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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
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?
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
Programmers should devlop soft skills. You can't outsource that
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.
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Find out more about the impending downfall o
Have you ever ventured outside of your mom's basement?
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...
Give your potential employer something that can't be done over the phone.
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. =====
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.
You obviously have no forethought. At $1000 a month you'll never be able to own your own home, provide for a family, save for retirement, etc... Just because you're currently a starving college student with no ambition doesn't mean we all are.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
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
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.
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Great. So after I get my $1000 and send $800 off for student loans I'll have $200 to buy food and decorate my cardboard box. Hooray!!
nah!
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.'
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---
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
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
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?
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.
Then why is China doing so well? They have very protectionist policies as do most of our other trading partners.
We are being forced to play on an uneven playing field.
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!
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.
I would suggest more than just being fluent in English, being fluent in communication can be an amazing strength. Interpersonal skills, presentation abilities and even understanding of some of the research about interface design can all help you in ways that you never thought possible.
My blog
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!!!
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.
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.
But unfortunately it isn't you who determines what your effort is worth ... just as it is not any producer who determines what his products are worth to the consumer. The consumer (in this case, your employer) determines what your product (your labor) is worth to him.
You are perfectly free to demand high wages (what you think you're worth) -- and employers are perfectly free to not hire you. If you do not wish to work for the going wages, don't work ... just don't complain about being worth more than you were offered, because you're not.
[Note: Nothing in here is meant as a personal attack. I could just as easily have said "If I do not wish to work for the going wages, I won't work ... I just won't complain about being worth more than I'm being paid, because I'm not." And no, it has nothing to do with having low self esteem.]
The Ezine Directory
- 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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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)
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.
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.
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..
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).
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;
}
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
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.
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.
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.