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Small Town USA Competing With India
William Hood writes "According to a news article at ABC, companies are sometimes opting to outsource to rural USA rather than foreign countries. Although it still achieves the same result of lowering the value of a job, I think the idea of moving to a larger house that costs less in a town with no traffic is a much better option than flying to Bangalore to train your replacement." From the article: "Sebeka is 14 miles from the closest traffic light, hours from the nearest Starbucks coffee shop and a far cry from the Chicago suburb he left. 'There is no traffic,' said technical consultant Clayton Seal, who also works in Sebeka. 'Anytime, day or night, you can cross Main Street -- almost don't have to look 'cause there's nobody there.' Seal also lost his job to outsourcing."
How exactly do you buy a larger house on a smaller salary? Chances are, if they move you to a more remote and cheaper part of the country, they're going to reduce your salary to an adjusted range for that region.
So let me get this straight... you move away from your family and friends. You pull your children out of their school, away from their family and away from their friends. You go through the trouble of selling your house and moving to a new place and buying a new house on your reduced salary. You lose the conveniences and diversity of a big city.
And what do you end up with? A job that could still always be outsourced if someone gets that bug up their ass. And what happens when that position is no longer there? Well, now you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and will probably have to move again because your new little podunk town isn't where all the jobs are - just your current one.
But if you want to inconvenience your family and live like a nomad, at the beck, whim and call of your employer - go for it.
For the record, my employer did this recently, too. But I refused to follow along unless they not only retained my previous salary dollar for dollar (not just salary GRADE), but gave me an increase. Most people, however, are not in a position to make such demands and will be in the "do it or we give your job to some guy in Russia" category.
Even companies that are doing this then move on to the next step of outsourcing, because no matter how cheap they can find labor in America, it's cheaper elsewhere. There are places without OSHA. Places without the same expectation of benefits. Places without the same taxation requirements or insurance. Places with cheaper construction, electricity and maintenance costs. If you can hire an engineer for $4-$7/hr outside of this country, why would you ever waste your money hiring an American when they could make more than that at Burger King?
To stay employable in the future in this country, you need to have highly marketable skills that are unlikely to be shipped overseas. Brush up on your ability to push a broom or ring up a cash register.
Seriously, any and every job that can be outsourced, eventually will be. I can't think of many that could not be. Even surgery eventually (since we saw the story of a surgery taking place across the ocean, via a remote/robot). Management could be handled overseas. Product manufacturing can be done over seas. Taking orders at a fast food drive through can be done overseas. Gas pumping can be automated. Even cashier work will eventually be automated. I guess security guard work is probably a sure bet. Police work. Janitorial work. And, I suppose, hollywood/acting type of work. Maybe teaching?
And yes, I'm a little bitter because I was too young to get into the game to enjoy the dot-com insanity and profit from it and now it feels less like a career every day and more like an 8-5 burger flipping job.
Living in the city is important to some people, but not to all. I lived in Seattle for a dozen years. My wife comes from a small town in eastern Washington state (we met in college in Seattle). Every time we go back to visit her folks, I always end up thinking "this is such a wonderful place - too bad there aren't any jobs".
Personally I'd take this sort of job in a short second. Friendlier people, a real sense of community, no commute, an amazingly lower cost of living... sure sounds good to me. Plus it'd make my wife happy - she's still a small-town girl at heart.
#DeleteChrome
If someone is going to do the same job as you for less money and arguably as well, or even better, not many people are going to keep you on the job just because of the fact you live in the same country as them.
In a capitalist country, how could you justify it as a citizen to keep your job when someone else is willing to do it for cheaper?
That's how the game is played, the harder you work and less you complain the more likely you will have a job. This whining about outsourcing is just a bunch of over-priviledged people who are used to having it easy.
If you want your job back, move to India and work for $5/hour, that's right you didn't just want "your" job (its a position, not a posession) you wanted the paycheck.
Get into a field of work that can't be outsourced if you want job security.
[cx]
I can code anything you can imagine, and work with any software program. I live in nowheresville PA :P Nothing to do here but bum on the internet 24/7 and wait for Dungeons and Dragons Online to be released.
God spoke to me.
