will be.
A quote from the original Wired article...
Farhat Gupta, owner of several Bangalore call centers, said that little attention is paid to technical training, as "all the answers are always on the computer screen in front of the workers. We exist for people who do not want to use the Internet themselves to find their own answers."
The only time I ever call technical support is when checking the manual and web doesn't get me the answer. If the person on the other end of the line has no more information available to them, what's the point?
Give it a rest. OSS isn't about working for free, it's about caring about what you're working on, and letting others give the same kind of care.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Personally, I think the multinats are on to something. They're cycling through countries, creating artificial "boom-bust" cycles in employment.
Take for example, the automobile industry. In the early 1980's, the US auto industry had some of the highest wages/benefits for auto manufacturers in the world. Alot of those jobs went overseas to Japan/Korea who (at the time) had lower wages (and better quality). This depressed US wages. Now, the reverse is true. Both German and Japanese automakers see that US wages are lower and have located plants here.
So goes it with IT. US coders were first to the trough and wages went up. Then the multinats moved to India who trained their people well and had low wages. Indian coder's rates go up and now the multinats are headed for Eastern Europe. As tech wages get lower in the US and we refocus on quality, the multinats will move coding operations back here and the cycle with start anew.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Now, the surprise on so many faces - "how can they do that to us", "how will our workers eat?", "We have so much labor, and they are moving operations to some backwater 3rd world country" ... will now be coming from New Delhi instead of New Jersey...
When your business consists of undercutting others, and providing services to willfully "outcompete" someone out of a job, don't expect pity.
As a piece of advice I once heard goes: "If you are stupid enough to date someone who dumped someone to be with you, don't be surprised when you get dumped, too."
meh
Open source only works if you want a piece of software that is good for everyone. Noone is going to come and write my factory control and admin system for free, even if they can give away the source afterwards.
Whats more, I don't think I'd trust running a control system that someone had written for free. Where would I get support? Updates? Who would I complain to if it went wrong without running the risk of the OSS programmers saying 'Sod it. Can't be bothered any more.'
As for the work being higher quality, you may well be write in the case of the big and famous OSS projects like Linux, OpenOffice, Gimp and so forth, but don't go thinking that OSS === Good Software any more than Pay For Software === Good Software. You get utter tripe in both camps.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Elbonia, lovely Elbonia
Once one company gets their employees to go along with a heath care cost increase or a salary cut, the other companies will rush to offer just as low pay and benefits. They call this "competitive" compensation. So if the jobs can be outsourced for cheaper, then the majority of businesses will all race to find where that is. It happened with manufacturing jobs, it is happening with service jobs. I don't really know what (if any) jobs are "safe."
Also, don't think this automatically translates into lower prices. It doesn't make the products better or less expensive, just cheaper to make. How much in lower prices do you pay for your Nike tennis shoes made in Burma?
Face it, corporations are in the business of making money, if they can reduce their costs by taking jobs elsewhere, they will do it.
Not that this is a bad thing, inefficiencies are weeded out, and companies can continue to make money.
Plus, the outsourced country benefits more than the whiny liberals care to admit. These jobs pay more than the local average, treat their workers a hell of a lot better, and boosts their economy.
So as a whole, this is not really a bad thing, except for the people losing their jobs. This is the free market at work.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
"Is there a country were people will work for free?"
Yes, such a country exists. However, to be part of this country you need to have a big needle stuck in the back of your head and your whole body gets submerged in Astrolube. Your then stored in this "pod" where this "dream" of your life is pumped into your brain by a big computer.
Now, in this dream your actually answering the phone and solving technical problems and you only "think" your getting paid for it. In real life, that money is getting collected so that more people can get plugged into the machine to make them more money...
There was this dude who realized it was a dream and managed to wake up. He now cleans the floors in the building that holds all the people and the big computer. We hear him wanding around go "Damn Red Buritto..."
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Don't you love corporations?
It's not pretty, but this is what globalization and capitalism is all about. As people get more prosperous and affluent, they're less willing to work for rock bottom prices any more. Others undercut them and take their place in the food chain.
Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. It brings economic development to poor parts of the world that can do things better and cheaper. It allocates resources very efficiently. But it also creates a lot of instability and waste of resources at the same time. Look how fast the jobs can be created -- and eliminated. And what happens to the people who used to have those jobs. And do you notice how the countries that take the shittiest jobs often end up with polluted environments as a result?
Someday, I hope we will come up with an understanding of how we can balance efficient economics and social good.
Let's look at a few trends:
- Automatization leads to fewer and fewer workers being needed to do the same amount of work, meaning higher profits for the producer.
- Outsourcing leads to those workers being paid less and less , meaning again higher profits.
- This, in turn leads to higher unemployment rates and a higher number of workers with low wages.
- While any individual company might profit from cost-cutting measures, wide-scaled implementation of these measures will lead to too few consumers with enough money to buy the products.
- Thus, to keep the system going, those profiting from it - the producers - must eventually give back enough of the profits to keep the whole thing going, otherwise the distribution of wealth will be too uneven to allow the system to work.
