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Outsourcing Winners and Losers
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has an article on the winners and losers of the outsourcing trend. It's a Q and A session with a distinguished panel of experts on the topic, including Professor M. Eric Johnson, who says that, 'Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.' Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers? Ouch."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/business/yourmon ey/07out.html?ex=1071378000&en=9b0b3f301239bb62&ei =5062&partner=GOOGLE
Slashdot Editors: Is it so fucking hard to get a Google partner link? What do you guys do all day?
...that we've seen over and over. More interesting is the mistaken impression that it's only coding jobs going to India. Look at Business Week for another take.
There will always be market for high-quality programmers.
Higher quality means higher prices, which means higher wages are acceptable.
It's basically a refinement of the market, not a disappearance.
I live in Sweden, which has some of the highest labor costs in Europe. Yet, Sweden has a strong steel industry, despite steel manufacturing being quite a 'low-tech' industry, with cutthroat international competition.
(Coming from Japan, and increasingly China)
How do they compete? Simple: They don't. Sweden switched its industry to high-quality and specialty steel production requireing more skill.
The USA really needs to move their steel industry in this direction, but instead they leveled tariffs on imported steel. (now dropped after trade-war threats)
(Also, note that swedish steel was exempt from these tariffs, for the reason that they don't compete with american steel manufacturers, who aren't in the specialty market)
So, for the software market, I think we'll see something similar. And a choice will have to be made whenether to face reality, at a cost of the lesser-skilled jobs, or give the industry artificial resuscitation through tariffs.
If you hire and pay on the assumption that coding is low-skill, you'll end up with crap programmers generating crap software. Projects will usually go over budget, rarely meet customer expectations, and generally have a miserable experience.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, that matches the behavior of many large companies. They hire chimpanzees, then are shocked when all they get is chimp crap out of them.
Aaaah, the free market and short sighted capitalism, leading the world to the lowest common denominator...
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Here in the USA you'll never get a job with a firm as a coder without some certificate from Microsoft. College degrees are becoming irrelevant for programmers, it takes too long to get that BA/BS and things change too fast in the industry. In addition, college grads know about things like algorithms and data structure and can write sorta good code. Writing well designed, debugged code which works takes longer than some guy just hacking it out in VB like they showed him at Microsoft school. As the folks in Redmond have taught us, "when the deadline comes ship it, and we'll fix it in the next release". Quality has lost out to time to market.
Keeping track of documentation, deliverables, schedules, budgets
But since it's these 'managers' who're doing the outsourcing, no way in hell are they outsourcing their own cabal. Enter reality re-construction #1: Management (of any kind) is indispensible! All other living matter - workers, office plants, et al. are forthwith commodities. Bring out the org. charts and let the random shuffling commence!! PowerPoint slides galore to come any week now!!!
Case in point: In the article, Mr. Johnson responsible for the quote
Since WHEN did GODDAMMED
Ok, rant completed, thanks for reading.
668.5
I've wanted to do an ask slashdot thing for a while about this, especially since it's so difficult. (When I asked my advisor, a professor with a PhD from MIT, he laughed and said "If you can't find a job, how are any of the other majors going to find one?") I was rejected when I submitted the story however.
I've had interviews and such so here's the advice I'd give.
1) Start early.
2) The people connection. Most of the interviews I had were because I actually the job was available rather than having it posted on some site or the newspaper. I even sifted through pages to find a company's e-mail adress and got a call the next day for an interview because I'd heard they were looking for people.
3) Be proactive. Bug people.
4) Get an internship. Experience looks really good. My part time job IT job at the university has been a huge plus for me.
And lastly, since I'm eager to network with people, if you're interested in working in the northern Delaware area (about 30 minutes outside of phili), I know of several companies that are hiring.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Now, to be fair, while I'm certain that you and those you've worked with are excellent programmers and engineers, I have also worked in a business that employed a lot of foreign coders from all over the world. Scandinavians, Asians, Russians, and the locals. I worked with several Chinese workers who were very difficult. It wasn't just a linguistic barrier - it was a general attitude that micromanagement is the accepted norm. None of them had any scientific education outside of the pure confines of their field, and none of them showed any initiative except for the occasional beaurocratic power struggle.
No this is not racism - there were a variety of other persons at the business that were also difficult to work with for various reasons. It was just that the mainland-Chinese workers all had the same specific problems. I have no problems with the principle of hiring workers from all over the world - and I don't believe the problems with the programmers there was one of race. It has just been my personal experience that the Chinese educational system does not produce the best programmers.
Whoever modded above parent flamebait is a cum-guzzling whore. A Slashdotter actually apologizes for something (once in a millenium occurence) and somebody mods them flamebait.
And my fiancee is applying for teachers college. She's a mathy, loves it, and its good at it, and wants to teach kids math. Anybody who doesn't think that's a laudable goal is a fucktard.
The companies that handle the outsourcing soon reach the point where they don't need the US company any more. That happened in consumer electronics and appliances years ago, and it's happening in apparel. If it can be sold through Wal-Mart, there's no need for a US company to be involved in manufacturing or distribution. Branding problems can be fixed with advertising, acquisition, or pressure. Some well-known US brands are already just fronts for offshore operations.
In service areas, if the service can be delivered over the Internet or by phone, it can be moved offshore. Right now, most of the companies doing this are fronted by US companies. But those companies become hollowed out, until they're just brands.
Next, the intellectual property moves offshore. This has already happened in consumer electronics and is happening in semiconductors. No US company can make a CD-ROM drive without licensing technology from Asian companies.
Finally, the money moves offshore.
The US could end up with Third World income levels as a result of this race to the bottom. Don't think it can happen? Twenty years ago, nobody though there would be armies of permanently homeless people in US cities. Or that Argentina would become a poor country. Or that Britain would become poorer than Italy.
In the US, average real weekly earnings peaked in 1973. That's why your parents are better off than you are.