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Globalization Decimating US I.T. Jobs
mrraven writes, "According to Ronald Reagan's former deputy secretary of the treasury in this
article in Counterpunch, globalization is destroying US I.T. jobs. From the article: 'During the past five years (January 01 – January 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 644,000 jobs, or 17.4 per cent of its work force. Computer systems design and related work lost 105,000 jobs, or 8.5 per cent of its work force. Clearly, jobs offshoring is not creating jobs in computers and information technology.'" Paul Craig Roberts quotes a number of formerly pro-globalization economists who are now seeing the light of the harrowing of the US middle class. It's not limited to I.T. Roberts quotes one recanting economist, Alan Blinder, as saying that 42–56 million American service-sector jobs are susceptible to offshoring.
Of course most folks who are actually working in IT could have told you this. I know a number of folks at companies who experienced several rounds of layoffs. They have survived the layoffs, but they are also currently doing the job of two to three employees now versus prior to the layoffs. Morale is low, pay has not kept up with the cost of living increases, the cost of health care or inflation. Productivity is still there, but burnout is likely in these individuals. Other people I know that did lose their jobs ended up going back to school and getting out of IT entirely which I suspect is not an isolated situation and would lead to skewed unemployment statistics.
The thing that worries me is that this is not an isolated employment sector, and I predict that we are in more trouble than we might know. Historically we have relied on our research and development to keep this country on top technologically, but over the last five years or so, we have been reducing the amount of funding we spend on research and development, particularly in the biosciences. For example, if you were to look at NIH grant paylines, five years ago the payline was around 33%. Next year it is predicted to be anywhere from 10-14% meaning the likelihood that a researcher will obtain funding has been cut by more than half. In fact, research and education spending on the whole is down under the current White House administration. So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
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You all said that globalism was a good thing, but now you can't take it?
Look at me! I'm white and American -- I shouldn't have to compete for my job!
If you find yourself sliding out of the job market, then get some more skills.
If only there were CDROM's available with fully-featured unix systems, complete with source code, that one could use to learn operating systems, compiler design, networking, graphics, and databases! If we had that, then unemployed American computer folk would have a shot at competing internationally!
No one is entitled to a job, even if you are white, American and whiny.
If the US government were to make it more difficult for companies to offshore, would the situation be any better?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Could this just be a reversal of what happened during the tech boom, where:
I'm curious if many of the competent, professional I.T. people are really losing their jobs.
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You can blame repubs, dems, the evolutionists, creationists, etc... But our own individual greed have all contributed to this problem. When was the last time anyone cared about looking for anything "made in the USA"? If we as individuals don't feel compelled to buy products from our own nation, on what grounds do we expect corporations to hire more expensive US labor? Especially when doing so, would put them at a price disadvantage when selling to us US consumers, who, surprise surprise, pay more attention to price than anything else? If they did that, they'd go under, thanks to us.
Something of a conundrum.
"Our morality is good, theirs is repressive."- Partisanship Rule #3
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I can't help but think of all of those poor buggy whip manufacturers who had their jobs eliminated when the automobile was first introduced. We should ban it .. oh wait ...
The IT sector hired far more people than normal as a result of the dot com boom. The IT market adjusted after the boom ended. The period they study includes the dot com crash. These jobs may simply have vanished along with the dot coms, rather than being outsourced.
How about all those Intel, AMD, Dell etc etc in Malaysia, Taiwan and around the world.
Didn't the lower cost of building all the components there help to decrease the prices of computing, encouraging demand. And wasn't the continuosly lowered cost of infrastructure/equipment an integral part of the computing/technological/information/internet revolution. Which incredibly benefited the US economically. Which provided jobs and increased jobs and increased pay scale during the late 90's and early 2000's.
So in other words:
globalization benificial to us: good
globalization detrimental to us: bad
news for ya: globalization works both fucking ways. You think jobs weren't decimated in third world/developing countries when they opened up their markets and have to compete with cheaper US products.
You benefited from it, now its someone else turns.
Or you can ask the US goverment to broke its own agreements and words, and strongarm it way to makes sure the deal is one sided. But don't put your hopes up. God knows it has never done that. And never will. well except maybe for that renmibi thing.. and that textilke subsidy thing..and...
waiting for Flamebait+7 and Troll+7
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
Are we being manipulated? If so by who...
You hit the nail on the head, there, man. The Democrats, and the clearly unthwartable propaganda machine they've built that has won them all their impressive power, have finally swayed Slashdot and CNN away from their traditionally pro-authoritarian views.
Some people will claim that a rise in political stories has something to do with the upcoming elections. Those people have clearly been bribed.
Decimating is killing one in ten.
17.5% would be like decimating... and then decimating the survivors.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Are you high? China is a prime example of globalization at work. We get a whole lot more stuff for our money from China than we could produce ourselves for the same cost. At the same time, China gets a lot more money selling to us than it would selling to itself.
Globalization isn't something just corporations are pushing. Most liberal egg-head economists are pushing it too. They push it, because the math works out, it makes sense, and has been demonstrating its usefulness for literally hundreds (if not thousands) of years. Louis XIV drastically turned around the French economy over 300 years ago by breaking down trade barriers, and there are still people who aren't convinced it works...
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I work as a software engineer and the idea of losing my job to someone in who lives in India or some other place where the average salary couldnt cover the cost of rent in the worst of slums in America scares me a lot. But whenever I read an article (like this one) claiming that its already happened I feel a lot better because it makes me think that its just fearmongering.
I recently did a job search and had potential employers beating down my door, within a week of sending my resume out I had a half a dozen interviews lined up with well known companies that pay nicely. I know of noone in a different field who has been in a situation as good as that. The company I work for now is desperate to get more software engineers and cant find enough qualified people to fill even half of the open positions. So whenever I read an article like this about how "all the programmers are losing their jobs to the developing world" I cant help but think its just some journalists trying to scare people.
Maybe I'll be eating my words 10 years from now, but right now I am calling BS.
What a lying sack of shit the parent post is, it's all about reducing labor costs so a thin layer of owners and managers can make hundreds of millions if not billions a year while BOTH Americans and people in the third world suffer terribly. Hint .001% of Indians will become coders and engineers and even that elite they will be paid probably a quarter of what an American would make at the same job and the rest of India, Vietnam, China, etc will work sweatshop jobs for pennies an hour. Globalization is a bad deal for BOTH Americans and people in the third word. As corporations scour the world for the lowest wages possible it creates downward pressure on wages for all of us. Unless we wake up to this fact and reign in the corporations they will continue to bend us over and have their way with us.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
The gains from doing this are large, but very spread out. The losses are small, but concentrated. As a result, those who lose out have a big incentive to try and stop this from happening - more so than those who would gain from it. They may attempt to have the government regulate the practice. This is known to economists as rent seeking, when one group seeks the uncompensated transfer of wealth from others (people who buy IT) to themselves through government intervention. These Other People have to expend more resources to get the same things done. This is not a spectacularly noble cause, though it often is hailed in the name of "saving jobs".
