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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?
Find a job that requires a super-high security clearance.
From what I have observed among my friends and acquaintances, it is that nothing in the tech industry is safe from being offshored in our globalized world.
The only "safe" jobs I can think of are security jobs that *require* a specific citizenship. Those reside within a nation's government or security companies with a focus on a particular country and its threats.
Also "offshore-proof" might be MBA, upper-management type of jobs that can't exactly be offshored to some person living in a country with lower costs and standards of living.
Other than that, being a coder in today's environment is pretty disposable. Experience is no guarantee to job security any more.
http://developers.slashdot.org...
http://itknowledgeexchange.tec...
in short: guy moves to malaysia (he had no ties to the area, just picked it on economic considerations) and doesn't just survive, but does well, on $16k/yr, working 10 hours a week
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
to qoute a certain chair thrower " installers installers installers"
cable installer, solar panel roof installer, wired home installer. installs man.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
(risking a whoosh)
Except your customers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
People's toilets will forever be stopping up. And it is a hands-on job to un-stop them. The wages are good, often better than IT.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
It seems like the only way you can truly make yourself unoffshoreable is to acquire your own local customers by running your own business.
Crimey
Or will those be robots controlled remotely from India or China too?
Ah -- if you're in IT -- perhaps a better idea is to be the US guy in an offshore-IT-company.
More seriously -- be your own boss. Start a company and you choose if/when you offshore your own job.
If you're a developer, work for companies that build complete hardware/software systems rather than just software. Typically if they design and manufacture in-house, the bulk of the software work requires close collaboration with hardware, FPGA, and systems engineers, and this works best keeping everyone local. Attempts to outsource in these environments usually end in failure, and the companies that try often learn their lesson and don't try again.
Hardest and thankless job in the U. S. However, you get health care for your entire family, and summers off. Also, if you don't live in a "red" State, likely the teachers are unionized so your salary might be OK, and you might have a pension.
be replaced by a cheap immigrant!
If you aren't willing to change jobs, find an industry that can't be outsourced and get good at their needs. Write software for plumbers, do tech support for electricians, etc.
I found a nice spot working for a consortium of roofers, none of them individually could afford a full time programmer but they had already started a pool for advertising and other common things, so it's working out. Sure, I only make 90k after self employment taxes and the food here is boring, but Amazon, Plated, and being able to buy a house with cash makes up for it.
And I'm set, at least until somebody invents a roofing robot. Then I'll have to hope rich people like shitty glass art made by former programmers.
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?
You think I'd hire a jirk like me? What do you take me for an idiot!
Study chemistry. Chemists really know how to unionize.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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.
Dice - you could save $ by offshoring timothy's job....
Given the quality of "editing" I thought it had already been done years ago.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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...
No, wait. Become a Slashdot stand-up comedian, that's something that will never be offshored anywhere, like Europe.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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
That's basically the only chance you have to be neither outsourced nor replaced by H1Bs. I mean, who'd shoot himself in the foot?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I started my own company. Now I'm the boss, I'm the one who decides if I get fired. So far, that hasn't happened.
no, I don't have a sig
Barber or Masseuse. Something that requires your customer's physical presence.
I come here for the love
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.
Study chemistry. Chemists really know how to unionize.
The joke is funny but the truth around the chemistry job market isn't so funny. It's as subject to offshoring as anything else.
To be pedantic, TV repair shops went away because the technology became so miniaturized that nobody could realistically repair anything anyway and because the cost came down to the point that it was a disposable item. Either one of those would have made it infeasible. They just happened to go hand in hand.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Thinking way outside the cubicle, one non STEM-based possibility is something where people value and pay for your personal presence or involvement in the product or service; e.g., the entertainment industry. Not sure how much this can provide by way of a livelihood, though.
TV repair is quite possible - given the schematics.
I've worked on reworking mobile phones, with much more dense circuitry.
It became largely impractical because both of secrecy by the manufacturers making service manuals impossible to obtain, and the much larger issue that the reduction in price, combined with the improvement in available TVs a year or two out meant that the price a repairer could charge became uneconomic.
How about choosing a career you love and/or are very good at and can perform with passion. Choosing a career out of fear is probably not the best way to go. Just be so damn good it doesn't matter.
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!
It's already here
Though, what is done is the building is printed in layers off-site, then the layers are shipped to the location and assembled.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I've worked for six companies that have offshored project management, and all of them have had to move it back. Senior management and C-level people get tired pretty quickly of dealing with someone that can't communicate and doesn't work the same hours as they do. Plus, understanding the product and the customers is vital for that job. Coming from a technical background for that job is also a huge plus. I've worked on a lot of different software projects from Facebook games, accounting systems, payroll, and education, and in all of them, the offshore people were a disaster since they didn't understand the product or the customers.
A bonus is that the PM jobs are usually pretty easy. Most of the PMs I've worked with worked about 1/2 to 2/3 of the hours that the developers are required to.
