Slashdot Mirror
America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware
New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"
We can eat it, wear it, breathe it... What the hell kind of society will this be if everyone just writes software all day?
increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders
How is increasing the number of workers supposed to decrease the unemployment rate?
We're already farming out software.
It's not as if anyone with the means, i.e., money, is trying to reverse the trend.
This doesn't even pass the bellylaugh test.
--
BMO
It is far less expensive to have a group overseas develop software. Not better, just cheaper. The same economics apply, but unlike hardware there are zero tariffs or import taxes to pay (not that there are many for hardware).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
... if we don't seriously fund education for the next generation, and stop thinking we can skimp on that commitment to pay for tax breaks for the rich and extended wars of choice.
Check your premises.
Although Apple didnt invent this category of devices, they figured out how to make and sell tons of them in the last five years. Hardware innovation is very much alive in the USA.
Paul Krugman correctly points out in today NY Times column that Apple has 45,000 high compensated US employees and 700,000 poorly compensated Asian sub-contractors. Apple does create lots of jobs, with mixed results.
Says the man posting to a computer on a network whoich started as a DARPA project.
Seems that the future of USA is in trivial patents, copyrighting culture, making that lasting forever and pushing that to the rest of the world. Why develop if you already get paid if someone anywhere tries to use common sense to solve a problem in the only possible way?
Software is one of the products most amenable to offshoring. Cost savings of manufacturing in China has to be balanced against logistic and shipping costs that fluctuate over time, but software has no such factor to offset. It's also a market rife with potential IP controversy (with patents, it's hard to get started before getting smacked by a big player with tons of patents, without patents it may still be hard to get started as a big player rips off your work, copyright can get messy regardless of patent situation).
We don't need more work visas, good local developers are in no short supply.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
We just need to do away with old labor intensive methods of manufacturing.
If we mechanize enough then the labor costs become irrelevant and we can bring the manufacturing home.
To that end, we should invest heavily in additive manufacturing and other technologies that will let us leap frog the competition while rendering their cheap labor irrelevant.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Should be "You must pay this person slightly above the going rate for software developers where you are," thus taking away the incentive to bring in foreign workers only because they're cheaper, and leaving the incentive to bring them in when you can't find a domestic worker to do the same thing.
There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode
high-speed pizza delivery
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Less military research, more research that we actually benefit from.
Like jet engines, rocket engines, the Internet and Super Glue?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
[Jobs insisted to Obama] that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.
Presumably his point was that he wanted to build factories in the US, but regulations and unnecessary costs prevented him. I don't know what regulations those were, but certainly not all regulations are good.
Obviously we won't move all manufacturing back to the US, we'll never compete with Vietnam at textile manufacturing, but it seems reasonable that we can do a lot of manufacturing here.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Is it because workers are treated better or is it because they are cheaper?
How is it that The Netherlands is the world's 2nd. largest exporter of agricultural products in value after the US, is it because the country is so blessed with it's climate and available space?
I'm convinced the USofA can be a profitable exporter of manufactered goods and produce providing their managers start looking at the long term instead of just this quarters profits.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Chinese people aren't less than us - they are people too. Understand that as their economy improves from doing all that work that "we don't want" ours is going into the toilet. Realistically, no matter how demeaning, unglamorous, and tedious those jobs are, THEY HAVE TO BE DONE, and you can't always count on someone else to do them. If we want our economy to prosper, we have to have people willing to do all jobs that need to be done. Otherwise, it's just a matter of time before the Chinese start selling their stuff elsewhere because our currency has no value.
A "service economy" simply isn't going to work. Other countries will NOT keep sending us cheap trinkets for us to sit over here programming and making burgers for each other all day long. At this point the only reason the US economy is still afloat is because we still manage to have a large agricultural presence. If not for that, the whole country would likely be bankrupt by now.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
100% this.
been out of work for well over a year. have 30ish years in various engineering areas (mostly coding and doing design at hardware and software level). I can speak well, I have a killer resume of who's who, I'm a bay area person right in the middle of 'things' and yet I cannot get interviews (lately) or offers (a year or so ago).