(If you happen to be immoral, other possible ways to boost the economy would be forceful destruction of goods and/or workers, which would a) create the need for rebuilding the destroyed goods and b) lower unemployment, because after the destruction there'd be not only more work but also less workers left. This process is commonly known as "war".)
Before people start complaining about more people overseas taking jobs, let's realize that this means more people in impoverished jobs having access at better jobs. They may not be getting the pay they deserve, but they will be getting paid a lot better than many of their fellow persons. That better pay in relativity means they will be able to give themselves and their families a better standard of living, which every human being on this planet deserves. This is the goal of free trade, isn't it?
If we've been smart (this is slashdot, right?), we've been saving money to help us through tougher times. More jobs will always be created.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Yeah, those Indians sure are living the high-life financially at the moment.
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Furniture, lamps, and antiques Australian medical couches
This is even better, now you can get even more developers for the same price, or the price for Indian developers will be cheaper. It's a win-win situation for you.
The history of the textile industry, I think, gives a pretty clear indication where the future of IT is headed, particularly due to the big trend of American corporations to outsource to India over the past few years.
The textile industry, at least what I consider the modern, industrialized version of it, began in and generated considerable wealth for England. Then, with the promise of cheaper labor, the bulk of textile manufacturing moved to the Americas, specifically the Carolinas, Georgia and a few New England states. The total generated wealth of the industry started to decline at this point, and another disturbing trend started as well. The distribution of the wealth began moving to a smaller percentage of people, namely the factory owners. Again, the prospect of cheaper labor induced the factory owners to move the bulk of textile manufacturing first to Mexico from the United States, then to the Far East from Mexico.
The important things to remember is that the total wealth generated by the textile industry declined with each geographic hop around the globe, and that fewer and fewer people got a larger and larger percentage of the total wealth of the textile industry.
How does this relate to IT? Well, considering that in the late 1990's we saw a mass movement of IT jobs for the US to India, and the associated wealth generated by the IT industry decline, I think the example of the textile industry is playing out again. Soon, the Indians who offered such low labor rates to win contracts and jobs away from American workers will be on the other side of the equation.
Russia, Eastern Europe and probably some African countries will do to India what they have done to America. The sad thing is that while India has been "carpet-bombing" the IT industry in the United States over the past few years with cheap labor and low costs, ultimately they've been laying the ground work for their own, future demise.
If all you offer is low costs and a cheaper price, then there is nothing to keep customers loyal. As soon as someone else comes along with a cheaper price, your customers will move to them. All because of the trend you started!
To some degree the former colonies of England and America will always have an advantage. These would be mainly India, the Philipines, and South Africa. These countries hve people who learned English at an early age and understand US/UK business habits. Jobs such as customer relations would work best there. Even software development involves a lot of communication. This is possibly why India seems to have beat China and Japan.
It's a nice theory but you forget that equilibrium may never be attainable. Skill and knowledge starts in a location just as it did with all these industries for autmobiles, programming, etc.
So the cycle we have today, will be the cycle we have tomorrow, or hundreds of years from now, just with different industries, different technologies and different products. You'll benefit from the countries establishing better infrastructures, but did you really expect some countries to continue their civilizations on candle-power? The employment cycles and people wallowing in corporate migration-mires will continue. People will always be subject to the fear that they will lose their jobs to outsourcing. Infact it will be easier and faster every time as corporations establish a base of operations in all the potential countries, and have accumulated experience from making these shifts.
One place will always be better than another, in the eyes of a profit-seeker. Making these evaluations and determining the best choice is what executive decision makers get paid big money for, isn't it?
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
How much money does a typical large company pay for software?
500 clients at $80 a pop for the os = $40,000
500 clients at $300 for some applications $150,000
Every 3 years per major release of windows.
Or?
Pay one human who's part of a open source project who fixes bugs and submits fixes @ $63,333 yearly, only diffrence is, you get them first.
Any company with 500 machines or more is going to have some form of help desk or software support contact. You could spend your money and actually buy a comercial product, or you could employ the people support open source.
The "pay for people not for software attidude"
Not to speak of the fact that having a viable project under your belt, rather then basic programing skill and bug fixing, would likely make you more desirable by employers.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
and I do not think hugarian IT workers are cheaper than the Indian IT workers, to the contrary. One of the problems my coutry is facing currently is that the workforce is not as cheap as a few years ago. Many corporations plan to move towards east (Russia, China, etc) if the situation does not change. I think the same can be said on the neighbouring countries, too. Workforce in the eastern block is not as cheap as it used to be.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
This doesn't surprise me, though it's happened a bit faster than I expected. Then again, that is sort of the point I was going to make . . .
A global economy and global communication accelerate things. The ever-increasing need for IT accelerates people seeking new products, ways to support old products, and development of new projects. Throw these things together and you have a recepie for change and unpredictability - and a chance for uniformity at relatively quick speeds.
