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A Thoughtful Look at Indian Outsourcing
thefinite writes "This article needs to be read by anyone interested in the outsourcing of IT jobs to India, no matter your opinion of it. It dispels some rumors (for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon's highest-rated programming companies Indian?). It addresses all of the arguments. Perhaps most importantly, it adds faces to the problem. It not only tells us about the American programmers who are out of jobs, but also about the Indians who are getting them. In the end of it, this is what Free Trade is about: people. This article makes that clear."
This article is simply a sensational piece. It's intent is to say, "See? Look at all the smart programmers we found in India! Don't you feel ashamed of yourselves now?" At which point both sides of the argument will start shouting.
Do yourself a favor. Realize that there are smart people in India, and there are smart people in the US. Realize that the amount of outsourcing done is ineffective and will change, but some outsourcing works and will work.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I assume that some of them are bad, and some are good. Some of my friends have worked with outsourced code that was unbelievably bad; on the other hand, I've seen awful code in the US.
I think there's a bit of everything in that; some actual bad code, some poor communications, some just about everything.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Irregardless of the angle placed upon the situation or the people involved, the "outsource-to-India" thing is affecting more than a few American jobs. This is a global problem.
Realistically, IT workers (non-management) need to consider their jobs redundant and over in five years. Make sure you've got skills that require onsite presence, like cabling.
The industry is just about finished, people, and it's getting worse. Give it a little longer and we'll see the likes of Sun vanish, HP is exiting the Unix market and the Linux bubble will eventually burst.
Can *you* make coffee?
I find it rather ironic that so many people in America, the land of capitalism, hate outsourcing so much. This is simple economics right out of Adam Smith. People in India can do the same things as people here in the States, and at a significantly lower price. Therefore, they get the jobs, and rightfully so. One good benefit for Americans is that this allows their employers to use that money elsewhere. And yeah, IT job salaries might fall, and some people might have find jobs outside the IT field. But for the most part Indians need these jobs much worse than we do. I'm willing to bet that as far as possessions go, the average unemployed computer geek is significanlty better off than the Indian worker who "stole" his job.
That's one thing this is NOT about: free trade. Free trade is when an unemployed American computer scientist can go to India to get a job. Guess what? It's impossible for Americans to get work visas in India. Why? Because they are protectionist.
People need to realize that the exodus of jobs is a one-way ticket. Indians can come over here and work as programmers, but Americans can't go to India. This is really a story of the American worker getting shafted by the illusion of "free trade." So let's stop the propaganda and say what it really is.
... it's the white collar execs (and wannabe execs) here in Corporate America that we're mad at!
They get the nice fat promotions and bonuses, while our jobs go elsewhere. And we are the same people they praised just last year as invaluable assets to the company.
So what happened? They can't get rich pulling fancy accounting tricks, so this is what they've resorted to.
I seriously hope that I'm wrong when I predict that this whole thing will fail miserably (taking the off-shore jobs with it).
I have nothing again'st people making a living, but lets see how your tune changes when they start outsourcing journalist jobs...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
This leaves the americans with the opportunities to open liquor stores!
As I was told by an Indian man at a liquor store once as I was reading a magazine... "this is not a library, you either buy or get out".
and the one thing that I wanted to ask the author was about how the heck is every American supposed to be an innovator? He seems to go over this idea several times, but never really lays down an arguement for it. This article constantly talks about how Americans need to become innovators for the world, as this seems to be his idea of the evolution of a knowledge worker. This is you typical sensational type reporting that Wired likes to do, and only seems to share half the situation.
In the end, I do think it'll be a while before the "highest level" of IT (such as research labs) find comparable counterparts at that deep a discount. People who are worried about their job moving offshore should think about how they can do things that can't move as easily, perhaps by increasing their education (MS/PhD)...
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
Funny, it also looks like it's in part about the poor getting richer.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Could it just be that because of America's prosperity has created a "bubble" in the american labor market over the past decades?
Maybe all americans are simply overpaid and we're in for a BIG correction in the coming years?
Kinda scary.
The key word is not "better" but "cheaper", it happened with manufacturing jobs in the past 2 decades... it started happening with other jobs now. As long as executive positions are not being outsourced Corporate America could care less about who is doing the job, and the quality of it.
In some sense it is economic suicide, sure you produce cheaper goods, but those who are in this country to buy them are out of jobs. I.e. they have no money to buy those cheap goods, and the people who produced the goods are too underpayed to afford those goods. This is why MBA schools should be shut down once and for all, they have been produced miserable failures for the past 2 decades, a ton of greedy idiot savants who are unable to see the whole picture.
I could care less if Indian companies can do the same job better, or cheaper. If that was the case Indian corporations would rule the market, if there was indeed a perfect free economic system as the article sort of tried to hint.
"Don't you think we're helping the US economy by doing the work here?" asks an exasperated Lalit Suryawanshi. It frees up Americans to do other things so the economy can grow, adds Jairam.
:)
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Maniar uncorks an aphorism that he doesn't realize I've heard 8,000 times before (in part because American white-collar workers have long said it to their blue-collar compadres) - and that I don't realize I'll hear several times again during my stay: "There's nothing permanent except change."
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The experience did more than capsize his work life. It battered his belief system. He's long espoused the virtues of free trade. He says that he supported Nafta and that for 12 years he's subscribed to The Economist, a hymnal in the free trade church. But now he's questioning core beliefs. "These are theories that have really not been tested and proven," he says. "We're using people's lives to do this experiment - to find out what happens."
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"Someday," Janish says, "another nation will take business from India." Perhaps China or the Philippines, which are already competing for IT work.
"When that happens, how will you respond?" I ask.
"I think you must have read Who Moved My Cheese?" Aparna says to my surprise.
amazing, they read American motivational books. btw, I recommend the book to you. very short book, you can read it in barnes and noble..
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For US workers, the path beyond services seems uncertain. But again, history provides a guide. Thirty years ago, another form of outsourcing hit the US service sector: the computer. That led to a swarm of soulless processing machines, promoted by management consultants and embraced by profit-obsessed executives gobbling jobs in a push for efficiency. If today's cry of the displaced is "They sent my job to India!" yesterday's was "I was replaced by a computer!"
Then, as now, the potential for disruption seemed infinite. Data crunching was just the start. Soon electronic brains would replace most of the accounting department, the typing pool, and the switchboard. After that, the thinking went, the modern corporation would apply the same technology to middle management, business analysis, and, ultimately, decisionmaking. If your job was emptying an inbox and filling an outbox, you were begging for someone to draw the I/O analogy - and act on it. Indeed, computer terminology is littered with traces of what were formerly jobs: printers, monitors, file managers; even computers themselves used to be people, not machines.
Computers have, of course, reshaped the workplace. But they have also proved remarkably effective at creating jobs. Bookkeepers of old, adding columns in ledgers, are today's financial analysts, wielding Excel and PowerPoint in boardroom strategy sessions. Secretaries have morphed into executive assistants, more aides-de-camp than stenographers. Typesetters have become designers. True, in many cases different people filled the new jobs, leaving millions painfully displaced, but over time the net effect was positive - for workers and employers alike.
If you've read this much, check out the article. I liked it...just remember to question everything you hear
Outsourcing isn't the magic arrow CEOs want it to be. This article doesn't really address anything important at all. Ratings are pretty meaningless. I know parts of companies that are rated at SEI Level 5, but produce some of the worst crap I've seen. They're rated well though, so they much be good.
Why doesn't someone write an article about all the times outsourcing has been tried before? How about what happened with Malaysia? How about the fact that the overhead involved in trying to manage people half-way around the world is higher than the amount they save by outsourcing? This isn't a new fad people. Sure, the people and the places change but the problems don't.
Things are different now than they were in the 80's I'll grant you, but no one seems to be drawing the comparisons. Health Care costs are rising in the US, thus possibly providing better savings when outsourcing now. However, it's not like this is a new concept and that the problems aren't well known. Let's see some hard questions asked and analysis done based on past experience!
KhyronThis article makes interesting advertising for outsourcing firms and raises some very valid points but hardly can be considered either objective or entirely factual. The article talks about the quality of Indian IT firms (and they do have some high quality professional firms). However, they fail to mention the many negative experiences U.S. firms have had with botched projects, poor service and support compounded by language issues despite claims that Indian English skills are adequate (albeit this is not true in every instance). One of the main issues offsetting these facts is that they work for a tenth of what their US counterparts do. Companies find it cost effective to allow them to make these mistakes and learn from them (which they seem to be doing). Outsourcing is a minefield that can lead to extraordinary success or disastrous failure. From an economic perspective the cost savings you reap from outsourcing you pay for in the long term (as a nation) by the erosion of your markets buying power. 3 Million consumers in your home market (making $70,000 dollars a year) are replaced by consumers in a market hostile to foreign competition making $8000 dollars a year (for the top tier anyway). Sooner or later America will realize this and legislation will be put into place to stop it. But in the meantime hang onto your seats
I guess things have quieted down now or perhaps we in the US have just lost interest. But there was a time where I am sure a few CEO's and CIO's had to be worried how long it would be before their big software project went up in a giant Pakistani mushroom cloud.
Do political situations, like the border skirmishes near Kashmir, ever get discussed when it comes to making these outsourcing decisions? If India was thrown into a state of turmoil due to an attack from Pakistan what would happen to outsourced projects? Or if India attacked Pakistan in a way that the US felt was too severe and sanctions were put into place against India, what would happen to these contracts?
'Same speed C but faster'
Actually, there was a day and time when you could make money, feed your family, etc. by just doing a good job day in and day out. That day ended, yes. So I guess apparantly I have to work for 10 years to get my PHD, then invent something in order to have any chance of making any money? Is that the moral of your story? Wow, that's certainly economical. Wal-Mart greeter is looking like the right career move right now.
That's not the point. This point is that Indian workers have the option of coming here and working. By law, it is illegal for Americans to get work visas related to IT in India.
So, here we are in the year 2004. America doesn't have enough IT jobs to support our own programmers. India's IT sector is booming. But guess what? American's are NOT allowed to travel to India to get a job.
This is not free trade. It's the raping of our nation.
That's all this Indian Outsourcing thing is.
Are there really really good, really smart Indian programmers? Of course there are! But overall, on the average, outsourcing will end up biting most companies in the ass, in the long run. There are hidden costs to it, like the 11 hour time difference, language barriers, cultural differences (anecdotally, from many accounts, Indians tend not to raise questions, or think independently when a design sucks, etc.)
Worse yet, this will bite the US Software industry in the ass when we suffer from brain drain - when software engineering is no longer a sought after degree. Then the Indians will start their own companies, and eat our lunches.
Worse still - with the decimation of these high-paying jobs, comes an overall lowering of the standard of living here in the US. These companies got rich by selling to the richest market in the world - American consumers. By gutting their own customers, these companies are shooting themselves in the foot.
- - -
That said - the writing, in big letters, in crayon, is:
Investors should believe that a wise company outsources, because it's a move towards efficiency. It will eliminate those overpaid "web designers" that are sapping corporate profits. Companies are "cutting fat". It's perceived as a gutsy move.
Actually, it's the herd mentality. "Oh my god! IBM's outsourcing, they're going to KILL us unless we outsource too."
