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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"
give the American IT person skills which cannot be given to other coountries (yeah yeah...anti-globalism)
...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...
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
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...
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).
Along these lines, I recently attended a rountable discussion of career trends in IT with several CIOs of large companies. They identified a few key things:
1) They know that what they are asking for now are "purple squirrels". What this means is that they are asking for something they know is very hard, if not impossible to get.
2) They stressed the importance of understanding the BUSINESS. They felt that knowing a business and IT makes you invaluable.
3) Get a higher degree. I go to one of the few graduate level Schools of Information Science in the country (http://is.cgu.edu). Or, if you already have IS skills get an MBA.
4) Most of the CIOs believe that outsourcing is just a passing trend, and that we truly have hit rock bottom of IT hiring. They feel it can only go up from here.
5) Everyone who attended this roundtable (which included people who were IT professionals but not CIOs) agreed that outsourcing is just another tool and not suitable for everything else. Knowing and learning what "everything else" is, is therefore the key to getting a job.
Just a few musings, maybe they'll help. -6d
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---
How cheap is it to defend useless isolationist policies that will cause the US to sink into an economic rut and become a backwater, third-world economy? Anschluss didn't work last time round, and it won't work this time either.
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!
Or (for those with actual people skills) switch to nursing. There are huge shortages of nurses already, and the demand's gonna go nowhere but up, as our baby-boomed parents and grandparents get older and less healthy. Of course you'll never get rich as a nurse, because the money will never be there for that, but you're not likely to get laid off due to overseas outsourcing.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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
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.
C) Hold the outsourcer (and the geniuses who decided to save money with these outsources) are held accountable to their decisions.
In part, this means making sure that whenever the outsourcer fails and causes expenses or delays as a result, you should at least note that somewhere. Having such a log is very valuable when the outsourcer's contract comes up for renewal, as it makes it very easy to generate a dollar figure for wasted employee time or impacted sales as a result of an outsourcer error. If that number comes up bigger than the "savings" number... management starts to ask questions...
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
My argument is that the chief responsibility should be to no small group but society as a whole. Not the shareholders. Not the consumers. If you just aim to satisfy either group you can always cut corners and make more money by screwing up the environment, or other parties not directly involved.
Anyway if you look at the way advertising runs these days I don't beleive that companies truely care about any consumer too much. They're happy to play to the weakness of consumers in order to move product. Anything ranging from plain stupidity to inexperience to psychological illnesses are all fair game.
Time we all learned that we live on one planet. It doesn't matter whose pool you're pissing in, it can only ever be a few thousand kilometres away.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
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.
You're saying every time goods or services are provided, there's a benefit to society, particularly if its priced competively? So if a company burns 10 times the fossil fuel to produce a computer that's $50 less that's a good thing?
Is this flaimbait? Come on!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
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?
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.
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.
Motley Fool
CEOs Still Raking It In
Monday April 19, 10:17 am ET
By Selena Maranjian
Has corporate America learned anything from Americans' outrage over CEO compensation excesses, fueled by the likes of erstwhile Tyco (NYSE: TYC - News) CEO Dennis Kozlowski? Not too much, it seems.
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.
Are such executives really 301 times more valuable than average workers? It's hard to imagine that's the case with so many major corporations not exactly performing in stellar fashion. Sure, some CEOs, such as Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A - News)(NYSE: BRK.B - News) Warren Buffett and eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY - News) Meg Whitman, take home relatively little in relation to the return their firms deliver to shareholders. But then, as BusinessWeek pointed out, you have Larry Ellison of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News), who took in some $750 million in total pay in the three years from 2000 to 2003, while his shareholders lost 54%. And then there's Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - News), who took in $35 million in the same period while his shareholder return was -84%.
Has the picture been improving any over time? Well, yes and no. The high-water mark for this survey came in 2001, when CEOs raked in 531 times what average workers did. That dropped precipitously in 2002, to 282, but has clearly inched up a bit since then. (The wide spread is largely due to the swooning stock market, which took with it the value of many bigwigs' stock options.) In 2003, the average surveyed CEO earned $8.1 million in total pay, up 9% from 2002. Meanwhile, the average production worker's salary increased just 2%. Step back further and the situation is grimmer. In 1982, CEOs took in just 42 times what average workers did.
