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Two Reviews of Yourdon's 'Outsource?'
Ben Rothke (continued)
For those Americans who would hope their representatives in Washington would get involved and pass laws to stem the flow of jobs overseas, there is little that Washington will likely do to help knowledge-based workers whose jobs are in danger of being offshored. While the loss of jobs is a crisis to many of us, Yourdon makes note of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and a speech that Jimmy Carter made in April 1977. Carter said "If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Nearly 30 years after Carter made that speech, oil is at an all-time high and nothing has been significantly done to reduce our dependency on oil; or to find a better solution.
If Congress is apathetic when it comes to an effective energy policy that affects an entire nation, it is clear that preserving the jobs of C and Java programmers is likely to be at the bottom of any congressman's to-do list. In 2005, national security, Medicare and Iraq are just a few of the issues that seem to be far more pressing to the nation than the loss of programmers.
The book is written about outsourcing in general, but has a heavy slant to programmers whose jobs have been outsourced to India. The prime advantage India has over other countries with cheap labor is a large base of workers that speak English. While the salaries in China, for example, are even lower than in India, the language barrier is significant.
The main claims of proponents of outsourcing are of increased productivity and major cost savings. Whether these claims are real is to a degree immaterial, as the perception among CIOs is that outsourcing has an immediate cost savings. This is primarily due to the fact that the salaries and benefit costs of overseas programmers are radically less than those of their U.S. counterparts.
From a productivity and efficiency perspective, many Indian firms are CMM level-5 certified, something that their U.S. counterparts can't attest to. At the end of the day, is better and cheaper code produced in Bangalore and Mumbai? Yourdon states that it is hard to find hard and fast answers. But with outsourcing the rage, there is the perception that Indian firms are more productive, formalized and efficient than their US counterparts is being accepted as fact. For many, perception is reality, and the reality is that jobs are being sent overseas by the thousands.
Outsource:Competing in the Global Productivity Race is written for (and beneficial to) anyone who feels that his job may be in danger of being outsourced. The book is well-written and pragmatic, and Yourdon notes that there are no simple answers to be found, nor are there any obvious choices. The book guides the reader who is working in a knowledge-based position to better determine where the trends in outsourcing are going and how to best save their job and simultaneously prepare for the inevitable. It is not that every knowledge-based job will be outsourced, but rather that the potential exists that every job could be outsourced. With that, it behooves everyone to get make sure they are prepared.
In 1992, Yourdon wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. In the book, he predicted that U.S. programmers would "suffer the fate of the Dodo bird" as companies shifted jobs from American workers to those overseas to take advantage of lower pay, less labor regulations and higher productivity. Yourdon admits his prediction was partially incorrect. U.S. programmers have not gone the way of the Dodo bird and hiring is resuming; but in spite of everything, huge numbers of jobs are being sent overseas.
While Decline and Fall of the American Programmer was focused exclusively on technology workers, Yourdon writes that every knowledge-based job is vulnerable to being outsourced. From radiologists to tax preparers, telemarketers to architects, and more.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of Outsource is the composed manner in which Yourdon writes. Outsourcing is a controversial, political and extremely emotional topic, and Yourdon provides a balanced view of the outsourcing phenomena.
One of the solutions suggested to stemming the flow of jobs overseas is protectionist federal regulations. Yourdon believes that such measures are doomed to fail, in that you can't protect knowledge-based worked in the same way that steel and agriculture products can be protected. Yourdon admits that there might be some short-term benefits to a protectionist strategy, but will fail in the long-term. His view is that protectionism is simply blaming someone else for the existence of competition; and such an approach does not solve the problem. His solution, and the overall advice in the book, is to make each and every American knowledge worker more prepared to face competition from overseas.
Of the books 10 chapters, the most compelling is chapter 6, which provides seven strategies in which to deal with the threat of outsourcing. The first is to be proactive, with the last being to consider a career change. Yourdon does not promise and secrets or miracles in the chapter and attempts to provide some common, yet often overlooked, sense.
Outsource ends with the following quote: "I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself; that my future lay in my own hands." This book shows you how.
Jason Bennett's take:
Information technology outsourcing has been a hot topic of discussion for many years now, but Ed Yourdon has, with varying degrees of success, been writing on the topic since 1992's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. His initial prophecies were somewhat early and off the mark, however, prompting his 1996 sequel The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. Now, eight years after his mea culpa, Yourdon has returned to the issue with what can best be described as The Decline and Fall of the American Worker.
Am I overstating his thesis a bit? Probably, but such exaggeration seems to be a Yourdon stock-in-trade (see his Byte Wars or especially his Time Bomb 2000! for some over-the-top predictions of doom). Overall, his thesis is fairly standard: the Third World (namely, Eastern Europe, India and China) has a lot of very educated people who, thanks to the Internet, can now do your job for your company from their country, and for a lot less money. This makes you expendable and them employable. Since there are a lot of them, unless you're really good, there's a decent chance your job is at risk. Yourdon expands his reach beyond the typical programmer or sysadmin to encompass all types of knowledge work, from reading (and diagnosing) x-rays to accountants and tax preparers. Eventually, he concludes, 10%-15% of current Western knowledge worker jobs may be lost to outsourcing, depending on various factors, including salary and productivity.
Yourdon's main solution to the problem can be summed up as "more productivity," by which he means business process changes as well as better measurability (CMM is mentioned several times in conjunction with Indian outsourcing firms). His point being, if you earn five times more than an Indian programmer, but are ten times more productive (and can prove it), then your job is safe. If your productivity is not up to snuff (or you can't measure it), you're more likely to be caught up in the rush. If you can't be more productive, (or not productive enough), he has various suggestions for making yourself less vulnerable to outsourcing. He also goes on at length about how companies can do offshoring, if need be, and what he sees as good national strategies to invest in education and job training to keep workers well-tuned to what the economy needs. In general, Yourdon sees offshoring as inevitable (and impossible to stop via protectionist means), but also as a challenge that can be met if we face it head-on.
Overall, while the book may be informative to someone who hasn't thought about the issue of offshoring much, or who has a fairly shallow understanding of the issue, I didn't feel that Yourdon addressed the problem in a particularly deep or thorough way. Offshoring, like any kind of trade, has broad implications for economies that are difficult to perceive. For example, will India's domestic demand for software increase as Western jobs are outsourced and its economy improves, and will that redirect programmers from offshoring positions? In his discussion on medical outsourcing (both of diagnostics, as well as actually traveling to other countries), Yourdon neglects to mention the legal implications of this trend. If an Indian doctor misreads your x-ray, how do you go about suing him? Finally, Yourdon does not address whether these productivity measurements are truly meaningful: A CMM level 5 shop can produce bad software just as well as a CMM level 0 shop; it just means that it can produce it badly in the same way each time.
In sum, this book is a good first read on the topic for someone who has not had extensive exposure to the issue, but for anyone who has been studying the problems for some time, the issues raised and solutions presented may seem elementary.
You can purchase Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
...to pay yoru $699 licensing fee you cock-smoking teabaggers.
Outsourced by the SCO$699FeeTroll (695565)
Don't be a cog. Cogs get outsourced. Cog == bot. Good day.
Ok. I agree that the excessive outsourcing going on is, well, excessive. HOWEVER, this book is about knowledge based industry people. People with college degrees, and relatively comfortable lifestyles. Worst case scenario: move overseas. Buy a plane ticket, and move. Big deal.
I truly feel bad for all of the people made destitute by the manufacturing industries leaving the US. These are people that are mostly not college educated, and often not even high school educated. These are people living hand to mouth, as their families have been for generations. These people are the ones getting fucked. They can't just get online, buy a plane ticket, and move to Asia for a job.
So while it's too bad that so much outsourcing is happening so quickly, I find it hard to feel bad for information type people when there are millions of truly poor people in the US who are much worse off.
I don't respond to AC's.
"Eventually, he concludes, 10%-15% of current Western knowledge worker jobs may be lost to outsourcing, depending on various factors, including salary and productivity. "
How long until Outsourcing: The Indian's perspective.
God spoke to me.
Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector.
So, if you want to avoid being outsourced, find a job that requires no knowledge. Management, marketing, PR and McDonald's come to mind.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Jason put WHYWOULDYOUSPAM in his mailto to try to deter spammers. Here is the non-munged email: mailto:jasonab@acm.org! HERE YOU GO SPAMMERS!
