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Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated
Jason Koebler writes Yahoo announced [Tuesday] it would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Meanwhile, tech companies are beginning to see that many of the jobs it has outsourced can be automated, instead. Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: "The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now," Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings, said. "Companies are seeing that automated replacements are getting to be 'good enough.'"
"...there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now,"
How about automating jobs here now. Wouldn't it be just as cheap, more secure and faster to ship if you kept automation in your own country?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
If those are tech support jobs, then they might as well automate them. The best I can tell those workers they hire over there have essentially no skills in the products they are supporting. They basically just read what the computer screen tells them to say or ask. As a customer, I'd honestly rather be talking to a machine as it would give me the same answers but might actually be at little easier to understand.
I always figured that software developers would eventually create simpler and simpler programming languages that make it easier and easier to write code. With the side effect being that eventually the languages would be created by programs and that once this occurs a closed loop system of evolution is created. And AI would be born from it.
Oh, back on topic. Software has been getting more and more advanced. It was only a matter of time till software engineers obsoleted themselves. Yet we still have to deal with car dealers because of state laws.
The monitoring software where my buddy works has gotten good enough they don't need teams of analysts to watch over things anymore. Most of the problems I see are caused by cutting corners in programming because there's not computer power. As computer power gets cheaper and cheaper that all goes away, and those tech jobs go with them.
In the 80s Computers and automation were suppose to free us for a 20 hour work week. Now we're pushing 50-60 hour work weeks because the only thing it's done is increase competition for the few jobs left. Productivity America's up something like 80% but real wages are way don. I'm not quite ready to become a Luddite yet but I'd like to see some of this increased productivity show up in my pay. But law of supply and demand says the more work I can get down the less it's worth.
Heck, I'll just come out and say it: Can I has socialism?
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Read the articles, both Yahoo and IBM cuts sound like downsizing rather than automation.
I hope the "automation" they're talking about in other parts of the article doesn't really mean "Do-It-Yourself". For example, grocery store self-checkout lines are essentially using my labor (at my labor rate) as an inefficient checkout clerk. I don't want to be a checkout clerk, and would gladly pay for a few minutes of a clerk's time if it gets me through the line a couple of minutes faster.
I'm all for automating management with decision makers powered by random number generators. It'll be more honest and more likely to come up with the right decision.
The outshining example set by those call centres can be replaced with a bucket of shit. A real problem needs the one person at the main office to fix it. The rest of the time you either have a dunce which doesn't understand or a soul dead real person unable to help as the software they have gives no options.
Here is xkcd documentation to back this up....
http://xkcd.com/806/
It solves many problems. It will be interesting to see what happens when robots and intelligent systems go consumer. Personal robots and personal digital assistants.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
After all, this will end all of the hassle of dealing with real people.
Maybe they can get virtual people to buy all of their products.
Virtual customers will be the next growth industry
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Could give some new relevance to the old, "Go away or I will replace you with a shell script" sticker!
This interesting mini-documentary by CGP Grey is totally relevant: Humans Need Not Apply.
A good example of first being outsourced and then automated is telemarketing.
The low level lead generation has been replaced by robocalls. This blight on the phone system makes automated calls very inexpensive for the caller and more expensive for the receiver both in call plan time usage (unless unlimited) and resources (time) of the receiver.
If left unchecked, my phone will go to an automated auto attendant instead of being answered for non white list callers.
It's a sad day when you need a spam filter on your phone to sort your calls for you. The cost is real calls are delayed costing everyone time. I hope robocalls are outlawed soon except for op in, such as appointment reminders.
The truth shall set you free!
It's inflation. Based on a simple inflation calculator I found on DuckDuckGo (usinflationcalculator.com), a $100k salary in 1980 would be the equivalent of making about $288,655.34 in 2014. Technology didn't cause the purchasing power of a dollar to collapse nearly 66% over the last 34 years. Federal reserve and congressional policy are the direct culprits. You don't have to be "anti-government" to pin much of this squarely on the federal government and Federal Reserve.