But mainly - it's a movement designed to lure investment dollars back to the Tech Industry. It's basically hype. Companies who outsource are selling stock. Not products and services. This is their motivation, their drive. And it's very much a herd mentality. Among investors, AND corporations. They may be heading off a cliff. They may be heading to the slaughterhouse. Or perhaps greener pastures. But make no mistake. The Outsourcing Movement is NOT a drive to offer better service, or find better talent, or even save real money. It's a drive to LOOK like they are.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
A couple of points to ponder;
(1) Being a software engineer just out of university - i'm currently working at a major bank which has it's own Indian software development wing. Quite a few large Australian companies do this and have already gotten rid of 'small' amounts of in-house developers.
(2) This 'outsourcing' phenomenon is very cyclical in nature, and India happens to be the flavour of the month - in a decade it'll probably be some other developing country.
(3) To best protect yourself from this is too be helpful in other areas of the business. Become more involved in the 'business end' of the company, looking at bettering processes, even start training people.
(4) Not everything can be outsourced, focus on continuous self improvement in *ALL* areas of your working life and you shouldn't have anything to worry about.
I've been out of work and interviewing. Every company I interviewed with has opening because they're bringing their outsorced projects back.
Granted, it's not 6 figures like 5 years ago, but it's still nice.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How must I compete, Mensa? Lower my standard of living to $11,000 per year? Move to India? Become a nuclear physicist or nanotechnologist overnight (until that job gets outsourced)? This "do a better job, loser" garbage gets old. This has nothing to do with "better". It has to do with the fact that there are 5-some billion people on this planet so they can keep moving from country to country paying the lowest possible wages to get what they want. They being the rich. It has nothing to do with our effort or skill level.
The reason that India has a disproportionate number of SEI CMM level 5 companies is that with ridiculously cheap labor you can afford to create a Potempkin process on top of the rampant hacking.
Having worked with two Level 5 organizations, one level 4, and several level 3, I can assure you it's just expensive window dressing. Motorola foisted this fraud on the world in order to keep their Malcolm Baldridge award (they were told they had find something similiar to their six sigma program, but for software). The way you get to levels 2 through 5 is to fire the internal assessors (yes, they self assess folks), until their replacements tell you what you want to hear (Ye Gads, you're a level 3 organization!).
Unfortunately, the cost of generating the useless paper for the audit trail costs as much as generating the actual software, so they farmed out the work to their internal offshore software factories (at first in India, but now, wherever hords of programmers are cheap).
The vast majority of Indian job shops are also self assessed, and comically so (I've been told by some directors of SE that they are SEI CMM 3.5). The real problem is that the CMM has never been objectively validated. You hear wonderful claims by the SEPGs, and CMM - but their jobs depend on it, so fudging is expected. The proof is in the pudding, and when times got tough at Motorola, the CMM and Six Sigma specialists were the first to go. There's now grumbling about what to do with Global Software Group (their internal offshore outsourceing groups). Cheap is still no deal if it don't work.
" I know parts of companies that are rated at SEI Level 5, but produce some of the worst crap I've seen."
My dog eats food and produces shit. He does it consistenly, and he has a whole process he follows. Hell, it might be SEI level 7 based on how well that process works.
But its still shit.
That's idiotic. The salary of the Indian programmer vs. my salary has absolutely nothing to do with skill level and everything to do with how much THINGS in general cost in each country. You understand basic economics, right? The reason I want/need $40,000 (actually more) per year is because that's what it costs to live in this country. Especially with education for the poor being so expensive. So aside (once again) from somehow lowering my cost of living to $11,000, there's nothing I can do aside from spending more money and retooling for another job that will also get outsourced eventually and on and on and on....
See,
most of the jobs that are moving out of the country are the type of jobs that are high profile. And therefor we hear a lot about it.
Typically, it is programming projects that require teams of 20 or 30 people (maybe) and that lasts for a year or longer.
But many programmers are employed where proximity is important and where the primary product isn't the software itself. Maybe it is a small financial institution or maybe a factory which needs a few programmers to build in house systems.
Sure, it sucks when HP, Sun and others move their big and fun projects to India, but many jobs will remain here, because it isn't cost effective to move them to India.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
But, really, there is a much more important issue that doesn't seem to be getting airtime. As a software developer, I have no problem with India or any other country doing my job. However, claiming that this is all just "capitalism at work" and developers should just "suck it up" is a specious argument, at best. I pay taxes to support the government, which in turn supports the citizens and corporations here in the US (I'm not interested in addressing whether this is the proper function of govt., that's just how it is right now). These corporations are taking those government granted favors (in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, trade favors, patent and copyright protections, use of infrasturcture resources such as highways, etc etc etc ) and hiring people overseas. Now, if MS or IBM wants to move their headquarters over to India, fine, so be it. But I truly believe it's a crock to take advantage of the pro-business US laws, excellent infrastructure, a competent policing force, and all the other services that developed under our system of capitalism, and then not supporting the community that supports you. I'm not talking handouts or redistribution of wealth, I'm talking about the long-term consequences of this sort of policy. Yes, US software developers cost more, but the cost of that worker is factoring in a lot of "unseen" advantages that are granted to companies founded here.
The environment that allowed MS and IBM and all the rest to grow and prosper is unique to the United States. These companies would have never happened if they had started in India.
Don't tell me American coders are willing to go and work in India now. It's pure bullshit and if you were in a logical debate, it would probably matter and show that the Indian government is protectionist, but in reality, it plain simply doesnt matter.
The real debate is within America. Do we live in a global society or do we stay within? Especially coz we were the ones who made it so popular in the first place? That's the question America needs to ask itself.
This sig is empty.
You don't seem to understand. Even if my skills were 4 times better, it costs 4 times as much to live in this country. I have no control over that. Can't you get that through your thick skull?
Secondly, how do you know anyone is doing a better job than me? I'm perfectly qualified. It's just a crummy job market. A buyers market, if you will. I have no control over that. Unemployment has indeed held steady, but the standard of living had gone down as middle class jobs have turned into service jobs.
So what you're saying is that once we're all working at Target/Wal-Mart we'll have the ideal economy?
The Flight to India
The jobs Britain stole from the Asian subcontinent 300 years ago are now returning. Is this a good thing or a bad one?
If you live in a rich nation in the English-speaking world, and most of your work involves a computer or a telephone, don't expect to have a job in five years' time. Almost every large company which relies upon remote transactions is starting to dump its workers and hire a cheaper labour force overseas. All those concerned about economic justice and the distribution of wealth at home should despair. All those concerned about global justice and the distribution of wealth around the world should rejoice. As we are, by and large, the same people, we have a problem.
Britain's industrialisation was secured by destroying the manufacturing capacity of India. In 1699, the British government banned the import of woollen cloth from Ireland, and in 1700 the import of cotton cloth (or calico) from India.1 Both products were forbidden because they were superior to our own. As the industrial revolution was built on the textiles industry, we could not have achieved our global economic dominance if we had let them in. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, India was forced to supply raw materials to Britain's manufacturers, but forbidden to produce competing finished products.2 We are rich because the Indians are poor.
Now the jobs we stole 300 years ago are returning to India. Last week the Guardian revealed that the National Rail Enquiries service is likely to move to Bangalore, in south-west India. Two days later, the HSBC bank announced that it is cutting 4000 customer service jobs in Britain, and shifting them to Asia. BT, British Airways, Lloyds TSB, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Norwich Union, BUPA, Reuters, Abbey National and Powergen have already begun to move their call centres to India. The British workers at the end of the line are approaching the end of the line.
There is a profound historical irony here. Indian workers can outcompete British workers today because Britain smashed their ability to compete in the past. Having destroyed India's own industries, the East India Company and the colonial authorities obliged its people to speak our language, adopt our working practices and surrender their labour to multinational corporations. Workers in call centres in Germany and Holland are less vulnerable than ours, as Germany and Holland were less successful colonists, with the result that fewer people in the poor world now speak their languages.
The impact on British workers will be devastating. Service jobs of the kind now being exported were supposed to make up for the loss of employment in the manufacturing industries which disappeared overseas in the 1980s and 1990s. The government handed out grants for cybersweatshops in places whose industrial workforce had been crushed by the closure of mines, shipyards and steelworks. But the companies running the call centres appear to have been testing their systems at government expense before exporting them somewhere cheaper.
It is not hard to see why almost all of them have chosen India. The wages of workers in the service and technology industries there are roughly one tenth of those of workers in the same sectors over here. Standards of education are high, and almost all educated Indians speak English. While British workers will take call centre jobs only when they have no choice, Indian workers see them as glamorous.3 One technical support company in Bangalore recently advertised 800 jobs. It received 87,000 applications.4 British call centres moving to India can choose the most charming, patient, biddable, intelligent workers the labour market has to offer.
There is nothing new about multinational corporations forcing workers in distant parts of the world to undercut each o
How many loggers while you're at it? Face it--the fantasy world of overpaid IT jobs is gone forever. You have a skill that is basically fungible in today's world, and can be purchased at a lower price than would sustain or satisfy you. What IT people have been failing to understand for years now is that technology expertise is not as valuable a skill as it was once perceived. In fact, a lot of technology work is drudgery on the order of rivetting and lever-pulling. Too bad for those who were counting on making $300,000 a year. Time to reinvent yourself. The steelworkers did it. The loggers did it. Now it's your turn.
Because if you had a family, you'd NEVER go for what you just posted, even if you simply multiplied x each person. Once you have a kid, things change quite a bit. Your economics are also a bit skewed as far as internet/transportation costs. You're saying that a year's worth of bus service equals one month of internet. I don't know anywhere in the US that you can get a year's worth of bus for 50 bucks. Factor in the time it takes to get to work on public transportation. Again, once you have a kid, your priorities would be different.
Very clever, but ultimately a ridiculous response. My point is that if the answer to all of us who don't have a job is to retool and learn a marketable trade, my answer is that this costs money. At one point does one reach a point of diminishing returns on this? I know I have already. I have $28,000 in student loans and no job to show for it. That's not my fault. I did the best I could to get out of poverty, given the information I had at the time. I can't keep retooling forever, otherwise by the time I'm done I'll never be able to retire. But you probably wouldn't understand this as you weren't forced to make this choice.
Yet, in the midst of all of this, what exactly is happening here? According to this Wired article a new middle class of Indian programmers is arising, and they are producing quality work (again according to the same article half of that, of the 70 or so companies in the world that have earned a Level 5 distinction [highest distinction possible], half are from India).
So who is benefitting? A handful of Indian programmers. US corporations with better and cheaper software. And US citizens who use these US corporations because the savings is passed on to the customer (please save me the ignorant response that corporations will pocket the savings because corporations are in a constant battle for clients, and the best way to win more clients is to offer comparable services at a cheaper price).
Who is losing? A handful of American programmers who are unemployed due to outsourcing. But this is only temporary, eventually American programmers will either find a employment, or a new profession. Or perhaps even go into business for themselves as another slashdot article mentioned today.
Stack the benefits against costs and you can clearly see the world gains from globalization and capitalism.
Aside: Yes, it is concievable, that someday the expected wages for a programmer in India becomes unprofitable (in the economic sense of the word, not accountant sense) for US corporations and will take their business to some other nation, say Albania. But the cycle will repeat itself, and now the same benefits that were given to Indian programmers will be given to citizens of other third-world nations. Slowly, but inevitably, raising the overall wealth of all nations that participate in capitalism and free-enterprise.