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.
I've had fairly good luck in freelance computer repair. I found that there were enough customers to scrape together a living who were tired of "tech support" they couldn't understand and weren't any help.
I'd say, work for yourself, find a job that requires the personal touch, and just be better at it than any offshore or H1B contractor could be.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sex worker.
While outsourcing sex workers will work for the vacation bonk, the daily bonk needs to be closer...
Pucker up, its working time...
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.
Any of the trades can pay well although in larger cities plumbers, along with all trades, are tripping over the competition driving the price down. I will also say it can be a very physical job, you won't find many plumbers without back problems.
I worked for The City of San Diego and career advanced to a $65K per year job. One of my sons is a Registered Nurse, the other works as a machinist for a small machine shop that has many contracts with local aerospace and aviation companies. Get an education or vocational training.
Welders need to be on-site or nearby to repair equipment; skilled, talented welders get to fabricate new stuff - more interesting and remunerative.
This trend is never guaranteed to hold but most of the large companies I deal with have US citizens on their product and internal IT security teams although I have seen in recent years a few H1Bs get in the mix. I am not talking about general IT security but specialized security teams within the company that do PKI, work with HSMs, CIRT leadership team (I have seen the analysis teams get off shored), PEN testing of internal and external applications, security teams that do government customization, and black box testing of products.
As one person I know put it "I've had a good career, there was always steady work in roads and commodes". And I doubt there is a H1B threat out there. 've been to India and their infrastructure is terrible.
Another friend of mine has had a nice stable career in AC electrical, mostly architectural and industrial construction work. Both of which required on-site inspections and 'boots on the ground'. AC electrical is also in demand for integrate alternative energy sources with a grid. Which also requires local inspections and 'boots on the ground'.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's not so much citizenship, but whether you are a US person. A legal permanent resident (i.e. holding a green card) is a US person. A US citizen, working for a foreign government or company is NOT a US person.
For export controls, there's a difference between ITAR/US Munitions List and EAR - Commerce, too.
Security clearances are granted to both US citizens and legal permanent residents and even some non-permanent residents.
Sure, the employment ads say "US Citizenship Required", but that's not technically the case.
they may be able to source say, something like network support overseas, but at the end of the day, when hardware fails or need replacement or new installs in data centers in the US, you still need those guys who can do cabling, swap 6509's and so forth -
I think the idea of a overseas proof career in IT are over, however. Ensuring you are always at the top of your game and being up on the latest skills even if it eats some of your personal time can go a long way though
RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
There is one thing that can be repaired without too much trouble: the power supply. Electrolytic capacitors, especially from the 200x's have a bad history of blowing out. For $25 in capacitors and an hour of work, you can fix a broken power supply. I've even done it once myself. Of course the cost of LCD TV sets keeps going down, making it only really worth repairing big TVs, as the falling prices just make them that much less worthwhile to repair.
A TV repair place recently opened up near where I live, but they also do computer repair. These days, with tube sets all but gone, there isn't a lot of difference in the skill sets needed.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Use the money you're making while you still have a job to cram your 401k and IRS full of at least a few hundred k and preferably a million or more. Invest it in interest bearing bonds or dividend paying stocks. When your job finally gets off-shored, set up "Substantially Equal Periodic Payments"(google it) and live off that and do what the fuck you feel like doing. You might have to move to a smaller city if you get a late start, but it beats working even the coolest job. Hardest part is pitching it to your wife. You may have to replace her if she can't stand the idea that you get money without having to work.
Any skill level you can achieve in the US (I assume you are from the US) can also be achieved in any other country. Maybe India and China are not yet up to speed, but it is only a matter of time that they on the same level. Especially, when I look at today's students and their inability to code and to design software. Recently, I learned on an conference that my impression from my little world was shared all over the world. So you might be able to be above average, but from a general perspective for every above average there is one below. So either you are already in a save place because your skills and your capabilities are required or you just average or worse then you will get paid less in future. Maybe you should offshore yourself and follow the jobs.
Yes, you can do surface-mount soldering, but it takes a lot longer than through-hole soldering, which in turn takes a lot longer than replacing socketed components. When repairs take longer, they get more expensive. Expensive repairs + cheap hardware = cheaper to replace.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I was chatting with a guy who runs a small wood fired brick oven pizza oven at the local farmer's market. Turns out he is a former IT guy who quit his day gig to do the farmer's market circuit year round. Gets to be outdoors, and his work load is a lot lighter for about 7 months of the year when the days and hours scale back for winter. Can't say it would be my first choice, but compared to cube life it doesn't look too bad. So starting your own business is an option.
In my case I do mixed signal ASIC design for a German company, so I am actually on the off-shore side of things (there is a limited talent pool in Germany more so than a wage gap). While there plenty of places doing ASIC work, it still appears that the barriers to entry are high enough that design shops pop up where there is a critical mass of workers with experience rather than just where the rent is cheap.
