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Increasing the Value of the Domestic IT Worker?
KoshClassic asks: "To state it simply, in today's global economy, the IT worker in America is in direct competition with IT workers in countries such as India who are willing to do the same job for less. Much of this willingness has to do with standards and costs of living in these other countries, and without lowering ours or raising theirs, the American IT worker can not compete on even terms if the only consideration is cost. What should American IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts, to add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits that will make it worthwhile for them to keep these jobs in the US? I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, but I am convinced that the answer lies in trends and industry wide changes, rather than just individuals polishing their own resumes. When an employer decides he needs to fill a programming position, what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered"
I respectfully suggest that voting would be a good start.
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Show them how to operate the fry cooker
probably failed it, but then, i am the CSLib menace.
-- > CSLib Menace
sure, IT professionals are fighting against lower wages from abroad. I am fight against my employer forcing me into lower wages. When are we all going to stand up and fight for what's right?
Striking obviously doesn't work... They will either replace us with someone else or say, "so? we aren't going to give in to your demands and you will eventually have to come back to work or you won't be able to live."
So how do we all make ourselves worth more?
give the American IT person skills which cannot be given to other coountries (yeah yeah...anti-globalism)
What should American IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts?
Sucky, sucky...me work for you for long time.
I just had to drive to the data center. How's someone in India going to accomplish that?
While the costs of living may play a role, what type of living is it that American programmers want so badly? I would be satisfied with an apartment and basic living expensives ($1000/mo) so it seems to me that we should offer our services for a much lower price.
Noone hunts IT workers in the US anymore. Just like no one hunts metalworkers who can't use CAD. Value is totally subjective. Unless the IT worker is plated in gold, there seems to be little left to do but move! Damn Bill and his legions of cheap labour.
Keep the faith, share the code
just stumbled about this:4 274152
http://forums.craigslist.org/?act=showThread&ID=1
seems someone "upgraded" a system and has no way back to a good build.
Too funny.
a.Find a refrigerator box to live in.
b.Sell drugs on the side to buy clothes.
c.Use the shower and bathroom at the YMCA.
And
d.Scrounge behind Safeway for thrown out rotten food.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
One thing that limits how fast jobs move overseas is communication. If you've worked with a group overseas, you're probably acquainted with the problems. For instance, if you give them an assignment and they do it wrong, they won't get your correction until the next working day. And running a meeting means that you either have to get up really early or they stay up really late.
My job might be more easily done by someone overseas, but my boss has told me how much he values having me right here and being able to walk over and talk about a project.
.. if you bring management skills to the table you will be better off. The biggest challenge today is to manage projects across time-zones and successfully coordinating between the teams in US and India. If you can demonstrate that you can work in such an environment and can actually manage the tasks also you will be in high demand.
...increasing the cost of a forign IT worker. Say by charging a crippling tariff on leased lines to popular outsourcing countries.
If it costs $100/min to transfer a call to Bangalore, very few compaines will do it...
I'm trying to break into healthcare now. Patents and copyrights as evil--so at least I won't be directly patenting or copyrighting something. You can never fully get away from it (until we all wake up), but those Indians will have to deal with that on their conscience.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Be the guy that translates non technical business logic into a detailed enough functional spec that the Indian IT people can code to it. Learn how the Indian IT people communicate and learn how to translate user requirements in a way that they are understood. Learn project management so your outsourcing project doesn't fail like a high percentage of them do.
Me, I despise project management so you are welcome to those jobs.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
The way to compete against lower cost suppliers is to increase productivity. Learn LISP.
should be handled with extreme care. he is often angry at years of alienation at the hands of his peers and usually becomes very afraid if cornered or confronted.
Programmers should devlop soft skills. You can't outsource that
But they don't since were talking about outsourcing, I would say customer service.
The U.S. consumers are pissed to call a tech support line and get heavily accented English and not 'Merican.
This being said, it doesn't explain why some companies never brought back their phone call centers to the U.S.
going by the numbers, though some dialect of Chinese has the most speakers in the entire world. Maybe we should be brushing up on our Chinese?
Seriously, the only way to prevent yourself from being outsourced is to start up your own company and hope you can make it.
I just have too many obligations (and not enough guts) to try.
FWIW
AND
(NOT QUITE THE FIRST POST! BUT DARN CLOSE!)
The value of an IT worker will never increase as long as they are holding signs saying "will write 'ask slashdot' articles for karma"
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
There are a whole host of advantages to being local. First is that local developers work the same hours as local employees, and are able to communicate for the whole working day, except after the normal employees go home. Second is the language issue. Even if foreign IT workers speak good english (and often they don't), they won't know all the buzzwords, corporate nonsense-speak and slang that are specific to the region. Third is the ability to come on site. This is great for learning about requirements for development and installing the system. Also, my clients really appreciate it that I can come and support software installations and examine and fix bugs in production systems by visiting them. This decreases the turnaround time for problems. I'd really play up the communications issues. Email is great, but all managers know that face-to-face interactions are the best for getting information to and from nontechnical users.
---
Find out more about the impending downfall o
WORK FOR LESS. Foreigners are working for less and they end up getting the work. What part of that do you fail to grasp? Don't like it? Either make people aware of the harm they're doing (anyone remember BUY AMERICAN?), or maybe try something a bit more constructive - such as finding some people to room with in a co-op so you can lower your cost of living, or organizing a lobby to get some of the absurd laws on our books thrown out so that the cost of doing business over here isn't so damn high (which might give companies a reason to stay in-country).
Now hold your breath... wait for it... here's comes the onslaught of troglodytes who'll lambast me for advocating the simplification of America's legal system. Heaven forbid we don't have the FDA to protect us from those nasty corporations!
For those working in a one-location company, do not hide in the IT room. When a user sends an e-mail asking for help, walk out to their desk rather than e-mail back. That way, you can see exactly what they're seeing on their screen, and you can also get a feel for what's going accross their desk while they're trying to interact with the systems.
That's one thing IT workers will never be able to duplicate...
Perhaps aligning ourselves with a particular industry would enhance hireability. For example, If I am a programmer with experience in insurance, wouldn't I be more hireable because I know what the tendencies of insurance agents and customers are, and I know what types of information are worthwile.
Just a thought.
Give your potential employer something that can't be done over the phone.
... and go work for a defence contractor or any large computer company doing any kind of work for the Govt.
No, seriously...
Paul B.
You don't have to go to India to find tech workers who don't speak English. (Or at least don't know how to use it.)
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
How would can we get Linux to surpase Windows as the number one OS?
How can we get those SCO guys to lay off?
What can we do to make software more stable?
How can we stop famine, hunger and war?
Apparently, they should be switching to car repair - a market with a labor shortage, a desperate need for people with strong technical skills, and something that is unlikely to be outsourced until cheap teleportation arrives on the scene.
I tried not eating once for a diet. It hurt. I can't imagine not having a place to live at the same time. Hell, the homeless guys on the corner are making more then the outsourced programmers in India are.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I would argue from my experience that many do not end up doing "the same job", at least in terms of what they bring to the table, and the results they generate.
There may be people with similar or more impressive resumes, but work alongside of them for a while and you quickly learn that not all developers are created or grown equally.
That's not to say there are not worthless American developers. Ideally you'd replace THEM with the brightest, best performing offshore people.
At least when hiring American developers (speaking from a US point of view), it's easier to ascertain the ability of an applicant than it is by email or phone overseas (and in some cases, you don't even speak to them).
Lastly, sometimes it's not such a bright idea to outsource a measurably valuable part of a company.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
English is becoming a second language in the US and Spanish is taking over more and more. Knowing Spanish might give a US IT worker a distinct advantage over say an Indian IT worker.
In quite a lot of cases, offshoring takes place because the offshore company has demonstrated strong skills in executing that kind of project. Jobs are not simply outsourced because of cost -- competency is a key factor. Many of the programmers in India for example have excellent academic qualifications and been part of groups that consistently deliver quality products repeatedly, on time.
My advice is to work more as a team rather than as an individual and also to improve your academic qualifications as much as you can.
In many cases, build a strong knowledge of the underlying business -- if you have a good feel for how the company makes money and you have ideas that can improve the bottom line, you are in with a better chance of keeping your job.
This might offer some hints (geeks fixing automobiles!). I have actually thought about auto mechanics in the past, but I do not know how well auto shops would take to a crazy cyclist like myself fixing cars (tally for number of times hit by cars is 3 and holding).
Perhaps I might have something more in depth to say if I was an IT pro (right now I'm an IT noob working tech support, but getting the occasional chance to use some programming skills). Be diverse is all I can think of. and don't always be so attached to IT. I was a bike mechanic for 3 years (still am a couple days a week), and I'd do it again. (just not the thing to do in places that have a winter.)
Andy in Chi
First of all, I am slightly afraid of the "Hire Me!" effect that I have seen. When you get people who are desparate for a job, they (and sometimes me) can sound whiny and pitiful. IMHO, the only way to combat this is to really be honest with what abilities you have and what you can provide. IT workers must explain the benefits of having IT that is in in your own back yard. Explain that communication difficulties alone may make up the difference in cost between the US and foreign work. Let those who want IT know that US IT can provide personalized, friendly service (in other words, become the Wal-Mart of IT).
Fellate at the drop of a hat and be willing to sell your organs.
Consider this. Both India and China are in the middle of economic booms, but neither country is 'rich', as such. Therefore, it made sense for the Indians and the Chinese to work for US companies, and make a lot more than they could locally, despite the inconvenience and quality issues of working online.
However, the Indian and Chinese economies are reaching points where their own citizens are crying out for advanced services. Who will code them? Those Indian and Chinese programmers. Yes, eventually the Indian and Chinese economies will force salaries up, closer to US rates. When an Indian worker's salary reaches 75% of the comparable American's.. guess what? Outsourcing will not make economic sense anymore.
From my own experience of shopping around for coders, the rates the Indians charge have SHOT UP in the last year or two. Two years ago, if I were a big company, I would have outsourced what I could. Now? No way! The salary expectations of US workers have fallen, the Indian rates have tripled, and now it makes more economic sense to hire a local American worker!
But, as always, I suggest that American workers simply work on their natural benefits.. The benefits are that they can meet me 'in the flesh', that we share a culture and can understand each others' jokes (damn necessary on big projects!), and they tend to be smarter, and not just code monkeys. If you can reply to my e-mails within the work day, be pleasant on the phone, and sound excited about the projects I'm giving you.. you're going to be hired over a half price Indian any day of the week.
Web Hosting Reviews
The number one way I can think of to differentiate yourself from overseas IT workers is to become fluent in English - and I do mean fluency, not just a basic working knowledge that exhibits itself so thoroughly in the functional illiteracy that most Slashdot comments betray.
</smart-ass>
nah!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
What is surprising to me is everytime something like this happens the same old replies repeat...blame the indians, blame the greedy CEO's...
You can't blame the indians for wanting to get good jobs and you can't blame the CEO's from wanting more money (do we live in utopia?) Either everyone join together and tells the politicians we won't tolerate this anymore or keep quite and let the world take it's course.. Ranting takes you nowhere...
Start learning Hindi or Gujarati.
If an employer is already willing to overlook the obvious benefits of hiring locally, do you think he can be convinced otherwise.
1) Location. The programmer is nearby and likely in the same time zone making questions easier to ask and schedules easier to sync.
2) Language. While most Indian programmers speak English, they speak it with a heavy accent that is difficult enough to understand, even more so over the phone. Local programmers most likely speak with the same English dialect as the program manager
3) Labor laws. America has some of the most lax labor laws in the Western world. "Fire at will" laws allow employers to get rid of dysfunctional employees at the drop of a hat instead of having to deal with heavy government restrictions like in France and Sweden.
4) Guaranteed ownership of ideas. Local programmers are much less prone to simply taking their employer's ideas and reselling them to the next bidder. Foreign companies with vast distances between them and their hiring companies sometimes decide that because they wrote the software that they have the right to redistribute it. Lax foreign IP laws and (lack of) enforcement do nothing to discourage this kind piracy.
But in the end it is the hiring manager's decision. If he wants to go ahead and make the decision to forego all the benefits above in exchange for maybe 100,000 a year cost reduction, then there really isn't much you can do to stop him.
I have been pwned because my
If two people with the same skills charge different amounts, the one who charges less gets the job.
:-)
All you can do is move to a job where you need a skill that you have and they don't.
Unlike everyone else in the (1st) world, I really like the way more and more IT jobs are going offshore. That's because I don't create computer software with my brain, I create it with other people's brains - in other words I'm a manager.
Now I can get my (human) resources for less. Cool!
If I want a Bayesian decision engine written, why would I get Mr Pale Skinned Programmer to do it at three times the cost of Mr Dark Skinned Programmer? I mean, I'm not too fussed about their skin colour, timezone, or mother tongue. I am fussed about their ability to write good software to spec.
But then my Bayesian engine is a highly technical component. It requires someone with fairly good maths who can follow a formal spec in detail.
When I want to attach that engine to the website that my UK based customers use, then I hire someone in the UK. Because that bit of software requires being nearby for physical meetings with end users, it requires being able to write good English, and it requires at least some understanding of, say, the medical decision support systems market.
So, if you want local jobs, specialise in something that non-local people find it hard to get experience of. Move out of the purely technical fields, into areas where an understanding of the social setting is important.
Or, become a manager
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...and provide personal (on-site if necessary) service with lots of reassuring face-to-face meetings.
Build up relationships with customers who appreciate that you are reliable and have the ability to understand their needs first time around.
If your clients are the type that don't value that relationship and will send work OS just to save a couple of bucks, then maybe you don't want them on your books?
Then again, if you don't provide a reliable service, then why shouldn't the jobs go the eager masses abroad?
I'm a web developer. I'm already competing with template-style businesses, cheap developers abroad, clients' cousins who can do it cheap, and the like. Yet my (2-person) business in Australia is growing each year, has many long-term clients, and shows no sign of falling over due to losing clients to cheaper workers in India.
One thing we do with our key clients is to arrange review meetings (at least yearly) at which we run through the achievements of the last x months and lay down our plans and thinking for their sites in the months to come. I think they appreciate that we're there as their partner doing a lot of the thinking and strategy for them. We try to make sure that the money they're spending is providing them with an asset that gives them some return (whether it's PR or direct sales related). I can't imagine that many of them would even think of taking the work away from us and sending it overseas where they would be starting a working relationship from scratch, and have less a chance of personal service from people who really understands their business first-hand.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Yes. This is a good idea. I will move into a cardboard box (not sure where I'll plugin my computer to upgrade my skill while living in said box) and I will be competitive.
experience, experience in a north american workplace.
I've been working IT in numerous roles, support, engineering, and for the last 4 as an IT Manager. Nothing beats workplace experience. North American experience with exposure to multiple levels of management.
In my realm of IT, our technical support is outsourced to India. While we still provide limited support here in the states, our technical support unit is wary that their jobs may disappear.
My advice to them has been to establish yourself as indispensable. If that means bucking for the "promotion" to 2nd tier, or product contact, or product development, then do it.
Strategicly, the BEST place to be is the domestic Handler, or the technical liason of those outsorced partners. (It has the best job security, for now.) Organization will need someone to make sure that their oversea workers are remaining up-to-par, so they will need to:
A) Know what the right answer is.
B) Make sure that the outsourced workers are providing that answer.
C) Hold the outsourcer (and the geniuses who decided to save money with these outsources) are held accountable to their decisions.
Granted, this is a fraction of the jobs that can remain after being outsourced. However, in my personal example, we are now using our original technical support staff as a 2nd tier unit for our global outsource call centers. (Not because we can, but because we NEED to, as our outsourcers are not as adept in supporting our product as our veteran staffers here.)
*Carlos: Exit Stage Right*
"Geeks, Where would you be without them?"
"Got Linux?"
Perhaps another poster can shed some more educated light on my idea, but what I was thinking was there could be some sort of law for American companies that they would have to have the same minimum wage type laws apply to them even with internationally based employees. I think I'm onto something here, but I don't know enough about the laws, the businesses, or anything else for that matter. Any expansion on my idea, complete reworking of it, or utter destruction of my idea is welcome.
---Excuse the bad English, I'm American---
rather than just mindlessly coding to a spec. I talk to others who have contracted for the same companies I have and ask "why did you do it that way....that's stupid" and they say "I know, but that's what the spec said". When I worked for them I would offer my opinions on things before the spec was written in stone, and they learned that they needed that valuable input. A contractor overseas is less likely to be able to be effective in that way.
Eduction, Education, Education.
Simple as that. Be better at what you (we) do. Keep going to school, at least take a class per year; if you have a BS, go for a Masters, if you have a Masters, go for a PHD. There is nothing better for job security as being able to do a job where it's very hard to find someone else who can do it, or can do it as well as you can. There's nothing that saves money like doing something right the first time. If you have confidence in the person you hired's ability to do something right the first time, then it doesn't make sense to take the risk of hiring someone else.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
how about some management skills so every american programmer has three or four of them underneath him or her.
1. figure out how to use cheap labor
2. dole out the bitch work
3. ????
4. profit!
hm, maybe you should read some Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers:
f shore.htmh tmm
Here is America's job future for the next 10 years:
waiters and waitresses;
janitors and cleaners;
food preparation;
nursing aides, orderlies and attendants;
cashiers
customer service representatives;
retail salespersons;
registered nurses;
general and operational managers;
postsecondary teachers.
For further reading:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/economy_of
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/job_data.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/where_jobs_go.ht
Ever hear of the H1-B visa? Ever hear of the L-1 visa? Global market doesn't just mean "outsourcing" or "offshoring".
Under a capitalist system the chief responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Looking after the rest of society is a very secondary issue and currently most companies only look at this to comply with legislation or when running marketing campaigns (profit again being the main motivator).
The fundamental problem here is that companies are able to make money in ways that do not benefit society. We need to ensure this is not the case by changing a lot of fundamental systems, and this is itself fundamentally difficult.
So any move towards lowering the standard of living in a country, for example by outsourcing to a third world country should not be rewarded. I don't know what the answer is. Taxation and legislation are the only two ways I see this happening but I'm no expert in this area.
We should definitely be striving to raise standards of living worldwide, otherwise you have large groups of people with nothing to lose wanting to take the wealth out of wealthier nations. Never a good plan no matter how good the technology you defend yourself with is.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
While the goal of IT for the last 3 decades seems to have been "how can I get a computer over there to do something while I am still here", I think that the only advantage that we can exert is physical on-site presence. We can make house calls like the old doctors did. Someone in India, as skilled as they may be, is not likely to fly for 14 hours to come format a disk for someone, or fix their printer. Don't think that some of these tasks are below you. This is what will set you apart from your counterpart in India.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Protectionism just doesn't work. American IT workers are no more irreplaceable now than American manufacturing labor was in the 1970s.
I would like to say a few things on this subject. First off, we all were fooling ourselves. A few years ago, we were treated as GODS in the industry just because we could remember a few key strokes or know how to switch the computer on. GIVE ME A BREAK. This was not going to last. A lot of IT guys that were highly paid were also under skilled. Most of the new jobs that are given to Americans now are only given to highly skilled ITs. I don't believe that this trend of globalizing IT will last since most of these techs that they hire in places like Russia and India are like us a few years ago, UNDERSKILLED. American consumers are not willing to pay people to do something that an incompetent laborer in their own country could do, even if that incompetent laborer in America will cost them more. REASON: the incompetent guy in America can speak ENGLISH. This is the big thing. No matter how much you mask it, Russians and Indians USUALLY cannot speak English as well as their American counterparts. Vote for someone other than a bottom feeding labor hating republican and sit back and relax. The level one help desk position will be back in your back yard before you can ask "what browser are you using? "
This is just protectionism, and will backfire.
This will force the US based companies to pay more, making them even less competative on the global marketplace.
So rather then just outsourcing a portion of the company, they move the entire company or workgroup offshore. Or they cover this extra overhead and remain less competative.
One of the biggest problems plaguing the software industry today is the fact that most companies want software projects done fast and cheap, not right. Even if it will cost them millions more in the long run due to increased maintenance costs, costly errors, etc., managers want the numbers on their next quarterly report to look good. Screw the future! It's not their fault. It's the nature of the system.
Poorly designed and implemented software has the potential to cost a company every bit as much as shoddy engineering does. However, when an engineer screws up there is the potential for people to die. (There are some cases when software bugs can be lethal too, but they are comparatively rare.) For this reason we have professional engineering societies which enforce certain levels of competance and ethics. If you want to work in the field you *have* to be a member. In the software engineering field we have no analogue. Any monkey can design code. Heck, half the time we just have people write it right off the tops of their heads. Who needs a design?
If a nation had a professional software engineer's society that enforced standards in coding it would increase the average time and cost of projects using those profesionals, however, in the long term it would cost less and systems would work better. If companies operated based on long-term benefits they would be motivated to execute projects in nations with such professional societies in operation. Of course, so long as corporate america (and indeed, the entire corporate world) is motivated only by the next quarterly report, there is little hope.
Employers who actually care about keeping work domestic will try to find their own justifications for keeping there workers in-house. Employers who are focused on the bottom line won't care what generic thing you might have to say. If you have some specific reason why *that* job shouldn't be outsourced than maybe that would make a difference, but *that* specific reason doesn't apply to the rest of us, so there seems to be no point to mention it here
The first thing that most off-shore outsourced IT providers will be lacking is an in-depth understanding of the core business of your company. A thorough understanding of the business challenges your organization faces in cultural, social, and political arenas and your ability to address them in addition to your IT skills is critical in maintaining that edge over your off-shore counterparts.
If all you know is IT, you will simply lose when faced with competition that simply knows IT because they will be cheaper. Too many IT workers dismiss the value of good business skills. This is why they lose their jobs.
Hopefull currency flucuations will make us workers more competetive. If the dollar starts loosing its value, us workers become cheaper. The higher value Euro has helped US exports slightly. However it will make stuff we import more expensive. And low skill jobs are unlikely to comeback to the US anytime soon.
Currency values seem out of wack. The big mac index doesn't lie. Of course they don't consume many big macs in india for other reasons....
In my expereance in the feild there are too many IT workers...more than half just have that title and are totally clueless some basic things that an IT person should know...not evryone can be good in this feild and I saw many people who are just bad at what they do...1 out of 3 people are actually good at what they do but all 3 have the same title so thats why the value is low...Good people in any feild always get paid top dollar...to increase your value you have to prove that you are better thats all...
A solution to outsourcing of not only IT jobs but all jobs is to enact a minimum wage and set of working conditions for companies that want to sell in the U.S. Overseas work might still be cheaper, but there wouldn't be the giant gap that there is now. This would be difficult to implement, as it is not easy to look through the earnings of every single foreign worker, but if the punitive measures for being caught are high enough, many companies won't take the risk.
_____
Thank you.
maybe you should stop reading slashdot altogether.
VA Software Uses Own "Offshoring" Experience To Tune Flagship Product For Hot Growth Market
Creator of SourceForge Enterprise Edition Applies Product to Manage its Own Outsourced Development in India
Big Increase in Development Efficiency Sparked Decision to Tailor Product to Offshore Outsourcing Market
Company Eats Own "Dog Food" and Finds that it "Tastes Great"
FREMONT, California -- December 8, 2003 -- Like many U.S. companies today, VA Software Corporation (Nasdaq: LNUX) has been focused on controlling costs while improving productivity and quality. While achieving these goals, the company has also gained valuable insight into tailoring its flagship product for a fast-growing new market.
VA Software was a relatively early adopter of offshore outsourcing. In 2001, VA retained Cybernet Software Systems, Inc. (CSS), to provide development and maintenance engineering services for SourceForge Enterprise Edition, the VA product that provides a common development platform for companies creating and maintaining software applications. VA and CSS put SourceForge to work as the shared repository for all code, requirements, project plans, emails, and other documents related to the engagement. VA Software even added an extra level of protection for their intellectual property by creating a "gated community" area within SourceForge that hosted projects specific to their outsourcing partner, sequestered behind VA Software's corporate firewall. And VA Software leaders closely monitored vendor performance and specific project status by using management features in SourceForge.
Using SourceForge to manage its offshore outsourcing, VA was able to realize the substantial cost savings offered by its offshore partner while actually improving team efficiency and project manageability. VA achieved total returns greater than 400 percent on its offshore efforts and nearly doubled its development capacity. "There's no way we could have gotten returns like this without using SourceForge," said Colin Bodell, senior vice president of product development for VA Software. "We saved a huge amount of management time by using our own product to stay on top of the relationship with CSS; we used SourceForge to track everything, identify and fix project bottlenecks quickly, used audit trails to keep an eye on our IP; and we accelerated time-to-market by using SourceForge to hand work back and forth seamlessly between India and the U.S. The more we used SourceForge to manage SourceForge development, the more we realized that our own 'dog food' tastes great and provides an excellent solution to many of the problems our customers faced with offshore outsourcing. We have used our own experience to tailor the product for this fast-growing market."
Today, VA Software announced the release of SourceForge Enterprise Edition 3.5, which has further enhancements for offshore outsourcing use (see separate news release). SourceForge Enterprise Edition is evolved from the software used by more than 750,000 developers worldwide on www.SourceForge.net, the global nexus for open-source software development projects. SourceForge Enterprise Edition 3.5 adds enterprise-grade security and management features, resulting in a product that helps companies cut application development and maintenance costs while improving quality and reducing risk.
CSS is one of the first SourceForge users to experience version 3.5. "We think this product is better than great," said Shiv Kumar, CEO of CSS. "The Global Development Dashboard in 3.5 will give real-time, location-transparent visibility into project status to our India-based managers and VA Software counterparts. We've already achieved excellent communication and collaboration between the Indian and U.S. teams thanks to SourceForge Enterprise Edition. The new release will make our teamwork even better. We're now talking with VA Software about the best way for us
I moved to the US in March of 2001 from New Zealand. After working as a webmaster/network Engineer there I was in for a rude shock once my residency came in 7 months later.