I liked this bit... So basically Indian people get rich off of american companies.
An $11,000 salary in India is about a $700,000 US salary (based on 2001 statistics -- http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/reis/).
What a lot of american companies don't understand is that it pays to develop talent in house. What is going to happen when the management retires and there are no qualified people to manage the outsourcing of work because it has been outsourced so long? Pay an Indian $700,000 a year to come over here and manage the outsourcing?
Me, I look at Japanese companies to understand good business strategy. The Japanese seem to know how to invest their money for the long term.
So let me get this straight, the low end of the American job market should do to the Mexicans since they are taking "jobs no American's will do", according to the President.
On the high end of the pay scale, Manufacturing and Skilled Labor, we should let all those jobs go to India, China, Singapore and anywhere else labor is cheap.
So that leaves the middle, where companies are currently not hiring and slashing middle management by the thousands.
Now, toss in skyrocketing energy prices. Natural Gas (up 25% from 2003), Gasoline ($1.60/gal). Follow that up with increased health insurance costs which have gone up another 50% or more in 2004 because employers have no incentive to absorb costs in a tight labor market.
What's the result? DEFLATION! Yes, that's right, that means prices will stagnate as the number of people with disposable income become fewer and fewer. If you kill off the USA economy (#1 economy on the planet) who will buy all products and services from out of the country. No Jobs = No Spending Power.
Until workers in other countries can afford to buy SUV's, computers, cars, homes, digital cameras, health care, Disney vacations, and daily food the lifestlye and quality of life of the American worker will continue to erode. We need to ditch Free-Trade before the world economy ends up in a ditch.
This is why MBA schools should be shut down once and for all, they have been produced miserable failures for the past 2 decades, a ton of greedy idiot savants who are unable to see the whole picture.
You know, nothing says Big Picture like performance tweaking an inline function!
I read a recent article on slashdot about how American companies (GE was one large one named) were building large research centers in India. Filled with PhDs (engineers, chemists, biologists, et al.).
Shall we say... "When they offshored the programmers, I did not speak out because I was not a programmer."
However, I am a MS/PhD student in (non-computer) engineering. And reading that on slashdot scared the hell out of me. So I have a few more years and several $k left in my education.... and by then it will be in India? What's the motivation for U.S. students to go for the higher education (which used to be equated with higher pay) when that in the very near future may not be the case? I think we *all* should be very very concerned. Not just the programmers/IT's.
I work for an Indian call center which does all sorts of processing and telemarketing for clients like Chase,Citi..ec.
I work as a systems admin at night(USA time), studying for my GMAT in the day along with catching a little sleep.The job gets me about $7000 annually.Yes I am going to study in the USA probably steal another job there, temp or not if I can get it.Does that make me bad?Does that make the whole outsourcing industry bad?Its not the minimum wage factor that I'd like to argue.
Everyday we get about 5 tasks that were done wrong by some desk jockey in the USA and have to be streamlined and corrected here.(not talking about the actually processing, just simple reports n stuff)
Ok maybe not everything is that bad but what is a guy like me supposed to do? I earn more than most of my friends..live an ok lifestyle and struggle to save up for future education.This is the typical scenario you find in a IT outsourcing company in India.
Should I just quit and work as something else? Why would Citi stop Outsourcing when they earn more by outsourcing and get better value for money? Isnt it right that we lobby for Outsourcing in USA?
Lord of the Binges.
Indian law is no different from American law in this matter. You're welcome to visit India, but if you want to work in India, you need a work permit. These are granted as a matter of course when the sponsoring company files the paperwork.
One major difference is that while in America, the LCA (Labor Condition Application) states that the H1-B applicant will receive a salary *equal to or in excess* of the prevailing wage for that job category in that region, in India, there is a reverse certification that the wages paid will be *less than or equal to* a certain constitutional ceiling, traditionally the same as the wage paid to the President of India, which is about $1100 per month. It's an archaic law that dates back to British times and when foreign exchange was a scarce commodity, and exceptions can be made, but that's how it is.
Americans (or any other alien) *can* work in India, if they're willing to work for about $12k/year. Above that, it requires more paperwork and approvals, but no reason that it can't be done.
Free trade has three requirements:
Outsourcing of jobs to India does not satisfy the third criterion. Technically, it is incorrect to call it "free trade".
The only true free trade system I am aware of is the European Union.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
Well, it's certainly an interesting point, but that assumes that India and the US are equal in all ways. I'd say paying one American four times what another American can do the job competently for would certainly be welfare.
You blew your case apart when you called a tax break a "Favor". Sorry, when the government robs you a little less blind, it is not a "Favor".
You'll get no disagreement from me on that point...except that it is a non-sequiter. The truth is, that under our current system, right or wrong, tax money is taken from me and paid to help corporations in many ways. If that company chooses to accept (or lobby for) those funds, it needs to pay the consequences. TANSTAAFL.
And they would have never happened if they had to pay workers 4 times the value of the work, as you would like to see happen. The companies succeeded because they avoided mistakes like paying much more than the real value of things.
Nice straw-man, but I never suggested paying workers four times what they are worth. My argument is, that the "worth" of a worker is not simply just what it costs you to hire him. A company does not get created and exist in a vacuum.
You seemed to have missed the point of my argument (since you didn't address it). There is more factored into the salary of a worker than just the paycheck a company hands them. Contrary to common misconception, the US (nor any capitalistic, without the capital-C, society) is not a lawless wasteland of a bunch of individual nomads roaming and trying to find the highest bidder and destroying anything in their path to get to it. The environment that these companies thrive under has to be paid for in some sense. Does that mean workers are not paid enough? I don't know. But it seems short-sighted to ignore the community that supports these companies that used to be nothing more than two guys in a garage with a good idea.
You can't have it both ways, you can't take favors nor use resources without someone paying for it. If you want to move your company over to India, more luck to you.
Yes, as an independent contractor and an American, I am troubled by the disappearance of American jobs. When I saw it starting my Freshman year in college, I picked up an extra major and started doing lots of extracurricular activities. Fortunately, I still get lots of work at my normal, exorbitant rate, even from companies who also oursorce, because of all of the positive word-of-mouth: customers know they can count on me for a quality product and they can get it fast.
An awful lot of people I see graduating from the college I go to have truly pitiful skills, even after four years. I worked on a yearlong group project with people who couldn't write coherent or working code to save their lives. I tried to tutor a guy who was 1 semester away from his B.S. but couldn't write a "Hello World" program. Horrifyingly, there is even someone in my 400-level Physics class that can't do derivatives. I have no idea how she survived 100-level Physics. At a local software company that I once worked at, my desk was next to a woman freshly graduated from college as a computer scientist, and she never did any actual programming - she sat there and watched TechTV, pausing to stare at the screen when the supervisor walked in, for about a month until it was discovered that she couldn't really program at all and was fired. Two English majors e-mailed me recently with questions about my upcoming participation in the ACM World Finals. Their e-mails had approximately the coherence, spelling, and grammar I'd expect from a middle-school student. These people aren't unusual. They are, I'd say, the 30-40th percentile of a typical American college. People became so complacent during the economic boom that they thought that they could expect a 50K-plus salary without doing the mental analog of breaking a sweat and by doing the bare minimum amount of work when it came to maintaining or advancing their skill. These people, I think, ruined the market for those who actually worked in their training. I imagine that it tends to be easier to keep all of your department staff in the same place, and for the drastically reduced price (assuming you're going to get a large quantity of workers who just can't produce and a few that can anyway), you may as well just go all outsourced.
Anyway, yes. I blame the slackers (and the companies who practically sell certification) who devalued degrees in their complacence.
~Ben
First of there's not just one IIT; they are a system of seven institutions of higher education (Kharagpur, Mumbai (Bombay), Chennai (Madras), Kanpur, Delhi, Guwahati and the newest Roorkee).
Second, it's important to realize that many of the students from India who do the best in their undergraduate class become graduate students at those American institutions you listed as well as other institutions (some not very impressive at all) in North America and Europe. It is still a big deal in India to go a major American university. I have a few friends who did their undergad at an IIT campus. All of them left India for graduate study, because the research opportunities there are just not as good as in the West (although the situation has been improving steadily over the years). I will grant that the undergraduate education there seems to be particularly strong though.
Furthermore, it's important to realize that just because IIT admits such a small fraction of its applicants does not necessarily make the educational opportunities there better. Selectivity does not always equal quality. If anything, it calls into question India's ability to offer access to quality higher education for its population.
Learning is a cultural thing. While many american kids are focused on TV, Britney Spears, video games, etc, these kids start training hard for school at a young age, in the hope of their families to be able to enter IIT years later.
I do have to agree with this in general. In America, there is a very anti-academic tone culturally (even in schools). However, you have to question the quality of a life where from the womb all you do is study in order to get into a good university where all you do is work in order to get a code-monkey job which is your life.
Even when I went to highschool, there were probably a couple kids in a graduating class of ~400 I'd consider truly gifted students. Often I'm seeing the gifted students were foreign born, because their parents don't indulge their children with crap culture, but expect them to start preparing themselves to be citizens at a young age. It's usually the second and third generation parents who fall into the typical american lack of concern and discipline.
For this, I think you have to look at what kind of people are first-generation Americans. It doesn't just take a lot of work and/or a lot of money to immigrate to a foreign country. It takes ambition as well. Immigrants are therefore more likely to be ambitious about themselves and their kids.
I know of many US companies who make a living teaching companies in other countries like India about quality control and the way that US Businesses do business. If Indian companies had good quality, these companies would be out of business and not have business booming. I shall cite some examples of the quality of offshoring below.
Thing is, most IT workers, such as me, do not blame the people taking our jobs, but the companies making the move to other countries and cutting us loose. This is a global trend that is not going to stop unless there is some law passed against it, which I doubt will happen.
First it was a Labor Shortage which was a big lie by the Corporations to get rid of US workers and replace them with H1B Visa workers or outsource to India. Now that there is a surplus of IT Workers, they still claim there is an IT shortage and need to move more jobs overseas.
Where is the beef? Where is the quality that Indian companies are supposed to have? Apparently they did not have Quality at Dell when they moved a Help Desk over to India. Where is the quality in programs written? Security issues are a big risk and we are supposed to trust someone we cannot even watch from half a world away that they will not harm source code or be a risk to security?
Of course there is always hidden Malware to consider. Really nice of them to put in a back door or virus or trojan to access the corp system after the Indian programmers are let go when the project is over.
Oh yeah, the myth that it is cheaper. Consider the Hidden costs of Ofshoring nothing like a project going over budget and full of bugs and needing US developers to fit it. Once again, where is the beef? That quality is just not there once again.
It seems that India is America's silent partner. We may not even hear about it during the election year. When a government is more interested in rewriting copyright laws so that the RIAA can sue 13 year-old girls and fair use is out of the picture, I wonder who our politicians really work for? Certainly not the US Citizens, only Corporations. So of course they support the wholesale slaughter of US IT Workers and the export of IT jobs overseas.
Ah but there is a big risk involved in Offshoring. Sort of like taking all the company stock to Las Vegas and betting it all on number 35 on the Roulette Wheel. :) Just ask those who craft the contracts about the risks involved.
