Slashdot Mirror
The Unstoppable Shift of IT Jobs Overseas
514x0r writes "The spectre in the back of many of our minds is that in a few years we may be replaced by an underpaid programmer in India. Newsforge.com is currently running an article about why this is unstoppable, that actually ends on a positive note...sort of." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
"corporate biggies outside of software companies tend to consider their IT people as somewhat ... strange ... more often than not. This is not a new phenomenon. I remember a guy who worked as a mainframe tech for a bank back in the late '60s who went by the name "Paul the Prophet," and had a dyed-green mustache."
Ok, that's just hilarious.
If, instead, you see this as an opportunity to start your own company, become proactive, and actively be more creative, then this isn't a bad thing. It provides labor for small businesses that they could otherwise not afford. (We were able to hire excellent programmers for half the cost) Further, if you are an excellent programmer in a specialized field, then you aren't going to have much trouble anyway. People will seek you out. We do.
So contribute to Opensource software. Get your name out there.
But if you think that you can just "punch the card" then in my opinion you deserve what you get. And if you think you can stay in California, well, good luck unless you figure a way to build the better mousetrap that everyone wants.
And you're a bloody hypocrite if you do.
All you accomplish through getting the government involved to prevent outsourcing is hurting a hundred people through higher prices for the sake of one person.
You don't have a right to an IT job. If you have one, great. Make sure you have skills that are so valuable that you won't be outsourced. If you can't do that, then find another line of work, you lazy bastard. Should the government have done something to protect operators of horse drawn buggies that were put out of business when cars came to the market?
I was thinking about going into IT. The recent fad of outsourcing makes me rethink my priorities. I don't want to benefit by causing prices to rise beyond free market levels and screwing my fellow citizens who have little to do with this.
When Microsoft pleaded that the GPL would destroy their ability to make money, someone responded, "Tough. Adapt or die."
So, to those IT workers who feel they're being cheated by having something taken from them, when in fact they did not have an inherent right to what they have:
Tough. Adapt or die. Offer something in America in IT that foreigners cannot offer or find some other line of business. I refuse to support people who want to screw me.
Economic illiteracy like this is the reason why we get screwed by the Republicans and the Democrats so often. Quoting John "Candy" Keynes. Sheesh.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Seems to me that the title of the post contradicts the end of the article itself!
Your next "IT job" may be in an industry you didn't even think about a few years ago. It may be in a place you never thought of as an "IT mecca." But if you have solid skills, whether as an entry level programmer or sysadmin or as a top-level IT manager or CIO, some company out there almost certainly needs someone just like you. The trick is finding that company -- but that's another article for another day.
Although in the end, I hate to say it, but this looks like its still based on speculation and hope rather than any empirical evidence.
Ever noticed /. NEVER has a positive article about the IT industry?
I guess bad news always sells more copies.
But most buisnesses and certainly no government would outsource penitration testing and other security jobs. I bet there is tech job security in well...the field of security.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
So the American corporations (of doom) are sending jobs to foreign companies to save some cash. Considering Indian IT workers have a wage of $10,000 compared to the $60,000 of fresh out of college Americans, that adds up. The pay raises usually end up in the pockets of the business owners.
But weren't the same American business owners, albeit in other industries, complaining about other countries making money by importing goods to the US and competing with the traditional businesses? Isn't that what the entire anti-dumping, WTO policies are about?
There was a mainstream article on Time magazine entitled Where the Good Jobs Are Going. (Premium, pay article) which you might want to take a look at if you have access to it.
This just means that I could get a low paying job as a programmer, and hire an indian coder on half my salary to do all of my work for me. Sounds great! :)
Um, car mechanics and plumbers and other trades don't exactly make the same a waiter makes. So aren't they just a bit hypocritical?
I dunno if I like paying a plumber 60$/h but I definitely wouldn't want one that expected 5$/h
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yeah well they are gonna pay once they realize that nobody in the USA has any jobs because they've all been moved overseas. Once nobody has any jobs, they won't be able to afford to buy anybodys products. Then when nobody buys the products, the companies begin to fold. Don't they see how this works. Its simple logic that says when jobs go away, people can't afford stuff, when they can't afford stuff, they don't buy stuff, then the companies fold. SIMPLE ECONOMICS. All of these companies need to start to realize that they are only hurting themselves in the long run.
So, not only am I competing with hundreds of other unemployed IT workers for every job from sysadmin to help desk, I have to factor in companies saying "Well, we can just outsource this position. Much cheaper". This is doing nothing for my positivity.
14 weeks of unemployment left. *sigh*
El riesgo vive siempre!
First of all, I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago...
In the early 60's and early 70's? How many programmers were there back then? Maybe a few thousand?
With a statement as blatantly wrong as this I'm wary to read any further.
First of all, I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago
Yeah those 7 guys were real assholes.
Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. Congress said someone may steal from it at night; so they created a night watchman, GS-4 position and hired a person for the job. Then Congress said, How does the watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning position and hired two (2) people, one person to write the instructions, GS-12 and one person to do time studies, GS-11. Then Congress said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Q. C. position and hired two (2) people, one GS-9 to do the studies and one GS-11 to write the reports. Then Congress said, "How are these people going to get paid?" so they created the following positions, a time keeper, GS-09, and a payroll officer, GS-11, and hired two (2) people. Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created an administrative position and hired three (3) people, an Admin. Officer GM-13, Assistant Admin. Officer GS-12, and a Legal Secretary GS-08. Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall cost," So they laid off the night watchman.
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
From the article: :-)
In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy.
The only way to deal with any kind of worldwide economy, not only IT, is international unions and solidarity. This is big corporations using one country's workforce again the other. As pointed out near the beginning of the article, this is a lot similar to German workers losing jobs to Americans who lost jobs to Mexicans. This would be prevented if there was an international labor standard. Well, there is, but it is not enforcable unfortunately.
Until international unions can be formed, we need to work to pass laws to prevent this abuse of workers, IT or any other field. However in US it is a far dream since there is no labor party. I believe US is the only industrialized society without a labor party.
Happy Labor Day!
ato
The trick to staying gainfully employed in the IT industry -- and to breaking into it -- is, as always, a matter of spotting growth areas and moving toward them.
It can be stopped. But it means learning the lesson that free trade is a deeply flawed ideology. It means voting for this guy.
cringely wrote 2 columns this month about the issue I think you should read.
0 7. html0 30814. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200308
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20
BTW, i'm not threatned. i live in a 3rd world country, and i can maybe even benefit from this situation. but cringely does raise several points that you ppl up north should know about. specially the decision makers
What ? Me, worry ?
I'm not sure why anyone would want to hire Americans, since our cost of living has shot way beyond anything like a reasonable level. You give someone a $100k salary, and in California he can pretty much just make ends meet and maybe buy a few gadgets.
I'm actually thinking it might be a good idea to move offshore myself. I'd earn less, but I might earn more when adjusted to the cost of living in, say, the Philippines or Brazil.
I'd still earn a lot more than the typical offshore worker due to excellent English skills. All I would need to do is learn how to communicate with them and I'd be in demand in the same way the Los Angeles auto mechanic head is. He typically gives instructions to the hispanics who do the real work. No different from my scenerio.
True, the infrastructure isn't there, but if enough of us go, it's going to improve over time. The first mover keeps the low cost of living, and in fact benefits from inevitable increases in costs. For instance, if I buy a house today, it will go up in value if more come.
SF guru Robert Heinlein always said that we have a choice of staying fat and happy in our own spaces, or going to explore the unknown. He said the fat and happy places would decline, and eventually get swallowed up by more competitive ones. I think we're seeing that happen right now, in our own lifetimes. There's no space travel, true, but international travel is every bit as mysterious to the average guy.
Maybe it's about time to realize that unfortunately, America isn't what it's cracked up to be anymore. We've gotten too flabby and expensive for our own good. That spells problems, yes, but it also spells opportunity for those who dare to take it.
D
I'm one of those who can't find a job right now. Graduated top 5% of my class, been programming for 16 years, but I'm stuck at home doing nothing.
The problem? I have no industry experience, and nobody seems willing to hire programmers with no experience right now. Presumably because there are so many recently-laid-off programmers who do have experience out there. I used to see dozens of Junior Programmer jobs advertised, now I see one or two a month and they usually need specialized skills. Meanwhile there's lots of Senior positions available.
I don't see things getting better for a few years yet at least. Until companies have reason to be optimistic and less skittish and start taking chances on people, there will be a whole bunch of us who are stuck.
Now I'm a full believer in a free market economy and in global trade, so I won't lash out at companies for shifting to a cheaper solution. But that doesn't mean I won't say that it really sucks!!!
Some govt. jobs require active secret or top secret clearances. How does this play into outsourcing? Can a company outsource work overseas to people without secret or top secret clearances?
Or can a company, itself, have a clearance?
-- bearclaw
Correct me if im wrong but won't most jobs such as sysadmins, web developers, security professionals, game developers and small scale contract workers still remain ? I mean, isn't it kind of hard to outsource a web developer/sys admin for a local university to some guy in India ? To me it seems as though there will still be a good core of IT jobs still available, just not the high-scale development jobs for large companies.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
What happens when most of the entry level IT jobs are shipped overseas? Highly skilled jobs requiring more experience should always be in demand, but when the entry level IT jobs are gone, the US will be producing far less experienced IT workers.
Which is good news for those who already are "over the hump" of entry level IT. If this trend continues, I don't think I'll have to worry as much when I'm 50 about a 25 year old coming in to take my senior position for half my salary.
So I train for money, and program for fun.
I have some experience with this. My last company laid most of their programmers off and outsourced the work overseas. In their case it worked since they were essentially an ad agency and all of the websites we did were pretty much "done" by time it came to code them (graphics and manuscripts just handed over).
Now I'm doing j2ee programming (I wasn't always a web monkey) for a different company, mostly financial applications. There is a lot of interaction with the business people, and requirements are quite often fluid. I doubt the business and sales people are going to want to come into work at 1am to conference call over to India to hash out the latest requirements.
Point is, some jobs are more likely to be shipped overseas than others. The pay scales of these jobs are going to fall in line with other white collar jobs (except the criminally underpaid teachers). It's just something we need to accept and move on with.
Woods' law. Never be in front, behind, or in a stampede.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
So let me get this straight: American IT workers are being replaced by Indians. At the same time, they are being replaced by humanoid robots.
I'm sure glad I decided to become an Indian robot designer instead of a fireman!
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
I know I am going to get flamed by the "Keep jobs in America" folks, but the argument shown is very one sided.
There is the outcry about the Indian programmers being underpaid. What is left out of the equation is how the pay fits in with the standard of living where the employee lives.
Isn't it only good business and responsible to shareholders that companies look for the best return on the dollar spent?
The company that I work for has employees all over the world. I work in Australia. I know that I am paid less than my counterparts in the US. However, I also know that my cost of living is an awful lot lower than, say, California.
That said, going to cheaper countries must be balanced with getting the appropriate skill sets. There is nothing worse than dealing with someone who does not have the skill sets that you require them to have as a basic part of their job.
Tp.
five lost years of school
five enjoyed years of working
lost to india
Of course, I'm being replaced by a sys admin expert system written by underpaid oversees programers.
I highly suggest signing up for this email. They notify people about people like this.
I want to point out that this is not just Technology jobs! Accounting jobs are being sent to India, and also call centers.
If this is not enough, the government is still allowing foriegners to take American jobs using L1s and H1-Bs.
Also, states are sending their money to jobs overseas. ANY job that doesn't require a physical presence in the United States can be sent overseas to places like India!
RIAA is nothing compared to the loss of our jobs to foriegners and overseas. We, that means everybody (tech and non-tech) need to make our Government understand we will not stand for jobs being moving overseas or foriegners taking our jobs!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I have a friend who is a mangager at IBM and he was recently required to change his team makeup to be 70% from IBM India. He is bummed but there is nothing he can do to prevent the shift in manpower. I think this is a different world from the past and these jobs are not coming back. Unless you move into management, work for a small local firm, or try to go out on your own like my self 23 Pools there is a good chance that your job may not be there in the future.
What I don't understand is why the pricing of housing hasn't come down more and expect that to be the next bubble to burst.
I really have a problem with the opening tone of the article:
..."
... 30 years ago I was an ovum :-)
"... I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago, and I don't recall a single peep out of anyone in the IT
Really
A large number of the people that I know of who are having a hard time finding a job are young. They don't remember what the factory worker's plight was like because they were simply too young or not born yet. His opening argument really turned me off. I think calling the American programmer unsympathetic is a rash judgement.
...we may be replaced by an underpaid programmer in India
Are programmers in India truly underpaid? Or are they simply paid less than programmers in North America and Europe?
What would you have the programmers in India do? Raise their rates? Unless someone over there is twisting their arm into underselling themselves, I'm just going to label this as fair competition by a less expensive supplier. This concept made America great. So swallow your lesson. No wait. That will make you fatter.
I'll have to add that to my 1984isms
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I have nothing to fear from overseas labor. Why? Someone in India can't fix the printer. They can't install antivirus software on someone's system. They can't set up the phone+new PC for a new employee. They can't head over to the hosting center and install that new rackmount server. They don't form a working relationship with their coworkers that makes assisting them and understanding their problems easier.
Further, they're not going to speak English very well(or they'll have such a thick accent, they might as well be speaking Martian), and it's going to be very expensive to communicate with them(and most upper management people don't consider "only via email" to be an acceptable communications medium, rightly so- it's damn tedious sometimes). Not to mention the time difference is a royal PITA. Companies are drastically slashing policies on telecommuting employees- remote just doesn't work. You've gotta be there for the over-the-cube-wall conversations, the overheard tidbits of information that contribute to overall 'corporate knowledge', the meetings...
You know what? While developers were making 2x, 3x my salary during the internet boom(and didn't have to deal with emergencies, late night pages, etc), I didn't hear any complaints from 'em. Now, they'll all finding they're replaceable and their salaries are dropping- while sysadmins, network engineers and internal support staff are doing a far better job of holding onto employment because their jobs require physical presence. I have zero sympathy for the programmers- maybe those engineers should have actually saved their money instead of spending it on Porsche Boxsters, the latest PDAs/phones, and expensive clothes. In my experience, the only people who were worse about spending habits were the execs, but the difference is, the execs are still getting paid insane salaries.
Hey, maybe we should outsource executives :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Did anybody else think of a guy from India working 3 full-time shifts, 7 days a week?
It's good see that there is a better future for the young people in India. There are a lot of really bright young people there. They are paid well in terms of their own economy.
It somebody else's turn to have an economic growth period. An american is no more important than an Indian.
I just read an article recently about Indian call-centers. There is massive turnover, because the employees *know* they are underpaid. They also don't like the job because they have to maintain Central Standard Time, instaed of the local time.
As for foreign programmers, their code is often sub-par, needing extensive debugging, from what I hear.
http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&i
Not just IT..... Looks like the Republican party is outsourcing it's fund raising activities to an Indian call center...
3 23
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34
Another point - Joe Sixpack might not shed a tear for US IT jobs being shipped overseas, but he WILL get irate when he calls for support for his shiny new Dell, and Apu in Mumbai answers the phone... This is where the offshoring scheme is going to start getting sticky, when consumers start getting fed up with talking to someone in India whenever they call a helpdesk for a product they've purchased...
Another sad part is, this is going to start rising animosity and zenophobia against Indians in general.....
Never ask a geek why, just nod your head and slowly back away. -Rob Malda
The software industry we know in this country will soon go the way of the dodo bird. Just like Textile, Steel, any sort of plastic manufacturing.... As more companies move their development offshore, there will be less jobs for entry level developers. Well, no entry level jobs means that in about 5 years, there will be no senior level developers in this country. Heck, all the main players thinks 5 years experiences makes a senior engineer, right? Since there aren't sufficient senior engineers here, it's time to rely on all foreign talent for the devleopment. Besides, the architect really needs to communicate with his team anyway, and in the same timezone. Soon, all development jobs are offshore. There will still be IT or admin jobs here, as those requires some warm bodies in the building. But true development will be all gone. Oh, the small consulting companies, the few experts with highly technical domain knowledges, they will have a paycheck. But the developer that can jump in anywhere and help out would not have a place. There will be no big software companies that has a big building with whiteboard walls. This is already becoming true, as more and more jobs openings expect exact fit in terms of domain knowledge. It's a matter of time before a big chunk of development for CA, Oracle, and Microsoft and others like them will be off shore. I suspect Microsoft won't shrink much, but the growth wouldn't be here anymore. I have a 40 year old, very senior engineering fried working on his Law degree. Most of us will need to think like him soon. If you read this Mike T., keep going!
Or, where's the savings? A project at work was outsourced to India. It was expected to cost 1/3 what it would've cost domestically. It's already 2x the domestic cost. That's a 600% difference!
...like it's a bad thing you (wait... for... it...) insensitive clod!
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
I agree that the shift of IT jobs overseas is unstoppable. Actually, I don't even think it's a bad thing: to me, VB or ASP hacking seems like the intellectual equivalent of cleaning toilets.
In any case, there is a sure-fire way to accelerate this shift of jobs overseas: restrict H-1b visas. You see, right now, the smartest IT workers from overseas want to come to the US, and employers eager to hire them will accommodate their wishes. But if H-1b quotas make it impossible to hire those people in the US, the potential employees understand that they can't move to the US and employers can hire them in their countries of origin at a fraction of the cost.
Whether that's a good thing or not depends on your perspective. It probably is a good thing for countries like the UK, China, and India, who have lost their best and brightest to the US, people who are desparately needed for contributing to their domestic economies.
Once more, I find myself educating those who should not need it... IT is more than just programming, people! Yes, programming jobs are going overseas. Phone support is going overseas. But in-your-office-today support? That's not going anywhere.
They can ship the business, project management, and all the other aspects of a software project overseas. I've seen quite a few companies attempt to do off shore development, and most have failed catastrophically. Why? The business side was fuzzy. Most projects have vague (at best) requirements and possibly a few meaningless use cases. So digging into one of the analogies in the article - developers are in the same boat factory workers were a several decades ago, the jobs all moved. When you are tooling a factory, you give someone a circuit diagram, blueprints, and cut out all areas that might have creative latitude. That works. Ever see someone try to design something over email with a day delay tossed into the mix? Joy.
Not to say it cannot be done. It can for software elements that have very clear design docs, etc. Last I looked, almost all the software I code is custom 'non-shrinkwrapped' stuff.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Machines land, buildings, are property, yes.
A job is property,
No, nix, nah nah.
--Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, section 38
And time to rethink the concept of "property." If songs are property, and words are property, and ideas are property, why shouldn't a job be property?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
That the IT industry is still paying for the dot-com stuff. Hell, even now as all the ex-dot-com'ers are looking for jobs you have a wave of new CS college grads who started their degrees when it seemed as if IT was going to change the world.
Of course I've also heard that people are finding limitations to the outsourcing of IT. Like it or not making software isn't stitching shirts or assembling toys for Happy Meals. The issues of holding to the spirit of a project spec or communicating with a customer requires a certain level of locality. I think folks are starting to realize that a 8pm conference call to Bengal is not the way to do software dev.
On a completely unrelated note: what the hell does the first 500 words of the article have to do with anything? What does a supposed responsibility of the IT industry to offshoring labor jobs or the high IT salaries have to do with the article at hand? Jesus, I felt like I was in parochial school getting the finger wag of Original Sin all over again. The gist: "You are so lucky to be IT. You have no right to complain!" This from a guy who works at OSDN to a lot of folks without jobs?
What is music when you despise all sound?
Overall this is good. Those overseas programers will spend money there, and that puts more people there to work, and they all spend money... They raise the standard of living. I understand that India is no longer the place to go to for cheap labor because their standard of living has gone up. Overall however their stnadard of living increases means mine can increase too. At least so long as standard of living is based on "new things", the most people who can create "new things" the more "new things" there are to choose from. (In quotes because there is a lot of there, not just the obvious toys, but also medical advances, and others I can't name now)
Already Japan has gone the whole way and increased my standard of living by increasing theirs. We wouldn't have Playstations without the Japanise. We might not have even had Atari (american except the name) if the founders had been too busy doing the things the Japanise were doing at the time instead, and the world would be a poorer place.
Of course if you are stuck in the middle without a job, it sucks, but people can adjust. You need to adjust too. Maybe it is find a new field. Maybe it is make yourself better in your field. Maybe it means accepting less money. Maybe it means moving elsewhere. Maybe it means something I haven't thought of, but do it. Don't be like the US steel industry, sit on your current ability until it becomes obsolete and you can do nothing. Even if you have a job you should take this advice.
This text stuck out to me in the article:
"In the end, like it or not, we here in the U.S. are going to have to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide IT economy. Some IT workers here may be forced to leave the "computer industry" and move into non-offshorable jobs,"
The problem with all of this is that the U.S. is NOT going to learn how to deal with a truly worldwide economy, until it's too late. You ship the majority of jobs overseas and guess what? Most people don't have jobs, and your country just hemorages money.
The dilema the U.S. is facing, is becoming a service economy - a economy which cannot sustain itself. What jobs are non-offshorable? IT jobs such as he described like fixing computers, and general maintenance - things which are important, but do not produce. The other other non offshorable jobs being those of the top execs who just keep voting themselvs pay rases from all the money their saving by shipping all these jobs overseas.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but the U.S. is heading down the road where it's economy is going to take a nose dive (which might be a good thing in the end). It wouldn't bother me so much if it wasn't for the fact that they keep axing American jobs (not just I.T.) but nothing ever gets CHEAPER.
No the price is reflected upon the customer when you pay someone $60k vs $10k. Sure you could hire a workforce in this country but it simply costs more and so would your product. Everyone wants things as cheap as possible these days so companies find ways to make the product cheaper (paying less employee salary). Thats why you can buy a dell p4 system box for $400 today.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Are they really underpaid? By whose standards? By Indian standards they may be paid quite well. I do software development here in New Zealand, and think I'm probably underpaid compared to my American counterparts, but by New Zealand standards I'm paid well.
Here is my take on this. There are different IT jobs.
There are Microsoft certified VB programmers and Sun certified Java developers. Those are going overseas, sorry.
Then there are the real innovators, people who made things like Java happen in the first place. Those are staying here, and those will continue to be high paying jobs. The reason they are staying here is the same reason why finances are centered in NYC. The reason they are going to be high paid is because there is few people who can do this, and it's not a matter of public education, it's a "genetic" thing if you will. Real software development is a complex creative process, and nothing has changed in this respect. People in Russia and India of *that* level will find that they need to move to the US, because that's where it is (Silicon Valley especially, but a few other places too).
Additionally, sysadmin and network admin jobs are NOT going overseas, because they can't be done remotely. And really good sysadmins (those who can also code in C) and really good network admins (those who can turn up BGP) are hard to find, and those will remain to be highly paid.
grisha.org
I'm a computer science student at a university. I've known for 10 years that I was going to get a degree in computer science? Was I planning on being a multi-millionaire? No way. I don't think I had any clue about how much money was involved.
Am I going to change my profession because of ups and downs in the economy or because the job market is shrinking? I haven't even considered it. Why? Because money isn't really that important to me. Of course, I have to have a job to live, but money isn't my sole motivation. I don't want to have the biggest house around, and I actually prefer old cars to new ones (if nothing else, they're less likely to get stolen). I don't care if I'm not making $60-70,000.
And besides, I figure that since I actually have a love for computers, I'll end up being better then the average loser that chose to go into I.T. because it looked lucrative.
So, I guess my point is that maybe our industry is a little spoiled, and maybe a little out-sourcing is a good thing.
First of all, I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago
Anndd... how many of those people were there 30 or 40 years ago to be "unsympathetic"?
[This is primarily directed at those who claim to be libertarians and then bitch about H1B's or offshore IT work.]
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Read up on Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the most brilliant economist to come out of Austria. One's inability to see that the move of IT labor offshore is a good thing is largely due to a failure of most people to understand Schumpeter.
Schumpeter's primary focus was on capitalism as a dynamic system. It continually evolves through creative destruction. There are countless examples of this phenomenon.
A 120 years ago, most Americans were living on farms. With little mechanization, hard manual labor was the order of the day. As mechanization began to become more prevalent, thousands upon thousands of farm workers were surplus to requirements. Doom and gloom predictions that the move from an agricultural economy to a non-agricultural economy would lead to the collapse of America were common. Politicians ran on platforms aiming to keep the family farms solvent and prevent greater mechanization (for instance by taxing production of goods that could be used for farm mechanization).
However, mechanization and consolidation took place in the agricultural business. Today, less than 3% of Americans are farmers, and there are far fewer farmers today than there were then. If static economic analysis, from the perspective of the past, was used to look at the economy today (or during the boom years of the late 1990's), the only conclusion would be that the US was in a total depression, because the vast majority of the old farm jobs were gone.
So why wasn't it the case that the US went on to enjoy even better economic times than in the late-19th century? Why isn't there 90% unemployment (since from the 19th century perspective, 90% of the jobs that existed then are gone today)?
What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.
For a more recent example, look at the state of heavy industry over the last 30 years. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans worked in industrial occupations, creating physical products. Nowadays, it's less than 20% (IIRC). You would expect there to be massive (>30%) unemployment, wouldn't you?
But there's not 30% unemployment. The children of factory workers went to college and became clerks or salesmen or scientists. Think about what your grandparents did for a living. With few exceptions (I'm one of them; my grandmother was one of the early programmers of ENIAC-type machines), they weren't computer scientists, sysadmins, or electrical engineers. They were probably factory workers, or day laborers, or housewives, or maybe a clerk at some large industrial concern.
By freeing up human capital from making cars and clothing and other labor intensive tasks, financial services, creative services, IT itself could be spawned.
IT arose out of the collapse of an old economic model; it will collapse as a major player. It is inevitable. In 20 years, the jobs held by the readers of this site will have demand levels at a fraction of what they were before. In a century, we'll be looked at as the farmers; while there will still be demand for the tasks we perform, it will be nowhere near what it is today (and nowhere near what it was a few years ago).
The core of what I'm saying is that we don't know what will come next (though it is most likely happening below our noses). T
It's going to affect all industries soon
You drive up to the Mc Burger Thing drive thru.
Indian Accent: Can I take your order please?
You: I'll have a Mc Whoper and a large Orange Squish.
Indian Accent: Would you like Mc Fries with that?
You: Oh...Yes Please.
Indian Accent: Would you like to McMegaSize your fries?
You: No thanks.
Indian Accent: McCredit number?
You: 134872 384997 78958 98797 89979
Indian Accent: Expiry date.
You: 08/2012.4:31am
Indian Accent: McThankYou. Just drive up to the McFoodSynthesizer to collect your order.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Another point - Joe Sixpack might not shed a tear for US IT jobs being shipped overseas, but he WILL get irate when he calls for support for his shiny new Dell, and Apu in Mumbai answers the phone... This is where the offshoring scheme is going to start getting sticky, when consumers start getting fed up with talking to someone in India whenever they call a helpdesk for a product they've purchased...
Another sad part is, this is going to start rising animosity and zenophobia against Indians in general.....
Funny you should mention that, there was a letter to the editor in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this morning complaining about how horrible the experience of dealing with Indian tech-support people is. There may have been a valid point somewhere in it, but the writer came off sounding like a racist ass.
I think the biggest threat for the US is not that much the Indian that will work for less, but the fact that said Indian ends up doing the job better. If you look at the education system in many of these country, it's improving fast, mostly in computer-related fields. Now, I'm not American but what I've seen from the education system (studied there a bit) is that it's going down. Expect the *average* Indian programmer to perform better than the average American soon... if it's not already the case.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
First let me say that I am all for globalization, but this double standard is not actually helping anyone. Corporations have protection that the people of the US are not provided.
#begin rant
Because our corporations just absolutely MUST compete on a global scale (for what reason I don't know) we have import taxes to protect these companies from foreign companies by keeping the price artifically equal with tariffs on goods coming in.
It seems to me that we as citizens of the U.S. should at least receive the same protection. If you outsource jobs, then those jobs should be taxed appropriately to keep wages as artificially high.
Why should corporations receive the benefit of taxable protection on goods when workers have no protection on wages?
The better solution would be to abolish import taxes, and head for a globalized economy, but that will never happen. God forbid the U.S. ever ceases to be an unrivaled super power setting the global economic trend, or become unable/unwilling to spend $400 billion a year on our military, we might then not be able to tell the rest of the world what to do.
