This thread is old but I thought I'd respond anyways. I've never been replaced due to outsourcing but my company has outsourced a few projects successfully. The quality of work was not great, but passable. With some relatively minor refactoring we were able to get it into a condition that satisfied our needs. It certainly cost more than it would have cost to do internally, but not when you consider the value of *other* work internal employees were accomplishing during that time. The business decision was made that it was worth the premium to get external workers to complete those particular projects when compared to the alternative of missing out on some other work we wanted done or ramping up internal staff with new permanent headcount.
If he's got any sense (as opposed to being intelligent) he'll get a job writing complex trading algorithms for some big Wall Street firm. There's no money in doing something productive, might as well be rich.
Honestly I'd be surprised if opening 100% of their algorithms and such would be detrimental at this point. The sheer capital requirements of getting into the search indexing game at this point make it a non-starter for all but very large companies. And those big companies would have a hard time growing into anything resembling competitive with a "real" technology shop.
Welcome to the real world, where most of the IT work people do isn't as hard as they make it out to be. This is evidenced by the fact that people in other countries can do a passable job at it for less money. It's just petty nationalism to assume that the best and brightest minds are in the United States. Our education system isn't magical and neither is our gene pool.
IT these days isn't like being an engineer designing the next rocket ship. This is slashdot so I'll use an appropriate analogy... it's more akin to being an auto mechanic. You bring some experience to the table and occasionally have to read a manual or two when the new fangled whatchamacallit comes out, but otherwise you're doing the same old stuff. The high end IT work demands and receives higher wages, but that's not what most of us are *really* doing.
The United States has one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. We're a MASSIVE market and businesses will continue to do business here even if we raise their taxes.
We'll provide both medicare and social security. We'll do it by socializing the healthcare industry and paying out less valuable dollars in SS via inflation. Putting all the net profits of all health care and insurance providers in the country into government coffers is going to balance the budget. It's already been done in places like Japan.
The states don't have the authority to not allow the federal government to take my money, but they can refuse when the feds try to give it back. Tell me how it makes sense to have the feds take your money but to lobby the state to not accept those funds back into the state? It's silly.
The Interstate Highway system was originally developed to provide the military a way to get resources into and out of major cities in the event that we were attacked. It also has a dramatic affect on interstate commerce. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that you do not travel on the interstate or purchase products that travel on the interstate during your year. So... you'll pay a small share (since you drive a relatively small number of miles) and you'll pay the rest of your share because it will be built into the price of goods you purchase which travel over those same roads. I disagree with this plan in lieu of raising fuel taxes but I don't think the Constitutionality of it is really in question.
We already pay for infrastructure with fuel taxes and by paying for vehicle registrations. If we need more money for infrastructure we have the facilities in place to raise revenue for infrastructure: raise fuel and registration taxes. This is good because it encourages energy efficiency and smaller vehicles for the consumer (which also cause less wear and tear). This is just a case of some vendor making a product and trying to get millions of units sold and/or more big brother. Take your pick.
Yeah, the Iranian IP thing is just sensationalism. If someone's stealing SSL certs I think making them use a US proxy is going to barely be a speed bump.
It may not be "right" for me to think this way, but IMHO when it's a big name company like Google, Microsoft, etc. that everyone in the WORLD has heard of additional scrutiny should be given before handing out these certs when compared to your mom and pop shop.
I agree with you completely. At the same time you have to remember that Slashdot users level of understanding of technical things is generally going to be higher than the masses. Yes, it's nerve-grinding to have the "technical specialist" tell you to reboot your router, but we live in a world where that isn't common sense to a lot of people.
To be fair, except for the fake name, none of that is specific to Indian call centers. And to be perfectly honest on more than one occasion I've gotten fake names from American sounding people. "Thank you for calling ABC Electronics, this is Haywood Jablowme speaking, how may I help you?"
