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The IT Market: Cyclical Downturn or New World Order?
An anonymous reader wrote: "CNN.com is running an interesting story on the heels of a Forrester
Research report concerning the
shift of high tech jobs from the U.S. to places like China, India, and Russia for cheaper labor and got me thinking about the nature
of the current downtrend in programmer demand in the U.S (as opposed to the "morality" of such a shift). While I'm sure the causes for this downtrend are variable, the more important
question in my mind is this -- Is software guru Bruce Eckel correct in
saying that the current downturn represents a temporary blip in the business cycle as jobs are shifted from large and medium companies to smaller companies,
or are Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas correct in recognizing this as
a new reality. Personally I tend to agree with Hunt and Thomas's view (which is not completely opposed to Bruce's opinion, btw) and
I also agree with their viewpoint that protectionist policies like H1B quotas and tariffs won't work to change anything for the better. So what do you think? Is this
just another business cycle or is this a New World Order in IT?"
We never thought it could happen to us: globalization was just supposed to make stuff cheaper to buy. But the race to the bottom can happen at all levels of employment, for all tasks that don't need to be performed on site. This includes us, the white collar IT workers.
This is not "the sound of inevitability", it's the sound of years of government/corporate policy to make the world our cheap labor playground. It can be reversed with rational policies that foster local investment at the expense of unchecked corporate profits. What happens when you have corporations that are invested in a locality? They don't ship the jobs overseas just to save a buck.
Read "The Economics of Empire" in the May Harper's. Excellent piece.
It happened to textile workers long ago. It's happening to us now.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
.. we'll start making widgets again!
but I believe that cycle has to do with posting stories over and over.
You have to say this: the man certainly knew how to run a quality burger restaurant. And I can't imagine those skills aren't transferrable to IT.
"That's Dave's Way.."
For all of the IT jobs that can be moved easily (read programming) it has come down to the lowest common denominator for most low quality projects . I say this from experience competing with people from third world countries for contracts , unless you can price your self down to there level you wont get the majority of contracts . That being said some of the better contracts (grand plus) are still staying relatively domestic (north american) because they want some one who they can phone up if something breaks . One majour thing preventing the shift is the lack of high quality english in those countries , right now (even with my english as you can no doubt tell is very 31337) allows me to win some contracts because I can accuractetly understand the proposal and people think I will do a better job. Once all of those countries with cheep labour get good english ... I dont know
Again, they are only outsourcing the call centers and other jobs for which no skill is required. I mean does it really matter that people will now call India for their first tier support. And if that is your job market them I'm sorry, but you should have learned more skills while you were back in college. just my $.02
Ohhh Paaalllleeeease!
Now 43, the veteran programmer is urging his 18-year-old nephew to stay in suburban Chicago and is discouraging him from pursuing degrees in computer science or engineering.
Glad to see that people besides me still attend Universities because of what they might learn, as opposed to who might hire them.
Take a closer look. All of the text is in italics. That means it's the submitter's opinion, not the editor's.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
We have to have our education system reformed. It is now passing kids so they 'feel good about themselves'. They need to learn to compete in the world market. It is very tough out here. Some teacher suggested mandatory military service because 'they could force them to learn'. I say we make the school system part of the military. It is what will help us win or lose the next economic war. Or do you think we should just join the Kymer Rouge?
The fact that H1Bs _exist_ is certainly not protectionist! I don't think H1Bs should even exist at all!! There are plenty of developers having a hard time finding work nowadays without us bringing in third-world workers who think that driving a 1981 Civic is a wonderful privelege!
T
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
..wrote crappy code.
An observation, but one that in my experience has been universally true.
The Russians aren't much better. On the other hand, I have met some first class Chinese coders.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Actually, Apu has a college degree in Computer Science.
His thesis was a punch-card based tic-tac-toe program that could beat any human, even at the Grandmaster level.
You know, I've been sitting at this table for over 30 minutes, waiting for my New World Order... I mean, I know its lunch hour and everything, and the chef can get busy, but c'mon? How long is this thing gonna take?
No tip, thats all I can say. I should complain to the manager!
In the last 20 years we've gone from the idea of working at one company for your entire career, to working at several companies in your career, to having multiple careers. This just seems like another logical step.
It will certainly take some getting used to, and not everyone will compete, but I think that the average white collar American is finally learning what globalization means. Highly skilled folks in the rest of the world have been dealing with this for years -- they all learned English to compete. Now it's our turn.
I wonder if we are going the way of the retail clothing industry. Companies that import clothing using cheap labor and selling it for higher prices. I can't see that business model as NOT being attractive for a business person.
I wonder if Microsoft will eventually ditch all the "die hard" believers they have working for them.
Companies move to the country that humiliates itself the most...
Its called capitalism..
In corparate america companies move YOU!
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Good point, it's still annoying though.
This problem can be fixed by exporting the Labor Unions, so that they encourage everyone everywhere to demand the same high pay. Even without unions, this will happen, only more slowly. Remember when Japanese cars were lots cheaper than American? The obvious reason was the lower cost of labor in Japan. Well, these days Japanese auto workers make about the same or even more than American auto workers. Any difference in cost of autos these days can be traced to greater usage of robotics in Japan. So, I'm convinced that globalization will eventually even out the cost of labor. But it sure is going to hurt until it happens!
... imagine what would happen if we unionized and tried to stave off the inevitable like the steel industry? Tarriffs slow the bleeding, but sometimes the limb has to just go.
Until the global markets are completely level, the U.S. will bleed jobs. We wanted this, but we thought we would come out ahead. We might have been wrong, but ideologues sometimes are.
I think we'll always need developers and IT stuff here at home - there will be many Detroits instead of Silicon Valley.
This space for rent.
The cold, unpleasant truth here, is that 90% of IT isn't worth its salary.
Globalization is the great leveler (assuming free markets). It takes time, but eventually, everyone gets paid what they're actually worth as opposed to what they think they're worth.
The secret is to make yourself worth more. Probably a meaningless admonition to most slashdotters who think that the world owes them a living so they can spend all their time downloading files from Kazaa.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I think this outsourcing trend is the new face of technology in this country. We all have to adapt. We are not going to be able to change the system, because the system is run by the corporations that employ, which have the politicians in their pockets. Take a look at how systematically, the clothing industry, the manufacturing industry, the auto industry has all moved their jobs overseas, to asia, mexico, wherever. At each point, people who lost their jobs in the US made a stink, but nothing was done. I hate to say it but I don't see it any different today, even though our programming jobs are supposedly "white collar" ... BFD.
I think we are just going to have to get used to it. We are either going to have to learn to get by on way lower salaries, or get into another career. Technology just isn't the type of job that's going to last for a whole lifetime. I'm already planning an exit strategy.
remember back in the day of 1999 ... when people said the tech boom was going to change everything? Introduce a whole new way of doing business? Well, that promise is being fullfilled. It wasn't exactly the positive change we were hoping for. But one lesson should be kept from those days. Remember ... be adaptable? Get used to change? If you don't change from your old business ways you'll die? All those messages were being yelled at the management, when it should have been yelled at us netslaves, the ones who supposedly "get it". What we need to get is, be adaptable. Tech is simply too volatile to base your whole life's career on. And those who don't adapt and change, will die a slow, horrible death.
... why shouldn't it happen to software?
The grunt jobs will be shipped off to the cheapest place, whereas there will always be a place for higher-end jobs. The goal posts will constantly be moving though.
I run the site listbid.com and can tell you with certainty that most of the people signing up and bidding on jobs are from eastern block countries. I don't have a huge Asian group, only around 30 or 40 but the majority are from Russia and the Ukraine. And these guys will do large jobs for cheap.
They actually, are the primary reason I added in a IP-To-Country part of the site, you can view where people "say" they come from VS. where their IP block is located geographically.
I will be adding some charts soon on the site to show the statistical breakdowns.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Will we see a jump in quality because of increased competition? It seems to me anymore that large companies concentrate on getting their product out to market before it is finished. The "release it now, patch it later" philosophy has caused a general downward turn in the quality of software. Perhaps a little healthy competition will help bring quality back into focus.
-=You might be a geek if your computer is worth more than your car=-
Who cares what you think?
Who cares what you think about what Michael thinks?
Who cares what you think about what Michael thinks about what some other people think?
You keep fighting the good fight though and maybe somebody you'll succeed in supressing all these dangerous opinions.
I heard someone on radio say the other day that American IT was the new version of the textile industry of the last century. Suffer for years with long hours, low pay, part of faceless rows of automatons, then - poof! - your job is gone.
I couldn't agree more. I am glad my degree is not in CS, I can find something else now and quit hoping for American leadership to discover wisdom.
... or does someone ask this every time there's a market downturn?
You must be referring to my MCSE...
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Hire 2 programmers or more at the same cost of 1 ? what would you choose.
and got me thinking about the nature of the current downtrend in programmer demand in the U.S
I hate this statement. Just what exactly do you consider a "programmer"? Is a MSCE a "programmer".
I look all around me and I see MSCE, 6 week crash course community college trained Java programmers, and guys who think they should be administrating 100 UNIX boxes because they were successful at installing Linux on the fourth try all over the place pissing and moaning on how bad things are.
On the other side of the spectrum I see C/C++ programmers and DBA's with job offers all over the place.
Until "programming" is a certified profession, such as engineers, doctors, even accountants, you can make the numbers do whatever you wish.
In the 90's businesses were pretty stupid. They thought that since you knew things around computers that they need you. Today, they are a little smarter and will ask more indepth questions, and ask to see that $50K+ piece of paper.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
Add to this the low barriers to commerce as a result of WTO membership and extensive fiber networks and the result is that we are about to enter a period of hypercompetition that will result in massive profit deflations for many American firms. Consider that the big three automakers are now demanding that their suppliers match the price for potential parts that could be produced at Chinese wages. They are essentially telling suppliers in advance to beat the potential Chinese price or the Chinese price will become a reality.
The end result of this will be the continued growth of Asian economies as China will most likely continue to surpass the US for foreign investment as it did for the first time in 2002.
Maybe in biotech and entertainment the US will keep a lead, but everything else is up for grabs and the lowest price will win.
It is the sad reality that companies are willing to trade any sense of locality for the quick buck. Problems with shipping high tech jobs overseas are hard to quantify, and therefore do not show up on investor reports. The main problem today is that companies are working for the easiest way possible to get a little jump on some chart or graph rather than establish long term paths to success. These shortcuts will come back to haunt them though, and eventually things will even out, in my opinion.
~ now you know
We need Managed Smart Trade ,as in some sort of formula to trade with nations that dont want to trade with us like CHINA and JAPAN and Taiwan. These countries are TARGETTING our JOBS and we sit and do nothing thinking that they will buy alot of our cars or planes. BUT THEY DONT.
Free trade with EUROPEAN countries but not with INDIA and other ASIAN nations. THeir Managers for their countries don't want anything to do with FREE trade. They do SMart trade. Thats what we need to do. Managed Smart Trade.
Limits on Japanese Cars and Chinese products, Indian programmers(who by the way were educated to take over U.S. jobs and not their own domestic market).
Living here in SiliValley I can attest first hand that companies are moving whole programming jobs overseas. For cost reasons, mostly.
As far as I know, webex does not contain smell-o-vision.
I feel the future is bright as long as it becomes legal to sell your organs for profit. I've calculated I could retire on the proceeds from the sales of one of my livers and 2 kidneys. You could easily do the same.
I am curious about the overseas outsourcing of call centers. When does it become more of a burden to tell your customers that they have to speak to someone that speaks their language as a second or third language than it does to provide quality service and support? I bear no grudge against people that have accents, as a matter of fact I find accents quite interesting personally. But customers rarely want to deal with this. When they call for help or with a complaint they want to speak to someone that not only understands them and their concern, but that they can understand as well. When this does not occur another customer is lost to some other company that does it well.
Just my $.02US (which probably isn't worth much right now, but wait for deflation to hit and watch out)
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
A certain high tech company in Canada was experimenting with this about a decade ago.
They realised a few things quickly - and that was that you spent more time and money writing specs, that turned out to make the projects far less flexible. Also, because of cultural differences, for example, when finding a major bug after the project goes gold, some cultures have a "duck the head, don't say anything" mentality, which resulted, in one occasion of note, in a very expensive recall of MANY CDs that had been pressed and sent to customers.
The biggest reason for cost overrun in IT is NOT the salary of the engineer in question, but boneheaded decisions made at levels higher - yes, it may look good in the short term to hire cheaper people, but that doesn't necessarily translate into cheaper projects. Especially when you take the 3am long distance bills into consideration.
I believe Canada swung back after these experiments because it was costing them more than they anticipated, with too much attendant risk. (Company goes out of business? Sells the code on the open market?)
Of course, they wouldn't let us telecommute because they needed us RIGHT THEN AND THERE IN THE OFFICE FOR EMERGENCY MEETINGS, etc. But outsourcing the work halfway across the planet? A mere logistical hurdle to be hurdled.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
That's how the U.S. ends. It ends with our company's looking for cheaper labor costs and in turn we teach them how all our products work and then they take over our company's.
You don't have to drop a nuclear weapon to win a war just win it economically.
I work for a big corporate america company that everyone has heard of. I could confirm that the demands of the current business stradegy is to off load programming to india or any other off USA soil site.
In the past development of new products was always developed here with local people and then once a product became "steady state" or in a maintaince mode it was then sent off shore to have them maintian any code or product.
This new development of working with offshore sites to develop new products has been a bit of a hastle. The business loves it because it appears to save money immediately being cheaper per line of code or per hour, BUT there are huge gaps when trying to deploy or release this product into production.
One of the major problems is offshore people can hardly speak english. We've found ourselves needing to rely on local foreigners to either translate or attempt to speak better english. This makes implimentation time and working with the system administrators a much more drawn out process.
As long as there are Department of Defense contracts, there will be some availability of jobs in the US. Programming that requires a security clearance to access the system on which the code will run, for example, won't be farmed out to India or Malaysia because of the security issue. In this, us IT guys can at least take some comfort.
From where I sit (commercial sector at the moment, working for a retailer), most of the work being exported is help desk and call center stuff. I do know of other places though that are exporting programming work to the far east.
What is my opinion? I think that the commercial sector will eventually bring some of the work back here, depending on how much greed appears abroad and how hungry the workforce gets here. Those in DoD do not need to be as concerned, regardless -- DoD spending is assured for at least a while.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Personally, I find that the dot-com dream of working for a huge company with all kinds of benefits is gone. All those jobs are going overseas as we have all have reluctantly admitted over the past year or so.
However, this is not the entire case. I find that the market for "renegade" IT folks (The OSS & Linux evangelists) in small-biz shopes is quite high. And they don't have the time, patience, resources, or confidence to bother with contracting work overseas.
It's the little shops where a renegade can make the most difference, prove their value, and become... *gasp* a CAREER employee. Use your grassroots techie knowhow and keep their heads above water, and they'll keep you on. Ah... Symbiosis.
Probably are several counter-examples, but it has worked for me, and I'm better off than if ever I had joined any of those l33t crack-shot developer teams.
It's been a nice experiment. But overall, if you talk to the folks who made these decisions to "save" money they'll admit that overall it's been more expensive or simply the same (but with the added problems of communication breakdowns and so on).
I think it's just a cycle. Eventually the PHBs that thought they could use $20/hr coders to do the same job that the $80/hr ones did will realize that it was a supremely stupid thing to do and will come to their senses. The price ratio of IT work will level itself out (I have to admit it was insanely high in some isntances) and things will return to normal, or a semblance thereof.
Eh ... to tell you the truth, most of those pseudo-programmers lost their jobs and skipped town in 2000, 2001. Plus when you have a whole company go under, they're not picking and choosing between the "real" programmers and the pseudo-programmers ... everyone's got the shaft and everyon'es looking for work. I don't deny theres a fair amount of pseudo-programmers unemployed, but take a look at some of the resumes out there in IT and you can't deny, there's some talented people who are just SOL. I'm sure you personally know a few of 'em.
Thank God I didn't go into CS like the rest of you jobless fucks.
Nice going, cut-and-paste the 8th (9th?) paragraph from the Eckel link without attribution, get a nice (5, Insightful) for your trouble.
Sweet. (I would've modded you down, but how can I go against a tide of clueless moderators?)
By the way, while I was over there, I met a guy from Siemens who was doing some manufacturing plant stuff in the area. He was complaining that they paid huge taxes on outgoing shipments, although most of that was refunded by the government a few months later. They were thinking of relocating their plant to Singapore or somewhere because of that.
It's quite obvious where this trend stops. Once we figure out how to outsource the entire command chain all the way up to the CEO, our shares of stock should be worth that much more because the company's cut their costs by a couple of orders of magnitude. I bet I could find a guy in Romania who'd be willing to be the company's CEO for one one-hundredth of what the current guy makes, with the same or better credentials. It's only a matter of time before shareholders realize this...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The boom times may be over, but they're more 'over' for the folks that entered technology for the money. The kids that switched majors or took a couple courses at a tech school in order to get a lucrative programming job are in trouble. But the folks that can actually think for themselves & communicate ideas effectively are not going to have as much trouble staying employed.
In the late 90's, anybody that claimed to have passed a VB, HTML or Java class (ha!) could find work without having to proove anything. As the job market tightens, the incompetent folks are getting laid off. Go figure. But the folks that know what they're doing & actually add value to a business continue to work.
Where I work, now and for other employers over the past 10 years, we've been doing custom software devlopment in a fast paced, dynamic environment. I've worked on multi-national teams that have had minor communication issues when we're all in the same office. No way did we have the time to write detailed specs that we could send off to another part of the world & expect to get perfect code back that just 'plugs in'. Our developers have needed the ability to communicate with one another on an ad hoc basis. This at all phases of the project - design, unit test, integration, production support. Some folks call it XP, some bad planning / project management. But the fact is that this kind of development is going to continue & the people hiring for these positions are going to have their pick of the cream of the crop. For those of us working in the field we're going to have to get used to the fact that most folks' salaries don't jump 10 to 20% a year.
OK, that's an ambiguous answer.
.
First, it's obvious the market has changed. We had the dot-com-to-bomb experience, economic slowdowns, etc. New technology is coming out, old ones fade - then suddenly hang on. I'm not sure what's going on, but it definitely doesn't seem like it did a few years ago.
However my feeling is companies have overreacted to the changes going on, thus making the changes in the economy and jobs far more painful and pronounced than need be. So we have a "blip" on top of actual changes.
That being said, I think our ultimate problem now is that in a shifting and changing world, with changing technologies, it's hard to know what is going on, and may well only get harder. Things will change faster. Trends will shift quicker. Overall patterns will be harder to determine.
Our methods of predicting and reacting to economic trends are far behind the speed of the world.
Just 2 cents tossed in the wishing well of the future . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Programming may be moving off-shore, but one thing's for damn sure: As long as companies have computers, the computers will break, and someone'll have to be on-site to fix them. IT Support, while getting harder to find work, will always be around. Hiring an American techie will always be cheaper than flying one in from India.
The H1B program is not an example of anti-protectionism. Without any trade barriers at all, the employment situation in the US would be like that within the EU boundaries: a programmer from Portugal can get a job in Germany with the same rights as a German worker. Under H1B, an Indian programmer does not have the same rights as a US programmer; he is basically an indentured servant, who must accept any conditions his employer imposes or face immediate deportation.
The argument for H1B is the claim that there is a shortage of skilled technology workers in the US. At present, there is not a shortage, except in very limited cases. However, many companies prefer H1B workers to citizen or permanent resident workers, because they can drive them harder and pay them less, holding the threat of being sent back to India or China in reserve.
So it's a double-screwing, exporting tech jobs and importing tech workers.
I knew I should have took up nursing. The only sure-fire growth industry these days...
The sad truth is that the H1B Visa is no longer an issue. It is easier and cheaper to outsource your entire support staff to a foreign country. With the maturing of high speed communications the ability to work with staff across the world is forcing labor costs down. Any law passed is easily circumvented as the support center ( consulting shop outside the US) is not part of the business entity. The only way that this behavior could be deterred is by putting a tarriff on foreign services which would too broadly impact other industries that arn't "abusing" (relative term here) this business option. P.S> Thank Clinton for raising the H1B visa cap his last day of executive power. 3 days later 2000 IT staff nation wide (US) were given notice. 700 here in Minnesota. Where I was at the time EVERY person that was laid off was replaced by H1B staff the following month (That totalled 22 people). One of my co-worker at $33/hr was replaced by a H1B @ $9.50/hr. NY Times was applauding Bill for helping create a 5 BILLION dollar IT industry in India. That's 5 billion that American Workers lost. That's 5 billion directly gone from the US economy.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I got into IT instead of coding partly for this reason. You can ship coding jobs overseas, but you still need someone in the server room to re-seat the RAM and flash the switch's microcode. As long as I'm not tech support, they need me physically present. It will take longer for them to bring people here to replace me than it would to simply send my job over there.
Yea, I'm a selfish bastard ^_^
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
But instead of abandoned factories, it's going to be a wasteland of office parks. It's not just IT but many middle class "service" jobs being outsourced (ie medical techs, accounting, engineering). I think the US is going to be hit with a period of massive deflation.
Once again this topic comes up on Slashdot. I remember a quote one time (cant remember where to link) but the jist of it was that while cheaper labor, they provide a different mind set to projects. The poster mentioned that American programmers have a better problem solving mindset, while Indian programmers could spit out more generalized code much much faster and could do math based programming better. While I don't necessarily agree with this, it did bring up a good point in my mind, and that's the old "right tool (or programmer) for the right job". It's too bad that businesses see it in dollars, not sense and leave a lot of good American programmers without work, and put Indian programmers on programming tasks they would better suited for.
But back to this threads topic, I do think that it is a trend that will be difficult to break. The reason is saturation of programmers in America. Partially because during the IT boom, everyone and their mother went to get a programming degree, which left the US market saturated with programmers that were in it for the money, not because they loved it. I think that's the root cause of the US IT employment woes, just like in the early to mid 80's when everyone went the MBA's. And in about 10 years the same thing will happen, a new fad market will arise (legalized marijuana growth is my hope...) and the saturated market will subside. That's just my opinion...
This is just how capitalism works. If I can buy a lawnmower for $50 less that is as good as every other lawnmower... I'm going for the less expensive option. At least until I can legally keep a variety of grass grazing animals in my yard.
My point is that many buisnesses are realizing that there are many folks out there who are willing to at least pretend that they are skilled geeks and will work for far less than the folks here in the US. The cost of our geeks just wasn't paying off so we're getting cut.
It's inevitable the jobs will be back. They may not pay as well, but they will be here. Meanwhile I should brush up on my foreign languages...
The most insulting part of the slideshow was the assumption that a high CMM level for an organization meant good code was being written.
All the CMM level means is that things are being done in a defined manner. Crappy code can be written in a defined, repeatable manner.
Please moderate accordingly!
yeah, but seriously, how do you feel about it?
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The bullet is enoooormous! there is no escaping.
There are two fundamental facts about computer programming that most engineers and programmers need to admit: 1) Learning most computer technologies is very easy and 2) Using most computer technologies is very easy. Once you learn these facts a third fact becomes readily apparent: 3) Shipping most jobs involving computer technology almost anywhere in the world is very easy.
Software Engineers tend to have a highly inflated view of their own intelligence and their supposed indispensibility. I am a Software Engineer, I know. All US workers in the IT industry need to come to a realization that most IT work consists of mundane tasks suchs as making cgi scripts, coding Java objects, and the like. Any decently educated and motivated person can do most of what we do.
Motivation is key. The jobs are getting shipped to countries where putting food on the table is a real concern. 99.9% of people in the United States don't have a problem with that. These people are exiting grinding, bitter povery which is a real motivator. Yes they should be payed more, but they are making more money than they would otherwise.
US IT workers need to acquire more specialized skills in IT to really become invaluable, work for less money, or move on to something else because their job is in danger
Thats true. Alot of "programmers" that had no real experience also got fired in the early stages of the dot-boom and left many companies with only a few skilled programmers left. But many companies didnt just fire people, they went off the market, bankrupt, leaving both good and bad programmers out of a job.
Ofcourse being an unemployed skilled programmer is better than being an unemployed bad programmer, but both are still out of a job...
True ravers don't need drugs
Really, how much farther into the future can it be before service patches, automated scripts, etc. are writing themselves with the new development codes released by various companies, so that there is practically no need for IT workers at all? Of course, there will still be the old network hubs, just like today there are still people that use typewriters and older stuff. However, it will be more a choice of personal fancy than the going trend. Think of the TV repairman -- who needs that? If the TV breaks, you get a new one. They're so cheap and efficient that it's not a big deal.
stuff |
Your keyboard was probably made in China. You should do what the american worker making the keyboard did...adapt..and move on.
2) The standard of living will rise in all 3 countries over time. Already one can find articles about companies leaving India to even cheaper locales. Same thing will happen there. There's only so many countries. :)
3) There is a different cultural mindset in China, Russia and India than exists in the US (i.e. The American Dream). Over time, I expect this will obviate itself.
Who knows how long the cycle will last though.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Many development jobs may be leaving the US, but there are many other tech related jobs that will exist (and don't currently).
From my consulting experience (large and small companies), I've seen two areas that need major improvement: workflow and training.
They're actually strongly related. Many companies are just now basing a significant part of their business processes on technology. They've been gradually moving this way for some time, but it's at the point now where a tech catastrophy would seriously hurt them. However, they're still only taking advantage of perhaps 10 to 40% of what's technically feasible and also practical. There's still quite a lot of double entry of data and shuffling of papers.
So the workflow side should see a continued increase in technical development for years to come, and this will require services of "experts" of both the problem domain and technology solutions.
Training is the other area that should see continued and hopefully increased rate focus from businesses. Most users (and their bosses) approach computers and software as they approach a rental vehicle. They don't typically get much or any formal training, and they don't spend much time with books or manuals.
