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Offshoring IT
Bill Blunden is the author of Cube Farm - a humorous autobiography and story of author's fruitless employment at Lawson Software. A physics major faced with the grand prospects of waiting tables after college graduation, Blunden is not a newbie in the unemployment world. Offshoring IT promises to give the reader "the good, the bad and the ugly" of IT outsourcing practices.
The book is not very long -- just five chapters -- but it's thorough, as each chapter packs data and statistics from various government and commercial reports. "Setting the stage" talks about general trends in the software industry and cost of education. "Measuring the trend" tells the reader which companies outsource, why they outsource and who's helping them with outsourcing. "The Offshoring Obstacle Course" describes existing outsourcing processes - when exactly should company start thinking about outsourcing, what type of jobs is most likely to go offshore, what's the difference between India, Ireland, Israel, Russia and Mexico. Finally, "Arguments in Favor of Offshoring" made it into the book just because the publisher requested a fair look at the other side's arguments (which shows which "side" Mr. Blunden is biased towards). "Arguments Against Offshoring" is truly the author's work with major myths and excuses about offshoring debunked.
Blunden points out that in order to compete in the global marketplace, countries like India invested in their educational system and constructed high-speed data networks, which provided the foundation for companies popping up with the capability to take over remotely as call centers, software development houses, and R&D departments. Meanwhile, the cost of going to Ivy League schools keeps going up, leaving the fresh graduates with six-digit debt -- debt which the Student Loan Corporation (division of CitiCorp) expects to be promptly paid. The cost of college education for those who choose to go this route stipulates adequate pay requirements after graduation, and in the world where IT is going offshore, the paycheck is often just not there anymore, which leaves the fresh grad owing money and needing immediate retraining or a career switch.
The book delves into specific industries and companies, looking at the outsourcing numbers and potential for jobs to be offshored. Blunden notes that while corporations made their offshoring figures public before, lately the backlash against going offshore has made PR departments suddenly avoid the topic. Blunden refutes the argument that only low-level jobs are being outsourced and points to Intel designing CPUs for wireless devices on campuses in India.
Chapter 3 focuses on reasons for outsourcing. According to Blunden, the more face-to-face interaction and management effort a job requires, the less likely it is to be outsourced. At the same time, many companies are currently exploring offshoring some of their projects, claiming that only non-essentials are going abroad. Outsourcing of small projects allows them to establish the necessary processes and test their service provider, so that when a bigger project comes along, the management can feel safer working with the same offshore provider.
Chapter 4 deals with pro-offshoring arguments. Even though the author states he only had to write this chapter to satisfy the publishers, the arguments he picks are ones that appear in the press quite often - namely, that offshoring means more efficient allocation of resources, better revenue projections, and increased shareholder value. In Chapter 5 Blunded goes on a crusade to discredit these arguments, though, saying that offshoring does not benefit average Americans, that only the top 5% of income earners benefit from increased shareholder values, and that frequently top management receives additional benefits while laying off the proles.
While the first two chapters of the book are filled with data, numbers and statistics, the last three chapters mostly read like an rant on the current state of affairs, which many of us may have gotten for free from the older members of the family at Thanksgiving. Blunden does have some valid arguments about the increased danger to national security and wealth due to offshoring, but you can't help but notice the feeling that the author feels entitled to a job provided by an American corporation, even though corporate America is bad-mouthed in the next sentence. To give Blunden credit, he mentions that sometimes reasons for offshoring include the low popularity of call-center and data-entry positions in the U.S. Americans view doing support for AOL and data entry for Cingular as grunt jobs, just temporary positions on the way to a better life, while for many Indians it is the ultimate career, and are thankful to the provider for giving them the opportunity.
Blunden also does not distinguish between different types of IT workers. The aforementioned AOL support soldier and top NASA scientist, designing microcontrollers for the next space mission would be aggregated into the same "IT worker" category. There's little detailed statistics on what sectors of IT are prone to outsourcing and which are pretty stable to be in. Sometimes the author plays little tricks with the reader to make his points across. On p. 106 he talks to an invisible IT manager: "Sure, you can hire six Indian engineers for the price of an American engineer. But if an American engineer can do the work of six Indian engineers, what's the difference?" Oops. Notice how by the time we get into the second sentence the equality in price gets substituted by equality in productivity. Just because 6 Indian salaries would equal to one American, the author assumes the productivity level is going to stay the same, making the example nonsensical, since why would you outsource if it's the same money and the same productivity?
Overall, it's an interesting book to read, although somewhat depressing, as it provides little pointers into how do the readers stay competitive in this marketplace or what needs to be done on the personal skills level to make oneself more valuable. You can definitely tell which side the author is leaning, but subjective writing makes the reading more interesting. Nevertheless, the title does leave an impression of being one giant complaint about the current state of affairs, and I don't think I will be re-reading it. Perhaps just loan it to my friends, who are in college pursuing IT-related careers.
In an attempt to stay up-to-date with his skills Alex reads and reviews many programming and technology as well as keeps the list of free ones available on the Web. You can purchase Offshoring IT from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new Indian overlords.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
I am still in school. I have a mediocre GPA, good skills (IMHO), I am tall, and I am friendly. Will my computer science degree land me a good job in the field, or will I have to teach (respectable, but I would rather not personally), or join the military or something to be doing something that involves my expensive education in a meaningful way?
"Read on for the rest of Moskalyuk's review; watch out too for my upcoming review of N. Sivakumar's Debugging Indian Computer Programmers: Dude, did I steal your job?."
How in the world do you debug an Indian Programmer?
Were's the GDB patch for that?
Seriously is things that bad were you have to debug their output?
And can a job really be "stolen"?
These offshoring posts are getting a little tired.
We've been paid very well for what most of us know deep down is idiot work.
1. Fire all of your American programmers, call center workers and IT personnel.
2. Replace them all with people who can almost speak English.
3 ???.
4. PROFIT!!!
Nothing against Israel (I personally support their efforts as one of the only democracies in the region, and they do have the toughest military on the planet), but one would think that the Middle East would be fairly low on the list of places to put one's IT future.
(Then again, considering the fights over the Kashmir in India, and the Mafia in Russia, etc etc... maybe it wouldn't be nearly as risky? As a guy in the US, The more one looks at it, the less one would sanely want to put their property at risk outside of US or EU borders in the first place...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Two parties will not willingly engage in a trade unless both parties are better off afterwords than they were before. Discouraging trade to the benefit of a small minority of people (those who will lose their job to outsourcing) while hurting the vast majority of people (those who will receive the outsourced jobs and the consumers that will receive the products produced with more cost effiecent labor) is a recipe for disaster. This works at all levels of economics.
and get back to work. If you're worried about your job being outsourced, get the fuck off slashdot and do what you're paid to do - don't give them a reason to do it.
...we outsource to old people in Corea not India!
To be honest, it's stories like this that make my hesitant to go the IT route now that I'm in college, though I think I'd enjoy it. I wonder if there are others with me, and how big of an effect this might have in the supply of IT workers in coming decades?
I know nothing
it is hard for IT people to see the benifits but if you are the company, you want to make money.
But offshoring does have major drawbacks. I think you are starting to see the threshold of what people are willing to take with offshored call centers. personally i hate calling Compaq and taking to someone in India. I am not trying to be rude but I can't understand them, and it bothers me.
I think you are going to see people in India, ect pushing for higher prices of pay in a few years, you can only pay them pennies for so long before they realize they can earn more, or until they start to become entrepreneurs themsevles, then what will you have on your hands?
also i do thing you will see American companies step out of outsourcing a bit, why? people again are getting annoyed with calling a call center and not talking to someone htey can understand. Customer service is king and people will be willing to pay more for.
Remember that it's not you that gets hired, but your good looks and fancy clothes. Sadly you may have to join the military.
Offshore development apparently is a hot topic. From well-informed sources I know that certain IT integrators are making strategic investments in offshoring IT development and IT services to India, Mauritius islands, as well as near-shoring to Eastern European countries (Czech Republic in particular).
I think that this fact speaks for itself: offshore has more advantages than disadvantages for huge projects (Texas unemployment office, anyone?).
Since Bush won the elections, more and more people are dragged into the offshore development centres and apparently the code quality is not as bad as some people might think.
The consulting firm I work for actually hires 100 people PER DAY in India alone.
Like it or not, I guess we better start living with the fact that offshore will stay where it is.
--Use ant to make
Dude, isn't the the author's whole point?