But then, if our first concern should be about saving jobs, we ought to do away with computers entirely so there is more work to be done for paper-shufflers in offices. We can save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of office secretaries! Indeed, we could get rid of machines entirely and go back to simple hand tools for everything. Except, well, not.
Of course, that doesn't stop it all from happening. Take textiles. The average US family spends $160 more a year on textiles because of import quotas. Each job saved costs $221,000 a year. This is paid for by other people. Yay.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I have no problem with "globalism" PROVIDED that the country getting the jobs has the same level of regulations and protections that we have (or higher).
The problems I have with "globalism" is when companies off-shore because the other country has FEWER worker protections or environmental regulations than we do. Yeah, it's great for your CEO's bonus if you can work 10 year old kids for 12 hours a day at $5 a week making tennis shoes. But this isn't about your CEO's bonus.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
Are you high? China is a prime example of globalization at work. We get a whole lot more stuff for our money from China than we could produce ourselves for the same cost.
no i'm not high.. and it's not working that way.
prices are lower relatively here, but we are not getting as much back in the drop in price as we are losing through drops in jobs and real wages..
in other words the nominal price is dropping, but the nominal wage is dropping faster.. meaning real price is actually rising.. except of course for the wealthy, or for those whose jobs cannot be offshored.
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Does it really matter if jobs go from LA to Las Vegas or from LA to Toronto or from LA to India? Either way, unless you are willing to follow the job and take the prevailing wage, you are still out of work.
It's a fact of life, almost any job that doesn't require your physical presence is relocateable. If the cost of moving raw materials abroad and the finished product back is low enough, and the difference in the cost of doing business is high enough, then everything else being equal you will see job migration.
If you want security from relocation, be a computer-equipment-installation technician. If you want security from offshoring, find a job that is "outsource-proof" such as certain defense-industry jobs.
The biggest issue in my mind isn't offshoring because overseas engineers work for half of what Americans charge, but offshoring of any type because costs imposed by the "American standard of living" are significantly greater than the equivalent costs in countries with a much lower standard of living. As long as we insist on things like clean air, good police protection, something approaching a "living wage" for our lowest-paid workers, good health care, safe cars, good infrastructure, etc. etc. etc., then we will have higher costs to do business here than in countries whose citizens don't demand these things. In a country or region without such costs, the cost of living will be much lower and wages can be lower while still having employees feel well-compensated.
There are parts of America with a relatively low payroll burden on companies and with relatively low costs-of-living. If your big-city job were suddenly transferred to some rural area 2000 miles away where 2/3 of your salary could let you live in a house twice the size of your existing one, but with the nearest big city 3 hours away, would you take the transfer or would you start sending out your resume? How about if it was transferred 10,000 miles away and the salary was 1/3, but even after paying for a flat the same size as the one you have now, you'd still be able to bank a huge amount each month?
Look on the bright side - the world and it's nearby neighbors are a closed system as far as the job market is concerned - no jobs are going to Alpha Centauri Prime any time soon.
I am not a troll. Just a realist.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Under the ideal scenario it works as you stated:
china produces at cheaper costs.. and though wages drop for those jobs in the US because of labor competition, the prices will drop at the same rate resulting in equalization of the two living standards with no real change in ours..
in reality it's quite different:
Companies see profit potential here..
china produces at cheaper costs, and wages drop for those jobs in the US because of labor competition, but because the companies are sucking up profits by not lowering prices to the marginal cost of production (like they would with US produced goods), the real cost of products rises for americans, and the standard of living goes down.
Some people will make the argument that this offshoring represents structural unemployment.. like mechanization.. but there is a huge difference here:
with previous structural shifts which caused unemployment.. the shifts were isolated, allowing the middle class worker to learn a new trade and advance back to the point where their wage is sufficient to keep their family fed.
Now different jobs are being offshored in quick succession.. the middle class worker moves from one profession to the next, but because theyre offshored so quickly theyre never able to advance beyond entry level.. their income is permanently suppressed.
This is not good.. it's very threatening to the concept of a stable middle class.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
From the perspective of someone who is not American, this is a good thing. It means that unions in rich countries are no longer able to keep the rest of the world poor. Poor people in Romania who have excellent IT skills have the freedom and opportunity to enter the capitalist system and compete on the global market.
The Americans spent 50 years trying to win the cold war so the guy in Romania would have this opportunity. Would you now turn around and say "Sorry, we're going to be implementing some socialist protectionist measures.... we didn't expect American workers to have to compete with you".
Looking at the IT landscape, it seems clear to me that the American IT industry is the most vibrant and resilient in the world. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, HP, Wikipedia, Myspace, Youtube, etc. are organisations which saw the light of day in America. Please don't react in a spastic way when the rest of the world looks at what you're doing and tries to do something similar.
The American president keeps talking about "freedom". For me, freedom includes the freedom to compete with American workers.
Walk the walk....
How do you feel if your employer shuts down your worksite and opens up a new worksite in another state that has fewer worker protections or environmental regulations? Maybe from a strong-labor state to a state with virtually no organized labor in your field, or from a state which greatly restricts youth labor to one that follows minimum federal guidelines, or one with a high minimum wage to one that uses the lower federal minimum? Maybe from one with good workers compensation insurance to one with very poor insurance?
You get the idea.
Don't laugh, such things happen all the time.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It is and it isn't. There's a couple of trends going on here for growth in the general I.T. department. The baby boomers will be retiring over the next 30 years, so experienced people will be leaving the field. (The smart will consult because they can and the dumb one will do anything to avoid being a Wal-Mart greeter.) As the economies of China and India starts creating their own internal I.T. infrastructure, they won't be supplying the U.S. with workers. Since there's no sex in I.T. anymore (as Steve Jobs once said about the Apple product line), the college pipeline for new I.T. graduates to replace all those retiring baby boomers is virtually empty. In short, there will be new U.S. I.T. jobs but there won't be enough people in the world to meet the demand.
Five years ago I realized that this tidal wave was coming, I went back to school part-time to learn computer programming and started earning my certifications while working in the video game industry. At first, it was hard to get classes because they were too many students. Now I can't get the last two advance classes I need to graduate since there are not enough students to run a class. A year ago I got a job with the IBM Help Desk that's been great since I'm making enough money to rent my own apartment while only working 40 hours a week. No more 60 to 80 hour work weeks for me!