They're just scratching the surface of what much of their tools could do for them. Many people need broad and specific training to really make their technology work. An example of this is MS Exchange and Outlook. (I'm no fan of these, but I use them as example since they're ubiquitous.) Most business users can send and receive email, possibly with attachments. But most never touch their calendars, public folders, etc.
So maybe development is moving away, but there exists a big vacuum for other tech-related services, and those are going to stay right here in the US, if only because they often require personal contact.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
This is most likely a new world order. although I wouldn't call it a 'new world order', it certainly will change things. Here's why:
Programming is a skill used by people to generate applications/programs that companies use, and that companies sell. It costs money to employ someone as a programmer to produce these programs. Up until this point, it did not make economic sense to hire people in places other than where you were selling the product. Usually because there were not enough skilled people available outside of the US and europe who could program.
Now there are many other places where people exist who know how to program and who will do it for less than people here in the US. The fact that the programmer is not geographically close to the company does not matter anymore with the advent of the internet. I think this trend will continue because it is so similar to how other industries were lost in the US.
The only two reasons a company in the US will hire someone in the US a) the company cannot get the product cheaper with an employee working in another country b) there are no workers with the necessary skills outside the US
Textiles, auto manufacturing, and steel mills were successful in the US until it became cheap enough to ship the products from another country to the US. This became reality when US companies could find cheaper labor overseas. The worker and the company no longer needed to be near each other, because the link between them (shipping, communication) was cheaper than hiring someone locally.
This same thing is happening with software. It is now affordable to hire someone who doesn't live near the company. And there is an abundant supply of skilled workers who will work for less than americans.
This scenario is not much different than what happened with US manufacturing jobs starting in the 1980s. I predict the IT world will have a similar outcome.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
I'm floored, you actually posted something that isn't a troll or flamebait. Even more absurd, I agree with you 100%. The boom created an artificial number of "programmers" who were anything but. Reality is that if you didn't study comp sci in college, you probably shouldn't expect to get another job in IT. The "gold rush" is over, only those that have in depth skills and stay on top of those skills should have an expectation of remaining in this biz. If you don't work in IT for the sheer love of it first and a paycheck second, your days are numbered.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Jumping...is useless.
In all likeliness, this could be a good thing. One way of looking at it, is that as more countries enter the "tech arena", there will eventually be an increase in demand, and that's where the North American organizations come in. In the short term, though, a lot of research and improvement will be needed, otherwise the U.S. might get behind. Much can be said about quality vs. quantity. Just a thought.
Amen.
This could scare IT professionals into accepting lower pay. Since there is a perception that jobs are being outsourced overseas (true or not I do not know), then an IT worker may think twice about declining a job the next time they are offered pay that they expected to be higher.
Question everything.
Driving a 1981 civic is a privelege. Perhaps you are unaware, but most people in the world do not have a vehicle to drive, period.
are you bruce eckel? if you are, great, otherwise, you should indicate that you're quoting verbatim from eckel's site.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
Since the USA and other Western countries are the primary market for the goods, we should simple refuse to allow multinationals to sell goods here (including software), that are not being produced by workers making a *fair* wage (say at least half of what they would earn in the West or something to this effect). A nice balance would still allow poor countries to attract jobs and investment (without exploitation), but stem the mad rush of jobs out of the country resulting from the decisions amoral corporate trash. It might also stem some of the resentment towards the USA by those feel their country is the victim our corporate imperialism ...
Why don't we try to shift our conception of "globalization" to be less "all resources, including workers, are simple transferrable commodities, and you purchse these commodities from whatever part of the world is cheapest" and more "all the economies in the world are interlinked, and the nations of the world progress into the future together".
Hippie crap aside, it's actually in our best interests to have the rest of the world improve itself, and policies that encourage economic and technological development in foreign (particularly "third-world") countries are beneficial to the IT industry in america.
Why? Look at it this way: *There are going to be extremely bright people in India no matter what you do.* As of now, the tech level and economic level in india are, compared to america, pretty crappy. This means the average person in India doesn't really have the opportunities or ability to become experienced with computers the way we do, or start start-ups, or buy computers or software. But, there are bright people there anyway. So what happens? Well, two things. Either the bright people find a way to get into a more developed nation, like america, where they work for relatively very low sums because both employees and employers know that if an H1B person loses their job, they are at the mercy of the increasingly bloody ("in the post-september-11 world..") quisinart that is the american INS. Or else the big corporations with all the money in the U.S. realize, hey, all we have to do is export some computers and training materials to India, find some bright people there, gather some bright people there, and they'll work for even more paltry sums of money becuase tech jobs are harder to come by there and it's better than the alternative.
This will happen as long as countries like this remain underdeveloped. The average person there will be unable to take real control of their own destiny, but corporations will be able to enter the country at will and pick and choose such people to do whatever tech work they like.
If somehow we got to a point where these countries *were* more developed though, what would happen? As the standard of living and access to technology increased, two things would happen. First off, the Indians would start demanding better pay for their tech work, and begin starting locally-owend tech companies of their own to offset the resulting movement of tech jobs to burma or whereever people will still work sweatshop wages. Second off, and more importantly, the Indians would reach the point where the average person can buy and get involved with technology-- making India not just a source of cheap labor for the tech industries, but an actual *market* to which tech can be sold as well.
Over time, this means two things for the american: one, the market for your tech products increases, two, you are less and less competing in the job market against people who have an unfair advantage because their standard of living is so much closer to the poverty level.
(Note I say "India" above just as a random example, I don't know so much about the specifics of that country, but what I'm saying applies to a number of places)
Globalization *CAN* be a very, very good thing. It's just a matter of who controls that Globalization and what it's used for. Globalization can be used as a tool to reduce world inequality and help everyone. Or it can be used as a tool to amplify the effects of that inequality and hurt everyone except huge american corporations in the short-term..
"Digital divides", of all sorts, hurt both sides..
-- super ugly ultraman
too uncertain of what i'm saying to post logged-in
One area of software development that will never be outsourced is projects for the U.S. Government and military. Get a security clearance and you can write your own career ticket.
Debates regarding the desirability of the transfer of tech jobs to places such as China and India tend to focus on how the increased supply of cheaper tech workers from traditionally third world countries depresses the price of labor in rich world countries (such as the US) and therefore depresses the earnings of high tech workers in the US. The ultimate thrust of this purported economic trend is that America is going to hell in a hand basket.
The points which are often lost in these debates is that economics tends not to be a zero sum game. If a tech worker is hired in China, India or Russia this does not always lead to a tech worker being fired in the US (though it can lead to a firing). But as Chinese, Indian and Russian workers gain two consequences emerge:
For example, I am a high tech worker (producer) and a high tech consumer so I both win (my cost of consumption goes down) and I lose (I gain competition for my product, i.e. my services).
The other major point that observers tend to overlook is that the dominant theme of global prosperity and stability in our lifetime (for the whole world, not just the rich world and the poor world) will be the extent that places such as China, India and Russia are able to successfully grow and develop- you could summarize it as a choice between the future of Mad Max versus the future of Star Trek. The three countries listed contain over a third of the world population, and they and we will be doomed if they are not able to participate in the high tech marketplace freely.
Many of the shortsighted observers who decry the tend to third world cheap programmers demand protectionist policies (immigration caps, etc.) Perhaps the only remedy against the disparity between a rich high tech world and a poor high tech world is an elimination of the the artificial barriers to development in places such as China, India and Russia. Instead of caps on H1 visas, why not allow unlimited immigration into the United States (and not just tech workers- why shouldn't an illiterate construction worker from the inner provinces of China be allowed to find work in the US legally if he or she believes that his/her life is better in the US)? This would very quickly alleviate the problems of poverty on the Asian continent, and if history is any guide allow the United States to witness the kinds of enormous economic growth and dynamism of the early 20th century. The alternative is to allow China, India and Russia to have a monopoly on dynamism.
It's difficult to predict anything, particularly if it involves the future, but I'll give it a go. My experience with the expansion of higher education in the UK to the great unwashed is that it hasn't changed the top end of the curve--the added programming labor has been rather clueless. Then my experience with foreign students taking a software engineering MSc has been that they fit in with that group, probably because the resources aren't yet available to teach them adequately at the BSc level. I've also heard from colleagues in the USA that sending programming tasks offshore is even worse than sending them across the country--don't have anything life-critical or mission-essential done in a place where you can't check up on the help. So if you're good, you'll keep your job or even get a raise if you can manage a bit. If you're not so good, it won't be so much fun.
If they believe so, why do they move all their tech support there a year and a 1/2 ago?
Would you computer guys have a problem if a robot took your job instead of a human from India or Russia?
I dont intend to troll, but this is what happens when you looked the other way when industrial automation started to replace blue collar workers. Anti globalization / anti free trader movements are like neo malthusians to me.
Globalization and free trade = more jobs, more products, cheaper stuff. Don't be scared. Quality of life will improve when Africa, Asia, South America gain infrastructure that the multi nationals will help build. The cost of goods will drop dramatically. There will always be things the USA can trade with the rest of the world. I absolutely do not think it's anything to be feared. Overall number of jobs and quality of life of the world will improve when people can trade and travel freely.
Face it. What the USA do, you do because it benefits you. You're not shining white knights. You are cutthroat egomaniacs, willing to go to any length just to keep your average 3.5 SUVs per household.
Yeah, we do what we do because it benefits us. The same as every other country, only we get flack for doing the same things everyone else does.
You think I could get a job in India? Hell, do you think I could even get a work visa?
If you think the trade barriers in the US are anything compared to those of say, Japan, you're delusional. But we're expected to be selfless.
You think we spread "venom" over the world? Look how other world powers have acted over the centuries--what we do is pretty damn tame.
Don't even get me started with those assclowns. They are intellectual sluts and nothing more. You couldn't buy a better witness for a courtroom. Too bad they specialize in manupulating opinions.
We're finding that outsourcing is not really a cost savings on small to medium projects. What we did with 3 people here, we now do with 2 people here, plus one foreign contractor here (even foreign on-site guys aren't "cheap") and 2 more in their home country. It's not a cost savings, and the reduced communication means the code we got isn't what it should be (it does function though).
Three points:
1: Copyright, patent, and tradmark laws are not uniformly followed in the various off-shore programming destinations. You'd be unlikely to see "Intellectual Property" (their term, not mine -- don't flame me) concious companys sending serious development work offshore for fear of it being hijacked.
2: Companies that have sent work offshore will have very mixed results -- just as they have had with American workers, but much worse. With American workers many 'failed implementations' could rightly be blamed on scope creep, slipping schedules, and unrealistic expectations. The offshore work will suffer all of these, but throw in a communication (language) barrier. This will eventually be worked through, but in the meantime a lot of companies will get burned by systems that don't work, detailed design specs that the foreign programmers don't understand, etc.
3: As companies in general move more towards open source and Free software, corporate programmer jobs will split into two broad categories: Things that no one wants to work on without pay and that are difficult to outsource (e.g.: business applications); And integrating various components to make a system that adds business value (some Free, some open source, some commercial, some built offshore).
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Just as many manufacturing jobs have left the US, are we surprised to see IT jobs leave as well?
Why pay a software engineer in those big expensive US dollars when you can pay rupees or rubles?
Marching forward to a service-only economy!
SOmeone making $40,000 a year with a desk top is definately comparable to a sweatshop worker sitting in front of a sewing machine.
I totally see the resemblance.
The parent post was copied directly from this link (originally linked in the article summary as Bruce Eckel's viewpoint.) Please do not mod the parent post up, as it is not an original post and does not identify the original source.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
To make the kind of higher level software companies want you need to know the task like an insider, that's something that's easier to get local and very difficult to spec out. A database without rules is just a database. I've got a couple of them. A database that knows suppliers, parts, shipping, FCR, and internal corporate organization is a tool that runs the company. Closed source software publishers, who often use offshore labor to make their inferior tools, have mistakenly advanced this argument against free software as "they don't know complex business applications." Bullshit. Small firms with knowlegeable people, sometimes laid of from the company in question, can do a much better job with customized software than those clowns in Redmond. IBM's service model fits this too and that's one of the reasons they are using free software. Software's function is not to move bytes and print forms, it's to make a business go.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
IT workers never had any right to prevent their customers from seeking cheaper alternatives. The customers aren't anyone's property; we have to compete for them, and that's as it should be.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Also, the dot-com boom created a lot of "programmers" who weren't. For example, in the midst of the boom we would have people show up at seminars who said that they "programmed in HTML" (and sometimes a little Perl) and felt like they knew enough about "programming" that they were ready for the big time. Naturally, they were swamped when faced with real programming because we assume competence in some C-like language, but these poor people had been fooled into the hubris of thinking "I don't need those prerequisites, programming is easy and I'm smart" (see Incompetence for more about this). But the dot-boom created a demand for anyone who could type any kind of code, even HTML, with, I'm sure, the idea that these folks could eventually be trained into more complex jobs. But now, the out-of-work ranks are filled with people who say they are programmers (because they were told so when they had their jobs), and yet don't have the skills necessary to do serious programming. Thus at least some of the jobless numbers come from artificial inflation of those who claim to be a programmer but aren't.
this is a straight lift from the article. For shame's sake: moderators!!!
I'm afraid we're looking at a buyer's market, as far as IT people are concerned. At all levels. There are more programmers these days than there are jobs. There are WAY more web developers than there are jobs. Things will settle over the next few years, but one things is certain; The days of easy money are no more.
No longer will we be able to command an average pay $60,000-$80,000 a year with stock options (who would want them anyway), and the other perks programmers are accustomed to. Programmers are going to become like accountants, at best, in terms of their work environment, and probably salaries and other things as well.
Gone are the wonderful days when we held all the cards. Gone are the days when we got foosball tables and video games in the office.
I'm not bitter. Really, I'm not. I've been without steady work for over 6 months (though I do have several contracting things going on that are keeping me just barely afloat). It's a hard reality, but I think that is the reality. I had never expected it, but it's sinking in.
I've got a lot of experience. I've been programming for 24 years. I'm pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. I'm not a prodigy, but I've coded assembly for 3 CPUs, I've programmed in Algol, Cobol, Pascal (even wrote a Pascal compiler years ago), Perl, Modula-2, C, C++, and C# (these days). I've architected and written some really impressive stuff. I'm sure if I'd be willing to relocate to other locations, finding work would be a bit easier.
I've written a book in this field and about 20 articles. And I have trouble finding work. That's not a good sign.
I'm currently looking into other things that interest me a bit more than programming does these days, though. We'll see what pans out. There are some good opportunities for programmers down in Mexico too, and I like living there, so maybe I'll head back there. Who would think people would be going to Mexico for work?
Here's an article http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/5918824.htm that goes into a more stark reality, with hope for promising change on the near-log-term horizon.
We're witnessing a *structural* shift that's permanent. There is no way to reverse the distribution of technology-based intellectual capital, and the financial capital that supports it, worldwide.
Essentially, for the first time in the collective history of the IT sector (and a few others), we're on a level (maybe even tilted in favor of others) playing field.
What makes you think they won't move the server room to India once the bandwidth and power become reliable and plentiful?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
See? I told you to watch out for phonies.
Think about it. We're obviously all aware of the dot-com bubble and bust. Everything was built up and then it all blew up. No news there. And because of that, we've got a glut of "programmers" here that are used to making six digits for figuring out how to use the blink tag in the right spots. There's going to be a downturn and eventually an upturn. But it will not get back to the level it was at before it all went to hell in a handbasket. We're all too wise to let that happen again.
By the same token...it's history. It's part of the history of the world to have the "new world order" in terms of industrialization and such. So this really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone either. We've got overpaid programmers, let's find cheaper ones. Just as we look for cheaper ways to manufacture, we can do the same here with programming.
It's a mix. We eventually will have an upturn as we recover from the frenzy that happened a couple years ago, but we will also use this globalized market to search for a global workforce.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
You'll know when the problem is serious (too late) when the housing market crashes
It isn't as if the Declaration of Independence stated that every man, woman, and child had a right to a job at which they would like to work at.
Simple economics are at play here, and I find it amusing that people are all up in arms as if they are entitled to something just because of some skill they have, and even worse - just because they at one time had a job doing it.
The fact of the matter is that things come and go.
Either learn a new skill - biotech and nanotechnology come to mind - they will bubble here in the states and in Europe, then they will hit the point where it is cheaper to outsource parts of that away as well.
If you really feel that you must have your job as a programmer - then move to a country that values your skills.
That is exactly what all of the H1B workers were doing - they had a skillset and there was a demand for that skill, so they moved to where the jobs were (at the highest pay rates).
Both of my parents are currently unemployed. I find it hard to be sympathetic with them or anyone else if their argument is "but I'm a and I went to school for that. waaaah. I used to get paid money to do that and now they are paying someone else less and getting the same skills. waaah"
In my parents case, they are learning new skills.
In the case of many people - in fact, the people that are are getting jobs - many are learning new skills.
This is one of the many reasons that University applications have skyrocketed over the past few years - it is hard to get into the top Law programs right now at Harvard and Yale - I have friends that got in back in 1999 when everyone was leaping out of school into the bubble to try to make a buck - she deferred and made some money. She is now trying to get back into the same school and is finding that her application is denied... there are more people applying.
Not to mention, while you are in school, you can defer your other student loans, and generally speaking, your cost of living is greatly reduced and life is easier than trying to scrape by on unemployment out in the "real world".
Hell, it isn't like I was an Econ major, but this is pretty basic stuff.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
"I'm floored, you actually posted something that isn't a troll or flamebait."
:-/
Yeah. This time, he just copied it from a linked article verbatim and hoped no one would notice.
I think it's interesting to note when this AP story made it to the pages of my local newpaper(San Diego Union-Tribune)the inflamatory comment about "simple programmers" got excised. A programmer to me implies writing code using a high-level language requiring years of attained arcane knowledge with an underlying formal (college) education.
I challenge anyone to identify any country offering anything like the H1B program that was clearly expanded because of corporate dollars to politicians. I doubt I could go to India and get permission to work on outsourced US project because of protections extended to domestic workers.
When you go to the grocery store do you insist on buying the most expensive item regfardless of the quality??
If someone else can do your job for less, what obligation does anybody have to hire you??
It's fair, moral, and ethical. What's unfair is having people starving to death because of discrimination, hatred, and indifference that people like you bear.
Nobody should be forced to give you a subsidy so you can drive a Benz. That's called theft and/or charity to the undeserving.
...Dave Thomas needs to stick to a business he knows: Hamburgers.
No, wait. Wrong Dave Thomas...
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Well, first off, if someone can do a better job cheaper, they can have the job.
That said, I've worked with a few Indian programmers and it's been a mixed bag.
- Some have been good, some have been horrific. I'm talking about complete rewrite after delivery.
- I've found them to be a bit inflexible. If they've been certified on WebLogic, for example, they don't want to deal with, say, JBoss. Very credential driven. Solutions tend to be by rote and not terribly creative.
Still, invest in yourself and you should be ok. As Jefferson had it, if you're going to wait for the Government to tell you when to plant, you'll soon be starving.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Perhaps its time for U.S. engineers and programmers to consider a major paradigm shift. A technical degree from a certified American engineering college is probably still considered very valuable in the world.
Maybe its time for American engineers and programmers to consider a migration to India or China, and start a new life and career there.
Just an alternative point of view.
That's the new reality. It's half. Whatever you were getting before or thought you deserved before, it's now half. And it's not ever getting any better than that.
Guys making $100k? Try $50k. Making $60k? It's $30k. It's half.
Had a 2 BR apartment? Enjoy 1BR. Had a 1BR? It's studio time for you. It's half.
Had a BMW? Enjoy your Civic. Had a Civic? I've got a use Kia or a bus pass. It's half.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but I'm afraid it IS the new economic reality.
even in the boom people were worried about tech outsourcing. so why is this suddenly back up on the radar? my guess is that with a down economy it's more likely that this 'news' will shock people into reading/watching/consuming.
for some reason (ethnocentricity) i doubt that tech jobs will ever be significantly outsourced overseas. yes, gone may be the days of low-hanging fruit in the tech sector, and our growth rate certainly could not be sustained - but if you think it makes sense for the average small or even medium sized company to outsource, you're nuts.
not to mention integration and consultation are the two biggest gems yet to be mined for tech professionals. And they're entirely localized problems. You can't outsource the kind of tech that walks over to your user's desk to help them understand how to get the most from their system - the kind of tech that integrates -your- phone switch with -your- mail server, in -your- office to promote -your- core business practices.
and its not only cost management, it's risk management in a down economy. If you have $10m to invest in a project, and it's kinda risky - hiring local leaves you with full-time employees, employees whose loss -will- affect the morale of everyone else at the company, who -will- be drawing medical coverage, (who probably will get severence or at least holiday pay), and who -will- require infrastructure to support.
if you're not sure a new development is going to bring you new business - it makes sense to outsource. if it fails and you outsourced, you cut your losses and move on. that easy. and while you're outsourcing, what's the difference between the shop down the road and the shop down the pacific?
oh, and that slideshow by Hunt and Thomas was crap. basically it was: reinvest in yourself to keep your job, don't lock your dev experience to a particular vendor/language/industry (duh). but we can't all be 'recognized experts' or lecturers or project managers now can we? it's more a treatise on how the gray hairs can fend off the tide of young coders than how coders can defend themselves from being restructured or outsourced.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
> Already one can find articles about companies leaving India to even cheaper locales.
And Elbonia gets even more jobs. Hope ya like working in the mud...but at least you can wear those uber-cool hats!
Look how other world powers have acted over the centuries--what we do is pretty damn tame.
No, it isn't. It's just that other world powers weren't as good as you at hiding their true motives. You're trying to play knight in shining armor while stabbing people in the back, just like the cowards you are.
But your days are counted. Nothing can last forever.
Wired just ran an interesting article last week about Indian IT workers falling apart after long hours. IT Sweatshops Breaking Indians
Everyone has thier breaking point I guess.
You don't get it we are realizing that our need for cheap products is killing our job markets. We arn't blaming anyone but ourselves (atleast the smart ones of us arn't)
I can see how this got modded up. I mean, the story contained three whole articles. You can't expect the moderators to read all of them, can you? :)
And, obviously, the failed to take the poster's advice and "Watch out for phonies."
Because offshoring has "fad" status, it's going to be given extra time to work. So, no one (at least for some time) will bother doing rigid cost analyses. By the time they do, it will be past "fad" and into "established practice."
This isn't happening because our markets are free and it's what just happens naturally.
It's happening because of the interactions between national economies; which most certainly are NOT subject to the normal rules of capitalism.
H1B was big companies trying to use the government to change the law of supply and demand for labor. The intercompany transfer visas were more of the same.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is a different case; but still not "normal capitalism". Companies overseas are simply not treated the same way as companies in the local nation (whichever one you're in). They work under different labor laws; different environmental laws; they enjoy or suffer different taxation burdens. This competition is not fair and not particularly helpful in the long-run for EITHER country in the equation. The first-world country loses money and jobs; the third-world country gains better-paying but still sweatshop employment but never develops a middle-class and the concomittent protections against the unchecked abuses of the free market.
Just think of all the tech and knowledge that we (the "West") have given to these countries that are now benefiting from the outsourcing?
- We have given them a good OS and all the source code to it so they can learn even more/better.
- We have given them many applications and all the source code to them so they can learn even more/better.
Why do you think that there is such a large uptake of OSS in countries outside of the West? They are improving their technology base and strengthening themselves on it and we are helping them along as fast as we can, making sure that they can compete better and move our jobs overseas.
Ship jobs to Russia, China, and India.
Wages and standard of living improve in those countries and wages go up.
Move jobs from there to South America.
Wages and standard of living improve in those countries and wages go up.
Move jobs from there to Middle East and Africa.
Wages and standard of living improve in those countries and wages go up.
By this time workers in the US will be so crushed and their wages so depressed that it'll resemble a 3rd world country; time to bring those jobs back home. Cycle completed!
Yes, all of us Americans are incapable of properly pronouncing words. Yes, we're all evil. Now bring your throat a little closer, so I can cut it, bitch.
Fact: we're a huge economic juggernaut, and you can't topple us. Sure, it may make you cry like the little baby you are, but you can't do a goddamned thing about it.
Sucks to be you, eh?
/*- Mohammed -*/
This is too important an issue to just point to a link; here's the body of the text for the link above, written by Sanford Forte for the Merc News in San Jose a month ago; his article says it all:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/59188 24.htm
"Foreign engineers will change our economic world; prepare yourself
By Sanford Forte
WE'RE hearing a lot these days about economic distress. What we're not hearing enough about are global economic and business changes that hit our manufacturing, technology and financial sectors -- and lead to job displacement. These changes will not abate; if anything, they will accelerate.
It's more complex than just ``globalization.'' It's a series of technology and capital transfers that have fundamentally changed our industrial and technological playing field. The rest of the world is close to fielding robust post-industrial infrastructure, and learning to outplay the best of us.
The National Science Foundation reports that China graduated nearly 200,000 engineers in 1999 from good universities that get better by the year. By comparison, American Universities graduate a mere 60,000 undergraduate engineers annually.
Combined, India and China produced nearly 26 percent of the world's newly minted engineers in 1999. Excluding Japan (where engineering wages are higher), Asian economies graduated 320,000 engineers in 1999 alone.
Wages for Chinese engineers range from roughly $4 to $8 per hour. Engineers from many other Asian nations (excepting Japan) command little more than that. These well-trained engineers are all perfectly capable of working ``on the wire'' for engineering firms all over the world -- and they are doing just that.
China has some 18 million people migrating from the interior to the coastal manufacturing provinces every year. This represents a virtually limitless source of low-cost labor for the next 10 or 20 years. It will feed China's surging consumer demand. Don't believe for a minute that China's (or the Pacific Rim's) economic development will be mostly fueled by American-made products and technology. It won't.
China is already the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics products in the world, and within three years will be the world's largest automotive manufacturer.