My understanding is that all the reactors are Uranium reactors. The primary reason to use Uranium rather than Thorium reactors is that Plutonium as a bi-product can be used to make nuclear weapons. It's possible that there's no plutonium there, but it's also a fairly reasonable assumption that all of the reactors have some amount of plutonium lying around.
People in India get to talk to someone that they're more likely to easily understand because they don't have a heavy foreign accent. There's also significant social differences in the expectations of customer service between various countries. That's not saying a foreign worker can't be trained in "Americanized" customer service, but it's not "natural" (natural here meaning socialized expectations) for the foreign worker. It has nothing to do with intelligence, skills, etc. It's the stuff that's harder to measure. Generally though, it's the heavy accent that I hear most people complaining about (myself included on occasion). I don't understand why people get so violently upset about it. If i can't understand someone I just apologize that I can't understand them and ask for someone else.
IMHO it sounds good on paper but the plausibility of implementation falls apart pretty quickly when you consider the huge supply chain for each individual part in a complex piece of machinery. If a single resistor in my car is manufactured by a company that didn't pay for their software licenses now I'm supposed to not be able to sell the car? How far back does the chain of ownership go? Do I have to make sure every single company between the miners to the end parts manufacturer are in software compliance?
Yes, technological progress would slow down without a profit motive. It's important to also recognize the probably change in the psychology of the "purchasers." If everyone is allocated the same amount of resources/money then there's less impetus to try to impress people with the latest shiny crap which was engineered to break just in time for the next release cycle. All of the less desirable work to be done would be handled on an individual level or automated entirely. For example, robots don't make and serve our meals right now because it's not profitable compared to hiring college students. The market would change dramatically on both sides. Of course it's all a fantasy anyways. I generally support capitalism.
I was more responding to the false premise that without requiring an income people would become unproductive and would not desire to innovate than implementation issues resulting from the corrupt elite. That's a different and arguably impossible to overcome issue. I am one of those kooky people that believes we'll eventually innovate our way to a point in which we really don't have anything for most people to do. But we're at least a few lifetimes away from that point.
I would suggest getting catastrophic coverage. The cost is unbelievably cheap and you will be protected in the event of some major health event: cancer, severe accident, etc.
Cool story bro time... I'm in my 20s and healthy. I would be like you (except with catastrophic coverage mentioned before) if my employer didn't provide insurance, but they do. Last year I was in an accident and broke my arm. The total costs (to my insurance company) for the ride to the ER, surgery to screw my bones back together, a couple days in the hospital, and some physical therapy afterwards was over $50k. A couple things to note here. That $50k would have bankrupted my family if we had to pay that out of pocket. More importantly though... while I was in the ER I got to hear the initial patient questions they asked everyone in the room... Name, what happened, do you have insurance, etc. I can tell you based on the responses to those questions that my $50k of health care probably only cost about half that, because several people didn't have any form of insurance... But the hospital had to pay for doctors, nurses, beds, food, etc. for every one of them. The hospital I went to is non-profit. And sure, the President makes a big paycheck as do the doctors, but there's not massive corporate profits going into the pockets of some benefactor. In fact, the big local for-profit hospital will just do enough to keep you alive and then offer you a free ride to the non-profit hospital I was at.
If I didn't make an income and had a reasonable lifestyle provided for me I would still be writing code. And the quality would probably be better because the people around me who only do it to make a buck would get weeded out faster.
Yes. I do whatever I can to avoid giving money to the government enforced monopolies. The only thing I still have via copper is DSL, and I'd prefer to lose that.
If anyone else is considering this, be careful. Most (by market share and coverage) of the 2nd tier carriers are owned by bigger carriers. For example: Virgin and Boost are both owned by Sprint.
I didn't say anything about intent. I was talking about the portion of my activity which is in violation of the law vs. someone else's activity, which was in direct response to the GGP post.