The Outsourcing Raget can't go on forever, and my guess is this is part of the last hurrah (or next-to-last) hurrah for Big Outsourcing Moves. At some point all potential markets will be explored, competition and increasing need will affect prices and skills, and you'll probably end up with the bizarre situation of a global market where IT resources seem relatively alike. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw it in ten years.
I work for a company that tried outsourcing and got burned horribly (last I saw, 50% of all outsourcing projects fail). Ironically, they found that good organization, hiring good people, and careful cost containment actually saved them money over outsourcing's total costs. They hired more people (at very good wages) and ended up coming out ahead.
Outsourcing has its place. But my guess is the enthusiasm for it will dip in time, because the speed of change will create homogenization.
Just my theories.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I have commented on this before to the people on slashdot promoting free trade. I told them that this was not about helping the people of India, and as soon as they got too "uppity" the corporations would drop them on their face and move somewhere else. See, folks, this isn't about helping out poor countries, this is about making corporations rich. It's not about exporting capitalism, it's about importing a 3rd world standard of living, which is why so many people around the world are against this. It's about making a market place, a product out of entire countries, whose populations are shopped by corporations, much like individual slaves were shopped for in the early United States. The message in return being sent to Americans isn't,"Thanks for helping us get to where we are.", but instead was, "Other countries are out-competing us, you better start working more hours." Of course, what they don't state explicitly, is that you are simply competing with another branch of your employer in a different country.
1) Supporting the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein by castrating the CIA
Actually I think castrating the CIA would do a good bit to prevent the rise to power of types like OBL and Saddam. Ya' see both of them had a lot of help from the CIA earlier in there 'careers'. The CIA has a policy of supporting the enemy of our enemy, no matter how unsavory the character is, or what his motives are. Well, when you lie down with dogs you get fleas. And we are paying the price for our past actions now. And we are doing it again. We are, so hypocritically, allowing a terror group in Iraq to keep it's weapons and camps, because they are against Iran. I for one will not be surprised one bit when in 10-20 years we are dealing with that group forcefully after they blew up some Americans.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
What's the hubbub here? Outsourcing is outsourcing. If Company A needs workers, it's going to find them. Perhaps they want someone that can drive into work every day, or perhaps they're fine with someone overseas. Once you reach the "overseas level", does it really matter where overseas they came from?
Also, consider this. We (the US, other nations using a particular region for manpower, etc) are building up an infrastructure and a skilled workforce in a way by creating demand for workers in that area. The area becomes known as a hotspot, wages (and usually the standard of living) rise, all is well. Then it's on to the next area that provides "cheap" labor.
And it's not just overseas where this happens. How many US companies are based in DE or NV because of their tax laws (no, this doesn't relate to actual labor but it does have to do with business decisions and where something is based).
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
bullshit, Gekko-boy. it just proves that people get desperate and will indenture themselves for lower wages. What happens is that wages hit rock bottom and then companies move there. The wages might be higher than they were the last time they hit rock bottom, but that's just inflation at work.
The only people getting richer are the board.
Stop worshipping at the scrotums of businessmen and get a clue. Business is out to fuck you and they will fuck you.
One of the horrible things about the global economy is that it makes labor essentially a worthless commodity, since the amount of supply far exceeds demand. Due to anti-competitive pressures, new businesses aren't forming to soak up excess demand for cheaper products. Therefore, a few select corporations profit immensely, while the population of the rest of the world gets treated like slaves. But, hey, I guess the word "free" is in "free trade", so therefore it must be a good thing.
Let's compare the two types of devleopment.
:-) Those types of people are probably NEVER going to try open-source code and they will just live with whatever product the market leader produces for their needs. I have worked with many people like that, and thankfully most are no longer in positions of power. The rest are praying that nothing ever happens to Microsoft, or if it does it happens slow enough for them to move to another position.
Issue: I have a software package that doesn't due what our company needs it to do and I need some modifications to it. The developers/company doesn't want to do it.
Closed Source/Proprietary: - You beg the vendor to do it, and threaten to switch if they don't. This is generally a limited threat, because of the fact that it will cost your company a huge amount of time and effort to switch to another vendor (who will have other issues). You could offer to pay the vendor for the development, but unless they are a small shop this probably won't do the trick either, or you will be paying HUGE $$$$ to them. You could have your own developers, provide some type of workaround, but this will break when the vendors upgrade/fix their code. Basically you have no good option, except to pray that the vendor will address your issue. Also when the vendor does release the upgrade, it will probably contain code enhansements that you don't care about, but will probably cause you other errors... I have lived in this world for a long time... and still do with Oracle and Microsoft.
Option 2, use Open Source: You quickly determine that nobody is going to work on the "patch/enhansement" that you want. You will need to now hire a coder that knows the language of the system (probably C). That coder will have to take some time getting up to speed on the program, and then fix it. The coder can then release that code back to the open source community, and it will "probably" make it in future releases. Now if you find yourself making significant changes to the code on a regular basis, then I would hire/contract development to give you what you want, and you wouldn't have to pay for time needed to get the developer use to the code. They can still release their code back to the open-source community, and it probably will get put in the main codebase, so you will be protected with future upgrades.
