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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.'"
If you think you don't have time to automate more jobs, but spend most of your time fixing problems caused by lack of automation, you are mistaken.
Obligatory xkcd.
And if you don't like that one, there's this.
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.
It was a choice of eliminating 1/3 of the jobs, or have all the jobs outsourced to Taiwan. I saved 2/3 of the jobs. That's pretty easy choice.
Now what were you saying about me?