Manufacturing is migrating from Pacific Rim economies (Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India) to China, leaving large workforces and technology infrastructures behind. Those displaced workers are migrating to the technology service sector, and already posing a competitive threat to high-tech service sectors in the developed West.
India already has Six Sigma (a universal measure of quality that strives for near perfection) technology and consulting firms equal to our very best, offering superb technology solutions at cut-rate prices.
Roughly 47 percent of Americans are directly or indirectly dependent on technology for their livelihood; keep this number in mind when considering how the ``Law of Lowest Wages and Costs'' has already -- and will increasingly -- impact our economy and lifestyle.
Bottom line: We in Silicon Valley -- and America -- are in for a long, somewhat painful ride. We will be challenged like never before. Americans will, after a time of readjustment and pain, finally have to ask what ``enough'' is . . . and that's a good thing.
It's a good thing because the seemingly never-ending upward spiral of promised prosperity that Americans have recently taken as their birthright has come at real cost: disintegration of families, environmental degradation, unhealthy xenophobia borne of the fear of ``losing advantages'' that we so dearly enjoy.
After the looming crisis fully takes hold, after the scapegoating of politicians, foreign nations and immigrants has run its course, Americans will search inward for values and ways of life that don't depend on maintaining material hegemony that is in excess of ``enough.''
We can be prosperous without obsessing ab
it makes perfect sense to me.
being a programmer in the future will be like being a writer.
writers are very talented, but they are a dime a dozen.
programmers and writers both operate on intellectual capital. and that, as far as economic rules of supply and demand are concerned, is very cheap.
what do you need to express your writing abilities? just pen and paper.
since these tools are cheap, writers are cheap.
previously, a decade or 2 ago, computer hardware was very expensive and rare, and so those who could manipulate it were very much in demand.
as computers become ubiquitous, those who manipulate them, like those who manipulate pen and paper to express their intellectual capital, will become equally just as cheap.
and so any one smart enough and interested enough can get in to a game. just like writing. equally devalued on the basis of supply and demand.
you want to make money in the future? become a plumber. become a nurse. supply and demand. these people demand more and more $ every day as less people in the west want to get into these fields.
look, IT work is a meritocracy. it amazes me that rich western geeks, who value and uphold the principle of how many mad skillz you got as the judge of your value in their technological world, in a perfect expression of pure meritocracy, should suddenly turn around and be so provincial when it comes to questions such as the globalization of IT.
c'mon, lose the hypocrisy. welcome to the real world. welcome to the globalization. no amount of sour grapes is going to change any of this process. give up your elitism and snobbery and realize that your skillsets are rapidly becoming a dime and dozen.
the golden age of super geek rarity is rapidly becoming a thing of a past. a smart teenager with some extra time on his or her hands can do exactly what you are doing right now. why do you suddenly think you deserve better monetary treatment than them? the economic value of your skillset is shrinking in the world as computers become more ubiquitous. get used to it. it's not going away.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You should suck on my ass.
tax companies for every job they export. then not only is their less incentive to export job becasue the price is not as cheap, but there is a means to keep money in out economy rather than sending it over seas.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
In many sences your correct but I disagree. In many third world coutries the cost of living is a fraction of that of the US. Here we have $30,000 cars, we pay $1,800 a month for rent. In the Sudan
Thinking that problems are limited to IT is a bit myopic. Semiconductors are not exactly the place to be these days either.
The problem goes back to the Reagan era policy of putting all the US's eggs in the service sector and then building up this straw man called intellectual property that is essentially hollow. It was never intended to be more than a scam like ponzi or a pyramid game which is what it has turned out to be.
Tighten up patent law back to where it was before the depression, make deregulation a mantra and the monopolies will grow like cockroaches in a backed up sewer.
Well, it worked. Now we're talking about deflation. Hmm, is this really so mysterious.
Developed countries SELL!
Developed countries BUY!
Developing countries make.
There's many examples given by people like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. From No Logo:
The tech sector fell into this trap in the 1990s.
The economic mumbo jumbo you hear and see everywhere in the US media is in stark contrast to reality. We have relaxed our environmental laws, beaten up on labor unions, sent jobs off shore to make consumer products cheaper, and still corporations are not satisfied. Why? Because constant growth in consumer spending is no longer possible.
The so called consumer is not getting wise to the Credit Card trap, essentially the cause of October 1929.
The engine of our economic growth has become the credit card, and the unrealistic expectations of the business world. The chickens are coming home to roost, first in the tech sector, then in all sectors if consumer credit continues to increase to unsustainable levels.
Raising interest rates will only precipitate the crash, so as the fed knows, it is caught in a terrible trap. The only solution perhaps is huge consumer credit default and mayhem.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
This, from:
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/5918 824.htm
Foreign engineers will change our economic world; prepare yourself
By Sanford Forte
WE'RE hearing a lot these days about economic distress. What we're not hearing enough about are global economic and business changes that hit our manufacturing, technology and financial sectors -- and lead to job displacement. These changes will not abate; if anything, they will accelerate.
It's more complex than just ``globalization.'' It's a series of technology and capital transfers that have fundamentally changed our industrial and technological playing field. The rest of the world is close to fielding robust post-industrial infrastructure, and learning to outplay the best of us.
The National Science Foundation reports that China graduated nearly 200,000 engineers in 1999 from good universities that get better by the year. By comparison, American Universities graduate a mere 60,000 undergraduate engineers annually.
Combined, India and China produced nearly 26 percent of the world's newly minted engineers in 1999. Excluding Japan (where engineering wages are higher), Asian economies graduated 320,000 engineers in 1999 alone.
Wages for Chinese engineers range from roughly $4 to $8 per hour. Engineers from many other Asian nations (excepting Japan) command little more than that. These well-trained engineers are all perfectly capable of working ``on the wire'' for engineering firms all over the world -- and they are doing just that.
China has some 18 million people migrating from the interior to the coastal manufacturing provinces every year. This represents a virtually limitless source of low-cost labor for the next 10 or 20 years. It will feed China's surging consumer demand. Don't believe for a minute that China's (or the Pacific Rim's) economic development will be mostly fueled by American-made products and technology. It won't.
China is already the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics products in the world, and within three years will be the world's largest automotive manufacturer.
Manufacturing is migrating from Pacific Rim economies (Malaysia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, India) to China, leaving large workforces and technology infrastructures behind. Those displaced workers are migrating to the technology service sector, and already posing a competitive threat to high-tech service sectors in the developed West.
India already has Six Sigma (a universal measure of quality that strives for near perfection) technology and consulting firms equal to our very best, offering superb technology solutions at cut-rate prices.
Roughly 47 percent of Americans are directly or indirectly dependent on technology for their livelihood; keep this number in mind when considering how the ``Law of Lowest Wages and Costs'' has already -- and will increasingly -- impact our economy and lifestyle.
Bottom line: We in Silicon Valley -- and America -- are in for a long, somewhat painful ride. We will be challenged like never before. Americans will, after a time of readjustment and pain, finally have to ask what ``enough'' is . . . and that's a good thing.
It's a good thing because the seemingly never-ending upward spiral of promised prosperity that Americans have recently taken as their birthright has come at real cost: disintegration of families, environmental degradation, unhealthy xenophobia borne of the fear of ``losing advantages'' that we so dearly enjoy.
After the looming crisis fully takes hold, after the scapegoating of politicians, foreign nations and immigrants has run its course, Americans will search inward for values and ways of life that don't depend on maintaining material hegemony that is in excess of ``enough.''
We can be prosperous without obsessing about prosperity, that is, sacrificing our very lives and identities to some abstract definition of ``success.'' I predict a resurgence of interest in things spiritual, a more relaxed defi
As far as a lot of what I've seen you often get
a) Workers that work/live in very poor conditions
b) Cheaper but less quality
Remember, workers in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, etc have certain rights. They came from revolts, etc and changes that happened a long time ago. Now, companies are moving to adopting cheaper workers, who don't have those rights, because often enough the countries haven't hit that stage of development yet.
You think that you're killing yourself coding an extra hour, it's often much more literal in these countries, and I guarantee you most works aren't doing 9-5 for any decent form of wage.
The end product is often not as high in quality. Yes, these countries do have good programmers, some very good. However, the poor conditions, language/cultural barriers, and just the different environment and distance will cause end-products to be oft lower-quality than those local.
It's a fact that when you start scraping low in the barrel for workers, you start doing so for product quality.
Outsourcing to other countries kills local employment, lowers product quality, and is supporting low-quality working environments. If you don't want your shoes made in sweatshops, why should you want your software from one?
Along the same lines, now that most of the dot-com era is over, it would be possible to see if there was an inverse correlation between the numebr of MBAs at a firm and its survival.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Here's what I've seen...
I've been fortunate enough that even in the downturn and the current economy, I was only unemployed for 3 months. I feel for those who are out of work now because I know that there are many many excellent programmers who can't find anything.
The problem?
Let's face it, a lot of people went to programming without experience and talent durring the dot-com years when they could get 60K without a college degree and a little experience in visual basic.
Those people along with the legitimate programmers lost their jobs and now they are all mixed together out there in the hiring pool.
To make matters worse, there is a corporate reality now that one programmer is as good as any other (and in my experience, the people doing the hiring have no facilities to tell if an applicant is qualified), so they hire the cheap guy or the fancy talker our outsouce to another country. I know a lot of really excellent unemployed programmers that have been passed up for inexperienced and untalented programmers.
So they continue to hire the cheapest workers and outsource to countries with an abundance of low wage workers and then they complain about the quality of software these days. It's ironic, but they can't seem to get that stigma out of their eyes...
T
> Cheaply produced chicken for instance, pumped
> with water to increase weight, moved half way
> across the globe packed *with conservatives* is
> one downside for instance.
(emphasis added)
You know, I'd really have to weigh the benefits of that one. I'm opposed to commercial mass-farming of animals, but if they were stuffed with the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Michael Savage...mmm...
(I think you meant preservatives, but I can dream)
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
By the same token, what would the moderators have done had this been a tyrade against, say, France?
Pity this'll be modded as a troll, too.
BTW the best programmer on my team has no formal education above high school and I would not trade him for ten people with master's degrees in comp sci.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
Because of the tech growing in those countries, lots of companies now outsource to them for big long term projects that they don't have the development team for. But they become too dependent on the outsourcer.
Outsourcing is dangerous for any company. Want to know why? Because they return you buggy code, and charge you again to fix it, but in the process creating more buggy code and less efficient code. This is due to the 'quick fix' syndrome: "Oh this doesn't work, well let's just do this for now." "Now that is a bigger problem, let's do this." etc.
This is how outsourcers make the money. They have quick turn around but poor quality in the long run. Short run their quality doesn't matter as long as they do what they were asked. Even if you have team of developers checking the code the outsource returns, your team will get overwhelmed in a year or two by the amount of code that is outsourced and has to be checked/verified.
In the end, outsourcing is like taking garbage to the cleaners, yeah it's better now, but it will still stink later on. This isn't meant to offend outsourcers but they do the bare minimum just to complete the contract. Why? Because they have other clients' source to complete that will result in more $$ if they get more done.
Within a company, $$ is in the quality of the work in the long run. Time is money and well... some management teams see some advantage in outsourcing. Outsourcers don't care about your long run success, maybe for new clients, but not someone dependent on them already.
Well that's my rant for now.
Causing Chaos Everywhere,
Nik J.
The strange world of a loner, in a populous city, drowning in society
Unless U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection starts inspecting all the data packets coming into this country, protectionism will only be a bunch of political posturing, hot air, and costly bureaucratic crap for legitimate companies. Customer service, software engineering, and tech support can move to any coutnry that has low labor casts, low hardware costs, and low bandwidth costs.
The credo that information wants to be free has an ironic impact on IT labor.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I wonder who these companies plan on selling their crap to (without a big drop in prices) when the average American's wages have been pushed down into the dumps. I doubt they can sustain themselves soley by selling to a few other rich executives.
George W. Bush is a coward. I am the one who took his place in Vietnam, so I should know.
." He had called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" not long before the bullet tore into his flesh. But the cowardly Bush can't get enough of war.
Corporate media have convinced the masses of a fictitious warrior Bush, who is a hero. This has been effective, as a neighbor recently told me, "If Gore had been elected, he wouldn't have had the guts to attack Iraq." My heart sank when I heard that, as I cannot fathom how it "takes guts" to order bombs to be dropped on children. Only cowards can do such things. Cowards who desert from war themselves while insisting that the working class bleed and die for the excesses of their national security state.
I have marched for peace many times with friends who are war veterans, and others who are long veterans of the peace movement. I opposed all of the Bush wars--the invasion of Panama, Afghanistan, the various Iraqi Wars. I opposed Daddy Bush's arming Saddam and protecting him politically for so long. Daddy Bush was the pilot who bailed out on his crew, leaving them to crash and die in WW2. Cowardice runs deep in the Bush family.
During the Vietnam War, when Bush deserted from the Texas National Guard, the National Security State found itself to be one short on cannon fodder, so they sent me. A member of the peasant class, I was expendable. Bush loved the war up to the point of actually risking his own "investment class" ass, to employ a favorite term of his father. He supported the war mind you--has always enjoyed killing, setting the all-time execution record for governors, though brother Jeb has competed well in Florida.
I was at Fort Meade, Maryland, for three months prior to being sent to Vietnam. My military bosses assured me they had friends in the Pentagon who could keep me from going to war. A lieutenant was dispatched to the Pentagon with a full-time job of wandering the halls in pursuit of this. The friends proved to be less powerful than believed, and I became an advisor to combat units for US Army Vietnam and Military Assistance Command, traveling all over the country to daily witness the hatred, greed and delusion of war, the lowest activity of my species.
I was an ignorant kid who knew nothing about what was happening. Nothing in my life had prepared me for understanding. My working class father voted Republican, because Eisenhower was a Republican and like him, a World War Two vet. I didn't even know there was a peace movement, as I was sent before it surged in 1966. The Stars and Stripes newspaper in Vietnam was so full of propaganda that by comparison the Wall Street Journal is objective on national security matters. I didn't know that the South Vietnamese government was a corrupt cesspool hated by its people and forced down their throats by old fashioned imperialism. Most of us went in order to avoid prison (we also had the choice of suicide, taken by more than 60,000 vets of that war since).
My heroes are those who oppose war, which is the only sane approach to it. Those who stand up to the warmongers have suffered greatly, often beaten and jailed, and sometimes murdered for that position. Martin Luther King, Jr., appeared to know where it would get him when he said, "I may not get there with you . .
I have been under fire for days at a time, with such fear beyond fear that it really requires a new word. Those who order wars never see the bleeding or hear the screams. I have seen rivers of blood and have given thanks for the insane roar of battle when it hid the screams of my comrades, to keep me from going entirely mad. But Bush can order a war casually, just before his golf game.
In a nightmare I faced Bush and said "You cowardly son of a bitch, I took your place in Vietnam." I could see in his glazed, alcoholic eyes the denial which kept him from understanding. His handlers convinced him that if he put on a flight suit and flew to an aircraft carrier,
the Era of getting paid over $30,000 is over "Unless you go to Schools like Cal-Tech, Harvard, Yale, or any other prestigious school. Think about it, If you were to hire a someone, who would you hire? Someone from Cal-Tech, or someone from ITT Tech?".
And to get up to $30,000/Year, Both Parrents in a family will have to work two or more jobs Working at Fast Food, that is until Dubya is elected another 4 Years, then he may get rid of minimum wage, unemployment, and anything else he can think of, then the family will have to choose between eating or the children having an education.
Globalization means more and more jobs can move from rich countries to poor countries. Workers in poor countries make higher wages while companies in rich countries save money. Of course people in rich countries are going to moan and whine about it and focus on the advantage to corporations, and downplay the advantage to the third world. In fact we'll spin it as "exploitation" and claim that somehow it's cruel to give a low wage job to someone who had no job at all before.
But in the end it'll benefit everyone I think, it'll just benefit the poor sooner than the rich. Trade in your lexus for a skateboard and learn to deal with it.
Interesting presentation (I kinda wish I had to voice over to go along with it though).
/.ers) .
1) Their suggested strategy for overcoming being outsourced is somewhat absurd: if EVERYONE follows their plan - which seems to focus on becoming a "recognized expert" - then we will end up with hundreds of people fighting for the limited time slots to give speeches and space to publish articles. There are going to be a lot more losers than winners, so I think that strategy is not too effective (i.e. not applicable to 95+% of
2) Someone explain the time != value "Everquest syndrome"? Are they implying that the way to beat outsourcing is to get a senior developer or IT executive to "twink" you?
3) It seems the that the authors paint "young" programmers with the same brush as "overseas" programmers - i.e. a "Threat." This is rather asurd as well, as most young programmers I know (in NYC) can't find full-time work.
Lets face it...
Globalization is just one part in a very large movement that looks to increasingly turn human labour, be it sales person ot programmer into "just another commodity".
As with any significant shift in the human condition, technology will evenutally commodify more and more jobs and careers and unfortunately business will always chose the quicker and cheaper path to improving the bottom line...
Its like business HP style...cutting our way to a better bottomline and bigger executive bonuses
Yes, its true, its all part of making things more efficient, cheaper, etc. But the dire possibility is that this downward trend will take the whole world with it, as the very people who drive spending can no longer afford to buy these products are loosing income faster than these products become cheaper. Housing is a perfect indicator. Although electronics, software and other good get chepaer, real estate, cars and other necessary items get more expensive. The end result is more people living at a lower standard of living:
Shanti Housing with Plasma Wall screens and high sped wireless access
www.enthea.org
Yep. Seems to me like we sent all this business overseas figuring that it would give us cheaper goods (like you say). And this works just fine as long as the foreign governments where we're sending this business take that investment and turn it into guns, graft, corruption, and basically nothing else.
But now they invest in schools and infrastructure! Uh-oh! Now we have actual competition and we don't like it.
Well, it's time to deal with it. And this is self-levelling - eventually, as all these up-and-coming countries become consumers instead of cheap labor markets, their standard of living increases and their labor becomes not so cheap.
So, in the meantime, we'll deal with a lot of racism and general xenophobia from people with inferiority complexes afraid that the entire Asian continent is trying to steal their job.
Ultimately, however, just as globalizing manufacturing has helped everybody in the world, globalizing labor will do the same. Protectionist policies do nothing but reduce world productivity.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
wah wah wahh whats wrong after fighting the commies for 50 years all the sudden you dont like capitalism? no one said that you having a degree in comp sci gives you the right to have a high paying job for the rest of your life. guess what this is the GLOBAL econ and you have to compete with EVERYONE. APAPT OR DIE. this is the system you chose quit bitching like girls and suck it up. this is the new future and just because by chance you are born in the first world doesnt entitle you to jack shit. fight it out for money like everyone else does.
20-25% unemployment
Massive social uphevel
No job security
There is no solution.
We played the game as a society, and we lost.
Such is life.
DAILY REMINDER: Hillary Clinton doesn't just stand by...she actively works to offshore American High-Tech!
Nasscom has an interesting viewpoint on the benefits to the US from H1Bs and outsourcing. By saving costs, US businesses can actually avoid laying off workers, despite a bad economy. Not only that, the US does $3 billion a year in high tech exports to India. Plus we need not mention that H1Bs still contribute to US taxes and consumption, and that many very large US tech companies were started by immigrants.
I realize there are real issues with high-tech globalization, and it is easy to scapegoat particular groups of people during economic downturns, but for every down point there is an up point, and the US will benefit from a global economic integration and growth over the long term.
it only makes sense that companies will seek ways to expand their available labor supply. the greater the supply, the lower the price. during the dot-com era, the supply was tight and programmers of all ilk and ability made a lot of money. it was a rare moment when a sector of the labor market was able to extract nearly monopoly rents from capital.
but capital is far more able to flow to optimal conditions than labor is. nike can flow its money to labor supplies in india, but the laborers here can't follow it. even for a quarter of the salary of an american programmer, an indian programmer is still getting paid a princely sum relative to the rest of his society. i'm sure many american programmers wouldn't mind moving there and enjoying the same lifestyle. but they can't. visa issues.
in a fair world, the ceo's job should be outsourced too, sure, but in an even fairer world labor should be able to move as freely as capital. and in the world that i wished we lived in, the supply of capital would be just as elastic as the labor supply.
but it isn't. face it: either you own, or you are owned. there aren't many of the former, and they want to keep it that way. look at how hard the riaa is fighting to keep control.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Let me be concise: We're doomed. DOOOMED!!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I work as an IT utility guy for my job. I have put myself in a great position by gaining the skills in the areas where people are needed on a face to face basis. I've stayed away from anything that could be outsourced or telecomuted.
I install, troubleshoot, maintain, fix all of our hardware/software/networking for my state and provide help desk support for our local branch as well as our 5 outlying areas.
If we have network (LAN/WAN/Wifi/Citrix/Webmail), hardware, software, etc. problems locally or at our other branches then it's up to me to fix it.
I also go as far as repairing shredders, printers, and even in home work for employees.
I am also the Photoshop / MS Office Guru and I maintain numerous reports that I compile into spreadsheets. From Hardware to graphic design I do it all here and I support a total of 60 users.
I've made myself valuble by having a wide range of knowledge and by always offering to help people be it here or at home. To be a valuble IT worker you need to make yourself indispensable.
By having no problem working hard and working late if need be then you can work till you retire in a position you like. I make a good income and I'm happy doing what I do. It doesn't hurt that I get to visit slashdot through out the day.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Since most companies see no "Real Value" in IT, it is no wonder that IT jobs are moving to where labour is cheapest. When the major computer manufacturers and the major software companies are already outsource thier own support and programming. How long do you really think it will before your job goes "away'?
First of all, how is setting tariffs unconstitutional?
Secondly, since when did the US become a charity dedicated to giving jobs to foreign countries?
Should we protect ourselves? Hell yes. If India, Mexico or whoever it is has a problem with that then their governments should improve their economies on their own.
Human rights my ass, unless you are talking about fat rich Western kids rights to have an overpaid job. You propose to let the Indonesians for whom a US$ 5 a day wage buys a living, die jobless, moneyless and foodless, in order to pay ten or a hundred times more to someone in San Francisco, Berlin or London for exactly the same job.
The two countries you name, China and Indonesia, have indeed lots of human right issues. The jobs offered by Western companies make this situation better, by creating a new technological middle class capable of seeing the benefits of free information flow and educated enough to fight for it.
I won't even try to take away your dreams as in "The USA supports freedom", but try finding out why China is one of US largest commercial partners and also which foreign countries support the Indonisian regime.
Boyfriend out of town?
My wife who is a QA tester, had to work for a company that moved all there QA to India and it became increasingly more and more difficult for the developers who were Indian to work with the developers who were American. Aside from that, they didn't understand goals and expectations for the product and ended up giving them something much different that what was asked for.
I think tech support, customer support and other low-tech things like that can be moved but in the long run, if you are willing to commit to a presence in a foreign country, you are better off sticking stateside... or trying Canada. :)
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Let's take this nation back from greedy executives who earn ten times what their skills and services are worth.
Let's take our rights back from the managers and marketers who treat us like disposable toys.
Let's not demand equal pay for equal work.
Let's take equal pay for equal work.
We, the workers of this world, have permitted the present order to exist and propagate for far too long.
Yes, brothers and sisters, it exists by our permission. We have let them do to us what they have in the name of compassion, and fairness, but what our noble intentions have given rise to is neither compassion, nor fairness, nor justice.
It is not a noble thing to sentence your brothers and your brothers and sisters to lives of misery and hardship.
When you demand, declare, and preach that it is fair and just to submit ourselves to this oppression, you tell a terrible lie.
You have been bought out. You have sold out. You have let them win.
Take it back, my noble and courageous brothers and sisters!
Workers of the world unite!
Successful programming projects save companies lots of money. One successful project will only whet their appetite for more. I expect there will always be work for me, no matter how many overseas programmers compete.
Awesome, D00D!
You criticize the U.S. educational system in the style of a sixth grader! The misspellings are a bonus!
Long live the "Kymer" Rouge!
Many of the discussions taking place on this mailing list seem to be focusing on one part of this argument while ignoring a number other significant issues.
Case in point: Let us consider a production process in which output is a function of two factors of production. K = Capital and L = Labor. Globalization is creating new opportunities to outsource labor, which, in turn is causing the price of labor to fall. Simply put, wages are falling while returns to capital owners are increasing. In turn, everyone on Slashdot is obsessing where it is good or bad that jobs are being outsourced.
What is being neglected is that the government can (and some would argue) should intervene in the economy to smooth out the dislocations. The higher returns that are being generated by the capital owners can be taxed and used to provide income supplements and educational training to displaced workers. If the outsources is "pareto improving" income to capital owners can be increased without decreasing returns to labor, then go ahead and outsource away. If, however, outsourcing results in a net drain on the economy, things get a bit more dicey.
Where the current systems in the US are breaking down is the combination of massive outsourcing with increasingly regressive social policies. We are increasing the share allocated to capital at the same time that we are slashing taxes. In turn, this is dramatically skewing income distributions. Not a good combination.
In this day and age when security is paramount I find it ironic that companies farm out work to H1Bs.
Backdoors can easily be buried into code. So..
If Fidelity Investments, Oracle, or whatever other company gets hosed by a backdoor then they deserve it.
I vereed off programming when I realized that
you can get paid more as a Unix / Network systems
consultant. The key is in CONSULTING since
you earn more, keep your certifications up to date, and you don't have to sit in a chair all day.
I think a software product should state:
Programmed by Americans... or whatever.
and supported by an American English speaking helpdesk!
Have you ever called Computer Associates?
Have a nice slurpee, thank you come again.
I'd much rather work in a "shoe factory" than flip burgers.
The truth is that globalization is moving people out of good union jobs into the "service industry".
Here's the chart.
I agree with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas's view on this. Currently managers are under orders to cut cost but at the same time they still have same amount or more work to do.
So what do they do? They ship jobs to India so when they report to their top boss, it would appears that they have a head count growth but at the same time cut cost.
