Slashdot Mirror
Bangalore Beats Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "The inevitable has happened. Bangalore, which grew under the shadow of America 's Silicon Valley over the last two decades, has finally overtaken its parent. Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
1.5 lakh engineers.
What's a lakh, and why do they need engineers?
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
I honestly think that a lot of the current commentators are dead on when they say that this is a "fad" and this will eventually balance itself out. Wait until some corporations get a gut full of having their code halfway across the globe. Most companies aren't willing to let you work at home and yet they're willing to hire hoards of people they'll never meet to write their code? Heh. This will right itself eventually.
It will be interesting to see how long it can sustain its growth to prevent the same kind of retraction that hit Silicon Valley.
...a lakh is 100,000.
"Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San Francisco and California, with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a total number of 1.5 lakh engineers."
1.5 engineers hey. Always wondered where that 0.5 kid from the average 2.5 family got to. Engineering.
Name 5 great software products to have come out of Bangalore. Last!! It hasn't begun.
How many of you have dealt with these Asian techies and have been on the phone longer due to a misunderstanding between yourself and a techie?
Rather Frustrating!
Maybe there's a learning curve, but if I had my druthers, I wouldn't put up with it.
Is this an New Year's/April's Fool article?
I don't see the folks on Sand Hill Road moving to India very soon.
Also, the article is from India Times, so expect some bias.
which grew under the shadow...
India is Mordor??
"I did this cuz Linux gives me a woody"
A couple of years ago on a train journey to Mumbai I had a long conversation with an Indian software engineer. Once he'd got his University degree he got a job in Silicon Valley, but only stayed a couple of years because he realised that although salaries are lower in India he would actually be a lot better off in India because your dollar goes a lot further there. In India he could actually afford servants - a maid, cook etc. as well as a big house with a swimming pool and car. So if you read this type of story and think of hundreds of poorly paid Indians in sweatshops hacking out code, think again.
I'm sorry, but so what?
I'm not an American (Norwegian if you must know), but I have worked in Silicon Valley. Like the saying goes, it's not the size, but the quality. Yes, the best engineers in India is probably comparable to the best in the US and the rest of the world, but I find that the average engineer in India is worse than the average in the US.
Je ne parle pas francais.
And I care because... why? At its height, Silicon Valley/San Fran contained thousands of individuals hoping to get rich quick by pretending to be techies. Now India has thousands of individuals hoping to have a better life by pretending to be techies. There's nothing new here. Move along.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Those jobs aren't ever coming back and neither will these.
Can I bum a sig?
Now would be a good time to put together a petition and send it to the various candidates and demand that there be some restrictions to all the tech jobs going overseas.
Good luck. Unless you accompany your petition with big sacks full of money, don't expect any results (other than a polite letter -- maybe). Those same candidates/elected officals didn't act when manufacturing jobs went offshore, why would they act now?
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
How many people know the difference between tech support and IT?
So how many of their languages do you speak?
Which puts you in exactly what position complaining about other peoples foreign language skills?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Show of hands please: how many of you have had to deal with these American techies (managers?). Is it possible to understand those "real nice" redneck boys down in the deep south? Very frustrating! I spend too much time on the phone because of them.
Interesting point that keeps cropping up in my meetings with Americans: tabling something in a meeting means exactly the opposite there. I guess we all have to learn how to communicate better with each other.
With the ability to get cheaper labor off short in the tech world, the prices for certain tech consumer goods (from software to DVDs to car computer brains) will fall, allowing prices to fall as well.
This will allow the average consumer to spend more of their money on other items, including entertainment, debt reduction, maybe even more money towards a mortgage or a new car. Jobs moving to other countries is only good news -- I can only hope we see more of it as it will allow people here in the States to find new things to do with their overpriced labor.
Maybe we'll even see that we don't deserve as much as we earn, and that we're not so special.
Tibor Machan has a great article on Job Security and why this phrase is false. If you can not produce a desired product at a price that the buyers are willing to pay, you are not really producing anything but waste. American techs are paid way too much for what really has become a blue collar job in many cases.
Just like tariffs on imported steel and imported sugar have destroyed jobs in this country (by making cars here too expensive, and even Fannie Mae chocolates has closed down today because sugar is too expensive), putting tariffs on imported tech software will do the same. Allow consumers of technology to decide what they are willing to pay. U.S. firms can even promote a "Buy American" program if people really care.
