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The Changing Face of Offshore Programming
teambpsi writes "BusinesWeek Online has an opt-ed piece on the trend in offshore programming pricing going up, with domestic rates going down. As a contractor, I've seen the downward pressure on contract gigs now to rates lower than what I was charging over five years ago. Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore, I wonder if this might be the start of some bigger trend -- maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cry ;)"
From the article: Some US customers have complained that the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses.
Tech support for corporate customers with Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers will instead be handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee, Dell spokesman Jon Weisblatt said Monday.
Let me get this straight. People cannot understand Indian accents, but they can understand Texan and Tennesseean accents? Obviously they've never been to either state ;-)
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
If there's a move to put customer service back onshore at Dell, or other "in-sourcing" trends, it's because the costs are lower, or the higher costs are offset by either good publicity / happier customers.
Mind you, I'm as pro-capitalism as they come, so being driven by the battle cry of "returns!" is a good thing, IMHO.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Dell didn't move all there support back, they only moved the support back for there business clients.
Don't expect any success with simply screaming "Buy American". Offer a better value proposition.
You are closer to the customer, not thousands of miles away.
You understand their problem better than some Indian programmer who doesn't truly grok the underlying American business practices being codified into software.
You are operating in their time zone.
etc.
That will win business a lot better than trying to shame a potential customer into paying more just because you are an American.
Democrat delenda est
Are you replying to the wrong story, or are you just dense? The point is that many of the offshore markets are becoming much more expensive. I just read another editorial by a fervent advocate of offshoring (6 months ago) proclaiming that it now makes more sense to cost-effectively develop domestically (cost-effective meaning that maybe you shouldn't rent a floor in an expensive office tower in downtown manhattan).
Although the "Buy American" campaign seems to be a great success in Iraq (thanks Dick!), I don't think it will go down too well in Old Europe.
This is keynesian economics at its best. Acutal supply and demand. Now that contractors and programmers in the states are worried that all their jobs will move over seas, they are lowering their prices. Chances are US based companies would rather do business with someone they can get of hold of, and I don't know how the legality of the system works, but you can sue people for breach of contract and such here, I do not know if you can do that with overseas contractors, is it more of a "buyer beware" methodology?
:)
Now you can expect the overseas operation to start lowering their prices or adding more value to their service, and vice versa until it eventually balances out, and once that happens most US based companies would probably prefer to work with someone based locally.
Doctors may not have to worry about this problem of oversea contracting since you still need to see them in person to do the best type of work. Lawyers on the other hand may not have the same benefits
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cry ;)
Wasn't that Walmart's battle cry for years... until it became convenient for them to forget it in favor of another battle cry that generated yet more money?
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
There's nothing wrong with siding with your own kind. It's not racism - it's common sense.
Racial supremacy is not "common sense". "My own kind" is the human race. Yours must be the Pure Master Race of Aryans.
I agree. Most people only look at the initial labor pricing of doing offshore work. For example a programmer offshore charging only $10/hour compared to a US domestic programmer charging $75. What most people do not see that their are hidden costs for bigger companies, the above scenario would work for a mom and pop organization asking for some custom programming where they handle all the itneraction. But a bigger company has to add into this the cost of communicating, keeping up to date with the offshore team, crazy hours to keep in order to communicate effectively, hiring a translator, setting up a WAN for the office over there and here etc...
There are hidden cost that the bigger companies didn't think of!
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
of course, the euro has only been around for a few years, so "historic" has less weight, but it is in fact the accurate adjective to use...
back OT, the larger trend to look at is commoditization of "business methods" programs, which is the demand side of the equation. if all these supposedly super-specialized vertical apps can be refactored into a common base plus the specialization, the common base is bound to find footing in some free software project sooner or later, and grow from there. refactoring is expensive but rewriting for each new platform du jour (jour == 5-7 years in this case) is even more expensive.
so, really: just how specialized are these programs? i'm no accountant but it seems to me there are very few ways to combine "plus" and "minus" in a fashion that supports accountability. what's the big deal?
Two of the biggest culprits behind outsourcing are Accenture and Mackenzie. I like one of Accenture's services "Human Performance" and of course they also list "Outsourcing". They are making a lucrative business out of going from company to company telling them which parts of the company to offshore and how to do it. Unfortunately HR consulting can't be easily offshored so they can't get a taste of their own medicine. If you see these snakes...errr...people coming in the door, get your resume and unemployment insurance paperwork in order.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of the overpaid executives the argument is unavoidably compelling. Labor costs are so integral to profit margin that there has always been constant pressure to reduce labor costs. American labor made a lot of gains in the 20th century which started out with conditions about as dismal as most of the third world has now. Unfortunately with the development of free trade, cheap telecommunications and a very efficient air and sea freight expensive American labor has become largely a liability unless you're in a service business that requires you're body be in the U.S. Of course there is also a solution for service, immigrants legal or illegal. Its no secret why there is so little enforcement of immigration law in the U.S and why H1B visas are so popular. It provides a vast pool of ultra cheap labor for service jobs, labor that by definition can't compain about poor working conditions. If you work for a living in the U.S. the good times are over.
Dell's action is commendable until you read that they apparently didn't sack anybody in India so presumably they just shifted all of their inferior customer service in India to individuals who haven't got the clout to effectively complain.
Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore...
Another poster spoke of the specifics of Dell, so I will not touch that. However, Capital One is beginning to bring back [some of the] work it mailed off to the other side of the planet, as they have been losing accounts hand over fist by customers pissed off about not being able to converse with support personnel due to a language gap. Sure, the labor is cheaper, but is it cheap enough to compensate for lost business? Apparently not, in the case of CapOne.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
"Who cares if an Indian can do a job better: they are Indian"
Except that they can't. Here in the US, I can keep track of my team and teach them what they need to know. If the work gets outsourced, then all you end up with is a large number of junior level programmer with no direction. It's simply not effective. Then again, neither is hiring 200 programmers for a project.
The real problem is that buisnesses are looking for the sweet spot between quality, productivity and price. It seems counter-intuitive to companies that a smaller team of more experienced programmers will be more effective than a large team of juniors. They think that a senior developer simply costs more, and that they'll still need the same number of developers.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Gosh, is it even surprising?
Please, gentlemen, repeat with me: "supply and demand". "Supply and demand". "Supply and demand".
A good course in general equilibrium microeconomics would serve highschoolers much better than chemistry or physics topics, you know.
Protectionism is stupid. American manufacturing workers have had to adapt to their jobs moving abroad since the end of World War Two, and it's caused enormous economic hardship here - but given hundreds of millions of people abroad new hope and new life. Sweatshops may suck, but they're better than making a living picking through garbage dumps, and that's often the alternative people face.
In the long run, this is one world, and one market: individuals should be free to trade ideas with anybody they want, and in most cases goods and services too.
Why shouldn't somebody in India, or Taiwan compete with me for my clients? No reason I can think of: it might suck for me, but it's going to be great for them, and probably for my clients too; the competition helps everybody except the losers.
America enjoys it's massive economic and social advantages for two reasons: the huge natural resources of it's land, and the incredible hard work and ingenuity of it's people. I think that asking the Government to step in and interfere with free trade in an otherwise free market (as software is now) simply to keep domestic prices high is exactly what landed us with a moribund and over-subsidized farming system, a largely uncompetitive and second-rate automotive industry and so on.
Repeat after me: government interference in markets, other than to address market failures or personal safety, is bad for the market, and bad for those who buy and sell in it in the long run. We have a history of lobbyists destroying the global competitiveness of their industry: don't become one of those people.
So what does that leave for the domestic programmer? Well, at one end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too small to outsource: the transaction costs in specification and organization are too large to make it more efficient to outsource.
And on the other end of the spectrum, there's the stuff which is too important to outsource: areas where people will pay a premium for domestic labor because it has to be done fast, and a risk of misunderstanding or second-rate work makes outsourcing unattractive.
But in the middle? Get used to the pressure, folks, as generations of your forebears have in other industries as the rest of the world began to catch on... First mover advantage only lasts for so long.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
"Only after that come the other nationals. Race has nothing to do with it. Having such priorities is natural and common sense."
That is the worst type of patriotism. Clearly, if a foreigner does a job better than an American, the foreigner should be favored. THAT is common sense. What country someone lives in has nothing to do with anything in such matters.
"By American" has been the battle cry of factory workers for years, especially factory workers in the automotive industry. Yet how many foreign cars do you see on the road every day? Consumers and corporations both go to wherever the lowest price is.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
In case you hadn't noticed, look how many indian doctors there are who came to the USA, Canada and England in the 1950s through 1970s, and I suppose still today. The work couldn't be outsourced, but the labor could be moved closer to where it was required.
And health care is still absurdly expensive, but that's another story.*
(on average, 75% of your health insurance dollar becomes either profits or overheads, with only 25% going to care for you or anybody else in your insurance pool, I believe)
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I still buy amercian if there is an option. I refuse to purchase foreign items, unless i have too.
F-em
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think we saw some massively inflated salaries in the late nineties, and a lot of the outsourcing that's happened since was a reaction of panicy companies who knew there simply wasn't a way to manufacture profitable goods at prices that were low enough to sell by paying tech people in the US the salaries they were asking for: this, at a time, when companies in the same sectors were going bust left, right, and center.
What we're now seeing is something approaching a normalization. With the dot-com bust and the fact Y2K has been over-with for the last three years, salaries are approaching levels that employers are willing to pay. At the same time, traditional out-sourcing sources are no dummies, they're increasing their prices to levels the market will bear after many years of charging the bare-minimum to attract business.
You know, this'll sound terribly harsh, but I don't see any real bad in this. India's economy, far behind most Western countries because of circumstance, has been improved radically because of this, and even if outsourcing work were to dry up tomorrow, the skills that those organizations in that country have developed with regard to specing and planning means it stands a good chance of becoming a leading force in the software industry in the future, and pushing up everyone's standards as a result. Meanwhile, US businesses are now securer, they can afford to get software development done for profitable products. And programmers in the US, while not having the opportunity any more to work for a decade and retire (if that situation ever existed), certainly now have better prospects for getting safe and secure jobs now that salaries are sane.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I have nothing but the utmost respect for many Indian computer scientist however most of the Indian coders I've met were filled with conceit and their coding ability wasn't all that good.
Mind you, I'm as pro-capitalism as they come, so being driven by the battle cry of "returns!" is a good thing, IMHO.
I think capitalism is the best socioeconomic system mankind has come up with yet. But some people get into it a bit too much -- mainly the CEOs at the top who think making ten million per year isn't enough, so they do various things to hurt the people at the bottom of the ladder (cut wages/benefits, outsource, etc).
I like the "survival of the fittest" aspect of capitalism, but I would rather have the citizens survive than a business. Outsourcing is painful, but I think eventually, as the author of one of the articles says, equilibrium will be reached. Hopefully few of us Americans get hurt in the process.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I would disagree. The bigger companies do think about such costs. Thats why you get a 25-50% saving when the salary difference is way higher. Similarly they are careful what and how they use very cheap but possibly lower quality resources. So for example who you get for a long distance phone billing problem depends on how much you spend a month.
Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well. The experience and infrastructure is now there. Much of the really low grade work now goes elsewhere.
You can't both have the cake and eat it.
You mean, you can't eat your cake and have it, too. Remember the arrow of time here. If you couldn't eat the cake after having it, what would be the point?
If you won't, please stop acting like liberals or ayn randians. A true liberal would understand the necessity of moving production there where it is least expensive.
I think you are also confusing liberals with libertarians. To put it in the terms of Karl Marx, a liberal believes "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" while a libertarian is more inclined to believe "From each according to his needs, to each according to his abilities." Liberals believe that group achievement is enhanced by providing for individual security, while a libertarian believes that group achievement is enhanced by individual freedom.
It is all buzz word compliant. I bet if you had set up shop in some low cost city in the US and claimed you had outsourcing capability you would have had plenty of contracts lined up. Heck, call your company Outsource Synergies. Of course you don't have to let them know that what is outsourced is your ATT billing and only because ATT did so. You can hire local programmers, admins at a decent wage and still make a profit. It is all about the buzz word. In certain cases the buzz word does become the reality without necessarily having to be.
OK I'll bite. That your family and friends mean more to you than someone you've never met is not surprising at all. But why should you care more that someone you don't know in Texas doesn't have a job and can't feed their kids than some guy in New Delhi who's in the same mess? Could it be that the guy in New Delhi is Indian?
