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IBM Moving Developer Jobs Overseas
helixcode123 writes "According to the New York Times (also on Yahoo News), IBM is planning on moving a substantial number of high level jobs overseas to 'India and other countries.' IBM argues, in essence, that they need to do this to stay competitive. The article
quotes that Forrester Research '...estimated that 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of the nation's computer jobs.'"
...I'll move to India. That'll fuck em' over!
My only question is, if you have questions with the code, aren't you going to need a translator for the comments?
int a; #Es un variable para el funcion de la red.
American Programmer: Buh?
so its okay to outsource jobs to reduce costs but not okay to lower salaries of the top management to reduce costs?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
8 percent!
That means that 92% of us will still be around.
Yippee!!
ee
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
Okay, I'm in Seattle, and it's already a pretty horrendous job market here - I'm reduced to working a temp job for $10/hr (not in my industry). This is gonna make things even worse. So what's to do? Do we have to have a 'Made by U.S. Programmers' label for software packages?
great! more lost jobs. any city anywhere should yank any tax breaks they are getting. its hard to work with someone thats hours are soo offset from your own.
Looks like /. covers one such story every other days now. Stop Cribbing, Guys! Get your skills upto date....there is no dearth of jobs for quality workers.
There is no patch for stupidity
Visit my blog
My boss told me it's a good thing that these jobs are going elsewhere since it gives America the chance to support these developing countries, and allows us to move to other areas. But what I still don't understand is what areas are we supposed to be moving to?
No todo lo que es oro brilla
We'll be telling our grandkids that the US actually had an H1B visa program to encourage tech workers from other countries to work here, not the other way around. And they'll say
"Grandpa, you're pulling my leg!"
SCO to Hell
But good for IBM. I mean this, but I know it won't be popular. By IBM cutting developer jobs, they will be able to stay competitive in more markets and increase the GDP of the nations they are moving operations to. That means increased buying power for that nation, and in turn, everybody benefits from selling to that nation.
It also means that while developer positions are harder to come by, more jobs in other sectors will be created to satisfy the increased revenue IBM has available.
So, before you flame IBM try to see how this isn't a greed manuever but something that can benefit more people outside of the software development industry.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
The US will be a 3rd world country soon. If we keep giving everyone our jobs and money that is. Thus, companies will rush to build labs and support centers here so thay can pay us $2.10 a day. IBM wont have leave the US to save money then.
Welcome to capitalism. You must be new here?
As an Electrical Engineer, I'm thoroughly convinced that defense jobs are the only ones that are going to stay in-country. Might as well jump on the band-wagon now. Viva le Tomahawk!
The meek might inheret the earth, but they'll be in India.
Yeah that would be just about as bad as if China ever invades Taiwan.
Yeah, this all relates to the Government's plan to continually screw the working class over and make the CEO's even richer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10595
IAALS.
I need to make sure I have this right. If we give the rich a tax break, they will create more jobs. Those jobs in turn will be transfered overseas where the rich will again see an increase in their capital investments which are now taxed less. Ok. Just making sure I understand. No further questions.
You mean to tell me that International Business Machines might employ people in other countries!!!?!?!!112@
That's just so wrong!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, I guess it depends upon the industry. For years German and Japanese companies have been moving automobile production to the US because the labor and benefits are much cheaper, while IT is being more and more phased out to India and other countries.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Don't be too perturbed if they make fun of your American accent though.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
My name is Singh. I have MSc in Computer Sciences but can only get job as taxi driver. I hope IBM hire me as I am smart man, definately smartest taxi driver in New Delhi. Please Mr. IBM, come to New Delhi and ask for man named Singh driving cab. I will like to work for you and make many good programs.
Yours respectfully,
That's pretty bad! Already most of the manufactured goods are coming from China and now white collar jobs are moving to India. Soon, the datacenters will start migrating to India as well and there will be no need for IT professionals with an exception of people from desktop support. Pretty dismal end. Time to think about changing a career, perhaps (may be I'll become a baker or something...).
Ok software companies already have a problem with good work code here in North America.
If we go by the logic that clothing made in overseas sweat shops is cheap and crappy how will software produced over there be.
It is croneyism ... libertarians just have far too high a regard of people's morals in the face of money.
If companies have to maintain profitiablity, and developers are cheaper in other countries, what choice do they have except to export those jobs? Sure, it makes life harder for the developers in the US, at least for the short term, but what if exporting that work enables IBM to spend money on R & D that provides even more work for state-side developers in the long run? I'm just thinking there are some benefits and some disadvantages with just about any solution IBM chooses.
Some of the technology colleges in India make Harvard's acceptance criteria look like childsplay... my personal feeling on the subject: this will lead to lovely increases in efficiency, but no such boosts in creativity in the field...
And you can spec that comments must be written in English. Given the pitiful nature of most comments anyway, who cares?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So foreigners (a lot of Indians and Asians) come to America for our "superior education". Then they move back and work for much less money than we do and take over our jobs?
And yet the universities insist that diversity is good for us.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
Out sourcing programming projects overseas/abroad is one thing since its essentially a 'science' and if they were taught 'right', the end product should be up to spec.(Not that I'm condoning it) But these are higher up (which I'd perceive as management positions). Typically big US companies sent their guys abroad to manage the outsourced/ international divisions because we did things a certain way. Could bringing foreigners in these positions eventually bring about some sort of conflict if only because of how they were taught how to 'manage' (I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that the East has a noticable difference in how they conduct busines than we do). If these 'upper' positions are nothing more than following ellaborate and strict orders sent by us, thats one thing, but if its a broad mission/plan I see the potential for serious issues/conflicts to arise about how they were/could be carried out.
Then again I could just be overanalyzing and IBM is just so big now, a few small groups who arent part of the core elite can't possibly make a difference.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
what do all the immigrants propose to do?
Live on welfare? And where will the welfare funds come from? You have to tax working people to have the money to give it away to someone else.
The government never gave away something that it didn't take from someone else.
When this is a total service society, and Pedro and Umbakki are coming here to mop floors and flip burgers, who will they be doing it for?
Someone has to have a job to have money to employ these people. This whole system is broken. The enconomy of the US and the rest of the world is going to collapse. We are the backbone that supports the world and the weight of the world is about to break that backbone..
1929 will look like a cakewalk when it goes down again..
'ta
Build an outsourcing company in Russia.
Hell, I speak Russian, I've got management experience, and I know where the on button is. What else do I need?
hmm...
What about:
Start up capital
Management Processes
Competent developers in Russia
Marketing
Pubic Relations
Public Relations
Just another
?
!
Profit!!!
Business Model
What we're pretty much seeing, yet again, is the valuation of the company over the individual. People like Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and pretty much every other CEO in the tech industry are getting richer and richer at the expense of the people who keep them there.
Where will this end? Equilibrium? I honestly can't see that happening. I'm pretty sure you could ship every technical job to India and China, and their cost of living, and hence their salaries, would still undercut the US by a massive margin. So what's to stop the flow? I think that legislation might be the only way. Hey, Mr Gates, if you want to use this country to stay rich, then you have to pay it back, your workforce has to be a certain percentage American.
Without that sort of thing, I worry, I honestly do. All I can try to do is be the best in the global market, not just the local market. But how good can I be. You can hire 5 or 10 Indians for what it takes to keep me in a job here in the States. I just can't compete any more.
Right now businessmen are eager to outsource a 80k / yr job to a 10k / yr position. (Forget that 5k shit in the Times, you need more developers and there are hidden costs, in delivery delays and communication overhead.)
What are the boards going to do when they realize you can get a CEO for only 100k / year in India or Russia ? If Ed Whitacre (SBC) was replaced, the 82 million a year savings (yes, look it up) would nearly be enough to make SBC profitable, for the first time since they hired him !
Corporate Boards themselves are much cheaper overseas; in some cases you only have to go as far as Canada to get boards that work for a tenth the price of boards in the United States.
These changes are the inevitable reflection of the market, and passing laws against it just damages our competitiveness. American CEOs will always be able re-train to other jobs to stay competitive.
Best of all, the savings to the bottom line can be feed into tax-free dividends, which help keep the stock market strong.
The IPs of those who respond against this post or mod it down will be reported to Asscraft as Al Qeada agents.
Guess what the word "indo" in "Indo-european"
family of languages, people etc., stands for ?
"India".
Pervert!
Couple of notes on this:
1. Brush up your Hindi/Cantonese/Tagalog/Mandarin.
2. While we in the US can keep crying about this (and will) don't you think it is a good move for the globe? This is practical wealth redistibution. Instead of 1% of the world population, now the wealth generated by IT can be shared with 20-30%. Isn't it just fair? Specially if you notice that this is not only an IT related phenomenon.
Effactively the US corporate giants (mostly Republicans) are doing what the liberals have been preaching for a long time (not Democrats, but Greens).
What do ya know?
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
These "how dare indians take american jobs" posts are getting tedious.
I'm not going to get stuck like people in the muscle industries have in the last few decades, clinging to the shrinking number of jobs for less pay for more work. I'm still in a good position, it's time to start gearing up to switch to an industry that's not getting shipped overseas.
Whadya think? Management's probably good -- those fuckers will never reduce their own numbers or salaries, but I hate sitting in meetings and being useless. Health care? Big barrier to entry, though... What else isn't going away?
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I know this is a new economy and this makes business sense but what about Nationalism? I'm not talking Nazi-era nationalism. I'm talking about the true definition of Nationalism...
I know this is a new economy and this makes business sense but what about Nationalism? I'm not talking Nazi-era nationalism. I'm talking about the true definition of Nationalism...
nationalism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (nsh-n-lzm, nshn-) n.
Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation.
The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals.
Aspirations for national independence in a country under foreign domination.
The key is "devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation". This is what we should be doing in a business sense. We rob our citizen's of jobs in an effort to enrich few. By supporting our economy and giving our citizens jobs we further enrich our future and our kids.
By continually outsourcing our jobs we shore up foreign economies at the expense of our own. At worse there should be arbitration between the companies and employees instead of moving jobs outside of the US.
I know this is a money issue but the big picture is what's most important. Exporting our jobs along with the technology which goes with it could be more dangerous to our economy than anyone could imagine. We already have technological espionage on our own soil so how is exporting the same technology safer and better form us?
There's also the other part of this argument where your foreign workers are working as slave labor. I thought we were a more civilized and caring society. Didn't Nike and Kathy Lee take it in the ass for having sweatshop workers making their products?
I don't think sending Frank Gifford into foreign countries, handing out cash to the poor will solve this issue....
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Do we have to have a 'Made by U.S. Programmers' label for software packages?
Honestly, did you 'look for the union label' before buying your clothing? Why do you think anyone else is going to care if their software was made in the USA? Ultimately, they just want the lowest price.
The situation sucks, but I'm not sure what we can do about it. Maybe tax breaks for companies that hire American workers in America, but even that would probalby not helpt too much.
I'm an American. I lead a lifestyle that is substantially better than most of the people on the planet. Outsourcing of IT jobs to countries like China, Russia and India is threatening that lifestyle, and if I'm not careful it could all go right down the drain.
I say: Good. It's about damn time.
Why does America deserve to have all the wealth that it has? If someone in India can do my job at 1/10th the cost, why exactly should anyone pay me to do it? Simply to support my American way of life? No. The American way of life is not a birthright. It has to be earned. You earn it by doing what those guys in India and China and Russia can't do. You earn it by innovating, and by taking risks. You earn it by seizing on oppertunities that those guys simply do not have access to.
It's time to wake up people. Being able to sling a little code, set up a webserver and talk your way around a design meeting is not going to cut it anymore. You need to get off your ass, put the time in on the weekends and:
1) Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)
2) Train yourself to do it well.
Otherwise you will not have a job. Simple as that. Just like during the manufacturing boom in the 50's and 60's, America (and Western Civilization in general) had gotten fat and lazy in the last few years. Now there is simply no reason why you are worth 10 times more than the rest of the world. So you had better come up with a reason, or move to China.
I guess its happening in the US...
Yeah, this is legit. And ok, so it's considered spam. O well, check it out anyway. http://fubak.plugusin4cash.com
I guess more of us will just have to work at a hamburger factory. No chance of that ever getting outsourced to India.
Repeat after me... Do you want fries with that...
It's always a good idea to have a backup plan.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I'm gonna patent outsourcing IT jobs to India!
It would be nice if jobs at least rotated out of our country instead of leaving for good. For the first 10 years of my working life i'll be a car factory worker. Next 10 software engineer... Back to car manufacturing, oh! oh wait now i'm a seamstress. Just dreaming... would be nice.
At some point the US will need to adjust to economic conditions outside the US. While in the past computer programmers and administrators were highly educated people, now community colleges and trade schools are pumping these "trained" people out. In addition to this, programming is not the work of a small squad or an individual anymore, instead it is a large conglomerate of people, and parts of software - think backend. The only thing that really needs a US/English cultural touch is the interface, for the most part (I in no way mean to minimize the importance of the interface). But thats it.
An educated anybody can really do these jobs now. The investment in education is nowhere near as high anymore (no programmer will be paying off $80k for school, think 2k at most at CC), and the decentralizing of software development has made the language barrier a thing of the past.
So now what?
...and everyone will be working 20 hours a week, making minimum-wage, or have no job at all. At the same time, the US economy will gradually transform into a medieval-style barter economy. Now THAT's progress!
so pick up and move to another country for awhile and get one of those overseas jobs! the world is too big to stay in one place too long!! sounds like a nice way to see the world to me.
is that 50% of those IT jobs left behind in the US will be for MS server reboot monkeys at minimum wage or slightly above.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
They've found a way to keep their programmers from spending most of the day browsing Slashdot...
Hmm.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Brazil is overseas and qualify as "other countries" too. Besides, we have very good Comp-Sci colleges and a load of excellent developers (left in the rain when our late and small dotcom boom ended) willing to work for a fraction of the average American developer income. And we are far nearer than India.
> No cultural differences ?
Yup. None. India is the "indo" in Indo-European.
> No language barrier ?
Yup. None. Indian languages belong to the
"Indo-European" family of languages. That's
what "Indo" refers to.
> Slightly brown ?
North Indians, regardless of skin-color are
genetically *indistinguishable* from
N. Europeans.
And then, ultimately there'll be some hot company that consists of a chairman who owns 51% of the stock living in the U.S. and all the other parts of the company and managers who will be in India or China.
Then that Chairman will sell 2% of his/her stock for some reason and get outsourced himself.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
What the hell is evil about this? What obligation do they have to hire overpriced, undertrained American workers?
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
While it is true that many technical jobs have been moved to India, the best Indian engineers actual come to the US to have jobs here.
CBS's 60 Minutes had a segment on students of the ultra-competitive Indian Institute of Technology a while ago. And apparently all the graduates from IIT want to come to the US.
Therefore, I have the thesis that technical jobs in the US are simply getting more and more advanced, whlie "easier" technical jobs are being moved overseas.
You should lay off Adam Smith for a while, and look outside.
Of course they are doing it out of greed - how else do you keep your share prices up in a declining market? How else do you justify the executive salaries?
For the amount of money that IBM gets in tax breaks and govt. contracts you'd think they should have some obligation to the people who made that possible...
Jan
Two or five or 10 years from now, India and Pakistan get into a fight. Where is your code? Who will be maintaining it? What happens when your packaged software is suddenly competing with a product nearly identical from another country, but at half the price? Sue them? Where?
Being a consultant I see company after company making the move to get $20/hour developers off-shore. Some make it work by playing with the numbers. Some make it work by comparing only salary. US Developer $60k, Indian developer $35k. Few ever cost justify the entire structure and impact. They don't want to know as most will be gone before the long term impact is seen.
As for the language, time zone, etc. Those are all minor issues that most of the sale people brush aside as trivial. Giving polished presentations on cost savings and how developers have become a major corporate "expense." They are talking to your CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs telling them how to save millions on development and support costs.
Your leadership will come out and tell you how we are going to work "hand in hand" with our overseas "team." Then after the transition, your position is no longer as valuable, or necessary. If you don't have a specialty niche, where being on-site is a major requirement, look for significant impact to you. Even if, as someone put it, you are the remaining 92%, your value will be driven by the going rate.
Amazing, Corporate America's greed knows no bounds. They will ship the American jobs off shore to improve the US based company's profits BUT the people in the US have no work so can't consume anything. So Corporate America makes even more money and the average American goes on welfare. They are shipping American prosperity off shore with no eye to the long term effects to the American economy. In the end, America will become a 3rd world economy with no consumers to be found. Corporate America is politically so powerful that I'm afraid the average American has no power to change anything. Vote how you like, the Corporate powers will simply "fund" their way into control of which ever party gets "in" and they will still run the show. Good bye freedom to manage your country the way "you" see fit. Corporate money wins everytime.
I wonder if the time zone difference might be seen as an advantage, i.e., as a way to have skilled, white-collar employees working on a problem 24/7 without having to pay them a premium for working overnight? The second page of the article states:
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
People forget that most software development is to support the real business of the corporation which makes the money. So if large corporations can get their coding done cheaper (and probably better), then the people doing the real money- making jobs can have more software to support them. This creates another virtous circle of productivity gains which will make us all in total richer. Of course you can't make an omlette without making eggs and I'm sorry for all the IT folk who have to change career as a result.
Yet when our "business model" (i.e., our strategy for making money) is challenged by a bunch of cheap programmers in some other country, do we "get used to it?" Do we bite the bullet and accept the fact that the world is changing, and programmers have become a cheap commodity? No. We sit here and whine.
We're all terrible hypocrites.
Most educated indians can actually write way better in English than they can in their native language.
S
Fuck... with all these companies outsourcing IT jobs it makes me feel real good that I'll be graduating in the spring with a CompSci degree. Looks like I'll be going straight from college into the unemployment line. Lucky me.
I knew I should have gone to business school instead... would've been a lot easier and I'd at least be able to get a job out of college.
I think the large projects for large companies can afford some of the risks of overseas outsourcing of their projects. There are risks and there are rewards in doing so.
Small companies, small short projects that live and die on frequent interfacing with small and medium sized business owners will probably be better off in most cases talking with a local support developer.
If your project grows large, stable and is properly constructed of commodity pieces, then it will make sense to move those functions to where they can be performed at the lowest cost.
I can also see where some of the lesser desirable jobs could be outsourced, such as quality testing of the weirdest kind, documentation. (You know how much your ace programmers love doing that.) In the end, we could end up with higher quality software than we do now.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
hotter chics for the occasionally necessary overseas team development trip.
Have a law that any over-seas programmer must be paid wages which equal or exceed the wages of U.S. programmers should.
That way no one gets fucked over.
Paying an Indian programmer less than a U.S. programmer is fucking the Indian programmer over.
Moving software development overseas so you don't have to pay standard wages to U.S. programmers if fucking over the U.S. programmer.
WTF ?! I understand that gov't people being bought out by big corpos and letting them do whatever they please afterwards ( do you REALLY need examples ? ) is shocking indeed, though...
Surely you can disagree with this point of view, but modding such a post as flamebait is so freakin' ridiculous...
United States of America, good ol' backers of world peace.
I'm sure they'll sign a nondisclosure agreement.
H-1B PRESS RELEASE
STATEMENT BY GOVERNOR GEORGE W. BUSH ON
THE CLINTON-GORE ADMINISTRATION'S REFUSAL
TO RAISE THE H1-B IMMIGRANT VISA CAP
"America has the best industries in the world. And that means we need the best workers
in the world. By failing to support legislation to increase the number of highly-skilled,
highly-trained immigrants, the Clinton-Gore administration is standing in the way of
continued economic growth.
"I urge the administration to unequivocally support bipartisan efforts in Congress to raise
the number of highly-skilled, highly-trained immigrants who can enter the country each
year. By increasing the number of these H1-B Visas, we can increase the chances that
our economy will continue to grow.
"Still, H1-B visas are a short term solution to a long term problem. As America's need
for highly-trained specialists continues to grow, the solution will be better education. I
have laid out an agenda based on the types of education reforms we passed in Texas,
placing a renewed emphasis on science and technology training.
"I urge the Clinton-Gore administration to put the public's interests ahead of union
bosses and special interests who oppose legal immigration. Let's raise our sights. And
let's raise the number of H1-B Visas."
...named Dilbert.
I'm a consultant, and most of my work does not require me to be physically onsite -- although my clients prefer it. So what should I do in response to a disappearance of nearly 1 in 10 positions overseas?
Maybe I should move to Bangalore, use my established clients to continue work in the US, and use the drop in my own housing/personal/family expenses to remain competitive. My old college roomie did a version of this -- telecommuting to consulting gigs in Los Angeles from a very nice house in Arkansas. I can think of half a dozen places to go that wouldn't suck at all. Hell, given the way the state & federal economy's been run into the ground here in the US ($450B+ deficit!), maybe my kids will get a better public education abroad.
Then again, I find that if I drop the price for my services below a certain level, then the client no longer respects the work as coming from an expert (and thus exclusive) source. It's sad to think that I tend to get the most abuse from clients to whom I've given cut rates. Maybe I should raise my rates? If I keep my fees well above the internationally-outsourced folks, but below the top decile (easy targets for that 8%), I should be in good shape, no?
J
I think not...(*poof*)
Take the "should" out of the first sentence...my error.
that IS progress !
Well theres a simple solution thats infinitely more effective than protesting. Instead of going to work stay home and code up a 'marissa' etc. multiply this factor by # of workers and we should have a statement made :)
"we hold all your computers, we want our jobs back!"
If you work with programming, writing manuals may be a good angle, although its not a big market. Basically, any good manual needs to be written locally. Realistically, even nations with the same language (like the US and Britain) should have seperate manuals to appreciate the differences, although thats not such a big deal. However, it'll be a while before they have Indians writing manuals to be sold in the US.
Just my seven cents.
Hands on support/hardware support/network support will still be there. You can't outsource yoru datacenter to India because latency is still latency. When a hardware card needs to be replaced a worked in India won't be able to do it.
if you're the one that actually TOUCHES the hardware you will have a job for a while yet.
we need union representation. Use that leverage to get the government to put a tarrif on overseas work. Apply it to every company. That way the cost will stay the same and the can remain competitive and we don't loose jobs.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not to mention, how do you provide security when the enemy is INSIDE the perimeter?
Why assume the "top management" jobs won't also be outsourced to India to reduce costs? As the article states, IBM sees the need to move "white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas." If the job as a programmer can be sent overseas, why not a management job?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Wow, you must have benefitted from that excellent public education.
CBS/NBC/ABC haven't covered it yet, but NEWSFLASH: we ain't the backbone anymore.
Between an uneducated & largely ignorant populace, and self-serving politicians, it's bread and circuses from now on, my friend...
Jan
There is no reason to comment on this topic at all. All the comments are going to say: 1. The Indians are stealing the God given jobs of the Americans! wah wah wah 2. Those evil companies don't care about their employees! Wah wah wah 3. Clinton NAFTA foreigners H1-B blah blah blah, ramble ramble ramble Get over it! It's called capitalism. Companies have a loyalty ONLY to their shareholders. Not to their Employees. If a company treats their employees well, it is only incidental. That is how the system is built and that is the system championed by the United States and spread worldwide aggressively by the US government. Million of blue-collar jobs have moved overseas a long time ago. The whining techies screaming about American jobs being lost don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying an inexpensive video card or printer made in China. The whining techies don't think twice about going to Fry's and buying a Via motherboard made in Taiwan. All this crap about "American jobs" being lost is a whole bunch of nationalistic lip-service tripe. Put your money where your mouth is. I challenge you to stop buying a single electronic item (or clothes, or anything else) not made overseas by a worker who "stole" American jobs. If you can't, you are infinitely worse than the CEO who moved the jobs overseas because you were the one that caused the CEO to make that decision.
