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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
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.
Be the guy that translates non technical business logic into a detailed enough functional spec that the Indian IT people can code to it. Learn how the Indian IT people communicate and learn how to translate user requirements in a way that they are understood. Learn project management so your outsourcing project doesn't fail like a high percentage of them do.
Me, I despise project management so you are welcome to those jobs.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
For those working in a one-location company, do not hide in the IT room. When a user sends an e-mail asking for help, walk out to their desk rather than e-mail back. That way, you can see exactly what they're seeing on their screen, and you can also get a feel for what's going accross their desk while they're trying to interact with the systems.
That's one thing IT workers will never be able to duplicate...
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.
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!!
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
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?"
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
...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.
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.
The fallacy of this viewpoint is the assumption that exploitation and coercion are separate. Maybe in some airy theoretical world, but not on this particular planet. The problem with the fallacious viewpoint is that you can use it to justify child labor, inhuman working conditions, and chattel slavery. "Hey, it's just 'exploitation,' the same way I exploit my skills or the farmer exploits the land, so stop complaining and shut up, okay?"
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games. There is very little exploitation of human labor in the Third World (or, to use the new politically correct term, "the South) without overt or implicit coercion, not to mention numerous human rights abuses.
"Don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep." Please! Corporations are human enterprises, not imponderable forces of nature. If we have problesm with corporations, the solution is not to sigh heavily the way we would about an earthquake, but to change the institution of the corporation. It's not like trying to move a continent or stop the sun in its tracks, and to make it sound impossible is to be complicit with the abuse.
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.
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