The official line of course is that we are in a globalization market, therefore we must take advantage of it. At the same time, we won't abandon US side of the operation, so you guys are ok.
Unofficially, I had one manager bluntly told me off the record that 1 US guy (avg pay is about ~55k/yr) = 3 Indians (~18-20k/yr). Therefore, no one should bitch. US guys should be glad they even got a job especially there are over qualified workers in India.
Nope. The IT industry is still crazy. I'm currently an intern being paid $14/hr to do nothing but read your site pretty much. P.S. The US isn't evil. We're just stupid.
So, does anyone know of a situation where a company has outsourced development to another country and been pleased with the results (not just the price)? I don't. All the stories I've heard end with "and then we had to take their code and rewrite most of it, and we still can't maintain it."
Code is a product. If a team is given precise requirements, and those requirements are met, then that's that. The idea may be created locally by the expert, but the code is just code: it doesn't matter who writes it.
You hire people locally to hash out your specific requirements, and you send those requirements to the coder farm in $country. Saves the company money as long as their requirements are in order.
The software doesn't make business go, it makes business go cheaper. You can bet your arse that if company X dicsovered that ledgers and calculators were cheaper than computers for task Y, they would ditch the technology in an instant.
My point is just that software is a commodity: nothing more. Software is the same as office supplies, Xerox machines, and TPS reports. Cheaper software "may" be less-than-perfect, but if it gets the job done, the company wins.
(I may not -want- it to be that way, but that's another story altogether)
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Developers in the US, in addition to not working for 4K/year, do not generally get the benefit of a methodology. While nobody in their right mind would send work offshore without a very clear statement of what they expected, careful management of requirements and deliverables, and a detailed plan for implementation, the same people will expect their local team to produce a product with none of those benefits.
A quick study of the decades old literature of Software Engineering would reveal that if US developers worked to the conditions of foreign development groups huge amounts of money (50-75%) could be saved. That would reduce the difference between off and on shore projects by so much it would make little sense to send most work offshore. With both wage and efficiency differences against them, US developers will watch their marketshare decline.
What do I think US developers should do? Well, first of all, start or at least support efforts to get project management, methodologies, and other efficiency improvements implemented. Learn architecture, requirements management, design skills, and other elements of Software Engineering. Get your employer to pursue CMM or other standards-driven objectives. Then, continue to work like H*ll (but smarter this time) and the erosion may well reverse.
I disagree with Dave Thomas in that I think the trend can be reversed if only we can adopt processes that improve efficiency and quality. I am not ready to concede our livelihood to others when I know that it needn't be that way.
Remember that the US car makers lost huge amounts of market share until they improved their quality and adopted the originally US-invented (AT&T) quality processes that the Japanese had implemented so very well. Now, the Japanese are building cars here, using their processes and our people to compete with the US manufacturers. That, alone, should show that it is not the pay difference but the process difference that matters.
Software Engineering started in the 60s and 70s and has been ignored by too many for two long. What is Software Engineering, you say? look at computer.org and swebok.org for the Software Engineering Body of Knowlege (SWEBOK) for a not so quick overview.
Sure we can send all our programming needs to offshore accounts, but those india programmers are built programmers. They are harvested so to speak. Sure they work cheap, but other than that, what do they offer? If the specs and design are well defined then sure, outsource it.. but if you need a programmer to also be able to think about design, what people want, how to make it easier/more useable, etc.. we have the upper hand
The Elbonians are simply too cheap to compete with and will eventually perform all IT work.
I couldn't have said it better.
Welcome to 15% unemployment.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
So the coping strategy is to drive cabs like the Russian programmers did for a living until deflation hits the US big time and then we'll be able to undercut the offshore competition and get our jobs back.
See the CAW website for details
All the Chinese workers I've heard of get free bed and board (well, at least if they produce on quota) and job security is phenomenal - they don't have to worry about being fired and having to find a new job until they get out, which is often several decades away.
Try beating that for job security, ANYWHERE in the US.
Yep... Remember the taxes I paid? They're half too.
I like it. Does this mean that a BS in computer science should be moved to BA?
I may seem a little bit naive, but I think that given the trend that moved enterprises in the last years, this is the logical conclusion. The US worker is already underpaid, with much less free time than his/hers collegues in the rest of the "it" world.
Big companies are making what they want of legislations.
The law is the same for those who can afford the same lawyer - all the others don't have much choice.
In practice, the US worker has been squeezed enough, now the big corporations are looking elsewhere to get what they want.
Let's hope oversea workers already know Dilbert and will avoid the Cubicle.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
that 10% are the only ones that actualy went to school becasue they wanted to learn. the other 90% went becasue they thought htey could get rich. unfortunatly, universities are not interested in weeding out all but the most commited, they are interested in the all mighty dollor, and if a student can get the work done, they get the degree.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Let me distill your post down to its essence:
"The good ole' boys network will keep the fat cats from suffering the same fate as the rest of us"
Thats my take on it anyways. And I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't have to like it either.
You've got a programming team of say 100 developers. You decide to outsource. You take 90 of those jobs and send them overseas. 10 of them you transition to do integration and analysis. So, what do those 90 people do?
Sure we can try to move up the food chain, but the nature of this is that there are inherently less jobs the further you move up the chain.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
there is an excellent bit with this very premise on an old "mr. show" (hbo comedy series with bob odenkirk and david cross. long gone but it is out on dvd)
look for davis cross as the indian child "bhopal" reading the 7 habits of higly effective child labor book.
-- too cruel for schuel
I currently work for $7.25 / hour doing small time web development for a department while I'm in school. It's not that much, but I don't do much either. A friend visiting from India says that a middle class person makes about 1,000-1,500 rupies a month (and that's full time out of college) You get about 46 rupees per dollar now. So, if I work 4 hours I've already made enough to live decently for a month in India. If I worked fulltime (8 hrs / day) I'd be filthy rich for 1 days work. They work long hours all month long and make what I (a cheap college web developer) make in 2 days. How can we compete with this?
As much as I'd love to believe that programmers are screwed and sysadmins such as myself are safe, I just can't see it. I work for a large web hosting company. What we do, essentially, is manage the systems administration of other company's webservers and related equipment (load balancers, dns, database servers, etc). We are the outsource.
We have customers from all walks of IT... Government, retail, news & information, etc. The trend I've been seeing lately with the customers I work with is that they are outsourcing their IT (especially Sysadmins) to India (or other places).
For instance, one of our largest customers is a big American brand-name you'd find on half the appliances at Wal-Mart and Sears. Every person I talk to at that company is in India--an outsourced sysadmin who's job is to maintain their internal systems as well as work with us to maintain their web hosting environment.
I don't think a company could get by without localized sysadmins, but they can cut their workforce in half (at least!) by hiring sysadmins in other countries that maintain systems wherever. Heck, the sysadmins could be in Inda and the systems themselves could be in South America. Location doesn't matter when you're talking about the Internet (at least, as long as you have enough bandwidth).
Another thing that seems rather odd to me is that half of my coworkers are H1B people from India. So I work for an American company that hires lots of imported Indian workers and I speak with customers who are essentially an outsourced workforce in India.
US IT Money -> India, regardless of job title.
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Losing jobs to other countries is painfull in the short term. But this does not mean that people will be permanently unemployed or wages will be suppressed for ever. The creation of new jobs is a continuous process limited only by the creativity of people. Most of the jobs we do now did not exist a hundred years ago (computer programming for instance). New and better jobs will be created to take the place of those that were lost. Being flexible is key. You might as well get used to this kind of change as I believe it is going to get much worse (.. or better depending on your point of view)
Although, since I'm employed as a programmer, I have to cringe at stories like that one on CNN.com, there is a silver lining to news like this. The more headlines about how bleak the outlook is for the tech sector, the fewer students will go for computer science and similar degrees. Aside from less competition in the future for those of us already in the field, it'll mean the people doing computer-related work will be doing it because they like or and/or are actually good at it, not because they thought it was an easy ticket to riches. Having entered college during the dot-com days and graduated after the bubble burst, I think this is a good thing.
Holy crap, you're right! This guy is incorrigible.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
It may be a good deal now, but the supply of nurses is very elastic and we could have a surplus of them in a few years. It's happened before.
In the 70's and the 80's in India nationalization was the in thing. The govt of India at one point kicked out CocaCola and it was well received by the people. Everyone was convinced that "foreign" companies would be bad for the country and that India needed Indian companies. The general perception was that foreign companies will exploit Indians and take away national wealth (I suppose you cant blame the Indians for not trusting foreigners, look what the British did to them for 200 odd years)
Today a similar situation is happening in IT. US workers are feeling the pinch of losing jobs to cheaper third world workers. Many are actively campaiging against jobs being sub-contracted to Indian/Chinese/Philipino firms. If we expect third world nations to open their economies to our companies isn't it hypocritical to stop US tech jobs from being shipped out?
This seems to boil down to wether one believes natural or artificial control methods are the optimal approach to increasing overall human good. On the one hand there are those that believe that market forces should prevail, and if allowed to, will eventually converge on some sort of optimum where everyone is paid fairly, etc. They'll admit this may cause temporary discomfort, but the long term benefits are worth it. On the other hand there are those that believe that the system, if left to itself, will produce a ruling elite and hordes of exploited workers.
I'm not sure which side I'm on, but I believe in certain facts:
- Positive feedback is a factor in economics which leads to the rich getting richer.
- People can't be represented by simple logical or mathematical constructs. i.e. - They can't be infinitely retrained or relocated.
- Government restrictions tend to inhibit businesses which drive technological and economic growth
Most geeks hold overly simplified world views and cling to them stronger than a religious zealot. I think this results in the intense polarization on subjects such as this.
I would think a modified approach would work the best. The government can assist by providing job training assistance, and limited oversight. But the global economy must be allowed to run its course. We can't allow state sponsored industries to exist because they're bad for society as a whole.
Soon we will also face massive global technological unemployment. Its been talked about for years, and maybe its still 50 years away, but it is coming. How will we handle the challenge of restructuring the economy when human labor isn't required? There are no 'invisible hand' solutions. There must be some human control because it is a human created problem.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
The good side of outsourcing is that it forces us to be more competitive, more effective in cost, quality, schedule.
... while their social and economic development increasingly lags behind.
At the same time, we should be thinking along the lines of ethical funds investment. Outsourcing to countries like China and India is akin to the Asian sweatshops exploiting cheap labor in producing export goods.
1. Outsourcing to such countries violates the "Prime Directive". We should be asking ourselves why we're giving advanced technology to less industrialized nations
2. Outsourcing to such countries rewards theft. Countries like China and India are among the greatest abusers of the intellectual property rights of American authors and publishers (e.g., blatant software piracy and photocopying of computer science textbooks).
>local developers will always understand complicated requirements better than those far away.
How many OpenSource project members have been local to each other? To the end users? Is physical location really a determent to those projects?
>Free software developers will be able to reach into the big fat free software grab bag and customize it.
Non-local developers can use free software just as easily as local developers. So whatever advantage you think you have, it applies to them also. Plus, they are flexable that if they are required to use closed source, they can.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I totally agree that 90% of IT workers aren't worth their salaries, but Globalization in it's current form is not going to level anything.
Until all workers have the same basic rights and protections, globalization of economic markets is going to do nothing but exploit the unprotected. The cost of living is higher in the US for a reason. Most workers have life insurance and medical benifits. Most offices provide a safe working environment. Workers are protected from malicious employers.
If a programmer in Africa complains about the asbestos in his office, they replace him with someone that doesn't talk so much. So what does the programmer do? He sits there and breaths it all in until he dies. Then they push him aside and fill his spot with someone else.
By outsourcing to a country where workers don't have basic human rights, you're supporting oppressors. That is wrong, and it should be illegal.
i'm an indian Now why is ther a view that for some reason american should get paid more than the indians for doing the same work. Guys.. u were getting overpaid..somebody came along and charged an economically viable price and all of the major companies jumped on the indian bandwagon. i saw a post about someone how used to get paid $33/hr getting dsiplaced by an indian programmer at $9.5/hr . now if you had been willing to do that work at $9.5/hr maybe you could have kept your job.
So now we have programmers who are used to getting $80 per hour for highly skilled work demanding the same thing for work that your average self taught hacker can do. Of course it makes sense for business to farm it over seas to have it done at a fraction of the cost. It's pretty straight economics if you can remove your emotions from it.
All the best,
--Bob
These changes will not abate; if anything, they will accelerate.
"I'm a poet. I know it. I hope I don't blow it."
--Bob Dylan
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
I'm 40 years old and earn 78k. I'm a damn good programmer as well. My other skills are network
and unix system architect. This helped me keep
my salary from deflating.
You should work for yourself. get a few software
projects, get them to pay you a deposit on the
job upfront and have them pay you as you achieve
each milestone. My dry period was from 89-94, during our last depression. I was lucky then, I didn't own my home yet and was renting from my inlaws, so I started my own company and consulted for a while.
You need to drum up more contracting business and
when you build up enough... increase your rate to the ones that are barely keeping you alfoat, they
are more than likely taking advantage of you anyway.
>>Reality is that if you didn't study comp sci in college, you probably shouldn't expect to get another job in IT.
Hmm. So my company taught me COBOL and JCL in 1985. While I worked as a junior programmer maintaining 15 year old batches I taught myself C and C++. I worked up my level of responsibility at my job and was trusted with new development for a major mainframe implementation. So I learned DB2 and CICS along the way.
After that, my boss at the time started to talk to me about webifying some of the mainframe systems. He knew that I was learning C*. So I wrote a couple of big C++ based CGI systems that talk to DB2 on the 390.
I have fantastic relationships with my users. They call me when they have trouble, because they know that I'll listen to them and help them.
I have good relationships with developers all over my firm. I believe in sharing knowledge, and working together to brainstorm and solve problems. This I learned over the years is important towards getting projects done.
These days I'm a j2ee guy and an architect for a $10 million dollar system.
I took only 1 computer class in college before dropping out in 1987.
The parent's comment indicate that because I don't have schooling, I don't deserve my job. Is this true even though this is what I've always wanted to do, and I love it?
BTW, I'm working to get out of straight coding, and into project technical leadership.
Huh?
I don't think computer work is cyclical at all. I think it's going to follow the same pattern as labor, and while I don't know exactly where it's headed, I don't think it repeats (no cycles, hence it is not "cyclic").
:)
Work is outsourced to wherever it's cheapest to do, and it looks like it's already at the cheapest point already. There might be one more step left (Africa) and then we'll have gone through the whole world, and prices are going up worldwide as standards of living improve - making this shifting of the jobs less worthwhile as time goes on.
When will it be cheaper to have an automated chip fab/car plant/whatever here than to build a fully manned one elsewhere? When will foreign IT cost more than the communication barriers and planning make worthwhile? Those are the points where the work comes back home to stay. There's definitely a process of shifting and settling going on, but it doesn't look very cyclical, it just looks like different industries are at different steps in the process (and going through it at different rates). That can give the illusion of cycles.
(This theory probably has an official name or something, which would have saved me a lot of explaining, but I'm not a professional economist, so I had to go the long way around
In a corporate world decisions are made based on profit.
Why does that surprise anyone?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Decline of the Dollar
I believe most of us IT people belong in "Ship 'C'", so the devaluation of the dollar may not be such a bad thing for those actually adding value to things. There is no question about it - something has to give, and the most likely thing is the value of the dollar on the world market.
I see this in a much better light than the author, as the author paints a pretty bleak picture of the pending devaluation of the dollar, primarily because of its valuation relative to the last historical precedent of 10-12 years ago. I believe the author leaves out some important points that should work to blunt the devaluation of the dollar like the larger amount of investment capital available, and the overall large gains in productivity since then.
As far as offshore outsourcing, there is also historical precedent for that failing to put the US IT job market in the crapper (oddly enough, at the turn of the last decade also). That was primarily because the complexity of building custom, large-scale, enterprise-class systems made good and timely communication and business knowledge of paramount importance - something that I don't think even the best teleconferencing systems and WAN technology can provide now any better than then.
Was the sound I made reading some responses here.
1) Some IT will be moved off-shore. That most portable, generic and easily transferable.
2) Programs everyone can use, and even foreign programmers can visualize a use for will be done off-shore.
Will everything go? No. Will 60% go. No. Will 10-20% go. Probably.
Look at the engineering business. Take bridge building. Is there any reason that you couldn't design a bridge in India, using a Indian engineering company and then do all the contracting/construction here?
Of course you can. India has bridges too. And their engineering companies are capable. So why aren't all our bridges designed there? Its not like bridges are a new thing (unlike IT).
Computer component production moved away from N. America (like you last motherboard or CPU) but same with most factory jobs. Services continue to stay in the US moreso than anything else. Service is a local thing, much more localized than production.
IT is more portable, and less standard dependent (think building codes, safety, etc) so some of it will go, but for the most part it will stay in North America.
Why will IT stay? India is still a third world country last I checked, I think that more than half the country doesn't even have access to clean water. They have a handful of smart usually western trained people, but these are not unlimited. The demand for local software and IT is weak right now because they don't really have a market for it. Wipro spends most of its time going after American companies with the sales line 'you don't have to do all your IT in the US'.
Language barriers, time zone barriers, quality, locally trusted firms (with local references) all make a big impact here. Service is definately a local thing, production is always outsourced to areas with cheap labour. Look for factory-like IT to move offshore and service-like IT to stay.
m
I'm the guy who fixes all the hardware. ...outsource *that* PHBs!!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
It sure would be great if as a result of your "half" strategy, that home prices dropped, the cost of living dropped, the cost of pretty much everything dropped by half, to reflect this. Afterall, such deflation happened in Japan.
And with these lowered costs and expecatations, their interest rates at zero, the Japanese are oh so happy right now. Yeah, right.
Companies exist to build products. Products are sold to consumers. Money paid for a product over its cost is profit. Companies do not bring in money from outsourcing. They reduce the cost of products by outsourcing. In the short term, outsourcing will decrease the cost of production, which will temporarily increase profit. The problem happens when there are less consumers left to buy your product. Right now, Americans are the major consumers. If Americans do not have jobs, they will no longer be the major consumers. Outsourcing American jobs will only be profitable long-term if foreign workers increase as consumers at the same rate that American consumers decrease.
I can attest to this (and shameless plug here, I've got commentary on this on my /. journal, go there for more articles along this line): widgets are the same anywhere they are made IF the process is followed exactly with the same material. They techs we are using are just as smart(and smarter than some!) as techs in the U.S. What we do have issues with are timings. Someone 1/2 way round the world cannot respond to a customer request from New York as fast as someone in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver, etc. Furthermore, there are culture differences as well. Individuality is almost a rule in the U.S. where as other countries expect you to conform to the norm. Last word, this 'outsourcing' will never end, biogentics/nanotechnology will be next, so be prepared and take control of your career. TTFN.
Disclaimer: I did not spel chek.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Solution? Use an Indian company to do the job! C++ IS C++, after all. Within a year, they were back at square one. I have another friend that is interviewing and testing Indian developers for a proposed India-based development lab. Result? Very few were able to answer half the questions correctly (mid-level Java developer-type questions).
So, quality does kick in at some point. India is NOT the IT panacea some have hoped for. I still think we'll see some more outsourcing, but it isn't the end of IT as we know it. Not every company can do this kind of thing.
On the executive point, yes and no. There are a LOT of execs who are part of the good-ol-boy system. Those who are good, do a great deal more. But the squids...
Anywho, my opinion...
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Yes, but this period also created a WHOLE SLEW of 4 year college graduates in CS, who know how to program MFC apps in C++ using Visual Studio, but fundamentally, have no clue how a computer really works, and no concept of proper engineering. I know, I've worked with MANY of these people.
I was never an "HTML programmer" - I was always a Systems Integrator-type guy. I've done programming, basic shell-scripting, some C, some VB, actually a buttload of DOS scripting (batch programming) - but I never really considered myself a programmer. When I was laid off, because my company felt it was better to hire a half a dozen clueless phone monkeys than one problem-solver, I went around looking for jobs, not billing myself as a programmer. At a couple of interviews, I was told that I was "selling myself short" - but on the other hand, wages are now VERY depressed. The amount of money I can ask for going into a new position with my level of skills is miniscule, compared to the salary I used to command after I had repeatedly saved people's asses over the years.
I don't really mind competing for a job. My latest endeavour has me working as a programmer. I'm learning a lot, and working my ass off. I can say that my last job had me stagnating, because they simply didn't demand my level of skill for where they placed me. So getting laid off was really a good thing. I just wish that the cost of living had declined along with my salary. It's not about doing without luxuries. It's about wondering if I can keep my home, or if I can afford to keep my car maintained.
In the end, my level of consumption has drastically decreased. THIS is why the economy sucks.
When corporations expect to sell to the lucrative American Market with their high standard of living, but then refuse to pay the salaries that make that standard of living happen - they're basically cutting their own throat. And I don't feel sorry for their falling profits at all.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
1. Massuese
2. Prostitute
1. Tech firms move tech support jobs to cheap labour shops.
2. Tech firms move software and hardware test jobs to cheap labour shops.
3. Tech firms move software and hardware development jobs to cheap labour shops.
4. Tech firms move software and hardware design jobs to cheap labour shops.
5. Tech firms move project management jobs to cheap labour shops.
6. Cheap labour shops will soon realise that they do not need the tech firm at all, which by now has been reduced to a corporate headquarters.
We are currently rushing headlong with #1, and inching forward with #2. But I can almost guarantee that as #1's cost savings are shown, soon #2 will start gaining huge ground. And as #2's cost savings are shown, #3 will start gaining huge ground, and so on.
It will probably be another 25 years at least before the software architects and hardware designers are heavily "farmed" from cheap labour shops, but eventually that will be the reality we're faced with.
That's why you should spend the next 5 years of your development job getting training to do design, and the next 5 years of your design job getting training to do overseas project management. Hopefully by then you will have advanced to the point of being in senior management, then you cash out and sit happy when the building starts to crumble.
MORTAR COMBAT!
I'm checking vacancies for postmen every day. The tech industry in USKA has had its jugular opened and is just bleeding out. I'm getting a job that will still be there in ten years, and one which doesn't require me to work 60 hour weeks to compete with Indian and Chinese developers. I owe my child that much.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Most people think that software development will go offshore and stay offshore, just as most textile manufacturing jobs did earlier in the century, and that it will be painful and inevitable.
Before you think that too, ask yourself -- how much do you think software engineering is like making a pair of pants?
I'd cite a different event, or non-event, in history -- the U.S. has yet to outsource (expensive!) jobs like doctors, lawyers, architects, executives, etc.
Is software development more like this? evolving into a new highly specialized, skilled profession?
In that case a certain, large amount of dev work will never be outsourced.
Alternatively, think of it this way... if outsourced development is actually as useful as some people think, it will eventually become more expensive. As soon as it is anywhere near the cost of on-shore resources, it ceases to be useful.
Over time, the solution is not cheaper people but fewer, skilled people -- with smarter tools instead of an army of bodies to do grunt work. I think companies that think this way will ultimately do a lot better technology-wise and just overwhelm the outsourcers of the world in the end with superior products.
is the ONLY question...I have moved my finaincial stuf twice because the company I dealt woth outsourced it to a 3rd world company that HAS NO LEGAL requirments about info protection of any sort. Granetd they do have contractual obligations with the companies they deal with but how can you hold them liable for US federal laws ??
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
If you really value job stability there's a few groups out there that will take you.
Bob Pryor, who heads the outsourcing practice of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, said it's "naive" to think outsourcing software jobs could ruin America's tech dominance.
Indeed, regardless of how many American programmers end up in welfare queues you can be sure that the CEOs and directors of US software comapanies will continue to fill their bank accounts regardless of where the programming is being done.
Retraining? How about stand in front of mirror, smile and repeat "D'ya want fries with that"
Hmmmmmm..... Deep fried and look like Squirrel.
Oh, there might be a few more cycles, but the trend is going to be inevitably downward -- and not just in IT.
Why? Because, simply, the status quo is an unmaintainable imbalance. The problem isn't greedy American corporations, the problem is greedy Americans, who think its Good and Right that our tiny country controls such a vast portion of the world's wealth. Whether it's Good and Right or Evil and Wrong, the fact is that a free market abhors this sort of imbalance, and absent draconian controls, the imbalance will be corrected. If an Indian can do the same job, and only needs to be paid a small apartment and a nice bicyle, where an American wants a huge house, two SUVs and annual vacations in Fiji, the Indian will get the job. And should!
I'm an American, and I very much enjoy my comfortable lifestyle, my nearly 4000 ft^2 house, my cars, my expensive hobbies, etc., but I've lived outside of the US and I have no illusions that the status quo can be maintained for long. There are too many people in the world who are just as deserving, just as smart and, frankly, probably willing to work harder. My comfort is as much an accident of my birth as anything I've done, and I don't think I have any God-given right to it.
Further, I think Americans need to realize that much of our current material wealth actually comes from the very places we complain are taking our jobs. Walk into nearly any store, look at the prices on the goods, then think about how much material and labor was required to make them. The stuff we buy is *amazingly* cheap; our own incomes are stretched to nearly ridiculous lengths by the abundance of cheap labor overseas. Quite simply, our lifestyle is all out of proportion to our productivity, and the market is going to correct that. IT is just one of the current victims/opportunities (depending on your point of view).
Protectionism, isolationism and schemes to keep ourselves on top by keeping everyone else down won't work forever, because they just don't make economic sense. We're going down, because that's the way it should be. All of the crying about evil corporations looking for a quick buck is just self pitying noise. The imbalance means that over the next few generations, we'll have to learn to cut back our lifestyles somewhat as people in other parts of the world improve theirs.
And if you spend a little time in the 3rd world, and see how many smart, hard-working, deserving people there are, you'll understand that that's a Good Thing, even if it's personally painful.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That's a pretty dumb reason to not pursue a programming/engineering degree. I studied Aerospace, mainly because I was interested in how airplanes and rockets and all of that other cool stuff work. Getting a job out of it would have been nice, but I tend to think my career path in IT has been more rewarding. I do not regret my education, despite not using it directly. It taught me stuff I wanted to know, that I could NEVER possibly hope to learn on my own.
