Open Source Globalization?

Carl Rosenberger asks: "In this article at IT Managers Journal [which is another part of OSTG, Slashdot's parent publishing company], db4objects CEO Christof Wittig speculates about the future effect of open source globalization on organizations and individuals. According to his opinion 'Engineers like globalization', although it may mean tougher worldwide competition for jobs. What is the opinion of Slashdot readers on this article? Is open source globalization going to happen? Will it make our jobs better or worse?" As the referenced article puts it, open source globalization is the ability to hire programmers from all over the globe to collaborate together on a single project with low overhead. Heck if it works for open source projects, why not for corporate software? Do you see the corporations you are familiar with embracing or fighting this concept?

Comments

Who cares ...

[Pegasus]

I don't care if the shortterm effect to my job is bad, as long as the longterm effect to the world is good.

Re:Who cares ...

[westlake]

I don't care if the shortterm effect to my job is bad, as long as the longterm effect to the world is good.

explain to me again what is good about driving wages and working conditions down to third world levels.

Re:Who cares ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and third world wages will rise up until both meet.

Re:Who cares ...

[DrSkwid]

Increased supply of workers will make wages rise. Which school of economics did you go to ?

Re:Who cares ...

[xappax]

We are not talking about moving workers to local markets, but moving jobs to other places.

This is exactly the problem. In a globalized market, jobs can get up and move anywhere in the world at essentially no cost, but employees are still restricted by the high costs and difficulty of relocating themselves. This gives employers a tremendous upper hand, and reduces job-security to almost 0.

In 1997, Billy worked as a programmer in Austin, Texas. He worked for a local company, and they paid him enough to survive relatively comfortably in Austin. In 2006, the company realized that they could hire a similarly competent programmer in eastern Europe, and only have to pay enough for the programmer to survive relatively comfortably in eastern Europe. Billy cannot compete while living in Austin, because he could not survive on the wage being offered.

Great deal for the company, bad deal for Billy. It costs the company almost nothing to cut their costs by moving their programming jobs to eastern Europe, but it costs Billy a huge amount financially and emotionally to relocate to eastern Europe. Billy has been caught in a cost-of-living race to the bottom, and it's an inevitable consequence of globalization.

Companies generally don't give a fuck where their work gets done, as long as it gets done correctly and as cheaply as possible. People, on the other hand, care very much where they live - most people have deep cultural ties to a certain area, be it a neighborhood, country, or even continent, and even when they do move, it usually takes a long time to adjust and establish themselves in a new environment.

People shouldn't be forced to conform to the international market's whims of where they should be living at any moment, simply in order to keep their cost of living competitive.

Re:Who cares ...

[cyberon22]

This is a thoughtful post. Three comments however from someone working in China:

(1) Workers in the west are already benefiting from the low costs of imported products, and there is still room for prices to fall in many areas. Wage adjustments in the west are simply lagging behind adjustments to consumer prices. This doesn't mean that falling product costs are unconnected with changing job stability. You can't have one without the other.

(2) The factors which make American employees uncompetitive wage-wise are largely tied to local markets (rent) and government policy (health care). If housing costs are a concern... well you guys should be complaining to your government about its imposition of import restrictions on Canadian timber in violation of NAFTA, lack of urban planning for high-density housing (everyone buys cars). If clothing costs are a concern... stop extending import quotas for foreign produced textiles (decent jeans here cost less than $7). If health costs are a concern... stop voting Republican and get decent nationalized health care plan like every other civilized western nation.

(3) Nationalism is immoral and one doesn't need to be Marxist to be an internationalist. I know a lot of college graduates here in Beijing whose monthly wages are around $250 USD a month. It is damn hard to find a place to rent, feed yourself and survive in this city on that salary -- the implication that people have it easy in countries where living standards lag behind the US is patently wrong.

To blame globalization for problems with the domestic economy is cheap and easy. But it is also wrong. The reason life is getting more difficult for Americans has a lot to do with government policy (try raising the minimum wage, guys). And things like the Iraq War and your government's plundering of social security and tax cuts to the rich are only making it worse.

You get what you pay for?!?

[tf23]

I was recently hired for a short spell to help someone develop a website. It appears they started the project (they're a US Company, based in NY) by hiring a developer from Africa at $10/hour. Now, I would presume for some parts of Africa $10/hr is good money, while others maybe not so much. However, here in Ohio (US), that's squat.