I know I don't. I want to see prices fall on technology so I can focus my spending on other areas -- more dinners are local restaurants, maybe more concerts or theatre.
Remember, the Living Wage is a MYTH.
What I find most curious is the incredibly rapid turnaround in opinion seen on Slashdot. During the dot-com boom, everyone was happy to see Open Source, a truly global phenomenon, bloooming. But now I see this strange bifurcation of views. Open Source software created by people from all over the globe is still good. On the other hand global commerce, in which the lowest-cost providers of goods and services win, is being villified.
So when a Chinese company (operating in non-democratic government) manufactures the inexpensive hardware that powers your gaming PC, that's fine. But when Indian programmers (operating in a democratic society) start beating out American programmers for jobs, there are some sort of insidious forces at work?
When principals butt up against pocketbooks is the time when you see what people truly believe.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I've always wanted to post this in an "offshoring" /. article, but have always arrived late to the game.
Firstly, a disclaimer: good on India. I hold nothing against them for accepting, with open arms, North American tech jobs as fast as CEOs rush to send them over.
That being said, I believe we (ie. North Americans) are being fucking morons about this. We are willingly shipping them high skilled jobs so Mr. CEO can report a quick profit the next quarter. In the mean time, we are losing an entire generation of "junior" positions. I believe that will spell the end of software development in North America.
My current job is that of a software architect. It is a high-skill job requiring very specialised knowledge in the area where we make software. I got to my current job by starting as a junior programmer at this company. After 3 years I was bumped up to "intermediate" developer. After 3 more it was a bump to "senior" developer. Now they think I know enough to design the systems I build.
Two years ago my company opened an office in Bangalore (we have offices across the globe). All new hiring has been through that office, and they ship the programmers from India to various other offices for training on projects. In another years time, programmers in that India office will have performed enough implimentations to be considered "intermediate" developers. In a few more years they'll be senior, and in a few more they'll be in my position.
As this is going on in India, all our own new grads will be working at Starbucks serving lattes, and will be left out of the loop.
All for the sake of a quick stock boost. Good on India, shame on us!
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
We protect you from your nuclear neighbors to the west and north, and in doing so, supply your freedom. International shipping, which any exporting nation needs, exists at the discretion of the United States. Nations are free to compete via trade, since the military competition has already concluded.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
"Attractive Women: Stay away. Nerd Crossing"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If you think times are bad, just wait till the election is over. The Republicans have struck deals with several dozens of corporations to postpone their outsourcing decisions till the 2004 elections are over. Expect to see wave after wave of US layoffs in the wake of the elections... especially if Bush wins again.
There was an article in the WSJ last month about exactly this. Apparantly, huge companies like IBM and Microsoft are keeping a low profile in India. MS has gone so far as to remove their names from the buses that they use in India to ferry programmers back and forth to work.
Magnus.
True, the numbers seem huge, but they are quite meaningless. Quantity does not imply quality. I have seen projects with 100+ programmers being *completely* scrapped. I regularly interview candidates who can't write a simple program, in whatever language, but call themselves "Software Engineers". I have seen resumes of "MS Word Programmers".
Frankly, I think this is nothing great - I am surprised it happened so recently. Like many other articles, this is yet another sensational article from the Times of India Group. Can't understand why Slashdot keeps posting from this paper.
When we no longer produce anything of value here, what do we have to trade? One thing we can do is educate people, foriegn students continue to come to the US in greater numbers to learn. Another is tourism. How many Indian's want to vacation in Detroit? Our college costs keep rising to the point that it is becoming more and more difficult for the middle and lower middle class to get an education here. The middle and lower middle classes make up almost 70 percent of our population. Another thing we have is money lots of it. Not you or I, but the ones really pushing for globalization. The 1 percent of are population that controls most of the worlds wealth and now wants more. These people find a service economy great for them, the lower classes have and always will bow to their every need. In fact, if the cost of service employees gets to high, then they can always push for more immigration, it is especially easy to get haitian or mexican labor to replace those high priced citizenry. It helps to give them a california drivers license. Most of these individuals were born into their position. Do not think for a minute Bill Gates was born into a low or middle class family in the suburbs.
By moving to a service economy where most of everything is imported, the middle class is left to struggle to maintain their status. More and more that is done with debt, easy credit for a good life now. Pay the rich forever.