In my opinion, one of the worst things to happen to the anti-globalization movement, and whole argument in general, in the past several years is its association with leftist fringe groups and sometimes-violent street protests. The first thing that many people think of today when they hear the words "anti-globalization" is a rioter, and this doesn't do very much to help it be taken seriously. Those protests, at least in the U.S., ended much real discussion about globalization by turning the whole thing into a farce. All people had to do was look on the news and see that it was the forces of rationality and authority versus the lunatic fringe, and that was it. (Granted, a lot of media outlets were only happy enough to portray it this way, with various levels of subtlety, but this should be expected.) Whatever salient points the argument might have had, evaporate when you're perceived as being mainly supported by bored college students with nothing better to do than go protest something.
If you want to garner support from blue-collar, red-state America now, you can't say "globalization," you have to say "outsourcing" or "offshoring." That's because the g-word has a strong association with protesters and radical fringe groups; no sane middle-class gainfully-employed person wants to associate themselves with anything "anti-globalization" anymore, lest they end up on some sort of FBI watch list. It's that 'blue collar' crowd who should really be the major backers of anti-globalization, but to date they have been notably absent; I think this is because of a large reluctance on many people's part to do anything that reeks of "dirty hippies." And it's tough to get deeper in hippie territory right now than "anti-globalization."
Violent protests may have been effective in the 60s but today they're cliche; I can't think of a faster way to let your opponents marginalize and demonize you in the press, and frankly to have the general public revel in watching you get tear gassed on TV. Average people don't have much tolerance or sympathy for rioters, regardless of the motivation or politics; it's no longer an acceptable mode of political discourse. This situation may be different in other countries -- it seems like riots and mass demonstrations are accepted by the public rather differently in some European countries. But here in the U.S., riots don't play in Peoria. They're counterproductive.
I tried to explain the anti-globalization position to too many people over the last few years to and have had more people pipe up "hey, aren't those the folks who were causing riots down in New York?" to think that those protests can possibly be constructive. It doesn't matter whether it's the protesters or the cops who start the escalation; if you have a protest and it turns into chaos -- particularly televised chaos -- then you and any arguments or positions that you might be associated with lose a lot of credibility.
The "rads" might think that they've won now, but really, I think that the logic that globalization might not be such a hot thing, has finally come into the light despite the efforts of fringe groups, certainly not because of them.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm an American living abroad and I know a LOT of Canadians. Before any of them ever give me the number one reason to move to the States (and I still haven't heard it from them), they'll give me the top 10 reasons NOT to move to the States.
Your salaries may be lower, but you have universal health care. Add to that the fact that the value of the US dollar isn't much higher than the Canadian dollar anymore. Now add BC bud to the mix and Canadians are happily staying right where they are: on the sofa.
jesus fucking christ NO.
"Perfect" capitalism has nothing to do with big companies making sweet heart deals with governments to ensure they get their monopoly. Globalization has nothing to do with the free market and capitalism. it is protectionism at its finest. the only "globalization" that true capitalists push for is free trade, unhindered by government. None of this trade agreement shit that hinders competition.
big fucking deal if IT gets outsourced. When that occurs it is a commodity and it shouldn't be subsidized by the gov't. sure, i'd like to keep my job and big paycheck but it is how true economics works. sure, it will suck but things will move on and humanity will progress. that is how it works, that is how innovation occurs.
What makes their patriotic self-interest in keeping jobs in their own American economy instead of overseas where workers unfairly compete without labor, environmental, political or economic protections into "racism"? The "radicals" who protest the WTO are more diverse ethnicly than either the foreign countries or America as a whole.
What kind of racism haunts your mind that you project it onto people who aren't racists?
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make install -not war
It's the high-cost of life in the US.
Speculators have worked very hard to keep land and house prices beyond the reasonable capacity of people to pay for them, hence overreliance on credit which increases the prices of the goods often by 100% (20 years at 5%).
In addition, the sprawling lifestyle puts an extra burden on governments who have to maintain an extensive networks of roads, in addition to the people who have to pay a fortune to acquire (also on credit) automobiles and run them.
It's not for nothing that third-worlders can live for a king for $10 per day; over there, people are not burdened by the expensive western lifestyle.
Automobiles are particularly to blame, because this is one expense that can be done without. When people will spend a third of their income to support their automobile, this means that with a proper public transportation system that allows ordinary people to live decently without a car, salaries could be cut by 25% without any diminished quality of life.
When this little fact will be understood by the thousands chambers of commerce, there will be serious moves toward better transit. In addition of lowering the expenses of employers, it will free the roads from millions of otherwise useless vehicles, leaving a free way for what cannot be transacted without a truck, thus cutting down on the time lost in traffic, furthering even more the savings.
Plus, when there are sufficient people using a transit system, they can be self-sufficient or even turn a profit and thus not be an eternal drain on public ressources like roads are (no right-wing wacko is talking about privatizing roads). 100 years ago, transit systems were big business, and railroads were the high-technology.
That you are trying to convince people that various companies decided in favor of offshoring so that they could make better lives for those "little brown and yellow paupers in Asia and the Middle East...is laughable if not patently absurd. They don't give one rat's about these people - their only concern is a way to make the company's short-term balance sheet look good.
If good people in other countries can do certain things better than Americans, they ought to get the work. It's up to us to compete with them (and each other) instead of whining about the competition. Globalization is helping everyone in the long run. Competition can always be painted as nasty and brutish, but it's the way we get progress. Everyone benefits from it, even if it causes job changes in the short run.
When the Japanese auto manufacturers started sending their vehicles to the United States, nobody took them seriously at first. Then American consumers realized that the Japanese were making better cars, so they started buying them in increasing numbers. The U.S. carmakers (and their unions) simply whined about the competition instead of DOING enough about it. If they had actually competed by producing products that were better than the Japanese products (in reliability, styling and a whole range of issues), they could have fought off the competition. Instead, the unions demanded that they keep their arcane work rules that saved useless jobs in the short run, but which lost a LOT more jobs in the long run. The managements remained in denial that they were that much worse than the Japanese. Even when they DID start improving, it was too little, too late. The culture in Detroit couldn't compete with the rate of change (and improvement) given to us by Honda and Toyota. American consumers benefitted from this competition. The stockholders and employees of the U.S. companies COULD have benefitted, too, but they were both too shortsighted to learn and compete.
U.S. IT is in the position that the U.S. auto industry about 30 years ago. It leads the world, so it doesn't see the need to innovate as much as it did even 10 or 20 years ago. They're arrogant and fat and happy, it seems. Now the rest of the world is starting to catch up to us. Foreigners are learning to do the same things we've been doing, but less expensively. So what's the response? The companies and the employees whine about competition. If you can't see the continued pattern (and what to do about it), you're going to have no one to blame but yourselves.