Well said Dr. Bent.
Its the law of nature to balance things over time. The swing just started to reverse and balance the scale.
You should lay off Adam Smith for a while, and look outside.
Of course they are doing it out of greed - how else do you keep your share prices up in a declining market? How else do you justify the executive salaries?
For the amount of money that IBM gets in tax breaks and govt. contracts you'd think they should have some obligation to the people who made that possible...
Jan
The math is pretty simple. Let's say you're IBM and you can either hire an engineer in the US for $40,000 per year, or in India for 60,000 rupees per year, which is at most $1400.
Now I have no doubt that American programmers are more productive, better versed in the needs of the American user, better speakers of English, and better trained at US universities.
However. Are you all really 30 times more productive? Can IBM get the work of 30 Indian programmers from 1 American programmer?
Probably not. This is the problem with economics. When we were the only country capable of generating good quality code because we had all the people who knew how to do it -- we were set. However, the Internet is, and should be a global driver of economies, and thus, much as manufacture of things (physical objects) has moved off shore, so too now will the manufacture of code/IP. Certainly innovation will continue to occur here, but for many applications, the consumer doesn't really need innovation, just some code to do what they want.
Doubtless my karma will suffer for this, but it's how I see it.
Kargis Strong
The economy doesn't owe you a living just because you're a programmer or an American. Get over it, because the economy isn't going to change. If you see that you can't compete, you'd better either increase your ability to compete or change your expectations.
In my opinion, computer programming should no longer be considered a "high-tech" job.
Sure, there is science in the mix (mostly logic, math), but how many programmers actually make use of this stuff on a daily basis? Most programming that is done in industry is relatively routine stuff;
Code, Run, Debug, Repeat.
Only a lucky few are developing completely new algorithms, and doing what can really be called 'research'. The rest are just engineering jobs, if that.
Now the former, research-related stuff, will stay in the country. Our universities and research are still much better.
The latter type of programming, which unfortunately is what most people are doing, like writing VB programs to solve relatively simple tasks and such, cannot compete.
There is no reason to keep those jobs in the country if someone else can do the same thing cheaper.
And that's just fine with me. For nations like India, it's still one step up on the ladder of technology, and for us, it's a motivation to keep pushing upwards towards the new areas that really are "high-tech".
...it's very good think. I live in Poland, where unemployment rate is as high as 20%, 50% of university graduates are unemployed, and where I work as a system administrator for about 1000 zlotys (less than 300 USD) monthly and last payment was from March.
I have a Masters Degree in Physics, and I am finishing my Masters thesis in Law. I'm 25 and still living with my parents in a flat (let's just say, that renting one room flat costs over 500 zlotys (half of my pay)) and I consider myself very lucky having a place to live, a job, and at least some perspectives.
So whenever some US corp. is moving out of US, we people from underdeveloped countries, are rather happy, as this means better future for us.
When in doubt, go to the library. - Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
I hear that Indian students get a great education in university (and that there's tough competetion to get in). Sometimes I wish that I could have gone to a better school (instead of my state school), but my company promotes based on years with the company... so it doesn't matter anyways. I think it's only a question of time before all non-defense development moves to India... what's going to stop the trend? I wish them the best of luck for their hard work.
Then we could be North Korea. What good would that do?
I want to eat, damnit! Let them build their own economies.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Only those of the Indian race may immmigrate to India, by Indian law.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I am form india, and i have first had experiance from there.
China is the place where al these jobs will move to, and this is only templorary, why you ask?
Beacuse like USA india has labour laws that do not allow one to pay below a certain limit.
Here are my fisrt hand experiances of businesses closed down due to china.
1. My uncle has a factory making table tennis play balls(ping pang balls). He closed down as china import is much cheaper and he could not afford to compete.
2. My uncle's friend used to manufacture plastic cans and tools, He closed down same reason.
In fact 90% of the manufacturing units in their industrail complex shut down, reason cheap imports from china. Small/Medium scale industries just cannot compete.
It is only a matter of time they get to the service industry and you know what i hear, they already have a plan to teach english on a massive scale.
China is the best place to be, best place to invest , not india, india is just a passing phase.
I posted about this in my blog the other day. I made some quick and dirty estimates about how competitive we can conceivably be. The minimum a family of 4 needs is in the neighborhood of $50K a year to have tansportation, a house, food, clothing, insurance, etc, and that is a fairly conservative estimate. That price is for a modest house, a pair of mid 90's used toyotas, etc. It might be possible to live on less, but you certainly aren't going to be saving money for college, retirement, etc.
Now, a well paid programmer in India makes $8000/year and lives well on that. So, if both parents were working in a family of 4 it's $16K vs. $50K. Even if you assume that they'd be willing to pay twice as much to have a local worker, that's only $32K, still way below muster.
For some perspective, $50K a year would be roughly $12/hr for each of the workers. I'm not totally familiar with the wages of union plumbers but dug up a $25/hr wage when I asked google. So, do you want to be a union plumber, a job than cannot possibly be moved overseas, or a coder? Why go to college and collect a huge debt when you can go to a trade school and make far better money?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
and here I am with no mod points (Or, indeed, the password to my account ;P forgot it 'cos I had it saved)
The irony is that our company (in other divisions) makes most of its money on defense work (non of those jobs are leaving, as that's a requirement of those contracts). If you want to outsource jobs to India, so be it. But I can't help but feel my stomach turn that they're also getting what's basically a subsidy from the government.
If you ship U.S. jobs overseas, should you still be granted government contracts?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
How do we sustain a cyber perimeter that encompasses multiple continents?
What perimeter?
Why do you think they are moving the jobs to India - to better distribute the wealth??? They are doing it because it's cheaper!
Following your argument, we should expect deepening discounts on IBM software and services, right?
Face it, this is about concentrating wealth, not spreading it around...
Jan
What makes you think that we care whether IBM increases revenue?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
IBM is simply joining the rest of the companies such as MS, HP, and Sun. No big deal. People will have to learn to change.
The funny thing though, was that I interviewed with Perot systems at C. Springs about 4-5 years ago. During the intereview, I found them to be total idiots. So I change subjects to talk about jobs and the coming lose of jobs to India/Russia/Far east. The answer that I got from one was that Americans were so smart that we could never lose our jobs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not many good ones to choose from anymore. Me, it's a tossup between law and finance. Technical sales maybe.
:(
I feel like a Sim, quitting his job to start on a better careerpath
Not in the long run. While they subsidize programmers in the short run (just like they subsidized textile workers, steel workers, etc.) at a cost to the rest of us, in the long run they just make our entire economy less efficient and less competitive.
Great, so an American (non-software) business gets to pay $150 per license for a program that costs its German or Indian competitor only $100 per license. That only makes another American business less competive in the international marketplace. Eventually, this American company is forced out of business, its employees are laid off, and the American software company has lost the market for its products anyway.
Or the American non-software company is forced to seek protective tariffs for *its* products... pushing the problem down the line.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports. If by 'learn to fix cars' you mean 'build robots that fix cars', you might be on to something; otherwise, there's no way you can compete with the robots that build new cars in Asia.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
750K jobs lost in the USA to the H1B Visa program and the L1 visa program. With 325,000 H1B visas and 329,000 L1 visas in 2001, this can only mean that U.S. citizens are losing their jobs to imported labor. As someone who has a couple friends still looking for work int eh tech industry, I think its a shame that we are sending our jobs overseas and then bringing workers here to take the jobs we still have here. Yeah, it sucks for labor, but it rocks for corporations.
Hmm... maybe it's time we start to ask our congressmen to reduce the number of visas issued.
Forget knee-jerk reactions for a second and focus on the "economics" of this decision...
Since the dot.com bust aren't there a LOT of unemployed software developers in the U.S.? (read: job market saturated). Shouldn't that mean that U.S. corporations have the leverage to pick and choose? (read: keep salaries low) So given that U.S. should "theoretically" have an abundance of cheap labour what is the real incentive of outsourcing to India? Do they work for dirt there?
My understanding was that Indian tech firms were actually fairly high quality and given the number of IT "schools" in north america that churn out underqualified barely-trained can't-think-forthemselves "developers" I suspect that quality may also be an issue that IBM is looking at.
If that's not the case, then perhaps the whole notion of thousands of unemployed dot-commers is a myth. Given that many were churned out by fly-by-night tech schools I suspect they sunk back into the woodwork to leave real development to professionals. Which leads to my next point: If IBM is moving jobs overseas to save in labour costs then that wouldn't that indicate labour costs here are high? Would that not in turn indicate a "shortage" of qualified developers. So if all these IBM employees get laid off, would they not be able to simply fill the shortage here but with other companies (that don't have IBM's resources to move operations abroad so easily)?
At any rate, corporations are not charities. They don't "owe" jobs to anybody just because you live in a certain country or don't. Corporations have a mandate to minimize costs and increase profitability - and in so doing, at least in theory, they contribute to making their host country all that much healithier economically. So in this respect IBM's move can be viewed as "ultimately" good for both the U.S. AND India even if it is painful in the short term for the individuals laid off.
I mean, if we all want software to be free, why would we care about commercial coding jobs moving overseas?
There would still be money to be made as systems integrators, etc. Under the GNU policy, eventually there would be no software coding jobs. Everything would be open source and free.
You mean that you can't make a living off of supporting and services? Shocking, considering all the posts to the contrary whenever a proprietary vendor is mentioned...
After reading the usual bitching and moaning about tech jobs going overseas, it struck me odd that the same people who are proponents of Free (not necessarily *free*) software are some of the loudest whiners. Ok, so you can charge for Free software, but once it is in the wild, then what? Well, you are shit out of luck! Unless you can talk a user of your software into a maintenance contract or whatnot, you are never going to see another penny from your software unless some do-gooder decides to pay for it even when they can get it for free.
Guess what? If I am a large multinational that makes, say, CRM software, and along comes some Free and kickass version that my customers start using then I start fucking laying people off or shipping my work overseas. Why? Because I am not making as much money. That in itself may not be too bad -- a little competition is a good thing -- but in this case now *no one* is making any money. Whoohooo!
People may want to see MS go down, and I can't necessarily say I am not one of them. However, stop for a minute and think of the mind-numbing and crippling effects that would have on the entire worldwide software industry. There are thousands and thousands of companies that make their money from supporting MS products, writing add-ins, etc... In the Seattle-area I would venture to guess that about 95% of the solutions providers and about 80% of the development shops rely on MS. MS goes away? Thousands and thousands of jobs go away as well. Fun fun.
</RantingTangent>
Yeah, I agree with you about the reason for this move. But think about the outcome, will not the Indian programmer be better off when he finds employment with IBM?
They are not moving to India to better distribute wealth, but that is what is going to happen as a result of their move.
And I agree with you that it will result in concentrated wealth in the US. CEOs will (are) earning 100 millions, while the janitor has to live on $5.75 an hour. Please do take this issue up with your government, after all progressive taxation does exist for a reason. Just make sure to vote non-Bush next time!
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
For all those who have been wailing about loss of US jobs; here are some interesting things to know:
.... Service-producing industries-including finance, insurance, and real estate; government; services; transportation, communications, and utilities;
... these jobs account for 8 out of the 20 fastest growing occupations in the economy.
t hal/5.2.html
:)
(source: http://www.bls.gov/oco/oco2003.htm)
Employment
Industry
**The long-term shift from goods-producing to service-producing employment is expected to continue
**Employment in the goods-producing industries has been relatively stagnant since the early 1980s
**Nondurable manufacturing, on the other hand, is expected to decline by less than 1 percent, shedding 64,000 jobs overall. The majority of employment declines are expected to be in apparel and other textile products and leather and leather products industries, which together are expected to shed 131,000 jobs by 2010 because of increased job automation and international competition
**Mining. Employment in mining is expected to decrease 10.1 percent, or by some 55,000 jobs, by 2010.
**Computer occupations are expected to grow the fastest over the projection period
**Declining occupational employment stems from declining industry employment, technological advancements, changes in business practices, and other factors. For example, increased productivity and farm consolidations are expected to result in a decline of 328,000 farmers over the 2000-10 period.
I know I have used a few numbers from the report. For a reason. Before complaining about loss of job/lack of job, PAY ATTENTION TO THE TRENDS IN EMPLOYMENT. Try to see which job sectors will not be affected too badly by outsourcing. Try to see if your interests/ abilities/ education can get you a job in one of these fields. Stop complaining over nothing.
And for those who think people in India cannot speak English:
In terms of numbers of English speakers, the Indian subcontinent ranks third in the world, after the USA and UK. An estimated 4% of the Indian population use English; although the number might seem small, out of the total population that is about 35 million people (in 1994)
Source:
http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/post/india/hohen
Just for sake of clarification: Job loss/ lack of job is BAD. For me, for you, for everyone. The important thing is that instead of blaming the corporations, tey to THINK how you can 'beat the system'. And also, don't complain when you find that half the things you buy are "Made in China"
I guess its too late for IT to try and unionize. Corporate IT has been reduced to slave labor.
Think of what happened to this country when all the "great" manufacturing jobs and textile jobs and all the other jobs went to foreign nations over the last 50 years? We pay them in dollars and ultimately, the only place where you can spend dollars is in the USA. The world gets rich with our money and so do we. Thats economics kids. Americans have had this bitch for a long time and we end up crying all the way to the bank.
Now if it is my job or your job, its a damn stark reality. Salaries may plateau or go down. Too many became IT personnel in the 90s, they will get weeded out. But there will always, always be service industry jobs in this country for lower wages. If evolution weeds you out you may find yourself in one. It sucks to be you. But thats freedom folks, freedom to succeed, freedom to fail.
Remember one thing about economic collapse, it will happen only if those in power allow it and they will only allow it if it is to their benefit. I can't see this as likely anytime soon. Have faith in our little corporate plutocracy. And work harder, stop reading so much slashdot!
Face it, technical jobs are becomming increasingly a commodity that can be filled as easily by someone in Bangalore as Boston. So, when the Joe CEO of Moneygrubberscorp realizes that he can slash costs by many times through overseas outsourcing, what do he's going to do? That's right, he sees that lower costs = higher profit = more money for Joe CEO, his cronies, and the all mightly shareholder. Almighty capitalism at its finest!
Unfortunatly, that means that means that the middle class workers he just eliminated are SOL. Their piece of the pie is gone, eaten up by Joe CEO so he can afford another villa in Switzerland. Poor John Programmer now must try to find another job - but unfortunatly, no other company can justify the cost to hire him.
As more companies outsource, those who don't, out of patriotism and respect for their countrymen, have higher costs, realize less profit, and lose their competiveness. Eventually, they will either: A) Be eaten by Microsoft / Oracle / etc B) Go out of business.
What does this mean? IT MEANS THAT SOON, THE ONLY COMPANIES LEFT WILL THE ONES WHO HAVE OUTSOURCED ALL THEIR WHITE COLLAR JOBS. John Programmer will have to find something that has not / can't be outsourced, such as the trite example of flipping burgers. Thus, bye bye middle class.
Who wins? Joe CEO, Moneygrubberscorp, its shareholders and all the other's companies like it make out big time by pocketing the difference between the salaries of thousands of John Programmers.
What can be done? I'm not going to preach here (I'll leave that for another time). Just be aware that this is happening and ITS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE IT HAPPENS TO YOU!
"Why does America deserve to have all the wealth that it has? "
because we deloped global capitalism.
Because we set the standar for other to achieve.
"1) Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)"
Well, that would be aahhhh nobody.
"2) Train yourself to do it well."
I do programming well. you would be hard pressed to find an area of programming I have not done. yet, I still will loose a job overseas.
Nobody has gotten fat and lazy in the last few years. That is always the perception because we work harder then most countries, but we also play harder.
well, thats a great attitude you got there, lets see what you have to say when your living under a bridge.
Hell yeah, America first.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't know where you've been living, but cars don't get 'fixed' anymore, they get 'replaced' with cheap imports
I don't know where you live, but nobody where I live can afford even a 'cheap' import since we're all waiting for the economy to come out of recession... (Oh, wait, I forgot the economy came out of recession over a year ago according to that group of economists.)
I'm driving an '87 model car (actually bought it new in '87 and have had no reason to replace it). And my wife drives a '94 model car.
Most educated Indians (that I know) can actually write way better in English than most Americans...
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Perhaps you don't realize it, but many of the things you take for granted as part of that lifestyle you only have because of cheap overseas labour.
IT wouldn't be the first time jobs went overseas, and things changed.
How can companies justify paying locals to do something that can be done for a fraction of the price overseas? If they don't do it, someone else will.
Of course, the government would have to erect trade barriers, to ensure that jobs stayed local.. but then what would nike do? What about all the clothing manufacturers? Think of all the people that the textile industry could employ.
U.S. jobs jumping ship -- Cheap overseas labor is not just for manufacturers any more -- is your job headed offshore too?
A lawyer & digital forensics examiner. Also an expert on open source software (OSS).
It may not be a crime, but it may also not be realistic.
There is a remarkably arrogant attitude here in the US that we Americans are born with a soverign right to get paid more than someone with equivilant skills in other countries, and the coming years are going to give a lot of Americans expecting to live better than their foreign counterparts a serious moment of pause.
IBM needs programmers. They can hire one American, or three people in another country. To a business, it's a no brainer. Sensible economics. Will it have a downard effect on the standard of living in the US? Yes, probably. Maybe we're due (or overdue) for that to happen.
The west is fucked. We are so used to drawing over $2000 a month for our work, we just can't compete with the 3rd world "slaves" who number in hundreds of millions, work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, for far less than $500 a month, with no benefits whatsoever. And until this "great equalization" is done with, the western governments have fallen and some sort of socialist-protectionist system instituted. Free market will destroy us. Just wait and see. The massive deflation wave will either force us to shrivel up in depression, or make us hyperinflate our way to hell.
Growing up in the heart of union country, Michigan. I thought always thought one of the factors to bringing down some american industries was the unions demands. Well, now that my job industry in danger. I wish there was an union who could protect our jobs and represent the industry. Hell, we as computer professionals there is not even a powerful political lobby to fight our cause. First the call centers, then various levels of support centers and now development shops.
Isn't the the reverse of what Ford did over 100 years ago? He paid workers more, and as a result, more people could afford the product they were producing.
When you outsource higher paying jobs, people have to find another (probably lower paying) job. With more people making less money (and this able to consume less), how is that good for the company long term?
I can dig competing for my labor costs on the strength of my skills, but I can't compete with developers who make $5,850 a year, because I can't even rent a hole in the wall in my city for that yearly income, let alone feed myself.
Do we really want to 'Flint, Michigan' the entire high-tech industry? At the very least, lets insist that only countries with similar social standards as ours can get looked at for this kind of expatriation of jobs.
Personally, I'm not interested in returning to the days of the Industrial Revolution where workers had no rights-- cause thats what it's like in many third-world countries.
What the hell, lets just expatriate everything... I'm sure we can find dollar-a-day workers for it all over there-- course by then they'll be nobody to pay the lawyers and buy the goods they want to sell to us-- at least the lawyers will all die of hunger too, thats should be a good thing.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
Ah...
So it's not wrong for Walmart to sell everything at a loss, just to drive the Mom-'n-Pop local shops out of business?
I'm sure if you ask the people who used to own their own local business (but now greet people at Walmart's doors) if that tactic is evil, I think they'd say yes.
no comment
Forrester Research '...estimated that 450,000 computer industry jobs could be transferred abroad in the next 12 years, representing 8 percent of the nation's computer jobs.'
Forgive me for being an optimist, but if the computer job growth rate doesn't beat the hell out of 8% total (not annual) over the next 12 years then the US economy as a whole is in a lot more trouble than just you and your job security.
Does anyone here seriously think this whole "information science" thing has played itself out? Come on people, use your head. This is a slump, the wheat is getting culled from the chaff and the lean mean fighting machines that are being brewed in people's basements right now are going to go beyond anything imagined in the wildest VC dog and pony show from 4 years ago.
In 12 years we'll have exported the menial computer science labour, but the high-end, US-centric computer science labour will still be here, and the total market for computer science will be at least 100% larger (I'm betting that's a big underestimate). As software development becomes an increasingly advanced science, customers are going to demand ever higher degrees of customization with a shorter turnaround time. Unless global adoption of English and videoconferencing both take a collosal step forward, being in the same city (let alone the same continent) is going to be worth the cost.
So quit whining and keep learning. The jobs are going to be harder, but they'll be plentiful and a lot more fun. Better yet, head out to your garage and start building a better CRM app.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
About Indians, you get what you pay. Really.
Your idea seems good, but must be executed carefully in order to succeed.
Essentially, you want to "vote with your wallet". In other words, don't buy a product that was produced overseas.
Conversely, you must support local business. If you boycot everyone, it will be like the early 1930's again. The Great Depression held for so long because no one was willing to spend any money, they just hoarded what little they had.
no comment
Is what all this outsourcing means! I've lost over 70 Lbs since I switched to my $10@ week diet. Hooray for layoff's and indian outsourcing!
Destination India: The new healthcare hubm l/unc omp/articleshow?msid=85080
_ 314029,0009 00020001.htm
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/x
Japanese visiting India to learn about medicine.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181
I think it will be the opposite. The companies that sit back and scoop up the talent that is left behind will be the next darlings of Wall Street.
Custom Software Development - you know, the kind that actually gives a company a competitive advantage - is not like creating shoes, tools or even cars. Good, on-task communication is much tougher and more vital because there are a lot more variables, and poor communication is the #1 reason for SD project failures. Anything that further impedes good communication is not going to be worth the projected savings.
I've also run into a lot of anecdotal evidence lately (via people working on offsourced projects) that suggests Indian firms are having trouble fully staffing a lot of projects right now. And when they can actually fully staff and complete a project, much of it has to be re-worked. This isn't my opinion - just what I'm hearing from others. This is only going to get worse when the true "offshore rush" kicks into high-gear, and the good ones over in India (their IT workforce is still pretty immature) are all taken by the first ones over.
It sounds like this is going to be one of those issues where, like many of the large ERP projects, we don't hear about the failures from the C-level executives (busy covering their asses) until the poor stockholders are left with funding complete re-writes or seeing their investment go to through the bankruptcy courts.
I hope the IT trade rags would start looking for and reporting these failures before the "best-and-brightest" leave the field, or the country, for other opportunities.
There's a throught - write InfoWorld, eWeek, etc. and give them an idea for their next big headline.
Yep this could be the end of SCO case IBM say if we lose we just setup a sub company in India and keep on going anyway.
It's funny to see this discussed on Slashdot, an open source advocate, where on every other day people are focused on making sure software is free. Thus making sure you don't have to pay anyone in America, or India, or anyone at all to do software development.
;)
Wake up.
At some point you have to pick a side, do you want free/cheap software, or do you want a day job that pays more then minimum wage to develop software? You can't have software be both free and cost lots of money at the same time.
IBM and others have figured this out before you did. Don't be mad, just pick another career, and try not to make that one free too
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
What we need are lawyers because lawsuits have become a way of life, there's no reason a court hearing cannot involve video conferencing over the internet so lets outsource the legal profession.
How about campaign contributions to senators, what we need is a forign senate, imagine what a million dollar campaign contribution buys in India.