No way for us to know dude. Seriously. Try first getting a good assessment of yourself. What's you strengths? Your weaknesses? What you like? What you dislike? Be honest with yourself, this is your life we're talking about here.
Then you can better answer questions like: is teaching were I should go? Is the military a good option (maybe you hate taking orders)? Anything we may say is going to be based on speculation, and assumptions. That's not a good way to be getting advice. Also get yourself a mentor.
Well, in answer to the reviewer's doubts, the key to staying competitive in the marketplace (as a worker) is to actually know something, like biochemistry or exotic option valuation or how to flatter to auto company executives. IT knowledge is a perfect adjunct to the real skills that get you a job. That's the same as ever.
In terms of what to do about the increasing concentration of wealth made possible by advances in comms, transport and free trade, though, I dunno.
If in doubt refer to ancient Rome -- they lost their well-off middle class in a few short decades once the Senate families had gained enough leverage to begin consolidating huge estates. Those Romans who still remained socially mobile (as opposed to the other 95% whose families were plebs forever) did it by going abroad and setting up shop in ever more remote and volatile provinces, often via the armed forces. Note how the age of consolidation of wealth in Rome came at around the same time as the major wars of foreign expansion and the shift from kinda-sorta democracy to straight up God-Emperors.
In other words, at the same time as Roman wealth became immobile (locked up by the major families that ruled Rome) the increasingly aggressive foreign policy made new, more mobile wealth available. This might happen again.
As a member of the 'reading slashdot at work' class, I have no ambition to share in it
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Only if you consider any job on this planet to be an American job first. Just another example of American arrogance.
When you can do your job from anywhere, so can someone else!
Pundits and futurists now saing, "DOH!"
I wonder how many companies are taking advantage of telecommuting tax credit on 'your' outsourced job!
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Americans view doing support for AOL and data entry for Cingular as grunt jobs, just temporary positions on the way to a better life, while for many Indians it is the ultimate career, and are thankful to the provider for giving them the opportunity.
The same could well be said for a wide variety of low skill jobs, which have been both outsourced (foreign manufacturing) or relegated to immigrant labor (meat packing, general labor, etc.). America has a strong cultural bias that looks down upon "low-skill" work, which has long provided an opportunity for other countries to fill those gaps in our labor markets. The difference now is that the competition is taking on the white-collar workforce as well. Horror of horrors!
Give us our cheap foreign-made manufactured goods, but don't you dare let them hammer out code as well!
Personally, I think it will be interesting to see how the currency trends of the past year (which are likely to continue in the same direction) affect outsourcing. American labor is getting cheaper day by day...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
A more careful reviewer might have deduced from Blunden's references to "our society's class structure" right at the start of the book that he's an out-and-out socialist, which certainly colors his analysis.
Sigs? Sigs? We don't need no steenkin' sigs.
Maybe you need to ask yourself what exactly it is you like about IT? The title? The long hours? The pay? What? Seriously all IT is basically some skills and knowledge, that just happens to have the IT label stuck on it. Try thinking a bit broader. What "interests" do you have, that other "job titles" can match? Like computers do you? Like frustration others with your questions of "why"? Like working with your hands? There's lot of jobs, other than IT, that'll fill the bill. Also as I pointed out to another poster. Know thyself, sadly it seems introspection isn't the geeks strong point. How can you make good decisions about your life, when all you see is a stranger in the morning mirror?
We are outsourcing infrastructure services now, have been outsourcing manufacturing for some time. It makes perfect sense to outsource management as well, after all most of the work is being done someplace else. Then we can outsource banking, financial services. Later goverment. Who needs these guys telling us what to do anyway ? Life will be nicer. Then we just need to outsource consumption. Oh.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
"The book is not very long -- just five chapters -" Since when was a book's length defined by it's numer of chapters?
America has a strong cultural bias that looks down upon "low-skill" work,
...whoops.
Pity America tends to look down on academic achievement as well...
The difference now is that the competition is taking on the white-collar workforce as well.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
In the finest slashdot tradition, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest that purely on the basis of a quote in a review, the author's views sound a wee bit racist. Specifically, I don't think the reviewer goes far enough in his criticism of that quote about one American engineer doing the work of six Indian engineers. I can see a rationale for one American call-center employee equaling several offshore employees, maybe -- if the Indian call-center employees are not as culturally as well as linguistically fluent in American, so to speak. But that's a tough argument to swallow with engineers; cultural barriers are much less relevant there. And the Indian engineers I've met are no slouches, either.
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
I've been in the IT industry for 14 years and it has been extremely lucrative for me. I do not recommend anyone to get into the IT field if they're going to be entering the job market 4 or 5 years from now though. I think that the combination of outsourcing along with the increasing ease of doing complicated tasks with computers will lead to a bleak job future for IT-specialized staff. I think that more and more administrative tasks will be pushed onto what are considered today end users today.
As for recommendations (which this book reportedly lacks)... Study business. Be the person that's sending jobs overseas or setting up your own plug and play wireless network.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Wonder why this doesnt get metioned as much, offshoring IT jobs are like a fraction of what US is paying to the outside world, consider the huge debt US is in to china for everything from silverware to computers ...
I guess it is important because immediate lifestyle ,Beemers,luxury houses is given higher attention rather than droves of small business , production factories losing out to low cost chinese strangulation , the effect is more permanent, and US dependency is sealed.
Its totally biased like everything else ..
Any country which leaves physical production of primary goods to other countries is not a good sign, consider the simple case of flu vaccinations one company somewhere in UK got shutdown and US had no flu vaccine.
With respect to producing something physically, i feel IT jobs are ethereal, you do have to question what ur producing .. i am not complaining being a software engineer myself ..
I just wish peeps would stop arguing about offshoring production / jobs and take some steps to stop it ..
aHH crap am rambling ...with no end in sight ..
IANAPS (Political Scientist), but wouldn't a true socialist be bemoaning the lowering wages and not where the jobs are located?
I know many Americans (and many non-Americans, for that matter) have a nationalistic view point that it's more important for us to have jobs than for those already filthy-rich Indians to have jobs, but it seems that a true socialist (which I am not, but I can sympathize with) would be upset that these workers don't have the same protections (I assume) that workers in the US have. Of course, maybe they are getting the equivalent of US minimum wage (which is obviously less than the typical US IT worker gets), in which case the US protections probably wouldn't help. I don't know, just my thoughts.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
But the most worthless jobs are executives, so let's out source that first and get some real managers. that way we (the developers) can build stuff that works, instead of chasing some phantom product dreamed up by an idiot.
The Dollar is going to crash. Its already started. If Indian programers are now at 6:1 price wise verses Americans, this will drop as the dollar depreciates. This is the natural course of a trade imbalance. An hour at Burger king will no longer entitle an American to 20 hours of chinese labor. This is not a bad thing, sure DVD players, Television Sets, Fuel, and PCs will cost more, but there will be alot more jobs as factories and services become more cost effective when done in America.
Since I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona, almost all of my work is telecommuting. For the last 8 months, I have been working for company in India and it has been working out fairly well. Sure, I don't get the same pay as I did when I worked in an office in San Diego, but flexible hours so I can spend more time with family and friends makes the whole thing work for me.
With the US economy heading south (foreign central banks finally seems to be dropping the dollar) I think that it is time for us in the US to realign our priorities:
1. avoid debt like the plague - unless you need to literally borrow to feed your family
2. consider doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend on "self education" to stay globally competitive
3. learn to totally appreciate non-material things like love of family and friends
I think that by and large things will be OK here in the US as long as people adapt to a sliding material life style. (It would also help a lot if everyone tried harder to conserve petroleum products! The patriotic thing to do is to try to help reduce the trade deficit.)
-Mark
>1. avoid debt like the plague - unless you need to literally borrow to feed your family
>2. consider doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend on "self education" to stay globally competitive
>3. learn to totally appreciate non-material things like love of family and friends
I like this but I would put the priorities as 3, 1 and then 2.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
An American-incorporated company? Foreign companies doing business in America? Companies using foreign parts? Companies using foreign natural resources? Any definition of 'American job' eventually leads to all jobs on this planet being American jobs first.