Should take note of the history of such solutions. The government usually makes things worse because laws made of political expediency don't think through all of the ramifications. Nor do most of us.
Do you want to get rid of insourcing? Those Toyota and BMW plants in America?
Outsourcing allows some companies to add more workers in other areas or even stay afloat.
Do you not think that other companies (overseas or otherwise) will not avail themselves of that labor market?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
The EU will be outsourcing to the US for cheap American labor.
Of course, there will be complaints about our funny accents being hard to understand.
In general it all started with telephone tech support, but more recently it has encompassed programming as well. I'm starting to think the only Tech jobs that'll be safe over here are those that require a physical presence.
I used to work for Symantec, well an outsourced call center anyway, and all too often after my introduction when a caller on the line I'd hear "Oh thank god, you speak English!"
Stockholders love offshoring because of the temporary boost it gives them, but doesn't it just really alienate the customer base eventually?
Well at least it helps developing countries...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
Given the number of hacker-level jobs that WILL be disappearing, would be to write Distributed Redundant Denial Of Service Attack Bots that specifically target Indian Router IP Addresses. The weak point in the chain of Business Process Outsourcing is that it requires 24/7 broadband connections across continents- if those communications can be disrupted without harming American backbones, then there's a half a chance that Indian productivity will fall- giving us a better chance of implementing Yourdon's solution of higher productivity.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Oh yeah, I can be an order of magnitude more "productive" than other people and prove it. Right, I'll just be a "shock worker".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Outsourcing can work well for simple or self-contained projects.
The problem comes when you try to mix outsourcing with in-house development. It gets real hairy when you have to guess what was changed overnight.
Also, if there's a mistake or a weak implementation (band-aid), then it takes 3 days to go back in forth through emails explaining what's wrong with the implementation and how to fix it. Often when it's time to upgrade the band-aid, the outsourcing contract has already ended and it becomes your job to fix it. There's a sense of ownership that you lose with any form of consulting, regardless of whether it's from an international or a local consulting firm. I doubt any cost-benefit analysis made by non-programmers ever incorporate this kind of work.
While outsourcing may look good on the surface, and as TFA says CIO's perceive it as a cost savings, there are many other factors that have yet to be analyzed.
$8.95/mo web hosting
While the loss of jobs is a crisis to many of us, Yourdon makes note of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and a speech that Jimmy Carter made in April 1977. Carter said "If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Nearly 30 years after Carter made that speech, oil is at an all-time high and nothing has been significantly done to reduce our dependency on oil; or to find a better solution.
Anyone making a statement like this is a kook... gas/oil has never been cheaper when adjusted for inflation
love is just extroverted narcissism
The worst part is that I am self-employed.
In the case of outsourcing it's going to take a few years, if not a few decades for things to even out abroad so that the cost economies that are now being sought by US-based companies through their outsourcing ventures will no longer exist, since the cost of labor, production etc have gone up there, too. Until that day, those of us in the workforce will have to fend for ourselves, one way or another.
Robots will do everything eventually anyway...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
After Ed Yourdon's "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" then the about face in "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer" and then his Y2K fruit-battiness (He has a video called "Ed Yourdon's Year 2000 Home Preparation Guide" as well as several Y2K sky-is-falling books that border on Art Bell territory) it's wonder that anyone pays any attention to this guy at all.
I mean, he's had to reverse course and say he was wrong so many times that when we writes about something, doing the exact opposite of what he recommends is almost a sure bet.
Yourdon is one of those chiefly responsible for the Y2K pre-non-event panicking in the streets. Of course, he had some books out on the subject so it was in his financial interests to scare people.
Y2K came and went, Yourdon's predictions fell flat, and now he's trying to scare you out of your money to buy a book on something else that he doesn't really know about.
That he's getting any attention after Y2K is amazing to me.
and the US government has even outsourced Iraq. If something as important as "national security" can be outsourced, where, in the importance of things (according to gov't anyway), do the development jobs rank?
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Perhaps this is simply a trend, or maybe it has something to do with the way the government treats business. Let's tax and tax some more. Oh, you can't do this because it'll piss off the environmentalists, you can't do that because it'll piss off the group that pays me to vote their way.
Here's my Guide To Stopping Outsourcing:
1) Cut H1B, L1 Visa laws
2) Stop rewarding companies for outsourcing
3) Lower corporate taxes
4) Big f'ing tax breaks for companies that keep work here
Or, we could just outsource Congress and see how they like it!
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
The only effect outsourcing has is to put more money in the pockets of the rich. I have never seen one study that proves that in the long term, outsourcing is good for the economy. It may be good in the short term for some companies, but these companies don't lower the prices of their products, so who's gonna buy their products in the end, if no one has a decent job?
Uhh, you're as economically ignorant as Carter was.
Once you control for inflation, you see that gasoline is far less expensive now than it was under Carter.
See graph here.
The main problem during the gas crisis was not lack of government action, but too much government action. Price controls kept prices artificially low, meaning that folks hoarded. Shipping regulations meant that trucks would drive to a destination and be unable to buy gas there for the return trip, etc.
A quarter of a century after Carter got booted out of office, we've got a minimal gasoline policy...and a good thing too!
Please don't try to apply the mistaken energy policies of the 1970's to technology today: you'll end up with lots of regulation, little creativity, and less adaptability.
Taxing service imports and canceling the H1-B program.
That's what's inevitable !!!
Outsourcing is not inevitable. Capitalism, all of economics, is a function of our choices - the choices of our leaders, the choices of consumers, the choices of businessmen. Somewhere along the line we decided to ignore morality in making choices, and capitalism has degraded to nothing more than the merciless exploitation of the environment and workers. Even knowledge workers, though it appears that every non-outsourced /. reader assumes that they can never be outsourced.
The decision to "outsource" is made to save money. Nothing more. Not to improve quality - who has proof that outsourcing has rescued any project? Not to save consumers money, nor to save the third world. Not even to benefity "shareholders", but pretty much to benefit upper-management. As competition increases between firms, they are desparate to keep profits growing eternally. Profit growth can occur due to an increase in revenue, or cutting costs. Increasing revenue is damn difficult. Cutting costs makes you a hero - to your shareholders, and you bear no responsibility for the laid off workers, nor the society you betrayed.
We must recognize that those who transfer jobs, knowledge, and the technology of our country abroad for quarterly profits are not captain's of industry but profiteers. Why do we accept the destruction of our factories, our labs, our research traditions? How do those who destroy entire towns sleep at night? I'm from North Carolina, and saw what happened when the textile factories went to China, when the equipment was packed off to Shanghai. Who benefitted - the American public, the managers, or the shareholders?
Outsourcing is not inevitable. We can reverse the trend. But we must first challenge the concept that free trade is beneficial to all parties. How, precisely, has free trade benefitted the US or the Western world? Our trading partners - India and China - do not believe in free trade - why should we?
And for all of the /. members from the States who think that outsourcing doesn't affect them: how much has your salary increased in the last four years? How many extra hours do you accept every week unpaid? How long have your friends been laid off?
The US will become a third-world country if we choose to support outsourcing. Don't shop at Wal-Mart. Write your congressional representatives. Question the leadership of the companies that you own shares in. Don't accept the destruction of our country to make the rich richer.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Y2K crisis was touted as a main reason to massively increase the guest worker H1-B program.
He's on the board of directors of at least one Indian outsourcing firm.
Every three or four years he finds The Next Big Hysterical Issue, promotes the hell out of it, and takes his profit.
GASOLINE is. OIL is not. Oil has been hit with 300% inflation since the 1970s. We may have minimal gasoline policy- but we've got maximum gasoline subsidies.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously, I've found outsourcing to be bad business practice for everything but classic, big-iron style waterfall development cycles. (Which is primarily what Yourdon knows about, but enough on that.) Any software that requires an iterative design process is going to be miserable to outsource, whether it's to a company in another state or on another continent.
My experience with Indian outsourcing shops is that the developers can be quite good (although one highly-recommended shop had no idea how to use versioning control systems), but it is not realistic to use them for anything other than software that has been exhaustively documented and architected before development begins. For many projects, especially those in this age of bespoke code, that just isn't a realistic requirement.
How do you rate productivity in the case where you can do the job and the Indian seemingly can't?
