Of course most folks who are actually working in IT could have told you this. I know a number of folks at companies who experienced several rounds of layoffs. They have survived the layoffs, but they are also currently doing the job of two to three employees now versus prior to the layoffs. Morale is low, pay has not kept up with the cost of living increases, the cost of health care or inflation. Productivity is still there, but burnout is likely in these individuals. Other people I know that did los
Disclaimer: I am an IT manager who sets up and runs IT groups in India. So I'm the "bad guy" I guess.
1. Outsourcing is not new. And the reaction by the IT industry is not new. The garment industry was outsourced, the steel industry, to a degree the automotive industry. It happens. The people directly impacted don't like it but as long as it make economic sense, outsourcing will happen. Adapt to survive and thrive.
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
3. Outsourcing is not easy in the IT industry. I can point to as many failures as successes. Not every company in the US that needs IT resources will be candidates for outsourcing. Not every job will end up overseas. In fact even though my entire IT organization is in India I'll soon be looking for a Systems Engineer in the US because I'm not happy with what I find in India.
4. Salaries for IT candidates in India are increasing very rapidly (think Silicon Valley, 1999). Given the inherent inefficiency of dealing with people great distances away, the economics of outsourcing are getting worse.
5. Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
There is a significant difference between the two -
Outsourcing without offshoring is usually a positive strategic choice, and a result of businesses moving non-core activities to firms more focussed on that activity and likely to be more efficient/effective at that activity. For instance, most large firms outsource their catering to an external provider. It may have some effect on the overall job market, but usually just means that your role gets moved to a more specialist employer. As this is a move based largely on specialist people being able to do the job better, costs should stay cheaper.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is almost always negative and tactical and little more than a race to the bottom on simple employee cost (usually as a result of poor employment regulation/health and safety/general standard of living etc in the target country). Eventually, however, increased demand for jobs in that country will force wages up, and the only option is to move on to the next cheap economy.
The problem is of course, is there ANYTHING productive left for US and other western societies to do, that they can compete in? It increasingly appears not.
Actually, the real problem is that IT management is so impressed by the initial dollar savings that they are completely oblivious to the utter lack of quality in the work coming back from offshore. Our organization has outsourced about 2/3rds of its internal development to one of the largest companies in India (InfoSys). The product we receive back from them is consistently of poor quality, bug-ridden, and unmaintainable.
Unfortunately, upper management is still so pleased with the low hourly rates that they're not realizing that in the long term, they're paying for three times as many hours than would be necessary if the software were written correctly in the first place. I don't have much hope that they will come to their senses -- this has been going on for four years here now.
I can confirm this. I've worked with a couple of Indian outsourcers, and I can tell you that your chance of getting a quality product back is slim. They buy licenses on the cheap (much less than what they need), skimp on their internal training, and hire people who might be nice, but not necessarily the brightest of the bunch. By now, I'm quite confident that while I can't compete with them on price, the quality that I deliver is far above what they can offer. My response when I hear that stuff is being outs
Essentially, it's down to the cost structures of labor and the economy as a whole. The levels of indirect expenditure on non-productive organizations absolutely kills the ability to remain competetive; spending on everything from intellectual 'property' through military expenses have to be paid for out of the pockets of the productive areas of the economy.
The problem is of course, is there ANYTHING productive left for US and other western societies to do
er..watching 5 billion channels of $#!+ on television, eating burgers and drinking "pop"? That's the US. In the UK, everyone can productively go on the dole...
... is because the economy in the UK has gone quite well for most people.
Unemployment in the UK is almost nonexistent, and very often when you need a qualified person the only option is to hire abroad (often by means of outsourcing and offshoring).
So this gloom abot everybody going to the dole in the UK is frankly childish nonsense.
The problem is of course, is there ANYTHING productive left for US and other western societies to do, that they can compete in? It increasingly appears not.
I was about to say "idiot managers and government clock-punchers", but they are ubiquitous.
Oddly enough, America does a darn good job of automotive manufacturing and engineering. Honda and Toyota are expanding their North American operations because they get good quality work out of us folks here in Flyover, USA. The problem with American business i
Which is why Detroit is busting so bad. Our free-market healthcare system (which is anything but free) is a large part of what's killing our labor market and causing jobs to flee overseas . . . and even if they come back they come back at Wal-Mart.
Oddly enough, America does a darn good job of automotive manufacturing and engineering. Honda and Toyota are expanding their North American operations because they get good quality work out of us folks here in Flyover, USA. The problem with American business is American government and American managers.
No, the big problem with US carmakers is how much they spend on health care and unionized labor. Back during the glory days of US industry, unions extracted some pretty significant concessions from Ford and G
Western developped countries and a few others have the higest standards of living in the world.
When I read these discussions it would seem like if people are now starving on the streets of Houston, NY anD la because jobs have been moved elsewhere.
What country are you from again talking about US workers having a lazy working ethics? When I was in Europe most people had less than 40 hour work weeks, got 4 weeks of vacation, and sick time. Here in the US my friends are very lucky if they get 2 weeks vacation and my sick days are part of that. I typically work 50-80 hours every week with no comp time as do my fellow employees. The only people I know who work harder than Americans are certain asian countries like Japan. Or third world nations were p
Quality is not uniformly crap. The indians are the new japanese. They are working *very hard* to come up to speed. They are insanely driven right now- to the point of committing suicide if they don't get in the right schools.
If you think they are going to produce crap quality code in 5 years, you are setting yourself up for a massive fall.
The good news is in 8 years, their wage advantage will mostly be gone at current inflation rates. And that americans begin retiring in droves in 2012 creating a labor shorta
America is grossly overpriced because it is a safe, prosperous place to live where the government mostly (even in these increasingly fascist days) leaves you alone and has comparatively low taxes. Rich people are willing to pay a lot to live in a pretty place which the government won't take from them and where the government or some religious psychos won't arbitrarily kill them, torture them, or put them in prison.
The next generation of indians will not be *nearly* so driven. Just like the europeans, then t
Okay. I'd missed that distinction. I might disagree on some particulars (like I think they have a lot of quality coders who are 1/4 our price) but not with your general points. Particularly that hordes of "programmers" are not going to be effective and about the potential instability if they don't share the wealth. I did see an article that they were outlawing child labor as household servants. This will reduce the labor force and that should raise wages for household servant slightly.
