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

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.

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....