If you can't care about both, then you can't care about either...
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Honestly could you tell how may things you buy are actually make in USA? I am not trying to TROLL here but be fair and think about it. Just like any other industry the goods are made by the lowest bidder.Capitalism.
There would be problems with IP violations because the code is proprietary and there is little chance that companies would find out about violations.
The lesson here is you really pay for what you get.
I work for a major company which is now trying to outsource my J2EE programming position to Brazil.
Its almost too funny watching it go so wrong.
Our group has for years fought with the business group over software requirement specs. What we end up building almost always diverges from what they had in there minds. Yes we create software requirement specs with mock up and all that. Yet most of these are in business speak, and can be interpreted in many different ways.
Now they are attempting to outsource to a CMM level 3 development group. The thing is the Brazilians require the software requirement specs to be in precise use cases covering every function that can possibly take place. In fact they will not even start working on a project until this document has been created and signed off on by everyone and their mother.
What has instead happened is the business has no idea how to create software engineering specs. They can't effectively communicate this through the middle management hell that is spread out over 3 countries. The Brazilians effectively sat on their asses for 3 months, and documented the fact that they did. Once they finally wrote something it didn't integrate correctly with all the systems that we have in place in the USA, because there was nothing spelling out the fact in the specs. Now the project is late and everyone is pissed.
Somehow this is better than paying me extra to know the systems, to interpret what business really wants (and sometimes get it wrong), and get things out on time.
In short I am not afraid, in fact I am looking forward to the time the come back to me needing help and I ask for a big fat raise!
Germany has one too: labor costs / inflation rise, they import more Turks (etc), but when unemployment gets too high, they start deporting people.
Most economic theories assume that the size of the population is more or less static and that the government has no control of it (Stalinism, Maoism and Nazism of course being exceptions to this rule), but in fact a lot of fairly powerful economies are operating partially through manipulation of migrant labor pools: here we have Mexians, South Americans, and the H1B scheme.
It does suck in a lot of ways, both for the migrants, who may only get a few years of the good life before being punted back home, and for the local labor pool, who can't get what they would consider a good wage any more, but in the long run it may actually support national prosperity.
That cheap labor pool may be what helps America avoid the worst of recessions, for example.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
If that is so, why don't those that make the decision to outsource open up their jobs for outsorcing?
>>Except that they can't
If that is the case , then the companies wouldn't be going there in the first place. Now regarding the quality of the softwares, its better not to talk about it. US companies like Microsoft have been producing notoriously inferior software in many aspects. So was there any issue about it? if the quality of softwares produced as a result of outsouring is "inferior" then customers will look for alternatives. Perhaps they will end up in insisting "made in US" softwares. What I really cant understand is what happens to the "free market mantra" of these guys when it comes to outsouring ? Let the market decide everything right?.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
Reading the comments here, I'm wondering if people read the linked-to Yahoo article, or just read the reporter's comments. The Yahoo article actually makes some interesting arguments to support what alot of people are saying here (essentially, that is in an open market, and Americans need to compete fairly with the off-shore developers).
The author cites several ways in which current American development costs are actually on-par with off-shore costs. Sure the actual cost of a single programmer is higher in the US, but when you factor in 'hidden costs' (more project management, risk of legal issues with IP, etc), the overall cost of the project can not only be the same in the US, but it can be alot more hassle free (and less hassle has value too).
I thought it was particularly interesting at how these factors can really hit a small company hard, since small companies generally lack strong legal teams, and strong internal development processes, and these are two areas where off-shore development has some risk.
Na-yeen-anajad
Nayeenanajad
Really, it's NOT that hard!
There are hidden cost that the bigger companies didn't think of!
Middle management was WRONG AGAIN! TELL 'EM WHAT THEY'VE WON, BOB!!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Even back in 2001 before they moved some of their support operations to India, Dell's customer and technical support had very long hold times and rude agents.
When I called to order my computer, after 50 minutes on hold, I got a sales rep; he told me that he would call back because he had a large amount of sales paperwork (???) to complete, and that he'd call me back within an hour. I gave him my contact info and hung up.
Five hours later, with no call from Dell, I called sales back and ordered my computer with another (friendly!) sales rep.
A week later the sales rep who promised to call me back finally did -- cussing me out and threatning me because I didn't order my machine with him.
I'm glad to hear Dell is moving their support staff back onshore, but hopefully something has been done about their rude customer support.
Notice how quality is never discussed in these articles? It's always "cheaper" when everyone gets their ass fired, but we never hear why it fails.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Indians, Pakistanis or Chinese. Really.
I'm an Indian, and let me tell you, the culture is racist to the core. Hell, even within the race there's the caste system, and don't for a minute believe anybody who tells you that it's dead.
Most cultures are ferociously racists: the only exceptions are places where there are too few people of other races to even notice (some parts of England, say, are pretty chilll) or America, where the fight against racism is a big historical driver.
This is one thing which I think Americans have got right and can teach the world: how to deinstitutionalize and stigmatize racism to the point where basic values change for many, if not most, people.
Seriously: I think that America has an incredibly tolerant and non-racist culture over all. Festering throwbacks excepted.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
No they are not. They are open to outsourcing the jobs of OTHERS, not their jobs.
I know you are a troll, and I shouldn't feed you but hey, It's 2004....
The smart companies never moved their programming and tech staff from in house, as they knew that the only way to get the best quality was to keep it at home.
We had a few phb's try and convince the CTO and the CFO that moving the entire development staff to an outsourcing firm... they almost suceeded until the old man (read that as the dude that built this company..) that hold's 51% of the stock said, "no way in hell. there is no security, no quality control, and no way for us to completely control the process." he went on about how only fools would trust another company with their secrets and their future.
The old man did this on one of the telecasts in front of the whole company intentionally making the Executive staff and the phb's look foolish for chasing small dollar returns for giving up the stable.
A company with strong leadership that actually looks toward the future sucess does not chase the easy dollar.
I'm not whining, I'm proud to have a leader in the company that isn't as incompetent as the management that thinks like you do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
We were all to "special" to form a union back when we had some power. Now we have no power because of the ease of offshoring, but we want to pick up the union battle cry "Buy American!"
All of you Overpaid twits that were worried that a Union would not help you because you made more money than the average joe, well some jerk in India has your job now, because you didn't want a Union.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
No, the problem isn't racism. The problem is most of the people manning off shore help desks - especially tier one support - are completely incompetent.
*fingers crossed* Please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please-oh- please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please-oh-please...
Blatant self-promotion: Jerek.net
Outsourcing always seems cheaper on paper but it often turns out that it is not as flexible as inhouse or that the costs for being as flexible are actually higher. Not that it matters by this time the manager who signed the contract has had its bonus and is busy on the next bone headed move.
Let me give an example. Local school wich also gave night classes had a cafeteria. It would do cheap cheerfull dinners so you could go straight from work, eat there and then go to class. Or if your class was early the other way around. GREAT. Then they outsourced the caferteria it promptly closed this great service.
I seen the same thing in other companies. They outsource the cafeteria lady and all of a sudden the office staff has to do things like arrange cake, late night food for when a department has to work overtime and so on. Worst case I seen had us using our own Microwave and cooker since we were not allowed to touch the equipment in the kitchen since it didn't belong to the company. Great fire hazard.
There was once a time when companies did everything themselves. They maintained their own cars, had their own doctors, had a few holiday places to send employees too. This was boomtime. Then companies started to focus on their core capabilities and outsource or sell anything that didn't belong. We been in a downward spiral ever since.
I WANT MY BLOODY DINNERLADY BACK! An old fat woman who knows everyones birthday and gives them a little cake at lunch and puts up a x-mas tree with cookies.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I moved four projects to India with reasonable success. We did not use a lowest-cost provider; instead, we used a company that charges more than Wipro or Infosys, but fields better talent than they do (in fact, they cherry-pick from Wipro and Infosys for new recruits).
Here are my conclusions:
1) We were able to ramp up faster than if we had tried to hire locally.
2) We were able to overcome personnel issues more quickly -- the vendor was able to add higher-powered programmers very quickly when they got into trouble, and "swarm" the problem with bodies. In our case (simple Web apps) it worked, although there are situations in which it obviously would not have worked (mythical man-month, blah blah blah).
3) The quality of the finished product was reasonable. Call it B/B-. Which was OK for us, maybe not good enough for some, but acceptable.
It turns out that if I had hired a much smaller number of local programmers as permanent employees (consultant rates would not have worked) -- very good ones at market prices -- and they had performed up to expectations -- I could probably have brought the same projects in on the same schedule for the same price. I probably would have ended up with a better architecture, and better code.
So maybe it's a wash. Except, I would have had the following problems:
1) Hire/fire. When the work was over, I didn't need the teams any more. With the Indian vendor, I could cut back without worry. With permanent hires, I'd have a serious morale problem.
2) Risk. If my gunslingers ran into a problem, I wouldn't have been able to "throw bodies" at it. My budget wouldn't have allowed for that.
3) Maintenance risk. The Indian teams can be scaled way back, but I could still keep 3 people on the project for continuity. If I scaled back my own teams similarly, I'd only be able to save one job, and if that person quit, I'd be hosed.
So there are a lot of subtle factors that play here. The Business Week guy alludes to them, but doesn't really itemize them well.
I'm not a capitalist, but at the moment capitalisme is the most succesfull. It would be nice if we would be working to better ourselves and rest of humanity, but so far no one has figured out how to make that work in the real world. Even communisme has a leathal flaw in it nobody so far was able to remove (They had to build a wall around their country to keep their inhabitants inside, think that says enough)
I guess there's still a lot of work ahead.
Try getting a job in India.
Seriously, they don't make it easy for foreigners.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Liberals believe that group achievement is enhanced by providing for individual security, while a libertarian believes that group achievement is enhanced by individual freedom.
Almost right. It would be better to say that liberals believe that group (really government) control enhances individual freedom.
I visited an independent car manufacturing plant in Fremont CA a few months ago. Interestingly they were building Toyotas and Hondas, all right hand drive, for export to Japan. Remember the days when car manufacturing was moving to Japan? Seems that our automobile industry learned how to adapt and is now reversing the trend. Perhaps software engineering will follow suit. It *never* ceases to amaze me how primitive Fortune 5000 IT development shops are. Oh yes, there are plenty of groups, teams, even divisions doing great work with new processes and technologies -- but on the corporate level few can answer basis questions such as "how many developers do you have?" "where are they located?" "On what are they working?". There is little standardization of processes, metrics are a pipedream and reuse is seemingly unachievable. Evolve or die!
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well.
They've been very good at what they're doing for several years now. Instead they're getting more expensive because they've gone from being a "secret" for a couple of companies to leverage the first-world education (for some) with third-world wages, to being a well known fact that every organization and their brother is racing to join the trend. Obviously there are a finite amount of highly trained, intelligent software engineers in India, so there is now competition for their services. Hence you have salary inflation. I've heard that the ascent of salaries has been absolutely dramatic. Capitalism at work.
Much of the really low grade work now goes elsewhere.
Some time ago there was an idiotic outer-worldly statement by one of the execs of one of the big outsourcers that if Indian developers got too expensive, they'd just switch to Vietnam, etc. This is so ridiculously imaginary that it boggles the mind. India, as you know, is a hot spot because of three things:
-They have a fabulous education system for some
-They are a reasonably stable, generally low corruption country
-Because of being a British controlled area, they have a large number of English speakers
Without all three of these factors, it's a no-go except in exceptional circumstances. It's for this reason that even in the high-education countries of Russia and China they are only a drop in the bucket compared to India. The idea of other areas like Vietnam is just absurd.
BusinesWeek Online has an opt-ed piece...
I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'op-ed' as in 'opinion-editorial'. Used to describe articles in newspapers that express a point of view usually opposing the paper's official editorial stance and published opposite the editorial page.
This is neither an 'opt-ed' piece nor an 'op-ed' piece. It's just a column.
I may be dating myself but it been a "long" time since I heard the phrase "buy american" I thought it was outlawed or something.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
I'm starting a new position this coming Monday. My new employer was dissatified with the output of an outsourcing / consulting firm.
They used a mixed model, with US based management and design, and Indian grunt coders - the major difficulty was that the software modules delived to date failed to meet specifications, event the specifications originated by the outsourcing vendor.
Hopefully, this will have a better outcome than than the last time I was taking over an outsourced project. This past summer, I never was able to obtain a full copy of the source code archive, documentation or specifications from the Ukrainian outsourcing company - I did obtain a sufficent subset to see that over half of their code would need to be rewritten, refactored or simply discarded before the project could be delivered to users.