Nice to meet the people that are taking the jobs moved to India. Also nice to know they are not concerned that US Workers are losing their jobs to keep the Indian workers employed. I'd think if I was given a job at someone else's expense that I would quote my religious or culutral references instead as well when asked to respond to that. :)
Maybe we should personalize the US IT Workers too. Here is Bob, he worked for a Fortune 500 company for the past 15 years developing award winning programs and his work gained the company many patents. Bob holds a Masters in Information Systems. Management decided that he earns too much, so he was terminated and his job was sent with many others over to an IT sweatshop i
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
"In this case India is showing that they have a competitive advantage in programming. They can produce code at the required level and do it for FAR less than the American programmer."
Yep. They work for less. That's the race to the bottom.
"The Indian salary will not remain static."
Well, we're pumping money into their economy so they'll see an increase, that is correct.
"As the number of jobs and the complexity of the problems increase (remember, workers are a market just like anything else) the salary will begin to rise."
Maybe. But doesn't that pre-suppose that there will eventually be more jobs than programmers and that the jobs will become more complex?
"As the rest of the economy begins to feel the benefits of this economic boon in India, more and more IT workers will begin to do other things."
I don't see this. If the IT sector is making money, why move out of it? Unless some other sector is making even MORE money?
"Eventually the global market will achieve Equilibrium and the competitive advantage will close."
That's the "bottom". The lowest price you can pay someone to do the work.
In order for that factor to INCREASE you have to have MORE JOBS than programmers. Which I do not see happening.
"We talk about how these theories are untested, well we've seen the results of this same phenemenon in auto manufacturing."
Different. It costs money and time to move cars.
"After all, remember all of those car building jobs we 'lost' two decades ago? Well, they're coming back in droves."
The ones I see "coming back" are in Mexico where the parts are assembled and shipped up to the US.
Making a car is not the same as assembling a car.
The US does not make many cars anymore.
"The Japanese auto makers are now turning to American labor to build those same cars, as the Japanese workers salary has now surpassed the American auto workers salary.. factor in the cost of shipping those cars across the ocean and American labor makes a ton of sense for that field."
It's cheaper to hire someone to assemble a car in Mexico (NAFTA) and ship it up to the US than to assemble the car in Japan and ship it to the US.
Now look at our old auto cities. Massive unemployment, still. The jobs are gone.
By your argument there will also be 4 times as many incompetents as well. In the end the US companys pay 1/3 as much for the same crappy software giving, meaning they pay 1/3 for nothing. I have seen this. Indian programmers in my experience are niether better or worse. ANy time you throw warm bodies at a problem in programming, code goes to hell. Read Brooks.
The other point is that it is not fair trade, the jobs leave and labor cannot follow. This is not fair trade.
Also one of the basic tenents of Demming was to carefully control the hiring process to get the right people for the job. Any time you outsource you lose control of hiring, leading once again to crappy quality.
Only mega corporations can afford to throw money down rat holes like this. Small to mid sized companys have to be more efficient than this and they in fact are where the jobs are. There was an article where a smaller company was going to be charged 40k/yr for each outsourced programmer and the manager said "for that price I can buy American" and he did! If you are looking at IBM, HP, CA or other mega-corps, look elsewhere. Large corporations are not the norm even in the US. It is just thier marketing that makes you think that.
Also, as the dollar weakens, any advantage will somewhat disappear. So basicly I am saying adapt, fight for true fair trade and tell the large coporates to piss off (boycotting thier goods is a good idea).
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
While I take offense and you trying to rank IIT above Caltech (as I'm sure the many Nobel prize winners from Caltech would as well,) I think you hit on an important aspect of American culture. We have a culture that does not promote education. We ridicule our smartest people (look at how many words we have in our vernacular for making fun of smart people.) We praise athletes or singers or pleasant looking people, but not scientists or mathematicians...
Large corporations (HP and Intel immediately come to mind) are fond of saying that they 1.) have to offshore to stay compettitive but 2.) America needs better education system because they can't find quality engineers here. These two thing seemingly contradictory at first, but they're not once you realize that maybe Intel would outsource to Arkansas if it was possible. Don't you think that if Corporation XYZ could open a new office in Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Wyoming, i.e. a place with lower cost of living and lower pay scales, then they would've done that before they "sent" their jobs to India? For that matter, even here in California you'd have a hard time hiring 100 programmers in Fresno, which is only a few hours from Silicon Valley and has 500,000 people living there. Of course there's no shortage of programmers in Silicon Valley, all needing $70K just to pay rent, but you cannot go to less expensive parts of the country and find skilled labor.
I'll shed a tear for the American Programmer the day the American consumer sheds a tear for the sweat shop laborer that made the overprices POS shoes you can afford to pay gross markups for from the likes of Nike.
Your country profits from the exploitation of child labor and people caught in poverty traps... You there, unemployed developer, reading this... reap what you sow.
My dev group was recently approached by some gentlemen from an Indian outsourcing company. They wanted to do our new product and made a very convincing case.
When asked for a ballpark figure about cost, they stated 20-30 an hour: probably not less than 21 and probably not more than 35.
After they left, the QA manager, the Project Manager, and me, the programming manager, ran through the numbers by using our estimation of project man hours times the Indian's lowest quoted price (21/hr) vs. the costs of tech labor in Utah.
Local workers actually beat Indians in overall costs because Utahns are willing to do a great job even when paid relatively little. The margins were close, but the Americans still won by about $20,000 for the project. So with these figures in hand, our CEO will probably decide to go with local help. Not only will the locals be a bit cheaper, but we'll have the workers in the office for consulations, oversight, and better QA and none of us will have to make frequent and costly trips to Bangalore to oversee the project.
This scenario probably won't work in much (most?) of the country, but this does show that there is still room for Americans once the figures are carefully analyzed and once wages cycle downwards for a bit.
for example, if Indian IT companies do such bad work, why are over half of Carnegie Mellon's highest-rated programming companies Indian?
CMM does not rate a company on its programming skills or quality, but on its development process. It's a very different thing. My company is trying to get to CMM level 3, and the process is a nightmare. The people in charge are not developers, software engineers or in any way technical. They're paper pushers and meeting schedulers. We flunked a preliminary audit because t's weren't crossed and i's weren't dotted.
Process is important, but like anything that is good, too much is fattening. Too little process and you flounder in ignorance and miscommunications. Too much and you flounder in the paperwork. The purpose of a process to get things done, and not to be an end in itself. CMM only cares about the process.
Indian software engineers are top notch. Their programming skills are excellent. They also have a more keen sense of the bureaucratic corporate culture than most US programmers, which explains the abundance of CMM Level 5 companies in India.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
It's not meaningless, it's true. Capitalism taken to the 9th degree will eventually be unsustainable. Who will buy the products when everyone is either mega-rich or poor?
For the record, the only way in which I'm jealous is that I'm jealous I don't live in a country where the cost of living is this low. I'm not jealous of the rich. Never wanted to be rich. Just wanted to take care of my wife and I and not be poor. Apparantly that makes me greedy.
The cost of living in FL is much lower than in CA. It is cheaper to hire programmers in FL. Some programming jobs moved to FL. I followed them- I took a pay cut but do very well thanks to the decreased cost of living. I can even afford a house now.
The cost of living in india is much lower than in FL. It is cheaper to hire programmers in india. I love indian food, I speak the language and wouldnt mind living there. Yet I cannot move there and work because I am not an indian citizen.
Thats the problem. There is an artificial barrier between countries that keeps their populations from mixing. There should be a corresponding barrier which keeps the jobs from wandering to where we cant follow them. Otherwise we are screwing ourselves.
I predict this will be a good year for outrage over outsourcing with the election and the "jobless recovery" underway.
Bottom line, it's not the responsibility of US workers or the US government to improve the Indian economy and help Indian programmers get jobs. The responsibility of US elected officials is quite the opposite, it's to see that highly trained US workers don't become redundant. And that too many of these highly skilled jobs don't move offshore to third world countries.
And for those who suggest everyone should have an equal chance to get a job no matter where in the world they live, you are living in a world of make-believe on lollypop lane. One might as well say "Gee, why don't all the countries of the world won't simply open their borders and let anyone to immigrate anywhere."
The truth is, there is very little totally "free trade" in the world, especially little of it India. And those that suggest anything that's not completely "free trade" must be "protectionism" are just drinking the free-trade kool-aid.
Most of the goods and services in the world are somewhere in the middle, not totally free trade, but neither are they totally restricted. That's where US high tech jobs need to be, somewhere in the middle. We can't afford to allow all of the United States technical base to migrate overseas, yet neither can we afford to totally cut ourselves off from the world. There will have to be reasonable restrictions. Reasonable restrictions do not equal protectionism.
Also keep in mind that India is one of the most restrictive, anti-free trade countries in the entire world. The offshoring of US jobs isn't an example of free trade, it's actually an example of very unfair trade. The Indian workforce doesn't have nearly the same worker protections and regulations affecting US workers and companies. The Indian government disallows many American products from being imported and actually manufacturers many US products in India without paying the US patent holders for their products. The US pharmaceutical industry alone loses billions a year in un-paid license fees.
So before any suggest offshoring is "Free Trade" Let's see India walk the "free trade" walk by paying those license fees to US patent holders. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
"no amount of wishing, screaming, arguing, protesting, legislating, hoping, lobbying, letter-writing, bribing, petitioning, imagining, discussing, complaining, worrying, fretting, bothering, sign-writing, stalking, or planning will bring it back"
You are quite wrong. Much of the debate of the next Presidential election will focus on the "free trade" policies that are gutting the middle class in the U.S. to the benefit of U.S. Big Business. Many many middle class people who used to have decent jobs who now are out of work, or working at WalMart, are mad as hell. American workers are coming to realize that they cannot compete with overseas workers who earn a pittance. In the end, no amount of money from Big Business will keep the electorate from kicking the guilty parties out of office. Thankfully Indian programmers cannot vote for American congressmen and Presidents.
--Slashdot: News for Turds. Stuff that Splatters.
Just a quick comment here...
The Carnegie Mellon CMM Level 5 rating that a lot of these firms receive is not always related to overall quality. Like the ISO 9000 standard, you can have a poor product come out of a CMM Level 5 shop.
The CMM is supposed to improve overall software development process but, for example, there is nothing in the CMM that says "Don't use unprotected globals" or "Avoid goto's and labels".
Code written in CMM Level 5 shops can be good or it can be utter crap. The CMM states that you have a process which meets all of these different criteria.
That's not to say it's bad to pursue a CMM rating. In some cases it helps. A lot of it can be common sense. Though what is one person's common sense is another's undiscovered fronteer.
Do not let a CMM rating wow you just as an ISO rating should wow you. It can be a factor in deciding a contract but there should _never_ be a single factor to decided a contract!
It's the companies that should pay. Find out who is outsourcing and tax the hell out of them. They're making quick bucks off of the American government and domestic/foreign workers.
and on top of all that I was forced to give myself the pink slip and outsource my personal website becuase free was too damn spendy!
The Roman empire did fall 200 years before it's final destruction in the west, actually. The combination of pressure from the barbarian hordes and internal political instability that led to basically non-stop civil war for the forty or so years leading up to Diocletian's accession destroyed the old way of life and brought in a new, authoritarian regime (think of the worst American rhetoric used to describe the Soviets - ppl weren't allowed to be socially mobile AT ALL, they had to take their father's jobs etc.) which only resembled the old one in name. To quote Gibbon, "if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honor."