Several guys in this thread (obviously USian or Westerners of other various denominations) decry the quality of the work produced elsewhere. This is unsurprising, and I am sure mostly unfair.
But accepting without conceding this point, obviously the code is good enough.
You guys are failing to see this and it was time that you woked up and smelled the coffee.
People in other countries may not code to your high standards (ha, ha, ha!) but frankly you should stop beating that horse and look at the real reasons f
Lifestyles in Western countries are wasteful (consumerism for you), your only hope is for you to re-arrange peiorities or sit and wait that other people commit the same mistakes.
As an American it is sometimes hard to conceptualize that there are people out there in the world who are working their asses off to get to where you started out from (economically speaking).
I know. It's amazing how much we waste our youth by not allowing them to work. How many hours of productivity we waste by making companies pay for overtime. And then there are all those pesky environmental laws to prevent dumping of toxic waste straight into the drinking water.
Then there are the annual taxes higher than most people in the world earn required to pay for police (several in texas were found to be making *over* $120k per year lately) and government officials (over $100k).
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S. I see examples of this all the time with illegal construction workers here in California. Since they are already in the country illegally, they have no insentive (or knowledge?) to follow OSHA saftey standards that a legitimate construction company would have to follow. If you can get away with the same thing with exported labor, exchanging a few lives for $$$ many companies are willing to do this.
So essentially, U.S. companies are deffering those costs by working overseas. I for one think companies should be punished financially in someway or guarantee the same worker rights in those foreign countries.
Another problem, and I think this is the biggest one, is the lack of national pride in the U.S. If the country you live in is say no more important to you then $200 off a plasma TV at Wal-Mart, what are you to care if jobs go overseas? I'm just saying that economically speaking, there is no added value in the tag "made in U.S.A." anymore since it is no longer associated with quality or pride with the average consumer. I suppose an employer sees their employees the same way now, looking at the individual and their qualities instead of "made in U.S.A.". However, if the U.S. does want to stay competitive it still must maintain self interest.
5. decimation can also mean: to cause great destruction or harm to
"Another problem, and I think this is the biggest one, is the lack of national pride in the U.S."
I agree but it isn't just about cost. 30+ years ago "Made in the USA" meant quality. Does anyone see it that way today? Often people are willing to pay more for things produced overseas because of higher quality.
I don't agree. IMHO, the government was used to rig the economic playing field. See 1970's, redux [slashdot.org]. Summary: federal reserve has been inflating the money supply [aol.com] since 1995. First came the dot com bubble, then the dot com crash. Recession! Then there came a "terrorist" attack, and Alan Greenspan and his merry band of fools cut interest rates to next-to-nothing. Because production had already been moving offshore (fleeing teh inflation), this new injection of mo
I was going to reply to the parent, but I am replying to you instead. Take two cars, coming off the same assembly line, one with GM badging, the other with Toyota badging, which car lasts longer, has less problems, better reputation? Answer Toyota. Why is that?
Well people see GM cars as disposible, and therefore do not take care of them, while the Toyota car is viewed as durable, and therefore people take care of them, so they last longer.
And don't tell me this isn't an issue, because it is an issue even wit
You mentioned one possible solution for this problem: americans should buy products and sevices done by americans. But this is essentialy isolation from the rest of the world, if you want that to work properly, because you need to use just your resources. And also because you have to guard your R&D (if you are good enough, your R&D will be better than that of the rest of the world and you do not want cheap products based on your R&D but foreign cheap labor to tempt americans:) . Or, alternatively, if your R&D wont be better, you have to essentialy deny that the rest of the world exists otherwise americans wont buy "domestic but inferior" products.
So, IMO, such isolation wont work - it's something similar to what eastern block tried during Cold War or something which China has been doing for quite a long time and is now ceasing to do.
But what other choice other that isolation is there?
Well, openess.
But openess does not mean "we, americans, can do everything, all of you others can do nothing". So no barriers should be used to block others from access to american market.
But to maintain edge over others (in terms of economic production, standards of living,...) is like maintaining a "water hill" in the lake - without walls you can to that to some extent only by perpetualy pumping water like fountain (or by manipulating gravity, but I want dwell into such things for now).
In such analogy, such pump should be something similar to what amaricans used in the past to get the edge: good R&D, freedom,...
Of course, your wealth will always try to flow to poorer countries (because of market forces: cheeper labor, more thus cheaper natural resources, better location,...) but you can view it also in good light:
it is a good reason for your standard of living not to overgrow your own production capabilities (i.e. no deficit in foreign trade which can't be maintained in long term and ends ussualy quite dramaticaly, IMO)
you're helping others out from their poor state (but not by just giving them money but by giving them work to do and paying for it) - TheUglyAmerican wrote it: "Salaries for IT candidates in India are increasing very rapidly" - something not possible without US participating in free world trade and I thing far better than just giving Indians money for doing nothing thus making them unable to take care of themselves
So yes, maintaing the edge in free world trade is not easy. But it's same with everything else, whether you're trying to be better skier, better swimmer, better hunter, better mathematician, better painter - you have to work on that, not just sit there and claim you are better.
Same with me: for now I may be enjoying increase in business coming from the US and western Europe to midle-east Eurore but I know that if I go too far (asking too great price not backed by something appropriate: good quality, good performance,...) my business will go elsewhere very soon - maybe even back the where it came from.
But that's reality (and openess about the reality).
So what you are saying in essence is might equals right that those who can't make it in the global market place should be left to suffer at the side of the road? Whatever happened to compassion? It fascinates that so many who claim to be "Christians" are also social Darwanists which is about as far opposite from Christianity as you can get. Now I happen to be secular but I sure wouldn't mind seeing a little more Christian compassion and little less kill em all and let the market sort it out in the U.S. In
Why is life a contest? How are we on a different team than the Chinese and Indians? I don't exactly feel any urge to "beat" them. Nor do I feel obligated to.
It's called 'survival'. While the company I work for is competing with other companies, I am also competing against other programmers to maintain my job and to advance my own self.