Between inflationary policies and allowing nearly unrestricted (even incentivizing by tax law) exploitation of arbitrage, we've see various government policies annihilate all of the savings and benies that technology would have brought to our economy. Now add on top of that the fact that we have a policy of heavy immigration which, when seen through the lens of the law of supply and demand, is essentially another assault on domestic wages (hint: adding millions of immigrants increases the domestic labor pool, which means that yes kids, wage competition will only increase).
Instead of Socialism, I would suggest reading up on Distributism. It is essentially Capitalism reforged through Catholic social teaching, so among many things it is free market-centric, but strongly pro-labor and pro entrepreneur.
I was more curious about the second link in the article as I was hoping for some examples of what was being automated. Instead the article was just another example of poor technology journalism: the author used a lot of words without writing anything of substance. It only spoke to the economic impact which is, I daresay, fairly obvious. I'm hoping technology journalism isn't devolving over all.
It reminds me of this poster. If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The problem with that scenario is that unless the machine has to call over a person then I have never gone through a self checkout line that is slower than going through a clerk's line. A clerk has zero incentive to get you through the line as quickly as possible.
I found the self check out is used by LOWER priced grocers as a way to cut costs and offer lower prices. Supermarkets without self checkout are often much more expensive to provide that personal touch. Natures, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, etc are examples of upscale markets without self checkout. Walmart appears to be the exception in haveing no self checkout and offering lower prices. Communities have a beef with the low rates they pay their staff, but they do have paid staff instead of self check out.
The truth shall set you free!
You can't automate enterprise level support. As an infrastructure admin (network, server, workstation), if I'm having to call tech support, it's going to be tier 3 and tier 2 in rare circumstances. Basically, the GAL list requires fixing via ADSI Edit or working around a firewall bug with a non-public release of firmware. In all instances including those two examples, support was in India.
Life is not for the lazy.
A recent Oxford study shows that 702 jobs or close to half the current workforce can be automated over the next few decades: http://artificial-intelligence... A nice solution to keep human employment might be to reduce our work weeks: http://artificial-intelligence...
One day corps might get their dream and have no wage bill at all, but then no one will have any jobs to get any money to buy their stuff so where will they be then? Dead and gone ready for the whole system to reset.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
walmart has self checkout
it was started, then stopped, then it's started again
Article is weak because it generalizes Yahoo's experience to all tech companies. Yahoo is in crash-and-burn mode, trying anything to survive. Apple hasn't changed its business practices. Microsoft just opened a Canadian center to exploit cheap labor. I don't see a trend. IBM is in crash-and-burn mode, too, so you can't use them to back up Yahoo's experience.
Article is also weak because it conflates technical support, software development, and hardware manufacturing. The author doesn't seem to know what he is talking about, even suggesting robot automation can take over tech support. Confusing.
FTFY.
If you're employed, it's not your productivity, it's not America's productivity. If the means of production (and productivity) are not owned by you, then you don't benefit. If your employer's investment in capital improvements can make the next guy just as productive, it's not about you.
... "FUCK YOU, YOU GODDAM MACHINE!!!," please wait for the next available ....
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
In the UK, Tesco discovered the advantage of 'virtual customers'. There's recently been a hoo-ha because this involved £250,000,000 in profits that, it turns out, were also virtual... or, as others might put it, fraudulently invented. ;)
On so many levels does this statement show a lack. Is humanity so desparte to hear words?
I'm waiting on "support" there for over 3 weeks that should have taken 3 minutes. Quality matters.
First, Yahoo's move was that of consolidation. The engineers were asked to either relocate to the US office, or move out.
Next, Yahoo had a series of terrible acquisitions in the US which had brought them zero revenue. They had given out these projects to the folks over here to run. Finally, they decided that they were better off not running them to make products better. Very recently, Yahoo turned profitable after Alibaba's IPO.
