Slashdot Mirror
IT Outsourcing Need Not Threaten Our Future
Xeo writes "The topic of the moment in a lot of people's minds is the outsourcing overseas of 'white collar' jobs. While many people are perhaps rightfully worried about this, there's an editorial on the subject that tends towards the other direction. It makes some very interesting points on the whole idea of outsourcing and what it means for the US at least."
Well yes, as I have maintained in the past, outsourcing does not present a strategic long term concern for the US. Sure, there are certain jobs that shall be relocated or executed from remote locations, but even if one looks at the current trends - anything that remotely involves creativity or innovation is not going anywhere
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Outsourcing need not threaten your future, there are plenty of new opportunities for aspiring programmers within the food service sector. Dare to dream!
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
The assertion that jobs are being outsourced because there aren't enough people in the USA that have technical credentials is BULL SHIT.
Try telling the guys with PhDs that can't get jobs that there is no talent in this country.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
The articles author makes decent points, but what it all boils down to is that, usually, change doesn't lead to disaster. Which is essentially true. I'm sure that whatever the econimic trends, some sort of equilibrium will be found. But as someone getting ready to leave a university with a CS degree in a year or so, I'm pretty worried about the interim. Although I suppose I'm in a far greater position than someone whose got a family to support. I'm sure many /.'ers would agree that money is a distant second to having enjoyable, challenging work.
:)
After all the doom and gloom about the tech industry I'm happy to hear a positive viewpoint, true or not.
Ansi's and stupid tricks!
This is an article about how Americans see themselves -- or rather, about how the author would like them to. It does not appear to actually touch on the economic realities (good or bad) of outsourcing.
Yay for fluff.
However, it is quite interesting in the American self-image that it pushes. While Americans are indeed diverse and tolerant, I think the remarks on innovation (which I hear often) could do with a little consideration.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
i worry about.. being replaced with a shell script
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
OK then - human flight, disputed. Refrigeration - I don't know (benefit of doubt to America then). Automobiles - Germany. Television - Britain. Computers - Britain. Space travel - Russia (or more accurately, competeting sets of Germans working in Russia and America after WWII). The Internet - America.
Perhaps a tad more humbleness might be in order from the writer of this article? A bit more recognition of the fact the rest of the globe does work as well? That final 'or has some link with Americans' is a get-out clause - "we claim it as ours even if we didn't invent it, so there".
As for the final question "what is it about our (the US) economy that nutures innovation" - that's easy. The US economy is the largest homogenous market, so all suppliers will tailer their goods for that market. It doesn't mean to say the goods themselves have to be either invented or produced in the USA though.
Cheers,
Ian
America's technological strength is based on innovation.
I would say it is partly based on innovation.
One huge advantage that the USA has in most areas of business is a huge, practically borderless, single market containing almost 300 million people. The benefits of this can't be understated, and it's something that other countries can't completely emulate (although in Europe we're trying to create a single market, we'll always have the issues with different languages and cultures).
I think commentators often overestimate the advantage that the USA has in terms of the greater capabilities of it's people, and also are blinkered if they think that other countries can't achieve greatness as well.
Five years ago: "So, do you want me to install a scsi interface too?" Five years from now: "So, do you want cream and sugar in your coffee?"
The guy is a President of an Engineering University. Is enrollment is down between 20-50% based on nationwide trends. Of course he is going to push a positive forecast to push enrollment up. But the kids are not buying it. I wonder what a good field is these days in the US?
IT outsourcing doesn't necessarily threaten the US economy in the long term but it does in the short term. It'll be like when the manufacturing and steel industries moved overseas to Russia and Japan and elsewhere. We as a civilization will figure out how to make new industries and replace jobs.
You'll have that sometimes...
The American worker is freed up to pursue a more efficient allocation of his labor.
Like reinforcing his home/cardboard box with duct tape.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
Which will then be outsourced.
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Regardless of how much Ford (the original) made cheap cars, he knew that it would mean jack if his employee's can't afford them. He hence paid his employees very well.
There is no point for a company to be cutting costs if all it does is starve the consumers - it will create a vicious cycle whereby the more you cut costs, the smaller your market.
Granted, you are opening a new market in the countries where you now do most of your hiring - BUT then it's still a comparative small market because your prices are aimed at consumers with assumed income several times that people in whose countries the products are made.
Isn't this just another great example of the great human fault of discounting the future?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
A point I think the article misses on, and a fairly important one, is the current education system in the US. While problem solving (vs. memorization) is still the focus of education here, it's not as enforced as it was in the past.