How about outsourcing the president? selling the whitehouse and Pentagon would raise $$$ Just think of the sort of property that would buy in India.
Just think of the tax cuts we can get, I sure am glad I knelt at the alter of capitalism.
It'll be Pakistan. Putting American 'interests' in India is just our way of making sure it's Pakistan.
That means that when the Indians want to take Kashmir for good, and Pakistan threatens to lob a nuke into India instead, they'll be lots of Americans there 'on business' whose immediate interests would be harmed as a result. American 'interests' means American forces, which means labeling Pakistan a 'terrorist state' and taking 'pre-emptive action' to protect those 'interests'.
I'm afraid the poster above is right; the only jobs left in the US will be the 'defense' industry. It's time to learn how to be okay with being an imperialist or moving to Europe.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Nothing against IBM or India or outsourcing. It's the way its always been done. America gets a huge leap on an industry and then we send the jobs elsewhere. It's what happens. The problem I see is that we don't know what we're supposed to do next.
If your textile/manufacturing job was lost in the past there was always that new computer course at the community college.
What do we do now? Flower arranging? What's the next big thing supposed to be? And don't say "we don't know yet". We knew that IT was the next big thing decades ago. The IT jobs we're losing now aren't being replaced by a "next big thing" that I know of. So, instead of all of us whining about losing our jobs how about pointing out which skills we should be working on. Bio-tech?
-
We were told making cars in this country was too expensive, domestics started moving production out of the country......and foreign manufacturers started moving in.
America does the high end stuff pretty good, those that make the high end stuff do pretty well too. If the laid off programmers get out of monkey mode they can be making more money than they were before, solve a problem no one knew existed and hammer the market (and get a good patent lawyer).
Give me a big Krell amp, a pair of Martin Logans, a custom chopper and the new Ford GT for the weekends....please.
The current situation is very similar to the 1890's when large Trusts controlled the work force and, ultimately, the US economy. William Harding was President and his position had been bought and paid for by the controlling Trusts. He ran the country literally for the benefit of the wealthy few.
It took a few years for voters to realize that it was to their direct benefit to look through the smoky media babble (media at that time was controlled and concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few) and to elect officials who acted in the larger public interest. In the end, it was the government that put people to work and food on their tables. Many people I have talked to who lived through the 1920's and 1930's remember fondly the government and the role it took to support the "common man".
After the Great War (WWII), corporate interests again gained control of the government. We see this very clearly now with President Bush's ties to Harken Energy and Enron, Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton, Army Chief of staff's ties to Enron, and Rumsfeld's and Rove's board positions and ties to international corporate interests. They clearly stated as they took power that they intended on running our government like a business.
When a company like IBM says they will move jobs offshore, it's with the full knowledge that the government will not stop nor hinder that movement. The article points out that an engineers union is attempting to recruit members around this very issue. Might it be time to seriously consider this kind of protection for our livelihoods? Might it be time to mobilize our overwhelming numbers to demand what is right? Or will we simply roll over and let what happens happen because we believe we can change nothing and that corporations have the "right" to do whatever they want?
Think about it. Seriously.
The freedom to do what you want means the other guy has the freedom to do what he wants - and if that guy's one of the owners of IBM and wants a better return on his investment....
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company! Hell, they can make Linux products and not put anyone here out of work! How is it even logical to give someone on the other side of the planet what amounts to slave wages and further erode the local economy? At what point do we starve to death by sending our jobs to someone who will work for wages no one here can afford to accept? At what point does the system simply fall apart?
The disparity between the wages of the common employee and the CEO of the company Joe Sixpack (or Joe Coder) works for is higher than anywhere else on Earth! So high that Japanese CEO's are appalled by it. And with outsourcing work that disparity grows ever wider.
Who cares if this gives a job to someone overseas if it puts your neighbor, or yourself out on the streets with no chance of finding a job in the market you are skilled in?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
How many people reading this are using the same development technology they used:
If you are predominantly in the 6 month to 1 year category, and have been throughout your career, you are probably OK. 3-5 years? Might be a good idea to learn Hindi/Chinese/Russian.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
So, now those programming jobs will be done by... Indian contractors, living and working in India.
They didn't say anything about moving those dead weight jobs for American-born and educated managers, project managers, team leaders and other non-productive job functions overseas did they? Those can still sit on their butts, in meetings or on the phone all day, and keep pulling in a considerably higher salary than the immigrant work-force.
So, at the end of the day, nothing will change, except for a reduced demand for Indian food.
Isn't /. america-centric these days?
But seriously, those of us who don't live in the USA, and who use products from USA and elsewhere on a daily basis, find the whole notion of an Americans-only closed-shop in the software industry rather liducrous.
Personally, my long term plan is to have a nice house and a satellite dish in some sunny third-world nation with nice beaches, and tele-commute. I don't much care if the client I'm working for is in the USA, India, or wherever.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I didn't know he'd changed his title from "Interim CEO" to "Developer" though...
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
When this came up a few days ago on slashdot, with the post about "Cylical downturn or new world order", I read a bunch of posts about people relating the software industry to the textile industry, or the steel industry.
Is this a valid comparsion?
When I think of a textile factory I picture a big *factory* with a bunch of low paid employees doing labor. Even if these factories were in the US, I never thought that someone with a Masters degree in Math would be applying for a job at a place like this. Same for the steel industry. My dad worked in a steel mill when he was 15, it wasn't exactly mentally challenging work.
Jobs are moving off shore. No doupt.
But, is the product (code) really comparible with the other industries?
If you think about it, almost any service can be moved off shore right??
Im just wondering about other slashdotters thoughts about the constant comparsion to the software development industry vs. the "making small plastic toys" industry that China totally owns.
Remember that everybody in the world hates us.
Now imagine all the opportunities overseas programmers will have to vent that hate. To truly screw over American business.
This really isn't as bad as everybody is making it out to be. It's just another classic example of how American CEO's have lost the ability to think long-term. Companies that do this are going to get burned, badly. And when they come running back to good ole American programming know-how, just remember these golden rules:
1) Everything needs to be rewritten.
2) Every estimate gets padded out to ten times what you think it will really take.
3) Our salary now has to be based on the anticipation that these idiots are going to make the same mistake all over again. Ergo, charge three times what you would normally.
4) There are no cubicles for programmers. Only corner-offices.
And finally...
5) Every one of these corner-offices comes equipped with a foot rest.
(When the CEO complains that he doesn't have time to be a foot rest is the perfect opportunity to inform him about your twelve weeks of vacation every year and three-hour lunch breaks.)
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Remove the space between unc and omp ... /xml/uncomp/article...
Make it so:
> Do we have to have a 'Made by U.S. Programmers' label for software packages?
How friggin arrogant of you. The 'I' in 'IBM' is for International (you know, 'International Business Machines') and their company motto is 'World Peace through World Trade.' IBM develops software all over the world. Always has done. It has long held that IBM in Brazil is a Brazillian company, in Britain a British company, e.t.c.
People in these countries buy American products. Do you think this trade should be one way? Of course you do. You think International trade is a good thing, as long as it is one way. Now why don't you divert your nationalist zeal into something productive like invading another lame third world country? They will welcome you, i am sure!
Move the IT jobs to places with a lower cost of living, TX, OK, AL, KS, LA, NB, etc. There are skilled people in those states who won't demand silicon valley salaries.
-- Viva FreeBSD --
You misspelled "capitalism"...
Yes, it's probably a good thing that the US begin to share it's wealth with other countries, however there are problems with how it is happening.
If you cut American's salaries/jobs who the hell is going to buy all of the overpriced graphic cards and such? I mean honestly by giving someone in India $5000 a year are they really going to buy a Geforce 5900 ultra or a Radeon 9800? Sure there's gamers around the world, but many spend their time in internet cafes. Cheaper labor matters not if you can't move products. Remember, in the U.S. we're ones that need the fastest
So, who will buy their software when all IT workers are out of job? They should move the whole manegment overseas... I've heard that CEO's are pretty cheap in Malasia.
Look if your tech development moves to India and your manufacturing to singapore and malaysia, then WTF do you need some white guy from NY as your CEO??? It's all about connections, You need some Oxford trained Indian guy who's connected in India and the far -east. All the upper management is doing is planning thier own demise.
.........
For years now small to med bussiness has been the big driver of jobs, not the IBM's of this world. With All the advances in Manuf. and technology it will soon be possible to make some pretty cool stuff with a small amount of folks, but margins will be low, so NO high salaried CEO to sit around "Do the vision thing", play golf and diddle his secretary.
These times are a changin
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
All the baby-boomers moving the high-paying jobs overseas are going to retire in a few years. You'll be needed to change their soiled undergarments and listen to their boring views on life all day long.
I work as a programmer (and software architect), so I have lots of compassion for IT people who will loose their jobs in this country. I lost my job a few years ago when my dot.com went out of business.
That said, except for environmental concerns, I think that globalization makes a lot of sense: perform work and manufacturing where it can be done most cost effectively.
Since I work as an independent consultant who mostly telecommutes, I have long considered cheaper overseas IT folks to be the competition. The question is, how to compete?
For starters, I try to constantly educate myself. Secondly, I believe in Joseph Campbell's teachings: "follow your bliss": do the work that you love to do. Just like a lot of people 'here' on Slashdot, I love what I do and I could not imagine working in another field. So, I compete with foreign workers with passion for what I do, constant education, and many years of diverse experience.
I know that this might sound callous, but I just believe that protectionism is a mistake.
-Mark
It's about the skill the job needs and the value that the job provides. Crunch monkeys, uh I mean developers are the assembly line workers of the 21st Century. And those jobs don't vary in quality output by high income/low income variation. If you did something that wasn't as valuable in India or Taiwan as it is here then you would continue to do it here.
Don't cry to me just 'cause you forgot to join the union.
From the article: ...the company's executives were particularly worried that the trend could spur unionization efforts.
Why aren't we unionized? What are the actual benefits, downsides, and what does it take to get there?
This is obviously the beginning of a downward spiral, so I say we should act now while we have a chance.
This is part of a larger problem in which everyone looks out for #1. If we would only concider our actions on the scope of our community (speaking nationally), things might be different... from copyright laws to workforce management.
no comment
The vast majority of jobs in our economy cannot be offshored, and therefore are in no danger of going away. Focus on one of these if you are really worried about your future: 1) Any kind of job requiring a physical presence: Burger flipper, security guard, apple picker, forest ranger, architect, construction worker, consultant, executive manager, ... In the IT realm, consider becoming an IT help desk staffer, business analyst, architect, or product manager.
2) Any kind of job requiring certification in the US. Become a doctor or a lawyer. They have unions, er I mean associations, to police the streets and keep the jobs onshore.
The scary thing about software is that modern telecom has made it so easily offshore-able. Within 10 years I doubt that any sizeable commercial software packages will be developed primarily in the US.
Programmers are the stupidest people on the planet.
First they create tons of free software applications and then they complain when it's hard to find tech jobs.
Well, half the market has been eroded by your own software, stupid! You should've used your skills to make a living, not to destroy your own employment market!
Will code a sig generator for food
Going to use India as an example:
First, as more companies invest in places like India, wages will rise (just as they may fall in the US).
Second, developers in India will leave American companies and form spin-offs or direct competitors, which requires more local employees, reducing the number of developers available for the US firms, also driving up wages in India.
Third, India will eventually develop a market for software, rather than just be a supplier. As that market grows, more and more Indian developers will be employeed to fill the demand, and American companies can compete as well.
Fourth, many jobs can't or won't be moved over, and IT is in general still a growing field. Computers and software are even more ubiquitous than ever, and the demand for domestic workers will still exist.
Fifth, only large companies can really afford to do this. They're usually the shittiest jobs anyway; I'd rather sand-blast my ass-crack than work for IBM. Working for a small-to-medium sized company is far more exciting.
From the article:
"Our aim here is not cost-driven," he said. "It's to build a 24/7 follow-the-sun model for development and support. When a software engineer goes to bed at night in the U.S., his or her colleague in India picks up development when they get into work. They're able to continually develop products."
If they actually think this will work, they're destined for failure anyway. A classic case of "If one programmer can do it in 2 month, then 2 should be able to do it in 1 month, right?"
So much time and money will be lost because:
-language barriers
-communication hangups (so I'm sharing this problem with Habeeb in India. I don't understand what he checked in lastnight... how am I supposed to ask him about it?)
-All the other problems around having multiple people working on one thing.
no comment
This is something that has been bothering me for a long time now: the United States has payed to educate many of the people that will now be our competitors. This doesn't seem right.
I've seen NSF grants given to faculty and grad students -- all Indian -- who will then take their results and education back to India to use in competition against us. I just completed an undergraduate course in where this was the case.
I asked the TA/GA: "So, what are you going to do after you graduate?"
He said, "Go back to India".
The fact is that Education spending and Science research dollars are being used to Educate and train our competitors. We're being taxed to cut our own throats.
The logic behind public education is this: people that get educated can take that education somewhere else, so it doesn't make sense for a business to invest all that money is someone who will go elsewhere. So we get everyone to share paying for education. This way, one company doesn't get stuck with the bill with the others reap the rewards.
This doesn't work when the companies in places like India don't have to help pay for that education through taxes.
We also are forced to pay for other expenses of foreign student that default on debt. A very popular way right now to pay for food, housing etc, is to run up credit card debt, then leave the country with your shining new degree -- never to return.
...and it hit small countries real hard in the past few years as large numbers of small and medium shops were put out of business by larger, foreign companies that were able to enter a previously closed market.
Now it's happening in the US; forgive me for not caring. You expect developing nations to play capitalist games on par with the US, but you cringe at the thought of having to play too?That entirely depends on the consumer. I was in the shop just an hour ago. I wanted a wine for tonight. I had the choice out of many. There was Californian one, French one and local one. The first two were much cheaper than the local one, but what did I take? The local one, because I care about my economy and rather have my money go to the people of my country.
And I'm not even nationalistic: I'm a foreigner in this country....
Compare it to buying your paper at the local paper stand instead of at the supermarket.... Support the small businessmen.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service. We live in a 'throw away' society.
I used to drive an '89 until things slowly started crapping-out on it. It runs, but it needs a new transmission. The guy at the salvage yard said it wasn't worth having it towed to them.
Granted, used car prices have gone way down, but it's almost cheaper to buy a new car considering the things they put into gasoline nowadays will just destroy anything older than a '95.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Have your wish. You are replaceable as well. Doubtful that you have truly unique skills. Business must handle the proverbial 'hit by the bus' scenario of their top performers. They'll find someone who will be a suitable replacement, even if they have to adjust their criteria.
The trend isn't limited to just IT. According Big-5's D&T Off-Shoring experts, the 40,000 entry level account jobs are next. Legal research has already had in roads too.
Unless you are uniquely positioned as top management or have a lucky choice of a
"stable" profession, you need to be worried for a broad segment of middle class in any country.
Already India is outsourcing to China. There is uncontrolled growth within these country's high-tech boom and many unqualified people are riding the coat tails. Some companies are starting to considering off-shoring from these two countries as well.
Western Civilization's accomplishments weren't made by being lazy. Understanding history, economics, and having common sense makes your analysis seem quite primitive.
Except cost, transitioning to lower cost employees doesn't solve any other fundamental problems inherent to the area of business. Unless you are an entrepreneur and have control of your company, you aren't immune, nor qualified to speak.
One could hardly refute your claim to do 1 thing "off your ass".
Fucking bourgeois. I have $23.71, mostly in pennies.
American jobs and american workers are the catalyst that allows companies to make money. We buy the products, we are the largest consumer market in the world (although China is probably catching up, but they mostly buy Chinese products). So, if all american workers lose their jobs to India, China, Russia, etc... then there won't be anyone left who can afford to buy IBM's products.
The main problem is that CEO's are only looking at the short term. Cut jobs, oursource, cut costs, and their stock prices got up. Big bonuses for them. But in the long hual this is going to hurt American companies. The fact remains, Indian, Chinese, Russian companies that are making money off oursourcing aren't using that money to help the US economy or US companies.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism and I think what needs to happen is there needs to be more reasons for American companies to keep jobs here. We need tax breaks for companies that hire more Americans. We need incentives to keep American jobs here. We also need to put a stop to allowing so many H1B's into this country. Other contries don't make it easy or even possible for Americans to work there, why should we make it so easy for them to come here.
bunch of little brown guys living next to a stinking brown river that is laundry, toilet AND cemetery can do just the same quality work, and they'll do it without having to own polo shirts, credit cards and BMWs.
I just want a fucking job, man! I did not ask for BMW's and polo shirts. I just want to program for livable wages. If I have to drive a 5-year-old Corolla, so be it. Just give me my fucking job back. Those H1B visa people took it away. The US does not owe jobs to the whole damned world. We need to take care of our own FIRST. Don't worry about your neighbor's family until you feed your OWN.
If say Ethiopians started crawling into India en masse offering to program for 8 peanuts a day, Indians would toss their asses out in a second. They are hypocrits.
Globalization tends toward equilibrium. This has two different meanings. One is for economists, and another is for everyone else. No, I did not arbitrarily decide this. I am just citing sources.
Equilibrium is... (from dictionary.com)
"A condition in which all acting influences are canceled by others, resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system."
This Economic textbook (Microeconomics, Gwartney, Stroup...) defines it as...
"A state in which conflicting forces are in balance... In equilibrium, it will be possible for both buyers and sellers to realize their choices simultaneously."
Economic equilibrium is a good thing. But the problem is the limits of reality upon the theory. There will always be obstacles to trade. Always. Since there will always be obstacles, there exists no mechanism to naturally allow all buyers and sellers to reach equilibrium - only some. This "some" may or may not increase with time.
Right now, the journey to equilibrium is crude and painful - partly a tool for the rich to expand and compete at the cost of the middle class and partly creating more competition. We get both, unfortunately.
It is also possible the progression to globalization will never end. It could get smoother (maybe if we all had the Internet at incredible speeds, the same government, etc.), but someone will always be losing money.
A vicious cycle? Maybe. Something we can fight? I am not spending my life trying.
If you want to actually do something about the way we are being taken for a ride, get on the phone and call your representative or senator. The House and Senate are about to vote on trade agreements with Chile and Singapore That contain immigration provisions that would prevent Congress from setting labor certification rules or limits on the number of intra-company transfer (L-1 visa) workers admitted from these two countries, resulting in the displacement of American workers. Future congressional ability to set numerical limits and worker protection standards for existing guestworker programs would be crippled by these treaties.
i d=29160 06&type=CO
more info:
http://capwiz.com/fair/issues/alert/?alert
Iraq?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Who the hell wants to live in TX, OK, AL , KS, LA, NB? With the exception of like two places in all those states, the rest suck. So companies can locate there and get medioum quality workers - for proof, look at state government. State capitols are usually in smaller crappier places and thus employ whoever they can - instead of good employees.
If that doesnt make sense, what does ?
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
While unions may share some of the blame. Greedy corporations have to as well. When the airline union was taking concessions, the corporate big wigs were getting big bonuses and perks. Kind of makes the whole "we're hurting, bend a little" sound pretty hollow, and shows that companies haven't mended their ways from the time unions first came into existance. And there's nothing (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft) to indicate they will voluntarialy do so.
"Really, we need to bust up some unions."
Then what are you going to leverage against your corporate masters, when they decide that it's better for the bottom line to ditch all the safety gear? Is being crippled for life worth the temporary (and elusive) promise of jobs? An existance I might add that will solely on your dime, since you've (along with your corporate masters) have dismantled all the good pieces of legislation that came from the efforts of unions.
See how this game works?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's 450,000 less consumers to buy IBM's products. At least they can't buy them until they get a new job and no longer despise IBM for transferring their job overseas.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
IBM Moving Jobs Overseas
I didn't know IBM had that kind of clout with Apple. Poor Steve, did he have any say in this at all? What about his family, are they moving too?
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* on anything you want. I bet you'd change your tune if one of your cars dropped a transmission or required any other major service.
Well, since I'm not working (and haven't for some months) and my wife works temp, if one of the cars dies she'll get the working one and I'll be taking the bus. 0% interest is nice, but I still can't afford the payments at this point.
"Than most Americans..." How many Americans do you know? Or is it you only know one or two well educated Indians? Or maybe you consider educated to mean studied in English for 10 years? You sound like an asshole when you make comments like that.
Personally U.s government contracts should go to only 100 U.s. companies. Just like what the Japanese do probably(use ony 100 % home country product).
Its amazing how much companies can save when they no longer have to worry about environmental regulations, fair labor laws, or living wages.
A free market based on fair competition, and guided by reasonable safty, environmental, and employment laws is a wonderful thing.
A free market with no controls is a race to the bottom.
We, my friends, are in a race to the bottom.
To those who say we should try to compete with India, China, and Mexico, WAKE UP! To compete with those countries we would have to have to degrade our quality of life to match theirs. Do you want to be like one of the vast majority of Indians living in squalor? Do you want to have your children making fireworks all day and all night, blowing themselves up, like in China?
I would like to see the wealth of the world shared with more countries than just the few who have it now. But lowering our standards, and allowing our businesses to farm out work to third-world nations is not the way. It's time to realize that the corporations, with their bought politicians, are raping and pillaging the US middle class. We need legislation requiring that any business dealing in the US adhere to certain base environmental, human-rights, and fair labor standards.
Look at my karma - I'm bad, just like Michael Jackson!
And get paid $10,000/yr ?
Please.
What happens in a case like this is that a VP hears or is told by his underlings that his company can save significant amounts of money by shifting jobs overseas. He waits a bit, notices that some competitors have done so successfully. He reads a couple articles in Forbes (always enthusiastic about new trends, as their folks are terrified about missing one). They're from high-level execs from companies that have shown savings preening themselves and trying to build up their personal recognition by talking about what a good move it is.
He gets a group of people at his company to evaluate the possibility of moving jobs overseas. They, knowing that this is a pet project, work damn hard to show that doing so is profitable and hand him back the results. The company then contracts out to some company to assist in transitioning jobs overseas.
Five layers down, a few months later, a bottom level manager is stuck with a mandate that he hire only (for example) Indian workers unless he can show good cause otherwise. He doesn't really care about company money -- as a matter of fact, if he's significantly under budget, his budget for next quarter will be simply cut to match updated expectations. He only cares that the job gets done (the one thing that *will* make his boss tromp on him). He simply finds the company in India with the best reputation, and ignores cost. He doesn't care.
A couple of Indian businesspeople start a company, grab a few Indian folks with a reputation, probably bootstrapping their new (or existing) company with some foreign (American, European) people who are well-known and can give the company an appearance of strong competency.
Prices start out somewhat low, but rapidly rise. The consulting company wants to jack prices as high as possible, and the manager contracting out doesn't care about cost (up to his budget). They hit near-US prices. If managers were worried about cost, US-based contractors wouldn't be paid what they are today.
Moving jobs to India won't have a major long-term improvement in savings.
However, it will move a significant chunk of the world's wealth, which has been very much tied up in the US, over to India. Smart investors can, as always, take advantage of the situation by investing in emerging firms overseas.
May we never see th
For starters, getting an MBA in International Business Development would help. Technology companies will remain headquartered in the US. R&D for the most part will stay here as well. Learn how to manage remote development teams while laising with domestic marketing and sales organizations. Extensive coding experience as well as business management skills are critical to this position. While a fresh graduate from India would be happy to code for $5k/year -- and do a decent job at it -- I have a hard time picturing somebody in that environment scaling across a multinational organization. Take your coding experience and turn it into the basis of a solid career in program/project management.
