Slashdot Mirror
How India is Saving Capitalism
alphakappa writes "Salon goes onsite to Chennai (Madras) in India to investigate the whole offshoring phenemenon (free daypass) and comes up with an interesting series of stories. Katharine Mieszkowski starts with a company CollabNet which creates collaboration software for teams to work together on projects from locations all over the globe, and has centers in Brisbane (CA,US) and Chennai (India) - a company that would not exist if they didn't have access to engineers from India. She makes the case that in most cases, it is the necessity to survive, rather than greed that has fed the offshoring process. As Behlendorf from CollabNet puts it - 'We saved the jobs of the people who are employed in San Francisco by hiring people here [in India],' he says. 'I don't know that we would be around as a company if we hadn't done that. What was the right thing to do, morally?'"
So now the media thinks we should *thank* them for taking our jobs. :-) Capitalism is great for the top 2% of the country. For the rest of us... Well, we dont have time to think about shit like that, we have to get up, go to work and make other people rich...
When will the middle class realize that the upper 2% is screwing us in the ass daily, and actually do something about it???? We are the *majority* afterall...
--Ryan
Thats why its been called "A race to the bottom". Once your competitors start hiring offshore, you're forced to do it to compete on price.
Sounds a lot like justification to me. Whatever helps him sleep at night.
We couldn't save all the jobs, so we saved half.
If companies refused to go off shore, then everyone would be able to survive and we wouldn't lose any jobs.
Can I bum a sig?
As many people are still wanting the wife/husband, 2.3 kids, a dog/cat, 2 cars, a TV, home theatre, good computer (maybe 2), etc, goods and services will have to remain relatively inexpensive.
Now add in health insurance for the family, dental insurance, minumum wages, retirement matching, etc etc that a company has to setup for its labor in American, and you'll see that goods and services cannot be inexpensive if made in America. The cost of labor is too high here if we are to guarantee cheap goods and services.
It's an interesting paradox: In order to keep prices reasonable for a middle class, a majority of the labor needs to be paid at or just above the poverty line...which would theoretically remove the middle class.
So what should we do? In my eyes you either make wages worth more to the people (ie lower taxes) so you can offer less, or you cut down the overhead cost of labor (ie have the government install laws against frivolous malpractice lawsuits to reduce health insurance costs).
What do you think?
(Taking tongue away from cheek) Ha ha only serious. On a more positive note, it's also India's Bandwidth Capital because of all those transpacific cables landing here via Singapore. And electricity is very cheap here, probably the cheapest among all of India's major cities.
I can't beleive how dense these outsourcing people are. You employ 100 people to develop software to ship thousands of jobs overseas. How does that help us?
I really dont understand how companies can layoff people, send their jobs overseas, and expect their profits to rise. They layoff people, their customers... WHO will buy their products? with no one having enough money to buy them.
There is only ONE reason for outsourcing. Only one reason: to make the CEOs and execs of these companies more money.
These stories of how outsourcing is better in the end are a complete farse. There is NO benefit for the average american worker.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
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While it may be true that CollabNet has to outsource to survive, other companies (Dell comes to mind) DO NOT need to outsource to survive, they outsource because it is cheaper. We can argue all day about the morality of outsourcing, but the bottom line is going to be profit in many cases.
I'll play the devil's advocate here (personally I despise the outsourcing movement). Some companies we think don't need to outsource are forced to because competitors have. Those competitors may have outsourced intially to survive, but once they do their (at least relatively) better-off competitors have to keep up or their labor costs will eat into and destroy their profits.The whole thing's turning into a nasty slipperly slope, and I wonder where it'll all end.
Well, of course it does! Everything has to do with morality.
From purely capitalistic point of view, the moral thing to do is to maximize profits in short term, while ensuring the survival and profitability of the company in the long term. These are often the same thing (long term survival probably being more important if there's a conflict between these), as not trying to maximize short-term profits can easily lead to going bankrupt unless long-term prospects are good enough to attract risk capital anyway...
So actually it would be immoral (towards shareholders etc) to *not* do things the most profitable way. Demanding companies to be patriotic is just another form of communism, and inevitably leads to same kind of inefficiency.