Globalization is great for up and coming economies, it was great for Japan, but they are now losing to Korea, Indonesia, India etc.
The rich 1 percent would have you believe that this is all for the benefit of poor countries, ignoring the fact that when the labor costs and living standards rise in those countries, they'll be in the same boat. It will be a long time till we see programmers whose native language is Tutsi. But eventually they'll be a source of cheap labor too.
So what we have in effect is the very rich deciding the middle class is not dependant enough so they have decided to take from the middle and give to the poor.
Not exactly what Robin Hood advocated.
I work in Silicon Valley for a very large tech company, and in December 02 I spent a month flying hither and yon throughout India visiting all the major tech companies, so I think I can reasonably compare the two tech cultures.
/. - the geek drive seems to know no language or culture boundary.
Firstly, the big tech titans over there are ALL dependent upon the US economy. WiPro, TCS, Zensar, Infosys, etc. are all oriented towards the export market. The managers over there pay way more attention to the health of the US economy than to the economy there in India.
India has an amazing infrastructure for developing engineers. The IIT system, for example, is easily comparable to the best universities in the United States or elsewhere in the west.
My colleagues in India make significantly less than I do, yet they do live in quite comfortable middle-class-land. Yes, they do have servants, but in India, this is pretty common and not limited to techies.
The eagerness, drive and overall "geekness" of the technical people I worked with would be instantly recognized on
Currently, the average work experience of the Indian engineers I'd been working with was pretty low - they were all in their early-to-mid twenties. What this meant was that most of the architecture and design work (and hence the "innovation") was created in the States, and then shipped overseas for the implementation. But they're very hungry, and very driven (as I said earlier) - I suspect that we'll start to see a lot more original development and design in the next 5-10 years as the tech base matures and gets some experience under its belt.
This is why those export companies (like Infosys) are now eager to not just position themselves as implementors but designers and innovators as well - they want to move up the tech "food chain" because there are about a dozen countries (in Eastern Europe, China, etc) that want to occupy that place in the Food Chain where India now sits.
The thing is that this offshoring business is actually possible because of the success of the Internet. I often work from my local coffeehouse when I'm not in the office, or telecommuting from home. If all I'm doing is slinging bits, does it really matter where I am? Often the answer is no...my saving grace (thus far) is that I don't work in an easily commoditized discipline.
hotmail.com
At least it was an indian guy who created it. Sold it to microsoft for $400 million..
Bash it all you want, hotmail was pretty revolutionary and is probably used by hundreds of millions of people..
Will code a sig generator for food
My observations below come from my experience managing a distributed software engineering organization with presence in San Jose, CA and Delhi, India. I have a total of about 25 people working for me with have in the US and have in India (think of that poor guy who is split between the two countries - that must be me with all of my travel between the two!).
Let's face it will swing back to balance over time.
Right now, there is an incredible head-count cost advantage to moving a project to India, with many companies doing. The drive to offshore to India is driving demand there heavily. It is difficult to hire quality people, wages are going up quickly, people are jumping between companies, and it is much like things were in Silicon Valley during the bubble years.
What we will see, is that the head-count cost advantage, over time, will narrow and the other costs of going off-shore will come into play (coordination, latency, frequent travel, etc.). As this happens people will become more and more selective about what goes and what stays.
In the long-term, I think "offshore outsourcing" will fade to a degree, while "internal offshoring" (building distributed development teams within your company. I believe that the trend towards distributed deveopment organizations that take advantage of cost differntials and cherry pick the best talent in various geographies (as hard as it might be to believe, not everyone wants to live in Silicon Valley or the US for that matter, I have an excellent manager, with US Citizenship, orginally from India who moved back) will continue and accelerate.
What does this mean for us in the US? It means that we will have to go up the "software value stack" and work at a higher level. If a task can be done somewhere else for less cost, it wll be. This mans that we have to be constantly working to be at the cutting edge and have the breadth and depth to add significant value and coordinate project in these distributed teams. In a sense we each have to take the role in our projects that Linus has in driving the development of Linux.
If it is any comfort, realize that we aren't the only ones feeling threatened. My friends in India are all worried and looking over their shoulders at places like China, Vietnam, Ukraine, etc. wondering how they will move to higher and higher value-add activities over time.