Caution: Do not stare into laser with remaining eye.
I'm not trolling, I do actually believe that America is an incredibly powerful positive force in the world. If you think about it, the USA defeated two of the most incredibly murderous regimes ever to see the face of the globe, and is working hard on containing the third.
Soviet Communism murdered around 60 million people, Nazi Germany around 20 million (around 6m Jews, the rest homosexuals, gypsies, dissadents, the disabled etc) and Mao around 40 million, plus more since.
That's nothing to sneeze at. Regardless how much people on the left will tell you that our wars against communism in, say, South America were a bloody and meaningless waste of life, in fact given the scale of the Communist murder states decimations of their own population, I can see why those wars were fought. But this is getting rather off topic.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Bangladesh is getting all excited about this ...
e _6 683.shtml
http://nation.ittefaq.com/artman/publish/articl
The White House is preparing to ask Congress to approve legislation next year making it easier for immigrant workers to enter the U.S., according to a report published in the Wall Street Journal.
"We need to have an immigration policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee," President Bush said earlier this month. "We're in the process of working that through now so I can make a recommendation to the Congress."
The Democrats want more : the right to vote for illegal immigrants.
I don't know who to vote for. Is there someone running who has a reasonable, moderate stance on immigration ???
You still ordered the pc with them didn't you? So their sales department was 100% effective in your case. Stop by my house. I got an old computer to sell to you but first I will kick your teeth in.
Geez. Learn to have some self respect kid. If a company doesn't even give you service when you are buying something how the hell do you expect they will treat you when you come back with a problem?
Admit it you are a masochist. Now get on all four and beg like a dog and maybe they will honor your tech support calls.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Indian and China have about a billion people each. How, exactly, are those people going to be fed, clothed and housed? Nobody has much of an idea.
They won't stay as peasant farmers, as the huge migrations to the slums of the cities has demonstrated, so yes, for now, those are the options: low wage factory labor, or starving in the slums.
India has a new program to try and roll out city-style services (telecoms, water etc. ) to the villages to try and encourage people to stay put, and I'm very hopeful about that, but with populations this large, options are limited, you know?
I'm all in favor of fair wages for work, but that's going to have to happen after unionization: you can't assume it into the system, it has to be won.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I'm all for the free market sorting it out. Just to be clear: I think the Indian outsourcing thing is a phase and that it will blow over.
The real problem (which is quite amusing) is that you can trust companies to do the right thing. Right after they've done everything else. Extreme Programming, Outsourcing, Consultants, etc., etc., etc. are all attempts are cure-alls in place of a well managed project. Not that this is anything new. Many other corporate departments have been through the same shift/reorg cycle as software dev. They all eventually smoothed out. Software development will too, don't worry.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
More like 'bye American' and then we cry.
Until India has comparable environmental laws, a safety net, reasonable healthcare, etc, offshore work done there should be subject to taxes and tariffs.
Scromp: why? Why should there be taxes (keeping money in the American system) simply because the Indians will work cheaper, or have less social infrastructure?
Could you justify that please? It doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
i am impressed.....
any chance you can tell us the name of your company?
A few sites:
Racism may be one factor but there are other issues also. In some side note related to recent gas explosion in China it was noted that more than 90,000 people have died in work-related accidents from January to September 2003. This figure is more than 10 times larger than in western Europe where typical rate is 8 deaths to 100,000 people. Based on stories there is also quite of lot serious accedents also, and one is typicaly paid little or nothing for losing a body part.
If you need to pay lower salaries and can omit some safety, health and environment protection costs it can be economical to have people to replace robots. If people in cheap countires will ever get rights to ask for compensation, the current asbestos liabilities are just small money.
As an IT worker, there is probably no great risk of losing leg, hand or life but probably ones work conditions are worse than on places where you can complain that 95Hz CRT gives you an headache and you want TFT.
What makes it even worse is that our tax dollars are being used to subsidize gas. That's why gass in the US is cheaper than in other places in the world. So the tax payer is also helping pay for the gas that the Hummers burn through. Talk about welfare for the rich.
No, he related his own experiences...and that with fair and equal offers put out, the indians were rasing prices, americans lowering, and that moving to india was no substitue for having american workers that understand HIS needs. Understanding saves money, more than actual wages. He was commenting that he sees it becoming a trend, and more work should start "coming back" when CEOs stop chasing the dream of small $$$.
Yea and unions were quite effective in keeping those manufacturing jobs from going overseas, right?
Really, it did. All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You can't fight that.
Protectionism is pushing against the tide. I don't necessarily like the results any more than you do, but those who deny the future fail to prepare for it.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
That would worry me. You would be so fucked if you lost your connection or you if the computer crashed.
Protectionism only works short term.
It removes the incentive to really innovate and improve and compete.
If you aren't competative it is just wasteful to use your money that way.
If you can't compete on one product, make or do something else.
If you sit and try to force people to protect local sources, you'll get eaten up by Walmart, and those local sources die anyway.
Is a load of shit, and goes against decades of economic theory. If other countries can deliver a better price/performance ratio (which, in the case of programming, we will find out in the long term) then having them do the work maximizes efficiency for both parties.
I'm sure lots of automotive worker jobs were lost when the Japanese came into the US market with better products. Tough nuggets. Stop releasing shitty products, and maybe somebody will buy them!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cry"
I personally prefer "build your own, luser!" myself...
But they're structured very differently: one union per industry - so all shipworkers are in the same union.
The bosses get a single group to negociate with, cutting down uncertainty and transaction costs, and the workers get a much more powerful union.
What's interesting is that by bringing it down to a duopoly situation, a lot of the inefficency and strife of the American union system vanishes...
There's a lot about the Swedish system that doesn't appear to work over here, and this is probably like that, but it's interesting.
And, in the final analysis, a union is just a corporation which has an "exclusive provision of labor" contract with a company. Even in a "libertopian" society, Unions could still arise if they provided a genuine service.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Please name one large company that has outsourced any upper management functions.
Normally I don't reply or even read what anonymous cowards post, but I feel compelled to say this.
I take the farmer analogy and apply it to today, a farmer would reap the seed they sew and eat the food they produced. This is similar to our augmentation of nature, we do jobs, get money, and can afford the things we need, want, and earn. Yes we live in a society of consumeristic whoredom never before known to the human race, but that's beside the point.
Nowdays, you'd plant the crops with efficient machines and eat what you need, sell off the rest. Many companies will simply hire you to do the work and pay you what you need. However, they've been using the idea of free market trade to push wages lower and lower and lower so as to make people homeless, hungry, uneducated, and very very VERY pissed off. 2 parents shouldn't have to work full time jobs to raise their kids and shouldn't be forced financially to send their kids to our shitty public school system but that's how it is.
Most farmers and their wives didn't work the fields 14 hours a day to make enough food. Sure, the work was hard and long but at the end of the day you got what you made and in the winter you got some offtime to do other things.
Free trade is simply an excuse large profit-driven corperations use to make the rest of us work for less to increase their profit margins because there's no other area left to cut up. Most companies have already cut benefits of any kind, as well as other perks to working there.
So, I'll tell you what. Go down to a shanty town and live there for a week or two, get to know the people and why they have the problems they do instead of telling people to stop whinging. That doesn't solve their problem of not having food or shelter and being very angry at all. Infact, if you did go down to a shanty town or a homeless person and told them that they'd probably beat you to a bloody pulp. Also, if you knew about the deregulation of buisness law over the past 200 years and the effect it's had on us, then you might understand that what's happening is wrong, it's a slow and steady push to making everyone slaves. Instead you choose to throw rocks instead of doing something harder, like educating yourself. Read Gangs of America, it's free in pdf if you do a google search for the website.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
How the heck is the US containing china? Have you looked at a store shelf recently? How many "MADE IN USA" labels do you see compared to "MADE IN CHINA"? HOW IS THAT CONTAINMENT?
China is communist in name only. They're a capitalist dictatorship.
Nasssssty little Indianses steals my IT jobseses! My precious, precious IT jobseses! Cheats, they is!
The notion that India is somehow special is laughable. Similarly India is already outsourcing work to other cheaper countries. Not just companies picking cheaper alternatives to India for outsourcing (and for plenty of products language is not a barrier) but Indian companies themselves taking on entire IT projects internal to India or external to it and then outsourcing bits of the work.
There are a lot of countries with good education systems, relatively little corruption and the infrastructure to support IT businesses. most even have well developed health care systems too - most of eastern europe for example fits the bill very nicely, as do countries like Brazil.
India also has problems some of the other countries don't - very high loss of hours to industrial disputes, extremely inflexible labour laws in some situations and the ever simmering border disputes with Pakistan.
The Indian governments own models are in part based on assumptions about call centres being a temporary not a long term phase of Indian business that will either move on or be automated out of existance by speech techology.
However, I think you're wrong about globalism.
I'm pro-globalization, and I'm strongly involved in third world poverty issues. I think that, in the long run, migration of work from the industrialized world to the very, very poor as a Good Thing, and although it's starting on pretty rocky ground, compared to the early days of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it's a cake walk.
America's balance of trade situation is completely unsustainable. But how much of that is because America is living in a completely unsustainable credit bubble?We borrow money to buy goods from abroad which we otherwise can't afford, and we will eventually have to pay.
The "actual situation" is that America was, briefly, massively more advanced in industrial infrastructure and many areas of high technology - we came out of World War Two as, frankly, kings of the world.
But then the world caught up, but Americans had got used to being enormously well-off, and so we started borrowing to sustain a lifestyle we couldn't afford.
In the long run, America's standard of living is going to fall to some sustainable standard: that part is inevitable. The questions are:
1> slow decline, or sudden crash? and
2> more or less equal wealth distribution at the end of that process?
We could easily end up as a Brazil, with incredible wealth gradients between rich and poor - and of course, they just elected a far-left socialist to fix that problem...
Bucky Fuller's "Grunch of Giants" has a few choice things to say about situations like this also. Insert that here.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
The real reason Dell moved corporate support back to the US was because they have run out of the engineering talent pool they have so proudly talked about using. This talent is moving quickly to non-voice BPO work with companies such as IBM, MicroSoft, Oracle, Accenture, etc. They have been using liberal arts grads, undergrads, etc. Computer support is difficult without the background. We've seen this before. Dell's follow-up announcement the day after stating they were committed to India was to quell investor concerns. As stated elsewhere, investors only care about one thing. Lehman Brothers cancellation of their in-house support required knowledge base with Sybase, something WiPro and TCS couldn't meet in the end. Indians are good at this - staying on top of the "hot" technologies. I don't think that the expertise (that comes with years of experience) exists there yet. BTW - Some companies are touting US support for all customers. MPC (formally Micron) made such an announcement recently. They took a jab right at Dell stating their top support is not just reserved to corporate customers.
Tried buying a drink in a bar in Boston? They won't serve you if you aren't an Irish Indian...
realkiwi
We are the lucky few on the bright side of capitalisme.
Falling prices indicate a lack of demand too, not just an increase in supply. Many businesses have not been adding to their computer staff. They believe they have enough technology to remain competitive. There are many exotic technologies that businesses could try although the rewards are not well known. Technology developers need to persuade businesses to make some forays into new applications and devices.
Many of the bottlenecks are human rather than computers/machines. Software is waiting for people to finish their tasks and then log a few more keystokes.
Speeding up people will create more demand for machinery, but are people not working smart enough? We're surrounded by information, but whenever a deep question needs to be answered, it is still so hard to get the best answer.
What are some effective ways to sell the idea of improving the knowledge infrastructure? If businesses buy more software for knowledge, this will improve their expertise and create more demand for developers.
There are more consumer gadgets that show the power of computer decisions. One example is the GPS navigator, that tells you how to go from A to B. Such devices could spark an interest in business owners to install custom systems to guide people through their tasks.
In other words, the insertion of more computer smarts in our everyday lives create more demand for applying computers to take on more tasks.
Now this brings us back around the cycle to people not working smart enough. What will people do when computers have taken over their jobs? These people will need more software to keep up with the requirements of their future work.
Right now this cycle is kind of sluggish. A lot of people do not need to learn much before they enter their next job. However, the attitude that very little effort is needed to start a new job must change. Globalization is a wakeup call. Everyone needs to see themselves as a player with international competition as well as computerized ocmpetition.
