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Outsourcing is Good for You
gManZboy writes "Catherine Mann, from the Institute for International Economics, has a look at What Global Outsourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers up over at Queue. She's got an interesting argument: outsourcing means cheaper IT products, meaning businesses will buy more, meaning more products to make & manage = net gain of IT jobs in the US. Ummm, did you follow that?"
On top of that, you can outsource your own job, take up another one, and outsource it too. Basically you can be making way more than you currently are. I think there was a /. story on this a while back.
Should have read:
a net gain of _outsourced_ jobs in the US
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
An economist. Lovely. International economist, actually. Have those people *ever* been right about anything?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
No I think it means more outsourced. IT jobs in Asia and India. And larger bonuses for american executives.
Outsourcing also raises the amount of money third world countries have. As they get richer, they start buying more expensive luxuries made in the industrialized nations. In the end, it will help our economy. Also, it is true that we do lose jobs to outsourcing. Like the article mentioned, however, we gain new skilled labor positions that are better paying than the manual labor positions that were eliminated.
I've been hearing more and more often about something similar. While not the same idea, it's the idea that America "recycles" (to be put in an Economists terms) jobs every year, something in the order of 50 million or so if I'm not mistaken, and that outsourcing somehow is just a natural process of this recycling...
:-P
If you ask me, I think Economists have it tougher than Computer Scientists, but that's just my opinion.
-Devin Torres
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Since not all jobs can be efficiently outsourced, a company that raises their productivity by outsourcing the jobs that can be will have more resources to devote to those that can't be
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Oh, the United States of India...
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
...and it appears valid at first bite. Ultimately the corporate motive is to make more profit however, so money saved by outsourcing probably wouldn't drain into more programmers (or whatever position abroad) more likely into the bottom line for the shareholders...not an entirely bad thing if you're a shareholder but if you're an employee...
...in bed
For adminstrative jobs that require physical presence and attention, outsourcing might be good.
However for jobs that can be done remotely (like programming, call centre etc), it's still a bad sign.
So those who can identify this change of job demand and acquire a different trade quickly, they may still survive in this outsourcing trend.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
Last time I checked the market set the price (with obvious unnamed monopoly exceptions *coughMicrosoftcough*). The price the company pays for the production of the item has negligable impact on price--and that's fine. The price people are willing to pay for something has a much bigger impact on the price. All outsourcing overseas does is fatten the profit margin for the sales of these IT projects. So right there, her basic premise is crap.
I mean, is she REALLY saying that companies will have more money to pay you with, because they don't have to pay you? WTF.
-- "A chicken is an egg's way of making another egg."
Thanks to outsourcing, everything I buy at WalMart with my unemployment check is cheaper!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Well, nice arguments and all. But fuck that. They can say all they want but before we stop paying multi-multi-millions to these greedy ass CEOs/CTOs and such, I don't want to listen to nothing. Do they have any answer to "If the CEO took a 50% pay cut, we could add another 2000 jobs in my company right now. So, why doesn't he?"
I guess I am just a little bitter but since they have announced 'massive' layoffs mid-sept, I can't do nothing but rant...
Free XBox, PS2
- The
.com bubble bursts, causing employees working for firms whose primary business is selling IT products to lose their jobs.
- Bigger IT companies that didn't actually fold outsource some work to reduce expenses.
- Due to public demand and reduced expenses, non-IT companies buy more computer crap.
- Non-IT companies have to hire the old IT employees to run the new computers.
Net result: Those employees eventually have jobs in computers, just not with computer companies.This actually makes sense, and I've seen it here locally. A lot of people I know who were laid off from startups are now working for their old customers. The problem is, this trend can take years. The number of businesses that totally went under put a ton of IT talent out of work. Compensating for that will take some time. That's not good news for the employees who haven't landed a job yet.
I outsouced my /. reading to India, i pay 4 dollars a day. They even make quality posts about random topics on it.
But as the economist John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we will all be dead."
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
But what is the realistic time frame for the world to become rich enough to afford all this wonderful crap we first worlders take for granted? 20, 50, 100 years? This isn't an instantaneous merry-go-round of wealth.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
I keep hearing this argument made in favor of outsourcing jobs, but what I never hear is a realistic estimate of the amount of time that has to pass before the good stuff comes back our way. If there's a fairly quick turnaround on work returning to the country of origin then it's a good argument, but I suspect that the amount of time that has to elapse in order for the jobs to start coming back is more likely to be measured in decades than years.
-- Gargonia
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn.
Meet my good friend, reality.
Hate me!
The difference is that there will be 1) jobs which are more productive / efficient for the world and 2) a more equitable distribution of wealth in the world. 1 - Technology made automated manufacturing lines possible, reduced the number of manual manufacturing jobs initially. This freed up people to do other types of work. If a machine / program can do a good job in a certain area, why tie a human to that work? It makes sense to free up people as much as possible, to do things machines can't, utilizing more creativity and ability that machines do not have. Technology will help that. 2 - pausing on the debate of how outsourcing can actually bring jobs back to the US, many people who complain about outsourcing just don't care about people outside the US. Outsourcing means better pay for people in countries not as rich as the US. Its fair for people in other countries to be paid well for similar work we do in the US. If you have any moral sense, you would care also about the wages of people overseas. -Edward
Sounds like you discovered the secret of multi-level marketing. Sssh.. before someone patents your idea.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
First, basing conclusions on an incomplete dataset is foolhardy. The quoted numbers do not capture the complete status of affairs. Much work in IT is done via contract/consultancy and those job losses arn't reflected in the numbers listed. If Fortune 500 companies replace domestic consultants with those working for offshore vendors, it really won't register in those quoted statistics. But it's been happening on a grand scale - as I type this, I am surrounded by ~500 offshore visa workers.
Numbers aside, there is a larger theme that Ms. Mann and others of her ilk neglect - if lower end "grunt" positions are being snuffed out in lieu of higher, "up the skills ladder" posts, then shortly, in a few years, both ends will inevitably be filled in such capacity. Where, pray tell, do qualified IT "engineers" earn the experience and prove their mettle? By toiling on systems bottom-up and then gaining an appreciation and understanding of complex system underpinnings. Or am I to understand that these ranks are now to be filled entirely by MBAs and sociology majors? Young folks are choosing alternate career paths, heeding the alarms that the parents and older friends send their way.
