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.'"

Comments

Monitoring software

[rsilvergun]

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?

Automating Management

[jacobsm]

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.

Re:If they are automating tech support, then good.

[Savage-Rabbit]

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.

Great, now all the tech support "guys" are going to sound like Professor Hawking.

Relax, you only have to start worrying when the tech support "guys" start sounding like HAL 9000.

It's not technology that's the problem

[MikeRT]

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.

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.

Re:Automation is the future

[Scottingham]

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.