An answer may be to accelerate the cycle. Everyone has to do two things: boost their own competitive advantage by learning, and increase the appetite for new technology.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Ok, I see what you're saying. And it all makes sense to me.
The part of the premise I don't buy is that a global middle class is possible. Seriously.
If we budget purely in money then, yes, it could potentially happen. But the problem is that that planet won't sustain that much more growth: the middle class is supported by enormous resource consumption, and cheap labor elsewhere.
I don't know of any solution to this problem within our current resource constraints: if everybody is moderately well off, the planet it toast. If only the very rich have access to resources, the poor are toast...
Phrased in those terms, it's impossible to see a way out. And I don't know where to go from there.
India and China can't afford to raise environmental and social standards to western levels until after going through an economic transformation, and the only way the could fuel or spark such a move is trade with the west. If we won't trade with them until they are where we are, they'll never get there at all.
But I don't know what to do about that. Right now, it's working in as much as it's building an infrastructure in the third world and while it's hurt Americans, it's not hurt them to the point of starvation. But is it a long term solution? I just don't know.
I see your doubts clearly.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Nothing is or was going to keep a lot of the jobs moving once WIPO and GATT existed.
IMHO Unions do serve a very useful role, but if you look at least at UK history that role has been best served not when there have been strikes but the rest of the time, when they've been able to work with employers on safety, and quality of life while at the same time helping to ensure a company runs well and everyone is happy.
And once a large portion of the good/high paying jobs have left who will pay the taxes?
It isn't like the goverment isn't getting smaller, so taxes will have to go up.
If China wasn't afraid of American military force, they'd have retaken Taiwan, probably North Korea, and generally expanded out to their previously huge borders. I wouldn't be too happy being Japanese either, if that happened.
Yes, that's containment.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I don't understand this. The most racist parts of Britain are the places where there are very low and very high proportions of people from ethnic minorities.
America is a comparitively racist and generally conservative culture, hence the need for institutionalised safeguards against racism and paranoia regarding it. It's not anywhere near as bad as Australia or Austria, and few places are as bad as India. An Indian friend of mine's father described Pakistanis as "sub-human". He's considered a bit left-wing by his friends.
It isn't just accent. It is huge, huge, huge cultural differences. Sometimes you would be able to understand their words more easily if it weren't so difficult to believe what they are saying.
About two weeks ago I was helped by a Microsoft tech support person in New Delhi, or maybe Bangalore, I forget which. Some otherwise correctly running Windows XP computers had trashed themselves so that it was impossible to run the Recovery Console. The MS tech support guy had absolutely no clue about how to fix the problem, although he did have plenty of time-wasting ideas. This is not unusual, of course. The Psychic Friends Network is sometimes equally as good as Microsoft technical support at understanding bugs in Microsoft software.
What made this technical support call different is that the Indian Microsoft technical support guy was the most arrogant person with whom I've ever talked. He made Larry Ellison look humble. He was cheerful enough, but entirely useless doing technical support because of believing that I am an inferior who should believe any lie he tells me.
After a while, for me it stopped being a support call and began to be an interesting social interaction. In Hindu culture, if you don't belong to one of the castes, you are an untouchable, a person below any of the castes. Obviously, I don't belong to any of the castes, so you know where that left me. To him, I was of the social class that cleans up after bodies that have been burned on a funeral fire, or empties latrines, or eats dogs.
Many, many Hindus are little influenced by the caste system, but this guy seems to embrace it completely. Whenever I would tell him that it was obvious that what he was saying was untrue, he would tell me another lie. No amount of mentioning that what he was saying was obviously incorrect stopped him. To him, anything that popped into his mind should be gold to someone like me. I would say, "You invented that; there's no reason to think that whatsoever", and he would just cheerfully continue with another invention.
If you aren't familiar with the arrogance and disconnection of the Hindu caste system, here is a quote: "By his very birth a Brahmin is a deity even for the gods and the only authority for people in this world, for the Veda is the foundation in this matter." -- Manusmrti 11:85.
For another example of Indian arrogance, see this story by an Indian : Hindian Arrogance on a Tourist Bus.
We hear a little about the problems of outsourcing technical support, but things are a lot worse than most stories say.
Thank you for this. This is something that needs to be known... that our businesses and therefore our government is supporting such a country with business.
In as much as it's got a 4000 year old university system, an excellent mathematical history, etc. etc. etc.
Those cultural institutions were left largely intact by the British, unlike the Chinese equivalents which were uprooted so drastically by the 20 years of civil war, the cultural revolution etc.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
... and it's driven by the declining value of the dollar overseas. Our currency is not going far when you try and spend it beyond our shores at the moment.
We declinded 19% against the Euro during 2003, sadly it is a trend that looks like it will continue for a little while longer.
Once the dollar recovers we will start to see jobs and services outsourced again.
A company with strong leadership that actually looks toward the future sucess does not chase the easy dollar
implying Nike, IBM, Microsoft and all that ilk do not have strong leadership
The old man's company secrets are most likely being reversed engineered and re-engineered offshore.
It's much harder now to maintain an edge. Companies should increase their IQ by inventing new products, not just new features.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Has any country truly been communist? They all seem to become dictatorships in the end. It seems to be the fundimental flaw with communism - it sounds nice on paper, but forgets what selfish bastards we humans can be. Someone will always play the system to take power.
The notion that India is somehow special is laughable.
Yes, that's why India is the destination of almost all outsourcing. Thanks for clearing that up.
They really are. And it's a point of pride.
America (and some parts of europe) really have made enormous strides in changing the way race is thought about, and I think that Americans should be proud of that.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
American economy and its processes have to compete with those of the advanced world. Particularly with Japan and Germany. American economy has symbiotic relationships with what it has "outsourced" before. For example, Taiwan and Japan became electronic majors when America "outsourced" its electronic business to them. That has left Germany and other advanced companies still biting dust. By outsourcing hardware America could foucs on software like Internet where the real innovation and money lies. Similarly, that will happen with services being outsourced to India.
The middle class: "people who have something to lose," effectively, might survive.
But what if they survive largely through shifting the basis of their wealth from unsustainable to sustainable resources?
Things we can assume about the future: basic resources like food are likey to be more expensive. Oil is likey to be more expensive. Energy is likely to be more expensive.
But other kinds of comoddities could get cheaper: computers, communication, entertainment etc. are all falling in relative cost of production, for example.
So I can imagine a future - a working, reasonable, healthy future - where transport and production costs encourage bioregionalism in agriculture, but there's a vibrant global culture based on cheap communication. You still have a middle class, but they measure their wealth in terms of music and movies and books and travel rather than in terms of fifty different pairs of shoes and four cars.
It could happen, perhaps.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I don't think that's a malady that infects only Indian programmers...
Bugger that. You are halfway a 5 year course you say, so it will be 2,5 years before you even come on the market, and some 5 years before you can be seen as somewhat experienced.
If you can tell how the markets will be in 5 years from now (and be accurate) you can make a killing selling your services. If not, just hang on and do the right thing.
Nuking the white house with shrubs in it might be right.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Who was it Alvin Tofler in the book The Third Wave talk about America losing it's manufacturing industry to overseas compaines was no problem. That American is becoming a Services based economy. That worked, but now America is sending its Services based economy and there is nothing to replace it.
.COM boom is over and corporate America wants wages back to pre boom levels. So they start sending work outside the country, to force Americans to accept lower wages. Look at the recent announcement from IBM to send 4700 jobs overseas, and another 3700 potential jobs to go. BUT, if the American workers are willing to accept the same wages as the Indian workers they can keep their job.
There was never a shortage of American techies, they just wanted cheaper wages so the government created the H1B visa program. Now the
Same going on with the grocery worker strike, Unions on a power trip have pressured companies to raise wages and benefits to the breaking point. Non-union companies come in with lower prices and people are shopping in those stores to save the average 20% difference. Unions did the same thing in steel, automobiles, electronics, and other manufacturing sending American jobs out of the country. American worker became too expensive. Long term effect some old manufacturing town have died or dying.
Trouble is with corporate American focusing only on cutting costs and increasing margins, they aren't realizing they are cutting the available funds of their customers here in the U.S. People sending all their money to just survive aren't going to be buying much.
So after all the pain to the American worker we gain nothing. Wages drop, business slumps until they drop prices. Some people lose their homes or can't pay high rents, eventually housing prices drop. So a lot of people get hurt, some companies/industries lost forever, just to adjust everything down.
I discovered long ago that Yahoo and other news consolidators have the habit of trimming articles, sometimes with severe consequences in apparent intent. I haven't compared the 2, but here's the original article.
If you look closely, I think you'll find that the US is not subsidizing gasoline, it simply does not tax it as heavily as, say, Western Europe. IIRC, here in Colorado, about 25% of what I pay for a gallon of gas is state and federal taxes. I believe that in Europe, about 75% of what they pay is taxes. As many people have pointed out in the past, "You want the US to conserve gasoline like the Europeans? A nice $3/gallon tax will do the job." Of course, any politician silly enough to vote for such a tax would have zero chance of reelection :^)
I think you'll find a number of Native Americans, blacks and hispanics who might disagree with you about the state of racism in America. Yes, it's deinstitutionalized to a large degree, but it's still there and there's a long way to go. Being a minority (caucasion) in Mexico, I have a much better appreciation for the subtelties of racism than I did before I lived here, and I have a much greater sympathy for minorities.
I think Indians and Asians suffer from it to a lesser degree than some other groups, though I'm not really sure why that is, and maybe people from those groups would disagree with me. Not having their point of view, I can't say.
But racism, even at its slightest, is very disturbing. At least I think so now.
Excellent point. A simple and straightforward tax code is not in the interests of politicians (as much as it might be in the interests of everyone else). "I voted for an exception (loophole is such a nasty term :^)) that lowered the tax rate in YOUR industry," is a wonderful thing to be able to say to a potential campaign contributor.
"I voted to reduce taxes for left-handed people with red-headed children," in an ad will get some number of people to vote for you.
I guess a simple tax code is not in the interests of companies like H&R Block either.
India will be off shoring their programming jobs to us. So brush up those "Apu" imitations guys.
Oh, and btw greetings from a fellow Canuck :-)
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
"In the long run, this is one world, and one market: individuals should be free to trade ideas with anybody they want, and in most cases goods and services too. Why shouldn't somebody in India, or Taiwan compete with me for my clients?"
No, it isn't "one world" and "one market." You are not free to level the playing field by moving to India and living as cheaply as an Indian. Indians can work cheaply because they can live cheaply. If the Indian government allowed as many Americans to live in India as the U.S. govt allows Indians to live in the USA, then you might have a valid point. But as is it stands, you do not.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
I'm making about 75% of what I made from 1999-2002, which is still a decent living. Everyone will be better off if developing countries become more prosperous and self-sufficient.
Simple: encourage instability in Kashmir and a nuclear exchange. China freaks out, turns western Pakistan into glass. Before they go, Pakistan lobs a few missiles into Bombay.
Al Quaeda is dead and Americans are scared to invest in India. China is our buddy for playing the bad guy. Win win, win.
We can do whatever we want in order to maximize benefits to American citizens. Fairness or corporate profit is not really our concern. If we want to penalize companies that outsource, that is our prerogative. Unfair? WHo cares?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Stop biting - he's intentionally talking at cross purposes to you.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Unions only work when the workers are replacable cogs in a machine. When it makes sense to collective bargain because one trained bricklayer is basically about as productive as another. And because you can't outsource their ass. And also note that unions are only effective in locations where they can operate under cover of the government. Unions in Right to Work states like mine don't get nearly as crazy with their demands.
So if you believe IT workers are generic cogs that can be catagorized into neat job slots paying a negotiated wage and want the government to force employers to hire your sorry ass, then unionize. Me, I believe I'm worth more than the average MCSE and if the market ever decides to disagree I'll learn a new skill and jump industries.
Democrat delenda est
We're living in a bubble right now. There are two major resource inputs: cheap labor, and liberally consumed natural resources.
If you cut off both of these, America as we know it would vanish. We import an enormous amount of natural materials to process here, and more in the form of goods, and if all that stopped? $500 for a chair.
We'd end up back in the 1930s - not just due to rising prices, but also due to having to have the entire economic pyramid in the country, rather than having the tip in the country and the rest in the third world.
Think about it this way: international trade replaced slavery.
How do we fix that? How do we make it possible for even the bottom of the pyramid to have a reasonable standard of living? I don't know.