I am not sure if this is a wonderful thing. As it is there are too many sub-standard colleges, and basic equipment and teaching staff is lacking in many. Such hypergrowth, in my opinion can cause nothing but trouble. I don't think the basic systems and infrastructure are there to support such an endeavor. Yes there are currently very good institutions but they are very few in the top tier. Most just dispatch their students with a "token" degree.
Frankly, I think this insane growth in the engineering colleges, is just too much of herd mentality. - not unlike the dot com mania. And instead of treating a college as a social cause or obligation, most of the "engineering" and "medical" colleges are nothing but commercial enterprises. They are run purely as businesses, even to the extent, that many are called "donation colleges." You pay a huge huge amount of money and you get in - even in medical colleges !! Just imagine one of those doctors operating on you. It happens in India all the time !
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
This hemoraging of jobs overseas has to become a prime election issue.
There was a good article on this topic in the Sunday L.A. Times pointing out it isn't only the Tech industry losing jobs overseas. All job levels and industries are sending services jobs overseas.
The Corporate CEO's and politicians they have in their back pockets only see improved operating costs, what they aren't seeing is they U.S. customers losing their jobs and won't be able to afford their products as time goes on.
Back when Alvin Tofler wrote _The Third Wave_ and said losing our manufactuing industry overseas isn't a problem, because America will become a Services based economy. Now we are losing our Services economy, but their isn't anything to replace it. The CEOs and politicians that cater to them need to open there eyes.
Outsourcing jobs overseas NEEDS to become a major issue in the upcoming elections. Every canidate needs to be informed of the issues and asked how they stand on it.
The company I work for, while incorporated in the US (for tax benefits and defense contracts, y'know), has the bulk of its employees in Bangalore. I, fortunately, have not had to work with the Bangalore office, since my work export control, meaning that foreign nationals can't work on it without special permission from the State Department. My coworkers on civilian projects, however, dread having to work with India. I'm not certain how much of it can be blamed on the Indian engineers themselves, and how much is the fault of poor communication, but all I ever hear about Bangalore is how often work needs to be sent back to be redone, and how inconvenient the time difference is.
...I had a point when I started writing this.
Do the company savings on salary and benefits make up for having to redraw a set of design prints five or six times? I don't know. I do know it runs the American engineers ragged and frustrates our customers when there's a schedule delay. The interface between the US and India is the real rough spot, I think. I know that purely internal work in both countries goes smoothly, but not being able to use our huge labor pool in India is hurting the American side of the business. Maybe I'm able to look at things dispassionately because my job isn't going overseas, but I *want* international outsourcing to work...and it's a rough start for my company. We need to overcome language and cultural barriers (any American who thinks Indian English and American English are the same dialect has never spoken to an Indian) and establish some actual communication between the continents, instead of throwing a set of design requirements into the ether and expecting the Magic Overseas Engineers to sprinkle some pixie dust and suddenly have a working set of engineering drawings.
Is it different for IT work? I don't think coming up with design requirements for a program and then implementing them is a fundamentally different process than for a jet engine.
On the other hand, the broken English of the company newsletter is occasionally hilarious.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
Indian friends I have, have told me that were shocked to discover after they arrived in the US that we did not have servants and cooks.
Of course, we *know* who the servants and cooks are in India and *their* standard of living.
Maybe India will get more than they bargained for... all they need is a class-based revolt.
They almost didn't survive. The result was A Good Thing for the consumer.
Now Japan has to worry about China, Korea and Taiwan doing the same thing to them.
It pays to go to work every day thinking it may be your last day there.
Whenever this issue comes up I always see somebody or the other clamoring for legislation or other forms of protectionism. But in doing this they make some serious assumptions, that are wrong --
a)American companies can be better off without any offshore development... No.
Reason 1... Not enough americans are getting into the engineering disciplines, and those that are do not get the grad degrees etc. Have you seen the university graduate school departments for Masters/Phd. lately? How many americans do you see? India already produces vastly larger number of Engineers/computer science degrees then USA. It had at the last count about 1200-1500 engineering schools.