-Baz
not the same as immigrating. My point is that India is by our "establishment" politically correct definition, racist. Again, I reiterate, if you call the Indian immigration bureaucracy, and tell them that you want to move to India, they will tell you that only those of Indian heritage may move to India. Period.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I ndia
B ecause of
M oney
I've seen lots of postings here raving of how great capitalism is, and that giant sucking sound of high standards in a race to the bottom is nothing we should be worried about. Here is a little secret: communism failed because it is an unattainable goal, but so is true free market capitalism too.
The US has nothing more than a demo(ney)cracy, if you can't pay for it, you just don't get it. I think this trend will just have to continue longer and longer until the flint michigan scenario plays out before people stand up and wonder what happened to their life style and demand that something be done about it.
A good attitude to have but somewhat niave on how business is really run in the US. You can bust you butt, study, live, eat drink and sleep code 24/7 and be the best coder on the planet. However, to an accountant, your still only a $60,000+ salary than can be replaced by cheaper labor. Accountants don't care about anything but the bottom lines. Bottom lines don't know Joe Super-Elite-MIT-PHD from Joe Third-World programmer. Bottom lines only know two things: Software will always suck and $60,000 > $5,000. So, wait a minute here, why does software always suck? Isn't bad software only the result of bad programmers? Sometimes this is actually the case. However, experience has taught me that bad software comes from bad design which stems from poor requirements analysis which stems from unrealistic demands and deadlines. Even if your the best programmer in the world, if someone asks you to build X and then turns around at the last minute and says it also needs to do Y and Z as well, your going to fail and either not develop Y and Z or sling Y and Z together poorly. Well, who's responsible for that? The developer? Nope, it's management. Well, what's the one group who ISN'T going to get shipped overseas? That's right, those same yes-men managers who only care about meeting a deadline to impress THEIR manager. So, if the software is always going to suck given that management isn't going to change, then who cares if it's Joe Third-World or Joe Super-Elite-MIT-PHD doing the coding? Certainly not the bean-counters or the managers. Those guys aren't going anywhere. All they care about is the bottom line and we know where we stand with the bottom line.
What good are lower costs for American consumers when the consumers are out of jobs or settling for lower paying jobs?
David Samson, an Oracle spokesman said the expansion of operations in India was "additive" and was not resulting in any jobs losses in the United States.
Can you say "bullshit"?
Wouldn't it be ironic if all these newly unemployed
software engineers started running for (paid)
elected office (since no one has figured out
how to export those jobs). Oh, wait...no social
skills...nevermind.
I understand were you're coming from. The thing the original poster is forgetting is that while the price of IT people may have made an adjustment. The price of goods and services didn't (In fact our property taxes went up 300%). But as has been pointed out every time this topic comes up. Things WILL adjust, in a rather painful manner[1], because the people who have made the adjustments will not be able to afford the goods and services the companies supposedly moved to India and elsewere, so they could continue to provide such to us (remain competitive).
[1] IMHO I don't buy the (remain competitive) argument for a lot of them, and for the ones that are doing it for that reason. Well that's an example of the ripple effect aka "bad apples spoil barrel". Hopefully justice will be served and the ones with greed in their heart will go out of business.
I'm talking about the power/hydro/water industry. Literally EVERYBODY needs those things, and the sources have to be localized (you can't make power in India and send it here) and due to the economy of scale (and their importance), there's a lot of money to be made in those areas. Without eletricity and water, pretty much all business as we know it ends. (Unless your a Canadian, because we live in igloos, which everybody knows doesn't mix well with electricity).
Or a job that will pretty much never go away? Be a guard for spent nuclear fuel. They're pretty tame when stored properly, but since their half-lifes tend to go to the thousands of years, your job is pretty safe in this century (unless of course, they ship it to India....)
...the value of the stock we own in our 401K's would be going up with all this 'cost saving'.
>> You don't have to wait. You can get 0% interest* >> on anything you want.
Have you looked at the sticker prices lately?
Your paying for that interest in the price of
the vehicle.
Buy a clue. NOBODY loans money interest free.
Sheesh, kids today haven't got a clue....
Terry
...and I hope you:
1. Smiled the whole time.
2. Suggested a 'nice frosty shake' with their meal.
3. Told here to 'please come again'.
Whoo hoo!!
Free trade is supposedly beneficial to "1st world" countries because it allows companies to move low-skill jobs to where low-skill workforces are dirt cheap.
Turns out we've been both duped and arrogant. Duped because companies don't give a crap about whos jobs they ship overseas - low or high skill. Arrogant because the rest of the work is teaming with brilliant highly skilled people just as much as our "1st world" countries are.
"Free Trade" is the greatest euphemism of this (and the last) century. What it really means is companies are free to pull up shop and ship elsewhere any time the workforce gets to demanding.
Welcome to the reality of unfettered competition. It's vicious and it's only gonna get worse.
I'm willing to work in this economy for minimum wage if I could do some real programming and work with other intelligent programmers. But the prevailing wages are so high that instead of hiring me, companies just go without. If they hired me at even $15/hr and I messed up, whoever hired me would get chewed out for hiring "cheap" labor. If I was hired at $30/hr and messed up, my being "cheap" would not be an issue. They paid good money for me and I didn't produce results. It's my fault.
Maybe soon I can find a job in my chosen industry at the wage I'm worth in this economy. I might've been worth $20/hr four years ago, but I'm not right now.
It does even out, eventually. As jobs are shipped overseas, the dollar will drop in value relative to the rupee (sp?) until things even out. I'm old enough to remember the car industry in the 70's, when it looked like everything was going to be made in Japan.
At least, this is my hope. In the meantime, it's not so great being in the tech industry here (although I was lucky enough to find a really nice job a few months ago).
It sounds like all of you understand my needs and concerns. I'm just like you, after all, with a wife and family to support. With three children who will all go to an Ivy League school, I'm certainly going to need all the bonuses I can get. And keeping up with the Jones in my neigborhood certainly isn't cheap! I'm counting on an excellent track record of downsizing and outsourcing to make sure I'm super-marketable in the rough and tumble world of corporate America.
Finally, I'd like to speak for all my other executive brothers and sisters sitting in corporate suites across the globe who are just doing what we need to do to survive in this dog eat dog world. Thanks again for your understanding and altruism...
...
...
...
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
There's something that needs to be added for all the pro "ship my job overseas, I don't care". Would any of these other countries do different, if the situation was reversed? Why not?
there's not a damn thing that US IT workers can do to protect their jobs or quality of life. In a few years programming jobs will get about $15.00/hr in the US - It's virtually inevitable.
If you want to see your future, go to one of the rent-a-coder type contract placement sites that are popular with Indian , Chinese , and Eastern European IT workers. 3000-5000 Dollar Java Development contracts go for about 300-500 USD, PHP work goes for $9.00/hr ( Yes Really! ). These contracts are almost exlusively offered by US and western european companies.
Unionization won't work - it'll only increase costs and reduce the value of IT skills due to overly restrictive job specifications.
Specialization and Skill building won't work - most of the countries emerging as our competitors provide free , or virtually free , university education - anything we can do they can do better , and for free! This idea that companies go to India , Roslov , or Shanghia because they can get cheap but unskilled labor is half wrong, and a bit bigotted. The labor is cheaper but usually equally skilled. We've barely begun to see the impact of international competition for IT skills. The money you'll spend to improve your skills through education will be largely wasted.
The only solution for the vast majority of US IT workers is to get out of IT. You're never going to be able to make a living.
I'm not stating all of this to be incindiary , I've thought long and hard about what I should do in light of this trend and in consideration of current market conditions ( I'm 33 and have a pretty respectable resume ). My dilemma is that I'd like to marry someday , buy a house , affort retirement et.al. and have been forced to face the fact that IT won't provide me the opportunity to achieve these things.
you can't fight the tides
DAILY REMINDER: Hillary Clinton doesn't just stand by...she actively works to offshore American High-Tech!
I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic. Parent was neither a question, nor was it rhetoric. Discuss.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
What things? Alcohol was rough on some specific engines, but I don't think there's a generalization there.
I'm still driving an '81 LTD (with 223,000 miles).
-Dave
Unfortunately it is not enough for salary to go down. Because even if you're offering to cut your salary in half, company has already decided to move the position to India, spent amount, equal to half of your "high" annual salary to bring person into US, pay for hotel and training and then send him back. So, unless you find a whole team with salary substantially less than those in India, company won't even think of bringing the job back. The only competition is from China, and I saw articles about Indian companies starting to worry -- they're getting into the same situation as US developers "China cuts us off!".
;)
p.s. dramatic cut in salaries should lead to deflation, which is feared so much by US politians
p.p.s. The US dollars sent to other countries in exchange for products can be used WITHOUT ever returing to Amercia. India buys stuff from China and pays with Dollars. And China buys back from India something else. With Dollars. Where is the "win" for US except for chance of horrible inflation if all the monetary mass suddenly shipped back into US?
Hyperom.com
It's fine and well to outsource and cut 450,000 jobs, but at the same time they are doing irreprable damage to the economy. These same 450,000 people will not be around to buy products and software which will in turn cut the contracts that IBM may be getting for it's products. And the vicious cycle continues.
Economy is a complex web, by sending more money overseas, IBM is seriously damaging the domestic economy and should be taxed accordingly. This tax will be used to pay the unemployement, job placement fees, etc for the multitude of workers out of work.
India, China and many other countries bordering on poverty in many regions will find workers that will literaly code for food. This will be seen as immediate profit for IBM (or other outsourcing company). What they never account for (I have come to the conclusion that most CFOs cannot see further than the next quarter) is that in the long run this will cost them way more than the money they saved.
I have worked at three different companies that outsourced some code to India and China. All three were utter failures.
In one case, their representatives here were making claims that they have PhD level people on their staff and can produce almost bug free code (salepeople are universal liars). In this particular case the company "had" a PhD that consulted with them, but most of the staff were people fresh out of college with a BS in CS or even worse people who took some CS courses and were sitting around collecting wages for the company and for themselves.
Well one fine week a co-worker was visiting India (his parents live there) and decided to drop by to check on their progress. He could not explain the chaos that caused. Their state of the art facility looked more like a low tech sweatshop, the owner quickly did a song and dance and took him elsewhere.
When it came time to deliver the alpha for review, they claimed they would need few more months and blamed our requirements (requirements were drafted and never changed thru the life of the project). It was a very simple data mapping of SGML to HTML (we did not have much faith in them and had 2 guys working in parallel just in case). Well months later we still got more hand waving and more complains and request for more time. At this point out internal version finished beta testing and was ready for official testing.
Well, when the executive who decided to go overseas found out about this "mutiny" he immediately ordered our project scrapped, asked for people to be reassigned and wanted to see heads roll. If the CEO did not find out about this debacle most people would have been fired and with correct spin the overseas project would have been made cost-effective.
After all was said and done, the Indian company was given an ultimatum of 1 month to deliver a beta product or else. A month came and went and they could not produce anything. We used the internally developed product while execs fiddled with numbers to justify the overseas loss.
I am sure there were many successful projects that were produced by Indian companies (I have yet to encounter one). I think some of the best developers India had to offer came to the US and despite the tough times, companies are not giving up their good people.
How do we sustain a cyber perimeter that encompasses multiple continents?
What perimeter?
I presume me means the wall of half eaten hot pockets and empty Bawls cans around the developers' desks.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
That was amazingly prescient. Today, we have guys in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia who are pissed off at the US policies bringing terror to the US. Hi-tech jobs are moving from rich countries to poorer countries, and one day will spread to places where the wages are even slower. The wonders of globalization!
I feel that the what is happening is only a natural progression. America has been one of the most prosperous societies in the world. It achieved this status by having the most well-developed, most competitive economy, cutting costs relentlessly. That is just what is happening now! And I am surprised at all the people who seem to be against outsourcing. What if huge markets like China decide that if the US doesn't let jobs move there, they won't buy any American stuff either?
Prosperity is indivisible, remember? It is flowing from one place to another. The challenge is to ensure that the prosperity level does't decrease at any place, that instead it increases everywhere.
Disclaimer: I am an Indian, and possibly a beneficiary of the job-shifts.
LOL. The swing just started to reverse and balance the scale.
The reason IBM is sending tech overseas is that the coders have, and are willing to learn to use more than MS .NET tools. The majority of tech schools turn out little else anymore in North America, and college grads here expect executive like compensation if they have even marginal skills.
Besides the emerging third world tech sector is not as blinded by Microsoft as we are here in North America. Thats why the Microsoft semi-phylanthropic things have been happening in the past two years.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
The government will eventually step in, but it will be "too little, too late". The tech jobs will move out of the country, and companies will make a tidy profit off of the reduced manufacturing costs. However, the largest market in the world won't have the cash to pay for their product or service. Full-on capitalism would suggest the companies who do this will eventually die out or move to sell where the money is (most likely).
If there was a suitable "geek union", they'd be doing something about this. Much like the Harley-Davidson duties on Asian sportbikes; HD said they couldn't compete on the price-point, so the government raised the prices on the imports, while collecting on the gig (and hogs are around today to prove this strategy worked). So we should be fighting for similar tech-based solutions. Big business wants to sell that motherboard here? Pay da man, Uncle Sam, his due fees. You want to provide tech-support from India on that router? You've gotta use our land lines, and that ain't cheap (maybe by charging a "water-to-land" signal conversion fee).
I like it. Aerospace did this to some extent. Problem is that people in these countries make less than the US minimum wage. I don't care how cheap it is to live in OK, min wage still won't buy you much.
One would assume that the outsourcing will give the Indians an edge for a while at least. Well, let's dispell some myths here...
_ pr.html ]
Wipro is an SEI CMM level 5 firm that is among the top 5 IT players in India, and guess what? Their consumer products division makes more profit than their IT division.
[quote src= http://rediff.com/money/2003/jul/22wipro.htm ]
It is consumer care and lighting, which recorded a return on capital employed of 86 per cent, compared to 41 per cent for global IT services and products in the last quarter (April-June)!
[/quote]
How long do you think the Indians are going to find IT profitable?
[quote src= http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.03/bangalore
Wipro Limited, which through its information-technology division employs 6,500 software workers worldwide and grossed $310 million last year.
[...]
Premji owns the majority stake in Wipro and has a personal net worth of Rs392 billion - more than $9 billion.
[/quote]
At $400 million a year [gross], how long does it take to accumulate $9 billion?
"IT" is profitable, yes, but not __THAT__ profitable. Most jobs will be shipped to China or some place else, as soon as they get upto speed on English.
India is looking to be a research hub, and move up the value chain. The call centers will move to Phillipines, the IT to China or Eastern Europe.
Time to see beyond the borders, there's lots more to this than meets the eye...
Last I checked the way to equalize value of products made in other countries is to Tariff them!!! "Made in the U S of A" Stickers would be sweet too! Electric Potato's Rules!
Hell, we should give them both the h-bomb, and let George Bush settle the Kashmir issue!
This is my sig.
There's something else people are forgetting. Ripple Effect. The US economy collapses because the consumer can't afford the now high priced goods and services (which BTW aren't just being produced by US companies). Now what happens both to the US and Overseas companies when they can't sell what they're offering? There's also a lot of other links between countries, and history has shown that when the US sneezes the world catches a cold. The one's that have done this to become rich will find that the only difference between rich and poor. Is that their slide will be a bit longer, and they will hit the bottom of the hole harder.
If only 450,000 tech jobs (8% of current) go overseas in 12 years, I would consider that a good thing. That means that the tech industry only has to grow 0.7% per year to be even at the end of 12 (and that assumes all 450,000 jobs disappear tomorrow).
Yes, more development will be done overseas. Yes the tax laws are messed up (overseas coding work should be taxed as an import). But is 0.7% growth too much to ask of the innovative tech industry?
Try hundreds of thousands at least. The population of India is 1.2 billions and the most frequently tossed-about estimate of the size of its middle class is 300 millions.
An L-1 visa worker I used to work with graduated from this university. Last time I checked their web-site, 100,000 students were matriculated there.
If you are a programmer in the United States and you are outraged by this... why don't you get off your butt, think up a product, write up a business plan, go to the bank and get financing, make it happen, and sell it...
Then you can hire whomever you want in whatever country you want.
If jobs move to India, perhaps you are afraid you might get outproduced? Perhaps you are afraid software will become more reliable? Perhaps you are afraid you won't be able to play ping-pong all day and get a fat check every two weeks? Perhaps others will show results where you have given us unreliable junk that no one really needs?
grow up... I'm not afraid of anyone in any country... I'll go toe-to-toe with anyone and win.
Admitingly, I haven't had much work experience. But in the couple jobs I've been at, I've never seen 'anyone' rewarded for working hard. It was always people who stabbed their co-workers in the back, or took extended lunch breaks to smooze the higher ups who got the brownie points. Are there actually places out there where the managment is so un-dilbert'ish that working hard can actually get you positive attention?
Everything will be taken away from you.
Question: Why is it OK for the IBM's of the world to do whatever is best for the corporation but when workers try to fight for their own self-interest they're considered to be nothing short of selfish Communists who "don't understand the realities of a capitalist system."?
Answer: Because you dumb-ass workers are too stupid to see the wool being pulled over your eyes.
Thanks,
IBM
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
cuts in salary are an effect of deflation, not the cause. if all the dollars are shipped back to american pockets, there will be negligible consumer price inflation because competing suppliers will keep price down (price is not simple a factor of demand but also supply, after all, if commodity prices remain unchanged then inputs are relatively stable and there is no need to raise prices even if the populace could afford them since your competitor will undercut your higher prices... this has to be true because it is the only way the entire population can have higher real wages... besides, the fed can slurp off excess dollars if needed if greenspan goes back to watching commodity prices instead of combating imaginary problems).
"Then you live in an area that's too expensive. Maybe you should move to India?"
Gee! I hope this doesn't get modded +5 Insightful, because it reeks of a snappy answer with a cheap rubber band.
unionization and other wage controls (like minimum wage) tend to cause unemployment and lead companies to ship jobs to areas to other areas so they don't have to worry about unions fucking shit up.
IT workers, (that includes me folks) have failed to organize or lobby or publicize effectively to protect themselves.
We think of oursleves as elite, clever hackers (not crackers note), yet we are not a Profession, not protected, even though (I believe) we contribute much more indirectly to efficiency and culture and community than any other so called profession.
The medical community is about making money, yet they market themselves as the caring profession, very smart PR, and impossible to offshore. We should learn some lessons from them.
We may be clever, but we miss the obvious, politically mal-droit, we can build operating systems via open source projects, but politically speaking we couldn't organize a kegger in a brewery. Wake up! they are pissing on our legs and telling us its raining. Are we going to stand here dripping urine and smile at them?
False IT labor shortage projections, created to justify allowing H1B's into the US was politically ok, as the bigger margins between billing rate and wages, accrued to the bottom line of US companies, who then make generous campaign contributions...
Being a good capitalist, I believe they made the right decision, because its important that the US have the best politicians money can buy.
However, the big difference offshoring makes, is that the US tech firms will now NOT see the revenue from that Margin, IN the USA bottom line returns. Firms simply using Tech are better off however.
Margins will drop in the Tech producer US industry, quarterly returns will drop, CEO's bonuses will drop! (NOT).
Jobs will be lost, forever. This means that lovely campaign funds and VOTES will be lost.
All the politicos and lobbyists will have to evaluate lower campaign contributions
for allowing IT wages erosions, plus increased re-election and negative publicity concerns.
So, they will probably pass some half assed, innefective, semi-ludicrous legislative attempt
to be PERCIEVED as trying to halt this trend. I say perceived, as they are not dumb,
they know its hopeless. No country can fight the law of supply and demand. Bandwidth is here to stay.
Net effect (pun intended) is a lot of useless posturing, some marginal and pointless unionizing and
much profitable public raving by media tech pundits.
Then back to status quo apathy about IT workers, (thats us folks), and the long slow spiral into lowest
common denominator wages, global commodity pricing, for all distributable IT services.
IMHO, we either become a profession, with accreditation, licenced practitioners etc,
or abandon all hope of competing with international globalization trends. Pick One.
So whats new here? Nothing much!
Just media noise and politics. Boring. Everyone please move along....
There is no god; get over it already! Never exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage.
Yep, I said it on /. Well-paying IT jobs are moving overseas for 0.1 the salary because the proliferation of free software (primarily Linux and Java) has lowered the barriers to entry for programmers. It is a simply economic axiom that barriers to entry decrease competition. Free software, however, decimates those barriers so that people in India, China, and Russia can learn your job for a fraction of the cost.
I have a friend who works for Wipro who tells me they attempt to do everything on Linux and Java b/c they pay nothing for their tools. Every student from India and China can write Java code but are dumbfounded when I ask for C/C++ (forget efficient C/C++).
Because of your holy crusades against companies like Microsoft, you have given your livelihood away freely. The reality is that the Bazaar economic model does not work in our socioeconomic system. Having something of value with a high barrier to entry to prevent your competitors from offering the same thing at a lower cost does work. Highly skilled means having a skill few others have.
Congratulations, ye promoters of free software! Now that many of you will be unemployed, you will have alot of free time to write free software to give away for free while freeloading off of those of us paying taxes.
Dont underestimate the power of POWER, dufus.
The US spends huge sums of money protecting a lot of countries that cant protect themselves. Do not think for a minute that in a trade war that threatened the US, that we would not start TAKING from countries what we used to pay for.
And there would be nothing any other country could do about it. Any country that fucked with us could be annexed, and those that cant, dont have anything we want anyway. Try growing your wheat in Russia. Try taking us on with the Canadian Navy. We have already shown that if we want the Oil, we will TAKE the oil. Deal with it.
The Religous Zealots who run India are dangerous thugs. They stand for nothing good and are, in fact, building ICBMs to threaten the United States . The sooner we re-impose sanctions on the, the better. Think this is a troll? Read
this story from the Christian Science Monitor. No, America was better off with a poorer India. Your comparison with Japan is off base, Japan is not arming to threaten us.
that can spell worth a damn? Or who can get they're, their, and there right? (obviously not many slashdotters, to read a few posts) Or, for that matter, two, to, and too? Or than and then? Or affect or effect?
;>
I work in an industry with a considerable population of well-educated persons from India-- and I know a heck of a lot of Americans (being one myself, and having grown up here, ya know). One of my co-workers' children has far better grammer and spelling than the average slashdotter (i.e. knows and understands the above grammer items, and can spell very well). He obviously hasn't been studying English for 10 years, given that he's only nine.
My point is that people in the US whine and moan about jobs going overseas to "less educated" people-- while the average American high school student can't even find Iraq on a world map. If Americans want to compete globally, they have to do more than just go back to school to get a degree for "life experiences"; they're going to have to actually get smarter and work harder. If stating that bluntly makes me an asshole, so be it
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Hmmm....
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
I don't think anyone is going to read this as there are currently 633 comments but it might help someone who is getting scared about their job or future.
There are lots of industries where there is a massive decrease in jobs and huge amount of unemployement. Domestic auto manufactures. Cod fishermen. Farmers in the 20s.
Be active. Read up on them. See how bad it got for them and what they did or didn't do. And LEARN from history. Just don't sit there feeling sorry for yourself.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Actually, one aspect of this that hasn't gotten much coverage is that this is really bad news for small businesses. A lot of small businesses survive by being able to do things cheaper than the large businesses.
