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Ask Slashdot: Moving To an Offshore-Proof Career?
New submitter sundarvenkata writes: I am sure most slashdotters (including the ones who had the I-am-an-indispensable-snowflake stance in the past) have already foreseen the writing on the wall for the future of tech professions (with IT being the worst hit) given some of the ominous news in the past few years: here, here and here. Of course, there are always the counter-arguments put forth by slashdotters that "knowing the business" or "being the best in what you do" would save one's derriere as if the offshore workers will remain permanently impaired of such skills. But I was wondering if some slashdotters could share some constructive real-life experiences of planning a transition to a relatively offshore-proof career. If you have already managed to accomplish such a career change, what was your journey and what would your advice be to other aspirants?
Either:
1. Do something someone else can't do
2. Do something that someone else won't do
Example of #1: Be the best darn $LanguageDeJour expert. But this requires lots of functioning brain cells
Example of #2: Work in places that others would turn down. This only requires lots of guts.
Although in the case of #2 last year I didn't even think twice about not considering a $200k/yr job because it was situated close to a lot of drug cartel violence in Mexico - but the work was available. On the other hand, years ago I made good money on a 6 month engineering project in Siberia and had a great time.
Currently there is a lot of money to be made in large scale engineering projects the middle east. Or recently there was a lot of money to be made in Fly-in/Fly-out work in Western Australia in the mining industry (it seems to have peaked), and possibly the fracking industry in the US. Both of these required people onsite, but the work and living conditions are sub-optimal compared to cubical land anywhere.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The question in TFS is another way of asking "How can I spend my whole working life doing the same thing without risk of change?" It's not much of an aspiration.
Better questions might be:
And there's another several hundred good questions along those lines. How to avoid your employment being outsourced is not one of them. Your life deserves greater ambitions than planned stagnation.
Service industry jobs cannot be offshored. Garbage collectors, police, housekeepers, store stockers/cashiers and other 'must be physically present' jobs cannot be offshored. Chefs, construction workers, beekeepers, doctors, plumbers, longshoremen etc...
What do you want to do?
If you are in a job that can be offshored, your best bet is networking. Not as in TCP/IP type networking, but in talking to people. If you know what you are doing and lots of people at other companies know that too, you have a much easier time finding a job. Hiring a qualified person is time consuming and expensive. If lots of people 'know a guy' and that guy is you, they don't have to go through the effort and you have industry job security even if you don't have it in your particular company.
If you aren't that good? There's always beekeeping...
Get a job that requires you physically be there. You can't outsource the fry guy to India. Then the question comes back to whether your job can be replaced by a robot or computer.
You can't find a "safe" job anymore. The best you can do is find a stable company and convince them you are indispensable.
If labour costs and skills were the same everywhere, then there'd be no risk of offshoring. So the quickest way to eliminate offshoring is to open the borders, both ways, for everyone. But the conservatives assert it'll have the whole world living like the worst of Africa or wherever, so we try hard to make sure we lose our jobs in a nice country, rather than raise the standard for the whole world.
Learn to love Alaska
Until it doesn't need to be hands on anymore.
For example, TV repairman diddn't go away because it became their jobs were offshored, they went away because TVs crashed in price so that by the time a failure occurred repair was no longer as clearly economic. ...
Leadwork - using sheets of lead soldered on roofs to waterproof - has largely gone away due to the introduction of fibreglass and membrane films which do the same job vastly more cheaply.
Leaded glasswork - piecing together large panes from small bits of glass went away when techniques for making larger glass came around.
Lath and plaster construction went away when wallboard came in.
While there may always be a need for some services to be provided locally - don't assume that the jobs required for that service will remain constant.
For someone beginning their career, and going into building, a clear risk is large scale 3d printing eliminating a large number of the people conventionally employed on a building site.
A large machine that takes a couple of guys a day to set it up on site, and then one babysitter to produce an insulated watertight structure with reinforcement and plumbing/electrical channels already there, eliminating most roofing, bricklaying, cement, ... guys seems entirely likely in the 20 year timescale.
Might as well go where the jobs are.
That's the last time I run code posted in somebody's sig...
Work that requires hands-on access can't be offshored. If you work with just a keyboard and monitor, you're screwed.
But even hands-on work can be "dumbed-down" by using an offshored expert (via telepresence) with a cheaper local technician.