Reason 2: Offshore/onshore combination development is a model that Indian companies have perfected as an art form, with the result that companies like Wipro, Infosys etc. are directly bidding for the contracts that US companies were outsourcing to them, because of lower costs. In fact IBM lists the Indian company Wipro as one of its most formidable competiters in future for its core services business. So, either US companies need to perfect the model, or start loosing contracts especially internationally
b) Stoping outsourcing for govt. contracts using legislation will help. False It would probably slow things down, but it would only mean taxing the common citizen more to pay another US citizen, i.e. redistribution of wealth, and not any creation of wealth. On the other hand outsourcing means more dollars in the hands of Indians, and what do they do with those dollars? they can do only one of the 2 things, i.e. either buy US products or invest back in US, and they do both. At the same time more wealth is created in US, because some customers save money,and the money that went out, came back again and bought more products creating even more jobs.
c) Indian companies are not creating any products.
False. Subsidiaries of US companies in India are creating complete products. See previous stories in slashdot. But even besides that India has been getting the largest amount of VC capital in Asia for last couple of years, and you will se products out soon. Some products are already there. For e.g. iflex In FY03, International Banking Systems (IBS) has ranked Flexcube as the number one selling universal banking solution in the world. Represented in over 50 countries through more than 30 corporate business partners, i-flex has gained the recognition of the first company in the world to cross the 100-installations mark for its product in less than 5 years. And there are other success stories.
Think about it. An Indian or a Pak executive will work for a lot less...and they certainly won't screw up^h^h^h^h^h^h^hmanage the company any better or worse than their overpaid American counterparts. Anyone interested in starting an executive outsourcing company with me? :)
Hotmail was created in Silicon Valley. Here's an article about it.
It was a typical Valley product with people from the entire planet working on it. In my expereience the teams are about equal parts Indian, Chinese, European and American.
so what do you do again ?
"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it--we're talking trade balances here--once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here--once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel--once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity--y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery"
(From Snow Crash.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Do you have any idea of the HISTORY behind such laws? It's because employers would pay below subsistence wages to unskilled workers (as in not even really enough to live off of...) so that they'd have to work 12 or more hours in a day just to make enough money to barely live.
Not a pretty sight, really.
Now they're exporting that misery to the third world countries because they can and it nets a profit short-term for the businesses.
It amazes me how many "get a job" people are so clueless- because they're NOT IN THE SITUATION AND NEVER HAVE BEEN IN THE FIRST PLACE. They don't understand that many of these people that are "too good to work a real job" (By the way, define "real job" for me... If it's manual labor, then you don't understand what many actually did in the Tech fields- not all of them were "web developers" that got laid off, etc. Many of the people that got laid off had "real" jobs that were worth what they were getting paid for them until the Great Downsizing...) actually have obligations like houses and the such that many of what you'd consider "real" jobs won't even pay for an efficiency, let alone the obligations like car payments, insurance, etc.
If you've not been there, PLEASE do everyone a favor and shut the fuck up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
OK this might upset some people, but that's too bad.
As a Very Large Company(tm), we outsourced our help desk a few years back. It was a painful running joke in the office that if you wanted to do no work done, you'd "phone India" with a problem.
The joke stopped justover half a year ago. Our India helpdesk is incredibly efficient at fixing problems, the staff are polite, and there's no bad attitude. I don't care how much money the company has saved--they have improved the quality of their internal support, and that's something pretty damned valuable.
So before everyone whines about 'cheap but crappy outsourcing,' make sure that it really is crappy. I'd wager that for all but the most highly skilled jobs, the overseas work is as good as anything locally.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I get busted all the time for my mistakes. Embedded systems don't play by the same rules as the desktop world stuff. A single mistake can go out to thousands of machines. In the case some of the systems I develop, a single mistake can KILL people. I do my level best not to make mistakes- just like those Hardware engineers you refer to. Keep that in mind the next time you think that all the software world is like frigging Microsoft or an apps vendor where people keep buying their broken crap.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
First of all, the reason they said "Lakh" instead of "Hundred Thousand" is becasue the article was in an Indain based newspaper. Lakh (Hundred Thousand) and Crore "Ten Million) are indian finacial jargon that has been used for many decades. People also use it when they talk about numerical values other then money. My father still uses Lakh's when he speaks about numerical values and not Hundred Thousand. It part of their culture.
No that would be NOW and the democrats...
He had india doing his and the republican parties' phone fund raising.
Bush falsely offered protection for the steel workers knowing full well that EU/Japan/UN would force him to obey our agreements from the 80's. He had nothing to lose.
I would guess that Dean will not comment until he realizes that he has to say something. That may be interesting to hear. Do you argue for an overall world economy that will ultimatly help you or do you try to protect local high-end jobs?