I don't think its me. I continue to work on tech things (I started my own company, actually; but it will be a long time before it makes money) but I don't see american companies reaching out to embrace people like me. they know I'm old, experienced and can tell BS from non-BS. I'm not abusable and I expect fair treatment.
therefore, I'm blacklisted. a very talented and experienced engineer but effectively put on a 'not to hire' list because of my age (medical goes thru the roof once you hit a magic number) and the fact that they don't HAVE to have an experienced guy around. they prefer having abusables they can command around. (oh, and the top level execs like to have the same thing in their lower level staff, so its all incestuous, in that way.)
when I was in the middle of the hey-day, I saw the quality of h1b's we got. they all sucked. sucked badly! but they were cheap and their clocks would reset if we fired them (you h1b's know about this clock shit...). they worried about being sent home so they do as they are told!
dammit.
we need unions. again. our corp overloards have, again, gotton out of control. instead of the railways and 'hire some cheap irish' from a hundred years ago, we're not doign the same kind crap again and looking to cut out the local born guy and pick the foreign one since he's easier to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF.
sickening. not at all a good trend, guys. I hope enough people see this before it gets too late.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But they could have evolved in a very different way. Imagine if, for example, it had been invented by a cable TV company - quite possible, as they already control a physical infrastructure that they could build upon. What would it look like then? For a start, server and client would not be equal: There would be no need for them to build it that way, and it would be more efficient to rely on centralised server equipment at their offices. There would be no need for the end-user machines to talk to each other - they only need to talk to the servers, so probably wouldn't even have globally routable addresses. Web browsing and email would still end up working exactly the same, but it'd also be far less democratic: You couldn't easily send files to a friend without going through a server run by your ISP (Which would probably have all manner of filtering), you couldn't run your own webserver or mailserver without paying very high business rates, you couldn't host your own multiplayer games, and you couldn't get involved in network software development at all without buying some multi-thousand-dollar equipment usually purchased only by the service providers. It'd also be far more assymetric, and have anti-copying measures built in, and likely only allow you to connect the equipment your service provider has explicitly deemed acceptable - like the US phone system was back before the big breakup, when you couldn't buy a phone but had to lease an approved model from the service provider.
Or perhaps the internet would originate in academia, where... well, it'd look much as it does today, really. Because that is where historically our internet came from: Born of the military, adopted and raised by academic institutions, and set loose upon the world like a sheltered teenager suddenly invited to the wrong type of party.
This guy wants to trade all of manufacturing for a few software jobs? I don't know what koolaid he is drinking but it must a good one.
Software has the same problem as that other US product, entertainment content, it can be easily duplicated. 1 car designer == 100 factory workers making 101 jobs.
1 software developer == 1 job. Sure, that salary of that software developer might fund a hotdog stand but if you think that a pyramid with software developers at the top if going to have base of 360.000.000.000 people... you obviously haven't got a proper grasp of how much a software developer makes. MS is NOT going to safe the economy.
It ain't sex, in an Officer and a Gentleman, the steady (used to be) reliable job in a carton making factory is looked down upon, a place to escape through a husband with a dream job... BUT in reality THIS is what a NORMAL country economy runs on. Yes there are exceptions, oil nations can do quite well without any real economy. Not just the Arab nations, Scotland is doing very well for itself now it can keep the proceeds from its oil and gas industry and not fund the entire UK with it. Scotland would be in the drain IF it wasn't for oil and gas.
But the US isn't an oil or any other resource rich country, it like my own country Holland NEEDS a solid, boring, unsexy production base. England pre-WW2 thought it could shift farming away from its own land and outsource it completely. It worked... except it didn't. Many thought that it was the u-boats that stopped it but the basic economy also took a nosedive and it started the recession in England that has simply never stopped since, the country is a shadow of its former self with massive un-employment. The only reason figures aren't higher is because non-jobs such as burger flipper are used to keep people out of the official stats. There are entire cities where the norm has been for generations to not have a job.
Replace all of manufacturing with mere software developement? Software development that can be done anywhere and where 1 persons labour can be infinitely distributed?
It is as sane as basing the entire US economy on content production like movies and music... oh wait, some people actually suggest this is a good idea.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of money is made in these industries but the way the pyramid of supply and demand is structured simply means that it doesn't provide a pay check for an entire country.
Idiots that come up with ideas like this probably look at the food chain and think that if only lions learned to eat plants you can cut out the middle man... NOT HOW IT FUCKING WORKS.
Even the Nazi Ford understood that if you want the people to buy your cars they need to earn salaries that allow them to buy cars. It is not that complex. Who is going to buy all that software? Chinese workers working for slave wages? The box shifters at Walmart?