#end rant
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
If you're going to try and start a new thread please link to something which everyone can read. :)
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Or will only work under limited scenarios:
Time to market: not only do products need to be delivered cheap, they also need to be delivered within a timeframe where they are still useful. Even in mature CMM level 3 or 4 shops, sometimes the business environment requires a rapid development cycle.
Quality of delivery: even though English is the lingua franca of India, there is still a huge language barrier (there is a huge language barrier with many Indians that are over here as H1Bs or green cards). Language misunderstandings, exacerbated by a 10 hour time difference and mostly email exchanges rather than face to face meetings are going to eat in dramatically to those cost savings, and also affect time to delivery. At the end of the day, there is something intrinsicly valuable in being able to walk across the hall and tell the programmer or project team where they are fscking up at.
Legal issues: if you subcontract out the work to an American company and they don't deliver, they might be legally liable, and action can be taken against them in the US court system. As an American company, try suing an Indian company in India. Good luck. If the Indian company doesn't deliver, you are SOL.
If you work in an environment where your company spends 12 months generating an RFP or a detailed requirements document, and time to delivery is measured in year+ increments, offshoring probably IS a cost saving possibility. If instead, you work in an environment (like I do) where your customers don't really have a good idea of what they want until it's almost done, and projects are generally three to six months, then no way will offshoring work.
If too many of your jobs go overseas then surely you mighty yankees will spend 10 or 20 billion bombing the brown bastards who took them?
It's a facinating essay.
i'm more concerned about "in a few months."
www.pixelectric.com
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
This article suggests that the threat may be significant in the short term, but in the longer term, when the baby boomers retire that there's not enough high tech workers in India to cover the gap that's going to be created by that event.
I hope that you're able to actually get the article and read it. Sometimes I can get it, and other times, they ask you to subscribe. It's an excellent article, and worth the read if you can get to it. If you have trouble getting to it, try going to CNN Money and going to the link at the bottom of the page. This seems to work for me.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Yeah. Code crunching monkeys, if you bring nothing special to the table then you are replaceable as Tijuana circuit board assemblers.
The truth is, I'm totally fucking tired of groveling for the scraps from some IT Companies table.
I've got the tools, I've got the plan, and I'm %90 certain that I've got the talent.
I dont mean to sound like a fruitcake, but I've got a business plan that's simple, actually takes advantage of a down economy, and depending on how it's executed could really wipe the floor with my competition.
Oh, I plan on supporting the Free Software movement in my little endeavour, rather than acting like a parasite.
Alright. Time to shut up. Just keep watching Slashdot or Freshmeat for a little announcement.
McDoobie
"Forget those grim unemployment numbers. Demographic forces are about to put a squeeze on the labor supply that will make it feel like 1999 all over again"
sounds like crap, yes, but I couldnt see it. They say since the baby boomers are retiring, taking a huge chunk of (older, smarter) people out of the workforce, workers will be much more valuable. Anyone who knows anything will be able to charge for it. In 2010, at least...
check the article
out for yourself
Let me first begin with the theory of Comparative Advantage which implies that if countries concentrate on the industries they are most efficient at, all countries will benefit. There will, of course, occasionally be shifts in who has the comparative advantage of what, and we might be seeing a shift in call centers and perhaps a shift in lower-level programming.
Secondly, there is no massive movement of foreign direct investment to India or China, as one would expect if there was truly a threat to the US economy from there. American companies own only $10.5 billion in investments in China and $1.7 billion in India. Compare this with $132 billion in the Netherlands. Even in manufacturing, 94% of outward U.S. foreign direct manufacturing investment in 2001 flowed to other rich countries.
Investing in China and India is still tough because of because of their underdeveloped infrastructure and legal systems, undereducated workforces (with notable small groups of highly educated workers), remaining trade barriers, and limited consumer markets.
The US today account for 12% of global exports, the same amount it did 20 years ago, and three times as much as China.
US productivity has risen 4.8% over the last year, so even though Americans are well paid, they are producing enough to warrant it.
If you are concerned about NAFTA, in the first eight years of NAFTA manufacturing output in the United States rose at an annual average rate of 3.7%, 50 percent faster than during the eight years before the agreement took effect.
Americans continue to earn more, become more productive, manufacture more, and export more each year.
Here is the deal - the US benefits from people in developing countries making more money. They won't be "stealing" our jobs. The stronger the global economy, the better off we all will be.
Look at India. It's telephone penetration rate is 4 lines per 100 people. India's telecommunication systems market now has annual growth of 22%, and has tremendous growth potential. This means companies like Alcatel, Lucent, Siemens, Fujitsu, AT&T, Ericsson, and NEC will be brought in to finish up the wiring of hundreds of millions of Indian homes. Sure, a piece of the pie will go to many countries, but much of that will go to the US.
Meanwhile, US industry will be saving costs by outsourcing call centers and low-level IT operations to India. When you reduce costs, you can hire MORE productive Americans, not less!
Anyway, I'm not saying "don't worry about it," but we all need to be flexible as parts of the developing world develop. It means we need to concentrate on the things that Americans can do best. All of humanity will be better off in the end.
IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago
Guilty as charged. 30 years ago, early in my career, I didn't give a tinkers damn about the plight of blue collar workers. "Look for the Union Label"? Hell no. Detroit autoworkers? Good ridance! It was all "me! me! me!" I was exceptionally self absorbed.
Of course, most four year olds are like that.
</likely redundant>
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
(from a progammers point of view)
(I lump Europeans with Americans because I believe that they are experiancing the same problem or will be soon)
ok, maybe the issue we should talk about is all the management for IT. Their jobs aren't getting shipped over seas (they don't want to move overseas or hire someone to do there jobs, that would be committing suicide). Until their jobs get shipped over or until foriegn companies take a bigger market share wee will not be in 'real big' trouble. The reason why management is one of the keys is because they are in charge of the projects. They want to see what is being built. They don't want to give a check out and wait, they want to be an integral part of the process. Because of this management will, at least for the time being, deal with the communicating between continents. This can be a real pain.
Another reason IT (programming jobs) are not totally in danger is because the 'proper' software process is virtually non existent in the real world. If you are fuzzy on what you want to do, then no matter how cheap the labor is, it is still going to cost companies a lot of money. Add this to the communication problems and I would think that around the same amount of money is spent. When companies realize this, they will probably hire local again.
Thirdly, and this is my weakest point, and virtually impossible to support, but because of the freedom Americans and Europeans enjoy they will always be a better better pool of IT (programmers specifically) workers.
Fourthly, dealing with smaller projects (company software...), I don't think foriegners can really compete. They don't have the access to users that locals have.
Nuttles
Christian and proud of it
we might not be such a minority in the sector.
From Roblimo's article:
Libertarian IT workers who watch their jobs go overseas should derive joy from geographic shifts in employment. Their "dog eat dog" creed requires them to be happy whenever the marketplace finds a way to pay workers less and increase business owners' profits.
B, effing S. We could care less about corporate profits. Libertarians are for one thing. Less government.
Would I rejoice if my job flew over-seas? No, I'd sit down and figure out what I had to offer that was worth being paid well for here in the US, or I'd fly over-seas myself to find a friendlier economy. Its called personal responsibility, but I wouldn't expect a typical american to have heard of it.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to realize the implications of fewer slimey governmental fingers in everything. Things like employee versus business owner rights would balance out naturally. A few roudy unions here, a corrupt business owner there, mixed liberally with laws that prohibit truly violent and heinous acts. Shake well and enjoy the freedom.
It's a simple equation really. Laws pro-union: bad, laws anti-union: bad. Laws pushing jobs over seas: bad, laws forcing jobs to stay here: bad. Laws in general: bad, laws against rape and murder: good. Just enough laws to foster civilization: good.
I know how to live my life better than any governmental sub-comittee, and I think you do too.
come on people, don't feed the trolls.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
The company I work for hired a team of developers from India. They worked for a large company 'Infosys'.
.NET framework development for Microsoft. He actually 'wrote' code for the .NET framework implementation and was employed as a contractor for Microsoft.
The bosses won`t be making that mistake again, the engineers came over to the UK, and it turned into a total joke, we sent some back and demanded engineers with better experience.
I was working closely with the engineers, and it was made clear that simply coding was something they did for 2-3 years, after that they all moved to management positions. The result, all the engineers I worked with had less than 3 years experience.
Needless to say, most of the work they carried out has since been abandonded.
We learned a few things:
1. the engineers were not experienced enough. Less than 3 years coding experience, we were developing in Java, all the engineers were were assigned only have 18months Java experience.
2. The engineers were not at all 'creative' in any way. You tell them to do something really daft, and thats what they did.
3. Without a cast iron, complete and fully prototyped implementation, the project will not succeed. As a small company we needed flexibility in the designs, this helped the projects turn into a real mess (mostly due to point 2).
Off shore engineering is great if you have a very detailed spec right down to the URL detailed design and realisation. If you don`t do this as part of your coding strategy then you may be in for a world of pain.
This makes me think that the larger companies who can aford the overhead management and design will find offshore contracting more sutaible. While smaller companies may find it a very big hiderance.
From my perspective, this is a fashion, which will pass when people realise it does not solve all their problems, and in fact causes more.
I worked with one of the engineer's who boasted on his CV,
It now strikes me that his 'marketing' of his skills and 'contracts' was more successful than his coding attempts.
Anybody else out there experienced the same situation, or was I just unlucky?
You don't have to move outside the US to vastly improve your cost of living.
Try getting out of Cali for starters. There are many states with thriving IT markets that are below the average cost of living for the US.
Using California as an example is really a mistake. Cali is not the norm.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I don't have a lot to say about the article itself, but I don't think outsourcing to India's going to last forever. Sooner or later, the time zone difference and language barriers will accumulate. Higher demand - higher wages. So when the higher wages collide with the cost of staying in touch, this option won't seem so valuable.
My opinion on this topic is largely based on my company's experimentation with overseas consultants. Somehow I doubt we'll pursue that again.
But can't we send Gates to Timbuktu?
Some of our prosperity is going to leak out to a country that really, really needs it? What will I do? I might have to live in a trailer and teach school! And I would still be living a life of fabulous wealth by the standards of India.
Liberty uber alles.
The US has slowly been converting to a nation of consumers rather than producers.
I work in IT, my father was a General Motors slave for 30+ years. I have always disliked this situation. For many years the US produced goods, we had top engineers and we were at the pinnacle of success. The words "made in USA" stood for quality. A product bought in our stores with that stamp meant nobody's children were locked in wharehouses creating goods for fat, under worked, unappreciating slobs.
How long can a nation go on consuming everything produced by others without producing anything in return? How long before nations such as India decide that they've had enough exporting good people? What stops them from deciding that since 90% of a company is now in their country, that it no longer is a US company? Some of you cry about passing laws against outsourcing. But the straight fact is they aren't outsourcing CEO now are they.
In the US we have CEO's stripping companies of all physical assets and personnel for quick profit. They are raping this country's infrastructure and cooking the books to make the stockholders squeal like pigs with glee at the virtual money being produced from thin air.
We import technical expertise because we are too lazy to teach our children that being smart is an asset. And all over the world people hate us because we sit back fat and happy consuming what the world produces for us and demanding these nations pay us interest for all the money we lent their corrupt politicians through the IMF & the World Bank.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Be an entrepreneur. Take some risks, try to fill that niche market, etc.
Working for big companies usually sucks anyway, since big companies are full of useless middle and upper management who thwart your every attempt to do something useful.
I have a friend who works for a large US software company. He spends perhaps 10% of his time working. The rest of his time is spent asking for work or trying to communicate with his manager or anyone upward who might be able to give him something to do.
Most management is poor. So heck, they might as well outsource all the worker jobs, since that's just going to be wasted money anyway. Those who are bright will just go on and do something useful again.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Show some respect for the old farts.
They paid thier dues when you were in diapers.
Read, L
And me almost done my Computer Science degree , too. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to get a Business Administration degree. North America always has lots of jobs available for a guy who's willing to do less work for more money.
The managers and executives who are making the decision offshore are just doing their jobs. Remember they are REQUIRED to act in the interests of the owners of their corporations (the stockholders). If they can generate long term value for stockholders by outsourcing then they MUST do it. Also, if their competitors do it and they don't then their competitors can reduce costs, offer lower prices and kill them. This is actually pretty simple and was probably easier for this crowd to understand when many IT workers were sitting on piles of valuable stock options.
I've worked lived in both Vietnam and China working with local programmers there is a real synergy that can be achieved between talent and American experience overseas. I suspect that many companies will realize this and ask for American programmers to move overseas to work in the development teams. The increase in productivity is massive. This means in the long term that more American professional in the IT industry will be asked to take long term overseas assingments.
There's always going to be a market for developers at home - not all jobs can be shifted off to the cheapest bidder in the far east.
Where I work we have a russian software house working on updating old (vba) backend software. The quiality of the code is excellent, top documentation, and the price is right, with two weeks work weighing in at little more than one or two days' work by the typical irish contractor.
However, I'm personally not worried about being put out of a job, because I'm working on a pocketpc salesforce system that needs serious hands-on within the business - requirements gathering, refining the system, more testing with salespeople etc. I'm dead happy not to have to wade into a pile of vba to update existing software to accomodate the new system. It frees my time for doing more productive work.
There's plenty of opportunity for decent software developers - stuff like what i'm working on would never be quite right without having someone on-site doing the work - I think the future of software development lies away from banging out simple add/amend/delete stuff, and for western developers will mean serious custimization for customers...
I am a contractor at Dell and our jobs are being outsourced right now. I thought I would share some of the discussions going around the office...
1. The Brazilian Contractor's that our replacing us make $5 a hour. There is no way in hell we can ever compete with that.
2. People keep saying "compete", but its only about price. We are way more educated and skilled than our replacements. For example one Brazilian listed "Internet" as a skill on his resume. Boy he knows the Internet lets snatch this guy up!
3. Why is it only IT jobs can be outsourced? I would like to see middle management outsourced. Of course we will never see that.
4. Why was it such a big deal to be on site as a contractor a few years ago, and now it's ok to have IT on a separate continent. I will take a pay cut if I could work from home. Not $5 a hour though.
5. When I was getting my CS degree it was hard, and I knew a lot of smart people who dropped out. I just can't believe they can go into these countries and just higher a 100 cheap programmers. I personally think they are lying about their education.
6. Every big project I have worked on required good communication between developers. I just don't see how the US business team, is going to get across their Specs to the Brazilian developers, who will then hand it off to the Russian QA team. Sounds like the recipe for a quality product to me.
In short ya I am bitter, because I don't think there is anything I can do to "improve" myself to compete with dirt cheap unskilled labor.
Apoptosis
Even if Indian companies are willing to work US Hours, which they may well be, it still doesn't matter. I have seen over the years that nothing beats the productivity of a handful of people in a room with a mixture of technical and managerial folk. You don't need teams of hundreds or even ten developers to produce some amazing software that has huge impact on a business.
2nd tier support and the like can be moved off, but companies that move core business development to any but a handful of the most trusted employees are going to run into a 10x delay in development/communication time and be eaten alive by more nimble competitors.
Now a company operating out of India should be able to take some advantage of lower labor and good communication.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just move overseas!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
People in North America are really losing jobs to the same people to whom they sold all those products from the 60s onwards. All the computers that students in India and China own have Intel chips, are mostly made in western countries by western-owned companies and designed by insanely paid fat and happy engineers. Natural law dictates that you cannot expect them all to send you a steady stream of income buying American copies of Windows(r), processors, washing machines, cars, airplanes, routers and telecommunication equipment, Levi Jeans and a connection to the Internet Backbone (and IP address space). After a while of selling North Americans raw products in exchange of these goods, they will start manufacturing and designing it themselves.
During the tech boom and export years, noone complained. Funny how everyone refers to 2000-2003 as the 'economic downturn' years while the 1990-1999 years were 'normal'. How about 1998 being a 'boom' year while 2001 is 'normal'? Add the IT market of Asian, Europe, Africa etc to average it out and you'll see 1998 was no normal year for the industry at all. Just as water tends to flow to the lowest potential level, so will the economy of the well-to-do countries.
IT is far from over in North America and not every position can be outsourced. Can an average-sized manufacturing company have its Network Admin located in Indonesia? Software development will be hit hard, but newer markets and applications of software will also open up all over the globe, and specialized software developers here will get the boost.
To be an optimist about the issue, just imagine the number of Linux and BSD developers multiplied by 20.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The only overpaid peoples are managers.
Why in the world a manager who do almost nothing have to make more money than 10 programmers?
They can and have to be replaced by computers.
Let's try to do that.
In both scenarios, native Americans are denied jobs that they deserve; however scenario #2 is actually better than scenario #1. Scenario #1 has fostered the growth of large ethnic communities that refuse to assimilate into American society. They consist largely of people who believe that Western culture is only for "white" people and who teach their kids that they should identify with their "ethnic" culture and people. These large ethnic communities also produce most of the spies who steal Western technology to give to Beijing. The two spies mentioned in "Two Men Arrested for Planning to Smuggle High-Tech Encryption Devices to China" grew up in Taiwan and came to the USA.
Scenario #2 will result in a reduction of those ethnic communities. This reduction does not mean that, for example, Chinese will not want to come to the USA. On the contrary, Indians, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. will still demand to be allowed into the USA in huge numbers even though there will be plenty of IT jobs in India, China, Taiwan, etc. Why? Our Western way of life is superior to what exists in Indian, China, Taiwan, etc. Please read "Hospitals see mass resignations" and "SARS doctors' ethics put to the test" to sample the quality (or lack thereof) of life in Taiwan. Instead of treating SARS victims, the doctors prefer to hide the information about the illness or to resign.
As Slashdotters, let us work together as a community and lobby Congress to terminate the H-1B program and to reduce the combined immigration quota of China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan) from 60000 to 2000. Let us encourage companies like Intel to pursue scenario #2 instead of scenario #1. Intel has frequently lied about the need for H-1Bs. In the future, if Intel needs H-1Bs, Intel should set up a plant in India.
Yeah, I'm now in charge of a team of people in India. As my boss put it, he can hire 3 people in India for the cost of one person here in the U.S. They may not be as good, but if you give them good directions and actively manage them, they'll get the job done.
:-\
My job is to put myself out of a job. But, I've actively pursued doing things to make myself as indispensable as possible.
Hey, I'm becoming a PHB!
India and Pakistan have huge religous and nationalist frictions.
Bombings in India are caused buy supposed muslims supported by Pakistan is the claim of the Hindu nationalist government. One thing Business likes is stability. When bombs are going off in Mumbai (Bombay) and Indian and Pakistan are nuclear nations with dilivery systems this is not a stable situation. Just how much is actually going to go off shore there? Sending Jobs to Canada and China maybe. India is about saturated and these companies are risk adverse. Indians may be very smart and well educated but they seem to have the national instinct of Lemmings in relationship to their dealings with a close nuclear neighbior/ex fellow counrty men.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
If the IT industry has anything to add, it will be by using networks etc ... to maintain standards of living while the casino capital value falls. There will still be local programming jobs, just less of them, and, hopefully, the kids will get into programming because of a 'higher calling' not because they want to be Bill Gates. The teenagers, in my experience, always understood this about music: do it because you like it and mabey get paid. For the adults with adult overhead, fixing hardware, debugging cell phones and networks and all manner of technical support will replace the more glamorous (?) and creative coding jobs being done in countries where $10 an hour is great pay.
Durable goods produced locally could be protected by a 'locals only' union label. This wouldn't stop information / media products from flowing freely but would add value to screwdriver sales on a local level while removing the wasted value of transport.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I've thought about my job being moved offshore for a while now and have come to the conclusion that I ought to get a job that requires a security clearance. Security clearances can only be obtained by U.S. citizens. Try to offshore that ;)
Honk if you're horny.
Go to microsoft.com and look at their liabilities and stockholders' equity section of the financial statement. It shows that MS had income taxes payable of 2.022 billion dollars.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Top Ten Reasons to Sell California to Mexico
10. Mexico is use to running huge budget shortfalls, $40 Billion more, not such a big deal.
9. Reduced costs of preventing "illegal immagration" by making it legal.
8. Most Californian's will never notice.
7. Interest rates are at a all time low, great time to buy.
6. Proceeds used to pay off US Federal budget.
5. Outsourcing IT to "our nieghbors to the West", good foriegn policy.
4. 2 for 1 Taco Tuesday's state wide!
3. English as a second language, good for all Californian's
2. Washington and Oregon can now legally limit immigration from California.
1. El Presidente Fox.
Actually, even if you are REALLY good at what you do, you should worry about your job. Most people that are really good at what they do get paid good. Cost cutting can mean that you are laid off with the other 2 or 3 "really good people" so that the upper-upper management can get/keep their annual bonuses (and other extra benefits).
Then, when you are unemployed, your resume will get lost in a stack of over 500 resumes that were submitted in the first 2 hours that the job was posted.
There is no job security for ANYONE in the United States anymore unless your job involves a service type industry. All other jobs can be moved overseas.
The job shift to overseas is not just happening in the Tech industry. It's happening in the Call Center business and Accounting business.
Why should a company in America keep you employed when they can pay someone in India $5000 a year without all the benefits!?!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Every time one of these scare tactic India-programmer stories comes up, the only thing that happens is people start getting complacent.
Forget it. It's a big ruse.
Programming is embbedding itself as a fundamental of organization required for any revenue-generating endeavour to function. If you think *all the software there ever is to write in the world* is going to get farmed off to Indian peasants working for ricebags, then you're clearly don't belong in the 'high technology' strata. I suggest you get a corndog stand, instead.
There is so much more to be done in the realm of computers, and it doesn't matter if Indians do it or if Cowboys do it, it'll get done.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
You idiot! We're in this mess becuase of the high taxes corporation have to pay on taxes!!! Putting in more tariffs will only make the problem worst. Look down under, computers that sell for $750 (US) in the US sell for $2500 (AU) down there. That's $500(US)/$1000(AU) more for the same product because of tariffs! And you think more will help the USA? The best way to decrease the lost of jobs is reduce the taxes corporations have to pay, and BTW corporation don't pay taxes. They collect taxes and past the cost onto the consumers.
Having lived all over the world in my adult life, I have looked at moving overseas to find work if I need to. When I was unemployed, I was offered very attractive salaries for my Solaris and Linux skills in Asia...all places I would live, and places I have lived. Then I got hired locally.
If you have not ready the book "Who Moved My Cheese" I highly recommend it. It can change your way of thinking for the better.
If you've read thus far you may think my opinion is to sue the outsourcing companies on some convoluted basis.
Actually what I'm proposing is much more radical and has yet to be developed in the IT industry -- the industry backbone to stand behind our products.
The ability for consumers to legally put behind bars incompetent CIO's & their coders & wrong-doers architects is the one thing that will keep the IT jobs in-country, whereever that country may be.
International criminal extradition is hard enough international civil-torte is near impossible, tell that to your customers.
Until the IT industry changes its model from pushing constant full-charge product upgrades, completely without warranty, to actually standing behind the product and code all the way to the slammer, the jobs will leave for cheaper pastures.
Not just American companies need to be able to be confident in products.
A first step is government or Insurance industry going for legislation that a software company can't sell software, with licensing terms that only empowers the owner with no recourse for the consumer or government on behalf of consumers.
Why does this go the assisting solve the flight problem? When governments mandate such thing you have to have local representation in that locale to be attuned and ready to lobby and that requires expertise and staff.
Secondly if Insurance & Gov does legislation correctly the IT industry will be pushed through the funnel to consolidate its best ideas and practices into fairly stock commodities.
Ever buy a car without locks? ever wonder why that happened? Just try to buy one without one. Now try buying a new car without airbags, seatbelts, a radio, etc.
It will take at least a decade of concerted industry effort to get all the consumer friendly & safety features discovered 2 decades ago worked out and into standard template/components --
Project Management and coders will be needed. If we are smart we move the entire industry forward in a sliding window fashion.
Much more if the components don't work per spec we should be willing to be put in jail for our failure to engineer for the foreseeable -- yes I said it; crap engineered, written and tested code==jail time for somebody.
Nothing less is expected when I have my architectural blueprints for my house outsourced. If my house collapses or my business inventory is ruined by rain pouring in the roof, I want to sue. Actually my insurance provider is better at it; I want them to sue. IT architects should expect no different treatment.
I know most the counter arguments, non-standard hardware, new technology, multiplicy of competing technoly, etc makes IT hard.
I counter that with the fact that all household 60 watt lightbulbs in the US have a standard interface, all modern consumer vehicles have a starter not a crank, How many banks go into aquistion mode each day to get the consumer base of that area --> yes I said it; how many software houses do there have to be?
IT needs stronger IEEE and ACM chapter involvement. We need to actually blackball the shoddy, wherever they are and raise and collectively protect the best workers, wherever they are, to keep ourselves and society from canabalizing our own progress.
Lastly Speculators and evil-Frontiersmen are driving the IT industry into the ground. Speculators have inflated public opinion that IT is easy and sexy, we all know it's not. It's not because IT hasn't been driven to make it easy nor should it ever be sexy, IT is a consumable product not a super-model.
Evil-Frontiers men (evil-CIOs and evil-Sales) take money upfront them, lead companies into the IT wilderness and leave them to starve -- that's just wrong, it degrades public confidence and harms the whole profession. These have always been around. Even the construction industry has its share of monorails and highways built through swamps and jungles.
We must elimiate these personality types from our ranks.
My rant ends here
I've already had some dealings with this. Dell customer service apparently defaults to an Indian call center, and the last three company purchases have required some sort of followup (various issues). Every single time, I get an thick accented Indian who doesn't know what's holding up the order, doesn't know how to fix it, and can't help me at all. Completely useless. After 20 minutes or so on hold and getting no help (hey, I'm trying to spend money here!) then necessitates another call to next level support in Texas. The thing that gets my ire is that this Indian call center is completely wasting my time (and Dell's), and IMHO seems more a waste of money than a savings.
And this is just for orders! Lord help me if I ever need to call for service on a hardware issue.
{ - Generic Guy - }
It's called "The Theory of Comparative Advantage" link. It may hurt individuals but it is good in general.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
The value of something is a function of how much the seller needs the money and how much the buyer needs the something. There is no such thing as a fixed value independent of the buyer and seller. Someone in India may sell their labor for a lot less than someone in the US and still feel well recompensed.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ten years ago, my team leader told me that jobs were moving to India. He showed me Yourdon's book: "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer". It did not happen. Not in a large scale.
Then a few years later, something else happened. My project was moved to Dallas (from Toronto. Even at that time, projects were being moved around. When we travelled to Dallas to transfer technology to the new guys, management told us to tell the American Immigration that we were going for a visit. I did not listen, and I told INS I was going to Dallas to transfer knowledge. They let me through. I was losing my job soon, so I would not have minded if they did not let me through. I was not going to lie.), the new group did not like the fact that one part of the project was still in Montreal. It was just difficult to coordinate development with people scattered around. But they had no choice, the technology was in Montreal. Nobody could have done what they were doing in Montreal. It was basically the same for us, but they intended to move some of us over as well. Some did relocate.
It is different now. Most programs being written now are quite similar. If you want to develop a website, there are only a few ways to do it. And tools and technologies are very uniform now. We have J2EE and .NET. That is about it. It is not difficult to train people to program in J2EE and .NET, wherever they are. It is funny in a way: EJB is easy enough to program; and they are going to make it even easier.
Now, this is just inevitable. Jobs will simply go to places with lower labour cost. When was the last time you saw a memory chip manufactured in the U. S.? On balance, that was a good thing. If that did not happen, do you think you would be able to afford the computer you have, with the same capability and memory capacity?
But you know what, I think something else is going to happen soon. And I think it is scarier: a shift in programming paradigm will be upon us. And I think it is going to shed almost all programming jobs, here and elsewhere. I am betting my money that it will start happening in five years.
I am a programmer, so I am going to try and see whether I will be the one making the paradigm shift.
... but time and chance happeneth to them all.
This could be because most American programmers are lazy and somewhat stupid. Most of them think they are 'l33t because they know how to use ASP and Access. So few people know anything about Computer Science, it really is a waste what we are paying them. They are terribly slow, have almost no initiative, and have trouble communicating with customers.
If you're worried about outsourcing, then make yourself more valuable! If you like your current salary, make yourself that much more worthwhile! Companies are outsourcing because people who were raised in the boonies of India are turning out to be just as smart as American programmers. Perhaps this means that American programmers need to start being more valuable.