For instance:
Somebody at an American company calls their vendor because they have a computer problem (whatever), and the inexperienced, inadequately trained Indian with poor English language skills (but who works cheap, and for little-or-no employment benefits) is completely unable to remedy the issue.
Whereas if they'd called prior to outsourcing, and you'd been the tech-on-duty, you could have immediately diagnosed the issue, talked them through the problem, solved it, and everybody is happy again.
Think that's an exaggeration? You've never called your vendor recently, have you...
Companies want cheap labor. Workers want higher wages. This story is analogy for all sectors of the economy.
/A.I. type programming language that would make programming more like 'manufacturing' cars using robotics.
.
One interesting event would be a new graphical
Someone needs to write these tools and the advantage is back to GOOD ole USA(yeah).
Another situation that might effect this whole 'shipping jobs' to countries with lower wages is that INDIA still has trade barriers from what I understand.
Trade is 2 way folks. If we are going to lose some meaningless grunt jobs then we can sell food , computer games and TSUNAMI detectors
Eric.
American manufacturing is in serious decline, Walmart and Home Depot are driving down prices and manufacturers are moving the jobs overseas.
This is destroying the middle class as blue collar jobs disappear.
This is destroying the upper middle class. The owner of the general store, the drug store, the hardware store, etc. have been replaced by the shift manager at Walmart.
This is not a good thing. Our society (and I lump Canada in here as well) is being pushed to extremes of poverty (McDonalds workers) and wealth (Home Depot shareholders). The only middle class left will be the specialized service industry (police, nurses, teachers).
It should be obvious to anyone who can add 2+2 that if you have large wage differentials, then the nature of capitlism is to take advantage of those wage differentials and LOWER everyone's living std. The failure to acknowledge this is, to my mind, proof enough that the "science" of economics is a net negative on the store of human knowledge. But i digress. There is one simple, low cost, easy anwer: raise them up to our level. And to all those /. posters who argue that outsourcing is a 2way street and not bad (eg, toyota plants in Kentucky).... go find the statistics on the change in inflation adjusted take home pay for the bottom two quintiles in the american workforce (e.g., people in the lower 40% of hte workforce by pay) over the last 30 years... you will find that for very large numbers of americans, things are not going the right way.
And as to the ludicrous arguments that more and better education and working more productively will keep us ahead of the Chinese and Indians: How on earth does anyone take this seriously !!! It implys that the average american is smarter and harder working then other people, and that we have a better more foucsed educational system..phuleeze
Final note: even paul samuleson can learn to add; the "dean" of orthodoxy apparently thinks foreign trade is bad (any one have a link to his article in an academic journal ?)
Sorry to be so sarcastic, but this seems so obvious...capitilism, by its nature is heartless and vicious, and the intrinsic nature of capitilism is to race to the bottom. It is sort of like the stock bubble of 2000: no one listened to the old timers. well the economy is the same thing: unrestrained capitilism leads to disaster. No doubt a lesson that will be appreciated in the next depression (before you say something, remeber how optimistic people were about hte stock market)
I work for a fortune 25 company who has outsourced jobs to india, mexico, you name it. And I can tell you that the assessors in India are not like the assessors elsewhere. The shops miraculously are certified CMM Level 5 the day they open - the first day employees show up, before they've worked on any project.
The biggest problem is their culture. They do exactly what they are told without question. Questioning the boss; even asking for clarification is much worse than shipping a defective product to the customer costing millions of dollars. So there are plenty of jobs in the U.S. for software engineers as they have to double check all the work done.
My neighbor went to the hospital with a broken foot. The xray was read by a radiologist in India. When you call the hospital after 6 p.m. it is answered by a call center in India. Insurance companies are looking at saving costs by having common but expensive surgery (such as bypass) done overseas. They also eliminate the risk of malpractice further reducing costs.
The engineer up the street works for the State, he now oversees a team of engineers who approve and revise drawings submitted to the state, in India. The state is looking at outsourcing its accounting and auditing review to India and Russia. The company has a nice American name with a headquarters in the state, but the workers are all overseas.
This is all a factor of "free trade" except it lacks fair trade. India is a perfect example of a country willing to take advantage of our laws (an Indian company bidding on state contracts gets a minority owned business score enhancement) while preventing any US company from doing the same in their country. We then have the "free traders" telling us that India will come around. Why should they? They will have the jobs and no incentive to change their business practices. Meanwhile we will have lost most jobs requiring a college degree. We will become the serfs of those with the money, the few elite left in the US and their foreign owners. And they will be owners for once they have the jobs and the money, buying the company makes sense as they will then gain all the profits.
Gloom and doom? Yes. But it is far less naive then the people who say things like "you always have to look out for yourself." It is this mindset that allows foreign companies and workers to take advantage of the cowards. Those unwilling to step up and say, "we made a mistake with manufacturing, but it ends here. We will not be the serfs of the next generation."
It's not a courage I see in this generation. It is far easier to blame the worker than to accept responsibility for how your government cares for other countries at your expense.
(In the case of America, it makes no sense for each State to expend vast amounts of resources to compete against the other States, because that leaves far fewer resources for anyone to compete against outside interests.)
In the case of "outsourcing" as it is currently practiced, I see a LOT of problems. Far from moving jobs to people who can do them better, companies are moving jobs to people who can do them cheaper.
This is about as useful as building a car out of tissue paper. Sure, a given piece of tissue is going to be cheaper than the same amount of high-quality steel, so you've "saved money". But the results are crap. Even if you can solve the strength issue, it's still going to dissolve in the first rain shower.
People are often either "for" outsourcing (which is stupid, because it's being done wrong), or "against" it (which is also stupid, because it could be done right).
Instead of looking at "outsourcing" as a single thing, it should be looked at as a collective term for a whole bunch of different methodologies. Most of those methodologies should be hung, drawn and quartered, and their proponents forced to watch endless re-runs of Jerry Springer. Without the benefit of anaesthetic. The few - the very few - that would actually make sense and improve quality, without hurting anything, should be actively encouraged.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
be fun. It used addre5ses will
The people doing the cheap labour in India right now will gain experience. They will move up the ladder.
There's nothing stopping them from getting an MBA.
So, in 10 years or so, you have people in India with 10 years of experience in the industry (which ever industry we're talking about) who are quite capable of launching their own start-ups doing exactly what they've been paid to do for the last 10 years.
And their executives will be making 1/10th what our executives make. And there won't be any language barrier at all and the execs will be in the same building as the workers.
So, a new company is formed, doing the same thing as the old US company, but for a fraction of the price.
The only thing left is to let the US-based marketing firms fight for the marketing contract. (and they will be fighting each other down pretty cheap)
5 years
10 years
15 years
20 years
Eventually, given our current off-shoring practices, it will happen.
I'm not a rocket scientest or anything.. but it looks as though the information on eia.doe.gov contradicts what is shown on the graph you have provided. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/25opec/sld004.htm
Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to other countries hurts the U.S. in the long term. The skills needed to develop and manufacture goods get transferred. The companies with the manufacturing expertise develop better products and eventually take over the market. Look at TV sets for example. Decades ago, RCA and GE made pretty good TVs. The latest and greatest TV sets are now coming out of Sony in Japan and Samsung in Korea. Are there any high-quality TV sets developed by American companies? No.
the thing you don't realize is just how cheap it is to replace a computer in the US right now. Thanks to Mexican assembly lines and Asia slave labor you can get a nice Dell, Compaq or Gateway for $499. Sounds like a lot? Well, consider the average idiot whose harddrive just died. He needs a new drive ($100), someone to install it ($50), a new OS because he lost his CDs or didn't get any ($100), someone to install his OS, it's software, and all the patches ($100). This is at least $350. Typically they also are in need of new antivirus ($50), and a new wordprocessor ($100, and no, they don't know what openoffice and abiword are). Finally, most of them, having bought shitty OEM computers have some bad ram that needs to be replaced which is only a serious problem during an install of Windows XP, and in anycase they need more than the 128 they've got now ($100, installed). Finally they've got to wait while all this is done.