But iPads sell like hot cakes... no. they don't. iPads sell incredibly badly... gaming software is even worse... "what" you say?
Apple sold 14 million iPads during 2010, WORLD WIDE... that is a market of 6 billion. That isn't a very good market penetration at all compared to something as simple as carton boxes. How many boxes did you buy yourself? If you bought your iPad online, 2 at least. Of course the profit on that box was far lower but the number of US households fed through simple boxes is far far higher then that iPad that came in a box from china and was only handled for seconds at time by minimum wage box-shifters.
That is part of the problem, it ain't just the production of iPads that has gone to China, it is the box making, the plastic bag making, the packing into shipping containers... it doesn't leave much of the price of a iPad to be earned by US hands. When a factory for making carton boxes shift shores, the machine making jobs, the wood cutting jobs, that cafeteria fan in the parking lot, they all go to.
This ain't fantasy, Manchester has experienced what Detroit is going through now for decades AND NOTHI
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have read some insane posts on the internet before, people totally disconnected from reality but this one is so far beyond insanity that it requires the invention of new words.
You think that a simple device that can spray ONE sort of plastic is going to change into a device that can make complex multi-compound materials EVEN FOOD in twenty years?
In twenty years we barely gone from spraying ink to spraying plastic. Or the other way around from devices cutting solid blocks into shapes to spraying materials into solid blocks.
And you think this is going to compete anytime soon with mass production? These maker bots are nice for some form of prototyping. Mass production turns out such plastic forms in mili-seconds, not hours.
If you wanted to make even a small lego set out of this you need days. And you want to use it for the production of a TV or even a car? What about clothes?
And even then, IF makers bots were being used, why would the location of these production machines needing an army of operators NOT be outsourced to china just as maker bots are right now?
Seriously kid, get medical help.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum
Spectrum in the US is allocated through an arcane, bureaucratic process that takes years to balance the needs of the government (NTIA) and the needs of individuals and businesses (FCC). Broadband For America, which aims to reallocate 500 MHz of "wireless" spectrum for commercial use will likely cost the DoD alone high tens to hundreds of billions of our tax dollars to implement. It will also take several years, due to the necessity of re-engineering of fielded equipment and software.
That spectrum which appears to be "unused" may be reserved for equipment in development, experimentation, or wartime uses. It may also be reserved for scenarios where all hell breaks loose here at home (e.g., 9-11) and the goverment can't afford to be competing with Twitter and Facebook for bandwidth.
Invenio via vel creo
By that logic, we wouldn't invent anything because people can only list inventions they've already made.
Nicely done, really.
This premise is a crock. Software is pretty easy to steal, and w/ all those FOSS licenses, freeware, shareware and similar models running around, it's pretty difficult for any company, except a few like Microsoft or Google, to make money of software. As a result, all the money made from software ain't gonna be enough to purchase the hardware needed to run it. Besides, the expertise for making hardware is still w/ Western companies: while the Chinese & Taiwanese companies may be good @ duping hardware and making it cheap, so far, they're not going to come up w/ hardware solutions that are needed going forward. Don't think that just b'cos China has produced the Loongson - that too a MIPS license - that it is suddenly innovative and capable of inventing anything. And sooner or later, the American work force has to come to terms w/ the reality that while $0.40/hr is unworkable, so is $5.00/hr if things are to be mass produced. Some manufacturing has to be shifted back to countries like America, European countries and so on.
Fact is that China's labor force can't keep sustaining the production demands on its economy @ current wage levels, and sooner or later, while some of it may be further outsourced to Africa, a lot of it will rise to levels which, while not @ par w/ the US, will still make it a lot less lucrative for manufacturing to be sent there. Also, a lot of contract manufacturers very often find themselves overloaded by demand, and are generally in a feast or famine mode. It's nothing sort of suicidal for US companies to have all their manufacturing concentrated in just one place. Good example was the recent floods in Bangkok, which caused a temporary shortage of hard drives. It makes more sense for companies to have a certain amount of in-house manufacturing to support the minimum quantities they must sell in a quarter, and then have any excess demand offloaded to contract manufacturers both in the US & abroad. They can definitely weight the distribution according to the cost differentials, but still, it makes sense not to be sole sourced.