I have family in several states in education and most agree that we're turning out fewer problem solvers than in the past. None seems to have a solution, outside of parenting (or lack thereof), which I think is the leading killer of a solid education.
What used to draw innovators from other countries was the freedom and opportunity found in the US. Both of those seem to be dwindling. Where does that leave us?
I think we're also in for a lull in innovation in the US, which is scarier to me than the trend in offshore outsourcing. I've been a professional developer for 13 years. Although I haven't been affected yet, I have to assume it will affect me sometime (hopefully later than sooner).
With three children, I am the math and science homework helper in the house. What I find is my children are taught tricks and workarounds rather than an understanding of the fundamental math problems. I'm glad to help my children, and love seeing the light go off in their head when they actually understand the problems they work on. So I have this idea. When I "retire" from development (forced or otherwise) I'm going to become a math teacher, preferably at the middle school ages. I've worked in math my whole career, and have had a wonderful experience with my own children (I know, teaching 25 kids is completely different). I think if more people were to go into teaching towards the end of their career, and in a field that matches their respective career, we would be turning out more innovators and maybe worry less about the future of the working world in the US.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
it'll be like when the manufacturing and steel industries moved overseas to Russia and Japan and elsewhere.
The one problem with stuff like this is letting business move anywhere it damn well pleases is is better for both economies concerned on a broad scale, it can really fuck over specific areas for a long time. I'm definitely better off with cheap foreign steel, but Scranton, PA for example is pretty much fscked.
I don't think that IT outsourcing is going to create blight areas the way mill closings did - MCSEs have a lot more options than assembly-line workers. But I wonder. A lot of Lisp people still haven't got over the AI winter, even if it was largely their own fault.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Slight problem here. Germany and Japan are certainly not known for their lack of innovation, while in many areas the US is notorious for its lack of precision and continuous improvement of products (missiles and other ways of killing large numbers of people being obvious exceptions).
America's biggest strength is nothing so vague and ephemerous as "creativity" and "ethnic diversity" (unless by ethnic diversity what you really mean is the disproportionate number of advanced science and engineering degrees given to non-Americans), it's just size of the population and access to wealth (raw materials, energy sources, etc.)
As global economies and improving technologies make these strengths less important as compared to such things as precision and continuous improvement (not to mention a highly educated populace and a sane top leadership), I think that the future of the US will become a very different one than what happened there in the 20th century.
CC-licensed translations of Japanese fiction: http://tonygonz.blogspot.com/
Because once a few engineers innvoate, we don't need indians or chinese, or hell, factory robots, to build the actual product.
Because everyone can be an engineer! It doesn't take 6-10 years of difficult math, chemistry and physics courses to become an engineer, and everyone, and by this I really do mean everyone, say at least half our 300 million population, can not only be an engineer, but a innovative one too!
Wrong cliche, since they wrote this, rather than saying it aloud, but how can they say this with a straight face? I'll tell you how. Because this asshat is one of the privileged, one of the elite. He gets to write stupid opinions for a living.
At least this opinion isn't nearly as sickening as some of the nascent, not quite formed opinions I see everywhere else. Ask Joe CEO what he thinks, and if he cares to reply at all, it's something to the effect that we should all be daytraders or the like. Too bad we're all sheep.
Baaaah! Baaaaah!
OK so we're saying that "we're good at innovation so we'll be okay" - but where is the evidence?
What have we really innovated in software in recent times? Windows? From a user perspective little have changed since Windows95 (from an engineer's perspective little has changed from WindowsNT3.1!)
Linux isn't an example either (firstly it's non-commercial, second it's a rewrite of Unix - the change is more social than technical).
I guess the browser is THE standout example - now how long did it take for that to become a commodity item? Not long. In software innovation is hard, but refinement is easy. I don't think that this "innovation" thing is going to protect us (even if we are "better at it" and I don't see any evidence to suggest that we are anyway).
The real issue here is the massive disparity of wages in the "global economy". American workers (and British, like me) can't live on the wages that Indian workers can, money here doesn't go as far (Indian workers are getting wages that are generous for the region - they are doing well). So we simply cannot compete - what is required is to attack the root cause of this - the disparity of the buying power of money across the global economy, because this outsourcing ISN'T a sign of the health of the global economy it's a symptom a massive distortion in the market.