Both options cost time and money, development isn't cheap, and some companies hate giving stuff they paid for away for free. However, at the end of the day THEY ARE IN CONTROL!!!, not some outside vendor.
This flys in the face of "nobody ever got fired for buying xxx".
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
It's economic darwinism. Of course it exists. Of course it's our basic instinct -- it's how we are in our most basic form in all facets of our life. No one is saying it's an enlightened philosophy but it is truth. An inherent truth in any society that is going to get ahead in any terms. It's just that instead of it being a personal darwinism (I kill another human being because he threatens my superiority) it's in a more macro scale -- Company A undermines Company B so that they can stay ahead.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Seriously, in the future prisoners will write code. As companies look for cheaper labor, this is the inevitable conclusion.
Just imagine, prisoners are paid little or nothing for their work and can be easily penalized for poor quality. Imagine getting say 3 months added to your sentence for every bug! Or how about extra conjugal visits for software that sells a million copies. I could go on and on!
I wish this was just a joke, but I see little that could keep this from happening in the US or anywhere else. And few companies or consumers would care.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I run a company in Holland that just does this.. leverage eastern Europe to achieve similar cost levels but better control and quality. Budapest is a 1.5 hour flight from Amsterdam and is in the same timezone. Don't forget, these are the guys that during the communist era were reverse-engineering western technology. I have NO idea why companies continue to develop technology anywhere else.
I fear I can't completely agree with this. There are too many cases where an organization, be it corporation or government, really does exhibit behavior that's different from its constituents. Look at an organization as a sort of life form built out of people, just like people are life forms built out of organs and cells, etc. Members will do things "for the organization" that they just wouldn't do on their own, or for themselves.
IMHO, there is a real difference here.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Why is Singapore included in the list? It's a tiny island-state: you can see the entire coastline from the air. I suppose IBM can buy the entire island to staff one of its minor divisions (I'm kidding!). It has first-world living standards, so that would be the last place I would look for cheap labor. Sure, they speak English, but so do most Americans. About the only advantage I can imagine is having a 12 hr timezone difference is handy for tech support call centers.
Put your college hat back on for a moment, and remember the Signals and Systems course...
Think of an economic cycle as a simple oscillator. As long as we had loosely-coupled economic systems in various nations, they could go through their economic cycles somewhat independently. Even better, the loose coupling acted as damping to calm down the ranges of cycling. Things only get REALLY bad when the cycles coincide and/or badly influence each other, like in the 1930's.
Enter "Free Trade" and globalization. Instead of multiple independent systems with damping, we have one bigger, more complex system, and who knows where the damping is. How do you make this giant mess stable, or at least limit the swings?
IMHO the creation of a giant, undamped, unmodelable mess is the real downfall of globalization.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Your comment defeats itself. If a country can undersell India, it is likely that the income from GlobalCorp, Inc. will have a greater impact for good there than it had in India.
I *personally* saw a group of Romanian engineers designing car parts for an American company. They were getting paid $400-$500 per month. You might say it's deplorable to do that. What if I told you that the average Romanian income was $100-$150 per month at the time? All of a sudden it's not so bad.
The point is that they are not getting paid as well as an American, but they are better off than the alternative, namely leaving them to struggle out of their bad economy on their own. In fact, barriers on trade actually *cost* third-world countries $150 Billion/year.
Free trade proponents *don't* claim that GlobalCorp, Inc. is doing it out of the good of their heart, as you imply. The point, in fact, is that they are *not* doing it out of the good of their heart, i.e. they are being rationally motivated to produce more efficiently. I agree with the sister post here that said that moral considerations sometimes play a part (i.e. products of true slave labor). However, we will not get rid of poverty until we reduce scarcity. Encouraging efficient production is part of that process. Where would we be now if machines didn't replace many factory workers? We would probably be working in old factories, with much lower standards of living. (Efficiency has made life better for those who still work in factories today.) In the end, how else are these countries supposed to escape poverty?
Boom Shanka
Foreigners grab US IT jobs because they ARE for grabs - US edu system cannot produce capable talent fast enough.
Wrong, lots of capable talent in the US, the talent just wants more money than the foreign outsource shops cost. Do you understand free market economics? Price point is everything. You sell yourself cheap so you never get laid off. I cut out the middle-man and contract directly with the customer reducing my market price-point and have more offers for work than I can service. Foreign outsource shops have lower labor costs so the work gets bid to them.
I want more outsourcing! In fact, I want companies to start outsourcing managers, exects, QAs, designers, and accountants. I want those people to feel the results of unemployment and I can't wait to see guys in Armani suits bitch about it! Why? Because I want them to feel what thousdands of American IT workers feel right now. I want them to wonder about all the years they spent in college, all the loans, morgages, families, kids and their future. This is how I feel whenever I start cutting out coupons and wonder if I have enough money to pay my rent this month.
Until the issue of foreign labor hits the hightest steps of corporate ladder nothing is going to be done. The funny thing is that if outsourcing is going to continue at this pace, pretty soon we'll end up in a world where only a few people will have buying power. Both American and foreign workers will not have capital; just watch the world's economy go down the crapper.