For some reason offshore workers are efficient only when you tell them exactly what to do. If there is only a small part left to interpretation they will do it wrong. Jobs where you are given only vague ideas and you have to fill the gaps yourself should be safer.
I'm not saying that foreigners are worse than locals but those who aren't will not be the ones you'll get when you look for cheap labor.
..or an electrician, or a carpenter, or a gardener or any other profession where physical presence is required to do the job
If virtual presence is good enough, you can be anywhere with good internet
Be your own boss. Then nobody can fire you.
But if you're as bad a salesman as I am, you'll starve trying to get customers.
I'm working as a handyman/carpenter now. More work available than I can handle, get to pick my jobs and clients. I'll probably go back to scientific programming some day, but I'll do it on my terms.
handymantoby.com
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Some time many years back, Sony (I think) advertised a TV with "works in a drawer". Basically, the electronics - excepting the actual high-voltage parts - were on phenolic circuit boards maybe something like 4x6 inches (give or take a meter). The idea was that a repairman could slot in a new one as easily as the older sets did with blown tubes.
I'm suspecting that in most actual cases, however, it was the high-voltage stuff that was most likely to fail once everything went solid-state.
In any event, higher-quality electronics are now so inexpensive that it's cheaper to wave-solder everything onto one motherboard and not even bother with motherboard replacements. Because even though the motherboard, fully ready-to-go might only cost $5, it's still cheaper to toss the entire set and replace it than to pay $65/hr or so to have someone do the replacing.
Learn a trade. You can't offshore something that needs to be hands on. It's either that or join the 1%ers. :-(
The trades cannot be off-shored, but they can be flooded by ex-employees of jobs that were off-shored.
There simply is not such thing as a safe good paying job. If you want above average income, you need ongoing above average effort in managing your career. For anyone under the age of 40 that usually means many career pivots before retirement. Very few industries will stagnate for 40 years in a row in order to provide someone a clear and easy career path.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Get a job, or enter a career that require that YOUR HANDS touch the hardware. If you can use Skype, Webex, LogMeIn or TeamViewer to do your work, your job can be outsourced to India or the Philippines. (The Philippines are taking online-support work away from India because Filipinos often speak excellent English, while Indian and Chinese accents are sometimes unintelligible.)
For example, I work for a document management company that started as a copier company. Our copier techs drive to the customer's location and repair and maintain the machines onsite. I work remotely, but in close consultation with the on-site technicians.
My experience has been that people with strong people and technical skills are very difficult to replace with someone working in another country. It doesn't mean it is impossible, but it is very hard. If you want to find a job that cannot be outsourced, it probably means working with physical things that require hands on manipulation. On the other hand, if you consider why particular jobs are easy to outsource, you may find skills that you can develop in addition to technical skills that would make you very hard to replace with someone on the other side of the world.
If you have strong people skills, you'll be one of the last ones standing, But strong technical skills? One reason what there's so much total crap software is that the people who hire software people could care less about technical skills if they can save money.
Sure, they DEMAND heavy skillsets, but when it comes to hiring decisions...
A TV repair place recently opened up near where I live, but they also do computer repair. These days, with tube sets all but gone, there isn't a lot of difference in the skill sets needed.
People still repair computers? By the time it breaks, it's usually better to just buy a new, faster one at 1/4 the price.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
They tried that with "1m h1b nurses" and it failed miserably. IT gets outsourced because of its extremely low social standing in north america.
Professor J. Rufus Fears taught me that a "career" is a French word that means "path." He says it's a path to get from graduation into a retirement home. I have tried to internalize this concept, and it helped me take risks with quitting multiple career-type jobs to open up my own businesses. Roll the dice, and see how they land. Have an adventure, not a career.
One business of mine is a software development company. This is my primary means of livelihood. Right now, I mostly contract out development services to small-to-medium sized organizations that have trouble staffing programmers. The vast majority of my clients are not large enough to hire a full time, on staff, programmer to help do what I (literally me programming, most of the time) do for them. I've developed a relationship with a programmer in Kazakhstan, where I can take advantage of the lower costs to get things developed cheaper than here. However, now I am working primarily with a MUCH more expensive local programmer, since his efficiency is higher, the Kazakh guy isn't as available and finding a new one is a ton of work, and on some projects the local presence far outweighs the cost savings by outsourcing. Plus, the American is my friend, an early mentor that taught me about web programming when we were both employees, and things are slow with him now so I wanted to get started working together (on a relatively small project for a client.) I'm also working on developing a software product for passive income, but that takes a LOT longer, and is much riskier than contracting.
Another business I have is rental property close to the local university. That business is, by definition, tied to my geographical area. When software is slow, rents come in and I can work on home improvement projects. When software is busy, rents still come in and I can pay someone else to do emergency repairs, and put off improvements until a slow time.