I am now self employed as a network consultant to a few small companies and a small ISP. I install their servers, make up login scripts, train on spyware removal safe web browsing habits, maintain database servers etc. I'm earning about 25K and I'm almost to the point where I can turn away work.
Of course I get terrible returns on the time I have to spend training (we all know it's a love affair), Microsoft products are a nightmare to support and they have the absolute worst support there is.
I was always a Windows man but I have completely retrained myself in Linux. I can do anything on a Linux box that I can on a Windows server. It hasn't done a crap of good for me. I have had some limited success getting Mozilla and Thunderbird accepted on Windows workstations, Open Office is great for making PDF files. Other than that I haven't had any luck getting people to accept Linux workstations. My customers won't touch it knowing that I am the only person within a 100 mile radius that will even work on a Linux machine - Does anyone have any good Linux rollout stories?
I don't know how programmers in the smaller areas get by. At the ISP I work at it we have several hosted customers that employ Ukrainian programmers because they are so cheap. Even now I do the majority of my work through Terminal Services sessions from my Linux Workstation and I'm wondering how much longer I'll be needed...
That being said, there is still a lot of room for people in my position to at least make a living.
Anyway, that's my 2c
John the Kiwi
MCSE looking for work... 10 years+ experience!
When an employer decides he needs to fill a programming position, what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered?
Simple. Money.
Realize that most IT jobs are outsourceable, and price yourself accordingly. Got your MS certification? So what? So do a million others. Accept the fact that even a $40,000/yr starting salary is a very, very GOOD place to be, and don't bemoan the dot.com years because they were FAKE. The salaries and benefits available then were a balloon. Don't peg your hopes to them.
The fact is that "computer skills" don't really buy you crap in this world, not anymore. Unlike our country's seemingly unending appetite for lawyers, graduating with an IT degree doesn't grant you some special divine exemption from the rules of supply and demand. Face it, there are a PILE of college grads out there with perfectly serviceable degrees that can't find jobs in their fields, or who must accept that they are going to have to 'pay their dues' by working 60+ hour weeks for sub-$20k salaries for several years.
"Computers" as a field, are now also one of those professions.
-Styopa
The industry as a whole won't do anything about it because it is run as a top-down concern, not on behalf of programmers. Unfashionable thought it may be to say it, there are only two things that can improve the situation for First World programmers: (1) a strong labour movement with worker representation through unions, or (2) government intervention.
Anything else is just wishful thinking: the bottom line is that companies don't give a toss unless it's about money. And that's not a criticism of the people that run the big companies. If it wasn't them making those decisions, they would quickly be trampled down by other companies willing to employ the most efficient tactics to succeed.
Although it's unthinkable in this age of free market orthodoxy, laissez-faire economics and the constant preference for business over democracy (they call this 'small government' -- small only on action for the people, of course, while big on tanks, planes and bombs), my suggestion would be a system of punitive tarrifs against countries that lack statutory decent worker's protection. (Oh, except that would include you guys in the States -- whoops ;)
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If you can't be more productive (in terms defined by your employer) than someone in India, then you aren't worth more to your employer than someone in India. It's as simple as that.
So, what can you do to increase your productivity? Really understanding what you're trying to build is a good start. Face-to-face communication is a big plus, too. (Studies show that 55% of communication is in facial expression and body language, 38% is in tone of voice, and only 7% is in the words.)
Quality counts. Code that actually works counts. Production-quality code counts, so that your employer doesn't have to hire somebody else to turn your code into something that can actually be shipped.
Since the current administration has the interests of big business above those of the common IT worker; the IT worker has to become a guerilla of sorts.
A friend of mine who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China where his parents (Norwegians) were thrown out of Shanghai. Their palace of a home had to be left behind. This family were totally disenfranchised and deported penniless.
From this experience he taught me that "your only security is your own flexibility, currencies collapse, and governments fall."
The IT worker in the U.S. is going to have to use the immense brainpower it took to become good at his/her craft to find something else to do. Checking out other industries where there is a dearth of qualified workers is a good start. There are worse things in life than becoming a nurse. That field needs good help. Look around, find a "hole" and fill it. Trying to go against such a large trend is counterproductive.
This is not trolling, this is wishing my IT brethren good lives with lots of money. Remember that one time buggy whip production companies had to go out of business. In a way the home grown I T worker has the same problems as they did.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
Very well, then, we have our fix. Grab some old jewelry, some kingly water, a couple of electrodes, and plate yourself in gold!
Note: Although plating yourself in gold sounds like a really good idea to add value, there may be an offsetting factor that works against this theory, particularly in the form of higher health premiums that will apply your surviving co-workers. Minor detail.
The productivity of the American IT worker is fine, poor management causes IT workers to lose value.
IT workers need to convince management to remove obstacles that reduce productivity. I doubt jobs that are offshored have to deal with the volume of administrative overhead as we do in the states.
Ultimately, focusing on the customer (not the administrative processes) is what brings value to the worker and the company.
If you become a cerified ford mechanic, you will never run out of work. A ford can't make it far enough to be able to offshore it.
Fight Spammers!
1) There is nothing that IT workers in the U.S., as a group can do, that they can't do in India as well. Don't say that they can't be at the office in person, that is not my point.
2) Politicians could save the jobs. But I doubt that they want to. If they agreed with the idea of trying to keep jobs within the country they would have set a precedent with the textile industry. You'd still have your IT job, but you'd pay $400 for a t-shirt.
3) The weak dollar and the strong rupie is your friend. This is how you will lose your buying power, without really noticing it. And it is how you will become competitive with the Indians again. And this is why the U.S. economy will grow slowly and it is the reason that the Indian economy will boom. They are catching up.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Unlike everyone else in the (1st) world, I really like the way more and more IT jobs are going offshore. That's because I don't create computer software with my brain, I create it with other people's brains - in other words I'm a manager.
Whoo! You just signed your death warrant on Slashdot, bucko.
Combine IT with the sex trade!
Imagine, your PHB who can't get laid without paying for it, can't possibly outsource this (unless he's into phone sex.. or maybe cam-sex..).
"Hey, Bob, the server's down.. and speaking of going down..."
My question would be, would I still be non-exempt?
Then there's the possibility of being flooded with more H1-B visa requests from "professionally trained" sex workers from Thailand...
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Work for a defense contractor. They can't outsource national security. Of course, you have to be able to get a clearance, but we're all nerds, right?? How weird can... um... oh.
The big problem with this question are the assumptions it makes:
1. Cost is the overriding factor
2. Work is of equal quality
Now I'll grant that even if 2 isn't true now, it could eventually be. That still leaves 1, and it's a biggie. Cost is not the overriding factor for every decision. Not for daily life, not for business. There are always other factors to consider.
union
I'd like to see an overseas IT worker check whether my network cable is plugged in securely. IT tends to involve solving a lot of problems which are due to hardware or are obvious if you look at the hardware.
With so many racist and American-centric articles here I've had it. Is there a website similar to this one that has more international tones? Or at least is less American-centric?
80% of the project is composed of 20% of the team communicating with each other. Measure it in time, in $value produced, in more/less equivalent "events", it's roughly the same. And *all* of the bottlenecks pass thru that 80% communication work. If tech work is viewed as a team of people who model a work or play scenario among users/customers, then automate the scenario for increased productivity, scalability, or portability with a working model that mediates among the users, that communication is best when the team reflects the customers. While "foreign" (or alienated domestic) workers might compensate for low quality with volume, the tighter communications, with implicit feedbacks among and parallel to peers, means more productivity. Superficially it looks like tech workers must therefore follow the marketing people more closely. But it's just as true for them: they must interact more closely with the tech people. Then that 80% communication is the *most* productive work, and the 20% rump doesn't wag the dog.
--
make install -not war
(the phrase "tyranny of distance" is the title of an early history of Australia) The myth is that it is easy to communicate over a great distance. The reality is that it is very, very difficult. I would rate an email connection at 10% of the value of face to face. Get closer to your customers, understand their business, make yourself to their success.
To answer the question, I'd say become a rennaisance man. Learn to use both sides of your brain. Take an interest in the arts, you never know how it'll inspire you to look at technical problems from a different angle. It works for me, gets me hired every time. See the link in my sig for a discussion about this very theme.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
We just need to create a number of white-collar positions with a vested interest in keeping jobs in this country and the ability to speak for extremely large numbers of tech workers.
Then we just let corruption take its course, and voila! No more jobs shipped off to India.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Don't answer the questions on http://www.mainframeforum.com/. We solved them years ago; they want to pick our brains.
Currency exchange rates are highly manipulated. It might make sense to have the rupee be on par with the dollar, but then we might have to admit that the 500 or 600 million desperately impoverished people in India might need a break from our financial manipulation.
The US government has the power to regulate the corporations that are sucking the jobs, money and life out of this country, but then their profit rates would go down and we might have to admit that they're destroying the earth and most of the people (with the exception of W's and Kerry's buddies).
I work with a fair number of contract employees and the majority of them are Indian (uh, major outsourcee). As a group they are more motivated, better educated, and generally more productive than their full-time salaried counterparts.
One import that I work with on a daily basis arrived with a bachelor's degree a few years ago. Instead of going home and flicking on the TV he is working on his masters and driving 3 hours one-way to a university on the weekends.
While as unappealing as taking your work home with you sounds the majority of Slashdot readers already participate in computer related pastimes. Why not take the time spent playing games or modding cases and put it towards more productive goals?
A basic understanding of businesses practices wouldn't hurt either. The time when you could get away with simply writing sloppy apps and telling the finance or HR people to 'just leave me alone, I'm a technical guy' are long gone. A solid understanding of requirement gathering and the full system development life cycle will be more of an asset to an up-and-coming programmer than knowing all the bits of the latest C/D/J language. Being able to add value to the actual business outside the sphere of technology is what those people who land the jobs will bring to the table.
Great answer. You came to a similar conclusion to me (see my post below yours in the main discussion).
I would also like to add that we should have seen this coming after the policy directions of the last couple of decades. (I say we although I'm not from America, but I grew up in the UK, which usually acts as a time-delayed mirror of US political trends anyway). The destruction of the manufacturing base was the obvious outcome of the push to a version of globalisation that promotes free movement of capital but keeps labour firmly in one place. It started with manufactured goods -- should be no surprise that's moved to the high tech industry.
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Indians (and other English-is-not-my-first-language races) tend not to have good written or spoken English, and understanding accents can become a problem dealing with support over the phone. (blanket generalisation blah blah, I know there are exceptions).
So my advice would be to emphasise your English skills, both written and spoken.
There's nothing that says "crap programming" faster than a GUI with spelling errors.
And if your English skills are crap, well take some classes to improve them!
I dunno why the big corporations are happy to outsource to India but they won't let their local coders work from home. I figure, you set up at home with an indian sounding trading name and be an "indian outsourcing company". With the money and time you save avoiding the daily commute, you could just about break even. Rogan Josh Coding Services.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Start by refusing to buy goods and services from companies that outsource jobs to forign countries. That may mean spending more but you win in the long run. A good start would be stop being a cheap bastard and avoid wal-marts.
You haven't looked at what they get paid in India, have you?
It averages about 100,000 Rupees per year's experience. Rs 100,000 (1 lakh) is right about $2280 , so do the math.
It's less than US minimum wage, so the only way you could work full-time on a wage-parity basis with Indians would be illegal.
And over there, you could hire servants! Servant make only about 1/10th of what Indian programmers do!
In reality there is little you can do to help yourself. In many cases the decision to outsource is made before a decision to hire. Hence, a person's destiny was decided before we even knew work existed.
This is not a global economy issue either. People will post "welcome to the global economy" like an "up yours" for the success of America. India for example, has some of the most protectionist laws in the world. They are winning jobs because they outsource from other countries, yet no other country can outsource an Indian position. Very protectionist, and it works because someone in the political/business arena believes if we just keep our economy open, they will learn the benefits. They have, the benefit is to have a closed economy while exploiting open ones.
I don't want to say you are screwed, as much as value is one of those things that is decided before you need it. Like the decision to outsource, you will not get the chance to describe your value after you are a target. Be sure to describe the value to the company you bring at least monthly. Forget "Made sure the TPS reports were delivered on time," "Bob the mail boy" claims that one on his resume. Look at your job and equate it to business revenue. If your position (and all positions like it)were not there what would the company lose. Look at the department, not the individual.
Then, always remember there are certain jobs, even IT jobs, that proximity to the client/end user, are required. Not because the job cannot get done, but because it is done, better, faster, and more completely with you sitting next to the end-user feeding back through requirements. Those are the sure ones.
really....in my industry all coder need a security clearance and part of the req is having to reside here (Canada) for a minimum of 3 years. Sure it cuts down on the kind of dev work but I'm not going to be fussy in this day an age.
Even if you have zero interest in defense work most state/provincial/federal gov. work req some form of security clearance.
Just my C$0.02
I firmly believe that a huge and overlooked reason for outsourcing is that it lets the people involved in the management end of business regain some control that the internal IT folks have taken from them. I've had experiences working with IT departments who end up holding the entire company hostage because they control the technology. When your business stragety takes a back-seat to your technology decisions you are in bad shape. I think many c/upper level management types just don't know what to do other than send the whole beauracratic mess overseas where at least they don't get bullied into making decisions by some tech guy who spews acronyms at him.
-_-
Here's why American IT workers are better and are worth paying more money.
I WORK DOWN THE F***ING HALL!!!
You need a problem fixed? Knock on my door, take me to your office, I look at problem, sit down at computer, and fix it. There is no trying to explain a program to a computer illiterate user, guiding that user through the menus or explaining text commands. And all without confusing accents!
If you want a feature added to one of my scripts or programs? Talk to me directly, draw up diagrams and use other visual aids right there or maybe even see me implement the feature right in front of you and know right away whether it could work!
Communication is EASY when you work down the F***ING HALL!!! I am a big fan of working with people in person and the difficulties in working over the phone, especially in tech support, are what I hate most in my job. Now I do like my job, but communication in person is simply better.
add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits
Nope. Sorry. Move on. Give any CEO a choice between reducing costs or getting "other benefits" and see which (s)he chooses.
Forget adding more value than what is needed - instead take the Outsourcer's dollar bid and compete against it. There are a million things other than (or in addition to) salary that you can cut from your yearly budget, its all in the packaging.
New servers? Nope, centralize your existing ones. More developers? No, fire 1/2 your staff and adjust your feature-set. QA? Fire 90% of your staff and set up automated testing and public betas. Licensing? Bzzt. Migrate to open-source for high-dollar back-end projects.
Outsourcing is a TEMPORARY problem brought on by the high cost of technology Stateside. Reduce those costs and adhere to a proper budget and you'll be FINE.
If we adopt a more eastern model, we won't be eating beef. Those guys in Bangalore seem to be doing fine without it.
Insightful? I've already taken several pay cuts in the past few years. I've had job offers for $9 an hour for laptop repair, and the recruiters get all huffy when you say they're less than half way there.
I've already taken the step by publishing JoshuaBranch AS as a commercial product. It provides off-the-shelf application security for J2EE applications. I was going to open source it, but livelihood before ideals.
In any case, I still plan to open source a lot of the components its built on. Someday, I might even open source a "lite" version. Down the road, I hope to have a good mix of open source and commercial offerings, with commercial offerings focused on corporate needs.
I'm done relying on consulting for livelihood.
OpenStandards.net will continue to be not-for-profit. Hopefully, someday, I'll have the funds to even help it fulfill its complete vision, increasing open standards and being an advocate for open source. The success of JoshuaBranch AS could determine it.
Open Standards Portal
I am an indian student who is doing is graduation in UK. I have studied a bit in India as well(in Mumbai) and there is a difference in what is being taught there vs in UK or US.
Back in India we as students are taught the programming language i.e. the syntax and code creation. No one there teaches how to program i.e. problem solving and designing a solution from the problem. Therefore most companies in US are offshoring their coding work to India. But this is after someone else in US has already anaylsed and designed the solution. So this is the skill that you need to develop. In most cases, the end user is an American and thus you can have a better understanding of what they want. I don't think there is any way you can distinguish between code developed by an Indian or an American. At present, some people may believe Indian code to be worse but this is a small problem and in time Indian programmers will get experienced and improve their coding skills. So you won't keep getting a higher pay for doing the same work, times change and everyone needs to evolve.
Don't expect any company or government to stop this, doing so will only make them less competitive.
There are also far more jobs using software than producing software. Using outsourcing to reduce software production costs will create more jobs in software use (most of IT) than are lost in software production.
We can and do need to compete better. We still need to improve our math and technical education, as Alan Greenspan says to keep a positive trade balance in IT services.
Guess we're missing one angle - over here, most major IT shops in large corporations are (like the coporations themselves) grossly mismanaged. The company I work for requires us to buy EMC disks for development servers at roughly 45 times the cost of regular disks - even if you don't need the redundancy... So one of the development servers cost us 4500... the disk space for it was $900.000... Seriously, what does it matter if I spend 100K or just 25K on the three users of that server if the server itsself is the issue?
Or to buy a new desktop - cost about 750 dollar - we spend $2500 figuring out if its really needed, if everyone approves it and so on... Add in that cost - and you have 95% of the reason why indian IT shops are cheaper than doing the same work in the US...
Peter.
Better code, better standards, for less money than anyone in the US or Europe. There is no competition here. Until the Indian economy and the Indian people catch up with the US and European standard of living (and government regulations), they are always going to be the clear winners.
Of course, when they do price themselves out of the market, all the jobs will be going to Chinese contractors.
"Under a capitalist system the chief responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders"
This is one of the worst generalizations I can think of. Under a capitalist system the primary responsibility is to the CONSUMER, without whom, there is no shareholders, employees or anything else.
The problem you are trying to express is one in OUR capitalism which is not really capitalism at all since corporate structure is dictated by the government and heavy regulation exists almost everywhere.
The states is very business friendly. IT is very business friendly. What other industry has replication costs of nearly free? Plus it is very easy to start an IT business. I am sure most slashdotters have enough hardware to create an environment that can be used to develop and test small applications. Invest some cash into consulting a lawyer, get an accountant and either learn to market yourself or get that buddy who always is seeming to go to parties to be your marketing. If it doesnt succeed, you can at least start applying for those sweet CEO jobs!
Let me use some numbers I just pulled out of my arse to demonstrate a point:
:-)
.02 USD.
Indian Help Desk Support Technician
Cost: 19,000/year (USD)
Abilities: troubleshooting Windows, Office, etc. over the phone, speaks English.
American Help Desk Support Technician
Cost : 25,500/year (USD)
Abilities: troubleshooting Windows, Office, etc. over the phone and in person, speaks English natively, took a course in interpersonal communications in order to be able to better understand and convey information.
Would 6,500 more be worth it for the above for in-house troubleshooting? What about for customer support, where the "in person" part does not apply?
If I were a boss (and I'm not), I'd opt for the American. Because s/he is able to communicate more effectively and efficiently, I know that the job has a higher chance of getting done right, AND that it'll get done faster, thus saving me money on phone bills/delays in production and possibly give me a higher customer satisfaction number, which might just increase the number of customers I have.
Now, we technicians/programmers/etc. may know this intuitively, but the probem is that the PHBs of the world don't, and so this needs to be communicated to them. When you're applying at a business that you think might outsource your job in the next five or ten years, make sure you put a point about your communications abilities in your resume. Not only will it help you by giving the boss more of a reason to hire you, but it might send a message if geeks everywhere start making a point of putting it on their resumes.
Just my
~UP
Eat the Path.
I suppose the "tend to be smarter" bit is silly and provocative, but this is the only post in this discussion I've read that made this post's main point.
Which I'd really like to see numbers and references for, but intuitively believe. The world is changing. Unless the US does some drastic, tyrannical things to its people and the world, it will not be the only "superpower" for long. Of course, that does seem to be the way things are headed, but I tend to think that, if we haven't already, we'll soon reach a point beyond which governments will quickly lose control of their citizens and native corporations.
Many of the corporations are looking at the short-term benefits from the cheap labor in these places.
The cheaper labor allows for higher profit margins on these items - but what happens when so many jobs are moved from the US? The average American will no longer be able to afford these "little extras" and sales will drop. Higher profit margins will not be able to make up for the drastic volume loss.
Who is going to make up for it - the low paid Indian/Chinese/Mexican/Etc - hardly - most of these people can't afford the products there making.
Short term greed will equal very bleak future with the distribution of wealth becoming more "out of whack". How long until we are at the Noble/Serf relationship again?
I just hope things don't turn violent in other places because of percieved inequalities of US Corporations. I guess the US military will be in need in these areas - so there are your new jobs.
Simple, I keep all the project documentation in my head. Since I admin boxes, this includes passwords, configuration data, etc. They can't replace me without loosing the information, I never seem to find time to write it down, and if they assign me a follower I'll quit, and they know it.
My co-workers may disappear, but I'll be around until the day I die (or document).
Two things are wrong with a lot of people I have seen hired recently... (yeah we went through a few)
h tm l
0 32 90851.asp
1. They didn't really know what they were doing. Sure they could get past an interview and even a technical interview but they couldn't think... if you know what I mean.
2. Attitude. Damn if some of these people aren't either biggest jerks or just damn lazy. Sorry, your not a prima donna, your expected to anwser questions if you know, and you damn well should bother to work. Your not entitled to your job.
As for those saying, your vote will decide. Sorry dingos, but if you believe Kerry's promise your just ignorant, worse your stupid. Protectionist laws will backfire quickly.
Suggestions for those who think the big old government will save them.
1. Wake up, they want your money, not your happiness.
2. Change careers. There are many technical careers that don't outsource.
3. Get away from the in-languages or faddish languages. You would be amazed at the work potential of all those non-boutique languages (ie, most PC languages are that)
4. If you believe someone else can do your job cheaper its probably true. Don't just code, solve problems. Too many programmers are just coders, the business world today does not need one dimensional people.
5. Understand the truth. There are less jobs outsourced in the tech industry now than during the tech boom. The key difference? The media wants it to be an election issue. They know how to find mindless people who will repeat it without bothering to really dig it up.
7. More jobs will be destroyed by the normal economic cycle this year than are outsourced.
8. Work for the small fry, big companies have it easier when it comes to outsourcing.
9 and 10.
READ UP ON IT..
http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-019es.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/meyer2004
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
When smart, educated tech people look for opportunities in the infostructure to do something for other people, we find them. So infobahn roadblocks turn to offramps. Get some air!
--
make install -not war
The American worker should live within his/her means.
The American worker's standard of living will go down and the rest of the world's will come up. It is a fact of life.
If we keep learning and improving our skills we will have jobs, the pay may not be what we got used to during the boom but it will do.
Do you need a tank that gets 2 gallons to the mile? A huge house? All the junk to fill the house and the credit card debt to go with it?
How many of you are debt free?
The Chinese, Indians and many other folks refuse to live in debt.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
If you look at the high paying positions in this country you might notice that they are of measurable quality and have PR; namely CEOs, sports and stars. The missing piece for anyone to compete and get top dollar is their ability to prove how much they personally contribute to the bottom line and publicize it. Since individuals in many organizations can't prove it the CEO gets most of the credit. A sports player has statistics that show how good he is compared to others. An actor / actress has box office draw to show their value. The big salaries don't come without first proving your value. The software industry needs globally recognized measurements to prove we are three times better and a PR engine to publish the top programmers names to the world.
- Improve your communication skills. India's native language isn't english, and sometimes that's painfully apparent. The better domestic IT workers are at articulating their thoughts, the broader the language barrier will appear.
- Be more responsive in the work place. India is in a very different time zone. Face to face answers to inquiries could potentially go a long way. Why wait until tomorrow for a response?
- Be more 'available'. This may mean an extra hour of work out of the day. Maybe don't go out for lunch, eat in so you have the apppearance of being at the office longer. Get there earlier, leave later. Ugh I hate suggesting this, but it's funny how bosses think sitting at a desk == productivity.
Enough participants here can make a big difference. "Yeah, you could spend less with them, but you won't be getting what WE offer!"
"Derp de derp."
Speaking English? :)
John Susek
Look at what happened to steel workers. Look what happened to auto manufacturers. Then find another career. Nothing short of govt intervention is going to stop the work going to the cheaper countries. You only chance is to work for Microsoft - they will last the longest, but I can assure you even they are already making plans to move out of this country. The only IT work that remain here is 1) work that requires on site hands on support or 2) secure/classified work. I assure you, there are too many developers for those positions already.
It's a good time to become something else. Make a bet on the next big fad - my bet is on biotech, although nano-tech may beat it. Look for careers that have inroads to those fields.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Coders should just look to companies that are doing business with Americans which makes it less likely they'll offshore.
Those same companies and the ones that are offshoring but have a semi-global or completely global reach should also keep in mind that if the majority of their bread and butter comes from American consumers, each one laid off is most likely not buying your products or that of other companies in the US.
On the flipside there's a impending real estate crash possibility in the US which could go a long way to putting us on a more even footing with forein job competitiors. But only if this happens and maybe if it were to cut the cost of housing by 50%. Currently any american that buys a house on a 30 year term pays over double it's worth. Which directly translates into the high cost of your house.
Here in Dallas a house could cost 60k to construct but they're selling for 250k or more. So the builder makes his quater million. Then the bank makes their quater million over 30 years and some change. Does this even sound right? If both parties did this for a reasonable profit of 60k for the builder and 60k for the bank then the buyer would be in for 180k and would leave him with a payment in the ranges of 750-850 dollars vs nearly 2k per month.