The problem with The Wealth of Nations is that it boils everything down to arbitrage. Unfortunately, the technology that really only came into being over the last decade have made nearly everything a potential for international arbitrage. This is not just a problem for the United States, although the United States seems to be the last to blush at it from a governmental point of view. This is something that every single one of the so-called "global North" are worried about because if everything is distilled to "capital" and "labor," well, labor is cheaper almost anywhere else. Labor is cheaper in Canada and Mexico. You don't even need to go to India. You think we've got problems with that? Go to Germany or Scandanavia where labor is even more expensive.
OF COURSE it is a "good thing" to the recipients of the work in underdeveloped countries. However, CEO salaries are on average thirty times what even the President of the United States makes. The CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch makes about half of the compensation for the entire House of Representatives and Senate combined. The AVERAGE CEO compensation is $11,000,000 per year--thats 39,285% more than the average American. A Dilbert cartoon recently opined on this where Alice is speaking to the CEO and asks, "I work 70 hour weeks and I don't make $40 million per year. Do you work twenty-eight thousand hours per week?" Note, this is a characterization of someone making $100,000 per year -- in the top eight percent in the United States.
This "they need the jobs more than we do" is ridiculous. That's a race to the bottom. Almost EVERYONE needs the jobs more than we do. By comparison, the unemployed computer programmer needs the $60k that used to be his salary about two hundred times more than the CEO who outsourced his job. Put your scorn for the overpaid where it belongs.
$60k in 2004 is $27k in 1980 dollars. Anyone who remembers 1980 remembers that was a painfully modest salary then. We're getting lost in a collective memory lapse where the numbers we see today are impressive compared to what we experienced a decade or two ago. In 1980, the pay gap between worker and CEO was only about 42:1. In 1990, it was 84:1. In 2000, it was 531:1. That's a jump of 44,700% in ten years. That's a compounded 192% raise every year. If a $60k computer programmer performed that well, they'd be making $40 million per year after ten years. In the meantime, we can all sit back and party like it's 1981. YAY.
As for this argument from possessions, the cost of possessions is relative to the location. Anyone who has travelled abroad at all realizes that the standard of living that $50k affords in the United States costs $100k in Sweden, costs $25k in Poland and about $15k in India. A $7.50/hour engineer in India is SIGNIFICANTLY better off than an unemployed computer programmer in the United States by virtue of the fact that it costs many times as much just to stay alive in the United States as it does to live in luxury in India.
That is the nature of arbitrage. You'd think by blathering Adam Smith you'd realize that.
The movement of jobs to India is simply the result of currency exchange rates .
Take a look - starting around 1991, the Rupee dropped from around 17/dollar to today's 45/dollar.
So that chick making $11,000/year? Using the 1991 exchange rate, her Ruppe-based salary would have cost her U.S.-based employer $29,100/year. 29K is s still cheap compared to a U.S. salary, but its a lot easier to compete against than 11k.
I suspect that a lot of companies would not be offshoring to India if the exchange rate hadn't gotten out of hand back in 1991. We've been bring the dollar down for a year or two now, but it's too little, too late. The exchange rate has been too "attractive" for too long, and companies are now finding the risks worth the potential reward.
Unfortunately, once this transition is complete, it will be nearly impossible to get the jobs back. Even if the exchange rate drops - the investment will have already have been made, and the risk of change will all be going the other way.
A lot of the proponents of outsourcing claim India as a bottomless supply of talent because they have a population close to a billion of mostly educated people. This is wrong.
India is a country of diversity where there are hundreds if not thousands of languages, having a caste system which means that there are the educated and non educated as it has been for thousands of years. Many indians do not become more than what they are because they believe it is bad karma. If you are a begger than you stay a begger because you believe that you will be something better when you become reincarnated.
Most of the IT companies in India are concentrated on the west coast of India (bounded by the mountain ranges to the east) and therefore only a fraction of the population of India would be highly skilled. Moves to expand the IT industry in India will stalled because of cultural reasons.
It is possible that most of the companies that have taken advantage of India's talent would have taken the cream of the crop. As with anything that has a great amount of hype behind it, Indian outsourcing will suffer from a bubble effect... Early adopters benefit while others find that the later they outsource the benefits become diminished. Others will find a detremental effect to their business.
Perhaps a policy to slow down outsourcing to India would be good thing for America in the same way that raising interest rates - in order to stop the economy overheating - is a good thing. This will have the benefit of stopping the bubble effect described above and at the same time will give time for American programmers to adjust and adapt to the new outsourcing reality.
The blind rush of people outsourcing to India also means that people forget that there are other countries with highly educated and undervalued people.
There are many professions that may never be outsourced like programmers. Managers, doctors and lawyers they have a competative advantage that professionals in other countries cannot imitate. In order to survive software developers need to be able to think and act like a business. Things like finding a competative advantage which outsourcing cannot compete against. Maybe rebranding yourself. Maybe building your capability to take advantage of new opportunities out there. But its frigging tough when one moment you have a job and the next you don't.
One more thing I want to add... corporations have a primitive drive to increase profit by either increasing revenue, decreasing costs or both. So therefore much of the politics related to business involve 1. protecting revenue sources, 2. reducing costs.
Now patents/copyrights is a actively discussed in /. and really is a form of protectionism that enables sustainable development of intellectual property and maintains corporate revenue. Outsourcing is also actively discussed on /. and is against job protection.
Now people who argue for job protection are also arguing against intellectual property protection and people who argue against intellectual property protection probably argue for job protection. My point is that beauty and sustainability must be a balance between nurture and freedom. Like a garden you pull out the weeds if you can, or if you can't destroy the weeds because you will hurt the good plants then you leave the weeds alone.
Yet another ironic recursive statement.
There is lots of work in North America. If you can't find a job that sustains a lifestyle in NYC, move. I can't imagine why you'd want to live there anyway, but I'm not an American and YMMV. Surely with all those people and connections that are possible, you can find some way to either run a company or get employed and make enough money to live.
I don't understand the problem. I'm a Canadian, and the economy here has never been what the US economy has been. I've always admired the feeling in US cities that things are getting done, money is being made, and the government stays out of your way.
But, that's right. Move. Sell your apartment on the street and hitchhike out of town. There are loads of small towns in the US where you can eek out a living with a tech background. If it's too expensive, those boots were made for walkin'.
Or become a mechanic. Learn to weld. Move to texas and work in the oil fields - or Alaska, for that matter. Figure out how to make things out of wood. Learn to take care of old people. Learn a martial art and teach people.There's lots of ways to make money besides bitching about outsourcing. Go into business managing outsourcing operations. Etc.
My own piece of constructive advice is move to a smaller city, and get employed by a small company that can't afford to outsource and can pay a living wage - and a living wage isn't $100,000, but it isn't $10,000 either.
I thought people here were supposed to be resourceful?
..don't panic
From the third page in the article: "Turner's bill passed the state senate by a 40-to-0 vote. But it got bottled up in the assembly, thanks to the efforts of Indian IT firms and their powerhouse Washington, DC, lobbying firm, Hill & Knowlton."
Why the hell do we allow Hill & Knowlton to greatly influcence our governmental decisions regarding outsourcing U.S. jobs? They have offices in 37 countries around the globe and firmly believe in outsourcing jobs outside the U.S. Our government really needs to stand up to companies like Hill & Knowlton and fight for U.S. jobs.
http://tomgould.com/
laws? If it is cool to outsource to countries without these laws because it is 'cheaper' then why the fsck did we ever pass laws that protect citizens from unfair labor practices only to allow all of the jobs to leave this country?
i am so very tired....
What? The people living there have little education? They don't even know how to use a computer? Well, I'd be glad to live in the sticks and telecommute - just like those Indian workers. While some may prefer the city, I'm sure that quite a few geeks would prefer the sticks, like I do.
The problem is, the corporation won't let you live in the sticks. They insist that you relocate to the most expensive regions. Then they complain that you are too expensive - because the cost of living in NYC, NoVa, SFO, LAX, etc is so high - and outsource your job to India.
My distaste for the city prevented my from taking a number of high salary offers. Also partly because the salary wasn't really all that high after talking to people who lived where I would have to move to. My friends were in incredulous that I wouild turn down $90K. But $90K is peanuts in SFO (even 10 years ago when I had the offer). Now I am glad that I stayed away.
There is really only one fundamental problem preventing cheaper Tech labor in America. Lack of infrastructure. Lack of education can be worked around by moving people like me to low cost areas. This creates more demand for technical education, and more qualified native workers will turn up as local kids get turned on to tech. However, telecommuting requires a decent broadband internet connection. In the sticks, you can't get DSL or Cable, so you have to get T1. That runs $600/mo, which adds $7500 to your salary right off the bat.
As one person said in the article, "where do you go after knowledge".
Anti-knowledge! UFO cults, Enron "accountants", HP PR, TV, SCO PR, WMD finder, Politics. Bullshit is the Future of America!. So put on your Hale-Bopp sneakers and come ride the magic bus!
Table-ized A.I.
Well, now we have "The NEW New Economy" which is supposed to be based out of Bangalore or something.
Has Wired ever gotten any fundamentals correct?
Seastead this.
Face it: American IT workers are no longer competitive. Partially, it is because the third world is catching up in education and infrastructure; partially, it is because too many talentless and overpaid people entered the American IT industry in the 90's. The causes really don't matter, as long as American labor costs too much. Most American IT jobs will go; those that remain will have much lower salaries, and the only American programmers remaining will be those that have a second job, and love programming more than money.
Why do I know this? Because I saw it, 10-15 years ago. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian scientists, engineers, skilled blue-collar workers, etc. found that their skills were suddenly no longer needed. The Russian industry was not competitive with the West, and the government was too poor to pay gov't contracts. So what happened? Some people emigrated to the West, where many of them had to take blue-collar jobs (because racist Westerners didn't care about their job experience or education). Some stayed for the love of their job despite not getting paid, and accepted a massive fall in their quality of life. Many broke down psychologically, started drinking, and are by now basically unemployed and unemployable. The rest went with the flow, and followed the money. They worked three jobs, sold vegetables, fixed cars, imported Western goods, went back to school, opened stores, created a banking system from scratch, etc. Some failed. Some were incredibly successful. The richest Russian businessmen today were knowledge workers in the 1980's.
The ones that were too stubborn or too shocked to adapt are living below the poverty line.
There are a lot of fallacies with this article presented here.
In almost every major pro-outsourcing argument, history is mentioned that back in the turn of the century farmers moved to the factories. And in mid 30's and 40's, migration from the factories to the cities started. So essentially a lot of the workers were trained in newer "better" jobs.
True...
Except everyone fails to mention this important fact: it all happened internally within one economy so overall affect was positive for the U.S. worker/economy/country. Workers moved from farms to factories then offices (spanning generations), to higher salaries, better standard of life and etc.
So what is just the U.S. IT worker will do? Train for a better a job? Such as law, or medicine? If one wanted to become a lawyer, s/he would have never majored in computer science. And worse, loss of IT job in the U.S. means lost income and tax revenue.
Ultimately, the Indian IT worker's salary will also go high, but then there will be Malaysia, Indonesia, and etc. Don't forget China.