AZspot
I am a programmer, I make my money from making programs. I expect to get paid very well for what I do. I have spent thousands of dollars in not only college expenses, but also other training and materials. If x number of programming jobs are exported to another country because U.S. coorporations don't want to pay what I expect how does that benifit me the programmer? The economy as a whole 'may' not be hurt, but actually helped, but in the end there are less programming jobs out there than if there weren't outsourcing programming jobs. The big picture doesn't make me feel better.
Nuttles
Saved By Grace
Wow! Sounds like a good plan. When do we start seeing these promised results?
Oh, and did anyone read that USA Today article where people would rather pay $400 for local tech support than pay $20 for an offshore call?
Become a security guard for rich people.
Build trust over a decade or so.
When the upcoming collapse is in full swing, abuse that trust by handing the boss over to the tar-n-feathers brigade.
Ya gotta think long term.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
It's basic economics. What is described is how it works in theory. However, the theory requires perfect knowledge for all parties involved, zero costs for movement of capital (human and otherwise). I'm also unsure how comparative advantage (Google and David Ricardo are your friends) works in a market that is essentially saturated.
Perhaps the thing that really needs to be looked at is that IT support is viewed as a commodity. Support offered in India or Russia is viewed as the same quality product as that offered in the US. If this is the case, quitcherbitchin. I doubt you are buy American in other walks of life. If there is a difference in quality, it's time to express that. Was it Dell who found that their business customers wanted US tech support instead of Indian tech support? (or HP?) The product wasn't a commodity, so it couldn't be switched.
Rather than gripe about losing your job, explain why it's better that you have it than someone in another hemisphere.
And if you made it this far, here's a link to a non unreadable article. Will Taco et al. ever admit they are wrong with this color choice?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
sounds about as likely as trickle down economics.
ya, know, not at all.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I don't believe it reduces prices but it does delay some price increases. The market is pretty competitive across the board and pressures on this market prevent any real changes in the costs of most goods. So what is a company to do? Try to do the same for less. This allows some, not all, companies to be able to forgo raising their prices.
Of course its all a vicous circle. Eventually one of the companies succumbs to the fact it will have to raise prices... and they lose a little marketshare but it evens out usually as others end up with the same issue.
However it is just as outrageous to not believe that using cheaper resources doesn't result in lower costs.
Seems to me that too many people can justify the milkman losing his job to technology, the seamstress to technology, and even the gas attendants to technolongy. Yet threaten the geeks and they act as if its the coming of the end.
Face. The economy churns through jobs all the time. Some of these go overseas which does result in lower costs for people here. Just as the cost of clothing is less when it comes from China so can the cost of tech.
Like that nice PC you got there? Cheap memory eh? Where is the crying over the person whose job was lost to a PC?
Sorry but the world maturing does suck at times for those caught up on the wrong side of it. Getting emotional and claiming its all a lie won't make it stop.
Remember 138 million jobs exist in this country and compare that to the number outsourced. Also remember that the number of people who are employable will decrease over the next 10 to 15 years... so...
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
is that economics is a zero-sum game. Lower costs supposedly means more profit to executives, but no increase in jobs. Higher overall demand supposedly means higher demand for outsourced workers.
... or you'll be paid to integrate that piece with other pieces that can be picked up cheap as open source software or as cheaply developed components.
What the author is trying to point out is that whole new markets of opportunity will open once the cost of basic programming activities is low enough. One of the benefits of open source software is that poorer countries can now obtain technology that before was out of their reach (or they can at least extract higher discounts from proprietary vendors).
I have a friend who works as a software consultant customizing proprietary accounting software for small/medium enterprises like those described by the author. That's the basic outline of the future -- smaller companies could benefit from technology that goes beyond office applications, but to more backroom ops, or e-commerce opportunities, or whatever. You won't get paid based on your ability to write something that can be written cheaply overseas to target a generic problem -- you'll be paid to tweak that piece into something that gives a competitive advantage to your customer
Many industries assemble cheaper components into an overall design that delivers a value greater than the cost of the parts. Software, as an intangible good, provides some interesting (perhaps worrying?) differences that make economic analogies a little tricker to apply.
But I think while some components are open to a research/science approach (algorithms, maybe frameworks) I think the majority of software is close to manufactured goods in that customer requirements drive a solution that isn't generically applicable or saleable (a problem for Microsoft-ish companies that try to sell the same thing to everybody). The world of de facto standard products gets a lot of press because it's typically winner-take-all (google, MS Office, MS IE), but the growth in demand and in jobs will be in the world of tweaked software.
I just recently came across this site.
Some of these guys are charging $0.16/minute for programming help ( $9.60/hour). Hell, the 976-HOTT girls make much more than that.
I should have gone into the sex-talk business instead of programming.
Wages in IT have remained flat in the US/gone down whereas for execs it has gained at least 20% just in the last year and that is average for the last few years.
That is what outsourcing gives us. So get to the top while you still can, you're either at the top outsourcing or you are outsourced.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Maybe we can start outsourcing economists, too.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
I kinda have to disagree with all of that. Current trends is not that business uses the money it saves to buy new stuff, it's that the money they save, they tend to apply to top executive bonuses and salaries. The trickle stops at the top, generally speaking.
I guess there's none of them pesky thermodynamics laws in the world of economics huh?
Starsucks
This has to be the first ever economic theory equivalent of the Chewbacca Defense.
I just love it when you IT people get all pompous about economists. Of course you're all the smartest people on the face of the earth, so people who've actually STUDIED economics can't possibly be right about anything, especially when you disagree with it on a visceral level.
You guys sound as pathetic as the steel workers and miners where I grew up, compaining about how the corporate "man" keeps you down. Get with the times: many IT people were the first to say that to the "old economy" manufacturing employees back when getting an IT degree meant a paycheck that was completely outsized compared to your actual skills.
Now that you're not making mad money right out of college, you're all more than willing to join up with the Union and be protectionists.
It's a known economic fact that lower labor costs translate to lower finished goods costs. You think you'd be able to afford the latest graphics hardware and a new box everytime the next killer FPS came out if they weren't being manufactured overseas for way less than they could be made in the U.S.? You all benefit from outsourcing and globalization, but you're too fixated on your own careers to see the benefits.
See:
u ll.html
...
...
"Exporting America : Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas"
by Lou Dobbs
"The power of big business over our national life has never been greater. Never have there been fewer business leaders willing to commit to the national interest over the selfish interest, to the good of the company over that of the company's they head."
See also:
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript334_f
DOBBS: I want to hear one of these candidates sharply and clearly say this country is about the people who live in it.