Now, to me, I'd rather take my computer to an honest shop and have the work done, because I'd know what I'm getting into. Trouble is finding an honest shop, since any idiot with a screwdriver and a copy of Norton can start a computer repair biz (I spend all day dealing with computers that have been 'fixed' by clean-booting in msconfig). I also am aware that a there's a pretty good DOA and failure rate in those $499 computers thanks to the lack of real burn in testing (not that I blame 'em, that's what you get for $499). People don't know this, so computer repair isn't usually economically viable.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is the idea that with lower taxes - and therefore either massive public debt, or inadequate government services - our standard and cost of living will eventually fall to that of India, or what?
Remember that there's an entire political party whose platform involves cutting back on government services and letting the private sector step in to handle things competitively, without the allegedly fascist values of the Republican Party.
Of course, Santayana doesn't hurt either: "Those who do not study their history are doomed to repeat it." Such tactics are sometimes short term effective, but long term... probably useless. If the current US administration's attitudes on corporations, terrorism, and civil liberties remain representative... laughably useless.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Why not outsource a job that alot here in the U.S. don't want. We do this with food.
Sally Struthers is always asking for money for poor countries. How about export some grunt jobs and let them fix their own economy and we will have someone to export to.
I use to fear shipping jobs but not anymore.
What we are likely seeing is increasing globalization causing a long overdue correction in the equity of global wealth distribution. Developing nations grew by an unprecedented 6.1 percent real GNP in 2004. Globalization is having an vital beneficial impact on the bottom part of the world population. For those of us who have been used to rare luxuries like indoor plumbing and vaguely reliable electric power, it's going to suck.
Of course, it would be nice if it impacted the richest of the rich in the US as noticably as "Middle Class Americans", but I'm not holding my breath.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I noticed there are a lot of Indians in my graduate school computer science classes. They'll probably start an outsourcing company in India when they graduate.
15 minutes after the first bomb falls, contract programming rates in the U.S. will return to "normal" levels.
They also dont retrain their employees for different jobs within the company. The jobs are just lost, its poverty or McDonalds for most. I live in a town where the population is made almost entirely of college graduates. This town has been hit severly by the outsourcing. You cant even get a job at Walmart as a cashier without a college degree. It makes me sick, because when I moved to this town 6 years ago it was one of the nicest towns in America to live in. And I really feel sorry anyone who was born in this town, there is no way they are going to be able live here their whole lives, so outsourcing is also splitting up families. Maybe it "is" just coincidence but all of this has happened within the last 4 years.
Nope, we have too much military superiority to do a thing like that. Look through history and find a "third-world" country with complete military superiority.
Find a country in history with complete military superiority and no means to pay for it. The US has been running a trade deficit since the 70's. That's money flowing out of the country that we'll never see again.
On top of that, the US also has a record budget deficit. Right now, foreign nations are buying our treasury notes. They're financing our tax cuts, education spending, infrastructure spending, social security spending, medicare spending, as well as our military spending.
Both of those deficits have produced a record US debt in the trillions.
At some point, foreign nations will stop pouring money into the US. The US economy will falter. And then we won't be able to afford all those nifty tanks, fighters, bombs, and aircraft carriers.
Here we go again with the just work smarter plan.
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
If you are doing a job and someone can do it for 1/3 as much, you are not competing against 1 person, you are competing against 3.
good luck with that work smarter plan.
here are the classes of jobs that won't get outsourced:
1.requires a security clearance (a form of govt intervention)
2.management above a certain level
3. a job which has to be done on location.
so maybe one day we'll all be CEO's.
No wait, everyone in the country will work for the NSA.
w.r.t. 3, you'll get displaced by insourcing, it's called an H1-B.
I think the free market will raise the living standards of other countries. However there is no reason why the standard of living in the US will continue to rise, it may very well (and probably will) fall.
Enjoy it while you've got it.
Absolute statements are never true
I'm troubled by what I read of this book. Basically little thought seems to have gone into looking at what it means to have a world economy driven by a military superpower with $500 Billion annual trade deficit. Measures of productivity comparing countries have little meaning the context of that kind of enormous liquidation of assets.
With our current trade imbalance and budget deficits it is only a matter of time before the dollar is devalued to the point where it costs more to outsource. By lowering the dollar to 1/5th of its value, Bush will make the US the source of cheap labor.
Oh, the irony...
"1.requires a security clearance (a form of govt intervention)"
Unfortunately a lot of illegal P2P'ers in a moment of youthful indiscretion, have arrest records, and just overall can't be trusted.
"2.management above a certain level"
More like money above a certain level.
"3. a job which has to be done on location."
Now being done by migrant workers.
"Enjoy it while you've got it."
Savour the irony in the IT's "old obsolete model" being replaced with a "new 'you should change, or else' model". Much like what's happening with the RIAA/MPAA/Game Industry.
I've worked in the technology sector most of my professional life. I've recently invested a considerable amount of time enhancing my skills by learning Java, with the intent of becoming certified (I've worked with other languages as well). One thought that has been lingering is that it might all be for naught, due to the current trends in outsourcing. Should I jump ship and swim in another direction?
Where do you think your Toyota is manufactured? Chances are that it isn't Osaka or Tokyo; its probably manufactured in Mississippi or Indiana.
I'm tired of doing all the work. Let some crazy indians take over the coding so I can go relax, read books, play boardgames and once in a while show up and make sure they're not destroying things too much. I think of it as early retirement. In due time mind you, what with how much this industry has taken its toll on my body and additional stress in my life.
Fuck Yourdon! What an over-rated hype-monger. Isn't this the same asshole that predicted man would be returned back to the stoneage as soon as the clock struck the Year 2000?
Why would ANYONE listen to anything this dipshit has to say?
Y2K came and went, Yourdon's predictions fell flat, and now he's trying to scare you out of your money to buy a book on something else that he doesn't really know about.
That he's getting any attention after Y2K is amazing to me.
---------------------
douchebag, did you know most major banks used cobol programming with all the buffers calculated out perfectly with no room for error? De-bugged and perfect code for the banks.
then some smart programmers shit themselves, noticing that when the year went past 2000 the banking machines would think that it was 1900 again.
douche, the banks would have had a problem. all the old cobol, and well programmed code would have fucked up because of an oversight. If those dudes didnt fix it, then the comps would have crashed,
from what i remember they left 5 computers running to show what would happen, low and behold each one crashed when the date changed.
as a main reason to replace all one's hardware to "get it into compliance".
Gee, wasn't it coincidental that the tech market crashed three months after 1/1/00? And that management had cashed out long before?
Follow the money.
"i guess we should start exporting TONS more goods to India??"
Or we can stay put while all the tourists buy us out, lock, stock, and barrel.
A correction: CMM level 3 means having procedures for doing $WHATEVER consistently (even if consistently bad), and documenting this; CMM 5 on the other hand means actively measuring $WHATEVER and documenting improvements continously.
And there is no CMM 0. CMM 1 is "initial", which is a euphemism for "hero-based chaos".
What is the difference between a real song and a simulated song?
If the name of the game is cost containment, then it would be up to Americans to set up their own outsourcing outfits that compete with Indian shops. News.com recently ran a short story about one outfit that uses a rural workforce (mainly retrained displaced factory workers) that comes in with a total cost less than offshoring.
Isn't Yourdon the same kook who predicted catastrophic results from Y2K, so much so he decided to move to some remote part of the country to live off the grid? Why would anyone want to take seriously anything this loon writes?
An hour's worth of work in France or Germany now buys more than an hour's worth of work in the US. The US is ahead on per capita income only because of longer working hours. And it's not ahead by much. US per capita income was 2x of that in France in 1980. Now it's about 1.2x, and when the dollar drops a little more...
The head of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute was over at Stanford a few weeks ago, chewing out Americans for letting the Government lose all the manufacturing jobs. Germany didn't let that happen.
Congress can turn this around any time it wants to. Never forget that on election day.
I guess that means that you'll just have to buy his retractions (and his retractions of his retractions, etc.). Sounds like a positive cash flow for Ed Yourdon to me!
DT
Is this thing on? Hello?
Virtually none of the hardware you list is made in the USA. Unlike cars and stereo equipment, US consumers didn't run away from US brands, rather the holders of the brands sent all of their production overseas. The cause may have been a drive to reduce costs, but the result wasn't something the customers could conscously control. Not like the sort of X vs. Y choice they had when comparing Fords and Toyotas.
Luke, help me take this mask off
so, i have one question:
do you have a 4 year degree?
... hi bingo
I know of major system failures due to the "bug" even though the clowns responsible for maintaining the systems had years of advance warning.