Then blacks get equal rights,
What next, outsourcing work instead of starting up sweat shops. Soon they'll even be regsersting patents and stopping Americans from inventing things.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Probably shouldn't be replying to so many offtopics, but I'd suggest staying one step ahead of what the overwhelming majority of the crowd overseas is doing. I've done that over the years by going from contract to contract specializing in whatever platform is just starting to get big (in my case, I develop mostly for mobile devices, but there are a lot of jobs out there for other platforms, especially various embedded sys or point of sale systems dev that haven't jumped into the outsourcing ring for various reasons yet). Most of those developers overseas have a simple strategy, get proficient with the most popular language around, and jobs will come to you because you're cheap. The only way we're going to be able to find consistent work is to stay on the cutting edge, get somewhat specialized, and be flexible towards moving around and taking short term contracts here and there. Being a salesman is one thing, but if you really want to code, and your heart is set in spending some crazy hours doing so, then that's the only way I can see that someone can keep employed relatively consistently. (At least, that's how I've done it over my several year career. Getting a degree in Software Engineering probably helped me more than a CS degree as well, in retrospect, but obviously there's not much you can do about that now.) Also, as a last note, get really good at tech and interpersonal communications writing. My tech writing skills have extended several of my contracts over the years, the payback for me has been pretty respectable. Writing good, informative emails has helped make managers more inclined to keep me around as well.
Being an out-and-out fascist?
Everyones opinion's coloured, that's why it's an opinion.
At least he has referenced 'out society's class structure' instead of pretending it doesn't exist, or anyone who cares is so lowly as to not matter.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I assume you're a member of the current US Congress:
US Congress passes H1-B Visa Hike
This while I know half a dozen educated, experienced technical professionals who've suffered through the recent poor job market being told they're overqualified...
Tweet, tweet.
http://us.rediff.com/money/2004/dec/03bpo3.htm . US outsourcing is just 0.4 of GDP, where as Indian outsourcing is 2.4 of its GDP... we are just crying foul because it affects our jobs...globalization is a bitch, especially when it bites back
i believe there's more than what meets the eye. most examples are very generic. its not always that ALL fof outsourcing is bad. the cases that most people present here are atomic/ binary - its bad for americans and good for indians. there's quite a variety of jobs being outsourced. there are areas where indians could be very compititive than americans.
...just that, its not that the whole of outsourcing is bad.
c'mon - nasa has plenty of indians/ people of foreign origin, so do many, in the cutting edge areas. many of these are denied managerial roles, or not allowed higher up the ladder simply because they are indians/ foreigners. okay, fine, it might be critical areas- and they need not be allowed to go further for security reasons. however, there are a few things that most countries need not be compared with USA. USA champions itself as a melting pot. except for running for the president's post most are allowed to run around pretty much anywhere.
so where do we arrive, before meandering into several spinoffs of this discussion ?
people do not speak of the times when the more advanced/ developed countries looted , destroyed cultures, plundered wealth of lesser countries. the first round of industrialisation was built on the graves and suffering civilisation of these lesser people. the second round was more civilised and this was the age of reformation where superpowers could still go unchecked but there was some accountability. ultimately, the age of information has ensured a full circle - some justice in the form of economic gain. again this is a very general account, but then- why does an entire economic cycle being trivialised into one single topic called outsourcing ?
As much as this topic interests me, and even though his publisher is mine, I just can't take him seriously if he's actually using the title "Reverend" after filling out a form on a website.
Pity America tends to look down on academic achievement as well...
I'll buy that statement *only* if you extend it to prospective employers. Of those (including myself) who I've seen struggle in a terrible job market over the last 2-3 years, the majority are math/science educated, experience technical professionals.
And this brings up an interesting question: since there's very little social respect in technical pursuits, and now that we're letting employers remove much of the economic incentive to be trained in math/science, who's going to pick it as a profession?
Becoming a suit or tradesman increasingly looks like the wiser choice.
Tweet, tweet.
Unless the Pakistanis have radically improved their English language skills, and got more bandwidth, the threat of outsourcing is going down due to the brilliance of our fearless leader.
Mission Accomplished
In IT, only speicialized experience counts, and you can't get that experience until you already have it. Unless you have a PhD from MIT, or something, you are not always the one to decide the technologies with which you work. Sure, you can train to stay ahead of the curve, but without the experience, it's usually for nothing.
Is it worth it? In IT, it seems, we are always training, and struggling, always racking our brains trying to find some angle that will keep us basically employed. I don't think other career fields have to do that.
I think it is ironic that the law of supply and demand only applies overseas.
A company in the US sends jobs overseas because it is cheaper. It is cheaper because the cost of living is lower, and there are more people so the cost (salary) for each one is less.
Yet, here in America, you could have the same thing, but it would take these same companies investing in their own communities first. For example, if a company were to spend money educating the future workforce in its own community, there eventually would be an abundance of qualified people right here at home. More supply = less cost, right?
And if people would stop shopping at Wal-Mart et al. and endlessly consuming the goods made overseas, we'd eventually have lower cost of living here as well.
I have no sympathy whatsoever for someone who loses their job due to outsourcing. Losing your job sucks (it happened to me twice in one year, but not because of outsourcing), but my guess is the people losing their jobs are the same people demanding 32" color TVs for $200, DVD players for $40, gallons of pickles for $2.97, and shopping at dollar stores.
All we do in America is consume. Everything in America is disposable. Why can't jobs be disposable, too?
You reap what you sow.
Guess what? About 60-80% of CMM level 5 company are Indian company... so let's not be surprised that outsourcing can be tempting... They produce better quality at lower cost.
If you want a crappo book.. check out apress' line. Its amazing what they'll kill trees for. Unqualified to write for Addison-Wesley or Prentice Hall? Call Apress.
Americans availing themselves of cheaper products and services are not getting screwed. Americans realizing the capital gains from company shares are not getting screwed.
A company sold an item for $100 that it took $90 to make in the USA. They build the product offshore for $10 and still sell it for $100. I propose we quit buying from companies that outsource and go right to the source - buy only goods made by indian and chinese companies.
Lets start with IBM. They take open source software, have some slaves in india hack on it, then bring it back here and sell it at an outrageous profit margin. Lets fuck up their little plan and quit buying from them. We are just making them fat, I want to make some indians and chinese fat. Fuck the outsourcers !!!!!
"I do not recommend anyone to get into the IT field if they're going to be entering the job market 4 or 5 years from now though."
I too have been in the IT field (for over 20 years), and it has indeed been lucrative. I would respectfully disagree. My advice would be to go where your heart is. If you really love IT, then do it. If you really love business, then do that.
Otherwise, you're going to hit your 40's, and wonder what the heck you are doing there. And probably switch into something else.
If you don't know what it is you really want, and are just looking at IT as a job, well, then I think you've got troubles. I see these guys all the time, and am never impressed by them. It will show. And it will affect your performance. And your job will indeed be at risk.
As for myself, I love what I do. Always have, and always will. I have absolutely no trouble competing world-wide and getting the gigs. Plus I target my rates so that I'm one of the most expensive contractors you'll find in Silicon Valley.
And I'm turning away work.
Here's some pointers from what I've seen. First, if the economy is good when you are entering college, count on it sucking when you get out. And vice-versa. So if you're going into College right now, I'd advise making plans for Grad School. If you're graduating right now, you're in good shape. Companies just can't find top-notch people.
Secondly, I'm concerned about how things are going for new hires. The VC's on Sand Hill Road now have the "group think" that startups shouldn't hire new grads; just off-shore to India. Personally, I've seen this be a disaster; and have seen some push to the contrary. But it is disconcerting.
Still, I make lots of money from the India jobs which didn't turn out. And Business Week ran some articles last fall about how Offshoring may have peaked; and now people are moving into the market of taking over those offshored projects which failed.
So, my advice here is if you can't find a full time job, consider contracting. For me it has been far superior, though it's not for everyone. You do have to move past the illusion of "job security" and realize that there is no such thing - just lower wages and more work with W2 employment.
What never seems to get mentioned is that time-to-market is so critical in the high-tech biz; and in my experience India just can't compete here. This is also being silently acknowledged lately; witness the recent move by the big Indian offshore shops to Canada (so that they can be in the same timezone), as well as the huge push to increase the H1-B visa limit (which will probably get passed, thanks to Bush and his cronies).
So, that's it from my perspective. Good luck to all.
Every government diddles with the markets. The US pays farmers NOT to grow food. It put high tariffs on steel and, of all things, chocolate, gives tax breaks for various industries, etc etc etc.