I just finished watching NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS. The first segment was about job flight.
It's worth watching for many reasons, not the least of which is the way Indian's learn American English by singing along to hip-hop songs.
No problem. Just make sure I get to pay $5 for a copy of the U.S. software that's now being produced in India rather than the $200 it used to cost when the coding was done in the U.S. - you know because the company saved so much money by outsourcing, they can afford to charge less to us people here who are now earning less. Same goes for shoes made in Korea by U.S.corporations and sold to people in the U.S for $150, etc., etc.
Never seems to happen does it?
More importantly, how am I or anyone supposed to pay that $150 when the only jobs left in my nation will be paying $30 grand a year? How are all these overpriced items going to be purchased if neither the workers in the U.S. or India can afford them due to cut rate salaries? What happens to your economy and corporations then?
I guess we should all become lawyers and accountants (if you're not lucky enough to make it in the entertainment business) then, and leave the actual productive fields to all the other nations of the world until we're poor enough to be considered cheap labor too. Or we should all be clerks selling each other things. There's a workable solution. Great idea. I really want to live in your country chief.
I'm all for bringing up the standard of living everywhere - but I'm not seeing it. I'd be o.k. with the outsourcing if there was some equality, if by doing so standards of living were rising in general, but that's not the case - the richest just get that much richer and everyone else becomes poorer. I'm seeing corporations taking the profits and the standard of living staying just about the same in the places getting the jobs, while it gets significantly worse for the place where the jobs were moved from. Sure ultimately the corporations themselves will take a hit when no one can afford what they're charging for their products. Guess what happens when the corporations start going under?
Sorry, I don't feel like turning the keys over to corporations while they run around playing musical chairs with national economies. That's a surefire recipie for disaster. But you go ahead and play the good corporate stooge and call it freedom. Just let me know what you'll be doing when your job and any job that can be done cheaper somewhere else is sent to Sri Lanka. What's your "freedom" going to look like then. I'd bet it would look something like a nation full of very unhappy, impoverished folk - kind of like the places these corporations are currently exploiting in their continual outsourcing. Regulation isn't optional if you want to have stability - it's mandatory at this point because those who run corporations have proven time and again that they can't be trusted to work in the best interests of society or economies in general. You're mistaken if you think that is what capitalism is about in any way shape or form.
Adapt or die? What kind of vision for humanity is that? Sure makes a nice sound bite though, eh tough guy?
Economically Illiterate indeed. I'm a person, not cheap labor up for exploitation and its the same the world over. Start considering people as human beings rather than salary/consumption buckets and maybe we'd all have a better standard of living.
The approach to take is fair trade, not free trade. Free trade says things like "eventually, their standard of living will be raised," while fair trade says "pay them a wage that provides a standard of living comparable to where the job came from."
This provides a much more balanced outcome for all concerned, instead of the few old boys who are making all the consulting dollars off of the $5 an hour they're paying the poor schmucks.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
Americans before: Competition is good! Suck it up and compete! We must bring free-market capitalism to the whole world!
Americans now: Aw fuck! You mean we have to *compete* now? I don't wanna!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'd be happy. For many things we do it better and cheaper in oz but the USA won't let us bring the product into the USA. Strange how it seems to be different if it is a USA company that has bought out an Australian one. I wonder where the Campbells soup ingrediants come from or if the biscuits (Arnotts here) are in the USA now.
As for the outsourcing programming, Australia does seem to be benefitting a bit. Adelaide has a big EDS shop and a Motorola shop. I think EDS has a problem getting good quality programmers because they've all left for Sydney and London (bigger pay packets). Some do come back when they've saved enough to buy a house in Adelaide (which means they never come back from Sydney).
I know people who have outsourced programming work to India, China, and South Africa - different projects of course. And not been happy with the results of any of them. If you were absolutely sure you required a black box and it would never need changing or tuning then I think you'd be fine, but in applications programming, it never works out that way. Not to say the local programmers can't make a mess of it, but at least it is easier to get them to fix it.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
http://business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,51816,00. html
There was a recent article on Business2 that talked about jobs going overseas, and how there are not enough skilled IT workers overseas now to fill the coming job-boom that will be caused by all the baby-boomers retiring..... just something to think about.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
Jobs stop getting shifted overseas?
Jobs are no longer shifted overseas?
Profit?
You are going to hate this comment, and will immediately bitch slap it to -1 troll. Here's why:
The only people I've seen affected by this sort of thing are Johnny-come-lately types who think they have an "IT career" because they got a CS degree at some point after they stopped teaching BASIC in college level classes.
Out here in the real world, where I've been since before that time, IT means a lot more than programming. It is a service. If you can do work that IT consumers find worthwhile (an interesting intellectual exercise will be to determine just who those people are), you will make a living, cheap Indian programmers notwithstanding. Do something people want, do it well, and do it for enough people, and you will not only succeed, you will be wealthy.
If none of this makes any sense, I recommend you go borrow some money from Daddy and get your business administration degree. On behalf of the (real) IT industry, I apologize for the inconvenience.
Before they take everything away from our god fearing white country we must unite and wipe them out before they wipe us out...
WHITE POWER!
One of the things that people seem to ignore about the costs of shipping good around the world is that it is so cheap to do so. Everyone complains about a factory moving to Asia from somewhere in the americas due to cheap labor. Well the reason that they really can move it to Asia in the first place is that transport is cheap.
If the US wants to be protectionist about manual labor jobs(physical goods), it needs to just up the cost of transport. Want to have cargo ship dock in the US, charge a hefty fee. Transport it by train or truck raise so taxes on diesel. It makes physical goods more expensive.
To tell the truth, I think that it is the way we should go anyways. We have enough cheap crap from Target, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, where ever. It is not going to hurt the economy much to cut down on these cheap exports.
On the other-hand, this ain't going to help IT jobs being exported! :)
We're a manufacturer. We just outsourced a bunch of US assembly jobs to an area in western Europe with a standard of living comparable to here. Labor costs, and overhead in general, are slightly higher now, until you figure in taxes and tariffs. That makes the cost of production about 20% cheaper overall, even for finished goods imported back to the US.
In case you were wondering where all those billions to meddle in the affairs of other countries came from, now you know.
So, basically the article says that regular folks/workers/blue-collars don't like IT people (geeks, wierdos, whatever), and neither do management. We're hated from both sides. And after years of setting up corporate systems where every worker is a replaceable cog, they now have the commodity hardware and a monopoly OS which (in their eyes) makes IT workers also replaceable cogs. The gist: Indian cogs work just as well as American ones, and cheaper too.
I'm not really surprised. I recall with both admiration and disdain reading many stories in the mid- to late 90's about IT job hopping, and watching many of my counterparts jump from one job to the next higher paying gig every year or so, with no semblence of loyalty. It was a crazy time, and now it is time to pay the piper.
/addendum: I'm still not sure where they keep getting these $60,000 just- out- of- college figures, since here in the midwest we worked our asses off and still never got close to that much.
{ - Generic Guy - }
In case people don't know, Dell off-shored their phone desk people a while ago.
I had to order some parts for a Precision Workstation I bought from a friend the other week. I spoke with "Andrea", who was obviously not from Texas. I had some obvious difficulties making myself understood to her, but thought I had it right. 10 days later my parts show up, most of which matched what I ordered, but a couple of items had been gotten wrong - a duplicate fan, a missing case fan, and some filler panels that didn't fit the case.
So, I call back to their spare-parts number, getting "Jack" this time. He wasn't from Texas either. Jack couldn't understand why the parts didn't fit (they were obviously for another machine), and transferred me to "Rich" at tech support. Rich spoke pretty decent English, I figured he had at least visited Texas at some point. He was able to get me the correct part numbers, and transferred me back to parts.
This time it was "John", who seemed to not be able to identify what part of North America Texas is in. He took my order for (what I hope turns out to be) the correct parts, and gave me the address to return the incorrect parts. The more he spoke, the less I understood. By the time he got to the ZIP code I didn't understand a word. I took down the address he gave me. Within a few minutes I got an email from them explaining how to return the parts. It didn't have the address on it, but it did say how to call Airborne Express and get them to pick up the package.
But today at work, I had a sneaking suspicion that I didn't get the address right, so I called Customer Service back. Sure enough, I had it wrong. I feel fairly confident that I have the correct address now. But I'm tempted to call back a third time, and take a vote on which address is most likely correct.
Am I cheesed off? Yes.
Am I likely to order a Dell in the future? The chances just got a lot slimmer. I have no problems ordering off their website. But the risk of something going wrong, and having to talk to a tech support person who only speaks English as a 2nd language is a big caution. Dad is getting ready to buy a new PC. I can just imagine how frustrated he would get with these people - he's starting to get hard of hearing, and listening to someone with a New Delhi accent is not the easiest thing to do.
Off-shoring their customer support people has got to be costing Michael Dell more than what he saved when they fired their English-speaking staff. After all, I spent over 2.5 hours on the phone using their toll-free number. They now also have the extra expense of restocking the parts that they shipped me by mistake because their person didn't have a good command of the language. Much more of that and it will start cutting into their profits (they'll probably close the parts division rather than fix the real problem of poor English ).
Chip H.
maybe companies will just move their head offices offshore too...
The shifting IT overseas is probably short term. The reason is that many of these developing countries like China or India will need IT people for their own IT industry. There was a report recently that India has high turnover of help desk employees. The employees feel that they are not getting paid enough. A even bigger factor is that IT productivity has not improved much on a per man hour basis. There is a lot of room for IT to grow in the third world. So this equates to a dramatic increase in demand.
Now, we will find more beggars in the street, holding a sign "will code HTML for food"!
I've seen alot of talk about IT jobs being sent overseas. I've also seen alot of discussion about why outsorucing work is good and why it is something that companies will be forced to do to stay competitive.
Inevitably, someone mentions the fact that many other industries have been sent overseas and no one complained. People also mention the fact that US IT folks are spoiled, fat, and lazy. And the biggie, that everyone seems to mention is that by sending more work overseas it will raise up the standard of living in other countries so more people can afford the products.
I actually agree with many of the arguments for outsourcing jobs to other companies, however, I feel that there are several things about the IT industry that make the outsourcing of jobs to cheaper countries a bad idea.
The reasons:
1. Tech support, network administration, system administration, etc are jobs that ( I hope I don't offend anyone ) aren't rocket science and probably would save companies $$ if outsourced overseas. However, language barriers, schedule problems, and cultural differences make the human interaction that these jobs always end up requiring usually end up making hiring an overseas workforce more expensive in the long run.
2. Software development, with all of the advanced APIs, and black box middleware out there, is becoming more and more like manual labor. A developer plugs and chugs working stuff together with thin shims of logic. Unfortunately, gathering requirements, being able to discuss the needs of clients/customers and adapt in real time, and knowing how to plug and chug the APIs and middleware are things that are critical in finishing a project on time and on budget. I've seen many companies have teams spread across the globe but not have everyone on the same page. Suddenly, all those cheap developers are producing code that creates more problems, or requires exensive modification or reworking by the developers stateside. Of course, as software development methodologies ( remember software development is still relatively new ) become more mature -- this will chnge as well. But culture, language, time differences, and not being able to walk down the hall and bonk someone on the head are all things that I believe are intrinsic to successful software development.
I could go on and on but I'm beginning to get tired of typing so I'll end with reason 3 ( a biggie IMHO ):
3. The products of the IT industry are expensive. Hardware is tangible, and requires extensive resources to produce, software, transparent systems, and knowledge are intangible but are valuable nontheless and require an abundance of time and $$ to get right. Unlike other industries, the IT industy isn't so good at pricing their products. Most companies look at their competitors and are forced to price their products similarly. Other companies seemingly pick prices out of thin air for their products. Although, IT companies spend alot to make their products and profit margins are often thin, there are also many premium products are grabbed up by early adopters. Those early adopters, along with refining of the production of products allow the price of products to eventually decrease so that companies can recoup their costs.
A big problem I see with the overseas outsourcing of IT jobs is that many of those fat and lazy US IT folks will no longer have jobs. So they will no longer be able to afford the latest wiz bang products. The US IT guy making 40-120K a year has been replaced by the Indian IT guy making 700 a month, or the Chinese IT guy making 500 a month. So now sits US company X, with a product that he developed with a team consisting of a few US "leads", a team of guys in India doing the GUI, and a team of guys in China doing the protocol code. The project was initially going to come in under budget, but because of timing, miscommunication, and the fact that company X had to bring in more US engineers to get stuff done at crunch time the project costs about the same as it would have if they had used a sma
Has anyone considered outsourcing Management overseas? Seems like Japan might make a nice fit.
No doubt, loosing jobs is never a good thing. However, unlike factory labor, employers are forced to educate programmers. With factory labor education is highly discouraged.
Individuals in "3rd world" nations have to be literate, know english, understand higher math, etc in order to become an application programmer. Yet on the other hand, individuals that work in textile and auto manufacturing are given lengthly schedules and small pay checks that prevent them from being able to go to school. Children and adults can't afford the time or the money to attend something as simple as a public school.
Heck, many mexican manufacturers, which manufacture good for US based companies, force their female employees to take abortion pills or injections should they happen to get pregnant. Seriously. If they don't do it they'll usually be fired or beaten. Or they might simply 'disappear' on the walk home from work.
I really don't see how loosing tech jobs to tech-sweatshops is a bad thing. Tech work, unlike factory work, will actually educate people and give them options in life. Factories produce a horrible infinity-loop of cruelty and oppression that needs to be stopped.
Furthermore, as we've already seen, folks that are innovating are not farming out their work. Farmed work can actually cause a lot of problems for folks that are trying to make high quality products. Look at Quark and Macromedia. Their software now has more bugs and a much slower release schedule. As a result they are loosing customers.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The article you link to compares an IT salary from a white collar IT worker with a blue collar Taxi driver and restaurant worker.
The is so wrong and pitiful to read that, sorry my French and arrogance.
Lars
For many years I've heard repeated statements that IT workers are too valued and Unions are only for unskilled laborers. Now that the writing is on the wall, is anyone changing their minds?
Offshoring/outsourcing is a key battle between workers and management and Unions are the only way you'll get a voice.
I'm a Union member (for scientists and engineers) and I'd be happy to organize any IT shop in the Silicon Valley. All it takes is a vote of current company employees (non-managers) at one location. Check out ifpte.org for an appropriate Union organization and/or drop me an e-mail.
If you don't organize, your job may be next!
Which is fine if you're 23 and have no debts or dependents. Slightly different when your 33 and have a big mortgage and 2 young kids to support. Yes I will probably be ok because I don't have this problem (although I resent enormously that I'm going to lose the only job I've ever wanted) but pity the kids who will have to put up with a great deal of stress as their parents have to scramble desperately to keep their heads above water.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
The first thing this article made me think of was how (before the .com bubble burst) I was often the butt of jokes from my corporate cousin system administrator, programmers, and IT manager friends because I chose to remain in IT in the academic arena in lieu of pursuing more profitable employment in the private sector. True, I make half of what my peers make, and still do, but I also still have a job while the majority of my friends have been losing their jobs left and right over the past four years. I still have my job, have advanced duly, have a wonderful teacher retirement package, and have (most importantly) JOB SECURITY. Plus, an added benefit from working for the state, is that when I hire someone for a developer/network/microcomputer support job, I have to give preference to non-international candidates, even in situations where two candidates with equal skills and one is an international candidate.
I hate like hell that all of this is happening, because I don't like seeing money being taken out of someone's pocket, or their security taken away. I program because I like it; I think it's fun, and I assume that anyone else that programs does it for the same reason, or at the very least gets some satisfaction from it, which puts it above most other jobs I'm aware of.
It is called Free Trade . Your government and mine signe the NAFTA agreement because they felt more loyalty to big corporations than they did to their own citizens.
One idea...
In the US there is a Federal income tax that averages out at around 25-33% of gross (for the middle classes). Why not just drop the income tax completely for everyone (including businesses), and replace it with a federal sales tax of N%?
Joe Poor buys a used Pinto and pays N% taxes on that purchase. Joe Middle buys a Minivan, and pays the same % in taxes on that purchase. And, Joeseph Corporation buys a Lear jet for the COO and pays the exact same % on that purchase.
Its pretty simple... The more you consume, the more you pay.
If the Federal sales tax rate were set at 20% for example, and there was no income tax, then I believe the majority of US citizens would actually end up having more cash in hand, and the Federal government would as well.
I'm sure there are holes in this idea, but as a starting point (if nothing else) it seems pretty fair and balanced to me.
Outsource IT jobs to India cost half as much, so makes sense if the new people are at least half as productive. Problem is, 95% of them are really pretty junior right now, so it's doubtful that they're even 50% as productive as the people with 20 years experience that they're replacing...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
"Laissez les bon temp roulez."
...making money by cutting their costs through outsourcing, should invest in the businesses doing so. If their revenues increase, then your claims will have been validated and you shall be in part a benificiary.
As long as you're willing to settle for being an employee, you'll always be living at the end of someone else's chain.
The risktakers fall-- hard-- many times-- but without them, we'd be a far poorer society today. If you cling to security like a toddler clings to a teddy bear, you still haven't grown up. Rushing to have kids, a house, a car blah blah blah is just stupid.
If it's just "a job", you can lose it. If it's your calling, you'll never starve.
This is taken from one of the comments on the linked article.
Bullcrap. The shift of jobs overseas is hardly a good thing, whether you call it "free trade" or some pseudo-Darwinistic economic evolution. You want good examples of what these corps do overseas?
Look at Nike. Indonesian factory workers - mostly girls - work under conditions and hours typical of late 19th century American garment factories. Environmental destruction runs rampant.
Take a look at Coca Cola's operations in South America - their hiring of death squads for "security" and assassination of labor organizers.
Remember Union Carbide?
This "free trade" business has led to US corporations moving offshore to the Caymans and elsewhere so they can avoid paying corporate income taxes. Taxes that you, me, and Joe Sixpack get burdened with - even as we move down the economic ladder.
Fortunately I still have my job - and yes, for a while it looked like my work was going to be outsourced to India. But the folks working in New Delhi don't understand the ins and outs of our operations or the systems we integrate with: I do. As a "knowledge transfer" - forget it, won't happen.
Folks seem to have this silly notion that what's good for the corporate economy is good for the citizens. That ain't necessarily so, nor do I think that "cheaper is better" is necessarily good for the corporations either, not in the long run. If the middle class continues to shrink who the crap is going to buy the stuff produced by cheap labor?
You make good points about cost effectiveness but one of your paragraphs made me laugh:
I'd still earn a lot more than the typical offshore worker due to excellent English skills. All I would need to do is learn how to communicate with them and I'd be in demand in the same way the Los Angeles auto mechanic head is. He typically gives instructions to the hispanics who do the real work. No different from my scenerio.
English is easy. If excellent "English skills" bought you anything, Indian English majors would be making the big bucks. What they value is programming quality. Your image of being the American who is eagerly made chief by the illeterate natives is delusion. You would be as welcome in India as detroit autoworkers in Japan.
Lies about crimes
The savings of outsourcing to India are exaggerated, and in today's business climate a manager can get promoted just for doing something that sounds cheaper, even if it isn't.
At one point the construction and skilled trades were terrified of the flood of wetbacks. It seemed all work would be done by Mexican peasants for $1 an hour. However, it turned out that speaking the same language as your co-workers can help you not get killed or maimed on the jobsite, building techniques are getting faster and requiring more attention and different skills, etc etc. In the end a certain segment of the trade was abandoned to the WB's, but it was mostly the carrying stuff part. Most of the wetback looking people you see on a construction site were born here, and are actually quite skilled, having what amounts to a two year degree or more in experience. Because no one wants to pay the cost of having a bunch of ignorants around getting hurt and stealing and costing you.
Similarly, the netbacks don't work out to be as big a competition as you think. These stories of the guy pounding the keyboard getting $5,200 a year are exaggerated; for anything that would be done by a real programmer instead of an intern, it's more like twice that. However, you also have to factor in the overhead -- you are now paying for an extra manager too, in India. When you outsource to India a lot less of the money ends up in the hands of the person who does the work. Also, there is a higher rate of having to re-do the project. And there are also higher communication costs (especially when you want to avoid re-doing it).
By the back of the envelope calculations I did from the few anecdotal outsourcing projects I know the numbers for, to compete with the netbacks you have to be willing to take $15 to $20 an hour.
That's not that bad. Ok, you guys from San Francisco are shiting your pants wondering how you will afford rent, but get over it and move, you should have done that a while ago. I know several half-decent and one decent programmer that would jump at $20 an hour right now. Globalization is also make the cost of a decent car and other gadgetry lower. Admitt it, you could actually survive on $15 an hour. And by the time you have to, the Indians will be charging more anyway, and we'll all be howling about those South African and Afghani programmers who are stealing all the work.
I feel I can compete with the netbacks.
I will summarize the article and all corresponding comments in three(3) words: "We're all fucked". I just graduated with a Computer Science degree and no experience. I won't hessitate to admit that I'm fucked. I'm fucked, you're fucked, we're all fucked. It's game over man, it's game over. What the hell are we going to do now?
Business 2.0 magazine is running an interesting article called The Coming Job Boom. Basically, because the baby boomers are getting ready to start retiring, and there just aren't enough workers to replace them, there is impending skills shortage similar that what occured in 1999/2000 just around the corner. According to the article, the article states that this will occur even if the US GDP growth rate is only 3% annually. (Latest reading is 3.1% BTW). Overseas outsourcing, importing workers, and people delaying retirement will not be enough to prevent this crunch. It claims the biggest shortages will be in tech, and has all kinds of data to back up these claims. We should start seeing this around 2005.
This is not the first article I've seen that makes this claim. Its just that this kind of article is not in vogue in the current environment. You have to dig through all kinds of doom and gloom about jobs lost overseas to find them.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
our government favors giving out our resources and money to 3rd word nations because it trumps up their popularity in nations that envy or even hate us, make friends with enemies, however, it doesnt work, all you do is add fuel to the fire against us and weaken us from within... really genous idea! (note: not.)
Bill Moyers NOW program is discussing this very issue this evening in some areas. Check also for repeats in the next few days.
This time critical information has already been mentioned but moderaters have rated the info such that most of you won't ever see it.
They have credentialist protection a union and they suck.What other "profession" can these morons hope to make that kind of long green in?Not to mention the short hours and long time off.
In a free labor market teachers would be far better and paid less.
Now the same thing is happening to the techie job market and we still have people saying things like "if you don't have {insert random skill that hasn't been shipped overseas yet} you deserve to lose your job. Harumph harumph, social darwinism, blah blah blah."
So, the next time you hear about blue collar jobs being moved to Mexico for the good of the shareholders, or a Walmart driving local businesses out for gains in efficiency, don't think of the displaced people as uneducated fools who deserve what they get. I'm in medical school right now and I could rest smugly on the fact that the AMA is maintaining a chokehold monopoly on the physician supply, but the fact is, all of us are affected by the worship of the bottom line.
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
There seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that exporting jobs will somehow hurt US productivity in the long run, while in fact it's a reflection of our high productivity. When I'm not a codec nerd, I'm an economics nerd, so let me spread the Ricardian gospel a bit.
Our GDP is hugely higher per capita than India. This is because we are hugely more productive per capita than India overall. Because we are so productive we have a much higher standard of living, and much higher wages. As our economy grows, and our GDP per capita goes up, so do our wages.
Eventually, wages get so high, that it doesn't pay to hire folks in the US to do them. So they get exported. This won't cause a lack of productivity - the only reason we can afford the outsourcing is because of our aggregate productivity in the first place.
Let's imagine the long-term scenario folks here are implying. First, all the high-paying jobs get sent to India, since Indians will work for less. Second, US workers will go broke. Why would it work that way? Obviously, as jobs go to India, wages will go up in the sectors we're looking at. And there is a limited population in India who has the secondary education good enough to go to any kind of engineering school - clearly it's a much smaller pool to draw on than the US has, even though our population is much less. This is because we're very productive, and can afford lots of really school schools, especially at the college level. Over time Indian wages will rise and US wages for those who do thing that could be outsourced to India will fall so that the total cost of each will be roughly equal. The US wages will likely be quite a bit higher still in that case, since having someone local has definite advantages, plus the reduced cultural barrier, etcetera. And the US economy is doing great, since we're able to get our software cheaper, and we've freed up a lot of smart people from having to do something that we can outsource. It's not like all those replaced IT folks go straight into retirement or anything. Lots of them will start new business, get new jobs, and so on. And the folks who keep their jobs are going to be trying like crazy to stay productive in order to justify why they're worth as much as six guys in India. That's great - their productivity is going up, and everyone is happy. These transitions can be painful, but it's not like the US has huge sustained underemployment (although we're in a cyclical slump right now, largely due to an economically incompetent administration).
Now, let's say that India makes so much money on outsourcing (which they won't) that they can really upgrade their schools, and approach the US in productivity. If so, great! We've got a big, rich, friendly democracy in a part of the world where we can use all the help we can get. And as Indian productivity rises, so will their wages, so that's less downward pressure on US wages.
Anyway, the thing to remember is that we're rich because we're productive, which means that those parts of the economy with lower relative productivity compared to the rest of the world are going to get outsourced. This won't make us poor, since the outsourcing is only a reflection of our wealth and productivity in the first place. It's a self-balancing system. So, if the problem in the long term is places like China and India grow productivity faster than we do (which is likely for the next few decades), than the relative gap between their our our wealth will decrease. No problem - I just want to be rich, I don't want India to be poor!
Also, if you look at the history of South Korea, Japan, and other nations that industrialized rapidly on US lines, we're still more productive per capital than they are. They get close, but the US always seems to pull ahead in the end, for a variety of reasons (lots of bright, motivated immigrants, low barriers to start new companies are big ones).
So, folks, don't define what you do so narrowly that the only career you can imagine is something that's outsourced. Programming to a spec? Not a good long term move. Being able to right good, business-driven specs? Good move.
My video compression blog
It's clear that very, very few posters here have engineering or physical science backgrounds.
It's easy to say 'we should adopt' to changing circumstances. We should be like silly putty, adjusting to our environment.
But what happens if you whack silly putty hard? Hint: it doesn't smoothly deform. All systems have a maximum response rate, and if you exceed it the damage goes WAY up. Another good example is water - it's soft if you're diving from a diving board, but harder than concrete if you've reached terminal velocity in your fall.
Prior economic displacements have primarily hit people with limited job skills. If you got your job with a HS diploma - if that - then you can be quickly retrained for something else. You'll take a pay cut as you go from one field to another, but you can recover fairly quickly. The biggest problems faced by people who lost textile and manufacturing jobs wasn't that there were no other jobs, but that these jobs were clustered so people had to move to other parts of the country to restart their careers.
But the jobs that are being outsourced literally leave many people permanently displaced. Really top-flight software developers usually (not always) have a college degree and a lot of experience. To be sure there are plenty of one trick ponies with far less, but it takes time to learn how to see the whole picture. And we're lucky - the other fields being outsourced (radiologist, tax attorney, etc.) require professional degrees and years of experience to be really good.
If you're outsourced in your 20s, you can still get reestablished in a new field. But if you're in your late 30s and 40s, entering what should be your most productive years with the best pay that you use to educate your kids and set aside money for your retirement... where are you supposed to go? Even with a college degree it will take years to get a comparable education in another field, more years to establish yourself... and the clock is ticking the entire time. Even if you manage to get back to your original salary, you'll lose out on decade(s) of return on your investment.
That's why this situation is so dire. One of my friends has kids just entering college, and he's had to discourage them from getting technical degrees because he doesn't want them to invest years of their lives into something that will be considered worthless by the time they start getting good at their job. Where will that leave the US in the 2020s and beyond?... Oh yeah, I forgot. Most people already act like technology is magic, so it won't matter if a generation or two keeps far away from the technical disciplines. We'll just sue any other country that develops any new technology that would leave us in the well-deserved dust.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
though i sometimes feel like a bad person for wishing pakistan and india would get into a nuclear war to improve my job hunting prospects
The disappearance of IT jobs is only part of a very frightening development. The big picture is that living standards are going to become more equitable, world wide.
This development is driven by two historic changes. In the first place, the American capitalist model of economics has been embraced by much of the world's population. The big breakthroughs occurred in China and India.
The second change is that modern electronic communication systems has made information portable, and cheaply so.
As a result, almost any job whose output is information is subject to price competition from overseas.