Naturally they made sure that few found out that their systems failed...how stupid would that look? The result is that some now claim there was no real threat.
And part of the reason for some people not taking action in time were the morons who repeatedly said that there was no problem, and labelling as fruitcakes anybody who thought otherwise.
They were at least as irresponsible as those generating Y2K FUD in order to sell books, etc.
All the companies outsourcing development are totally backwards in their approach to design and are still operaing under archaic 1990's Object Oriented design assumptions. Back then, verbose source-code definitions were all that was possible. Higher levels of abstraction were simply not possible given the hardware. See full explanation of why offshore dev is ass-backwards at www.SoftwareObjectz.com. Of course, if your dev guys are charging you for OO it might make sense. But that is the equivalent of using a abacus for spreadsheet calculations. Doug Hettinger www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
His view is that protectionism is simply blaming someone else for the existence of competition; and such an approach does not solve the problem.
Other careers have various protections in place. For example, doctors, lawyers, and orthodontists have exams and quotas to protect them. Their trade groups put all kinds of limits into the certification process. This is one of the reasons why doctors and lawyers make pretty good money. Foreigners would flood those careers also if allowed to.
If they can have protectionism, why can't we? Why are *we* supposed to bend over and take it in cheap-labor arse, yet they stay protected? Why cheapen programmers but not cheapen doctors and lawyers also? It ain't fair, people!
It is time we stand up politically to get the kinds of politcal protections that union workers and certification-based careers get. Those speaking the "free trade" mantra are often hypocrits. They just have not been burnt yet and arrogantly think they are magically immune.
Table-ized A.I.
You want to have a nice life? You want to be happy and carefree like your buddy Phil? You want to live free, not in fear? Well, read on! I'll hook you up.
First, let's consider "the problem":
A large portion of traditional "IT" jobs are/were in corporations. But corporations' black-hearted owners (rich guys who invest in the stock market, which BY THE WAY is a VERY small segment of the population) have decided that American workers are too stubborn about silly issues like "a living wage", "time with their families", "decent benefits", "workplace safety", and "job security". Consequently, they have created the worldwide job market. Now, the rich can look to countries that don't have pesky workers-rights laws, occupational safety regulations, environmental laws, and other annoying little peccadillos they had to struggle with in First World nations. They don't have to worry about a "living wage" either, because in SOME countries, a living wage is an executive's COFFEE MONEY. And they get to have a nice, deep belly laugh at the expense of all those annoying technologists they USED to have to keep on staff.
Considering this situation, the problem should be clear: How does a smart technologist make a living and find happiness when a huge chunk of his job market has effectively gone down the toilet?
Let's begin. Let's "Work the problem".
PART 1: Filter out unsuccessful approaches to dealing with the problem, and discard them.
FIRST: Never, EVER work for a corporation, even if for some strange reason they start trying to hire Americans again. They were never great employers to begin with. They'd make you sign noncompetes, IP agreements, nondisclosures... And they expected you to work sixty to eighty hour weeks with no overtime, and pretend you were happy to do so. One place where your buddy Phil used to work actually said on orientation day that if the job wasn't the most important thing in your life INCLUDING YOUR FAMILY, you didn't belong there (TRUE STORY). Corporate jobs are worse than anything. Just say "no".
ALSO: Don't keep racking up student loan debt to get higher and higher degrees because some idiot talking head says you've got to "move up the food chain". This strategy is NOT going to work. IBM and several other corporations are already doing research and development in India with Indian Ph.Ds. There is nowhere else to go up the food chain; the ladder has ended and the hatch is welded shut. Save your money.
AND: Don't count on becoming some kind of analyst. Everybody and their mother is already calling themselves analysts. That sort of thing isn't going to last any longer than R+D did. You know who's going to be doing analysis? THE ANALYSIS TEAM AT THE INDIAN OUTSOURCING FIRM. Yep. They've already got one. Don't waste your time.
PART 2: Having discarded worthless approaches, identify viable approaches to pursue.
PRIMARILY, CONCENTRATE ON IT JOBS AMERICANS STILL HAVE A SHOT AT.
Best: Civil Service. The pay is lower than the old corporate jobs were, but those are mostly gone now anyway. And the 50-60k you'll end up with is STILL about double the national average salary. You'll have REAL job security (UNION membership!), excellent benefits, and a nice, nine-to-five schedule so your family will actually be able to call you by name without referring to a cheat sheet. Your boss will actually (gasp!) be NICE to you, your working environment will be civilized, you won't have to sign any scary contracts, and in general you'll be happy. Pick your choice: federal, state, county, city. It's all good. And, generally, you've got to be a citizen of the city/state/whatever to apply for a position.
Second Best: Get a job in the IT department of a university, college, community college, or high school. This is actually very similar to civil service, although not quite as nice (for example, maybe you get a 401K instead of a full pension). Still, it's pretty good.
Lagging slightly: Academics. If you can stay in college through at lea
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Let's all pitch in to buy an island somewhere and name it Geekland. We keep the cost of living very low so that we can compete with the third-world.
Table-ized A.I.
Too bad the Tsunami didn't destroy all the undersea cables and all the call centers in India and all the outsourced companies in India. That would have put a crimp in outsourcing. Maybe some of those jobs would have had to come back here for a while.
Interesting that the post that inspires the most intelligent debate gets modded down to -1, despite merely presenting a non-majority viewpoint.
You lot really ought to grow up.
Outsourcing has been moving "up the food chain". From call centers selling products to help desk support. And from help desk support to software development, chip design, paralegal work and any other job that can be done on a computer.
One of the scary things about offshore outsourcing is that it appears to be eating into more and more high paying jobs. These are the jobs that were supposed to belong to first world "knowledge workers". After hollowing out our manufacturing and losing high paying manufacturing jobs, then losing "knowledge worker" jobs, the fear is that all that will be left are "service sector" jobs that pay poorly and have few benifits.
These fears should not be dismissed and they are certainly echoed in the slashdot community. But the issue is more complex than the pay differential between India and Silicon Valley.
People in the US are notoriously insular. We don't travel to foreign countries as much as people in Europe since the United States is huge. We tend to assume that people everywhere are either just like us or want to be just like us (just listen to they way G.W. Bush talks about Iraq).
When we look at India from afar we see a democracy. India has a British derived legal system, just like we do. Many Indians have excellent english language skills. Many of us have gone to school and worked with people from India. So there should be no problem moving jobs from the US to India where the job can be done for much less cost.
How simplistic this view is was brought home to me recently when I read Suketu Mehta's book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
India is a huge country. Maximum City is about just one part of India, Bombay. I have no idea who different Bangalore is. The picture that Mehta paints of India is of a country whose legal system is broken on every level.
A broken legal system has a number of implications. One implication is that without a civil tort system, where a lawsuit can be successfully brought, there is nothing to stop someone from stealing your intellectual property. If you pay someone to develop software there is nothing to stop them from selling it to someone else. If you partner with someone there is nothing to stop them from appropriating shared intellectual property or the money that you put into the partnership.
The legal system is broken on a criminal level as well. Extortion exists more or less without check. Wealthy people must be careful to avoid displays of wealth, lest they be targeted for extortion. Wealthy Indians who do not pay are killed or their family members are kidnapped. There is no reason to assume that a foreigner in India will be immune.
The police in India practice torture and have squads that take part in extra-judicial killings. One chapter in Maximum City starts out with an account of a muslim baker being burned alive during one of the Hindu anti-muslim riots.
This is not Kansas, Dorothy.
Cost in the western world are much higher. But the legal system in the western world works well in comparison to the legal system in India or China. While there is corruption in the police and civil service in the United States it is not a way of life as it is in India or China.
The book Mr. China by Tim Clissold tells a story of how the investment group that Clissold worked for lost $400 million (US) on a number of Chinese joint ventures. After three years of struggle, Clissold, who spoke Mandarin Chinese fluently, was totally burned out.