As for Mexican immigration destroying the unskilled labor market -- remember that the southwest United States used to be part of Mexico, and people on both sides are pretty much the same folk; their legal status mostly luck & whatever laws were in effect at the time. I would point more to the Mexican government's devaluations over the last 25 years (from 6MXP:1$ in 1979 to 11,500MXP:1$ in 1994), and predatory "development" loans from US & European banks that caused them. Many Mexican workers are in the US because of that sharp disparity, and they send over $11 billion dollars a year to their families back home.
As for the rest -- protecting the enviroment is a luxury of industrial overcapacity, something the US as a whole didn't much care about until the late 1960's. Industrializing nations quite literally can't afford to worry too much about it. The same is roughly true for workers agitating for better conditions.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Americans are equal to all and better than most, and nothing, not even contradictoring evidense, will convince us otherhow.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
You gripe about losing jobs:
Are you walking in shoes made in China?
Are you wearing clothes from Malaysia?
Are you driving a car from Japan?
Do you shop at Walmart?
Who do you think you will get sympathy from?
I work in the IT industry and I am concerned that my employer would consider outsourcing.
However, I can not help from wondering if this is somehow backlash for the dot com boom of the late 90's. I know companies were bending over backward trying to acquire engineers. Some rather strict companies made some major changes to compete by abolishing strict dress codes, allowing flexible hours, and stock options.
I realize companies make the decision to out source based on a number of factors and the business world is supposed to be professional and not vindictive. But I could also see a lot of managers that are not exactly happy their company made such concessions to hire talented engineers and are not overly concerned when there are talks of moving the engineering jobs off-shore.
That might not be the only reason to out source to another country, but I can also see them not fighting the change if it comes to the table.
Thoughts?
- Bruzer
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
You are correct when looking at it from the overall world view, but we're talking about decisions made by the US which affect the US. Right now we have the money and we're quickly giving it away with these huge trade deficits.
Yes, eliminating outsourcing would hurt the vast majority of people who benefit from outsourcing. Most of those people live in China/India. But it would help the minority of people- those who live in the US. The average US worker does NOT benefit from outsourcing. Sure, the TV he wants is now half the price. But he can't buy it because his job is about to go to India. And if he does still have a job, that TV isn't such a great deal anymore because of the pay cuts he took to compete with foreign labor. So now we're back to square one, with the exception that another country has skimmed off the money.
Whereas before all the money stayed within the US, now it is permanently leaving our hands. Whereas before goods cost more but your town was in better shape because people had good jobs, now goods are cheaper but your town has declined because people have lost their jobs or taken pay cuts (and at the same time a town in India has been modernized with your money.)
Outsourcing is a short term solution whose long term affect is mainly taking money from the American workers and distributing it between American execs and the population of third world countries. It has a sapping effect on America. Those who make the decisions (execs) do benefit greatly, but for every American exec there are thousands of American workers who are losing out.
The US has a very small population compared to China/India. They could take every one of our jobs and still have hundreds of millions of people left over to fight over those jobs.
And this isn't uniquely a problem the US has to deal with. European counties, with their small, relatively highly paid populations are subject to the same demise. Who wants to pay a German engineer $50,000 when you could pay a whole team of Indian engineers the same wage?
"We are undone, my dear sir, if legislation is still permitted which makes our money, much or little, real or imaginary, as the moneyed interests shall choose to make it." -- Thomas Jefferson"
And this brings up an interesting question: since there's very little social respect in technical pursuits, and now that we're letting employers remove much of the economic incentive to be trained in math/science, who's going to pick it as a profession?
People whose talent and interests are concentrated (only) in the technical/scientific areas. Of course, that means smaller numbers of engineers in the future, because those with more versatile talents will look for other jobs.
C - the footgun of programming languages
This website and blog seem to contain similar content as the reviewed book, especailly from the point of view of national security and global trade-bubble poppage risk.
Here I am, the mexican from the third world country who will take your as programmer and my paisano will take your plumer's (malicious laghter). There's your globalization. Americans finding out there are people willing to work more for a living than they are. You shouldn't be that afraid my globaliphobic gringo friend, even though it is true that USA will loose its position of power over the world order, the world as a whole is moving to a better situation, specially because there will now be various spheres of power which will compensate and balance one another (US, EU, and China). Now the US will not be able to do as they please over the world. Finally, the day has come!! (malicious laughter continues)
I'm currently working as a Software Engineer for a defense contractor ( a safe haven for outsourcing ) I've been there for 2 years now and this is my first job out of college. Last week I've interviewed at 2 companies Siemens and Comcast which are not in defense. When the offers come by I'm wondering if I should take the leap of faith. Reading everyone's comments reminds me to think will I be looking for a new job in 3 even 1 years with these other companies. These jobs will have a lot more benefits such as higher pay, better cost of living, and close proximity to a location I'd rather live near anyway. To reenforce my uneasyness as I was interviewing at Siemens I saw articles posted outside people's cubicle entitled: "Why we shouldn't outsource..." My plan if I got a job at Siemens or Comcast would be to go to grad school for EE part time and have those companies pay for it. Maybe I'd be able to fulfill my original plan of becoming an EE.
Offshoring IT only makes customers unhappy in the end my service quality in the UK from service providers using indian call centers is crappy. I have nothing much against indians but when they dont understand the english language thats a huge issue that they need to over come regardless of if they know the product.
Got a question about UNIX ask it here : Unix/xBSD Forum
Fuck what everybody is saying. Work for yourself.
Believe in yourself. Work hard in starting a new business while you are still at school. There's much more to do than a new great internet idea (which, if you would know how to develop, then you ain't got good IT skills after all). You can, for example, create an information backup service company for small businesses. There's much more.
All you need is willingness to work hard, sleep little, and make money.
If you have a year until you graduate, then you'll know if you can rely on that business to pay your debt by the time you graduate. If you decide you can't make money on it, and you really did everything to start a business, that'll help much more in your CV than something like "I've worked as a part time software tester at a small software firm in Austin".
While I agree that free trade might provide a *net* economic benefit for an economy, it is not guarenteed to be reasonably equal. Capitalism does not guarentee equal distribution of wealth. People involved in management and sales may indeed benefit, but those in manufacturing and "brain jobs" may be screwed by free trade. Statistics seem to show more and more lopsided wealth distribution since WWII, and free trade may be one of the reasons.
The US wealth distribution has been surprisingly equal (relatively speaking) in the past, but this may not continue.
In the 1800's, the naked reign of capitalism in England generally resulted in two classes: owners and peasents. I don't see any force preventing such from happening to the US other than some kind of protectionism. Even lawyers and doctors have protectionism in the form of certificate quotas. IT is one of few "naked" careers left that don't have certificates or unions to protect it from free-trade onslaught, and is getting hit because of it.
Table-ized A.I.
Blunden also does not distinguish between different types of IT workers. The aforementioned AOL support soldier and top NASA scientist, designing microcontrollers for the next space mission would be aggregated into the same "IT worker" category.
The answer to that appears to have already been mentioned in the review:
According to Blunden, the more face-to-face interaction and management effort a job requires, the less likely it is to be outsourced.
It is not the "level", but the human interaction, or lack of it, that matters. The laws of physics are the same in India, so some NASA research can probably be done there also.
(Whether NASA is allowed to do that or wants to is another issue. They risk having gov't unions typical in other agencies tighting their grip if that starts.)
Table-ized A.I.
Don't forget that today's codemonkey from India is tomorrow's experienced programmer. But I agree with what you say about Open Source projects. In some ways, it allows you to leapfrog past "corporate noise" portions of early programmer experience.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Outsourcing exists to cut labor prices for those who control capital (either physical or intellectual) so that they may earn a higher profit. That's it. Nothing more. It doesn't mean that society benefits, or that a nation will be richer after trade. All that matters is reducing the cost of labor.
Ricardo's theory of comparitive advantage assumed that labor and capital was essentially restricted to individual countries, and could not be exchanged. Ricardo did not foresee a situation where all labor costs would be cheaper in a differing nation. Put very simply: where, exactly, does the US have a comparative advantage vis a vis India?
If you want the US to "compete" against India and China the only way you can do so is to drastically cut US wages. Hence, a side effect of "free trade" is a "race to the bottom" where worldwide wages plumet to that of the lowest cost labor market. The net effect would actually be more economic efficiency - more goods produced at a cheaper price - but the effect on a Western nation would be - is - disasterous.
What's good for the capitalist is not necessarily what's good for the country. Should the wealthiest - say the Walton family - be made wealthier in order to sacrifice literally million of American manufacturing jobs? The benefits of offshoring are received by just a few, the costs impact all of society.