They got into a bind, their developer didn't know what he should know (or, rather, needed to know for this project, possibly not his fault) and ended up contacting me. First wanting my help/advise for free, because, well, the website is based on an open source project I participate in. At first a few questions here or there is fine, but after a while, finding out it's a for-profit venture, enough is enough. I balked at the continued "free help".

First they complained they're only making $10/hr. Later, they begrudgingly offered me half my going rate. Again, I baulked. Eventually they antied up the full rate, and I worked with them till they had a hardware disaster and gave up.

Moral of the story? Globalization of IT is difficult; The language barriers and the difference in time-zones can be frustrating and complex. The difference in pay can be astounding.

However, Globalization rather scares me more then not. Looking at what happened to me, the company seemingly purposefully went out and hired a developer, in Africa, just to save money so they didn't have to pay an American, who'd require more pay. My only saving grace was that this developer they hired didn't know as much as me (and especially didn't know as much related to the open source project's code they were using).

But one day, he may (or will)! Then what? Any US company can hire him, at a far lower wage then what I require (to feed/cloth my family as they currently are, etc etc). Where does that leave me? Scrambling for a job/career that has steady employment from which I can sustain this lifestyle.

I don't relate this experience to complain about the un-named company that hired me, nor the across the globe developer. I bring this up to tell my story of a project which was global in nature and which, after experiencing it, leaves me skeptical regarding IT's future in higher cost of living countries.

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[RetlawST]

The thing is, as he starts to learn more, he'll be worth more. We're learning that in India right now as more IT professionals are becoming competitive, threatening to take their knowledge elsewhere if companies don't pony up. While this is still considerably less than workers in the US, it just underlines the fact that knowledgeable people are a commodity and the more you know, the more you're worth.

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[Aladrin]

Don't you mean 'lower cost of living countries'? It seems it's pretty clear... You get what you pay for. If you try to hire someone for a fraction of what it's worth (in your country), you get someone that doesn't know what they are doing and needs to be helped constantly. The same as if you'd hired someone locally for that price.

There are exceptions, I understand that.

But my company outsources some of it's programming work to India, and it's been nothing but headaches on anything larger than a simple script. It's gotten to the point that, like you saw, they ask me for help on their problems instead of trying to figure them out on their own.

I have to wonder, though... Did they REALLY have a 'hardware crash', or did they realize they had spent more on the project than they had earned, and saw no way to fix it? It's not that they are stupid, it's just that they try to do jobs they aren't qualified for because the pay is so good. The same thing happens here in the US, but the market is fairly stable, and they don't last long. IT is booming overseas, and there's many more jobs than qualified people to fill them.

I see this getting worse before it gets better.

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[dmayle]

Any US company can hire him, at a far lower wage then what I require

I must admit, I see this attitude so often here on Slashdot, sometimes it really astounds me. I live in France, where we also have problems with this kind of attitude.

What do you do when no companies will hire you at a price you find reasonable??? There are a couple of options:

• Whine and complain on Slashdot
• Go on unemployment, and then get the media to be interested in your hard-luck case
• Do something about it:
  • Move
  • Start your own company

Really, people, globalization is not the end of the world. Not only that, but people in open source are poised to reap the greatest advantages of globalization. People living in lesser economies simply can't afford the prices of proprietary software from G8 countries. This leaves them with three options: 1) Build it themselves, 2) Pirate it, 3) Open Source.

This means more users, more coders, and eventually, more money . It's quite simple, folks. If you wanna give out free advice, that's your choice, but until localized support is in place, it's up to them to learn from the source, at your rates.

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[trojjan]

IT is booming overseas, and there's many more jobs than qualified people to fill them.

I completely agree. Right now the situation in India is that the companies are almost hiring anyone that can read and write as 'programmers' because a lot of work is being outsourced to them. Although what you are being paid is quite low even by Indian standards(somewhere around Rs 200,000 i.e around $4.5K a year). I don't see how long can this continue, these people aren't magically going to turn super intelligent and I don't think the low quality of work is really acceptable.

Re:You get what you pay for?!?

[Fire Dragon]

And what happens once they've learned? There is now more competition for you - with which, at your income, at your tax level you may not be able to compete. If this were to continue on, you'd find quite a few jobless people. And jobless people cannot pay taxes. Yes, I'm generalizing, but hopefully you get the idea.