My approach (chosen because it is immense fun, not because it is relatively offshore-proof) has been to specialize in developing software for embedded/real-time systems, mainly instrumentation and controls, and more recently "IoT". While embedded software is my "job" (either on bare-metal, with an RTOS, or with Linux). I have had to get involved in all levels of system specification, design, implementation and, most importantly, troubleshooting/debug across multiple disciplines (software, electronics, electromechanical, mechanical, physics).
The alternative is to offshore the entire project, something that is happening more often when there are no IP issues involved. But when trade secrets are present, or patents are being filed, or when the development window is tight, offshoring often adds delays that can cripple the time to market. That's where "on-shoring" often works best: Hire local gunslingers (contractors) to speed the process.
I've also done the local hands-on self-employed contracting thing, and managing it is a PITA (quarterly taxes, health coverage, SEP IRA, etc.). Fortunately, there are more companies that handle all this for you, either by hiring you as a consultant, or just being your "benefits administrator". But marketing is still a PITA.
Otherwise, you're left with the hands-on trade or service industry: Retail sales, carpenter, carpet cleaner, massage therapist, and the like. At the top of the list income-wise would probably be Plumber and Nurse.
Incorrect. To hold any US security clearance requires US citizenship. No exceptions. Furthermore, if you look at BAE, Thales and the other multinational companies doing US defense work, they are heavily regulated such that export licenses and classified data controls are very strong.
Being afraid that your job will be taken away by "overseas workers," besides its vaguely racists and xenophobic connotations, is just the latest flavor of a very old fear.
Back in the days of the industrial revolution, it was automation that was going to take away the jobs. And in a sense, it did. But the population of (for example) the United States is larger today than at any time in its history, and most people still have jobs. Whahoppen? And yet now some of the people who weren't even alive during the industrial revolution are worried that robots and other machines will take their jobs away. Or foreigners.
The best wait I can explain it is that you should never approach an employers with the idea that you are a consumer asking the employer to give you something, in this case a job. You should think of yourself a a business resource -- which is what you are, and in fact the most valuable one that exists on the planet. When you apply for a job, you are OFFERING an employer something. You are not the consumer. You are a supplier. So as an autonomous resource who has control of your own destiny, how do you increase your own value so that you are more attractive to your current and future employers? It ain't gonna happen by you taking a job and then sitting down at your desk and pretending you're going to do the same job for the rest of your life.
If you're afraid that you've got the kind of job that your employer could just hand to somebody else tomorrow -- somebody you've never met, somebody who's never met anybody on your team, somebody who maybe doesn't even speak the same language as you -- then my first question is, don't you like money? Why are you in that job, when it can't be worth what they pay you for it and you could already be doing a lot better for yourself.
A lot of tech workers seem to get confused and think their value to their employer is in the skills they have. That's true, partly. But I'd say at least half of being successful at any job -- and maybe even 80 percent -- involves interpersonal skills. How well do you work within the team? How able are you to anticipate what the business needs and act on that? In cases where there's a leadership vacuum, can you fill it? And then when it's time to follow directions, can you still do it?
Or how about this one: Do you LIKE your job? Do you show up every morning feeling good and ready for work, because you feel like what you do for a living is something worth doing? I've talked to a lot of people who don't feel that way, and honestly I feel like a lot of that is on THEM. Going back to the idea that you're not a customer, you're a supplier ... you've gotta stick up for yourself. For most of us (hopefully) nobody has stuck a gun to our heads and made us take ANY job. It's true that they wouldn't call it work if it was all fun and games, but many of us spend more of each 24-hour day at work than we do sleeping. And certainly more than we do spending time with our friends and families. My advice is to spend that time on something you think is worth doing -- not something that a 10-year-old could do for you, if that was legal.
Do that, and you're already ahead of the game. When you're in a job where your real value is not to some nebulous economic concept, but to the people who make up your business, then you're in a pretty good spot. You can outsource Worker X but you can't outsource Dave Johnson, because there's only one of him.
So don't be Worker X. Maybe it sounds glib, but that's really the whole game. That's your life.
Breakfast served all day!
If you are able to be replaced by someone who barely knows the language, doesn't know the country, has to live out of a suitcase, well, mate, it is your fault, not theirs.
There will always be need for some local ‘hands on’ help. Networking is highly local, cabling, fiber , technicians, etc.