Third, the engineers who were asked to move out were amazing people by themselves. They would be well capable of creating automated analysis algorithms running at a decent scale (Yahoo's India Datacenter had quite a few thousand machines) - and if there was a need to throw an Axe on employee costs, that would have landed in Sunnyvale first.
I hope people stop taking any articles from Jason Kobler seriously, and focus on real news.
Because it took about a decade for the effect of going off the gold-exchange system wherein the dollar was at least pegged to a fixed unit of gold to really start hitting home. Then the printing presses started and suddenly inflation started to kick into high gear, especially 2000, onward. Since the early 1970s, the US dollar has been getting systematically hammered by federal policy and is it a surprise when eventually wage inflation can no longer match the inflation inflicted by federal policy?
But I suspect you are really a Keynsian who wants to believe in magic multipliers, animal spirits and all that horse shit.
And as I said, inflation is not the only culprit. In tandem with inflationary policies, we've incentivized the exploitation of arbitrage on multiple fronts, labor being one of the biggest. There's also the fact that this country continues to absorb immigrants despite the fact that all net job creation for about the last 15 years has gone to immigrants.
Of course, even if we aggressively clamped down on arbitrage and deported most immigrants who aren't particularly valuable (ie O1 candidates), our inflationary policies would still be raping the lower class and middle class. You can add half to a full trillion dollars a year to the money supply and wonder why an increasingly swamped money supply is buying less and less even domestically.
It will never end until it comes crashing down because the current system allows both the rich to prosper (they have the best access to the newly issued debt-currency from the Fed and get the labor benies) and it's also increasingly how we fund the welfare-warfare state.
Oh, I've had great enterprise support. Their knowledgeable, and quick to follow up in response. Consumer product support is a fucking joke however. No, my problem is understanding their thick Indian accent through a VOIP connection over a cell phone. It's very fatiguing.
Life is not for the lazy.
for the offshore workers who displaced American workers to know that their value is now being measured by whether it can now be done by a TI-84 calculator or a resurrected TRS-80 if a human is still required in some capacity. They will now know how it feels to have to compete for jobs managing their automated overlords for even less meager earnings than before.
And, one has to wonder how far the shockwave will go. Will engineering and middle-management type jobs now be offshored (something that, historically, has not worked well) further compounding the problem in the company's home country or will a job "firewall" protect those jobs while driving the economies of the offshore workforce into the dumper? Or, will it encourage the need for the countries with the offshore workforce to adjust and create strong, viable companies that directly complete with their former overseas employers?
I foresee that we will see companies opening new offices overseas to directly compete with local companies as a result of the new global economy that this level of automation will usher in.
It's going to be interesting.
Higher tier support wasn't what was getting outsourced to low level CSRs in India.
Based on all of the lazy Indian "developers" I've had to deal with this can only be a good thing.
Do they know the difference between "they're" and "their"?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
My experiences with support for commercial products has been much worse than the support I've enjoyed from open source communities. It seems like all they want to do is accept money to allow their customer to check the box to say there is support for audit purposes. It's cynical, and the fact it can be relegated entirely to IVR is more proof.
Now, if they would put fewer, better qualified people into a moderated forum that would be an improvement and save money, but then it would expose too many precious secrets
Nullius in verba
In the enterprise, there isn't a need for L1 support (L1 in the conventional sense.) Either it is a failed piece of hardware, or it is a bug, and the admin has done the proper searches, chased down error codes, and used every tool from WireShark to gdb to pinpoint the issue. At the minimum, it will be a level of people who are going to either have a workaround or they are going to be putting a ticket into JIRA or whatever tracking system for the devs to handle. "Turn it off and back on" doesn't cut it in the enterprise [1].
