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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.'"
Wouldn't it be just as cheap, more secure and faster to ship if you kept automation in your own country?
At some point it's going to come down to the cost of electricity.
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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.
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.
And reliability, and maintenance costs, and bandwidth costs, and probably things I'm overlooking as an outsider to the jobs.
That's enough to make it a complex system with multiple solutions for local minima.
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"
Isn't this what is promised by OpenStack k basically autonomous systems using Puppet, Chef, PowerShell scripts?
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
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.
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...
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.
To a certain extent, yes. However some functions cannot or should not be fully automated. There are reasons why we still have human beings flying planes. I am an ex-IT guy as I drive an 18 wheeler now. You hear about automation attempts at self driving cars and trucks but a self driving 80,000 pound semi going 65 mph is not a good idea. 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. Automation can and should be more of an assist rather than a takeover. I could see automation for trucks enforcing safe speeds, following distances, warnings, etc. Even Airbus and Boeing recognize that only so much can and should be done automated.
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.
Can we just grow and insert more humans into the power grid?
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.
I have little doubt that computers will be able to drive big-rig trucks not too far into the future. All of the examples you gave sounds like it would be better handled by a capable computer. Split second? How about sub-millisecond? Multiple events happening at once? Humans are notoriously bad at doing that. Hardware glitch? Like sleep deprivation?
Ever see that Volvo ad of two semi's going in reverse at 40+MPH and staying within 3 feet of each other? Do you think people could do that?
Of course, we aren't there yet. It will happen though, and highway safety will improve.
Taxation is kind of hard to see for phone support, since it's a cost center, not a revenue center.
You just aren't being very creative. If you want a little bit of profit to be made overseas, create a subsidiary in India that charges your company for phone support. Make sure the price is high enough that your subsidiary is making a profit, and you have just shifted some profit overseas.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Generally speaking, we *don't* have human beings flying planes. Autopilots do it. We still have human beings sitting in cockpits because of a) liability paranoia and b) unions.
I have no doubt we will....not too long after I predict we will have the great war against the masses and we shall then see what kind of society (if any) we have when its over.
The singularity is coming folks, those in power know this which is why there is such a large fascist shift in such a short period as the hoarders will try to keep their place at the top of the food chain at ALL costs including millions of human lives. What is a singularity? It is a moment in time which radically and forever changes society and our world, for previous examples see the printing press,steam engine, automobile, airplane. Once these technologies were introduced to the world the way of life planet wide was affected, reading went from an activity only for the elite to expected of all, the steam engine allowed a ship to travel across the ocean on set schedules instead of at the mercy of the currents and allowed factories to increase their output by quadruple or more overnight, and of course the airplane changed everything from freight to warfare in the blink of an eye history wise.
But for the first time in history we are reaching a point where the poor are no longer required for society to move forward because the machines will be able to do all the tasks from the picking of the food to the delivery to the consumer. Its the dark truth of John Henry which was NOT man beating the machine, but the fundamental truth that a man can work until he drops dead from exhaustion and the machine will keep on going, never getting tired, and more importantly for the elite never asking for pay. The end game of capitalism is that one shall own all and the rest shall have none and we are already a LONG way toward this goal, with the top 86 families getting nearly 90% of every dime created.....so what happens when they have reached 100% and you are no longer required?
And THAT will be the question which I truly believe will be at the core of World War III, because we can already see what the elite want to happen based upon their radical shift towards fascism and open and very blatant attacks upon the poor and whats left of the middle class, and that is an iron boot followed by slow death by starvation. It should be obvious to all by now that ultimately capitalism by its very design MUST die, because a world where 86 families control 90% of the capital while labor is replaced by machines means the very core of capitalism, trading one's physical or mental labor for capital, will soon no longer have even the pretense of functionality. Education WILL NOT SAVE YOU as the world simply won't need a billion engineers and rocket scientists, a handful of think tanks owned by the elite shall do.
What this next singularity will decide is which future the human race shall face, a Star Trek "socialism for all" where the majority have everything given to them without any labor required (because again their labor will be worthless as the robot will do it better/faster/cheaper) or the world of Soylent Green, where a handful of elite live like gods while the masses live in hell holes and slowly starve and any attempt to change this results in the iron boot upon your neck. I would say its obvious which way the majority of the %1 want it which is the latter, and this is why I fully expect to see WW III in my lifetime.
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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.
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Sigh. Not the old 'Ford paid more so his workers could buy Ford cars!' claptrap again?
Ford paid high wages because it allowed him to hire the best workers, and reduced costs by reducing turnover. If I remember correctly, he had about 400% employee turnover the year before he dramatically raised wages, and about 0% the year after.
Not only that, but a big portion of the increased wages were a bonus that depended on satisfactory performance in house visits. Yup, if the factory rep decided that you weren't keeping your home clean enough, or thought you were drinking too much off the job, poof went a big portion of your comp.
For capitalism humans are required not only for labor but also as consumers. Therefore the elites require to find a way to distribute money to the rest otherwise their system will collapse. However, I have the distinct impression that they do not know that.