A few data points from Plattsburg, Missouri (pop. 2,375), where I call home... based on what I can tell (and I've lived in Chicago and SoCal, as well as other rural areas) these data points could be duplicated in many areas:
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
I live in Harrisonburg, a college town in VA where $35,000 would actually be a pretty good starting salary for a programmer since the cost of living is $17,000 a year. I'd rather be paid $40-45,000 a year here starting out than $60,000 in Fairfax, VA which is a pretty large IT area in the US, because the money would go farther here.
:-D
Seriously, these companies are abysmally stupid. They can always hire an English-speaking CS or CIS student and start a new branch in bumblefuck USA for much less than going to India. The best part about it for the management is that it's all domestic and if they do it right, they can drive out that day and talk to the team in person.
Like many CS students here, I'd rather work in this town for $45,000 because it's close enough to bigger areas that it's not a struggle to get out on the weekend, but it's small enough to make an entry level salary really attractive. I can honestly say that I'd be very happy making that same salary around here for 4-5 years because barring VA's tax rate going through the roof (yeah, fuck you Gov. Warner!) it'd be easy to really save and invest A LOT out here on that kind of salary.
Outsource to bumblefuck USA, not Bangalore India. That should be our new anti-offshoring slogan
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is slightly off-topic but I was thinking about why governments do not protect workers from outsourcing and I had an idea... The Government makes decisions that favour big business, since big business is the government's paymaster. Sometimes these decisions involve sending us to war and getting us killed just so they can get more bribes and directorships from companies like Halliburton. I have a radical proposal. Why don't we just bribe the government directly? Imagine if everyone in the country gave £10 a year to a special government bribe fund. You would have several hundred million pounds (or dollars if you're American) with which to bribe the right people. Suddenly we might be able to create legislation that benefits the public at the expense of big business. Bribing the government to get what you want would be a lot better for your health than protesting. When you protest, you have to stand out in the rain and get clubbed over the held by riot police. You don't see the board of directors of Raytheon protesting in the street. They are smart enough to know that bribery is far more effective. For example, if the government was being bribed by arms companies to invade Iran, we could counter-bribe and prevent it. This kind of thing could even work internationally. Many people around the world would be better off if the U.S. did not invade Iran. On an international scale you would have many billions of dollars in the bribe kitty! How can we go about pulling this off?
Accoutability and scope. If 5% of your workforce working from home doesn't do their job, they get canned and the job still isn't done. 5% of the major project you outsourced to Bangladore doesn't get completed, you don't pay a dime.
Oh wait, I'm forgetting that in this country, people who don't do their job leech off of others until they retire, and vendors who don't fulfill agreements & deliverables laugh all the way to the bank with their prepaid check.
I guess I have no clue, then.
Southern ohio. The only thing I really think I'm missing is an ocean. I mean I have access to all 4 seasons, reasonably priced restaurants, housing, insurance, several major metropolitan areas (Cincy, Columbus, Indy, Cleveland, Detroit, Louisville are all 3 hours or less away) when I need some culture. Ok I'd also like some decent public transportation, but having your own car is easy enough and has advantages (visiting people/places 1-3 hours away is easy).
The big thing that seems to be lacking are jobs though that seems to be changing. I've always thought they ought to outsource to the MW.
This argument is constantly floating around, but it makes no sense. Oil being traded in dollars makes almost no difference. It's the goods that are purchased that is the issue. Suppose I am a Chinese oil company. I have yuan to buy oil with. I go to the currency market, and exchange my yuan for dollars and pay the dollars to Saudi Aramco. Now suppose the Saudis want to buy some of those $29 DVD players. They go back to the FX market, convert the dollars back to yuan, and buy the DVD players. The only benefit that the U.S. gets from this situation is that both parties briefly held Dollars. This is called Seignoriage. Suppose the money is in dollars for three months while the trade is completed, then if all world oil were traded in Dollars (which it's not), then the seignoriage is only about two billion dollars a year. Two billion dollars doesn't keep a 10 trillion economy floating.
I live in a great town of just over 2000 people. It is very different from when I lived in the Kansas City area, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. I work as a software engineer for a small/medium size company that has a great work environment. I just bought a 1603 sq ft house four months ago for $45k. So lets see...
1) work in the IT world (check)
2) have a great house for little money (check)
3) have 3MB DSL to my house (check)
4) 3 minute commute to work...on my bike (check)
Yup...I love it here. Outsource to these regions would be a very nice alternative.
