Slashdot Mirror
Tech Sector Slow To Hire
Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"
I read through all the posts so far, but decided to make your my entry point.
Why would a company train an American worker who they will have to pay lets say 85k/year... then they can pay someone in India/China lets say 25k who is more willing to work harder?
It's a very serious question that sadly both the left and the right seem to completely ignore.
Everybody likes to export. I'm sure Americans feel proud that Intel, AMD, Microsoft, RedHat, TI... are world leaders that export to the world. Free trade like that is wonderful isn't it?
Indeed, the old arrangement went something like this: :P
The west will do all the fun and interesting work and sell such products to the developing world
The developing world will do all the work we don't want to do (farming, manufacturing, textiles...) and sell it to us.
Sounds like a match made in heaven.
To simplify it. We trade then CPUs and they give us coffee beans
Yet, what happens when we in the west really can't do anything much better than the developing world? Hey, I hate to break it to you, but it is unreasonable to expect a western person to be much 'better' than a person from India or China. Education is highly overrated as an economic advantage. Education is really just another commodity.
Yet, we look at the assumptions. I live in Canada and our liberal party sat around signing free trade deals, running trade ventures to China... always telling us the people that if we just invest in education, we can still compete! I've come to call it the cult of education. A brand of the progressive religion. They have an undying faith that education solves everything.
economic competition? answer: more education!
crime? answer: more education!
innovation? answer: more education!
family problems? answer: more education! specially ECE!
It's like a religion. I a Muslim and when I used to go to the mosque we would hear the same thing. The solution to all problem is Islam! Why can't we just get everyone to believe and obey and be a good Muslim. Then everything will be good! It's the same crap. If only we could education everybody then all the problems are solved... except they're not.
Canada is one of the most educated countries in the world... yet we don't do anything with all that education. We don't have a lot of great companies. We really don't invent a whole lot. To this day, Canada is really still a natural resource country like Australia. We lucked out with oil!
And so we come back to the reality... that we must deal with reality.
Education is a commodity. When enough people are educated, there is no real benefit in more education or training. You/Me are really no smarter than people in India and China *in the long haul*. There is no intrinsic reason me/you should be paid more than someone in India and China. Correspondingly there is no intrinsic reason we should be more productive or better than someone in India/China.
So we're left with questions about free trade. We have 6 billion people in the world. How many do you need to be education to build all the technology we need? Here's a hint... not many. Since education is a commodity, it will go the lowest bidder... Since we in the west have refused to accept reality, we'll keep falling. We have a minimum wage here that people we trade with don't have to respect. That follows the entire wage chain. The progressive cult of education keeps feeding us the crap that we can be more innovative if we just spend more on education and we can still make lots of money... ignoring the realities of life.
Look, a textile worker, waiter, warehouse worker, farm worker... are all jobs society needs done and they should be jobs a society should be willing to do. We're out of whack if we think our education is so special. This is the real imbalance in our society. It is plain and simply not.
The real issues are those of free trade and wage distortions. I get really angry when I hear people say thin