I think that it's important to understand that this trend doesn't only apply to IT workers. It applies to careers as diverse as interpretation of mammograms to analysis of mortgage applications.
If you get squeezed out of your IT job, where will you go next? There's no place to hide.
Are stealing the country.
Fire the
Commander-Less-In-Chief
Thanks,
W00t
Perhaps you have little obligation to endorse a system which will lead to your being unable to pay your creditors, unable to continue your child's education, or unable to continue contributing your share to providing for your partner and yourself the sort of life you have committed to providing for one another. These are the sort of personal oaths and commitments upon which your measure as a person -- the content of your character -- is founded. Had you thought otherwise? Do not listen to those who would confuse you and have you lie to yourself.
Many would say that these relationships are special, that there is something about these relationships that warrants extra consideration. For 2500 years we were told again and again by men in their studies, men in their academies, and men in their ivory towers what is and is not moral, what is and is not ethical. And surprisingly these men, living unto themselves, have come down from their mountain tops and declared to us as if they were prophets having faced the very Good itself, that what it means to be ethical is to ignore what it is that makes each one of us and our relationships unique.
How many of these men -- the very establishers and propogators of the existing patriarchal system which they would have us bend our knee to -- have looked into the face of their child cradeled in their arms? Oh what fools they are, and what fools we are for believing them. Will they say unto this child, this helpless being, "I have brought you into this world, and yet I shun you helpless child, that I may go about the business of helping those halfway across the world who neither your nor I shall ever meet?"
Why, why do we direct our admiration to these men who have not lived, who have brought down and imposed upon us the oppressive patriarchal system, that twisted and corrupted institutions which exists solely to grant and guaruntee them their comfort and their standing above us?
Why do we do this when we already who have and do live already know what is right and what is wrong if only we will turn our gaze inside and to one another?
Look at your child and at your partner; now tell me what it is that is right and what it is that is wrong. Or do not, for you have just seen the very foundation of it.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
All these Indian companies are buying American hardware and software. We watch American movies and are increasing consuming American pop culture. You can even see young Americans working in India and China. They realize where the next growth area and they are eager to explore this situation. South Korea is right next to China. The programmers in Korea get paid at least twice the amount a Chinese programmer gets. Still Korea manages to exports software to China (mainly games and mobile content). So, find a niche area, do something different, It will be a long time before companies in India and China will produce something like Apple. That is the greatness in America. Your strength is your ability to innovate. Keep doing that and we will still buy your stuff. And all this talk about getting your government to close your economy will lead to nothing. Like Friedman said "I did not start globalization, nor did you". Globalization is inevitable. When our economies were closed, the west lectured us to open it. We have lived under a closed economy and we have seen how boring it was. And companies will continue to be greedy. That is whole point. And they will do anything to increase your margin. So no point in teaching morals to them.
How amusing it is that an article about jobs moving overseas is posted by a guy named "514x0r?" It seems that the reason is given before the actual problem is stated...
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
I'm in the business of to going to homes and busineses to fix computer problems. Many of the machines I work on are still within warranty Dells and Gateways. So why do people call me for help? Because they're frustrated with the first-level tech support, usually overseas. They're reading from troubleshooting scripts and not really diagnosing the problem. And when the user actually knows what the problem is, the tech will not listen, but instead will force them to go through every last step of troubleshooting. As the quality of vendor support declines, third-party techs such as myself will increasingly be called upon to fill the gap.
Since I got my BS in Computer Science, I have been eyeing a job at the Waffle House... I have always loved to cook!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Plumbers and auto mechanics, along with many other skilled tradespeople, tend to be slightly scornful of white collar workers in general, and may have trouble seeing why a programmer should earn any more than an accountant -- and many skilled tradespeople consider accountants overpaid, too.
So what exactly does these guys jealosy have to do with the facts. If they were making a programmer's salary themselves, they wouldn't think there was anything wrong with it. They'd get used to it, and eventually start wanting more for themselves.
I'm sure there's some garbage man or broom pusher out there who thinks that the guy changing spark plugs at the local service station is making too much money. It's all about perspective.
Also, programmers get paid so much because we're writing the software that keeps track of where the money is. (Well in my industry, banking anyway). It's about skill and the ability to think through a particular set of problems.
If the mechanic changing spark plugs doesn't do the job right, the consequences are that some poor guys car doesn't run properly. Big deal. If I don't do my job right, the system starts dropping trades and money starts to dissapear. Not so good.
wbs.
Huh?
"I want to point out that American programmers and other IT people were outstandingly unsympathetic when factory workers' jobs started going overseas 30 or 40 years ago"
I don't remember any IT jobs available 30 or 40 years ago for except rocket scientists at NASA.
It could be worse. You could be replaced by a small script written by an overpaid under-seas programmer.
This company already has a plan.
Workers willing to work a given job is a non-decreasing function of the pay rate. For example, the number of people willing to work at recycling computers for $20 per computer is greater than or equal to the number of people willing to do the same for $10 per computer.
The number of jobs that potential employers offer is a non-increasing function of the pay rate. For example, the number of people who would consider it the very most profitable investment of their money to create a computer recycling business if they have to pay their workers $20 per computer is less than or equal to the number of people would make make similar investments if the labor cost were $10 per computer.
As an introductory textbook in economics will show you (at least mine did), these curves can be graphed as a big "X". The number of people actually working when the prevailing wage is at a certain point, is the minimum of the two curves, the lower legs of the "X".
Unless there is something like a minimum wage law, competition among workers and competition among employers causes wages to move toward where the lines cross. On this graph, this is also where the number of people employed is maximized. This does not necessarily mean that total wages are maximized at this wage rate, but it does mean that total production is, and money is basically a way to distribute what is produced. So, it seems to me that transfer payments would create a lot less unemployment than the minimum wage, as long as the transfer payments are structured so that people still make substantially more money if they take a higher paying job.
IT people typically do not work at wages near the US minimum wage, but we pay for it when we pay triple the cost of food, clothing, and housing that people pay for the same quality goods in China.
I believe that the people in our ghettos also pay for the minimum wage. I think their unemployment is largely because it is illegal to locate a business that would profit from the fact that some people are willing to work for less than the current US minimum wage in the US. A lot of "working class" Americans also miss out on the opportuntity to create little businesses, which is so much easier than in the United States when there is no minimum wage. I am talking about businesses such as virtually all forms of recycling, food delivery, food kiosks, taxi service, and even small factories.
If the US eliminated its minimium wage, I would not expect unskilled labor prices to fall to quite the level of third world countries, because our workforce is more skilled, so perhaps we'd see a drop of only a factor of two for completely unskilled labor. Also, currently employed minimum wage people might be effected less than those applying for new jobs because our current minimum wage employers at least have had the luxury of picking the best employees available.
What I would expect is that a lot of currently unemployed people would gradually become employed in newly created jobs doing things that would increase the buying power of our dollars. So, I think that if we were to eliminate the minimum wage, it would allow US IT people to achieve a higher standard of living and compete more effectively in the global market.
My company tried outsourcing to India. We had trouble attracting truly qualified people, we had a hard time retaining the people we did attract, and at one point even though we supposedly had a dozen people on the payroll, it seemed like there were only 3 doing the actual work. It seems that India is experiencing a job boom similar to what we saw at the height of the dot-com boom. That means finding and keeping good workers will be a problem, and their pay will rise, so their competative advantage will disappear.
At any rate, as many economists point out, a job created in India does not necesarily equal a job lost here. Jobs that go overseas are jobs that have become commoditized, meaning it's relatively easy to find workers to do that particular. In the meantime the US has an innovation economy, meaning we are busy creating the next big while we are shipping the work for the last big thing abroad. The problem is, most of us can't see the next big thing, all we see are jobs disappearing because the economy hasn't really taken off yet, and we hear about jobs going to India.
If you look at the data, we have been shipping tech jobs overseas at a fairly steady rate for the past decade. It's not a trend that just started in 2001 when the recession hit, we just didn't care because jobs were also plentiful here. But recessions always destroy jobs, people always whine and look for a culprit, and things always improve.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Hi!
Want to scare a lot of people? Or want to get a zillion page views to boost your website advertising sales? Post a red-meat story on SlashDot about IT jobs getting outsourced to India, and watch the fur fly. Toss in a statistic or two (in this article there were no statistics at all) about how EDS has thousands of jobs in India, and let's not forget about that tape recording of IBM's HR guy saying that they should be moving jobs offshore, too. By golly, we'll all be sitting on the curb selling pencils by Christmas!
Or maybe not...
Believe it or not, those offshore code factories aren't much of a job threat to American programmers. Companies have been trying to move programming work offshore for a good ten years--and yes, some programming work has moved offshore. But most of the offshore outsourcing that's been done is either code maintenance (hiring the cheapest person possible to maintain legacy COBOL applications that refuse to die) or help desk support jobs. Neither of those categories poses a big threat to an experienced C++ programmer with good communication skills and a good resume.
What is a threat to American programmers' jobs is a simple economic reality: a lot of us had high-paying jobs in the 1990s because of two different bubbles. The dot-com bubble and the Year 2000 "crisis" had the delightful effect of creating an unbelievable demand for programmers--with or without experience. When Congress passed "emergency" legislation to permit corporations to expense Y2K related expenditures (instead of depreciating them as usual) I joked to a friend that the bill should be called the "Full Employment for Programmers Act."
Those were terrific times. But they're gone.
The hard and simple reality:
The bubbles have burst. All of the Y2K coding has been done. Every Fortune 500 corporation that simply HAD TO HAVE A WEB PRESENCE BY THE NEXT STOCKHOLDERS MEETING is now hoping that the auditors won't compare the money spent on that Enterprise Web Portal with the amount of business generated by it. The insane levels of demand for programmers--and the insane pay rates that went with it--are gone.
That doesn't mean we're all going to lose our jobs to people in the Indian subcontinent. But it does mean that we have to adjust our expectations of the labor market to something a bit closer to reality. If we were newspaper reporters or insurance claims analysts or high school teachers or mechanical engineers we'd face certain realities: you have to look for a job; employers want experience before they'll hire you; sometimes you can't find a job in your area--so you may have to consider moving; and sometimes, well--sometimes you have to consider the possibility that you should look for another career. As information technology becomes a more mature business, a lot of those realities apply to us as well.
Programming doesn't move offshore well
It doesn't. Sure--if you're a SlashDot regular or devoted to a particular Open Source project, you can name talented programmers who live and work outside of the United States. Miguel de Icaza of Ximian, for instance, is an extremely capable programmer who lives in Mexico. Do I consider him a job threat? Not in the least--because programming is not as portable (at least not to India) as you might think.
It's about communication
Simply put, the essence of programming is communication. The vast bulk of programming jobs involve translating user requirements into functional computer code. And if you've been in the business more than, say, three weeks, you've no doubt learned that the customer's written requirements generally have little relationship to what the customer actually needs. Central to what we do is figuring out those little nuances of a customer's business that let us write an effective application--which inevitably involves asking questions the customer never even considered we'd ask.
For example: I'm presently wor
Globalization is going to be painful occasionally because of the disparate incomes in various parts of the world. It isn't just IT and manufacturing, it's all jobs - Intel has a marketing division in India, Boeing has a design center in Japan, and so on. If you aren't delivering some value that can't be offshored, you are vulnerable.
In the IT industry that means you need to learn to be close to your customer - so they can't replace you with a coder in China.
What is happening is simple - we used to talk about automation replacing manufacturing workers, and code writers being replaced by RAD tools. Maybe someday. But first we have to elevate the worth of human being worldwide so that their pay makes the cost of this automation economically valuable.
Some people question the wisdom of globalization because of the painful changes it forces in an economy. That is not tenable long-term. The planet is shrinking and if we are going to avoid devastating wars and dislocations we must make the nations of the world so interdependent that there is no potential for gain in anything but full participation on a global society.
I agree with what you've said.
Rather than make this a long conversation about the "bill of goods" that Globalist have sold us. Why not read about it
The American public has been sold, lock, stock, and barrel.
Ok lets take it from the top.
1. There are people with functional brains and mathematical skills all over this planet. The US has no lock on either commodity.
2. The educational system here has been garbage for years. We have emphasized collage preparatory skills over vocational skills and managerial and business skills over technical and engineering skills. Other places haven't had this luxury or stupidity.
3. Capitol ALWAYS seeks the lowest cost solution. As soon as the ability to move material goods became cheap enough to negate a localized location requirement for manufacturing items, then the next highest cost became the labor expense and companies sought the lowest labor cost market they could find. To not have done so would have been a breach of their obligation and duty to maximize the profits of their corporation. As soon as the transfer of information became inexpensive, knowledge based companies did the same. And investment companies have done the same. What do you think the currency trading and international banking markets are all about anyway?
4. Don't know about you friend, but when I was born I didn't come with any guaranties or warranties. Competition is the natural state of life and you can no more be shielded from it in employment then you can in any other factor of your existence.
In short, you are all whining. Some have said that people of this opinion must not have ever lost a job to such outsourcing. Good guess, but wrong. I myself have been fired, quit, and been downsized out of positions. No one has yet assured me that I'll have this job forever, nor even this line of work. I've been through four different career fields so far and if I have to do a fifth then I do. If the only other job you can get is "do you want fries with that", then neither your initiative nor your imagination impress me. Try becoming a plumber, I can never find a good one when I want one, and it's bloody hard to downsize that position to India. Or start your own business, or go work for the government, go into sales or... But stop wasting the world's time complaining about how the gravy train has stopped flowing for you. You were put on this world to suffer and work, only slaves get things handed to them, free men have to earn all they get, so get moving or be a slave. And since it's corporate profits that are increased then don't fight the tide, roll WITH it. The rule is INVEST, INVEST, and INVEST. Not in stupid, flash in the pan ventures either, but for the long term and steady returns. My father in law is eighty, he's been a farmer all his life, when he was twenty he was smart enough to figure out that farming would never pay worth a damn, so he invested every extra dime he could. He still goes out there and farms, because hard work has never scared him and at heart he's still a farmer. But he's put three daughters through collage and helped them all get started in life with the money from his investments. Stop whining about the moneyed class and figure out how to get into it.
"I, for one, do emphatically support people who want to screw me." ...especially the ugly ones.
The upper 1% of wage earners pay for 35% of government income.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Consultant betrayed us! Wicked, tricksy, false. We ought to wring his filthy little neck. Fire him! Fire him! Outsource them both. And then we take the precious and we be the master."
Folks, get with the program. Job lose is normal. Adapt or move on.
Right now, there are literally millions of opportunities here.
Personally, I am part of several startups that is taking advantage of all of the above. Based on the first 3, one of the startups has won several major contracts to move another 1000 systems over to Linux and provide the monthly support. We are anticipating even more.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Firstly this is just yet another doom-and-gloom BS article of the sort that appears during every single downturn: Each time it's pronouncement of prophecies, and then a few years later when we have a market where web slugs are making $150K/annum these people are silently biding their time waiting for the next downturn to spout their negativity.
Having said that, firstly Indian workers aren't working for "less" : Many of them have large homes, servents, etc. The issue is one of currency conversion: The US dollar is grossly overvalued, and while it allows US companies to buy foreign firms cheap, it also makes the same US operations uncompetitive on the global market (which is why the US has had a trade deficit for many years). Already as the US $ has declined the hypothetical cost competitiveness of Indian firms has greatly diminished.
In the end, though, India isn't the "problem" with the IT market: The problem is that IT hasn't delivered on its promise. In many organizations the redundant and overlapping IT processes take a large share of the budget, earning a lot of attention for cost savings. The software development process is an absolute FARCE, with the majority of software projects being absolute failures, often coupled with extremely heavyweight processes that ensure that the actual developer is a tiny portion of the process (with a massive business paper trail). Tell me that you can get a 30% savings by outsourcing to India, and I'd say that you could probably yield a 80%+ savings by culling the deadweight and switching to an Agile process: Something that actually yields results.
"That said, I still support free trade, I don't think it's right to make society as a whole suffer to enrich a few IT professionals with outdated skills."
And yet you see no problem with enriching a "few" multinational US (in name only) corporations, at the expense of everyone from the middle-class on down?
Someone's suffering, and it's not the people who put us into this whole mess.
Globalization as presently implimented is flawed. It has taken about 30 years for some of the effects to be seen, but it's exponentially downhill from here. Hope you like Ramen noodles.
So basically, you have faith that some unknown new industry will come along, and everyone will get jobs in that, once all the current jobs are gone? And you have this faith in spite of no evidence, based purely on the fact that in the past it's happened a few times?
Well, you've certainly adopted capitalism as religion.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
1. Watch jobs move to the other side of the globe
2. Sell IP Telephony systems
3. Profit!!!
> don't expect a great deal of
> political support for laws to help keep
> programming jobs in the U.S.
I should damn well hope not. That is the solution of the coward and a thug -- "thug" because it involves using the threat of violence (all laws are ultimately enforced by men with guns) to take out the competition, and "coward" because those proposing such thuggish methods hide behind their proxies in the legislature and law enforcement.
I have a wife and four kids and have been out of work for 2-1/2 months, but I'll clean toilets for a living before I'll stoop to threatening someone with violence to get a job.
In fact, you could then get another job, and another Indian and so on and so forth. You could become a millionaire.
And then everyone on slashdot would talk about how evil you are for not paying them 6 times as much to do that work, even though you couldn't possibly afford it...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
those not IT. The IT people want their salaries
to rise, but the non-IT people want everyone
else (except themselves) to get lost so prices
in the US stay low.
I can with no difficulty understand both groups:
they all want what is best for them., and that
fine. But please, leave morality arguments
out of the discussion; such arguments are useless to both
groups and the discourse becomes pathetic.
Basically the article is pointing out how the Baby Boomer generation is preparaing to retire within the next few years and this is going to great a massive labor shortage. The largest of these labor shortages will be in the IT field. Here's a paragraph (any typos are mine):
The chart referenced is the same as found here, just without the pretty graphics.
According to this article, there is hope on the horizon for us. Even if this hope is two years away.
The typical indian programmer makes $10k now.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We are throwing all the fat people overboard while our ship is sinking. Reminds me of Enron CEO's dumping stock for personal gain. I bet other countries love to watch how fellow Americans screw each other over all the time. I want to say more but "Fear factor" just some on. later@!
mod this up
yeah my company uses this technique all the time - playing vendors against each other and insuating bigger carrots if they will just "take one for the team" this time. I have personally seen my company drive 2 vendors into the dirt with these little games they play.
More on topic -
Its not just software that's being outsourced: its engineering in general, coupled with manufacturing. Its disgusting to watch thriving R&D units get shaved away into skeletons of PHB's, "engineering project managers", and a secretary or two.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
It's not any more difficult for an Indian to "sound American" then it is for an American to sound British. I know of one Indian chick that spoke with no discernable accent when I talked with her, but spoke with a very acute Indian accent when talking to other Indians.
Lots of Indians grow up using English anyway, but speak with the same accent everyone else does. But they can drop or change theirs as well as any other native speaker.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Gupta: Habib! Habib! The server went down in America.
Habib: Oh goodness gracious, what are we going to do?
lets see, ,schematic, layout , full fpga design etc etc with the usual bit of software.
u s mill)
I work in australia as the embedded hardware engineer of a small company..
I can do and have done full design cycle at system level
I get about 30k AUS a year. 30k *0.6 =~ $20k US and thats on CONTRACT. Now maybe i could earn $50k aus if i wanted to do 80 hours a week but lets not go there($25 to $30k US). My guess is that in the US, someone doing this would be getting somewhere between 50kUS to 80kUS from friends i have over there.
So over here you can get 2 to almost 4 designers for the price of one US designer and YES our company is in cometition with US companies and has done designs for leading European medical companies as well as doing significant design for some very large japanese companies.
To be honest 30k is pretty crap, but i dont know many other hardware engineers with jobs.
Now lets move to singapore. Typical hours are from 8am in the morning and often to 10pm at night and i can tell you my singaporean friends are pretty darn dedicated and education is very serious there not like in Aus or the US. Taxes are a bit lower in singapore than Aus and non senior hardware engineers might get 15kUS to 20kUS for local companies. We arent even near china prices yet.
Now can you pay your rent in the US for that much in a cheap suburb?
So I sit somewhere in the middle. I dont enjoy whats happening but there is nothing you can do about it. One of the main areas where jobs are going to is china.. so lets look at some stats.
company,%profitincreaselastyear,revenue($
Intel 34 2000
Nvida 60 900
STmicro. 40 900
TI 57 766
Motorola 22 450
Nat.Semi 49 270
Analog.dev 42 240
etc you get the drift.
As you can see alot of companies are making alot of money in china. So naturally those companies have to put some money back into china. Its like a balloon with air, if you take the air out and dont put any back its a pretty pathetic balloon.
So basically its not JUST that the US is loosing jobs to china etc but that tech revenue is decreasing in the US and thus so do jobs, but tech revenue is increasing in china and thus so do jobs..
The real issue comes down to that we need technology perminently but we dont need designers perminently(on mass) and thus there is no secure revenue for designers(programmers engineers etc) because problems get solved. Unfortunately the economy relies on people being employed so they can buy things and thus we end up with an unstable system..
1.programmers/engineers fix problem and make money
2.programmers/engineers spend money and make economy strong
3.problem fixed engineers fired
4.programmers/engineers dont spend money economy falters.
5.machines get thrown out because companies go broke
6.unemployed engineer makes new machine and cycle continues
modern economics is based on an economy NEEDING people to work, but now machines do 90% of the manufacturing people arent needed to work all the time, but they are needed to buy things and maintain the machines once in a while. classic unstable system system in control theory. So how many years will it take polititions to realise their theories arent up to date and that unstable systems need dampener controls.
Actually in some countries they have in part, its called the service sector. You forever need services so if you have a large services sector the economy is less suseptable to this cycle.
Unfortunately services sectors basically bleed economies, they are a result of bad designs needing maintance and if manufacturing isnt strong enough to generate real income the services sector also falters(ie in the end people need to buy real items like food).whats more robotics will soon kill even the services sector in many areas.
Interesting times ahead
Well said. Corporations and greed, who'd have thunk it. It's quite possible that America will end up not being the far and away richest country in the world.
Everyone should look at California, they are often a prediction of what will happen in the rest of America. Outrageous housing costs and living expenses, and jobs that can't even come close to covering the bill.
Want to survive in the new new economy? Learn a second language, and I don't mean C#, or a Romance language. Try something like Hindi or Chinese. Now you can be your companies ambassador, and be once again on top of the food chain. If people want to code programs for $10,000/year. I say let them. I sure as hell won't, but I wouldn't mind telling them what to do, as a project management role.
Think how valuable it would be for someone who understands the culture, and language, of the country that people are outsourcing too, and also has a strong tech background. Imagine if you knew three languages?
There are too many grifters in IT anyway. Way too many people are in just for the money, and not because they love it.
In volatile times there is opportunity to be had. Carpe diem and all that. Also, there has to be a reason why people are leaping at the chance to work for $10k/year in India. I am betting the cost of living is ridiculously low. I bet they aren't screwed up on software patents either (althought I don't know). You're out of the reaches of companies like SCO.
If all the high tech talent moves to countries where it makes sense. Hell. Who wouldn't hire an American who only wanted $10k/year to write programs. In fact you might get a little extra, because you are one of our own.
if(life == lemons) {
if(you == makelemonade) {
exit(SUCCESS);
}
sourpuss();
exit(LOSER);
}
No.
Unlike steal or textiles, coding can be done anywhere. You just won't see the same rates that you did before. There will be plenty of Americans willing to code for $20k and by then Indian rates may have gone up for good coders.
Since you don't need big factories and infrastructure you can move these jobs around too whatever's cheaper.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Once more, I find myself educating those who should not need it... IT is more than just programming, people! Yes, programming jobs are going overseas. Phone support is going overseas. But in-your-office-today support? That's not going anywhere.
So we won't be able to design waterparks, but we can still clean toliets!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Job security by proximity doesn't quite hold up, because companies can hire foreign employees and then move them to the US for 6-12 months.
My office has many Indian subcons who sit in the US for extended periods (>12 months) but are paid foreign wages.
And yes, they interact with my customers just like I do.
I see the writing on the wall.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There are still enough companies around (at least here in Australia) that consider software developers as so much better than the rest of their employees that they still get ridiculously high wages and excellent conditions.
Consider the company that I work at. (don't ask - I'm not going to tell. It's one of the reasons I'm posting anonymously) The developers get their *own* lunchroom, a corner of the office that is beautifully fitted out that the rest of the company is not allowed near and a base wage of around $80,000.
Then there are the people such as myself who are stuck with the job of supporting the crud that these people turn out. We're the ones that have to deal with their software running at the speed of snails on Windows 2000 or later and often fail to generate error messages capable of giving us the slightest clue as to what is causing the problem.
We're the ones that have cheap and nasty wooden desks packed together like sardines in a part of the office that have blown lights replaced once every 6 months (if we're lucky) and gaslift chairs that you have to raise five times a day. We're the people that have to wait second or third in line to get software installed on our PCs in order to do our jobs and have to repeatedly beg for various things that make our jobs easier (such as as headsets for people who spend all day on the phone) Our base wage starts in the low $30Ks and even the level 2 techs only get the mid $30Ks.
Somebody tell me why this is fair?
Wrong, go take economics 101 again. Full employment, without central planning and price controls, generally leads to hyperinflation due to basic supply and demand. This is regulated largely through interest rates. Notice how LOW they are now? Think there might be a reason? Well, labor is paid for through capital (read:money) and interest rates reflect the cost of money. High unemployment? Lower interest rates (increase demand). Inflation? Raise interest rates (remove demand). A simplification, but a relatively accurate one. When was the last time the United States had ZERO unemployment, which is defined as those "actively seeking full-time employment" NOT simply "those not working?" Answer: NEVER. So, yes, it is possible to just not have a job -- a scenario exacerbated by the fact that OVERqualified candidates are often eliminated. PhD's bitch about this ALL the time, especially since India has more of 'em than anyone and they work CHEEEAAP. Knock the rosy-cheeked economic sophism in favor of a slightly more complex reality.
What the hell is up with this article going on and on about how we can't hope for govenerment intervention so we're screwed? Where did this weirdo notion come from?
The way to combat this outsourcing problem is well known--they're called unions and I'm not talking about a C overlapping data structure here. If IT people can't or won't unionize, then... yeah, we're screwed. Get over it and move on.
Me and my Bachelor's degree in CS are gonna start a happy-fun career as a plant operator at a wastewater treatment facility in a week or so. (no joke)
Furry cows moo and decompress.
The person who wrote this article is a flamming asshole. One, I have a real problem with people who believe no one should get sympathy because that person hasn't heard it from a specific group of people. How the hell does this prick know whether or not I care if cab-drivers and steel workers lose their jobs to employees in other countries? The fact is "asshole" that I grew up with steel and I surely do give a flying fuck about it. Just because my chosen interest and choice of employment disturb you doesn't make your misconception of me my problem. Nor does it give you the right to say shut up and take it. In other words, if assholes could fly, this would be the airport, and you would have the biggest plane you meatheaded sack of shit.
A old maxim says that the collective intelligence of a corporation is inversely proportional to its size. My company is one of the ten largest corporations in the world, so its collective intelligence is pretty low.
Our marketing designed and spec'ed product is failing miserably in the market. Our "legacy" engineering designed system is still doing gangbusters and keeping us afloat. The corporate solution to this problem? Sell our core intellectual property to our competitors for a flat sum, officially obsolete the legacy product, and make press releases that the failing product is actually the market leader.
Oh...and outsource our core engineering. All software development and most hardware development is to go to India. This isn't just some webpages or stuff. These are specialized medical embedded systems. The company laid off half of engineering, most of IT, but no one in human resources, finance or marketing. Those in engineering that remain have been told that they will either work in management, process, or other such roles.
A group of managers and directors just got back from a hiring trip to India. The news was not encouraging. Very few qualified people were found. Collectively, everyone who went on the trip said that this offloading plan will not work without at least two years of preparation and training. But the India group is scheduled to go live in December. They all say that the new hires can't handle the level of engineering that we requires. But the executives in charge aren't listening. The Indians will only work from 8:00am to 5:00pm, their time. No exceptions. So if we need to teleconference with them, it is us who need to come in five hours early to stay five hours late. We spent the last fifteen years building up an engineering department with intimate knowledge of our specialty, only to have anyone even close to collecting a pension layed off. We replaced them with Indian kids straight out of college. Our collective expertise in the field didn't get halved, it got decimated. We couldn't build a new product know if we tried.