I am having a hard time understanding what is bad about this cycle. The jobs move away? In America, they were replaced with higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs. The distribution of wealth became less even? Even if that is the case (and there is a lot of information disputing that), the *overall* standard of living became significantly higher. Just because a textile worker wasn't making as much as his boss doesn't mean he wasn't making more than before he got the job.
The example from America's history is proof that India did the *right* thing. Look where we are now in average standard of living compared to the rest of the world.
Boom Shanka
I don't know much about the whole situation, but consider:
Serious Sam is considered one of the most fun games of late. It cost $20 at the store. The developers are all in the former Yugoslavia. The cost of living in Yugoslavia (and living wages, etc) are *tiny* compared to the US. Not only do they not have to sell a lot of games to make an equivalent amount of money as they would if they were based here in the US, but it proves that there are LOTS of creative and talented programmers elsewhere who can produce QUALITY work and still make a good living for themselves. Personally, I love seeing other countries offer up their best and brightest, it ups the bar for the rest of us. I like the competition!
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
You do know that Saddam did all of those awful things, like gasing his own people before the first war. Why wasn't that a good enough reason then?
/. more than once and haven't encountered some variation on this lame joke from south park. Sure, the episode was funny, but as a slashdot joke, it's played. seriously played. Even by slashdot standards.
Ask the UN. They preferred to give saddam another decade in power.
Local taxes support the infrastructure of the city that I live in. State taxes support my state. I don't believe that every cent that I give in taxes - as an American - goes to all "welfare bums". Obviously you have little respect for your fellow Americans who may be in a lower tax bracket than you. Do all of us a favor and please move to a different country. Right now. And take your friends, too.
Welfare recipients do not pay taxes. They do not pay property taxes, they do not pay state income taxes, they do not pay national taxes. Yet they receive a living from other people's taxes. I understand that sometimes people need a little help, however I fail to understand how 'a lifetime of subsistence living paid for by others' is *help*. My problem is not with *a* welfare system, it's with the *current* welfare system. I also believe that people *should* contribute to charity, but that doesn't mean I'm going to propose legislation that not only forces them to, but also specifies the amount they must give, and to whom it will be given.
Also something people need to realize: we only have about half the people in the country paying taxes. How low will that number get before the despised 'rich' who are now paying the vast majority of actual tax dollars decide to go somewhere where they don't have to subsidize the same ratio of people? We have an interesting phenomenon in this country: we all want to have more money, but anyone with more money than us is evil. Of course, I don't see *any* prominent politicians living in habitat for humanity housing and giving every last little bit of their money away. In fact, I was told that one of the senators from WA was 'a great man' because *once a month* he invited a homeless person to dinner. Wow man. Once a month you bring some poor homeless guy into your mansion, and let him have a taste of what you get the rest of the time, then send him back outside. That sure is a 'great man.' Think, people. Politicians don't care about you. They care about your vote, and spending your money. If wealth redistribution is such a good thing, why are the Kennedys still so freaking rich? Not that redistribution would work. If we took every bit of money and property in this country, and distributed it exactly equally to everyone, do you really think it would stay that way? Giving everyone in this country the same amount of money would not make them exactly the same.
Also, I see a lot of this 'aww the rich get a bigger tax cut! that isn't fair!' Well no, not if by fair you mean exactly the same for everyone. But if by fair you mean that the people who pay the most in taxes get the biggest benefit, well...shouldn't they? Here's an example for you.
Let's say I'm out to dinner with some of my friends, and when the bill comes, I can only pay 10% of it, bob can afford 30% of it, and bill gets stuck with the 60% remaining, plus tip. Now say we get a 30 dollar refund for bad service or food or something. Do we split it evenly, three ways? Of course not. Bill gets 18 bucks, bob gets 9, and I get 3. How would it be fair to split it evenly, when not everyone contributed equally?
I'd also like to point out that the tax cut we're getting isn't the one Mr. Bush proposed. It's substantially smaller. If it isn't helping enough people, perhaps you should look to the libbies who killed the larger tax cut.
3) Makes absolutely no sense.
I can't believe that you've read
Just one last question for you. How long did you actually serve in the public sector? You seem like such a giving individual that g
http://xkcd.com/386/
Labor supply is indeed far in excess of demand. But your solution seems to be to corner off small portions of labor and exclude the rest so that these small portions of labor remain in demand in their protectionist markets. What this amounts to is making these people "in demand" by relegating some people to an "even less in demand than before" ghetto where they can't even be considered for employment. In short, if the average free-market wage would be $0.75/day (making up numbers here), your solution increases the wage in some countries to $100/day at the expense of decreasing it in others to $0.10/day. Which is pretty much how things are.
But you claim this is justified?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We Trade for Imports
Yes, we do trade for imports,....
Unilateral Free Trade
This is a joke, the aim of our corporate government is not to get imports into the US, but to get our corporations into their markets, which is why they only trade with countries that trade with us.