The concept of relying on a single employer for all my income is extremely scary to me. I would much rather diversify my software earnings across multiple clients to mitigate risk. Similarly, I'd rather have multiple one-bedroom apartments to rent out as compared to a big house to rent so that when one of the college students decides he cannot pay his rent this summer, and that he's leaving two months early (despite his two, international, trips setup...) I still have rents coming in. I have two companies which provide me with income, in terms of about seven clients/customers/renters. Both the Albuquerque software industry (most of my business is serving local customers) and the Albuquerque university rental market would have to collapse, simultaneously, for me to be majorly screwed. If anything, I'm pretty tied to Albuquerque and should try and diversify geographically more! I love Albuquerque though...
I do not have a family to provide for. I'm working on changing that, with trying to be as good of a boyfriend as I can be, with the goal of getting married someday. I am not saying that you should throw away all sense of security for your family (if you have one) and become a hustler overnight. "Look kids, we get to have the BLUE Ramen noodles for dinner tonight! Insurance? Who needs it?!? Jesus is my insurance!" No, that's not what I'm talking about... My local, subcontractor, friend (that I am just starting to work together with) took the plunge about three months ago and went into business for himself. He has a wife and two kids. He prepared extremely well, and setup enough contracts to be making about 1.7x his salary for the first three months from basically day one. This is his first slow two week period, so we are working together. My local community has all sorts of people that are interested in promoting entrepreneurial activities, helping you get started, and providing free advice. I am extremely
...the technology became so miniaturized that nobody could realistically repair anything anyway...
Miniaturization made the components smaller, but it didn't change the way the circuits work. If anything, the huge number of ICs used today have made the manufactured circuits much simpler and easier to understand (which is great because it's nearly impossible to get the schematics anymore).
There's still an electronics repair shop near my house and the owner absolutely repairs modern electronics. He doesn't just swap boards, either, he still replaces individual components. Electronic components these days are much smaller, but the concept is the same.
I've done a not insignificant amount of surgery on computers and phones and the like with a fine soldering pencil and a hot air gun. It's not difficult, it's just different. And tiny surface mount components are nice because they're cheaper and you can fit a huge number of components in a small space! You just need a good pair of tweezers and a loupe.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
All the jobs suitable for introverts, autistic spectrums, and people with just plain bad social skills are gonna go. The jobs left will be those actually calling the shots and bringing home the bacon. If you're reading this website that's probably not you, in other words. Thanks for playing!
Funny, sad and true all at the same time.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
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.
Figure out new ways to make/deliver unique solutions.
And move back to the US
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.
So it's basically an extra-crappy pre-fab then?
Truck drivers are always needed, and the work is fairly easy. Making it a very good fall back job if nothing else is in the works.
They're always needed because the pay is crap. And I guess you missed this story about self-driving Freightliner 3 days ago
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
But I was wondering if some slashdotters could share some constructive real-life experiences of planning a transition to a relatively offshore-proof career.
Well, how good are you at giving blow jobs? The oldest profession is unlikely to get offshored.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
From an old dude who actually experienced and understands employment cycles, the safest job market. Where once in, your are fairly safe and as long as you are relatively reliable will keep working. The job that can not be outsourced and it always local. In fact a hugely varied job in many markets, many labour conditions but fairly demanding working hours (not so much total but when you are needed you are needed). The one area of the market most people forget about except of course the experienced older generation because they know and don't often say. "ANYTHING TO DO WITH MAINTENANCE" fixing stuff. Pretty regular work and, insurance companies often pay the best. Lots of contractor type choices, people also tend to prefer older more experienced people. Older people tend to drift to it but nepotism brings in it's own recruits who do pretty well, whilst keeping fairly quite about the lucrative nature of the maintenance industry, in which ever segment of the market it is in.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, it's outsourced because it can be done remotely and it's high cost. Opposite example is burger flipping - has to be done locally and it's low cost.
4wdloop
Want to have the most crisis-proof career? Then start living the life of a survivalist. The idea is to grow, build and fix as much of everything you need. Then as a sideline, get any job that doesn't pay starvation wages and give you enough time off to starting growing, building and fixing the things you need. Make sure the stuff that you can't DIY is merely a luxury not an essential when worst comes to worst (nuclear winter, zombie apocalypse, asteroid impact, etc). Or at least make sure the thing is easily repaired rather than an iGadget only a service center halfway across the country can fix. Then you can use the income you get from your taxable job to buy your iPad, aPhone or electric scooter.
A lawyer specializing in a state that's too small for an outsourcing firm to bother with. What Indian student is going to want to specialize in Rhode Island law?
Table-ized A.I.
People are always going to need heating and cooling. You get in the Sheet Metal Workers or Pipefitters union and you get to live with a little bit of dignity instead of playing dog eat dog with the hungriest dogs in the world.