DOBBS: You have a responsibility not only to your investors, you have a responsibility to the marketplace, you have a responsibility to your customers, to the community in which you work. You have a responsibility to the country that makes your business possible in the first place.
MOYERS: Heresy. Are you a traitor to your class? The investor class.
DOBBS: Well, I'm, you know, I think most of us are investors. And I hardly think I'm a traitor. I think it's traitorous and treasonous and absolutely ignorant for these people to be out ballyhooing double-digit returns on equities when first we have to get our house in order in this country. And bring back integrity, principle, leadership to our business enterprises, to our markets. And try to do a lot better for the people who count. That is the middle class.
MOYERS: You begin with a stunning quote. I'll read it. Quote, "The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
DOBBS: Absolutely. Corporate America has at this time controls the national media. It controls nearly every avenue of an American citizen's access to information about the way he or she lives, about those forces that are influencing our lives.
And corporate America is protected in Washington by the dollars it spends. It is protected in the media by some virtue of ownership.
Outsourcing is bad for the person whose job goes elsewhere.
But the job goes elsewhere because someone else can do it cheaper.
It happens all the time. Sooner or later, all those guys in India will price themselves out of the market and lose their jobs to people in China or Africa.
I have sympathy for people who lose their jobs. I have no sympathy for people who want government to distort economics.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Bitch and moan as we may, this ridiculous imbalance in world wealth doesn't look very stable to me. Outsourcing this kind of stuff had to happen.
There are masses of very poor people out there now able to afford a computer and internet access. Their disadvantages are many, their only advantage is that they're poor. So of course they will work for less. Suck-it-up dept is right.
I don't support the exploitation of workers in poor countries, but it's hardly exploitation if these people are making a living doing what they do.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Remember the following 5 slashdot offshoring axioms:
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The author shows how IT oursourcing might be good for the U.S. economy as a whole, but I fail to see how that is going to help the average IT worker.
The author's main point is that by saving money, supposedly it will free up money in sectors such as education, health care, and construction. What the author fails to realize is tha most of the outsourcing WAS in customized applications. It wasn't the big boys like Microsoft, IBM, etc. doing most of the layoffs, it was the smaller shops. In addition, I would call in to question the value of IT spending in each of these industries.
1) Education - need better teachers, not better software. I've taught before and that is the main problems. Computers won't keep Johnny from . Secondary schools are mainly just babysitting
2) Construction - ?? you hire a bunch of drunks to pound some nails in, what do you need computers for. This industry loves cheap labor, I don't see much opportunity here
3) Health services - IT could really shine in this area, but it is such a huge mess that it won't be fixed without government regulation, which means that few will profit from it. I remember this was what MicroStrategy tried to concentrate on back in the mid-late 90s, I suppose they just dropped it after they realized what a colossal mess it was. A bigger problem with health care is the cost of health insurance and the fact that people are living longer and needing more care, long after their productive years are over. Malpractice is another issue effecting this industry.
Really they only way you can make money in the IT sector anymore is you can show businesses that it will save them money. IT is mainly just a cost center nowadays. I don't see this happening for any of those industries.
Also, consider this: Are Windows/Office any cheaper now than it was 10 years ago, adjusted for inflation? I don't have the statistics on hand, but I'd be suprised if it were true. Though I suppose hardware is a bit cheaper.
Consider what happened during the 1980s - 1990s . I suppose you could say it was good for the U.S. "economy*" that all the decent wage manufacturing jobs left the U.S. Consumers got cheaper cars, but workers lost their jobs, and they NEVER came back. If you use the author's analagy and applied it to the manufacturiung sector, then as prices fell on consumer goods, demand should have increased since consumers now had more money which to purpose. Well I suppose that did happen, but the sector never responded, and things only got worse.
Some of them were able to retrain to IT jobs, quite a few were relegated to WalMart. A few years later they also lost their IT jobs. Its just not possible for a 45 year old with three kids and a mortgage to be constantly retraining like this. Quite a few familes have never recovered.
The author suggests that by outsourcing programmers you create more positions in design/interface, interacting with customers and management. But how is someone who has never programmed Only a few with can be a manager/CEO straight out of college. You need some time in the trenches. And if they layoff all these junior positions where are our next batch of managers going to come from? I suppose from whatever country you are outsourcing to.
In short, I don't see no light at the end of the tunnel for those in IT/Programming, which is part of the reason I'm getting out. Luckily I'm still young and have no family, I suppose with the way the U.S. works, from a purely economic standpoint it is uneconomical to have one.
* Interesting how these lassez-faire types hate collectivism yet often resort to a purely aggregate word such as economy, GNP, GDP, etc.
In the NY Times a while back, in a Virginia Postrel column about outsourcing, Mann suggested that (paraphrasing) "perhaps technology would allow IT workers to find IT jobs".
Clearly, the woman was unfamiliar with Monster.com, Dice.com, or the realities of the IT job search.
I think this was earlier this year, so clearly, she's had her head up her ass for the better part of a decade.
Her idea was that there might be "hidden" IT jobs in hospitals, and other places where an IT worker might not be smart enough to look.
If she knew what she was talking about, she'd know that you don't just look for jobs at IT companies, you look for jobs that require the skills you have. (Because there's not much point applying at a VB shop if what you know is Java.)
In IT job ads, you're likely to find ads from hospitals, insurance companies, banks, and local government, as well as "IT" companies. Slashdot readers know this.
Mann seems to have no concept of what an IT job search is like, yet she doesn't hesitate to consider herself an expert.
Example #1:
Design and interface must be done together with the customer, but coding and maintenance do not require close proximity with customers and can be done by less costly programmers abroad. The higher-wage jobs, involving design and interface, must still be performed in the U.S.
Good try, but wrong. There are times when the designer and the coding monkey can be safely separated, but in general you're asking for trouble. Prepare to be IMing a lot. The offshore outfits are becoming better designers in any case, and soon the US designer's employer is going to be shipping his/her job out to be where the code is written.
Example #2:
The value to the U.S. economy of cheaper outsourced software and IT services is that it reduces the price of customized software. Econometric estimates are that, to an even greater degree than IT hardware, demand for software and services increases more than one-for-one with reductions in price. Therefore, as prices fall, demand for services and software rises more than one-for-one, diffusing IT into the lagging sectors and deepening the use of IT in the leading sectors, thus increasing demand for workers with IT skills in all sectors.