However, when all the large businesses can outsource (not an option for a small shop) their programming for a 1/6th or a 1/10th of what the it will cost my company, I'm going to look ridiculously overpriced...
Suddenly the tables are turned. You can only produce reasonably priced software if you are *large* enough.
If I were a big developer, I'd move all my development offshore too. If I ever needed to reverse-engineer a competitor's product, I'd be perfectly allowed to under that nation's laws.
I'll just make sure they don't discuss it at US conferences like Sklyarov.
we had enough Soy Source, now more Curry Source
So the guy in India, does just as good of a job and is willing to work for tons less... why *wouldn't* he desearve the job?
You've missed the point entirely. This is not just about American workers.
Global Capitalism, our New World Order, pits the Indian workers against the American workers and indeed against every other worker on earth. Each worker must continue to lower his or her labor prices in comparison to the others in order to remain employed; in order to live.
Refer to my simple scenario again.
The Indian worker had to work twice as long for half the money in the end in order to get the job away from the American worker. In order to get work, he had to lower his own value by a factor of four, along with the value of every other worker in the same industry anywhere around the globe. And he will have to continue to lower it in order to compete with (for example) a Chinese worker, who will be lowering the worth of the workers even farther, extending his hours even longer in order to try to wrest the job from the Indian worker.
And as economies collapse, the fat cats at the top continue to draw huge salaries while moving the jobs to wherever people are most desperate, driving wages and benefits relentlessly lower for all workers around the world, while they themselves draw larger and larger salaries and bonuses from the resulting increase in margins.
And all the while they use global media (owned by the wealthy), trade organizations and government policy (both most heavily influenced by-- you guessed it-- the wealthy), in order to create labor surplusses in any field whose labor price they wish to reduce. "Come buy a degree in IT from us! IT is where the future lies!" is the word that hits the airwaves, and workers around the world who are hoping for a decent salary pay the big $$$ to buy into the new field only to find that they've had a hand in creating (and have paid their way into the middle of) yet another labor surplus, so that they can be played off against one another while lining the pockets of those at the top.
The rich get richer and are able to consume more and more. The worker must get poorer and poorer if he wishes to stay employed, which is just as well, because as the hours increase more and more, he has less and less time to consume anyway. Think about it. How many of you have put in unpaid overtime because you know it reduces the chance of your getting your tech-pink-slip?
By doing so, you're making other tech workers try to out-unpaid-overtime you, so that they won't get laid off. Here and there a few workers can't afford to sacrifice any longer and they do indeed get laid off. You may say to yourself "thank God I worked all that extra unpaid overtime" and go home happy for one night... but you're now expected to be that productive all the time. And inevitably someone else will come and out-work you.
Perhaps that someone else will be someone in India who is needy enough to work twice as long for half the money.
When that happens, the company makes money. But you don't get it that increase in profits. The worker in India doesn't get it. The new worker in China who works three times as long for a third of the money doesn't get it either, though he does steal the job away from the Indian guy. Who gets the now 66% wage savings, multiplied by innumerable workers (and leaving destruction in its wake)?
The CEO, the board, and the investor and venture captial class, who aren't even fairly taxed on those increases.
Who loses? Everyone else. The workers. The children. The social programs supported by workers' taxes. Entire national economies. Everyone who isn't... working.
Welcome to the New World Order.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
So true. I'm talking in Canadian dollars here, but I remember the slick little maneuver, one which the media happily played along with (claiming that the auto industry, which amazingly pulled through the "recession" generally making hefty profits, was "losing money" on their "interest free" deals), being exemplified in the Chrysler Neon: Suddenly a $14K CDN car was selling for $20K at 0% interest, and people were lining up to buy them. 0% indeed.
That's interesting .. Apple's CEO is going to India. I must say, though, that I never thought of him as a developer.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How do you think third world countries grow into places where workers and citizens have rights? You're posturing as someone concerned about developing nations, but your argument seems to be that we should only allow Sweden as an outsourcing country.
Good jobs empower workers. $6000/year may be peanuts here, but are you so naive to think that isn't an excellent salary in much of the world? As these contries develop, they'll be able to compete more strongly, and their incomes and infrastructure will improve. Complain if you want about the effect on programmers here (I'm one too), but don't pretend it's out of concern for other nations.
Companies seem to be incredibly short sighted... The RIAA is suing their best customers, companies are paying off frivilous lawsuits, and big companies are dropping domestic employees, so they can pay less over seas.
When it comes to paying $5/day to foreign employees, you no longer have employees that are making enough money that they can buy your products. They say they need to remain competitive, but the more jobs removed, the less people are going to be buing their products, no matter how much they can save on making them.
Maybe it's time to "out-source" the owners...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Nice one JT.
You forgot the obligatory "I'm saving up my pocket money to move out of my parent's basement" though.
Join us, won't you, as "The Community" learns that the same company that embraces Free (and in BEER, you numb-skulls) software, also likes to cut costs elsewhere - namely, where you get paid.
Life sucks, don't it?
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Why should a company which is based in the U.S. be allowed to benefit from the infrastructure here while offshoring jobs? Why should the company get a free ride when their employees no longer pay U.S. taxes or pay into Social Security, and the company no longer pays the mandatory matching contribution?
You aren't aware that corporations pay income taxes at a scale of something like 40% of their income?
ASA
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Look at the larger picture. In the US, the company gives some $X of profits back to the workers - out of total $T. Company keeps T-X.
In India, company givex $Y to workers - and you can bet that Y is a LOT less than X, right?
So the net difference is that X-Y is the amount of ADDITIONAL profit to be concentrated. Over and above whatever they get now.
Hence, on the whole, this is not a wealth sharing mechanism...
Jan
People still come to US schools to learn about basically anything.
Get a job as a tenured professor at a state college. You become a state employee, with awesome benefits, and are basically impossible to fire (unless you're a republican and let someone find out)
The salaries of professors of state institutions are a matter of public record. Many of them are paid better then you are.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
and hire a gang of offshore Indian lawyers for $5k/year trained in American labor laws to represent US IT workers
Vince
What is "our" government going to do about it. I hate to say it but it seems that the exportation of all our intellectual jobs overseas is a scary idea. What happens when a software engineer cannot find a job at a local McDonalds becuase he's overqualified?
It's not like these jobs are going to England where you could have the hope of just leaving the country in hopes of good work in the field you chosen. These jobs are moving to places notably hostile to Americans in particular so they cannot move there along with the fact that these people are being paid 1/4th of what were being paid. Lets not also mention the fact that "some" of these people may just help terrorism by providing the tech background to carry out more destructive tasks.
Another sick factor is the fact that our government is sponsoring visa's and in some cases paying these students tuition and where do they go? Back home thus there is no payback through a life of paying taxes in the US.
It's high time we've added a tax to software imports to make the US competitive with other countries for jobs. If you make it expensive to develop programs overseas then the jobs will come back.
I dont care of mohammaed, abdul, or shrif gets a job with IBM, as long as it's in the US and I've got a chance in the running.
Not to mention how many of those paeans will buy their $x00 product or $30k car when they only make $5k/yr?
On top of that add in those x00000, people now out of work who used to be able to afford blowing some excess cash on overpriced crap.
Looks to me like a sure-fire runaway train headed for a major disaster. The best thing that could happen is if we could get the dollar devalued to the level of the rupee, yuan, or ruble and then let the bastards try to come up with a reason to hire them.
According to this story in Pravda Intel is focusing investment in the long-term viability of the Russian software market.
This is just smart business. Those who think we can insulate our country from every other, as if this would somehow benefit us economically and protect American jobs are shortsighted. Markets will continue to expand, and we have to take part in the larger world. We should also be thinking about sharing our talents, resources, and experience to lift the rest of the world up to basic standards of living. At the very least, we should work to ensure that every country has clean water, sustainable agriculture, and freedom from disease.
That said, a pure profit motive that only looks to the next quarterly balance sheet is the surest way to undermine that effort. Likewise, operating as a hegemony with a colonialist mindset only alienates regions where tradition and culture are valued above materialism. Our colonialist mindset is more or less at the crux of our policies throughout the world, and those of the WTO as well. It is an unfortunate attitude borne out of the arrogance of the elite - who after all have the luxury of brushing aside whatever causative truth it pleases them to brush aside.
-- thinkyhead software and media
"high-tech" != "experimental research & development"
This trend of offshoring jobs is disturbing for one HUGE reason. I hate to sound like a Bush-43 cabinet member, but here it is:
National Security.
Our Government and Military subcontract lots of high-tech work to companies like IBM. The US should realize that many potentially classified projects are now being developed overseas.
What happens when some critical project in India gets whacked by a Nuke from Pakistan? Worse yet, what happens when "our stuff" ends up in China?
This is going to be a disaster in the long run.
-ted
...Gonna be a dental floss tycoon...
Is 26%
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
No way bro! Having a peice of my dick chopped off sounds really GOOD!
Your signature has a typo. The prime factorization is 17923, not 17293, *29.
Spam removed for the Internet's pleasure
Oh no! the capitalists are coming! they are going to *gasp* sell things! and *gasp* make money
America's corporate culture has always driven things this way.
Our culture is, out innovate/stylize and then milk that cow for all it's worth until it dies. It is not until the cow dies that we panic and decide to do it again.
The Japanese take the best of everything, combine it, and perfect it, and nurture the cow.
The Germans have a culture of engineering pride that results in qualities that give them a lasting reputation. They have very refined cows.
Well, the software cow is not getting any younger, and we certainly have not been nurturing it. Have you used Microsoft products lately? Have you written Microsoft-compatible software lately? Does it strike anyone as strange how many people take a step BACKWARDS to Unix derrivatives because a multi-multi-billion dollar company can't do anything better? This would be like a resurgence in home made Model-T based clones because new cars, while prettier and more featured, are clunky, unusable, unmodifyable and unrepairable.
Anyway, my point is, just as we had to move up a rung in the latter from farming, to mechanical design & mfg, to electronics, to computers, to software, it's time we move up a rung again. Last time we were chased off of our rung by Japan, this time it's India. There needs to be some new thing that creates a bunch of new jobs to which we stylish, creative, and aggressive Americans are uniquely suited to.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
I've done about two years at, ah, let's just say Wall-Mart's #1 competitor. 1997-1999.
They have outsourced a collections system for their credit card to India. That happened about a year before I came in. They got the code back and it was a disaster. So I had the pleasure of cleaning the mess up. Here are some examples of Indian software development for ya:
C arrays starting at 1. Yep. That's right.
Another "quality software engineer with years of experience" needed to create a custom message box. Nothing special: three buttons and a message. He made 13 different classes - because there were 13 different messages. We called it an "Indian Code Reuse".
By now you probably think that I am a bitter troll. Not in the least. I swear, this is honest to God truth.
The best one came when I was there for about 6 month. The Personal Hygiene memo. I guess some big wigs walked around the bullpens and they didn't like the smell...
No, I am not worried. I am not worried at all...
The moral is that you should go into the yacht building, selling, repair, and maintenance business...
Geeks may hate to admit it, but the majority of the managers hate programmers and despise the IT staff. It's very hard to find high level managers that really understand this fact. That's all fine, since they weed themselves out eventually. The more things change, the more it stays the same. There will always be someone ready to replace a failing company that is blinded by statistics and forget the value of the employee. Everything moves in cycles.
I started out as an engineer - robotics from the University of California. I even still maintain a P.E. license. With engineering tanking I went into software development since I am pretty good at it. I have my M.S. in comp. sci. Over the last few years I have focused on "soft skills" like project management, people management, communication skills, etc. Nevertheless, becoming a car mechanic or opening my own automobile detailing shop is looking pretty attrative these days. I wonder how many auto mechanics are more credentialed than those who actually design the cars? I am also an adjunct prof. at one of the local colleges. My summer course in C++ was cancelled due to low enrollment. I am not surprised. The CEOs get richer and the worker bees continue to struggle to constantly "reinvent" themselves to be economically viable.
nuff said!
...Except for the sardonic comments et al... but... It's what we all want to say to a customer at some point or other. :)
There is a great deal of competition for defense jobs -- your "last resort" was the first choice for a whole lot of super-qualified people.
Enlist.
Problem solved, you're not going to starve, and with an education, you'll do pretty well.
..don't panic
We will see the quality of linux code coming from 3rd world countries...woops, thats gonna be the USA, if bush has a second term.
You will be very lucky to find any software related position in defence that does not require an active TS clearence. I have 15+ years experience in defence electronics, but as my clearence lapsed over 5 years ago, it does not help.
A relevant excerpt from the "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck:
The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vats is poisoning the air. And taste the wine--no grape flavor at all, just sulphor and tannic acid and alcohol.
This little orchard will be part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.
This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they won the canneries too. And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents. And the canned pears do not spoil. They will last for years.
The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. and the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people come from miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosine on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit--and kerosine sprayed over the golden mountains.
And the smell of rot fills the country.
Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putresence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates--died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is a failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
A downward economic spiral in the U.S. will eventually push more companies into using Linux!
Regarding tax breaks, they couldn't hurt. Cracking down on countries that keep their currency values low for export purposes I think would help out more. Our wide-open trade policy over the past three decades doesn't seem to have done much for the American people. Its kind of funny that our nation's leaders don't have the balls to take on the WTO and other trade organizations when we're funding most of the trade they oversee. What are India and China going to do? ... God forbid these "trading partners" should become self-sufficient.
If all the big companies send work offshore, then it will get screwed up!!! I've seen it 1000's of times. Oh yea it a cheaper rate, @10$/hr bill rate that's great, but it will take them 10x the time to do it and it will fail!!! so now you have paid the same and got crap. Good! you deserve it, and next time you start an ad campaign to BUY AMERICAN, then you can F'off. I'm buying a toyota which is built in the great USA!!! At least the Japanese know where quality comes from. ;)
F'you and the horse you came on big FN blue.
You've never been smart, (OS/2 anyone?, C/Set?, MQ?, MAINFRAMES, need I say more?) Anything you say is the right way is sentenced to death.....so send the work overseas. It just means when it comes back I'm going to RAPE big businesses!!!! Oh the 3 figure an hour PAY RATES will be mine once again!!! You think these India's can get it done? (I'm sorry I'm not going to call them Indians out of respect for those native Americans that I would like to call my people!!) And as they "the US" F'd them over too. Now how can I help them out with this?
GW go to hell!! Big Business you can go with him!!
-nt-
And it doesn't involve unions. Simply get everyone whom is concerned about this, IBM employees, IBM suppliers etc etc, to buy IBM shares.
IBM's corporate charter (constitution) will dictate what is a minimum amount of shares to vote, and how many makes a majority.
If enough people do it then swinging the opinions of the major instutions won't be that hard.
Don't forget CEO's / board of directors have hundreds of Bosses, whilst most of you only have one.
Make yourself more valuable than those Indian workers by being willing to work 60 hours a week for the same salary
Working 60 hours a week, or 80 hours a week will not save your job. Please re-read step #1 carefully:
1) Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else
A programmer in India can obviously work however many hours per week that you work +1, for whatever you get paid -1. Working hard is not a differentating factor between you and Samir over in India.
I am NOT just saying "work harder". Not at your current job, anyway. What i'm saying is that you cannot stick you head in the sand, casually learn whatever new programming language or operating system is in vouge at the time, and expect to keep your job. You have to LOOK AHEAD and LOOK AROUND.
Looking ahead means figuring out what skills will be desirable in the next 2-5 years that would be difficult to learn overseas, and learning them. These skills may not be limited to Information Technology. If, for example, you want to be a coder, and you think that Informatics (Medicine + IT) is the next big thing (as many people do), then you might want to take some classes at your local university on medicine and biology. That's something that a coder in china probably won't be able to do. Combining domain knowledge that is specific to U.S. companies with your IT knowledge will make you more qualified that those guys offshore.
Looking around means trying to find oppertunities here in the states that are not available to overseas developers. Do you think that an overseas developer can afford the $10,000 in airfare it would take to go to a professional conference like JavaOne? You, however, might be able to make a day trip out of it, learn a few cutting edge skills, and meet a few contacts that those developers in India simply won't have access to.
In the end, it does no good to argue with me. This is going to happen, just like it did in the 70's. You can spend you time whining about capitalism, globalization and the evil multinational corporations... OR you can deal with the situation by making yourself irreplaceable. Not by working harder, or taking less money, but by thinking ahead.
This and other wonderful translations of your software coming soon.
You give one reason (besides many) to skip college. If you start working right out of High School (admittedly for about 10k/yr.), you will have the experience and likely knowledge in new technologies that you would not have had if you went to college. My experience is that college tends to teach antiquated technologies and poor technique for "in the field" programming. I can't count how many times my boss has made a remark about how something that I did as a result from my teachings in college was bad for the product life-cycle. Of course, you do learn some great theory, fast algorithms, assembly and such. However I have found that anytime that I need an advanced algorithm, I can figure it out or find some info on the net or a book. Even so, it is rare, since most of what I (and most programmers that I know) write is 3-tier business applications or other straight forward apps and not operating systems. Usually this requires nothing more than a solid knowledge of the language, some experience with databases and some O'Reilly books. I started college as a music major. A After taking several cs classes I became disillusioned with college (about the same time that they kicked me out), I started working on web sites. Of course, this was during the .com era, but I asked for a whole lot more than 10k per year. As time went by, I worked my way up through the languages until I got where I am now. Now as my friends are just graduating, I have more than 5 years experience and have worked with many times the languages and technologies that they have.
No man is an island... But I wouldn't mind having a bigger moat.
Every job that involves sitting at a computer or talking on the phone is in jeopardy. The IT of many companies is the heart of the company. If you move the IT, sooner or later, you'll move the other jobs with it.
This is an important political issue. L-1 visas and H-1B visas are being abused in this country. But for these shenanigans being played with our laws and borders, there would be no discussion of "economics."
By flooding the local market with low paid L-1 visa holders and less low paid (but still indentured and uncompetitively paid) H-1B holders, we are simply "training replacements" for the United States itself.
Had they shipped work overseas with citizenship or clearance requirements, the management would have violated the contract (at a minimum) or enjoyed a stay in a Federal pennitentary (at a maximum).
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Nothing but patience, some tools, and the service manual is required to rebuild an engine or transmission in a car. It's a myth that engines can't be repaired; they are fairly simple. You can bore out most engines at least once, and for a modest parts outlay, you can rebuild the engine good as new for much less money than a new car.
I'm learning, slowly, how to build performance engines in my spare time. My situation might be a little bit different than the average person here (Both I and my girlfriend have a engineering degrees), but that's my backup plan. I can easily cover rent and expenses rebuilding engines in my spare time, and that's a market that increases substantially when the economy is bad for a prolonged period.
However, it is a myth cars are throw away now. Far from it. They're a lot more complicated than they used to be, but computers are what we're supposed to be good at here, right?
..don't panic
If the government's job is to look out for its own citizens, perhaps the best way to look out for its citizens interests is to open up its markets for more competition.
Behind every producer is a consumer. If you artificially inflate the price of a good because of protectionist policies, like preventing the production process to go overseas, then the consumer suffers.
For example, if you were forced to buy $200 shoes in California because the governor prevented shoe production going to Kentucky that would make the shoes $100, you'd be pretty pissed off as a consumer.
Likewise, behind every corporation is a stockholder, who could be you or me, who doesn't get a good return on investment because it prevents the company from acting competitively. Perhaps it's not in your interest as a producer because it'll mean losing your job, but you are not the only American citizen involved in the American economy. There are citizens who buy IBM's services who would like it to be cheaper and better.
As a citizen of a fairly small first world country (New Zealand) that is very dependant on exporting and as an employee of a company not too dissimilar to IBM (although I speak for myself) I have a slightly different view.
To be pointed, to rail against this kind of move on the basis that your job will disappear strikes me as whinging - or worse. Effectively, by saying that, you are saying that your standard of living is so important that your customers and the rest of the world should pay for your comfort. Let me explain.
If the US decides to put in some form of protectionism to protect these jobs then the cost of software to your customers will increase (or at least be higher that what it would otherwise be). This increases the costs of goods and services your customers might export. Secondly, foreign companies who can make use of the cheaper labour will do that and start undercutting the high export prices you charge.
IBM doesn't really have much of a choice here. All of IBM's competitors are looking at doing the same because if they can provide the same service at a cheaper cost then clients will ask for that. In the short term, if IBM manages to move faster and do this more effectively than its competitors (something that is very hard to do), then there are some fairly good profits to be made. In the long term, if this works, then all of IBM's competitors will do the same and the cost of software will decrease. This is all standard economics.
In the even longer term everything will even out a bit more. The Indian programmers will start spending their money and so the rest of the Indian economy will start feeding off that and therefore get more prosperous. Slowly prices will rise and maybe, just maybe, India will have a standard of living equal to a first world country.
The really interesting thing about the free trade argument is that in the long term this kind of change supposedly can be acheived with the existing first world countries being dragged down (at least not too much). I'm not sure I really believe this claim though.
Now to get a little bit more harsh. The US is the largest and richest economy in the world. You also control something like 90% of the world's resources with about 4% of the world's population. You have also shown yourself more than willing to use violence to take more resources on fairly flimsy pretexes.
Exactly why should you keep on controlling this much of the world's wealth? When suddenly a foreign country works out what you do and does it better you start trying to diddle them.
In general, the road to continued wealth for a country is to have better innovation. I don't really think the US has much of a problem there.
On an individual level, if somebody can provide the same skills as you provide at a cheaper cost then you need to get better skills. This is harsh but whinging and expecting the world to provide you a living is the mark of a somebody who will find themselves marginalised fairly quickly.
Software has a market value rapidly screaming towards zero, zip, zilch, nada. This is in part because of the open source movement, but it makes too much sense and is/was largely inevitable. Tools that everyone benefits from make sense to develop collectively. "It is inevitable"
The trick is to apply those technologies to non-commodity tasks to save money by enabling more efficient or new production technologies. One example would be adapting an embedded linux to real time control applications, so you can more easily control and automate a production facility (likely putting workers out of jobs, or allowing existing staff to do more). This might have taken money from a commercial RTOS vendor, but enabled the production company to become more efficient, and created a demand for someone with the skills to implement the solution.
Resources do not necessarily dissapear because a job has gone. That means that in our economic system, it's more beneficial for that person to do something else - it just sucks balls when you are that person.
Software is a means to an end, not an end in it's own right. This is something a lot of people have forgotten. Free software puts the means to produce things in the hands of many, many more people - not all of them Americans - and allows them to try and produce something of value with it, all the while contributing those changes back to the community.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian, so maybe things are worse than I understand in the US.
..don't panic
Maybe your grandkids will be lucky and get into the India's future version of the H1B program to encourage tech workers to move and work there.
Seriously, there will always be a need for a highly skilled and highly educated workforce.
In case you're interested, here are some more links about this and other related issues that we have seen before.