Believe it or not, average Americans are not the only ones concerned about this. Back in 2002, The Conference Board issued recommendations on improving corporate compensation and governance, featuring some thoughts from Warren Buffett himself. Buffett pointed out that compensation committees often act like lap dogs, rubber-stamping CEO requests for pay increases, as CEOs strive to keep up with each other.
What's needed? A little more backbone in the boardroom, for starters. If you're paying a CEO $5 million per year and he wants $6 million, can you really not find someone else who's talented and would be happy to do the job for $5 million, or perhaps even $2 million? Let's see a little competition for these plum posts.
Share your thoughts on our discussion boards. We're offering a free 30-day trial. Drop in to see what Fools are saying.
Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway, eBay, and Sun Microsystems.
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
The playing field may be slanted against the American middle class with respect to jobs, but the US employs very protectionist policies against neighbours, and when it comes to trade, the US likes to have its cake and eat it too. I'm all for free trade, it just has to be free. You have to accept that what you offer must be globally competitive in that scenario. If it's cheaper elsewhere then that's where it should be done. The problem is of course that it's very hard to reconcile the "American way" with this harsh reality. Americans truly believing they have a right to endless consumerism are finding it a bitter pill to swallow that the capitalist society they hold so dear (in these times where right wing is considered moderate and left wing radical) has created the problem. Not that this is a strictly American problem, it is occuring in all "western" countries to some extent. It's just that not many other countries have such a (modern) history of manipulating the architecture of economics, or such an attachment to its ideals. It's ironic that a nation with such overt moral stance (when convenient) on issues such as abortion has no such stance on the moral issues associated with its economic policy.
Anyway, enough from me. I'm going back to accumulating useless possessions and filling my local landfill with garbage.
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.
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
I see this problem all of the time from my co-workers in the Taiwan office. I can fully explain something, but when I come back in the morning, I get e-mails of, "I don't understand", and "Please explain again", or they ask me a question that I already answered.
In fact, it has gotten so bad, that my manager (here in the U.S.) has requested that I work nights two days per week, or five days per week, any time something critical comes up, so that we can do simultaneous work.
Thus far, I've only had to do it once, but still, it's enough to drive my crazy.
-- Joe
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.
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
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.
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.
Things are undoubtedly different in California, but they're kinda in their own bubble there.
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.
I think solutions fail because they are too specific, and they are written to solve problems from the customer's point of view.
The customer is usually unsophisticated, and says, I want to keep track of sales by quarter. So the project sets out to meet that objective - instead of realizing that a simple OLAP cube will provide a browsable view of the companies operation by any degree of granularity - emplementing that solution has real value - whereas emplementing the poorly expressed goals of the customers may fall short in the real-world.
One thing to note is that the pace of change is itself changing - market competativeness doesn't allow for responsive businesses - it require proactive businesses, business which realize that with 10% more effort on this project will yield 10 fold results later on.
For example - we use a lot of templates - so the art department creates a template with a calender - by the time its ready - the season is just about over - I insist that the art department produce three years of calanders with the same design - now in the five seconds it takes to change the date and rerun the "create month layout" we have three years of templates rather than three months.
AIK
Walmart also censors CDs, and movies without having to mention it to the customers.
Because they have so much market clout, they can force a label or studio to edit out those portions they don't like, else Walmart won't sell it.
Now, you might say: This is just fine! They should only sell what they want to sell!
Well, I have no problem with that, except that they found that if the CD or movie has some little sticker that says that it is censored, that people won't buy (as much) of it, thus the mechanism they use allows them to censor without labeling.
I have a problem with this.
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.
The real issue is that american managers see outsourcing as the "magic bullet" because the workers are lower paid so they can have more. Having dealt with comparing a factory I was at to the overseas equivelant, they hire nearly double the staff with more managers to do the same job as we do here. The real issue is american management not workers. Even the dreaded UAW is pretty p-whipped nowdays. Even with the Unions BEGGING to work longer hours for less benifts and pay the american management culture still can't make profits due to sucky business decisions trying to make Lots of profits instead of steady ones. That's why all the growing manufacturing companies are run by the Japaneese. Not because they're neccessarily any better, but because they stick to their management plan and company standards long enough to realize the payout in loyal customers AND employees...something american companies still don't get.