This would directly feed back into the economy, back into our companies who would then be able to not only hire american workers but probably hire cheap overseas labor at the same time and still not kill their bottom lines while having the benefit of bringing up global living standards and being able to expand their market vastly as the global markets are able to afford their products.
Oh and for those companies paying 150+ million to their CEO's CXO, CTO ad nauseam add that all up. Then imagine what your bottom line would look like if you just paid each one 1 million dollars a year + reasonable 10-15% bonus and med.. Not only could you hire more workers, improve support for your consumers and make your company better each year.
And if you think those **0's are irreplacable maybe it's time to remember anyone has good ideas and there are leaders out there that would love the money but are not motivated to make all that much and probably could do much better than a overpaid insertwittycomment person. If they find that they're truely replacable then they'll learn to live life with what you give them.
It's your company, your money, not the **O's.
At a recent outsourcing panel, the CEO of one of the top-10 outsourcing outfits asked & answered the question "Where do you see yourselves in 5 years".
The outsourcing timeline can be classified into 4 tiers -
Tier 1 - Staffing - bring Indian pgmmers on H1Bs & L1s into US to staff IT departments
Tier 2 - Codefactory - Indian pgmmers in India write code spec'd out by American pgmmers.
Tier 3 - The current outsourcing wave
Tier 4 - The future - No IT department in the USA. All IT needs serviced by Indian outsourcing firms.
So you see, they are already preparing for Tier 4. All IT jobs, including R&D, design & architecture will eventually go to the IT depts in India & other low cost structure countries.
How to compete ?
Well, don't! Don't fight the tide. Do something else. IT has been commoditized. Find another field and get into that. If you must do IT, simply go where the jobs are - to India, Philippines, Russia, elsewhere.
The economics of the situation are so compelling, it makes no fiscal sense for US companies to keep IT jobs in the US.
Sounds scary, but that is what we were told.
Project Outsourced - the film
what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas?
"Yessir Masser Sir, I can clean them shoes up real nice, Masser Sir."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
While parts of Asia and Europe continue to grow, the US still holds a large consumer base. The companies that are outsourcing jobs depend largely on US-based companies and consumers to buy their products. We're being told that they outsource jobs to save money and be more competitive. However, is this cost-savings ever passed on to the consumer? Personally, I haven't seen a drop in prices in the things I buy. The companies that are taking jobs away from us all are the same companies asking us to buy their products?
- The truth is a virus. -
Back when we had more so called "trade barriers", we had ...
... when the goverment looked after the middle class and the middle class looked out for goverment. The powers that be were not obsessed with tax breaks for the rich and promoting a globalist agenda.
1) higher growth rate.
2) lower divorce rate.
3) higher birth rate.
4) higher social mobility.
5) less wealth distortion.
6) higher voter participation rate.
7) less hours worked per week.
8) more mom's staying at home to raise kids.
9) higher savings rate.
10) lower incarceration rate.
I can go on. Americans were happier way back when
Look, man, I pay 35% of my income in taxes. Those global companies can buck up, too. Fair is fair. Taxing imports and exports is a wise, prudent thing to do. For the record, Smoot-Hawley was a Republican scheme. I'm not saying 100% tax on import/exports. 10% will do. 20% on semi-dictatorhips like China and India.
I saw a segment on CNN on an outsourcing company that has workers on the phone in India, and trains them.
:
They know English. No. They are fluent in English.
Not only are they fluent in reading and writing in English.. they can speak fluently in English.
No, better yet...
Do you want
A. Michigan English
B. Classic British English
C. Cockney English
You say it, and they'll speak it. Fluently. Unless you're a superb listener, there's no way you would know.
In fact, the one woman who was doing the american english accent answered with "This is Sandy Potter." An outright lie, of course, but who's gonna know ? Most people wouldn't even realize that their call is being routed to Mumbai, India.
push one of them sticks with the bristles on the end.
You should give your boss extra perks that your off-shore counterparts cannot... go down on your boss.
Outsourcing + productivity gains going to the top + increasing robotics/AI means we're only seeing the leading edge of the unemployment to come (and not just in IT_.
--
Power to the Peaceful
Rule 1 - Companies are in business for the purpose of maximizing the CEO's net worth. The CEO has spent years brown-nosing, back-stabbing, and delegating the blame, and now it's time to make some serious dough! The CEO is supported in this by the board of directors which consists of other CEO's (quid-pro-quo time), ex-political hacks, and the odd clueless celeb, or academic chosen for their docility.
Rule 2 - Wall Street will forgive anything provided you beat earnings estimates by one cent a share. Fire the staff, move operations to North Korea, level and pave an orphanage, eat puppies and kittens - no problem as long as the you beat the analysts estimates.
Rule 3 - Honest politicians stay bought - political favor can be purchased by carefully organized campaign donations by an industry. How else could you explain things like H1-B, or the DMCA. Do you really believe that voters demanded these laws?
Rule 4 - Screw the customer - used to be that (better) companies competed on quality and customer service. Those companies are dinosaurs, and likely are now extinct. All that matters is price. Quality doesn't matter, support doesn't matter, service doesn't matter - just price. Hell, you can even harass or sue your customers. And if you can form a cartel - price doesn't matter either*
Rule 5 - You are expendable. You are a cost, if your function can be provided by someone cheaper either here or overseas - hasta la vista baby.
Rule 6 - Yesterday was yesterday. Doesn't matter if you produced something that made the company $100 million last year - that was last year. All that matters is what you cost today.
So where does that leave you - your options are as follows:
1) Got a good speaking voice, a pleasant manner, a degree of ruthlessness Genghis Kahn would envy, a diagnosis of sociopathy, and most important; a good head of hair. You might be CEO material.
2) Otherwise, practice and learn one of the following phrases: "Would you like fries with that?" or "WELCOME to Wal-Mart!".
* However, the government MAY force you to refund $13.86 to consumers. Think of it as a cost of business.
today we're going to learn about something called factor mobility. when a factor of production such as labor can move freely across borders, it is as if there is one large international labor force, such as for software developers. now, while the marginal productivity of labor may differ between american and indian workers (the amount of code they can write per hour), the wage rate differential between american and indian workers may be greater than the marginal productivity of labor. hence, until the wage rate catches up to the marginal productivity of labor, oursourcing will continue.
It's not about where people are doing the jobs. It's about paying people enough money so they can afford the products you are selling. If companies keep paying a substandard wage eventually no one will be able to afford what they are selling and they will go out of business. Henry Ford was smart, people who are outsourcing to save money are shortsighted and dumb.
I'm from Pueblo, Colorado, one of the few steel towns left in the good old USA. I watched as the industry collapsed over, and over, and over... Foreign steel was simply cheaper, labor cheaper, and resources abundant elsewhere. I just got done reading claims that "eventually equilibrium" will be restored, it didn't happen the people's lifetime here, and it probably won't happen to the IT industry either. However, the side effects were clear -- people lost their pensions as the company became refocused over and over, bought out, and otherwise spiraled downhill. All the American companies that are outsourcing should use CF&I (Oregon Steel) as a possible example of how the mighty falls - its so predictable -- first its jobs, then its an industry, and eventually, its everything that supports that industry as well. I have been pondering solutions to all of this, but I'm sure management have heart attacks. First, I feel that all software produced foreignly should pay the appropriate customs taxes. It is, after all, a foreign made product. Second, I think its fair to say that foreign outsourcing firms should be playing by the same standards as here -- that is -- no pirated software and valid redistribution licenses. If appropriate licenses aren't given at customs, the software isn't permitted to enter the country. I think these solutions are fair. The money collected could definitely be used for domestic issues, and it wouldn't necessarily upset any particular political party.
Anshluss for those who don't get the reference. By insinuating that those that disagree with you are "Nazis", I think you lose the argument. I think you guys can feel smug calling people who want sane border laws "xenophobes"; but calling people "Anshlussers" or "Junkers" or "German militarists" is stretching it a bit far.
BTW, Anschluss did work. Not taking Moscow before winter was the Wehrmacht's big mistake.
Decrease the value of the over-seas option.
Create tariffs on 'out-sourcing', increase tariffs on imports..( even abstract things like importing knowledge or information )
Drive the foreigners out of business and penalize domestic companies that choose that option...until a balance has been achieved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The best advice for any IT person is to stand behind your work as it should be done with pride, efficiency, and professionalism.
Not always is the answer available right away but always ensure your customers get one.
Offer your customer good ideas when they are available and help make them happen, share credit for success and own up to failures.
Lastly, there are slouches and those that really give a black eye to all Programmers and Support teams and Admins. Ensure to weed them out before they see a customer and do damage to the professions.
I've walked in after poor performing teams or individuals that loaded the customer with so much emotional baggage, that they don't trust anyone with their IT. All this due to one sod who got over his head and destroying the servers during a 1am change window that should of been done quickly during the day if she had from the start planned it right.
slouches are worse than outsourced labor. Oursourced slouches are death to a company's IT.
I think outsourcing software development from America to India has "hidden" costs besides salary, such as more difficult communication, weaker control, and weaker protection for intellectual property. This makes the economic arguments less disastrous for American developers that they seem at first when only salary is considered.
At the last Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, the moderator of a discussion on outsourcing (I think it was Jack Ganssle who edits
Embedded Systems Programming magazine) said that some US companies (I think he mentioned the Boston area) have figured the true cost of outsourcing as around $40k/year for an experienced software developer and have offered that to US developers. (I guess these developers could have easily found $70k/year positions during the boom, but at least they still have job opportunities at a fairly good wage.)
If more executives and investors are made fully aware of these hidden costs, I think things will go better both for American developers and for American businesses. I do not think outsourcing is always the wrong choice, neither do I think it is always the right choice. I do think that some people have an exaggerated idea of the economic benefits of outsourcing.
For about 200 years.
As a longtime programmer it seems to me the only way to make a US IT worker valuable to an employer is to become the employer. I started my own company 4 years ago and am sure glad I did. I now farm out work that I don't have time or inclination to do. Since good code is good code regardless of who writes it, price is the only differentiator. You can be the sheep or you can be the sheep herder.
Seriously, go over to www.growbiointensive.org, and buy their book. Use it to learn how to grow your own food. Then LEASE -- don't buy -- a 5-acre piece of farmland for 50 years. (50 years x 5 acres x $30/acre = $7500). Get it going with biointensive farming, and feed yourself.
Forget working for others, until you get a decent offer. Forget about buying all of the latest and greatest, and keeping up with the Joneses and helping the economy.
If our country's shakers and movers (both economic and government) do not see fit to pay a family wage, then they shouldn't expect to do business with the rest of us. Working for a wage is like any other business transaction: if the transaction is not profitable to all involved, it shouldn't happen.
I'm really serious. Besides that, you can take your farming skills with you wherever you go, and really supplement your lifestyle.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The answer is simple. MAKE YOURSELVES CHEAPER. Programming is a monkey's job much like flipping burgers or working on an assembly line. You deserve nothing more than minimum wage!
You have a social contract with your fellow citizens. If you were to sell state secrets to Russia back in the Cold War, you may have been executed for treason.
I propose that certain types of Americans (managers, investors, politicians) be tried for economic treason, such as outsourcing, etc.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It is interesting how China and India are affecting the U.S. economy in two entirely different ways. The Indians provide cheap and well educated workers. China on the other hand provide cheap products. You may be right in that Indians are followers. As a side note I think that history will show that the Chinese will be innovators.
The Chinese are undermining the production industry. This has been going on for many years. The Indians on the other hand, is undermining the skilled worker. The factory worker actually has a small advantage compare to the skilled worker in order to keep his job. The production worker creates a physical product which costs money to ship to another place in the world. This cost will motivate a higher cost for domestic production. The product of the skilled worker can be sent over the water in an Email for free (basically).
In any event, I think that IT workers for the most part aren't required to be innovators. They are hard workers and they implement what someone else has told them to implement. The innovators are the companies, and they can move their IT department to India while keeping the Innovators in the U.S. or even relocate the innovators to India.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Quick background. I'm an Australian programmer, and, in the height of the .com boom, a lot of work was being outsourced here. I was over in San Fran talking to some Development Managers and CEOs of some fairly respectable corporations. They quoted me some insane figures, stuff like graduate programmers wages going from 40K to 90K...and having to pay 130-150K for an intermediate programmer...which was why they were sending the work down under. They just couldn't justify spending that kind of cash. So, my question, and I'll try to make this not too flamable. If U.S. developers were prepared to profit from market demand, and push their wages up (and think back a few years, the wages were stupidly high...you'd be hard pressed finding a developer that could _honestly_ justify the 1999-2000 wages)...why should you expect the same companies that were being screwed over a few years back to have any loyalty now? This is something I would actually appreciate an honest, well thought out response to. Because as someone from outside the U.S., I'm inclined to say "serves you right"...so I'd like to see what I'm missing in the equation.
Where is the advantage to the average American in offshoring? It looks like it is helping the people at the top of the companies get very wealty while hurting the wages of the middle class.
BusinessWeek has once more surveyed executives of major corporations, and the folks at United for a Fair Economy (www.ufenet.org) have used its data to calculate that the average CEO collected $155,769 per week, compared with the $517 earned weekly by the average production worker. This means CEOs took in $301 for every dollar earned by rank-and-file employees.
Do what you can do get a security clearance. I've got one, courtesy of the USAF, but friends of mine with no military background whatsoever left telecom jobs and were able to get a security clearance. You got that, you're gold.
I could quit my job simply because it's Monday and have 5 offers by the time I hit the turnstiles on the way out. The pay is great (contractor, not gov't employee), it can't be outsourced, and as long as I don't lose my clearance for something stupid, I'm all but guaranteed a job.
Hard to do? Yes. Impossible to get? No.
My PHB likes to use Indians for outsourcing because of the "culture differences". Personally, I would call "culture differences" an act of discrimination. He told me that it is easy to "boss" (as in push around) an Indian programmer. He said an American is more likely to stand up for themselves or ask to many questions.
We outsourced to Russian programmers for a while but we switch to India programmers. I was really impressed with the Russian programming and they did a very good job! The only bad part was that they commented their code in Russian. We ended up dropping the Russian guys because my boss said they wasted too much time when they wanted clarification on requirements before they started coding.
the American IT worker can not compete on even terms if the only consideration is cost. What should American IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts, to add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits that will make it worthwhile for them to keep these jobs in the US?
This presumes that management is interested in fair competition in the first place, which they aren't. Had this actually been a free market, IT workers would have had the opportunity to match costs or increase "skills" before they were fired and their careers destroyed.
But it's much more profitable to inflict suffering on the powerless and then make a television show about it.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
There's an irony.
I don't usually blindly promote Open Source.
Even as a paid programmer - I can see a future in which Open Source offsets outsourcing.
First of all - Indians simply don't pay for development software. American companies probably do - and as a result, the cost of proprietary software is felt disporportionately in countries with enforcement differentials.
Open Source lowers the cost and value of software writing and shifts the value to presence, service, business models, data, access, an installation - most of which are not telepresence suceptable.
AIK
It's appeasement to the management by saying 'yesyes,' which is apparently some sort of Hindi word that means "I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about but I want your contract." Management wants yes men, and unfortunately, foreign shops are all too happy to deliver low quality work for 1/8th the price of American work. You want increased value for the domestic IT worker, grow a fucking spine and tell your manager EVERY time your offshore counterpart fucks up. We were able to rid ourselves of a offshore contractor that way.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
When was the last time you bought shoes made in America?
Turns out that shoes used to be a standard measure for any given size. That is no longer the case, and shoes are getting thinner for a given measure of width.
I went to 4 stores in the mall and could not fit ANY shoes to my feet in any store.
Today I finally went to a small specialty store and paid 3 times as much to get a good pair of shoes.
The alternative is numb toes, and down the road loss of same.
We must make it clear to these dim witted managers that the product built in the foriegn coutries is NOT the same product. If they can't even get simple measurements the same, how can we trust them with a complex infrastructure?
Fact is that in the 90s it became accepted that spending 3 months learning a programming language made you a "programmer" commanding 80-100k per year. There were enough tasks around and low hanging fruit that everyone could get a job. Fact is, now no one will pay you to write another editor, or code another HTML page. So -- guess what -- times have changed, and if you are not a true software professional and skilled in the craft, you will be and deserve to be hit by outsourcing. When the apprentices have been trimmed, the craftsmen will still have jobs.
In our startup all my programmers make above 95k per year -- the top guys much more -- and they are local. However, no one has a lower qualification than a Master's in CS or EE. Interviews take a full day and then you get probation for two months. The top guys are faster and cheaper by any metric than an outsourcing (we tried Russians, and Indians), even with some outsourced programmers working for $2k a year, some for up to $60k per year. And these outsourced guys were hand-selected and pretty damn good.
Why?
You can divide guys/ladies with a future in the US programming community into two groups -- true hackers, who read pattern books at night, can hack Unix kernel as necessary and play with the TCP/IP stack for fun. They can code in a day what takes others a week and yet make it extensible and bug free. Their skill will save their jobs, since it allows the company to reliably deliver.
Their being local also bring an ability to capture business logic and hence an understanding of the business as it grows will diffuse into this group's code. This we found is impossible with outsourcing. We call these supercoders. They re-use some core libraries and use tools to maximize their performance. They know HOW to code complexity and keep codebases under control.
The other group that have a future are good programmers, but focus on laying out and designing the software architecture, or developing algorithms -- IP. Most have EE or Math backgrounds. In short, they tell the supercoders WHAT to code. They are secure in a company that designs products, because no outsourced company will do your thinking for you or build your IP for you.
If you are in neither group, why do you think you deserve better pay than anyone else who went through four years of college, or acquired a professional skill -- such as a teacher?
How many times should we pay for another string
These jobs aren't being lost because they are outdated. They are lost because companies, with insurace/tax incentives/military backing from the US goverment, are moving them overseas.
What do you think will happen if China or India nationalizes our industries? It happend to our oil companies in Mexico and it may happen again.
Perhaps if we all stopped spending our workdays reading slashdot, companies would regain some of their respect for American IT workers.
Corporations have succeeded in turning programmers into commodities by breaking programming tasks down into such small, standardized, pieces, using "standard" languages and standard protocols that any one of thousands of programmers can do the job in an interchangeable way. Besides lowering perceived risk (if one "Lego Mindstorms" programmer leaves, another one can be hired the next day without jeopardizing the project), this process has turned programming into a commodity. You can't fight it.
The only way US sugar and cotton farmers, other commodity producers, can sell in the US market in the face of more efficient global competition is through massive and inefficient subsidies. I predict that this will be the only way that US commodity programmers will be able to compete. Or people can stop thinking they can make a first-world living by writing middle-end glue to connect MySQL databases to web front ends.
I was going to write that people could try to get a better education and offer corporations higher value than commodity programmers, but that market is much smaller, and it is not clear that such an education is widely available, given the past corporate influence on computer science programs in this county.
As health care becomes more unaffordable for the American middle class and technology continues to post large gains in price-performance, an underground market will evolve in non-FDA-certified devices.
The only real difference between a heart monitor in the Intensive Care Unit of the large hospital and the heart rate monitor on a bicycle handlebar is about $10000 in cost. All that cost goes to provide FDA certification and insurance overhead for the ICU device.
There will be a large black market in medical devices developing in the USA.
There may even develop a black market in minor home surgery, although this seems at first glance to be a nightmare seanario.
Civic pride. Keeping your dollars as close to you as possible, by giving them to companies that are close to you, keeps that money within your local economy, ultimately benefiting you as well. What 'close' means can vary a lot. It can mean buying books from your local bookstore instead of B&N, so more of that capital goes to the same guy who may spend it at the very company you work for. Or may buy coffee from the coffee shop you like, keeping it in business.
Or it could mean, as it does here, keeping money and jobs within your country. Keeping the trade deficit less up (can't say down, can we?) Researching which companies outsource and giving them your patronage instead of buying a Dell might keep a laid off Dell techie with three more years experience than you from getting a job you otherwise would have been given.
Going out of your way to support companies whose policies you support is an admirable thing to do. It encourages corporate values that go beyond shareholder value, in a culture where corporate ethics need a lot of shaking up.
One thing that a local worker can do that a foreign worker won't do is care.
Care about the end user of the application -- provide him a good user experience. Care about the ultimate ROI of the project -- not just your cut. Care about the application's security. Care about the stuff that's not mentioned in the specification or the stuff that's underspecified. Care about the person hiring you and whether that person is happy he did. Care about doing a good job. Care about meeting your schedule.
When something isn't going right on your project, and you're frustrated, explain that you'd "like to do a good job and [whatever factor] is going to compromise that".
You get the idea. Your foreign competition won't be able to compete on motivation because he's not there. He can't see the big picture. There's a disconnect, and no matter how much he cares, he won't be able to overcome the distance.
The auto industry was allowed to emigrate to Mexico, which ruined the industry.
Steel, I cant comment on with out any personal experience.
Troll? No. Just a protectionist that isnt afraid to voice his opinion around narrow minded people....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I mean you can find tons of programmers that can churn out code if given tight constraints that works ok. That's all well and good. You find far less programers that can come up with unique solutions to new products and generate GOOD code that gets the job done.
./ has worked with many of these kind of people before, and every IT person has supported them. These would be the programmers that can't even deal with basic system tasks, or the computer engineers that can't trouble shoot simple computer errors.
I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department and I'd say that, as stereo types go, the uncreative one is reasonably fair of most of the foriegn students. We have a very large number of Indian students, probably even the majority. They all tend to quite well in their classess. However, none that I have ever met are geeks. They are all here to get an engineering degree because that will get them a good job. They learn what they need to learn to pass a class, which usually doesn't require creative thought or much application.
Graduates like these form the group of people that often get called "code monkeys" (or I guess circut monkeys in this case). They know the part of engineering they've been taught, and are good at doing routine tasks. Now these may be complex tasks, involving lots of calculation, etc, but still routine. They are not very good at being presented with an open ended problem and being required to come up with a solution from scratch, do all the calculations, and then implement it.
I'm sure every engineer and programmer on
Now there are no race limitations on this, code monkeys come from, and are, everywhere. They are generally the people that are in the field for the money, not because they are intrested in, and just go to school. They don't do anything to get a further education (like intern, or hold a different, but related, tech job), just do what is required to graduate.
What I do notice is that a disperportinate amount of the foriegn students are of this type. They are going to school for an engineering degree as a means to an end for their future, not because they really care about what is being tought.
Well, the easiest way to get a leg up on people like that is to CARE about what you do. Learn about and I mean REALLY learn. Understand why you do something, how it relates to what else you've learned, how it is applied, etc. As the parent said, be something of a rennaisance man. Don't JUST code or JUST design circuts. If you are a CE guy, take some programming classess and learn how the code works. Then work to understand the relationship between the code you write and the circuts you design. Get a job doing tech support (universities usually have tons of these for students). Learn how it all actually comes together in the applied world, and flex your problem solving skills.
There are not so many people that can do that. From all the stories I've heard of outsourcing experiences and from what I've observed in students, I think those people are in even shorter supply overseas. They are also needed greatly. A good program doesn't just happen by a bunch of code monkeys sitting down and bashing away, it happens by talented problem solvers designing a workable system, and doleing out the basic tasks to the code monkeys.
It's not about loyalty. Employment is a contract between employee and employer. Neither needs to sign if they don't wish to, and nothing is owed that isn't in said contract.
The companies inflate prices, they inflate wages to higher the best talent and as a result the cost of living also increases. To maintain living in a particular area wages must go up, period. Employees were not at fault for this.
What is happening now, is employers have been over the course of 3-4 years been demanding more productivity. This means people doing MORE work than they used to at the same or less pay. The cost of living has not lowered in most areas, it's gone up. This means, that now that jobs are coming back people are job hopping because their employers squeezed them as hard as possible with threats of ending their contracts and sending them to the unemployment line. Why stay at a company that had you doing the work of 5 of your ex-coworkers when you can now leave and get paid the same or more and do less?
It's a vicous circle and is why we are always focused on GROWTH. The bubble that burst was a growing pain. They have existed as long as economies have and will continue to exist long into the future.
This appears to be a global trend - look at the outsourcing from Europe to India as a good example. It is just a metaphor for the whole free-trade movement. Unfettered movement of capital and goods, restricted movement of workers. Ergo, in the case of software development, capital will seek out cheaper and more 'efficient' pathways. Its hard not to view this cynically - in my mind at least - it always looks like capital ruthlessly hunts out cheaper and more compliant labour.
If we continue to want cheaper goods and don't really care about their 'real' cost, then we must also accept that those goods which we assume we will produce in exchange can also be produced by our trading partners. In the case of the developing world, there appears to be an unlimited supply of workers. Software is a commodity too.
ferretous
Private morality, world morality. Since man no longer believes that a God is guiding the destinies of the world as a whole, or that, despite all apparent twists, the path of mankind is leading somewhere glorious, men must set themselves ecumenical goals, embracing the whole earth. The older morality, namely Kant's [categorical imperative], demands from the individual those actions that one desires from all men - a nice, naive idea, as if everyone without further ado would know which manner of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is, which actions were desirable at all. It is a theory like free trade, which assumes that a general harmony would have to result of itself, according to innate laws of melioration. Perhaps a future survey of the needs of mankind will reveal it to be thoroughly undesirable that al men act identically; rather, in the interest of ecumenical goals, for whole stretches of human time special tasks, perhaps in some circumstances even evil tasks, will have to be set.