It's quite ok to vote with your money and buy from companies that are patriotic even if their products are more expensive, but it's entirely different (and quite uncapitalistic and anti-free market) thing to criticize companies that do offshore outsourcing to get competitive advantage.
Sometimes the morally right thing to do is not the best thing to do. For example, at the fall of Germany a large amount of medical research data was siezed - most of it the result of some incredibly horrific experiments on prisoners. The morally right thing to do would to have been to lock away that information, as it was tainted by the methods used to obtain it.
I'm not saying that the cases compare at all - the difference in scale is huge - it's just a good example. So, your company needs to employ 20 people but only has the resources for 15. Do you
a) Outsource 10 jobs to somewhere where you can pay half the wage, thereby keeping the business afloat
b) Fold
c) Try to limp on on 15, provide a substandard service and end up folding
d) Ramp up your prices to pay for the extra 5, lose your customers and fold.
Option a loses the country 10 jobs, options b-d lose all of them. So, the answer is easy, yes?
Question 2: What happens to your competitor who you just managed to undercut...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
When the bottom rung into IT is halfway around the world, we are going towake up one day and ask why there are no skilled people here.
If the goal is good, homegrown talent that you train yourself is the only answer. If you want cheap you generally get what you pay for. If speed is the issue see 1 and 2.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Detroit was faced with the same problem in the 70's. The Japanese were whipping us six ways to Sunday. The unions wanted us to support American-made cars even though they were utter crap. You could go into a showroom and see that the doors were mis-aligned, switches were poorly installed, etc. And that's just what you could see doing a casual inspection. American public said, "I don't think so" and purchased Hondas, Toyotas and Datsuns (now Nissan) They were simply far better products.
Detroit bitched bellered and bawled about it but finally got their act together and started producing a much better product. For Detroit, it was a stark reminder that they couldn't just throw up barriers and hope to have a captive market. It was painful but they came around and are able to compete globally now where in the 70's they were getting creamed.
Same thing is happening to us - we simply have to be able to compete. Whining about unfair competition just makes us look like whiners.
You might ask how you can compete with a $5/hour worker. What I've done is started a small business that uses software I wrote. The business is large enough to support me and a couple of other people but small enough that it doesn't attract competition. Niches abound if you're willing to go look for them. Just don't sit around waiting for someone to hand you a job - get out and create your own job.
It isn't about being "more competitive", it is, as an earlier poster pointed out, a race to the bottom.
You, as in an American at risk of having your job moved overseas, can't compete. You'd be somewhere around the poverty line if you were living on the salaries paid to, say, Indian programmers.
Those who shortsightedly argue that demand for IT people in India will drive up the salaries there and make employing in the US more attractive neglect the obvious. Once India becomes too expensive, the jobs will be moved to the next developing country with a reasonably well educated workforce. Rinse and repeat until half the world is complaining that country Foo stole their jobs.
It's a little low of the article author to suggest that the engineers responsible for the development of the current Internet technologies are responsible for the offshoring of jobs. Did they take the decision to do so? No. They made it possible. That's actually one of the major points of being an engineer, particularly a software engineer. You are either working to make someone else redundant, or to make yourself redundant.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
...at least on an individual level.
If you are a developer in the US and you are worried about outsourcing, get a job that requires a security clearance. That job must always be done by a US citizen, in the US, and therefore can never be moved offshore.
In the Washington DC area there is a huge, huge demand for IT people with clearance, and there are also lots of companies that will hire you and help you get a clearance.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
What was the right thing to do, morally?
Quit paying you and the top executives and senior management team filthy, unreasonable salaries. Not only are they inappropriate in most cases, the fact you failed (repeat that over and over again a few times to let it sink in) means the top brass should take it, not the producers in your company.
This is not the rant of some 20-something employee just out of college. I've run two companies I founded and grew, and don't see that I should fleece my customers or shareholders for obscene personal benefit (yes, $100K individually and over in this economy is obscene - you need to be living with less, providing good jobs for people, and investing in rebuilding your company!)
I see this over and over again. Wharten, Harvard, Yale types born on third base (thinking they hit a triple), that are slaughtering company after company for short term protection of their fat income. I own and run a tech company in the midwest that employs twenty people, and I'm the lowest paid. And no, it doesn't produce amazing profits I pocket as dividends. Someday it will be a nice company but I haven't earned that yet.