I think a basket of cheap technologies could make it possible to make village life both sustainable and pleasant:
1> clean water (see "potters for peace" and their proven, $3/year water filters)
2> affordable village-scale solar/wind/microhydro power systems (electric light, radio, tv)
3> vastly better public health infrastructure
4> much more sophisticated rural agriculture (think permaculture, "one straw revolution", Land Institute types stuff)
5> Better shelter systems.
With all of that - and development could be centrally funded - I suspect it might be possible for these folks to stay in roughly the same economic niche but feel much, much better about it.
At that point, it's possible the incredibly cheap labor pool might dry up - if village life is bearable, not so many people will wind up in slums in the cities, and the competition for wealth might lose some of it's desparation in the third world.
But it's a long shot: everybody wants to be an American, and that's really what's destroying the world: everybody desires something which only a few could ever have, and even them perhaps not for long.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
He was standing in line to buy train tickets. When he got to the head of the line, he asked for two tickets to Tokyo, in Japanese. The woman behind the window replied, in broken English, "No speak English." He answered, still in Japanese, "I'm not speaking English, I'm speaking Japanese, two tickets to Tokyo, please." Again, "No speak English," and the woman left the window. My acquaintance was rather embarrased by all this, since it is considered quite rude to hold up the line. After a bit, an elderly man came to the window and asked, in English, if he could help. My acquaintance, still in Japanese, asked for the two tickets. The old man responded, in English, "Oh, you speak very good Japanese," but would not conduct the transaction in Japanese.
My acquaintance said that he encounters this situation, where people refuse to acknowledge that an obvious foreigner can speak the language, regularly in Japan.
What's funny about the outsourcing is that if someone from India claims to be superior to a U.S. worker that is OK. If a U.S. worker does the same then they are racist.
I've worked on many projects with Indians before they took all the work and went home and from what I've seen the U.S. corps. has some big surprises waiting. What you've got is a bunch of women getting into positions of authority and making their litle cliques. They get rid of anyone that threatens them. In other words anyone with competence. The Indians come in and tell everyone what they want to hear and the kiss ass with great skill. It's not until all the people who really knew what was going on are gone and the project is 18 months over due that they start to realize the truth of the matter. By then Sanji has got his green card so he could care less.
It makes me sick the way these U.S. corporations want to over charge and cheat the American citizens while at the same time they want to send our jobs overseas and think there will be no negative effects. How many U.S. corps now have people from outside the U.S. who are owners or high level managers and think that U.S. workers suck? They send our jobs over seas while making money off our economy. The tell us how bad our own workers are while at the same time talking about how great their workers are. Our government happily sits up on the hill doing nothing to help it's own people.
One company I worked for "borrowed" it's source code from it's previous home. The code was supposed to do a critical check and we were supposed to just copy the code these brilliant Indians had done. You know how the code worked?
return false;
That was the code! No one would believe it but it turns out that this sensetive software that was in use in the medical industry didn't actually do what it was supposed to and no one knew. The Indians were hailed as the best programmers ever because THEY TOLD PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR. If you want a bunch of liars that won't try to do the right thing and care about their work that's fine. Go Indian all the way.
Of course the funniest thing about this is the work/profit relationship for U.S. companies. These greedy corporate execs don't see the writing on their own walls. They pay to train the Indians to do their work and then send them home to India and set them up to do this work.
What's the problem with this? Well, if I'm an Indian writing software and I'm making $10000 doing all the work while the execs in the U.S. are making millions and they do nothing but collect checks then sooner or later the Indians are just going to leave the U.S. companies, start their own companies with the skilled labor our companies have paid for, offer the products at 1/4 the cost, and cut the execs out the way the U.S. workers were cut out. And most corporate execs in the U.S. are too stupid and greedy to see this coming.
Look at the trend where companies are using Citrix farms for their software. Oh great, my hardware, software, and data is outside the country. If Sanji and sons decide to turn off my access I have nothing. What do I do? File a lawsuit against them? In India? The rest of the world hates the U.S. and our own leaders side with them against their own people. Clinton gives the Chineese our tech, opens up our borders through NAFTA. Cheney robs us blind and moves all the money offshore so that when the U.S. does collapse it won't affect his money. It's not in U.S. currency.
The U.S. better wake up and realize that it's not in the position it is in because of divine right. All these greedy feminists that are taking control of our companies need to stop killing all the skilled labor because they don't like to be threatened and stop sending the work to India so that they can please their share holders.
Nationalism in the U.S.? Don't make me laugh. We get sold out more and more day after day by our own leaders. We are told that if we stick up for ourselves we are racists. When we are told by others that we ar
Don't y'all just love people who whine and complain that we don't pay enough for gasoline?
Hey! Go look up the income tax rate in Norway and then come back here complaining that our taxes are subsidizing our taxes and that's why taxes are cheaper here than in other places and how we could be like the Europeans and pay two or three times as much in taxes, which I suppose you would think would be a Good Thing since you think we're getting off lightly or something.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
Okay, first things first: Is slashdot an American website, or International? I couldn't glean the exact meaning of "maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cry ;)", but if Slashdot is decidedly American, than perhaps it should make it more obvious to those of us that live in "International". In fact, I'm actually getting a little tired of media outlets that take an ostensive international pose while putting a distinctly American spin on everything (aka CNN, MTV, and I hope not slashdot).
Now, more to the topic, and my gripe. I'm gaining from the "off-shore" movement (though I'm still looking for a beach in the middle of Europe.) I'm sorry about those people that are losing jobs as a result of this, but other people and economies are benefitting as well. Arguably, some of these people/economies sorely need these jobs more than the people/economies who are losing them.
Perhaps it's not so cut-and-dry with the off-shore movement. Currently, while companies can easily move money around the world for hiring in cheaper countries (aka globalization), the free movement of labor is very restricted. Perhaps freeing this up would attract labor to the US, which, while cheaper, would create a less extreme situation, since these immigrant employees would still have to be paid with a US cost-of-living in mind.
Another thing: The upper-middle class in the US (the strata most IT people live in) enjoys one of the highest standards of living in the world. Maybe this off-shore thing is, in a way, a natural balancing of economies - another effect of globalization?
So anyway, suck it up - it's not just greedy corporations that are benefitting from this, but real people in other parts of the world. But, of course, those aren't real people, are they? At least, it always seems that way on CNN.
This article from a South Carolina newspaper sums up what infuriates me about the entire situation. Here we have Federal and state programs such as food stamps being outsourced overseas. One wonders how many unemployed Americans actually having to use the food stamps might be qualified to work on the help desks--not to mention the other projects described in the article. The politician who rants about "using tax dollars to erode the tax base" makes a valid point.
Then there was this article not long ago on Slashdot, describing a Pakistani medical transcriptionist who decided to cash in on the Great American Dollar Giveaway by blackmailing a patient from a California medical center. At least a US transcriber could've been tracked down and legal sanctions brought to bear.
I think there are some fundamental issues that transcend coding. How much are we willing to give up in the legendary new "race to the bottom?"
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Neither India nor China is socialist.
China is a command government with a capitalist economy.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
So why don't you hear a lot of people complaining that their airline or credit card company customer reps can't talk good American? Because there are plenty of well-educated Indians who speak fluent western English. All they need is a little practice on their idioms and pronunciation, and you can't tell them from a native of Duluth. Not over the phone anyway.
So it's perfectly possible to run an operation out of Bangalore or Dehli without communication problems. And yet you hear all these horror stories. I have a few myself: I subscribe to techwr-l, and we often get lame questions from Indian writers, usually basic grammatical stuff even a American 4th grader or a Slashdot editor would know.
My inference is that the companies driving the offshoring trend aren't satisified with the pay differential between San Jose and Bangalore. So they don't hire people with degrees from India's universities or engineering schools. (Which produce a lot of good people -- I've worked with some of them.) They hire folks whose educational achievements culminated in one of those "learn programming in 2 weeks" schools. Their English is hard to follow, not because of their accents, but because its one of the highly-localized English dialects that Indians use amongst themselves.
Here's another horror story. If you're a tech writer in the San Francisco Bay area, you've noticed a lot of headhunters trying to fill a very strange job in San Ramon. What's in San Ramon? A bunch of engineering outfits that decided that rents in Silicon Valley were too high -- never mind a limited local talent pool, if people want to keep their jobs, they'll commute or move. One of these outfits is the development arm of what used to be Pacific Bell, now a nameless subsidiary of SBC.
You need massive databases to run an RBOC, and this one has fallen way behind on database development. People complain of billing errors and outdated listings. There's a hair salon in San Rafael that can't get SBC to put its Yellow Pages listing in the proper category -- for two years running it's been listed under "Massage". Which sounds funny, until you consider the kind of lowlifes who respond to a massage ad for "Curl Up With Kelly".
So these guys in San Ramon are scrambling to update the software. They need a tech writer who can document their work. Said writer needs to be able to read source code in half a dozen languages, including the venerable Revelation Basic. Oh yes, and the writer has to work for $25/hour.
Well, I have the skills and I need the work. But that's hardly a reasonable wage, especially considering the two-hour commute. (It's a short term contract, so relocation is not practical.) I'd be better off working at the Starbucks down the street.
When I pointed out the absurdity of offering entry-level pay for a job requiring advanced skills, I was told that all the costs were measured against the alternative of moving the whole operation to India. Which is total nonsense. I'm sure there are plenty of Indian operations that could engineer a fancy database from scratch, and do a good job very cheaply. But SBC doesn't even want to spend that much money. They want to continue hacking 20-year-old code running on legacy platforms. Do they think that India is swarming with experts on the PICK database system?
The whole offshoring thing is just the latest development in a nasty long-term trend. Even before the dotcom bubble burst, Wall Street was dominated more and more by numbers dweebs, people who have no understanding of the industries and businesses they're investing in, and have an idiotic obssession with the bottom line. They hate costs more than anything. Even if you're turning a
There isn't too much that cannot be moved offshore. My last job was all remote sysadmin. So, if you're one of those types who thinks that their job is secure because somebody has to be there to take care of the hardware, think again.
"...once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out...into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity..."
--Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash"
Remember that the company operates out of an international tax haven. They are neither a US, nor a company under any standard western jurisdiction. Even ebfore they outsourced to India, they would 'outsource' to armies of underpaid and underskilled grad programmers. Every so often the screw ups show, and Accenture pays a lot to keep it out of the news.
I read the Yahoo! article with great interest and generally agree with the observations therein. But the truth of the matter, IMHO, is that it doesn't matter anymore, the damage is done.
When I was in grad school, there were all of these stories, based on labor dept. stats, that there was going to be a dire shortage of science professors in the future (ie now). Something had to be done to get more Americans to pursue academic careers in science, etc. etc.. Well, it didn't happen! Tenured professors stayed longer, there weren't that many students interested in science because it was too hard and didn't lead to really lucrative jobs. So the schools didn't replace the professors once they did retire and generally cut back on math and science offerings in favor of more popular courses.
Now that people here see that the once lucrative IT jobs are leaving these shores by the tens of thousands, you'd have to be nuts to go to school and prepare for a career in which you will be unable to find work. The damage is done, even if some of the jobs come back, IT is not going to be a career path that our best and brightest are likely to embrace, if they want relatively secure employment. There will always be those who have a love and passion for IT who will pursue it in any case. And some of these will have the entrepreneural spirit needed to really be successful in the field by charting their own destiny. Afterall, your job can't be outsourced if you are the boss and the company belongs to you!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
No the solution isn't to diffuse the power of the middle class. The solution is for China and India to create one.
I hate to tell you this, but it must be done with rifles. American's have consistently fought and died for the right of the middle class. Chinese and Indians need to fight this battle against their masters. Giving away our prosperity will only make us like China and India.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
The author obviously used cut and paste twice.
Editor needed.
Six months ago, I could find high-level programmers in India willing work for $15 an hour, vs. the $100-plus an hour I was paying Americans for the same work. In only six months, that rate has climbed to $25 an hour in India, while my domestic rates have dropped to around $35-$50. On the last project I bid out, two proposals from India came in higher than domestic contractors. Admittedly, I'm in a very small sector of the larger market, and it's too soon to tell even here whether the trend will last, but I've heard similar reports from other businesses (see BW Online, 12/2/03, ). My major arguments were that overseas labor costs would rise with increasing demand, and that increasing patronage would gradually empower workers overseas and inspire more of the local labor regulations and controls that add to labor costs in the U.S. One of those trends is already happening, at least in the labor markets I've been exploring.
