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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?
A better choice would be to cut the h1b program and start an immediate investigation of the companies involved. But what will happen instead is an expansion and our political class looking the other way.
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Not yet ... give it time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
> I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Yes you do, actually.
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.
...you say until your job is off-shored, and you can't find another one because they've all been off-shored too.
Professional organization doesn't mean union. It means lobby group. Less focussed on helping individuals with their specific conditions and pay - no direct contact with an employer - but focussed on highlighting the issues, raising awareness of the benefits of a good, strong, local IT workforce, and playing the campaign donation game.
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"
> A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone
Recruiters will take any warm body they can shoehorn into a job, as long as 1 or 2 of the required acronyms appear on your resume.
I'm always flabbergasted by people who say the job market must be great, because of all the recruiters calling them. First of all, those recruiters all get the same leads so you may be contacted by 3 or 4 for the same job. Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend. They are there to make money by supplying "human capital" to the Evil HR departments who haven't a clue about how to find good qualified people themselves.
Recruiters are nothing but leeches. They have a huge turnover rate because nobody in the game can stand the stink for long.
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 :)
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.