Good luck with that, seriously, it's nice to know there are a few optimists left. Personally I'm putting my money on the tried-and-true Darwinesque "survival of the fittest" existence to continue. People, societies, companies and humanity in general will only cooperate/compete fairly when (a) it is beneficial for everyone to do so (which almost never happens), and/or (b) there is no other option but to cooperate/compete fairly. Life has evolved that way for millions of years, why expect it to change in your
People, societies, companies and humanity in general will only cooperate/compete fairly when it is beneficial for everyone to do so...
I think what you mean to say here is "People, societies, companies and humanity in general will only cooperate/compete fairly when it is the most beneficial for people in power to do so..."
There are two important differences here I am trying to highlight. First it's not a mater of being beneficial to all of humanity, because if there is a way for people to benefit themse
Nice. The "everyone sucks except us" approach, also known as xenophobia, nationalism or even (shock) racism. Who modded this insightful? Tell me something - who is American, and how do you know? Who deserves to play on your team - Native Americans, Jonestown people, the kid born here from illegal Mexican immigrants, the Bulgarian physicist who was just naturalized?
It's people like you who make me embarrassed to be an American. Stop giving the rest of us a bad name and get the hell out of my country.
exchanging a few lives for $$$ many companies are willing to do this.
And herein lies the real problem. Someone wrote a letter to our paper a few days ago complaining about new toxic pollution laws (not CO2, this was stuff like mercury and things that are actually proven to kill people) complaining that the current laws are "already far too onerous" by requiring a level of pollution that would kill only one in a million people.
Yet people don't throw these guys in jail? If I ran around killing one in a mill
People die. That's what they do. Every single one of us will die, it's just a matter of where and when. There is risk in everything we do. A friend once told me that in big projects in the past, there were acceptable losses of workers factored into the cost. They actually worked the cost of people dying into the overall cost of building things like the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge. His idea was that we live in a society where risk is so unacceptable that we probably couldn't try anything so ambitio
For me, the lack of national pride - or any kind of pride at all - is the big problem. From what I see in this forum and elsewhere, US workers are embittered, cynical and feel they're grossly underpaid, while foreign workers are not embittered, uncynical and are grateful to work for peanuts.
Someone tell me why I SHOULD hire a US worker or invest in the US with the above being true.
For ever job I could give a bitter and ungrateful US worker, I could give 10 jobs and materially improve people's lives in anothe
From what I see in this forum and elsewhere, US workers are embittered, cynical and feel they're grossly underpaid, while foreign workers are not embittered, uncynical and are grateful to work for peanuts.
"Have-Nots" who are given opportunuties tend to be positive. "Haves" who have opportunities taken away from them through no fault of their own tend to be negative.
Someone tell me why I SHOULD hire a US worker or invest in the US with the above being true.
I agree with you there, I would just rather hire positive people, and have positive people around me than negative ones.
It may be nobody's fault per se, but that doesn't make life any more enjoyable when it's spent around bitter people.
I hope some of the bitter people who are reading this will take it to heart. Improve your atittude and you're a lot more likely to get, and stay, employed.
I thought you made and excellent point and if I wasn't the writer of the parent post, I would have modded you up.
However, the people I really suspect I will need are support people and maybe a graphic artist. I have people back in the US doing testing for me. Support people, of course, need to be cheerful, and I don't think it would hurt if my graphic artist was too.
So I think things will work out OK. Take advantage of each country's natural temprament:-).
I never said anything even vaguely like that, so I'm a little puzzled as to why you would think it. The unemployment rate in the Philippines is far higher than in the US.
The Philippines is a much nicer place to live than the US if you don't need to earn a living, or if you can take your work from another country (which is what I plan to do).
If you need to make a living, the Philippines is a nightmare. This is why huge numbers of skilled people are leaving the country to work in the US and other countries wi
And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S.
First: we are talking about IT workers, right? Safety standards are at best a minor issue. Americans get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome too.
Second: you are responding to a post that says that there is fierce competition for IT workers and therefore burgeoning salaries. These are not abused factory workers. They are PHP program
While IT workers aren't 'abused' in the sweatshop sense, don't trivialize the challenges American IT workers face. We're not complaining about jobs without free soft drinks, but about jobs where we're doing the work of two or three people for 60% of the salary we could command five years ago. American wages are being eroded much faster than Indian wages are going up, with the difference being pocketed by employers, and any attempt by American workers to ask for more jobs, better wages, or better working conditions are discouraged by the threat of jobs moving to India.
What I fear is something called 'wage arbitrage.' Transnational corporations can go anywhere to take advantage of low cost labor, and skilled workers trapped behind national borders cannot follow. So wherever corporations have jobs, they can keep costs down by threatening to move workers overseas. Governments are desperate to keep these jobs, so they're happy to pass laws at the behest of the corporations, giving them tax breaks or making it illegal for workers to unionize.
So I really don't see it as "America is hurting, but India is turning into a technological superpower." If it were that simple, I'd probably just start looking into migrating. India's day in the sun will only last as long as they don't do anything stupid, like try and tax the corporations to pay for the education system that benefits them or improve the lot of the rural poor. The moment that happens, you'll see a massive shift away from India towards some more compliant country.
Of course, that will raise wages in Sierra Leone, or wherever the jobs move to. But not nearly as much as wages will fall in India, and again, corporations will pocket the difference. It's all a huge shell game designed to transfer as much of the wealth created by labor into the coffers of owners, while giving as little back as possible. Wage arbitrage gives capital a huge advantage in any negotiations with labor. But in the long run, this destroys the middle class, and erodes nations' abilities to invest in the health and education of their citizens, which are necessary for businesses to run successfully. So big business is reaping short term profits while undercutting both demand for their products and the ability of labor to create those products.
IOW, I'm happy to see India doing well, but I think it's part of a long-term trend that is going to hurt everyone.
True. Average wages are inching upwards, but that glosses over the fact that wages are skyrocketing for the top 1%, and actually falling for the bottom 20%.* I'm sorry I made that statement, because I really can't back it up with a source. But the claim does make intuitive sense to me, because if every one dollar of salary exported raised Indian wages by one dollar, then what would be the point? In my mind, I was only talking about the relative fortunes of the Indian and American IT sectors, but I didn't
A country is an artificial abstraction. You should be happy for your peers in India building a parallel high technology business that will help the whole human race move forward more quickly by providing global IT at reduced rates while supporting investments into the Indian school system.