Six months ago, I could find high-level programmers in India willing work for $15 an hour, vs. the $100-plus an hour I was paying Americans for the same work. In only six months, that rate has climbed to $25 an hour in India, while my domestic rates have dropped to around $35-$50. On the last project I bid out, two proposals from India came in higher than domestic contractors. Admittedly, I'm in a very small sector of the larger market, and it's too soon to tell even here whether the trend will last, but I've heard similar reports from other businesses (see BW Online, 12/2/03, "U.S. Programmers at Overseas Salaries").
The other thing to think about is the declining dollar, which increases overseas costs to american countries.
Using the Euro for example which increased by 19% in 2003, that means the USA would pay 19% more for European goods (unless they did something like lower their prices) than they would for the same goods one year before.
I don't deny the caste consciousness still strongly present in many Indians, but I don't think it's relevant here. We Westerners are exempt from the system. I've worked in India and with Indians in the West, and among the many perplexing cultural differences I've run into, the inclusion of *me* in their caste system was never one of them.
I think that what you encountered was just an individual personality. I've had these experiences with Indians, too (especially bureaucrats who wanted to prove their importance), but I've had similar experiences with people everywhere. I've managed a tech support group in the US and some of my own people acted this way (until I either stopped it or got rid of them.) It wasn't correlated to their skill level either, just to the degree to which they seemed to feel the need to prove to others that they were smarter (which seems to afflict geniuses and idiots in roughly equal proportions.)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Well who's money is it?
The shareholders, and they don't care.
Most shares are held by institutional investors, who don't vote or push issues with the board.
Those fund and investment pools carry enough votes to run the company, but they don't.
Until we stop letting our money be mishandled like this it won't change.
In part, the offshoring (and all outsourcing) trend is driven by the fact that it is difficult in the US, and other developed countries, to decrease nominal wages. A firm may have to cut the price of its goods by 10% in order to compete. But if the firm's workers have not become more productive, so that the value of their labor has decreased by 10%, it is quite difficult IN PRACTICE to cut their wages. In general, the only way to do so is to lay off the existing workers and hire new ones at a lower wage rate. Doing this effectively, at least in the US, tends to put the firm in violation of age discrimination laws, as the highest-paid workers are generally the oldest ones. Outsourcing an entire department avoids that particular problem. And as long as you're outsourcing, you might as well look for the cheapest alternate source that you think can do the job.
Several of the comments above have been from consultants who say that the rate that they can successfully charge for their services has decreased sharply. What the firm pays a consultant is determined for each project; changes in the supply of and demand for consultants comes into play each time, as does the firm's view of the value of the project. The same is not usually true for an employee. Last year we had a hot project in a new, highly profitable area; this year we're doing maintenance on older, less profitable products; but the firm will have difficulty changing the wage rate every time they move someone to a different project.
One area where this plays out in a particularly frustrating fashion is with teachers. My kids' high-school teachers are no more productive than my own teachers were 30 years ago. The classes are just about the same size and the material they teach is roughly the same. Pundits point at standardized test scores and assert that the quality of the product has declined in the last 30 years. That's true in another sense as well -- I am almost sure that the average real wages earned by people whose education stops at high school (real wages being a measure of the value of their contribution to the economy) have decreased over that period. Simple economics would suggest that real wages for teachers should have declined (which may, or may not, have occurred). Given that the value of many of the benefits that teachers receive as employees (health care, pensions) have increased sharply over time, the real salary rate should have gone down a LOT.
Or, perhaps, the School of the Americas? Or Pinochet? The US sponsored huge, huge covert war against left-leaning governments in south america. Do some reading!
And, as for the defeat of the Nazis, the USA offered huge economic aid, and kept Britain afloat for several years before joining the war.
Really: Europe would not have survived without American intervention.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Although you gave me a good laugh!!!
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I think you'd get in trouble for a slogan like "Buy Americans!"
It's probably illegal to actually purchase people. Some sort of stupid civil rights mumbo jumbo.
Fat people are harder to kidnap.
we are learning in college that the newer Organizational Management can change things. It promotes diversity in the workplace. It works people into teams. It empowers employees. It shares the wealth.
Racism is counter-productive to an organization, and often results in lawsuits. So is discrmination based on age, gender, religion, disability, etc. The organization is effectly shutting out people that could help it grow and earn more money. Sometimes people with different viewpoints can help out greatly.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
80k a year is barely enough to sustain a 2 bedroom apartment and life expenses in San Jose.
The actual cause is probably the inability of Bush administration to keep the value of the dollar high due to high budget deficits and a soft economy.
The following dollar helps US exporters and makes domestic programming more competetive cost wise.
These curency exchanges are way more important than people think.
As many famous philosophers and scientists have been repeating for at least a century: unbridled capitalism is a bad socioeconomic system because it is unstable. In capitalism, wages have nothing to do with the value of the products produced, wages are determined by the law of supply and demand on the labor market. This creates social unrest because the profits end up in the hands of the few who provide capital but don't actually produce anything; and it also creates an insentive for those few to create and uphold a limited (controlable) amount of unemployment to keep labor costs down.
I like the "survival of the fittest" aspect of capitalism, but I would rather have the citizens survive than a business.
The survival of the fittest aspect is what destroys the social structure and puts an enormous strain on the environment and resources. Every society is built upon a social structure in which people must cooperate to achieve more than an individual on its own possibly can; that's why societies have laws forcing their members to cooperate. Capitalism introduces another set of rules which make it nescessary to compete on one level with the very same people you cooperate with on more fundamental level (by paying taxes and abiding the law).
In the long term, this makes for people who are very aware of their dependence on the cooperating group but don't see this dependence as positive thing or a nescessary fact of life but as something that threatens their economical existence and limits their freedom, resulting in socially challenged people who are indifferent or even hostile towards the cooperating group they belong to, destroying the very roots of society. (Einstein wrote an interesting essay about this more than 50 years ago.)
PS: I'm not rying to start a flamewar or a thread of political deliberations, it's just that capitalism has both good and bad aspects. In the past these bad aspects have lead to class struggles and revolutions; while the more moderate forms of capitalism of today (all tainted with socialism) still lead to environmental problems and societies of indifferent individuals.
The changing face is simple: over the next few years, India will develop its own, stand-alone software industry. US firms won't be outsourcing to India, they will be competing with Indian companies.
Furthermore, multinationals will not be "outsourcing" to India anymore, meaning sending sporadic, low-level programming tasks there, they will be expanding their subsidiaries there and doing R&D in India, just like they are doing R&D in the US and Europe.
Will this mean downward pressure on the salaries of US programmers? You bet. But it's only fair: companies like IBM make more than half their revenue outside the US, therefore it stands to reason that they should employ more than half their employees outside the US. Right now, the percentage is still much lower.
Unregulated captalism turns into feudalim. It's happening in front of our eyes with all the consolidation of power and resources. People are separated from the means of production by mega-corporations.
One only need look at Dell's business models. Sure, they outsource to a LOT of small manufacturers. But they basically make them work for shit because Dell is controlling the front end. They are driving up their own profit margins by dicking over suppliers. This is also what Wal-Mart does.
The mega-concentration of end-point branding creates a feudal condition because individuals can no longer compete.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
You may want to live with it or have the electronic herd (i.e. the stock market) stumped over you
Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well
Uh, No!
India is getting more expensive because the talent pool is drying up and those programmers are starting to learn that they don't have to work for $4/hour any more. Quality, in this instance, has nothing to do with price.
The most racist place I've ever seen has been Israel. This type of thing is more common than you would believe, as it is okay to discriminate against non-Israelis.
In Australia, the US, or the UK, this sort of behaviour would get you sued to hell and back.
"Places like India are getting more expensive because they are getting way better at doing the jobs well.
Actually the quality is getting worse. Because of the explosive demand for programmers in India, hiring standards are dropping in order to find enough bodies to fill the seats. It is *much* easier to get a programming job in India now than it was 5 years ago.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
What many companies are doing (and Dell, I think, is among them) is bringing the Indians here, training the accents out of them, then sending them back to India to work the phones, instructing them to use Western-sounding names (Jimmy, Alex, etc.). That way you get the dirt-cheapness of outsourcing without the obvious foreignness that turns your customers immediately off.
Pretty deceptive if you ask me, but hey, sometimes you gotta sacrifice your scruples if you want to increase shareholder value.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Same here, but you know what? One of the benefits of living in a 1st world country is that you can pick and choose what you do for a living (in theory). Heck, I _like_ computers. That's why I'm studying IT, not because it looked like The Next Big Thing when I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life.
So when do we go over and take those Indians' land? I think that would solve our problems. :-)
The Japanese have a very strange concept of politeness. The culture is completely dominated by it. Politeness even complicates the grammar of the language. It's a tool for scrupulously observing the details of social convention, and everyone is expected to play by the many rules. Foreigners in Japan are quickly immobilized by a net of condescending smiles and polite retorts that permit no escape.
I'm not Japanese, so what do I know? Here's my guess. Your friend was probably breaking a rule when he tried to speak Japanese to the people at the train station. He is a guest to the country and they are workers at a train station, which makes them servants. They are definitely at a lower point than he is in whatever social hierarchy determines these things, and so they were clearly expected to speak his native language, in deference. By placing them in a situation where he is speaking a non-native language for their benefit, he is forcing them to be impolite. They were trying to make everything polite and OK again by insisting on English. In fact he committed a grave social error when he forced the old man to admit they did understand his Japanese.
Just a few weeks ago at work a tantrum arrived via fax from a software distributor in Taiwan who had been recently fired by our sales employee in Japan for breach of contract of some sort. It was a copy of an email that the distributor had sent in response, and the guy was so livid he faxed a copy to us in California in an attempt to go over his head. In the first paragraph it says "You, being Japanese, should not have allowed this to happen." I thought that was a very strange remark.
That's a very insightful comment, and I'm not just saying that because it's something I've been thinking about for a while ;-)
There's a real big difference between entrepreneurial talent and bean-counting. I remember hearing someone on television talking about Las Vegas (in the "good old days") and comparing it to Atlantic City. He said the old time Vegas casino owners would charge you for a top-quality steak a price at which they would actually lose money. Hotel rooms and such were also very cheap. The idea was the gamblers would lose money at your casino, but feel better about it because they were "being taken care of" and having a great time. That's what would keep them and their money coming back. His words on the subject, near as I can remember, were "but at Atlantic City the accounts came in and would have none of that."
To take another example, a guy could own a book store or whatever and put in a coffee shop. He might not make any real money at the coffee shop, but he would understand, as an entrepreneur, that the shop drives more traffic into the store, and this in turn drives up book sales.
That, and the example above it, are diametrically opposite mentalities.
These kinds business practices are no big secret, but there are just some people who just don't get it. Accountants provide indispensible information, but it's just one piece of the puzzle to use in decision making -- it's not gospel.
Give the number dweebs a well lit office with plenty of sharp pencils and read their reports carefully; but for God's sake don't put them in charge of anything. They will run a business right into the ground and never understand what happened.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
I am a white american who has lived in Japan for quite some time. This is an everyday occurence here for Japanese-speaking foreigners. Japan is the most racist nation I can imagine.
.3% of the population. The total number of non-japanese people hovers around 1 million, and thats out of a population of ~130 million. More than half of that million are korean or chinese people who have lived in Japan all their lives. You dont know what its like to be a minority until you have lived here.
:P
:/
Let me try to put it in perspective... American persons living in Japan, you account for less than
In Japan there are no anti-discrimination laws. Apartment rental agencies all have an option on their listing form to specify whether youll rent to Japanese Only, or to exclude certain races from being able to rent. Over 90% of the forms opt to sell Japanese only. If you want to buy a home phone line but you cant write your name in kanji, TOUGH, you have to have a name that can be written in kanji so you can get your official stamp signature so you can purchase it. Sucks for westerners
Anyway, I just wanted to give some credibility to this guys anecdote. Its not them being polite, its just a passive racism that stems from living in ignorance of other nations.
Oh, its also interesting to note that the vast majority of japanese people associate black people with crime, and they call hip-hop music, BLACK MUSIC. Need I go on?
You can say a lot of bad things about America, but its definitely about as racism free as we have in the world today.
-Ken
The high value added work leaves the US labor force doing what? Selling real estate, imported goods, or luxury services fewer people will be able to afford. It's the classic macro conundrum. Every employer wants someone else to pay the salaries that can afford their product or service. Capital is now flying around so rapidly, it's difficult to settle into a new macro (or micro) equilibrium.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Do you buy from Dell or Wal-Mart?