Ok, it seems like the two quotes are contradicting each other. By "we" in the first statement, I mean the people of the US. In the second statement, I am referring to the corporate government, whose motives are different, IMO. There are also two kinds of imports, which I didn't necessarly make clear. There are intra-corporate imports, which is what corporations want, and their are imports that come from foreign companies which is what the rest of us Americans should desire. The reason we want the latter, is because foreign companies will typically return more of the profits to that country, which will mean higher wages for countries we trade with, which means more consumption by that country and more money flowing back into the American middle class. Intra-corporate imports means lower wages, and the profits get returned to that company and it's investors, who will simply hoard that money.
I benefit from being able to buy German beer, Japanense video games, French cheese, Canadian video cards, Turkish tobacco... Shouldn't people produce and sell what they can do best? If Indians (or Romanians) are efficient at producting software, more power to them. The economist Thomas Sowell does a good job of explaining why different countries are good at different things.
I remember some years back when there was a local uproar about a Home Depot being built in Auburn, California. The big complaint was that Home Depot is a Georgia based company. Folks didn't want their California dollars going out of state to those Georgians all the way on the other side of the US. The cost of living is cheaper in Georgia. Buying things from Georgians is a "race to the bottom". Only buy things made in your own state... no, your own town... no, only things you make yourself!
---
"If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." - Milton Friedman
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Open source programmers and their viral GPL are slowly destroying the value of our high quality, patriotic, made in the USA software like Windows and SCO Unix. I think the only solution at this point is, through legislation, to restrict access to compilers, debuggers, emacs, vim and other software tools to God fearing American corporations. Home PC's must be registered with the government, and it should only be legal to run the IE web browser and that Army game on legacy PC's. This can be enforced with random spot checks. All new PC's must not include hard drives, (indeed hard drives will be classified as a munition and not available to the general public) and really can be nothing more than dumb terminals with a web browser hard wired into the firmware. God Bless America! Remember your motto citizen! "For AOL, Microsoft, God and Country!"
When I was spending time in the Philippine's several years ago, I had an interesting talk with an elected official in one of the provinces. He was discussing why developing countries had so much trouble becoming richer. They attract companies because of their low wages but if the wages start to go up, the companies simply relocate to a poorer country. How to break the cycle, he didn't know and I sure don't. The third world being kept poor to support the West I suppose.
A few facts:
:)
* If you lose your job in Romania, the goverment pays you around $150/month in unemployment, effectively setting a minimum wage.
* The average salary is about $200/month - but that is the average, skilled and non-skilled.
* The average skilled salary is about $50-$100 higher, depending on discipline. Example: an insurance actuary, a person who computes premiums, gets about $300/month. That same job in the US would get about $60k, minimum, and requires advanced mathematics degrees.
* Many Romanians have gone into business themselves to increase their earnings.
* As of last year, any kind of bandwidth aside from modem access was horribly expensive, with T1s costing over $10k/month, payable in US currency or Euros.
* Romanian women are just amazingly attractive as a group. Not totally on topic, but I can certainly understand why Western businessmen would want to prospect there
The bottom line: it isn't cheaper to hire a Romanian over an Indian, and their English is less likely to be acceptable.
So... it is likely that the corps are doing this as a way to avoid a spike in salary inflation in India - a negotiating tactic.
jonathan
This is how the world will look for the next fifty years or so. Formerly, markets and labor pools were isolated from one another by transport and regulatory barriers, with the result that standards of living could vary wildly from one part of the planet to another. Now, the barriers are low or gone, which means that the places with lower-priced labor are pulling jobs from higher-priced areas. Of course, this decreases the econonmic level of the former and increases the latter, causing wages to fall in the source country and rise in the sink country. Let this process run long enough, and the whole world will have roughly comparable labor pools working for roughly comparable wages at a roughly comparable standard of living. If we're lucky, we'll get everyone at something close to the current "first world" standard; if not, we'll get a straight averaging of the current world situation.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Your premise is misguided. Not all Corporations are out to screw everyone. Correct. "Corporations" are out to make money, whether they screw someone in the process is inconsequential to it, that is unless, again, it impacts them getting money.
Individuals in corporations who make decisions may or may not be out to screw everyone. That's up to the individual and his/her psychiatrist.
Remember, corporations aren't people. It's what our legal system leads you to believe. People still make decisions.
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
Therefore, the fact that these jobs are spreading out is caused by the fact that A. The U.S and other countries currencies are overvalued and the same standard of living can be bought for less in a country with undervalued currency or B. The people living in these lower wage countries have big families to provide for and not so great living conditions and would really like to move one step up the standard of living ladder which means moving the person who lost their job in the high wage country a step down on the ladder. Of course with comparative advantage this is not always a zero sum game.
This is all a big process of equalization of living standards that takes place once people started embracing free market economies and free trade a bunch of years ago. The only thing that makes any difference now is immovable capital like infrastructure and the quality of the legal system.