Geographic location, a common culture and laws are "artificial abstractions"? I don't understand that statement. Maybe you meant something like, "nation-states are becoming increasingly irrelevant to commerce"?
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I don't agree that the "lack of national pride" in the U.S. is the "biggest problem" we're facing.
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
Wasn't part of the opening premise of Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash" that everyone's wages in the world economy had been equalized and everyone made the same amount of money--that of a Pakistani brickmaker? That was fiction of course, but the reality of the situation is that we have given corporations free reign to do as they please without consequence. Coporations as entities have only one allegiance, the dollar (and not the US dollar at that). It doesn't matter how patriotic their captains are, the doll
More than anything it is sickening to see these companies (who all made their money off of the labor of the average american who fought for labor rights) completely ignore workers' rights elsewhere--as if the workers' movement in the US was a mistake and not a correct moral stance.
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; communism is the reverse.
Outsourcing is certainly not new, however one could argue that massive outsourcing is new for white color jobs that require a significant level of very specific education. Traditional manufacturing jobs do not necessarily require a university degree.
Exactly - for ages, those in the IT world scoffed at the clericals and other low-skill employees who were obsoleted by advances in technology they created and/or implemented. Secretaries have largely been wiped out due to the advance of email and word processing, manufacturing and distribution personnel have been cut due to the development of industrial technology, retail workers threatened by the progress of e-commerce, etc. Now, when IT workers themselves are threatened by advances in communications techn
Exactly - for ages, those in the IT world scoffed at the clericals and other low-skill employees who were obsoleted by advances in technology they created and/or implemented.
In 18 years of working in a corporate environment, I've never seen this attitude. I always appreciated having a secretary for our department, having documentation specialists, etc., because some of those folks were far far better at what they did than we programmers were, and it was a sad day for most of us when those folks were le
Now, when IT workers themselves are threatened by advances in communications technology that allows their work to be done by foreign competitors, many of them cry foul and demand protection.
Replacing people with automation is not the same as replacing people with other people elsewhere. When people are replaced with automation, the money to purchase and maintain the machines goes elsewhere within the economy (leading to other jobs -- probably fewer, but higher paying). The money saved results in lower pri
Replacing people with automation is not the same as replacing people with other people elsewhere. When people are replaced with automation, the money to purchase and maintain the machines goes elsewhere within the economy (leading to other jobs -- probably fewer, but higher paying). The money saved results in lower prices, which also helps the local economy.
Basically, we're talking about productivity improvements. The single greatest factor in a country's long-term wealth-building ability is continuous pro
A few years ago, the work that I would have been doing would have been absolutely dull. Things have changed now - I'm involved a lot more with customers and working out how to help them instead of being in a lab all day. Outsourcing has meant that the dull parts of my job have been moved away but the juicy bits remain. And guess what guys and girls, this makes me happier.
Incidently, I read something like for every dollar of work shipped out overseas, we get to see 1.30 in return. This is a well known
"Incidently, I read something like for every dollar of work shipped out overseas, we get to see 1.30 in return."
I wish you would think more critically about the 'we' part. When a company offshores, the extra 30 cents is only seen by the owners and shareholders. The people who get laid off don't see that 30 cents. That 30 cents helps those who make their living off the interests of their investments, but the bast majority of Americans make their living from a paycheck.
I have thought a lot about it. I've also traveled around the world, in a non-tourist capacity, and witnessed the reality first-hand.
If excessive taxation caused the middle class to shrink, Europe would have a small, rich, wealthy class, and throngs of poor people, and relatively unregulated, untaxed places like Africa and South America should have a burgeoning middle class.
But in fact the exact opposite is true. Places without regulation like South America have a wealthy, ruling class of a few, well-connected families. The other 95% of the population are living on the edge. It wasn't until I lived in South America that I saw homeless families -- mom, dad, and kids -- living on the streets. Until then, I had thought that a homeless person was just a crazy guy who heard voices and couldn't hold down a job.
So then in Europe, with high taxes, extensive regulation, and strong unions, we see the largest middle classes and the highest standards of living. So, the reality is the opposite of what your theory predicts. The states with the most regulation, highest taxes, and stongest unions are those with most highest per capita income and the highest standard of living.
Without government regulation, greedy wealthy people will exploit the average joe to maintain their wealth. There are good, honest rich people who want to treat people humanely and compete fairly in the marketplace. However, they are quickly outcompeted by rich people with no ethics, who have no problem bribing officials and having people killed to get what they want. You can't compete with a cheater when you are playing fairly. So what happens is that a kleptocracy arises -- the best cheaters rise to the top.
What government regulation does is keep the game fair, so that honest players have a chance at winning. It's not a perfect solution, but it is far better than the alternative.
Again, I with you would think more critically about these issues. As the slashdot sig goes, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. I am glad you and your friends are having a good experience with work, but your situation is not representative of reality for most Americans. You can't just look at what is immediately in front of you and think, "Things are going well for me; therefore, things are going well for all Americans."
So, the reality is the opposite of what your theory predicts.
But we all know that reality has a well-documented Liberal bias! Besides, when did this administration care about anything as fungible as reality? When did the American populace start thinking of reality as a type of TV show? Where do I go now that I've gone too far?
Have you ever thought that the American middle class might be shrinking because of excessive taxation (spurred by big government) and draconian business laws that make it difficult for companies to operate?
Taxation on what exactly? Payroll is tax free! That should make the middle class GROW rather than SHRINK!
The American tariff code has over 1000 pages!
And you don't have to deal with a single page of it if you make everything here that you market here- tariffs only deal with OTHER nations. If your
I'll preface this by saying I'm unconvinced that there is a problem with outsourcing. I've never had trouble finding a job, but I am young and still moving up the ladder, not trying to maintain my position.