Also, it's not in the best interests of countries like China, India, Philippines, Thailand, et al to be totally dependent on sales to the US - that way, when the US economy sinks, they too feel the heat. It makes more sense for them to support domestic demand. In fact, the US too could target some overseas markets and get exports moving.
The problem is defining the market rate. That's more or less the rule for H1Bs at the moment, but when you hire a 'software developer' the going rate includes an average of people with decades of experience writing C for embedded microcontrollers and fresh graduates writing PHP. If you're hiring someone in the first category, then the average wage that you'll be comparing the salary that you offer against will be a lot lower than the average within that subfield.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
1 ) require that any product SOLD in the united states be made under the same EPA and environmental laws we expect from our own manufactures.
2) require that any produce SOLD in the united states be made under similar OSHA and worker safety constraints, including a 40 h work week, medical benefits, unemployment benefits , and minimum wage adjusted by cost of living in that country.
3) if a countries laws do not ensure 2. The the company should bind itself to deliver those benefits to it's employees, using applicable contract law in the country it is in , or it will not be issued an import license.
Here is the reality check, we passed laws about worker safety and pay etc, because it is WRONG to treat your workers like slaves. Why should we permit the sale of things in this country that don't meet that standard.
We passed EPA and environmental laws in this country because it is WRONG to destroy the earth for future generations for nothing other then temporary profit. If it is wrong in the United states is it any less wrong in China ?
Either are laws are good laws because they are morally 'the right thing to do' in which case we have not excuse for buying things from people who do otherwise OR we should repeal those laws in this country.
Either way , if the playing field was equal on labor and cost of production due to regulation , the added shipping cost from a foreign country should make it necessarily to produce many commodity items here. Which would create massive numbers of U.S. jobs.
( it is also likely to have the bad effect in the short term of causing serious price inflation ,because all the cheap overseas products will be gone .. so you would have to phase this in slowly enough to allow everyone to adapt.)
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I'll tell you...
It's time to jump ship and get out of IT. It's about to crash. No, I don't mean .com style. I mean industry/career-wise.
I'll explain...throughout modern history, there is a tendency to tout a career choice or field as a long-term career. The truth is, it almost always fails to be and is usually done at the peak of that career's value.
There was a time that being a butcher was an excllent local career choice. Until suddenly, no one went to the local butcher as the big grocery store became the supplier (this mainly due to the advent of the automobile which made such travel inconsequential).
In the 70's there was talk of electrical engineering being the field to be. Manufacturing of electronics. In fact, IBM let Microsoft own DOS because HARDWARE was the place to be. Then that all became automated and outsourced, suddenly you can buy an entire computer for less than the operating system. How things have changed.
The two big ones mentioned now is healthcare (in particular, nursing) and software.
Let's look at nursing as I believe it's ahead of the IT curve right now. I have been amazed by how many friends I have who are back in school pursuing nursing degrees. At least 6, and I don't have that many friends. LOL
My wife is a nurse. Let me give you some insights on that career path. Her hospital won't hire any nurse without prior experience. Is this unusual? Nope, come to find out that few are. I've met a number or recently graduated nurses. They've done their four years. Made the grade. Taken on the debt with the thought that they were entering a field in which they'd be guaranteed a job and not have to worry about unemployment. It wasn't a glamorous career, it's dirty, messy and hard work. But at least they'd always have a job, right?
Well, every nurse I've met who has graduated in the past year is still trying to find a job. That's right, they've sent out resumes to dozens of hospitals. No job. As I said, my wife's hospital will only hire you if you've got a number of years of experience. Right now there are enough nursese floating around many regions that hospitals don't want to hire and train a new nurse.
Oh and yes, there are many nurse positions in certain cities and regions. Where they hired highly-paid travel nurses.
But that's changing, and it's also largely because of seasonal clientelle numbers. They don't want to add full time permanent staff. So they bring in an expensive travel nurses to cover 2-3 months when they're more likely to have higher number of patients (summer for accidents) and (holidays for heart attacks).
http://nursinglink.monster.com/benefits/articles/193-why-cant-new-nurses-find-jobs
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-07-09-1Anurses09_ST_N.htm
I expect the IT industry to soon follow the same slope...
Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.
I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.
One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.
The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.
I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!
As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...
Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?
YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.
The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?