How else do you support those executives at the top that produce nothing of substance
(and sorry folks, "business decisions" are not items of substance) yet pay these guys
a Mil a year and up? They sit on each others Boards, upping each other's compensation,
all enjoying the cash flow circle jerk.
There's (at least) three ways; theft, lawsuits, and slavery.
The theft happens in places like manipulating the stock markets and shuffling around
nonexistent commodities like Enron, or something as simple as lobbying the government
to allow usury rates of >30% on credit cards, or allowing state-run lotteries and casinos.
Or, if you're thinking big, invading another country on false pretenses to steal their resources.
The lawsuits we are seeing with SCO are a good example of the second method. Granted, it's
one corporation taking from another in this case, but the cost of that will be passed down to
consumers or compensated for with unemployment because of less working capital. That
expense rarely impacts executive compensation, which is preserved at all costs.
Money moves around, yet produces nothing of substance. Maybe this really belongs
under theft, because that's what it is.
And then there is slavery. Sure, these people don't work "for free". But even in the US's
past, the slaves were still fed, clothed and sheltered. You can't kill 'em off or there will be
no slaves left to produce those items of substance. But when the profit is made from those
items, only enough is put back to the slave population keep the system working. It's
happening in Mexico, in Indonesia, in India, and in the US migrant worker camps from
the Midwest to California. This is, of course, nothing new. The US was made possible
through the exploitation of others. We saw a bit of change here after the post-war boom
of the '50s and again in the '90s for a few years but when "money" sees this happening,
it moves to quickly remedy the situation, usually by installing a Republican run government.
Here in Indianapolis, there's an area north of the city where they are building these huge,
multi-million dollar houses. Hundreds of them. Where does this money come from?
Is it necessary? Steven Hilbert, who ran Conseco has this huge mansion. He was ran out
of the company for fraud and theft yet he's got his castle. And you've now got this army
of VP weasels that all think that they too deserve to take one to on hundred million a year
and bury in in the ground so they, the trophy wife, and the trust fund kids can live like kings.
Instead of taking the working capital and putting it back into the company, letting people make
a working wage, they instead believe that they should, indeed deserve, to surround themselves
with rewards of their greed and cunning.
That money has to come from someplace, and that's from the backs of those with no other option
but to be enslaved, or starve. This can't last forever, but it's end is not coming soon. At least not
until the lease on their new Hummer H2 runs out. At least that's what Rush told me: It's a good thing.
I can name one country where a huge variety of normal tangible goods are still manufactured, and the workers work for "almost" free, and that is the US, where prison industries now use inmate labor in direct competition to "normal" free market workers. And I definetly don't mean license plates, I mean normal stuff you buy at the store like furniture and whatnot. And it's run by private, for-profit corporations. Hard to compete when you have a tax payer subsidised infrastructure,ie the prisons, and where the forced workers "make" like 10 cents an hour or something that they get to re spend back into the same private corporations prison stores. Add in the fact of the growing prison population due to more political-like crimes such as represented as the war on some drugs, and yes, there are places where the workers work for "free". I also just read an article last week or so, maybe here, I've forgotten, where prisoners in India are being used as forced programmers.
As to software, oh well. I think eventually (I have no exact time prediction, just some time in the somewhat near future) that software writing as a pure and extremly profitable business will eventually be very limited. That's primarily because right now we already have available most of the software that is required to do business, it exists already when you get down to it. Next is to take the automation concept to it's logical progression, the tools to write programs are getting easier, there are millions more very young people now who take it as a matter of course to learn these the same as "shop class' was when I was a kid and most guys my age can do a lot of normal car mechanics and carpentry, etc, and eventually those two lines on a graph of easy to do and millions doing it will cross and we'll have a full saturation point, where at that exact time the "worth" of software will be no more than todays throw away newspaper, so cheap as to be almost free. And the ones remaining still writing a lot will be doing it as at best an adjunct to their other and more primary job task, whatever that is, or doing it as a hobby, similar to learning to play a musical instrument is now, most people never make a cent from enjoying playing music. I'm not saying it-softweare writing to get back to it- will disappear,not in the least, just lose it's incredible profitable market share. Look back in that industry 40 or 50 years, see what people were paid for it and what the companies doing it were charging,and how many people by the numbers were doing it (take into consideration COL and inflation obviously), and now look at today-globally, you are forced to, now extrapolate it.
Ain't looking as rosy now is it? Especially with the amazing geometric progression.
I give it as a rough WAG to the commercial expensive software writing and selling bubble will burst within ten years or so (maybe less even), the high paid stuff anyway, and settle back down to a more normal type endeavor, not be quirte as sexy or in demand. I also think that people in that business and who are still paid well are (mostly and sure to be very much debated on this particular forum, but not on general forums) in just as much denial today of that prediction as various people were when they were buying stocks from companies that were trading at 200 times earnings and still sat on them, thinking this was going to just keep going on forever, even when on even a casual glance anyone could see these various companies had no net earnings whatsoever once you deducted VC. Millions of sane, intelligent adults fell for that, too, they were in complete denial of economic realities, because they (not all obviously, but most) were basking in temporary and theoretical future "wealth" they would receive magically,effortlessly, and forever. that gravy train was going to go on forever, that was the gross generic mindset then. Right now, it's the same mindset with various other aspects of industry, I'd say in particular besides software the professional managers in various industries, who think they are
before they discover little purple methane-loving aliens who will program for poop. Stop them Mars probes while we are at it. Just because Mars microbes are tiny does not mean they don't have the ability to get PhD's and take our jobs.