Of course how you do this is difficult to see, but THIS is the end that we need to look at. We need to be VERY careful how this is done, because large and rapid corrections would be catastrophic to Indian workers and they deserve protection too. But shipping IT jobs (and hence skills) to off shore locations isn't smart in the medium term. Indians aren't stupid, if they are doing all the technical work, why will they be happy to report to foreign management forever?
I don't believe they will, Indians can be just as enterprising as anyone - they will have a ready work force of skilled workers, trained by OUR companies, it won't be hard to motivate them to set up on competition with US companies (stock options, maybe?)
It seems that we're underestimating the skills and drive of the Indian people, this is a fundamental mistake.
If we REALLY want to make the "global economy" work we must correct the distortions within it. I'm sure that the we can compete with India (and other emerging regions) if this is done (it won't kill the outsourcing, but at least we'll all be on a level playing field). Don't think I'm underestimating the Indians, I think they are as capable as any of us, and I think companies that are massively outsourcing either don't understand this OR the decision makers are not concerned with the long term (only short term profits).
No news here. These are MBA-type CEOs that love to ruin people's lives because they can't lie enough to keep customers happy but screwed. The kinda guy who thinks he's a success because he's filthy rich, and who can't understand he needs people. He can't grok that people want to do something instead of bloodsucking like him. So his company lacks an Y-shaped career path.
Contrast this to Germany where CEOs are engineers.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
OK, I'm supposed to be working, but everyone likes to blame politicians and the tech bosses. Why do you guys never consider the fact that its technology itself that is helping to drive you out of jobs?
The problem with this argument is that thechnology has improved more and more over hundreds of years but unemployment has not been growing correspondingly; today unemployment is only (5-6%) which is not particularly high by historical standards.
Every time we get an economic recession everybody predicts that technology/foreigners (it used to be the Japanese, now it is the Chinese and Indians) will make everyone jobless and that everything will be misery.
Rather the combination of technology and outsourcing is leading to steady increases in standrads of living; the US has shown GDP growth of around 3% for a long time.
Tor
In the words of Homer Simpson "You're living in a dream world...".
Innovation costs money. Bleeding money off shore through outsourcing until the common guy on the street can't get a job is not going to help scientists and engineers innovate. The more you lower the standard of living in a country, the less people will be concerned with innovation and the more effort they'll need to spend just to stay afloat. Eventually you will simply bring the standard of your own country down closer to the level of the countries you outsource to.
Outsourcing to another place where people work like slaves for peanuts just to keep themselves from starving is evil. Period. You reap what you sew. This BS WILL come back to haunt us all.
Everyone who genuinely wants to work should be able to make a living. If they're willing to make a gigantic effort they should be able to expect proportional rewards.
Sammy
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
When I talk to CEOs about the career paths of the engineers in their companies, they say that many reach a career plateau very early, often after only five years. This happens not because of any technical deficiency, but because of a lack of "people" skills such as communication and teamwork. Moreover, engineers often come up short when they have to deal with people from different fields, such as manufacturing and marketing.
How enfuriating! This CEO sycophant would have us (engineers) believe if we improved our social skills we could all be executives and all would be right with the world. Bunk. Corporate management structure is about the few controlling the efforts of the many. The structure is not imposed through democratic means - CEO's don't run for office. Neither is the structure merit based. (What do you think about the review process at your company?) It is based on ambition, alliances, and persuasion. Climbing the corporate ladder is considered by some to the the ultimate competition. To me the game resembles musical chairs more than anything else.
One of the reasons the free software culture appeals to so many in this forum is that those who have reached a "career plateau" can bypass the rigid heirarchy of the corporate world and express themselves professionally though writing software. No management required!
an ill wind that blows no good
1) HVAC work 2) Carpenter, Electrician, Plumber. The rise of HGTV, This old house, etc has created a demand( artificial?) to do $10,000 remodeling jobs. People spend more money redecorating than our parents did. 3) Painter 4) Ceramic tile/ carpet Hmm do I see a trend?? We, in the "High Tech" are in a big trough. The "next big wave" hasn't started yet. Lets face it . The transistor is 50 years old.We are a silicon based industry. Silicon has become a commodity. We are all in a commodity business. , not unlike the Iron, Steel, Steam , Plastic and Coal industry before us. Once the general public (circa 1989) knew who Intel was, the handwriting was on the wall.
As long as the cost of living (and therefore the cost of labor) is higher in the US I believe corporate America will continue to outsource. Anyone who thinks efficiency or innovation is primarily an American product probably has a bit to learn about the rest of the world.