If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The article assumes more jobs are a good thing. That is a last century concept. How many people actually want to work all day? Most people do it to get the things they really want: food, a decent home, etc. The job itself is a necessary evil, and if they could get the things they wanted without it, they would. We should aim for productivity so insanely high that people don't *have* to work for a living, just like the rich do now. Then the people who actually enjoy doing whatever it takes can take care of the remaining work.
This is the direction society has been heading in since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and obviously still has a way to go to reach that goal. Once places like India and China get developed enough, corporations will inevitably look for cheap labor elsewhere. These days that is mostly Africa, and a few other spots. Once *those* get developed, there will be no cheap labor left, and corporations will inevitably pursue automation. Who will buy their stuff then, when people get put out of work by automation? Either prices will fall due to competition, or governments will tax the remaining workers and businesses enough to pay basic subsistence for everyone else.
The alternate route is "home fabrication". Your robot gardener grows the food, the garage machine shop builds "stuff" based on downloaded plans. You still have to do a little work that can't be automated, but can otherwise goof off. It beats commuting and sitting in an office for 10 hours a day. I hope one of the above futures arrives sooner rather than later.
When I worked at Apple there was a lot of discussion about whether the company should divest itself of hardware, or at least open up the clone business. The best argument against it was to look at the market cap of Microsoft at the time, which was obviously very high, but not as much larger than Apple than it would have seemed at the time. The prevailing wisdom was that if that cap was the best Microsoft could do, and it was hard to imagine anyone with a higher success than Microsoft, then Apple would be foolish to throw all its eggs into the s/w basket. Since then Apple has succeeded making great s/w that runs on great h/w and now in fact is larger than Microsoft.
I guess for some of the same reasons I'm concerned with the suggestion that the US should emphasize s/w only and give up on the h/w market.
Yes, but an H1-B visa allows you to convert to a green-card after 3 years. It takes a while (took me another 2 years, but hey, the same company that gave me an H1B also paid for the green card, so that was fine by me).
I'm from the UK, I didn't come to the US for anything much more than the sunny CA weather and the money... The company that now employs me bought my (small) company, and one of the conditions of sale was to relocate to the Bay Area. They really didn't have to twist my arm *too* much, but there's nothing inherently superior or overly-wonderful about the software industry in the US compared to anywhere else.
There's a few very large and successful companies (more so than elsewhere) and a whole slew of smaller ones (which is the same as anywhere). On the other hand you have to offset:
- the "police state" trend (even the cops here are far more aggressive than back home, how the cop who shot a handcuffed man in the head on the BART in Oakland didn't go down for murder I'll never know) :) and the measly vacation grant.
- the TSA. One thing to say: WTF!
- the fact that there's no universal health system to speak of. Only when I'd lost the NHS did I truly understand what a blessing it is. I get a great health-plan from my employer, but given that healthcare is tied to your employer over here, that's like having a lifesaver vest that dissolves in water... Oh, and it's more expensive than the *real* lifesaver vest. Another WTF! moment
- the fact that education is so expensive over here. I'm not talking about the "best of the best", even the lowly state schools are ridiculously expensive. My wife (a JD/MBA) has only recently finished paying off her student loans and she's getting towards the harsh end of the 30-40 range. I went to one of the "best of the best" colleges in London (Imperial College, for Physics) and it cost me a grand total of £2500 over 3 years. They paid me £17,000/year to do a PhD, not the other way around.
- a minor niggle : the low number of public holidays - ones actually *observed* by companies
Now I've worked off the "golden handcuffs" my employer placed on me, the last stock options are vesting this year, and the housing market is getting to the point where my currently-underwater house is getting back to the black, I think by the end of the year it'll be good to sell. My soon-to-be-born son will be American but have English citizenship by birthright, so I'm thinking we ought to move back to the UK in the next 2-3 years (before school becomes an issue).
I've paid well over half a million dollars in taxes into the US economy over the last 7 years or so. I'm probably the sort of person the US would like to keep (at least from a fiscal perspective), but the country is on such a destructive spiral, that I can't see any way it'll be a good place to raise a child and retire in. It'll take some sweet-talking to convince my wife (who loves the Bay Area), but I honestly think the US is not a good long term strategy for me and mine.
I've been asked if I was ever going to apply for US citizenship, and I used to joke that the UK citizenship was my fall-back option. Now I don't think of it as a joke.
I'll miss the weather.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!