Don't think about your career. Think about your life.
I was part of the last generation for whom academia was a good career choice. I see the hollowed eyes of the kids who are still thinking a PhD is a golden ticket to a tenured professorship and banging co-eds. I got lucky because of when I was born. I hope those of you in tech, in the US, are smart enough to see the writing on the wall.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Actually it's more traditional mass production at work, I do have a friend that works in the construction industry and modular housing is the big thing. Like for example bathrooms are fairly expensive with membranes, heat cables, tiles, plumbing and whatnot, the smaller ones just come on a trailer from a low cost country. Just hook up electricity, water and sewage and you're done. In apartment blocks they sometimes do whole apartments this way, for more custom buildings there's wall modules and such. Less and less is actually built on site, at best it's assembled.
And at least according to my friend though he might be somewhat biased but he's done both, the modular builds have fewer faults. Instead of unique builds depending on the job performance that day the modules have strong consistency and a pretty decent QA system. Even though the deliveries are more standardized the buyers are usually okay with that, just like there's a limited number of car models usually you're fine with getting one that suits your needs. What you need carpenters/plumbers/electricians for is now often aftermarket repairs/changes, not construction.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In my very limited experience, outsourcing was expensive, slow, and had a lot lost in miscommunication. We pretty much got a minimal viable product with very brittle code. Since they only focused on getting small sets of features at a time, they didn't ever look at the whole feature set. They effectively had feature creep even without changes to the specs.
In the end it was cheaper to hire full time programmers locally. Barrier to entry was much lower with outsourcing, but even within a year's time, the costs were much higher, and the quality was sub-par.
Why is this moderated down? Plumbing is a very well-paid job that cannot be outsourced. I pay my plumber $100 an hour and he's worth every penny.
A slightly lower paid but cleaner career would be electrician.
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Perhaps civil engineering or hvac engineering. Engineering-level construction jobs can be very rewarding and are well paid.
I also happen to think that software development will continue to be a rewarding career. I recently went back to it myself when I realized that the need for software is going to increase faster than the world can supply talented developers.
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Write applications for an Apple or Android app store. Then you don't have to worry about getting hired and fired. Just know that it's hard to make your app stand out.
When you use your computer or mobile device, be on the lookout for times when you get annoyed because something is awkward or impossible to do. Then see if you can write easy-to-use software for that problem.
Become a garbage man.
There is lots of different US military hardware that has been named M1 (model 1.)
Beg to differ,
It's been quite a while that 'lawyers' have been outsourced. Simple things like house contracts, wills, and other things you'd normally need a lawyer for are being shuffled down the pipeline to India. Obviously not for the type of lawyers who stand up infront of judges/ juries and actually say stuff, but they're a small part of the plethora of lawyers in the world today.
Practically the first hit on google for 'lawyers being outsourced' nets this, from 2013 : http://www.smallfirminnovation...
And also - anecdotal experience tells me this happens.
I had a friend who is a lawyer and complains about his corner of the profession being outsourced and also: I received a 'lawyers document' which had come from Bangalore... or somesuch bollocks.
Utter rubbish. A majority of law school grads never practice. It is extremely difficult to get full time work as a lawyer since the supply far exceeds the demand.
That and requirements management is a major PITA. Go ask DHL about Convergys.
-Judge Smails
The only jobs that are "offshore-proof" are jobs that require a *very* high security clearance and can't be done by non-citizens for reasons of law and national security or jobs that literally cannot be done from a remote location, such as janitorial work. So, you have to either be the absolute top in your field or switch to menial labor.
Or, and I know this might sound ridiculous if you buy into right-wing politics, you could actually support politicians, laws, and unions that work towards ensuring that every American has a good paying job and that penalize companies for sending jobs out of the country.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
Even if the job is mostly remote (as mine is), many clients want to see you once in a while. Or, maybe you are doing internal testing which requires you to be on-site, but only project-focused, not all the time. I've managed to off-shore myself (literally, on an island), while being responsive to clients and still able to travel in a reasonable period of time when needed.
The guy is asking for a job which is offshore proof, and you guys go off tangent talking about cost of offshoring to five-eye countries ...
Anyway, the one and only way to ensure that what you do does not and will never go offshore is to create that career for yourself
You can never rely on somebody else ... ie., and employer ... because they are there to make a profit
So, pick a field, a field which you know you are very capable in, and start your own business in that field
And since it's YOUR OWN BUSINESS, you, as the boss, get to have the final say on whether you gonna offshore the operation of your own company, or not
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I worked in different software houses for quorter of a century and I have seen many people, even young people taken to a hospital from the floor because they could not move due to back pain. I also have seen some just falling unconscious and never coming back too. Back pain is only sometimes caused by heavy lifting. Usually life style choices and lack of fitness and proper technique at lifting is a problem. Wrong bad is also a factor. It is a quite physical job at times but unless leeches make you do more than you can and you do not take care of your body, you are good. As in any other job brains are important. Cohders may be good at coding but that is monkey job anyway - you need much more to stay on top of things. Taking care of fitness of your body and mind is your task - IT or plumbing.