China is changing at a dizzying rate. The conditions of a few years ago that Clissold described may no longer be the same. But even in China the "rule of law" is in the process of evolving. China is still the land of the "Red Princes" and those who go against the oligarchy can
The little known fact relating to offshore outsourcing is that the phenomena represents a huge windfall of profit to the platform vendors like Intel and MS. Even though the computers and OS's are not actually used to run alot of business over there, this second duplicate wave of purchasing has resulted in the equivalent of what happened here about a decade ago. Furthermore, the ass-backward code-intensive designs with a zero level of abstraction ensure the contracting companies here (the ones ordering the outsourced development) will be forced to purchase every single upgrade for the next five years. Totally worthless and impossible to maintain designs are great for business - if you sell OS's or hardware. Doug Hettinger www.SoftwareObjectz.com
http://www.softwareobjectz.com
Do you mean the red tape that is an attempt to stop the worst abuses of pubilc money, space, property and saftey or the old fashioned restrictions against the slave-trade and child labour? Society as a whole pays for the red tape because of the past history of commerce.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"So, to be safe, find a job that requires neither knowledge or ethical compunctions. Like PR, marketing, or the executive suite."
Or illegal file trader.
Yourdon would have us believe that, if we American programmers want to justify 5x the salary of an Indian programmer, we have to be 10x more productive.
Wouldn't that be nice? The reality is, the programmers that still have jobs evaluate interviewees based on the threat they pose. If you're really the sort of programmer that's several times more productive than average, then the programmers that interview you will consider you a threat to themselves and you won't get a job.
The following is an actual rejection letter I received recently. The names have been blanked out, though they don't deserve such courtesy. They e-mailed me this 50 minutes after I left their door.
Preserve my job by getting more competent? I don't think that's going to work for me.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
"You lot really ought to grow up."
Here's another.
1) It's OK to use technology to "fuck" content creators out of a job.
2) It's not OK when technology is used to "fuck" IT workers out of a job.
Good thing as someone pointed out. Slashdot isn't a person. Reconciling the two would do their psyche harm.
http://www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/1999p/ar97.htm l
"The Declining Real Cost of Living in America"
For the last 500 years, we have used "labor destroyers" to lower costs and raise our living standards.
Whether its farm automation, nafta, computerization, lean mfg, the article above shows how our living std continually has risen in the face of the same challenges now presented by outsourcing.
Well, if there really was no American talent that could get these jobs, fine. But changing the requirements so that nobody in the world could have (e.g. 10 years of Java in 2000) to ones that H1B's. I seriously doubt that after looking in the whole country that they couldnt get who they were looking for in the US.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Well, that's because they could be putting double standards into practice. Why not just post anon the names of the people? Sometimes these people need the hell they deserve.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"Preserve my job by getting more competent? I don't think that's going to work for me."
However no one's complained that improving their people skills has been a waste.
People who aren't cogs get fired because they do not fit nicely into the well oiled business machine. That's hardly any better than being outsourced.
But we must first challenge the concept that free trade is beneficial to all parties. How, precisely, has free trade benefitted the US or the Western world?
By allowing us to buy things we previously had to manufacture ourselves much cheaper from China (clothes & stuff) and India (software). Since it's cheaper we can get more of it (or other things we want), and thus live materially better lives.
Free trade is in large part what made the rich world rich. It's no coincidence that countries with the freest trade are also the richest.
Our trading partners - India and China - do not believe in free trade - why should we?
This argument is based on the assumption that free trade is bad for you. Something you do as a favor to others, hoping they will repay you in kind.
In actual fact, unconditional free trade is good for a country's economy, regardless of whether it's trading partners also practice it.
I know this flies in the face of conventional wisdom and government policy of pretty much every country, but nevertheless it is a basic fact of economics that is typically explained in 10-20 pages in first year economics text books. Don't take my word for it. Read a book on the subject!
A lot of people are upset about creationism possibly being mentioned in science books. But where is the indignation over this scientific fallacy - which affects our daily lives immeasurably more - being far more widespread?
The Japanese workers were said to be more productive, and they may have been, but what Japan Inc. did was make their own products in their own companies, which earned the respect of the US citizens. Do the names Toyota or Sony ring a bell?
The Indians apparantly are unable or unwilling to form their own mega-corporations and so they export their workers electronically. They "Work at Home" so to speak. This may result from the more left-wing political and social structure in India than in Japan. If this changes, will an Indian software company be the thing that truly challenges Microsoft?
The Phillipinos are also paid a lot less than Westerners but do different work, so the entire national economy is built around physically exporting workers to the First World as mostly low-paid labor. You'd think they'd do the same thing as India but they don't have the same tradition of using English as the Indians. But I don't know why Phillipino corporations haven't dominated some sector or another.
The South Koreans have "Cheap Labor" but they went the Japanese route (Samsung etc). Likewise Singapore and the rest of the "Asian Tigers".
The traditions and characteristics of each nation do vary and this variation seems to dictate different paths to development and joining the industrial (Western) world.
One could argue that smart citizens of the West would demand that their governments suppress the development of the Third World countries in such disruptive ways, but the prevalent ideology and the interests of the elites are not compatible with that sort of mercantilism. Media consolidation is further ensuring that the prevalent ideology is transnational rather than local.
You can be sure that C and Java programmers, formerly seen as elitist yuppies, will be treated no better than obsoleted blue collar workers, most of which had a union.
There was a small effort to unionize software types in the eighties and nineties. If it had succeeded, it would no doubt be blamed for the outsourcing revolution. Since we can't blame the union movement for outsourcing, should unions be becoming more popular?
I may have given you more of a taxonomy than an analysis, but I hope it helps.
The Future
One trend to look for might be the accelerated number of microprocessors and microprocessor -driven devices increasing even more tremendously as a side effect of Moore's Law. So if the demand for software is a function of the number of computers, then there might be another "Programmer shortage" after the Indian wave has peaked. In world with two billion PC's and 5 billion embedded devices, say, most hardware cycles will be running standardized software written by a few programmers (i.e. Microsoft) but 90% of the software engineers may be employed writing the software that runs on 10% of the machine cycles.
The thirst for software may be insatiable. That is, I'd like to know how elastic the market is for software, and how much the world could absorb. At one time 99% of all humans worked the land. How many people could be employed writing programs and web pages?
I18N == Intergalacticization
I'm increasing my weekly intake of Indian food.
The truth you are telling must be told to the world! don't post anonymously, please...it only makes the situation worse! speak up, stand up for what you say , are and represent!
What kind of degree? Art? Computer Science? Business? Does it matter?
That graph doesn't even have 1970's in it.
Aside from the fact that Ed Yourdon had made himself look ridicules so many times with wrong predictions (like Y2K), I generally am torn between if Outsourcing actually helps developing nations or not. The negative impact on Western jobs is obvious of course. Al through I do think that most big companies who like to save money so much by firing everybody forget that soon everybody will be unemployed in the West and who exactly is then supposed to be buying all those products (something you can already see happening due to the current economic recession in the EU being caused due to low spending of consumers among other things).
I generally tend to view Outsourcing as a kind of "locust like behaviour". It seems these companies move from poor country to poorer country to use cheap labour and whenever it becomes to expensive, leave again. Because their only interest seems to be pleasing shareholders on the short-term, not just the eventual end product suffers, but they also will just as easily move on to a cheaper country. And obviously they don't care for social benefits, etc. for their workers. After all, if they did, they wouldn't have moved away.
But on the other hand, it can give a boost to developing nations. Especially for the IT industry, people need to get educated to a certain level. So while perhaps the intentions aren't noble, it might be a side effect that is beneficial in the end to developing nations? I am not sure if there is any correlation, but I've noticed that when I these days Google a coding problem, more then once I end up finding quite an insightful article written by somebody who's name sounds like they are from India. But obviously they could be people who now live and work in the US or EU as well.
YEs outsourcing php perl and asp projects to India has come to stay...cris
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Do I sense a bit of xenophobia in this discussion? I thought slashdot is a global forum of smart people. The impression I get is that a huge population of dumb, but cheaply available people overseas perform menial jobs that are lost from American society. May be, but there must be more reasons than just greed from CEOs and shareholders. It is not just routine IT projects that get outsourced. Google, M$FT, Adobe and many others established IT shops in India and elsewhere.
As an aside, is there trade war on outsourcing looming around the corner? This may not affect many of the slashdotters, but do we want it is the big question.
Do folks remember Yourdon's book "Death of the American Programmer"? In the book, he predicted the move of software jobs to India way before the trned really exploded. I think the timing was delayed by the .com boom and Y2K. The book is a bit old, but it may still be worth a read, even though many other sources have covered the topic, in depth, since.