In short, discouraging someone from pursuing a degree in something that interestes them, just because "You won't get a job doing that" is a pretty dismal outlook on the whole point of a higher education.
The fundamental problem is that I demand a high salaray because the stuff I want is expensive. The guy in India doesn't need as high of a salary because the stuff he wants is not nearly as expensive.
Why?
Because too much of the stuff I want is made by Americans who want wages that are high.
Things are out of balance. If more labor goes overseas, the stuff I want to buy gets cheaper, so I don't need as much money, so I'm able to compete better on a wage basis with the guy in India. In the end, I get just as much or more stuff than I was before, and he gets more stuff too. In fact, now that there are all these people overseas who can afford, say, healthcare, my drugs get cheaper too, even if they are still made here by overpaid americans.
Americans losing work because jobs move overseas is straight up bullshit. Jobs have been moving overseas for years and years, and if you listen to those predicting impending doom, we should all be unemployed by now - but we're not.
The economy stinks right now because way too many people sunk capital into really bad ideas that never earned a return - no return on investment, no growth in economy. Now a lot of capital is gone, so it's going to take a bit to dig our economy out of the mess we stuck ourselves in when we bought overpriced internet company stock.
Which is yet another reason to ship jobs off to india - less money spent doing what they do, more money to invest in other areas of our economy.
paintball
One of the factors for the U.S. gaining the advantage for a few decades, aside from the havoc in Europe from WWII, has been the ease with which the best students and researchers from the whole world can work onsite with their peers. Visa problems and other undesireable side affects caused by P.A.T.R.I.O.T. and other anti-U.S. legislation makes can help move IT centers out of the U.S. Outsourcing drives this by providing funding and further incentive.
DMCA-like legislation and software patents also stifle innovation. Although there will not necessarily be mass emmigration from those lands, they will over time suffocate innovation, In contrast, lands where development can build on previous develoments and on investigation and publication, can move forward.
So, in short, the U.S. had for wa while a great environment for IT develoment and growth. The U.S. or some other economy which can produce or maintain such an environment is going to get the growth in the future. Whether it's Asia, East Asia, North America, or Europe (or Australio-Pacific) depends largely on which ones take themselves out of competition by enacting weird P.A.T.R.I.O.T.-DMCA-SofwarePatent laws
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Even though the H1Bs are treated as indentured servants, the popularity of the program is nowhere near what it used to be. Take a look at monster.com. Most of the jobs require US citizenship or a green card. No sponsorship, no H1B, no relocation. These days, employers can demand a master's degree in CS, US citizenship, and still hire all the people they need for peanuts.
To me, the H1Bs are primarily in competition with people from their home countries. If you really need language and communication skills, most of the H1Bs are out of the picture. If you can get by with what they offer, why not save big bucks and move the job to India/Russia/China? Once you bring these people to the US, they pay US taxes, they deal with the US cost of living, and they expect something resembling a US lifestyle. For a few dollars more, you get a native English speaker with no immigration issues. In the current market, the H1Bs original purpose (to fill-in for the so-called "shortage") does not exist.
Those few H1Bs lucky enough to get hired will soak up the jobs that might otherwise go to recent grads. In the long run, it will make the next "IT shortage" that much worse, since the value of a CS degree has gone down the toilet.
As I see it, the top 10% of IT people will have more and more opportunity, facing less and less competition. The other 90% will face a desperate search for marginal employment, and very few will bother sharpening their skills.
Nobody wants to have an employee who's not satisfied with his job. And you clearly aren't going to be satisfied with anything less than an Architect position.
Thereis nothing natural about this trend. Its based on an entirely fucked up econimic model where there is free movement of products and services without free movement of labour. Outsourcing only exists because a guy in Romania is stuck there and has no other choice but work for $300/month. Btw, I'm saying this as a Russian developer making most of my income thru offshore development. IMHO US should grant green card citizenship to any skilled developer so they could come and compete on qeual terms with US guys it will still drive the salaries down but not nearly as much. (simply because you cant sutvive on $300/m in the States)
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
But your days are counted.
I'm sure you mean our days our numbered, right? Everyone's days are counted (I supposed everyone's days are numbered, too, for that matter).
I don't think even the most ultra-patriotic Good Merkin will argue that the US has a perfect record of internation diplomacy. Just one question for you: given the events of the last century (1900's) which would you choose as the ultimate victor:
1.) Germany (2nd or 3rd reich)
2.) USSR
3.) USA
If you choose anyone but the US, you're stupider than you sound. Sure, we abuse our position as the last remaining superpower, but nowhere near as badly as the other choices would. We're not systematically murdering millions of people at home and abroad (one could perhaps argue hundreds or even thousands, but certainly nothing anywhere near the scale of the Holocaust or what Stalin did).
No, it doesn't justify our behavior, but we certainly are the 'least of all evils' in this context.
Now, what are you doing to make the situation better, beside belly-aching on Slashdot, I mean.
my analogy holds up because not every writer is a george bernard shaw or a james joyce or a tennessee williams.
likewise in IT.
you are merely drawing attention to the notion of the meritocracy which i did not examine in this light. so we essentially agree, but get at the same conclusion from different povs.
the meritocracy holds up as the judgment of how much $ you should make.
and artificial geographic boundaries between how someone who does simple html work in san francisco versus bangalore disappears, especially in a discipline that works in a frontierless world like the www.
the guy/ gal doing advanced research in grid computing is still going to demand top dollar, as he or she should.
but again, this is irregardless of geographic location.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In some areas, the US doesn't have the technology any more. CD and DVD drives require licensed technology from Asian companies.
i just went to geocities and used yahoo's templates to copy and paste and move around some simple html.
;-P
i'm a webmaster now! lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Silence, nerd! Prepare for a moon spanking! You drop those sweatpants right now!
IMHO, it's a national security issue. We don't need to be exporting our expertise, we need home grown expertise that will stay in America.
Big buisness uses H1-B and L-1 visas to hire employees that they can pay well under the going rate for U.S. citizens. Small buisness doesn't have the overseas connections to hire folks with this so it only serves to give big buisness even more power over the start-ups.
Additional information on H1-B and L-1 visas:
Washtech.org
L1s Slip Past H-1B Curbs
Re: H1B and L1 visa influence US unemployment
After H1-B visa, L1 now bytes IT
String him up to a tree....and when he stops kicking, let's head to Washington.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Actually, deflation is a little iffy. The Fed is threatening to print money to fend off deflation. How would the Fed print money? Easy, they will buy back Treasury bonds. Since the T bills are "assets", the Fed can exchange "money" for them thus increasing the money supply. The problem is they're Enron style assets. Luckily the goverment is excempt from accounting regulations.
I say damn the torpedos, we rich Westerners are rich for a reason - we work more than anyone else in the world on average. You've got lazy Europeans fighting to work less and get more vacation time, and Asia? Forget about it - they can't even keep their feet dry most of the time so why trust their infrastructure to handling IT or technology jobs? Screw H1B visas, and close OUR borders. American jobs for Americans, I say.
IT, IS, and MIS people suck. They're overblown tech school dropouts who are finally realizing their worth in this econo
In a way, linux itself demostrates the powers of cheap labor. how much money does redhat make off of free software? could they make that much dough if they made the OS themselves?
i know that a lot of the revenue generated by the companies comes from services and support contracts, but the meat & potatoes are mostly free.
With regards to everything in life, there is no such thing as a free lunch. if an item is cheap for you, then chances are someone, somewhere is subsidizing the price you pay with their low-paid time.
'The world needs ditch-diggers too!'
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
In my years in the commercial software development world--admittedly 2 companies, both startups--we've never considered outsourcing any work overseas. We did outsource I18N work--to an American company--because not one of us programmers wanted to touch I18N. The universal experience of all the programmers I know in the USA is that outsourcing _significant_ software development overseas results in universally disastrous code. It's may sound harsh but the US still has 90% of the really good coders, and any US company that wants to succeed is best advised to stick with US operations. Of course of the really good coders in the US a significant fraction are not originally American. But, I don't see the balance of talent changing any time soon.
Today it's IT, tomorrow it's banks, insurance, accounting, architecture, and on.
There's no reason why any other white collar job needs to remain in the US if there are loads of qualified people in other countries willing to work for peanuts.
People keep discussing this as an IT-related phenomenon, but it's not. IT is just the first to go...
As I was reading this, I thought to myself, he's right. This is a global economy. This is natural and normal, even if we aren't happy about it.
Then he got to the point where he's preaching about spirituality, and he lost me at that point.
Soon Americans will be emigrating to India for the opportunity to run convenience stores and gas stations.
I actually read the article, and it's not talking really about I.T. jobs. I'm in I.T., and what this article is talking about is strictly programming jobs (not really even I.T. programming jobs) and tech "creation" jobs. In fact pretty much all of the article focuses on out-of-work programmers -- these are not I.T. people.
I.T. is more a service industry while programming is a creation industry -- two very different beasts if you want to outsource to foreign workers.
When a guy in our California office has a problem creating a document in a database on our Notes server is he going to call/wait for an I.T. guy in the UK? No way.
When we need to make a programming change to our back-end server in California, do we care whether the guy making the change is in California, Nevada, or the U.K.? No, of course not.
There are two fundamentally different situations here -- the tech industry is simply going through a shift from a creation-oriented focus to a service-oriented focus. This is not very different from the change a lot of other industries have gone through, but it seems scary because it's now hitting our beloved tech industry.
The fact is I'm essentially a programmer with a computer science degree, and I have a good, solid, well-paying job in the I.T. sector where I'm programming only a small percentage of the time. I'm a director, so I hire I.T. people pretty often. The applicants I see are either I.T.-oriented, or they're programming-oriented.
The bottom line is that if you aren't able to adapt to a more service-oriented role in the U.S. tech industry, you will have more and more of a problem getting a job because you'll be competing for an ever-shrinking pool of jobs...
I agree with your statement to a point, but I don't think we draw the same conclusions.
The U.S. is only going "TO PAY" for ignoring these other countries if we slack off and let them dictate our future.
What I mean is, innovation and creativity ultimately result in production of desirable products worthy of export. The vast majority of innovation in the tech sector seems to come from the Japanese, and increasingly, other countries (like Malaysia) that are getting on the high-tech bandwagon in a big way.
If U.S. companies continue to be content to play "follow the leader" and create nothing more than copies of whatever the consumer is fascinated with (originating in another country), our economy will continue to go down the tubes.
I don't think the economic game was really ever about "bringing them along". Similar companies compete with each other, and it's true whether you're talking about 2 American companies, or 1 American and 1 Chinese company producing similar products.
If we expect to maintain a high standard of living, we need to continue making products and providing services that are worthy of that standard. Yes, India and other such countries have citizens content with receiving lower wages than us -- but the more they're exposed to technology and the "unnecessary but entertaining, useful, and/or life-improving" gadgets out there, the more they'll want to earn salaries that allow buying them.
This can be a very GOOD thing, or a very BAD thing for the United States. It all depends on how many of those innovative products are built first (and built best) here!
You must be referring to my MCSE...
You joke but you would be amazed how many people I have interviewed that say are MCSEs and really aren't. When I see a MS certification on a resume, I ask the interviewee for their MCP certification number. (The one you get when you really DO certify) Many times the answer was "Uh, I don't know where I put it.". Sometimes the interviewee would come clean and admit they weren't certified but knew the "Windows 2000 Unleashed" book from front to back.
What it all comes down to are asshats who lie on their resumes and claim false credentials that make it difficult for hiring companies to quickly and accurately weed through the mountains of resumes.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
How many times have I heard that old so-and-so just didn't keep up and that's why old so-and-so got laid off?
It ain't all that easy to "keep up", particularly if you have family responsibilities. But even if you do, you may not be able to avoid all the unilateral job displacement happening now. Through no fault of your own, you may face years of unemployment and/or underemployment. Training is not going to fix all this. The last sentence of the story said it most succintly.
"We need to move beyond the idea that individuals can simply cope and retrain,"
I'll repeat what I've been saying for years. All you cocky, young prima donnas who think your skills will spare you from these bouts of joblessness have another thought coming.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
The import of the team was the only way to do this within budget.
The UK already imports nursing staff and primary school teachers in quantity, since we neglected to train and retain sufficient staff in the past.
You couldn't outsource doctors easily, but lawyers and architects don't always need face to face contact with the client, so these are prime candidates for outsourcing.
Executives will never, ever outsource themselves.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
And if they do that guess what'll happen to your precious Dollar..... And guess how much longer stuff is going to stay as cheap as it is right now.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Egad... Eckel is a smart guy, but he doesn't mention overseas outsourcing at all. It makes you wonder about his motives.
The average computer programmer in India costs $20 per hour in wages and benefits, compared to $65 per hour for an American with a comparable degree and experience
So you're telling me the average Indian programmer earns like $40k a year, and the average American programmer earns $120k a year? Bullshit! Not even with benefits!
I know a lot of programmers in the LA Valleys earning $30k-$50k and enjoying it. It's not the 'old money' but it's more than livable if you're single.
There is no freaking way the *average* programmer in the US earns $120k including benefits.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Not what I'm seeing. In the SysAdmin arena outsourcing is staying here, and teams are beiung trimmed in some cases. My feeling and hope is that once the reality of the failings of outsourcing sysadmin functions are realized (and revenues rise as the economy picks up) then the IT industry will likely turn around. This bust was not limited to IT. The economy was bound to react to inflated (and false) GDP and growth figures that were being released by the Clinton administration. In fairness, these government figures are often way off the mark and amendments are made later. However, their figures were inflated to over double the reality. Couple that with companies like Enron doing the same thing in the business sector, and you have all the ingredients for a bust. >
"We can be prosperous without obsessing about prosperity, that is, sacrificing our very lives and identities to some abstract definition of ``success.'' "
Ok, I'll believe it when this guy takes a pay cut to $4000 a year, or less, and doesn't complain.
Working in San Jose, I'll bet he ends up living in a nice refrigerator box, over there by the overpass.
No, we cannot be prosperous by outsourcing ourselves headlong into third world status.
There's always someone willing to work for less...where's the bottom? $4 an hour? $2? 50 cents?
We may be able to rationalize our poverty by clinging to religion, but we will be in poverty nonetheless; moreover we will know it acutely, because our parents, and their parents all had a much higher standard of living, and we were sold into poverty for their handful of silver.
The real question is: Are the companies that are moving jobs overseas profiting? Are their share prices rising? Are they paying better dividends? Or are they merely reducing technical costs so that the executives can receive higher salaries and bonuses?
A lot of us tech workers are also stockholders as well. In theory, our job cuts should lead to gains in our investments.
Normally I don't respond to these things, but really. Let us at least admit that there is a problem here if you are an American in almost ANY industry. IT is just the current victim of a larger trend.
As for credibility, I cite personal interaction with a representative sample of people making these decisions. Several of my customers who are Director and EVP level types at large companies that employ technology workers. The discussion happening here has happened with them over many dinners and lunches for the last couple of years.
All my customers are outsourcing or plan to outsource 90%+ of their IT workforce to foreign companies over the near term. Each is a Fortune 1000 company. There will always be those critical projects that require home grown talent, but they are few and far between.
The arguments that "americans are innovative" seems to imply that the majority of IT work has a need for innovation. Instead, the vast majority of IT work involves applying existing technologies to new or not so new challenges. Can you really argue otherwise?
I have strongly advised family members not to follow the IT career path I followed in my life for exactly this reason. To date the majority of wealth transfer involving IT was to Americans. In the future it will be to non-Americans. As there are more non-Americans receiving the wealth than there were Americans, the individual recepient will not receive an equal amount. (Incidentally, many believe that India is going to become a relatively expensive place to outsource to because, just like anywhere there is a booming industry, Indian companies are showing signs of wanting to raise prices.)
Free trade only works when participant plays by the same rulebook. In the world marketplace this is clearly not true. The rational decision for the American government, if they were really concerned for the common good of their populace, would be to move further towards protectionism in order to protect the common good of their own population. You can get a fairly decent summary of this idea from reading the end of Lee Iacocca's autobiography.
I realize this pre-supposes the greed of the American people who are unwilling to drop their standard of living in order that the standards of others will rise. We can agree that this is exactly how Americans feel, can't we? I would even state that that is just how anyone would feel if they were in the same shoes as Americans.
Most likely companies in the United States will slit their throats long term by engaging in globalization. There will be a primarily one direction flow of wealth out of the United States to other countries. The standard of living will drop in the United States and rise in other parts of the world. The United States will give away its position as an economic superpower before the EU and China even have a chance to try and take it away. Ironically the executives outsourcing American jobs today will see the opportunities for their children dry up.
I am just jotting this down quickly (busy at the moment) but I think that IT is just feeling an overall trend that continues to work itself throughout the entire American economy. When it is over it will be a different world. America will be alot poorer, and countless other countries will be a bit richer.
- AC
p.s.: This does come from a scarcity mentality, which is a short term view of things. Over generations I think this situation will be corrected as technological innovation continues to raise the standards of living for the world as a whole. But unlike the decline the recovery will happen after I, and many of you, are dead.
- Potentially lower costs
- Multiculturality yields strength
the cons:- Loss of control
- Loss of confidentiality
The lure for lower costs will definitely swing companies towards offshoring plenty of work. The loss of control and confidentiality may not be apparent at the beginning but eventually they will cause a swing back. Offshore companies will do their best in the beginning (or otherwise thay won't attract any more business) but at some point they will want to cash in their initial investment (you can go those extra miles at the beginning but not keep the extra effort forever, US or foreign this is the same everywhere), this is just one example of a loss of control. Confidentiality problems will arise, we are seeing this in other manufacturing already. GM was recently upset when Cherry, a Chinese car manufacturer, apparently copied GM's new design and released it before GM did. Guess what, if the piece designs were leaked out, there is much they could do in the US but not much they can do in China. This will cause a swing back but most probably it will not go back to the "old order". Hopefully, the habit of not having the programmers in-house should enable more telecommuting (considering the housing/rent prices in "hi-tech" areas, accepting a lower salary may not be too bad if you can move to a place where houses/rent are half price)I don't believe regulation will be effective but US (federal and States) governments should be very careful about confidentiality and appropriate use of tax money. Reports on DoD work eventually being outsourced to China are not very reassuring for US National Security. Paying for extra expen$ive toilet seats but being stingy on the software is not a good idea. The tax issues are more complex. Usually a portion of what the government pays out comes back in the form of taxes. For example, when the government buys my company's product, my company pays me, I pay taxes on my salary and the government gets it back. If instead the government gets a cheaper product because of lower offshore costs but I am unemployed, the government is receiving less taxes and maybe paying unemployment benefits, therefore increasing the total cost. From a government perspective, these costs should be considered when purchasing products, contracting work or giving tax breaks to companies that offshore a portion of their work.
In summary, I don't believe trade restrictions are a solution but I do oppose my tax $$$ being spent on subsidizing offshored work.
In other words, once this happens, we'll finally legalize pot and all get together and smoke up every day at 4:20. Nice! That's what, 60 years away? maybe less?
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
....numbnuts
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Labor unions won't help you. The fundamental problem is that the corporations can move their operations easily, but the workers can't easily move themselves. This creates an imbalance of negotiating power that heavily favors the corporation.
Ok, that went by miles above my head :-) OTOH, I know nothing about the KDE naming scheme...
Earlier, in response to this post, I posted:
And YOU can help export our jobs by writing GPLed code! Then, you can try and compete to offer complementary services with $1/hr non-first-world programmers!
Hmmm.... I guess wrong thinking can be at least erased, if not punished.
Translation: "Are there any condoms in it?"
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
A professional chef at a fancy restaurant can make a lot of money. The guy flipping burgers at McDonald's makes minimum wage. They're both cooking, so what's the difference? The chef's job requires a level of skill that not very many people have, whereas almost anyone can flip burgers. You can't just lump them both into a job category called "cooks" and pretend they're doing the same thing. Similarly, the most skilled programmers will continue to make a lot of money while the people writing html code see their jobs go to high school students or overseas.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
Rich people know why.
Poor people know how.
The Rich people (those at the top of companies) don't care how it gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible.
or are Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas correct
Dave Thomas??? I thought he was dead...
eMelody Web Directory add your site today!
You're right on about the " long, somewhat painful ride."
But I'm afraid your too optimistic thinking that "Americans will search inward for values and ways of life that don't depend on maintaining material hegemony".
Americans as a whole have never been good at self-examination and taking the long view. I think it just as likely that we will turn to the one thing in which we are still the undisputed heavyweight champions.
Our military!
Hopefully I'm wrong.
The devolution of larger companies into smaller companies is a pretty obvious consequence of hiring more programmers at lower wages to solve problems that are analytic. You really do end up with worse architectures by hiring more architects at lower wages -- not better. So the huge edifices built on such erroneous philosophy will collapse -- the sooner the better.
Seastead this.
If you have been in IT long enough to remember the 1980's, then maybe you can see this as a continuation of the trend that started in the 80's and was interupted by the dot-com explosion.
Japanese manufacturing labor has costed more
than American manufacturing labor for 30 years.
yes, we say the same thing.
meritocracy prevails.
globalization prevails.
and that is why geopolitics is a stupid notion to appeal to over the issue of declining salaries in IT in the west, especially when talking about a type of job that utilizes the borderless internet.
we could really digress and talk about how much of a skill is trained, versus it being innate. it differs by job, and innate versus trained skills are certainly not mutually exclusive anyways.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Reality for outsourcing IT is a monster that will grow out of control. It is true that outsourcing has become a trend in the US. Companies are beginning to outsource Accounting, Human Resources, and etc to other companies and those companies will eventually search lower wage areas (i.e. India). Outsourcing will become like the snake eating it's own tail. Less jobs means less and only option for the US is to adapt to global economy. One solution is to always introduce new technologies that are not being developed in other countries. That means more IT jobs. Question is, how do we do this before it's too late?
....by the principals of Code Simply
eat shiat and bark at the moon
"...the genius of American enterprise is its leaders' knack for envisioning the next big thing -- and workers' ability to redefine job roles and retrain. Americans pioneering developments in nanotechnology and biotech will have far more job security than simple programmers..." True. In the past the ability for anyone to teach themselves and go on to create their own, garage based, shoestring budget start up has captured that spirit. But nanotech and biotech aren't quite as available as common electronic parts now are they? (even in the 70s)--nor should they be!! So for the theory that we'll just keep up by adapting and retraining will only hold if our schools keep up... oh man, were SCREWED !!!
A solution to this problem would be a "temporary" tax of say 500% on all code developed over seas, and any administration done as well. This tax could then be lowered over time. Say 20-30 years.
I doubt if that could work. To avoid companies buying code from (at least formally) independent companies instead of having their own employees in countries like China or Russia programming it, this approach would mean that high import duties on code would have to be introduced.
I don't think that would be a viable solution.
First, it would be very hard to solve the problem of code smuggling. Nothing can be moved across boundaries as easily as electronic data.
Secondly, that would mean that everything having to do with IT would be significantly more expensive in those countries that have such protectionist policies, which would have huge economic consequences. I don't think governments and voters would be ready to accept that to save domestic IT jobs.
I think it is important that negative social consequences of globalisation are alleviated, but globalisation can't be stopped in such a way.
In the long run, the price gap will become smaller. As far as I know, salaries of IT specialists in India have risen sharply in recent years. Cheaper IT products could also lead to even wider application of IT, and that could mean that the demand for certain jobs that have to be close to the customers or their headquarters (many people want to be able to talk with someone face to face in their native language) could rise.
I wonder what history shows in such a time. Do you know? What
is the next failure mode? Because that failure mode looks like it
will occur on a worldwide scale.
The collapse of the Roman Empire or the Ming Empire are probably good examples. The increasing plunder drives people into feudal (same as communist) societies, which rely on loyalty and status rather than money as the basis for exchange of goods and services. Most of the population starves to death due to the great inefficiency of the system. Those at the top of the collapsing government involve themselves in intrigue, as they desperately try to stay on top, as a matter of survival. Increasing turnover at the top sucks up all the resources of the government, leaving anarchy, in which new powers arise.
Eventually the old government dissolves because no one wants a powerless position that guarantees death by intrigue of the person who holds it. In the meantime wars rage among the new powers, as they sort out their relationships. Eventually, those powers which stay at peace for longer periods of time grow larger capitalist economies than their neighbors, and thus gain more power than their neighbors.
I rather expect it will be good and bad, but meanwhile it will pay to be very alert. It actually will not pay to fight for power. Isn't there a Chinese martial art that involves going limp? Something like that might be useful to learn for our human interactions: let the waves wash over, and be as charitable and just as you can, meanwhile.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
he will be screaming like a bitch for outsourcing and h2b protection....and RIGHTLY so! We pay our politicians damn well to look after US, and not the citizens of some other country. Whatever they CAN do for US, they had better damn well do it. And if they don't....try their asses for treason.
BTW...slashdot has been ignoring this story for months, no doubt because they would rather not offend possible Indian/chinese readers. Well, they are selling us out, just like our politicians. You American programmers had better get your acts together and find a forum (and politicians) who will support YOU.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Let's open up H1-B to teachers, doctors, lawyers, policmen, firemen and managers, too.
One Indian programmer told me that he was sent to Thailand to write a banking system for Oracle or someone. They didn't have anyone who could speak Thai, so no one understood the business. You can imagine the resulting mess. Similar sort of mess the americans' find themselves in Iraq, not understanding the culture or lanquage.
The two Indian outsourcing firms doing a review of my company's tech needs for impending move to offshore have readily acknowledged that they can compete only because the Indian government is heavily subsidizing their operations. How long does that last?
Factor that into your discussion regarding whether this is a blip or a paradigm shift.
- Sig this!