I get those silver spoon types all the time telling me how I should outsource my labor - which would be possible for us. Put all the tech oversees, along with support call center. I'd be making over $300K annually. The funny thing? They simply cannot understand why I would want to make less and employ people, because (you may have guessed), THAT IS WORK! Outsource it and collect the checks is the new Harvard MBA strategy, apparently.
Seems I saw the movie Wall Street. I've seen people pursue short term profit through slaughter. But you know, someone's gonna have to be around to buy your product, and if you get rid of the middle class, you might not have many customers. And don't forget, as long as you're expensive overhead (and not producing hard, tangible results towards the bottom line), you're expendible too.
"Management" may have a moral obligation to "shareholders" (or stakeholders) but that pales in comparison to the moral obligation of individual managers to their real, actual people who work for them!
The truth is, that we live in a society based on reciprocity: I will give you my loyalty and labor, and in return you will give me trust and physical security. (Where physical security=money.)
I doubt you really believe that your first obligation is not to the people who depend on you for their daily bread.
Thank you for listening to my rant.
--Rhandir
p.s. I think that network security mavens would probably agree that if you violate the expectation of reciprocity of concern, (that you trust your employees and fail to show concern for their lives), then you are screwed, no matter how l33t your security policies are.
p.p.s. The one logical consequence of this line of reasoning is, however, if you do choose to outsource, you now have a moral obligation to look out for them too...which is somewhat tricky.
For us to change our payscale it would have to be changed up and down the stream (from the highest paid CEO to the lowest paid web designer) ;)
We would also have to shift our entire economy - then again would you like to live in the same style as third world countries? There the difference between the rich and the poor is far greater then here.
I think this offshoring justification is a mass-media feel good. My friend who was at a high level meeting with a company that wants to offshore jobs emailed me "I do not like this - helping offshore jobs"
-A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Brazil has a very viable capitalistic system, too.
Unfortunately 95% of the people are quite poor but for the rest it's an excellent place.
Once the USA had it's middle-class destroyed, too, it will definitely resemble Brazil.
Sigged!
I do not understand all these arguments and doomsayers when they talk about outsourcing stealing our jobs.
Ya see, there's this guy, names Joe. He was a good kid in school, tried to do his ABCs, got good grades. Other kids from rougher neighborhoods teased him and took the piss, and overtime he began to change. Over the years he stopped doing his homework, and his grades went from A's to F's. A teacher told him once, he could get a scholarship, go to to university, and not just on a football scholarship. He stared at the floor, wishing he could go home and play on his Sega - he hates school and knows he will hate work. After trying once, teacher couldnt care less - she underpaid and overworked she had 30 other kids just like him. Faced with a school that has no trust in him and friends who smoke weeed, Joe drops out.
10 years later Joe's got a job; its not much but its enough for the essentials - a beer with the guys, weed on the weekends. Governemnt pays for his sloppy joes and the council's given him a nice phat three bedroom house for his wife and his son. By day Joe works as a telephone operator, by night he spends it all away on dope.
A year later and we're in 2004, and the company's outsourcing to india. Joe loses his job, but he doenst care - the government takes care of him, only change to his lifestyle is can afford less dope. The next day his son breaks his leg, they go to County, and medicaid pays for it, its no big deal. The sun shines down on Rover, the family dog, and for Joe, life is good. He knows another job will be comming his way soon - he can jsut sense it.
There's another person in this story, her name's Maya. Her mum died during childbirth in the streets of Calcutta, the only animal to comfort her during her labour-pains a mangy, flea-bitten ally dog. Alone except for her older sister, the two girls stand outside of the airport begging for money from rich foreign tourists, every day prayign they will be able to afford rice. Wanting to provide a future for her baby sister, the elder girl becomes a prostitute, selling her body for sex three times a night. If she's lucky, she can seduce a rich white man - they pay better. She hopes of better things for her sister.