So with cheap custom software, more businesses will use it and the user employees become computer skilled. The first assumption I'll buy into, assuming that an easy and cheap local consultant is available at the start of the coding chain. If this plays out to the scale she thinks, therein lies the benefit to US IT workers. The second assumption is complete crap. Someone using a customized Access database front end is no more "computer literate" than someone using Word, all else being equal.
Example #3:
Meanwhile, U.S. IT jobs continue to move up the IT skills ladder. Demand increases for workers with the skills needed to design, customize, and utilize IT applications...
Nope. This assumes the US always holds the high ground. However, as more development and design occurs overseas, and the host countries become ever more developed and self-sufficient, this falls apart. They sell to us, and by and large don't need anything back... except our increasingly worthless dollars.
Luke, help me take this mask off
This isn't that complicated.
I am a custom programmer, I bill $50/hr.
I get lots of work, I hire someone to help me.
I pay them less then I charge, I make money on their work as well as mine.
I provide the work to them, and supervise, this is how I justify my cut.
This is how many small business grow, it is called organic growth, and is very common.
Since programmers don't need to be physically close, why not hire the cheapest capable person? If you only pay $10/hr, you make $40/their hour, of course minus your management work.
What about this doesn't make sense, when I was 14, I worked for a guy cutting lawns doing almost exactly this.
Yeah, I follow that arguement...all the way to the unemployment line.
First, all tech is crap. Let me repeat that. Our careers are based on crap. First, for any non-tech company, computers are a support accounting item. This means that computers are not in the business of making money for the company, they are an expense. (Get over it, I'm not done yet, so hold the flames til you see where I'm going.)
Let's look at the grocery store. It's full of tech in my area. PCs on the check out lines. PCs to weigh and print tickets for fruit and veggies, computers to check the temps in the coolers, computers to do the accounting, timeclocks that are really T104 form factor motherboards with full computers, hell, almost every isle has a computer. (I understand that some stores are replacing the security camera VCRs with computers now.)
Second, when these devices are first installed, there is some sort of cost/benifit study, both before and after they buy it. (If they are a cluefull company. Uncluefull don't do them, simi-clued do one before. Only fully clued do both.)
Third, after a few years, these productivity gaining devices stop being seen as something that saved them money, but just another expense. They forget they replaced things that cost even more, or the savings they got from installing them.
Now comes the down cycle (remember when all the wall street anaylists said we beat the down cycle markets? Cheap talk, and while I never believed it, many did.) and busineses have to cut expenses.
Gee, where do we cut? Almost always the answer is IT, because IT is seen as an expense. They almost always forget the productivity gains they get from the use of technology, they only see that line item cost IT people are on the balance sheet.
As for tech companies, very clued know that IT keeps the plates spinning and productivity high. They may cut a few in IT, but mostly by quietly asking "who are the bottom 10% we can do without best?" and those hit the bricks.
Simiclued tech companies just cut the last hired.
Unclued cut a lot of IT, regardless of why.
Likewise, consertives say "outsourcing is GOOD for jobs!". Look at thier reasoning, folks. If you believe it, then outsourcing is good all the way up the chain of command, yet you don't see CFOs and CEOs being outsourced. Oh, no! What you do see is that they get multi-million dollar bonuses and raises for cutting 2,000 jobs here, 5,000 there.
This is why I say IT workers are the modern black gang of the world. We stoke the boilers, fire the engines, make the computers run. But are we asked our opinions on all the jimcrack geegaws PHBs demand? Hell no! Most of the time we are accused of "slacking off", "being uncooperative", "geeks" with a roll of the eyes and shake of the head, and the only respect we get is when we save their ass and the empty mouthings of praise during those "all hands" meetings where the bosses give each other awards.
(OK, so I'm bitter right now. I'm miffed because I just came from one of those all hands meetings, and it was a complete waste of THREE FREAKIN' HOURS.)
But let the pager go off at two in the morning, and we are there. Someone has spyware on their system? We are there. Virus? Ditto, gritting our teeth all the while they regale us with how smart they are about technology or how absolutely they can't do a thing with a computer. Thinking how this person makes twice what I do, with an IQ measured in irrational numbers....
But what really gets me is the number of times when the very people that depend on IT to get their computers working bypass IT, and go spec out and order servers and software and then expect us to keep it running, or second guess us the rare times we are asked our opinion.
You know, I'd never dream of tryi
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The problem with outsourcing is that it isn't a buisness move that creates growth. You remove a job here and create it over there. Profit is generated but no real change has happened so there is little modivation to create new jobs.
Yes its true the new job over there creates higher standard of living and wealth over there but at the cost of the standard of living and wealth over here you really haven't gained anything but CEOs with larger wallets.
I've recently been to two hardware companies, one a small business doing about $10 million in annual sales, another with $2.7 billion in annual sales. Both of them have attempted to outsource their hardware manufacturing to taiwan. Both of them ended up deciding they could do it cheaper and with better quality by keeping it in house.
For the small shop, the problem wasn't the cost, it was cheaper per-board to have it outsourced. Their biggest problem was that it took a month or more for turnaround. The next biggest problem was that they had to ship out the specified BOM to taiwan, since there were few manufacturers for some of the components.
For the big shop, the problem wasn't cost. It was the dynamic nature of the work. Every day, they fill and empty a warehouse of a different product. The complaints that the manager mentioned were that the products were more likely to break, were more often defective, and were often made with cheaper or inferior parts than the specification, sometimes causing the product to fail FCC standards. This was an intermittent problem, so they found that to preserve brand recognition for quality, they needed to keep it in house.
I don't believe that cost alone is the overriding factor. If a company decides based on that alone, the company will have shoddy products, choosing cost over quality.
Of course, I'm not saying that outsourced stuff is necessarily bad, only that the experineces of the companies I've worked with have found it to be the case.
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Call me a troll, fine... but it seems to me that most of the responses of negativity towards the article is with the reasoning, "I'm not employed, so therefore IT jobs arent being created."
However, I must say, as I am currently looking for alternate employment, I have had several opprotunities for job interviews (about 10). And these jobs range from technical support at 30k/yr through Sr Network Engineer and Security Analysts at 100k/yr and more.
The jobs are out there, people... however (here's the troll) whether you're qualified for them is another thing altogether. Whether you want to be a tech support guy is yet another... It also depends on where you live (I happen to live in the NYC area and there are plenty of IT jobs around). Yes, my current company is outsourcing to India, but we're still hiring IT people... just not the same group of IT people.