OC if you work in an uranium ore mine in china or wolfram mine in Andes and your wage is only good for a bit of food then this is different. It has nothing to do with job itself but with pay and work conditions. That is why offshoring actually works in many cases. You offshore jobs to countries with lots of desperate people, not much legal rights for workers, no rules for environmental protection - you save on all these costs. Plumbing is in a sense the same as any other job. Skill and organization of your work is vital. You cannot work for leeches of course as emptyheads will suck all juice out of you and dump you as soon as their last offshoring bonus went up in the nose or out trough the door with a hooker. You need to learn other things, new tools in plumbing there are new materials too. At some point you can become Master and let other 'help' you.
Claims that plumbing does not work are exaggerated. It does - you just have to do it right. It is the same with being a lawyer. There are many lawyers that do not earn enough too because they went on to do family law in some odd place.
You mean they make most of elements somewhere, ship it to the building site and then assemble - improved efficacy I admit although I would not want to live in first few generations of such houses made in china. My understanding of what you trying to say is that (besides assembling workforce needing a plumber or two as well) in case one pipe in this building starts leaking you just replace the whole building? Because in unlikely case if you want to rather fix the fcking. pipe you will need a plumber or you just live with the shit just leaking to your neighbour - I guess that is an option too. Ach I forgot - you can of course skip all the pipes. Heating can be done with electricity, washing and shedding waste moved outside. Well done. Did not think of it.
That seems to be the universal experience. One thing I also noticed when reviewing code that got produced in off-shoring is that the coders often did not get all the info needed. Local coders would just meet with the people that know, but having a time-gap and a cultural-gap and usually also a prohibition to communicate other than through official channels kills that way to get the information needed. This makes everything much more expensive and makes projects often fail outright.
The really pathetic thing is that all this is well-known. The bean-counters responsible are routinely too stupid to count beans. Gartner had a study about a decade or so ago that showed that well-done outsourcing/off-shoring saves about 30% and that most projects end up costing more, sometimes much more.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've a standing offer of some years to offshore that job to me.
I've been forced to conclude they don't actually want a real editor.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Mike Rowe has given some good talks about the shortage of skilled labour in the US and what a problem it is. This kind of thing can't be outsourced since, well, the labour is needed in the US. I suppose it could be replaced with H1Bs but that doesn't seem to be happening.
Most of it is stuff like plumbing that isn't glamorous, and even can be dirty, but it is necessary and will continue to be necessary. Eventually robotics may advance to the point of replacing it, but not in the foreseeable future.
This is known.
What's also known is that the CIO will get a nice bonus for saving several million dollars in the first two years, then leave the company before the TCO kicks in and the subsequent loss of capability and increase in costs really takes effect.
No, just recognition that getting knee deep in shit can't be done remotely from India.
That doesn't mean we're jealous of people getting knee deep in shit, and personally I'd prefer to risk my job being outsourced and stick with my comfortable office based role.
Of course, in the UK the plumbers are all immigrant labour anyway these days - word is it's harder to find a Polish plumber in Poland than it is in England at the moment.
Indeed. Disloyal CEOs are the plague of our times. Vastly overpaid and not only underperforming, but actually massively harming the enterprise they lead. The right thing to do to these destructive parasites would be to strip them of all wealth and lock them up long-term.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I liked my analysis of this in the recent "Peter Principle / PHB" story.
Aside from all the communications considerations, what you get with the Indian culture is a lot of deference and obedience. Which is precisely what you don't want, because they do exactly what managers tell them to do, and managers are by definition, people who are not competent to do their job.
It's a GIGO problem...
Being a school teacher is not that bad if you can do this job. Otherwise just plain hard core software developer seems like a pretty decent path.
I doubt that India and China can raise outsourcing levels, quality is poor and the cost is going up by an hour.
All other countries are small or have a very long way to go. Looking around me I find that even pretty inept engineers are employed. Yes, the most inept engineer I met in past 25 years moved to be a store manager but he was really exceptionally inept.
IMHO, all remaining outsourcing trends are due to the fact that management simply could not find anything else to do.
So, if you can do something beyond filling getters and setters generated by your IDE, your job prospects are decent. If you know why setters should be deleted (*) your job prospects are good relative to most of the other mass occupations.
BTW I do believe that sucking the rest of world dry from talent is a good idea in many respects. Among other thing it is way easier to compete against some one making 1/2 of your salary vs one making 1/10th.
(*)Setters break encapsulation - for ones who did not learn it yet.
satisfaction is amazing. Pay is reasonable. Automation prospects are negligible.