Just what are Americans are supposed to do?
Here's a question: with the low-end (farm and service industry) jobs to be filled by Mexican workers, mid-level (such as customer service - AOL anyone?) jobs to be outsourced to India and others, manufacturing jobs gone forever (challenging to find any product made in U.S.A anymore), high-tech jobs and products outsourced to India and made in Taiwan, steel industry succumbs to cheaper import, I ask again just what are Americans are supposed to do? How many lawyers, dentists, and doctors do we need? Or are we supposed to become car salesmen at local dealerships?
To do what?
There aren't any new industries that are coming up that require lots of human workers. The next revolution is supposed to be in biotech. But biotech work is very easy to automate and what human work is needed will only be done by the elite of the elite.
I know what "other things" Americans will be doing.. they'll be spending their time fighting even harder over fewer jobs.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
As much as I like to read /. as a way to gain insights into the way the American mind works (or at least the American mind of a subset of the polulation I can relate to), I am often annoyed at the capitalism flags that get waved in droves at every occasion. I find it highly entertaining how quickly people turn around and suddenly find capitalism Not So Good. Welcome in the real world, don't forget the lesson you learned
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
As a Computer Science major at Fresno State, let me jump in here.
You're pretty much right on the dot. Here we are, just south of the Bay area (it's not even a full 3 hours from here to San Jose, barring excessive traffic near SJ). Our department is rather well respected - we're one of the few CS departments in the CSU system that pulls in recruitment from Microsoft, HP, etc.
And not only are we a tiny department, but the vast majority of the students that are there aren't Fresno natives. Most aren't even United States natives.
Rather, we get a ton of students from India, Japan, Russia, Ukraine, etc. Only a select few of us are Valley (that's San Joaquin Valley) products.
Virtually none of us will remain in Fresno come graduation. The overseas students will largely return to their home countries. The non-Valley natives will head back to their areas of the country, and most of us Valley natives will leave the Valley (which is fine with me, but I'm sure a few would rather stay in their home).
Funny thing is, Mayor Alan Autry (better known to most as "Bubba" from "In The Heat of the Night", our Arnold before Arnold) really was seeking to pull some Silicon Valley business down here, where cost of living is far lower. Unfortunately, things haven't remained rosy in the tech sector, and there's a lack of homegrown talent here waiting for the jobs. I'm sure there'd be a number of out-of-work programmers willing to head here, but California's business climate is just not allowing much of anything to happen right now.
You may implement fair trade policies. You may implement trade restrictions. You can declare war on India. You can vote Democrat. You can vote Green. You can vote Libertarian. You can enact a law that forces all US companies to use only US Citizens for all software engineering labor, to force them to use only foreign labor, or anything in-between. You can make it all free, or all restricted.
The reason businesses choose to hire cheap programmers is because that is how much they are willing to pay. If you artificially try to raise that price, they will not hire programmers at the higher price; the projects will simply go away.
You will not make your job come back. It is gone FOREVER. It is a dead issue. Politics and greed are simply irrelevant; this is the reality you must face and deal with constructively, by looking for ways to adapt your skills.
A brief aside:
I have little sympathy for the millions of my fellow Americans who charged into the gold rush of computers in the 90's who now have no jobs. I did not choose this lifestyle because I had dollar signs in my eyes. I chose it because it is who I am and have always been.
I am fortunate that people are willing to continue to pay me to do something which I enjoy and do well. But I am not so naive to think that this will always be the case; I am mostly concerned with whether or not I am providing more value to my employer than I cost. If I fail to do so, then it is up to me to find new ways to be productive.
And I'm lucky in that my employer actually asked me to provide weekly status reports. Imagine that -- he actually ASKED me to do something which I really wanted to do anyway: Once a week, I remind my bosses how I am contributing more value to him than he is having to pay me. And by doing so, he is happy because he feels he is getting a bargain, and I am happy because I am well-paid, enjoying my job, and likely to keep it.
But there's more than that. I'm also keeping up on the industries we're in, and the trends in those industries. And I am using that to get advance warning of what skills I will need to brush up on, and the likelihood of my company succeeding in certain areas, and most importantly, when the project I am is in danger of becoming cancelled by the company.
My resume' is a marvel of marketing: It tells an employer not just that I have skills, but that I do this because I enjoy it, have always enjoyed it, and have a history of seeking to make value for my employers.
I don't have to like doing this. I just have to do it. That is part of being a professional. That is part of adapting to reality.
This is how you deal with a down job market constructively! You can go ahead and do your superstitious lobbying and your arcane petitions to the witch doctors in Congress to somehow magically summon your long-dead, buried, and decomposed job from the grave. There is no evidence that such mythical sorcery has ever managed to successfully resurrect a job, and it's not for a lack of trying!
Fuck politics. Instead, market yourself well. Learn about the industry you work in. Make your goal to produce more value than you cost. Do these things, and you never need worry about having a job, regardless of what you do or where you do it.
However, you have to question the quality of a life where from the womb all you do is study in order to get into a good university where all you do is work in order to get a code-monkey job which is your life.
This is true, but from the American perspective, it's not very encouraging to see that you can work hard, study, blow some serious cash on school, and then have your job sold out from under you, leaving you with $7/hour flipping burgers and trying to pay off those student loans. That's one aspect of the Wired article that was almost completely ignored - with all of the people saying, "just move laterally into another field", no one seems to have a good idea just how to afford that lateral move and the training it entails, especially for the poor schmucks that are just now graduating.
There are lots of comparisons made with the steel and textile industries, but those didn't require an expensive specialized education that suddenly became worthless. Also, there is *such* a gap between the COL between here and India - the Wired article mentions that the project manager they interviewed makes $11,000 per year and lives quite comfortably - that's practically at U.S. minimum wage and not really a sum you could live on here.
I guess that this whole thing is an object lesson in going into business for oneself - when it comes down to it, you're the only person that can really be trusted to look out for you, because you can't trust an employer to give a damn.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The real loser here is the US Government. If each Indian programmer that was hired had to have medical, dental, disability, social security, state, and federal taxes taken out of their salaries they wouldn't be making nearly as much, not to mention that you can double most of those as the company pays about the same. For outsourced programming positions, that is a lot of money that Uncle Sam never sees.
no one seems to have a good idea just how to afford that lateral move and the training it entails, especially for the poor schmucks that are just now graduating
Well, actually, the idea is pretty obvious, and has been used repeatedly for the previous wave of outsourcing in manufacturing jobs.
The basic notion of free trade is it that it makes people richer. (If not, the parties involved wouldn't trade.) We all buy electronics made in Asia because they're cheap; that's a great deal for us as consumers (because we get to have more stuff for the same money) and it's a great deal for Asian manufacturers and their employees (because they get a slice of our wealth). In the long run, everybody is better off.
But as you point out, in the short run people whose jobs go overseas are in a pickle; they have trained for a job that's no longer available. The solution is to tax consumers a bit (so their cheap imports aren't quite as cheap) and pay for job retraining and income support.
There are some programs like this for lost manufaturing jobs, and there should be more. And their needs to be support for those harmed by the new wave of white-collar jobs. Write your congressman!
But the solution isn't to block trade. Trade makes us all richer, and blocking it makes us all poorer.
You're completely right about Brooks and Deming! But I can't let this pass:
The other point is that it is not fair trade, the jobs leave and labor cannot follow. This is not fair trade.
I see. Is it unfair trade that, say, US movies are so successful around the world? Perhaps we should be noble and shut down Hollywood so that local film industry jobs around the world can flourish?
Of course not. Free trade is a positive-sum game; blocking trade makes us all poorer. If India can make better software for less, then more power to them.
But I think, for exactly the reasons you cite, they can't. In the same way that the Japanese competition forced American cars to improve drmatically, Indian competition will force American software developers to improve. And as you say, they could start by doing the things that Brooks was recommending 30 years ago.
For some definition of "stolen", anyway. From Cortez to the East India Company to the slave trade, natural and human resources were systematically removed from the rest of the world by European colonial powers.
"Stolen" implies that one group of people has the right to property or resources.
Nature IS competition for resources. Does the wolf steal from the mountain lion because it killed the lamb first, thus depriving the lion of food?
Ever since the first single celled organisms in the primordial ocean began to consume each other due to the exhaustion of glucose in that ancient environment, life forms have been stealing resources from one another.
The lie you are perpetuating is that amongst humans, this is unique to white men. The fact is only they were good enough at it to affect the whole world. What about the mongels? Who got all the way to vienna? Or the huns?
Every major war, every revolution, every system of society, and every culture has come into being to assist that extended tribe in the conquest of and competition for natural resources.
Yes, since then, most of the wealth of the west has been generated. You have to understand, however, that it takes wealth to make wealth. The rest of the world is only just now starting to bounce back thanks to globalisation, despite the best efforts of wealthy countries to keep protectionism alive in all industries except the ones they do well.
It takes human ingenuity and civilized behavior to create wealth. It should be clear that wealth in the material sense is insufficient, otherwise Africa would be the wealthiest continent. For primitive people, wealth cannot be created. Their instincts only allow for the most basic form of resource exploitation.
I would also question your suggestion internationalism helps third world countries. The major issue with India never discussed is why they as a people are focusing on software engineering and not improving the country they are in. We are talking about a country where the vast majority of people live in housing inferior to most urban housing in the Roman Empire over 2000 years. India is a prime example of how Internationalism only benefits a select elite. The average Indian citizen is probably worse off today than under British rule.
What hope does the average fellow have in India except to work as a servant for the wealthy who get their money from the US?
Internationalism is only going to further the caste system in India, except that even the upper echelons of society there will be little more than parasites on the great fat Internationalists.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
1. There is no 'next big thing.' The farmers saw their jobs moving to the factories. The service industry was blossoming when the manufacturing industry began to falter. There is no booming industry now. There is no next step. You can tell the programmers to retrain and get new skills but what skills should they get? Unemployment is about 6%. There currently isn't an industry in need of workers. The Wired article suggests that programmers should move toward some designer/process-problem-solver type of conglomeration... thanks captain obvious but a good programmer is a designer/process-problem-solver. They tell us to becoming inventors and innovators which, apart from being ambiguous and, well, hard, begins to lose it's meaning when the jobs that support innovation are moved off in just a couple years.
2. Unskilled vs. Skilled labor. Farmers, while skilled in their own right, didn't require expensive formal education to practice their craft. It was learned from the generations before them. Textile workers didn't go to college and sometimes didn't even graduate high school. Skilled programmers now-days often attend prestigious 4 year universities with high and ever increasing tuitions. It hard to tell someone who spent $18,000 per year (the current cost of my alma-madre) to 'just retrain.'
3. Trimming the wrong corners. Look at the stats in the article. Top 400 wealthiest Americas, y2k average salary $174 million. Yes... One hundred seventy four million! Many of these top 400 are CEOs of the very companies moving their IT workforce overseas. Let's see... at 50 grand a programmer per year that's 3480 programmers per CEO. Let's speculate and say 100 of these top 400 are IT oursourcing CEOs... that's the equivalent of 348,000 programmer jobs. By the way, their incoming is growing about 15% faster than the average Americans and this number is sure to increase as unemployment stays high.