I strikes me that our leaders will take easy ways out rather than do the right thing. Time to set direction for our nation the way that India did.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The answer to that statement is "That's just silly. To a manager cost cutting means cutting YOUR job, not his. Havn't you been paying attention?"
It's amazing that during an election year that I've yet to hear one thing from Dean or Bush about this. Is everyone bought and paid for?
The answer to that question is "Of course they are, havn't you been paying attention?"
Sadly, this appears to fall into the "globalization" groupthink. It's a "free market economy" therefore it must be good...right?
The answer to the last statement is more complex. The plain truth is that our government has done this to us on purpose. Rather than cutting back on spending they simply spend more and more and more. How do we pay for that? Well, last week Greenspan printed another $5 Billion in fiat money that has no gold or assets to back it up. In the same week the Fed issued an addition $17 Billion in debt. And that's just one week! How about a month of $17 billion weeks? Think about a year of $17 billion weeks. How about a decade of $17 billion weeks. What will that do to our economy? Throw in ridiculusly low interest rates and it's a recipie for disaster. Allow me to elaborate:
Here in Southern California we have 15% of the jobs and 10% of the nation's population. If you count Southern California and the San Fransisco/San Jose are we have nearly 15% of the population of the entire country AND a bit more than 20% of the jobs. (This data comes from Claritas, a demographics company that I use to work for)
People need to live where the jobs are. Yes, you can say "Go live in Indiana where you can buy a house on 2 acres of land for $200k" but then reality sets in and you realize that in general, you must live where the jobs are. People need to buy houses where they live. The artificially low interest rates have made it far too easy to get cheap money in the form of home loans. This access to easy money has artificially increased the price (not the value, but the price) of homes. In Mission Viejo in Orange County a house next door to my niece sold for $440k 4 years ago. It sold last month for $1.2 million. In my area of San Diego our home prices have doubled in 5 years.
So how do people pay for that house? They need higher wages. Now follow along because this is an important concept: To purchase the same house they could have had 4 years ago they need almost twice as much money. In other words It takes more money to purchase the same amount of stuff That ladies and gentlemen is the very definition of inflation. That is the inflation that Allan Greenspan says does not exist
So our government has made it far too easy to get money which has caused housing prices in the areas where the jobs exist to skyrocket. In the mean time they are printing money like maniacs which also deflats the value of all the existing dollars AND they're going deeper and deeper into debt at a such a rate that they seem determined to utterly destroy the country and it's entire economy at the fastest rate possible.
Our government does not represent us, the middle class. Republicans, Democrats, it doesn't matter. We don't need an election, we need a revolution.
Now are you paying attention?
Moreover, it is found out that the Americans are shying away from the challenges of math and science. A recent National Science Foundation Study reveals a 5 per cent decline in the overall doctoral candidates in the US over the last five years.
One way to look at this is that we Americans are just lazy compared to Indians, Chinese, etc (and there is probably some truth to that). But from another perspective, why should we Americans bother to get advanced degrees in Math and Sciences when we're constantly bombarded with the message that we won't be doing the sorts of jobs here which require those degrees?
This gets me to my main point: we're not only witnessing the export of good paying jobs from the US to various 3rd world countries (and the associated economic effects), we're also witnessing a huge transfer of skills and knowlege out of the US.
As there are fewer tech jobs in the US it means that fewer engineers will be employed. When an engineer has no work for a year or two their skills will stagnate. Most engineers pick up new skills 'on the job' and without a job, they won't be picking up newer, in-demand skills.
Of course this has a ripple effect: your nephew Johnny who is in highschool wanted to follow in your footsteps and get into engineering, but now he sees that you've been out of work for a couple of years and you're considering a different field altogether. You sit down with him at Thanksgiving and tell him to go into dentistry or auto repair so that he can have a steady, decent-paying profession... Well, you get the picture. Whereas math and science education is already pretty poor in many parts of the US, this trend will not encourage it to get any better. No, we'll be offering pre-law classes in highschool instead of calculus soon.
A lot of people make comparisions between engineering and computer programming. I happen to work in an engineering firm, but have a degree in CS, so I am very aware of both sides of the analogy.
The analogy sucks.
The reason the analogy doesn't work is mainly because engineering deals with real-life physical problems. Also, engineering takes place in a realm of (generally) fixed possibilities.