This is very likely, and I think we've already seen the beginning of that with the Iraq war. Throughout history, many wars have occurred for economic reasons; the most notable is WWII. Germany was in terrible economic condition, and was kept that way by the victors of WWI in order to punish Germany. So what happened? They got pissed off, built a huge military and killed millions of people.
The difference now is that the causes of our economic condition are not external as they were with Germany. We're losing all our employment due to outsourcing, and a generally poor economy, but the people who are prospering are also right here in the US: the people at the very top of the economic ladder, the corporate executives, major shareholders and investors, and the lawyers and politicians that do their dirty work.
If things do get really bad, people aren't just going to sit on their asses and feel sorry for themselves (well, they might... Americans have recently earned a reputation for laziness). If historical events are an indicator, people will become angry and direct that anger somewhere very violently. This will be either internal, or external. Internally, it would result in a revolution of some sort, either against the government if they're blamed for the whole mess, or against the rich and the corporations (who really are to blame IMO) if the government successfully transfers blame there even though they had been helping them all along. Externally would involve someone (remember Hitler?) taking control and transferring blame to a foreign nation, resulting in a war, occupation, taking of resources, etc. The problem here is we don't want to pick on the wrong country, because if they have nukes then we're in trouble (so are they, but still I'd rather not be in the one US city that gets bombed before we annihilate the other country).
Personally, these events have far too many players and too much inertia to be feasibly changed, especially by a bunch of angry slashdotters. So what's important, at least to me, is what to do to best weather this coming storm. This I'm not too sure about. Buying a remote property in Montana is seeming more attractive every day...
I think this is a new reality. Fortunately, I saw it coming before it was too late. I sold the house (that I really couldn't afford) and bought a small Townhouse instead. Paid it off quickly and began renting it out. Bought another small townhouse and did the same thing. Today, I have 3 rental properites that I own outright and I live in a Duplex that will soon be paid for. The next dwelling I buy will be a nice house like I *used* to have because now, I can really afford it.
;)
I still have the IT career as I'm a decent programmer and sys admin, but many of my friends do not. The difference between me and my firends is that I realized how quickly I could be out of work, they did not. I remeber talking to them about it and how they thought I was a nut. They think I'm a visionary now, but I'm just a realistic person who has a good grasp of reality and not a false preception of it.
We'll have to make do on less from now on, but we can make it if we get our minds in line with reality and act accordingly. Get rid of the big house, the expensive car, etc and start making what money you have *work* for you. It worked for me. There's nothing like the thought of sleeping at night while someone writes a check out to me for rent
This is one of the many contradictions of the western capitalist system.
...
Everyone claims that we should let 'market forces' take care of who produces item X and who can afford to buy item Y. The problem is that 'market forces' includes bribes, extreme political pressure and military intervention.
About a year ago, I decided to practise what I preach and tried to buy some clothes that were made in Australia. Anyone who has made a similar decision will know what I found: there are NO clothes made in Australia. There are plenty made in Chinese & Indonesian sweat shops. There is no consumer choice. If there were, those companies who offered it would discover what it meant to be bankrupt rather quickly, as people would avoid their higher prices like the plague. The point is that the so-called empowered consumers have NO choice in the matter - it is all decided by multi-national corporations, and rubber-stamped by corrupt politicians all around the world.
Back to the article
You think companies will employ programmers at a premium of 5 times what they can get elsewhere? Some will. Very few. Good old 'market forces' will send most people to sweat shop programmers. And do you think your government will step in and fight for the rights of foreign citizens and demand they get decent working conditions? I didn't think so. Probably it would be impossible anyway, as the foreign citizens' government is too busy paying off loans for weapons of mass destructions to the World Bank, or too busy trying to deal with the social problems caused by the IMF's 'recommendations' that the backbone of the country is privatised.
Thinking of responding with some mindless name-calling? I'll get you started. I'm a left-wing radical. I'm a stupid mindless hippie. I'm a fucking communist. Whatever. At least I've made some observations about why our world is so fucked up. Try to address these issues. That's the point here. To discuss the problem, not call each other names.
We'll take this nice and slow: LOTS of people have been submitting stories about this general topic for MONTHS. But /. has NOT been running them for POLITICAL reasons. Finally, I decided to change my sig to get the word out about how /. has been avoiding this story, and then they run the story. The fact the YOU submitted this PARTICULAR NEWS STORY has nothing to do with what I was talking about above. OK? Now I think your mom is calling you and wants to drive you to school. SO get along....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
But fair is fair. Allow me to buy those 4$ sneakers made by 9 year old Indonesians kids. Let me buy that authentic imitation Gucci wallet for $.50 made by some 80 year-old Laotian under gunpoint.
Fair is fair, right? American companies have no problem screaming about how they need to compete with all these cheaply made products, as they're gleefully outsourcing everything they can. Then the government and these same companies do everything they can to restrict what can be sold to us.
I'm starting to laugh when I hear people still saying "Buy from US companies!" If we're going global, go global all the way. Open up the floodgates, baby. If I'm going to have to downgrade my entire lift because some guy is willing to do it for $3 an hour, fine. But give me the option to buy whatever the hell I want, from wherever I want.
I think the thing to go into now is import/export. Specifically, import, as there is nothing left to export (except jobs.). I'll be damned if I buy a razor now from an "American" company that just outsourced my job to India. I think as the government and US companies show how disloyal they are to us, they'll find that the tables can turn. No more bailing how failing companies (Airlines anyone?) who fail to compete because of their incredible bloat, and try to find inane things to blame their shortcomings on (RIAA anyone?)
Payback is hell.
Reality, however, is different. I work for a large software house with its 2,000-strong technical workforce in India. Several portions of its flagship products are developed here.
Why do you Americans keep trying to convince yourselves that the tech jobs will somehow stay back there? Either we non-Americans can't speak/write English, or we're incompetent, or we don't have good IP laws, or <insert favourite consolation>
I've worked with enough Indians to know this. Even they admit that their english is better than their Hindi or whatever other language they speak.
Incidentally, this is also why India will have the biggest advantage of that group of Asian and Eastern European countries in this regard. If the governments of China and other countries are really smart, they will make english instruction mandatory.
The taxation policy in the recent past has basically encouraged retained earnings. Those earnings are controlled by management. In many cases the money was either squandered or used to buy up company stock to boost its price (for management's benefit). Not a very efficient or ethical use of capital...
There is a direct relationship between wages and home prices in Silicon Valley - they each influenced the other into an upward spiral. Since you have to make so much more there just to pay rent that requires larger salaries to attract people to move there.
From what I hear home prices/Apartment rents in the Valley have not really gone down yet. Housing prices seem to be rather 'sticky' when it comes to declining.... Similar with wages, though many have accepted pay cuts in the last 2-3 years - yet their rents/mortgages have remained high.
But rents and land values must decline if the Valley is to remain competitive with Bangalore, India, for example. Of course there are other areas within the US which aren't as expensive...
In the long run, if Thomas and Hunt are correct (and I tend to agree with their thesis) Silicon Valley is in for a long decline which will eventually lead to lower (much lower) land values which may in turn sow the seeds for it's revival - but that is probably decades away.
"If you don't work in IT for the sheer love of it first and a paycheck second, your days are numbered"
Congratulations! You have passed the final test!
Move directly to your corner office where you will leave your clue in the trashcan, and the company barber will sculpt your remaining hair into two vigorous points.
Thank you for choosing the Titzware management aptitude assessment scheme (tm).
Titzware: "Advancing dolt's careers since this time last month"
T&K.
Political language
Maybe I'm seeing things too simply, but we started globalization by moving nearly all blue-collar jobs to countries where the labor was dirt cheap. Now we're starting that cycle with white-collar jobs, the professionals, the skilled. We are building a nation of people who will be either in management or fast food/retail. At least until we're poor enough for India to start outsourcing some of its programming to us.
Promoting the benefits to the shareholder is probably the best scam corporate America has devised. Just don't look too closely at who controls most of the shares.
Although you sound very trollish, let me point something. Without even taking into account History, your present problem is that the so-called "slackers" learned and are now trying to prosper. They learned to make shoes, they learned to make steel, they learned to develop software. And now they are offering to do such things for a fraction your salary (or mine). Look at it as a great global "income equalizer". In the end everybody except a lucky feel will be earning the same money, only the jobs will differ. The Indian software engineers, the Chinese steel workers and the Indonesian shoe-makers will all earn the same the Western 7-11 employee earns.
Silicon Valley (SV) died today after a multi-year decline.
SV's death was apparently due to it's addiction to astronomical land prices which in turn led to astronomical salaries.
Silicon Valley is survived by it's adopted stepchild, Bangalore, India.
"I modeled myself after SV, but I just hope I can learn from and avoid it's mistakes." Bangalore said in an interview today.
In my view, globalisation shows that internationalism is not an outdated slogan, but an urgent need. Does it make sense when labour unions support protectionist policies? I don't think so, globalisation can't be stopped that way. Instead, they should realise that they have common interests with workers in poorer countries. If in these countries, there is a strong workers' movement there, salaries will rise more quickly, and therefore also more jobs can be kept in the rich countries. There is a struggle, indeed, but if workers in different countries don't realise that they're on the same side, they will lose. Labour unions in Western Europe and Northern America should collaborate more closely with labour unions in South Korea and Russia and support labour unions in China, where independent workers' organisations are suppressed by the regime (there is wild 19th century capitalism and a lot of state-capitalism in a communist disguise).
It seems to me that doing this whole outsourcing bit is really solving the wrong problem.
Technology is not in and of itself useful. I mean, yes, your compiler writers are useful, and the software itself provides some service, but the net worth of IT is what it can do for a person, company, etc.
The value in the internet is not selling servers, but implementing an e-commerce site that allows people to buy plane tickets more easily.
The value in the office is not 10 boxes of Office, three quarters of the features of which never get used, but in setting up an office system in which documents can be edited, tracked, archived and shared.
IT kind of strayed from its initial premise and attempted to model itself after other, box moving enterprises. But code isn't like raw oats or widgets. The endgame of it is, how much time or money will the use of it save me?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Innovation? Certainly a few thinkers will have jobs (wherever they are), but the implementation of an innovation should be done externally.
What characteristics are unique? Well, I can think of only a few:
I really can't see any justification for more than 10,000 decision makers who have a position because of personal connections and capital. For the rest of us, domestic service is pretty much the only thing that can't be done cheaper elsewhere.
On the bright side, things will likely get cheaper here!
Since when are H1Bs cheaper?
I recall reading somewhere that companies were starting to rely on India for jobs such as stock analysts etc, why pay $250k when someone with just as good education and skills takes in 10-12k? So yeah, it's not just high-tech by any means.
when that guys giving it away for free?
, 00 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,59126
I'm hanging up my programming boots and starting an MBA in September. Gotta keep running just to stand still. And to mix one's metaphors, too.
If the CEO's can figure out how to give themselves all sorts of stock options and pay raises, while the companies lose money (Enrons Worldcoms), with the stockholders saying nary a whit, they'll figure out how to outsource everything except their chair. But then the overseas companies won't need them as they gain higher level experience - architecture management and the like which companies like infosys and tata already surely have.
Why do you Americans keep trying to convince yourselves that the tech jobs will somehow stay back there? Either we non-Americans can't speak/write English, or we're incompetent, or we don't have good IP laws, or
Isn't this the question that answers itself? Why, you ask? Because we don't like the alternatives. People are worried about whether they're going to make enough money to get by. And yes, while some of this currently is "Oh no, I can't get that BMW I've always wanted now." and deserves little sympathy, more and more its starting to be a bit more about the fundamentals. There are people out there trying to find work in the market with 4 kids and having to get help from neighbors and (in the specific example I'm thinking of here, which isn't me, BTW) fellow church members. I don't think we're about to go hyper-critical here, but times are tough for some people right now, and that makes them edgy, and grasp for any hope/excuse (however unfair or just plain silly) they can see.
Feel free to not care. Its not your problem after all (and you probably have worse stories to tell about how bad things can get over there), but do recognize the fear that is there.
Horsepucky. For every selfmade success, someone to pull himself/family from absolute poverty with a stellar idea, i can show you 10,000 trust-fund successes.
Rich sons and Rich daughters, buy their way into ivy-league schools and cheat their way through to a moron degree. Given jobs by their golf-club friends.
Their biggest skill? condescension and the confidence that comes with never having cleaned a fucking toilet in their lives.
I work in the Auto Industry (big three), our Plant Manager (a small, old plant) makes somewhere near US$500,000 PA. Her major talent? A former VP father, and the ability to parrot the latest useless goddamn management initiative.
She hasnt a *CLUE* about what the hell is going on, she gets lied to by a group of old-timers who REALLY run the show, and play lip-service to her bullcrap to keep her at arms-distance. Every 2years they send another one of these morons from Michigan to sit in a the parade of previous morons... The only thing they know is how to take meetings and talk about "process improvments to deliver an increase in our internal-customer's usability metric."
This cruft, AT THE TOP is running the West into the ground, fat and stupid, these morons propagandize to the public to BUY BUY BUY BUY (and the sheeple happily follow) without any concern for long-term planning, the planet and the ability of my great-great-grandchildren to eat... Im not going to buy a $100,000 yacht on the backs of my neighbours kids -- but this idiot is in charge of 1000 people in my building would do it happily, giggling all the way to the bank.
I have two thoughts about this problem, and I'm not sure which I like better:
1) It's our own damn fault for creating bloated IT departments, failing to manage budgets efficently, and for making everything more complicated than it needs to be.
2) We need to keep the jobs here, and similar to what would happen if a company started producing anything else overseas, there would be a tarrif on that good as it entered the country. Let's start taxing offshore IT development as it's brought into the country (sure, you would have to rely on the honor system, but companies would pay it to avoid being audited).
I'm not sure which I really belive.
1) IT industry fights back with mangement app on bootable floppy
- expert system (includes common sense module)
- additional floppies include:
- favor Sales
- favor Marketing
- favor Operations
- given Yes/No questions, answers Yes/No/Get out
- statistical probablity proven 80% correct answers
- extremely modest hardware requirements (x86)
- beta available on Palm OS & Pocket PC
- ROI is off the charts...
2) some management consulting firm decides to offer a service to outsource management...
some companies jump on the bandwagon...
some successes...some failures...
spin the failures (think ERP implementations...)especially the $$$ saved/wasted...
eventually the process of outsourcing management becomes fairly straight forward & successful...just like any other activity...
up to the point where anybody from a foreign country can learn how to do it...
3) groupware matures, open source projects with little management layer are analyzed, the whole nature of a company is revolutionized...
mod parent up
"...and a job description in English (at a building company) contained the phrase assistence to the chief executive during erections (they had the erection of buildings in mind)"
I believe those are called interns?
The Sky is Falling Down!
Quote:
"
you are a quaint, provincial moron
you live on the planet earth, not in your stupid little ethnic enclave called USA
you are a human being, not an american
give up your stupid nationalistic ethnocentrism
american politicians are about as powerless to fight this as the rising and setting of the sun
it's called globalization, there's no vested interested behind it, it's merely inevitable change at work
get used to it, there's no fighting it
"
Give me your wallet. it belongs to the world, and not to you, you silly fool. No use fighting....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Why is that? Why are so many /.ers experiencing the current softness in terms of
foreign competition? Is this territoriality in action?
To identify the cause as having been the meltdown would be to point the finger of blame at ourselves, to admit to unchecked greed, of dreams of participating in one good IPO and spending the rest of our lives skipping rocks across some tropical bay.
What we have now is not so much a downturn as a return to normality, exacerbated by deep, profound distrust of anyone outside our tribe. From this statement I can argue that what is needed is better understanding between world cultures, before we Americans invade every country we can't control. Bridge building. What we need is bridge building.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
you
just
don't
get
it
when people go shopping, they tend to seek the highest quality for the lowest price they can get
what in your mind suggests that people shouldn't do that?and what in your mind thinks that anyone can, or should, fight globalization?
i'm not a communist you fool, i am merely full of a lot more common sense than you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
IP effectivly doesn't exist in other, thrid world countries. Some of these countries have been honest about this and stated it as National Policy(tm). How many people have been caught exporting IP back to China to become "China's Cisco"? More than I can count on one hand, that's for sure.... and that's how many were caught.
Exporting bullshit COBAL and other legacy coding tasks is actually doing the Developed world's IT staff a favor. In fact, I would argue that exporting helpdesks to India is the next best thing since sliced bread. The tech revolution should not support the lower sediments of some labor pyramid. It's about setting the thinking members of that lower sediment free... the remainder can stay there and out of the tech sector (hey, somebody has to build my house).
Somebody has to plug the wire/fiber into the socket. I don't care how good IPv6 autoconfiguration gets, there are some tasks that can not and should not be exported (security falls into the "should not" category).
Finally: Ethics, visas, electrons and passports. They have absolutely nothing to do with one another and one does not imply the other. Do you really want some hungry mouth who has Saudi and Russian "Friends"(tm) and is "just happy to have a job"(R) type writing your electronic wire transfer database code in a country where the power routienly goes out at 8pm for a half hour? BTW, he got the job because his H1B visa expired and he had finished up Grad. School without the funds or intellectual means to continue on to get his PhD and couldn't find a compnay where he would fit into the corporate culture... and he's only slightly pissed about this.
Every tool has it's use... exploiting the world's cheap intellectual labor to pound large square pegs into small round holes isn't one of them.
Yeesh I hope not. Before I made $30,000 and lived with my parents. making 15k and uh, living in my car, is not something I'd look forward to.
Just to let you all know, I was a contract programmer. Now I am an IT recruiter. I get contract openings all the time. The problem is....the clients specify L1's only...NO Americans. Not even H1b's. Why? Besides being cheaper, the there is no Social Security tax, no unemployment tax, no medicare to pay...all in all, there's just less gov't reporting and less paperwork. And if they lose the job, they go back to India. No hassle at all.
Because all of our jobs are either going to illegal immagrants, or being moved overseas.
Of course, these asses don't realise that
the United States is a huge part of the world
market, and if more and more Americans can't buy
their crap, then how are they going to make enough money to stay afloat?
OK, I want this post modded up, so here goes:
Lazy prima donna Americans make 6 figures a year when a brain-damaged freakin' orangatang(tm) could do it for 2 plums and a banana(tm). You geeks aren't worthy to shine my shoes and your glory days are over.
Get used to it slacker-boy, you suck and your little dog, too(tm). Learn a useful skill like CEO or plumber and prepare to have the Indians and Chinese eat your lunch anyway. You can't avoid it and the headlights are getting closer and YOU WILL DROWN IN YOUR OWN HEDONISM I HATE AMERICA AND I'LL PISS ON YOUR GRAVE AND <dances little gleeful America bashing dance, falls on floor with foam around the lips>
Ah, the burden of being a natural born leader. I guess the rest of us Mud races don't know what troubles the responsibility of leading the world can create...
The execs that 'put it on the line' by going off-shore will always claim sucess. Even if the product failed. Even if they spent 3x the money and 4x the time. I have never seen quality from off-shore projects. They invariably suck. em make work. But inovation will not happen.
Bottom line is the bottom line. American Greed by the few with the death of us all.....
The problem with trying to learn English is the language structure - Or lack thereof. I'm not an English student, so I don't know all the proper terms, but I do know that English is a prick of a language to learn because of its unstructured nature.
When you're learning by rote from a teacher who barely speaks the language themselves, of course you're going to have difficulty. There's a reason why native English speakers are in huge demand in Asia as teachers of the English language.
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
You know where to find me...
I'm sorry, I just can't agree with the folks who argue that Indian software engineers with doctorate degrees making minimum wage working on outdated equipment in code sweatshops will somehow put me out of a job. I'll do it by fiddling with my 401k, IM-ing, kazooming, and playing Civ-III all day long.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Does anyone see this becoming the justification for war on a world scale?
What happens when enough people are unemployed, when every news station has adopted FoxNews jingoism, when US pride rests solely on its military might?
Is it reasonable to expect that our standard of living will remain constant as India and China raise theirs by taking "our" jobs? Where and when does everything break?
Without global standards, for instance a global minimum wage, the banks who run the IMF etc will always be able to seek the lowest possible wage levels. Without a global labor movement, the workers are at the mercy of management. IWW, anyone?
As long as local production is destabilized, individual communities will be at the mercy of the global supply networks.
[flamebait] But if you guys think my CD should be free, why shouldn't your c code be free?[/flamebait]
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Fractional Reserve Banking as Economic Parasitism: A Scientific, Mathematical & Historical Expose, Critique, and Manifesto
in Macroeconomics from Economics Working Paper Archive at WUSTL
Vladimir Z. Nuri
Abstract: This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be something like a new ``F=ma'' rule of the emerging econophysics field. Some implications of the equation are outlined, derived, and proved. The phenomena of counterfeiting, inflation and deflation are analyzed for interrelations. Analogies of the economy to an ecosystem or energy system are advanced. The fundamental legitimacy of ``expansion of the money supply'' in particular is re-examined and challenged. From the hypotheses a major (admittedly radical) conclusion is that the modern international ``fractional reserve banking system'' is actually equivalent to ``legalized economic parasitism by private bankers.'' This is the case because, contrary to conventional wisdom, the proceeds of inflation are not actually spendable by the state. Also possible are forms of ``economic warfare'' based on the principles. Alternative systems are proposed to remediate this catastrophic flaw.
As the jobs of educated, middle class people go, the unemployment rate will skyrocket. What you describe as an imbalance has nothing to do with these people, or people with low-paying jobs. It has everything to do with the WEALTHY. The 1% who own 99% of the wealth. These peoples' jobs are not getting shipped overseas, and even if they were, you can make plenty of money if you ALREADY HAVE plenty of money. So we will still maintain 99% of our wealth, but it will just be less evenly distributed. As long as the wealthy are in this country (and why would they leave?), it keeps the cost of living high for the rest of us. This combined with the fact that the rich executives and stockholders are making money from the exporting of jobs, while the average Joe is losing his job. We simply cannot compete with the lower salaries the rest of the world are willing to accept because they do not have to compete with as many wealthy citizens for a place to live, etc.
Although I don't know if there are any feasible ways of isolation that don't hurt certain countries, I do think that it is better for every country to have a plentiful suppply of jobs than for every person to have a dirt cheap VCR. What good does a cheap VCR do my if I don't have a job? Maybe this exporting of jobs is good for third world countries now, but in the long run, it makes more sense to have local economies that can supply products for themselves, and by themselvs.
I know this is gonna come off as trolling.. but seriously, who cares? Whatever my oppinion might be isn't going to create new jobs.
Perhapse we've found the real reason for the missile defence program? Gotta stop all those chinese nukes.
Awsome name. 4:20 forever!
"The end result will be a decreased standard of living for all but the richest Americans because once you start outsourcing whitecollar work to other countries, you lower the wage-base for the majority of Americans. This creates a nice big insurmountable gap between rich and poor, and great dichotomies of wealth are the stuff of revolutions."
This is why I had a rubber stamp made up that says: "Can I afford your product?"[1] All that junk mail gets sent back, marked accordingly. Surveys, anything related to marketing. Do you think they will get the message?
[1] Feel free to modify this.
"My job went overseas. Can I afford your product?"
"My job went, the CEO stayed. Can I afford your product?"
"The economy is down. Can I afford your product?"
"Former Worldcom employee. Can I afford your product?"
"I voted for Gray Davis. Can I afford your product?"
"I voted for Bush. What the hell was I thinking? I know I can't afford what your selling."
RANT
/RANT
Here's a basic formula for local economic disaster that we've been following for quite some time:
1. Market product.
2. Product sells... and there is much rejoicing.
3. Competitor makes a similar product and is sells at a lower cost. We lose market share(but not that much in the way of profit) and shareholders demand that action be taken.
4. Price wars ensue... production is moved to overseas location with cheap child labor and no environmental protection, overtime, union, or safety laws.(etc, etc, insert favorite money-shaving details here)
5. Market share is regained(profits still down) and shareholders are happy.
This seems all well and good at first. What's happening, though, is repeated across all industries and eventually the economy experiences more and more entropy. The products are cheaper, but there are fewer people employed at jobs above the poverty line which enable them to buy the products to begin with. The fewer people who can buy products, the more cost cuts need to be made in US companies to keep losses at bay. The first cut is usually jobs, of course. You don't have to be a mathematician to see where this viscious circle is going.
Unfortunately, we 'consumers' are somewhat to blame for the rampant increase of outsourced labor in this country. If we can get a product a few bucks cheaper, we jump at the opportunity. Cheaper is better, right. Hell, if I can get two pairs of BrandX jeans for the price of a pair made in the country(incidentally, the only brand I've seen is Texas Jeans http://texasjeans.com) then I've gotten myself quite a deal, right?
Just by cheaping out by a few bucks here and there on practically everything we buy, we've contributed massively to the continuing imbalance of:
1. Sending more money out of the border than is coming back.
2. Giving a disproportionate amount of money to companies who aren't reinvesting in the local economy.
3. Allowing continued trade with countries with whom we otherwise have grievances.
Don't get me wrong. I love chinese culture. China lays claim to some of the most fascinating cultural history I've ever read about. China's government, on the other hand, is easily as detestable as that of the former Iraqi 'regime.' A year ago, you didn't see anyone jumping up and down about the idea of outsourcing production to Iraq, right? You can bet your last dollar, though, that if Iraq were a major source of cheap labor, with the infrastructure to support it, we'd have plenty of interested companies getting ready to set up shop in the desert.
This stuff never even crossed my mind a few years ago. Then I went to WalMart to buy a blender. Guess what? I couldn't find one made in the US.(I don't even remember why It ocurred to me to check.) You know what? I couldn't even find a single blender at WalMart NOT made in China. The same thing for quite a few other products. I've given a great deal of thought to the economy, and I figure it might even help if more people tried to support their local economy. Buy local. If you can't, at least buy in the country. If you can't find something made in the country, try getting something made in a country you can deal with philosophically. I'm wearing DocMarten's. I don't care if they're cool or not, they were made in the UK. My other options at the time were made in China(all of them.) Oddly enough, there wasn't a huge price difference. About 5 bucks as I recall. So, No cheaper is not better. I try to buy local/domestic as often as I can. Maybe if more people did the same, we wouldn't have this sort of worry.