Suddenly, Maya's luck changes. Her sister's boyfriend is a line-manager for a telecoms agency - he teaches new employees English and tells them about Sheapard's Pie. He agrees to take Maya on, and pay her. Maya cant believe her luck - now she can afford to eat everyday and she can even afford a modest appartment for her and her sister; but the best thing of all, is she's learnign English, she knows the company has a high turnover, and maybe she can get a job as a secretary or an assistant in a few years time. She's already started saving money - although she has no boyfriend, she wants her kids to have an opportunity to go to University. Maybe, if they study hard and get good grades, they could move to the States and send her money every month to tide her over in her old age. The time is 7:00, and her sister has just started applying her makeup...
In Calcutta, the rain is ending, and the sun is peaking round the clouds. In Counciltown, UK (or Suburbia, US), Joe is looking up at the clouds, a spliff in his hand, and a dog at his feet, and is smiling.
It's not a question of who's less deserving at all. At the most basic, you can reduce the problem to two candidates in separate countries who are equally "deserving" (both in the sense of being qualified for the job, as well as the humanitarian sense, as you're more likely to mean): the only difference being [roughly] the disparity in the cost of living, which allows the company to pay fewer real dollars in salary.
I'm not going to go so far as to say that this is immoral, but surely you can concede that morality has nothing to do with capitalism (as your question, does, in effect, relate to morality).
--- What
If you can explain the fundamental difference between the decision to buy a car made in Japan vs one made in the US on the one hand, and the decision to outsource a programming job to India vs hiring a US programmer, then you'll impress a whole bunch of economists and get yourself nominated for a Nobel prize ...
Hint: There *is* no difference. It's all trade. The slashdot crowd is just having the same reaction US auto makers had to imports 10 or 20 years ago (and that steel manufacturers were having a year or two ago).
Everybody's a protectionist when their job is on the line, and that's perfectly reasonable. But please don't think there's anything *special* about outsourcing jobs that doesn't apply to every other sector of the economy.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
I am really busy and my time is more valuable than I could buy outsourced developers. So I am going to start an open source project and hire India developers for peanuts. I will then put on my resume that I developed program widget and get a higher paying job.
Does this seem stupid at all levels? If it does than outsourcing should be viewed the same way. If not than maybe this is a massive shift by society and I'll have to keep the idea for my future management move...
Why is the person outside of your country - probably also the head of a household - less deserving than the person in your country?
Because that person didn't go to school here for 7 years while working and raising children and rack up $30,000 in student loans like I did. I have no problem with outsourcing. What pisses me off is that our government did absolutly nothing to take care of it's citizens in the process. They talk about retraining and the Next Big Thing, but it's all bull shit. As long as the big corporations are happy, that's all that matters. People have 5 year car loans and 30 year mortgages. A little warning would have been nice. But instead, fuck the middle class.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Funny, I'm from Canada, now living in New York, and people back home get surprised when I tell them how much MORE I have to pay in taxes than they do (in terms of property taxes for instance), but without getting some of the decent stuff like universal medicare and such (to be fair, NY does have some very nice programs in place, such as first time home buyers program, financial aid for studies for studies, child health plus, etc). I'm insured now, sort of, but for the longest while wasn't (and really couldn't afford anything anyway). That rather sucked. Question becomes, the state may have good stuff that I don't mind being taxed for, but where does all the federal money go to? Ummm...killing Afghani children with 2 million dollar bombs maybe?
Supposedly anyone who kicks against outsourcing is against companies being profitable. I have no problem with companies being profitable.
What I have a problem with is the fact that I'm in my mid-40's and high up in the payscale for my particular niche. If my job got outsourced, I'd like to know what these profitable companies expect me to do for a living?
So far -- as the article points out -- all the executives can tell us is "Uh, think of something."
So forgive me if I don't cheer for India's (current) good fortune. Twenty years ago, when the manufacturing jobs began leaving the US, at least The Information Economy was on the rise, and most people managed to change gears.
Today there's nothing on the horizon unless you count flipping burgers. Uncool.
Because decision makers don't use offshore resourcing because they want to make Indian people richer. Decision makers want to make more money in a quite easy way (thanks to governments driven by economical liberalism). Those decision makers are immoral because they would never be willing to give a decision maker position to an Indian person.
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
I think the question of morality comes in on how the different countries governments, and people react. Is India opening all of it's markets to US goods? Have they dropped tarifs on US goods and services? If they are sucking out our jobs, but not putting anything back, that is immoral.