Oh and one other thing... most of the people that were laid off here in the US due to my company's outsourcing have been Indians who are here on work visas.... so if you're going to get the same people at 1/2 the price because they are 6000 miles away, then why wouldn't a company do that?
you wrote:
" No, her basic premise is sound economics.
Economics is nothing more than a science of how to fuck over the working citizen and benefit the investor. Anytime I hear someone talk about "economics", I know they are either callow and ignorant or an evil greedhead. Guess which one I think you are....
you also wrote:
What outsourcing really does is grow the economies of those other countries.
WHo cares? America is my business. I own it jointly with all my fellow citizens. They are my partners. I aint looking to fuck them over so I can unduly benefit myself and some foreigners. I call that treason....
The money going into those economies results in higher economic spending power among the outsourcees. They in turn buy more goods, which employs more people in their local economy. This causes economic growth... at the same time it provides the ability for people in these countries to start their own business, utilizing cheaper local professionals, to produce products and outcompete the American companies. That sounds scary... but the net gain is cheaper goods and services for US as well.
OK...that scenario MIGHT come true, at some point in the future, maybe 50 years or 100 years. But I and my fellow citizen-partners are gonna get mighty skinny waiting for your free-trade, lasseiz faire, cornucopia-religion, rapture-prophesy crap to come to fruition. I say fuck that, and put up steep trade barriers. You know, things CHANGE from time to time in this ol' world. What works OK at some time N, does necessarily work well at some time N+K. Reality is like that.
You wrote:
It's the concept of competitive advantage. The workers in India have a competitive advantage as they can do the IT jobs cheaper, and ostensibly at or near the same quality level. By allowing them to take that advantage they win (their economy grows), but they also begin producing products that out-compete the more expensive American products. This is the exact same cycle we saw with Japanese cars (which has come full circle with those companies opening up manufacturing plants in the United States).
Here is an analogy for you: I and a bunch of people own an office building together. Each of us owners uses one of the offices to ply our trade. I am a lawyer; Joe down the hall is a dentist, Mike is an accountant, etc.
Then we hire an office manager. This office manager finds out that the office building on the down the street is not doing so well. The lawyers, accountants, dentists working there do not have much business. They charge much less than we owners in our office building do, but the problem is that their location is not as "prime"as ours. So that office manager conspires with the owners of the other building: whenever someone comes in looking to hire a lawyer, get dental or accounting work, etc., he just sends them down the street. He gets a kickback.
When we catch onto what he is doing he just says basically what you have just said: "it will grow their economy, it will keep prices down, yadda yadda yadda...."
Now, what do you think of that office manager?
With regard to manufacturing and japan and the USA, you might wanna read this....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
If you laid all the economists end to end, they'd point in all directions.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Well if you want to skim off money you have to add value somehow.
Supervision, hiring good people, project management, ensure quality, provide customer support, all those things customers want.
You know all that stuff Redhat is doing with Linux.
Bear in mind, foreign countries, particularly China, tend to do economic espionage. I wouldn't reccomend moving your R&D lab there.
... I suppose we could just our crops from south of the border, though. Right?
Also, I knew a lot of Chinese folks who wanted to get their educations overseas.
For the moment, at least, the west has a good lead in terms of R&D and education.
Of course, we'd be more competitive if we copied China's lead and forced some farmers to produce food for our country for near-slave wages.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
People can't easily switch careers. I have a family
to feed, so I can't just go back to school. I made
my investment in education. Somebody going into IT
today would be stupid of course, but some of us
started long ago. We're stuck. I need to keep this
career until I die.
The feds muck with interest rates all the time.
Sometimes they break up monopolies. They dish out
artificial monopolies to your local phone company,
patent holders, copyright holders, TV stations,
and so on. Market distortion is the norm.
Because we're all shareholders, remember? Except the 50% of the population that isn't, like those of us still trying to pay off the student loans we took to get us into white collar jobs and out of the dying manufacturing industry. We're the real suckers. Thousands invested in a future that was pulled out from underneath our feet.
This all seems to be pretty simple to me, and fits into "the big picture" quite firmly.
/. about how overseas programmers are less "in tune" with the business problems that the software is to provide the solution for, and how in some cases the programmers are not as well-trained.
From 1999 to 2002 (last available data), the number of "programming" jobs in the U.S. earning on average $64,000 fell by some 71,000. But jobs held by application and system software engineers earning on average $74,000 increased by 115,000.
So, programmers overseas are now writing the programs that businesses depend on, and we're hiring more people (44,000 more people in 3 years) to try to implement / support that software. Makes sense to me.
There's been lots of discussion on
Therefore, it should be no suprise that it takes that much more work(ers) to crowbar this software into place & pound it into submission so that it does the job, and to keep it doing so every day. Additionally, when you consider that the personnel doing the implementation/support are that much further disconnected (language barriers & such) from those who actually built it, this becomes a no-brainer.
The real question is, is the trend of software requiring more and more maintenance & support year after year for myriad reasons a good thing? This article claims that it is in the short-term (more jobs), but what about when the whole card house tumbles?
Once all the IT jobs are outsourced, it will only be a matter of time before the Indians decide they don't need the American companies to tell them what to do, and can just send over some Indians on L-1 visas to interface with *their* customers.
but I dont think I've ever seen anything more insightful in my 3+ years here...
does anyone wonder if computers would have taken off so much, and started to appear on every danged desk ever (ever) without having been made affordable by cheap manufacturing labor overseas?
i certainly doubt computers would have ever reached such widespread price appeal if not for outsourcing their construction.
if televisions were manufactured in america, they would be expensive as hell. if this was cathodeslashtube.org and we all programmed tivo funcitonality for tv's and other related service industries i'm sure we'd be glad for our jobs. but of course, we wouldn't have them in any great number if televisions weren't commodotized. well, now computers are a commodity (boy were us mindful people grateful for that 5 years ago!) and so are many computer programming services! oh no!
so yeah, business sucks, lost jobs and all. but honestly, what if we stepped past our bias (we all want to be employed, just like those autoworkers who contributed to a net gain of something when their job loss meant more affordable cars) perhaps we can see a future (an unlikely one) where the benefits of cheaper software development trickle down like many other products that benefited our economy because of their cheap manufacture.
cheap computers begat a huge service industry. is it too farfetched that cheaper software development might trickle down into more feasible implementation of 'smart' products now that you don't have to pay a small towns worth of taxes and benefits to develop some measly software.
where this trickles down to....well...somewhere
- I'd prefer not to.