Ok, I'm done making myself sound like a Pro-Union zealot(no I'm not.) I'd say I'm sorry for sounding like an ethnocentric Flag-waving elitist. But, you know, that's where I live and all. If I'm going to be enthusiastic about someone's economy, it's damn well going to be mine.
I guess the USA must be doing something right then...
There are a few problems in getting half the salary: 1. Medical care is ridiculously expensive and one of the worst in the civilized countries. Insurance, lawsuits, lawyers drives it high enough. The rest of the world has universal medical insurance. 2. Housing in the last years grew 100% in price 3. Due to stupid car safety regulations we cannot drive cheap, light 4-cylinders without airbags, automatic transmissions, etc. how it's done in Europe 4. Public transportation is rudimentary and exists only in large cities 5. Labor (and services) is expensive because cost of living 6. A lot of money is wasted by bad management and people. Also, why should I have six pairs of sneakers, anyway? So, Americans are in situation of inequity with the rest of the world. Thus it either should be corrected here or we need some protection from the outsourcing, say, tariffs for products or services.
The Fed will always be able to print more money to avoid true deflation, but we'll still see relative deflation. For example, prices of things like food and energy will rise to keep pace with the increasing money supply, while salaries stay the same and so are effectively reduced.
by changing our education system to try to produce millions of cookie cutter programmers who aren't capable of producing visionary changes. Any country can copy a mass production tech school style education system and get the same results in. Feed humans in, get programmers out. What we've given up by producing so many programmers is the ability to innovate that made us great. Thus, we will no longer be great after a couple of decades of riding on our past.
This will backfire in the long run: Jobs move overseas, workers in america lose their jobs, therefore have no money to purchase products and services from abroad. Foreign economy is not big enough to absorb all these goods and services, so what now? What will this global economy leads to?
Perhapse we've found the real reason for the missile defence program? Gotta stop all those chinese nukes.
Actually that is the REAL reason USA is building a missile shield. No, I'm not joking. The whole notion that the missile is for terrorist states is the most stupidest thing ever--or a convenient excuse. There is NO WAY a terrorist state will launch nukes. Why do you think they are called terrorist states? Because they use terrorist means. And guess what? A missile shield is not going to stop a smuggled in nuke.
US missile shield is primarily to combat China (and to a lesser extent Russia and others). Once China ramps up its nukes, USA will have to back down on many issues (including Taiwan). With a shield, USA will attempt to stand still.
KoalaBear33
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
Or sue them. Welcome to America, land of the free and the brave?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I might be biased by I think the most likely scenario will be the collapse of capitalism. I can't see how capitalism will survive a scenario where hordes of people are unemployed and poor.
There are two (easy) ways for capitalism to collapse. One cause will be debt. And the other is the one we are talking about, which will basically be a class war. The elites will not matter much after the revolution--just like how the monarchs and the aristocrats didn't matter much after the previous revolutions.
KoalaBear33, waiting for the day capitalism collapses
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
... I can only hope it is a New World Order.
/., is that I'm not welcome. I must be a job theif, since being highly skilled has nothing to do with it.
I'm getting really tired of hearing this crap about foreigners taking all the jobs from the US. I'm an Australian electronic engineer and I have considered moving to the US from time to time. But the attidude that I'm sensing, at least here on
If I'm not welcome there, but I'm still skilled enough to do the job, then I'll just stay here and do my best to move the job here as well. I may not succeed, since people in India are highly skilled too and a lot cheaper, but then it's the same logic again. The job goes where it's most efficiently performed. I could move to India to do the job and probably have a lot of fun doing it too. I wouldn't get rich quick though but I don't care. Plus I might be welcome there as my training could be of benefit to the locals, I have no problem teaching what I know, just as I have no problem opening up my source code. It costs less to live somewhere, so the jobs get done there. Eventually the countries with high standards of living get brought down by globalisation, while the poor countries get brought up. It's only fair really. The trick is to find new jobs that can't be done in poor countries, then the rich countries can stay rich while the poor countries come up. Such jobs tend to be high-tech intellectual jobs, because we have the advantage of a decent education system. But don't just sit back or the poor countries will once again out-compete us. We need newer and better high-tech jobs.
The reality of globalisation is that efficiency tends to increase. Corruption and corporate profiteering does too but I'll leave that alone. If it is more efficient to do something overseas, then thats what happens. Take the Australian sugar cane industry on the northeast coast. The land isn't particularly well suited to the growing of sugarcane, and the runoff from the farms that makes its way into the Great Barrier Reef is very much responsible for the fact that we won't have any living reef in that region in even one decade from now. But that industry is what sustains whole communities. The most efficient solution is to let people in poor countries grow lots of sugarcane, since the price collapsed and it's no longer economically viable for us to do it and maintain the standard of living that we have come to expect. But that would upset a lot of people whose communities would become surplus population. They have the option to do something that is economically viable, like become engineers and other intellectual professionals and tradespeople, but they don't want to adapt to the changing times. Instead they would rather all go poor trying to keep on cane farming. In the end they will all lose their farms since the price isn't coming back up. Plus we as a nation lose the Great Barrier Reef which would have to be worth more to the economy in tourism than cane farming. So the reality is that as a matter of efficiency we should stop cane farming, and find something else for those farmers to do. It's not like they really have a choice anyway, it's coming one way or the other. A forward-thinking government would make sure there are opportunities for these people, so their communities don't have to totally collapse. But our retarded government simply ignores problems like these. It's easier to close off a market than to accept that it's no longer viable to compete anyway.
People are welcome to complain as much as they want. They want to stay put and not move around, they want to keep their communities going long after the usefulness is gone. But as an engineer I can expect to move around every few years, country to country, in search of new opportunities. This is one of the key differences between the older jobs and the newer ones. In the past travel overseas was expensive and time-consuming. Now it's becoming more and more necessary. Anyone may find that their profession is no longer needed in their ho
Folks,
....
Problems, find solutions, make it happen
It is time to play the tune, or pay the piper.
There are new and innovative economic theories waiting to be tried, but they will upset the BoP for the Capitalist Republic models. Do we evolve and better ourselves by meeting a challenge or play spectators and lose the future for US and humanity.
Open your minds, think, feel, and do, but never let fear dictate your decisions. Plurality and Peace provide success for humanity. War at times is required for survival of the fittest most plural societies.
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Java and the proliferation of thousands of free utility libraries has cheapened programming. It's true. Anyone can program in Java now. It's as easy as HTML. These novice Java programmers might not get stellar results, the programs they make may look odd and run slowly - but in general the code they write runs well enough to get the business task done. I wonder if everyone would have jumped on the Java bandwagon in 1996 had they known it would ultimately contribute to them losing their job or lowering everyone's compensation. And considering Sun has yet to make a nickel on Java, perhaps they regret its introduction as well. Java succeeded in its mission - to lower the barrier to programming and make writing business application cheaper for companies. I guess we all should be very happy.
> What it all comes down to are asshats who lie on their resumes and claim false credentials that make it difficult for hiring companies to quickly and accurately weed through the mountains of resumes.
No, what it comes down to is asshats who think a msce means anything, and expect to see it on a resume. Try reading what's sent instead of just picking at what pops out of your buzz-word filters (TM).
You assume developed nation's (like the US) compete to win the coveted title of "world's low cost supplier". I take a different view.
Our past and future wealth is built on speed and reliability. Our economy generates, vets and brings to market products and services with unparalleled speed. Our currency and debt instruments are the benchmark stores of wealth in the world. We are the vanguard economy whose creative/innovative output is commoditized, refined and salvaged as scrap by the developing nations.
Our responsibility - your personal responsibility - is to keep innovating and creating. To swing the bat, because you live in a country where you can. It your innovation, and that of Bill Gates, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin and so many less known that will keep us at the lead.
Bracing for sarcasm from all those too afraid to create and innovate.
An argument posed in the article said Americans need to be retrained for the next "big thing" like biotech and nanotech...two industries that HAVE NO JOBS other than R&D because they are too new...what are we supposed to do untill colleges have biotech and nanotech courses available...flip burgers? Give me a break! It's real simple...if I don't find a job in the field soon I'll leave...keep it as a hobby...and say screw upper management....for Christ 's sake at least as an Auto mechanic I'll get paid a living wage and have better job security.
our history is riddled with examples of foriegn compitition or domestic based companies finding and using cheaper off-shore labor to compete in our marketplace. The same highly skilled jobs we have were the auto workers of yeterday and so on. Your steadfast belief that our destiny is a continual downward slide is very much off.
The true reason for americas sustained higher standard of living is innovation and cutting edge development... our greatest wealth is in our schools and research facilities. Americans continualy excell at developing new and inovative technologies... and at succesfully implementing them and selling them. Sure there have been many OTHER technologies that may have been "better", but you will find even the majority of those were american based.... america is a competitive differential engine... meaning our society and culture fuel continual compitition and improvements which eliminate older technologies or infirior solutions (or infirior marketing).
what does this mean for us? It means that programming and IT in general are steadily becoming non-innovative vs. the world population. No longer are technical skills completely foreign to the rest of the world... there-for dimminishing their value. However the newest of technologies still remain amongst us, and those with the proficiency to create, maintain, and otherwise operate them will be initialy very well paid. There is a reason americans have an average of 7 careers.... it's because this is the land where old and un-profitable die quick and horrid deaths.... I can't profess to know where the newest of the new technologies are going... but i can say to a great degree of confidence that they will start here.
Another great problem with cheap labor is it's inherent lack of competitive quality. The rewards for doing work at 8$/hour in an environment where your skills aren't regarded as cutting edge are much less... thus those working them become more like the blue collar union workers in attitude.... they work the job cause it pays well but not much more. This has a secondary effect in that the products that result havn't the quality and more often than not the ground-breaking advatages often imbued in more competitive markets.
We are just watching the wheat seperate from the chaff.... and when it all settles you will still find the economicly driving (meaning leading) forces comming from the same place. Although our standard of living sucks (in that it's too high).... it's that exact standard of living that fuels our very vital market.
There was a time where we were loosing jobs to japan left and right.... and as the japanese SOL rose we lost less and less to them... and they began to loose out to china and singapore. Even now india is begging to become concerened about it's own increasing valuation of cheaper labor being pushed off from them to bangladesh.
The only thing that pays is to stay on the cutting edge.... to have the newest, latest, greatest shit that no-one else can produce yet... that's where the money is at.... that's where the margins are at. And that's where america is at.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Times/UK: Lawyers Furious as US Builds (Gitmo) Death Chambers
LAWYERS expressed outrage yesterday at plans to put al-Qaeda suspects, including two Britons and an Australian, on military trial in Guantanamo Bay.
They would effectively be tried by a "kangaroo court", stripped of all basic rights of due process that would be afforded in criminal courts in Britain or America, they said.
...
He said: "The construction of execution chambers makes virtually every lawyer in the Western world extremely angry. The idea that there is an artificial creation or enclave which, according to the Americans, is beyond the purview of all recognised systems of law is repugnant."
...
Times/UK: Lawyers Furious as US Builds Death Chambers
The Courier Mail: US Plans Death Camp (May 26, 2003)
THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber.
Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.
The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.
...
"This camp was created to execute people. The administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists."
...
The Courier Mail: US Plans Death Camp
>>Hmm. So my company taught me COBOL and JCL in 1985
Should say 1995.
Huh?
I agree with you. As the current response to the neo-liberal US policy is pretty much neo-liberal all over the world, I guess you can say that what the US do is the same as every other country.
However, what strikes me as unreasonable is the american IT response to this trend. I do believe that jobs will migrate to some extent to outside the US, but in time there will be a balance, perhaps with less pressure on high salaries. Thats what free market is all about, I guess.
What I can make sense of all this is that theres a big fear looming over us. pretty much a sense we will be forgotten by economy and the government. Whenever we feel like this, we should remind ourselves of all the people in other countries who cant get a job good enough to feed their families let alone buy cool gadgets and pay a mortgage.
Whats the pursuit of Happiness anyway? I guess wed be better off expecting it as some kind of divine gift, instead. pursuing the dawn thing makes us too selfish, too greedy in the end.
Of course, that's assuming that "globalization" doesn't keep outsourcing jobs to low-cost areas, reducing the entire planet to a giant slum.
You mean, as opposed to the current situation where the place where you live is nice, but all the rest of it is an even worse slum? There is absolutely no moral principle for which you could claim that that's a good thing. Yes, the world will all be a "slum" if you consider $9/hr for coding 'impoverished'. but on average most people will be better off then they were before.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Who shall be left to buy, if all jobs except for the 3 top guys are "outsourced"?
How is Wal-Mart going to outsource it's employees? What about McDonalds?
The only thing that's going to happen is that eventually pay rates in India and the US will reach parity. At that point, there will be no more reason to outsource.
And anyway, there is nothing stopping these people from selling their goods to people in India. I wonder what it is that makes people seem to think the only 'consumers' in the world live in America?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
There are a lot of idiotic programmers in the US. I've met tons of 'em. Which is why I don't have much sympathy about this outsourcing stuff. It seems like a lot of US based IT people suck ass. Why should some Indian not have a job so that some VB monkey can make $50k/year?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Try the L1 visas. These things don't have limits, companies don't have to pay for them, and companies don't have to pay market prices for the labor. If you do a search on google you can find some really good news stories about them. It appears that CPA companies are farming out their work to India and Manillia. AND, there is a cottage industry growing wihtin companies:bringing people over through the L1 visa and then farming the work out to other companies. Companies are now shifting their call centers to Ireland and India... it's here to stay. Face it, the American job is Wendy's and McDonalds. Remember what D. Quale said about jobs in the late 80's? "I dont' understand the problem for people finding jobs. I can go down the street to Wendy's or Burger King is hiring" (paraphrase). This is the new American Job market. Boy, I'm glad I have those philosophy degrees to get the edge up on you PERL geeks.
My message to IT workers:
- you have computer programming skills
- computers are extensions of the mind
Apply these skills and machines to do something challenging. Businesses are buying 3 GHz machines so people can fill out form letters, store a few bytes of customer name address phone number sex age purchase order. Does that sound like a waste?
I don't want to hear how IT workers are suffering. People in the third world are getting off their asses and using computers to improve their own lives. Displaced IT personnel can do the same.
IT workers should go to their management and create new tasks worthy of the education and hardware currently available.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
any remaining members of the once-thriving American textile/garment industry ... or ... machinists or factory workers.
Seen any American-made TVs lately?
People who think things will return to "normal" as the economy picks back up are just fooling themselves. There will be some IT jobs left in this country, but it's going to be a smaller and smaller pool as the jobs flow out through the hole in the bottom of the wage structure called Globalism.
I'm not suggesting that Globalism is evil, but those who ignore its effects are just whistling in the dark.
This IS the end of the American IT industry as a major employer of Americans.
Relatively speaking, about the same number of jobs are being offered to a ton more people, as the top tier of the education systems in Russia, China, and India target overseas jobs. So in addition to competing with the top 10% of our 250 million people, you're competing with the top 1/2% of about 2 billion people, who actually can overcome the language and cultural barriers to do a better job. This works bottom-up, so it affects the average developer first, because s/he doesn't get the mid-level job to get better experience. And those are the people we are already happy to beat out for jobs.
The problem is that we decide based on individual choice, but they make national investments in human capital.
And if you think Americans are running the companies, you haven't seen the ownership and management rolls at most significant companies.
This means that as an american with some experience in the field, you can get a job overseas easier. They always need people with technical and language skills to manage teams, and you can live like a king in these countries, send your children to international schools (much better than the suburban Columbines here in the US), and maybe even have some servants. You won't make as much, but I think your quality of life will be quite high.
It is challenging to live abroad though, and it is not for the faint of heart, like the guy who keeps submitting some 'news' to this effect every 2 weeks or so. Is there a 'bitching about globalization topic/icon yet?
I for one look forward to working abroad, but I'm also not a programming grunt. I'm a gEEk (EE) and it's probably soon hardware's turn for outsourcing. I'm excited for the future, but I see that I am in the minority.
Isn't free software like the ultimate outsourcing?
Wow, I'm surprise the article didnt blame on open source or Linux :)
Ohhhh,, thank you, thank you. So nice of you to feed another starving engineer and his family.
The trip to India and placing signing up with Wipro is a helluva a lot better than sitting under the bridges in Silicon Valley. I spent my last $1000 to swing it. A better bet than those online headhunters and US placement firms. Indian H1Ber's know how to get it done! They know how to talk to those 28 year old MBA's that don't know how to use Windows XP but sure as heck know how to calculate Delta's in Excel! Thank you. soo hungry. Dog hungry too. MMMmmm good. Oh yes. Yum.
Hi sterno!
Take money and jobs out of the picture. People take their problems overseas for a cheap fix. It's trendy. It's sexy. It's how you get ahead in the shady world of business management: because you have to get ahead to get out from under all the unsavory problems you leave behind.
You can make all kinds of arguments about eating your own dog food and self-sufficience, but how many of those 90 programmers can improve their own quality of life practicing their craft without some corporation to pay for their services? The real problem is the 10% who stay on to help leverage the substandard material produced by the overseas sweatshops.
Do you really need management to make those kinds of decisions? Maybe those 90 programmers could have regular meetings and figure something out. Maybe not. Maybe they need those managers. Part of the problem is the thought that you are competing aginst the overseas programmers for coding dollars. This is not so. You are competing aginst outsourcing managers for influence on the corporate bottom line and leadership status. Those 90 programmers need to become better managers than the people who fired them.
The thing is: if the name of the game is cut out the middleman, first don't be a middleman, and second cut out the middleman! Admittedly, you can't do everything so you will have to rely on a middleman here or there. The thing is, you will either have to form a strong trust relationship (Go watch the "Words of life and death" scene in Clint Eastwood's "Outlaw Josey Wales"), or you will have to strategise a way to limit your weak trust relationship with the middlemen like having a high turnover rate.
Every problem states its own inherent solution. The 90 people keep programming and ditch their crappy management! Try to take the other 10 programmers with you. Try to imagine the few enlightened dot-com startups in absence of all the greed and bullshit of the others.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Soo. um. Your US kids in massive future debt are more efficient than those kids in Asia.
I was in the valley for a short time in 2000...part of an australian software company that was being contracted. I was speaking to one of the project managers of the sponsoring companies about how much graduates, juniors, intermediates and seniors can expect to get paid over here...and how much that actually costs him after applying exchange rates (I think at the time, a graduate would have cost him about US$28kpa)...he was amazed...he related to me that they just offered some graduates (straigh out of uni, no real experience) US$90kpa and they guys didn't take the job...they asked for US$130kpa...for a graduate?!?! The company ended up raising the offer to US$130...two of them still turned it down. US$130 000 a year...for a graduate...that's insane. You guys got greedy...you all wanted to be millionaires and you got selfish and greedy. Now you sit and talk about how companies should be looking after the good 'ol american worker...after the years of fleecing you gave them. Ha! Exactly the same way everyone on /. always says that CDs are too expensive, so P2P is equalizing the gap and it's too be expected....well, a few years ago you guys got just as greedy as RIAA and it opened the way for other countries to close the gap. Suck it up fellas...you created the problem, you wear it.
http://www.h1bjobs.com/h1bjobs/ittalentseekers/onl ineSkillTesting.asp
Step 1: Go out of country.
Step 2: Learn an accent
Step 3: Get a deeep tan
Step 4: Call an H1B placement firm.
Step 5: Hire back at your old job and don't pay those darn taxes!
Step 6: Be a good Globalist on Slashdot!
Step 7: Talk to US MBAs much stupider than you.
Step 8: Get an apartment.
Step 9: Get laid off and go back to step 1.
http://www.h1bjobs.com/h1bjobs/ittalentseekers/onl ineSkillTesting.asp
that it is easier to stay wealthy than to become wealthy. At least the way money works these days. (as another poster pointed out)
Also it doesn't hurt that America sucks the smart people out of the rest of the world to some degree.
The bigger problem is distribution of wealth. But that's more of a global problem than an American one.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
The sad thing is that I graduated too late. I missed the tech boom by an year or two. I basically ended up without a job since I graduated...and I didn't even benefit at all :( ... I knew I should have gone into social science or philosophy--at least my heart will be in the right place then :(:(:(
KoalaBear33
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
Consulting is for dummies...
Offshore outsourcing only accounts for a small fraction (I've heard 2%) of the IT industry. It is widely publicized and blamed but it's really only a small part of the issue. The main issue is that the IT industry in general was inflated and hit a massive downturn. Addtionally, IT as a whole is maturing, becoming better understood, and more commoditized.
Almost every time I hear about globalization, it's opinion and armchair speculation and is very short on relevant hard numbers.
The argument makes perfect sense to any armchair economist: "sure some third world guy can type in computer programs for a fraction of the salary of a westerner". It's a growing phenomenon but it is still massively exagerated. Lots of people have been saying that software development was going to be completely outsourced since the 1960's and this really hasn't happened. I also hear a lot of resentment towards mid to upper class western tech workers with big egos which is really a separate issue.
I've worked in the software consulting industry for many years and have encountered little serious competition from offshore outsourcing. People talk about it all the time and almost every company I dealt with has tried it in one form or another. To a large extent, US IT wins business on competitive merit.
Everybody speaks about H-1B visas. Nobody says a single word about O-1 (outstanding scientist) visas which are much better. Why?
Many Indians come to the US with O-1 visas.
Shut your mouth you cowardly French piece of shit.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
You can too:
o nl ineSkillTesting.asp
http://www.h1bjobs.com/h1bjobs/ittalentseekers/
White people should treat the tech industrie the same way blacks treat rap. Make sure it is dominated and run by whites, instead of sending the industrie we created over to people who have nothing to do with it. Oh wait this would be raciest..
flame away!
There's a big difference between a technology company managing it's product development somewhere and some company full of non-technical business dweebs thinking they got a great "lowest bidder" deal.
The parent is correct. Most outsourced corporate development project have serious scope and spec issues, and as many as half just fail outright. And that's with the developers right there in the building.
We do need to keep in mind that outsourcing to other nations provides them jobs, most likely better incomes and a better future outlook. While I am sure that at a gut level this isn't very popular, at our heart level it is a good thing. What makes an Indian so different from an American? Both probably want to make a decent wage, go to work, etc.
Yeah, well your futuristic "city" is just a cardbox box, and it doesn't even have a roof. Honestly, it looks kind of ... crappy.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Add more curry to your sauce!
There are something like 18 langugaes officially recignised in India. (I'm not sure to what extent that means) Nobody speaks all of them, though English is the closest. Hindi is one of the more common ones, not dominate by any means.
The Indians I've met (from india) speak English just fine, most as their third language. They have a strange accent, but if you have taken a math course at any university you will have no problems understanding them. Nobody who speaks english as good as they do is allowed to teach math at the university level.
But they got good at it. Even if Indian programmers suck right now, they will get better. It's just a matter of time.
Soon we will all be getting paid $1000 / mo.
This is my sig.
That type of scruitiny is extremely counter-productive. Wall Street seems to be allergic to anything other than a steady-string of ever-increasing EPS. Real life doesn't work that way, synced to neat little three month periods. When a company makes a big investment in it's future it's going to be in the hole for a while until it really starts paying off. It looks shitty for EPS but it's the best thing for the company.
No one who puts money in a company (or works for one) would want their CEO's playing this kind of game. Think about it:
1. Cut company down to bone and say hell with the future.
2. See stock price soar with record EPS for a few years
3. Cash in options and get the hell out of there
i.e.
Profit!!!!!!!!!!!
Wall Street LOVES this game though. Of course, it's not too surprising. They (unlike you the employee or Warren the massive shareholder) can get the hell out with a phone call. People like this probably own a whole lot of YOUR company too. I really think that if there is one thing worse than leadership without accountablity, it's ownership without accountablity. You dont have to look far to find it.
Welcome to hell.
I think the market has matured into its new order. ( unfortunately )
.org is subsidized by some large oraganization, a government, corporation or wealthy individual. Just a way for the big boys to pool their industry efforts. ( and play it as if helping the common folk ) It might product tools a service industry would need. Being a vendor is not their buisiness model....
If open source really comes to be the dominant market product then the fight is really going to be over the service jobs to run that open source code. Most of those service jobs will be outsourced that are not critical or are not dependent on geography. So, the guys in India and China doing the coding are in a loosing game also.
I view the modern programmer in some strange catagories:
1. coder works for an open source initiative. The
2. The coder is a monk. The person codes after the Jack In Box burger flipping shift. A true hobbyist. Does not give a hoot if you use the code.
3. The coder is rich. The person codes after their massage and manacure. A true hobbyist. Does not give a hoot if you use the code.
4. The coder works for a large corporation. The coder is miserable and is strictly limited. The coder might do catagory 2 or 3 also on the side.
Sadly, the small players in the "buisiness" were eliminated. Also with the net, the innovation is also transferred quickly. So, the innovation arguement might buy some time but not as much as it use to.
The real problem is there are to many people in the world. Its just the "cheapness" of people. Its going to get worse. And what will be real interesting to find out is the fact that there is not enough resources to give the billions that high standard of living they see on the satallite tv. And then the oil runs out.
I agree. I am amazed that Slashdot editors have not posted more such stories, given the depth and length of the technology recession. Among technologists, at this moment, this topic is one of the hottest, hotter even than stories regarding P2P, file-sharing methods, or the RIAA.
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
Bob Lewis at IS Survivor writes at : ... ...
Here's what might work: Charge a trade tariff on offshore services pegged to the import tariffs their governments charge on our exports. Companies located in nations that create no barriers to selling U.S. goods and services within their borders would find no barriers to their selling labor in ours. Countries that make it artificially expensive for their citizens to buy our products would find their offshoring companies suddenly uncompetitive in the U.S. marketplace.