In the short term I'm sure this will prop up the stock price for the board of directors, but in the long run it is the death of our company. And this isn't just us. All our major competitors are doing to same thing!
Hey! There's people in India who will take the job of CEO or vice president for a twentieth the salary! Why aren't they considering that option?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Indians speak better English than you do. They've been bilingual their whole lives. Good luck with that evening course in Hindi. Maybe you'll end up the janitor there.
I'm a pretty high-paid IT worker. Last year I paid $63k in state and federal taxes. I don't know how many more people like me are around but we do contribute a pretty fair amount to the tax pool.
I don't know how many jobs will go overseas; I've seen estimates ranging from 1 million to 5 million. Let's just guess 3 million for now. Let's say that on average they pay $40k per year in taxes and get newer lower paying jobs where they only pay $20k a year instead. So the government would lose about $60 billion a year in tax revenue. If some people can't get jobs for a while there are unemployment benefits the government must pay as well as even lower tax revenues.
Expect companies to make up the difference? As I recall, income taxes paid by companies constitute about 3% of the total internal revenue taxes. People get few breaks, but companies get more tax breaks than you can shake a stick at. You can be sure that the extra profits made as a result of outsourced jobs will not result in an equal amount of additonal tax revenue. Not even close.
The fact part is that $60 billion in lost tax revenue is only a small percentage of the estimated annual deficit in the next few years. How long before the country goes bust or achieves hyper-inflation?
As an avid Slashdot reader, I was somewhat scared when I graduated from college in May. I thought I would never find a job in IT after reading so many doom and gloom stories, yet within weeks of graduation I landed a great job. In fact, I had my pick from 3 great IT jobs after only sending out(or rather hand-delivering with a nice suit on) a dozen or so copies of my resume. I make more than just about all my peers in other fields and I really do like my job: developing enterprise systems in .NET!
I don't have any great background either, I majored in MIS and Finance. My only IT experience was some light consulting work I did to help put myself through college.
I'm AC for a reason, this isn't a "look how lucky I am" post, it is a "it's not all bad" type post. Keep the faith!
welcome our Indian programmer overlords.
Use TAX Policy to keep jobs in the US
1) Eliminate all offshore tax shelters
2) Eliminate R&D deductions equal to the saleries
of US workers replaced by offshore workers
3) Eliminate H1b and L1 Visas for any quarter
where the unemployment rate in the target
industry exceeds 3%
4) Offer a Tax deduction of 20% of the witholding tax
paid by US employees with saleries between
1.5 and 10 times the minimum wage
This would make US employees cost competitive
with low paid forign workers.
"I suspect most of the truly high-tech work (such as scientific programming that depends on a thorough knowledge of science as well as software) will stay here."
Read this and realize that that's not going to be the case. It's also the same reason the "retrain, reeducate" argument doesn't work as well as it's advocates would like.
a bit off topic, but just to let people know how far you have to fall in order to get food stamps in california, you have to earn less than 10K a year, and you cannot have any assets worth more than 3,000 dollars. Meaning, if you are broke but still have a car that's worth 3,000 clams or more, or you have a pile in the bank or in retirement funds, no food stamps for you.
This nation expects you to be practically destitute before giving you any food aid. Now I know a lot of us have never had / nor will have to deal with extreme poverty, but from what I've seen, there's not much of a safety net if you fall from the comforts of middle class. Being on welfare and food stamps doesn't mean you're doing well, at all. It's shocking to think people still assume people would actually WANT to be on welfare because they're too lazy to work...
IT workers should have unionized when they had the chance. Year after year, Slashdotters puffed out their chests and said, "I don't need a union!" Now we do. And it's probably too late. Corporations have latched on to the idea that low wage overseas IT workers are better than domestic IT workers. They'll never give it up.
in the reply in an almost identical discussion. The answer remains the same.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
.... which is what they've been doing for the past three years and propping up our sagging economy. Just whip out the credit card and charge it. And if your cards are all maxed out? Refinance your home. Consumer credit debt is at an all time high. Heck who needs a job? Just give everyone a charge card and everyone's happy!
"This could be because most American programmers are lazy and somewhat stupid. Most of them think they are 'l33t because they know how to use ASP and Access. So few people know anything about Computer Science, it really is a waste what we are paying them. They are terribly slow, have almost no initiative, and have trouble communicating with customers." http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/08/27/132243.sht ml?tid=3
I know a handful of people who have graduated recently from major universities with the more generalized CS degrees(A little bit of engineering, a bit of math, and everything on data structures), and have no problems getting and keeping jobs. It seems like outsourcing is only affecting, slightly lower level IT people. Granted we've all heard a couple of horror stories about great IT Professionals getting laid off because they are too old, the economy is declining, etc. But it seems that CS grads are still marketable as long as their training isn't too specific( I.E. Learning .net, or other MS crap that changes every other month)...it really doesn't seem to effect those with actual skills too much...but that's just my point of view.
This far in, this post will probably not get read but...I just landed a 4-month contract that will yield a considerable amount of cash. When I was going through the sale, the client told me that they saw similar applications for less than 1000. They wanted to know why I was asking for 30,000.
The old line "you get what you pay for" is still very valid. You will find that companies are still very much willing to pay for good work. Granted, they're not paying $200/hr, but there is still money to be made. The bottom line is that you have to convince your potential client that you are offering them quality. Quality, support, and personalization in the development of the software. If you can show them why the job cost as much as it does (through a detailed Statement of Work), it'll be much easier for them to accept it.
But this is not the true purpose of my post. To be sure, this is a very scary time for many people and I am very sympathetic. Finding new jobs is very difficult, but there are a couple of things that you can do.
First, let me just say that I hate sales. I don't know anyone that enjoys selling, but you have to do it. Now, I have an edge as I have been an independent contractor for over 10 years. But anyone can do it on their own.
The key to being successful is networking. Quick tip for those with a bit of free time. Pick up a networking book such as Masters of Networking. Figure out who you know and who you can sell to. Put yourself in situations where you are forced to meet new people - preferably 10 a day. This is not selling in the pure sense. It's not cold calling. Just go and get involved in activities that involve other business people.
A couple of thing that I have done recently:
1) Join a business network group, such as BNI.
2) Join a social group that attracts business people. I recommend Toast Masters. As an added bonus, you will learn to present yourself better.
3) Every one is freaking out over the SoBig virus right now. Similarly, a lot of people want to go wireless in their homes but, with always-on broadband connections, are afraid of getting "0wn3d". Print up some flyers, walk around your neighborhood, *personally* meet with every neighbor, and offer, for *free* to help check their PCs for viruses (virii if you're so inclined), configure their firewalls, recommend a router. This will get you in front of people, generate goodwill, and let your neighbors know of your availability.
One of the most powerful ways to find new work is through referrals. I haven't made a cold call in my life. All of my new clients come to me through referrals. Word-of-mouth and a personal recommendation can do a lot more for you than any marketing brochure or telemarketing script could ever do. Go over a list of people that you have worked for and with in the past 5 years. Call them up, catch up on lost time, work in that you're available, meet for lunch. Don't turn it into a sales pitch, just keep it friendly. They'll get the idea. And you'll get out of the house.
Find ways to get yourself in front of people and let them know that you are here. It's not easy, that's true. I was extremely shy when I started. Now, I speak at tech conferences in front of more than 7,000 people. I carry a stack of business cards with me at all times. I find opportunities to start conversations with people.
I didn't start out knowing how to "work a room" and I still have a long way to go. But, I am making a living. Not as much as a couple of years ago, but my bills are getting paid and I am sleeping at night.
Consider this. When you see a job posting, there are over 1000 applicants that you are competing with. As you might guess, most HR/recruiters do not have the time to read through all of them. They'll go through the first
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
I've always felt that success this century will go to those who can be a nerd about as many things simultaneously as possible :).
My video compression blog
No. Do not 'enhance' health care systems.Stop! Doctors and middlemen pushing antibiotics is not healthy yet is is done to the end. I should be able to choose when and where I purchase medication, and canda mexico have THAT freedom right over us. Only make us be dependent on the wealthy. Teach people how to take care of themselves. Make roadways safe or try to change the current system of transport. That is the biggest problem we are facing and will face. Patents only make the rich richer. ABOLISH PATENTS.
Automobiles. Think of all the technology we have and will have without automobiles. If we continue on our present course of automobiles we will wind up regreting it. We allow for to much freedom with such a dangerous machine, in all aspects. It's possible if you try to imagine them gone.. Jesus do you see how many people ride on the road during working hours? Is this not a waste of energy or not, there should be reprections for such wastful useage.
Work less but allow access to what life has to offer not to charge a loan's worth to relax.
If we allow companies to outsource, we should have puchasing access to companies outside the US. That way the consumer also benefits otherwise TARIFF what is going outside us borders. Is that not just? As it is now , is surely is not natural to give more to those who have more than enough.
Those who manage must have something to manage, if they wish to spend their lives attached to a beeper and phone so be it! They made their own decision but in the end everyone else around them loses then finally the circle completes itself.
It's all about choices, currently the only way to get around seriously is by automobile. That is not a choice! People in the US should also have an equal amount of choice being an IT person as much as a manager, especially if they love it, like me.
Best Regards,
John
"I think the real problem behind a lot of the issues in America today comes down to greed--whether it's the RIAA or Tech companies sending jobs overseas."
Or the greed of the citizentry.
Anyway I'm watching it now, and one of the points is that outsourcing may be a monetary boon, but a PR dud. That's why outsourcing isn't talked about much by the companies doing it.
There was also something on MSN(?) that pointed out the correllation between those that do lots of outsourcing and layoffs, and the increase in executive pay, and other benefits.
I've been saying this for a while and people look at me like I have a green mustache.
..... etc will take us there. They can never pay little guys to little and they can never pay the CEO's to much.
The jobs get outsourced to Indian Consulants, but the end result in products or whatever is still sold here for the same amount, only with a much higher profit. BUT, here's the rub, we have Americans making less so they can't afford to buy a bunch of overpriced american goods any more. A bunch of Indian programers and accountants making $6000 a year aren't going to be lining up to $1500 Amana Fridges, $30000+ ford SUVs or $20 brittany spears cds. Except the CEO's still want to make thier 20 million a year salaries. There will be massive defaltion, something has to give. The CEO's want to make all the money, only problem if they have all the money and they aren't paying US and they aren't paying the Indians a whole lot, no one has the money to buy thier stuff.
If things get bad enough Congress WILL enact those tarrifs, they will do all the things the author said they should'nt, because thats thier job. Eventually we will have socailst style gov't where everything is regulated ( all those regs require gov't employees to do the watching).
I don't like it but the every greedy CEOs, CFOs, CIOs
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
The software open source movement, MIT making their courses available online, the BBC making their old shows available, the US outsourcing their workforce, free trade, clandestine immigration... all look like a part of the same trend to me. The protectionist stance is less and less sustainable, if only due to advances in technology.
Pretty soon, as much as we might like to, we won't be able to speak in terms of nations. The boundaries are becoming more and more meaningless and artificial (if they weren't already, according to some ideologies). Indians are working for American companies, American forces are in Iraq, it's already happening!
Funnily enough, quite opposing ideologies are fighting the same protectionist battle, but on different fronts: the people defending copyright are not really the same people opposing free trade!
All I'm saying is, protectionism seems doomed in the long term, on all fronts, for better or for worse.
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Presently, the outsourcing rush is correcting an obvious market inefficiency; namely that for whatever reason, highly educated Indian labor is cheaper. A properly functioning economy redresses such imbalances rapidly: India's skilled workforce is finite and its value will increase with average quality of life, reaching parity with ours.
Parity, however, is grossly distorted in this situation. Indian employees and firms do not pay the ~45% tax (spread over income, miscellaneous regulation, property, ad naseum) that their counterparts here and in Europe must. In effect, this aggregate taxation is an enormous tariff sponsoring foreign labor, and the otherwise natural equilibrium in compensation found at parity ought to rest in the vicinity of... 20% ->below- foreign levels.
I do not mean to imply first world taxes are wasted by govt, but some combination of reducing the largely unconstitutional federal bloat and introducing tariff on outsourced production (correcting for minuscule Indian cost of living) raises job market parity to a bearable level.
However, overriding protectionism (such as that Japan *still* favors) will certainly ruin this nation. After all, how will all our exported capital ever return as investment if the US and Europe appear content to maintain the status quo (0% GDP growth, in more obvious terms)? Long decades of trade deficit and wholesale hollowing out of domestic industry afford developed countries little flexibility defending what little real productivity they retain. Socialist policy and GDP shrinkage or free market and some painful hard work are the plausible remaining options.
Suggestions that companies outsourcing their labor are self-interested offer no insight. Individual and corporate motivation to profit are the only reliable constants in a democratic, capitalist society.
My thoughts seem grossly out of place as I read recent comments, but what the hey.
hell, if there is someone that will do the job for less than me to feed themselves, then why shouldnl't they get the job....just because they aren't American? does that mean they dont get as hungry as me or something?
Business2.0 is running the story in teaser format to nonsubscribers. I found the following summary of it at http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/967536/posts .
-----
THE COMING JOB BOOM
Judy Reed is a buyer in a buyer's market, and frankly, that has its advantages. The vice president for human resources at Stratus Technologies, a Maynard, Mass., maker of high-reliability servers, Reed never lacks for attention at parties and dinners in this employment-starved economy. When she does post a job, she gets four times the volume of responses she got three years ago, and some job seekers even follow up with Christmas cards. If she wanted to, she could fill every opening at a salary 15 percent below the going rate -- as, in fact, many of her competitors do.
But that's one advantage Reed won't take. She recently hired an engineer with more than 10 years' experience for nearly six figures -- the same wage she paid at the height of the bubble. Reed isn't just being kind. Sheasserts that any other course of action is asking for trouble down the road. "The buyer's market we're in now is temporary," she warns. "Maybe it'll last another year or two." And then? "Companies that haven't taken care to build worker loyalty," she says, "will find themselves in the same predicament as in 1999 and 2000."
At this particular moment in history, that is quite a statement. Two million workers have been downsized or displaced since the recession of 2001. At 6.2 percent, the national unemployment rate is the highest it's been in nine years, and the number of new jobless claims has sat above 400,000 for 20 weeks.
But Reed isn't alone. Executives at Cigna, Intel, SAS, Sprint, Whirlpool, WPP, and Adecco... have told Business 2.0 that they, too, worry that the supply of labor is about to fall seriously short of demand. Former Treasury Secretary and current Harvard University president Larry Summers regards a skilled labor shortage as all but inevitable. Economists... have issued warnings to the same effect. And in April, the country's largest and most influential trade group, the National Association of Manufacturers, added its voice to the chorus. The association released a white paper based on research by labor economist Anthony Carnevale, former chairman of President Clinton's National Commission for Employment Policy, that forecast a "skilled worker gap" that will start to appear the year after next and grow to 5.3 million workers by 2010 and 14 million 10 years later... "By comparison, what employers experienced in 1999 and 2000 was a minor irritation," Carnevale says. "The shortage won't just be about having to cut an extra shift. It'll be about not being able to fill the first and second shift, too."
The cause of the labor squeeze is as simple as it is inexorable: During this decade and the next, the baby boom generation will retire. The largest generation in American history now constitutes about 60 percent of what both employer and economists call the prime-age workforce -- that is, workers between the ages of 25 and 54. The cohorts that follow are just too small to take the boomers' place. The shortage will bemost acute among two key groups: managers, who tend to be older and closer to retirement, and skilled workers in high-demand, high-tech jobs.
"People think we're going to have plentiful workers forever, but that's not so," explains David Ellwood, a Harvard University professor who recently led an Aspen Institute study of the problem. "If you want to hire somebody who has traditionally been the bread and butter of the labor force, you're soon going to have to hire them away from somebody else."
No sentient adult could have made it through the past decade without developing a healthy distrust of forecasts like these. But... when Carnevale's model, for instance, shows that within seven years 30 million people now in the workforce will be older than 55, that's not a guess. It is virtually a certainty.
The result [will be] an unprecedented mismat
First, this is simply a poorly written, ill informed, and altogether uninformative article. Perhaps the jobs are shifting oversees not because of the reasons stated by the author, but because we seem to have lost the ability to properly write a journalistic article in this country.
/. pseudo-experts to determine which category IT falls within.
Directly to the point: about eighty percent of those replying--the 'hey, it's capitalism, and you should like it' gang--need to take a basic course in economics. The problem is, folks, the real world(tm) is not ceteris paribus. That is, things are not perfectly efficient. What that translates into, in terms of the job-export dimension of globalization, is exploitation. Of course, this is part of captitalism too, and it's not always a bad thing (unless it's happening to *you*).
And to a number of unresearched points made in other replies: protectionism is just as old and solid of economic tradition as free trade. Sometimes protecting industries/markets is a wise thing; sometimes allowing global free trade is a wise thing. Depends upon the circumstance. In general, protecting young, developing markets long enough to allow a ROI is prudent. Protecting old, low margin markets is not. I leave it to the
Your complaint will have much more integrity if you go through your closet and find no clothes made in Thailand, China or Indonesia
Where are the clothes that are made in the U.S.? Can you tell me? Because I have looked and looked, and can not find them. I WANT to buy U.S. goods. I can't find a U.S. VCR or DVD player. I can't find U.S. clothes, unless perhaps I hire someone myself to shear the sheep, spin the thread, weave the cloth, and sew me up a shirt.
I have a U.S. car -- that was easy to find. Other products I want, I look for "Made in U.S.A.", but can't find it. If you know where it's at, please tell me.
Think it through. The people most affected by the current resession are boomers, ie. older workers. Instead of building up their retirement savings, they are instead living off it and depleting it. This shortfall will be made up by, you guessed it, taxing younger workers. There's nothing you can do about it either. Boomers outnumber and outvote you.
All right, reality check time - let's go back to macro economics.
I'm in technology, and it's been quite a while since I really studied macro/micro (no, economics, you dolt!!! NOT design!!! :-))) Anyone
who can put a fine point on this perspective -- please do.
Like John Houseman (to misquote), "I seek clarity."
Having read much in the genre of political treatise (I admire Machiavelli, he was right so damn often!), some philosophy, and "modern day polemic" [everything is polemic, today :-/ ] I understand the argument as far as I have taken it, and I can understand how big business can manipulate events to cause this to happen - but I wonder about:
I say significant events, as the baby boomer generation (I missed it by about 8 years :-) retiring is going to put such a load on us as a
society that I don't think there will be that much benefit in the
(believed/perceived) sudden influx of available positions - if
anything, I worry that this will be the springboard needed by those
who'd ship our entire economy to someplace where more money could be
made.
So, yes, I'm a bit worried. I'm preparing, and you're here reading this, so you're far ahead of the rest of the U.S. population, but that should be small comfort to you (and to the rest of us...).
Live long and prosper.
Redundancy is good; triple redundancy is twice as good! - Me.
Except in all the examples you gave a new technology was the reason the other way of life was destroyed. Farmers could stop being farmers because their labor was needed to make machines that make farming easier and more productive. IT laborers came from manufacturing and financial jobs to make manufacturing and financial jobs easier and more productive. Outsourcing just destroys jobs and replaces them with nothing. Supporters of outsourcing also falsely assert that prices of goods will fall because of the cheaper labor. This is false for price is never set by cost to produce, but by the price the market is willing to pay. Nike and other textile jobs have been sent overseas where it cost a nickel to manufacture Nikes and what has happened to the price? Absolutely nothing, the same pair of shoes that cost a nickel to make still sells for a
$100 because people are willing to pay a $100 for shoes. Also look at automobile and furniture manufacturing for examples of industries that have outsourced, gotten cheap labor and still charge the same price or more the product. Libertarians point to electronics as an example of outsourcing that actually has lower prices due to cheaper labor. Electronics are cheaper, but not from outsourcing but from obsolescence. A 30 inch TV used to cost $1,000 but now you can get one for $200-300 and is this because of cheaper labor? No it's because the 30 inch TV is smaller than the 58 inch TV you can get with HDTV for $1500-1600. The 30 inch TV is cheaper simply because they're other models you can buy with more functionality and a bigger, clearer picture. PCs follow a similar model only at a much quicker pace. You can buy a PC for $300 but it has 2-3 year old technology in it. The cutting edge machine still cost $2000-3000. Both PCs cost about the same to manufacture, but prices are still high for the newer technology because people are willing to pay extra for more horse power and bling bling. Cost has zero impact on price in competitive markets other than setting the minimum price a manufacturer is wiling to sell. The extra money simply goes into the manufacturers back pocket and adds little value to the economy. So in summary we'll still pay the same price for goods and services, just fewer of us will be able to afford those goods and services.
I mean, heck, maybe we poor American programmers should help our poor Pakistani friends. While we're unemployed, maybe we should be designing flight software for cruise missiles, nuclear simulations,
they'd better find jobs quick for a million unemployed American geeks. There will be no limit to the trouble that we can cause.
This is my sig.
"My major current hobby is teasing people who take themselves & the quality of their knowledge too seriously...".
I believe a huge chunk of the baby boom will simply work until 75.
So let me see if I understand this correctly...protectionism will make the problem worse? But it is a shame we're losing all of these jobs? Hahahaha.
/. just started shaving). The argument is complete bullshit (excuse my language). I mean, what has happened with industries like the textile industry? Sure, we've lost lots of minimum wage jobs to Indonesia. But we've gained tons of jobs in sales, marketing, design, and distribution for textiles. And these aren't minimum wage jobs. The people employed in these industries consume further goods, leading to markets for Wal Mart cashiers making minimum wage (the same workers that used to work in the textile industry). Are we better off as a result? Well, it sure hurt during the transition. But the US as a whole is wealthier as a result. So are the workers in India. This is a classic "win-win" situation, so long as the people caught in the transition are not left to whither.
I remember hearing this same argument back in the 80s regarding the computer chip manufaturing industry (yes, not everyone that reads
Getting back to the computer hardware industry, it is quite true that much of the computer manufacturing industry has fled to the Far East. But guess who designed the latest Pentium M chip? My guess is that it was a team of American engineers. And I bet each one of those engineers made 10x as much as a computer hardware manufaturer would have made had those manufaturing jobs stayed here in the US. And I bet the goods consumed by these folks now employ the very people that would have been employed at the manufacturing facilities had they remained in the US. Does is suck for those displaced by the changing economy? Yes. Is the US economy better off as a result? I would claim so. [note: the downside to all of this is a greater separation of wealth between the folks that would have worked at the manufacturing facilities and those that design the chips...how we deal with the separation of wealth is a far greater problem than the flight of these manufacturing jobs to countries with lower wages]
How many of you have worked with Indian computer software programming firms? I've worked with dozens during my tenure as a programmer. Care to guess the general quality of software design and engineering coming from these firms? Let's just say that I wouldn't mind having these firms implement something designed by my fellow lazy Americans, but my experience leads me to avoid having the design work being exported. [note2: I have had the best luck with the design coming from Russian firms...but have had other issues with their work that still leads me to chose American design over low-wage design any day of the week] What is the result? The low-wage jobs do and will flee to countries such as India. But the high-wage jobs, generally in design and engineering, will remain in the US. Fewer jobs, perhaps. But higher-wage jobs.
Do I want my Nikes and underwear to be manufacturing in the US? I couldn't give a damn. Do I want the materials design for the space-age foam used in my Nikes to be developed in the US? Yes. These materials design jobs are high paying. The people working in a shoe manufacturing facility likely would be making minimum wage. The end result? Our economy continues its flight from manufacturing towards service-sector jobs such as design. And the low-wage workers in the US end up working in "trickle-down" jobs, such as McDonalds and Wal-Mart.
Are there social issues regarding this separation of wealth? Yes. Very large ones. This is why I believe in social programs
--Be human.
If he had just said, "I oppose moving coding jobs to India because I'm a coder, but I favor moving textile jobs because I buy clothes," he would not be hypocritical, but simply self-serving. No problem there. But then he shouldn't whine about how unfair it is that coding jobs move overseas, and how domestic jobs should be inherently saved.
Every argument against shipping jobs overseas boils down to being racist, self-serving, hypocritical, or a combination of any of the three.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This is eerily similar to the talk Neo had in Matrix: Reloaded. The discussion on whether the machines had control even at the most basic level -- purifying water, cleaning the air. Do we even now have a lack of control? What if all Asian countries decided to stop producing goods -- would our economy survive? Think of how many companies have ties in Asian countries. The automobile industry, heck even the IT industry with it's reliance on Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturing would nosedive. The stock markets would fold, there'd be a mass hysteria trying to create those products again. We'd have to figure out how to deal with it and the first thing we'd do is take the jobs to South America or elsewhere and start the whole thing again.
Or perhaps I'm just giving the worst case scenario. At any rate, it's interesting to think about the implications of globalization for those being "served."
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
First NAFTA moved the jobs from the US to Mexico. Now the jobs are moving from Mexico to China. The Mexicans were "overpaid" at $4,000 a year while the Chinese make $1,000 a year. CEO pay is, of course, higher than ever.
L. Long had a natural ability to always land on his feet. He also advised as I do to keep a blaster or needle gun of some type upon your person to make sure in all situations you are at least at parity if not more than equal to others who may be more than intent on screwing you. Good advice.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
with health care in the precarious, expensive state its in, it's quite possible a lot of boomers with depleted retirement savings will be unable to afford decent health care and die sooner than later. Then, with them out of the picture, problem solved. They gotta die sometime, and dead people can't out number or out vote. And besides, gen Y in terms of population vastly out number the boomers, and they're on the cusp of voting age.
For starters, what's with this statement they inserted in the middle of the whole thing:
"Libertarian IT workers who watch their jobs go overseas should derive joy from geographic shifts in employment. Their "dog eat dog" creed requires them to be happy whenever the marketplace finds a way to pay workers less and increase business owners' profits."
Did the author of the story suddenly feel a need to attack Libertarians or what?? That's, at best, a very inaccurate statement.
Libertarians have no "dog eat dog" creed! If anything, it's more of a "live and let live" creed. Do whatever you wish, as long as you don't infringe on other's rights to do the same.
As a self-proclaimed "Libertarian I.T. worker" myself, I can assure you, I'm not taking great joy in the marketplace constantly finding ways to pay workers less for their work. On the contrary, I'd simply like to see workers able to keep more of the money they're entitled to for their labor, rather than be forced to turn about 1/3rd. of it over in taxes.
But I digress....
On this I.T. outsourcing issue, I'm not sure if any of us really know yet how it will all pan out. I have a strong suspicion it will be a short-term "bad thing" that turns out to be a "good thing" in the long run. Why? Well, many 3rd. world countries are far behind the technology curve right now, but are trying hard to catch up. When enough of them earn some money doing I.T. (even if it is for the U.S. companies), it will help spur interest and growth of I.T. in their own countries. Eventually, that means they'll be needed locally, instead of only when they take U.S. jobs. (That also means new jobs might become available for U.S. workers willing to accept work overseas.)
Part of the problem with this whole "global economy" thing is that U.S. citizens are still going into it with "tunnel vision". We're all about the "What's in it for me, today?" -- and tend to forget it may take some pain and suffering now, to "jump start" the economies of other countries, so we'll all be operating on a larger, more level playing field down the road.
In the short term though, yeah - I don't think you can avoid some of the I.T. outsourcing. Much depends on how much human interaction is required from your job. Programmers generally don't need high levels of interaction. They're paid to bang out a product (code), and if foreigners code cheaper - that's the new "going rate" for the work.
Including me, and I like it.
When I buy stuff, I buy the cheapest stuff. I don't care where it's made, it's all the same planet to me. And you know what? 99% of IT workers are the same way.
It doesn't freaking matter. As long as we keep outsourcing jobs to foreign countries, we can keep making less money and maintain the same standard of living, because things keep getting cheaper.
I know its comforting and easy to blame "greedy corporate executives", but if you think the money that's saved from hiring foreign workers goes into executive pockets, you're an idiot. It goes to lowering prices so that that company doesn't get put out of business by their competition who DOES outsource their labor to India and gives the American people what they *REALLY* want...
Cheaper shit.
paintball
Actually I've been on welfare AND food stamps. It's not the picnic everyone makes it out to be. Yea you can go above what the system offers ASSUMING you're willing to NOT play by the rules (read that as crimminal acts). The system's not for the honest, because the honest barely survive if at all (and woe to anyone caught, for the government can make your life a hell).
