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."

Comments

Coder vs. Mgr is an old, boring flamefest

[waveguide]

...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.

It all depends on how you look at it..

[k98sven]

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.