Besides, there is no "free trade." The Chinese currency (Yuan) has been kept artificially low vis a vis the dollar for years. The Chinese government has access to prison and forced labor, lower enviornmental standards, etc. that put the US at a distinct disadvantage.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Iran is seriously looking at moving to euros for oil trading, and Russia's talking about it. Of course, Iraq got invaded after Saddam Hussein announced his plan to start trading oil in euros.
Yes this does cost us some jobs, but in total it is simply forcing our shift into the information age. Let the third world enter the industrial age, I say, its about time.
"Information age"? Bull! More and more information processing and analysis will be done by the cheaper-labor third world. Brains are becoming as cheap as light-bulbs if you simply have the bandwidth to communicate with them abroad. We are entering the "persuasion age", where sales and schmoozing reign supreme. Or perhaps call it the "PHB Age".
Face it, nerds without people skills are on the decline. They should teach partying in school rather than calculus II.
Table-ized A.I.
What we need to understand here is that tech workers have experienced in 4 years what it took 80 years for auto workers to experience.
Job starts out as highly technical skill relegated to a privileged elite of the working class.
Job gets automated and simplified, pushing skillset availability to more and more people.
Job gets outsourced to placed with cheaper labor.
It's not the fault of the Indians that our tech jobs moved there, just like it's not the fault of the US Southerners that our auto jobs first moved there from the north, or the fault of the Mexicans that they moved there, or the fault of the southeast Asians that they moved there.
This is how capital works. Whoever can be best exploited gets the contract. Do you have no labor laws, a brutal dictator that puts down unions with bullets and tanks, and a crushed, oppressed populace willing to work for pennies? Well, then, sign up, because you're ready for investment!
India is getting the US tech jobs. They won't have them for long, because they have a pretty well functioning democracy, strong labor laws, and all the things that corporations prefer not to have to deal with. Plus, these tech centers are usually run like white collar sweatshops, and as soon as people there start to organize and form unions, the outsourcing will high-tail it out of there to somewhere a little less problematic (ie, free).
That's how things go, and I'm as against free trade as anyone, but the idea that you can stop it with protectionism and a "Buy American! (tm)" attitude is ridiculous. Look at how far that got the auto industry.
The only way to change the face of outsourcing and globalization is for the AFL-CIO to get off their asses, and stop sending millions to the Democrats (who have sold them out over and over), and start investing money in union movements in the countries where the jobs are going. If corporations are going to move a job somewhere else, we need to make damn sure that the new people they employ will have a good wage, decent hours, a union, and a safe, sane working environment.
Will the mainstream unions (or tech workers for that matter) ever start supporting overseas labor movements? I hope so, but I don't have much faith. Everybody's too wrapped up in this xenophobic, protectionist BS that won't get us anywhere.
We also have to look at IT as far less "special" than we thought it was. We are not the gifted wunderkind of the world. We are not the digirati, forever sipping lattes and controling the world from our laptops at the beach. We are nothing more than skilled labor, working folks who will be screwed over by CEO's and their profits, just like everyone else.
Once we realize that, then we get out of the dream world we've been inhabiting for way too long. And that's when the real fun begins.
If it was your point to bash Bush go to some political forum like moveon.org. And your attempt to make it sound worse by exagerating the number of daily hires (365,000 annual) only makes the point of posting suspicious unless you provide a company name and a way to verify this figure. And that this was an upward trend since Bush took office.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Becoming a suit or tradesman increasingly looks like the wiser choice
Do you really want to become a suit? I mean, honestly, when a journeyman electrician can make upwards of $35 per hour?
I never understood why people have this idea that the trades are horrible dead-end jobs. Not only can you make good money, there's a whole lot more unionization (which, for all the problems that unions have, they're really nice to have sometimes), but you also have the advantage of learning a new skill that's really useful, and meeting other people with other useful skills, whether it's electrical work, plumbing, tile, woodwork, painting, etc.
Compare that to becoming a suit, where you not only become a chump, you also meet people for whom their whole existence revolves around schmoozing and bullshitting. How many karaoke martini bars and fake smiles can you really take? And let's not even get into the whole fact that suits don't have any worthwhile skills to speak of.
No, I'd never be a suit. I'd rather work an honest job.
One month after I started my current job, my new boss informed us they had just hired 12 programmers in India. "Great, I'm toast" I thought.
5 years later, the guys in India have yet to produce any usable code. My job is very secure for now.
I went the Bangalore to train some of them to do my job. Before I went I had a preconceived notion that the programmers over there would suck.
Well, I was wrong.
I now think they are quite competent. The problem delivering a working project, IMHO, stems from extreme shortsightedness of my company. All the company sees is "12 engineers for the price of 2!" What they don't see is "12 engineers, 13.5 hours out of synch with the US, who need good documentation training on our existing systems & very good requirements documentation".
The Indians were not hired with a working knowledge of their project (obviously). Since the company wanted only to save money, they didn't explain the project well, or document the requirements. Communication was limited because of the time difference. The project ended up working, but only barely. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been deployed anywhere.
The guys I trained did a fine enough job, but only because I went to Bangalore and explained things in person. I answered questions, demonstrated some things, and have maintained contact since.
Once my little project was done, they were moved to a very complicated project. The company should have brought them over for a month or so of in-person training. Instead it was decided to do all training via email. The new project is now entering its 3rd month, with no completion expected soon. In the US office the project would have been done in 2 weeks, tops.
In short: productivity is slower and software quality is worse, not because the programmers are bad, but because the american company involved wanted to save money without spending any $$ to support the offshore development.
It is ironic you mention Siemens, which is hardly an American company. They are German -- and their US facility can be construed as 'outsourced'.
Ironic yeah kind of. Still doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy that they won't reallocate their workforce somewhere cheaper.
look, i don't know exactly where i stand on outsourcing, but one thing is for sure- arguments like "only the top 5% of management benefit from outsourcing" are getting really old. after all, as rational economic agents, OF COURSE they will act in their own self-interest, so telling the top 5% (who are most likely the decision-makers) that only they will benefit from outsourcing isn't really going to be convincing, you know? i mean, why WOULDN'T they act to put money in their own pockets? any argument that is built on the idea that altruism exists (especially at such high levels of cutthroat business) is weak. it really boils down to "do the right thing... please?" and i think we all know where that leads.
if you are opposed to offshoring (and as i said i don't have a position one way or the other), what you need to do is show those decision makers
it should read: look, i don't know exactly where i stand on outsourcing, but one thing is for sure- arguments like "only the top 5% of management benefit from outsourcing" are getting really old. after all, as rational economic agents, OF COURSE they will act in their own self-interest, so telling the top 5% (who are most likely the decision-makers) that only they will benefit from outsourcing isn't really going to be convincing, you know? they don't give a rat's ass if it puts joe blow out of a job. i mean, why WOULDN'T they act to put money in their own pockets? any argument that is built on the idea that altruism exists (especially at such high levels of cutthroat business) is weak. it really boils down to "do the right thing... please?" and i think we all know where that leads. if you are opposed to offshoring (and as i said i don't have a position one way or the other), what you need to do is show those decision makers that in the long run they personally (NOT just "society") do not benefit economically from offshoring. until then, they will continue to do whatever makes their wallets fatter, and how can we fault them for that?
Since I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona, almost all of my work is telecommuting. For the last 8 months, I have been working for company in India and it has been working out fairly well. Sure, I don't get the same pay as I did when I worked in an office in San Diego, but flexible hours so I can spend more time with family...
I am curious. Why would it be cost-effective for them to do that? Even in Arizona's backwoods the cost of living is far higher than in India.
things will be OK here in the US as long as people adapt to a sliding material life style
This may mean that it pays more to be a WalMart sales clerk than a programmer. On a larger scale, I don't get what the US does "special" anymore that justifies our high-cost of living. Money will stop flowing into the US if we cannot provide something the rest of the world wants. "Innovation" is not exclusive to the US, and most of the activity around bringing innovation to fruit is being offshored also. Thus, before a good idea that may generate 900 local jobs may only generate say 100 now, the other 800 is offshored. Could be one of the reasons why the US dollar keeps sliding. However, if it does not stop sliding, then those holding huge amounts of US investments will start selling them off, lowering the dollar yet more creating a panic cycle, creating a giant financial crisis for the US.
Table-ized A.I.
If you weren't sure, why didn't you ask them about outsourcing? Maybe they wouldn't tell you the whole truth, but at least you'd get management's story.