You have to like people however amd have a thick skin
I have been a programmer for over 30 years now. The best way to keep your job is to jump on the hard technologies that real industry is doing, not the latest dot bomb thing. That stuff goes to India or Costa Rica. Manufacturing needs big data to reduce production costs. Marketing needs it as well. It is hard stuff you can't just hack out, and you need practical math. The clients also expect good communication skills and don't mind grey hair. I think being a data engineer is going to hold out against large scale offshoring for awhile. That is my bet, anyways, and I have managed to stay at the forefront for quite a few years. Also, get the heck out of Silicon Valley. Go to America's offshoring places. I am in Utah, and get paid much less but can buy so much more. My cost of living is fractional of CA. We are America's India and business is booming.
... is become one of the 1-percent. Otherwise, if your job isn't offshored, you'll be replaced by a robot. Basically, you have to own the robots to win.
Seriously, you have to own the business. Oddly, america has load of ppl with great skills that should be focused on starting their own company as opposed to working for others.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It is not for everyone, but when I get tired of doing IT I am going to teach tai chi. I have been training for almost 15 years now and while I am not a master, I have some proficiency with it. Tai chi is good for health and the philosophy behind it is one of the better ways to live a life.
I am not too worried about my job leaving any time soon. Given the average competence of my co-workers and the lack of competence that I have seen from H1Bs, I know that my position is going to be stable for a while. The reality is that there are not that many people who understand IT environments from top to bottom (technically) and who can also work with the business side to transform their needs into working systems that are delivered and managed on budget.
Just as I've never seen a legislator vote to reduce their own pay, I've never seen a manager offshore their own job. Every other job, yes. Not their own.
Here in Canada there are lots of burger flippers that are brought in on our equivalent of H1Bs (foreign worker program).
They'll work for minimum wage in a city where a really cheap house is $1.3 million, and once they've been abused by being employed at a different location then their visa allows, they can really be abused.
Sadly a lot of employers are petty tyrants and it is easier to tyrannize people with no other choices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Having just finished a contract in the investment banking arm of a Swedish bank, I can point to a range of frontline support and development roles which are going to be RELATIVELY outsource-proof. Telephony system support; desktop support; trading platform support; algorithm/decision support system development; basically anything that an investment banking trader is going to need in order to process a deal, although the specifics are going to vary by company.
Those traders are (a) paid a metric crap-ton of money, and (b) stressed by anything and everything from reflections on the screen to their coffee being too hot.
Having to pick up a phone and shout at someone in another country is not going to work - even someone in the SAME BUILDING, but on a different floor does not do it. They want someone in the same room (same room is not a small office, this is typically a trading pit with 250-300 people in it, so pretty big) who they can grab (sometimes literally), point at the problem and yell "fix it", before running off to chug down a couple of valium. If they do not get what they want, they bitch at their managers about how the company is not giving them the tools to do their job (make tons of money for the bank).
The typical overhead for one of those traders by the time their Bloomberg and Reuters real-time data licences plus software licences and broker fees is included, is well over $10,000 per month, and that is without accounting for their salaries, bonuses, IT hardware or software licences that are calculated at a corporate level - operating systems, Office package, databases etc. Overall, the "normal" monthly investment that the bank makes in that trader is over $100,000, so for the business, even when it is run by bean-counters or Harvard MBAs, whatever that person needs to increase their productivity, they get. So if the users say that they NEED an IT guy on the spot who can be at the desk within 20 seconds to look at and start working on the problem, that is what they get. If that IT guy is going to cost $80,000 - $100,000 per year instead of $15,000 per year for some guy called "Dave" with an Indian accent working out of Bangalore, tough shit, $65,000 is pin money.
Remote access from outside the bank is almost always flat out refused for security reasons, so while off-site support can work, third-party support has to be on-site and in person.
The only exception to the "local first" rule that I have seen, is the Bloomberg helpdesk. Those guys work remotely, and can be reached either by telephone (usually a call center somewhere in the same geographical region as the user) or by pressing F1 twice on your keyboard, which brings up a Messenger-style chat window. You type your question and it gets routed to a team that hopefully knows something about the specifics. Almost invariably though, when a trader gets a Bloomberg problem, it is batted off to the in-room IT guy who goes through the problem with the Bloomberg tech while the trader goes to pop another valium and get a massage to de-stress.
Basically, if you are someone who can turn Excel inside out, write high quality C++ code while being constantly interrupted, and solve whatever random crap problems come up while maintaining a calm demeanour and keeping the world's most stressed people from flying into hypertensive shock, then you have a job for life.
A typical day? Printer is out of paper; another printer is jammed, and has a full waste toner bottle; internet connection for user X is down; User Y has just sent a naked picture of client A's wife to client B by mistake; Murex overnight jobs have failed so the D3 trading platform has the wrong start prices and wrong date, so someone needs that escalating to the Murex support team to get it fixed; User Z has just got in and spilled coffee in his Bloomberg keyboard so the biometric login does not work; vendor A upgraded their app without telling anyone last night, so now all the users of that system cannot login; the row of desks 24-48 are completely dead, Christ knows why, although t
Just what the world needs, more lawyers. No thanks.