A subject that hits close to home for me is outsourcing support operations. I work for a fair-sized federal agency and we're currently looking at consolidating Level 1 helpdesk operations from 13 separate helpdesks to one outsourced agency to serve the whole organization.
Current industry standards say that for an organization our size a helpdesk call should cost the company ~$20. Outsourcing to India would cut that cost in half, so it's easy to see where that option would be attractive to big business.
Support operations do not generate income, therefore offshore outsourcing reduces operating costs. IM frequently less than HO corporate America's first loyalty is to stockholders and unfortunately altruism doesn't increase the bottom line, so I think companies will continue to outsource until there's a financial incentive for them to quit doing it.
I don't think code written in the US is necessarily more innovative than code written in India for half the cost - so until third world IT organizations raise wages it's still gonna be more attractive to outsource.
I think the bottom line is that wages for skilled American IT workers will continue to slip unless they're in a job that cannot be outsourced - I just suggested to my son-in-law that if he wanted a job in IT the place to be was probably in networking - preferably telecom or Information Assurance. Those fields will probably remain for the most part in the good old US of A ;-)
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
According to wikipedia.com:
Automobile -- France via Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot
Television -- Germany via Paul Gottlieb Nipkow
Computers -- Britain, sort of, via the Colossus. It was not very programmable though. ENIAC post-date's it but was a true computer in the modern sense that it was designed to be Turing complete.
Space Travel -- Germany was actually the first to send an object into space in 1942. The U.S. was the first to send a living organism into space in 1946. Russia was the first to achieve an orbital launch in 1957 and subsequently send the first animal up one month later. They also sent the first human up in 1961
Internet -- US via DARPA.
India has just a had a federal election with a suprise win by the left. It seems that alot of Indians have not seen improvement themselves despite a hugh growth in there own economy. This is hardly surpising given the level of poverty present in that country - India is a country that is never going to have a standard of living even close to that of a western country. Meaning that outsourcing is here to stay unless these new guys attempt to wind back the clock to what it was like in the the early 90's (ie no technology whatsoever). Which is not realistically going to happen.
Anyway getting back on topic - outsourceing has it's source in explotation. Indians are no better then programming then Americans. The best argument for this is that England has a massive Asian community, many of whom must have been through the humanities are for wimps and try to think as little as possible Indian educational system. Yet I don't see jobs moving from America to that country. Do you? In fact the English software industry, which has always been strong (see Bullfrog, Sinclears etc) seems to be shutting up shop. If Asians where better at programming then its only natual that you would expect a revivel of the English software industry.
Outsourceing is all about cheap wages period. And 9 women to carry a child for 1 mouth thinking. It will continue unless Americans can match those wages and this just isn't going to happen, because, like I said before India does not have a wage correction function present on there side.
What we are seeing is the selling out of the many by the few. For ultimately short sighted gains - if all jobs go over seas then then American econonomy will ultimately collapse.
Trying to stop outsourceing is like the RIAA trying to stop music downloading. This article just reeks of someone going down to the sea when the tied is turning and saying they ain't going to get wet.
And I for one welcome our Hindi overloads, hell the last couple of bollywood movies I've seen haven't been bad and no worse then most of the crap that seems to come out of hollywood these days. The foods good. And seeing how you guys run a war just makes me glad that in the future you might not have as much money to spend to the lastest WMD's.
By Lawrence Lessig, who is widely praised among /. readers for his work in IP law. I wonder if his thoughts on economic protectionism will be as well received. :)
One thing that most CEO's are probably not taking into account is that while they are saving money in the short term they are also supplying their furutre competition with money and technical skills. I know of one Indian company (InfoSys) that has already opened offices stateside and started competing directly with some of their past customers.
I would not be surprised if some enterprising young developers overseas were to take the money and the skills that they aquired from working on code from software companies in the US and put together (for example) a enterprise-level RDBMS and begin selling it globally for a fraction of the cost of Oracle or SQL Server.
Over the past 10+ years or so, India has seen great economic growth. Many economists attribute this to the adoption of a more capitalist/free market system. Recent elections threaten to turn back these reforms as many rural people feel they have been left out of the boom. Such a backlash might make doing business in India more difficult. In fact, shortly after the elections, the Indian stock market dropped about 4%.
I'd like to hear the opinion of Indians on these elections and their impact.