Leaked: IBM Execs Urge Moving Jobs Offshore in Internal Teleconference
An internal recording of an IBM teleconference about moving jobs offshore was leaked (Google) to the New York Times by an upset employee. From the article: '...under increasing pressure to cut costs and build global supply networks... I.B.M. needed to accelerate its efforts to move white-collar, often high-paying, jobs overseas even though that might create a backlash among politicians and its own employees. "Our competitors are doing it and we have to do it," said Tom Lynch, I.B.M.'s director for global employee relations. He also said that 3 million service jobs were expected to shift to foreign workers by 2015 (based on a Forrester Research report, which represents about 2 percent of all American jobs) and that I.B.M. should move some of its jobs now done in the United States, including software design jobs, to India and other countries. Oracle plans to increase its jobs in India to 6,000 from 3,200, while Microsoft plans to double the size of its software development operation in India to 500 by late this year. Accenture has 4,400 workers in India, China, Russia and the Philippines.' Critics say 'schools will stop producing the computer engineers and programmers we need for the future' as a result of these moves. Listen to the IBM recording in Real format (direct link at pnm://audio.nytimes.com/audiosrc/2003/07/21/busine ss/20030722jobs.audio.rm). More at the SJMN, Inquirer, and CNN/Reuters. Slashdot has discussed Global competition, offshore outsourcing, lower cost replacement workers and the ensuing legal turmoil before.
To paraphrase from the movie Jerry Maguire:
It's not technology friends, It's technology business.
Screw the Indian programmer! Let him/her start their own company!
In ten year's time, when the whole IT market is dominated by Indian, Chinese and Russian companies and IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun and HP have been driven out of business, people will say: "Oh, why didn't the companies our country once had use these opportunities to go to India in time. Then, they would still exist, and some of their jobs would be here."
OK, perhaps that scenario is not very likely, but there will probably be more companies from these countries in the future competing with Western companies.
Someone please enlighten me, I can't decide whether this is a good or bad thing for open source long-term. On the one hand, open source would seem to benefit everyone in that it provides quality, affordable (free) software to anyone who chooses to use it. No negatives here that I can see. On the other hand, at least part of the motivation for developing open source software is recognition, and the possibility that this recognition could lead to career advancement as a programmer's skills are recognized. If an American programmer has no hope of competing based on salary, does this destroy the motivation for contributing or only dampen it slightly (or maybe not at all)?
sig != null
FYI, American programmers are making USD25K per MONTH(!!!) in Saudi Arabia. Well, the social life there... actually there is no much of such thing there. But that is a good thing also: nothing to spend money for. After 2-3 years contract you can return back and invest money into you software company, and give the job to American programmers. Or to H1B, who knows how you will be changed after all :)
Less is more !
Not necessarily "the Jews" collectively, but certainly those zionist bankers that comprise international finance Jewry.
An onion shaped wealth distribution where the powerful share their wealth with a large percentage of the population known as the middle class has and will be a characteristic unique to the 20th century.
In times of international confrontation the role of the middle class was to stabilize the society and standing united against less efficient competing economic alternatives. Now that this confrontation is over and capitalism has won the role of the middle class as stabilizing element is no longer worth its cost.
I for one welcome our new overlords, the Turbo Capitalists.
The rest of your very believable (I have similar experience) story aside, overseas programmers don't code for food. They get paid money like you and me, and they have quite a bit of it left over due to low living costs.
So the money sent overseas gets spent on something. It's much less likely to saved over there; if it is not all absorbed by a very extended family, it is often invested in a relative's business. At least part of it is things that come from the US.
And the money saved at the company is then used in the US. Partly on cheaper products to sell to us, partly (largely) stolen by Corporate Officers before it even hits the rest of the economy through taxes or stock dividends or re-investment. But even money stolen is still eventually spent.
In short, it's not possible to say that in general the effect is sure to be bad. It sounds bad, but it might be just more churn.
If Walmart saves money by buying cheap clothes from China, we also get cheap clothes. Wages may drop here, but things cost less. Sure we have a minimum wage and all, but if your periods of work and non-work get so that you are out of work half the time, on the average you are getting half the wage. If everything is cheap it's not such a big deal. You have more time to live a euro-trash cafe lifestyle (also known as couch potato or porch monkey in the US) because your savings last longer.
In the end, the whole world may earn low wages but have really cheap chinese clothes and plastic furniture and drive Elantras.
What's wrong with that ? You still get to have A/C in the summer, and you can still do whatever you want to do in your life. If you can afford cars and a house and have occasional vacations, you are basically middle class. I think it's great. You just have to realize that it's going to be a middle class more like that in the deep South or rural Canada, and not what you are used to. But you can still do whatever you want.
I'm just curious, are games programming still being done on the US or have they also started outsourcing to India? US and Japan seems to handle all console development, Mostly US for the PC games.
From what I see, this might still be a good place to land a job.
Or I could be wrong, anybody knows?
Everyone is so fixated on IBM's plans they are overlooking a very,very important fact: Nearly a THIRD of this countries population was born before 1964. This means that over the next 20 years or so MILLIONS of people will begin to retire. All sorts of positions will open. The long term outlook for anyone in the tech feild in this country is very rosy.
I just received an email from an Indian programmer that is truly mindbogglingly stupid: the kind of thing you remember and chuckle about months later. It's not just a lack of English, or a lack of cultural knowledge, it's a resounding gut-churning sixty-second brain fart that empties the room. As Babbage said, "I am not rightly able to comprehend the confusion of mind that might lead to such a question."
I pity the fool who chooses that guy for their outsourcing project.
I know plenty of smart people of Indian descent, but they all live in the US or other parts of the west. Up until now, it seems like the smart programmers have emigrated and the dumb ones stayed behind, giving the whole country a bad name as the cut-price sweatshop of last resort.
Now perhaps in the future more of the smart people will start to stay at home rather than moving to the Bay Area. Despite the relative cheapness of housing and food, those people are still going to want the cars and computers and overseas holidays that their cousins in the US have enjoyed, and they are not going to be happy on USD5000 for very long.
You pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Some jobs can be done by monkeys.
"Why does America deserve to have all the wealth that it has? " because we deloped global capitalism.
And moving jobs offshore is just another part of the global capitalism "you" created. You'd better get used playing your own game.
"2) Train yourself to do it well." I do programming well. you would be hard pressed to find an area of programming I have not done. yet, I still will loose a job overseas.
Yeah this will happen. It doesn't mean you suck at what you do. It simply means that your company can get a bigger bang for a buck moving offshore.
That is always the perception because we work harder then most countries, but we also play harder. You work harder? You're really naive to believe that. In many poor countries people work an average of 60 hours a week and their sallaries is about 50 USD, without any kind of benefits.
Hell yeah, America first.
That was never the mind of the north-americans. For most business men there it is more like: Hell yeah, my money first.
Particularly the bit about capital speculation in global hedge funds driving global shifts in employment toward lower wages across the board. This is the predictable outcome of a new gilded age with global trusts abusing the lack of international law and regulation to play off regional labor markets in a drive to the bottom. They will also play off national and local government to drive out regulation in order to force government to reduce environmental and safety regulations at the risk of losing entire industries to the next cheaper country. We see this locally with tax incentives given to attract or keep employers at the state level, it's the same game played internationally. Unfortunately, internationally there are no regulatory bodies under the authority of duly elected officials, nor is there any public scrutiny. It's a free for all.
100 years ago it's this type of behavior by the trust barons which led to the American populist movement, unionization drives, and finally the trust-busting movement in government (remember that Republican, Teddy Roosevelt?) Whole populations had to make their displeasure known to government and industry before the trust barons relented. Looks like it'll have to happen once again, only this time globally.
There's not much IBM can do about this given that their competitors are doing the same. This is the nature of collective action, there's only benefit when all agree and act upon a beneficial course of action. When only one is altruistic, (s)he gets eaten as prey. Which is why we have elected government, to create a process whereby citizens can engage in collective policymaking (through their elected officials) and enforcement to the benefit of all. Thus creating the rules whereby beneficial collective action takes hold.
A couple of points to make WRT capitalism, unions, and trust-busting:
First, there is nothing inherently anticapitalist with duly elected officials creating and enforcing anti-trust, environmental, food safety, worker safety, or anti-poverty (minimum wage) legislation. Capitalism requires a free market of many competing organizations (read: small business) in order to see macro efficiency gains across the whole economy. When a single entity takes over entire market(s) we see the kind of market distortion that Standard Oil, the former IBM, and the current Microsoft enjoy, to the detriment of the economy as a whole. Thus, even capitalist economies at the macro scale require some level of collectivist management. The trick is for the general population to collectively gain through competitive small business, which requires real democracy at the policy-making level. We haven't had that in the US for some time.
Unions create the same economic distortions as do monopoly trusts when they grow too large. Thus we saw the AFL-CIO and other very large unions become corrupt, yet at a time these unions were critical to gaining basic worker rights for average Americans some 100 years back. A union organized in a small shop, which collectively bargains with local management toward rational agreement, provides the local workforce with the leverage they need to counterbalance the inherent power management has over their workforce. But like with Enron, Worldcom, and all the other corporate scandals we've seen, scaled up Unions represent just another opportunity to fleece their membership base (or shareholders, in the corporate scandals).
In both cases we see problems from scaling up to organizational sizes beyond what human society can support (this would likely be a biological limitation), while still meeting rational societal needs. Remember, we formed 'this most perfect union' as a democratic collectivist experiment. We are a society first and foremost. When that dies, only anarchy, lawlessness, and violence will remain.
I believe that what has happened over the last thirty years is that corporate America has taken control of all three branches of government and driven policy makers to enact policies strictly for t
I agree with your points and I also have a dumb question. Couldn't find a better place to post it really.
How come companies import goods into this country and pay import taxes in addition to corporate taxes? I mean why can't they say they just outsourced everything and just pay income taxes in the US, i.e., avoid the import taxes, duties, tariffs whatever.
American Workers aren't over priced, INDIAN workers are UNDERPRICED. Compare American Programmers to other countries that actually aren't borderline 3rd world countries. 25% of people in India don't make enough money to EAT. Of course they work cheap. The sad part is, if the American government continues to allow jobs to move overseas tech workers in America will have to work for peanuts to compete. If a company has a certain number of it's workers overseas it should be forced to pay some type of tax, or move it's home base to another country.
comments then become irrelevant
Right now, the Bush administration and the Fed have pulled out all the stops in trying to get the American economy on track. We're 20 months past the last quarter of GDP decline, and US payrolls and capital spending are *still* dropping like a rock ... that has not happened since the great depression. The explanation has a lot to do with offshoring ... its not just for programmers and call center operators anymore. Accountants, financial analysts, scientists, engineers, HR, anyone that does not have a mandatory customer-facing role in their job description. This is not just happening in the US ... its taking place all over western Europe and the rest of the developed world (and its pissing them off as well).
I can't say I can really blame IBM for looking offshore ... its their duty to shareholders to keep labor costs down and their bottom line up. Free trade, in principle, ultimately works to help everyone in the long run. However, China, India, and other new "trading partners" have adopted some rather underhanded policies, including ones to peg their currencies to low values on the dollar (a big part of the reason why an Indian salary costs 1/5 of a comparable American salary and the Chinese even less). Their human rights and quality-of-life records are far from admirable, and yet we're so eager to bring China into the WTO and wipe out the trade barriers standing between us and the third world. Unless we all want to share the quality-of-life of an average Chinese citizen, we probably should be re-thinking our current international trade policy, not to mention the administration responsible for implementing it.
FYI, American programmers are making USD25K per MONTH(!!!) in Saudi Arabia.
That makes my point about highly educated and skilled workers being in demand. Grossing $600K in two years? Not bad at all. I don't know how much of that (if any) goes in taxes but that's still a fair bit of cash. I understand that relocation costs, vacations back home etc are all handled by the Saudis, but it may depend on the outfit you are with.
Who knows... down the road you may not even have to leave the comfort of your own home to have a contract of that nature. It's certainly technically feasible today to work remotely. Indians and other offshore workers could get into the same game, but for countries like Saudi Arabia there is a strong preference for American, Canadian and European workers.
The government tried your plan in 1930 with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. It is now regarded as one of the 3 main causes of the Great Depression.
Check out the economic principle of "comparative advantage", and you'll see that it is to America's net economic advantage to find the cheapest way to produce. Even if that is overseas.
even after his groundbreaking work you will still get the krugmans, greenspans, and others saying it was speculation and irrationality.
Billware is still stuck with a 16-bit non-protected model .. something that was supposed to disappear in '93 with the unified windoze 3.1 & nt release due to appear then.
People use unix because it works. You're not stuck with things, you can change them. Take a few tools, saute them and voila, something new and useful.
As to your cars example, they're rapidly moving towards unrepairable -- many repairs are of a "keep on replacing boards until the problem goes away" nature. The modern auto, while featureful, is not an end-user friendly device if it's lacking a feature you need to have.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
The issue here is that Offshore the jobs in all the Consumming Nations equals long term disaster due to not having any more consumers local. This is the big issue. The other is that IBM is not just one Company but one of many companies. Though it needs to do this to be competitive by doing so it reduces the number of consumers for its self and its customers to be supporting. This then prolongs the recession and makes recovery non-existant.
Other issue with India, China and Vietnam is that these nations are not so labour ruled as is North America.
So my question is, what will replace Computer Software/Hardware Development in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand?
How can I consume with out income? So,plan to sell in the nation you employ because we here who are unemployed will not be able to purchase the New Software or Electronic Gadget. What is the reason if it will give no Return on Investment.
Folks, time to wake up. Do you really think IBM has only just now come up with this idea? Hah? Where do you think JavaBeans was developed? Websphere? Most definitely not in the states!
A significant portion of JavaBeans was developed in Latvia. Look it up in the map. At that time developer salaries were less than $500 per head, per month. including all taxes.
Over the past 10 years, IBM has developed a good feel for the international development market, and is now taking this to the next higher level. Previously the project work was done in low cost countries, and the admin and leadership work in the developed countries. Now they are also moving the admin and leadership positions abroad, as they have identivied people who are capable of doing this at a cost significantly lower than in the states for equal value.
IBM has offices all over the world. Many of these offices specialise in certain areas for a larger geographic area. As the low cost offices show their capabilities, they are given more responsibility for a larger area.
Although this may be a crappy situation for developers in developed countries, in the developing countries this is a godsend. And you in the developded countries buying these products, well... you do want a quality product at an affordable price, dont you? By reducing the development cost, IBM can allocate more development time to get the product right. Think about it.
the budget deficit isn't causing deflation. deflation has been coming for years now when greenspan freaked out trying to fight an imaginary inflation monster. "treating to trigger" is wrong too: we are in a deflationary environment. that combined with the recession are why total receipts are shrinking. bush's first round of tax cuts were straight up keynsian and didn't do shit.
where did you get your econ training? reading comic books won't do it, sorry.
"The entire point of trickle down doctrine (which worked so well in the eighties) is that the wealthy are supposed to spend the money (on things like yachts, presumably)"
"eighties" is mispelled. i think you meant "twenties and sixties" (hint hint: kennedy's great expansion was from supply-side policies).
also, supply-side doesn't worry itself with where the cash goes. increased spending is a keynsian idea, not supply-side. supply-siders, like nobel winner mundell, say that you want to decrease the marginal cost of capital and have better arangements of it.
"Did you ever wonder why interest rates drop during a recession? It's a reactionary technique."
like from 79-82 where interest rates hit their highest ever? your head must hurt from that vacuum between your ears.
try not to rip on supply-side theory (read: classical economics) until you understand it.
I need to get cracking on some letters and a resume...
Ben
Work Safe Porn
For America to stay on top there must be free movement of jobs and wealth across the borders. Closing up will only bring about the end of American leadership.
The way the article is worded, it seems like IBM hopes congress will get mad and come up with a legislation to impede offshoring. IBM would probably be more comfortable if they worked with local workforce only (American or otherwise, but local) and if everybody else had to.
People who think there is basically no difference between offshore outsourcing and labor importation need to think a bit more carefully.
It is one thing to transfer a person between nations. It is another thing to transfer a job between nations.
There are some things they have in common of course. For example, industries with substantial national security implications need to avoid importing labor as well as exporting jobs, for obvious reasons, and there are more industries with substantial national security implications than the globalists are willing to admit. Moreover such irresponsible globalism is more pervasive than many detractors of globalism may think. Even the "White Nationalist FAQ" at a leading white nationalism site is insistent that "labor markets are global" and does not see any particularly important security implication to exporting industries wholesale if that is what global competition demands. According to traditional political axes this is impossible. If even an openly and racially nationalist organization cannot protect industries with national security implications, it says something is seriously out of whack with the political axes used to map ideas against real world concerns.
Having said that, the importation of labor is a more serious problem than is exportation of jobs for the simple reason that, just as possession is 9/10ths of the law, residency is 9/10ths of citizenship. Integrity of citizenship is important to the world for the simple reason such integrity is the source of all knowledge about what works and what doesn't work in social organization. When citizenship ceases to represent the principles upon which a society is founded, the experiment represented by that society is destroyed and consequent events in it are uninterpretable. Experiments need controls and if there is one thing we learned from the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation it is that revelation must be accompanied by experimentation.
The American Experiment has already been severely disrupted by early 20th century immigration from portions of Europe that supported theocracy during the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. This resulted in the centralization of powers during the 20th century replacing the laboratory of the States with strong central governmental control, in direct contravention of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution. This then resulted in the immigration liberalizations of the last half of the 20th century and the present condition in which massive amnesty programs for illegal immigrants are routinely proposed and passed as a means of importing not only labor but voters and activists from cultures that have no history of successfully resisting theocratic rule. That this pro-theocratic liberalization came primarily from the founding culture of Western theocracy, Judaism, is an important, if heretical, topic under the current theocracy that dominates thought in the United States. See "Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881-1965: A Historical Review" by Prof. Kevin MacDonald. It is always the case that the most threatening ideas to a theocracy are heresies -- and this is no exception.
Seastead this.
I'm sick and tired of large scale corporations sending good jobs overseas so they can save money and be competitive.. The US economy is suffering to the point that a lot of very tallented people are being laid off by the numbers. I have recently been laid off, and myself as well as many other slashdotters know how difficult it is to find a good paying tech related job in this plot of time we call "now".
I believe some states were considering passing laws to forbid corporations/companies to do such things like this, but I'm not sure if it was ever put in place or will even be enforced.
This is what companies need to stay in business? how about hiring locals who will give your company more pride and better services/products? It's not the responcibility of the United States to support the job markets of other countries while ruining our own enconmy in the process.
All the blame isn't on George W., but all I know is I had a job before he was in office.
they should all be free, once that effort is made seriously and we are essentially freed of our labors by the automation we will be able to pursue whatever we want, which would make us a far more powerful and profitable nation than we are now
sure there would be more GGW videos but imagine how much more shit people like einstein could have come up with if they didn't have to come up with a rent check and worry about whether or not he would have food on the table tomorrow..
Please?!?
/. knows, counter-intuitive business cases are *always* the best!
/. business cases require either the customer or the competition to be as dumb as a post?
If you're going to be a skeptic, you ought to try applying Occam's razor.
Your example involves a VP who is just a mindless sheep. He apparently got promoted to VP because they ran out of space in the mail room. He reads in a magazine that (imagine this) he can save money by paying people less. What a ridiculous idea... As everyone on
So the employees at his company fudge the numbers to make it look like you can save money by paying people less. Can you believe the gulliblity of this guy? Fortunately, after he implements the policy, he kicks back and never looks at the balance sheet again. The pioneering programmers rapidly drive up consulting prices without facing cut-throat competition from the other 1 billion citizens of India. (After all, it worked so well for Mexico.) Hooray! Hoorah! The economy is saved and the naysayers triumph.
Why do all
-a
No, sorry, America didn't get richer after transfering its manufacturing industries offshore, what happened is that America went from being the largest creditor in the world to the greatest debtor nation in the world.
No, making our trading partners wealthy did not help America because they practice managed, strategic trade in which we lose hundreds of billions of dollars of capital and industrial skill every year, capital which goes not to purchase American products but to purchase American land and corporations.
International economics is warfare, and the strategic terrain is a combination of industrial and technological skills for a nations workers and capital ownership of the means of production, and in both categories America is losing badly.
Not only are the best jobs being shipped overseas, Americans aren't allowed access to PhD candidate positions in American Universities anyway, because most of those spots (along with the funding for them) are being reserved for Indian and Chinese students. So forget a good job and forget advanced training if you are an American, you've just been put under the jack boot of Globalization.
The US today is in exactly the same position as the Soviet Union in the 1980's. Dependent on imports for all of its consumer needs, losing its industries, vastly in debt and going deeper at historically unprecidented rates, and pathetically attempting to rely on military power to both distract the population from the treasonous policies of a corrput elite and to convince the world that it remains a preeminant power.
The bizarre position that eliminating the most productive jobs in the economy is a way to "save money" is typical of the desparate and deranged thinking of a management class reduced to attempting to function in an economy so severely distorted by political failure that actual sense makes no "business sense."
Well, I guess as an American I'll just have to find another source of income.
Hey, I know! I'll go down to the local IBM office and selling bumper stickers saying "Protect your jobs: Nuke India". Bet I make a ton of sales.
I'll take a trip to Bangladesh, if it means getting a job again, finally. ;^)
And there I was thinking that US got its place by cheap land (nicked from the locals) slave labor (from africa) and appropriating British intellectual property without paying royalties.
Either way, there is no guarantee that 15-20 years down the line that will not start to get commoditized. However, commiditization and off-shoring will never happen overnight, so ya gotta keep your eyes open.
Myself, I'm gunning for a research job - code slinging is fun, but I want more.
dot-india, dot-bust. India is a bubble waiting to happen, I'm gonna setup shop in Africa so that I can under-cut India when the time comes. I'm convinced that upper-echelon business-types are a bunch of nitwit-lemmings; they follow each other and don't have an original though between their pointy-hair-fringed ears. If companies spend a little more time and money on R,D&E and less on reckless penny-shaving, maybe their won be a future dot-bust that is going to put the US into the dumpster-bin of history.... Face it, we're the UK post-industrialism. Everyone will have to live with their parents due to a scarcity of credit (because millions of people are going to default on their mortgages soon). And, look foward to 15-25% unemployment, just like Europe/Japan. China is the were it's at right now, even though the rules change w/ the wind (because there's no real democracy), but the Chinese will have more buying power than the US in a matter of a couple years.
Don't follow the money... be where the money is in the future, and get out before it leaves.
...
Personal carers, writers, actors, doctors, specialist in all kinds of hobbies and in general personalized services.
Glas half full?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Goverment X picks up a FLOSS project that provides the tool that most closely do what they need, customize it and they are done. If none exists you develop it from scratch.
Commercial closed source software is not the answer for any goverment, not even the USian one.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You claim the US developed global capitalism (poor Brits, another one that the US attributes to themselves) but then you are unwilling to compete. When you have to compete some people end living under bridges but the society overall improves (and here society may mean world, not just US).
Perhaps if we have a more equitable distribution of income worldwide we will have less people inclined to follow loopy ideologies that offer people with no hope (politically or economically) a false way out of their backwardness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm sitting in the contact center of an outsourcing company in Mumbai, India as I type this. I'm not sure how many other posters here have A) been to India or B) are planning to visit to implement an outsourcing project, but I can tell from most of the posts here that the majority of /.ers fall into neither category. This means they have absolutely NO CLUE what they are talking about.
I work for a major US corporation that is currently installing infrastructure in India to outsource call center jobs and here's what I've learned about India in the past two weeks:
1) If you have any illusions that salaries here will rise quickly enough to deter US companies from outsourcing jobs, then you're sorely mistaken. Salaries here are so far below the US average that they will take DECADES to increase significantly. Call center reps here are earning about US$3,000 to US$4,000 a year... (that's about 1/7th the going rate in the US) and 75% of them have MASTERS DEGREES or higher. The guy sitting in the next cube has a masters in botany and speaks PERFECT English. For comparison, my driver here makes about US$700 a year. My ususal tip of 100 Indian Rupees (about US$2) equates to his normal daily pay.