My 2 cents on the topic is that the trned will not end soon or at all, but that the value and savings have been blown out of proportion. Thre is work that makes great (economic) sense to offshore, but too many companies have tried to ush too much offshore. We will see some classes of work come back, but not see much press, because no one wants to admit failure. The people who self promoted how smart they were for doing this are not going to say "Ooops, I over did it" in ublic.
M D Nalapat, Professor of Geopolitics at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education of India and also a UNESCO Peace Chair, has become well known for his proposal to form an "Asian NATO" led by the United States and India. A year ago, BEIJING REVIEW interviewed him about his thinking on an "Asian NATO" and the new world order. Last month, Mr. Nalapat visited China again and had a frank talk with BEIJING REVIEW reporter Zan Jifang on current international issues.
BEIJING REVIEW: Last time, we discussed your proposal of an "Asian NATO." What's been the reaction to the proposal so far? Can Asia accept such an organization?
NALAPAT: I think a lot of discussions are going on about the Asian security system. The need of Asian countries to handle their own security is under discussion among security experts and policy makers of relevant countries.
India has set up its first permanent overseas military base in Tajikistan. India is the first Asian country that has opened an overseas military base. What do you think its strategic importance is to India? In your opinion, how will it affect the regional security structure? Is it out of energy concern, as analysts comment?
The Indian armed forces are quite strong in Asia. The fact of the matter is that India would like to be a global power, not a sub-regional power. I think India's policies are going to change, with this shift in the perception of India's role. I think it will not be possible for any country in the world to bring India back into a position where it is not at the first rank of technology. Take nuclear weapons for example. No country can force India to become a non-nuclear power. I don't think any country in the world should have a problem with this. Every country should accept that India is among the top countries of the world. India has the right to have nuclear weapons, and India has the right to have a strong defense system. I don't think any country should worry about it.
I think the Indian army is very professional. But unfortunately, in the past, the Indian army did not accept many people from outside our borders for training, especially those from our neighborhood. This was a mistake. The Indian army should become much more active in military diplomacy, and help other armies with training. I think what you referred to is only a small first step in that direction, and I believe that many similar steps will follow.
India, like China, has got serious problems locating low-cost energy sources. India is developing new energy resources, such as natural gas, as alternatives to petroleum. And as far as natural gas is concerned, Central Asia is very important. It's not only an energy question, it's also a question of cultural attitude and outlook. We believe we must help countries that are friendly to us. By interacting with them, we can promote values that are good for both sides.
What's been your evaluation of India-U.S. relations in the past few years? Now, Bush has been reelected, could you forecast the future relations between the two countries?
I think the relationship between India and the United States has gone very far forward in the past four years of President George W. Bush. The two militaries are no longer suspicious of each other, and our air forces and navies are getting very friendly with each other. The two armies are also holding joint exercises regularly. So, there is a very healthy development in the military field. I think Mr. Bush's reelection is good for India. He looks at things in a very practical way. He supports outsourcing from India, from China and from any part of the world, without the tribal loyalty to Europe that other U.S. politicians demonstrate.
The United States has blamed Indian scientists for helping Iran develop its nuclear program, and it also announced sanctions against two Indian scientists and recently planned to add another three Indian scientists into its so-called blacklist. What's your comment on this? Will the issue affect the development of the relation
China, the IT center of the world.
It is interesting to note also that many European countries have no minimum wage (although France does). European countries with no minimum wage include Germany, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Switzerland and Austria. I thought that UK had no minimum wage (most of its former colonies have none), but Wikipedia article claims that UK does have a minimum wage.
I've never thought of this, (mainly because I don't have breasts), but I wonder if most women here in the U.S. would feel more (or less) confident knowing that their mammograms are being analyzed by somebody over in India who may very well be on a "productivity schedule" - requiring that "X" number of mammograms be processed each hour? Does an Indian radiologist really care as much about your x-ray as perhaps the radiologist who works for your personal physician in your hometown? Yourdon's observation about American politicians not really giving a damn about American programmers - and whether or not their jobs stay here in the United States - is spot on correct. Unlike CEO's and business people in general, who tend to be "organized" and highly involved in politics, (read "fundraising"), knowledge workers are notorious for being politically uninvolved. (Engineers are especially noteworthy for being averse to politics.) Of course, there is a cost involved in shunning political involvement, and (increasingly) that "cost" is your job.
any 4-year degree, from an accredited university is better than none at all, as it opens up doors that were previously closed.
... hi bingo
www.dallasfed.org/fed/annual/1999p/ar97.html
"The Declining Real Cost of Living in America"
For the last 500 years, we have used "labor destroyers" to lower costs and raise our living standards.
Whether its farm automation, nafta, computerization, lean mfg, the article above shows how our living std continually has risen in the face of the same challenges now presented by outsourcing.
As we outsource everything, the current account deficit will continue to soar. Sooner or later, the rest of the world will tire of buying our debt and the dollar will plunge to new lows, even more humiliating than those now occuring under the tutelage of the Shrub. When the euro buys 10 bucks or so, the US will be so cheap that foreigners will snap up the family jewels for 10 cents on the dollar. Businessmen are stupid. They will smilingly sell you the rope you will later hang them with.
I plan on stuffing a bunch of dollars away and then living on the Mexican side of the Texas/Mexico border.
Carter said "If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Nearly 30 years after Carter made that speech, oil is at an all-time high and nothing has been significantly done to reduce our dependency on oil; or to find a better solution.
And the world still spins even though nothing's been done. Why does Yourdon bring up a failed prediction? It doesn't help his case that Congress has to 'do something'.
But personality-wise, we couldn't see you fitting with the culture that we have on our team.
Are you a primadonna? Do you leave on your CAPS LOCK to make a point?
I'm leaning towards primadonna as your attitude of "Well I'm a threat to them as I'm a hyper genius" smacks of it.
The names have been blanked out, though they don't deserve such courtesy.
They told you why you weren't hired. That's 101x more than any other company does. Now its up to you to act on it. Or would you rather post to slashdot, wondering why you haven't been hired, when you slam the courtesy of a review by someone that interviewed you?
Due to....what? An elitist mentality that presumes that any college graduate is automatically better than anyone without a four-year degree? Does 15+ years of prior work experience count for anything?
A little story: I managed a small group of people for a while, two of which were recent college grads, and one other of which was a bright kid in high school. This kid ran CIRCLES around them. They couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. I asked them to do a small project, left them on their own, and two months later, they had barely anything to show for it. If that's what employers are after, I regret to say that I'm not qualified. Here's something even funnier - they had the cajones to ask for salaries that were on a par with mine,
Free Trade is diametrically opposed to fair trade. Fair trade is about providing a just wage in return for a just price- free trade is about fucking the worker for the lowest possible cost.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Does 15+ years of prior work experience count for anything?
honestly? no, not a damn bit.
I regret to say that I'm not qualified.
in those 15 years, you could have managed to get a degree, and meet minimum qualifications for most jobs.
sorry that you dont like the way the world works.
... hi bingo
The question is, what of democracy? We have witnessed the wholesale purchase of the American politic by monied interests who care little for democracy except as window dressing for a rigged election ceremony.
As the states begin to feel the pinch of the federal tax cuts we witness the closing of local libraries, the consolidation of media toward a single, ubiquitous propaganda, and the absence of any checks or balances in our government.
And for all this, we race headlong into greater oil dependency coupled with massive foreign debt. Congress does nothing and the earth still spins and soon larger and larger numbers of unemployed Anmerivcans will have little mnore to do than watch the clouds go by.
They add revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services & have the fringe benefit of helping nations impliment trade policies to the benefit of if's community.
Everything else being equal, if a govt decreases tariffs it has to look elsware to find the dosh they no longer recieve from that source, meaning potentially higher income tax rates.
Speaking of which income taxes that are only nominally progressive (once tax loopholes & corporate subsidies are taken into account) that then maybe even pan out as income nuetral or slightly regressive once the various state & local sales taxes enter into the equation, only have one function - revenue to the govt coffer that helps pay for govt services, they have no finge benefits in regards the implementation of trade, labour & region policies for the benefit of the community at the end of the day.