Many corporations interested in outsourcing spend lots of money on public relations to quiet down the concerns of the public who are affected. There is plenty of research on how outsourcing negatively affects individuals and not just the people who lose their jobs. It takes no genius to see how and if you dont want to take the time to identify and read scholarly books on the why and how you can see a movie like "Roger and Me" that can demonstrate it without getting into the heavy economic aspects.
If your read the article again you'll notice that all of the points are really just conjecture and not based on any large scale samples nor has it proven itself historically. Remember all those hardware engineers back when companies outsourced PC manufacturing, factory workers when they outsourced to sweat shops, etc, etc. Look at alot of those cities now. Its happening again to the Software Industry and all those who were planning to have a living working in that sector. The only people who do well will be those jobs that can't be outsourced or obsoleted (yet), management, and of course the owners who always come out ahead. DONT BE AN IDIOT and believe such nonsensical articles. If nothing else it just takes some common sense.
No comment.
Obviously the industry is growing, but industry leaders are using every trick in the book to manipulate labor costs.
Sure, there are thousands of new jobs being created in the US, but Americans are not even given a shot at filling many of these positions.
I agree, it's not as bad as one may think, it's actually alot worse!
www.displacedtechies.com
I'm not that old for a /.er, but I loved international relations as a younger buck. It's quite interesting to see how similar the complaints about India's outsourcing are to complaints about Japan's rise as a semiconductor (back when DRAM was the shiznit, Arabs would take that or gold for oil) and auto manufacturer. Look at where Japan is today, they certainly didn't get everything and really missed a whole bunch of the computer industry. However, there is one major difference, in the Japanese case, CEO's, upper management, and stockholders were effectivly being outsourced (as Japanese companies were started from the ground up and competed directly with American companies). However, in the Indian rise, they are working with our companies do some jobs remain here.
In the Japanese rise, there were plenty of businesses created out of nothing here that profited significantly from the growth of Japan. Done by people who took the time to learn what was important to the Japanese, not just throwing products over there. The same will be true in the rise of India. Since all of us are early to the game in realizing the magnitude of the change, we are well positioned to capitalize on any gains. Some idea's financial services (tools for newly wealthy to invest and managage their new wealth), items of cutural importance (Japanese demand for luxury goods, art, and expensive liquer) increased signficantly from 1970-2000, find a similar business exposed to India.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
some of the growth industries in the US now are defence related, and the "justice system".
Jobs in the future for kids now inside the US will be soldier, prostitute, house maid, gardener--and that car wash example. About like that it appears. Tongue in cheek but it's roughly true, too.
They got all these kids now faked out they will be a sports star or a rock star or something, or some other job along those lines. It's pretty sad when those are the best paid jobs to strive for from societal brainwashing. It's obviously the most interest that the vast majority have. You can fill a stadium -or multiple stadiums and venues really- with 50,000 people any given weekend near any medium or large US city to watch some game or get entertained with some various music, but you're *lucky* to get 500 people to a political conference even occassionally. Ya, I just invented the numbers, but I think you can see the point.
IF "globalism" as they push it now was so successful, then WHY are we now the worlds largest debtor nation, when a bit over 20 years ago when all this big push started we were the largest creditor nation? If it was supposed to make the nation all this loot and be successful, where's the beef? They keep claiming it's working, and the numbers keep proving them wrong, so they say we need MORE of their schemes to make it work. It's nuts. There's the big lie staring at us, along with we now have the highest incidence of mortgage defaults since the great depression, personal bankruptcy is at record highs,pension funds in both private and government are in the most serious problem levels, and so on. Can't even think about the ponzi scheme social insecurity is, that's gone for most practical purposes.
Nuts, it's a series of big lies. This "new and improved" system is designed to transfer even more wealth to the upper 1% of the population that is already the richest and most powerful, and it has to come from someplace, and that someplace is the US middle class, because that's the only other place it exists in the fist place, it's the last place they can steal it from, so there ya go.
-- I speak only for myself
...especially if you happen to live where the outsourced jobs are located. It isn't outsourcing then.
Let things happen. Protectionaism just leads to a workforce stuck making buggy whips.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Geographic location affects school choice more than money. There's not enough money in a voucher system to run a school "properly" (you need economies of scale - you couldn't pay a tutor with a voucher), so schools don't just spring up out of nowhere when theres a voucher system. They have in fact been implemented in a variety of places and education hasn't noticably improved. Know why? Because people just left the kids in the same schools.