Stop calling assembly manufacturing please, some of the biggest FUD out there now. Use the correct terms. Picky point but it's true. We used to manufacture cars, now we do not, we put together car kits.
And how is it "all of us" when it's not "all of us" who can get these cheaper goods and services? Aren't you leaving out the ones displaced, out of work, rehired at less wages, etc? That means it's not "all" of us, correct? Seems like you are assuming two things at the same time, that outsourced jobs result in zero loss of jobs here, and that they make more jobs at the same time. Say whut? How are people who have now much less money or no money supposed to take advantage of just cheaper trinkets, when basic bills and utilities aren't even being met?
Sorry, it ain't working, been hearing this scam pushed for over 20 years now. Stuff in general costs more, and good well paying jobs are much harder to come by, you can't just pick and choose a few selected entries like CPU chips or something and call it the total economy. Got the personal memory, don't need an article to tell me that. Stuff costs more now, not less, generally speaking.Yes, there are new products on the market, but in general, nope, stuff costs more. Food, energy, housing,clothing, all costs more. People have lost purchaising power, not gained. Bankruptcies are at record levels-why if these games are making the economy so good? Why is that? Really, why? Savings at all time historic lows-why is that? if we are all so better off, wouldn't it be trivially easy to sock away more now? But it's not happening. House notes are now common at 30 years, I can remember when 10 was common. Why are they at 30 now, is it because houses cost more, or less? and yes, I even mean the same excact size houses in the same areas. And interest only loans? Excuse me? WTF is that noise? People are getting so desparate to hang onto their houses-just a place to live- they basically agree to rent them forever? That's simply...weird, but I'm seeing the ads now on Tv and such, never used to be that way. Car notes are at 60 months now, I remember 12 month loans, and any random middle of the road joe normal blue collar paycheck could pay them off to boot, let alone a white collar at 2x the average wage. And some people are being forced to a perpetual lease, they can never really own a car (that runs and ain't beat to snot) now, it's turned into an expected monthly utility bill because the lease is all that's affordable. I remember when leasing was extremely uncommon for joe sixpack, now they push those magic cheaper numbers because outright purchase is so hig-where's the cheaper cars at? I remember a ton of cars brand new at under 2 grand when I first started driving, where are they now?
Less people have jobs with full benefits now. More people have lost their primary jobs and have been forced to take lesser paying jobs with less or zero benefits, sometimes not even getting a full work week. They just screwed people over on overtime this week with that new law to boot. More households require two checks to function, when one used to cut it easily.
How is this "better"?
Nope, the US did well when we pushed a full, completely diverse, vertically integrated and protected economy, the whole magilla, manufacturing, agriculture, energy production, etc, all of the above. It went downhill when they pushed swapping the cow-working- for the magic beans of get rich quick "investing" in whoknowswhereistan and making millionaires into billionaires. The only servicing I am seeing is the US middle class getting "serviced" right up the tuchus by the same old slick snakeoil guys.
The better era with a better styled economy would have been the 50's to late 60's. Since then, coincidentaly with allowing dumping of autos and the start of offshoring,and allowing huge tariff imbalances, and also giving TAX BREAKS to offshore, we've gone steadily down hill. Just because we have some shinier stuff now doesn't mean we have a bette
How is outsourcing beneficial at all in the long term? To me it is a short term solution to increase the stock value of a company. I don't know if it is just me that thinks this, but it seems to be like the middle class America is disapearing, does it not seem that outsourcing is to blame for this? To some degree I can see some jobs getting outsourced (like Levis jeans for instance) where a developed country such as the US is wasting resources, this won't hurt the economy, but when companies like Nortel Cisco and IBM and pharmaceutical, and R&D companies start outsourcing university level jobs, this is a problem IMHO. Take a look around, the middle class America is slowly slipping away.
What if N developers migrate to N management positions and 3*N offshored developers?
Now you have more total global employment, higher value US employment, and more productivity for everyone.
I know that is the rosy scenerio, the other (obvious) one is all the jobs go away and we're all unemployed.
Fighting against the second with protectionism doesn't work. Working towards the first scenerio can work.
I won't argue it is easy, or it will happen quickly, just that is how I think we should view this opportunity.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work;" --Edison
Now, we pay the N managers 60$ per hour, and the offshore guys $10 per hour, each. So the net cost is $90 per hour for 3 times as much work as one onshore guy at $50.
So, which company will succeed? Output of one man at $50 per hour, or output of three for $90 per hour?
There is a net benefit to society, the ex-programmer is making more money, and he's producing cheaper code. There's a net benefit to the offshore society, they are earning reasonable wages in context.
The loser, admittedly, is the competing on-shore programmer, who either has to drop his hourly rate to $30, or figure out how to become more productive, or go and find 3 dudes to write code for him. Any of those three is a viable strategy, I'd suggest option 2 is the least stressful and the most satisfying, since I don't enjoy management or poverty.
Outsourcing is vandalism, like breaking glass, that ends up costing everyone. Caroline argues that outsourcing (dollars spent somewhere else) benefits everyone, including the programmer who's picking his nose and filling out resumes instead of being paid for the same work. It is clear that the programmer would differ. The programmer would also argue that the outsourced work is inferior in quality and that he's not allowed to compete effectively due to further government vandalism though insane IP laws. The supposed work that's created is click and drool upkeep of Winblows, which pays very poorly, while others do the brain work. Everyone pays the price for this, if they are not sensible enough to use free software, by paying monopoly fees for software that could and does cost much less. These hidden costs are carried by all in the form of higher general costs lower efficiency and inconvenience. The situation with non free software is much closer to the case of the boy who's paid by the glazier to break windows. That's what the upgrade train is.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Probably most of you whine about how we don't do enough to help the poor, and then here are some hardworking guys in foreign countries struggling to pull themselves out of their poverty, and you want to close the door on them.
Go read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations , and you will discover how trade barriers simply impoverish both sides of the barrier.
Stop thinking of just your own greedy selves, and think of the welfare of mankind. Think about how it shouldn't have to matter what country a man is born in, he should have the same chance in life regardless.
Shame on you all.
Oh, and yes, I am biased, because hiring Russians allowed me to start my own company without any venture capital (Namesys), and I am a perfect example on a small scale of how globalization is making the US into a corporate headquarters location for the globe.
And yes, I am sitting around in the US doing the menial labor of running tests on the code my guys write for my US customer at its site because I could not get visas for my guys to come here, when I could be designing the next product instead.