Many political models of PRC include the possibility of a break-up into a number of warring kingdoms after the "old men" die.
"We never thought it could happen to us: globalization was just supposed to make stuff cheaper to buy."
and it hasn't ?
"But the race to the bottom can happen at all levels of employment, for all tasks that don't need to be performed on site. This includes us, the white collar IT workers."
what bottom , and for whom ?
For IT workers and attendant staff within emerging economies this is hardly a race to the bottom , but rather a dramatic acceleration in income and welfare. Why do you assume that these people are beneath you and that whatever benefits them must constitute a "race to the bottom" ?
"This is not "the sound of inevitability", it's the sound of years of government/corporate policy to make the world our cheap labor playground."
what policies and which institutions (I don't think that you know ) ?
And cheap by who's standards ? Do you have any concept of the impact of this phenomena on local economies within developing regions ?
Why is it that the people most insistent on retarding the advancement of developing nations can't be candid about their motives (to secure the lifestyles of wealthy individuals within developed economies at the expense of those within emerging ones) ?
It can be reversed with rational policies that foster local investment at the expense of unchecked corporate profits. What happens when you have corporations that are invested in a locality? They don't ship the jobs overseas just to save a buck
sieg heil whiteboy ! - you do realize that this is national socialism.
As to your point , which model of localization are you alluding to - Germany's sclerotic "social market" , Sweden's therapeutic socialism ( which produces gross incomes below the US's Mississippi ) , or perhaps China's stratocracy.
Do you have any idea of what it is you're proposing , the repercussions of this on your own welfare and economic standing ? Can you name even one successful altarchy that has existed since the advent of the telegraph ?
idiot
The fact is if borders were open and workers were free to move to where the work is in the long run everyone would benefit except big corps and government.
It is in the interest of all governments to maintain closed borders so they can keep people under their thumbs and continue the protection rackets they are so good at.
And it is in the interest of their corporate contributors/masters to keep this just the way it is. If, as an example, workers could flow freely between India and America, a very different set of conditions would soon exist from the ones we see now.
Eliminate the protection racket and have a true free market where the flow of people and their productive efforts can move around the world freely, and noone is held hostage because they lack a passport and the so called outsourcing of jobs and threats of globalization would be a non-issue.
We might even get some true competition amongst governments instead of the geographical monopolies we have now.
Meanwhile, the CEO and VP's are getting double..
Making $2mil, now it's $4M,
had a 3000SQft home, now have a 3000SQFt vacation home too.
Had a Lexus, now have a Mercedes
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
English instruction is mandatory virtually everywhere on earth (except perhaps in some european states, where english may be an option out of several for their nation's foreign language requirement). English education is a double-edged sword as it can promote brain-drain. English is frequently used in India due to India's historical ties with an english-speaking colonizer, and that language still is important for indians seeking a political career. During the cold war, vast amounts of Chinese students came to the US for their education, while hardly any soviet students came. The chinese leaders paid closer attention to their economic advisors.
c'mon, lose the hypocrisy. welcome to the real world. welcome to the globalization. no amount of sour grapes is going to change any of this process. give up your elitism and snobbery and realize that your skillsets are rapidly becoming a dime and dozen.
If your home is flooded by natural disasters, often the govmt steps in to help. If your career is flooded and you risk losing your house, the gov does not seem to give a flying fudge because it is gradule and less dramatic on TV.
But, it is still just as painful. Thus, the government should and can step in to help by:
1. Kicking out tech visa workers (or at least tax them up the wazoo). We don't need 'em.
2. Issue a formal warning to *new* college students to avoid newly "globalized" fields so that the market is not further flooded. The natural attrician rate should keep IT careers afloat longer. Retirement attrician is often a good way to trim ranks without painful cuts to existing people.
Yes, what you talk about is probably inevitable, BUT the gov can help give us a softer landing and save the next generation at the same time.
Table-ized A.I.
Once upon a time when computers were not so cheap and plentiful, programmers got paid more because their skills were in demand and the supply of programmers was scarce. Computers were expensive. Not everyone had them. You probably had to go to school to learn how to use one properly because documentation and programming tools were primitive by today's standards. Businesses could cut costs by having their information processed quickly and efficiently with computers - thus they created a large demand for these skilled workers.
What has happened with the proliferation of cheap and plentiful computers is that the supply of programmers has vastly increased - keeping up with demand and exceeding it in these recessionary times. The demand remain the same or greater - businesses still need to manage information with computers. However, it has become much easier for a person to gain access to a computer and learn how to program it. You can go to any bookstore in the country and pick out a few books and be well on your way to learning something useful. The computer is just a tool for getting something done.
Thus, the price one is willing to pay for the skill of operating this tool has dropped. Let me ask you honestly...do you really need to go to college for 4 years or more to get a CS degree to become a good programmer? High school kids with enough aptitude can do it.
In 1993, programmers were scare and demand was high. In 2003, programming is an easily found skill.
So what is a geek to do? Well...do what we've always done. INNOVATE! Innovation is the primary driver of economic growth. This is the only true way to create wealth. We need to get back to the innovation that made silicon valley great. If you do something that is valuable that nobody else has done before, then you can be sure you won't be outsourced to India.
Rome, after a century of war with Carthage, had the most advanced, organised, and powerful army on earth... Once Carthage was destroyed, the senate had to either disband this vastly expensive force, or put it to work. Ever try to disband tens of thousands of disciplined killers?
And so the Roman Empire was born.
Fast forward to today. The cold war is over, the evil empire vanquished. The victor is left with a huge standing army, the most powerful and most expensive on earth.
How many peacekeeping actions do you think it will take to keep a million men under arms occupied?
Considering how much interest this issue generates, it should be big in the US voting in 2004, at least among us "Techies".
With that in mind, I ask: Do you plan to vote this issue in 2004? If so, who will you vote for? why?
Lets say those 90 jobs cost the company $5,000,000 annually while they were placed in the US. After the outsourcing, the developers in India does the same job for $500,000 which means the company has saved $4,500,000 annually (this is all hypothetically figures). Suddenly the company can lower its prices and beat its competion. Eventually it needs to expand, therby requring more people for integration and analysis. And voila, everybody wins... India gets more jobs and the Western Hemisphere has moved up the food chain. The only real loosers are the 90 US engineers that get stuck in a structural change of the economy. They will probably have to learn some new skills to stay competitive.
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
An interesting and almost useful piece of information posted to slashdot...
/*- Mohammed -*/
The L visas are for transfering employees to the US in the same company, e.g. a programming shop with branches in both the US and India.
Unlike HB1, L-1 has no quota or time-limit;
L-1 has no salary floor;
L-1 has no reporting requirment, though HomeLand Security is trying to track them;
L-1 do not require advertising with the US first.
It seems that most comments about the trend to export jobs have been negative. There is an alternative view: rising incomes worldwide should create new markets for goods and services, much of what will be conceived, designed, and implemented within the US because of the education level of its population as well as access to capital. The transfer of manufacturing jobs gave rise to increased comsumerism worldwide, including in the US. There is a possibility of the same with "white collar" jobs. It remains a challenge to find economic opportunities in this new paradigm rather than to cling to the vestiges of the past.
This issue has been around for awhile. I remember reading Yourdon's books on this topic:
Decline And Fall Of The American Programmer
and the sequel:
Rise & Resurrection of the American Programmer
To this list, I would add Steve McConnell's:
After the Gold Rush: Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering
and Cem Kaners:
Bad Software: What to Do When Software Fails
Considering this discussion, these books are worth reviewing.
In Yourdon's view, the response of American Programmers should be to develop better quality through better Software Engineering. As some of the Indian Software Houses are trying that approach, we need to respond.
McConnell would add the point that Software needs to become more of a real Engineering Discipline, complete with professional licensing.
In "Bad Software", Kaner advocates for better quality software and "software consumer rights". Some of these points can go into a "Software Building Code", something we also need to add in making IT more professiobal.
Nobody ever accused geeks of understanding Economics... ...but then, as MERE TECHNICIANS unable to grasp the meaning of what they are doing, can we really expect them to?
Let me break it down nice and simple, as my dear friend Greenspan attempted to do on the congress floor the other day:
Learn it, write it down, take a picture of it. Tatoo it on your pasty white foreheads:
Economic policy is designed to maximize: WEALTH
Economic policy is NOT designed to maximize: JOBS
You want to maximize jobs? Go on a riot and destroy all earthmovers. Now replace the earthmovers with 1000 workers with spoons. To dig a ditch it now takes 1000 workers one hour instead of one worker on an earthmover one hour.
Congratulations, you just created 1000 jobs out of 1 job! But it will cost us at least 10x as much to do the same work. Jobs increased, wealth decreased.
No, it did not cost "THE BOSS" 10x as much, it cost US as a society 10x as much. Who do you think pays for that ditch? That hamburger? That car? We all do.
If you still can't break free from your fantasy world, take a visit to China where the above example is illustrated in real life to the scale of billions of people. Yeah, there's a lot of JOBS if you're in the "spoon digger" industry! But wealth, there is not.
Let me hold your hand through the mental leap from "spoon digger" to "code monkey."
I need a new WidgetApp written. A Slashdot geek in San Fransisco quotes me $40,000 at a rate of $80/hour, that comes to 12.5 weeks development time. My good friend in Brazil can also do the project in 12.5 weeks and quotes me R$2000 based on DOUBLE the average monthly salary of R$300. With a 3x exchange rate, that's $666 in US Dollars. Even assuming he takes TWICE AS LONG as expected, it still only costs me $1332 vs. $40,000 from the greedy Slashdot "spoon digger."
Did you notice what else happened? I HAVE MY WIDGETAPP PLUS $38,668 LEFT TO SPEND.
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that you do not want to lose out on that $40,000 development project because of your own selfish interests. Perfectly understandable. Just don't hide your interests in moral outrage about how "they" are "stealing" "YOUR" precious jobs.
Welcome to the market economy. Compete or die.
Nobody ever accused geeks of understanding Economics... ...but then, as MERE TECHNICIANS unable to grasp the meaning of what they are doing, can we really expect them to?
Let me break it down nice and simple, as my dear friend Greenspan attempted to do on the congress floor the other day:
Learn it, write it down, take a picture of it. Tatoo it on your pasty white foreheads:
Economic policy is designed to maximize: WEALTH
Economic policy is NOT designed to maximize: JOBS
You want to maximize jobs? Go on a riot and destroy all earthmovers. Now replace the earthmovers with 1000 workers with spoons. To dig a ditch it now takes 1000 workers one hour instead of one worker on an earthmover one hour.
Congratulations, you just created 1000 jobs out of 1 job! But it will cost us at least 10x as much to do the same work. Jobs increased, wealth decreased.
No, it did not cost "THE BOSS" 10x as much, it cost US as a society 10x as much. Who do you think pays for that ditch? That hamburger? That car? We all do.
If you still can't break free from your fantasy world, take a visit to China where the above example is illustrated in real life to the scale of billions of people. Yeah, there's a lot of JOBS if you're in the "spoon digger" industry! But wealth, there is not.
Let me hold your hand through the mental leap from "spoon digger" to "code monkey."
I need a new WidgetApp written. A Slashdot geek in San Fransisco quotes me $40,000 at a rate of $80/hour, that comes to 12.5 weeks development time. My good friend in Brazil can also do the project in 12.5 weeks and quotes me R$2000 based on DOUBLE the average monthly salary of R$300. With a 3x exchange rate, that's $666 in US Dollars. Even assuming he takes TWICE AS LONG as expected, it still only costs me $1332 vs. $40,000 from the greedy Slashdot "spoon digger."
Did you notice what else happened? I HAVE MY WIDGETAPP PLUS $38,668 LEFT TO SPEND.
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that you do not want to lose out on that $40,000 development project because of your own selfish interests. Perfectly understandable. Just don't hide your interests in moral outrage about how "they" are "stealing" "YOUR" precious jobs.
Welcome to the market economy. Compete or die.
IT workers may not like it but I've decided this is best for the industry. I used to be an IT Manager for a dot-com and I haven't been able to find work so I'm getting a PhD in economics and there is no doubt everyone is better off if the jobs are exported. We are all going to have to retrain and/or become entrpeneurs. Many will have to face the fact that wages will be lower in IT and many people went to school for many years for nothing. This is the reality of our current situation and it will only get worse in U.S. because there is no "IT" union( and there shouldn't be one either). No one ever promised you a job at a particular salary, if you try to use political influence to alter the market for such purposes you only hurt everyone in the long run. Industries change more quickly and retool and reorganize more quickly than in the past. Everyone is having to retrain and change jobs more often - it is the reality of the digital age - you have to take the good with the bad - this is the bad...
I don't think Capitalism would collapse, not in America anyway. It's too much a part of the American identity. I could certainly see a strong nationalist movement, though.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Actually you can get a job in India and you can get a work visa. The point is are you willing to compete with the people there for them. You will probably need to market a unique skill like interfacing with clients etc.
Who is driving car? Bear is driving car! Oh no, how can this be?!
Sounds like a bunch of fear mongering to me, but lets look at the numbers, shall we:
The National Science Foundation reports that China graduated nearly 200,000 engineers in 1999 from good universities that get better by the year. By comparison, American Universities graduate a mere 60,000 undergraduate engineers annually.
Since the population of America is about 300 million, that would mean about 0.02 percent of the population graduate as engineers each year. China's population is about 1.3 billion, which means about 0.015 percent graduate as engineers each year. I think we're doing pretty well, all things considered.
Honestly, if we were graduating 200,000 engineers a year we'd have a serious shortage of doctors, scientists, lawyers, etc.
Combined, India and China produced nearly 26 percent of the world's newly minted engineers in 1999.
Combined, India and China have nearly 33% of the world's population. If they were producing fewer engineers than they are, it would be an indication of something being seriously wrong.
I don't doubt the validity of these numbers, but presented this way they're nothing more than FUD. There's simply no way we can compete in a straight numbers game with either China or India, let alone both combined. OK, so the whole of Asia (excluding Japan) produces 320,000 engineers a year. Well, they have roughly 10 times the population of the US, and only managed to produce 5 times as many engineers. I think that says something.
As for the quality of these engineers, well, I have my doubts. I don't deal with many foriegn engineers, but I can say that my company has had nothing but problems with the software work we've outsourced to India. That hasn't stopped upper management from dictating that it must be done, of course, even though it actually costs us more, but that's a whole different rant. I would not expect any better results from non-software engineering endeavors, since they all require that same peculiar combination of knowledge and creativity which simply isn't a part of most of those cultures.
To be fair, some of the best engineers I've met have been Chinese, Indian, even Iranian, but every single one of them was educated at an American university and working for an American company, in America, for American wages. I'm not saying that Asians are incapable of creative thought, far from it, I'm just saying that the institutions in their native lands don't encourage it like American institutions do, and that's an essential part of training good engineers.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I like most of my generation grew up watching the Smurfs. I loved them so much that I tuned in every Saturday morning to see what crazy hijinks those lovable little blue creatures would get up to.
I did too. In my country I was addicted to the Comic Book, not the cartoon, but the same idea is there.
It is just now that I have realized what I was really tuning into each and every Saturday morning was actuallty COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA!! Yes that is correct, Papa Smurf and all of his little Smurf minions are not the happy little characters Hanna Barbara would have us believe! The cartoon was really created by the Russian government in order to indoctrinate the youngest members of western society with communist beliefs and ideals thus destroying their resistance to the imminent Russian invasion that was to occur when this generation (my generation) grew up.
The comic is belgian, not Russian. BTW, You'll notice that most of the children stories are communist "everyone is nice and beautiful" (Teletubbies anyone?). Except the notable exception of GI-Joe as you mention below.
To prove my point I submit that 1.) They live in a communal village and are discouraged to leave the village without the company of their fellow Smurfs.
Oh, come on. These nice little creatures live in such a beautiful harmony. Besides, Gargamel is waiting for them so it is just a wise idea to not get out alone.
2.) Every Smurf has his own specific job and does not deviate from that job. The job even becomes part of their personality and even their name (Brainy Smurf, Handy Smurf, etc.)
Does that reminds you of snow white and the seven dwarfs? Jewel of the American culture... well, since the Sonny Bono Act, Jewel of the Walt Disney Corp. for a little longer.
3.) If ever a Smurf decides to strike out on his own he is cast into danger in some way of another, and it is up to the collective to save him.
Communism is perhaps not that bad. Again, it is a survival defense mechanism. Keep in mind the Izrael cat and it's evil master. It's a dangerous world out there.
4.) Papa Smurf looks an awful lot like Karl Marx plus, he wears all that red.
I couldn't get used to him, that is true. This guy thinks he is the wisest of all, and this thought alone screws it up!!!!
And let us not forget Smurfette, the lone female Smurf and the embodiment of community property.
I could see the Smurfette as the "Poison Ivy" symbol of Capitalism in the whole thing.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Hence "entrepreneurs" (one step away from slave traders) in these countries will take advantage of the skilled labor that is freely available to contract for companies that have grown, prospered, and precipitated innovations under the capitalist American government. The people in these developing nations are only being used as commodities, since they really have no other way to compete.
We in America are in a very tenuous position. Between the greed and lust for oil and the irresponsible behavior of many American corporate executives, we will be lucky if our society lasts another 20-30 years. Personally, having my ancestors come from "off the boat" back at the beginning of the 20th century, it pisses me off that these greedy leeches we call "executives" fail to see that what really has made them wealthy; it is the investment in and contributions to our society and economic infrastructure made by the lowly American worker. Think about it, where do you think these "shareholders" and "executives" come from? Not all of them are derived from the upper class. Many of them are probably one or two generations away from the borderline poverty that was so common not so long ago, and have seemingly forgotten all about strife and struggle. Funny how a BMW and a summer house in the Hamptons will do that to you.
Regarding quality of work...to make the assertion (as I have read here) that as an American IT worker I need to "get used to it" and assume that a lower standard of living is inevitable so that other countries, through fair competition in the labor market, can raise their standard of living to an "acceptable" level is simply ridiculous. I know too many people with these Engineering degrees (American, Indian, Chinese, Russian) who have tons of book knowledge, but very little common sense and creativity. You can teach a monkey to code, but the true value in Engineering (network, software, whatever) is the ability to apply creativity and treat Engineering as an art as well as a science. This is where I believe America shows great strength and an inherent advantage. Our culture is a breeding ground for those who endeavor to break the rules and take risks to achieve their dreams- which in some cases leads to great advances in technology. Culture and environment does make a difference in this case.
Beyond that, American corporations (and shareholders too) DO have an obligation to the people that work for these companies, and should be investing in the people that have gotten them where they are. I doubt many of these executives have studied history, nor do they understand the long term consequences of their decisions; I mean, what's HISTORY got to do with anything? You can't make money off of history. *sarcasm* Can you tell I was a History major? ... and self taught in everything else CS related. So much for the stereotypical lazy, complacent American :-)
Getting a quick-hack contract is really easy nowadays. A sole coder can always track freelance task listings on major sites like e-lance.com. Several hours of searches and writing proposals and you are hired for a day or two or a week, and while you are using the same system to write feedback for the employer or to withdraw your money, you suddenly get the next task and so on... You don't get rich this way but it is definitely an option to consider, paid the same or even better that most local jobs.
What is actually surprising is that this very special market is biased towards tiny webmonkey projects. Endless clones. Endless websites to make money out of nothing. Our domestic market gives us more sensible, challenging and expensive tasks... We've already put great effort into finding at least the same scale projects abroad, but generally without luck.
Notice how assembly line jobs are gone but assembly line management is still here? Basic programming is going away but programming management is going to be around. All the anecdotes about outsourcing include a business owner saying how it's cheaper to hire Indian programmers. The key is the business owner is still here. You'll always have opportunities in IT around here, but you won't be able to do IT as a programmer.
I for one feel very strongly that this is a business practice that will eventually ruin our way of life. Remove the jobs, remove the income. Remove the income, remove the consumer. Remove the consumer, remove the revenue, and then even the workers you pay $10 a day to write shoddy code for you will be out of work. Corporate greed becomes it's very own Ouroborus.
There is a solution to all of this.
If you dont like the way a company does business, dont purchase their products. Refuse to support a company that does not support your interests. Boycotting these companies and their products will eventually make offshore outsourcing non-cost effective. The only difficulty then is to establish an avenue for finding out a company's (HR)business practices. Does anyone know of any consumer watchdog groups that report on this sort of thing?
Nice. This guy is trying to sell us on the spiritual advantages of working shit jobs for shit wages. Oh boy, I can't wait to have a tight-knit family when I'm a door greeter at Wal-Mart.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
I don't think Capitalism would collapse, not in America anyway. It's too much a part of the American identity. I could certainly see a strong nationalist movement, though.
Perhaps it will be one of the last countries where capitalism will collapse (kind of like how Britain is one of the last countries that maintained monarchy). If USA switches to nationalism, it could easy become fascist (since most Americans are conservative). At that point, I wonder if capitalism will matter at all.
KoalaBear33
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
When China built massive new steel production facilities, did they know that those mills could produce far more steel than China could use domestically? Without a doubt. But their cost structure is low and they planned to export the excess. Do they know that they don't need that many new engineers every year? Almost certainly, and they'll attempt to "solve" the problem the same way they solve their steel problem -- export.
Rather than seeking to control the supply of engineers, perhaps it would be interesting to ask how we might increase the demand for them, in both the developed and developing world.
Price normalization between india and China will happen much faster then price normalization between the US and India. Anyway, there are only so many stable nations out there.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Computers and software have gone from raw idea to commodity product in a little over my life time. Its been a long run. But I remember lots of other innovations that burst onto the scene and then faded into the background: hifi, stereo, LPs, acid rock, rock and roll, blues, jazz, radio phones, cell phones, mass production, muscle cars, and on and on.
/. that remember when computer people didn't want a pc (lower case). Who would want to leave work on a computer with a 100 meg disk drive and go home to play with a computer where the only storage was a cassette recorder that could hold about 100 KB on an expensive 60 minute tape. On
Frank Zappa (gee, another thing that's come and gone) used phrasing like trend mongers, (gee another thing thats come and gone, polyester suits), which reflects the degree that some part of America will embrace just about any new idea.
So, the computer industry becoming too boring for Americans to really be bothered - after all, what is now needed is for Microsoft to get rid of 99% of its employees and hire those slow working, spec writing, code reviewing, boring coders who won't release a line of code until it can be burned into ROM, and there are about 7 of those guys in the US. Get the 100 million lines of Microsoft code right without "improving it" requires people who can achieve nirvana or inner peace by spending hours making that one perfect cut or perfect stroke.
But that isn't to say that there aren't great opportunities for real innovation, for breaking the mold, for proving that the impossible just takes an extra day.
America is a land of extremes.
We are so innovative that we "invented" the oil based economy and we've pushed it to such an extreme that 10% of the worlds population consumes 25% of the world's oil production. And we created the infrastructure to do it. The mind bogggles.
Consider: The US uses 18 million barrels of oil a day. That's well over three quarters of a million gallons of petroleum products every day. That's about 3 gallons for every man, women, child every day. And that's only about half the energy we use per person.
To make the US and the world totally dependent on oil, Americans drilled lots of holes. In a span of about 20 years, Americans were so into finding oil that 10 of thousands of people founded 10s of thousands of companies to drill about a million holes. Some of those holes are still producing about 2 barrels a day, just a bit less than they produced when they were new wells. What all the people did pumping out millions of PC software packages and millions of web sites wasn't anything new.
But where are we today.
Well, we're probably at the world peak in terms of oil production. For the next 100 years, oil product is going to go down hill.
And how are a lot of Americans viewing this? "That's impossible, there has to be more oil, we can't live without oil, if this is true, life is over"
And when anyone suggests something simple like, say, windmills, the response is "it would take 20 years of installing 10,000 windmills to replace the electricity we use every day.
Hmmmm, 20 * 10,000 -> 200,000. That's a small number. What's the problem?
Americans should have no problem installing 1 million or more windmills in 10 years.
In fact, after the first 25,000 were installed, the costs should be brought down by everything learned and by competition so that we'd be installing a million a year.
Twenty years ago a sat dish was huge, required a specially trained team to install. But today, people pick them up and install them on the side of their house. And the sat dish is "free". I don't expect a wind mill to be as small as a sat dish and I don't expect them to be "free", but I expect that they will be so cheap that wind mills will be used instead of running 100 feet of copper wire.
Either that, or wind mills won't be able to match solar panels.
I suspect that there are a few people reading
"Saving even half of that would allow 250-300 staff to be retained instead of downsized, or could even be used for staff bonuses, or -- get this -- reinvested back into the company to promote growth."
Excellent point. The problem with this is that the idea of what adds "shareholder value" is determined by the executives themselves. In the old days, CEOs cared about the shareholder but nowadays, you can't even fire a CEO "with cause" because of the elaborate contract that governs the terms of his employment!
So, even if you could cut his salary [which I'm sure is no easy task], it still leaves him with the choice of how the money should be used.
The way the markets have been evolving these past few years, all you have to do to "add value" is wait another day for the next influx of cash from everyone's 401k to hit the street. As long as you've paid off the people who run the local slush fund, they'll buy your stock with some sucker's money no matter what you do. BINGO! instant shareholder value added! check!
bonus anyone?
Good question. The average executive compensation has been creeping up towards 500 - 600 times the average employee compensation
Let's say that the average salary in the US is $30,000. By your reckoning, the average executive would be on $18M/year. That simply isn't the case. Very few executives even make it into the low millions, and they're the top players at the largest corporations. In fact, I'm not even sure, if we're comparing averages, that the average manager even makes 10x the average employee. I don't know where you got that figure, but it's complete and utter nonsense.
Don't let the wealth of people like Larry Ellison and Michael Dell confuse you - they get paid what they get paid because they own large chunks of their respective companies, and there are very very few people in their bracket.