Money for education does not trickle down properly to classrooms. It doesn't get reflected in teacher salaries. Even worse, schools (in the US) are normally funded largely by property taxes, which is just another way of keeping the "good" teaching in the rich areas. "Performance" base teaching is stupid because there's no simple metric for success, and because it would then encourage schools to ignore lower-achieving students or shunt them aside. You think it sucks being dyslexic now, wait till schools will actively try to get rid of you. Theres a whole ton of problems with educational funding (and it's not just about the amount of dollars, although thats a real problem in alot of places), but "teachers are lazy and deserve to be paid minimum wage" isn't one of them.
As for the last point - here's a pretty simple test of logic. Given, we've got a poor public education system. Given, other countries have superior ones. Should we a) attempt to emulate what others who are successfull are doing, or b) Switch to something totally new that hasn't had the desired effect when tested, in the hope that it'll be even BETTER than those other systems that our currently better than ours? Bear in mind that the future health of our country relies on your answer.
And screw quoting all your responses, it's early and I'm still tired. I'd like to know what personal knowledge you have of the education industry that you're able to place the blame on teachers so squarely. Being grumpy because Mrs. Gruder gave you detention in 4th grade really isn't enough.
It used to be that IT was "bulletproof" as far as the job market. You go to school for a few years, get out with a CS or IT degree, and you'd make 40-50K your first year. Now, see what it will get you with a dime..
I think the worst part about outsourcing is that it recursively hurts the American economy. American programmers(sys admins, help desk guys) can't get American jobs. This means that these people, now jobless, cannot buy a house, a car, whatever. So, because they now have no place to live and no transportation, they cannot get a job. See the cycle? Of course, it could happen to everyone, too, and then nobody would have a job, or everyone would work in fast food.
In short, I think there is no upside to outsourcing. It hurts our already failing economy. We can't risk walking on such thin ice.
Research and innovation needs money. Research money goes to industries that make money. There was no profit in going back to the moon so nobody did any more efforts to get there. So now we want to go to Mars we don't have the technology we would have if there was money in it.
It's all a bit sad really. And surprisingly, military research (death science) has blossommed into many technologies we use today (hint:Internet) because there was money in it.
-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "Shadows are as important as the light" - Jane Eyre
Most of the PhD's I know of in Math are working as Actuarials or some such.
They aren't doing anything "innovative" or "creative". They picked up the degree because they like math.
Now, not every field can be handled with a notebook and pencil. Chemical engineering. That takes some money for research (and without research, you don't have "innovation" or "creativity").
If those engineering jobs go overseas, where will the people who will make the "innovative" or "creative" discoveries learn?
This article reads like someone falling off of a 100 story building.
10 floors down, doing okay.
25 floors down, doing okay.
50 floors down, doing okay.
75 floors down, doing okay.
90 floors down, doing okay. Based upon evidence collected at this point, there will be no problem when 100 floors have been passed.
splat
Ummm....
Which will also then be offshored.
If you're building a company, and offshored labor is a lot cheaper than local labor, then pray tell why would you build it with local labor? The answer is that you probably won't. And that is how most companies, new and old, will answer the question.
The greater the availability of cheap offshored labor, the worse the prospects for local labor. And therefore, the higher the local unemployment rate.
It'd be one thing if offshoring was a gain in economic efficiency, but it's not, because the amount of human labor expended to do a job remains the same, if it doesn't actually increase. That means that offshoring has to be analyzed in the context of a zero-sum game (economics is zero sum unless there are gains in efficiency involved, because the money transactions themselves are zero-sum). And in the context of a zero-sum game, offshoring is a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes (those who are losing jobs) to the upper classes (those who own, run, or have significant investment in corporations), because at least some of the money saved from offshoring is going towards additional payouts to the CEOs, upper management, board members, and large investors.
The move towards offshoring won't help the U.S. economy, which gets its strength from the middle class. It'll destroy it, because it'll destroy the middle class. And it might (depending on how far it goes) destroy the world economy as well, because it'll force entire countries' economies to compete with each other with only one variable determining who wins: the standard of living (the amount of resources the average person has above and beyond that which is needed to barely survive). That's because the lower the standard of living, the fewer resources being used by the population, and thus the lower the cost of that population, and thus the lower the cost of using that population as labor.