David
That was a very poorly written article. Granted, it was an editorial, but a little more in the way of rational argument would've been nice. Instead of presenting opposing points and showing their weaknesses, the author simply writes off opposing arguments as ridiculous and baseless. How about actually showing why they are wrong.
For example, he writes this in the beginning:
Unless he is countering a specific argument made against him in the past (which I doubt, based on the language he uses) this is as far as he goes as presenting the opposition argument he is so adamantly against. This is a straw man. He uses the blanket term "economists", as if all economists believe this. As anyone who has spent any time with economists knows, it is rare to find two economists who agree exactly on a given issue. Even if they agree generally, they may dispute endlessly about small details. To claim that offshoring is a practice that all economists consider useful is just wrong. Also, notice his choice of words. "Offshoring...can only have positive benefits overall for Americans." This is very obviously an over-simplification of the argument.
Other great fallacies include the numerous ad hominem attacks (mixed well with the aforementioned straw man). Here are a few:
He also does a very good job of making himself look like an ass by making claims without any explanation or reasoning to support these claims. Here are a few examples:
I could take the time to refute these one by one, but I re
So, if we are supposed to rely on education, technology and research and development to keep our edge as a country, we are already in trouble, especially when one considers that even if we were to turn things around tomorrow, we have likely done enough damage that it will take a decade to recover.
Industrial recovery is not possible while we trade with non free China and your government/corporate masters have you screwed out for RD too.
GE, Microsoft and others have already started moving their research offshore. I'm talking about basic industrial research, like turbine design. "First World" Physics, no longer viable, so forget it. Brains are cheaper, and theoretically free, in Russia and India. The situation is worse in China, where people really are not free.
Our trade was supposed to set the Chinese free, but it's working the other way around. It's just business, right?, and China is just another big company. Not quite. Our big dumb companies might have you by the balls, read your email, and sell it all to big brother, but they can't put you in jail yet. That will take another dissaster like NorthWoods so that everyone is really paranoid and ready for rationing and a WW2 style command economy.
The only way out is lots of wealth creation to raise everyone's standard of living, but it's not happening. With all the mergers, wealth will continue to move to the already very rich owners of those companies. The mergers are the ultimate result of government favoritism of large companies. IT was supposed to be the poster child of new competition and robust US Performance. It has not happened because incumbent companies were allowed to crush new comers, so that "just enough" competition would be left. Now, we all sit under the M$ monopoly, two big media companies, two "broadband" companies, one electric company and a merged OPEC/ExxonMobileRoyalDoubleDutchFuck and wonder where the jobs are and why service sucks. If we can't help ourselves, we will never be able to help anyone else.
Eventually, this will get the rich too. A real depression is no fun for anyone, but those happen when wealth concentration reaches a critical level. When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China, kind of like the great Royal Fuck Festival that was the first World War.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You've never actually listened to Democracy Now have you? Amy Goodman has broken a lot of stories with serious investigative journalism like following the deposed president of Haiti Aristide to Jamaica after he was ousted in U.S. backed coup. Or being the first to report on the use of white phosphorus as a chemical weapon against the Iraqi people which was latter admitted by the U.S. government:
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See: http://democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/1
followed by: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/
As for Noam Chomsky he has been documenting U.S. war crimes in places from Nicaragua to Vietnam for 40 years now. He is an American hero and if the MSM dared to give him a voice and people were made aware of the level of violence the U.S.government has committed against the world we might see new leadership in the U.S. and live in a much more ethical country. Of course we will never see that because it would threaten the corporate bottom line.
If you were to listen to Democracy Now and read a Chomsky book you might actually learn something. Of course it's much easier to not to read or listen and just smear with a cheap ad hominem attack, right?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Here's a list of offshore legal services. Now you can have your legal work done in Bangalore. Pass a copy of this to your corporate counsel.
There is no balancing involved whatsoever. BOTH American and third world I.T. workers make LESS as companies scour the world for the cheapest wages they can find. And the I.T. work only benefits a tiny sliver of the billion + people in both China and India something like quite literally .001%. How can you honestly call something that benefits .001& in the third world a little bit while the rest of the world is suffering a setback a balancing? It's a disingenuous use of that word i.e. a lie. What's more I think you people who peddle these falsehoods are engaging in deliberate mendacities i.e. you are shilling to cover some ones ass in the elite. Shame on you I hope you sleep very poorly at night.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
> if you studied everything you know out of a book 5 years ago, most of that is useless now
It might be a good book, but the real question is how you think and how adaptable you are. If you drop it all and become a hermit for ten years, when you come back you might not know what the latest portable hologram generator is or where all the interesting research is or how to open the computer's cup-holder, but it won't take you long to figure it all out. (If you've got a head for tech.) If you know how to think about the problem, you'll be able to solve it. The facts that you learn from the book are less important than the though processes that you learn by discussing it.
Isn't globalization really a natural re-distribution of labour and wealth to the parts of the world where it is truly needed? Perhaps the fact that jobs are lost is merely a sign that somehting was wrong in th first place, not that there is anything wrong with globalization itself.
According to Businessweek, most private sector jobs created in the 21st century have been in health care.
What's Really Propping Up The Economy
This is a remarkable trend. I don't know about the rest of you but I ain't none too excited about the prospects of a career in health care.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Wait, wasn't the dot com crash in Feburary 2001 - i.e. just after the reporting started? Wouldn't it stand to reason, then, that all of the useless dot com monkeys who did nothing but read VC monthly and talk about how they were going to make millions in stock options not selling things, they'd be included in this statistic, right?
I only ask because I'm not exactly upset to be rid of them...
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Some of you have pointed out that one reason for the disparity in pay which makes outsourcing attractive is the disparity in living standards. I agree. As more and more high paying jobs leave the US for lower cost regions of the world, Americans will have less disposable income. They are already deep in debt. At some point, consumption must fall.
I don't think many Americans understand the extent of the wrenching adjustments that lie ahead. It will not be pleasant.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Over time jobs have continuously moved abroad.
Back in the good old days (you know, when the western world had it's colonizing hat on), we decided it was far cheaper to source raw materials abroad - so we'd say grow cotton in India and import the raw product back to the UK to be refined.
Then we twigged we might as well weave it into cloth abroad (and fired a load of mill workers). Then, realizing we might as well make something out of the cloth abroad before importing it we fired a load of the cloth workers.
Now - at the time there was lots of personal pain for some people - but the benefit was two-fold. The vast majority of people got a far cheaper product and we were forced to up-skill. Do you honestly think we'd be in a better position today if we'd spent a fortune protecting those lost industries?