The other moral question is, what are US businesses (and the government) doing to help people in the short term? If we assume that the economy will recover, and the jobs will recover.... We still need to help people until that happens.
Is it immoral for China works to do all our cheap labor, but to artifically close the country to US products (by manipulating the monetary value)?
It's fine to have a global economy, but everyone must agree to participate at the same level, the same playing field. The US job market doesn't need to be the sacrefic to building a job market in other countries.
I've had the same opinion of open source/free software for a while. I've voiced it here a few times.
When programmers start giving away their time, and effort, it makes their time and effort worth less.
So if the programming community does not value itself enough to charge a good rate- then our business community can send our 'custom' jobs overseas, while getting the other stuff for free. Sounds like a good deal for businesses, and a crappy deal for programmers. Because in EVERY business, the final price of a product comes from PERCEIVED VALUE not the real cost of goods. So, by giving stuff away for the past few years, the percieved value of software has been going down.
I still go back to the analogy of plumbers. If I know that I can get someone to fix my plumbing for free- I will resist paying a regular plumber a few hundred bucks to come out. But as it is now, I know that I can expect to pay about $150 minimum to have some work done. And I'm happy to pay it.
Yes of course there is a difference, because plumbing cannot be outsourced to India. But when people run around shouting 'software should be free' and telling their bosses to use the 'free version' then the general feeling is that software *should* be free, or at least cheap.
I've never seen any other industry where there was such a push towards devaluing its own product. And then people get upset when the money flows somewhere else?
No reason to lie.
I'd like to see a study on how many companies go broke trying to outsource their technical work to india.
What I would be more interested in viewing is a study that analyzed the outcomes of IT outsourcing in general, whether some domestic IT services firm or some overseas firm based in Asia or elsewhere. I want to read about the outcomes for that company and find out if outsourcing actually worked for them.
Of course, I'm leading up to this, but I would bet that most outsourcing decisions have led to a higher cost for less productivity in the IT space. You only need to talk with employees of companies that have outsourced to find out that this occurs more often than not. In my experience, this is what typically happens.
First, the outsourcing firm comes in, promises the world, shows the company how they would actually save dollars (keying on the different pools of money that salary comes from vs. vendor expenditures and the tax benefits therein). Then the deal is signed, the outsourcing company starts moving in, analyzing the environment and looks to be making great strides.
Then year two hits and the outsourcing company brings up the topic of scope wrt the contract. Suddenly, that $/server figure you did doubles, and then triples. By year three, you're realizing that even though you've signed a deal to outsource the IT work to another company, your own employees are still doing the bulk of the IT work since the majority of your IT is deemed out of scope.
By this time, your own employees are getting stressed out and pissed off because the money that could be going to their salaries are going to an external company that isn't doing squat anymore, while their duties have increased greatly. But you still have a few years left on the contract, unless you execute some termination clause and bite the bullet one more time, sending further funds into that outsourcing company. But maybe, you'll finally realize at this point that farming out the talent for little return makes little sense and that keeping the talent in-house can be much more cost-efficient in the long run, even if it seems like it costs you more in salary right now.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
We have seen this situation before. It used to be that only a few could go to college. Now a college eduaction is much more widespread and available. That means we need to find more ways to stand out to secure our careers and jobs. When more people went to college, it flooded the workplace with "educated" people. It was still the best and brightest (or best connected) people who got the jobs. The offshoring just opens the field more.
An answer, improve ourselves and make ourselves indespensible. This doesn't guarentee anything, but it helps to hedge out bets. When it comes down to it, skills and competency will always be needed, at whatever cost. Also, we need to make it obvious why our "local" work is necessary. Increasing personal interaction in a productive way can make a huge difference in overall productivity. This is something that can't be felt with workers around the world.
I think the offshoring is good. The only moral issue is whether you are doing what you need to do to secure your job in the face of supporting a family or that BMW. The work makes us sharper, and the exposure makes our lives richer.
If open source is good for programmers, than outsourcing is also good for programmers.