Any job that requires a license cannot be performed by someone off shore. Immigrants *can* do them, but only permanent ones. You can't make a claim that a guest worker is needed because he (as a foreign national) is licensed. But even that doesn't really hold up. The only people who still have the job they had 40 years ago are the ones who have stake in the company. So chose employment which offers partnership.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I enjoyed reading all the offshore proof ideas people posted.
I get the sinking feeling, "there is no sanctuary" for most of us. The offshore proof 'good' jobs are only a few, and once a city has X many plumbers, or lawyers, or nurses, doctors, mechanics, ...then what about everyone else?
It seems that there may be a finite reservoir of total possible jobs all of humanity can do, they seem a resource to think about like we do for drinking water, farm-able land, and such.
With the constant upward growth of global population from 7B ==> 9B, it looks like it is a race to the bottom for most of us. Too many people chasing too few 'good' jobs, and every year the odds less in our favor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Ever heard of LPO - Legal Process Outsourcing? What do you think that is?
Maybe patent law could be useful, if one is coming from a tech background
Fast food industry?
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
They tried that with "1m h1b nurses" and it failed miserably. IT gets outsourced because of its extremely low social standing in north america.
No, nurses have to be brought here, and that raises the costs of having them. The reason there are such nurses is that a lot of locals would avoid flyover country, usually wanting a job in their home city. Not that there's anything wrong w/ the latter, but end result is that there remains a need for such people in flyover country, but not enough willing to do it. Bottom line - demand exceeds supply, which is why they're there. As a result, the H1B nurses would be high cost as well, since there are not too many of them to begin w/.
IT, by contrast, as someone else pointed out above - was very high cost, and had a problem of employee retention. That, and the fact that it could be done remotely, contributed to the bulk of it being off-shored. Plumbing, by contrast, has to be done locally, and if there is a shortage of local workers, bringing in migrant workers will be more expensive, not cheap, since demand will still exceed supply. No matter how many H1Bs or even illegals come in. Only way to make plumbing cheaper is if it can be automated.
Not too long. Politicians are busy pandering to illegals and trying to get them a path to citizenship - look at Hilary, Lindsay Gramm, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, et al. But once they get their way, a day will come when illegals will demand the right to have an illegal as a president or CEO or elected rep. It'll be funny at least to see the politicians cook in their own cauldron
Returned to school at 46 YO, 2 years of prerequisites followed by 4 years of dental school. $150k in student loans at 6.8%.
Dentistry is exactly the opposite of engineering. My work is appreciated by my patients, and I get respect. They can't send my job to China/India/wherever because they can't send my patients to China/India/wherever. Pay is a little more than I made as an engineer and growing rapidly.
I just wish the ADA wasn't so far to the right on the political spectrum...
That company was Motorola. Now look at them.
That being said, its still possible to repair a modern TV. I fixed a 4 year old plasma TV with a service manual and a multimeter to determine the fault. Actual component repair of the faulty board was outsourced to a refurbishing company (the price over buying the parts kit alone was minimal). Popped the repaired board in and the TV is as good as new.
Not so much with the lawyers. Imagine spending tens of thousands, possibly up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for your degree, and you can't get a job to pay it off. It's happening now.
Imagine a world where most of the day to day stuff is paperwork. Now you get that paperwork on the Internet. Your $500 document fee is now a $29 download.
A friend works for a volunteer agency that gives out legal advice. They have a waiting list for lawyers to give their services. Anything to get their name out, even free, since they can't get a job.
So now we have jobs that need accreditation going away thanks to the Internet. Im not sure what's safe anymore.
(2) Make sure that your skills are needed on the site of the work, and your job doesn't depend on having communications. We've lost 75% of our communicatinos because of the crane operator putting a load through one of the satellite radomes, so my work on this vessel is safe until the end of the contract.)
(3) multiple languages help. Anything other than English (I have moderate French and Spanish, a smidgin of Swahili and a dash of Russian) is an advantage against people who only have English.
(4) Get used to travelling. I'm half-way through this trip, with another month to go. Maybe more - who knows ? (No-one. Anywhere.)
Ummm, they're the main bits of advice I can give you.
What? You want to go to your home every night, and you work in communications of some sort? Well then, sir, you are in direct competition with millions of people all over the world who also intend to go home at night and work in communications. Many of them live in a lower cost economy than you do (in fact, precisely half of them live in a below-median cost-of-living economy. That is what "median" means.), and so you are, irrevocably, vulnerable to losing your job to them. It's called globalisation. Welcome to the brave new world. No, you cannot leave.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"