Ok, these points being stated, I agree that IT is on an irreversible decline in the US. That's unfortunate as the reason I got into computers wasn't because that's where the money was; it was because I really like computers. Luckily, the company I work for is stable enough and my job is such that outsourcing would be between difficult if not pointless. Regardless, the plight of the IT worker must be addressed. Companies are moving their workforce like ants marching.
Unfortunately, you can't place a tariff on a service like you can a good. I'm not sure that would even be the best answer as most people seem to thing that 'protectionism' is a very bad thing. It just seems odd that a company can reap all of the benefits of being and doing business in America while still getting all of the benefits of international cheap labor all the while, American jobs are dropping like flies and the rich are getting richer.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I'm a relatively old fart in this forum; I'm 33 years old, and I've been programming in one language or another since '95. I've been around; I did the comp sci degree, the Y2K effort, the Manhattan, NY, dot-com/dot-bomb experience, some corporate IT, and civil service in a few different organizations. I've been around to watch our field go down the tubes, I have a pretty good understanding of the whys and whens, and I've got some advice for you, so please listen. I might be able to save you some grief.
First, look at the problem at hand: corporate jobs are going away because of corporate greed and disloyalty. First it'll be IT jobs, then virtually everyone as corporations move everything overseas that CAN be moved. This is nothing new, they did it to the manufacturing sector decades ago. But it IS unique in that once it's gone, that's it. There's nothing left for an ex-corporate type to retrain to except dead-end retail jobs at six bucks an hour.
So, this is pretty scary. But you CAN keep yourself out of harm's way. You don't have to just let yourself get sidelined.
First of all, ask yourself: do you really want to work for a corporation? You'll have to sign an IP agreement, a nondisclosure, and a noncompete, so you won't be able to work for anyone else for several years even if you're fired -- this is sort of like indentured servitude. And you'll have to work 60+ hours a week with no overtime pay because they'll write you up as an "exempt" worker. And you'll have some idiot suit breathing down your neck all day, reminding you on a constant basis that "you're lucky to have a job in this economy" (believe it or not, I've heard of this kind of thing from a lot of different people). You'll have to physically restrain yourself from dropping him out the nearest window, which will cause you stress. And you'll have to eventually watch your job go away, maybe even training your replacements.
So all those corporate jobs sucked anyway. Fuck 'em. Don't even consider them. The only reason corporations are still hiring is that they haven't fully ramped up their outsourcing yet. Why help them while they're still in the process of screwing you and all your friends over? Blow 'em off and get a non-corporate job. Stay in school. Get that Master's degree. Go on to the Ph.D and become a professor. If that's too annoying and your suck-up skills aren't strong enough, get into the IT department of a university near you -- you get all the benefits and none of the headaches of a professor's post. Get into civil service if you can. DISDAIN the corporations. They've earned it.
If you can't score one of those jobs, try and find something with a small business. Parlay your knowledge of computer science into a position where you'll learn some other trade at the same time. Wear a lot of hats. Be the indispensible local geek who keeps everything running. Small businesses are better than you might think; if nothing else, they would NEVER have the resources to outsource your job. Think about it.
So, ok, now you have a job. You're eating, you're making your car payments, you're not rich but you're not dead meat either. So, now what, you ask?
REVENGE.
Say it with me. "Revenge". Feel how it rolls off your tongue. "Revenge". It's such a happy word, such a WARM word. It LIKES YOU. It's your FRIEND.
REVENGE.
Here's how to get one for the little guy, without breaking the law or doing anything that'll get you into trouble.
1. Don't buy anything from a major corporate outsourcer unless you absolutely have no choice. Or, be obnoxious: buy a Hewlett Packard printer (usually sold at a loss) and buy NON-HP INK. If you need a new laptop, buy it on Ebay, where the money goes into the wallet of one of your neighbors instead of a corporate bank account. Buying music? Buy it used in your local CD shop. Buying a car? Get a used one. BE CHEAP, and be proud of it. Convince everyone you can to be cheap as well. Think grassroots.
If you're buying an item like a TV, and you don't w
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I'm an Indian, born and raised there. After working my butt off in high-school, and I got admitted into the University of Pennsylvania. I applied to America, because I was under the impression that America was the country which wanted the world's poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and were willing to work hard to get there. I also applied simply because I wanted to see what the rest of the world was like. What a mistake. I went and stood in the line at the United States Embassy with all the other applicants to get a student visa....this after I had already gotten admission. I had to prove to the visa officer that I didn't want to permanently stay in USA, and that I wasn't going to blow up the WTC. I got to the USA, and paid the FULL $120,000+ that the tuition costs me. But I was reminded everyday how I stole Joe Public's college place. I was also told "If you don't like it here, y don't u go back to your own country. BTW do you go to school on Elephants?". Interesting to see what other kinds of people make it to an Ivy league in America. Then when I graduated (The initial months of what would become the dotcom bust) I got a job with Amazon.com (again I stole Joe Public's job). Non-US citizens are NOT allowed to work in the US without a work visa. I don't know all those mexicans do it, but that's how it works for the rest of us. Then, I was told that I would get a work visa based on my performance for the next 6 months...at the end of which I got fired. This means I had to leave my job and apartment and leave the country, which I did gladly. Apparently, America is no longer the land of immigrants. You want to live peacefully and seek life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, do it elsewhere. So then I went back to my home country (India) because clearly I'm not wanted in USA, the miserable, decently educated thief that I am, and got a job with a software company. Guess what, now apparently, I'm still stealing Joe Public's job. Apparently, Indians will only be safe as long as they are only cleaning the shit out of your gutters, or acting like dim-witted kwiky-mart owners. Anything more high-level than that and we're stealing "your" jobs. First of all, this outsourcing revolution is unique to India. Software will remain an Indian monopoly, and the reason for that is English. Indian languages are closer to English than Chinese/Japanese or Russian will ever be. This means that an Indian can pick up English much faster than a Chinese person can. Second, Who the hell do American's think they are to point fingers at us for 'bad english'? Most Indians educated in English can outtalk an American anyday. Someone made a comment about culture. Apparently, teasing adolescents to the point which they steal guns and murder their classmates is a culture to be aped. Outsourcing is here to say, because it is a Big Business phenomenon. GE has a virtual empire here in India. There's no way it's letting go. Ford, GM, Yahoo, Microsoft, they all need us. Deal with it. The time will come soon, when American might will be challenged by Chinese and Indian might. Clearly you guys aren't ready to meet that challenge. Oh but we have a lead over China. Yes, a lead - we're a democracy and as proud of it as the next American is. Of course, to most Americans who wouldn't be able to figure out where their arse-hole is without class-action suit-induced directions, we're just another bunch of turbaned freaks who follow Bin Laden.... And we're a young country, whereas most of the developed world is greying out slowly but surely. Sorry dudes, the new world is Brown and Yellow, not White. So in effect. You're screwed. Capitalism/Free Trade is dead. Long Live Capitalism/Free Trade
Enron.
Power deregulation in the US.
Train privatization in the UK.
Parmalat.
WorldCom.
Higway and bank privatization in Mexico.
Sorry, but the private sector seems to bi as bad as the public one.
At least politicians can be voted out of office, we can't do much about Billy Gates and Darl.
Although Europe is not as prosperous as the US it is certainly more egalitarian and less disparate, the deprived parts of Europe are immensily better to the ones in the US. Been in both of them, I would not wish on my worst enemy to be a poor person in the US...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The other option is to have an entirely protected economy. This should work very well if human greed did not exist. A model that we could try is Gandhi's concept of Gram swaraj. Each village is self-sufficient. They grow their own food, make their own clothes, and consume only what they themselves can produce. Everybody is happy and satisfied. There is no competition between countries, let alone competition between villages. Of course, the whole system is made unstable by the greed of a single person. Gandhi said, the world has enough resources to satisfy the need of everyone, but does not have enough to satisfy the greed of a single one.
A few years ago I worked for a long established American firm making 390 mainframes(*).
High level management were trying to outsource to India, my senior peers were coincidentally assessing static source code analysis tools.
They used the tool to assess the quality of the Indian code vs their own code. Result was the Indian code was measured to be better. The outcome? Tool was deemed to be broken and not used. Company went out of business a few years later.
Moral? Well the one I took from it was that everyone thinks other peoples' code is worse than their own, because it's different. When that code comes from a different culture, then the differences are going to be greater. But if it gets the job done (which encompasses reliability, maintainability etc), stop whining.
(*) Amdahl.
A lot of the comments about being "unable to compete" with regard to outsourcing can also be made by commercial software companies trying to compete with Open/Free source software. The answer typically given is that Open/Free software raises the entry level and provides a better starting point for commercial companies to build upon.
Similarly, Western IT professionals (it is not just the US having to deal with this issue by the way) concerned at this trend should try to acquire a broader-based skillset which includes business and creative as well as "pure" technical skills - and local knowledge that cannot be easily duplicated by an overseas company (in most organisations, it still is a case of not what you know but who you know).
Also the companies outsourcing are mostly major corporations - which by their nature tend to stifle innovation with bureaucracy. Freeing up their workforce will make it easier for smaller companies to start, recruit, expand and innovate (provided the DOJ manages to rein in Microsoft). And it is only a matter of time before senior management and CEOs find themselves being outsourced (who needs a US-based board of directors when all the real decisions are being taken overseas?).
Finally, this also provides the English language with a massive boost - India is gaining a real advantage due to their widespread use of English and other nations like China and Vietnam will have to do the same in order to grab a significant slice of the outsourcing pie (French/German/Spanish supremacists beware!).
Bear with me a moment.
o urce merry-go-round. Every once in a while, some manager hoping to score brownie points would suggest outsourcing as a means for the company to improve their bottom line. And it would be done.
I am currently looking for a job and have noticed that many companies ask that I send my CV as well as my preferred salary. Okay, I can do that. Of course if I state my preferred salary is R10 000 and someone with similar skills and experience says she wants R5000, who are they more likely to hire?
A few years ago I worked for a company that seemed to be permanently in the outsource-then-bring-it-back-in-house-then-
outs
Then not too long in the distant future, the outsoursed jobs would be brought back home because some other manager suggested that doing it ourselves would be cheaper. And it would be done.
Face it, Joe Soap might have started his lemonade stand as a means of feeding his kids but when he started making more money then he needed for groceries what did he do? He grew his company, branched out into orageade, limeade and coolade and employed his brother-in-law to do deliveries.
That is until Joe realised that he can pay the Indian kid down the street a fraction of what he pays his brother-in-law for the same job and in the end Joe makes more money.
Does he stop selling lemonade when the kids are all grown up and can provide for themselves (assuming they're not American programmers)?
Of course not, because it stopped being about feeding the kids a long, long time ago. Now it's all about the money.
Is it not better for a company of 150 people to outsource 100 jobs and stay in business or not outsource at all and so all 150 jobs are lost?
It's still about the money because if you don't have money, you certainly can't afford to pay a programmer.
"I'm going to worry like hell and that's not an easy job, believe me" - Lu-Tze "Thief of Time"
Bullshit.