I don't see how Americans becoming specialized in being the entrepeneurs of the world is such a bad thing.
Yeah that's great, except you can't offshore outsource lawn mowing
You can't offshore it? Maybe not. But you can still lose it. There are a slew of "undocumented workers" in most states (at least western and mid-western) who have those jobs: the blue-collar, low-income and unksilled labour jobs.
Proponents (not perhaps without some justification, I suppose) argue that since no Americans want to pick strawberries or mow lawns for a living, without the illegal/legal migrant workers, the work will never get done.
But how soon will it be before proponents of white collar outsourcing start saying that no American would want to do low level I/T Work - eg., Call Centers, 1st Line Tech Support, basic coding? I think it's already being said.
Those with the "have" are in a position to call the shots here. Or put another way, capitalism being tied to the private ownership of the means of production allows the private appropriation of surplus value. Companies outsource more for marginal benefits at best it seems, and yet nobody things to cut the salaries of the top executives?
If anyone thinks I'm taking this too far, then why are the CEOs and top executives of some of the companies responsible for the most outsourcing making millions of dollars? (Carly Fiona and Sam Palmisano).
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Proponents (not perhaps without some justification, I suppose) argue that since no Americans want to pick strawberries or mow lawns for a living, without the illegal/legal migrant workers, the work will never get done.
"Free trade" proponents always say that. The truth is that Americans don't wan't to pick strawberries for the salaries the growers offer, because you simply cannot support a family in the US on those salaries. If the growers up the salaries, then Americans will do it, but that makes the price of strawberries go up. Then we'll just buy strawberries from Banana Republic where they're willing to work for $1/day and can actually support a family.
Those with the "have" are in a position to call the shots here. Or put another way, capitalism being tied to the private ownership of the means of production allows the private appropriation of surplus value. Companies outsource more for marginal benefits at best it seems, and yet nobody things to cut the salaries of the top executives?
You haven't been following the news lately. CEO salaries are out of control because of all the "good ol' boy" networks in these corporate compensation committees. Stockholders can't get rid of them because too much is held by insiders. Look how the effort to oust Eisner at Disney failed, and he's been paid insane salaries to run the company into the ground.
The problem is that CEO's and their ilk live in a totally separate reality from the rest of us, and have lost any sense of "social responsibility". And the last defense we have against the "aristocracy of wealth" is the estate tax, which the Bushies want to permanently abolish.
Also, there is a movie released in 2003 called The Corporation which, as one of its premises, stated that if you consider the typical corporation as a person and diagnose it using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it would be a sociopath.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
I appreciate your response.
I was being rhetorical when discussing CEO salary. I had in mind Ricardo's view of "the iron law of wages". Put essentially, if an employer (according to Marx, Ricardo, Malthus, perhaps others) introduces new machinery that will double the output of the worker in a day. Does he then double the wages? Not at all; he keeps the surplus value for himself.
Subsitute cheaper labour for new machinery. Yes, the old-boy networks exist. They are a neccessity to justify this sort of behavior.
I also recommend the movie you referred to. Well worth watching.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Catherine Mann, from the Institute for International Economics, has a look at What Global Outsourcing Means for U.S. IT Workers up over at Queue. She's got an interesting argument: outsourcing means cheaper IT products, meaning businesses will buy more, meaning more products to make & manage = net gain of IT jobs in the US.
I say outsource her job, then see what she has to say about it.
The problem with your progressive tax is expressed fairly well by Reteo Varala. It's exactly what the powers that be want in order for them to be more dependent on the government.
:)
A better tax idea would be the Fair Tax plan. The idea is to abolish all forms of taxes except one, the retail sales tax. And by all taxes, I do mean all. No income taxes, no business to business taxes, none. Just a sales tax on items you purchase.
This allows our businesses to thrive and removes the "rich vs. poor" in taxation that the political hacks use to promote class discriminations.
You can find out more about this here. www.fairtax.org Good reading
was one of the most intellectually dishonest pieces I've seen in a long time.
First off, both of the major categories cited are part of an overall pool that is decreasing according to the BLS There were
2.933 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" according the BLS in 2000
2.827 Million workers in "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" in 2003
Secondly, this job category has been affect massively by immigration polices that IT companies paid congressmen handsomely to get:
In this period, we had 300K new H-1b visas issued inside the cap to folks that went to work in IT.
Probably about - 80K visa holder went home at the end of their visas(about 50% get permanet residency)
80K The US pool of IT workers expanded by about 80K (natural increase--this is probably way too low because the retiree pool is small and the academic programs expanded dramatically)
20K visa holders "went illegal"(Which they can do now that they have friends in the USA). This proportion is a guess. This number may be quite a bit larger due to the tendency of folks to use business visas this way.
100K IT workers that came in outside the cap to folks in IT (this is an estimate)
100K IT workers that came in under L-1 (this was lower then and is just now getting ramped up(this is an estimate)
100K IT workers that came by other means(married a US citizen or chain migration)
The estimates are necessary because the figures the government keeps are so bad.
If we had the above up, we get around 640K. So we are looking at about a 21% displacement rate of US tech workers overall during this period-and this is probably much higher in some categories like DBA's and programmers-and much less among statisticians and actuaries from looking at the BLS category.
The issue here is that in many cases there is an active bias towards hiring foreigners for these jobs. Businesses like Enron like having a workforce that they can control (due to the illegal nature of their business). Managers at places like Hewlett Packard see as part of their personal "bottom line" the ability to get friend and family "green cards"(which would be worth upwards of $100,000 if they could be purchased on the open market). It is quite simply worth considerable investment and organization to obtain those immigration rights. Acting like simple "education" of US workers will solve the problem is sadistic in this context.
I know the posting is meant to be funny, but it does raise an interesting question - would a jihad against hindu's take priority over that against christians? As I understand it (being a born-again athiest) islam regards the other 'people of the book' - jews, christians - to be preferred over anyone else, hence islam's long tradition of tolerance to enclaves of such people living in it's borders (although this would have appear to have declined with the rise of the fundies over the past 70 years).
Any muslims care to enlighten me - I know I've probably made a complete has of explaining, but is there any milage in the general idea?
1. So far American IT companies are charging the same prices for software despite outsourcing.
2. Outsourcing means the software will be made overseas. If it generates IT jobs it will not be high quality jobs like programming/development. It means getting paid $9 an hour by AOL to tell someone how to find google with their browser.
Basically her idea relies on the premise of certain things which I don't agree are facts. She bases a lot of her facts, with no figures to support them.
