Pros and Cons of Tech Offshoring?

An anonymous reader asks: "There's an interesting analysis of tech offshoring at the moment posted on Membox. It looks at the pros and cons of the practice in two separate articles. Since this is a big issue in tech at the moment, it's good to see the arguments on each side given so clearly. What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?"

Comments

fear, mostly

[Hitch]

I haven't seen a lot of jobs actually go away because of it, but a lot of people are jumping ship out of fear - and we're having to hire lots of new people to replace them.

Re:fear, mostly

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Where do you work? If you haven't been downsizing and are still outsourcing, I want to send your company a resume. I'm sure several thousand others will as well. You're completely right about the fear- but if your company has succeeded in avoiding downsizing while outsourcing, that fear is mostly baseless in your case, where it isn't baseless elsewhere. For instance, I can show you closed factories right here in my home state of Oregon that were built by HP and Intel- those jobs left for China and India. I know people from Microsoft who were downsized and their jobs moved to the Windows Research Center of Hydrabad. If your company never downsizes, I know plenty of engineers who would like to work there.

Wrong question

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The study of economics is based on a simple problem - human wants are infinite, but the resources to satisfy those wants are only finite. So the question becomes - How do we satisfy our wants with the most efficient use of resources?

From the pro article. I've seen this a lot- but there is at least one economic theory, distributism, that claims that human wants are just the mortal sin of greed and human NEEDS are what we should be focused on satisfying- and human needs are indeed finite.

Long term...

[Evro]

By sending jobs to other countries you end up ensuring that your potential customers can't afford your product, as they have no income.

Re:Long term...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If you kept the jobs in the US, then no one would be able to afford them. Right now, a shirt made by slave labor costs about $15. How much would it cost if it were made by USians getting paid $8 an hour?

About $15- the price did not go down significantly when the manufacture went overseas. The real difference is that the retailer now makes a 200% profit instead of a 10% profit on the same shirt.

On top of that, no one really *wants* to make shirts in the US. People want jobs, but not thoes kinds of jobs.

Tell that to the textiles union- which has been testifying in Congress for the last 40 years to try to protect the jobs of the 500,000 Americans who used to make shirts. They failed because of people like you.

Offshoring is a way to make sure that the US will continue to get better. We look at the shittiest jobs out there and find a way to send them overseas. Then our workforce trains for better jobs.

At which point the better jobs leave before they can even finish training.

Picking fruit, makinf shoes, and writing code are all in the same bucket; no one wants to do it at the price customers are willing to pay. So we offshore it.

And what is left?

Retrain for something better and stop bitching already.

What's better? I want to know what the next target for offshoring is- I've got a bunch of Indians who are perfectly willing to train to do it....

Some folks seek such specific skillsets...

[Richard Steiner]

...that they could walk into a room filled with several dozen experienced programmers, interview each one, and fail to find a single "qualfied" candidate.

Remember that not everyone has formal experience using the same set of specific products or tools that you have, and that many things (like file formats) are relatively easy for almost anyone to pick up and work with if they're even remotely competent.

Common in your specific industry, perhaps.

[Richard Steiner]

That doesn't make it a common skill in the general programmer population, however, and that's my point.

We use a lot of specific technology in the airline industry, also, but over the years we learned that the probability of finding someone who knows those formats, languages, or systems/environments was just about zero unless they'd actually worked in the airline industry before.

Because of this, we decided that some level of basic technical training was going to be a fact of life regardless of who we hired, and in the long run that turned out to be better. A person with good previous general software development/support experience proved to be more valuable than some of the folks we'd hired who already knew the specific technology!

Don't be too sure that someone couldn't learn about DICOM in a week. I had a contract once where I knew the main language being used but I didn't know anything about the specific database in use, any of the text editors, or the general programming environment, and I was writing productive code at that site (and modifying an existing program) inside four hours, mainly thanks to their willingness to teach me what was needed.