"[Americans] are regularly told by politicians and the media, that America is the world's most generous nation. This is one of the most conventional pieces of 'knowledgable ignorance'. According to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the US gave between $6 and $15 billion in foreign aid in the period between 1995 and 1999. In absolute terms, Japan gives more than the US, between $9 and $15 billion in the same period. But the absolute figures are less significant than the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP, or national wealth) that a country devotes to foreign aid. On that league table, the US ranks twenty-second of the 22 most developed nations. As former President Jimmy Carter commented: 'We are the stingiest nation of all'. Denmark is top of the table, giving 1.01% of GDP, while the US manages just 0.1%. The United Nations has long established the target of 0.7% GDP for development assistance, although only four countries actually achieve this: Denmark, 1.01%; Norway, 0.91%; the Netherlands, 0.79%; Sweden, 0.7%. Apart from being the least generous nation, the US is highly selective in who receives its aid. Over 50% of its aid budget is spent on middle-income countries in the Middle East, with Israel being the recipient of the largest single share"
"Why do people hate America?" by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, 2002. p79
______________
OTTERS RULE.
The entire CMM argument is just a marketing tool for these firms. CMM describes process not result or whether people actually found the software produced useful and usable. And the real issue is often not IT and its process, but that the line of business people and politics do not let internal IT shops practice the process.
A lot of the problems of US IT groups and projects is that with programmers down the hall and senior level line of business (LOB) guys able to threaten and yell at and IT execs and get them fired for being honest, a US based IT shop often has to do a lot of changes on the fly, delvier before something is ready, etc. With a remote operation, a specification gets written and a contract gets attached to the spec. The senior business execs sign off but now THEY CAN NOT CHANGE things without renegotiating and visibly accepting responsibility for the schedule and quality impact of the changes.
They can not pressure the Indian firm to make a change and still hiold the schedule. When you are in IT and work for a company, you are always powerless and the senior management listens to the line of business folks and gets angy at or ignores the process or schedule or deailed explanations about why a change will cost 5x as much, slip 1 year, etc.
The distance and the contractual relationship put the discipline where it is needed - on the line of business folks. That isn't to say that there aren't bad I folks, bad plans, silly promises and the like. But a lot of the problem is line of business people who buy a pitch from some software comapny whose product can't deliver the benefit promised, that will take 2x and cost 10x to implement ans the like. It comes from them refusing to understand why the stuff they legitimately need can't be delivered when they want it.
So, the discipline of the Indian companies isn't in the CMM stuff, it comes from the arms length contractual relationship protecting them from the stuff that screws up projects. It comes from the distance keeping the line of business execs from demanding constant change. Most IT shops know about process, and reviews and the discipline. The problem is that the CEO's and line of business people will not let their in house teams practive these techniques.
Both the main wave of outsourcing fever as well as most the outsourcefobia are mis-directed.
/. giving a nice profile of the shortsighted, term-profit and quantity-per-share oriented MBA, who are totally detached form any innovation, knowledge or background of the programs they manage. Outsourcing is just one in the large arsenal of tools often used poorly by the people in charge.
;-)) with no innovation, no expansion (or "added-value", if you will) is a sucicide going multiple ways:
Firstly, we have to focus on the right target.
There was a great article "Managing the company to death" posted on
These are the people who gave the outsourcing a bad name, and are ruining not only the products they tremple on, but the lives and economies on both sides of the sea.
Outsourcing a suitable product or better, parts of it, by maintaing or increasing quality, main purpose being extension of production and doubleing the pools where innovation can come from may be a very sensible thing to do. Having multiple products in different stages of development or levels of sofistication fits well with a multi-continental concept of a company.
Sacking one experienced set of troops to reduce costs (i.e. outsorcing code from a good team to a cheapest team, which, for that matter, may in the bottom line both already be located in Asia
- the products may well go sour
- ruined lives of sacked troops
- short-term benefit of new troops only lasts long enough to get acustomed to a good life just in time to lose it (and going back is never easier), as is washed away by an aftermath disaster or simply next downsize-cycle
- bad management decisions always create circumstaces that reflect in the local economies, creating new anomalies, like circles in the water, that have to be leveled later at the cost of those affected.
The problem in a "bad-but-show-me-a-better-system", democracy with a free-market economy is that there is no such thing available as an effectiv "corruption-pest control": before the politicans and the grumpy grey old pension fund board members both realize who doing a bad job (most of the times close buddies, with hands so interlaced in each others pockets that you can no longer tell where the thread starts and ends), a whole generation has to suffer and pick up the tap.
A lot of damage, especially by the US companies, has already been done and it will be very difficult to make the wrong-decision makers improve their thinking.
I read an article several weeks ago where the man being interviewed, I believe he may have been European, expressed the following opinion (from memory)...
"In the future all of Europe will be like a 3rd world country, China will be the blue collar for the World, India will be the white collar worker for the world, and the US will be the innovators and middle managers"
Ok, I don't agree totally with the part about Europe, and he left quite a few innovative and important countries out of that list (Japan, Canada, etc), but I think his point was that as the economy becomes more and more global, it is inevitible that the now 'global workforce' will be broken up into the most cost effective 'divisions'.
I think the 'global workforce' has been in effect for quite a whhile now for many types of manufacturing, but with the ever quickening pace of IT accomplishments, the march towards a truely global worforce also quickens.
I think it will happen, sooner than later, and some people are in denial, and/or not willing to adapt.
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
There is a lot of whining going on...why doesn't everyone use that energy to figure out what they can do for themselves so they aren't subject to this anymore? Getting an education and getting a job is NOT the only way to make money in the U.S.
I'll tell you why...because it's easier to be a victim than to accept the responsibility of taking care of yourself. IT'S NOT ANYONE ELSE'S FAULT BUT YOUR OWN! Those same forces that are taking "your" jobs to India are available for you to take advantage of. Got design skills? Got a good idea (we all have some)? Get a team of India programmers to bring that idea to life and sell it! Get together with your buddies that had their jobs "stolen" and have them help you design and manage it while on unemployment. Sure...you will have to adjust your standard of living...but that standard is not guaranteed to you by anyone else...you create your own.
Now I know some of you will say that it takes lots of money and lots of time and its very risky. Well...if you are creative enough you will find that isn't necessarily the case. And what's more risky? Having a job you can lose at ANY time to an offshore programmer or taking your future into your own hands and having a go at it? Are you going to outsource your own job overseas? I doubt it.
I know I am going to get flamed or whatever but I don't care. I am sick of hearing all the whining. Yes...I still have my programming job (not sure for how much longer...but I do work for a small shop so maybe I won't be a "victim") and yes...I am taking my own advice. What am I doing? Looking into investment real-estate to create cash flow since the rates are so low. Everyone and their dog's cousin's uncle wants to loan me money to buy a house. And don't tell me you have to have money to do it either. I am finding out very quickly that isn't the case. You can ask the seller to help with your down payment. If you have a renter in place before the closing of the loan (signed lease for a year) then the bank/investor/mortgage company will loan you the cash. If you can charge more in rent then your expenses then you have a monthly cash-flow that won't stop if you manage it correctly. Repeat as necessary.
Get out of the consumer mentality. Get out of the mindset that the ONLY way to support yourself is to have a job. Having a job is by far the easiest way to support yourself and your family...but with that comes the (almost) complete loss of control over it as we are seeing now. Companies are in business to MAKE MONEY! That is done by lowering costs and increasing revenue. The most expensive part of running a business is labor.
Flame away.
B
If you could shrink the Earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, keeping the same ratios, this is what it would look like:
57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 Western Hemisphere, and 6 Africans
51 female, 49 male
70 non-white, 30 white
70 non-Christian, 30 Christian
50% of the world's wealth would be held by only 6 people who would be U.S. citizens
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death, 1 near birth
1 would have a college degree
0 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for both tolerance and understanding becomes glaringly apparent.
That would be a valid argument if wealth is a scarce resource... in other words, if you looked at the world like the 6 Americans were "hogging" all of the resources, and the rest of the world was suffering for said "hogging." Unfortunately, there are resources aplenty on this planet that create wealth, mostly just lying around, matter of fact, we go to many other impoverished countries precisely because those resources are literally lying around undeveloped and are so glaringly easy to get to.
Nations and wealth are built from within. Don't speak as though the rest of the world is suffering because my ancestors died in coal mine cave-ins to build a real infrastructure... that is an inconsistent conclusion. There were these people from other times, called the ROMANS, that built wealth from vineyards and cattle farms. They didn't steal to get there. They organized. We did the same.
So let me adjust those statistics you quoted at us like we are a-holes that have it so great:
-fifty percent of those starving in that "global village" live in perfectly great growing locations with real, if not constant, growing seasons with real resources to make crops.
-80% of those that live in substandard housing live in countries with no concept of the words "building code," and thus spend all of their time keeping out the rain instead of doing it, by hand, correctly the first time. My people made log cabins. Certainly better than sheet metal and a pole.
-illiteracy is not a resource, and you cannot imply poor living to illiteracy.
Face facts. The reality of why the rest of the world is poor has to do with their lack of education and skills, not with some exploitation of the rest of the world, or these scarce resources you speak of. Most of the countries that scream "exploitation!" are upset that they can't read and are jealous when people from cultures worldwide come in and can read. See the history of the British Empire on this one. This was the first time that some people ever saw steel mechanics and other things like a record player. The lack of science was holding them back, and little tips like this:
Handy Third World Tip-
If you place rock next to the river bank, and place your house in and high, then your home doesn't wash away every other year with all of your possesions, livestock, and children.
You just can't blame science... so you blame the people that know it, call them the devils, exploiters, and then when you see an ignorant face in the wilderness on the Discovery Channel that is living just like we all used to live, (and you notice that you are living in air conditioned, clean, vermin-free glory) you feel guilty.
You assume in the back of your mind that you made them suffer, that you are responsible, like that lumber that came from American forests by American workers for your American house, is actually coming from their forest, and they are living like this because of SOMETHING YOU DID. The truth of the matter is it is NOTHING YOU OR YOUR ANCESTORS DID, other than the fact that they innovated and busted their tails to improve their childrens lives, and these poor villagers don't have a mechanism or a concept of how to do
If someone can do a job cheaper, they should get the job .
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,the US citizen, is about .
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...Fin...The end ...
Let's check this logic
All jobs in the US can be done by someone else from another
country, by bringing them here via L1 visa or sending the
job overseas
Thus, we end up with millions of bankruptcies, repossesions,
and foreclosures, all costing billions of dollars
Even the lawyers could be outsourced
Even the court clerks filing the death slips of america
could be outsourced
We could outsource the police force to go and bodily remove
ppl from their homess and cars
I think the "race to the bottom" logic misses the point
Destablizing the largest economy in the world will send shockwaves
thru the entire world
I for one think that shafting millions of US workers will
have a long term negative impact on this country
There are NO jobs that cannot be outsourced
If over 50% of the jobs are worked by imported hispanics,
or imported visa workers, or sent overseas , it will be the
beginning of the end of the US
It is like a snake eating it own tail
The world's largest economy is about to collapse under its
own greed, because its largest consumer
to be replaced by someone that will not spend the majority
of their money here, they will send it home
They will not put it in US banks, they will put it in foreign banks
Most of the imported labor hates the US, but loves its money
The only loyalty is to the bottom line
This will cause a ripple effect thru every sector, and once it
gets enough momentum ppl will be leaving the big cities in droves
due to their outrageous costs
The burden to welfare and other social services will
not be supportable as less money will be paid in, as the foreign
contract workers do not pay into our system
Thus it will collapse like a house of cards
No more welfare, no more jobs, no more anything
Finito
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"