However, that routine stuff that was outsourced used to be the things that entry level people did to learn how to do the more interesting stuff. I see fewer companies willing to take on and train somebody. Even when they don't out source they wast their experienced people's time with trivial and unin
5. Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
6. I could be wrong on any or all of the above.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every s
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
Wrong attitude for businesses to take, seems to me -- competing on cost alone results in a race to the bottom, which is what we seem to be experiencing. I've worked with Indian teams, in person, and they are
Over the last 20 years I've watched as American business management seemed to forget about delivering the best product, and focused on maximizing profits instead, as if the two could be entirely separated.
There are a number of cases of this to prove the point.
Walmart and cronies, and the people who shop there, are mainly to blame for a lot of this IMHO. They kept demanding lower and lower prices from manufacturers, which resulted in many of the manufacturers needing to cut costs. Slowly over the years manuf
Your points are absolutely valid. As the economic favor hits India and other nations, they will experience the same costs increases that have been experienced in the US over the last 40 years only in a fraction of the time. This makes the cost of doing business overseas less attractive than the cost of doing it internally. This explosive growth can become problematic if the area doing the growth (industry/country/region) can't handle it.
As long as there is a computer located in the US, there will be a n
Well, one thing seems to be improving at least: the quality of discourse on offshoring.
I want to raise a counterpoint to your point 2:
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
I'm not sure I agree with this, although I think that protective measures
I feel the need to disagree with your final point. Firstly, there has never been any point in history that these sorts of tariffs have worked. Any time they are applied, industries are less likely to do business with that country due to the relative instability of prices (see the recent Steel Tariffs debacle, or any very protectionist country like Iran). If a variable tariff is put on in some countries but not others (due to free trade areas such as the EU, non-adherance to the treaty, or whatever), those c
I rather suspect you didn't carefully read my post, since you just came out with the standard globalisation dogma, most of which had little relevance to the contents of my post.
It's unacceptable to make a claim like
Firstly, there has never been any point in history that these sorts of tariffs have worked.
without citing some thorough research. Being able to find an instance where tariffs fail is not the same as proving that tariffs never work. As an example, I've been working in Switzerland for the la
I apologise for not directing my response enough. To clarify my post, I certainly agree with your sentiment and would love a way for it to work, but do not feel that there is a way for it to work with the world still on such an unequal economic footing. There was a very good survey discussing this exact topic in the economist about 2 weeks ago, but as it is a survey it will not be put online for another month or two so I cannot link to it and the studies it cites (I dont have the issue to hand right now). I
Tariffs work when you control your borders- and sink boats/blow up trucks that don't pay the tariff. We haven't done that for 150 years or more- and so our tariffs don't work.
Unless you are willing to use deadly force to enforce your laws, your laws are worth NOTHING.
"Does anyone know of a good existing proposal out there?"
William Grieder's "One World, Ready or Not" proposes something very much like this towards the end of the book. It's about ten years old, but he was already seeing these trends very clearly. It's a long book, but you sound like the sort of person who would find it absolutely gripping.
I'm looking forward to reading this book [amazon.com] by the same author.
Anyhow, I think it would be very much worth your time to read.
Good points, parent. I think the best first step is to get rid of the federal reserve banking system. Fiat currencies (paper money) are the direct cause of massive trade imbalances between the United States and the rest of the world.
See my other post in this thread [slashdot.org], and the posts I link to too.
Consider that the only reason Chinese goods are still cheap is because they've pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar at a fixed ratio. In a free market currency system, as the trade imbalance with China grew, the
Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
Kind of, I mean, nobody's being killed...
I've always thought it was legitimate to use decimate when you're refering to removing a small, but not insignificant, fraction but doing so in a particularly harsh way. For example, "Our profits were decimated!" wouldn't work because a slight reduction in profits
It will be better when indian tech companies start making their own products to compete with us, instead of us using indian tech companies to make our products. It will generate a maelstrom of competition, and will be better for both sectors - the Indian tech companies won't have to rely on american tech companies to hire them, and will instead focus on creating solutions that only a new industry could create: a new OS, maybe, that can take microsoft down? Once Indian tech companies realize that they can str
I am one of those people that the article refers to. There is an old urban legend that says, "talk is cheap." What do you need? What do you offer in return?
1. Outsourcing is not new. And the reaction by the IT industry is not new. The garment industry was outsourced, the steel industry, to a degree the automotive industry. It happens. The people directly impacted don't like it but as long as it make economic sense, outsourcing will happen. Adapt to survive and thrive.
But you could (not that we do) put tariffs on the garments and steel that 'American' companies try to send back here from the nations they outsourced to. Thus if an American corporation decides
Yes, you are the "bad guy", although ultimately, the blame can probably be at least equally placed on the owners of whatever company you work for, as well as any superiors you report to other than the owners. Of course outsourcing/offshoring is not "new", and of course you can point to as many failures as successes with it. All of this completely dodges the point. As the original article clearly stated, the problem is, for every I.T. position that is sent overseas, we get nothing in return from the nation
America is still a place where you can be a self-made man. That's not true in much of the world. You do need to know what you are doing and how to work within the culture. Read Upton Sinclair's "The Junge" for a look at what happens when industry is forced to stay in one place.
You could always work for the government in IT like I did for a while. The government requires that you be a US citizen for any IT job that has even the slightest security risk so they'll never be exported. The problem with those jobs is that unless you live in a area with a low cost of living or it is very high level it is hard to make ends meet and you have to leave for the private sector (which I did).
Regarding #5, this isn't quite correct. Decimation at it's roots means to kill off 10%; however, decimation can be used to mean kill of the majority of a group so long as no reference is made to a portion of the group. i.e., you can say, "decimated the population" to mean the majority of the population was destroyed; however, you cannot say "decimated half the population" for the reasons you mention. If you are explicitly referring to a fraction, that fraction must be 10%. Forgot the best references, but wik
1. One can make economic sense and still be a traitor to patirotism; the health of a country does not always make economic sense. 2. Here's a restriction that WILL matter: If a company wants to do business outside of the United States, it can no longer do business inside the United States- and vice versa. I see NO reason to allow businesses to be multinational. How long will they stay in business if they've been cut off from their primary consumer market, and all of th
In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Outsourcing is not new. And the reaction by the IT industry is not new. The garment industry was outsourced, the steel industry, to a degree the automotive industry. It happens. The people directly impacted don't like it but as long as it make economic sense, outsourcing will happen. Adapt to survive and thrive.