Which means that the end result will look a lot like the middle ages did: people were either insanely wealthy or dirt poor, with very little variation in between. Most were dirt poor, and little more than slaves.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
To me this seems more like replacing good creative but expensive people with adequate but really cheap code monkeys. Or replacing a five pound sledgehammer with five regular hammers. They don't serve the same purpose, but clueless managers make the substitution anyway.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
If *all* jobs are filled by machines, then mankind can go play all day. Sounds good to me. We'll do the jobs we like because they're fun and let the robots have the rest, a la _Voyage from Yesteryear_. I can spend my days writing code that pleases me instead of beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to make someone else's code do what we need.
I'd say the other reason that people aren't afraid that *everyone* will be replaced by a machine is that there is so much human activity left which we still don't understand to any significant degree. Show me the "master architect algorithm" or a function which correctly models customer satisfaction, or a machine that can win souls for $DEITY. You can't emulate it if you don't know how it works. I believe that that day will come, but we are not positioned to see it, even if it arrives tomorrow.
I was given the opposite advice, by a mathematics teacher about to retire who knew me well. She recommended I take my maths as high as I could, and then transfer it into whatever field I wanted to work in. That turned out to be some of the best advice I've ever received: an undergraduate degree in maths and a post-grad CS diploma later, and I'm more qualified than most of my peers. More importantly, I understand maths and can apply it in new contexts, as well as having easily enough CS to work in software development specifically (where a lot of people don't have any formal CS background anyway).
I'm also curious about this idea that mathematics opens no career paths. My peers now work in finance, IT, bio-tech, engineering R&D, and numerous other interesting and/or well paid fields. A few did go on to do PhDs, but certainly not the majority.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Well yes, as I have maintained in the past, outsourcing does not present a strategic long term concern for the US. Sure, there are certain jobs that shall be relocated or executed from remote locations, but even if one looks at the current trends - anything that remotely involves creativity or innovation is not going anywhere"
I think that this statement contains several assumptions that we need to look at critically. I think you will see that if we depend on this kind of thinking to set policy, we are fucked. It's an arrogant statement without basis in fact or history.. And this has been said many times before in failing empires.. It is never true..
First, I should explain that movements to 'outsource' jobs historically have come after
economic increaases in productivity that have empowered middle class workers and especially, skilled craftsmen/women (yesterday's 'programmers') Basically, its driven by greed. Productivity increases should be shared, but instead, the upper management prefers to keep them all themselves. So, in a sense, the explosion in offshoring is the executive management's revenge for the salary increases many of us extracted from them in the late 90s. (Also, where do the designers and creators come from? They have to work their way up to that point. How will they do it if the bulk of entry-level jobs have dissapeared? It won't happen. Most people will never enter the field. Those who are midway will be forced to leave it for more renumerative work elsewhere, if they can find it - doubtful, at that point..because most service jobs - the ones that cant move overseas..will be automated by then..)
But they are also making another assumption they shouldn't. That they will be able to, after training these offshore workers, be able to remain as the middlemen offering their services to others, and making a princely, easy profit off of them. That wont happen. What will happen is that those jobs and technologies will leave the US, never to return. All because of greed.
Basically, the loss of technical jobs is creating a vicious circle. People are less drawn to technical careers, (to put it mildly) and this creates a 'shortage of skilled workers' that sends the innovators in technology elsewhere to start companies and build equity.. Like Spain, Holland and England before them, the US will lose its 'empire' to other, more innovative countries if we dont stop this hemmorhaging of technical investment now..
But it may already be too late.. Those of us who like working in technology may eventually be forced to move where the jobs are.. or do something else..something boring and nonproductive.. Its our loss. If the US government turns into an inflexible corrupt protector of the status-quo - the monopolies and monied interests.. intelligent people without extensive investments or inherited wealth would be well advised to go elsewhere.. The inward-looking government will be all-consumed with erecting barriers to their success here.. Head for the frontier.. Since you cant go to America, there must be another frontier somewhere.. China, Asia, Canada, Europe, Australia..New Zealand???? Look for places where innovation is rewarded..appropriately.. The offshorers wont care at that point.. they have already made their money.. now their main obsession is preserving it... Preserving the status quo.. Fighting creativity.. At least thats how I see them.. Look at the DMCA, the RIAA, wage stagnation, the loss of privacy in the workplace (like Foucaults Panopticon), the financial scandals on Wall Street..the 401k scam, massively inflated real-estate prices masking salary stagnation, cronyism and corruption..the shifting of the tax burden away from the rich and onto the (shrinking) middle class and poor.. The signs of the collapse of an impending bubble are all there..
Thats economics 101 Its already begun..