In any event, if mankind is to keep from destroying itself by such a conscious overall government, we must discover first a knowledge of the conditions of culture, a knowledge surpassing all previous knowledge, as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. This is the enormous task of the great minds of the next century.
my comments
Sadly, Nietzsche naively believed this problem would be solved in the next century... Yet, people still focus on the simple aspect of free trade not realizing how small an issue it is in the grand scheme of human progress. Nietzsche wrote that nearly 140 years ago, and ultimately the same simplistic morality still reigns. "Everything will work out in the end" they say, all the while ignoring how rapidly our civilization is declining.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Problem solved! :-P
At least not book smarts. However there is a difference between being educated in the sense that you know a lot of theory and being educated in the sense of being able to relate that theory to the real world and use it to solve problems.
.com boom contributed tons of those people, the "Paper MCSEs" being a great example. These were/are people that are book smart in Windows. They know a great deal about it, including lots of obscure little things. Problem is they don't know what they know, or rather don't know how to relate and apply it. So they are rather worthless in the real world since situations often don't follow what was in the textbook, and even if they do require analysis to get to the point of knowing the problem is a textbook one.
Feynman talks about it in his biography, fragile knowledge is I believe how he describes it. For example: He tought in Brazil for a time. He was at an oral test of a student that did quite well. However, after the test he asked the student some more questions to see if he really knew what he was talking about. One question he asked was for an example of a dimagnetic substance. Well the student had defined dimagnetism corretly during his test, so this should be easy. Alas, he had no answer. Why is this? Well it's because to that person, it was all memorization. He had memorized the definition of diamagnetism but didn't understand how that actually related to electon shells.
Now along these lines someone may understand the theory, but not the practical application of something. Try it some time. Challenge people to give you real world examples of theories they supposedly understand. Make them give you more than one. You'll find many people at a loss to do it. The reason is not that they don't understand the theory part fine, they just lack the greater understanding of it's relation to the real world to be able to generate an example.
Problem solving is something else that being smart in the book/school sense doesn't imply. This usually stems from not understanding the overall relations of the theories and not being able to apply them, but in general there are plenty of smart people that can't solve novel problems. They can work through a constrained "problem" when it's just figuring out the result of something, but have trouble when presented with a novel situation where they need to come up with the method, as well as the result.
Soooo (the point to all this), this seems to be more prevalant in the workers in the outsourcing plants than in domestic workers. This is probably because many (even most) of the workers in those plants are doing it for the money, not the love. They did what they were told to do to get a degree so they could go do this. To them, it's just another job like working an assembly line, but one that pays better. Because of that superficial level of learning and lack of care, they aren't going to be the creative thinkers and problem solvers.
Now you, of course, find that in plenty of domestic help. The
Most of us who program for a living are not writing shrink-wrapped software. We're automating things in-house, or writing code that uses knowledge of our organizations.
Doing this kind of work well involves lots of communication between the developers and the users of their code. This simply cannot be done with people who are 8 time zones away. It requires lots of face time and one-on-one interaction between the developer and the user, who typically doesn't really know what he wants until he sees it. Or, rather, until he sees what he doesn't want.
The only kind of development work that can be outsourced is waterfall-style work, wherein somebody writes a detailed specification of exactly what the program is supposed to do, and then sends it to a coder. Forty years of experience should have taught everyone by now that this just doesn't work. For one thing, detailed specifications are usually wrong, obsolete before they're finished, and vague on the important details. Consider: if you could really describe exactly what a program is supposed to do in clear and concise language, you might as well just write it down in a good programming language, especially since that's usually the only way you'll be able to say precisely what you mean.
If you want to program for a living, you have to learn how to be more productive than someone offsite could ever hope to be. That means, for the most part, adopting the practices of eXtreme Programming, using lots of communication, very short release cycles, rapid development environments (like Smalltalk) and a great deal of interaction with the users of your work. If you're wasting time and money fighting syntax to translate someone else's ideas into C++ code, you can and will lose your job to cheaper outside competitors.
When in doubt, why not just do what richer countries typically do to poorer countries. Turn them onto the tourist trade! The amount of training (& costs for training) necessary to make a good living in their country is much less. All of their wives will end up working on their backs. They will soon have no desire to go into any highly skilled trades since they can make a quick buck working at a hotel, bar, tourist trap etc.
Once the area shows some promise for tourists, them major outside companies will purchase up the land, hotels etc & suck out all of the major profits.
You will notice that countries that really do rely on the tourist trade really don't do that much job sucking.
Yeah, I know this is sucky idea; but the sad part is it is probably true.
It is really sad how just about all big business only thinks of the current quarter. As they continue to strip jobs from Americans, that is that much less money in the economy to come back to them. Think about all the crap big business can get away with. They cannot vote, yet they can still bribe for laws through "campaign contributions". They try to maximize profits by charging the most that the market will bear for their products/services. Yet they drop American workers to save any tiny amount of money they can. They hire the most shady accountants to pay the least amout of taxes that they can get away with. They abuse patents and copyrights as a game to get ahead in business instead fo the purpose for which they were created, to enhance the public domain. Many of the CEO's even give themselves a million dollars or more for turning deals like laying off workers to save money. What was that one airline that recently asked their workers to take a pay cut while the CEO was going to give himself like a million dollar bonus for the deal?
We need a new political party in the USA that will clean up the politics and put big business back on track. The Republicans are all just about paid for by big bisness. The Democrats are all bought by other special interests and the Libertarians would just let everything go in a free-for-all. I don't see any solution in site, other then hitting the books and staying on step ahead of overseas workers.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I did it myself. I changed from pure old-fashioned programmer and I became a pre-sales engineer for the networking industry, and later a trainer. I was able to susrvive the crash right here in Silicon Valley (being myself a foreigner) while a bunch of other people was being laid off, never making less than 120K/yr.
I acknowledge I was lucky too, and I was in the right place at the right time, but here is my advice: cut your hair, shave, and put on your suit. Learn to speak and "sell". If you have a direct face-to-face communication with your customer, you'll be the last one to be shot.
As an I.T. worker myself, sure, I'm interested in keeping up with what's happening in my field. But at the same time, I think I've seen the same basic topic on Slashdot at least 10 different times now - all with slightly different initial "takes" on the theme.
What can the U.S. I.T. worker do to remain competitive? Simple, folks! Hone those communications skills! The most important skill you possess that the foreigners generally DON'T is the ability to speak clear, fluent English, and understand complex problems, even when the person describing them to you isn't doing a very good job of it.
You can be the most efficient programmer in the world, but if you can't follow directions and explain your progress (and pitfalls) while you're assigned to a project, you're not really wanted.
Why is all the outsourcing of helpdesk jobs failing miserably (causing firms like Dell to bring some of it back to the U.S.)? Customers don't like fighting a communications barrier when they're already frustrated and need assistance!
There's no doubt in my mind that some of the best and brightest software developers are in other countries. Some of the best remote control/remote desktop type packages I've seen for Windows come from Russia, for example. (By contrast, the U.S. firms offer bloated, inferior, and overpriced solutions like "PC Anywhere".) IMHO, if they're providing a better product than we can make here in the U.S. - so be it. Support whatever's "best of breed". But U.S. firms aren't going to see real gains in the long run if they "outsource, outsource, outsource!" with salary as the only motivator.
I really have no big worries about this whole thing.... The "dot bomb" was much more harmful to my career than this outsourcing trend will ever be.
Imagine if a company considered its responsibility to the consumer above all else. Consumers, of course, want the most benefit for the least cost. The company, therefore, provides its products at a fraction of what it could charge because doing so benefits the consumer. In the meantime, the owners/shareholders of the company lose profits and divest. The company now has no capital, no money to reinvest in R&D, and basically becomes a non-profit ran by society.
This is your definition of capitalism? Your website is "iamblue.net" but I'd say you were more green than anything else.
The Ezine Directory
Remember way back when in school when they told you about design and you ignored them? Well that is what companies will be keeping around. No company is going to want to lose their core competencies. For example if I outsourced all of my engineering work to India including design, what would I have? besides a bunch of headaches that is....
I think most people will realize over the next few years that companies are not going to outsource their whole development force, it would be suicide. Who will be around to think up the next big thing? What would prevent the outsourcers from taking their newfound expertise and starting their own competing company?
The fact is that yes, it will be tougher for programmers in the US. But that is only if you are just a programmer, if you have solid design skills and the ability to innovate you will always have a job. My company outsources a lot yet we still have about 25 engineering jobs currently open at my site.
Pick somewhere that the cost of living is low, say North or South Dakota, start your own outsourcing firm and start contracting with companies. According to this salary calculator, a $60,000 salary in San Francisco is equivilant to $23,778 in Fargo, ND. I'm sure a lot of companies might prefer to outsource an employee at $30,000 vs. someone in a different culture/language/timezone. In fact, your outsourcing firm could be based anywhere, and your employees could be anywhere, as long as they have fast connection.
P.S. San Francisco to Columbus Ohio, that $60,000 is equivilant to $41,000.
What, me worry?
Is that the US programmer/engineer generally has a lot more real project experience than the offshore engineers. Of course, if the offshoring trend continues it will be just the opposite in a few years.
Most offshoring projects are 'on-the-job-training' for the foreign engineers who work on them. A former co-worker of mine was recently sent over to India to do some training in the Indian office, he said that one of the first things he realized was that he needed to teach a course in basic C programming.
The strange thing is that none of these companies would hire unqualified workers in the US and then train them on the job. They expect us to know the intimate details of obscure technologies before they'll even consider hiring us. Yet they're hiring unskilled foreign workers. Sure it seems like they're saving money in the short term, but it's a risky bet, isn't it?
Isn't it great that all these US corporations are suddenly so altruistic that they're going over to 3rd world countries to train the workers there to do highly skilled work. It's almost like the Peace Corps or something.... Oh, wait, it would be altruistic if they weren't throwing US workers out of their jobs.
You could sell the domestic IT worker to North African slave traders. Depending on the condition of the domestic IT worker, you could sell them for parts, auctioning off their organs on Ebay. Either way, you could get alot for the domestic IT worker.
Ideas to help the domestic IT worker in developed western nations;
1. In America, both the Republicans and Democrats favor reducing limits on international trade. Sticking to the two party system will not solve the problem on the national level, and a third party will not take the oval office any time soon. Instead of trying to win the whole electoin, a third party should pick two or three popular trade related issues that the Democrats and Republicans carefully avoided (opposition to NAFTA, relinquishing soveirgnty to the WTO, etc) and concentrate its energy in 3 or 4 states, while taking donations from anyone in the US. If a third party could get enough electoral votes to choose who becomes the next president, that's powerful leverage in getting one of the two candidates to rethink their views. Of course, you try this once and the two major parties will close the 'loophole.'
2. Put tariffs on the importation of intellectual property the same as you do with goods.
3. Organize boycotts of any country with inadequate workers' rights. Workers in developed countries should not have to compete with slave labor or child labor. And since increasing the wages of farm workers, for example, increases the cost of living for everyone, this is relevant to the cost of living for IT workers. A person can get by pretty comfortably on $200 a month in Nanjing, but that doesn't work in the states. This will serve the added benefit of preventing developing nations from accumulating the capital to start competing with developed nations. While people might question the ethicality of this, a government is responsible for representing the interests of its citizens rather than just a few large corporations. God knows that China and India protect their economies, China via it's currency, price controls on agriculture and forced sales and labor restrictions. India, by forcing foreign countries in India to use Indian workers, etc.
4. Don't import from countries that don't respect our IP laws. China sells American movies like mad, and their attempts to stop this practice are all for show. While it's nice to be able to pick up a movie for 60 cents on the street, or a program for 40 cents, IP, patents etc. are major American exports. This is controversial, especially on Slashdot, since our IP laws are rather broken. but American companies should get some kind of return for the use of their material just as foreign countries want some kind of return for the use of their labor.
5. Work to keep foreign talent in the country.
Lots of folks from developing nations try and school in developed countries. Our standards are more rigerously enforced (You can practically buy a degree in China). While keeping the best of these people in the states might not be to the advantage of IT workers already here, it could benefit us the same way the soviet "brain drain" did.
6. Inflation. America needs some to help pay down the debt and rectify the trade balance.
7. Cheap energy and reliable infrastructure. These are good answers that developing countries can give to the cheap labor costs of foreign countries, since the advantage of developed nations lies in their technology and automation.
Cheap energy is especially important, since infrastructure nowadays becomes outdated rather quickly, and investing in it tends to tie a country to a soon-to-be-outdated technology.
Nuclear power, fission research, wind and water power; that was one thing that FDR really got right. If your economy is in the can, relieve unemployment by building dams and similar apparatus (unless you're like Japan in which case you should work more on economic diversification to decrease investor risk and encourage stateside investment, but they're a special case)
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Construction is a dead end in most parts of the country as well. The high cost of liability insurance and such means that only large firms are surviving, and at least over here on the West coast, just about all of them hire piles of semi-skilled Mexican migrants/illegals.
The trades are in pretty poor shape...which isn't to say they aren't a viable option...
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
The subject says its all.
PS, im finished with the discussion. You are the crux of the problem with your disrespect for this country.. No need for me to continue wasting my time with you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
In Seattle, IT workers with seven to ten years of experience are a dime a dozen. The same can be said for places like LA, Chicago, and many other major cities.
:)
On the other hand, how likely is it that there will be someone with your skills and experience in Indiana, or Wyoming?
There are many places in the US, where IT jobs are not getting outsourced, and not getting filled for the simple reason that there just aren't any qualified IT workers near bye.
Translation: You'll be hard to replace
This signature has Super Cow Powers
that we are losing a serious knowledge base. We are not talking about jobs which are taught or mentored in a month to a years time. We're talking about jobs that have 4, 8, and even 10 years worth of education being flushed down the tubes. While it's sad that blue collar jobs were lost to outsourcing, this isn't the same thing. Many blue collar workers can be retooled to work another blue collar job in 6 months to two years and still be making the same kind of money. What are highly trained IT workers supposed to retool to become? How many millions of high tech training dollars are we flushing out of our own economy? Now then, imagine years from now when the IT knowledge base is mostly out of the states, the US is going to become a third world IT country, skillset wise.
Right now, there is a huge quality gap between current US IT quality and the crap that comes from outsourcing countries. Just the same, that gap will continue to close as the years go by. With each step up in skills to outsourcing countries, the US' skillset takes a notch down. This cycle of inferior skillsets for inferior products which is causing a significant loss of US skills benfits no one, save only the countries which are using these skillsets. Beyond that, it's harmful to the US economy and its long term technology position.
I wish US companies would wake up and think of the big picture 5 or even tens years from now rather than the next stock quote 6 months away. Short term greed is killing our IT economy.
This sounds like the point of view of someone spending high school asking bullies what he can do for them to stop them from beating him up - now he's in the workforce, and after working 60 hour weeks with 24/7/365 reachability by pager during a boom, he is laid off or facing downward pressure on wages due to the owners desire for things to be that way, and his question is - what can I do to make myself more valuable to you?
Well from that pathetic vantage point there are the standard two answers. One is if you were working sixty hour weeks for a set salary, start working seventy hour weeks for the same salary. Your boss will get ten free hours of you creating wealth for him which will make him happier. That's the one generally less favored as workers obviously don't like it, and being only 24 hours a day, bosses can only push it so far. Which leaves the second option of productivity. This is the only thing that people can really see a positive thing about in our (and most of the world's) economy - productivity increases. And they were a lot more impressive from the 1940's to the 1960's. Toward the end of the 1960's productivity growth has been pretty stagnant, except for a bump here and there. But anyhow, this has been the drumbeat answer of course - train, train, train. Bush, one to stand in front of signs displaying pseudo-subliminal messages has been on a big "training" sign background recently. I recall him answering a question recently someone asked about jobs moving out of the country, and he stuttered and said "Well, people should train..." Well, people working manufacturing were told to train for high-tech jobs, but now the high-tech jobs are disappearing. So what the hell does he suggest people train for? Bush is a Republican, but the Democrats are in some respects even worse with regards to this. They're all reading off the same page more or less.
Anyhow, all of this kind of points to what I think. I don't feel like being a rat in a maze running around looking for cheese. There is a business propaganda book called "Who Moved my Cheese?" which tells workers who were laid off or whatever that they should not be affected by it, they should just collect their full six months of American unemployment (note: the length of unemployment in America is pathetic compared to an equivalently sized economy like the EU - German unemployment can last forever, technically), and not worry about why their cheese was moved, but simply adapt without complaints to go off and find wherever the so-called invisible hands have placed the new cheese. To go forward with this analogy, the real problem is the jobs are disappearing, not only from IT but from manufacturing as well. That's because the system is based on the profits of the capital owners (more or less the richest 1-2% of the US), not the wages of the workers (more or less the poorest 90-98% of Americans). I often here people say that the boom was followed by the bust due to "incompetence". In a sense this is correct, but it can imply that unemployment, what the government calls "NAIRU", booms followed by busts followed by booms and the like are not structural problems, but simply errors due to the incompetence of the managers of the economy. Considering that we can see this cycle in this century, in the 20th century, in the 19th century and so forth, as time goes on it becomes more obvious that these are not temporary
As it turns out, the U.S. tax laws do not apply to corporations overseas. Doesn't take a real long or deep thought to figure that one out, but follow where this is going. Rather, where we are now.
U.S. Companies with operations overseas do not pay taxes at those points of operation. They are protected, fed, and sheltered by our resources- but do not pay taxes.
Dell Corporation now has 60% of ALL it's holdings in India and China, as an example.
Who exactly is benefiting from this? Why are these businesses based inside the U.S. if they aren't majority stake holder in promoting U.S. welfare.
The classification of "corporation" is equivalent to a U.S. "citizen"- as sick as that sounds- that's the actuality of it. To be that, you must live here the majority of the time. Our corporations do not live here the majority of the time. Where does their allegance lie? Who cares? Why should we give a shit. Why are they even allowed to stay here?
This is rotting the U.S. from the inside out.
Money is leaving. Taxes are not being paid. Businesses are not staying here, and using us as a comfortable place to protect themselves while they are actually working out of Asia and selling back to what's left of the existing economy.
This is what's happening. The U.S. Government is essentially using tax paying citizen's money to pay for the protection, infrastructure, incentives of Foreign Corporations.
Sounds like I'm just a looney doesn't it. Look up the laws for yourself. Look up our own corporations holdings yourself. We've been ratted out here boys.
It's time to get a collective rope and start it swingin.
The point is globalist boast about the benefits of "free trade". Where are they? We had higher growth rates when we had more restrictions on capital flows.
Great. We get cheap junk from Walmart and Billionaires running the country. I stand by my observations. We'd be better off with the old ways of doing business: business paying their fair share of taxes and import/export taxes.
As I can see, 1st-world countries don't find it bad that Nike manufactures their shoes by teenagers and polluting developping countries with mercury, cyanide and chemicals. "After all, if they're poor, it's their fault". But if we offer the same IT services as the 1st world developpers, then you find it bad ? Come on...
Originating from India, I guess I have the right to criticize the quality of work back at home. ;-) ). Such maintenance/quality assurance issues are bound to pop up sooner or later. All said and done, you get what you paid for.. ;-) :D :) ), the US technological supremacy is here to stay for a fairly long time. And then, maybe we don't really need so many techies in this country anyway. How about more American artists and BETTER POLITICIANS instead? :^)
It's all good for now, while most software being written is new, and due to the tight time-lines, not many people pay attention to the quality of software written, or service provided. I could swear I once heard a customer service rep obviously in India chewing something while talking to me (my guess is Paan, a betel leaf filled with stuff. Good thing he didn't spit it into the phone
As the Indian service industry grows at the current pace, there is obviously going to be further dilution in the quality of services rendered. The difference is, the Indian bubble will burst even quicker than it did here; companies will pull out almost overnight, or there will be major buy-outs of the quality providers (remember the recent IBM acquisition?) while the rest will be the way the dot-com boom era code-monkeys are now. Hence the current demand by the private sector in India for more relaxation of laws governing foreign ownership of Indian corporations. They know exactly how they operate and the know that such risks exist
"Market Forces Rule".
At the end of it all, the US consumer will benefit by better, cheaper, personalized services (whith a verry verry Indian accent, sir!). The US techie will be a little worse-off in terms of wages, but that will be due to the fact that the US corporations will expect more sophisticated work and therefore the same pay amount will require higher qualifications. And there will be more management-type techies in US and more techie-type techies elsewhere. But look at the brighter side: you might have to go to to grad school and invest a couple more years in coursework, but you'll immediately be doing work that will be far more challanging! Don't expect the design work of your next-generation supercomputer or ultra-portable to move out of the country anytime soon! That said, shameless advertisement: If anyone wants to outsource their data mining work, let me know. I'm moving to India next year
Like it or not (like it if you are American or think like American, or not if you're not
There's more in life to worry about. If you find that you can't compete, or that it's no longer feasible financially, then look into fields that are. Get started with real estate. Become a car salesman. Become a plumber. There are many lucrative jobs that are here to stay, it doesn't matter whether or not your extroverted.
Every career has a learning curve and it's safe to say that IT has one of the steeper ones. So go, find something else to do. Maybe somewhere down the line someone will realize that it was a mistake to force this dilemma on you in the first place; when it no longer pays to get a technical degree, perhaps then someone will realize that a strategic mistake with lasting consequences has been made.
"Anschluss" 'em !!
Uh. I mean "autarky" 'em.
whatever.
Domestic IT worker, increase thy own value.
Seriously, folks. If you want to compete, you have to compete. That's all there is to it.
As much as I like nationalism... Oh, wait. I don't like nationalism. Never mind.
And, I don't mean to lump everyone in with the nationalists; if you feel that more expensive domestic IT staff has more value than offshore staff, and just isn't being marketed well, then market yourself better. That's all you can do.
To elaborate, Moore is saying something about American programmers vs programmers who work and play well in large, population-dense, environments:
More Americans are pioneer tyeps than any other nation. Pioneers have to handle life-and-death problems by themselves in a simple and elegant manner or -- well -- they die. The Wright brothers built everything -- their engine, their wind-tunnel, their materials, frames, prop, etc. -- in their bike shop.
When the big boys wake up and realize that software constructed to optimize the use of large numbers of people, as oppose to lower the complexity of the solution, is actually more coherent, reliable and secure because it has to be comprehensible to a single person then they'll come back to American pioneering inventors not only for software -- but for laws -- just as they did with Constitutional government.
Hopefully the world won't have lost its ecosystem by the time pioners have the resoruces back and can lift technological civilization out of the biosphere.
Seastead this.
There are many problems - of course from my point of view it is the uneducated management. Before you skip this - I have working on ( and in ) computers 30+ years, been in management but didn't like that at all, I have been working all over the world. And where I haven't been I have had groups of people working with / for me. Now an advice, be better than the people you are competing. Not easy because the management has ( I should know ) different view but on long run they will be promoted and you will find a better job ( for a while until the current management gets this great idea to find cheaper workers.. ) By the way - if it is any relief - most of those multi billion companies are history now ( no names ). To the point - we can always use programmers but people as systems programmers, analysts, etc.. can never be replaced with remote people, it just doesn't work, proven many times over. So - learn those skills, learn the trade !
One factor that is often overlooked is that there is in some sense a productivity boom in IT, same as in other sectors, that has allowed fewer workers to get more done. A lot of the things programmers would have done from scratch in the old days are now encoded into APIs or web-enabled, or have complete products already in place.
.net middleware to serve web pages from their database. Well, the database and the web server are already done, so all that's left is coding up some middleware type stuff and guess what, that can be done in India by people who maybe could or couldn't build a web server or database by themselves but can certainly use the APIs and get those web pages working.
When I first started programming, databases, window systems, consumer operating systems, the internet, web-enabled everything, etc did not exist. If you wanted to process information of any sort, depending on the platform, you may have had to code from the BIOS or program loader all the way up to curses windows. But at this point, a lot of the programming effort that would have been spent building a custom database, a custom TTY window system, a custom printing system, blah blah blah is now either integrated into the OS or available as a comprehensive product.
This sort of factoring of functionality by making a product out of it and making it accessible to other companies at a reasonable price is (a) something that managers can understand and (b) a logical consequence of the engineers credo to "not reinvent the wheel".
The downside is that business have less reason to have senior programmers "on retainer", if you will, doing traditional sorts of programming: custom-making some well-designed functionality fit into a proprietary system. At this point they just want some
If you're so desperate to compete with Indian workers maybe you should move to India. Then you'd get the lower cost of living that India has to offer.
Or you could use your more expensive education (presumably funded in part by the higher cost of living in the states) to train for a more competitive job.
In any market, there are two general ways to compete: price and quality. Competing on price is always a losing battle for all players except the largest; therefore, the way to compete successfully long-term is almost always by providing a better product or service.
Specifically regarding IT and other professional positions, the trick lies in possessing deep, domain-specific knowledge. The more focused the domain, the better. Your domain could be intimate knowledge of a company's specific procedures and systems, a specific technical platform, or, best of all, technology applied to a specific industry. If you're at the top of your game in, say, health club technology, you'll always have work. It's a wide enough field to have a lot of clients or employers, but narrow enough that you'll likely have little competition.
While you master one domain, it's important to maintain a "bell curve" of related and diversified skills. At the top of the bell curve are your core competencies, while further down the curve are other, lesser skill areas that you could easily move into as market demands shift. Know everything about a couple of things, be good at a few more, and and know how to spell a bunch of other stuff.
America will not buy American to save themselves. This is my view comes from living as a forigner in the US.
Americans are fiercely competitive, a trait nurtured from birth. You see it drummed in from the little league baseball fields, in the schools and colleges, right through corporate life. Marketers fuel this cultural characteristic. You see it in advertising, the portrayal of material wealth as its own virtue, and as the stock formula underpinning so many of Holywood's predictable movies.
The destiny of American workers depends not on a few outspoken individuals (God bless them) but on crowd movement. And the crowd is price driven, not by the hand on the heart. Americans are so obsessed with getting 'the best deal' they are willing to go well out of their way to get it. Wal-Mart out of town store locations were borne out of this theory.