Same thing is just still happening and will continue to happen - whether you like it or not. You've just got the simple choice whether you want to stand there trying to hold back the sea, or whether you should take a few steps up the beach to get out of the way.
You might get the odd law/import quota protecting your own job, but that's just at the expense of everybody else around you - The USA can't afford to buy everything 'Made in the USA' and expect to keep the same standard of living.
Look. You're both right and you're both wrong. And you should be smart enough to realize that. It's nice to see some honest dissent, but you both should learn to tone it down about four notches before you consider conversing. Fearmongering is a short-term tool. It doesn't work forever. Reality is slowly catching up to the political / economic system, and there are a lot of factors in it. All that really needs to happen at this point is a fair playing ground, so off to Black Box Voting for both of you.
Oh, and if you didn't shoot spittle at every conservative you spoke to, you would have a better chance of convincing them. I know I do.
My little site.
Offshoring does not apply to IT. No doubt geeks want their overpayed jobs, yet still want cheap labor to supply their clothing, shoes, ipods, RAM etc. Why should the IT industry get any preferential treatment?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That is a shit website with a politically biased agenda.
2 13/13tech_nemko.htm2 26/archive_005064.htms /frameset.exclude.html
Here are some reputable sources:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/060
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/010
http://money.cnn.com/popups/2006/moneymag/bestjob
Especially check out that last website. Top Job: Software Engineer.
"Software engineers are needed in virtually every part of the economy, making this one of the fastest-growing job titles in the U.S"
Ah, Slashdot. I find it so ironic that the same people who are for "free software" and "free information" are also against free trade.
The idea of a nation having a comparative advantage (if you're going to talk about globalization, you might as well use the lingo) in certain markets is what this all boils down to.
Let's say you're French. The French enjoy an enormous comparative advantage in producing fine wine. The climate is right, they have the wineries already in place, they are well-known as wine producers and so on. If you own a winery in France, or work at a winery in France, or ship French wines, or even just occasionally mash grapes with your feet, you've got it made it in the shade. Your goods will find plenty of willing buyers in the global marketplace.
But here's the problem. What if you live in France and don't want to have anything to do with the wine making business? You don't know anything about wine, grapes disgust you--whatever. In fact, what if you want to just design and make automobiles? Whoops! You will have a hard time competing against the vast hordes of foreign auto makers. Your French workers will require higher wages and better benefits than their foreign counterparts. Much of the steel you need has to be imported from Germany. Your engine blocks have to come from Japan, but only after they're assembled in Canada. You're really having a hard time keeping your costs down.
Your business is going to fail, and the French government will have little choice but to see your company fall by the wayside, or else pass laws to create subsidies that explicitly favor your goods over their foreign counterparts, which is prohibited by GATT and can only be done under very specific circumstances. The French could still tax foreign goods with tariffs, but even then those are highly regulated by international authorities. No, your auto business will soon be out of business.
Globalization's answer to that French auto maker is "well, you could always make wine" and its answer to the unemployed people who worked for that auto maker is "well that's a shame, go work at a winery." Now that's pretty harsh. How do you respond to something like that? You either go work at a winery or you go riot in the streets. When companies and egghead economists alike are so gung-ho about pushing globalization, the human element seems to get lost in the shuffle.
The best argument for globalization has always been "okay then, suggest a better way." It's impossible because the alternative to the free trade system is pretty horrible: Entire industries that create goods with no useful purpose that cannot be sold overseas; a limited selection of goods for consumers; huge increases in the costs of goods for consumers due to reduced competition, and so on. If the WTO allowed for any more artificial barriers to free trade than tariffs, that is exactly what would happen. And even then, eventually getting rid of tariffs anyway, and removing the last barrier to free trade is the stated goal of WTO/GATT.
Those who embrace the trendy new rhetoric that decries our current free trade system either know nothing about it or refuse to acknowledge how much we truly benefit from it. It is far easier, I suppose, to shill the globalization issue to promote another political motive. Don't be used.
in other words the nominal price is dropping, but the nominal wage is dropping faster.. meaning real price is actually rising
Arguably, there are just a few issues that are keeping the nominal price from dropping faster (all of which are interrelated):
a.) Real estate. There are many factors (some of which are only in play in certain regions of the US but not others.) Curiously, (fundamental) demand is not really one of them. The "wealthy" here may be blamed, but they are just current homeowners, and the high cost of real estate is transfer of wealth between generations (young people paying high rent prices to older folks who own real estate.)
b.) Taxes. Almost all of this can be attributed to government overpromises (large pensions given to local government employees that are no longer working out on paper) for instance. This is a complex issue with no easy solution. If I were to take a bet, the emerging nations will not follow the same path and make the same mistakes.
c.) Commodity prices, such as gasoline.
d.) Health care costs.
I hypothesize as an arm chair Economist (with an Econ degree, but what that means is up to debate) that if Real Estate prices took a sufficient drop and a more realistic realingment, then the drop in overall wages would be met with an equal drop in nominal pricing.
(There's a chance that that will occur.)
Really? Where do you get your definitions from? Because a "depression" or even a recession (a long term recession constitutes a depression) are not caused by anything like that. Oh wait, you're quoting John Maynard Keynes. Riiiight, I see. Is that what they're teaching in school now? That "hoarding" causes recessions? Good heavens.
When power is concentrated enough, the American Empire will go to war with China
Will it now. Just a quick exercise for you - try to calculate how much of the US economy depends on the Chinese economy. Then do the same calculation backwards. Now tell us about this "war". What are the justifications for it again? Why does it happen? When? How exactly? Please do elaborate. Unless you're just jumbling together "hot topic" words to get some karma like you always do...
M$ monopoly
Good old twitter. China is evil, "big dumb companies" are evil, "M$" is evil, Kermit the frog is evil and everything should be free. Same broken record but with impressive-sounding words and lotsa links. Karma every time.
For anyone that has forgotten, you could get an IT job during dot.com if you could just spell cumputer^Wcomputer. For a more realistic point of reference, choose a point before dot.com, say Jan 1999. Do that and you;ll probably notice some growth.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The article compares 2001 to 2005? Other than globalization, there were two minor events that could have a small influence the job count:
1. In 2001 the dot-com-bubble burst
2. In 2001 9/11 happened, bringing with it 2 wars
Where these events so minor that they aren't even worth mentioning in the article?
I'm an american who would really like to go abroad, as it turns out. I have a wide variety of IT and programming skills, but no management experience. I'm very close to quitting IT and teaching english or something else to achieve this goal, but I'm pretty good at all this computer crap. I hate to ditch what I'm good at.
But guess what? Although I speak fluent german, I can't work in Germany or Austria. A company has to advertise for 3 months for an EU resident to fill a slot before they can sponsor a visa for me. And I'm not even picky--I can't find an IT/programming job for an american anywhere outside of the US from Cape Town to Kabul.