"Going forward, the global sourcing of software and IT services will further reduce the price of these products, yielding a further increase in jobs demanding IT knowledge and skills."
Little evidence is given for the reduction of the price of IT products and the reducing of price due to outsourcing. It can be argued that IT products are reducing due to cheaper production methods and competition. Most IT hardware is manufactured in the East and has for a long time, so with hardware in particular, this really doesn't fit with the outsourcing theory.
The increase in services and software does not mean a tenfold increase in purchases. It would interesting to see if the purchases were made by companies or by the public. Additionally, since service jobs, such as tech support are outsourced, it is likely this will only generate revenue for the company overseas. Whereas 50 thousand more copies of a major software package could be purchased without the guarantee of an additional job being created. I believe the increase in computer use, the increase in population and the increased use of the internet and other technologies are down to these increases.
The statistics showing an increase in jobs, could be down to many factors. However, due to her mentioning that 64% of IT jobs were not in the IT sector, it also means that many of these jobs are transparent and it is harder to determine how many jobs IT jobs are lost, yet the figures can be conveniently skewed when IT jobs are created or skewed by IT sector losses.
The statistics showing an increased number of programming jobs based on outsourcing is speculation. Since many programming jobs are now outsourced regardless.
I think any attributing of an increase in jobs due to outsourcing is speculation at best and at worst a potentially harmful attempt at creating governmental policy to support her wild theories. Once jobs are outsourced, they don't come back and suggesting it should be government policy shows a detemined lack of consideration.
1) Everything would cost less.
2) Everything would come from a third-world country.
3) The largest employment sector would be in the transport of goods whether that be truck driving, warehousing, or stocking the shelves.
4) The second largest employment sector would be in business management.
5) Programming, IT and other high paid skill positions would likely be in third-world countries to keep down costs.
6) Everything would have to come from a third-world country because the largest employment sector would have low wages that prevent them from being able to afford anything else.
Of course this is hypothetical, but it seems to me that this is the goal of our economy.
I can't wait to hear the uproar when middle-management positions start getting outsourced to third-world countries to further lower costs.
Maybe truck driving wouldn't be a bad career after all...
Are you so pathetic you can't figure out how to raise your productivity by 50%?
If so you deserve to live on unemployment or enjoy your obvious career as a lawn care engineer.
The good people who work for me have a productivity at least 4 times that of the average guy. I see no sign that the offshore staff are that good.
Pull your finger out and stop whingeing. Yah whinger. Whiney whiney whiney.
This sort of asinine logic really gets up my nose. Software development is still a sort of craft, code is not (yet) churned out like burgers or chocolate bars. So some sort of apprenticeship is still required if you are to have any expertise in the field. Anyone who claims that learning UML (or whatever) now provides you with the tools magically to produce quality designed systems (from which resultant quality software is generated) is talking out of their backside.
If you are to check the quality of code produced offshore (back in the West say), you have to do some form of code walkthrough, never mind re-testing. Testing and performance checks alone are not sufficient to determine code quality (what if a bug occurs and the code is obscure?). If all the code checks, design checks, testing cycles and documentation is outsourced, what are you left with, apart from some (relatively) simple management tasks such as project tracking?
But how are even these management tasks to be properly carried out if you don't understand the software development cycle (as your PM has little contact with software people)?
I read somewhere recently that 160,000 IT jobs had been created in the US last year - but there was no net increase in US software expertise because an equivalent number of jobs had been outsourced. The same is beginning to happen in the UK (although not quite as bad as the US, despite our govt's efforts otherwise). The number of students taking IT exams in the UK has dropped significantly, which is usually a pointer to where the money now is (ie,not in software).
As software people age, they tend to drop out of direct involvement with software (some become managers) whilst the new intake is shrinking. In other words, the apprenticehip is moving offshore. In 20 years, there will be very little expertise left in the West, the corporates will have moved the bulk of their operations to where the expertise lives. And I venture to judge that software will still not be automatically generated. We'll be left flipping burgers for the new class of Asian tourist (of which I see a lot more in London these days), who've come 'to see history'.
Did he inhale?
It's only been the last 100 years or so where the poor have been living in anything better than subsistence and not dying from preventable diseases like cholera and tuberculosis. That's because in the 20th century some of the wealth was taken from the very rich and used to create the society we now take for granted.
Look at history; how much further have we advanced in the last 100 years than we did in the previous 10000. That wasn't due to greed, it was increasing the opportunities of those who normally would've died by the time they were 40. The massive economic, technological and social success was built on secure jobs and social justice, not laissez-faire capitalism. Throwing it all away just to increase the Dow Jones will be catastrophic.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Try out this article from Reason Magazine in July.
Ten Truths About Trade
It goes into the concepts more than the numbers. Could make it easier to explain to others.
I remember in the 80's when it was manufacturings turn. The argument was that we'd ship manufacturing jobs like steel, autos, and consumer electronics overseas. The U.S. economy would move to service sector jobs which were 'cleaner' and 'higher pay'. The result - manufactured goods got cheaper, CEO's and shareholders made more money, and workers - well, two out of three ain't bad.
... well, we don't know ... but somethings sure to turn up!
The promised 'retraining' didn't happen - manufacturing workers were lucky to get jobs flipping burgers or stocking shelves in Wal-Mart. The U.S. paid for those lower priced manufactured goods - with poverty, divorce, higher crime rates, and devastated communities. But free trade advocates won't tell you about those. Now they're trying to do it again. Move those high-tech development and R&D jobs overseas! Look at all the money the companies will save. Look at the big bonuses the senior managers will get! Don't worry - the jobs will be replaced with
So, if you're an American programmer. If you live in a high-tech center like the bay area or Austin. If you want to see into the future - just visit places like Youngstown Ohio. Drive past the moldering closed factories and steel mills. Drive past the boarded up stores. Take a good long look - cause that's your future.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Software engineering is a "level", not a position. It is like training to be a manager. You don't become one just out of class. You have to be a programmer *first* before allowed to be a "software engineer" or architect.
And, losing programmers to India is not going to make significantly more because it is a roughly 3-to-1 ratio of programmers to architects/SE/etc. Are there going to be 3 times more applications now? I don't think so. The total savings from offshoring is only like 20% if you factor in everything. 20% is not going to create 3 times as many applications.
Plus, those stats contridict some recent stats I beleive came from the IRS that fewer people filed as "information technology specialists" or some other generic term for computer worker.
Table-ized A.I.