Now the fact is govts do provide many essential services & these need to be paid for, meaning we'll always have to have taxes. Well unless a govt can nationalise a proportion of it's nation's productive sector that's annual net revenue is equal or greater than it's expenditure requirements. Incidently this is how Brunai & Kuwait both manage to provide free cradle to grave education 'n healthcare to their citizens, & provide subsidized housing to any citizens that want it, combined with all the other services that govts normally provide, without having to resort to any income taxes at all. Incidently Baathist Iraq managed to do this as well in the 70's & in a few short years Iraq had pulled it's GNP per capita levels up to the same as Australia's (all while Iraq managed to employ primarily it's own people in every sector of it's economy, including the many sunrise industries & service sectors, something the dysfunctional Wahhabist state of Saudi Arabia still hasn't managed to do, actually late 1970's & early 80's Baathist Iraq was the only petro-dollar state that has ever managed to do this). Pity Saddam made such a huge miscaculation in 1981 when he blew the Baathist success story away by invading Iran.
H'mm I'm raving on 'n wafting onto tangents again, I obvioussly wacked up too much meth at that party last night.
Chinese mode-average wage increasing from $2 a day or whatever to $4 a day or whatever, while the US mode-average wage drops from about $11 an hour to less than $11 a day. (I use mode averages because the US mean average wage is distorted to the point of statistical meaningless by the tiny proportion of Americans on hugely extreme 9 figure or greater incomes)
The concept of citizen armies were dieing by the mid 3rd century, from then on, the rump of the Roman legions were Federati, IE Germanic Mercenries in the Western Roman Empire (both individually recruited & recruited as complete units) & Anatolian Galatians (Hellenised to various degrees) & Illyrians (longstanding citizens of the empire but still consided barbiarians by some in Italy) in the Eastern Roman Empire .
Guess which Roman Empire almost made it into the Renaissance?
Guess which Roman Empire failed to see out the 5th century?
BTW even the disunited Britons (made up of about 50 chiefdoms by then) that had lost most of their Island to the Anglo Saxons even managed to start a half century of 100% successful campaigning that cleared all of Briton of Anglo-Saxons bar the East coast by 540. But for the Brytonic population being decimated by the plague from the resurgent Eastern Roman Empire that reached Cornwell by arround the mid 6th century (the plague killed some 75% of the Brytonic population over about a generation), odds on the Anglo-Saxons would've left those shores altogether. Afterall during the previous 30 years the only significant Anglo-Saxon responce to the resurgent Brytonic campaign to claim back their Island was reverse immigration back to Frisland & Juteland by a substantial percentage of the Anglo-Saxon population, most of which had been in Briton for 3 or 4 generations, many even longer.
It's no coinicidence that the 3 biggest successor states of the Western Roman Empire were Ostragothic Italy, Visigothic Provence 'n Spain & Frankish Northern Gaul. All 3 states had their origins in huge tribal based Germanic Federati legions of the Western Roman Empire whose allegiance was payed off through the acceptance of the 3 huge vassel kingdoms formed wholy within the Western Empire all nominally sworn to Rome, thet their mere presence created. Which is why by the fall of the Western Roman Empire large percentages of Goths & Franks were more comfortable with colloquial Latin than the Germanic lingo of their own tribes (they had been born in the legions not born north of the Rhine).
BTW guess how the Anglo-Saxons got their foothold in Briton? As Federati in the Roman legions there from the beginning of the 4th century.
They ate raw meat, drank sour horsemilk & went months without Bathing, yet they were able to sack the Greatest capital of the greatest Empire in the World (well the world west of the Oxus). We're speaking of Abbasid Bagdad, then the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (then the clossest Analogue of the US in the 13th century world, west of the Oxus)
If we outsource the worker, don't we also outsource the taxes a worker would be paying here?
"Nope, we have too much military superiority to do a thing like that. Look through history and find a "third-world" country with complete military superiority."
A bunch of Mongols fighting in essentially the same way as the Attila's hordes nearly a millenium earlier totally destroyed the most advanced state in the West (west of the Oxus), the Abbisad Caliphate that had so easily routed the Armoured Knights of Europe from the Levant
The graphs look the same to me, for the equivalent time period.... the graph you provided is the same when you look at the price from 1980 to present in Real Dollars (Real Dollars are inflation-adjusted, which is what the parent's graph presented).
Last company left using domestic resources.
Because of the quantity of merchandise people buy there Walmart can assert a requirement on suppliers for both quantity and required yearly cost reductions. This forces companies to first stop selling to smaller distributer buyers where they have a higher price level and soon after relocate their production to be able to continue to meet yearly supply cost reduction requirements. This requirement should be made illegal. This really causes this trend but under the guise of capitalism (which I strongly advocate) it is impossible to do this and still have free trade. Please post many suggestions and if able stir discussion on this. Huffy and vlassic are two companies that commented, I read it on the web a while ago.
I simpathize. It's impressive to see that the interviewer actually wrote you. Normally, they just let things drop.
Where this happens really varies. A few managers out there actually recruit talent, whither they use it is still unclear. I have seen some programmers and managers that were more worried about their job than getting things done. So they made it a policy not to recruit anyone nearly as competent as they were. At one place, a lead more or less pushed out everyone else who was also highly competent. That way he became the undisputed head engineer and was able to get job security and a big salary. (management wasn't very good there either).
As for interviews, now-a-days just getting interviews can be hard. I figure that I'm only interviewed for 5-10% of the jobs I apply for. (I only apply for jobs that are a good match for my skills).
for those (like me) who didn't know...
from dictionary.com:
bespoke (b-spk)
v.
Past tense and a past participle of bespeak.
adj.
1. Custom-made. Said especially of clothes.
2. Making or selling custom-made clothes: a bespoke tailor.
Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
You have it nearly right. A Libertarian understands *some* goverment is necessary: enough to administer courts and provide for a police force maybe some parks; but not much more. Running this type of infastructure isn't that expensive and it could be funded with minimal taxation.
The problem is that the current US gov't has its hands in all sorts of cookie jars it shouldn't: payments to farmers, running a retirement system, bailing out airlines, funding medical care, supporting the secondary mortgage market, and the like. US citizens don't benefit as a whole from these sorts of govenment hand-outs. When the government supplies a service, individual taxpayers could probably do better in terms of price and quality by going to the private sector.
"inally, Yourdon does not address whether these productivity measurements are truly meaningful: A CMM level 5 shop can produce bad software just as well as a CMM level 0 shop; it just means that it can produce it badly in the same way each time."
Hmm, my understanding of CMM is that "repeatable results" is the goal of level 2. By level 5, you've incorporated metrics gathering, a feedback loop and a complete set of best practices, cross training and continuous improvement.
Of course, a CMM level 5 shop can produce bad software - bad programmers are bad programmers, no matter the process system they follow - but his statement is inaccurate.
> When the government supplies a service, individual taxpayers could probably do better in terms of price and quality by going to the private sector.
This is bullshit - I can provide several counterexamples.
Until recently, electrical power generation and distribution in South Australia was handled by a single state-owned authority. Now that the infrastructure has been raffled off to the private sector, we are having to choose our supplier (an unnecessary headfuck, and a nonsense, since the stuff still arrives over the same old wires). Electricity is now more expensive (regardless of the service provider) and supply is less reliable.
We also recently sold off our water supply to private enterpirse (our previous state government was a bunch of Thatcherite morons), and guess what? Water is now more expensive and (wait for it) the supply is less reliable, although it's nowhere near as bad as the electricity.
Australia's health system, which is still mostly public (although probably not for much longer), is considerably more efficient and cost-effective, with better patient outcomes, than that of the USA, which is, iirc, largely private.
I could go on at length, but I'm sure you get the picture. As soon as you let private companies get their snouts into the public trough, they just rob their customers blind.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
There is this magic hat illusion that privatization provides competition to lower costs.
That idea has no basis in reality except as a one-time ruse to start a stampede toward a bad privatization program that eventually bilks the newly captured and orphaned audience.
A few years ago in CT, seniors were lured into HMO health plans who, once they started losing money, began dropping high risk seniors - then even low risk seniors - a minor crisis for those who initially experienced cost savings then were stranded without any coverage.
Government and the private sector strike a delicate balance that in the US is irrevocably damaged. While our nation enjoyed the fruits of seemingly unlimited resources, everything ran smoothly. Today we talk about importing natural gas.
If libertarians believe limited government is good - leave - Iraq is your utopian state - enjoy. But don't lecture us that it's cheap or desirable.