Americans will always look after #1 regardless of how one eyed it may seem. Case in point is Bush's famous "You're either with us or against us" statement, forcing the world to take sides on an war that most countries wanted no part of. Even with a statement this terse, instead of criticism, Bush actually received support from the American people. 'Protect our own' and to hell with the rest. This ultra competitive stance translates from the world leader level right down to individual daily behaviour.
How does this translate to jobs in India? Well it's Wal-Mart coming to bite Americans in the rear. What you will find is a thinning of the middle class, a concentration of wealth forming towards those who will benefit from outsourcing (The owners) and a lowering of living standards to those who don't. OK, so this is obvious. But the same competitiveness that makes America so great in all sorts of ways will work against all the software development community.
The crowd will not stop going to Wal-Mart even with the sweat shops knowledge. Look at Nike & Gap. Mom wants to get little Johnny those tennis shoes for $4.95 far more than she cares about bleeding knuckled workers in Asia.
IBM just picked up 6,000 people in India. Do you think they care? No, they are just making executing a business strategy to reduce their development costs.
The days of $90K for an English Literature grad with 2 years HTML programming experience are long gone. But some thought that their Comp. Sci. degree with 15 years of C/C++ expericence would insulate them from the culling. Well you can get a mature C++ developer/architect with CMMI Level 3 capabilities and a masters degree in Comp. Sci. for US$11K in India.
But cost isn't the end of it. The next most important thing is that Indian's don't fly by the seat of their pants like 90% of Western software companies. They are highly structured in their design because their education, experience, language barriers and remote development from the customer has forced them to be.
In the end, it just doesn't make sense to have vast R&D teams using high priced labor. Coding is a largely mechanical job that can be taught. So can design, good design. Software has been running around as a pseudo-engineering profession for 40 years hacked together by people in a hurry. The outsourcing step is the next logical progression of the industry. The marketers and executives will be left in the US along with some business analysts. American architects will remain largely to act as on site liasons with their Indian counterparts. But the work will get done in cheap skilled labour countries.
I don't know what is left for US programmers. Maybe it will become just a hobby as it once was for all of us.
...of poor campesinos out of work in mexico and some other central american countries, oddly enough, and not much known to the US public I think. All of a sudden these campesinos couldn't compete with the larger american corporate mechanized farms. whoops. They could still grow their families food of course, but their cash crops became undervalued in their own countries. Result was they streamed north, literally by the millions, in search of work. Once here, they flooded the labor pool,already increasing in size from the blue collar manufacturing jobs being outsourced, and those blue collars trying to compete with each other for replacement jobs, many in service, agriculture, and so on. wham, the two forces hit, result, big drop in pay and increased living costs all around.. Dropping wages for those already here, making a mockery of national soverignty and "borders" and putting a huge strain on suddenly over whelmened local government support structures, such as public schools and community hospitals, water supply and sewerage treatment, etc. One of the results here was that already poor or semi poor rural areas got even poorer, as property taxes had to be raised to pay for all this increased infrastructure cost, the speed of influx overwhelemed slower, planned growth, at the same time the previous residents found massive increased competition for low income housing in a shrinking job market.
In short, it's been an almost complete disaster for all the countries involved, because of the speed of the changes. Even manufacturing facilities transferred to mexico, only lasted a few years when they were moved again to yet another nation, leaving more workers stuck with no jobs after getting their hopes up for a few years.
It's nuts, and has been pointed out, it's really only gone to benefit* the top 1 or 2% of the worlds richest.
*temporary cheaper consumer goods "advantages" are offset by longer term economic decline caused by loss of actual purchasing power due to job loss, underemployment or shrinking wages accompanied by inflationary monetary policies and over extended credit all around. In many nations, the IMF/world Bank conmen have had a hand in it, by loaning "money" they poof create out of thin air and using the borrower's nations natural resources and other assets as collateral. It's international loan sharking on a massive scale, usury gone amok.
The whole deal is interconnected, quite complex, but the gestalt is, yanking around the worlds economies to here and there instead of concentrating on *each nation building a core vertically-integrated, diverse and self-supporting economy FIRST* is causing severe global economic problems that will in a lot of cases lead to even more severe "boom and bust" scenarios that historically, once again, only go to benefit you know who, the connected string pullers who are already rich as croesus..
In short, it's a scam. They rotate around the bones they throw to the various populations then move on to the next set of suckers.
I work for a large company in downtown Chicago and over the past 6 months we have been adding more and more Indian consultants to our IT staff. Prior to this, we would use local staffing agencies with regular IT guys in Chicago like myself. The biggest PROBLEM I see with working with Indians versus Americans is that they are not sociable, they are all work work work work work and no play. They never want to go out after work. Sure they are friendly, but they do the least they can to maintain the friendship, and keep it 100% professional. I just miss some of our consultants who have since been replaced and all the good times we had together. Not only are those times gone, but the ability seems to be gone for good as well.
And the Cubans will run out of cars and trucks eventually. Oh, you mean in the other direction.
By exploiting the lower cost of skilled workers in another country a company makes itself richer - which is what any company wants to do. But in the process it also enriches that country by raising the minimum standard of living for everyone in that community - the IT workers have jobs and money, which means the panhandlers have richer folks to beg from. Meanwhile the IT workers become more sophisticated in their interactions. Ultimately, everyone benefits - just ask the folks of Japan, Philippines, Ireland, etc. The company may pack up and leave, but in their wake they leave all sorts of resources the community can make use of - if that community is smart - or, they can give up and the place turns into another Flint, Michigan.
I remember, not too long ago, when most folks I knew in this industry were excited about the new opportunities these tools give us all. Remember how we were talking about how folks would be able to "telecommute" and do their jobs from anywhere? How farmers would be able to form their own cooperatives, purchasers would be able to co-op their buying power, and all that other great stuff? Well, we have all that now - and who are we to deny these opportuinnities to others?
I think it's fucking fantastic these folks have many of the same opportunities I do. I buy and sell shit on ebay, supporting my hobby and earning income - ten years ago I couldn't do any of that. I can access data on just about anything in an instant - ten years ago I had to order books and stockpile them in my office. My entire office has turned into a sotrage room now because all that data (and more) fits in a small box on my desktop.
I work in a call center (for now) and I listen to people spew xenophobic shit every day and I'm delighted at every opportunity that creates to tell them how I'm coming to work every day simply because I enjoy the competition (well, and for the health insurance).
This is the fuure we were so excited about. Sorry so many of you have forgotten this in your devolution against evolution.
If you have a problem with corporations, stop supporting the corporations you despise. But don't blame the technology, and don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep, or blame the sun for baking the earth.
If you are an U.S. Citizen and you support outsourcing, then we call you not being a patriot.
Am I right, Bush?
For example let's look at the people making hazel nuts. If the buyers are just stuffing the nuts into chocolate bars to meet some percentage quota then they will source the cheapest nuts (from Turkey or wherever). That makes it hard for producers from other places, perhaps making superior nuts. Just saying "our nuts are better" is enough since the buyer is only buying on price. To get the buyer to buy your nuts means adding value in a way that the buyer actually sees and is wiling to pay for the advantage. eg. you could be selling organic nuts, which the buyer will pay a premium for, for inclusion in organic chocolate.
Now since programming began the commoditisation problem has been with us. Why should I pay for an experienced programmer when I can get a college grad for half the price? We all know that the best programmers outperform the worst programmers by a factor of at least 10:1 yet you won't find a 10:1 pay differential. Commoditisation is driven mainly by management models which like to think of standardised programmers and headcount since otherwise making those project charts etc is just too damn hard. This unfortunately means that we see a drive towards headcount oriented planning, budgeting and resourcing. I can get 10 Indians for the cost of a programmer in California, so I buy Indians.
The only way to decommoditise is to add value, in a way that the buyer can understand. Show how you saved the company $5 million last year by doing xxx. Know the stats of revenue/programmer and show that you outperform the average by a factor of 5:1. Part of decomoditising is to educate (or select) your buyer. This is hardest in large corporations. It is also important to be able to back your value statements with facts("Americans are better than Indians" is not enough). Good luck
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Things are undoubtedly different in California, but they're kinda in their own bubble there.
One thing in which the US work culture differs from what I know of the other countries is ability to work in a very informal environment, yet do it fairly coherently. Sometimes it degrades into outright sloppiness and sometimes into rigid bureaucratic structure (and sometimes to both). When little energy is spent enforcing the rules, yet work flows smoothly things are super-efficient (managers, are you listening?).
If we've used up all the manpower from a 1000 million Indian population, I don't think the 10 million in the Czech republic is going to be much of a buffer of low paid programmers.
India and China makes up more than half the poor world. If they get rich, there aren't all that many poor pockets left.
The problem is no that Indians are entering our Job market - the problem is the Balance of jobs is shifting.
It is the duty of government to insure balance - because individuals simply cannot effect change. Slogans only whitewash the problem - and the truth is most "buy american" bumper stickers are printed in taiwan.
The real goal should be to figure out how American Investment in India can create More Total Jobs and it would help immensly if the Indians were consumers in the new market as well as producers.
AIK
This post is about solutions to a problem that everyone already understands, not about redefining the problem from differing viewpoints or giving up (aka "move to India"). Please keep it on the right track, we may just find a solution. Having said that, legal liability for when software causes businesses money/personal injury as a result of a bug, poor design etc...might encourage higher quality code, which in turn requires better skilled, qualified workers with credentials and experience. Let's use our strengths as Americans; we have a great university system in place, a government that can be bought and a populous that can be swayed in this direction. We as IT people would need to band together to fund politicians and raise awareness in order to out-do the big guys (with M$ being the biggest). This is not a perfect solution and may set open source back quite a bit but it may also save our professions. Something to think about.
Skin color? No.
I was at a party talking to a Hindu software development manager. I mentioned the incredible disorganization of the Hindu culture. The host thought that the Hindu would be offended, but he heartily agreed, and told some really chilling stories.
In the Hindu culture, you must do what your elders tell you. That means that, if you are coding and discover that the project specifications are wrong, you just keep silent and keep coding even if you know it won't work well. Yes, it is not always this way, but enough that it is a SERIOUS drawback. It's especially serious when you realize that it is rare that project specifications are free of error.
Just to get you started on your paradigm shift, please read the highly informative reviews for these excellent books:
read this
and this....
this one, too
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Do people see the entire Tech Sector as IT workers? I work for an ISP doing network and security and I see myself as a lot different to the off shore phone support workers. I guess if you consider reading off a tech support script an IT worker then we are in pretty sad shape. I think American and 'IT' workers from other countries (EU, ect) offer a lot more workers from developing nations. I guess the definition of IT needs a bit of clarification.
-ZiN-
Henry Ford realized that by paying his employees far more than the going rate he'd have, as he put it, people who could afford to buy his cars. He also had, as it turned out, people who built him much better cars more efficiently than most of the literally hundreds of automobile startups he was competing with at the time. He also pissed off most of his contemporary industrialists who believed it was immoral to pay anyone a cent more than you absolutely had to to fill the job.
The folks running most of our corporations now are like Ford's peers, not like Ford. (Ford also was a Hitler sympathizer later on - so we might guess he wasn't exactly paying his employees so well out of some sort of utopian idealism.) But when it comes to programming, Ford's approach may make even more sense than it did with cars.
An excellent programmer is worth 10 average ones - this is well-known. What makes for excellence is in part understanding deeply the situation and the users for whom one is programming. To the extent that the situations and users are here in the States or Europe, programmers here who are excellent are worth 10 times what even excellent programmers in India are worth, if those Indian programmers don't know the persons and situations intimately where the software will be applied.
But programmers here only have this advantage if we go out and really learn the details of the myriad local niches which great software can help optimize, and stop hanging out within the confines of techie communities.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Hey everyone, it's easy to make sure you don't get outsourced: provide value to your business.
No part of the business that is deemed "essential" would be outsourced. This means that IT is not considered essential, and it's not contributing to the business as a whole.
This is true of most IT - how much value-add do you bring? Do you actually help make the business better, or do you sit around talking about Lusers and how dumb they are? How those business people are morons? How they're so stupid they can't even turn on their PCs?
Are you a BOFH? Then you'll become an unemployed BOFH, and a happy worker someone else will do a better job than you.
Are you actively involved with your business groups, and understand how you help them make money? Then you won't get outsourced. Period.
Outsourcing is the business striking back at the geeks. The geeks have held sway for too long, basically removing value from businesses by being totally unresponsive to business needs. And if you can't get what you want at home, you go somewhere else. Its' that simple.
The U.S. government petered away its manufacturing base by representing the few, the wealthy, and now its blind subservience to the rich threatens to squander our intellectual capital. I would encourage every American who reads this to write to his congressman and senator to express his concern, except that doing so didn't save our factory jobs and it won't save our engineering jobs.
<sarcasm> Personally, I'm going to write to my senator to see if he has any openings for henchmen. After all, its better to be a houseboy than a field slave. I think I may use the immortal words of Homer Simpson in my plea, 'Listen to me, Mister Big-Shot. If you're looking for the kind of employee that takes abuse, and never sticks up for himself, I'M YOUR MAN! You can treat me like dirt, and I'll still kiss your butt and call it ice cream! And if you don't like it, I can change!' I could throw in some comments about Rush Limbaugh being some kind of genius and how sending jobs overseas will make commodities ever cheaper benefiting those Americans who will still have an income source. </sarcasm> Think it'll work?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
I still think it's a good idea. I wonder what else I missed.
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Are you familiar with the mathematical concept of a limit?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You wouldn't think so the way the current administration runs things...
Depends on what the thing in question is. Remember, these outsourcing decisions are made by the same PHB's we all work for. Here's how I've seen it happen:
- Company A successfully offshores their widgetmaking division to Elbonia
- A VP at Company B reads a magazine article about it
- VP calls a meeting and tells his managers to try to do a feasibility study of moving their widgetmaking to Elbonia
- The managers figure Elbonia is the VP's new thing and they want it to look good, so they find some good numbers for it
- Ignoring all reality, the VP then offshores the widgets to Elbonia. The managers simply know "use Elbonia now" but don't look for the best price, and end up paying about 10% more
s/Elbonia/Indonesia/g && s/widgets/journal abstracts/g in my caseRemember, if the people running businesses really understood business then stock prices would be constant.
All's true that is mistrusted
... that the globalists elite have in mind for the next generation, after the US has been free-traded to a "global fair average"
1) soldier/mercenary
2) prostitute
Most IT systems fail because they dont do what the customer wants them to do. (for whatever reason - design/technology/usability) Developers in the same office (or at least in the same city) who can walk over and chat to the users and solve their problems, have a much better chance of producing a workable system than a bunch of developers half way across the world. CIOs know this. Pity the poor Indian developer trying to develop a system for a business he knows nothing about for users he has never met. So get out there and listen to your users and understand them, and you have an advantage that no Indian can match without blowing 1000USD on an airfare each time. However if you are stuck in a server room, dont like talking to your users very much, and dont understand their business then you are probably in trouble.
Such a policy should have the following components:
- minimum wage indexed by cost of living
- health standards
- labor standards
- environmental standards
Health, labor, and environmental standards can not be allowed to be relativized or compromised.
Outsourcing will _still_ be a viable cost-saving option for a corporation, but it will no longer be a race to the bottom, it will no longer be exploitative, and it will no longer rape and pillage the environment and our collective future in the process.
Rather than cutting costs by 10-15% by outsourcing, outsourcing might cut costs by 2-5%.
We will enforce this policy through taxation as possible, and tarrifs as necessary.
And to any libertarian arseholes out there, I do not say this as a protectionist conservative. I say this as a liberal.
This is a socio-ethical issue. Those who support restrictions on outsourcing have the moral high-ground and in debate and discussion should not hesitate to proclaim it.
If you get laid off because of outsourcing - you should consider contributing your industrail knowledge to the Open Source community. Make the effort to start a competative open source project in that field.
I remember working at a shop in which we rewrote the same code until we couldn't see straight.
I wrote a CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool - in Access which could spit out the basic form of any of our two hundred forms in seconds.
Then I wrote a generic middle tier which was data driven and could replace any of a number of middle tiers (It was basically a relational database tier which supported foriegn key drop down boxes and event driven queries on same, with support for updateable tables in a multidimensional security context.)
The point is - a few days work on a general solution can replace years of man hours on specific close minded - manager dictated code.
I think that many outsourcing projects will end up on the dunghill of code because the real cost of software is maintanance - and elegance is everything when it comes to maintainance.
AIK
"what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered"
Threaten to send pictures of him and the secretary to his wife.
Open source software lowers the cost of entry into the software market. Essentially, by doing this, american companies who open source software are providing the key to their DEMISE because competing companies from developing countries can produce the same software for less!
American workers who develop open source software are contributing to their own job loss by making it easier for overseas developers to get work of the same magnitude!
Quite ironic. Of course this gets modded down, but hey, its open source evalgelism or quit huh?
The solution: A new license - open source for anyone who lives in the USA! Otherwise, no use is permitted.
Well... some products may be cheaper. However, the cost of living is not that much influenced by cheaper Taiwanese VCRs, Malaysian shirts, and Indian call-centers - the "cheaper products" crowd is forgetting about the cost of houses and rent, food, electricity, utilities... all those things that the now-unemployed workers still have to buy, instead of the cheaper stuff they are likely to be less able to afford than if it would be couple dollars more expensive but they would still have a job.
Before Dean was submarined by rest of the Democrat candidates, he talked about reforming payroll taxes.
It's a shame he was so beaten up over this, because he was right on.
Payroll taxes punish employment. The tax rate might seem small (about 6.5%), but considering most corporate revenue goes to pay wages, this becomes huge money.
Further consider just how poorly corporations compensate shareholders. For the S&P 500, the average dividend rate is just 1.5%, so a 6.5% tax on wages is gigantic relatively speaking.
It's obvious that when a company has a choice, they're going to try to avoid this tax and that means greater unemployment here.
Even when they don't have an outsourcing option, they always have a downsizing option.
Dean was right and it's ashame politics ruined a great chance for discussion about reform.
It's easy to explain why requiring companies to pay American wages to non-Americans is a bad idea: it promotes companies that buy the product from foreign companies rather than those that hire people to produce it in house. I.e. along with shifting from American to foreign workers, it shifts from American companies to foreign companies.
This ignores the fact that garment production doesn't have minimum wage jobs. Garment workers were roughly $10/hour jobs in the US. They're hard jobs why do them for less than that...a much easier job is available at Wal-Mart at $7/hour.
Simple!
Nuke India, nuke every nook and cranny.
After that follow-up on Pakistan... Nothing like a fresh new world with less terrorists...
We have been discussing this over at http://www.windley.com in the forum. Look, we aren't going to stop outsourcing, so lets try some practical suggestions Here are some things that can be done: The US Government can get the US Trade Representative to make a deal with say, the Chinese. They have industries (agriculture, soft drinks, etc) that are suffering from US competition as bad as the IT industries are suffering here. (Both countries are getting totaled in the manufacturing industry) The WTO has no rules on this, the Chinese could raise prices for IT work, and we could raise our agricultural prices (for example) so that both industries in both countries could develop. There are good arguments why this is in both countries best interests. The government can help create semi private companies that could employ most US IT workers without violating the WTO. Doesn't require legislation, doesn't require funding, just some Congessional legislative comittee to hold DOL's feet to the fire to get them to act. The J.O.B.S. bill contains funding provisions and the US Department of Labor has identified plenty of already funded but unused programs for this same purpose according to Mr. Samples of DOL at an AEI conference on CSPAN. What sort of companies should the DOL incubate? Here is a one example: The Veterans Adminstration spent 20 years and tens of millions of dollars developing VISTA, a free OSS hospital admin suite used around the world in thousands of hospitals. DOL could create a base infrastructure company (a la Eclipse) that would provide the toolkit for adding new health tools. We could minimize out healthcare costs (a major national priority) and prepare for the aging baby boomers at the same time. Maybe even help solve the Medicare crisis. I have a number of other ideas about possible companies, contact me if you want to hear about them. Here is another suggestion: The major difference in labor costs is the relative costs of living. Laws that promote alternative COL mechanisms like LETS exist. Military workers, for example, get access to PX's and other facilities that reduce their cost of living. Why not allow companies to become reserve "Army Corp Of Engineer" units so those facilities are available to them? IT workers could be competitive with less actual pay if their costs went down commensurably. There are too many other things the US could do than I could list here. That isn't the problem. First and foremost, our leaders have to decide that they are willing to fight for U.S. IT workers. Right now, they don't have the will. When they finally do, all that is necessary is for them to instruct the DOL to make it happen, or else. They might want to look at,say, General Arnold of WWII and Boeing for an real world example of how to make it happen. The US is suffering from a failure of imagination and will, not macroeconomic forces. That's the problem that really needs to be addressed.
If you pay enough of the people in the region significantly more, the ones that weren't so lucky get screwed: their income doesn't rise (or too little or too slowly or too late), but the costs of everything from food to housing skyrocket in the region. But these people don't get the headlines; nobody cares about the "losers".
Just get a job working for the US government that requires some sort of security clearance. The US government isn't going to hire foreign workers/contractors to work on things pertinent to national security... at least I hope not.
Are there any penalties for selling non-FDAed devices? For possessing them? For distributing construction blueprints?
Why bother outsourcing to India when you can just build a box, install AT&T's Natural Voice's new Indian accent, Anjali http://wcarchive.cdrom.com/pub/bws/bws_44/Anjali.m p3), some run of the mill voice recognition software (maybe an old copy of ViaVoice) and send it to a perl script for processing? Hell, the thing would be damn near perfect- it still wouldn't be able to understand you when you call in for tech support, and would cost HALF! Perfect Emulation!
there is nothing you can do to compete with low cost labor.
I mean if the people making the decision don't realize that every job they export is exporting the countries tax base as well and in turn that means that they will eventually have to pay higher personal taxes..oops who am I kidding they won't pay more since they own the Republicans so they will just jack the taxes up on the few remaining middle class and poor.
So vote for god sake and make sure that these weasels are stopped before they destroy the nation
This is entirely untrue.
Your life would be much more expensive if all your shirts cost the extra $30-$1000 that they would if they all had to be made in America where the actual cost of a single employee is at minimum on the order of $10/hr.
And your VCR would still cost $400, and that shiny television too, and the Microwave, and the fridge that your soda is in, (but probably not that soda).
In fact, the only thing that would escape first-pass price hikes is food. But driving up cost of living would make farming more expensive, and thus... you guessed it... food would be more expensive.
If you think that the corporations are making an absolute killing exploiting us all, I encourage you to start your own company (relying on only U.S. equipment, buying nothing from overseas) and you tell me if you can do better than twice the price of your competitors.
Remember, that means no foreign cars, no foreign electronics. And no foreign-built anythings.
I would very much like to hear/see the results, in all seriousness... and if you can make it work, then guess what, you will be filthy rich, and will finally have that political clout to help change our evil practices
Is it possible to give more value? Maybe but where does it stop. I'll tell you what we do to keep jobs here. Allow companies to outsource to keep markets going, just increase penalties and tax the hell out of them. All it is about is widening profit margins...if corporations want to be that greedy...TAX the HELL out of them.
Secondly, get rid of all the politicians who profit from this or at least benefit from it..they know who they are!
That the CMM 5 ratings are, as I understand it, a bit of a sham, as they are the "entry ticket" for the Indian firm to get into this racket.
And have you looked at what a CMM level actually is? Go look.
emt 377 emt 4
They *were* paying more, and making a profit ( most of them. disagree? please, show some numbers, dont make claims.... IBM, HP, DELL, all making money before, as I understand it... ). And apparently, they were compentitive on the global marketplace. They had reasonable stock prices.
So, I dont see it as forcing them to pay more. I see it as keeping them giving back something where they are taking. ( They are US corporations, living off the protections of the constitution ( supposed *my* constitution ), the protections of the police, the laws, the military, etc, etc. All these things that *I* and not corporations are paying taxes for. )
emt 377 emt 4
Agreed, but JavaScript nonsense can be blocked with an extensible browser. Flash's real usability flaw is that it mandates a single interface. By binding together content and representation, it prevents any client side presentation-fiddling. One could build JavaScript into a text browser and have things like popups behave in usable ways. (Like the split windows in Vim.)
The hatred of Flash over JavaScript isn't because of the stigma of it being a language for "graphic-design type people." One could say the same thing about Apple -- it's been historically targeted for designers and artists. But your average splashdropper will spray his spiderman underoos with life itself at the sight of a G5. Extensibility, transparency, verily.
I didn't hear any complaints from slashdotters about the evils of Java.
Crap, I didn't realize you were trolling. Glory to you, good man!
Yours in Christ,
eSolutions
<p>A good way to increase the value of All Domestic Workers (IT included) is to apply the <a href="http://www.h1bresources.com/html/whatish1vis a.shtml">H1B Visa</a> to <b>ALL</b> Public Corporations' Executive Positions whose official title begins with a "C".
<p>Then we begin Insourcing MBA's from India to run these corporations at a much lower level of compensation telling them that they will receive permanent residence status if they can successfully operate their corporations at profitable enough levels to satisfy the equities traders without exporting jobs.