Want to bitch about globalization? Bitch about the last trade barrier: Labor. Globalization currently benefits CEO's because the resource they have to start the game, money, is now easily transfered. But labor isn't allowed to be transfered--labor might as well be opium for all the free trade associated with it, but with more positions available. I, for one, can't fucking wait until that shit ends, and I can whore myself out to whomever I please, wherever I please.
Professor Chomsky was busy documenting American war crimes while writing books glossing over the butchery of two million cambodian civilians: http://www.amazon.com/After-Cataclysm-Indo-China-N oam-Chomsky/dp/0896081001
Professor Chomsky used the following argument to discount testimony by refugees that a slaughter was in progress, saying we should be wary of "the extreme unreliability of refugee reports": "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocutors wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account"
He has never apologised for his stance on Cambodia.
The cost of reproduction has risen by a factor of nearly 4 since I was born in 1954, fertilizing the portfolios of landlords, or more properly, land barons, with the decomposing marriages, fetuses and sometimes bodies of the bulk of the baby boom generation, leaving a demographic hole being filled with imported slaves* by those same landlords.
The baronage calls this "progress", even as as the price of homes was removed from the consumer price index while introducing CPI factors like "hedonic value" and "imputed rent" to make it appear "real" earnings have increased over the time period of demographic collapse and loss of ethnic enfranchisement to imported laborers for the baronage.
I call it genocide.
*It is really being too kind to the baronage to call the imported laborers "slaves" since the baronage doesn't have to pay for their human capital upkeep--the rest of us do via social programs. Southern Plantation owners were far more moral than these sorry excuses for human beings.
Figures from my insurance agent sent to me on my birthday:
The two big ticket necessities:
3 bedroom house price increase: 22 times
1954 $ 10,250
2006 $219,375
car price increase: 18 times
1954 $ 1,567
2006 $28,000
Even if we grant that the quality/cost ratio of manufactured goods has gone up so much during the last 52 years that $1,567 for a used car in 2006 is as good as a new car was in 1954, it doesn't bring down the sum of the 2 major debt-service items much:
house+car increase: 19 times
1954 $ 11,817 =$1,567+$10,250
2006 $220942 =$1,567+$219,375
So the debt-service load in a family household has gone up nearly a factor of 20 in the last 52 years.
And don't kid yourself that it didn't hit hardest at the peak child-bearing potential of the mid-to-late boomers who were paying 20% mortgage rates when they were trying to form families in the early 1980s.
Look at these foreclosure rates peaking within the first 10 years of boomer's trying to form families:
Year $ value of mortgage loans foreclosed (in millions)
1965 944
1966 1,034
1967 957
1968 865
1969 364
1970 321
1971 438
1972 478
1973 577
1974 715
1975 1,086
1976 1,129
1977 868
1978 723
1979 683
1980 917
1981 1,563
1982 3,282
1983 4,240
1984 6,163
1985 8,675
1986 13,942
1987 18,373
1988 18,859
1989 18,189
1990 22,862
1991 17,105
1992 12,408
1993 6,852
1994 3,422
1995 2,506
1996 2,138
1997 1,805
1998 1,470
1999 1,022
2000 900
Has household income kept up? Hardly...
average household income increase: 13 times
1954 $ 4,137 (one wage earner)
2006 $54,000 (two wage earners)
So household income has gone up only about 70% as much as the essential household debt service in the last 52 years.
Oh, but wait--that "household" in 1954 was one income and the income was relatively stable--the woman stayed at home and raised the kids.
How can we factor not only that both parents must work in 2006 and not only are each of their jobs less secure, but the effective income of the household, adjusting for risk of not being able to meet debt payments for a substantial period of time?
Here's a realistic option: We can reasonably say that the odds of both parents being out of work at any given point of time in 2006 is comparable to the odds of the father being out of work in 1954. Hence the reliable household income--the income stream that can service debt without foreclosure--is approximately 1/2 of the household income. Certainly we can say that there w
Seastead this.
...in a Polish branch of big American holding, I can safely say that I like this trend.
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every so often to follow the jobs since I am not married and have no kids. I'd even move to India if I had to even if I hate the climate (as in: weather) down there. Unfortunately not everybody is as willing or as able as we are to uproot their wife and kids every 2-3 years pack their belongings into a 20ft container and travel around the world with a big smile on their face in a cheerful quest to adapt to the latest fashion trend in the fabulous outsourcing biz. Unfortunately it looks as if this lifestyle will become a necessity for a lot of people unless they are willing to settle for a relatively menial job back home.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I flicked through the article and though seemingly thorough it doesn't really advocate a solution to what 'might' be a problem. So one can only assume that what is being advocated is protectionism.
Lots of statements can be made about the benefits or not of offshoring, but protectionism is usually pretty damaging for a number of reasons that many economists will agree on. The number one reason is that protectionism is almost always badly implemented, look at the many military acquisition purchases which have been for pseudo-politcal/protectionist reasons.
A famous story here in Europe is the Eurofighter project, a project which has cost billions over many year. For political and protectionist reasons the plane parts got carved up so they would be designed in different countries so as to create local jobs. The result? A 5 year late project wasting massive amounts of money recreating a clone of an existing American combat fighter. That's protectionism in action.
Imagine a company with zero engineers, and 100% managers, it cannot survive.
Now imagine a company with 100% engineers, which spend 5% of their time doing 'management' , it would
still work and turn out a product, see google and apple.
A smart engineer can learn in 6months how to be a manager, a manager though would take 10 years to be as good as an engineer.
After all there are no management 5 year degrees at unis are there.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
May the Maths Be with you!
Not correct. White Phosphorus, although a chemical, is not a chemical weapon within the meaning the the Chemical Weapons Convention:
White phosphorous is no more of a "chemical weapon", as normally understood, than napalm. Or course, flame weapons have been subject to controversy of their own.
As for Noam Chomsky he has been documenting U.S. war crimes in places from Nicaragua to Vietnam for 40 years now. He is an American hero and if the MSM dared to give him a voice and people were made aware of the level of violence the U.S.government has committed against the world we might see new leadership in the U.S. and live in a much more ethical country. Of course we will never see that because it would threaten the corporate bottom line.
There are other views about Chomsky. And it isn't the corporate bottom line I would worry so much about....
Left-Wing Monster: Pol Pot
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I hear job growth in the military is huge.
There is a definite attitude I see in a lot of workplaces. The attitude is predominantly "I may not do your job, but I know it better than you" among managers.