The outsourcing phenomenom is the great wage-leveller of our times: equally qualified people outside the industrial countries are getting the jobs for less pay, while their counterparts in the industrial countries get fired, and will, on the whole, find jobs for a lower wage. The phenomenom will reach equilibrium when wages (adjusted for transaction costs and other economic barriers) equate. Another moral issue involved is what the high wages in the industrial countries lead to: superflous consumption. Many who decry outsourcing to less developed countries are, in reality, concerned with the threat to their levels of consumption, much of which they can really do without. In the process, they deny persons in other countries the opportunity to lead a dignified life. It's a sort of sublimed neo-colonialism.
"The bottom line here is that white-collar types have gotten fat and happy over the last several decades, and are now shocked to find that they are facing global competition much like agricultural and manufacturing workers have for decades."
m l
First off India isn't "saving capitalism". Capitalism is using India to satiate its voracious appetite for cheap labor. In the complete absence of any checks on it there is zero chance of Capitalism failing. It will take care of itself, it always does. It will destroy a lot of people en route, like it always does. The people being destroyed are just changing. Capitalism is about picking winners and losers.
As for facing global competition, there isn't really any competition to it. You can live like a prince in China or India for ten dollars an hour. In the U.S. you are living in poverty at that wage.
What you're seeing here is all of the barriers to globalization have been removed. As is the way of capitalism, it rushes to the cheapest labor that can do the job. With globalization a labor pool of a couple billion new workers has come on line in China and India. There were also huge imbalances in the cost of labor between developed and developing countries. In China in particular there is no minimum wage, no pollution controls, no workplace safety regulation, health care costs aren't spiraling out of control like they are in the U.S. and there are no out of control taxes, especially payroll taxes, draining a workers income. There is a near inevitably that globalization is going to devastate workers in developed countries whether it be the U.S. or Western Europe. At the same time its going to continue to make multinational corporations and their share holders richer. If the government in the U.S. cared about working people it would have left enough barriers in place so they wouldn't be broadsided by the imbalances in global labor markets. Instead corporations are actually being given tax incentives to move jobs off shore. The fact is both Republicans and Democrats are so in the pockets of multinational corporations now abandoning U.S. workers is inevitable until working people get a clue, realize they are in the majority in the U.S. and start voting out any politician who is screwing them in favor of multinationals.
Indians should note that if Indian labor becomes wildly successful wages and cost of living will start to inflate. In the new world order, as soon as it does the jobs will just move to China or Vietnam and Indians will be carping about off shoring. The one thing in their favor is it will be a near impossibility to achieve full employment for the billions of workers in China and India. If you were to do it you would proably decimate increasingly scarce world resources like oil.
What you're seeing here is a godsend to multinational corporations and a death knell to workers. Workers in India and China should rejoice now for their rising prosperity but they should appreciate that they are just as expendable as workers in the U.S., its just a matter of time and inflation. With globalization we have reached a market that is entirely in the favor of employers and entirely against employees.
Its no accident the Bush administration is all for outsourcing because its entirely pro business and anti labor. You see the writing on the wall when you read a bio of Elaine Chow, Bush's labor secretary. Her father and her family make their fortune in container ships, shipping goods from China to the U.S.
http://www.counterpunch.org/flanders04012004.ht
Our labor secretary is decidedly anti labor as evidenced by her departments effort to strip U.S. workers of overtime pay last year.
@de_machina
Invest all your money in stock you say? See the profits roll in!
So, we're at that part of the cycle again are we? Didn't this all happen before?
That isn't true, either your memory isn't that good or you are young. In the 80s, the Japanese were more educated and made better products. That is no longer the case, now the Indians are more educated and the chinese make better products. The difference is that the Japanese would work for low wages in bad conditions, they worked hard and their children are now much better off for it. However, the problem is that the children in Japan (now adults) want cell phones and computers and such. That they now want to "consume", they won't work for $.25 an hour. So they are now lazy and can't make good products, and the Chinese and Indians are much better. So, to disagree with your arguement, in 10 years the Indians will be out and another group will be in. If the Japanese were so much better than an American, why is Japan doing poorly and India is doing well?
It applies to software, and here is a similar one:
In the economy, you are the following 3 things:
1) a consumer
2) a investor
3) a worker
Now pick two. What's good for those 2 choices may not be good for the remaining one.
Currently, it's number 1 and number 2.
If you look at this story you will see the real issue. US companies going overseas and hiring workers, and making profits on those workers, don't have to pay tax on those profits.