<p>The valuations of Domestic Workers would skyrocket overnight.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
Wage-slavery will always be a race to the bottom, to see who can undercut the poorest nation in the world, but entrepreneurialism creates new jobs, new opportunities, new wealth. If you don't want to compete with the wage scales of Zimbabwe or Mongolia, you're not going to want to do commoditizable labor. Instead, rely on your capacity for invention and your marketing savvy (or ability to organize the invention and/or marketing savvy of others) to create new lines of business.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Check out what a software office in India really is like.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
A large part of the problem is that, while there is a large, international supply of IT workers, there is only one country that has a demand for them, and that's the US. Once India and China and the rest start generating a larger demand for IT workers, the cost of outsourcing will go up, and make it less attractive to US companies. One thing I want to know is how this effects Europe. We always hear about the drain on the American IT jobs, but how are European IT jobs fairing. Do European countries outsource as much? To where? Is it a problem?
Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
$ X a gazillion. Got it?
Americans have one of the greatest education and industrial combinations known to history. Who else has gone to the moon? Who else has nuked anyone?
IT people have to demonstrate the power of computers by achieving greater profit margins and reducing the amount of manual effort required of everyone to earn the same amount. People should be able to retire at 50, but so many people are worried that they have to work until 80. People should only have to work 30 hours per week.
Why aren't people able to telecommute to the point where traffic isn't a problem? Why can't someone run a robot from home? A lot of people go to school to sit in front of a chalkboard - these people can learn from home.
Computers have come a long way but they have to start doing more things for us automatically.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
But it's better to pay more for consumer-grade stuff you can afford, even if it requires a little more saving (though if the wages would go up because of the job market saturation, won't necessarily be that much in term of man-hours required to make enough money to buy it).
Then there is the outsourcing way. If the US workforce is so expensive, let's go elsewhere. Including the "knowledge workers" and the developers. Giving away your crown jewels, for some ephemeral profits.
Foreign-politics note: there is no need to fight USA. USA will defeat themselves in a neat and efficient way. Just hope they won't try to keep their vanishing power and/or mask their growing domestic problems with military expansion - it doesn't work.
During the .com bubble, I worked for a company headquartered in San Jose, and the business climate there was downright hostile. Difficult to rent rooms, get flights, office space (for startups, this usually involved huge rents + giving up part of the company)
Of course, this also extended itself to labor. Since the cost of living had been driven up so high by all of those companies basing their operations there, and since they were located in a market that was sucked dry of competent people (and, for the most part, even incompetent ones ;), prices went up.
One of my co-workers who was hired in San Jose decided to relocate to the office I was working in. He got a handsome pay cut as a result to match the local living expenses/market conditions (but ended up better off due to cost-of-living)
Personally, I earn more now hourly, working less hours than I did for a .com (sometimes being reqiured to work 24 hour long shifts) while working outside of California. I don't get a pile of worthless stock options out of the deal, but at this point, being paid for the hours I work and being able to take vacation looks much more attractive.
But it's better to pay more for consumer-grade stuff you can afford, even if it requires a little more saving (though if the wages would go up because of the job market saturation, won't necessarily be that much in term of man-hours required to make enough money to buy it).
woah. is this an argument that inflation is good?
Holy Shit. I never thought I'd hear one of those.
(Not talking about the other possible benefits, as with more expensive devices it becomes less tempting to save every stinkin' cent on material and engineering[1], resulting in an inevitable cheap-but-crap "consumer devices" we all know way too well.)
[1] Please don't extrapolate to infinity. This assumption doesn't behave linearly for the entire 0-inf range, assuming so would only make a fool from both you and me.
The solution is simple. Devalue the dollar.
This helps the workers in the US (we get jobs again at pay rates that we can live on), but hurts some rich people who already have lots of assets in $ they want to use overseas).
Yes import prices will go up, but guess what..that means more production will move here...so yes... more jobs! more money for US workers..! It is win win for the regular american..
The Chinese currency is cheap to the US Dollar (I was just there BTW), because the Chinese govt. forces it that way, so they can be able to dump lots of stuff on our shores for us to buy at cheap prices, while giving jobs to their people. This is the game we need to play..
Basically, we need to do to these countries (China, India) what they do to us..fight with a low valued currency. Then Indian programmers..etc., are no longer 'cheap', and the offshoring will stop.
Nothing, beside currency value re adjustments, is going to fix this... nothing..
I call BS on this post. Not EVERY job requires the best of skills. I'm sure your company would be perfect for handling NASA software contracts. But for your average small business, they may only need support or simple solutions. Why should such simple solutions require the wage demand set by your company and its employees? Remember, not everyone is asking for 110%. They just want the job done....cheaply. You sir, have a very false sense of idealism.
Life is not for the lazy.
Last thing I want to hear about is the issue of outsourcing. Take the advice of some of the other posters to this forum and actually learn how a business runs. Learn when it's economically sound to outsource your work, and when you should do it in-house. Personally, I'd acquire a secondary skillset and look for work using those skills (I've run a small business for a few years and have skills necessary for admin assistant jobs). If you've been around for a while, start your own consulting business, or look around your area for short-term contracts in your area of expertise. One thing that I have found to be very valuable is to keep an open line of communication with previous employers you have done an excellent job for, because you never know when they may call on you and ask you to do something. My last employer called me up in March and offered me a short-term contract to do some work from home, and that was after I moved to Georgia.
It's a lot and i'm sure there are more companies: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/
"Everything will work out in the end" they say, all the while ignoring how rapidly our civilization is declining
People have been saying that forever. Wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong. When was civilization better (in the past)? And for what reason was it better? Surely it was just different, some things better, some things worse. People who say civilization is declining are usually the types of people who can't listen to their children's music - at least in my experience. That somehow the kool-aid of their youth was "better".
I think it may be more accurate to say that civilization isn't getting morally worse or better. For example, Newfoundland was run by a corrupt merchant class in the 19th century, and now it's under the corporate thumb - as well as a few rich people. Seems the only thing that's changed is the method of bondage.
But there are things that have gotten better over time... for example, the court systems have largely replaced the older system of vengence, and led to a decline in the murder rate. The murder rate is lower now than in the 970s, and even the 1970s. (source Elliot Leyton, an anthropologist who studies killing in various cultures through time)
IMHO civilization is destroying itself, but for reasons David Suzuki would talk about, not because of the destruction of culture. Even this is debatable, since if you study a populations growth in a closed ecosystem, and that population doesn't have a breeding season, then they approach the carrying capacity of that ecosystem, and then pretty much stay there. I don't drink that particular kool-aid, however, it a valid point.
We live in a cultural ocean... too vast to comprehend. The sub-cultures in my small city of 150,000 are rich and varied. Even little St John's is an ocean in which a fly can bath and an elephant drown, and it's unique.
In any event, if mankind is to keep from destroying itself by such a conscious overall government, we must discover first a knowledge of the conditions of culture
By destroying itself, do you mean Armageddon? Do you mean a hell on earth biblical style? Why is it a requirement to understand everything perfectly to not annihilate oneself? Don't forget that that would require [in part] understanding _your_ culture perfectly, which involves your city, and the street in which you live... etc... and since you're part of your culture, and can change it, then you are talking about the sort of self-description that leads to impossible recursion. If you don't think you're important in the "big-equation", remember what chaos maths has taught us.
The only thing that is certain is that societies and cultures will change. I don't think free trade will make everything okay in the end... it will just make everything different to how it is now... and our concepts of what free trade should be will also continue to change.
We certainly don't need some super theory of culture that will save us from ourselves... perhaps it's enough for world cultures to just evolve spontaneously. This doesn't mean that we'll all have a fairy-tale future... but it certainly doesn't mean that we're going to destroy ourselves, nor does it mean that our culture will regress.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Simply put whatever programing position you hold if you want to be more valuble than outsourced workers, learn your bussiness. I mean who do you program for the automtive industry, the chemical industry, the film industry? Learn the bussiness, the process and why. What i am trying to say is learn the in's and out's of what your program is designed to do realy well. Not just how to program it, but the actual workflows, ect that make up the actual work. Not just programing a generic metadata driven application but acutaly knowing the metadata. Realy get to know the bussiness drivers and stake for your applictions. This is a big advantage for those of us in industrial/corporate programing
Right after I got my degree in 1984 I got a job with a computer vision company writing image processing microcode. My degree was in Physics. The company I worked for gave me the title of "Systems Engineer", mainly because the Chief Engineer denegrated the position of "Programmer". That company had no programmers working for it -- only "Systems" and "Electronic" Engineers. But I still spent most of my time writing code. Code was my principle deliverable.
After that I worked for SAIC for a few years. They were the same way -- they denegrated the position of "Programmer" and I became a "Senior Systems Engineer". But I still spent all of my time either writing code or writing documents about algorithms and the design of software systems. But no way was I a "Programmer".
Then I went to a more IT oriented industrial company and I found out what the problem was. I worked with several people who had the title of "Software Engineer", but who were actually "Programmers", in the denegrated sense. They were not productive. They were slow and difficult. I could produce (by their esimate) at a rate of 10 times what they could, and (by my estimate) at a rate of 100 times what most of them could do. I was a manager, but it made more sense for me to write what I needed myself, rather than to delegate. Of the 30 engineers at the company, perhaps 6 were good enough to use as developers.
The reason the other 24 people became "Software Engineers" is because they thought they could make some money. They did not have strong math and science interest, but they were working on their degrees in the early 90s when Time magazine or whoever said the world needed computer programmers.
This is our current problem. The US has millions of people who are supposedly "Software Engineers" or "Programmers" for strategic or commercial reasons. Engineering is not in their heart -- it is a manifestation of greed and desire. This is due to the pudit assessment in the 80s and 90s that "High Tech" would be the place to be -- the rewarding career of the future -- and the hyperbola of the "Dotcom" boom. Such a weight of disingenuous involvement necessarily has a deep and devastating flip side, and that flip side is now, and reflected by your question. The question is not asked with quite enough blood and pain, I think.
The present is painful because the past was foolish. There is actually no room for programmers in this world, but only for engineers. Engineers can design their own programmers -- hence C++, hence Java, hence Visual C++, hence dotnet, mono, whatever you like -- Programmers can be outsourced mindless anonymous denizens piecing
simple concepts together. For a penny an hour. Because the Engineers have made it easy to mindlessly wire simple concepts together anywhere, even as far away as India -- if the problem being addressed is a "Programming" problem.
***
FYI -- I have been there, in Bangalore. They are beautiful, motivated, and brilliant, totally enamoured by knowledge. You must know who Ganesh is and the relation of Ganesh to Bangalore to understand why Bangalore is such a good place to outsource. But you must know that they want to be *here*, in the US. Bangalore is a pit, full of the oil scum of two-stroke lawnmower engines. No one wants to live there for long. And the more success, the more expectation, the more money -- the higher the standard of living they will demand.
Is programming a commodity??
NO, because an activity cannot be a commodity. Programming is a process of iteration, and value comes froms proximity. When all the wannabes pass away here, those who cannot compete because they simply do not have the aptitude or interest, the value of proximity will begin to re-emerge. I am no better than my brother who is as good as me in Bangalore, but I *am* closer.
Or maybe neither of them succeed... but many others will.
One thing is certain: neither would have had the income they have had it not been for that "exploitation." These are two diverse ends of the very worse of that (very) bad exploitation, but they will both have the same result: an increased economic status for the individual and, ultimately, the community - which will inevitably result in the people of that community cracking down on their perceived injustices. Either way, it's better than Yuan's family starving to death or Sveta freezing under a bridge with a sack of spray paint in her lap.
This isn't an excuse - it's a simple fact of life. Yeah, it would be great if everyone in the world could do whatever the fuck they want and we all had whatever we need provided to us and life was shiny and sunny all the time - but we don't live in that world. The tools of this new economy help bring us all a little closer to that end but we still have a long way to go. And, in the bide, most of the complaining I hear - just like yours - amounts to litle more than a moralizing defense of your own self interest. Yeah, it sucks that Yuan makes fifty cents a day and lives in a cardboard box and little Sveta has to suck boris' dick when she's not in front of the camera - but at least Yuan can feed his family without having to huddle on the roadside at night and Sveta has a warm bed to sleep in and proper medical attention when she needs it. And no one is forcing you to support Boris OR Nike.
Consider this: I practice what I preach - I avoid wal-mart like the plague, damn near everything I use in my life is recycled cast-offs (from the car I drive to the laptops I reurbish and resell to the vintage clothes I buy). Even my entertainment comes from artists who trade online and my custom made clothes come from an online tailor - and in both these cases that usually means overseas. So am I to be damned for supporting artists who get essentially nothing (as opposed to nearly nothing, as in the domestic releases) from their recordings? Or for buying tailored clothing from one of those "sweat shops" in Taiwann that employs garment workers at a premium because the clothes they make all have to be custom cut to my (very large) measurements and stitched to my preference?
And what are the alternatives? Make my own clothes? From cloth made in China or Pakistan? Or grow my own cotton, have it ginned, then pay a weaver? Where does it end? And who benefits from me growing my own clothing? How does it help my neighbor if my entire life is so consumed with basic self sufficiency that I end up living in economic poverty? I can afford to pay Yuan to stitch my clothing - I don't even know of a tailor in my own community that actually makes the clothes they sell. And I'm not going to buy "off the rack" imports then pay for alterations - as I already pointed out I can get that done better, cheaper, by doing the import part myself.
So what of you? I'm not asking you this to attack you, I'm asking you this because I know where I'm coming from, but I have very little insight into your approach - and from what I see in your post, it just looks like more of the same cheap talk.
Coercive exploitation is a bad thing - but what makes the bad stu
The book is "The New Ruthless Economy" by Simon Head and there is a sample chapter online at this URL (PDF file)
I work in IT and this book made me think about the situation in a way I hadn't before.
The bottom line is that there may be no way to stop this bleeding of decent jobs overseas short of legislation. But a little protectionism might be in order in this situation.. But it might be futile.. But even so, one way to go might be thinking more long term.
The corporate structure also should be changed to make cororations more accountable to the community. This might require changing our participation in some international treaties which override the democratic process. For example, companies can sue countries that impede free trade under the NAFTA treaties and others. This was done to prevent countries from imposing limits on corporate power through the ballot box. See yesterdays New York Times for more on this..
We need to do a cost analysis of the full cost of exporting jobs overseas. Because eventually, a lot of people will be going on welfare, etc. if the bleeding continues. It wont just be IT workers. Basically, a large percentage of people in the so called "service industry" and managerial jobs are also threatened..
The solution I think is to look at the *real cost* of eliminating the US technological infrastructure. If we ship the jobs overseas, eventually, those buyers and sellers of services will eliminate the middlemen.. the US companies.. Its an old story that empires do this in their decline.. by the way..
Its not that the money to pay Americans isn't there..the corporate interests are just getting greedy.. The IT workers (in their opinion) were being paid too well. The bottom line is that even though IT workers saved the employers a lot of money, they are still workers.. i.e. expendable. Blue collar workers have been dealing with this for a long time. Their solution was unionization, but that only goes so far because you cant unionize robots. It's not going to get better, IMO. In the future, very few people will need to work. this could be a good thing, if we can adjust to it. But it could also mean poverty and civil unrest on a massive scale if we don't. Its a slow process, so people aren't noticing it. But wages have definitely stagnated for everyone except the CEOs of this world..and the independently wealthy who live on investments.. We are headed towards a postindustrial society...with all that means..
You have two products.
They are both identical.
One is cheaper.
Which do you buy ?
Thats right you buy the cheaper one.
Just because they can do it better than us, doesn't make them bad, and it doesn't make us unpatriotic for wanting to use their services / products.
What is should make us do, is want to do our job better so that our clients come back to us.
Competition. Isn't that what capitalism, freedom, and the American Spirit is built on ?
Oh no wait. Thats right. We prefer to have that facade and enjoy monopolies and locally produced, substandard goods.
Corporations have an obligation to their shareholders to cut costs. Even if it means child labor, even slavery.. (as long as they can get away with it where they do it)
They have no obligation to provide jobs. In fact, they have an obligation to eliminate jobs.
They have no obligation to any country of community.
They have an obligation to those that provide their capital. Period.
I'm from the UK, and I concur.
Stop being so Xenophobic and get competitive !
but I have to charge 875% more then my Bangalore competition just to make rent (in San Francisco). A satellite uplink and a Ko Pha-Ngan bungalow have started sounding good lately.
I'm sort of joking about moving to Thailand but am curious if any other /. readers have moved on to cheaper overseas real estate.
Wall Street responds by making their stock more valuable.
Want proof? See how they penalize Costco for treating their employees well, while loving Wa*-M**t which treats their employees like slaves. (locking them in at night, cheating them on overtime, etc.)
Why compete with slave labor when you can exploit it yourself?The pay difference is so great between India and here that you can set up your own development or consulting company, hire cheap Indian labor to do the work and pay yourself to manage them out of the profits. Only a fool competes with slaves; the smart man finds a way to get the slaves to work for him, too.
Being a regular on /., I've found that MOST people here-
1. Hate Apple for OVERPRICED hardware (aka, why don't they release OSX for x86... its cheaper hw you see... commoditize yada yadda)
2. You like Rio cuz they make an mp3 player that is cheaper than the iPod (how'd you feel if you could that iPod 40GB for $99 instead of $599??)
3. You like linux which is, primarily, cheaper than other commercial offerings.
4. You HATE SUN because their hw is expensive (and don't care that its backplane can push 9.2GBps... )
5. "...imagine a beowulf cluster..." you like clusters cuz they allow you to have "CHEAP" computing power.
6. Whined all the way when SUN placed $20 download fee on Solaris x86 to cover bandwidth costs
7. Bashed apple iTunes store for $9.99 album price (what... no CD and still $10!!)
Need I say more ??
Everybody likes things cheap/free. And the dot-com boom produced enough IT workers that in post dot-com era, they're in over-supply... or in short IT workers are a COMMODITY...
Its Indian workers now JUST because internet (yeah!!) made it possible to do work equally well for *most* IT jobs. Sometime ago I was reading about how IM/phone/email has changed mode of communication in office... instead of walking over to co-worker down the hall, you ring/email/IM him/her.... so how does it differ if the co-worker is half-way around the globe... internet just doesn't care!!
If it weren't for the communication boom, you might have been watching cheap mexican workers or H1B workers taking your job...
Face it... everyone likes cheap/free... even the CEOs and PHBs!
- mritunjai
Learn Hindi?
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Software can be multiplied easily by making copies of it. This means if you do software, the development costs often won't be the major pain, but getting people to buy your product. I guess you can prove me wrong in some cases, but I'd say that a lot of the expenses in salaries is really executive and creativity salary. If you start cost-cutting there, you can just as well start to chop your head off.
If you are a software company that needs to borrow capital, I guess offshoring makes sense. Smart money is just too smart for us.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
What should IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts, to add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits
I've been wrestling with a similar problem for a while now...
I work as a developer in my organisation of 2000+ people. My department designs and builds bespoke applications to enable the business to operate. Occasionally, we outsource projects to external organisations but only if it's because we don't have the resources to build it in house, which is the preferred option both politically and financially. Interestingly, about 90% of our developers are contractors, some of whom have been at the company for over 5 years!
However, in order to further my career I was told that I had to something different. It must be said, that my organisation is very keen on multi-skilling and expects it's permanent staff to move around every couple of years. I was offered training and a position in Business Analysis or Project Management. Both are good roles but I wasn't really that interested. I've always considered myself a technical person and most of the time, I really enjoyed my job.
However, the senior technical roles are very few and far between so I was kinda stuck. I needed to find a way to further my career (and my salary) without having to pursue a managerial position. I tried increasing my technical skillset, improving and demonstrating my "soft skills" (presentations, procurement, managing people) but that wasn't really working either.
Eventually, I stumbled upon a chance opportunity: a non-IT 2 year secondment in business. I was expressed an interest in this role and although management where suprised that I was applying they where very supportive and encouraged me. I think the reason is that there doesn't seem to be much human traffic between the IT Dept. and the rest of the business. I could act as a sort of ambassador between the two departments. But most importantly, I will be actually experiencing the challenges and the issues that our Users face. When I return to IT I will bring my first hand knowledge back and some pretty "l33t" analytical skills! :->
So everybody wins! I further my career by adding another dimension to my skills. IT wins by having access to somebody who understands development and the business processes and challenges. The Business gains by having someone with excellent technical knowledge and a in-depth knowledge of their systems.
I'm not suggesting that everyone should give up IT and do something else for a couple of years, rather I think that some of us might benefit from adding value to themselves in ways other than developing their technical skills. If we really really understand what our customers/users/colleagues are trying to achieve with our products then we might be able to find better ways of realising their ambitions and serving them better.
that's a lot of hot air - the market never pay $130K to $150K for an intermediate programmer during the boom time. Even at the end of boom time, getting pay $92K to 98K for a senior Java programmer is quite common.
I suggest that a US (or UK) it worker should mention that the money they earn will be spent in the local economy. Thus promoting growth. But money spent on outsourced IT is money lost to the local economy (including for the products produced by the hiring company)
Where was the electronics made that's all over your place? America or Taiwan?
Where were the clothes made that you were wearing? America or China?
Of course, you can buy American-made clothes and electronics, but it's a damn sight more expensive. That, my friends, is the future of IT. The majority of stuff will be produced cheaply, and there will be a small domestic market for specialist niches that can't be shipped abroad. And as with clothes and electronics the stuff the majority wants will be produced very cheaply.
The domestic clothing market is fancy designer stuff, so the domestic IT market will also only be for fancy designer stuff. Nobody in their right minds would start a company making jeans for everyone, there's just no way to compete with the foreign factories.
There is also a domestic electronics market and this runs along the same lines.
So in the long term:
(a) the politicians won't do anything about this because it's just the market operating as it's meant to, and it's already happened at least twice without the economy going tits up - in fact, the benefit to society of clothing and electronics being exported to the East cannot be ignored;
(b) those of us in outsourceable jobs WILL lose them and WILL have to find something that cannot be outsourced, either in fancy designer shops, the IT equivalent of those poncy clothes shops that charge a fortune for a pair of socks that look no different from bog-standard stuff except for the label, or in other fields, such as face to face teaching (although a lot of teaching will be outsourceable as well).
...improving your math (sic) and spelling.
OK let me clarify, since United Stateans will be clueless.
If you HAVE to abbreviate it, it would be "maths"
G. W. doesn't read the newspaper, but he reads /. ... who'da thunkit.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
Think about this. America stands for capitalism and free trade (almost). So when a company wants to buy rubber balls for mice it would make sence to buy the best quality for the cheapist right?
/. about the mobile internet labs in India - cool idea right? - bringing Internet to the farmers and other who would not have access normaily. Same with jobs - it's about giving access to jobs in other countries. And bring up a middle counsumer class, raising the quality of life.
Same thing with workers. Back five years ago people said that all the Indians should go back to their country - And they did. Taking all what they learned about busness and ideas with them.
Now this was all part of a planed idea - How else do you help another country than to educate it's workforce and let it become more competitive on the global scale?
Think about the posts on
Americans insted of thinking that they are the Best and Only country in the world should really open their eyes and look around them.
As for Americans becomming more competitive you have to think - What do *I* have to offer that someone else does not. IT is not the answer to fast cash anymore. Sorry. You also have to remeber that fellow Americans are also your compititon.
Some Ideas:
Learn a language. Knowing of only English is good if you plan to work for a small shop. But knowlage of Indian or Russian or something else can help you when that forgien Boss comes to make a bussness deal.
Learn something that makes you diffrent. Learn Cobal or some old language that people have forgoten - You have to remeber that there a lot of old systems out there (banks) and they pay good money if you know them. I'm sure that I could find 500 MCSE/C++/Peal programmers in 10 minutes.
Travel. If you plan to work with a global company then knowing about the little things can help when you meet peole from those places.
Think Global. The world does not evolve around the USA anymore. Busness is about the bottom line and could easly hire an ad agancy to make it look like they are form the US.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
This is an old trend with out sourcing tasks to other countries. Mexico comes to mind right away. Now to the point of this posting, I don't think that IT workers in the US are in dire straights. A company needs to have a strong management structure and proper processes in place. This limits to the large companies. Joe Blow Business can't afford to go out and out source their IT department to India. To face facts there are greater number of smaller business in the US than large ones. These trends normally do die out since so many blunders will happen and difficultly of management. Don't remember the future we're doomed to repeat it!
Then change the consultancy you are using.
In our case is pretty much everything done every morning....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The answer is to lower your standard of living. U.S. programmers are paid too much and delude themselves into thinking that they are special and have some "hot" skills. Compare yourselves to physicians or engineers (real ones). The reason they earn more compared to the rest of the population is because they actually have to study for years and pass rigorous certification exams. If anybody can be a programmer -- and I do mean anybody (dropouts, journalists, musicians, janitors, etc.) -- then maybe your skills aren't so hot, are they?
Sorry guys, but all I see here is bleating about jobs going to India, here in the UK that is old hat, almost no jobs are going to India....
Vietnam is the new India, even the Indians are worried....
two thoughts....
1/ maybe the Koreans weren't so dumb (you listening BT you assholes) when they rolled out 10 mbit domestic connections faster than we could roll out so called broadband 256/512 ADSL.
2/ you think the fuckers have forgotten about agent orange and shit? wait till mcdonnel-douglas start outsourcing their IT, lmfao.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Honestly chaps, how much does it help you to know about the latest rubish on TV, who won the superbowl or who is the latest TV evangelist if what you need is to implement an algorithm in C++?
You can explain perfectly technical terms, even with vlodi espelling errorz, tat altoug tirezome, dont ofuscate compleetly the meaning of the messaje, to somebody in a completely different social context.
You guys should stop fooling yourselves, you may not understand the accent of your Indian, Sinagaporean, or Hongkonese counterparts, but their communication skills in written English are as good as those of native speakers who have a false sense of security believing that being native speaker gives you an innate advantage to communicate properly.