[1]: Except for one case where a hardware vendor actually had an issue with a timer on one of their HBA cards that would cause problems and random crashes after 400 or so days uptime. The fix? Complete power cycle (meaning pulling the cords to the chassis and letting the box sit until the capacitors completely discharged) every year.
Technology didn't cause the purchasing power of a dollar to collapse nearly 66% over the last 34 years. Federal reserve and congressional policy are the direct culprits. You don't have to be "anti-government" to pin much of this squarely on the federal government and Federal Reserve.
The alternative too a modest amount (2%) of inflation isn't much better.
I would suggest you read Piketty's "Capitalism in the 21st Century" for a good history lesson on income, wealth, the concentration of riches, and the rise, fall, and re-rise of inequality.
You may not agree with his suggested solutions in Part Four, but the first three Parts are wonderful for a historical anaylisys (with data going back a couple of hundred years, where available).
Inflation may be suck-y, but the alternatives are probably worse.
A lot of that departure was driven by the political climate in the 1980s, which was to exact vengance on those industries and their supporters. The finishing blow came when the opposition encouraged non-assimilating immigrants to flood in. To a limited extent, that's playing out in current-day United States, except through various actions.
What Thatcher (and the financial interests she enabled) couldn't kill, the opposition managed to finish off through importation of non-assimilating individuals from the Third World.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
. Driving a truck requires many, sometimes split second decisions and requires processing multiple events happening at once. An 80,000 pound semi is absolutely lethal if the driver loses control and is unable to regain control. Imagine a software or hardware glitch on an 80k semi carrying hazardous material .... you have a scenario likely to kill, maim, or effect thousands of people.
I'm sure a lot of flight engineers (the third guy that used to be in the cockpit behind the pilot and co-pilot) though that as well. I'm sure a lot of pilots where skeptical of auto-pilots too.
I think "auto-drive" is coming to trucks (and cars), but it will probably be mainly used on long-haul highways, just like most use of the auto-pilot is used in the "cruise" phase of flight over 10,000'/3000m. Driving in more (sub)urban areas will mostly be manual.
I wonder where they think people will get the money to buy their products? Even a right-wing nut like Henry Ford understood that he was creating customers by paying a decent wage. If American corporations keep outsourcing and automating jobs, soon enough, no one in the US will have any money to buy their wares.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
'It's All Thatcher's Fault' - the battle cry of the British left for decades now.
The nationalized industries of the 70s were a complete disaster zone, paying high wages to low skilled workers to produce things no-one wanted to buy because the quality was so low. But, yes, obviously it's Thatcher's fault for closing them down.
There always seems to be a pendulum in the cheap labor vs. automation decision. When a lot of manufacturing jobs were being outsourced to China, many looked at what those jobs were and saw that they were very repetitive and low skill jobs. They would then get a puzzled look on their face. They get that a Chinese person can do the same task cheaper than an American person, but why have a person do it at all? This job is perfect for automation! The reality, though, is that many Chinese people toiling away is still cheaper than designing, building and maintaining an automated system (i.e. robot). Of course, that still didn't stop someone from trying to figure out how to automate such a task, and now the costs of automating have significantly dropped. At the same time, as the economy of China is stimulated, the quality of life and cost of living rise, so rises the wages. Automation then looks like the cost effective option. The cycle will continue with the next cheap labor market and task that is only newly and expensively automated, and so on and so forth.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
...The finishing blow came when the opposition encouraged non-assimilating immigrants to flood in...What Thatcher (and the financial interests she enabled) couldn't kill, the opposition managed to finish off through importation of non-assimilating individuals from the Third World.
Am I confused or are you? How did a "flood" of "non-assimilating individuals" kill heavy industry in 1980s Britain? I don't believe that many of the UK's mines, steel works, car factories and or ship yards employed many immigrants, but non-unionised manufacturing (which did actually employ significant numbers of immigrants) saw dramatic growth throughout Thatcher's tenure. I'm afraid that it was the indigenous, working class, lifetime union jobsworths that killed their own future.