2) Mumbai has 15 million residents. Most of them live in Asia's largest slum, which extends for miles in all directions. There are huge shanty towns made up of left over metal scraps and plastic tarps.
3) The roads are in very poor condition (it is the monsoon season) and there is no visible public sanitiation. Garbage is literally EVERYWHERE. You can see and smell it wherever you go.
4) Ever seen a "Stay in school" commercial on TV in the US? Did you take your free public education for granted? Here they run commercials urging parents to keep ONE child in school while the others work to support the family.
My company will save millions of dollars by outsourcing to India over the next few years. Even if the salaries here rise steadily for the next decade, they still will not be anywhere near US salaries for the same jobs. Plus you get a worker with 6 years of college education for 1/7th the cost of a high school educated American.
And what happens when India gets too expensive? Well, thats what our long range plans for China and South America are for!
Currently, outsourcing to India is about 60% of the cost of doing it in the US. This used to be more like 10% at one time, and I expect it to keep rising in time with the mantra "charge whatever the market will bear". Expect figures more like 75% when more companies start to glom onto this. It's still a cost saving to the US companies so they will go ahead with it, but it's nowhere near the saving it used to be.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
There are countries like Germany with 10% of unemployment and they are not full of beggars and 5 bucks a pop thieves.
You can't live isolated pal, the US has a lot of stuff bud does not have it all. You have to trade with other people and as much as you would like it otherwise, workforce is just another good to be traded. If you want to promote a Socialist system in which the goverment makes sure you have a job you are very welcomed (people in Socialist countries used to all have a job, there was 0% unemployment). We know where that leads, so I would call isolationists rants as yours naive and uniformed.
What people like you fail to realize is that the oportunity is there for all: how can you use cheap labour abroad in your benefit? Prices of goods produced in those countries must go down: how are you going to takle advantage of those prices dropping? Which fields and professions can't be outsourced?
Some whine and look for the comfort of a nany state that nurses their ineficiencies. Some others, the winners, the enterprising, find the opportunities on the prevaling and future environment and thrive and prosper.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Tell them we want laws to forbit companies to hire outside of the US for less than what they would of paid here.
IBM has a lot of development outside of the U.S. Hursley, England is the major development center we deal with.
One example that I rant a lot is the mobile games exports of Korea. China has equally good Java programmers, but they end up buying a lot of content from Korea as the users find Korean games more fun.
I just think that the nature of developer will change in the US. There will still be requirements that need on-site programmers.
Do not worry, something new will come. It is inevitable. This is a cycle.
From what I've read of history, the UK went through the same thing 100 years ago when competing against USA. Americans made better products for lower wages, so many durable goods sold in UK were made in USA, causing pay cuts and layoffs in UK. Then after WWII the USA became the world leader in R&D, so during the postwar recovery UK still must've lost a lot of jobs to that too. So how has UK handled it since then? Should USA in the 21st century look to UK in the 20th century as a historical model?
>Rhetorical Question:
At what point will the risks to Organizational/National Security be considered? How can we effectively defend key components of national critical infrastructure against domestic or international attack if all of the source code is being developed overseas.
Better question: How can we PAY for our conventional and WMD's... when there aren't enough TAXPAYERS LEFT to foot the bill?
You know how a lot of these "second world nations" (Brazil, Greece, Nigeria etc.) drove themselves off the cliff with debt, with corrupt leaders making money off the country's misery... so much so that the country never fully recovers? Then the hungry populace *demands* an ultra right-wing government to militarize things?
I don't think Bush is as stoopid as he pretends. I think he's trying to recreate the same thing here. The bastard deliberately raped California... a lot of people here in New England laughed.. until California stopped spending then our economy tanked too. Oh yeah.
I'm so mad I could write to my Saudi shadow government to complain.
A little background story. I've always been a Malaysian citizen although I went to school and university in the UK. My first job was in the IT department of a rather large investment bank and I recently got made redundant.
As a graduate of a university of some repute and with 18 months of work experience under my belt, I would expect to have exactly the same job prospects as any other British university graduate here in the UK. Unfortunately (for me), work permits are hard to come by as companies have to prove that they've advertised for positions in local newspapers/trade journals for a minimum of two months before they are allowed to tap the international job market and, as a result, I've had no jobs coming my way. The result of this is that I've accepted a job in my home country for an 80% pay cut (my new job is paying US$ 790 per month).
Folks, I've seen a few posts which either directly or indirectly imply that we Third World workers are nowhere as productive as Americans. I agree this is most probably true for world-class programmers, you can't realistically expect me to believe that EVERY SINGLE American university graduate is that much better. The company that I'll be working for was founded by an Oxford graduate, several of the directors have been educated in England and the United States, and we're all working for substantially less than what you in the West are used to.
Keeping that in mind, please tell me what incentive large corporations actually have for employing an American (or European) worker if you can get quality work done for much cheaper elsewhere.
It's not all doom and gloom, guys. I've been thinking about the situation and there are sectors in which jobs should still be available. I doubt it's that worthwhile for smaller IT outfits to offshore their work, having no infrastructure in place in India (for example). You also have many more contacts and knowledge about your respective countries (be it the USA, the UK, Finland, or whatever) than Ranjit from Bangalore or Abu from Kuala Lumpur. Use that as leverage.
I do wish everyone the best of luck, though I don't expect it to be very pretty in the short term.
For some time now I've been formulating my rant for our baby boomer middle management that are clogging up the corporate ladders of American. This is not that rant. That one may just become a book! This is about those money hungry flower children trying to keep they're middle tear management job by dumping jobs, en mass, to India and South America. Hay converted Hippie! You made your number look good this year by putting that call center off shore! Talk about "forest for the trees!" For the next 5 years we will experience the American peoples backlash and watch the economic bottem fall outta that plan. This could possibly putting an end to your little management racket, friend(but I could be wrong, you "good old boy club" baby boomers stick together like glue) Once, we, generation X, the ones you so incorrectly, dubbed as lazy, fix the crap you screwed up yet AGAIN, America as a whole will still be out x number of jobs because you CYA'd (Cover Your Ass) this year! Its become all to obvious that the boomer generation cares only for getting a good retirement plan, propping up Social Security till they get they're piece, and then moving to retirement and laugh while the following generations that you've dumped all the work on for the past 5 years burn themselves out trying to support your retirement community. What do you care? You got your golden parachute attached to your golden goose (Gen X). What happened to the flattening out of the corporate ladder? We don't hear about that anymore, cleared out the generation ahead of you and then dropped that sword, did we? Have you seen how many fat men hang from our corporate ladder today?
Some times my rants come with a solution; some times I leave them as a rant.
Disclaimer: This solution is just plan, politically incorrect, a bit morbid, and violent. So please, read on at your own risk. If you where born before 1965, I hope it makes you just a little red in the face.
Solution: Lets open up all those old Hippie communes again! Put the problem back where it came from. In the 60's you talked of living off the land and being free. Well, kool, do that. Let us handle business from here on out, you've proven your ability at the helm. We'll supply the sunflower seeds, tie dye, and cyanine pills. Come to think of it, to bad more of you didn't follow in line with those crazies that killed themselves on that commune. Could have solved all the problems that we have now. Problem is, then, like now, Boomers, you didn't follow through. Took the lazy way out and blamed it on the next generation. Talked outta one side of the ol mouth about free love and working together and then grabbed for every penny you could.
What's wrong with our economy? A lot of things... Sending work that isn't cut out for a people to a disbalanced and already weak local economy? Abusing our global influence to save your job? We've spent years sticking our noise in other peoples business, pissing off about everyone out there. When the bill comes for this migration of jobs to India and South America. When those people realize, as a whole, how we used and abused them and left them with nothing... who's gonna pay the piper? Generation "X", you should have named us generation "fooked" cuz we are the ones that are gonna get the screws for the crap you leave behind. Don't be to shocked when the power goes out on your retirement village because we can't pay the bills for you!
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
It is very bad. Much worse than the recent CNN article suggests (http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/22/news/economy/jobl ess_offshore/index.htm). Has anyone found the MSFT presentation? This ought to be a smack in the face to the MSFT lovers. Jobs to India is fine as long as they experience the same costs (taxes, hidden taxes, and layered taxes) as we do.
The only real plan I see is OpenSource. When the software is free nobody has to worry about a monopoly giving away free software like what others are selling, a government that is unwilling to tax/tariff large companies (or prosecute the monopoly), or a cheap labor force that can produce the software more cheaply. Sounds like others are like me and have already experienced this from the receiving end. The midrange server company [omitted] has effectively closed its plant after a presentation in 1996 showing no new headcount in the US into the future. OpenSource (Linux, JBoss, Java) is now just as good/better than the costly stuff so we have no reason not to use it. Send the jobs to India, we are no longer buying your products! Even IBM saw this as they OpenSourced Eclipse and it is now the base for their development environment. Not sure about mySQL.
The only other viable plans include requesting the government tax the imports. Will never happen... just look at manufacturing for auto.s and hard goods. Take a look at the steel industry. Studies showed something like 80% of the refined products are passed off as raw products such that a US steel manufacturer could never compete with this level of tax evasion. Even those board/machine manufactures that take sufficient engineering are gradually defined into a process in the USA and mass-manufactured to Mexico or Tiawan. Software is inherently untaxable as my experience is the companies in India simply FTP over their work product. So, how could one even try to tax that. No, taxes will never be applied and that is reason enough for companies to move their software manufacturing and support overseas.
I know lots of techies and programmers who have exited the tech field. The new college grad.s just gave it up and went to Japan to teach english, to become a policeman, or back to waiting tables. Very sad. The older techies tried to go into real-estate, to be a fireman etc. Lots of Cobol programmers looking for anything (for the un-illuminated who said unwanted jobs are what is going over-seas - who prefers integration to product development!!!) Lots of my friends were unemployed but not smart enough to even draw unemployment as they expected a contract "any day now" for eight months! Or, like me, laid off after being laid off in a way I cannot get it I do not think. Suspect the government isn't realizing these people in its numbers. I myself am strategizing how to exit the tech field which is tough since that is all I have done for many years; and I certainly will tell my children not to go into technology of any type. Medical OK. Heat/Air and other such services. Good. Legal/politcial. Best. As the government will never let legal jobs go overseas; though hiring a lawyer in India to do a house closing seems fairly possible - just illegal! I'm afraid the teachers are going to have a real problem as techies with advanced degrees are attemptng to devour those jobs and are possibly more qualified. E.g. my friend who has a Ph.D. in math some 30 years ago and was recently laid off from a local University and has worked for many tech companies. Imagine some algebra teacher with a BS trying to compete for her/his job next fall with people like that!
Besides all this, the IRS is in attack mode against small businesses such that despite using one of the top 100 accunting firms per Inc. Magazine and nothing ever being filed incorrectly I still ended up paying $800 to the accounting firm and/or several hundred to the IRS every few quarters until I finally gave up and closed my business. I have contacted them each year since 2000 about making an online portal so we can see what was filed (and entered int
Expect Freedom.
...when open source can so readily provide free software, execs start to think "hmmm...I can probably cheapen up my labor costs too" and they move em out. You guys in the open source world are programming yourselves right out of a pay check and right out of the field altogether. Good luck flipping burgers at McDonalds cause that's what happened to the "skilled" employees in Flint when their jobs "moved". History has a way of repeating itself, doesn't it?
Topic is enough said. G-Dub is actually the anti-fascist, who will be our savior?
Rightly so there should be a swamp on posts on this. This is plain and simple bullshit that people are not going to deal with much longer. Americans are already fedup with trying to understand Habib Ra-quesheshesh for Tech support and they sure as shit wont stomach "CURRY ERROR: PLEASE FIGHT OVER KASHMIR AND REBOOT. ERROR CODE: REDDOTFORHEAD 0x8764CCE"
IBM worried about cash? Try _NOT_ paying a worthless executive tens of millions in unearned bonuses. Somebody needs to found new companies in America that care about Americans.
Mod me down and rub your Buddah, when you are American and being told guess what you get to work at McDonalds with your skills and experience it can be a hard shoe to cram on if you can begin to understand.
I have decided to change fields. After 20+ years in IT (12+ as an Oracle DBA), I am getting out. Its back to college for me and onward to a job as a teacher. Low stress, high demand and the job won't get outsourced. In the mean time I will avail myself of every government program I can to make ends meet. If you can't beat the game, change tables.
Trust me when I say that they do meet these obligations to the politicians who make that possible.
Here in Chicago, we used to be the candy capital of America maybe the world. Wrigley gum, Ferrera Pan, M&M Mars (gone to PA), Cracker Jacks, Brachs, World's Finest, and many more.
The high cost of sugar has driven all but two candy manufacturers out of the country. The subsidies to support low profit margin sugar producers have caused the loss of high profit margin candy producers! More high paying jobs have been lost in the candy manufacturing industry than the low paying jobs saved in the sugar farming industry.
Thats what are elected officials have done to help us!
I'm scared. I have a wife, mortgage, 2 car payments, 2 student loan payments, insurance, etc, etc.
If I lose my job there is a 100% chance I will be ensuring that my wife collects my life insurance policy in a fairly rapid fashion.
MORTAR COMBAT!
1. The wealth in the US is primarily held by "the captains of industry" who are the same people sending all this work away. They will continue to make money from these companies. It is the employees in the trenches who will pay the price. Even when things get bad, the majority of the people in the higher echelons are sufficiently wealthy to ride out the repercussions of their actions.
2. By definition, the amount being spent in other countries is relatively small, otherwise this wouldn't be happening. Other countries are not going to get rich off this, not even by their own standards. There will be no cleansing redistribution of hoarded US wealth. The poor will not enjoy the luxuries of American standards of living. A great equalization is not just around the corner.
3. The good old entrepreneurial spirit ensures those running the offshore development companies are looking at wealthy American corporate officers as a role model. They want a cut of that pie, and coming from less well-developed nations, and probably a less comfy background, they are probably even more ruthlessly unconcerned about stepping on their fellow citizens to get it. Consequently, you will end up with the same situation overseas, where the top few are doing well (by their standards) and their workers are doing slightly better than average, at best. This will be worse outside the US as those other countries rarely have the kinds of anti-exploitation protections in place that US workers enjoy, and it is to the advantage of the governments of those countries to avoid that kind of protection to encourage further US investments.
Middle- and even low-end managers are very much involved in budgetary concerns in large companies. The problem is, they have no choice. Where I work, it was recently mandated that MOST work (nearly three quarters) must be done by Indians. Ok, they said "offshore" so we have a few Russians in the mix, but it's mostly Indians. The costs will rise due to natural market forces, not because managers don't care. It has already been documented that offshore development costs a great deal more now, across the board, than it used to.
This problem will not affect the US alone. Read The Register. Jobs are already being lost in the UK. The India and China have more than enough warm bodies available to completely trash the economies of the rest of the civilized world. It has been said that the Japanese never considered WWII to have ended, they merely shifted to an economic form of warfare. They may have been on to something. I do not believe India has any dark intent, they are merely looking out for themselves, and I lay the blame on US companies for selling out their own people -- but I believe the US may have no choice but to take a dim view of this. Unfortunately there seems to be no good solution.
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Actually, it shouldn't have a downward effect on US living standards. Since the software is largely sold in the US, outsouring should make it cheaper or better, making the US economy more productive. And if the software doesn't get any cheaper, IBM makes more money, which gets into the pockets of US citizens via divdends and captial gains.
Free trade is generally a positive for both sides. The problem is that the pain of free trade is concentrated, but the benfits are diffused. Outsourcing always hurts a few people a lot, and helps a lot of people a little. But the net effective is positive.
In the long term, wages are proportional to the net productivity created by a given worker. Over time, expect the ratio between US and Indian salaries to roughly mirror the relative productivity of US and Indian workers. And don't forget this is just salary. Stuff like office buildings, the utility of being able to talk face to face with management, etcetera, all factor into productivity.
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It's great that we're moving white collar jobs OUT of North America and into places like India etc. I mean isn't it great that we'll soon have a nation of ditch diggers and plumbers and no more expertise of these complicated computer thingies? Meanwhile our national economy gets fucked because a few companies want to save a buck....thanks IBM!
If American jobs are *that* important, why does everyone push for linux since that will mean the unemployment of tons of Americas employed developing MS products. No expense means no income, right?
1. The interest of the country is not the interest of the corporation, and vice-versa. No matter how much libertarian kool-aid you have drunk; the race to the bottom does not help our national interest. (I remember tweaking my IBM friends about the time of the last India-Pakistan brouhaha; wondering if their code was going to be radioactive). 2. Western Europe Might Have Been Right All Along.
People keep whining about how jobs move out of the US and how living standards are decreasing in the US. Yes, they do, and yes they are. And so what? What is wrong with that?
The US and Europe have been incredibly lucky, being able to build very high standards of living on the basis of cheap labor and cheap raw materials from third world nations. But those third world nations are waking up and they want their fair share. That means our standards of living will probably stagnate or go down until those nations catch up.
And that's not something we can stop anyway. Colonialism is impractical--we don't have the resources anymore to conquer and suppress large numbers of third world nations. If we oppose globalization, our economies will nose-dive. That leaves embracing globalization. But we don't have a lot of competitive advantages anymore: folks in India are smart and well-educated, and they have lower costs of living, so of course they are going to be successful and compete with us.
Overall, this means our standard of living will stagnate or even go down until the rest of the world catches up. The best thing we can do is embrace this trend and help other nations improve their standard of living quickly.
Abolutely right.
The company I work is outsourcing to India.
A colleague of mine is preparing the job and he has to detail the whole functional design and technical design up to the last comma and method.
Suddenly changing requirements was always the big problem here, and technical designs were something you did afterwards.
But when outsourcing it seems that it is possible after all to get good requirements and create a detailed technical design after all!
If we had more good, fixed requirements and time to make a good design, then we wouldn't have had any problems here and we'd be much more productive.
OOTH, I got the feeling that this wave of good functional and technical design is just temporary. Within 6 months they'll be back changing requirements on the whim and they won't allow any designing at all.
And then they're *really* screwed. Because loaclly we can check thing with our customers, but those Indian certainly can't.
Capitalism is fine, the problem is when you undercut your own country in favor of other countries. Do you know what a tariff is? It's something used in capitalistic societies to give one party an advantage over another. I.E. tax all incoming tea or whatever so that local-produced tea is comparatively cheaper.
Other countries don't have things like the EPA, they don't have Social Security requirements, they don't have employee tax, they don't have labor unions, they don't have any of these things that drive up the cost of producing in the US.
If you want to keep things in the US, then by all means TAX IMPORTS! We're taxing ourselves, shouldn't we tax others? This is the way to do it, and constitutionally it's one of the few legal taxes (sales/import tax). As of now, we're giving an unfair advantage by imposing domestic tariffs on home-made products.
Respectfully,
Clint Herron
Hey.. do you remember techWar? Man with all the jobs going oversies it sounds like science fiction turning science fact! Imagine a tech war against
anyone subcontracting out work overseas! Imagine
the best and brightest minds batteling the idiot
politicians passing laws that infringe on our rights! I don't mean debate or fight in court, I mean all out war! I bet our world may come to this in the not so distant future.
or some such.
Like the AMA or state BAR associations, it would be responsible for licensing software developers and other IT professionals. Not only would it help protect jobs and the skill base in this country, it would help protect national security and the consumers.
Most people in developed countries have more purchasing power after adjusting for inflation than they did 100 years ago.
The masses have also benefitted, perhaps not as much as the rich classes, but all have benefitted, to sat otherwise is completely untrue.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
where's a good old fashioned plague when you need one?
I run a small software company in India & really sympathize with those losing their jobs as a result of outsourcing to India. (I'm not directly responsible as we work with Japan :-) )
However, you must consider that all the outsourced work is much lower in the value chain as far as IT industry is concerned. Indian companies & programmers are essentially performing 'worker bee' roles, while work in consultancy, design, conceptual thinking, product design etc. is still done in the US. In fact if you look at the number of software products designed & developed by Indian co.s, it is really low. The success of our IT industry has been in providing mainly coding services at low cost.
American co.s & people will still drive the industry & continue to do well as long as they are in the creative, innovative & high value role of creating & designing new products & services. Indian co.s cannot grow beyond a point till they move up the value chain & think beyond being outsourced coding outfits.
I agree. Suits in India operate under the same motivations as suits in the US. Pay your workers and vendors as little as you can get away with, and charge your customers as much as you get away with. The cost of doing business in India will creep up. Furthermore (and more importantly) the software industry is not the athletic shoe industry. Indian programmers are not at all like the legions of uneducated and disenfranchised who fill the slave camps of Nike. Their power, wages and expectations for living standards will actually rise, and Indian outsourcers will be under pressure to meet their employees' needs and pass that cost along to US customers.
...I lay the blame on US companies for selling out their own people -- but I believe the US may have no choice but to take a dim view of this. Unfortunately there seems to be no good solution.
Of course the companies have a choice in this. IBM recorded $1400 000 000 in profit link last quarter. Just how "competitive" do you need to be to stop shafting your own people?
That is correct, but is that good for that society to all agree on that type of immigration? Sounds just like Nazi Germany in the 1940's. Is that what you want?
Well it's all coming down to profits right now in a bad economy... "Monkey see monkey do". What will happen is that development will move in segments slowly like everything else in the US. So what is left for the Americans to do? Well you'll still have doctors and lawyers left with a few VP's and CEO's who make the "real" money. But then again more and more Indians are undercutting us in all those fields. Hmmm... its all going to desolve into a classic case of the "strongest survive". And what is that? Hmmmm... nothing? That we're all "equal" and all deserve the same lifestyle? Exactly.
And your car....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I just came home from half a year of physics research in Bangalore, and I met no racism at all. I am sure that an indian company will happily employ you if you have the skills and you are ready to work for $1000 - $2000 a month. Much of the Indian Computer industry is placed in south India, where they don't speak hindi. Their english is fairly good, so I don't think that language will be a problem for you.
With regards to goverment control of outsourcing I have too objections. First of all I believe that it is morally incorrect. The money in the world are very unfairly distributed, and I happily welcome this step towards economic equality in the world. Secondly I find it obvious that goverment control will fail, as you cannot convince the europeans and japanese to join you.
With respect to the distribution of wealth, I believe that you are right that a great percentage of the money will not make it into the rural areas. In rural areas, they produce rice and vegetables, and there is a limit to how many vegetables, a computer programmer can eat. Thus the major transfer of money will go to the indian middle class. However talking to intellectual indians I met a great sense of responsebility for the poorer classes of india. I guess that the question is whether or not this responsebility can be converted into responsible tax policy.
By the way a chinese programmer earns much less than an indian programmer, so the indians are afraid to lose their newly aquired market part to china.
I bet you can hire a dozen quality CEO's for what it costs to hire one CEO in the US.
First of all, I am getting a little tired of the cost arguments!
I have experience with a company that moved many parts off-shore (specifically, China). They made igniters for gas grills. The prices were cheap, but the quality control was horrible! They ended up scrapping 1/2 to 2/3 of every shipment. Yet, in reports to upper management, no mention was made of the scrap rate or scrap cost, only the total savings in per-piece cost. Only one example; but it's one I saw personally!