2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees.
3. Outsourcing is not easy in the IT industry. I can point to as many failures as successes. Not every company in the US that needs IT resources will be candidates for outsourcing. Not every job will end up overseas. In fact even though my entire IT organization is in India I'll soon be looking for a Systems Engineer in the US because I'm not happy with what I find in India.
4. Salaries for IT candidates in India are increasing very rapidly (think Silicon Valley, 1999). Given the inherent inefficiency of dealing with people great distances away, the economics of outsourcing are getting worse.
5. Decimation means to kill off 10%, not 90% as some posts have said. From Wikipedia: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth." So the article is correct, this is decimation.
6. I could be wrong on any or all of the above.
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:4, Informative)
Outsourcing without offshoring is usually a positive strategic choice, and a result of businesses moving non-core activities to firms more focussed on that activity and likely to be more efficient/effective at that activity. For instance, most large firms outsource their catering to an external provider. It may have some effect on the overall job market, but usually just means that your role gets moved to a more specialist employer. As this is a move based largely on specialist people being able to do the job better, costs should stay cheaper.
Offshoring, on the other hand, is almost always negative and tactical and little more than a race to the bottom on simple employee cost (usually as a result of poor employment regulation/health and safety/general standard of living etc in the target country). Eventually, however, increased demand for jobs in that country will force wages up, and the only option is to move on to the next cheap economy.
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Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the real problem is that IT management is so impressed by the initial dollar savings that they are completely oblivious to the utter lack of quality in the work coming back from offshore. Our organization has outsourced about 2/3rds of its internal development to one of the largest companies in India (InfoSys). The product we receive back from them is consistently of poor quality, bug-ridden, and unmaintainable.
Unfortunately, upper management is still so pleased with the low hourly rates that they're not realizing that in the long term, they're paying for three times as many hours than would be necessary if the software were written correctly in the first place. I don't have much hope that they will come to their senses -- this has been going on for four years here now.
Horses for courses. (Score:2)
Blanket statements like yours normally are unfair and innacurate.
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My response when I hear that stuff is being outs
Come back to boast.... (Score:2)
Internships give you a taste of how things are in the real world, but if you think that is the real thing you'll be sorely doissapointed.
I would not surprise me if in a few years you are foced to do less than stelar code once you are under the real pressures of a real job.
Theres always the miltary (Score:4, Funny)
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Essentially, it's down to the cost structures of labor and the economy as a whole. The levels of indirect expenditure on non-productive organizations absolutely kills the ability to remain competetive; spending on everything from intellectual 'property' through military expenses have to be paid for out of the pockets of the productive areas of the economy.
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er..watching 5 billion channels of $#!+ on television, eating burgers and drinking "pop"? That's the US. In the UK, everyone can productively go on the dole...
The only reason why Labour is still in power... (Score:2)
Unemployment in the UK is almost nonexistent, and very often when you need a qualified person the only option is to hire abroad (often by means of outsourcing and offshoring).
So this gloom abot everybody going to the dole in the UK is frankly childish nonsense.
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I was about to say "idiot managers and government clock-punchers", but they are ubiquitous.
Oddly enough, America does a darn good job of automotive manufacturing and engineering. Honda and Toyota are expanding their North American operations because they get good quality work out of us folks here in Flyover, USA. The problem with American business i
Don't forget healthcare (Score:2)
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No, the big problem with US carmakers is how much they spend on health care and unionized labor. Back during the glory days of US industry, unions extracted some pretty significant concessions from Ford and G
Oh fucking please. (Score:2)
When I read these discussions it would seem like if people are now starving on the streets of Houston, NY anD la because jobs have been moved elsewhere.
A sense of proportion would be very welcome.
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Prejudice is basically saying "all ",
without regard to real differences in the subgroup.
It's funny that in denouncing prejudice, you show a prejudiced
viewpoint on westerners, and "their lazy work ethic".
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In quotes was supposed to be "All {pick subgroup} {pick verb}".
Except this time, I am not going to be a lazy westerner, I will
preview this one.
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The indians are the new japanese.
They are working *very hard* to come up to speed. They are insanely driven right now- to the point of committing suicide if they don't get in the right schools.
If you think they are going to produce crap quality code in 5 years, you are setting yourself up for a massive fall.
The good news is in 8 years, their wage advantage will mostly be gone at current inflation rates.
And that americans begin retiring in droves in 2012 creating a labor shorta
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except...
I'm not sure africa is going to be a viable labor market. Nor will most of afganistan.
There are large areas of the world that are just too unstable even for piece work.
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I might disagree on some particulars (like I think they have a lot of quality coders who are 1/4 our price) but not with your general points. Particularly that hordes of "programmers" are not going to be effective and about the potential instability if they don't share the wealth. I did see an article that they were outlawing child labor as household servants. This will reduce the labor force and that should raise wages for household servant slightly.
There's no need to
Good enough is sufficient. (Score:2)
This is unsurprising, and I am sure mostly unfair.
But accepting without conceding this point, obviously the code is good enough.
You guys are failing to see this and it was time that you woked up and smelled the coffee.
People in other countries may not code to your high standards (ha, ha, ha!) but frankly you should stop beating that horse and look at the real reasons f
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As an American it is sometimes hard to conceptualize that there are people out there in the world who are working their asses off to get to where you started out from (economically speaking).
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It's amazing how much we waste our youth by not allowing them to work.
How many hours of productivity we waste by making companies pay for overtime.
And then there are all those pesky environmental laws to prevent dumping of toxic waste straight into the drinking water.
Then there are the annual taxes higher than most people in the world earn required to pay for police (several in texas were found to be making *over* $120k per year lately) and government officials (over $100k).
And then there's entertain
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S. I see examples of this all the time with illegal construction workers here in California. Since they are already in the country illegally, they have no insentive (or knowledge?) to follow OSHA saftey standards that a legitimate construction company would have to follow. If you can get away with the same thing with exported labor, exchanging a few lives for $$$ many companies are willing to do this.
So essentially, U.S. companies are deffering those costs by working overseas. I for one think companies should be punished financially in someway or guarantee the same worker rights in those foreign countries.