Slashdot Mirror
This thread is old but I thought I'd respond anyways. I've never been replaced due to outsourcing but my company has outsourced a few projects successfully. The quality of work was not great, but passable. With some relatively minor refactoring we were able to get it into a condition that satisfied our needs. It certainly cost more than it would have cost to do internally, but not when you consider the value of *other* work internal employees were accomplishing during that time. The business decision was made that it was worth the premium to get external workers to complete those particular projects when compared to the alternative of missing out on some other work we wanted done or ramping up internal staff with new permanent headcount.
If he's got any sense (as opposed to being intelligent) he'll get a job writing complex trading algorithms for some big Wall Street firm. There's no money in doing something productive, might as well be rich.
Honestly I'd be surprised if opening 100% of their algorithms and such would be detrimental at this point. The sheer capital requirements of getting into the search indexing game at this point make it a non-starter for all but very large companies. And those big companies would have a hard time growing into anything resembling competitive with a "real" technology shop.
Welcome to the real world, where most of the IT work people do isn't as hard as they make it out to be. This is evidenced by the fact that people in other countries can do a passable job at it for less money. It's just petty nationalism to assume that the best and brightest minds are in the United States. Our education system isn't magical and neither is our gene pool.
IT these days isn't like being an engineer designing the next rocket ship. This is slashdot so I'll use an appropriate analogy... it's more akin to being an auto mechanic. You bring some experience to the table and occasionally have to read a manual or two when the new fangled whatchamacallit comes out, but otherwise you're doing the same old stuff. The high end IT work demands and receives higher wages, but that's not what most of us are *really* doing.
The United States has one of the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the industrialized world. We're a MASSIVE market and businesses will continue to do business here even if we raise their taxes.
We'll provide both medicare and social security. We'll do it by socializing the healthcare industry and paying out less valuable dollars in SS via inflation. Putting all the net profits of all health care and insurance providers in the country into government coffers is going to balance the budget. It's already been done in places like Japan.
The states don't have the authority to not allow the federal government to take my money, but they can refuse when the feds try to give it back. Tell me how it makes sense to have the feds take your money but to lobby the state to not accept those funds back into the state? It's silly.
The Interstate Highway system was originally developed to provide the military a way to get resources into and out of major cities in the event that we were attacked. It also has a dramatic affect on interstate commerce. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that you do not travel on the interstate or purchase products that travel on the interstate during your year. So... you'll pay a small share (since you drive a relatively small number of miles) and you'll pay the rest of your share because it will be built into the price of goods you purchase which travel over those same roads. I disagree with this plan in lieu of raising fuel taxes but I don't think the Constitutionality of it is really in question.
We already pay for infrastructure with fuel taxes and by paying for vehicle registrations. If we need more money for infrastructure we have the facilities in place to raise revenue for infrastructure: raise fuel and registration taxes. This is good because it encourages energy efficiency and smaller vehicles for the consumer (which also cause less wear and tear). This is just a case of some vendor making a product and trying to get millions of units sold and/or more big brother. Take your pick.
Yeah, the Iranian IP thing is just sensationalism. If someone's stealing SSL certs I think making them use a US proxy is going to barely be a speed bump.
It may not be "right" for me to think this way, but IMHO when it's a big name company like Google, Microsoft, etc. that everyone in the WORLD has heard of additional scrutiny should be given before handing out these certs when compared to your mom and pop shop.
I agree with you completely. At the same time you have to remember that Slashdot users level of understanding of technical things is generally going to be higher than the masses. Yes, it's nerve-grinding to have the "technical specialist" tell you to reboot your router, but we live in a world where that isn't common sense to a lot of people.
To be fair, except for the fake name, none of that is specific to Indian call centers. And to be perfectly honest on more than one occasion I've gotten fake names from American sounding people. "Thank you for calling ABC Electronics, this is Haywood Jablowme speaking, how may I help you?"