The editorial says that Americans are more creative than foreigners in engineering advances. And that will remain America's specialty, as foreigners retain other advantages that draw some of the global engineering economy their way. But that creative edge was born in the unique global America of the 20th Century, and is now going the way of that time and its conditions.
Americans were unusually fortunate in developing a scientific culture, while the rest of the world was still mired in faith cultures: religion, racism, royalty. But those cultures failed, especially when they competed directly with America, most obviously in war, but also in global economics like colonialism. Now American scientism has spread to other cultures, like in Europe and Asia where previously at best a tiny elite indulged. And their share of scientific innovation, and its overachieving younger sister, engineering, is dramatically increasing. Note how many American science papers are coauthored by visiting foreigners. While Americans are increasingly turning to the exact bad habits that kept their global competitors back: complacency, entitlement, anti-intellectualism, faith exclusive of reason, and competition via force rather than excellence.
Americans, dominating the 20th Century invention scene, stood on the shoulders of foreign giants, some of them immigrants to America. The wave moves on, with the compliance of the medium through which it moves. If Americans keep reorienting towards faith, exclusive of science, and waste all our hard-won opportunities to lead, the wave of innovation will move to where it is more welcome. And many of us, compelled to innovate, will move with it, to foreign shores.
--
make install -not war
Assuming, of course, that there is one..
Richard K. Miller,
President,
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
This is a school that is funded by the Olin Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of anti-labor causes in the US. The Olin's are multi-millionaires and fund to the tune of millions a year causes that are the most strident in screwing workers and helping millionaires and billionaires. There are not many wealthy American families on the front lines of what they must perceive as a class war as them. The only other ones I can think of are the Coors family, and to some extent Richard Mellon Scaife.
I read through this article and what is he saying? Nothing but a lot of bullshit. But other people here have mentioned that so I'll just throw up a red flag about who he's connected to (and paid by).
I should also mention that if there's a "problem" they'll always say it is American workers versus Indian workers. As if we're in a race and have to compete - working longer hours for the same amount of money, improving our skills so we generate more profit for the bosses and so forth. What is not mentioned is overwork, that if American workers and Indian workers got overtime pay, unemployment would fall (as people would be cut down to 40 hours work per week), and wages would rise, since supply of IT labor hours would shrink, increasing the price.
I am really tired of hearing the bullshit. The problem is not with the IT workers, we can administrate and program just as well as we could five years ago, if not better. The problem is with the people who control the capital, and their broken-down economic system which has the sole purpose of making profit for them. The only way to fix anything of this for ourselves is to talk to other IT workers who are of a similar mind (which there are many of), organize together and do something together. The sum is greater than the total of all of the parts. There are already nascent efforts out there working towards this, we just have to join up with them and push them along.
When I talk to CEOs about the career paths of the engineers in their companies, they say that many reach a career plateau very early, often after only five years. This happens not because of any technical deficiency, but because of a lack of "people" skills such as communication and teamwork. Moreover, engineers often come up short when they have to deal with people from different fields, such as manufacturing and marketing.
This does not explain why companies continue to only hire vertical engineers who have laundry lists of languages, technologies, and certs on their resumes, rather than horizontal engineers who are well-rounded and have better-than-average understanding of a wide range of industries and disciplines.
The whole statement that we need more "broader" technical talent is bullshit. It clearly has not been communicated down to the people in HR who are continually and consistently denying resumes because they haven't hit enough of the checkboxes on the acronym chart.
Corporations failed all through the 90s to truly harness and benefit from the diverse interests of broad-minded workers, instead fostering a stovepipe theory of corporate growth which in fact lowered the morale of broad-minded employees because the areas they were once able to branch out into (due to small-company necessity) were yanked from them in the name of territoriality.
If corporations think they need more broad-minded talent, they need to do two things (well three, but "get their head out of their ass" goes without saying): 1. Un-fuck the unenlightened roboticness of HR resume filtering, and 2. Actually create and promote positions that have broad domains.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
But what good does it have to add new, innovative engineers to the labor pool if there are no jobs for them and VCs aren't interested in funding *real* innovation that doesn't match the latest set of new/hot buzzwords?
The other point is that yes, we have real creative artists in the engineering field. However, to develop them to the point where their skills can produce new inventions of the sort which will benefit us all, these people need starting points for their career paths, i.e. entry level programming, electrical engineering, etc.
These are exactly the jobs that are going overseas.
Tech Public Policy stuff