You don't have to design a building to withstand 1,000 mi/h of wind because you know that will never happen. However, your program, to be anywhere near 'bug-free' (which can rarely be proven, of course) must be hardened against every combination of inputs. The effects of wind, and the behaviors of steel, etc. are very well known. You simply don't have this kind of data in programming, because you are almost always designing one-of-a-kind logic.
You make the implication that engineers don't make mistakes. That is far from the truth. The main reason why you don't hear about engineering mistakes is because of the massive QC effort that goes on. Most projects have at least 3 milestone levels, where plans are reviewed by the engineer's internal QC process, and then reviewed by the client's QC process. When you submit for jobs, part of your submission must document your QC process. No QC, no job.
If software companies put in anywhere near the same amount of effort on QC, you would see a definite improvement in software quality. However, it would be very difficult for software companies to achieve this. This is because the use of standards in engineering saves QC time by minimizing the amount of work that the reviewer must actually check. While many software companies do have internal standards and practices, the lack of industry-wide standards hinders the QC process. Libraries can assist here, but there is still a lot of unique logic being written for programs that simply isn't checked well enough.
People bitch about the costs of engineering (like the Big Dig), but fail to realize that more than 50% of the time is spent checking the work. A lot of money is spent to ensure that these things are safe. If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash, I hope you're prepared to pay for it.
I don't know where your bitterness against programmers comes from, but you need to chill out (and it sounds like you could stand to learn a lot from a software engineering course).
Note: Many of my comments are in the context of public engineering projects. For private projects, plans are reviewed (in New Jersey) by the local Planning Board, as well as the Department of Community Affairs, a state agency.
While I find this plausible, I find no easily locatable sources for it. It wasn't in the first 3 pages of links from Google under what I thought a plausible set of search links.
Now I don't follow the WSJ, so I would probably not have seen it if it were there. OTOH my default assumption would be that some reference would have shown up in Google. So an appropriate link to the story would be appreciated. (And no, lexis doesn't count as an appropriate link.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Corporations do not get tax incentives for outsourcing
Wrong.
Corporations are not required to pay labor/payroll tax on workers who are nationals of other countries.
Corporations are allowed to deduct the cost of outsourcing off of their reported earned income, thereby reducing their tax liability.
These are very strong, cost-saving incentives for a company to outsource to another country. The loss in tax revenue is made up by the rest of the citizenry.
No bullshit with unions
There are no IT unions in the US.
no messy healthcare
While the healthcare system in the US might need some work, an employers relationship is limited to paying the premiums.
no worries about ADA, OSHA, EEOC, Afirmitave action
Yes, protecting the rights of an indivudual from discrimination and harrassment is just plain wrong. Until you become that individual. Perhaps you're too young to remember such agencies as TaTa and others and the disgusting manner in which they treated their employees, sent to the US and elsewhere as endentured servants. If you think that regulatory agencies are the primary motivating factors for outsourcing, you really are not understanding how corporations work.
And OSHA?? What does the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have to do with IT?
Why just stop Corporate Welfare, when you can stop ALL Welfare!
This is an asinine statement, to be sure. But just in case you truly don't understand the reason for welfare, just know that there are still some people in this world that feel they have a responsibility to help their fellow man. Beyond that, there are very compelling reasons for providing public assistance in any society.
Without "Corporate Welfare" of reasonable taxation, the Corps will go overseas.
Again, nonsense. Companies have been operating in the US for over 300 years. While there have always been deals, favors, and preferential treatment afforded to corporations, I cannot think of a single instance where a major corporation packed up their operations and moved overseas. I'm sure there has to have been a couple, but they obviously did not have much of an impact. Ford might be making cars in Mexico, but the bulk of their operations is in the US.
The "working class" and the poor will finaly have to start paying thier fair share of taxes to support their way of life
Let me assure you, they already do. They may not pay the same dollar amount but, percentage-wise, they pay the same, if not more. In fact, most poor people do not have the financial means to obtain the majority of tax deductions that higher income families do. But if you insist on sticking with your ill-conceived opinion that they are not "paying their fair share", consider the fact that its the poorer people who are doing the jobs that you don't want to.
There will be no more greedy capitalists left to subsidize your welfare way of life.
Wow, you really do have a lot of disdain for lower-income people, don't you?
What makes YOUR work worth more than the same quality work from India? The fact that you are an American?