Got any questions about rural America and IT works? Feel free to ask.
(wow...am I an info-mercial?)
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Sooner or later you have to make money. Holding up in the most remote location you can find so you'll get hired for the least money can keep you alive but around the age of 30 you'll realize you can't work forever and you'll need to start accumulating massive amounts of money if you want to partake of modern medicine.
You'll die young because you wanted to stay in software, but whether dying young was necessary or not, a lot of people are going to still be around after you pass away. You'll have achieved nothing but miss out, and no-one's going to care why you missed out.
The other thing you'll realize is that Indians are buying bigger houses. Chinese are buying bigger cars. Your college buddies are moving to more extravagent neighborhoods. But you're in the same situation you were in 10 years ago.
Most humans want to be in a better situation than they were in 5 minutes ago. Whether you feel a poorer situation is mandated by the decline in software jobs or not, the world is going to be richer tomorrow than it is today.
Meanwhile you're degrading your situation and making sacrifices to stay in software. You know, no-one else cares.
This is the first time on slashdot, I can comment from my first hand experience as this company is where we outsourced outr work and I met Dave La Reau about a month ago in person. What they won't tell you is that they took a 3 month project last one year and it is still not complete!! His company hired people and sent them to our site as experts when they barely had any knowledge of the platform/technology. They were learning on the job while charging over $40 an hour rate. It is shocking to see them trying to get publicity on ABC news when they provide such crappy skills that mediocre offshore contracting firms can provide much better!!
Rural areas run the gamut, just like neighborhoods in a big city run the gamut. Some are great, some are terrible. Just as you choose a neighborhood to live in in a city, you have to use some choice about where you live in rural areas.
You paint a pretty bleak picture compared to what I've seen living in rural areas of the US for 40 odd years. I'm in a town of 1200 and have better cable modem throughput than a lot of people in cities.
One thing I notice about rural areas, is that what poverty there is is less shoved off to the side than in cities and suburbs. When the town is a half mile square, the other side of the tracks is still just up the block. In some ways, I think that's healthier than in some of the Chicago suburbs I visit where the only minimum wage earners you see are the ones working in fast food joints. The poverty there is miles away, and easy to ignore.
We have more than enough surplus to feed the entire world. It's because markets are inefficient.
No, it's because of the lack of a completely free market that people starve. In a truly free market, no one would be starving, because the number of people who couldn't afford to buy food would be so small that charity would easily fix the problem.
Now, as soon as you start messing with the money supply through the banking system, as the United States has always done, even in so-called free banking eras, you will get business cycles. Business cycles result in recessions, and that usually means unemployment and starvation for some. Attempt to fix these recessions with social programs, and you will only disrupt the market further (since government programs do not create real wealth efficiently, if at all). Communism, socialism, and fascism also distort the market, in more obvious ways. With the exception of natural disasters, all wide-spread starvation is caused by government intervention in the market.
Only a small minority in India are benefitting from any of this outsourcing, the rest are just as poor as they ever were.
A minority is better than no one.
The net effect of outsourcing has been to lower the standard of living, not to raise it. As soon as the standard of living gets to high, the corporations will move.
How does the standard of living get too high if the corporations are lowering the standard of living? I'm not following.
You keep describing this as a process of wealth redistribution to the 3rd world, when the reality is that the wealth is being distributed to the rich.
You speak of wealth as though there is a set amount, and it is simply redistributed around the world. The reality is that wealth is continuously created in capitalism. Workers in the 3rd world create wealth (i.e. a programmer writes a program), often using the tools provided to them by corporations, and the workers offer their creations to corporations for something the workers value even more (i.e. a salary). Both parties benefit from the transaction; it doesn't really matter which party benefits more, because if they don't cooperate, neither will benefit.
free trade has taken money away from the middle and lower classes, and put it in the hands of the upper classes.
Money is never taken away from anyone, except in the form of taxes. Perhaps what you mean is, if a rich person is paying someone in India to do work, then that means he is not paying that money to someone in the USA. In that instance, money has not been taken from the middle or lower classes in the USA; rather, it simply means they won't be getting something they were never entitled to. That's what the "free" in free trade means; you can spend your money where you want.