No way, I'm sure you buy from their higher priced competition.
Give me a break, you hypocrite. If you read the companies' history, you'll find they got there by the direction of their CEOs' brains.
Anybody who's got a better idea will find a way to compete. That is what capitalism is all about.
Look at Pepsi versus Coke. Pepsi wasn't always there. They had to compete with the likes of a mature and fully funded Coca-Cola in a David-Goliath type of battle. Once Coca-Cola figured out that they had competition, it was too late. Pepsi was there to stay. This scared Coke so much that they changed their recipe.
Maybe you couldn't compete in the real-world. But that's why you don't run a business. So why do you think you know enough to regulate others' businesses?
You need to read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
Very true. That's why capitalism will, also, fail. The greedy bastards don't know when to stop.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
I work at an overseas CMM Level 5 IT company in Korea that started offshoring recently and have been working with a team of guys that we brought from India. Though I just started with the company as a software developer, I almost immediately became a member of their team and a full-time interpreter -- though I was much closer to being a manager as many people at the company prefer not to deal with them.
I can't say much positive about their attitudes and work either, though I don't want to stereotype all ethnic Indians. Whenever I visit their cubicles, they are browsing the web or chatting with their buddies rather than completing their assigned work. I wasn't receiving any respect from certain members of the team, mainly because I had fewer years of experience in software development. However, it certainly did not appear that they had the four years of experience in Java cited on their resumes. I was reviewing their code and fixing major logic errors in code and the grammar mistakes and typos made in the comments. This was work they could have easily done themselves in the very lax 3 week deadline they had to fix their 3-5 test cases. Instead, I spent two weeks fixing their code and writing the documentation that they had "written". I asked one guy to fix a mistake in two of his test cases, pointing out the error and explaining how he could fix it, and he got really angry at me and sent me e-mails about me being the newbie. Since I was not the manager he refused to change his code.
My co-worker has been also working in India for a few months and he does not appreciate the attitudes of certain programmers either. Some of them decided to change some of the code our company had written causing several bugs to appear in the build. None of the developers would take blame for it, though it was probably obvious who had changed it from the PVCS logs.
These experiences have led me to decide to transfer departments and work with people that have experience that actually counts, even if they are not involved in software development (which I hoped to pursue by finding an overseas job and obtaining experience with the company).
There are two questions companies should consider when making the decision to offshore (outsource) to India which directly relate to cost efficiency:
1) Do we fully understand their culture and will conflicts in culture present a problem? In other words, how much additional money and resources will be spent on interpreting and managing their work, making sure that they maintain a certain level of quality?
2) Are we just outsourcing to become trend-followers, blindly following the reocmmendations of McKinsey, Gartner, and Accenture to find cheap labor in India and China? Do we know exactly how much domestic labor will cost in current times (older BW article)?
It's my opinion on getting them to be efficient workers is that you need an Indian motivator/manager who understands their culture very well, is older than them and has a more impressive resume. Then, have someone from your company who is very knowledgeable about business processes and the related field, in this case software development, communicate the requirements to the Indian manager.
My manager has been assessing the quality of their work to present to our CTO whose initiative was to increase our offshoring in India. Does anyone have a good way to measure the the value of a software developer which includes factors such as cultural differences and communication problems?
Funnily enough we in the rest of the world often get that impression from the US. As witness their awful dummy-throwing-out-of-pram act following the French refusal to fall in line over Iraq.
"Freedom Fries", ferchrissakes!
You can say a lot of bad things about America, but its definitely about as racism free as we have in the world today.
Doesn't look like that from here. But my experience from both home (UK) and abroad has been that no matter where you are, older generations and the poorest and least well-educated tend to be racist while young people from the middle classes and those with University education tend not to be. In general, and allowing for exceptions of course.
As much as I hate to say it, the most crime or any other illegal act I have seen committed was by a black person. I am unsure why this is nor am I enticed to find out. However, I am quite weary when I'm on the west side of town. I mean for new years they shoot guns and almost killed a co-workers son while he was in his room watching TV. :(
Dayton, Ohio r0xx0rs eh?
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
The old man should have fired EVERYONE who suggested the outsourcing. (I would have done that were I in his shoes.)
It's much more likely that your support representative was arrogant because these jobs go to the top-notch -- people who are used to being at the top of their classes all the time.
They are really in trouble if the nations top-notch talent is doing tech support. This does not bode well for the staff doing their high-risk programming (guided missiles, space operations, etc.)
So most likely they are among the better educated and think they are better than they actually are, much like some number of support specialists I've run into in the US, from Sprint PCS Vision specialists (over 100 hours logged to solve one problem, solved by one smart tech on the last call in under 10 minutes by resetting the password on my PCS mail account machine access, which was somehow out of step with my normal web access, wonders of seperate databases) to the good folks at Microsoft tech support where the few I knew worked at one of the MS contractors for support and while knowledgeable had holes in that knowledge that were vast.
The short of it is I think the support job gathers that style of personality for some fraction of its staff. Folks who think they should be working at5 a more advanced position, but lack the skills.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Those bids are fake. Many unscrupulous (or simply very stupid) people give low bids, and then want more money to finish or "touch up" the project they did half way or less than half way. The people who use those sites regularly to get jobs done can recognize a looser when they see it (most of the time). Note that a script posts the same chatty note and bids $18 on every single project; you have to filter those out just like penis bird or GNAA posts.
Anyway, the strategy on those sites is to do a good job for someone so that they contact you directly afterwords for further work, not posting the bid on the site at all. The guys posting there get burned a few times and learn to appreciate reliability and honest assessments.
If you have the time, scan the sites for a few weeks and then submit bids on a few projects you think you can do in your spare time. I believe you will find that it is possible to make money that way, maybe without the salary or stability you desire, but survivable and you make contacts that can lead to other things.
I think it's a good excercise to do even if you don't need to, because it gives you a confidence and perspective. You will find that doing jobs that are widely varying in nature gives you ideas and insight to apply at work. You will be less susceptable to anti-foreigner "Know-Nothingism" scare mongering. You may give up weekends for a month or two, but six months after you have done 2 or 3 projects, you will be happier. And if you are laid off, you will live on Ramen and cheap hot dogs for a few months, but it will not be a big deal.
"I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I have made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with--the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product."
Ayn Rand made money as a result of the set of involuntary restrictions called copyright...
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
The real problem is that buisnesses are looking for the sweet spot between quality, productivity and price. It seems counter-intuitive to companies that a smaller team of more experienced programmers will be more effective than a large team of juniors. They think that a senior developer simply costs more, and that they'll still need the same number of developers.
Keep in mind that decision-makers do not always want very competent people [1] (expensive, hard to replace and might present a threat to their authority), often they want people that can be easily controlled and appear to do a "good enough" job. Couple this theory with the fact that those who hold the purse strings tend to be non technically-oriented and are quite often likely only focused on short-term results.
On the other hand, I've seen a few IT "dynasties" that effectively held companies hostage with ever-growing ranks of techs that were useless. Same thing seems to be true in the non-computer engineering world.
[1] Pay top dollar for the original idea, then farm it out to lesser-paid individuals.
Just move away from India and towards Russia, Africa, and China.
Mexico a decade ago was the hotspot and Mexicans demanding more money. The suits in return left and took away 50% of the manufactoring jobs away to China where it was a half to a fourth of the cost.
Same will happen with accounts, programmers and other former white collar workers.
There is such a thing as unlimited labor with unlimited low demand in return due to oversupply. That is why the h1b1 visa's are still in this country. The suits want to lower our salary and use the extra money to add it to their's.
India is going up in price now but a Russian can do the job for $200 a month according to some slashdoters mentioning it. An Indian who has experienced and is good wants $1000. Less then I make in the states now since I had to take a minimium wage job??? pathetic!
HUngary is another hot country with college educated folks who are desperate. Perfect situation to exploit.
Do not forget China either.
http://saveie6.com/
In the meantime, if all of this is driven to maximize shareholder value, why stop at the shop floor or office cubes? Is - say - Carly Fiorina adding so much value vis-a-vis her compensation that the shareholders wouldn't see some extra dividends by shucking her for a German - or hell, Indian - executive paid at their typical rates?
Re: the unemployment figures. Sorry, the stats don't back you up. Peaks and valleys of US unemployment since '61:
1961 - 6.5%
1969 - 3.5%
1971 - 5.9%
1973 - 5.0%
1975 - 8.5%
1979 - 5.5%
1982 - 9.5%
1989 - 5.2%
1992 - 7.0%
2000 - 3.9%
now - 5.9%
Luke, help me take this mask off
On the other hand, it's not like "Buy American" has ever worked before. Considering that every nation with a massive oversupply of cheap labor that has also gone high-tech has invariably managed to convince us to "Buy Chinese" or "Buy Japanese" or "Buy Taiwanese" or "Buy Korean" or "Buy Mexican" and now, of course, "Buy Indian" it's hard to imagine that corporate America will, in a selfless, completely uncharacteristic effort to protect its own workforce, suddenly perform a complete about-face and begin to "Buy American". Don't hold your breath: in matters of business ethic the U.S. of A. has sunk about as low as it can go, and still maintain some semblance of market leadership. If we continue to shoot outselves in both feet we will find that third-world status is less difficult to achieve than one might think.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
People of all colors do stupid things with guns, and I've defintely seen white (redneck type) folks shooting them off into the air on New Year's.
Yes, there are a lot of high-crime areas that have large concentrations of black (I'm not German-American just because ancestors whose names I don't know were born there) people, but I think that the problem is far more complex than that. Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of black families came out of slavery and into poverty, and poverty is a mindset as much as it is a financial situation. A lot of people just can't imagine that they can get out of it.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I've heard of data mining, but this must be new. Is it like offshore oil drilling?
Unknown host pong.
It all depends on what you mean by "competition". This is also called "efficiency".
Well, for Wal-Mart and Dell, it means squeezing vendors to such slim margins that they have to drop all their wages. The key to their businesses is controlling the front end, controlling access.
In Wal-Mart's case, they lie like sacks of shit. They use predatory prices to drive their competitors out of business. Then they jack up their prices. They pay their people shit and make them work unpaid overtime. Virtually NOBODY is allowed to get benefits. Then they take the money and ship it off to someone else. They suck money out of communities and deposit it in the hands of the Walton family.
This is a race to the bottom. Their "efficiency" means that people are inherintly inefficient. The people must be reduced to insignicant pawns. Group by group everyone falls by the wayside until only the very top has access to the spoils of their labor.
Anyone can get low prices by using serfs. It takes a REAL businessman to treat their people right AND turn a profit.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
Yeah, it's wrong. It's incredibly wrong. IMHO, due to human nature though, this is just one of those steps that has to be taken to reach the enlightened state of tolerance. Like many other posters have noted, for all our faults, the US is light years ahead of *most* of the rest of the world when it comes to racial tolerance (that does not mean we're *PERFECT*).
Once again, IMHO, I believe we're all racist to some degree. Yeah, every stinkin' one of us. That doesn't mean jack though. All that matters is what you do with that racism. Much like mildew, shining light on it (IE talking, sharing feelings, etc) makes it go away.
I believe it's OK to be intimidated and scared of someone from another race. You shouldn't deny your feelings. Just don't let those feelings turn into anger or somehow let you justify treating them as less than a human being. You don't have to like people, but you *DO* have to treat them as you would like to be treated. It's your perogative if you want to remain ignorant...
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
This fuckhead is the result of too many people who have lost the sense of a home. They are stuffed into apartments and cannot conceive that the character of the American citizenry works hand-in-hand with the immobility of labor. When their jobs move, they move ... leaving behind no notable indicators on the property. No well-composted gardens. No marks on the wall showing how their children have grown. No walkway stones laid by their own hands. No fruit or nut trees planted in order to yield a harvest.
... so you can just go fuck yourself as much as you are trying to fuck everyone else with your essentially Gypsy lifestyle.
People with real homes must use the power of government to make capital stay put and perform its necessary social function. If you hate American protectionism, then at some level you are the enemy of the American home
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Question?
What language is your website in? Just curious.
http://saveie6.com/
Yes, people need roots. But most people choose to break them to move because the work moves, or they don't like the climate, or a dozen other things.
The so-called American Home you're imagining is mostly a fantasy. Check out statistics on population mobility... it's already far, far, far too late. Something like 20% of the population moves house every year, and interstate moves account for something like a third to a half of those. Nobody has any roots anymore.