However, so long as scum bag companies (like Disney, firing 100’s of US programmers then claiming they can’t find help and pushing for an increase of H1B’s), the job problem will only get worse.
The fact is, the oligarchy that runs this country only cares about market cap, eps, and shareholder value. Screw American jobs, if they can reduce a cost by a penny, it’s done. If you’re at the top of the living scale country, you’re screwed – if you live in a 3rd world sh#t hole with no environmental, intellectual or labor laws, you’re king.
They only way to stop the trend is to take big money (IE: corporate dollars) out of politics. Use tariff’s like they are intended, recognize corporations are NOT people (neither are chimps) for the simple fact that no one is ever held accountable . So, unless you all want to start crapping in outhouses over rivers in which you bath and drink from (google river pollution in India – the nexus of where your job likely went) , get politically active and vote OUT anyone opposed to campaign finance reform.
Problem solvers are far more in demand than ever, and that won't go away till we get strong AI (at which point the problem won't be offshore, but inCPU).
I don't mean 'engineers' like code pigs or most IT drones (not a dig at IT, really good IT people are engineers too). You just have to be someone who can take all information about the problem, including the constraints, then design and implement the best solution given the constraints - that means time, budget, reliability, support needs, end of life, etc.
The trouble is that most people can't do that, which is why it's in high demand. Risk assessment and mitigation are crucial and mostly untaught skills. Most people will just do what you tell them to, or take their favorite hammer and chainsaw and use it on everything in disregard of practical requirements. Most offshore 'engineers' fall into this category as well, which is one reason engineering outsourcing has such a bad stink among those who jumped on the bandwagon in the 2000s.
Which leads to the other problem - it's nigh impossible to learn except by doing. Normal path is to get an engineering degree, then join an engineering firm and work on actual products - though if you join a big boring place like HP you still may end up just learning to be a code pig unless you're lucky enough to end up in one of their very few interesting divisions (memristors!). Obviously this is long term project, high expense. High risk till you get the degree, then fairly low risk.
The other option is to just start making things. Make 'products' for yourself and try to finish them - i.e. make it something you could sell, even if you don't. This is easier than ever now thanks to explosion of low cost boards, motor controllers, cameras, drones... Get your hands on. Someone who can code, breadboard, solder and do servo control is a highly contested prize.
The bad news is you may find you're just not suited for it. In which case your best hope is probably to find an avoided niche like COBOL.
The good news is that if you're suited for it it's ridiculously fun and rewarding. Some days are still gonna suck, but generally you're solving interesting problems and making real things and people are using the things you made (this is THE BEST). Usually not as lucrative as banking or politics, but making decent money and helping rather than being scum of the earth (unless you go to work for Facebook, *zing*) is worth a lot of peace of mind.
Replacing surface mount components is considerably faster than replacing through hole components. Replacing a passives takes a few seconds (heat with air, pick up with tweezers, drop new component, remove air) and replacing large multiple pin ICs is orders of magnitude faster (still seconds).
Repairing new electronics isn't more expensive because the reworking takes longer, it's more expensive because service manuals impossible to obtain, as the person you replied to stated. It also isn't considerably more expensive that it used to be, it's just considerably cheaper to replace a device than it used to be.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Except that it won't, except in very special circumstances.
Let's be honest here: Most IT jobs - being a sysadmin, writing software, setting up a network - are not complicated. Most systems don't need much other than some some packages and configuration handled by something like Puppet. Most software doesn't do anything remarkable - it just shuffles data from point A to point B and displays a few things to an end user. Etc., etc.
A vast majority of IT jobs only require mediocre skill and knowledge. Most H1-B folks I know have rarely been mediocre, but they ARE cheap and management doesn't know the difference anyway. All they know is eventually their widget does the new X they've been asking for. So what if the code is a terrible mess and deployment is a gigantic pain? The management doesn't see or care.
Knowing the business? That's what project managers and other management-y types are for (or so they think). You and I know that a software engineer who is well versed in a certain business will design better systems, for example, but I've not once seen a manager that believes this way.
Management sees IT staff as nearly a commodity with people easily interchangeable. They're not entirely wrong - not entirely - but they think they're not wrong at all.
Remember: It isn't what YOU think that is important when a company is doing the hiring. What is important is what THEY think and how cheap they can get you and how much they can work you before you burn out.
Love sees no species.