It's like credit card debt. The effects can linger, and weight mightly (been there, done that, sold the T-Shirt for food).
here in sf we just got a rent reduction on our apt, which was rented at a discount from what it was before. rents have bowed to market pressure, thank goodness. buying a home, sadly, has not, maybe that's the other shoe to drop.
If this trend of outsourcing continues maybe products will become cheaper, if the labor used to produce everything is cheaper. that would be interesting to see. but then wouldn't we start running into the problem of deflation?
You seem to be under the impression that the global economy is operating under 'free trade'. It isn't.
And that seems to me to be the root of the problem.
What if a nuclear war breaks out between India, and Pakistan? What if some extremist group launchs a major attack in one of the countries? What if some crazy dictator comes to power in one of the countries, and tries to extort US Companies? I truly feel that we are going to get burned with this outsourcing. There are many goods made in these countries, that if the supply was cut off, we could do without, but how do these tech companies plan to handle something bad happening. Information is different, and I am afraid one day we are going to get stung by one of these governments.
Ok, call me stupid, and I've floated this idea before...so let me say it again (and I'll say it again later too).
Why can't a person setup a company in the middle of USA, say Oklahoma or West Virginia, where living is cheap, and where people are content to enjoy nature and being paid less, say 30-40k a year. Sure, it's not as low as India, but if the quality of software products and services were high, English skills are a given (and will be head and shoulder above those of native Indians), time zone is better, it's more "patriotic", etc... there are many benefits to outsourcing to such a company.
What I'm saying is, I think USA can compete with India on Indians terms. Sure, say goodbye to Silicon Valley (and good riddens, what a horrid, trashy place it has become, yuck, yuck). Say goodbye to high salaries. But all is not lost and there is plenty of room, we, USA citizens, can go down in price and still be happy. There will always be some fat schmucks who are arrogant and think they deserve 100k a year to write 2 lines of code a day, screw em. But there is plenty of opportunity in the middle of USA.
The middle of USA is like India right here inside USA. And people living in there could sure use all the economic stimulus they can get. So, it would be both cheap, and good for the people, and competitive.
So why not? If you are thinking of starting a new company, why not start it on a virgin land in some obscure state? Indians have proven that all you need is a phone line and the network connection (and sometimes even a modem connection is fine) and you get the job!
I just can't understand why seemingly every fool insists on setting up their company in San Fran or NYC and then complains that they can't find cheap labor there.
I think what you're getting at by saying "living standards will equalize" is that the standard of living in 2nd and 3rd world nations will improve while the standard of living in the 1st world will decrease, everyone averaging out somewhere in the middle (and with the vast majority of the world's population in the 3rd world the net result will be an increase). That being said, I think there will be a huge numebr of pissed Americans. Pissed spoiled Americans, who will suddenly bitch and moan because they won't be able to afford more than one car per family, more than one bathroom per home, and no, they won't be able to add a kitchen to the master bedroom and install a home theater in the basement...
http://www.freakhole.com/?item=18772&back=funny_pi cs&page_no=4
And I'm from the school of thought that recognizes that without government. There wouldn't be any kind of organized business, PERIOD. It's funny how all the free this and market that forget that very simple fact. A chaotic free-market can exist for awhile, but soon it builds structures that resemble one's that a government would have built.
In other words, the free-market as most talk about it wouldn't have existed without governments, PERIOD.
Also for the poster your repling to. REALITY CHECK. There's no complaint if someone's earned there way to the top in a fair and honest manner.
Unfortunately a disproportionate amount haven't, and if they could keep the effects of their misdeeds to themselves, then all would be alright. But they can't and didn't. Also you ASSUME that everyone has made it big, and made it early. I'm here to tell you, no they have not. And even if they did, my fair and honest comment still stands, for we all have the right to point out the misdeeds of others, and ask for redress.
Unfortunately, I've fallen so far that yes I know how hard it is.. and yes I've done it. Housing assistance is even harder. I've yet to manage to get that even when unemployed and homeless. Somehow I didn't qualify. I'm really not sure why.
Being evicted is probably one of the worse things I've been through. Having to move when you are unemployed and really have no other place to go. That and having the utiltiies shut off constantly as I strugled to stay above water. Every time they'd shut off the utilities my food would spoil.. so I'd have to buy more food.. which made it harder to pay the bills to begin with. It was these two bills (rent and utils) that totally trashed my credit while unemployed. I'd never used credit cards and the only loan I ever had was for school. Nobody really cared that a 20-something might be starving or homeless. Call various places for assistance and 'Do you have kids?' was the first and last thing they'd ask. No kids.. then well fuck off. I can see why a lot of people in this situation might choose to have a baby.
Almost as bad is when you're looking for work. The only way to get a job is to lie. You wrote software? Sorry, Taco Bell (Walmart, QuikTrip, etc) isn't interested in hiring you.. never mind that you could do the work as well or better than the teenagers working there. Or for a good job you have to lie and suddenly claim that you have a PhD in astrophysics from Big Ralph's University so that you can get a job doing the same thing you've done for years.. despite it having nothing whatsoever to do with astrophysics.
Why anybody would want to live in welfare I don't know. It's a hellish life. I'd much rather work a decent job even at less than great wages. $10/hr * 40 hours a week would be a start.. if I could get such a job that lasted longer than 6 months. I hate finishing projects and being thrown back out into this job market.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
How long will it be before the same suits who padded their profit margins by exploiting cheap labor find these same people sitting in a conference room explaining to their soon to be ex-clients that they can (because they have been doing) the same job for 50% less?
In the long term, the executives who are doing this are slitting their own throats, because they're enabling other countries with lower labor costs to gain the organizational experience and expertise to create companies that will compete with them. At least Nike and Banana Republic have brands and trademarks as a defense against knockoffs. What does EDS or Accenture have? Especially when their clients will know full well when their work is being outsourced?
I don't think that outsourcing is actually working. Many top managers don't really understand what they are doing.
American software companies are paying Indians to develop software, but while the Indians are doing that they are developing re-usable basic routines and getting basic understanding of particular industries. The first version will be delivered to the American software company, and the out-of-touch top managers will say how smart they are. The second version will be delivered to the American software company, and the out-of-touch top managers will buy new houses. The third version will be a product that the Indian company made using the experience paid for by the American software company. And that will be the end of the American software company. I've seen fabulously successful software companies die in six months because of mismanagement.
Many outsourced jobs are to do things that would not be required at all if the company were more efficient. I wouldn't call for technical support if the product worked.
Microsoft is outsourcing its Partners Newsgroups to China. The Chinese are answering maybe 15% of the questions with erroneous replies. Maybe 20% of the questions are given answers that pretend to be answers, but aren't really. Maybe another 25% of the answers are incomplete, and merely send Microsoft's customer off to do a research project.
Outsourcing is an extraordinary dangerous practice for Microsoft, because it further isolates Microsoft top management from reality. I wouldn't be asking questions of Microsoft technical support if Microsoft products were properly designed and if there was proper documentation.
Microsoft may look to some people like a rich, successful company, but the facts are that Microsoft's success is based on having a monopoly. Without a monopoly, Microsoft is not well-managed enough to survive. Every day Microsoft gets closer and closer to the day when it will collapse.
Remember, it has happened before that abusive companies have collapsed. At one time IBM had 100% of the PC market. Then Compaq computers became available. They were equivalent in operation and cheaper and Compaq was at that time less abusive to its customers. That was the beginning of the end of IBM's PC business. In a few years, IBM had 8% of the PC market.
A couple of thoughts:
1. My (Indian) VP says all the smart Indians are in the US. That is, all the intelligence-based jobs are here and will remain here. The standard 3-tier, give me a UI, business, and persistence layer stuff will increasingly be with the people who can do it cheap, just like they used to load or unload bales of cotton for 10c/death.
2. I have my job because I'm worth about 20 raw Indians. So be it. I worked hard to get my skills and I've spent the last two or three years pissed off at clueless asshole newbies who spent their time describing how they were getting in on the dot-com thing at just the right time, while I was at the end of my usefulness. I got laid off as too expensive and they stayed on as the low cost providers. Now they're being killed off by cheap Indians, and I'm rewriting the way credit information gets fed to the world. IMHO, the end result: the US programmer market will be a bunch of brilliant performers. Everyone else will be living in their parents' basements and rescheduling their Fine Arts degrees, or complaining about the lack of adoption of open source software on slashdot. I'll be commanding hordes of Indian newbies from the God-like heights of my experience while the stupid hangers-on, who got into programming when the geting in was good, will be starving.
Final deal: If you love what you do, you'll probably be good at it. Hence you'll be well-paid and happy. The other products of the US school system will increasingly devolve to things that shit in their hands and fling it at each other.
I think many Indians have religious problems with this sort of thing. Their problem. For now.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
This is true.
But they also "earn" over 70% of the total income. (yes. in brackets. many of them didn't earn it at all. No, you didn't work hard for shares to pay off, etc.)
Now I understand what all this union shit is about. It's really fucking sad that we have to make a gang to keep our jobs.
Of course, most developers would never agree to such a thing. They'd rather die first. Fucking irony.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
The US population goes up while the number of jobs go down, does it matter if toys are cheaper when I cant pay my expensive rent or buy food due to no job?
That only benefits rich people.
"so the country benefits from our old job being done and us working at a new job. Why should we expect people who are not affected to be sympathetic?"
What new jobs have been created?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I read a good article on this, which of course I can't remember now.
Basically, if you move this somewhere, you now need a group to to manage this other group in a different time zone. The idea is that the other group is so cheap that the cost of the new group is negligible. Of course (waves hands) in the long term this doesn't work (was it Business Week? damn...).
In the long term, the group you outsourced it to will realize "why should we sell our stuff through Widgets Inc? Lets go in to sell our stuff to their customers!" And you just funded a new competitor.
Recently I took a Sun J2EE Architecture class. A student from Chase said that most development had already been moved overseas. The code reviews were horrendous but Chase figured they could afford the back-and-forth to get it fixed as it was so cheap. Software development has enough problems, I don't want to subscribe to the design philosophy of "throw it over the fence."
Long view, this has already failed before, it will fail again. But it is trending toward a larger spread of the jobs, but not a "send them all somewhere else."
Rick DeBay
ObObservation: Why does the software industry have so many parallels to the US auto industry of the 1970s and 1980s, but management wont't see them?
If things really got that bad, following your train of thought, that there was a huge underclass and a 1% of super wealthy, hiding in their mansions, the shit would hit the fan and there would be a French Revolution right here in the states. America has a history of the masses getting active and raising all hell if a big majority feels like it's getting the shaft. Something would crack, be it riots, protests or just voting everyone who wasn't for job creation, higher taxes on the rich and worker's rights out of office until something changed.
At the very least, things might change so we move more towards socialism. If there simply aren't enough jobs to go round there will have to be huge taxes on the rich in order to support a vast amount of underemployed workers so they don't raise hell and riot. We become: Like Europe, where there's a large % of people on the dole, bored out of their skulls in the pub.
Check out "Silver Lining Around the Cloud".
I have a wife and four kids and have been out of work for 2-1/2 months, but I'll clean toilets for a living before I'll stoop to threatening someone with violence to get a job.
That's ironic, because I bet most Indians would kill your wife and four kids for an American job.
I've seen several articles in various places on the woes of the current job market and ways to deal with them, and I noticed that they are primarily written with a "hearing" audience in mind (a reasonable target audience, after all). Their advice on coping in today's job market often does not address the unique difficulties of being a Deaf IT professional who has been laid off.
For several years, even as a Deaf person, I rarely had to look very hard to find a job, simply because my skills were in demand. Now that the tables have been turned around on all of us, an already bad job market is worse for me because I am Deaf. Many job postings state that excellent communication skills are required--which is fine and reasonable, except I feel that I am at a disadvantage and won't be considered a good prospect once they know that they can't just talk to me as easily as they can talk to most people.
I do communicate quite well in one-on-one settings with minimal background noise. However, even if I get the interview and land the job, there is another concern: fast-paced, cutting-edge job environments do not encourage ideal communication settings. The norm is to get together in group meetings, which I find very difficult. Yes, I could get an interpreter, but these meetings are often called at the last minute (fast-paced environment, remember) and many interpreting agencies want a week's notice. Also, the lag time in the interpreting process prevents me from smoothly contributing to the discussion. In a previous job, I tried setting up an IRC server to allow people to talk online, but the other workers just didn't want to have online meetings. The isolation had very deep, harmful effects on me. This was a corporate setting, and I don't see how a Deaf person could survive there.
I seem to remember that employers were more willing to work around these issues when the economy was better. When that changed, there was less and less tolerance for my needs (however substantial they were) as time went on. Now that I have been laid off, this is on my mind as I search for job opportunities. If I'm not someone who can communicate in a "typical" way, there are hundreds of other candidates with no communication issues who will appear more attractive for that reason. Furthermore, for the sake of my sanity, I do not want to get into another impossible corporate situation like my previous job.
So, I am faced with couple of possibilities. One is to seek out a work environment where we can work out ways to communicate effectively and get fairly settled for pretty much the long term. I do feel that I would do well in a small-company environment, where I could easily get to know everyone. In the past, I have worked in such settings and they indeed proved to be better experiences. That kind of environment is hard to find nowadays, and the ones that I have come across don't seem to be hiring. Even so, this would be my preference, because my experience is that corporate settings just do not work for me. The same goes for consulting firms such as RHI (just to pick one example out of many) which would entail working out communication at the start of every new contract.
The other possibility is to change my career. I'm not sure what kind to consider yet. Once upon a time, Computer Science (my degree major) and IT were considered very promising fields. Now, it is all a completely different ball game.
Actually, my career is not completely uncertain. I became a Deaf preacher in the last few years, and this is becoming my primary focus. However, Deaf churches are usually not able to support a full-time pastor, so I expect to be bivocational when the Lord calls me to pastor a church. Thus, I still need to think and pray about what kind of work to pursue on the side.
I also have a few Deaf friends in the IT field who are either laid off or see the ax falling anytime soon. I wonder what advice I could give them and other Deaf IT professionals (and myself, for that matter) on how to cope in today's job market?
--
Happy Fun Ball got first post...because I taunted it.
I know the solution to RIAA's woes, thanks to your post. Lay off all the recording artists in the states ... and hire Indian musicians instead. Imagine the cost savings. No more paying a manager, agent, talent and producer six figures to record a cd, see it get pirated to hell and your profit is shot! Now you can record your cd for pennies on the dollar by having the whole production done overseas!
And ... when the band goes on tour ... hire some H1Bs ...
Well first no one wants to live in welfare, people who do this dont have many other options. Their options, join the military, go to college, or go on welfare.
Not everyone is smart enough for college, not everyone is discplined enoutgh for the military, so this leaves welfare, usually women who arent as accepted into the military.
Considering that I'm in the same situation as you, I'm going to college, I figure if I cant find a job, I'll go to college, get an education and the gov will pay for it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There are people saying 'as long as you are supercompetent and lucky and well connected, you'll make plenty of money'. True of any economy, but when one is discussing the effects of this situation on the economy as a whole, one has to take into account everyone who isn't supercompetent and lucky and well connected. That's the great majority of the American middle class, regardless of job title.
The faith based on history that new jobs will come along with comparable salaries to the old ones, only requiring a new skill set to acquire them will replace the old does not seem to apply to the new global outsourcing reality.
This is the first time in human history when the bulk of the "good jobs", i.e. jobs that pay well enough to support a family on 1 or even two people's income can be done from "anywhere".
Going to a service industry job, IF there's one available isn't a matter of social stigma, it's a matter of parents telling their kids that they're going to be homeless for the foreseeable future.
A minimum wage service industry gig doesn't even make a decent living (one's own apartment, a car, TV, eating regularly) outside of the very lowest cost-of-living areas.
What does education mean to kids who know that when they get out of school, the jobs won't be there? What does hope for a future mean to someone with a family who knows that the job that was just lost is the only realistic hope of having a decent life? What happens when one mulitiplies this by a very significant chunk of a middle class? Let's call it social destabilization.
Do you want to live a country where most people who will hit you up for money are going to be kids begging for enough money to buy food? Do you want to live in a place where having a decent income means you'll have to have armed security if you want to go shopping?
Tech Public Policy stuff
Hello? The RIAA, SCO, the MIAA, the BSA, and Microsoft just phoned and left a message.
They've just phoned to let you know that they're very interested in your offer to get screwed and are only to happy to screw you big time. Please bend over.
"Pissed spoiled Americans, who will suddenly bitch and moan because they won't be able to afford more than one car per family, more than one bathroom per home, and no, they won't be able to add a kitchen to the master bedroom and install a home theater in the basement..."
I've already chewed out someone you replied to for assuming. I see it's now your turn. A lot of the middle-class doesn't have all the things you've mentioned, and can't add them (or don't want them). Remenber we're the middle-class, not Jed Clammpet struck it rich. And yes there will be a lot of people pissed, as they should be (as you well know.)
HA HA !!!
I remember once we sketched out a design for one at lunch. This was back in the Internet Startup Dayz and we figured that if ours failed we could always get into weapons. We didn't follow through, but I figure that with the advent of high level languages and faster processors, a lot of the problems in previously modern weapon systems are within the realm of the small team or even the solo programmer.
This is my sig.
During the dot-com boom, I was being paid $100,000 a year by a San Francisco dot-com. Of that, $50,000 went to Federal and California taxes, leaving me with $50K.
Due to SF real estate being so grotesquely overpriced, rent for my modest apartment cost $2,700. Add in utilities and you're smack at $3K/mo.
That left me with $14K/yr. to buy groceries, to make my car payments, to occasionally go out on a date, to... etc. It was a very unpleasant experience.
During the dot-com boom, $100K in San Francisco was enough for someone to pay their bills and have a decent place to live. That was it. There was no money leftover for 401Ks, to throw in a savings account, to finance a wedding or a honeymoon, etc. While it's certainly a better standard of living than most of the world has, a $100K salary was not enough for someone to engage in the great American pasttime of "upward mobility".
don't expect a great deal of political support for laws to help keep programming jobs in the U.S.
Who cares what they think. I think dentists are also overpaid. But they have political clout to protect their profession.
We need to form lobbying trade groups to protect our political butts. It is just this kind of lobbying that has allowed big corporations to bring in H-1B and L1 visa works while techies were hurting.
We need to form PAC's, people. That is the bottom line.
Table-ized A.I.
When I was a kid in the late 1950's and early 60's the post-WWII Japanese economy had been reconstructed to the point where their factories were using cheap labor to produce mediocre goods for sale in the US. The phrase "made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap crap. But Americans bought plenty of that cheap crap, and over the years Japanese companies successfully made the transition from providing labor to creating products of their own. I remember when the first Japanese cars came over (Datsun, now Nissan). The intrepid and/or curious folks who bought them were surprised to find that they used less gas, took less maintenance and lasted longer than American cars. The revolution had begun.
Nowadays Mexico, China and other countries are transitioning from providing cheap labor to doing their own engineering and creating their own products. They've been shown the way by Japan, and the process is taking less and less time. In a few years the majority of programmers in India who are currently doing outsource work will be doing original development for Indian companies, competing with the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. Already some Indian firms are themselves outsourcing to other countries where developers work even cheaper.
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete. The world economy will be homogeneous enough that there won't be any places where people live on a scale 50 years different from other people. That's the only thing that will stop outsourcing. Not tariffs or angry protests. So learn to be a blacksmith and ride the wave as long as you can.
Channel your anger and volunteer for any democratic candidate who supports your views. Many many are in the same boat as yourself.
I read a post here already as a reply towards someone who wants to immigrate to India. The response was "Try telling Indian officials you there to work and steal away Indian jobs...".
You know what? THey have been f*cking doing that and still are through the H1B1 visa program. AND THE INDUSTRY STILL IS LOBBYING FOR MORE!
We need a government that like uh, represents us. India has one why can't we elect that does.
Our current government favors the screwers over the average American and that is sad.
http://saveie6.com/
How did you manage to get the govt to foot your college bill and living expenses? Even with grants etc I always had to pay my own rent, utils, food, and various other expenses.
I'd join the military if they had a branch that only defended.. and to me that doesn't mean attacking other countries 'in defense'. I don't believe in attacking other countries and I'm not willing to do so even to get a paycheck. (Which is why I get really angry at all these military people having a fit at being sent to Iraq.. well fuck I didn't want to go so I never took the govt's money even if I really could have used it.. they did take the money so let them go.)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do you own a Dell? Try calling technical support if you have a problem? Most of the time they just hang up. Its bad and a highschool dropout with minimal wage could do alot better in terms of quality.
http://saveie6.com/
I don't see any problem. The job market in India is booming. Several friends of mine, all developers and arhitects, have already moved to India, most of them from Cali. They keep saying that the life they buy for THAT salary THERE is much better than it was in California! And the job market there is very demanding US-English speaking project leaders to keep communications with their american headquaters and customers.
Of course it won't work for those who are white fascists. Outside of US you have to be much more tolerant to other skin-colors and other accents, no need to mention to other cultures around you.
Less is more !
If all these yahoos are doing it, that leaves no one in the field with know-how. Time to create a start-up filled with old fired engineers and sweep the field. Better hurry before you're blocked from pulling off such a feat from them buying laws like the dmca & software patents. Or is it too late and instead time to invest in oversea companies(not in India)?
IT workers just get paid too much. We have become fat and lazy and awfully impressed with ourselves. I personally know people in other professions that have what I consider to be much more skill than I, yet command a fraction of what I was making. I have a friend that graduated with a 4.0 GPA in some sort of art degree, went on to get a masters and makes next to nothing. I did not graduate from college 10 years ago, but was making almost 6 figures. Was I smarter? No, I was just positioned better at the right time.
Add in the great
I did get laid off from a U.S. company, but not due to Outsourcing - the company was just falling apart from poor management and was selling itself off piecemeal. It was not due to Outsourcing overseas, but I can see the concern with that.
Since then I have done a few things. One, I drastically reduced my standard of living. I got rid of the $2k / mo mortgage and got it down to $800 in rent. I did not get a new car, but kept my old 96. I stopped buying every new toy and tried to get back in touch with life.
In the past year, my life has gotten so much better with so much less. I do freelance consulting for anyone who needs it, I take a college course every semester so I can get cheap insurance through the school, not to mention have use of the gym, pool, library, etc. Now I work between 15-20 hours a week. The rest of the time is spent with my daughter, reading, excersizing, etc.
We need to accept that the days of high paying IT jobs are gone. Programming has become so easy that most anyone can be trained to do it. Granted really good programming is still a skill, but how many companies really want a well designed program? Not at the technical level, but at the management level. 9 out of 10 will take the fast, cheap way and forgo quality. Since programs are useful for less and less time now is it really important.
I think as the jobs go overseas, then eventually it will level out. It may take a long time, but it is already happening. I have heard that the better programmers in india are making up to $65k a year. For where I live, and what I require to live that would be fine for here. As the people over there make more, the cost of living will rise as other people realize that they can charge these people more. Eventually it will even all over.
Quality? I have heard both good and bad about overseas. It seems like the executives are under the belief that the quality is better, but the technical people think it is worse. This could be the technical people protecting thier jobs and executives just buying the latest Gartner hype. I do not know first hand - I do directly know people who have been tasked with running people overseas that have complaints.
Remember that all things are transient. What is now will be gone tomorrow. Our happiness and our suffering is all temporary. In a universe level view of everything, I am not even a dust mote. If I have a roof over my head, and enough food to not be hungry then life is good, even great. In this country we have been trained by the media and our peers that if we are not happy all the time, then we are lacking. If we are not death-camp-thin then we are not attractive. If we do not have a giant house then we are substandard.
Did you ever notice that when your income changes your expenses do also? In two years I went from making $30k to $60k with only one job change. You know what? After a year I had exactly the same amount of extra money left over each month. Why is that? Because all the sudden I could acquire more and more. When I look around at my posessions, I find that sometimes it was the smallest things that give me the most joy.
Hah, I think I will post this into an essay somewhere.
This is all my opinion, and subject to change as events develop. Be well.
It is going. What companies are doing in that case is that they are setting up centralized IT centers for maintaining all branches. It's what Lucent did. So... you were saying?
The title isn't being flip, but pointing out the fact that the handicapped fall under a lot of people's radars. I've had to turn down, or avoid any number of jobs because I can't travel (my bike got stolen to boot, GRRR). It's really rather hard on one's patience, but I manage. I have the education, and the willingness, but I can't make anyone hire me, and I can't change certain things. The non-handicapped have it hard (read all the replies), and the handicapped have it even harder (don't forget the "accomadations" that the law requires).
;). Things will eventually turn around, and those who've silently and steadily built up there bases, will find themselves in a much stronger position, than those who spent their time moping.
What advice as a fellow soul could I offer? Keep the faith. Bond with like-minded individuals. There's strength (of all kinds) in numbers (look at women, and how they cope). Pursue those things that your job formerlly didn't allow for. Get back to the basics (all kinds
Peace.
So you're majoring in something that has to be done onsite? Are you sure? Or are you simply planning to go into an occupation where the axe will take a little longer to fall?
Everyone, even this poster can claim ignorance but that won't help them today. They need to find another way to live - either overseas as a post suggested or go back to graduate school and diversify.
Congratulations, you made the same mistake Roblimo did. I congratulate you because ordinarily, Roblimo's a very perceptive guy and a voice of hard common sense. Your post suggests that you're neither, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt long enough to reply.
IT ISN'T JUST IT PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING OUTSOUCED.
It's customer service and accounting and R&D and middle management and even telephone soliciting (ask the GOP, the RNC is planning to hire Indian call centers to call you to get you to help pay for his campaign) and ultimately, any decently job that can be done from pretty much anywhere with adequate communications.
I define "decently paying" is one that will allow a worker to support a family on one and a half incomes. Something that'll enable a family to pay for housing, food, clothing, school expenses, and go out every once in a while. . . and ultimately, pay for college educations.
Individuals without families can do what needs to be done to survive. Not all of those can afford to go back to graduate school. Will you be able to when your job winds up in Bangalore?
Ultimately, the jobs at risk are the majority of jobs held by what we call the "middle class" today.
What happens when those jobs disappear and at best, are replaced by minimum wage "warm body" jobs?
Outside the lowest cost-of-living areas, a full time minimum wage job can't support an individual, let alone a significant part of a family. And if everyone moves to a "low cost of living" area, it won't be one anymore, the competition in the rental market will drive prices upwards.
What happens to political and social stability in a country where a strong middle class is replaced by a small minority of rich who and a large minority of poor, some of which will be very well educated and all of which are desperate for jobs?
What happens to the even the warm body jobs which depend on businesses formerly patronized by the middle class?
Yes, we're describing Libertarian utopia here. A place where no sane person wants to live.
Tech Public Policy stuff
It's just market economics doing what they do best - balancing out supply and demand.
Oh, that must be why the gap between the rich and the poor is shrinking across the capitalistic world.
I think you have your wires crossed. Market economics ultimately makes a few people very wealthy and most people extremely poor.
I am not an American, but I have been to New York, and I can tell you, in the heart of capitalism, I have never seen such poverty living alongside such obscene wealth.
The irony is that despite your flawed assumptions, your basic tenet is correct. What is happening in the IT field is market economics doing what it does best.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
thats all what its about, or maximizing profit - yet no sane company seems to realize that if they outsource everything to 3rd world company in the long term they'll hurt the consumer market here.
Actually the situation is much worse than people can imagine. We are outsourcing people and the technology that made america great[1]. Plus you add in all the effort that the countries themselves have put in. People are talking about going into field this, or field that, and US superiority. But the fact is that practically all of it can be moved overseas. Science can be conducted overseas. Art can be done overseas. The US despite a big military will soon be a second-rate superpower, because our strength wasn't in our military, but our economic system.
[1] Take a look at any product (even military), and notice how much actually comes from overseas.
All that requires technology to make. Guess who put it there? That's right, the multinationals.
And don't forget all the technology companies were willing to sell to our enemies (past and present)?
We're facing a monster of our own creation. Kind of like the present political situation.
Hell yeah! Auto workers and steel workers have very strong unions. That's why no automobile or steel-producing work has ever gone overseas!