Heck, even people like me with a recorded history on this site of murdering in a daily basis Shakespeare's mother tongue can compete with you guys, you would be monumentally stupid to believe that stellar English skills will be a fundamental factor in keeping you employed....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'm french. During several years as an IT member of an American company my internal softwares were rejected because of nih. Well not really rejected but the amount of money dedicated to those projects was in the 1 to 100000 as compared to big holes like 'I want to spend 200 M$' on my new SAP and 3 years later management is changed, you've spent 120 M$ in nothing and switched to another big iron called it oracle or whatever. This is not informatics, this is not software, this not technology. We must all come back to artisans as we were at the beginning of the web. Not to mention the fact that directing people, even bright one, from oversea is frustrating. I know this. As I say it anytime a big project is launching in a corporation, why not buy a company who is specialized in this domain. it costs less.
Brazilians don't go to US universities because the ones back home are good enough.
In case you did not know Brazil had always healthy high tech industries (IT, weapons, cars, mining, etc.)...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If you are a member of a fund, a plan, if you have a bank deposit then you can make a difference. Call your institution and tell them that you would be willing to take a slightly lower return in order to keep jobs in Australia/USA/etc.
I know there are things like ethical and triple bottom line investments, anyone care to give their thoughts on these sorts of things?
It is not like unemployed US programmers are dying of starvation on the streets.
How ridiculous can some people get?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Your companies" in Mexico, as you call them, were paid every single penny worth their assets during Mexican oil nationalization.
This was necessary because (surprise, surprise) they refussed to obey several rulings of Mexican courts regading workers rights (foreign oil companies in Mexico were flaunting Mexican law as far back as 1907, so the different Mexican goverments of the period only took around 30 years until finally found no other solution). They even treathened the Mexican goverment, with get this, military invassion in case of nationalization.
Nothing new under the sun I guess.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That means using tools which let you do the same job faster and more reliably.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"When an employer decides he needs to fill a programming position, what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered? That question is becoming difficult to answer as the days go by !
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
...to listen to your truth! After decades of media propaganda, they are trained better than Pavlov's dog.
m .htmlp ://www.deoxy.org/korten_assault.htm
THey will, for the most part, just mutter "Commie" to your remarks, and either mod as troll or move on.
Oh, well, what can ya do? Anyway, here are some links backing up what you are talking about:
http://www.geocities.com/cryofan/socialde
http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htm
htt
eat shiat and bark at the moon
...of our govt working for the corporations and investors. If we acted as if we were the OWNERS of this country, instead of employees for the corporations, we could do whatever we want to this country.
Imagine if a jointly owned business hired a manager to handle that business, and then that managers started turning away business, sending customers to the lower priced competitor down the street ("outsourcing"). When confronted by the owners, the manager replies that his behavior is justified because now the managers can get that "outsourced" product/service cheaper, thus benefiting the owners of the joint business.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
People have been saying that forever. Wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong. When was civilization better (in the past)? And for what reason was it better? Surely it was just different, some things better, some things worse. People who say civilization is declining are usually the types of people who can't listen to their children's music - at least in my experience. That somehow the kool-aid of their youth was "better".
That is why Nietzsche refers to it as a primitive morality. You are absolutely right, the problem is the proponents of Free Trade are using what amounts to a very basic moral justification for their beliefs.
I think it may be more accurate to say that civilization isn't getting morally worse or better.
You might be right, but clearly a huge number of people don't agree with you.
But there are things that have gotten better over time... for example, the court systems have largely replaced the older system of vengence, and led to a decline in the murder rate.
I don't think Nietzsche would agree that is necessarily an improvement. Clearly, a major problem in this world is there isn't enough killing, enough war. Billions of people are going to have to die, either through ecological collapse, or warfare. Death is a natural part of life, and it is simplistic to say that a decline in death valuable... in the case of our modern world it is destorying it. Maybe 6 billion isn't to many, but soon it will be 10, then 20... In the next 100 years we WILL get to a critical mass where competition for natural resources will result in combat. This happens with all animals, including the invading organisms in your body right now.
Personally, I think combat should be renewed as a legitimate means of dispute resolution. I cringe every time I watch some court drama.
By destroying itself, do you mean Armageddon? Do you mean a hell on earth biblical style? Why is it a requirement to understand everything perfectly to not annihilate oneself? Don't forget that that would require [in part] understanding _your_ culture perfectly, which involves your city, and the street in which you live... etc... and since you're part of your culture, and can change it, then you are talking about the sort of self-description that leads to impossible recursion. If you don't think you're important in the "big-equation", remember what chaos maths has taught us.
Well, I would encourage you to read some of Nietzsche's works. Also, as I said... Nietzsche isn't too concerned with death per se, so that is not the kind of destruction he is talking about. He is talking about spiritual destruction. You seem to have a very Christian ethic (whether or not you are a Christian), so be careful to apply that here since that is something Nietzsche is directly attacking throughout his writings.
We certainly don't need some super theory of culture that will save us from ourselves... perhaps it's enough for world cultures to just evolve spontaneously. This doesn't mean that we'll all have a fairy-tale future... but it certainly doesn't mean that we're going to destroy ourselves, nor does it mean that our culture will regress.
Are you sure about that? I don't know where you are, but a quick walk through 19th century neighborhoods shows a much greater spiritual clarity amongst people in the past. We used to build houses with character, beautiful parks, construct statues to artists, composers, poets... I could spend a great deal of time discussing HOW culture is being destroyed, but I don't have the time. Read the book I quote, it is one aphorism of hundreds.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
moron
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It's not whining when the people you hire overseas are truly incompetent. That's what this shop was, truly. They blew a major QA project for one department, and lasted three months with another division upstairs before being taken off of that project. We have a very competent Ukranian operation that we work with, and a division of our own company in Bangalore that works out fine because they weren't hired for their cheapness, but rather for their competence. When the company in question is in charge of the HR issues, you can pick your remote employees, and get the cream of the crop.
But like working with every consultant, it is extremely important to track their mistakes and their successes. In the case of the outfit we fired, the former outweighed the latter.
But the dirty thing is that there are managers wandering around to see 'who is working' and looking for excuses to put people out to pasture in order to replace them for 1/4 the 'price'. Some managers actually think that the biggest unnecessary expense is salary, a rather dim and short-sighted view for a company expecting workers who will bend over backwards to give them a quality product.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
The local group finished on time and on budget, including verification testing.
The offshore group has now spent more money than the on local group, their compiled image is roughly 8 times as long as the local group's, their testing is inadequate to pass FAA standards and they are 6 monthes behind.
I hope this outsourcing thing turns out to be just a fad because it's costing us more than it is saving us.
Recently, I needed 3rd level support for an IBM product. I was told I would have to wait 24 - 48 hours for them to set up a meeting with the 3rd tier support half-way around the world! When I got the inevitable call to ask my opinion about how the issue was resolved, I told them I was very displeased with their service and that they should have someone available here!
If the market demands that vendors provide people in a way that only local people can provide, then businesses will provide that (and the jobs that go along with it). Demand personal visits on issues. Demand 24x7 availability. Eventually, it will be cheaper to have workers residing in the local economy.
If the tech companies are sending the work to overseas firms that in turn cost less for the tech companies, why the hell is the price of software still high?
I still think it is the biggest scam that Photoshop costs close to $1000, for one copy.
I have been witness to the trend that companies often hire "employees" who later eventually become unemployed, unsatisfied, and untrained.
High costs of IT (in addition to needed specialties) often force companies to outsource, hire consultants, or use managed services. If the work you do (service) is being sold at $60.00 to $188.00, then maybe you should consider an alternative. Start your own business. The failure or success of your business is a result of the effort you put in it.
Also notice that there is alot of small, disadvantage,8a companies. There not it in for the long-haul, they are in business to grow a company large enough to become acquired. After all who wants to work til your 80. Why not start a company, build it, then sell it later to enjoy the retirement you work hard for.
Then i was REALLY wasting my time, and in this case id change the label from traitor, to enemy.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't get me wrong... I'm another one of those folks who's entire "Profession" has left the building... Dice has had exactly 1 job notice in the area of Technical Support over the last 7 months. Thank God, I've got Software QA to fall back on... Doh!!!
The point is folks, that this is a huge complex beastie, and I'm getting tired of the blind folks talking about, how the elephant is like a snake. The American economy is still the primary economic engine in the world. Period. The worlds trade and financial stability is directly tied to the American economy. The wholesale export of American jobs is just a small part of American companies, globalizing, and reaping the benefits of cost differentials between world markets and American markets. The Fed has been only too happy to give big business anything it wants, because we now have the best government money can buy. The feeding frenzy has produces an economic implosion the likes of which the world has never before seen. The wealth of America is flooding out of it's borders in what can only be described as explosive hemmorhaging.. and there will be collateral damage enough for everyone to partake.
* The dollars value crashes explosively...
* The government has to print more money to cover expenses (like the insane deficit)
* The Bonds market collapses (have you been following the price lately?)
* Interest rates go throught the roof.
* The Housing Bubble goes BOOM, followed by business growth.
* Millions of people with mountains of credit debt (credit cards, new homes that weren't purchased on a fixed rate loan... etc.) discover their monthly payment start to resemble last years annual payments. These people go belly up, and what is already a record setting pace over the last two years of people going bankrupt becomes an economic freefall.
* Banks begin to go south as their customers go bankrupt, and the Fed is hard pressed to cover the defaults as it too begins to inch towards economic collapse.
Now for the interesting part... All those jobs in India, and China, and the Phillipines... who's going to pay for those jobs. The world market just killed the biggest customer, and now except for a very few "Have it all"s everybody is now equally destitute. All those foreign countries holding dollars find that those bucks are now being printed on rolls that are squeezably soft, and except for their superior absorbency, those bucks don't have much value. Now we're looking at global economic disaster. If America implodes, be assured, we're taking everybody with us.
This is why you need to control free international trade. This is why you establish tariff and trade barriers.., not because their pretty, but because the alternative in a world that moves as fast as ours, and is as inequitable in it's current state as our is, is unable to sustaing anything ressembling free trade.
We need to bring the world up to a high standard of living, while working on modernizing our infrastructure, and providing real world class education from the K on up. As it is, our schools are sheep farms, and our children are being taught to be nothing more than good consumers who do what they're told. If we're going to lead anything... it will be a third millinium of peace and prosperity for all, or it's going to be a short bloody mess followed by extreme quiet for a very long time. We need to start putting people with longterm vision, and talent in positions that will actually serve the race. Accelerating technology insures that we will either all win, or we will all certainly lose.
Genda
In other words, the outsourcing companies are laying themselves open to espionage by either foreign companies, governments, or non-state actors (i.e. Al Queda and friends). Considering that many of the countries most used as outsourcing destinations (India, Russia, China) also target us with espionage, there are MAJOR National Security implications here! If for no other reason, the US Government DOES have the right and obligation to intervene.
I would recommend taking only full-time positions with health benefits.
Taking temporary jobs only seems to cause more problems. It only entrains management to accept a virtual reality as if it were real. Outsourcing is only an experiment, don't let it take root !
Alot of companies are only hiring temps to brain suck intellectual property out of them for outsourcing so accepting temp work only fans the flame.
If you do have to take contract work after years as an FTE, beware of the new problems you'll face. In my state, you can't collect unemployment unless you work at least 6 months straight. Unemployment benefits are "use it or loose it" so be sure to file the week after your contract ends. You may need that money for health care after dealing with all the stress caused by employers who now treat software developers as little more than gloried fork lift drivers.
Big companies are blamed by Indian service providers for pushing up salaries
Why every job doesn't translate well overseas
IT auditors worry that outsourcers may not provide the documentation needed to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley
We need more IT people in management and ownership positions. The fact is, most managers and business "leaders" have no clue the value of their IT staff.
the lives of its participants. Villages, tribes and communities sprung for the general welfare of the members, not so that certain people would have a vehicle for obtaining wealth.
Adam Smith (like Karl Marx) was philosopher, not a scientist.
THINK ABOUT THAT FOR ONE GODDAMN SECOND.
Basicially, you're saying "Companies SHOULD be able to make them work 12 hour days, use child labor, use PRISON (aka slave) labor, etc, because otherwise, they wouldn't get any of our dollars!"
That is the arguement used to justify all worker mistreatment from slavery to pre-unionized factory labor. Happened a lot during the great depression.
"Why, they should work 16 hour days, 6 days a week in my factory, otherwise they'd be out on the street, or working on a farm for 1/5 the money! We're just trying to help them better themselves!"
Virtually every economist I have ever read or heard speak disagrees with this, and believes that free trade and labor movement is the fastest way to ecoomic growth because countries produce goods in which they have a comparative advantage, thus increasing overall production to the maximum amount possible. Do you have any data to back up your hypothesis (although I hestitate to use that word so loosely)?
It seems that IT workers are now making the same old arguments textile workers and circuit board makers have made for years... and for what? Bottom line, your industry is changing and you can either change with it or starve. That is what my family has to do when they began losing the manufactoring jobs they once had. What did some of them do, get jobs in computers. Now what are they doing, getting management degrees. I went back to school at night just to get a business degree, and it was the best decision I could have made. Quit whing about fairness, you number is up so get in line. Just don't think you can step on the manufactoring worker ahead of you.
GODDAMN IT.
Yes, Indians are just as smart as Americans. They have magic universities which are the best in the universe.
That doesn't mean that a great deal of the contracting companies out there aren't filled with lousy programmers. In fact, you may recall a lot of crappy IT school graduates passing themselves off as programmers when they had 2 weeks of Visual Basic training. You think the same thing hasn't happened in India? So when someone says "People are America are better engineers/aren't code monkeys/can design", its not a freaking comment on the genetic inferiority of the indian people, its because when you have a person in front of you, you know their skills and can communicate your requirements better.
Much more than someone on the phone saying "I have many MANY skilled people behind the curtain. Send me your EXTREMELY EXPLICIT requirements and I will code it." then later you find crap in the code like:
while (majuaba5)
{
majuaba=majuaba+1;
}
... or are those getting outsourced too?
First post on slashdot wuwu. I'm an unemployed software developer / administrator in Canada. I have a few responses to things in many threads on this subject. #1) Outsourced IT workers living in another country I dont believe they are sweat shops, and do believe they get paid almost the equivilent of North American developers in respect to cost of living. What I'm tired of hearing is the opinion "dont you think IT workers in India deserve a job". I think everyone in every country should live well, but I'm not going to give my career up for someone else in some other Country - I care for ME and only ME. #2) Outsourcing to reduce costs benefits us. BS. Any gain made by reducing these costs only goes to shareholders and CEO's. Do you think I'm happy for top management to make an extra $50,000 bonus while I'm outta work? #3) Find another Career Easier said then done. White collar workers generally have a skill-set thats been developed over years. You cant simply switch to something else overnight. Someone in blue collar industry mainly services, can more easily find a job because they dont require immediate skills (as long as the market has jobs). Have you SEEN the requirements for IT positions these days? They want 4 years Java, 3 years .NET, 6 years unix, 5 years windows, 10 years for a product thats been alive for 2 years, want you to hold a pager for 24X7 support, and "willing to work in a stressfull and demanding environment", putting in 60+ hours / week.
Anyone with any knowledge in IT, specifically software development knows that someone who develops quality work will know either Java, or .NET (as an example of common development requirements), and not BOTH. Also, I find it near immpossible to be coding a project, and doing "Project management", "Support" at the same time, these are completely different skill-sets.
#4) There should be tariffs for knowledge work.
As an example, to me theres no difference when the US tariffs Canadian lumber (its cheaper i think). You could comment on this stating "why dont they do the same for texttiles etc". Well, I dont know, this type of politics is not somethign I look into every day, but now that it hit me personally, I do have an interest in what effects me.
#4) Offtopic - job search in the IT industry
Anyone else find job searching almost useless, and networking your way into a job the only way?
We seemed to have moved to "electronic" recruiting using workopolis etc as the main way, and now that the market is saturated with unemployed IT workers, any position offered are flooed with 1014340101 resumes.
At this point, I have no idea what to do.
Unemployed Tech Worker #494343
I would like to see the US government offer similar incentives for companies (of all types) here-- so that there's some interest in keeping jobs in the country. Payroll tax reform sounds like a good place to start...
It gets downright expensive to try to talk with someone who can barely understand you, and who you barely understand. Misscommunication leads to rabbit trails, which last for at least 12 hours, because that is the time offset between here and india.
...are only given to US citizens, except for extreme cases. So, we should all follow my example and go work for a defense contractor! Let's see them outsource me now!(That wasn't a challenge if "they" are reading this.)
Get a minor or double major or masters in another area.
Every field under the overarching banners of science and engineering can benefit from programming. From visualization and modeling to calculation, there's a need for people like us with the ability to bridge the gaps between computation and the theory of a particular discipline.
Become very proficient in a foreign language. International business can benefit from multilingual development teams for international sites and software. Sure, there are plenty of foreign developers who speak english, but I'd argue there's just as much demand for the opposite.
Study art or writing. User Interface is always going to be a regional problem. Being that person whose great at design and programming is gonna give you the edge. Likewise, there's always a lack of documentation and people will need english fluency and actual technical aptitude. And you could branch out and start writing books on programming.
Get a teaching certificate. "those who can't, teach." Well, "can't" doesn't always mean lacking the ability, but lacking the opportunity. Training is still huge and like writing, you have to be technically adept. You still get to code, you just code for fun and learning instead of under someone's deadline.
Perhaps it's time for computer science to become a core part of education like mathematics? It's a specilized tool that can take you into highly important jobs in other fields.
Cross-training at least provides us all with an out. If programming really does continue to fall out, we have a direction to go in.
?
m.
CEO's will accept a learning curve if its cheap and if it increases the quarterly earnings. They are at such a high level in the corporation, that the only results they see are the bottom line earnings.
The stock market has people looking for short term increases in earnings, not long term benifits. Who cares about long term as long as they can cash out and get rich.
If it takes a programmer a year to get up to speed, thats OK if he only costs half as much.
This isn't going to be popular, but I think it's a valuable observation. I work in a CS department with a fairly high percentage of Indian students, and I've noticed a number of differences between the Indian and American students. The biggest differences seems to be arrogance. Most of our American students spend a good portion of time moaning about how bad MS software is, and how they won't even touch a Windows box, let alone try and code for it (then go home and play Tribes on their Xbox). Meanwhile, the Indian students are working both on Solaris and on Win2k, learning Visual Studio in addition to open source tools, and generally just working harder-I can come in any night of the week and find Indian students in the labs, I can't say that of American students (that may be more of a factor of home computing power than dedication, however). The reality is, whether we like it or not, business uses Microsoft software, and being unwilling (or unable) to use the dominant platform certainly isn't going to help your case. I'm not saying everyone should run out and get their MCSE/MCSD's.....but this is a case where I think our own inflexibility and predjudice doesn't help.
I am a brazilian programer and I see a simple reality here: The American way of life is too expensive and not sustainable.
The salary of a intermadiate programmer in USA is the same of a high level manager here.
My company is a CMM level 2 with 5000 employes, I spend 1/4 of my salary with taxes, and my country signed the "Kioto Protocol" which USA didn't. "The U.S. has laws governing polution, working conditions, benefits, etc. " someone told. My country have all of this as well. And much more cheap.
Ask the australian and indian fellows in this discution. They will tell you the same. With my salary (something about US$ 2K/month or 26k/year with all the benefits like health care, life insurance, one month vacancy,etc..) I live very well in my country. I have a house, a good car and I have the best salary of my friends. So, what is wrong to outsource jobs here?
I have a sugestion: vote! But vote in politicians that care with the rest of the world. There are no the poor people of India or China. There is the poor people of the world.
The world is our house and our contry, and the USA is not separeted of the rest. The probrems here in Brasil, or in China or India or Africa, soon or later will reflect in someway in the USA and Europe.
In the next American election, are the candidates discuting about foreign police? Is war the only American foreign police?
Thank you all.
No... I think the people of India need to "get over their prejudices". Or don't you consider the "untouchables" from the lower caste of India's Hindu population worth your consideration.
I didn't think so...
At its heart, this is a Tragedy of the Commons problem. Outsourcing to get cheaper labor is always beneficial to any one company. It's when everyone does it that the center cannot hold and you get one big clusterfuck. By the nature of the problem, it's in the selfish best interest of each company to do it.
The solution really is legislation. This situation is no different than the environment in that respect. Sure, it's in the free market best interest of every production company to have no environmental standards if not required by the government, but if that's allowed, pretty soon nobody can breathe or drink water anymore.
My solution: Make it disadvantageous to outsource/trade with countries who have protectionist policies preventing U.S. workers from competing for their jobs. (This has the added side effect of making the common slashdot refrain that outsourced IT workers should look for jobs in India or China 75% less ludicrous.) Do the same for any country that won't match our labor health and environmental standards. If another country can compete even up with the U.S. in an industry without poisoning the air or forcing children to work in factories, more power to them.
That won't stop all outsourcing, nor should it. But it would be a step in the right direction.
I will try to explain it. Please assume that the 'product' is basically a commodity.
A product is $5 when made in the US.
Offshore cost is $4.
Protectionist view.
Add $1 tarrif to imported product.
Product is $5 for either supplier, US gets no exports.
Consumers pay $1 more then the rest of the world for the same product.
Other option.
The US company brings their cost to $4.
The US company can now sell their product globally.
The consumer pays the same price as the rest of the world.
Lets say this is with production equipment.
In option A, the company has to pay 25% more than an offshore competitor for their manufacturing equipment. This means before they have even made a product, it is more expensive to do business in the US. This is why although a tarrif will help company A, it will hurt downstream customers.
It is a nasty spiral, eventually it will result a globally uncompetative country, with no exports, which will make imports terribly expensive.
The best solution is to be competative, either on price, or a better product.
There are some reasons other than what you mentioned that I won't shop at Wal-mart:
1) Their business model is to always lower their prices - you've probably seen the happy face ads on TV. In order to do this, they demand that their suppliers lower their prices. If the supplier refuses, Wal-mart threatens to look for a new supplier. Because Wal-mart is so big, the loss of such a contract can be devastating to most suppliers. So the suppliers cut costs to meet Wal-Mart's demands, laying off workers or moving operations overseas. (There was a good article about this about a month ago, but it's expired.)
2) They no longer let me use my bank MasterCard as a credit card because they don't like the fees MC charges.
3) Their practice of offering lousy employee benefits is encouraging other retailers to do the same.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
For example, India is not necessarily the cheapest solution in terms of performing coding functions any more. However, large American corporations, one of which I work for, have made large investments in India and the labour pool available there, and are therefore demanding that prices do not increase too much.
So how then are Indian firms coping with this situation?
As we speak, they are finding countries with workers even cheaper than their own countries to keep prices low, so they can continue to attract business, and continue to please their multinational (mostly American) 'partners'.
Which countries you might ask?
Well, InfoSys, one of (if not the) largest Indian outsourcing firm has already begun on-outsourcing to firms in Bulgaria, and Russia. Interestingly, not China, due to language barriers. It would seem that there are a reasonable amount of trained, bright IT engineers in Bulgaria and Russia also reasonably fluent in English, who are able to perform coding jobs at a reasonably low cost.
So what is it then that the Indian firms provide? Well, they are very accustomed to dealing with multinationals now - particularly American multinationals. They have learned how to interact, how to communicate, how to work across the hideous time differences between Bangalore and Silicon Valley, and how to interpret what their customers really want.
This all points to the eventuality that we may indeed see a decline in the levels of IT engineers being hired in India - a leveling of the boom so to speak, just as was experienced in the USA, the UK, Australia ... practically every 'Western' country, once the boom started to bust.
In fact, the pattern of what is happening in India has already happened - to me, in another western country.
I work for one of the largest IT/Internet related firms in the world - an American multinational. I choose not to reveal which firm this may be. My job until recently was managing a development center for internal software development based in Sydney, Australia, which was created to offset costs of internal development in the US.
As my company made a greater and greater investment in India, it soon became apparent that we were no longer as cost competitive - so we changed as a group to capitalize on the skills we had - namely, our proficiency in our understanding of corporate necessities, our knowledge of the existing systems and infrastructure of the company, our proficiency in English, and our ability to work across time zones.
However, eventually it soon became cheaper to even outsource those functions to India.
Do you spot a pattern here?
Maybe Bulgaria will also one day be on-outsourcing.
Now, I don't claim that this is the death-knell for Indian IT. Certainly not for a while. Large multinationals have made too significant an investment in India to have that disappear just yet. But they're going to have to stay on their toes to keep prices down, or eventually the cost/benefit analysis will say it is worth uprooting Indian operations and relocating elsewhere. Maybe by that time it will be Kazakhstan, or Tajikstan, or maybe it will be somewhere in Africa - the forgotten continent.
These are market forces at work - the market is supposed to find the cheapest prices. It isn't pretty, but let's be realistic - in many ways, IT engineering has already been commoditised. Don't kid yourself. Count how many IT engineers are at your company now as compared to 5-10 years ago.
Oh, to be sure, there is always going to be a market for IT engineers in certain select fields. The guys at Pixar are always going to be shit hot, but frankly, with the amount of Ph.D's, Patents, and cool ideas between them, they frankly deserve every accolade, and thus their continued employment.
Robots will do most of the work. Software that six year olds can use will commoditize programming. Most other jobs will be gone too. Why use people when machines can do the work? Even cars will drive themselves and robots will pick our fruit, sell us groceries and even serve us in restaurants as well as cook the food.
Productivity will continue to soar. Society will make more than it does now, much more, with ony 1/5 the people employed. Those people will make little. Because they will be a dime a dozen.
Decision support software will make all the critical decisions, humans will simply be a front to maintain illusions.
Taking care of the masses of homeless poor will be outsourced to China and India.