That's a losing proposition for American workers. I know some web designers who would have accepted $20k/yr to do work, if they could work from home. THey had broadband, there was no functional difference between them and the Indian worker. The problem is, corporations can hide profits made my Indian workers and skirt paying taxes, and all the other hassles American workers have with them, such as employment benefits, the paperwork associated with W2s. You can write a single check to an outsourcing firm overseas. Anyhow, read the Yahoo article.
Bush doesn't care, he'll give US corporations anything they want, any tax loophole they can find he will support. The middle class is destroyed, and so you will need business skills and the ability to create an LLC and be an indepedant IT consultant to make it, because nobody will hire you.
Yup. There's another thing as well; americans are acustomed to working 8 hrs a day and having time off. To an indian, 70 hr workweek at the kind of pay they're offering is a godsend.
Point here is, managers shifted their loyalty a long time ago from their workers to the allmighty doller. Sure, if they get a good compeditive group of people they aren't going to give that up, but for everyone else getting fired every 4 or 5 years and switching careers every 10 is becoming the norm in corperate america. The idea is if you fire a guy who's worked for 5 years, you can find someone who can do the same job (like a out-of-college preppy type) for less. Do this on a massive enough scale and the guys who have 10, 15, 20 years experience also get paid less.
This doesn't work. There's a reason job security is important in japan. The japanese believe that by keeping your workers for a lifetime, your workers will be productive because if the company does well, they do well. They know if they work hard and everybody else works hard, there'll be plenty to go around. There is no playing BS with the worker.
It used to be that way with america. Everyone used to work hard because it was a moral thing to do. Then managers began playing BS with us. Then the mantra became not "I'm going to work harder" but "How little can I work and not get fired?" (as you're not going to see the fruit of your labor, the shareholders will).
It's mostly middle-sized companies that outsource. Fortune 500 companies don't do that because companies that fsck the worker don't usually last long.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The only way to do that is to build denser communities where people live close to where they work and things are centralized and not spread out.
Few communities in the U.S. have this model. A few big cities like New York ans some experimenal attempts to recreate this type of communities in suburban areas. But, overall, these communities are few and far between.
There is definitely a demand though, just look at al the inner city communities that are being revitalized today and the attempts to build traditional city living in the centers of spread out cities like Houston.
There is no sence in complaining about outsourcing.
Sure there is. It's irresponsible. It's unfair, and it is destroying careers, educations and communities.
If you are unemployed, stop reading Slashdot and find a way to be valuable to the economy.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who are "valuable to the economy" who get fired anyway. It isn't up to the employee whether they keep their job. It's up to some liar cheat fuck manager, which explains why everyone I know is either:
a) Unemployed
b) Recently laid off and working 60 hour days trying to start a business
c) Working, but earning just enough to accumulate debt
It also explains why HALF of the eligible workers in this country are:
a) Unemployed
b) Out of the work force completely
c) A temp
d) Working part-time
That means that only half of the workers are in permanent full-time jobs. Only HALF.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
People who didn't buck up got laid off and replaced with people willing to work 80-100 hours per week.
I'm sure my friend would have something to say on the matter, but s/he doesn't have time to read or write to /.
Names and genders have been obfuscated to protect the already tenuously employed.
The CB App. What's your 20?
The notion that continual offshoring will depress wages is based on a number of false assumptions, especially the notion that worker productivity is static. Fact of the matter is, workers in India are less productive than workers here - that is one of the key reasons they are generally paid less, and the cost of living is reduced. Productivity does not have any moral baggage attached - Indians are not less smart or good or whatever - they just don't have the same economic facilities that US workers do to match the output per unit time as Americans. One thing offshoring will do, in fact, is incite productivity increases in the places that get the new jobs.
When manufacturers started moving their factories out of places like Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and moved them overseas, the job losses were temporary - those workers are not still out of work. It allowed newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to be created HERE -- while providing newer, higher-paid and higher-skilled jobs to people overseas.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Yeah, don't you love Maher -- welcome to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, where health care is apparently an option and safety nets are non-existent.
But I'm glad you care about the quality of your work.
When I offshored a chunk of work from the US to India -- mostly because the group I inherited had (a) fucked up by the numbers, blown $15M, and produced nothing; and (b) couldn't code their way out of a paper bag even when properly managed -- quality went up, not down.