Historically? American corporate history is rife with examples of the failures of outsourcing. Many industry watchers regard outsourcing as a bad idea. Not just for the displaced workers but for the companyies themselves. Maybe someday people will learn that cheaper does not equal better.
No one owes you a living. No one owes you a living wage. The accident of your birth does not grant you a right to the fruits of my labor. Nor does the fact that you are my neighbor require me to buy your products.
No one is "owed" anything and no one is claiming that here. While American IT workers are affected by outsourcing, it is a short-term problem. Some salary adjustments have to be made, it's more difficult to find work, might have to move, but it can be done.
The bigger concern is the shortsidedness of cor
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
I really liked your analogy especially when you point out: "..If you want a Mozilla or a Real Player that doesn't crash...". But perhaps you're analogy could be improved.
In all fairness, I think it's wrong to compare an engineering project as complex as the Big Dig to a relatively small (and relatively unimportant) piece of software like Real Player. Perhaps you can compare the Big Dig to the software that runs the recently landed Mars explorer Spirit. They put several hundreds of million dollars into that thing and they probably followed it with a more comparable level of quality control.
Perhaps the proper analogy would be comparing a Sony Laptop/Wega TV to an Apex or other lesser brand name company. With Sony you're pretty much guaranteed a solid product that works well and has all the advanced features. With the Apex you'll get a product that works decent with a few bugs and few advanced features. In this analogy Sony represents companies that have strict QC measures and pride themselves on quality whereas Apex represents your cheap software, slap-it-together shops.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
Anybody can start a storefront white box operation... but making it scale to a national level can't be done without external funding and may not be possible even with it.
While I labeled outsourcing as a management fad, there is no reason to believe that the fad won't last long enough to destroy most technology industry in the USA or persuade kids going into college now NOT to get degrees in technology-related fields.
Without tech industries in America, welcome to the Third World. You've presumably read SnowCrash. It's predicated on a "race to the bottom".
Tech Public Policy stuff
India is a cheap country to live in and I know it because I lived there. Yes you can say that you get very less pay than what you get in US but then you should also look at expenses. You spend more than half of your salary into taxes, rents, and payments of other kinds which is not the case in India. The saving there are tremendous. And you can end up saving more than here. The reason jobs keep on moving to India are significantly many some of which are: 1) 1 US Dollar = 50 Indian Rupees (approx) 2) You have to pay there much less than here in US. As for e.g. If I get paid here in US 5000 bucks a month, this translates to nearly 250,000 Indian Rupees. A salary of more than 25,000 Indian Rupees a month is considered more than excellent. 3) Excellent cheap labor. There are many educated people there whose primary language is English and can effectively deliver the goods. The economic condition is improving drastically and it does not surprise me why companies want to move jobs to countries like India and China with the very reason why we are seeing such a jump into Jobs @ Bangalore.
First, engineering is an industrial approximation of science. Ohm's Law isn't exact. It fails in the extreme. The engineer doesn't usually need a detailed understanding of quantum mechanics or GTR when working with electrical components. Computer Science IS math. Church's Thesis states this. It's as exact as mathematics itself. That's the difference. It's like comparing apples and oranges.
However, one could make the point that both engineering and CS require extensive project management and time management skills, a healthy dose of vendor documentation, and elaborate design.
The problem is that the line between advanced IT and engineering has grown thinner over the last 10 years. Sure, there's a big difference between writing a device driver and a creating a large scale enterprise application. However, I've seen guys who have done both. I've seen my share of guys with EE degrees working in what I term advanced IT (IT on a large scale with more sophisticated architectures). Of course, now that advanced math (combinatorics, algebra, and logic beyond discrete math) has been removed from most CS programs and CS has been moved to the engineering side of the house, this trend will continue. I understand the professional reasons. I respect them. However, I'd like to point out that Donald Knuth, Marvin Minsky, Dennis Ritchie, Martin Davis all have PhDs in math. I'm sure the list of prominent CS people with math degrees is extensive and on the theoretical side of the house it's all math anyway (once again, church's thesis).
I've always balked at people who say they like programming but can't stand mathematics. It just doesn't make sense. Either you haven't really studied mathematics or Alonzo Church is wrong. CS will always be an open and interdisciplinary field. AI is as much biophysics as it is engineering, and certainly requires an intimate knowledge of foundational mathematics as well. The computer program is mathematics, and fields like bioinfomatics, digital physics, and computational linguistics prove this.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....