My understanding is that all the reactors are Uranium reactors. The primary reason to use Uranium rather than Thorium reactors is that Plutonium as a bi-product can be used to make nuclear weapons. It's possible that there's no plutonium there, but it's also a fairly reasonable assumption that all of the reactors have some amount of plutonium lying around.
People in India get to talk to someone that they're more likely to easily understand because they don't have a heavy foreign accent. There's also significant social differences in the expectations of customer service between various countries. That's not saying a foreign worker can't be trained in "Americanized" customer service, but it's not "natural" (natural here meaning socialized expectations) for the foreign worker. It has nothing to do with intelligence, skills, etc. It's the stuff that's harder to measure. Generally though, it's the heavy accent that I hear most people complaining about (myself included on occasion). I don't understand why people get so violently upset about it. If i can't understand someone I just apologize that I can't understand them and ask for someone else.
IMHO it sounds good on paper but the plausibility of implementation falls apart pretty quickly when you consider the huge supply chain for each individual part in a complex piece of machinery. If a single resistor in my car is manufactured by a company that didn't pay for their software licenses now I'm supposed to not be able to sell the car? How far back does the chain of ownership go? Do I have to make sure every single company between the miners to the end parts manufacturer are in software compliance?
Yes, technological progress would slow down without a profit motive. It's important to also recognize the probably change in the psychology of the "purchasers." If everyone is allocated the same amount of resources/money then there's less impetus to try to impress people with the latest shiny crap which was engineered to break just in time for the next release cycle. All of the less desirable work to be done would be handled on an individual level or automated entirely. For example, robots don't make and serve our meals right now because it's not profitable compared to hiring college students. The market would change dramatically on both sides. Of course it's all a fantasy anyways. I generally support capitalism.
I was more responding to the false premise that without requiring an income people would become unproductive and would not desire to innovate than implementation issues resulting from the corrupt elite. That's a different and arguably impossible to overcome issue. I am one of those kooky people that believes we'll eventually innovate our way to a point in which we really don't have anything for most people to do. But we're at least a few lifetimes away from that point.
I would suggest getting catastrophic coverage. The cost is unbelievably cheap and you will be protected in the event of some major health event: cancer, severe accident, etc.
Cool story bro time...
I'm in my 20s and healthy. I would be like you (except with catastrophic coverage mentioned before) if my employer didn't provide insurance, but they do. Last year I was in an accident and broke my arm. The total costs (to my insurance company) for the ride to the ER, surgery to screw my bones back together, a couple days in the hospital, and some physical therapy afterwards was over $50k. A couple things to note here. That $50k would have bankrupted my family if we had to pay that out of pocket. More importantly though... while I was in the ER I got to hear the initial patient questions they asked everyone in the room... Name, what happened, do you have insurance, etc. I can tell you based on the responses to those questions that my $50k of health care probably only cost about half that, because several people didn't have any form of insurance... But the hospital had to pay for doctors, nurses, beds, food, etc. for every one of them. The hospital I went to is non-profit. And sure, the President makes a big paycheck as do the doctors, but there's not massive corporate profits going into the pockets of some benefactor. In fact, the big local for-profit hospital will just do enough to keep you alive and then offer you a free ride to the non-profit hospital I was at.
Define fair. Please try to briefly discuss Darwinism in your response. kthxbye.
If I didn't make an income and had a reasonable lifestyle provided for me I would still be writing code. And the quality would probably be better because the people around me who only do it to make a buck would get weeded out faster.
How many proxies are you behind :)
Yes. I do whatever I can to avoid giving money to the government enforced monopolies. The only thing I still have via copper is DSL, and I'd prefer to lose that.
If anyone else is considering this, be careful. Most (by market share and coverage) of the 2nd tier carriers are owned by bigger carriers. For example: Virgin and Boost are both owned by Sprint.
I didn't say anything about intent. I was talking about the portion of my activity which is in violation of the law vs. someone else's activity, which was in direct response to the GGP post.