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Fury and Fear In Ohio As IT Jobs Go To India (computerworld.com)
ErichTheRed writes: A company called Cengage Learning now joins the Toys 'R Us, Disney and Southern California Edison IT offshoring club. Apparently, even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users. As a final insult, the article describes a pretty humiliating termination process was used. Is it time to think about a professional organization before IT goes the way of manufacturing?
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
any more successful than unions at "saving American jobs"?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If a "professional organization" means some sort of stupid union, then no. Unions did not prevent outsourcing of US jobs, and cannot. The reality is, if you want substandard work on the cheap, you're always going to get that in India. As my boss says of our products, "(software) products without revenue are built in India, products that make money are built in the US".
We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
- Vincit qui patitur.
Our politicians don't care about the American worker. Our corporations and their willing yes-men lackeys don't care about the American worker.
But the American worker cares about the American worker, and together our shared interests can at least give us a "bargaining stick." Of course we need to be ready to swing the stick if need be to show that it's a real stick and all.
Holy tracking link Batman! Try this one instead:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3002681/it-outsourcing/fury-and-fear-in-ohio-as-it-jobs-go-to-india.html
face facts. use logic. best way to prevent jobs going to non american citizens is to be truly productive and contributing value for money paid, not demanding to be paid more for doing less, than non americans who are deservedly getting these jobs. all other ways including unions are simply welfare leeching on productivity of rest of the world, who has to do the work anyway as always.
Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
WTF are you talking about?! Tier 3 and 4 (specialized) jobs are being outsourced to India too. If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways. Anything from networking, Windows/*nix administration, to running the entire enterprise VMWare stack; all of it going overseas. About the only thing that remains is executive staff and grunts that rack-n-stack equipment in a data center.
Life is not for the lazy.
Those unions worked great for manufacturing and prevented having those jobs go overseas, didn't they.
A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone tells me he makes a point to study weekly, constantly learning. Anyone who is concerned about the level of outsourcing and illegal H1-B usage might keep that in mind.
Will be sealed with the advent of better systems and automation technologies. Most of the jobs that go to India are menial tasks which require no or very little skill .The core stuff still happens in the west. There are extremely few kernel programmers in India. So think these layoffs as having been replaced by a robot.
If you are an American, with all the benefits that citizenship entails - education, infrastructure, living conditions, security, stable government, rule of law, material and spiritual abundance - that make you the envy of the rest of the planet... why the hell can you not compete with third-world peasants, struggling against oppressive governments, scarcity of resources, illiterate parents, crime and pollution?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
Nonsense. It isn't a company behaving rationally. It's executives who know that making the company bottom line look better for a few quarters means big bonuses. They can then move on with a great story about how the great job they did before the company crashes and burns.
Except this is bullshit. Consumers only benefit from reduced prices to a point because they have to be able to afford fixed costs such as insurance, food, and rent. Fixed costs that have skyrocketed in recent years. An iPhone being 20$ less means nothing to a family that may have 100$ a month in discretionary income after taxes.
The healthiest economies in the world are the ones that rigorously maintain the middle class because the amount of money in the global economy means precisely dick after people's fixed costs are being met. What matters most to the economy is that money is able to freely flow through as many people as possible because when money changes hands value is created. This isn't about a few hundred thousand jobs. This is about entire communities being impacted because the buying power of the average american is being undermined by cost cutting measures, and as more and more people approach their discretionary income margins the more the economy suffers as there is less capital for luxuries and investment in new technologies.
It is simply stupid to suggest that the economy losing middle class jobs is somehow a benefit.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
"Better would be to blame idiot politicians that make stupid rules"
Companies work really hard at making sure those idiot politicians get elected and quite often also write the legislation for them.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
They moved all of these IT jobs to Cognizant, which is a company made up almost entirely of H1bs. Cognizant is blatantly in violation of the H1b laws, and if they are taken down, as they should be, all of the companies that are depending on Cognizant for outsourced labor will be up a creek without a paddle.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?
Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.
History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No 'professional organization' is going to stop free market forces.
Ah yes. The free market. That wonderful ideal the true red-blooded 'murican idolizes, regardless of how hard or how often it bends them over. In fact, they beg for more as they continually elect these "real Americans" back into office again and again no matter how badly they get screwed by them.
The free market. Capitalism. Nonsense. It all ends up, one way or another, of stealing from you and giving to the few. I bet those company execs agonized terribly over doing this. I'm sure they all gave a sociopathic chuckle when they cooked up how they were going to shaft their employees while giving themselves a tasty little bonus since making 1000x the average worker just isn't enough to build a house made of money.
Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?
Of course not, because you know just as well as I do that any such legislation would either be lobbied into uselessness or have so many loopholes you'd swear it was a sweater. Congress is a free market. The lobbyists have known this for decades and the Supreme Court all but legalized paid for politicians. Few, if any, give a rat's ass about me, you, or the American people. As long as Wall Street keeps the money flowing into SuperPACS and Congressional pockets, they can continue the "Us vs. Them" bullshit and stay in office.
Aside from that though, you're argument is ridiculous. Basically you're saying if you accept the same pay as someone working in a third world shithole, you can keep your job. But you can't because in this country we actually have laws and regulations regarding health and pay, things that third world shitholes don't have to care about. Somehow, I don't think repealing labor laws and turning America into a land of suburban third world slums to feed the corporate fat asses their million dollar bonuses is going to work out well.
~X~
> If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways.
if you believe this then i have a bridge to sell you :)
i've worked for countless companies over the years that have tried to outsource to India (and China, and the Philippines, etc.) and every single one of those projects was a disaster. the majority of those programmers are nothing but bad code monkeys who write terrible code and even worse documentation. the ones worth hiring are getting top dollar themselves. then you get to try to coordinate a project with people on the other side of the planet and who are 12 hours off from your work day. if you want to make it work you need to send some of your people over there to actually lead the team- and even then the results are rarely worth the trouble. the main problem- at least to India and China- is that they're often taught through rote memorization. if a problem comes up that requires a novel solution, or if you are trying to troubleshoot an obscure issue- they lack the skills to solve the problem.
you'll get much better (higher quality and far more creative) work when you outsource to places like Poland and Ukraine- but then you often run into language barriers.
for every company that outsources- there are 10 new startups looking to hire people.
people have been sounding the death knell for IT workers in the US for the last 20+ years. if you think it's going to happen any time soon- well- let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath :)
> Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend.
They get paid their commission if and when they provide the best candidate, the one who gets hired. Twice, a call from a recruiter has resulted in a job offer that doubled my take-home pay - that's pretty friendly in my book. Of course my experience may be different from yours because as I said I make it a point to study my field weekly, not to bitch and moan about "the evil HR departments" who won't recommend me for an interview.
You can continue to complain because people as people continue to not hire you, or you can do something different; your choice.
It's funny how executive jobs are don' seem to be off shored.. I would think a CEO from India would be cheaper for the company.
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
The point being that the jobs that got outsourced are jobs that are no longer creating enough added value to keep them inside a high-wage location, such as Ohio, USA
Even at Silicon Valley there are jobs that have been outsourced, but if we examine what kind of jobs that had been outsourced and which jobs still remain we will find that the jobs still remain (and are still being created) in America are jobs that are heavy on the side of creativity
Data entry jobs, even some of those so-called 'programming' jobs have become so routine it no longer makes any sense to employ people doing this low-value jobs in America
In other words, if you are Americans and still want to work in America, find yourself a niche, a niche which add a lot of value to what you do, a niche that no one outside of America can easily duplicate, and you will get to enjoy your job as long as what you do creates more money to your employer than what they pay you every month
You guys may not like what I am saying, but we need to face the reality somehow --- this world's competitiveness has heat up tremendously. USA and Europe are no longer the only places in the world where innovations happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't give a damn about India. They can handle their own problems. If history is my guide, they'll handle them badly because lying, cheating, and resume inflating don't work on overpopulation and infrastructure problems the same way they do on American executives who are also liars and cheaters.
No, we want tax policies and tariffs that make offshoring unprofitable. One of the very first thing the founders of this nation did was engage in protectionist trade policies because they knew that having industry wad important for this country. When George Washington found out he'd been elected President he sent away to what at the time was the only fine clothing maker in the country for a new suit. You see, the British forbade the colonists from having such things because they knew that industry wad important for their nation too.
Washington wanted to send a message. It's one that's apparently lost on herp derps like you who like to yell 'communism' every time somebody purposes not letting companies do whatever they want.
The founders trade policies served this nation well all the way up until we were stupid enough to elect Ronald Reagan, an act which coincides precisely with the decline of the middle class and wages across the board. Since then we've engaged in these stupid globalist 'free trade' policies that have all but destroyed the economic power of most of the nation.
It's time to return to what works, and this free trade crap doesn't work in any way that actually matters.