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
"This is good advice. For myself, I've left the corporate IT world, and as the article suggested, entered into another industry. The ATM sales and placement company that I work for now didn't know how much they needed a computer guy. Now that they have fancy databases and web pages they do know how much they need someone like me. Sure I make a lot less then I did at Lucent, but I have a much less stressful job that lets me program, and I can keep it as long as I want."
Well good for you. Now answer me this. Are you as part of a minority willing to prop up the entire economy?
The thing quite a people are forgetting is that the economy can't survive on a minority making it through(1). We need a certain number of people making it through for us to survive in any recognizable form.
(1) Did I forget to mention the upcoming segment of the population that's nearing retirement age? Got to support them as well. Hope you have a strong back, Atlas.
blah de dha flawh
How did you manage to get the govt to foot your college bill and living expenses? Even with grants etc I always had to pay my own rent, utils, food, and various other expenses.
Financial AID is what its called. Live on campus and the gov will pay for living expenses.
I'd join the military if they had a branch that only defended.. and to me that doesn't mean attacking other countries 'in defense'. I don't believe in attacking other countries and I'm not willing to do so even to get a paycheck.
I agree, so join the peacecorps, I might do that. I dont like the idea of attacking other countries either.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
You're just bitter because you're new. Go cruise through the archives back from 1997.
Help us build a better map!
Okay, let's see how much you can make locally a year and still get food stamps. I used to "work" at a food pantry and this was posted on the walls. You can make up to $960 a month as an individual (family of 1) and get food stamps. Now let's see how that adds up in a year...
$960 x 12 = {1920|9600} 11520
Yeah, it's about the same here (Niagara Falls, NY). However in the interest of full disclosure I will say that I get food stamps (I'm on a fixed income, and it's well under $960/mo).
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
I assume that everyone who is so against free trade in your own industry have a convincing rebutal of the arguments in favour of it? read Riccardo then come back to this argument (or admit that you value your job more than the national interest, in which case no one else needs particularly care). At a simpler level remember you can not export without a matching flow of either imports or investment the other way (not sustainably anyway). Anyway I am quite happy to have moved from the first world to the third for one of these jobs and a higher standard of living so I am all in favour of this.
I have a wife and four kids and have been out of work for 2-1/2 months, but I'll clean toilets for a living before I'll stoop to threatening someone with violence to get a job.
And the managers and executives who laid you off so that they could raise the profit margin by half a percentage point and get themselves a nice fat raise will thank you for that service... After all, they're used to taking a dump on you, it's only logical that you'd clean it up for them too.
The real issue and the one that will probably stop the entire Off-Shore economy is this. Security National Security to be exact. Lets think about this for a minute. We are giving a HUGE amount of jobs that involve our credit cards, our phone calls records, our SSN, our medical records, and other private information to countries who either dislike us or hate us. Many will say India doesnt hate us. Well we should also look at the fact that a large amount of the jobs given to india are then being subcontracted to the phillipines and China. At that point it can be given to any of our enemies(and we have alot). What we should be really pissed about is the total disregard that many if not all these "US" companies deal with our personal information and leave us very very vulnerable to a foreign IT terrorist attack. Hey I dont trust all Americans but you know what? I trust them a hell of alot more then anyone else...
Really? By definition, conservatives don't care about "other Americans" in any grand inclusive manner; that's socialism, remember. No, your sympathy extends to those who, like yourself, believe in the opposite of liberalism. Your creed of "Hands off my pile, I made it!" is not a foundation for having much concern about other Americans.
And if you're going to profess a philosophy that stints your fellow man, then at least have the courage of your own greed. Be consistent.
No, that's actually how Japan went to war: Nation first, World second. Later, Japan was rebuilt at great American expense--reconstruction that was sensibly based on the view of World first, Nation second.
Do you read newspapers? Our own children are getting fat, and they've got video games coming out of their ears. They enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. They wear on their precious little backs clothing that is often made in sweatshops by children who have the poorest standard of living in the world. Our children aren't dying, not in numbers that are even remotely significant compared to children overseas. And that is why the plight of others elsewhere moves some Americans, these people you "loathe"."The law of nature is that of "survival of the fittest". It's very brutal. It's not at all fair. It's not democratic, it's not just."
Uh huh, law of nature. You might want to look more carefully at what "mother nature" actually does before you decide she should be your personal role model(1).
(1) And NO you can't pick and choose what "laws" you want to follow. It's all or none.
The article mentions solid skills as a sure job getter.
Sorry, but no. Employers want certifications and 'perfect matches', not real knowledge.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
are in the majority of cases property of the public, since the biggest shareholders are private and institutional investors (pension funds, insurers, banks, ...)
It's been my experience that the only people who would suggest not having a minimum wage are people who have never lived at the bottom. You can't support yourself today making minimum wage, let alone a family. If you eliminated the minimum wage and allowed wages to get lower, yes it would reduce the cost of certain things. But they would lose more by making less money than they would save by having reduced costs. Cost of living would not go down proportionately. You argue that the flood of low paying jobs would cause companies to raise wages to compete for workers. Do you honestly think that it would even approach the minimum? They would do the same thing they do now - ship jobs overseas where people will work for even less. I will give you the fact that there would be more jobs - at the bottom. I don't think theres a problem finding jobs at the bottom right now, McDonalds seems to be perpetually hiring. There is a lack of jobs that pay a living wage. All this would do is increase the gap between rich and poor.
Also, let's speed up the rising of living standards in the third world, and wage will raise, too.
Ciao
----
FB
Well, I've just come back from a visit to our Indian support office and also a workshop with our outsourced developers. It is interesting talking to some of the more senior guys out there who are beginning to get concerned about the situation out there. Firstly within programming you have rapid wage inflation, so the outsourcing companies who were used to margins of over 100%, now have margins of between 30-40%; still large margins but it kind of affects their ability to invest in the infrastructure they need. And believe it, they do need to invest in upgrading their infrastructure; powercuts, three or four times a day; telephone lines which are unbelievably variable in quality; let alone physical infrastructure like transport, sewerage etc.
Secondly, and this is from a senior manager within one of India's largest outsourcing companies, their code sucks! 40 defects per function point as opposed to 5 if you use an Israelli developer as opposed to 1 if you use a Vietnamese developer.
Thirdly, at the moment they are only producing software developers and good sysadmins, support staff etc are as rare as rocking horse-crap. The education system trains but does not educate, so innovation does not come easily.
So although at the moment, things look a little bleak in the Western IT industry, it could all change or at least the opportunities will change. And hell, it only takes a war between India and Pakistan to mess everybody's outsourcing strategy up.
For someone in, say, India, a better headline might be:
"The Unstoppable Flow of IT Jobs To Us"
Just another reminder of the artificiality of borders.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
How about going to symposiums, trade shows, and other information sources (a lot of them free). That's one way to get a feel for what's happening in the a given industry. There's also any business venture resources that one's government provides (local and federal). Make the system work for you. Subscribe to free trade magazines (it's easy). Collect trade litature (catalogs, cd-roms, etc)
It's all a question of lifestyle. Cars factor into it; live without a car, and you salvage anywhere from $200-400 a month even at the low end.
I know single men that get by on $500 month, but they live a lifestyle that few people would tolerate; buying 5 lbs hamburger at the wholesale club on sale and then eating hamburgers 2 of 3 nights for two weeks. Repeat cycle for pasta, etc.
Never buy anything but the dingiest used furniture. Buy your clothes at the used clothing store. Don't update your house (paint, modernize/fix bathroom or kitchen). Drive the junkiest car you can.
But they also largely live alone, no girlfriend or wife and they have few social activities. Add any of those in and you can't live like that.
Neither of my schools ever offered to let my financial aid cover living expenses. My friend who's school had something like a credit card that drew from financial aid could buy food with it from the school cafeteria but it didn't cover rent or utilities. Sounds like whatever you've done it's the better plan. Unfortunately, there is no way in hell I can get more financial aid at this point. Bummer.
:)
I considered the Peacecorps before but they sounded like they wanted people that had degrees and I don't really want to go to third world countries anyway. I'd be perfectly happy staying in the US doing things to help my fellow citizens.
Again I wonder why they don't offer jobs instead of welfare if they are going to give you money anyway. A shame they wouldn't pay me to work on a community garden, teach kids to read, or even develop opensource software.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Suppose all your assertions are true (many of which I disagree with, and may respond to in a second follow-up if I get around to it). Why do think that transfer payments couldn't handle it?
If production is increased (because the artificial unemployment due to minimum wage is eliminated and, therefore, there really is more work getting done), then there is more wealth available for transfer payments. Theoretically, you could even have a system where everyone was at least as well off as with minimum wage (not actually practical, since you can't individually know what each person's future would have been, but there would be enough goods and services produced to do it).
Fact of the matter is, unless you're in the top few percent of the wealth spectrum, the world's a pretty ugly place for you. And it's only going to get uglier in the USA once the social security system goes bankrupt.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Transfer Payments... Welfare? I guess if you said, well, we're getting rid of the minimum wage, but everyone that makes under $x will get welfare, then they might go for it. But the welfare system is working so great right now, what with the new welfare reforms, thousands who geniunely need it are being kicked off the rolls. If something like this went through, I wouldn't be surprised if they kept the minimum wage gone, but took back the welfare checks, especially with a republican president. Your plan isn't as out there as I thought it was (now that I caught the transfer payments), but I'm still not sure. A minimum wage sorta acts like a tax that goes to the poor already, that everyone pays.
The problem is not only exporting money, it is the Henry Ford lesson in reverse. It doesn't matter where your employees are, if you pay them just enough to survive (and reduce their lifespans with nasty chemicals) they won't be able to buy anything, and the economy takes a hit. If you pay employees a little extra they start buying stuff, whether they are in China, India, or North America, and companies prosper.
Money never trickles down, it flows up. Corporations are really dumb to be pushing for tax breaks at the cost of welfare, UI, and social programs that indirectly put money in their pockets. They are dumb to outsource, too. Cheaper goods are very nice, but company executives are not a sufficient market to sell them on.
When you get down to it most VPs could be outsourced way easier than techies, especially considering how employees can be abused in China et al. Point stick bosses instead of PHBs.
No one in the US thinks long term. Anyone who thinks a presidential term ahead is considered to be doing serious planning. Thus chaos.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
It is the same effect as those overseas factory jobs, but it isn't the same thing. Factory workers were not college-educated.
A friend of mine has left engineering for embedded systems because he can't find work. He is getting his nursing credentials now. This guy used to write code embedded into networking equipment, and now, because of the labor market, he's taking people's temperature, doing throat swabs, and doing eye chart tests. Is this what those in IT are supposed to do? Leave the industry?
As per a friend from a large company: do what everyone else does, get someone to submit your CV, which should be a work of fiction, get them to tell you what you need to know for the interview, fake the interview as best you can, then take training courses. Of course most of the people end up being useless, and the company then outsources, first inside the country, and, when that doesn't work well, to India/China/Romania.
The real reason for outsourcing is HR, not savings. HR people don't know anything about tech, so they take the dishonest applications over the honest ones, and managers are forced to hire from their selection. The people they hire are useless, so they increase the requirements without increasing the salaray, and get even more dishonest applicants. Then they give up and outsource just so they can be rid of the useless people they hired. Nortel went through this (and you would not believe how bad the people they brought in through outsourcing were), they knew their IT people were crap, and they tried to replace them first (during the boom, so they only got rid of good people).
To eliminate outsourcing promote good HR practices. This does not mean scanning CVs and counting buzzwords.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
The other difference is that clothes made in China don't differ much from clothes made in the US, while outsourced code tends to be crap. There are good people working in the third world, but they have options, and they don't want to work for subsistence either. India is tapped out. HP found this out when they outsourced their support work and got people with no experience, who hate working nights (time shift), who are now pissing of their clients. The problem is that tech HR in the US is so bad that big companies cannot hire good people, so the potential quality difference goes unrealized.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Neither of my schools ever offered to let my financial aid cover living expenses.
I guess you didn't go to schools with a fat enough bank.
I'd be perfectly happy staying in the US doing things to help my fellow citizens.
How about AmeriCorps? It was invented by the Clinton administration as sort of a domestic PeaceCorps. Teaching computer skills is even one of the tasks they list. You work for them for a year in exchange for money to pay for school or pay off school loans (and your loans are deferred while you're with them). Some people also get money for living expenses but all get health insurance which may not sound like a big deal until you need it.
Again I wonder why they don't offer jobs instead of welfare if they are going to give you money anyway.
Because that would be Socialist and Socalism Is Bad. There are other reasons given but for most people, that simple-minded concept is what it boils down to.
Ive had a "pleasure" to work with some of these outsourced support ppl recently. They are fucking idiots, they cant speak or understand english, their emails are just a combination of words with no sense or logic. they cant follow simple conversation or written instructions which consist of 3 steps....
did i say they are fucking idiots?
Here is how to stop the flow now. Restrict the flow of private customer data across borders. Define private customer data so it covers the kind of informaiton found in accounting systems, in CRM databases and shipping and distribution systems.
Look at regulations like HIPPAA for a template on how to do this. Right now, sending data overseas is a loophole in HIPPAA that is going to encourage more outsourcing!
-- $G
And it's only going to get uglier in the USA once the social security system goes bankrupt.
Errrr...you have a social security system? One that can go bankrupt?
Ok, let's not get into an arguement wether the U.S. social security system is really a social security system or just a sad and sorry excuse of one. But let me tell you one thing that's for shure: If *your* social security system goes broke, your definitley in deep shit.
If *our* social security system goes broke - and it currently *is* going broke - then it's just gonna make a big splash'n'wake-up call and make us all wet. But we will still have a chance to fix things. Hopefully.
Personal Note: I was stupid enough to renunciate my american citizenship to become a german citizen. In the end I'll probably think was lucky that I was that stupid.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Money flows up. If poor or middle class people have money they spend it and the CEOs of the world get rich on their consumption. Henry Ford had it right, pay employees a little more and they will consume leading to more production, more jobs, and more prosperity.
The big economic threat to the US at the moment, surprisingly, is deflation. People don't have the money to buy items, even though the items are cheaper because they were produced by the most desperate employees anywhere in the world. There is no reason that global living standards will rise with outsourcing unless the amount of work outsourced exceeds the amount of workers globally. Prosperity won't happen unless the living standards rise enough that workers, even in China, are earning enough to buy the items they make (and they won't on 30 cents an hour, especially when many of them die at 35 because of the working conditions).
What can we do about it? We can try to reclaim US politics from the obviously corrupt "conservatives" who don't want to conserve anything except greed, embezzlement, oppression, and influence-peddling, and from those who are completely bought, but it won't be easy (or possible?). How many congressmen make less than $1 million/year? None. How many care about people who make less than $1 million per year? None, especially with the campaign financing rules and incumbency advantages. How many congressmen will pass any law for a fee? A large majority.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
This article is written by a person who happens to be a millionare. WHo if he done things right never has to worry about feeding his children and or if he can keep his house. Someone who got lucky on the .Com/net bubble befor it burst. So I really have to take his veiwpoint with a HUGE grain of salt, and point out that these job don't really raise the standard of living as much as he says... As we already know via economics the price of the consumer goods and services will rise to meet the new salaries in those countries. Thus the poor will still be poor and the rich will most likly stay rich, and the "global" community will just shift around a little more, and so it goes...
I understand that the government of India has created the population of Indian programmers by massively subsidizing their education. Should we compete "fairly" while other governments don't?
And BTW, 2 1/2 months out of work is nothing. You could easily be out of work for a full year before you find another programming job (that should give you plent of time to finish the rest of Ayn Rand's books.) I hope that does not happen but if it does, we working cowards will gladly pay our taxes to help you...and your children.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Like some of the others here I've started moving towards running my own business, a non-tech business. My technical knowledge got me a plum contract in that non-technical field. Strange how it worked out. I've been telling people for years how technology can make them more effecient. Now I'm using technology to make me more efficient. Because I'm good at applying technology I can out-compete my peers in the same business. And the barrier to entrance, the cost of implementing new technology, is a non-factor. I don't need to pay someone to set up a network for me, hook up a DSL connection, install and configure a firewall, set up a web site, improve rankings in a search engine or use a new piece of software. It's a huge advantage. People in complementary services are recommending me to their customers because I use technology to make working with me easy for them.
What I'm getting at in a round-about way is that I was surprised how much technical skill was an advantage in a non-technical field. That can work for you, too. So the $60,000 a year programmer jobs might be disappearing, but you can still take what you know and put it to practical use for yourself in a different area.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It seems like every time /. posts an outsourcing thread, the server gets slower than hell. What gives?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Give up giving suggestions to MikeFM, he sounds like one of those whiners where "things just don't work for him" and "that wouldn't work for me" and "I've tried that, and it doesn't work"
Meanwhile, immigrants are coming here that can't speak english, don't know anyone and without a penny and flourishing. Apparently it "works for them".
You get food stamps and have a computer with internet access and work on an opensource project?
Christ. What a system.
"underpaid programmer in India" You have to know they are not underpaid..infact they are paid pretty well for Indian standards and Cost of Living.
David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is probably one of the most important in understanding international trade. In a sense, this isn't something new. Back in the 18th century, Portugal had a big comparative advantage over Britain in textile production due to labor costs.
Ricardo and Portugal
See http://internationalecon.com/v1.0/ch40/40c000.htm
Overall this maybe bad for a few programmers in the US but is good for the US economy overall!
As a business manager, I find the talent in India to be top notch! The university system, and the strong grounding in logic and mathematics has churned some very well educated people. In addition, I find Indians to be a very entrepreneurial bunch. Stifled by socialist governments for decades, these guys are hungry-- and will go the extra mile to make the buck. Something I cannot say about the average worker in the US.
Overall, I anticipate India to extend its comparative advantage to other areas. Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the beginning of this trend. For more information see http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cf
Over the last 18 months I have seen
Here's an advice to those who want to make money -- Go East young man!
OK. So with all the above being said. How come all the unemployed geeks don't get together (how many millions?) and form their own companies? Hell how about all of the unemployed (a lot of them are managers, and similiar skill sets)?
We know what the problem is. We know what the solution is. So were's the action? There's cheaper. Our's better.
You don't need such regulations.
What the US and EU should do, is simply open their doors to people from all over the world, the same way they want our third-world countries to open the doors to your products.
When people get to be as free as money and goods, you'll see the difference between "outsourcing" and "homemaking" vanishes.
You don't BELIEVE in attacking other countries?
How does that work, exactly?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
No more like you are too lazy. I may disagree with Gates' business policies but he probably put in more hours into his work than your average slashdotters. Here's a real life example. I had a roommate who is a high school drop out. He works at a low paying dead end job and lives paycheck to paycheck as I had to loan in money time to time when unexpected expenses came up. Do you know why he lives paycheck to paycheck? He spends all his free money and time on video games. If he cuts his gaming in half and did a little bit of part time work, he can easily save about $500 a month. I had tried to get him to get a GED. I also told him that he will be eligible for finanical aid, enough to attend a community or state college without having to pay anything out of his pocket. Of course, he'd rather spend his time playing games then on education.
My uncle came to US when he was 35 years old. He did not speak any english at that time. He started with job as a janitor. He also picked up a part time job as a painter. He worked over 60 hours a weeking cleaning and painting. After he became good at painting, he opened up a painting business with his brother. They made decent money but they didn't blow it on fancy cars or phat gaming or entertainment systems (they still use a beat up van for work). Instead, they saved it. In the early 90's they moved to California and used their and investors' money to buy real estate. During the economic boom, the value of the real estate jumped and the rest is history.
So is there a gap wealth gap between my uncle and ex-roommate? Yes! Do I have a problem with it? Absolutly not!
BTW my uncle didn't forget all the hardships that he endured and have set up a scholarship fund for low-income students. You claim to have a conscience but I can say that my uncle does more to help the poor out than the likes of you.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Ask people what they consider to be "middle class". You ask people who make anywhere up to 200K+ if they are middle class and they will say, "yes, were not rich, we have to work for a living! And private school is so expensive!" If you don't believe me, go ask. Nobody wants to admit they are wealthy.
Saying that lower paid foreign workers are putting US jobs at risk is a bit like arguing that visual GUI/IDEs have put assembly code workers out of a job.
If I could get 5 times as much LOC for my dollar in Thailand (I wouldn't using India as much as its more expensive !) then this means I could provide 5 times as much functionality or features.
But think about it - who the hell would be doing the requirements management, installation, acceptance testing, implementation, user training and manuals ???? Not some Foreign worker but a US local.
Think of programmers who create lines of code as just one small part in the whole food chain of software developement. With MODERN software development creating lines of code is actually one of the smallest parts in the whole business.
A programmer is simply a factory worker who turns requirements into intermediate goods. It doesn't even figure in the GNP figures of a country !
$100,000 a year, even now in Southern California, is not a "comfortable" amount of money if you want a "nice" house. And things are about to get worse if new taxes kick in (or if more jobs move out).
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
The world is not infinitely big, and eventually this evolution will be complete.
----------
Not in our lifetimes it won't. There will always be some more 3rd world countries on the way up. Afghanistan, Liberia, etc...
From an energy perspective alone, the world's oil output won't be able to sustain complete industrialization (if you equate this evolution from 3rd to 1st world with industrialization as well).
This is going to cause some serious problems also.
Everyone in the world can never ever become a yuppie programmer driving an SUV. It just can't happen.
If corporations are obsessed with finding cheap labor to avoid employing their country's own workforce they will be able to continue playing musical chairs forever.
I mean do well financially. I know how crap TS is as a customer!
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Thanks, Rush.
Anyone who invests in company stock directly or indirectly via 401K programs, 403Bs, etc.
Remember, these are by in large publicly owned companies you're talking about. They are own by their shareholders, and have a responsibility to turn a profit for them.
Profits a public company makes are typically reinvested in the business, to keep it growing and healthy, or they are distributed to shareholders via dividends, or indirectly via raised share prices.
Actually, if you get a job in India, you can quite easily get a work visa. May be even more easily than a H1 in the USA..
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
[Disclaimer: I don't work in the IT industry and I'm not affected by the current situation.]
As a social scientist, I tend to take a "neutral" stance to most social phenomena. This is a case in point where the situation can be seen as extremely bad or extremely good, depending on who it has an impact on.
From the point of view of IT workers from less wealthy societies, it can be a very good thing. So-called "Third World" countries tend to be dependent upon the production of goods that are quite expensive to export. Working as an IT worker for a US company while living in a place where the cost of living is extremely low is an improvement for the individual who does it, even if this person is paid less than the US equivalent.
My personal (naive) philosophy is that it all evens out in the end.
Now, one thing that non-US IT workers need is education. Computer training but also a broader education. Notice the number of "international" students on campuses. More students means more teaching opportunities. And going to teach overseas can be an extremely enriching experience.
True, the situation seems bleak for those who arguably "had it easy" during the tech boom. But, quite possibly, education might be the next best opportunity. Of course, it requires a lot of time to retrain but think of those "international students" who switched their careers around. Flexibility is the best asset in the current situation. And it's what a good education gives you.
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
A lot of people think unionizing is for lower-paying, lower-skilled professions, but historically, high-skilled workers (draftsman, architects) were the FIRST to organize, both to counter unfair competition and lower-quality work.
Target companies that outsource labor
For Shareholders:
For the general public:
At the same time, technical professionals need to raise the profile of this field. Recently the State of Texas had some story recommending not to accredit software engineers because software types were not subject to the same stringent safety responsibilities that physical engineers are (indirect mention). Techies need to combat this directly by organizing into professional unions that discourage bad programming (code-like-Hell), bad security (Microsoft), and bad data modeling.
But most of all, we need to take the fight for ourselves. In the beginning, we don't need the sympathy of the American public. Even if the US public is not inclined toward the tech worker, they're not inclined against them either. Everybody likes to hear the story of a group fighting back to rightfully protect their jobs.
ORGANIZE.
For more information, check out From the People who Brought you the Weekend , The Activist's Handbook and Organizing for Social Change .
But think about it - who the hell would be doing the requirements management, installation, acceptance testing, implementation, user training and manuals ???? Not some Foreign worker but a US local.
The five people who have always been doing it. It's the hundred programmers that worked with them that are out of luck.
Besides, I think this shift proves that *any* job can eventually be done by overseas workers for less money. First it was primary resources and agriculture, then heavy manufaturing, then electronics, now programming and tech support, and in another 5-10 years it'll be training, managment, and manuals, too! The march of progress stops for no industry.
Some people have already been to college, and already are buried under tens of thousands of student loan debt. These people are likely not exactly enthused at the idea of going BACK to college and taking on more debt. Others simply don't have the qualifications to go to college.
I also know from experience that the Americorps and Peace corps programs are currently swamped with applications. Meaning, you apply and it's not like you instantly get swept off to safetly. You wait, for months to up to a year before you get to go.
Socialsim is not inherently bad in my opinion. I think society has an obligation to help people to a certain extent. You can't just let stupid people starve. But the difference I see on this board is how much help is really helping or just enable people to mooch off the system. I have to say from my years of experience I think people are overly ignorant of how people fall through the cracks. Everyone just assumes, you get fired, you go on UI, you get on welfare, someone will always take care of you. Not so, if you look a little deeper at the details.
EXACTLY! Up until the part about military power, I agree completely. With an influx of so many laborers in the global marketplace, labor, as a commodity, will decline in price. That's why I decided it's pointless to send out resumes or develop marketable skills. In the current environment, and for the forseeable future, it's better to live off rents.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
People like that are hard to find. The ones we find are all frantically busy doing something already. We can find good people who can put in a few hours a week, but we need at least half-time, because these are the key people who hold the project together.
They're not out there. We're not coming across unemployed top-level programmers. There are plenty of people who can do what it says to do in the manual. We don't need those.
(If you're interested, send us a thousand lines of C++ you're proud of. No pay, some risk, a fraction of the prize.)
... when it comes to jobs like system administrators, technicians, and management - jobs that need people to be able to respond quickly to changes at the home office.
I don't see this "Indian Revolution" extending much further past programming and maybe system design for this reason.
+++ATH0
I've called Dell Tech Support numerous times over the years and have NEVER had them hang up on me, not even the ones who were obviously working out of India.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Comments on applying to the Peace Corps (as someone who's doing this):
There's a long lag time in the application process. I mailed in my preliminary applications this past February. I was told the earliest I can get placed is next January - almost a year lag.
You will be questioned on why you're joining. "I want to help my fellow man and don't mind living in really horribly crappy conditions for the next 27 months" is the correct answer. Anything else will likely raise some eyebrows.
You've got to have a useful skill or show some previous initiative on public service. Experience teaching is a plus. Knowledge of waste water treatment plants is a bigger plus. 6 months volunteer work at a tutoring center is a plus. Experience with Linux, C, C++ will be greated with a blank stare (and yes, I know about the program to wire Senegal).
You've got to be healthy. If you need dental work, it's got to be done before you leave. This can get expensive if you've been putting things off because of lack of insurance. If you're on prescription meds, the number of locations they can send you goes way down (so the length of time you'll wait to get assigned goes way up). If you've been depressed/ever seen a mental health professional (likely if you're suffering through bouts of unemployment) it gets even stickier.
You've really got to not mind living in crappy conditions. I want to emphasize that.
That is all.
I work for the largest telecoms company in the UK. We have a large number of Indian programmers on and off shore. Having worked very closely with both groups for the last year I can honestly say:
1. The coders on shore fall into 3 categories - excellent, average and useless. The %ages are no different from UK programmers. However, I see distinct cultural differences that result in Indian programmers being less productive than their UK counter parts. One example is 3 Indian programmers huddled around the same workstation to solve a problem. No big deal, but the 3-to-1 ratio of coder-to-problem does raise some eyebrows. The second is far more serious. I've lost track of the number of times an Indian coder has hit a problem and not sought help/advice from the designer/architect. Days will pass before this comes to light. Now they do work long hours, typically 8am to 7pm but how productive is this given the 2 scenarios above?
2. Communication offshore is very difficult. The time difference doesn't help but this can be worked around. However, without face-to-face meetings, an issue that should take 10 minutes to resolve can take days of follow up calls before it is settled. Add to this the reluctance of the off shore team to acknowledge that they too have hit a problem but will not seek help and things start to go bad. I'm not exaggerating when I say I have had phone conversations where the Indian guy does not understand what is to being asked of him/her, but reassuring replies 'Yes'
So, I think this outsourcing exercise is interesting, but is bound to failure. I already over-hear private discussions between management where they acknowledge that the situation isn't working, yet they were extremely enthusiastic about it at the start.