People will live on their inherited wealth or be forced to move to the inexpensive planets like Mars or Ganymede. (but they will get soaked on the cost of oxygen) Humans will be able to buy everything they need if they have the money. Indentured servitude in the colonies awaits the rest. Sure, as before, many won't survive. This is part of progress. The strong inherit the weak.
Fighting offshoring is futile. You will be assimilated! Bend over!
First, step back and approach ther subject from a neutral standpoint. Start with the statement "virtually every economist". OK. Now realise that what you hear, and I will agree with you, virtually all economists make their own personal fortunes working *inside the con* I am referring to. They profit most handsomely from this. Start with the biggest con, wherein "banks" are allowed to create money on demand. Fractional reserve banking on a local level, to international currencies that are not backed by any tangible produced wealth, but create "money" into existence via large computer generated loans. They go from nothing, to something, with no intervening honest steps of true wealth production. They is a currency based on immediate debt creation, not on wealth production, and all(most, very broadly speaking now) these fellows personal fortunes are based around that concept, which on a smaller scale is prosecuted around the world as a form of buncoism, but on a national scale and above is called "business". It is impossible to loan that which you do not possess, violates laws of physics so therefore it usually violates 'the law", but taken on a huge scale, it's exactly how this money gets created, and I'm sure you know this, it's just established fact. Small scale=illegal, it's fraud, on a large scale it's "legal".
Now ask yourself, how many of these fine fellows who make their living on what is in essence a huge variation of the 419 scam will point out the obvious fraud involved here?
A few specifics, random here to support my claims.
Here's one we discussed on slashdot before, Bolivia. Bolivia was in a "financial crisis". We won't get into that really far, but even there there's some linkages to how this crisis came about, but let's get to this "loan". They get approached by the world bank, who will "loan" them an instant debt, in the form of poof created "money". The loaners demanded collateral for their created money(sweet deal for them obviously), in this case control-or ownership basically- of the nation's water supplies as a condition for the loan. Then they passed their new ownership of the water up the daisy chain of interconnected corporations to bechtel corporation. You'll have to dig out the daisy chained ways that bechtel is involved, but basically it's worldbank figures and figures from bechtel are the same guys. Serious conflicts of interest, or insider trading of a sort. Now, then bechtel immediately raised water rates back in bolivia as soon as they "owned" the water, to, in some instances, the bulk of a lot of the peoples there normal income, which was very low to being with. They basically created a huge serf class-literally serfs now- who overnight now "owed" most of their labor to bechtel on a national scale, over something as critical as water, a necessity of life.. It lasted awhile, the people righteously rebelled against it, your normal rioting, government "crackdowns" on the rioters, some lawsuits, your normal indications of some big kickbacks to local government corrupt guys, etc, who worked to get this loan, etc.etc. If you want the whole skinny there, google has it with a few keywords, so I won't try to pick one page as a link, diverse sources of intel are better anyway, probably we both agree on that. Just keep looking, you'll find more examples along those lines.
OK, I'll provide one more for fun, I just picked a random google reference to a case I hadn't heard about before, a famine in sierra leonne. This article at this URL http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalisation/story/0,73 69,1032345,00.html
comes from an actual insider intimately involved from the world banks side, who decided to speak out about it-become a whistleblower- and try to stop the famine in the making that was coming from a loan based on forcing "free trade" with a nations food crop into an economy not even near ready to free trade on the international market, because they had not yet gotten to the point they could afford it. It's an example of my assertion in that FIRST
98% of companies in the US only care about one thing PROFIT! The Shareholders, CEO, and other executives could give a shit about their employees. The only thing they care about is being able to get the new BMW next month because their current one is coming up on being almost 2 years old. It is not just IT jobs it is anything where they can cut cost and screw over current hardworking employees. I have seen this happen to many times. For example, my old company decided to cut raises for all employees EXCEPT the CEO and CFO who got an outstanding 22% increase in pay all while the people who actually do all the grunt work got nothing along with a decrease in health benefits. This all happened in a company that was doing very well and was in no way shape or form hurting for income. They just wanted so see a HIGHER profit margin then the one the already had and this is the main reason why I left the company. Now before you ask, No I haven't had any of my jobs outsourced, and I have never been laid off so I do not have some of the resentment that some people have (and I can understand why they do). I am just getting sick and tired of the top 2% of the population in the US that controls everything becoming more and more greedy by the day and not giving a shit about what their actions are doing to the local surrounding communities when all of the employees are taken pay cuts or finding themselves out of a job. Now don't bitch at me about "I only care about America and shit / it is good for the global economy / Blah Blah Blah" because the only thing I can about is my family and being able to provide a descent life for them. I apologize now for bad spelling/grammar and other shit.
I know that I'm better and more experienced than maybe 75% of the folks out there...but I'm not foolish enough to think that there aren't folks who are better than me at some things, nor do I doubt that some of them live in the FSU, or China, or, for that matter, Mexico.
Why keep the jobs here? For one thing, get management and HR past the idiocy of thinking that experience isn't worth paying for. For another, get them to think - if they have two brain cells to rub together (as opposed, for example, to "CEO" Bush), that having someone in India or whereever do the jobs of local workers means that
1) the now-unemployed local workers won't
be able to afford their products;
2) that if there are problems, they are the
ones who will have to deal with them
long distance, and possibly with
language barriers (American managers
speaking furrin' languages? Perish th'
thought!)
3) let's not forget the time differential,
as well.
Finally, the folks who said "vote" have it right. Consider that *EVERY* *OTHER* *COUNTRY* (except maybe India - I just don't know) that the US worker is competing with has *national* healthcare, so the employers don't have to pay that, or Workmen's Comp....
But no, no one here writes or emails or calls their reps, they won't do anything, they're all owned by the insurance companies, just keep your noses to the grindstone...as long as you've got one, and it isn't offshored...
mark "wait till management is offshored"
"...everybody exploits and this is a good thing"
Based on your logic slavery should be the ultimate system. Explain again how this would benefit the slaves?
"I work in a call center..."
In your defense you must have a first-hand knowledge of exploitation.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The US IT industry needs to focus on innovation, developing new technology and software.
Companies can not outsource any part of their competitive advantage since doing so risks providing that source of competitive advantage to other firms. Where US IT helps a company do something better, faster, and cheaper than competitors, it is guaranteed to be closely held within that company. When IT is a source of competitive advantage, it can not be outsourced.
Higher productivity and innovation are the keys to the success of the US IT industry over the lower wage IT industries in other countries. At the policy level, to promote IT productivity and innovation, increase funding for graduate-level education, add incentives for startup and small businesses, improve the telecommunications infrastructure, and promote the free flow of information.
Your shirt example is apt, but I think you are missing the point that has been much on my mind for years. The point is that more expensive items are worth maintaining. And maintenance means local support.
Firstly, a quality shirt made in America will probably fetch a good $60, compared to a Chinese version costing $15. With shirt expenses being 4 times higher, you're apt to have less of them, so your shirt expenses won't rise by that factor of 4. But these expensive shirts -- made of good material and buttons which can be maintained -- can be taken to the local seamstress, perhaps invoking $5/shirt/year for maintenance charges.
Note that the Chinese can do the same in their area.
In such a way, many more people can "win" instead of a limited amount of international traders. You -- the American -- would have shirts that would last for decades, and your downtown and suburb tailor shops would exist again. Meanwhile, the Chinese would have a similar economic base.
What you won't have is racks and racks of cheap shirts (like I ended up with). I strongly question how all those shirts are doing me any good. Likewise, I strongly question how much good all those cheap (in cost and quality senses) products are doing us any good. Products with no maintainability are also invoking a landfill cost that has yet to strike us with full force.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
The one who we really should look at is Frederick Winslow Taylor - The father of "dumb it down and speed it up"
Do a search on "Taylorism" - it's the REAL philosophy of American business...
And read Foucault, who coined the term 'panopticon' for a prison in which everyone is under surveillance.
Mexicos GDP has grown since NAFTA was introduced.
Farmers were affected and should have been protected, but as a whole Mexicans are wealthier than they were before NAFTA.
And USians also, but that is the truth that is not spoken in this website when free trade is discussed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your theory is absolutely correct.
The problem with your theory is that management, and the recruiters they hire, just don't know how to differentiate between the mediocre and the excellent. All the terminology and buzzwords on the resume mean nothing to them (they pretend it does because they've seen those words before). And everyone is selling themselves ... though the mediocre are doing that more (because their skills are shifted more to the social interaction than the technical). And even when they do manage to get someone who is an excellent designer or coder, management too often doesn't like them personally and socially. A few are social outcasts and primadonnas. But most aren't, yet managers don't like them anyway because they don't fit into the same social circles managers are accustomed to. It's fundamentally a bias on lifestyles.
The solution is to stop all the production of mediocre people. Direct them to some other profession, like retail sales, where they might do better. That will correct the problems of business managers who are unable to differentiate. Shutting down the low end schools will be a big start. Educators whining about a shortage of high tech people need to be silenced (e.g. tell them to STFU).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Dreaded to every geek, but the solution is simple: Customer service. That's the value you can add that can't be done from halfway around the world. As yesterday's article on the growing dissatisfaction with outsourcing stated (repeatedly) the main problem comes in a lack of work ethic and quality in the other countries due to a massive difference in culture.
Translated this means that if you have contact with customers, a company outsourcing that position WILL fail.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It's a failure of imagination and will, part 2.
Here is some more things that can be done.
===
Create Business Introductory Services. Price isn't the main concern in purchasing software services, Results are.
One issue for American vendors is that indidually, they are too small and with too little reputation to compete with the big offshore firms. The government could add value with coordinating vendor alliances between firms and financial backing (again a DOL issue) so that this concenr is not an issue in competition.
===
For those who study national hegomonies and the competitiveness of nations, the issue is one of generating "clusters of excellence", areas where an unusual level of expertise is available. THe government could easily seed a few of these, there are many possibilities. For example, Enterprise Level PHP based on PHP 5) is just starting to gain traction. It has the possibility of making a dent in J2EE. The government could easily seed a few centers to develop this as a specialty.
===
Every one agrees IT workers increase productivity. Our national infrastructure is in poor shape. Put the two together and start funding IT infrastruture projects, similar to TVA or WPA. We got America's energy infrastructure that created the industrail boom of the 1950 and 1960's that way.
===
The 911 commission regales us with tales of poor Signal Intelligence and Human Intelligence ( traditional data gathering. The other meaning is a given) Traditionally, human intelligence is the property of news reporting. The BBC is considering blogs for news reporting, and the blogosphere is in every neighborhood worldwide. Why not retrain all those IT workers as Investigative reporters for a blog based news equivalent of Reuters? They know computer assisted reporting very well, and can get into any databases. For that matter of fact, you don't really believe all those thousands of IT people laid off from Wall Street didn't know every scandal that was going on before it was public? They could generate tons of articles just based on the gossip they have heard.
SInce they all have printers, they could even do a physical news service for those in their neighborhood who do not have Internet access.
If nothing else, the propect of generating a nillion new investigative reporters, all of whom are upset with senators that favor outsourcing, should galvanize Washington into that fastest passage in history of a legislative relief bill for IT Workers that involves those workers NOT doing investigative reporting.
===
THere is lots that can be done, there just isn't anyone in government (especially the Department of Labor, the USTR, and the Senate Finance Committee) who cares enough to do it.
please explain why they cooked the books here then, on the unemployment figures, taking the people off of it last year when they exhaust unemployment insurance checks, but remain unemployed? Why did they do that? Or do you deny that happened? If so I can go find the references again to prove it. That's an indicator that they delibarately are skewing the numbers to make things look rosier than they really are, at least to mostpeople who consider it. And why did they remove cost of energy and food from most cost ofliving indexes a few years ago? Again, only really one credible reason, to make things look better than what they are.
Explain why property taxes are going up all over to pay for new schools that are now required to school all the illegal immigrants children, and why a lot of hospitals are now running in the red, when they were in the black for a long time before the mass immigration of the past few years? Both those things happened in the last county I lived in. It's the main reason I was forced to move, I simply lostmy ability to get any housing there, when I needed to get another job. It went from "I can find a place, but I have one now and it works with my income level" to EGADS, I'M SKREWED! And they publically admit there that it's because the county got a 1/3 population increase in THREE YEARS,13,000 to 21,000 primarily from illegal immigrants coming in. It sure affected ME and what zi do for a living and what I need in the way of even bare minimum housing. Low income housing costs skyrocketed, because the illegals quite literally would and still do live ten or 12 to a single bedroom apartment, and the landlords quite willingly raised the rents knowing that they could accomodate the increases from so many people paying for what was before, a single persons or small family's housing. And forget entry level ownership, in those same three years even raggy old single wides went from what you expect for a price for them to YA GOTZ TO BE KIDDING.
This and similar has happened all over the nation. when it started 20 years ago with manufacturing I lived in a town that lost a few factories, it devastated the economy there, all sorts of people lost their homes with years equity, etc, because they were forced to sell at less than what they still owed prices just to get SOMETHING. It caused huge numbers of bankruyptcies, but, even with the press at the time, no one cared, especially white collar workers and the government and industry said that ITwas going to be the wave of the future and to "not worry". sorry, it HURT millions of people. And you can't just ignore it down in mexico and other nations, NAFTA DID put millions of the poorest out of work, literally from ultrapoverty level right to panic and leave got nothing to lose now mode. In some areas in mexico, 1/7th of the residents have immigrated already. In fact,some figures I have read indicate as high as 10% of the entire population has immigrated in the last decade. C'mon, that's not indicative of a system working, that's a huge figure. Even cut that in half it's still huge.
Free trade has some merit to the concept, but it has a lot of demerits to it as well, and the anecdotal proves it. You can't just throw people away in your mind and think it's this vague "nation" here or there, it's real humans you are talking about. It DOESN'T MATTER if one or two people make more money, if 7 or 8 make a huge amount less or make ZERO because of it. You can't just look at one side of any argument, it has to be taken in totality to be relatively honest and accurate.
And I'll wait for an answer on the US unemployment figures, why they modified how they do the count. Details, please.
I agree with the sibling post, in that when I've researched how to obtain a clearance, I've found that you need to be hired first and have your employer help you get the clearance.
Is there any other way to go about it?
I switched from computers to construction, and took a carpenter's training program, and guess what, here I am in the middle of the day sitting at home reading Slashdot because I still don't have a job.
There's been alot of thought on this already from a source some might not have expected. Check out this outline of social justice teachings of the Catholic Church over the past 100 years, on how it applies to labor vs. those with the capital, the rights of the worker, developing nations, etc.:
m
http://www.op.org/curia/JPC/booklets/socldoc.ht
or another good resource:
http://www.osjspm.org/cst/doclist.htm
You asked what you can do to improve your chances. It seems we have gone off on several moral tyraids. Being an IT professional, I feel the same pressures you do. There are a couple different directions you can go here. The point of all of them is to move where your competition isn't.
Option 1: You can gain new skills that they are not adept with. You can start working on that management level education. They will likely start moving into these fields as well, as the moat is shallow, but it is deeper than pure engineering. There will always need to be an American face.
Option 2: Stick to smaller companies. You have less security the smaller you go, but you will find people that need very fast turn arounds, with little documentation, and that requires someone who is going to put in hours, and is good at interpreting what the "customer" wants. Outsourcing is not good at this. You can live the rest of your life here.
Option 3: Move over there. The standard of living will be similar, if not now, in the near future. You might make US minimum wage, but that will set you up nicely in other countries. This is a difficult choice to make, but you would be a rarity and possibly quite promotable for your communication skills.
Option 4: Start your own company, do your own thing, compete with US companies that are size based and grow rapidly, until you hit speed/mass quotient and have to outsource your own work.
Option 5: Make sure that no lawyer ever had a job again! Why do you think the cost of living is so high?
Option 6: Don't be a consumer. One of the very real issues of the US economy is that people have forgotten how to be producers by and large. We buy entertainment, we buy food, we buy transportation, we buy everything. We don't produce anything, and this has lead us to a disposable society with highly inflated lifestyles, where many are on the brink of destruction if they miss a financial milestone. Buy and sell stock, gain new skills, make money on the Nasdaq and free yourself from the necessity of these milestones.
None of these are a silver bullet. Take a few and mix and match. All you can do is statistically improve your chances and outlast the majority. Once it becomes painful enough to the majority, it will change, through war, or politics or whatever. Just make sure you aren't part of the group that is the source of the pain that makes the US move. (at which point your standard of living will be caca anyways)
That is all well and good till another major war breaks out and the USA isn't able to supply its armed forces with what they need. And, war will break out again, always has and always will.
Corporations can easily measure their costs and must report them every quarter. When costs go down, profits go up and the quarterly numbers look better. Thus Corporations feel pressure to outsource and reduce the cost of their IT.
Well run corps understand that it is hard to measure the value produced by IT and don't just look at the cost.
To fix this you change the way stock transactions are taxed (more capital gains tax the shorter the stock is held) and thus move the markets away from Quarterly numbers. This takes the pressure off and better decisions are made.
Yes, I am presuming that a well educated IT worker in India with 2 years of experience does not produce as high a quality result as an IT worker with 20 years of experience.
Studies have shown that if done properly, humans prefer to deal with machine interfaces. So both company and customer can win. Machines never ask for a raise, either.
No more surly customer service..
What's happening now, has for years been happening in the automotive industry, construction, agriculture (The Netherlands). As long as companies try to out-price one another, they will move their industry to an cheaper enviroment. To counter this, you will have to be innovative, and think of new things to develop. Just being quote "better than 75% of the people out there" isn't good enough. If you costs 7 times as much, two programmers, instead of one, in Bangalore can do the same thing you do. It's sad but true, and I have to confess, when factorys like Philips moved to Taiwan, I didn't complain, because it wasn't my job on the line. Now it is, and I'm sorry I didn't saw it back then.
You waste your time posting this fucking message because someone mistakenly types a 4 instead of a 3?
Just becuase it is clear you are insane, I am going to take great pleasure in moderating down every post you make for the forseeable future, as well as responding to the numerous innae comments which you will surely write. I'm sorry, but I just LOVE to harass nutcases.
Also, btw, Nietzsche was already the chair of the philosophy department at the University of Basel in 1869, so I would hardly say he did not begin serious writing until 1870.
Oh,and you're a recruitment analyst practicing in LA during 97-2001 ?
Therefore automatically correct, unimpeachable.
Brought to you by the same people who brought you outsouring in the first place.
emt 377 emt 4
That is why Nietzsche refers to it as a primitive morality. You are absolutely right, the problem is the proponents of Free Trade are using what amounts to a very basic moral justification for their beliefs.
People use self-delusion, pattern matching (ie what they've experienced matching what they can see/hear), and all manor of irrational things to justify their beliefs. A moral justification of any sort is generally spurious. The point is that, in general, people will do what they want (or can), and anything that remotely justifies their actions will spew forth from their mouth.
What I'm saying is that using basic morality to justify your actions and beliefs is only human. You want something (make money)... you do it (get better import/export deals)... you justify it (it's better for everyone this way!). The US is a big proponent of free trade... when it suits them. They are actually quite protectionist.
I think it may be more accurate to say that civilization isn't getting morally worse or better.
You might be right, but clearly a huge number of people don't agree with you.
A small percentage of a 6 billion is a huge number. Also, just because all everybody believes something doesn't mean it's true.
Lets apply some reasoning to the problem. If civilization is declining, then that means in the past it was "better". Okay, when?
Try looking at the morals of ancient civilizations... I mean how did they justified their actions. Most would agree that we are morally better today, than say the Romans? Emperor Caligula knocked up his sister, and then killed her whilst cutting out his baby and eating it. What happened to him? He remained emperor for a time before his officers killed him.
What about the feudal period in Europe? "Kill them all, the Lord will know which are his". What about the Victorian era, the height of the British empire? Well she was known as the Warrior Queen, because her subjects were always at war subjecting the inferior barbarians of fighting the other tribes of Europe... not much different to the Romans.
Complaining about how things used to be better is only human it seems. Since we're still human, then we're still complaining. Seems that Nietzsche just came up with a bunch of flowery language to placate that feeling - that's only human.
Clearly, a major problem in this world is there isn't enough killing, enough war. Billions of people are going to have to die, either through ecological collapse, or warfare.
Really... you should study population growth before making such claims - you'll find the number disagree. Your statement comes straight off the back of a pop-culture magazine, the type that said we'd have to live underwater because there'd be no space on land.
Population growth is a problem (IMHO), did Nietzsche ever talk about it? Did Nietzsche understand population growth at all, or did he just predict the end of the world Nostradamus style? Disease will kill a lot of people... perhaps... food shortages... perhaps... but surely that's better then people killing each other!
In the next 100 years we WILL get to a critical mass where competition for natural resources will result in combat.
Why 100 years? How do you know it WILL happen? Define exactly critical mass? The world may well go to war over fresh water in the future... or perhaps somebody will perfect the water desalination plant. We don't know... we have to see what happens. Perhaps as water become scarer, it will become expensive, and people will be forced to use less. This may reach a point where people won't or can't have families because they can't meet the expense... that's a possible scenario.
This happens with all animals, including the invading organisms in your body right now.
Disease is less of a problem now than ever before. Perhaps microorganisms will become resistant to all our medicines... but that won't spell extintion for humans. That w
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It may be a little more costly, but no one said defending principles or even freedom would come cheap.
The "principles" at stake here are free trade and free markets, principles that the US has been one of the primary advocates of. What you advocate runs completely counter to that. Whether it is by popular choice or the imposition of tariffs, "buy domestic" is protectionism and anti-free trade.
The US wanted free trade, and the US has to accept both the good and the bad consequences of free trade. On balance, the benefits still far outweigh the costs.
Let's be a bit more specific here. We have high-priced US labor, high-priced US exports, and a huge trade deficit. What does that tell you? It tells you that the dollar is overvalued. The solution to that is simple: the dollar needs to be devalued until the US trade deficit shrinks greatly and until US labor costs about as much as foreign labor.
Why aren't the markets devaluing the dollar? Because they aren't entirely free. Lots of people with political power have assets in dollars, and they don't like to see the dollar devalued. Americans like getting cheap stuff from other countires. And other countries like having a booming export business to the US.
But even though everybody concerned likes it, this can't go on forever. If US labor and products remain too expensive, America will simply run out of funds to buy foreign stuff with. At some point, the system will adjust. The fact that US high tech workers are too expensive relative to foreign competition is just the beginning of that.
And that's where voting comes in: push politicians to adopt reasonable fiscal policies and to stop living a lie. But as long as people keep voting for politicians who promise no-pain solutions, increased wealth, and lower taxes, while at the same time spending liberally, that just won't happen.
dyslexics of the world untie!
No really though, you've been disenfranchised by an economic and political war against liberal high techdom, consider youselves in the same league as southern gentry after the civil war; not exactly sure what will spook executives away from the voting booths, white hoods are not likely to do much more than piss people off;
you can always show up at any quarterly shareholders meeting en-masse and spook away investors, especially if you know something about the inner workings of a corporation, ask the CEO poingnat questions about the cost of maintaining that private jet, or the sales meetings in Hawaii, vs. the cost of the 300 jobs that were "shed". That would definitely bring the point home better than unenforcable legislation, the shareholders are the voters of the company afterall. When they go, let the heads roll.
Straw man argument of scared IT sorry puppies....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I find Taxan accent completely impossible to undertstand.
Listen to Bush.
I rest my case.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Um, the actual employment (FICA) tax rate is more like 15.3%. Your employer "pays half" which means YOU really pay it, you just don't see it on your pay check stub.
Um, the actual employment (FICA) tax rate is more like 15.3%. Your employer "pays half" which means YOU really pay it, you just don't see it on your pay check stub.
Oh, I mostly agree.
What ends up happening is that the productive people in the economy eventually end up supporting the unproductive. The games the government plays, like the "pays half" crap, don't change the fact that the money spent puts a burden on the effort of workers.
What's sad is that workers don't even know they're working for free when it's happening right in front of their faces.
Consider Joe burger-flipper that's paying his 6% or whatever. A senior comes in to buy The Senior's burger with the social security money he just got in the mail. Joe does the work to make the burger. Then senior pays and goes on his way. Repeat next month.
What happened here? Joe just worked for free making that burger. If you follow the money, that's basically what happened. The senior is giving Joe back the money he got from Joe's taxes. In exchange, Joe does labor for the senior. When Joe get's paid, that 6% comes out so Joe can make more free burgers when those seniors bring back that tax money and the cycle repeats.
Walmart also censors CDs, and movies without having to mention it to the customers.
Then why do I see "EDITED" conspicuously on a label next to the barcode on 90+ percent of rap CDs at Wal-Mart?
But all the election cash in the world doesn't do a god-damned thing come re-election time if you screw over your constituency.
The Constitution prohibits a President from serving more than 2.5 terms. So what if a President of the U.S. screws citizens over during the second term of his presidency, when he has no concern about being re-elected?
Yvan eht nioj.
Of course, you mean that if movie tickets cost more than consumers are willing to pay for them, than moviegoers will vote with their feet. Which is fine for entertainment. But what about little necessities like rent. I can "choose" to move to a place where the rent is cheaper, but that choice also entails moving to a place where there are no jobs...
"Perfectly free". Interesting concept. Nice for propounding simplistic ethical and economic theories. But in the real world, we deal with less ideal facts. Such as: some people have more power than others. Especially economic power.Companies with deep pockets can screw people over. They can buy influence, so laws and public policy are made in their favor. They can sell at a loss to drive out competition. And most of all, they can simply set wages as low as they like, and wait for the workers to get hungry enough to accept them.
At this point, you're saying, "Well, what's your solution, state control of everything? Socialism? Anarchism?" No, those are solutions that are as simplistic as simply blindly trusting the marketplace to behave sanely. In the real world, you have to find a middle ground.