I notice that these cost-saving discussions only come up with the rank-and-file workers. When it comes to obscene salaries, bonuses and stock options for CEO's and CFO's and CxO's, no cost, even into the millions of dollars, is too high. The two top-level managers at Tyco, currently under criminal investigation, made $80 million apiece their last year at Tyco (NO STOCK OPTIONS, JUST SALARY AND BONUS!). That's enough to hire 3200 people at $50,000 a year.
Of course US labor costs more than foreign labor. The taxation rate in this country is more than 50%: we work more than 1/2 the year to pay off our tax burden (STFW, you'll find it). So we are automatically twice as expensive as what we actually earn for ourselves. You can make all the arguments you want about tax money providing security, infrastructure, etc, etc, BUT those same arguments apply to companies, too; if they don't like paying those costs for the advantages they get here and the market they have here, then they should move! Move to India, hire Indians and SELL to Indians! Stay in America, HIRE Americans and sell to Americans!
And our government isn't helping at all! Agreemnets like NAFTA have provided incentives for and removed penalties against moving jobs to foreign countries. Now who the hell do they think is going to pay taxes? Who the hell do they think they are going to sell product to? Indians? Mexicans? Other third world countries who DO have incentives to keep money within their own boundaries? The whole idea of a level playing field where everyone prospers is a fucking joke when other countries are not playing by the same rules!
It's not the VP being a sheep that's a problem. It's because of the motivations in place.
The VP is primarily interested in pushing through a big project that he can use to promote himself and his further advancement. The low-level managers, upon whom any long-term savings actually rely, are primarily interested in getting their project done within their allotted timeframe.
It's not as if this isn't an existing problem in other fields -- a VP hears from a someone that workplace security is important, so they start a big intiative to do so. The people in the trenches end up bypassing whatever is put in place, because it makes their jobs more difficult. Same goes for disaster preparedness (boy, lot of contractors raking it in on that after 9/11). VP comes up with plan, actual implementation relies on people in the trench, who aren't willing to document everything they do and store it offsite, because it makes their jobs more of a pain in the ass and because it may keep them from finishing within the time constraints placed on them.
May we never see th
I am sorry to say this, but a big part of the problem is that these people have been tricked into thinking that they were indispensible. The sad truth is that their wages were heavily inflated.
The point is that even if there had been no outsourcing to third world countries, the wages would still have taken a dive sooner or later.
Good question I also raised it in another thread.
US IT infrastructure is being outsourced to other countries that often don't have our interests, security, or physical welfare at heart.
They often do not support our democratic way of life nor give a hoot about US.
Many complaints here that while the corporations are using up America's infrastructure and R & D, they should hire people over here as well. Capitalistic market pressure aside, lets look at the principles at work here.
Microsoft is using Americas infrastructure, American banks to loan, American universities to educate and R&D and then hires Indians to do the same work leaving out American BCSes in the cold.
But then the same Microsoft sells so much to the countries outside of America. The American economic power is based more on exports than its good self-containment, and this is very true of the tech sector. All those Taiwanese PCs manufactured need an OS to run and Linux cant run win32 binaries well. Sure 95% of the copies are pirated but for the ones that are not, considering all the computers in all of Asia and Europe, that tells something of where the wages of those Microsoft employees are coming from.
So in all fairness, if a corporation will hire employees from their own country, they should limit sales to that country as well, and only to companies which will have further products that will only sell within that country. We've seen what economic blockages do to China, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq etc and the same applies to a lesser extent to America as well. The reasoning that companies are responsible for hiring employees from their own country is flawed.
However the American tech sector was doing very well keeping an open economy with Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia and Australia during the economic boom, the wealthy countries had struck a profitable balance where they bought alot from the tech sector and gained many jobs there as well. In due time India will too join the club and the wages will neutralize again at a lower level, but the MARKET for IT will also grow. We will see more specialized companies, more segments of the market expand and generally bigger markets for any product than we had in 1998. If you're a programmer with 12 years experience, you'll have many more companies even in your own country ready to hire you.
Globalization will level the playing field for the poorer countries and that process will hurt. But the process will not take more than a generation in the case of the tech sector and after the dust has settled, will create a bigger market to sell to.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Your example involves a VP who is just a mindless sheep. He apparently got promoted to VP because they ran out of space in the mail room.
/. business cases require either the customer or the competition to be as dumb as a post?
No, he got promoted to VP because he was energetic in promoting himself, starting initiatives that he can come back with and use to promote himself to his boss. That's the filter that produces upper management in oru society. High-level execs *do* this. Bring in a new CEO, and he'll start a new series of initiatives that he can show some sort of good numbers on.
He reads in a magazine that (imagine this) he can save money by paying people less.
Yup. How do you think large-scale business moves start (laying off middle management, slapping in asset management, moving jobs offshore)? All execs in the world don't get together in a big conference room and hobnob about the latest and greatest. They read publications. Do they run out and implement anything based on that, no feasibility study? Hell, no, just as I pointed out in my post. But that's where they get the idea.
So the employees at his company fudge the numbers to make it look like you can save money by paying people less. Can you believe the gulliblity of this guy?
They don't *lie*, they just focus on positive aspects of the thing.
Fortunately, after he implements the policy, he kicks back and never looks at the balance sheet again.
He's not *worried* about two years down the road, because that's not *relevant* to him. His initiative has succeeded, and he can't be put to blame -- it's the low-level managers hiring overpriced companies that can be blamed.
The pioneering programmers rapidly drive up consulting prices without facing cut-throat competition from the other 1 billion citizens of India.
Look, you can get programming done ass cheaply in the US, too. The reason contracting prices are so high is because *managers will pay it*.
Why do all
There's no stupidity here. It's just that everyone is doing precisely what their company is encouraging them to do. Sometimes those moves aren't what's best for the company as a whole -- this is nothing new or exciting.
May we never see th
You hit the nail on the head. If companies are smart enough to relocate operations where operating costs are lower, then individuals should respond by relocating labour supply to where the cost of providing that labour is lowest.
The first step is getting out of the cities. If software can be remotely produced in India, then it can just as easily be produced in Idaho. Programmers in the rural developed world might not be able to live off as little as programmers in the developing world, but they will certainly have a lower cost of living than those in the major economic centres.
The second step is working for a standard of living rather than a a meaningless numerical amount. The value of labour and land in India is small enough that you might be able to afford servants and a mansion in India with the same income as you'd be spending on your trailer home and TV dinners in the US. Here, go play with this.
Living in America does not make you special, just expensive.
The question is, where is India going to outsource to? China? Africa? And when the time comes, where are they going to outsource to??
I am not good enough to make it into the best paying companies on the globe, thus I am happy to work for a dot.com that gurrantees me 80 hour weeks and a heart attack at 50. ;-)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Before 1950 the military used compute ballistic tables using scores of women punching numbers on adding machines. Many of these became the first programmers of ENIACS and the like.
Then it was first taught in business schools, perhaps tainted by its secretarial connections. MIT and Stanford didnt allow undergrads to major in CS until the 1970s, because it was thought to be a second-class discipline. People snuck in through math, EE, or biz-school. MIT still doesnt have a pure CS department- it still part of EE. However, the first required EE course is their version of Computer Science 101.
I had a support call handled by a provider a few months ago. Since it was something pretty serious it had to be followed up 24/7 until solved.
;-) ) and finally we were back here.
Then I started with somebody here in Europe, continued talking to an Australian guy, later on an USian (OK, located in the US since he was Chinese
Actually I hope my company would start something similar, then I could go to sleep during crisis!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I agree with you about the workplace security thing, but not the outsourcing. I don't think VPs are necessarily dumb, but they are usually very busy. The security thing is a distraction. They initiate the program but they don't want to keep monitoring it.
But when it comes to the bottom line, it's something they can't ignore. They are not going to implement a cost saving program and then ignore it. If the foreign office ceases to become a cost savings, they will probably axe it.
-a
... will move to the Caiman Islands, Belize or Monaco.
What will you do then?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We have servers live-live accross two continents.
Datacentre activities can and will be outsourced.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Most development work is internal, not closed source or even FLOSS.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... of *International* Business Machines YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!
We ARE doomed LETS all GO and BUY winDoWs.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The thing that pisses me off is that some of these companies (GE Power in Atlanta, for example) get tax breaks for creating x amount of jobs in a community, and then send the jobs offshore or bring in developers from other countries. Wait...that's my money their using to give my job to someone else.
The code is property of the company that paid for it and surely they will have backups back into the main branch office.
You sue where you are harmed, basically where the product is sold and you have a presence. Exactly as you would do right now.
And finally, this has happened before. If you adapt you will survive, otherwise you are toast. Nothing new.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Finally, eventually the same problem will hit India. They will experience their bubble, and it won't last as long as it did here because they have less to offer. I have already seen one news story about fears in India about losing their jobs to literally-dirt-cheap offshore contractors in the Philipenes and the former Soviet republics. It's only a matter of time.
I see no end to this, and I believe it will cause severe and long-lasting damage to the US economy. And don't be so naive as to believe the rest of the world can withstand long-term major economic distress in the US.
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"The companies" are not single giant entities. A microscopically small part of what makes up "the companies" are what makes the decisions. The choices have been made. Believe me, I know all about this problem, my own company has laid of tens of thousands in the past few years, all the while posting RECORD profit numbers -- not just profits, but bigger profits than we've EVER had before, and they're still cutting heads and selling out the people who are left to jobs in India. It's deeply fucked.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I should clarify that damage to the US economy causing trouble for European nations as a result of the economies being bound together is only part of the picture. Even if Europe was almost completely independent of the US economy, Europe is at risk mainly because they're in the same boat comparatively speaking. It's only a matter of time.
For all their varied political and social differences, European big business is just as much good old American-style unfettered capitalism as anybody headquartered on Wall Street.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
I hear this argument often. For some masochistic reason, I feel it necessary to attempt to remedy your ignorance of how economics works, even though I somehow know that it is pointless.
Globalization theories which result in raising the standard of living in developing countries presuppose a number of requisites. Important among those are (a) the developing country is allowed to become a relative competitor to the countries exporting jobs there; (b) the overall global GDP continues to grow; and (c) productivity rises and/or overall economic efficiency improves.
Now the problem with your argument:
What is occurring to day is a corruption of price-to-value parity. In more specific terms, the value of work being performed is being undermined by an artificial devaluation of the price the market is willing to pay for that labor/service/product.
This is possible only because of temporary inefficiencies between developed and developing nations.
As developing nations seek to increase their relative competitiveness, which necessitates increasing their cost of production and standard of living, the global firm again relocates those jobs elsewhere, thus hindering/halting improvement within that nation, and starting the process again in another developing nation. (There is historical precedent for this in Asia within heavy manufacturing)
Further complicating the situation is the fact that markets are not efficient, and this entire process creates enormous monetary incentives for the exporting country to create political barriers preventing/slowing developing nations from improving.
The basic problem with the "we'll all benefit" arguments relating to globalization is that they are utopian. They assume a near perfect efficiency of global markets. So long as even the most basic trade barriers exist--that is nations are sovereign and have differing legal/commerce/social systems--the current globalization efforts only serve to concentrate wealth into the hands of those willing to exploit cheap labor for the want of greed.
There is a basic truism that is all but ignored today: you get what you pay for. Apparently they're not teaching critical thinking or even basic common sense in the gilded MBA schools these days.
Well, as in all jobs, you compete by being more productive than the next guy. This means you add more value to the company proportional to your cost (which is more than just salary).
:).
Hopefully you have some skills the other guys don't have, or are willing to work longer hours, or are willing to work for less. If there are more experienced folks out there who are willing to work as hard as you, as long, and for the same money, well, you're in trouble
Still, our economy is quite good and finding work for those who have valuable skills. If you can't find a job right away, do some volunteer work to build up the skills and resume.
I know LOTS of people who have been laid off, but one way or another, they're all doing something, and paying the bills today. Myself, I started up my own consulting practice, which is a great way to make money while still having time to spend with my kids while they're small.
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And that's a good example of why free trade is a good thing. The benfits to the few who gain by high sugar prices are a lot less in total than the losses to all of us who have to pay for high sugar prices, and the losses to those in the third world who would otherwise be growing cheap sugar for us.
The best thing we could do for the third world is to drop our agricultural and textile tariffs. Foreign aid is a good thing, but most of the world would be better off if we had zero aid and zero tariffs.
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It's nearly pointless to debate this any further. It's happening and it's going to continue until the vast majority of jobs are over near the cheap labor. Downward mobility is how most will cope with this. In the not too distant future, most
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I'm afraid you've missed the boat pretty much completely here. Give an example, EVER, in the history of the world, where an economy as a whole was gutted by imports.
If the scenario you describe were actually to start to happen, we'd see the salaries start to converge. Also, cheaper outsourcing means cheaper goods and services, so the cost of living will go down as well. In the long term, free trade always helps both parties in aggregate, even if there are individuals who don't do well.
The only long-term way for the US to grow jobs is to continue to have high labor productivity. If we want to have five times as many dollars spent on us than the average Indian worker (bear in mind that salary isn't close to all of the costs of employing a worker), we need to be five times are productive.
Let me give an example of how free trade works, just look at the USA. The Constitution had as a main goal free trade, by taking away the rights of states to limit interstate commerce. Read your post again, and substitute "New York" for "USA" and "South Carolina" for "India." Lots of jobs move around with the country, with limited tools for states to change things. But have we seen the economy as a whole decline? Absolutely not.
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Except that the outsourced products are cheaper to make, and hence will be more affordable.
Over time, Indian salaries will rise and US salaries will drop to the point where the relative productivity per dollar will come close to matching. Assuming we can turn out good programmers, the US wages will remain higher.
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Sugar Cane used to be grown in Hawaii.
No. Sugar cane used to be grown in Bermuda and other areas of the Carribean, aided in large part to the use of slavery. Very similar situation here, except now the slavery is legitamized under the big umbrella of "market forces".
Programming is simply a commodity. I oughta know, I am a programmer.
No, programming is a service. But the important point is that those jobs you listed in the beginning were blue collar jobs, requiring little additional education. The problem isn't that programmers are being moved overseas. The problem is that the level of job being moved overseas is steadily increasing at an almost logarithmic scale.
General manufacturing (textiles, metal works, food production) moved west at the turn of century, then overseas where it was viable. Too bad for the uneducated worker. In the 50's and 60's, you've got skilled construction (auto assembly, electronics manufacturing, etc.) moving overseas. Too bad for the high school graduate. Now even our service jobs are being shipped overseas (call centers, programmers, etc.). So those of us saddled with thousands of dollars of college debt are now screwed.
So the jobs were taken from the lower class, then lower-middle, and now middle class. The upper-middle's filled with lawyers and doctors, so look for them to be "transplanted" in the next couple of decades. Then you've got the upper class, which is basically just property owners living off their investments. That won't change much. But the society underneath them will be markedly shifted from three-tiers to two, and our country will resemble feudal times, where jobs are so scarce and the workforce so enormous that people will struggle just to pay their rents.
This isn't paranoid delusion -- it's already happenning. Used to be, a general education would provide you with the tools you needed to get a decent job, and perhaps 30% of your income would go to housing. According to a recent report by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard, more than 14 million households spend more than half their income on housing, and another 17.3 million spend between 30-50 percent. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development guidelines on housing afforability suggest spending no more than 30%, but this is getting increasingly difficult.
Fuck off, tard
What the heck unemployment crisis are you talking about? It's hard in some sectors right now, but unemployment right now isn't bad at all compared to the last 30 years.
Granted, I think that the current lack of economic savvy in the administration isn't helping.
Anyway, I went LIFO on this, and will leave others to critique other elements of your rather amazing errors-per-word post.
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Oh, man, the "zero sum" argument was shot down CENTURIES ago! If you were right, we'd all be 20% as rich as our great-grandparents, since population is up by 5x. Read your Adam Smith.
Seriously, in the whole history of the world, give one example of "racing to the bottom" ever happening? People always talk about this like it's inevitable, but it has NEVER HAPPENED EVEN ONCE. And pretty much by definition, it's impossible to happen. Individual industries can get hurt, but an integrated economy has never on the whole failed due to competition. Failure is more typically caused by bad monetary policy.
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Check out the CIA World Factbook on India some time. It's a largely rural society with huge illiteracy rates. The proportion of Indians with sufficient secondary education to even begin a US caliber computer science degree is tiny, with the gross number certainly smaller than in the US. An Indian programmer makes many, many times the average income in India. It's a much bigger wage gap than in the US between minimum wage and a typical programmer salary.
Of course, as outsourcing progresses, this should improve over time. This is a good thing - India is the world's largest democracy. We want them to progress rapidly, and be a partner to the US in the way only deep economic integration makes possible.
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Of course, the cost of transport has to be factored in. If you make heavy things that don't take much labor, that's likely to happen close to the area of consumption. Of course, freight costs are always going down...
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The basic problem with the "we'll all benefit" arguments relating to globalization is that they are utopian.
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? I didn't make a "we'll all benefit" argument. Quite to the contrary: I said that the US and Europe will stagnate or even suffer.
Globalization is a result of transportation and communications technologies; there is little governments can do to stop the mobility of ideas, people, information, or goods. We can't go back to protectionism or colonialism without hurting ourselves even more. The only choice we have is to make the best out of what is happening, and that means helping the poor nations catch up as fast as possible.
Now, there is one form of globalization that we can do something about: the US and Europe try to beat poor nations over the head with "free trade requirements" and all that, often to protect inefficient and outdated industries like farming and textiles at home. That is something we very much can stop. The laissez-faire approach to globalization pushed by right-wing economists where there is a level playing field won't work: developing nations just can't compete in a level playing field. One of the best things we could probably do for the long term is to drop our agricultural subsidies and import duties while, at the same time, give developing nations free reign in setting up whatever trade barriers they believe are good for their economies against our goods.
Apparently they're not teaching critical thinking or even basic common sense in the gilded MBA schools these days.
I don't know about "gilded MBA schools", but perhaps you yourself should brush up on your basic reading skills.
What you say can be true for a given industry. But the current aggregate differential between the US and India corresponds to the aggregate differential between the two economies. We're richer than India because we produce more, and we're richer per capita because we produce more per capita. It's our productivity in the first place which makes it possible for us to outsource effectively. Wealth doesn't exist apart from productivity.
We're rich because we produce a lot, and export a lot. If we weren't rich, the wage differential wouldn't exist. A better way of thinking about this is "we're so rich now, US workers can't afford to do menial IT tasks."
Protectionism of any form doesn't help make a nation richer. It helps make some sectors richer, at the expense of all the rest. IBM exporting these jobs will help the economy on the whole more than keeping them here.
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So does this mean that Unions will be cropping everywhere in the states?
:-)
Technology Workers 10010010101001, etc.
I don't think that the trend to outsource jobs will continue past a certain point. Why? Because jobs like tech support and sysadmin work and many, many others will eventually be done by expert systems or robots. They will not require human intervention. Most of the physical jobs that are nowadays done by human beings will be done by robots. Like it or not, it is more efficient that way.
In the future, most of us will not have to work, our society will still produce as much or more than it does now. How we choose to deal with that as a society is up to us.. I would suggest volunteering (if you can afford it) And don't judge yourself on 'what you do' but rather 'who you are'.
Remember, Corporations or governments have no obligation to support you. You have to sell yourself. Invent new jobs if you need them.
(I suspect that society will adjust)
It will have to, or there will be major social unrest.
Have a pleasant ride!
You have read about Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia??
Those VP and executive types really know how to run a business for the benefit of all the employees and stock holders.
Start your own comany, take it public, and then do as you suggest. See how well you do.
You have read about Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, Adelphia?? Those VP and executive types really know how to run a business for the benefit of all the employees and stock holders.
The point is, they care about the bottom line, or at least what they tell people is the bottom line after they finish inflating their earnings.
These executives aren't necessarily stupid. Some of them are con artists. Others were merely forced into a catch-22 due to the out-of-control economy. I blame Greenspan for not having the guts to put his money where is mouth is by pre-emptively raising interest rates.
-a
And at $15/hour, all you'll need to have a good life is to move to India and take that job with you. ;-)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Thanks for the info. Would you have the name/number of the bill, whether in its current incarnation or in the defeated one. I feel a P.S. to my letter to my Congressman coming on...
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
I have read these series of posts and i must say iam surprised to find many reasonable voices unlike the gloomy predictions in indian media.
Let me add an indian, pro-capitalist point of view. A decade and a half ago, india hadn't liberalised her economic system and i can vouch for the scarcity of jobs for educated people. The standard of living was low compared to even what it is today. When we started liberalisation of the economy, one of the immediate benefits was the ability of enterpreneurs to create jobs. People like Narayanamurthy of Infosys, Azim Premji of Wipro, Ramalingaraju of Satyam established indian IT industry on the world map.
Indian IT companies started off with the concept of body shopping where in they supplied low cost indian technicians to satiate growing appetite for Technology workers in USA. This was in the early to mid 90's. Then came the era of off shoring where in whole projects were moved to india to be delivered to the customer by a few on-shore workers. Nowadays the trend is towards remote management and complete off shoring with the emphasis being on follow the sun model. All the major indian companies like TCS, Infosys, wipro, and satyam now have development centers across the world, in countries ranging from Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, Bulgaria, China, UK and USA.
In that sense IBM is just following a global delivery model started off by these companies. That was the innovation brought in by these companies.
Some mentioned that, they are cheap indian labour. Let me tell you they are not by indian standards. IT workers are among the best paid in India on comparable basis with any other industry. Similar is the case with working conditions, HR practices and so on.
Another intersting point would be can IBM, Oracle, Micorsoft or for that matter any company that sees the world as its market be considered an American Company? I would say not. Corporates have become supra-national in terms of their employee profile, share holding pattern, target market etc.
So i dont think we need to blame the corporates for moving to locations where they get the best value for their money to get the job done.
Tomorrow if say fiji or tanzania create the right atmosphere for businesses to get work done at a lower cost compared to india then IBM would happily move work from india too.
So what are people supposed to do???
1) Keep updating themselves in their field.
2) Be willing to move from place to place even country to country to achieve the standard of living that they would want. Dont be attached to a place even if it is your country.
They didn't 'work out a deal', they're living in an lower economic area.
succinct.
Good thing the fired employees won't need to outsource a cheap saturday night special on the street after they get outsourced! Thanks to the NRA, and the Republicans. The reprocussions of out sourcing, corprorate greed, and despotic business practice is going to come back to haunt the entire corporate structure of the USA and Canada. Bin Laden need not do anything. Corporate greed and insane comsumerism will succeed where terrorism will fail. I personally wish good ethical American businesses people success. It is just the price and definition of success has become too high and distorted. Bull-shit to your post
The corporate terrorism now going on in America is going make Bin Laden look like Yosemite Sam vs Bugs Bunny. I pray for America, I hope someone is listening!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I make 50K a year you insensative clod!
Totally agreed, but how integrated are they into the energy cartel? I think that's a major difference, as it tends to affect geopolitical alliances and such.
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For example...
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
Clicked on the link... but Enron is still a US corporation (that was used and abused to further the US Energy hegemony). Now if you start to implicate Bechtel, or maybe Alstrom, I might agree with you.
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To the citizens of the United States of America,
In the light of your failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.
Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories. Except Utah, which she does not fancy. [... snip]
[snip]
To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
- You should look up "revocation" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up "aluminium". Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up "vocabulary". Using the same twenty seven words interspersed with filler noises such as "like" and "you know" is an unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up "interspersed".
- There is no such thing as "US English". We will let Microsoft know on your behalf.
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