Usually what happens when people learn skill to do their job, their market value increases. They get more work that they can handle with their original rate. Usually smart people understand that they make the same by raising their rate and losing some customers for others working cheaper.

To get local jobs, you have to lower your rates until they start to be better deals for skills and services you provide for your local customer. Once the rates around the world start going up, you may also raise your rates. While waiting you better start to increase your skills to offer better service. Most customers know to look for quality/cost ration instead of cheapest price tag.

I used to be programmer, now I do maintenance and design for local customers and programming has gone to somewhere in India. There starts to be local programming jobs availeble after few silent years, customers are coming back to their local suppliers for the service they can provide for current rates.

Globalization has some bad effects if you happen to be too greedy. Due the globalization local rates have gone down, but so has the living cost, mainly thanks to cheap imported goods.

It gores both ways

[brunes69]

People in the First World complain because we are driving their wages downward, but what is being lost is globalization is driving wages and employment standards in the third world upward.

Sure, the wages are low compared to here. Sure, the employment standards are lower. But change does not happen overnight - the amount of improvements seen over the last 25 years are more than were seen in the first 50 years of the industrial revolution in the first world.

Eventually, what will happen is the wages and employment standards of the entire world will meet somewhere in the middle. Then, they will only go up, as competition for skilled labour drives them that way.

You have to think long term - like on the 50-100 year scale.

What about immigration?

[plopez]

What if someone wants to move to a place with lower wages but much lower cost of living? Are we going to address this? There can be no true free labor and job market until labor can freely migrate after jobs. That is where the inequities are. Borders must be open otherwise true globalization can never happen.

Globalization - Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain

[Thumper_SVX]

Sound like a management mantra, but it's true. Globalization sucks for the people caught in the middle today (the high-tech workers who actually directly drove up the price of tech workers during the dot-com boom) and will continue to. There are two sides to the story, though and that is that in losing a little in the "first-world countries" we are actually pulling the "third-world countries" up to our level.

However, there are problems that I think people are only now beginning to see. For a start in India in general now that a small percentage of the populous has suddenly become relatively well paid, the cost of items in the economy is going up. This either forces the majority of the population to get increases in pay relative to the increasing cost or they run the risk of destroying the economy of their own country. Increase in wealth must be managed or it risks the entire economy. India is starting to learn this.

Now, so long as it's all managed properly then India will be bought up to the level of the US in terms of quality of life, cost of living and so forth (well, maybe a little lower), then their jobs will all be offshored to some other country and so the cycle begins again. Over time this will have a generally levelling effect and will result in a world that is better placed to actually improve the lives of those living on the Earth rather than in-fighting and bickering. This is generally a good thing.

The utopia envisioned by science fiction writers for years will not come about without a great deal of pain. There's going to be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the economies of the first world countries will crumble. The high-horse that the West has ridden for centuries has finally run itself out, and we're all going to feel the pinch.

There are ways to make sure you survive through this; be flexible. Be ready to work where and doing whatever it takes to make ends meet and support your own families. Don't get too attached to the "everything on credit" lifestyle to which we in the West have become accustomed, that lifestyle is going to end in a huge and extremely ugly crash. The foundation of this crash was founded in the early 1970's when the dollar value was seperated from gold. Then with the additional weight of the effect of networking and decentralization on top of that it will lead to a complete crash of our lifestyle. I don't know if it will happen in our lifetimes, but I really believe it will happen.

We're in a new market now where our jobs can be done anywhere. This is going to lead to a short term situation where jobs will migrate away from the West. We can't prevent it. We can complain about it, and we can whine about it but the best we're going to do is delay it and in doing so make the crash that much worse when it comes.

Yes, I've been hit by globalization myself but even I have to realize that the future is going to change radically. Many are going to hate it, I don't claim to like the short term picture myself... but I have to accept it. In fact, as one of the drivers in the dot-com boom and the decentralization projects of large companies I also have to claim a certain amount of responsibility. Many of us on Slash do. We wanted this brave new world where the Internet made things possible like improving the lot of others in the world. Well, now our visions are becoming a reality... but the utopian vision we had has a down side that we're all feeling.

Get used to it, or complain about it... but we can't prevent it. Not now. Not ever.