And if you feel uneasy, then don't switch. Job security is very important these days (as there really is none), and you seem to have found a job where job security exists.
Thirdly, if you want your grad EE (master's?) then go to night class. Don't rely on a company to pay for it -- you may be left high and dry.
And finally, everyone likes to think of the best-case scenario, but be sure to think of the worst-case to feel where your best balance is.
Not to be prejudice against Indians, this is just with my personal experiences and my personal experiences alone.
The last job I had ended up outsourcing most of its IT to India. The company was a Unix-based company, and I'm seriously wondering if anyone there has ever seen a command line. Those people ask questions that would be considered dumb by most Unix users. The result was a drop in everyone's productivity, due to us Americans constantly being bombarded with questions.
The other thing is they have a dog-eat-dog mentality. We (Americans) try to work as a team, but they have a mentality that they want to look good at your expense. In a perfect world, it backfires, but they are such ass kissers that our management is in awe of them, even though time and time again, they spin their wheels and get done less than half as much as we do.
Americans in general have an attitude that we work hard and let the results pay for themselves. The Indians (in India) that I worked with have an attitude like the squeeky wheel gets the grease. Unfortunately, our management ended up choosing them over us and ended up outsourcing the rest of our jobs.
In summary, once they start outsourcing jobs, don't train them. You'll lose your job anyway, and it will hurt worse if you actually trained your replacement.
I appluad the current administration for running horrendous and unsustainable debt, this will invariable lead to a massive devaluation in the dollar, and subsuquently an end to outsourcing. Most international analyst are predicting an Argentina style economic implosion in the US unless significant fiscal changes are made. The current administration however seems determined to 'stay the course' on our path to bankruptcy. One of the few bright spots in the Argentinian economy however, is an outsourcing boom since there wages/currency are so weak on the global market. Mark
Eventually oil will run out to you know.
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
"If you weren't sure, why didn't you ask them about outsourcing?"
In hindsight yes I should have asked.
"Job security is very important these days."
I suppose I'm considering it because my current position is at a small company. Software isn't where I want to be and that is the only course I have at this company. A Siemens or a Comcast I could hopefully get into other fields of interest.
"Don't rely on a company to pay for it"
Now why wouldn't I rely on a company paying for grad school? If they pay for it it's paid.
You don't have any idea what you are talking about. First of all, $35/hour comes out to around $72,800 per year, which is a pretty mediocre goal for most people working on their MBA. Second of all, these "suits" have a number of qualities that most techinical and trade workers sorely lack. Not the least of which is the ability to command respect and lead teams of people. Third of all, the "suits" are given a great deal of responsibility. When a programmer makes a bad call, the deadline slips. When a CEO makes a bad call, companies fail and people lose their jobs.
In a group of N workers, there are (N-1)^2 paths of communication or miscommunication. Keeping the bodycount down on a project is an optimum strategy. So what you do is to split the project into mini-projects, each with fewer bodies. However this pushes back extra organisation work onto those comissioning the project.
See my journal, I write things there
>>Software Engineer for a defense contractor
>>( a safe haven for outsourcing )
Sorry to tell you, but defense contracting is not safe from outsourcing. The US military is already in the process of transition everything to contractors. Halliburton is an excellant example. As for overseas, the government also has little qualms about sending confidential info across the pond if it will save them a buck. The IRS is outsourcing your tax returns.
One issue which may be cultural or it may relate to a lack of domain knowledge is that an Indian is less likely to complain when given a stupid specification. A western programmer will tend to complain that something doesn't make sense but an Indian not.
See my journal, I write things there
Confidential Yes. Classified No. Halliburton has a lot of work that applies to the military yes but not all of it is classified. As long as it's classified which most of our work here is then we're safe. As far as i know you still have to be a US citizen to get clearance.
Affirming the prejudices of computer geeks.
Although I am not a Bush fan.. political views aside.
I've been using computers since I was 8 years old, with my Commodore 64, and steady to the present. I read about new IT stuff out there daily, I play with the new stuff regularly, and I work in IT where I manage projects, troubleshoot issues, etc.
It's taken me almost two decades of regular computer use to make the salary I make now.
While I admit that much of the stuff I do could be considered simple, it's quite often not. Sure, I could tell a user their e-mail "can't go because something is wrong." But it's much better for me to be able to know that the other companies domain expired two days ago, that their mail server is not RFC 822 compliant, and that the recipients' mailbox is full. The depth of knowlede is what I get paid for, not just because of some of the actual duties included in my job.
So yea, to me the job is pretty easy. Performance evaluations of disk subsystems, reporting on messaging usage, and troubleshooting level 3 user issues are all pretty easy for me. But I dare you to find someone with less then 5 years hard experience do the job I can.
I think my salary is fair. I've worked my ass off for it and so has a lot of the IT community. Just because I enjoy what I work with doesn't mean I shouldn't be paid for it.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Okay India maybe 'stealing' jobs, but they're doing a good job knowing that they are considered one of the poorest thirdworld countries. I think outsourcing is a blessing for the country. We should step back and look from their point of view. THere are kids starving over there with no home. Okay you may not be able to buy your dream car, but be happy that the dream car fed a poor kid living on the streets. However i dont agree with companies exploiting workers for dirt cheep wages.
It seems that over the last 10 years, the term engineer is being loosely(sp?) applied to anything that has a title. I think it all started with the "politically correct" phase of the early 90's ("Sanitation Engineer" aka Garbage Man), but then exploded with the growth of the bubble in the late 90's. So we soon had "website engineers" and software developers were also called "engineers".
Hell, I went through the college of engineering for a B.S. in Computer Engineering at my university, graduated, got a job in my field, and I don't even consider myself an engineer.
The Real Drivers of Outsourcing of Software Development... *** While I have not read the book referenced in this thread, I do have some opinions on the topic of outsourcing of software development. Most of these opinions follow from the belief that a significant percentage of outsourcing results due to a disconnect between budget-controlling managers and technical services providers. Financial managers, including those tasked with selecting technical service providers such as software development, typically have the responsibility to award contracts to a low-cost provider of a product of sufficient quality. Before the age of computers and software, this was a relatively straightforward process. There were fewer complexities associated with production processes associated with manufacturing and more traditional services such as accounting, engineering and legal. Before the age of computers and the web, there was far less variability in the productivity of individual resources within a given category of service provider. For example, before spreadsheet software, an accountant could only process a limited number of transactions, or research a small sub-set of the Internal Revenue code. A financial wiz was bounded by the time it took mechanically calculate the potential profits of a given arbitrage or hedge strategy. A lawyer could only look up so many similar precedent cases in legal publications. In short, procurement managers faced limited risk in their investigation of the abilities of potential service providers. However, within a couple short decades, this has all changed. *** With the advent of personal computers and software applications, there is a significantly larger variance in individual resource productivity within every category of knowledge services. An accountant or financial manager with strong spreadsheet skills and only limited programming expertise can be exponentially more productive than a similarly educated, less computer-enabled peer. A lawyer who still relies on a physical library of printed legal publications would very plausibly be five percent as productive as a similarly educated attorney who had mastered a personal computing environment and had a grasp of the taxonomical classifications employed by the online legal publishers. So, mastery of technology has dramatically increased the variability in the productivity of knowledge service providers. *** Naturally, the same concepts that drive the increased variability in resource productivity in traditional knowledge services such as accounting, law and non-computer engineering are responsible for the even greater variability in productivity in software development services. It is quite common, in the field of software development, for a single expert developer/consultant to produce more than a team of a dozen or more in-house developers. This is especially true when a development team has locked itself into an "every Xxxx object is written using this pattern approach". Situation and approaches like this serve to cap the productivity of the individual resources. *** This background serves to highlight and underscore the disconnect referenced above (between procurement managers and technical service providers) in the context of offshore outsourcing. Almost without exception, outsourced development efforts are predicated upon the belief, by procurement personnel and management, that there is little variability in the productivity of individual service providing resources. It is difficult for an MBA-style manager to believe that using a slightly dated approach to design, as is usually the case in offshore outsourced systems, can result in the purchasing company taking ownership of a code-base that is dozens of times larger (in terms of source code volume) than a more modern design approach. But it is almost universally true. *** Virtually every outsourced development effort I've encountered in the field reflected a decade-old design. Of the dozens of offshore-produced code-bases I've seen in large corporations, virtuall
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
IT'S A COOKBOOK!!!
"Becoming a suit or tradesman increasingly looks like the wiser choice."
Become an artist. I hear they get lots of respect.