Another problem, and I think this is the biggest one, is the lack of national pride in the U.S. If the country you live in is say no more important to you then $200 off a plasma TV at Wal-Mart, what are you to care if jobs go overseas? I'm just saying that economically speaking, there is no added value in the tag "made in U.S.A." anymore since it is no longer associated with quality or pride with the average consumer. I suppose an employer sees their employees the same way now, looking at the individual and their qualities instead of "made in U.S.A.". However, if the U.S. does want to stay competitive it still must maintain self interest.
5. decimation can also mean: to cause great destruction or harm to
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree but it isn't just about cost. 30+ years ago "Made in the USA" meant quality. Does anyone see it that way today? Often people are willing to pay more for things produced overseas because of higher quality.
We only have ourselves to blame for that.
blame the self-appointed ruling class, not 'us' (Score:2)
I don't agree. IMHO, the government was used to rig the economic playing field. See 1970's, redux [slashdot.org]. Summary: federal reserve has been inflating the money supply [aol.com] since 1995. First came the dot com bubble, then the dot com crash. Recession! Then there came a "terrorist" attack, and Alan Greenspan and his merry band of fools cut interest rates to next-to-nothing. Because production had already been moving offshore (fleeing teh inflation), this new injection of mo
to finish that sentance... (Score:2)
the government's central bank.
Had a recent post on the banker/populace tension [slashdot.org], might want to check it out...
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Take two cars, coming off the same assembly line, one with GM badging, the other with Toyota badging, which car lasts longer, has less problems, better reputation? Answer Toyota. Why is that?
Well people see GM cars as disposible, and therefore do not take care of them, while the Toyota car is viewed as durable, and therefore people take care of them, so they last longer.
And don't tell me this isn't an issue, because it is an issue even wit
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
You mentioned one possible solution for this problem: americans should buy products and sevices done by americans. But this is essentialy isolation from the rest of the world, if you want that to work properly, because you need to use just your resources. And also because you have to guard your R&D (if you are good enough, your R&D will be better than that of the rest of the world and you do not want cheap products based on your R&D but foreign cheap labor to tempt americans :) . Or, alternatively, if your R&D wont be better, you have to essentialy deny that the rest of the world exists otherwise americans wont buy "domestic but inferior" products.
So, IMO, such isolation wont work - it's something similar to what eastern block tried during Cold War or something which China has been doing for quite a long time and is now ceasing to do.
But what other choice other that isolation is there?
Well, openess.
But openess does not mean "we, americans, can do everything, all of you others can do nothing". So no barriers should be used to block others from access to american market.
But to maintain edge over others (in terms of economic production, standards of living, ...) is like maintaining a "water hill" in the lake - without walls you can to that to some extent only by perpetualy pumping water like fountain (or by manipulating gravity, but I want dwell into such things for now).
In such analogy, such pump should be something similar to what amaricans used in the past to get the edge: good R&D, freedom, ...
Of course, your wealth will always try to flow to poorer countries (because of market forces: cheeper labor, more thus cheaper natural resources, better location, ...) but you can view it also in good light:
So yes, maintaing the edge in free world trade is not easy. But it's same with everything else, whether you're trying to be better skier, better swimmer, better hunter, better mathematician, better painter - you have to work on that, not just sit there and claim you are better.
Same with me: for now I may be enjoying increase in business coming from the US and western Europe to midle-east Eurore but I know that if I go too far (asking too great price not backed by something appropriate: good quality, good performance, ...) my business will go elsewhere very soon - maybe even back the where it came from.
But that's reality (and openess about the reality).
Of social Darwanism and Christianity... (Score:2)
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It's called 'survival'. While the company I work for is competing with other companies, I am also competing against other programmers to maintain my job and to advance my own self.
Survival was based on cooperation and competition. (Score:2)
Re:Survival was based on cooperation and competiti (Score:2)
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I think what you mean to say here is "People, societies, companies and humanity in general will only cooperate/compete fairly when it is the most beneficial for people in power to do so..."
There are two important differences here I am trying to highlight. First it's not a mater of being beneficial to all of humanity, because if there is a way for people to benefit themse
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You may not be a complete moron, but you argue like one.
Fundamental mistake. (Score:2)
I can't think of a game in which people compete against each other but all win.
Very postmodern and PC, but that would be the correct analogy.
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It's people like you who make me embarrassed to be an American. Stop giving the rest of us a bad name and get the hell out of my country.
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And herein lies the real problem. Someone wrote a letter to our paper a few days ago complaining about new toxic pollution laws (not CO2, this was stuff like mercury and things that are actually proven to kill people) complaining that the current laws are "already far too onerous" by requiring a level of pollution that would kill only one in a million people.
Yet people don't throw these guys in jail? If I ran around killing one in a mill
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A friend once told me that in big projects in the past, there were acceptable losses of workers factored into the cost. They actually worked the cost of people dying into the overall cost of building things like the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge. His idea was that we live in a society where risk is so unacceptable that we probably couldn't try anything so ambitio
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From what I see in this forum and elsewhere, US workers are embittered, cynical and feel they're grossly underpaid, while foreign workers are not embittered, uncynical and are grateful to work for peanuts.
Someone tell me why I SHOULD hire a US worker or invest in the US with the above being true.
For ever job I could give a bitter and ungrateful US worker, I could give 10 jobs and materially improve people's lives in anothe
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"Have-Nots" who are given opportunuties tend to be positive. "Haves" who have opportunities taken away from them through no fault of their own tend to be negative.
I think you should hire the person who wil
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It may be nobody's fault per se, but that doesn't make life any more enjoyable when it's spent around bitter people.
I hope some of the bitter people who are reading this will take it to heart. Improve your atittude and you're a lot more likely to get, and stay, employed.
D
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However, the people I really suspect I will need are support people and maybe a graphic artist. I have people back in the US doing testing for me. Support people, of course, need to be cheerful, and I don't think it would hurt if my graphic artist was too.
So I think things will work out OK. Take advantage of each country's natural temprament
D
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The unemployment rate in the Philippines is far higher than in the US.
The Philippines is a much nicer place to live than the US if you don't need to earn a living, or if you can take your work from another country (which is what I plan to do).