I am a CAD Drafter and at my old job our IT manager had it in his head that we would be faster with AutoCAD LT than regular AutoCAD. For those of you not familiar with Autocad, LT is an extremely crippled version of the software. There's no command line, no expandability with LISP routines, and no 3D. We kept telling him that switching to LT was going to increase lead time from engineering due to the cut in productivity (we literally had hundreds of LISP routines we relied on). He arrogantly refused to listen, as if we didn't know sh*t about the tasks and software that we used every single day.
Analysts and CEOs sit in an Ivory Tower, practicing what I like to call "theoretical business." They are so far removed from "the trenches" (i.e. the real world) that they actually think they have a clue what it's like to do your job. We have the John Stossels of the world telling us "outsourcing is GOOD thing!"
It reminds me of 1984: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength
Yes.
Now an Iowa local computer store is able to sell to finland, morocco or egypt, via an e-store.
Scratch that, even local KILT producers are able to take work orders from all over the world.
This is globalization. As in a free market, it comes with its own challenges. You cant expect a rose be free of its thorns.
Read radical news here
Hey, you're the first to mention the concept for which I was looking, so you get the reply:
This is correct, in my opinion. The big myth - which was not cited in the article - is that you can actually maintain an economy with high standard of living based on "high value" services alone. The key to an economy is really its ability to produce wealth - hard, physical, tangible goods that, as you said, actually raise the standard of living of that society's citizens. All the dentists and doctors in the world cannot help you if you don't have good tools, good infrastructure, or even good food.
I remember from one of my early economics classes that the only wealth-producing endeavours known are agriculture and manufacturing - the rest of economic activity just shuffles that wealth around.
If the economy of a country switches to being service-based, it is then a slave to the actual wealth-producing nations, because if the nations that have the wealth no longer need or want the services, with what is the service-based economy left? The reason the US economy used to be so robust is it had a good balance between service and wealth production. The shift away from producing wealth locally (I don't mean by ownership, I mean physically) is probably a greater risk than most are able to recognize.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Before taking everything in the article as fact, take a glance at the rest of the stories on the site. You will definitely see a pattern. And NO..I'm not going to suggest what that pattern is.
Is that while a lot of these jobs are lost - and people are complaining about not having a job -
there are a lot of idiots who went into IT in the first place, who should NEVER have gone into
IT to begin with.
I don't know how many idiots I've met in the IT industry that have ZERO business being in
there. They don't have a clue as to how logic works. Can't be bothered to read a frickin'
manual or just use references to figure things out.
It's sad that a lot of these people are whining and complaining, instead of realizing that
they didn't belong there in the first place!!
Well, doesn't it? Hoarding causes that money not to participate in the economy. At the same time, the money is still there, so the value of the money that does circulate stays the same. So, in effect, less value is participating in the economy. Isn't that a recession? I'm just asking; I'm not an economist.
:)
If someone hoards a huge amount of money and keeps it out of circulation, then the market adjusts and starts to behave as if the money no longer exists, causing deflation, which is an increase in an individual dollar's purchasing power. Now, inflation and deflation are the opposite of each other, and both have their pros and cons.
Inflation is good at fighting unemployment, as the continual decrease in purchasing power is an effective way of circumventing minimum wage laws. E.g. if the minimum wage is 5 dollars per hour, and there was an inflation of 5% during the following year, then the real wage, i.e. the purchasing power of the 5 dollars have decreased by 5%. Thus employers are now effectively paying 5% less to their employees, even though the amount of dollars paid is the same, and this means that it now becomes profitable to employ people for less productive work, resulting in an decrease of unemployment.
The downside of inflation is the reduction in PP, and the higher demands on ROI. If inflation is 5% a particular year, and a company's profits grow only 3% that year, then the real profit of the company has decreased. This also works on a individual level, i.e. I have 5000$ today, wait a year, and then I have lost 5% of my wealth, even though the amount of dollars I have is unchanged. What this results in is that any investment that has a ROI that is less than inflation, is actually making you poorer. No need to wonder why stockholders/owners/investors demand ever-increasing profits from corporations, inflation is the culprit.
Deflation is pretty much the exact opposite. If there's a deflation of 5%, then even investments with a negative ROI are profitable as long as deflation is higher. This makes having money lying on a bank account a good investment, as you'll be able to buy more stuff with that money after a year.
Of course this also increases unemployment, at least unless the minimum wages are decreased at the same rate as deflation.
Another bad/good side of inflation/deflation (depending on if you have debt or have borrowed money to others) is that as the PP of a dollar increases, the real size of a debt also increases, which is bad for those who have debt. Again the opposite is true.
IANA(K)E, which could be seen as a good thing, depending on which school you follow.
I have liberal arts degrees anyway and only got into IT in the go-go '90s so maybe it's time to look elsewhere.
I've been taking unemployment office job-hunting classes offered in our "heart-of-the-midwest" state the last couple weeks where they make you get chummy and identify yourself, and I have run into no fewer than FOUR people who had been teaching English in Beijing, Taiwan, or Japan. They were back wondering whether there _still_ aren't any jobs in the U.S. and judging from the general pessimism I suspect they will be back in Beijing shortly.
Maybe the global economy means everybody hops one continent to the left. Ted Turner already owned a land mass the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. If enough of us leave, maybe he can be the first American to own a state outright and the U.S. can divide itself up into little fiefdoms of the super rich.
If you actually read it (I know, it was longer then a digg blurb, so you probably didn't) you'd have seen that he used many dates, but the fact that many of his comparisons STARTED with 2001 (which you yourself said was a shitty time for IT workers) and compare them with TODAY (or close as he could get with the data) while showing NO growth or negative growth is scary. In other words, since the shittiest time after the .com blowout, there's been hardly any tangable IT growth.
He blames it on offshoring in general, and I agree with him. Off-shoring IT is a direct IT-job losing situation, but all off-shoring has a serious impact on our economy in general. It's the huge companies getting bigger, and being as greedy as possible while doing it.
So, imagine if he compared things to the year 2000 or 1999? It would look *completely* bleak.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't agree that the "lack of national pride" in the U.S. is the "biggest problem" we're facing.
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
Almost like clockwork, every couple of weeks we get another article about outsourcing (or global warming, or voting systems), and everyone wrings their hands about it. "The rich are seeking slavery" versus "you can't ignore the free market."
What I find most disconcerting among the con camp is the tired sense of entitlement. It is believed that corporations should pay a premium to a given employee because "it's fair". Americans fret about losing any percentage of the well-beyond survival level of wealth we enjoy. It's not that we worry about living in huts and going hungry, but that we'll have to buy a Hyundai instead of a Toyota, or maybe a smaller house, eat out less, etc. Our expectations are very high.