This review reminds me of the funny bit on Conan O'Brien about one of his writers actually flying over to India to meet the tech who helped him with his pop-up ad problem. Funny stuff if you get a chance to see it, plenty of sites with the bit encoded in WMV.
Linux at home
The real problem with outsourcing is that we are training the rest of the world to do our jobs better. We create labor forces that will eventually undermine our own national economic security. I don't think that Americans are innately entitled to these jobs, but that's really not how national security works.
The best posts are both flamebait and informative.
A key for Americans who need to survive outsourcing is to become as inexpensive (once time and language barrier are considered) as offshore labor.
In turn, this means reducing cost of living so that the (much) lower income is sufficient. For that, I recommend offshoring the ofshore-ers. That is, We need to skip the American middleman and buy our goods directly from the source for dirt cheap.
This is how 'the rest of us' can effectively offshore the jobs of the managers who are offshoring our jobs.
Somehow, I'll bet the same American companies who do the most offshoring will suddenly line up outside of congress screaming bloody murder about the need to protect America by forcing us to buy from them!
The real problem is impedance mismatch between economies. Offshore workers cost less because the goods and services they need for a decent living are much less expensive and because of the exchange rate between U.S. dollars and their local currency (though that seems to be changing lately).
1. avoid debt like the plague - unless you need to literally borrow to feed your family
2. consider doubling or tripling the amount of time you spend on "self education" to stay globally competitive
3. learn to totally appreciate non-material things like love of family and friends
Unfortunately #3 takes up too much time and money which prevents you from doing #2 and maybe even #1.
However, the dollar is devaluing. This raises the cost of the Indians relative to the Americans. It also makes the Indians richer. This is how the market is supposed to work.
Great point. But the average consumer in India (and especially China and Japan) takes it in the shorts in high prices because their government's policy is to depress the value of the currency relative to the dollar to protect exports and increase employment. This is why Asia buys US Treasuries. Maximum economic growth is not the goal in Asia. Full employment is. The US wisely has a weak dollar policy. Asia ends up giving their stuff to us! The race to the bottom cannot continue, however. Asian currencies must strengthen eventually.
an ill wind that blows no good
IN big companies, the ones paying big dosh, there is absolutely no fscking way that you can meet your clients personaly. That would be unproductive and you would be rightly fired for not using the resources at your disposal.
I have been only communicating with people by phone and email for the bes part of 6 years and I am doing fine, thanks, since these tools allow me to multitask and be more productive.
Just to think about wasting my company's time meeting people unnecesarily makes me cringe.
If you want to socialize, learn a language, practice yoga, or something like that....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Both of these companies were not just major users of H-1b and outsourcing -- they were the leaders of this trend.
This isn't ironic or puzzling -- it is entirely predictable and it was predited by people who are now going to take the information industry back from the brainiacs who thought they were being very clever and cosmo and, above-all, fashionable, by throwing open the doors of the US to the world.
Ever since Scott McNealy said:
It has been downhill for Sun as well as the entire computer industry.Guess what, suckers?
You lose.
Seastead this.
I never understood why US companies would off shore to India and other countries where there is a significant language barrier when Canada is right here. We both speak the same language, the Canadian schooling system is as good as the US one (better in some respects but I am biased) and the Canadian dollar is less than the US greenback (which is what drives most of our economy up here).
So why India?
It's interesting to me that you mention CitiCorp. I am currently a contractor with Citibank. The Citi Cards division recently got a new CIO, Mitchell Habib, formerly of GE Medical.
a ses/200204apr/pr_20020411.htm 2 301385.cms
His new plan is to outsource all contractors to India. At GE, he reduced 70% of the staff through outsourcing and it looks like he'll do it at Citi too after he's done with removing the regular contractors.
I'm just glad I already found a new job.
Here are some links about the GE outsourcing.
http://www.prdomain.com/companies/t/tcs/news_rele
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/4
http://www.tcs-america.com/news/011404.html
re: "I am curious. Why would it be cost-effective for them to do that? Even in Arizona's backwoods the cost of living is far higher than in India."
:-) I also have lots of experinence, which helps me get things down quickly (so some benefit to them for paying more). My main point of contact is in the US - which also helps.
:-(
I probably cost them what 5 software engineers in India would. The company has a few people in the US, but I am the only programmer (here or in India - most of the staff have MBAs). I do work hard
re: "...I don't get what the US does "special" anymore that justifies our high-cost of living..."
Bingo! You have that right, unfortunately
For my part, I spend lots of time on "self education" and I have a lot of confidence that this will keep the work coming in. Basically, I love the work I do, and I don't want to change careers.
Best regards,
Mark
I agree with you! I should have either made that an unordered list of put 3 first.
-Mark
I suppose next you'll say something like "Correlation does not imply causation." like some sophomoric dipshit.
Look, just take your money and invest it in the wonderful companies that have "vision" and ignore their employment policies. You'll get what you deserve. Preferably you'll buy long.
Seastead this.
I know that is why I don't buy anything from Linksys anymore. Ever call Linksys for support? I can't believe they are a Cisco company!
"Long-term? What does that have to do with my bonus?" - AnyManager, YourCompany, Inc.
Why should the quarterly-driven MBA crowd care about the long run?
Your argument that investing abroad is relatively unsafe seems rather peculiar to me given current sociological, financial, and political trends.
The U.S. has the highest rate of murder and deaths due to gun violence than any other industrialized country. Northern Ireland gave us a run for our money for many years, but of late the worst of their political troubles seem behind them and they are falling from challenging us on this point? Regrettably, Iraq seems to be the new nation attempting to challenge our lead in this unfortunate statistic, although the statistics are skewed since we are responsible for many of these deaths (about 100,000 by some estimates; about 10,000 - 20,000, if you prefer to believe only in official Pentagon accounts).
Health care costs are rising as US longevity is leveling off (or falling in some regions of the US; infant deaths are on the rise again throughout the US, evidently in part due to the limited availability of vaccines). With the passage of new rebooblican efforts to better support the drug and insurance industries, we can expect even more Americans to be priced out of the market for health care (now rising at about 7.5%/yr) or be kept out those few courts of justice for which political appointees haven't already made the notion of justice quaint or new "tort reform" laws written by industry lobbies are designed to guarantee. In any event, your chance of dying for lack of affordable medical care is increasing (unless of course you are a politician and then you can borrow other people's money and let them pay for it). Virtually the rest of the industrialized world has state supported health care, so their competitive advantage will only increase relative to ours.
Our current account deficit continues to increase even with the drop of our currency, so in its wisdom our new rebooblican congress has found it necessary over the last year to increase the US debt ceiling 3 times to keep their charge card in working order (one would have thought that borrowing more money in the last 4 years than all other previous administrations put together have in the history of the country would have caused the rebooblican leadership to pause, lest it make the notion of "conservatism" seem more like a mask at a costume ball than a policial ideology, but no matter one will never see an embarrassed rebooblican). In any event, this should guarantee that our currency will continue to weaken at a faster rate. Current US fiscal and monetary policy really only now consist increasing the amount congress and the white (wash?) house can borrow to finance its debt. The fed continues only to create money just a little faster than we send it abroad to make our interest payments in a frantic effort to avoid the inevitable financial panic that will come when the currency falls so much that inflation will rise rapidly requiring the Fed to raise interest rates precipitously relative to real economic growth. Don't worry this probably won't happen until the 3rd quarter of 2005 and it won't start in the US markets first.
The value of the dollar is dropping and consequently, any dollar denominated asset invested in the US is likely to be relative looser, at least over the next 5 years (no one in DC is predicting a surplus before then, are you?). Even today, the White House suggested they were going to put the extra money needed for "solving" the social security crisis on the rebooblican charge card (you know, they charge, you and future generations pay). Add this to those extra tax breaks for wealthy campaign contributors (that really don't start to kick in until this tax year) and you can be pretty sure our currency is headed for the cliff. You are better off putting rupees under your mattress rather than dollars for a good rate of return. Those buying our debt are already beginning to clamber for something more tangible than worthless paper backed up only by debt they largely already own.
The good news is that as the dollar drops, it is more likely that foreigners will b
I've worked with a group of 30+ very good engineers from India here in the USA. They had a tendency to be "good soldiers". The problem is that sometimes the best ideas come from the guys actually doing the work. When they are afraid to raise their hand and suggest an improvement it gets lost.
It maybe risky to draw big conclusions here but I do think our "can do" culture is a major asset in global competition. Innovation is critical to our success.