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.
About 3 days out of the week I have mod points, unfortunately today isn't one of them.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, most people that complain about no IT jobs are in some major market like New York, Silicon Valley or some other high-profile market. Believe it or not the "IT industry" is alive and well.
There are really only two jobs being outsourced in the tech industy, tech support and coding. Tech support is an entry level job that requires no skills. Alot of people will hire tech support workers that have NEVER used a computer. Why? Because most first level tech support is never intended to actually solve any major problem, its their job to run through a script and if that doesn't work transfer you to someone else. Why are people complaining, or even suprised, that this work is being outsourced? It's the IT equivalent to burger flipping.
The other type being outsourced is coding. During the dot-com boom everyone wanted to break in to this industry. Most of those people, not knowing much about computers, entered the part of the field that sounded good, programming. These people were incapable of turning a computer on but all they had ever heard were words like "hard drive" "RAM" and of course... "programming". So they all went to some school or another and told them they want to "program computers". 1-4 years later they are unleashed on the dot-com booming world and they get a nice cushy job doing either:
(a) nothing
or
(b) the most God awful coding the world has ever seen
After the ole' bubble burst alot of coders were left jobbless. Now, you may think thats good these hapless n00bs got canned but the problem is companies tossed the good with the bad. There are some awesome coders out there, but unfortunately after the bubble burst they were lumped in with the rejects. Now, one would think that with all these coders out of work the price to hire a domestic one would be peanuts right? Well, not quite. The legitimately good coders still want, and rightfully so, a decent amount for their valuble skills. However the bad ones that are still around still think they are a valuble resource and want a high price too, simply because thats what they were payed during the days of milk and honey. Unfortunately all the companies see are these bad ones and they get a bad taste in their mouths when they hear "coder". Soloution, Habib gets your coding job because a few idiots have to ruin a wonderful profession by giving it a bad name. I think this part of the outsourcing will gradually shift back to the US but never again to the point it was.
Now, back to the original point, the IT industry is not dead. A couple segments are seeing bad times but others are still very lucrative. hardware maintainance, network administration, troubleshooting, network deployment, network planning, etc. are all still in demand. They may not be in your area but try looking in less crowded areas. Specifically look at growing ares! I live near Charlotte, NC one of the smaller "big cities" in the US but it is growing quite rapidly. Just about every Network Administration student at my school has an almost guranteed job with Arrendale Associates, a medical transcription service company near here. They hire 2-3 people a month from my school and they get all kinds of training, mostly in Oracle. Family Dollar is another company that can't hire pre-graduates fast enough around here, and no, not for cash register jobs, real honest to God IT jobs. They have a lot of stores that need to be networked to gether and their corporate offices are local.
Yeah, that was a long rant so heres the executive summary.
1. Most IT jobs are still here to stay, Tech Support and Coding are not the only IT jobs.
2. If you can't get a job in your area then try another. I don't care if your emotionally attached to the city you live in, if you really want a job you need to go to where they are, not wait for them to come to you. With modern technology the need to have your bussiness in a dense urban setting is not required, most of the growing ones are out in places you may never have heard of.
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.
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
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).
and most can even manage a decent house/condo/apartment with cool things like air conditioning, heating, running water
Actually, multi-family residence is at an all time high (not to mention adults still living with parents). The fact is, in some parts of the country many people can not afford a decent place to live on a single income. In fact, at the current rate it is estimated that a very large percentage of the US citizens will require the pay of THREE full time jobs to afford decent housing. (Keep your eye on Realty Times as they discuss this issue from time to time.)
Remember, once upon a time, a SINGLE income family could afford a decent home.
Some things are better now days, but some things are very decidedly going down hill.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
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.
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;
}
Well, I think that you must know the "foreign" rules before tell your opinion. I am a brasilian worker and I can assure you that we have severe laws to protect workers and my country has signed the "Kioto Protocol". The USA didn't.
I tell you, the american way of life is too expensive and not sustainable. And if the americans do not start to re-think how thay live and how they spend the money, the movement of jobs to the third world will increase year after year