That's fine, as long as we're willing to do what it takes to generate that wealth. If you believe that you're so talented, but your employer doesn't appreciate it, start your own company. IT is one of the few fields with minimal startup costs. Our country was founded upon the idea of entrepreneurship, and it was those original risk-takers that lead our nation to greatness. People weren't as locked into the cycle of college > corporation meritocracy as we seem to be today. We play it safe, and have the inviolate expectation that we deserve a given salary by law because we've done what was rewarded in the past. This isn't a socialist country, though. Companies are free to pay market wages, and the market keeps getting bigger. We can either accept this, and take personal responsibility for our own success, or continue to complain that things are changing, and try to manipulate the system to mitigate the change.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have some measures to protect workers, and as a country we do, but we have to recognize that there is a cost for having such protections, and that is the economic disadvantage it puts us in relative to those in developing economies. We can't have the best of both worlds.
According to the April 24, 2006 issue of InformationWeek:
"IT employment in the United States has reached a record high of 3.472 million in the 12 months ended March 31,
surpassing the 3.455 million IT workers employed the previous quarter and at the end of the third quarter of 2001, the height
of the dot-com employment boom, according to InformationWeek's analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data."
This also jibes with what I heard when I had lunch with my recruiter last week; he says the market is very strong at the
moment. The automated query emails I get from dice.com and monster.com also show a decent job market, at least in the
RTP area of NC.
Has globalisation affected jobs in the US? Possibly, but is the sky falling like these people are making out? No, not even close.
And if it was, the answer isn't more protectionistic polices and government meddling, it's making the "free market" more free
so more people have a chance to try and create wealth for themselves.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I think people are overestimating the quantity of intelligent workers. Are there great Indian and Chinese engineers? Of course. Are they enough to do all the major design work in the world? Nope. Furthermore, the very factors that makes China or India great for manufacturing, work against it for high quality engineering jobs. With such high rates of poverty and 'IT' seen as a way to make money, you get a lot of poor quality people graduating through the system. Some get by through cheating (see article about Chinese student getting surgical implants to cheat on tests...), others just lack the passion to do good work, and some just get by via the corruption. Imagine being a manager and trying to hire a good engineer in India or China. I really don't know how they'd do it on a large scale given the sheer number of applicants. As far as I'm concerned these countries are just now starting to get their fair share of high end design work. For such large countries, they deserve their fair share of highend work. But its not going to be the death of our economy. A better way to look at it is the US IT industry has been far too large. Other countries have good engineers too and they are resources to be tapped. Good engineers are too hard to find for any country to have a monopoly.
Bah, Slashdot really knows how to stoke the IT flames with an article like this. But maybe its time to stop thinking its "us vs. them" in regards to off-shoring. Perhaps we are seeing the opening stages of, what I like to call, "the grand unification" of the world. Yes, someone can do your job for less! Move on. Is it the end of the world? Are Americans all of a sudden living in slums and standing on soup lines? Hardly.
Why is life a contest? How are we on a different team than the Chinese and Indians? I don't exactly feel any urge to "beat" them. Nor do I feel obligated to.
I've done enterprise-grade checkpoint firewall installs by configuring the equipment ahead of time and mailing it out there. If you document well and are careful about what you do, its entirely doable.
If I can mail a firewall across the states, someone in India could mail one from there. Likewise with a router.
Is it nicer to have someone on-site? You betcha. But its cheaper to have an on-site guy who is just competant enough to plug in the port marked "WAN" and outsource the harder configuration to someone else who costs more per hour, but doesn't need to be salaried.
once you go slack, you never go back
Parent actually has good points. You just insulted him "in style", but the "in style" part is of course debatable.
Wealth is always relative, and never absolute.
Thus, it's impossible for wealth to be created or for it to disappear in absolute terms. But what IS possible for a relative quantity? Aha, that's right -- concentration. Yes, in relative terms, wealth can concentrate. That's all it ever does. It either concentrates or diffuses, and it's never created or destroyed.
I'd maybe go deeper into it and explain why wealth is relative, but you're a dipshit who is not worth my time. I'm writing this for other people, not for you.
Something rarely mentioned here in the USA is the impact of these measures on foreign workers. Obviously foreigners have some claim to a higher standard of living. Obviously a wage increase to people in sub-saharan Africa would benefit them.
Thus far, globalization has been a tremendous boon to foreigners. Since the mid-1990s, when globalization began picking up the pace, the world has had an economic growth rate of over 5% annually--more than in any prior time in history. As a result, wages in some very populous places (Coastal China, for example) have quadrupled. That increase in wages has had a dramatic and positive effect on poverty in countries that were previously extremely impoverished. Bear in mind that in the early 1970's China had a per-capita GDP that was scarcely higher than sub-saharan Africa.
I believe that capitalism and rising prosperity in those places will also greatly benefit world stability to the benefit of America. Obviously there will still be sources of instability (religious extremism and territorial disputes are two examples that may not be mitigated by prosperity) but we will no longer face violent confrontations over imagined "exploitation" or competing economic systems.
The American IT industry is doing fine. I work in it and I can say with confidence that demand for programmers is about as brisk as it has ever been, except during the anomalous dot com boom.
It's strange when American IT workers (a few of them, at least) react angrily to Indians and others who are trying to do the same things we do. It's the height of hypocrisy. We should never fault anyone for just trying to participate in the global economy.
The vision which America has exported in recent years is that capitalism benefits everyone, and furthermore, that freedom includes economic freedom. So far, that policy has worked extremely well in the short time it has been given, in most places at least, contrary to what detractors claim. Even in the few places it has not worked well (like Russia), people still have regained most of what was lost during the messy transition from Communism.
...Right now the world is undergoing rapid economic growth similar to that experienced by Western Europe and America during the late 19th century and early 20th. It is quite feasible that in a few decades most people in the world will enjoy a standard of living approaching 1st-world standards. A world like that would benefit of everyone, including Americans, and it would be unbelievably stupid and cruel of us to prevent it.
Engineering and management require different skills sets.
Sometimes the same person have them both, but on many others it just does not happen.
The best way to create a bad manager is to force a good Engineer without the necessary skills to become one.
The assumption, very common around here, that Engineers are some kind of uber human that can learn anything thrown at them is laughable, to say the least (disclaimer: I am an Engineer and at time I have had managerial responsibilities)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Lesson number 1: "wealth" is not the same thing as "value".
I would agree that the value that is placed on manufactured goods has been declining, but that does not mean that the wealth inherent to the manufactured goods is any less.
Put another way: The price of a house does not changes its square footage, ability to store things and protect from the environment, etc. The wealth of a house (sans damage or additions) is constant, regardless of the price (value) associated with that house. Yet another example: a wrench does not lose its "wrenchness" if it only costs $5 instead of $10.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)