No outsourcing would have occurred had this group been able to produce. We threw out hundreds of thousands of lines of code. All worthless. We didn't have time to recruit locally, and we couldn't get the $15M back. Offshoring saved the company.
Your boss should care -- very much -- about the quality of your work. I would seriously think about changing jobs if s/he doesn't.
This seems to be primarily a debate on other countries with massive populations finally being able to claim an equal proportion of the worlds resources.
America has a large share of the world's land with a much smaller proportion of the population. The benefits of this agriculture, natural resources, are the first order advantages enjoyed by the US. The mechanism of free-enterprise, and the risk-taking mentality in the have created second-order benefits which the US is enjoying today. Also, the vast separation from the rest of the world, kept the US industries standing after WWII, allowing th US to supply the rest of the world.
Now the massive population in the rest of the world has finally become a market that is worth serving, and is clamoring for resources proportional to their numbers. The US having used an enormously large proportion of the world's resources so far, is going to find itself using a smaller and smaller proportion of these resources and going back to the first-order advantages.
India and China, with their huge populations, will be able to do any service jobs that don't require actual physical presence at a much cheaper cost. The only platform on which americans can compete is their incredible efficiency, learnt over many decades. However, IT provides much of this efficiency, and can quite easily be transported anywhere in the world.
As trade between the rest of the world increases, trade between the US and the rest of the world will become proportionally smaller - except in key IP areas, where the US still enjoys a large knowledge monopoly, and agriculture, where the US has the advantage of area.
This is different from the previous scares (Japan, China etc.) as it represents for the first time, the benefits of a countries huge population, as opposed to the benefits of a small population.
The US should try to compete by growing R&D, getting and keeping knowledge workers, using NASA etc., as a springboard to newer techs, which the developing nations can only dream of.
Sorry for the long ramble... I hope some of the comments will be able to get some clarity from this..
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
I write software for money, and I write free software. The free work is an engine for a 12-year-old game, and is not something that anyone would ever get paid for. The professional work is technical and fairly picky work, and isn't something I'd do for fun (although I do enjoy it).
From what I see, many open-source projects are either in areas where nobody could get paid (such as emulators for old game consoles), or areas where Microsoft has driven all competitors out of business (such as word-processors). I made a good living through most of the 80's developing word-processors, but my chances of getting paid to do the same nowadays are close to 0.
As a programmer who owns a small software development firm, (there's two of us), our customers care about the percieved value of an inventory system. They do not care about operating systems, databases, web servers, or any of that stuff, they care about keeping track of their inventory. In the past, we have had to "educate" the customer that if they wanted to have an inventory system, they had to pay $$ for an operating system, and then $$$$ for a database, and $$ for a web server, and then they could spend $$$$ for our inventory software. Lots of that money went to people besides me, but the customer percieved they were buying an inventory system, and these other components were necessary expenditures to get what they really wanted.
In the open source era, I can go to the customer and say, "Here is an inventory solution for $$$$$$$$". The perceived value is the same to the customer, but I don't have to pay Sun for the OS licence, and Oracle for the database license, etc. I use open source alternatives like Linux, PostgreSQL, and tomcat instead.
If you look at the big picture, the open source software movement is doing for software what the IBM compatible PC did for hardware. Commoditization. I shudder to think that during the course of my career I wrote two application development frameworks. Why? Because I needed one, and it was cheaper to build one myself than it was to buy one of the three commercially available ones, which may or may not have met my needs. Now there are a dozen robust, mature open source application development frameworks for me to choose from. I can select one that closely meets my needs, and modify it, if necessary.
The end result is that when programmers "give away their time, and effort" it makes thier time and effort worth more, not less, as you assert. By sharing the work for common functionality, my time becomes more valuable because I can spend it doing the thing I know well, inventory, not the thing that I don't, like application frameworks. My contributions to open source projects may be small, but when you combine the efforts of many people, those small contributions provide great benefit for all.
In time, open source inventory systems will be far better than the one we have developed, and people will be saying "I can't believe that I once wrote an inventory system, what a waste when there are so many good was available." I will then have to move up the software food chain to the Next Big Thing, as will everyone else.