For my part, I spend lots of time on "self education" and I have a lot of confidence that this will keep the work coming in. Basically, I love the work I do, and I don't want to change careers.
But what will happen if you become burned out in a decade or so and no longer have the will to be the Samuri Programmer needed to compete against the wages of 4 Indians?
Table-ized A.I.
It is always a good idea to be aware with respect to sensitive data. In particular, it is important to know exactly who processes the data, and where they are located. This applies regardless of where a company is located. There are issues if the subcontracting is done to another party in the USA. However, it is likely more difficult to hold an overseas perpetrator responsible. See this article which talks about assessing healthcare privacy concerns with outsourcing.
People whose talent and interests are concentrated (only) in the technical/scientific areas. Of course, that means smaller numbers of engineers in the future, because those with more versatile talents will look for other jobs.
Then pro-offshoring/visa biz lobbyists will use the smaller numbers as an excuse ("labor shortage") to do further damage to nerdy careers.
Table-ized A.I.
I would like to hire a Perl programmer for a project of mine (NOT for a company, so I can't afford a high rate...)
Where are job boards?
How do I get started?
No joke, this is a real job (6 months full-time)
thanks!
We'll screw the other nations later. (OK, not "we" but "our corporate overlords"). Oh, that, and, we seem to be doing a good job of randomly harming any other nations who "simply got in the way"* already...
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
* "Your ensign simply got in the way", reply by builder of manical computer, M5, on old Star Trek after red-shirt gets fried by said computer when it starts sucking down some high watt power.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
Why is losing a job to outsourcing worse than having it be obsoleted outright because of improvements in labor-saving technology?
Here's an example: "computer" used to be a job title held by people who tabulated numbers manually before digital calculators. Clearly no one makes a living at that anymore. But let's say those jobs had gone to India instead of being replaced by technology. Would it have made a difference?
I think the issue is, people take it personally if they perceive a one-for-one job transfer from an American to a foreigner. Losing your six-figure job doing legacy COBOL apps to an Indian triggers thoughts like "that job *should have* stayed here" because said job still exists, somewhere else. But dumping the old system and the jobs with it isn't a story, it's just business as usual.
Bottom line: this industry is all about accelerating change, and if you want to survive you have to "embrace change" and keep up, or go the way of the dodo. Outsourcing itself is a red herring. If you're that high-paid mainframe guy still maintaining apps from the '70s, your job is vulnerable. Doesn't matter whether you lose your job to someone in India or whether it goes away outright--for some jobs, Bangalore may just be a pit stop on the road to obsolecence.
Being Indian, I have to protest against this. India is a Sovereign , Secular, Socalist country by definition. That spells out to "We won't let other countries screw us" as part of government policy. Thankfully the government seems to be keeping that promise to a large extent.
From 1950 to 1991 , India was a protectionist economy . In 1991 the globalization initiative (due to the influence of USA , no less) , hit India along with a finance minister (Manmohan Singh) who knew what he was doing. Almost all trade restrictions on exporters and importers were taken off between 1991 - 1997 . And what you are seeing today is the result of that liberalisation.
America has dished out a lot of Free Trade agreements and then screwed a few foreign industries as well - Canadian car industry would be an excellent example. America used protectionist strategies to let Detroit sell cars by raising tarriffs on Japanese cars. America too has been a protectionist economy and almost destroyed it's economy (still is trying to repeat that according to US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan).
The really ironic part of your comment, is that India has profited more from dropping their Nehruvian protectionist policies than from anything else since Independence.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Dude, that's the problem when the government doesn't invest enough in Education and infrastructure. You end up thinking of the money spent on education as something you need to make good. Quite a few end up as money grubbing , greedy CEOs or doctors with a penchant for CAT scans for headaches.
I paid around 12k INR for my Computer Science education similar to around 600 of the best and brightest students of my state. The rest of my educational burden ie 500k INR was borne by the state. So here I am, working at around 300k INR per annum and sending around 25% of that money home. Paradoxically the state has the lowest per-capita income in the country , but has the highest standard of living. But of course, that depends slightly more on me sending money home or coming back home to settle down with my retirement money. But it did work out nicely for 50 years now.
A cheap education is not often a bad thing - I should say I didn't really appreciate it when I got it. But now, I really do understand how it just keeps the economy afloat eventhough the state seems to get NOTHING out of it directly.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I loved that bit. For me the coolest part was seeing most of the techs standing/sitting in jeans/t-shirts, just talking to each other or customers, just like your average North American tech support geek.
:)
:)
Also, I loved how a lot of them looked at him like he was insane when he started to do his Bollywood-style dance on the table
And, of course, the comedy writer taking the support calls was awesome, too
Thanks for your commentary /.
I think I will be spending some time at the Career
Center here at school. See you in the workforce.
Those statistics don't compare murder and deaths that still occured in those other countries anyhow, just without the use of guns, and it does not measure the violence avoided by criminals believe that there is some small chance that a potential victim might be carrying a gun (both in cases where the criminal himself/herself used a gun and not). A more telling statistic is that since England banned the use of guns, mugging has risen to six times New York's rate.
There is a book by a former professor from Yale and the University of Chicago professor who was a gun control advocate until he started pouring through the statistical data. The book is called "More Guns, Less Crime." If you read it, be sure to get the second edition, which includes a section that covers a lot of the statistical fallacies that were used to try to criticize the first edition.
Also, Gun ownership increased crime, shouldn't Canada, with it's higher gun ownership rate, have more crime?
*** Virtually every outsourced development effort I've encountered in the field reflected a decade-old design. Of the dozens of offshore-produced code-bases I've seen in large corporations, virtually every one relied on highly labor intensive patterns that could have been generated very simply, given an understanding of the situation. And since the modules/programs were not generated, but instead written slightly different by many different resources, they are virtually impossible to maintain subsequent to the original writing. In this world of never-ending compliance, this is a recipe for disaster. To be fair, this is not limited to offshore shops. I've personally known of many big-budget projects where high-dollar domestic consultants (from a variety of shops) delivered systems that relied on per-form, or per-query source code representations (unnecessary programs - in manager-speak). *** The very important fact is that there is greater variability in the software developer productivity than any other service sector. A Failure to understand this reality is the primary driver of offshore development. *** Just as object-Oriented software was the buzz of the past, when computer hardware was less advanced, Engine-Oriented software is the solution for today - not mechanical and unwieldy offshore developed systems. Outsourced developed efforts that are predicated on the low variable, or resource-level, cost model make no sense as the economics of system development are more fixed-cost in nature. Doug Hettinger (dh_75032@yahoo.com)
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
The problem is we have not mobilized in response to offshoring. There is no unity between IT/Computer workers.
There are no strong unions, no poltical structure to protect our jobs--which are/used to be high paid. So we're going to be taken advantage of.
I do not think it completely a matter of "keeping up with the times" any more. I think it is more of a matter of politics now--and we have done nothing poltically to protect ourselves.
There are other industries have stronger unions and political constructs which protect the job security of their workers.
For example: Law.
They have begun offshoring Paperwork (contracts etc.)
Already we have far too many Lawyers, however, it keeps getting worse.
At my University's law school (which is considered top notch around this city) there are VERY FEW graduated Juris Doctors who have been able to find law INTERNSHIPS.
Lawyers are political by nature, do you think these JDs are going to allow all this work to be moved perminately to India? NO. They have already went to political means to stop this practice through the BAR ASSOCIATION.
Now I am not a laywer, and nor to I claim to know everything there is to know about this situation regarding to law, but I do have close friends who are lawyers and law professors.
--
I graduated in May of '04. I have a BA degree in Multimedia, I am three credits away from an additional BS degree in computer science, I have a 4.0 GPA in my major, I have a 3.1 over all. I have won two national awards for Macromedia Flash web design.
With the exception of a week of temporary employment, I have been unemployed since graduation, and with the exception of graduate classes (which I am taking to keep the student loan collectors off my back until I can manage to get a job) and whatever networking groups I can find, I have been practically rotting away in parents house.
I have been trying to find a group in the Pittsburgh area to join in response to the offshoring crisis, but I can't seem to find one.
This is a significant problem.
All I have found is suggestions such as:
"professionals should look for a newer career model, based on a more structured training and career development, in response to the increasing trend of offshore outsourcing."
In fact, George W. Bush suggested something similar to this during the debates.
I just paid 60,000 dollars for an education and I need a career change--and I haven't even started my career yet!!!!
-Tony