And if I own a company, and I choose to spend my money overseas, who have I deprived? Would you be better off if I was forbidden from doing so, and so just decided to stick it in a matress, rather than loose it doing activities that were unprofitable here.
Most business people didn't get their money robbing the banks and rapeing the villages, and even if they did - then fine get on them for what they did, not just because they have money.
Most people who have money got it because people like you choose to buy their stuff, use their services, and patronize their restruants. Now to turn arround and talk about how much they owe us, and how they're obligeted to use their money on our terms is disingenuious at best.
Now don't get me wrong, I've been unemployed for the last 2 years and only recently got hired on at a fraction of what I used to make in the Silicon Valley. It was hard, I was desperate, but even so I didn't coerce old ladies to give me dough, I didn't shoplift stores, I didn't rob banks, I didn't threaten, force, or extort business men to give me cash (for obvious reasons, I hope) - yet people think that when they do these things in the form of government that it has no worthy consequence. It amazes me to see how a person could see that if he jumped off a bridge by himself, that he would break his legs if not get killed - but if he holds hands witheveryone else and does it as a group then blissifully thinks there is no real consequence.
Lazy? How the f*** is a 40-something year-old man supporting a family, paying a mortgage, making car payments, putting kids through college, etc., supposed to "find another line of work"? Is he supposed to sell his house, move into a dorm, and have his family live in an RV at Walmart while he attends the local college? Momma's boys like you make me sick. Grow up.
Sounds like something H1-B Microsystems or similar pulled off
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Uh, so?
Curious you should mention this. It is possible that it is just the firms I have dealt with, but it seems that very little innovation happens in these Indian code shops. You hand them a spec and it is coded too...
This totally reminds me of Indian tailors I've visited. Just pick out the suit from the latest BOSS brochure, they take your measurements and voila a suit for you. No cutting edge design, just cookie cutter.
Most immigrants are on welfare or in prison. I dont know where you get the "immigrants are successful" crap.
Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and guess what, the majority of prisoners are hispanic, the majority of the people on welfare are hispanic, and most hispanics are poor.
Take a trip to california and look at the immigrant ghettos, projects, slums, high crime rates, messed up urban schools, etc.
Please tell me that you see the same immigrant communities I see, Arnold is an exception, hes not the norm, it usually takes a generation to work your way up, the first generation immigrant lives in hell here and works their way out of the dangerous crime/drug filled ghettos that you are too afraid to drive through and would most likely roll your windows up when you pass.
I can tell you arent an immigrant, which is why you make such ridiculous comments and have such high optimism, ignoring the fact that immigrants do fail.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Others simply don't have the qualifications to go to college.
Over 80% of people graduate highschool. Over 90% of people have at least a GED or above. Meaning less than 10% of people do not have the qualifications for college.
"Socialsim is not inherently bad in my opinion. I think society has an obligation to help people to a certain extent. You can't just let stupid people starve. But the difference I see on this board is how much help is really helping or just enable people to mooch off the system. I have to say from my years of experience I think people are overly ignorant of how people fall through the cracks. Everyone just assumes, you get fired, you go on UI, you get on welfare, someone will always take care of you. Not so, if you look a little deeper at the details."
Its not easy to go on welfare anymore because conservatives want to remove all the safety nets.
The more safety nets we remove the higher the crime rate, this is why when conservatives take office crime seems to rise, and the prisons fill.
Filling the Prisons, or Welfare, which sounds better to you? People who cannot find a job will rob you before starving. Think about it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Will look into AmericCorps. I hadn't really heard of them before.
;)
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
What the shit do I need public schools, police, or highways for? I have no kids (And won't as long as I'm poor), I have nothing worth stealing and am to scary to have any other crime commited against, and I don't have a car and would be happier walking someplace than driving anyway. I'd much rather have help getting a job, or rent/utils assistance when needed, or even decent medical coverage.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Obviously, you don't know many immigrants and have never had to deal with the INS (or whatever they are called now). Definately a painful experience.
You'll also find that immigrants often are better networked than most of us. They will usually already have some friend or family that has made the move.. or other immigrants of past will try to help them because they know how hard the effort can be. If anything IMO that is one reason these people deserve to do well.. they are willing to work hard and help each other. A shame the rest of America doesn't remember those things.
I've obviously had more experience with these things than you have so maybe you'll stop bitching about my opinions.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I happened to get knocked out of the system about 3/4's the way through college. I had a roommate die and I had to take care of alerting his friends and packing his stuff and various other tasks. I tried to bow out of the semester but the school wouldn't let me and I had a nervous breakdown so essentially I got all 0's. Totally ruined my grants and scholarships and made it so I couldn't afford to go anymore.. not to mention severely shreading my GPA. So I probably can't go back to college.. at least not until I can pay for it out of pocket.
There are big cracks to fall through and most people just don't care. I'm clever enough that I can always keep from really falling through but it does make it difficult to climb back up. For people less adaptable I can't see how they could ever get back to a normal life other than stealing or selling drugs or something to earn enough money to make the jump.
Being the geek I am the whole process has led me to investigate what I'd call nomad technologies. Things that make being a homeless bum easier and possibly even more enjoyable than a normal life. Such things still cost money (obviously) but do allow people to live much cheaper if they are flexible. I've even considered the idea of going back to horses and living in gypsy wagons. Maybe with some solar panels to recharge my computers batteries.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I have a Robin Hood complex. I always would rob from the rich.. never the poor or lower middle class. I'd probably give most of the money away too.
No doubt that is another reason I'm not so well off. At times that I am making money I tend to give away my extra to people in need rather than saving it up. I'd rather put the money in the hands of people that need it rather than bankers.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
It's against my morals to attack someone based on their nationality? I have as many friends in other countries as in my own. I certainly am not going to try to kill anybody just because my government tells me I should.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
A piece of evidence to this fact is a "special" city .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
that has been setup in California called the city of industry
It has special tax laws, and special inventory exclusion laws
to provide corporations shipping entire cargo container
ship loads of materials through that port
Other places like the "city of industry" in california are
being setup in other states as well
So tax dollars corporations used to pay are now bypassed
by some greased palms, and some sleazy government approved
accounting
Meanwhile in the fallout of the DOT BOMB days the common
man is going to be stuck holding the bill and we get to
pay for what the Corps "used to pay"
You will see more and more of this as time goes on
Keep in mind in Norman Mattloff's speech to the house and
senate, that he knows they were paid off to the tune of
$22 million to up the H1-b visa limit after the economy
was already seen going south
The Senate in one of the most lopsided votes in history
voted like 97 or 98 to 1 in favor of doubling the h1-b
visa cap
If you think that is bad, there are NO LIMITS on L1 visa
workers, and ppl like Tancredo in colorado and a cpl of
Reps out of Connecticut are about the only ppl raising
hell over their voters losing their jobs, their homes,
and their cars
It is one thing to tell ppl they need to change their lifestyle
and sell off all their over priced garbage, but to spring
it on them with no notice and bankrupt them is another
This bankruptcy burden has a ripple effect that will move
thru the entire economy
You think it is bad now, just wait a few years if they keep
flooding in millions of legal and illegal workers
In Texas construction workers are about 80% illegals and the
government even knows it, and some of bushes staff even had
some employed working for them
Tancredo from colorado is trying to fix it, but to be honest
apathy is king in america these days
Nobody gives a damn anymore, because everyone feels no one
gives a damn about them , maybe they are right
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Spicy and tangy... just like tandoori.
but your e-mail address is not listed .
.
.
.
.
.
.
h oo.com
I want to thank you for bringing together alot of ideas
I have been running around in my head for some time
I intend to follow your advice and I know it will help
a great deal
I have done alot of these at different times, and seen
minor spikes of success on my own
I never put it all together, and I did not stick to it
I eventually just got a job somewhere
Thanks for the wake up call
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
Ex_MislTechNOSPAM@NOSPAMya
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Wow, the tech boom is over. Whoopdee-friggin-do.
People assume that it's all outsourcing that's cutting into their business.
It ain't.
About a hundred years ago, nails were hand cast. There were thousands of nail shops. A good shop could turn out a few thousand a day. Settlers would burn down their temporary housing after the winter to retrieve the nails from the wood. Then a guy came up with an idea to cut nails from sheet metal. Made a machine to do it. Suddenly, his shop can outproduce any others by 20-1. He sold all of his nails... business owners knew they wouldn't have to wait for him to produce more. His business expands. He drives down prices because it takes less than a quarter of the manpower to product the nails. The little shops shut down. They sure as heck didn't outsource the jobs. The nailmakers didn't sit at home for a year and whine on message boards about their dilemna; they learned a new skill and moved on.
Same thing happens in software development. Thousands of little shops or in-house development departments, banging out code by hand. Other companies got smart. They understood the general parameters of businesses, created software to handle these, and then created modules to handle specifics.
How many versions of word processors do you really expect to find in corporations? Sure, there's staroffice, but Word is the king.
In oil companies, SAP's IS-Oil module is king.
In academia, Peoplesoft's Academic Solutions group works the best.
Many companies use Oracle's application server 11i, especially for their financials.
Techies act like they're so downtrodden. The only thing that's happened is that they've been slapped with the cold reality of American business history.
Techies weren't there for the car factory workers, they weren't there for the clothing people, or the furniture people, and software developers really didn't care a great deal when hardware manufacturing jobs went overseas. So why should the rest of the country really care about us?
The industry has simply refined itself. A BS in CS is no longer enough. A MS might not be enough without other consideration.
I go through thousands of resume's a day. People with a BS in CS and a MA in business and training in one of the big ERP packages (JD Edwards, Lawson, SAP, Oracle, etc.) are not having a great deal of trouble finding work. They usually get to pick who they want to work for and what they want to get paid.
Some of them do programming, but they aren't programmers. Anyone can be a programmer. Lots of people can be good programmers. Not anybody can design a successful business system.
The market is doing precisely what it's designed to do.
Why would any high-quality programmer bother with a *chance to compete* for a *fraction* of a million dollars when the video game industry offers a greater chance at a greater prize? Offer a steady paycheck that someone who's good and knows it will deign to work for and see how hard it is to find good software leads.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
I'm generally in agreement with Schumpeter's view, but there are a couple of other ideas you should look into:
- Henry Mintzberg, a well known organizational theorist, has noted that most organizations have the "seeds of their own destruction" planted into them in their tendency to drift towards a bureaucratic configuration, which inevitably leads to a politicized configuration, thus resulting in either renewal or the death of the organization. This is congruent with Schumpeter's view of creative destruction, though from an organizational theory perspective.
There is a problem however: corporations more and more are being sustained through political means. Corporate welfare is all the rage in the USA - from the airline industry to MCI Worldcom, handouts are the norm. Ever since the government bailed out Chrysler so many years ago, it has become almost impossible for the government to let a big company die.
The hackles and howls from the business community and press over the death of Arther Andersen are still being felt: they don't feel it's a good idea to let a company die. And they may have a point, considering the social wreckage caused by unemployment. BUT we still don't have a good solution to balancing the need for killing ineffective, weak, or corrupt companies with the need for social continuity and a strong employment policy.
- Karl Polanyi wrote some great stuff about the problem with economic growth and "creative destruction" - it's the "destruction" part that wreaks havoc on society. Social legislation serves as a counter balance to economic growth. Society is getting better at coping with change, but its mode of behaviour since the beginning of time has been to prevent change. Growth uber alles can cause tremendous strife and can even lead to depressions if the society cannot keep up, or if there is too much transitional unemployment. Is this because a key purpose of modern society is to provide status and function for the individual in the context of its representative organizations (whether businesses, non-profits, or government). If it fails to do this, society will begin to disintegrate - and the economy will follow. Today, social concerns are treated another one of those "exogenous" factors in the market system because they're hard to measure.
The new growth theorists are finally taking Schumpeter seriously in factoring technological change and innovation into the core economic models (the endogenous growth theories). I wonder how long it will be before they factor social needs into it. Social needs are even harder to quanitify than innovation, but it doesn't make it any less important.
Unfortunately, way too many pseudo-intellectuals that will take economic theory's dearth of support for social needs as indication that social needs are actually irrelevant and that growth is paramount, and all social ills can be solved by freer markets. This is a sadly incomplete vision.
-Stu
While I agree with the majority of your points, I don't believe that everyone here is whining...
Our problem is that we do not seem to have the same opportunities your generation had.
Then again, if you feel like we're complaining because the gravy train has stopped flowing to us, I'm sure you'll have no complaints once we're unable to afford your gravy train (re: Social Security, Medicare, Other retirement services, etc).
I couldn't get a student loan because I was not enrolled. I couldn't enroll without a student loan. I ended up taking out a personal loan, which needed to be paid back immediately, which required getting a job, and at the point I said "fuck it this isn't any fun anymore."
I find the closest technology to the old gypsy is to compress your worldly needs into an old hatchback. Find a talent you have and live as a street performer. Around these parts, we have a lot of Folk Festivals, Universities, etc. The only problem I've found is that a lot of cities have ordinances against camping or sleeping in one's car.
Maybe with the horsedrawn carriage you could overcome those predjudices.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
A friend of mine had a nice thing like that happen. The school wouldn't let her in because they said the loan hadn't came through but she couldn't get the loan to go through because the govt agency that gave her the loan said it'd already gone through. So they wouldn't let her in school anymore but still expect her to pay for that loan. A load of bullshit if you ask me. Is no way I'd pay that. I'd let the school and the agency work it out between themselves.
I've cut back my new computers to mini-itx systems which are much smaller and more energy effecient than most computers. I also ripped most my dvd's to these systems so I don't need to carry around the colection of dvd's, a dvd player, or a tv. I'm interested in alternative power so I play some with using solar panels and such to power my computer and lighting etc. I've considered living in a car but am not to keen on paying insurance, upkeep, and gas money. I've considered either resorting to backpacking or maybe getting a good bicycle. I was looking at one of those bikes with electronic boost for hills or when your tired. Maybe strap a lil bike-cart behind that could carry my gear and maybe popup into something like a lil camper to sleep in. I'm still trying to figure out how to get food. Obviouly, I could probably beg for it or steal it but that lacks flare. However, I can't think of anything much I could grow that I could haul with me that way. I've considered next time I get a job I can do offsite that maybe I'll go nomad for a while. I could use my earnings for food and such while cutting down my cost of living a lot.. I'd also get to travel which is one of my favorite things do to.. especially travel by manual means.
I've slept in parks, cars, etc before and never been bothered. I think the key is to not seem like a bum. If you tell everyone your on a field research project they'll treat you much better than if you say your a homeless drifter. It's all in the presentation even if it boils down to the same thing.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Telephone and dialup total $23 a month, that's chump change. My computer cost me $400 used (yes, I was ripped off), and I bought that with my SSI lumpsum. I can afford internet easily.
:)
I was working on open source while I still was on welfare (I used the public library's Internet access). Really, it's not that hard.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Think of programmers who create lines of code as just one small part in the whole food chain of software developement. With MODERN software development creating lines of code is actually one of the smallest parts in the whole business.
What a load of crap. Not only are all you worthless overhead types the reason business must cut down IT costs, but now you say your overhead is the importanrt part and the real work of programming is just one small part of your bloated bureaucracy. Well that may be true, but not if programmers had any say in it.
rd
"Most immigrants are on welfare or in prison. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and guess what, the majority of prisoners are hispanic, the majority of the people on welfare are hispanic, and most hispanics are poor"
Such racism. Do you really think so lowly of the hispanic population that you believe such drivel?
Yes, I am an immigrant, you bastard. You need to wake up and look around at your country, not just South Central L.A. or whatever suburban hellhole you live in. There are many immigrants in the U.S. every year and the vast majority end up not "in welfare or prison"
Of course, what can I expect from someone who actually thinks Howard Dean is the answer?
Yeah, keep making those excuses Mike, they have gotten you so far. So now its the immigrants are "better networked" and "willing to work hard and help each other" and the "rest of America doesn't remember [to help you]"
Of course it is a painful experience. They are moving to a new environment. WHAT IS YOUR EXCUSE THIS TIME MIKE???
I'm glad I can help pay for your food. Its obvious your priorities are straight.
Funny, I think Socialist and Capitalist are both extremist concepts the way they've been used.. maybe I'm evil but I always think that the only to avoid the evil of either is to balance the two concepts against each other. You don't want the state to control everything.. but if they are collecting tax dollars they may as well make sure you have what it takes to live.
This can be stated in a way that the economic theorist posters can understand. It is in the government's interest, and the country's, to collect income taxes from its citizens versus having to pay for unemployment. Since it is in the government's interest, then it should require that all government contract money spent on labor is spent on labor that pays taxes, especially including subcontracting.
While some products, including software packages, may be purchased from foreign sources, a percentage such as 65% of product purchases for government contracts should be required to be purchased from American coimpanies meeting the same requirements of all American labor, including subcontracted work.
This requirement does not fetter the business decisions of private industry but protects the legitimate interests of the American taxpayer. Of course, some will argue that the government shouldn't be collecting taxes and spending on anything but defense, and to the degree that specifics can be pointed out on what to cut, of course spending should be limited to what we agree to fund in Congress, but this requirement includes privatization efforts where the government outsources the work from government employees to private enterprise.
If it's American tax dollars being spent, the tax dollars must be used to pay American labor and buy American products that meet the 65% guideline of products purchased from companies using American labor. This must be acted upon urgently by Congress and put into effect. There is no trade agreement that can override a country's legitimate interest in being able to meet its own needs. Exemptions will be required due to lack of American sources, but that points out our weaknesses that can be addressed with a guaranteed government contract as a business plan to start up manufacturing.
rd
I wonder how many ex .com startup CEOs are now lavishing it up in their million $ mansions and still living the high life, while their ex employees who made it happen are left with nothing....
How many immigrants have you known? They do help each other quite often. It's something that many of the rest of us could learn from. I didn't say it wasn't a painful or hard experience to migrate but it's because it is a painful and hard experience that they pull together. Possibly they were closer in their native lands also.. I wouldn't know.. but when they get here they tend to stand together. Of course they are networked.. how else do you explain them having their own sub-cities, their own businneses, etc that are largely by and for people that have immigrated from the same areas.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You may not realize this, but I am classified as mentally disabled, and also cannot obtain gainful employment.
Not everyone is able to join the workforce. Some of the rest of us are in fact good programmers. Don't take us nutjobs for granted.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
they steal all our jobs.... lets go to war with them.
In fact, if you have never heard of the Appalacian trail, its a 1400 mile long hiking path from Maine to somewhere in the south. It has areas to camp all along it. If you just want to live a solar-powered laptop bound existance, that drifts in and out of existance, this one borders on Socially Acceptable.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Sounds like a possible route. I've been considering walking from my current home in the midwest out to the west coast (rather than flying or taking a bus) but am a little unsure if I'd survive walking across the desert and mountains. A day or two I could do easily enough but I'm not sure about carrying enough water and gear to make the entire crossing. I'm sure people have done it often enough but the risk is a bit of a worry. I can walk about 50 miles a day but I'm sure it'd still take me several days to cross that region. Even by car it takes a long time. Last time I went that route it took something like 24 hours to go from Oklahoma City to Las Vegas even.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I understand that the government of India has created the population of Indian programmers by massively subsidizing their education. Should we compete "fairly" while other governments don't?
If the US doesn't subsidise its own education system then that's more to do witht he US being phenomenally stupid than to do with anyone else being "unfair". I doubt very much that it's true though.
Hi!
In my earlier post I wrote about the logical fallacy of pro causa non causa--the fallacy of false cause. Entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce, and IT jobs in India are booming. Both statements are true--but it does not follow that IT jobs in India are booming, and therefore entry-level positions in the U.S. are scarce. They are two distinct phenomena.
Entry-level jobs in the U.S.
One of the remarkable things about the computer science curriculum in most colleges and universities is the utter lack of correlation between what is taught in school and what is used in the real world. I'm not just talking about the use of Eiffel and APL and other "teaching" languages, or the emphasis on subjects like compiler theory. At a much simpler level there is a subtle--but pernicious--emphasis on work habits and programming style that are not just beside the point; they are positively harmful to one's career as a programmer. The CS major may have had a class on UML--but he hasn't had to design a project in UML and present it for review; he may have had a class on databases, but has no sense of how a database can be used; he has heard about the importance of documentation, but has never been asked to make a change to a program written three years ago by a coder who cannot be found; he has heard (possibly) about the idea of designing for maintainability--but who cares about maintenance when the semester is only 90 days long?
An experienced programmer should understand the importance of design, documentation, and maintainability. Savvy employers these days don't just want experience--they want "full life-cycle" experience, meaning that you have worked on a project from inception through delivery and at least one subsequent revision. When you have done that, chances are you have a pretty good handle on what is necessary to deliver another successful project--that's valuable experience.
Which means...you're absolutely right
It is hard to break into the programming business these days, if all you have is a college degree. If you've already graduated, your best bet is to find a job--any job--and get your foot in the door. A young man I'm quite fond of was a hotshot C++ programmer in college--the best job he could find was a contract job writing HTML on an e-business project. He took the job, for peanuts, and devoted himself to becoming an expert in Javascript. He helped out--learning to write Transact-SQL queries, and writing useful "helper" applications that we needed from time to time. He grew--and eventually the company hired him full-time.
If you're still in school, look for internship opportunities. I worked with a couple of interns over the summer--they both wrote real projects, worked on real business problems, and gained some remarkable insight into the difference between programming in the real world vs. programming in the confines of Carnegie Mellon. If an internship doesn't work, look for a not-for-profit organization that can use your help. Find somebody, somewhere, that needs a program. Write HTML, write Javascript, write ASP--whatever you have to do, to build real-world projects. It will make a world of difference in your marketability--but it will also give you a dramatically different perspective on the remainder of your classes.
Bottom line: programming is maturing as a field of employment The days of kids leaving school after their sophomore year to take six-figure salaries are gone. The kids who did are probably out of work, wondering if they could go back to school--a
So you don't believe in dismantling the governmental regemes that cause misery and death? I'm sure your friends in North Korea are very happy that you're sticking to your principles.
Facist countries, they don't go away without a fight.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Hi Bill!
(I'm also replying here to your comments on a post of mine, about the fallacy that declining IT employment is being caused by growth of the Indian IT market.)
The bleak American IT marketplace is not largely caused by outsourcing. While outsourcing is a phenomenon, Jerry Pournelle's analogy (originally about client/server computing) to teenage sex is apropos: a lot of people are talking about it, a lot of people claim to have done it, but in fact not many have, and a lot of those found it painful. Outsourcing down the road suffers from the intractable problem of communications that I spoke of in my earlier post: you simply can't communicate as well with a coder in Bangalore as you can with a fellow in the next cube.
The real cause of the current malaise
The bleak IT job market at present is caused by the collapse of two bubbles: the dot-com bubble, and the Year 2000 "Crisis". 1998 and 1999 saw a hiring frenzy (and a consulting rate boom) that we will never see again: anybody who could spell "HTML" could get a big-ticket job with a dot-com startup. Stories abounded about college sophomores quitting school to take six-figure positions with high-tech firms. Lots of kids took computer courses in college to cash in on the feeding frenzy, and lots of adults in the working world decided to quit their jobs and join in the gold rush as well.
Meanwhile, there was this Y2K thing...
While the dot-com boom was starting, Business America was getting panicked about the Year 2000 problem. And there were entrepreneurs out there (Ed Yourdon, Gary North, and Mike Hyatt are three that spring to mind) that were consciously fanning the fires of panic, writing about the rioting and calamity that awaited us when the electricity went off and the banking system failed. Corporate CEOs got alarmed, stock market analysts started asking scary questions, the major media got wind of the issue, and the matter ended up in front of Congress. Who passed laws.
The Law of Unintended Consequences
One of those laws permitted corporations to expense the costs of Y2K preparedness, rather than depreciating those expenses out over 5 or 7 years. Depreciating PCs has always been stupid: they are essentially worthless after two years, but accounting rules required keeping them for five. The Y2K rule permitted any savvy CIO to replace essentially every PC on the premises, buy all sorts of new software, and start every project on his five-year wish list--and the corporate finance people would approve. (By expensing the projects and purchases, corporate profits would go down, but "trailing free cash flow" would remain the same. The effect for most corporations would be a significant reduction in taxes, but little or no impact on cash flow.)
In other words, the Y2K tax legislation engendered an IT spending spree. Every IT pro with any modicum of experience was hired on these projects (even thousands of COBOL guys were hauled back out of retirement)--there was essentially full employment in business programming. And while there was full employment in business programming in midtown Manhattan and down on Wall Street, a whole new industry of e-commerce was developing in Greenwich Village and SoHo. (I'm using New York as a metaphor here.) The city was crawling with programmers, and every programmer was making a fortune.
Then the money ran out.
The Y2K projects generally ended first, but they generally ended gradually. The retirees went back to retirement, and the contractors found that they were spending 2-3 weeks "on the bench" where before it had been 2-3 days. Business was still okay, but not great. By the end of 2000, and the beginning of 2001, the dot-coms started to run into trouble. FuckedCompany.com appeared, and the news stories seemed to stop focusing on big IPOs, and started to focus on collapsing dot-coms. Through the spring and summer of 2001 the dot-coms seemed to be collapsing left and right: and a lot of
Habib: Oh my goodness gracious, what are we going to do? We cannot develop the source codes...
Try the coast guard.
Here we go, the US rightously policing the world.
1- there is always two sides to a story. What your government tells you, and what it doesn't. WMD in Iraq? the current political climate in Afghanistan? What about slightly older stories like Vietnam?
2- The first thing you do in invading a country is cause misery and death. Remember the boy with no limb left? Or that young girl napalmed from the Vietnam era? Do you cause less misery and death by invading than by not doing it? Do you trust your government to do that grim accounting for you?
3- Remember that what your government wants to do, it wants to did for political, financial, hegemonical and ideological reasons first. Humanitarian last. Always.
All the best.
Nope, I'd be happy just to keep our own government from slowly following that same path. I have no problem with people fighting facist countries but it isn't likely to be me doing it. Let the people uprise and do it themselves. Maybe if we weren't supplying weapons and such to their military leaders then those people would have a chance at succeeding. Before you go cleaning other peoples houses it's best to clean your own house first.
On the other hand I'm all for enabling the downtrodden to fight back. Educate them, provide them with food, medicine, shelter, technology, etc. Make them strong and then let them sort it out for themselves. Doing it for them won't leave them with the needed backbone to maintain their new freedoms.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I am lucky I live in North America.
This piece just sounds like a lot of FUD from corporate MIS-managers that are experiencing the fall of industry in general. This inevitable crash that we get to live in affects us all.
My response to all of the huge judgements about "immigrants" in the piece...
Every North American programmer I know is an immigrant or a descendent of immigrants. There are lots of artificial barriers in place to keep immigrants out of North America while we can travel freely anywhere in the world.
I invite you to go live in India!
The 'others' are taking american jobs. Quick, let's protect our lifestyles by limiting free trade.
This is simply xenophobia or, worse, racism. Unfortuantely, it's going to increase as the US Presidential Elections draw near, and various politicians try to create enemies they can battle against.
It's not seen as particularly pleasant any more to target the Far Eastern worker for stealing American jobs, so why should it be OK to target Indian programmers. This is a problem with the American economy, not the Indian economy. American programmers are paid too much and limiting free trade is not the answer.
India's sufficiently far away that most Americans will already have a very strange view of the country. And of course, if America says it is saving the Indian savages from 'slave wages', then they should be pleased about the generosity of their great western lords.
Strange that we never hear Americans complaining that the UK is stealing all its financial jobs. But then, it's mostly white people working in the City of London, isn't it.
Although we discussed in another response that this could be covered by the transfer payments that I originally suggested, I want to point out that that I don't know if your claim is true anyhow, at least when you average in the additional unemployed people earning $0/hour due to minimum wage. I would be interested in hearing a basis for this prediction and seeing what that basis predicts if we were to raise the minimum wage to, say, $500/hour.
I don't think theres a problem finding jobs at the bottom right now, McDonalds seems to be perpetually hiring.
If that were true, then we should rescale welfare to assume that everyone at least works at McDonalds. I think that it's more likely that McDonalds franchises, like many businesses, find it economically worthwhile to give that impression so that many people will interview, and they can keep their turnover costs low. It probably is true that someone educated enough to read slashdot who wants to work at McDonald's will get hired immediately, but I don't think that's true for everyone who you describe as being "at the bottom."