Table-ized A.I.
just like in 'Dilbert'.
Scott Adams was right!
The work people produce is a commodity that is traded openly on the world market. Get used to it. Your job is neither "yours" nor is it a "job." It is simply the current value of the manifestation of your labor, period, and can be exchanged (by your employer) for goods and services or even phased out completely with absolutely NO INPUT FROM YOU. I get so sick of hearing people bitch about "that God damned Mexican took MY job!" when the job was never yours in the first place.
It is really very simple, people: perform a service that people value highly => get paid well.
Perform a service that some 12 year old kid in a sweatshop in the Phillipines can also perform => lose "your" job.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Just like some people dont like big government, some dont like big corperations, and its for the same reasons. You dont want all the power to be in one persons hands.
If you want people to stop begging the USA for money perhaps we should help them start their own businesses in their own countries instead of forcing our businesses into their countries, I dont know any arabs who asked for Mc Donalds to expand there, in fact it pisses them off.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm a Sr. UNIX Admin with over 5 years of experience with Linux and some experience teaching this stuff.
I would work for free if we could all agree to do away with money (or that money has no value) so I could afford to grab food from the local supermarket and live in a small home or apartment close to my job. I don't require a lot to keep me happy. Mostly just musical equipment, computers and tools/books that help me do my job.
But I know hardly any of you would ever agree to give up your money so its a safe bet I'd never have to work for free. Too bad. I would have let you stay home and watch TV. I only care about getting the work done and automated once and forever. I find myself continually repeating the same tasks over and over again for money, in our current system, but I guess this is what makes more jobs.
India has had wage inflation to the point where Indian engineers may one day cost more than American engineers. Keep your dusty old social security card around.
1) Indian labour is cheaper than Eastern European / Russian.
2) Russian offshore-development industry is much smaller than Indian one (both in absolute terms and per capita).
3) There are no significant growth reserves (this also applies to Eastern Europe).
4) The existance of a few successful companies doesn't constitute an industry (or a threat to India).
5) Without initial investments you can't create a large IT industry. India did those investments.
6) There are no real figures that indicate this process of "outsourcing outsourcing" is actually happening.
7) etc.
Usual sensationalistic journalism. Bettet than Blair's inventions, but not much better.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
When will ordinary consumers begin take advantage of offshore sources? When will it become practical for ordinary people to go offshore?
Banking? for financial privacy?
Insurance? to get around government restriction on exclusions on aids, alcoholism, mental health that are essentially a tax on low risk groups to support high risks groups?
Other examples?
Wow. Now I really want a time machine to take me back to 100 years ago. Because according to you, before the advent of public schools, the world was a utopia.
But what you don't realize is there has been a hundred year effort since the advent of public schools to train free humans to be part of an organization rather than think for themselves.
So the world was filled with clones of Plato and Aristotle, filling the world with enlightened thoughts. But tell me, if the world was filled with altruistic free thinkers, who formulated and implemented this vast conspiracy?
This is what the study of sociology was originally created for. This is why books like Brave New World were written. This is why you spend 16 years of your life in school.
One would suspect, especially one with a sense of humor and a taste for sarcasm, that Brave New World was written to satirize this type of world and make free thinkers examine their own world. (Oops, no more free thinkers. Blows that theory to shit.)
The modern system of organization exemplified by the corporation was the product of vast studies and research, it permeates our very existence in every way. It was done so that people stop thinking for themselves and do what they are told.
And you escaped this web of mind control, how?
It is a difficult concept because simply having free people live together does not produce the amoral behavior found in corporations. It requires a certain kind of person. That kind of person must either be trained in a school or desperate. It is usually the former.
So, in this utopia of pre-public education, there were no violent acts, violations of others rights, or crime of any kind?
Your apparent ignorance of this world wide trend over the last 100 years proves you are a dumbass. Don't be so quick to judge.
Don't forget to refresh the tin-foil in your hat. Cheers.
While the corporations are outsourcing everything to the lowest bidder, they're forgetting something important. SOMEBODY HAS TO BE ABLE TO BUY THEIR SHIT!!! If all the American workers are unemployed, and the Romanians are working for $100 per month, who's going to buy their shit? At best they'll have to lower their prices dramatically; at worst they're outta business!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
And Buffalo buffaloes buffalo Buffalo buffaloes.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
I have/had an optimistic phrase/mantra:
"There is far more stupidity than evil in the world."
In recent year(s) I've added a less optimistic one.
"Sufficient stupidity combined with sufficient power may be indistinguishable from evil."
Kind of like Clarke's Third Law, only pessimistically applied to ethics.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.