Yes, some people cling, or hold out, but I'm sorry, times have changed. You can make stability for yourself if you try hard enough, but the time you're talking about is gone. Farms are run by corporations, software is moving abroad, heavy industry is gutted, and your so-called American Way Of Life exists only in adverts.
Grow up. Wake up. You sound a lot like Keats - a fucking pastoralist.
Wrong millenium, mah friend, wrong millenium. Your children's children's children won't even know which continent you lived on, will probably have four or five ethnic identities, speak half a dozen languages and live in five countries before they're twenty five.
By all means, stay in your little nest boyo. See if I care.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Companies don't always take the course of action that lies with the best decisions. The current crop of management in many companies could not tell their asses from their keyboards if given 3 tries.
Governments have had trade tariffs for years to benefit their citizens. What is wrong with doing that? Sure, the very short term will benefit the company's bottom line, but what happens when their local market dies because nobody can afford any of the crappy widgets they produced? It seems like companies are selling the cow to buy the grain the cow eats.
I speak Thai pretty well. Sometimes people on the phone won't realize that I am a foreigner. When I go to order food from a vendor on the street, though, as often as not he will not listen to me and look at my Thai partner for a translation. If I am alone I often get something not at all related to what I ordered. People pre-judge others. It's just a fact.
Put identity in the browser.
There are safeguards to make sure the little guys get hurt, but the little guys keep crying that it's too much work to punish the big bad guys for taking advantage of them. The fact that political parties caught in corruption scandals survive the scandals could be taken as one of them, so are the Enron, etc.. scandals.
The system is very finely balanced, and "tends" to work. The only problem is that it ain't big enough on education, motivation and participation.
Quoted from article:
maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cryIs that a Honda in your driveway?
Obligatory quote from parent so that my karma-whoring isn't quite so blatant:
And you, sir, are most definately correct.Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well, capitalism at least plays to the greed angle. Companies battle it out with each other pitting one faction's greed against another's. Problem is, it only works as long as no one faction wins the battle.
I am an Indian too.. I agree completely.
There are Indians who do treat foreigners as untouchables. I experienced the Brahmin arrogance while in India, and it was easy to recognize again in the technical support person.
The major point of my comment is that those who employ Indians are experiencing a much larger problem with cultural differences than they generally realize. Microsoft seems to have no mechanism for recognizing these kinds of problems, so no one in authority will learn of them, and they will continue.
For more elaboration about this problem, see this comment from an Indian: #7856623.
The underlying problem is that the documentation of Windows XP is VERY poor. If it had been better, I would not have needed to talk to a technical support person. The technical support people learn from the documentation; in this case various pieces of information in the documentation were subtly misleading, in error, and absent.
Software companies generally use customer problems as a profit center. There is an element in the companies that view customer problems as good for the company.
When Bush was offered to negotiate an agreement for the free movement of workers with mexico he declined.
If workers comming form other countries would have a chance to work legally that would level the playing field for local workers.
As things stand now everybody is having a hard time and the only reality is that foreign workers will always be there, you either regulate according to reality or ignore realities at your own peril (like Bush and any US President not ready to deal with is with real, workable solutions).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If your problem is well defined there is only a maximum amount of "cut and paste" a Jr programmer can do in one working day.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Having worked extensively with programmers from three continents (Europe, North America and Asia) and a few from Africa, the ability of any programmer is not measured by their nationality, race or native language, but their skills as a programmer, which does include things like the ability to communicate effectively.
Indians, in general, do their jobs just as well as anyone else as long as their english is good enough.
In fact, I just finished a project I was supervising, where the star performer was one of the Indian contractors. He was one of the best programmers I've had the pleasure of working, anywhere. Furthermore, the worst programmer in the team was one of the full-time employees of the company I work for, i.e. someone born and raised in the US. Not only was he lazy, unskilled, but he also had a severe attitude problem about receiving feedback or acting on it. Little good his excellent command in the English language did for him, when he didn't want to use that skill...
Right now I'm supervising an outsourcing project where all the programming is performed by Indian programmers. The quality of the code is, in general, better than average and the team includes several senior programmers, even one with an PHd (and, oh boy, can you tell the difference between him and everyone else).
Basically everything you said about outsourcing is untrue. The only thing you said that is true, is that publicly traded companies in the US are greedy above anything else and will without intervention from people who know the real pitfalls of any upper level business decision go with the cheapest option in every case. Short term (3-month outlook) profits over long term success...it's rather sad actually.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill greed
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Not everyone in this world is 3 or 2 dimensional. There actually are real life people who are 1 dimensional therefore representing them in literature should not be seen as a deficiency.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Foreign made cars both Asian and European are MORE EXPENSEIVE then domestic Ford, GM or quasi-domestic Chrysler yet people still shell out more money for a Toyota, Honda or Nissan why?
Because they don't break down as quickly as an American car will. Have you seen the rebates and cash back offers Ford and Chrysler and GM have to offer just to get people to walk onto the lots? Up to $4000 cash back thats how much. Do you think Toyota or Honda or Nissan have to offer that kind of cash back? They sure as hell do not.
Even citizens of the city of Detroit have embraced reality, most of the people living there do not drive domestic cars. What does that tell you? Not to mention that domestic cars consistently rank lower than foreign cars on both JD Power and Associates and Car and Driver reports.
I mean what kind of a dream world are you livng in? Have you seen the quality control that goes into an Asian automaker's factory? The high levels of productivity? It takes anywhere from a third to half the man hours for Toyota, Nissan and Honda to pump out a car than it does for GM, Ford and Chrysler not to mention the asian factories are modular and able to respond to market flucuations be changing the model of car they build instead of idling entire lines or even whole factories.
If you are still not convinced take a look at resale value. A domestic car is virtually worthless after 5 years because people expect so many damn problems with it they don't consider it worth buying. On the other hand try finding a cheap 10 year old Nissan Pathfinder. Those things are still around $5000+. 10 years old and its only lost 2/3rds of its value. Amazing.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I'm not an accountant, but it had more to do with tax audit laws. The law changed such that it was difficult for a company that Arthur Andersen audited to also pay Arther Andersen for IT services. So they spun off the IT services. Most of the big accounting firms did this, I think in the early 90's.
Quality of programmers depends on the individual, not where they're from. In my experience, some Indians are decent programmers and some are lousy programmers. Same goes for US programmers.
However, you don't think these outsourcing companies really hire the good Indian programmers with years of experience in architecting, leading teams, etc, do you? No! For one, those programmers are probably already here in the US. Secondly, the outsource premise is that it's cheaper.
Not to worry though. US firms such as Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting) hire just about anyone as a programmer and then charge a bundle for their "services". So it's not a problem unique to India.
My overall point is that junior programmers abound. At least with in-house coders, I can teach them everything they need to know (and hopefully weed out the useless ones). With outsourced coders, they do whatever they "think" is the right way according to some imaginary schedule made up by management. The end result is tremendously low quality code. Not that it bothers the outsourcing companies any. That's more money for maintenance.
Every company should have a highly experienced and capable programmer who will lead a small team by training and example. The code quality will be higher, the dev cycles lower, and the junior programmers will be well on their way to becoming seniors. Of course, that isn't going to happen as long as managers feel threatened by highly qualified people.
If any of you managers are listening, a good coder still needs a manager. He doesn't want your position, and he's not out to make you look like an idiot. Just do your job, help him do his job, and you'll find yourselves with a lot of the credit when things go right.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Here's to hoping what you wrote was as funny as it was incorrect.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
RE: But a bigger company has to add into this the cost of communicating, keeping up to date with the offshore team, crazy hours to keep in order to communicate effectively, hiring a translator, setting up a WAN for the office over there and here etc...
And what better way to guarantee your continued existence as a manager in these times of economic turndown, than to argue that you're suddenly valuable and not expendable because you're there til 7pm nightly, interfacing with the Bangalore team, doing TPS reports, etc.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
You need to read Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
;)
You need to read
Bob the Angry Flower
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Your assumption that the entire world could not sustain current western levels of consumption is incorrect.
Lets take wood and paper consumption for one example. There's a limited number of trees to be cut for houses and paper correct? That means once this limit is reached then long waiting times and higher prices must result correct? Well not exactly. Genetic engineering can produce faster growing trees for future generations.
Energy consumption. We're running out of fossil fuels right? Yes. This will be our downfall correct? No. All power generating technologies are improving as we go forward. The least of which are hybrid engines to cut down on oil consumption. Then there's the increasing efficiencies of solar and wind power and advances in geothermal and nuclear power.
I know the environmentalists want you and everyone else to believe that the Earth cannot sustain anymore people but its simply not true. There's no reason why this planet cannot sustain at least 30 billion human beings. Genetic engineering applied to agriculture will allow us to produce hyper-fast growing livestock and plant produce.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
That's what they said in the 1950s. Fifty years later, nuclear electricity is still honking expensive, and power in general is nowhere like as available as "experts" predicted then.
Your predictions will be no different, in all probability.
You're are talking about a fantasy world: the "in the future, things will be different." fantasy world. You're pinning hopes on genetic engineering, which is completely unproven on the scales you're talking about, and alleged increases in the capabilities of energy generating technologies and vehicle efficiencies.
You know what? Show me.
The most optimisitc predictions of how good hydrogen vehicles will be show a 5x improvement of passenger miles / unit energy.
So if the entire world had two car households, we'd still need roughly 20 times the energy input we currently have in the form of oil. 20 times more energy than the current total world oil consumption. And that's just the running costs, not the road construction, the manufacturing, the disposal, the whole nine yards.
And almost unimagineable amount of energy is going to come from where? Little purple faeries from outer space?
there are limits to consumption - pretending that there aren't is living in a fantasy world just as dangerous and corrupt as any religion.
I do believe in near-infinite future growth in some areas: computing power, scientific knowledge etc. However, while some areas of life run on exponential curves, others are at best logarythmic. You have to learn how to tell the difference.
Looking at the past helps: energy has always been an issue, from the age of firewood onwards. And no technology on the boards changes that, not even fusion reactors.
Roughly half the world make their livings by growing food in their back yards, only occasionally having enough to sell to cover other expenses. For most of these people, a chicken is a luxury item and eggs a delicacy.
Just a reality check. Unless you're assuming some kind of future nano-socialist post-scarcity science fiction state, these people are still going to be there, living much as they do now.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
I just downloaded GoA and read the first 18 pages.
It promises to be fascinating.
Thank you for mentioning it.
(No, I'm not the AC)
Writers imply. Readers infer.
"French" is a culture, not a race. That's just hair splitting. Many people would disagree with you.
All of those jobs have gone abroad, and as is fairly obvious, eventually it will happen to software too.
You make software sound like an easy problem to solve. P = NP. There is no undecidability.
Software that have practical applications and that has been implemented for the masses will go to open source. User interface tweaking/enhancement will migrate to self-serve customization. And cheap third world labor will be replaced with robots.
P != NP though, not yet anyways. That leaves people with the difficult problems. Everyone should prepare to work on something hard because resources will be allocated to those problems. People who don't want to touch difficult problems simply won't have a job, just because there's no money to pay for it.
We're all facing the prospect of getting off this planet. It's becoming depleted. The sun will burn out. An asteroid is coming. We can't just worry about how the middle class could disintegrate due to unsustainable consumption. The whole world has the technology to cooperatively find its way so let's do it.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Foreign workers are better at some jobs, that is all there is to it.
I'd say it's because the employers are cheap screws, typically all to willing to jump at percived short term gain and without a clue or care where it takes us. Well, it's a hard fact of life that neither Adam Smith nor Karl Marx are the last word on anything, as long as US citizens still hold the right to piss, moan, and vote.
Luke, help me take this mask off
If you want some more reading material, I reccomend these books:
Rereading america
Anything by John Taylor Gatto
You are being lied to
Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian
Balance that off with your choice of monopolised media, I know I have and some stuff is absurd but around 95% of what's in those books is true.
Then, check CNN or any of the big 6 media corperations and contrast it with smaller, local publications that our country has been banning our soldiers from reading on a daily basis, such as ones that publicise that our soldiers in iraq are triggerhappy crazy people. It sounds like crazy at first, but when you've realize that most of the army advertising talks about being in the army as a career and most of our people over there have been broken down into mental mush then built back up by the military you begin wondering exactly if they really even care about the people they're supposed to protect.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Fine brother, you win. Get back to us with an update after it's your ass that's been gored.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I thought about that as well and agree with you. However, I do not come from a rich family either and yet I am doing my best to get the hell out of it.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."