If you fancy indulging in a little xenophobia, please do it intelligently. You might also find it helpful to ground your statements in facts rather than random conjecture and mindless prejudice, too.
Start with a quarter of the entire workforce. I will bet you it makes zero difference given the shit level of quality, management, skills and customer sat they all strive for now. After that quarter is chop off another 10% of the remainder EVERY quarter. Go that way for 13 or 14 straight quarters until 20-25% of the original workforce remains. Half of the IT companies will be out of business or purchased by someone else. The other half will suffer a steep drop in customer sat but it won't matter since everyone will be the same and there will be no customer advantage in switching.
I get a call every week by a friendly Indian who fixes all my Windows virus issues.
The funny part is that the Lefists whining about Thatcher closing down the coal mines will usually then go on to claim that we have to eliminate coal power because Global Warming. Many will also claim that allowing cops to ride bikes when they haven't passed their proficiency test is a Health and Safey violation, but sending men down coal mines where they'll die at forty from crippling lung disease is OK.
It's more the middle group of grocery stores that use them. The ones that pretend to be the lowest and perform the most manipulative marking towards its customers. The actual lowest priced grocery stores don't have them. These are the stores that don't have loyalty cards and only have at most 2-3 different bottles of ketchup (store brand, mainline brand, and a fancy version) compared to the other stores that have 15 different version of ketchup. If your grocery store provides discounts to card holders, it isn't one of the cheapest stores.
If a tech job can be automated then it shouldn't have existed in the first place.
I saw that Hawking is going to be on the upcoming Pink Floyd CD. If so we can compare it to "Keep Talking" from "The Division Bell" from about 20 years ago.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
I support some sort of negative income tax. Primarily one that would be like...
(Poverty Level - Federal AGI) / 2 = new credit (not like the EIC, which is based on earned income only; this would affect the lazy, unemployed, and unemployable)
If those are tech support jobs, then they might as well automate them.
I think it would look something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
YES! Go ahead and automate everything. Just give me a call when it breaks and all comes crashing around your ears. I can assure you the army of consultants I will send you will quickly eats away at the savings.
If you really think about it for a moment the whole cloud computing movement is not really about improving productivity or the user's experience. It's about turning everything into a cheap commodity and cutting your workforce and keeping the cash. Big companies are learning hard lessons about data security and availability right now because of their obsession to save costs and drive up profits. What they save in labor often they lose big time with a loss of credibility. Ask Target or Home Depot about people shopping elsewhere to keep their personal information secure.
One day the technology will catch up but it's not there yet. Instead of using this technology to be evil why not use it in a more constructive way? Ah yes that's right the people making the decisions are cut throat scumbags that can only derive pleasure by screwing over others so they can amass useless trinkets to fill their broken souls.
I lost my crummy systems admin job to automation. I made lemons out of lemonade. I now own a thriving consulting company and I derive a LOT of pleasure by giving greedy companies exactly what they want and watching it eventually blow up in their faces. Think of me like the evil genie of the computing industry. Anybody need anything automated? I'm always looking for new victims clients.
"'It's All Thatcher's Fault' - the battle cry of the British left for decades now." - the battle cry of the British right for decades now."
that since the same amount of wealth is being generated with 1/3 less people, but society at large is no better off. You did good to stem the worst of it, and you should be proud. But now we've got however many people in poverty with little or no way out. It's a race to the bottom, with you and Taiwan both eventually losing. Maybe you'll die before that happens. Maybe you're kids will too. What about your Grandkids? If they're not the factory owners do they have any future? Does anyone but the guys at the top culling 1/3?
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The first image that comes to mind is Chris Dowd in "The IT Crowd" as "Roy" who's first response to any Help Desk call was "Did you tried turning it off and on?". As the show progressed, he automated his phone to answer with a reel to reel tape recording asking the same!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
How can these companies justify needing more H1Bs?