If you need to make a living, the Philippines is a nightmare. This is why huge numbers of skilled people are leaving the country to work in the US and other countries wi
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And this is the problem, countries like India and China can get away with horrible working conditions, lapses in saftey standards and employee rights that we take for granted in the U.S.
First: we are talking about IT workers, right? Safety standards are at best a minor issue. Americans get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome too.
Second: you are responding to a post that says that there is fierce competition for IT workers and therefore burgeoning salaries. These are not abused factory workers. They are PHP program
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I fear is something called 'wage arbitrage.' Transnational corporations can go anywhere to take advantage of low cost labor, and skilled workers trapped behind national borders cannot follow. So wherever corporations have jobs, they can keep costs down by threatening to move workers overseas. Governments are desperate to keep these jobs, so they're happy to pass laws at the behest of the corporations, giving them tax breaks or making it illegal for workers to unionize.
So I really don't see it as "America is hurting, but India is turning into a technological superpower." If it were that simple, I'd probably just start looking into migrating. India's day in the sun will only last as long as they don't do anything stupid, like try and tax the corporations to pay for the education system that benefits them or improve the lot of the rural poor. The moment that happens, you'll see a massive shift away from India towards some more compliant country.
Of course, that will raise wages in Sierra Leone, or wherever the jobs move to. But not nearly as much as wages will fall in India, and again, corporations will pocket the difference. It's all a huge shell game designed to transfer as much of the wealth created by labor into the coffers of owners, while giving as little back as possible. Wage arbitrage gives capital a huge advantage in any negotiations with labor. But in the long run, this destroys the middle class, and erodes nations' abilities to invest in the health and education of their citizens, which are necessary for businesses to run successfully. So big business is reaping short term profits while undercutting both demand for their products and the ability of labor to create those products.
IOW, I'm happy to see India doing well, but I think it's part of a long-term trend that is going to hurt everyone.
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I'm sorry I made that statement, because I really can't back it up with a source. But the claim does make intuitive sense to me, because if every one dollar of salary exported raised Indian wages by one dollar, then what would be the point? In my mind, I was only talking about the relative fortunes of the Indian and American IT sectors, but I didn't
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Geographic location, a common culture and laws are "artificial abstractions"? I don't understand that statement. Maybe you meant something like, "nation-states are becoming increasingly irrelevant to commerce"?
Be that
You guys do not know what poverty is. (Score:2)
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Cheap software.... (Score:2)
The guys in India and China may not making great breakthroughs, but they are contributing to make the economic landscape elsewhere more efficient.
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Don't insult our intelligence. (Score:2)
Your situation is anecdotal, overall most people benefit by buying cheap stuff and services.
re: no pride - Made in the USA tags (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with that line of thought is, people run around trying to drum up support for things made in the U.S.A. with "peer pressure" vs. trying to ask the tough questions. (EG. WHY do people not particularly care if the Made in the U.S.A. tag is on their product or not?)
I saw this clearly with cars and trucks throughout the 80's and into the 90's. You had your union workers proudly driving around their Chevy, Ford or Dodge trucks with big bumper stickers slapped on them telling you to only buy U.S. made vehicles. Yet, most of the general public was reading publications like "Consumer Reports" before making such a big purchase, where they learned that every year, the most-reliable and best made vehicles were coming from Japan instead. So what do you do? Buy U.S.A. anyway and receive an inferior product (and by extension, continue to vote for inferior products with your dollars)?
I think "pride" in U.S. made products will only really come when we've earned it. This isn't going to happen as long as we're only concerned with selling "as cheap as China" either. We need to quit dumping our skilled jobs on other countries to save a buck in the short-term, and then wondering why people don't really like our products better than foreign ones!
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Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; communism is the reverse.
s/labor/taxation/g;
s/worker/taxpayer/g;
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Now, when IT workers themselves are threatened by advances in communications techn
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In 18 years of working in a corporate environment, I've never seen this attitude. I always appreciated having a secretary for our department, having documentation specialists, etc., because some of those folks were far far better at what they did than we programmers were, and it was a sad day for most of us when those folks were le
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Replacing people with automation is not the same as replacing people with other people elsewhere. When people are replaced with automation, the money to purchase and maintain the machines goes elsewhere within the economy (leading to other jobs -- probably fewer, but higher paying). The money saved results in lower pri
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Basically, we're talking about productivity improvements. The single greatest factor in a country's long-term wealth-building ability is continuous pro
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Incidently, I read something like for every dollar of work shipped out overseas, we get to see 1.30 in return. This is a well known
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I wish you would think more critically about the 'we' part. When a company offshores, the extra 30 cents is only seen by the owners and shareholders. The people who get laid off don't see that 30 cents. That 30 cents helps those who make their living off the interests of their investments, but the bast majority of Americans make their living from a paycheck.
I am glad that you are fortunate eno
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:4, Informative)
If excessive taxation caused the middle class to shrink, Europe would have a small, rich, wealthy class, and throngs of poor people, and relatively unregulated, untaxed places like Africa and South America should have a burgeoning middle class.
But in fact the exact opposite is true. Places without regulation like South America have a wealthy, ruling class of a few, well-connected families. The other 95% of the population are living on the edge. It wasn't until I lived in South America that I saw homeless families -- mom, dad, and kids -- living on the streets. Until then, I had thought that a homeless person was just a crazy guy who heard voices and couldn't hold down a job.
So then in Europe, with high taxes, extensive regulation, and strong unions, we see the largest middle classes and the highest standards of living. So, the reality is the opposite of what your theory predicts. The states with the most regulation, highest taxes, and stongest unions are those with most highest per capita income and the highest standard of living.
Without government regulation, greedy wealthy people will exploit the average joe to maintain their wealth. There are good, honest rich people who want to treat people humanely and compete fairly in the marketplace. However, they are quickly outcompeted by rich people with no ethics, who have no problem bribing officials and having people killed to get what they want. You can't compete with a cheater when you are playing fairly. So what happens is that a kleptocracy arises -- the best cheaters rise to the top.
What government regulation does is keep the game fair, so that honest players have a chance at winning. It's not a perfect solution, but it is far better than the alternative.
Again, I with you would think more critically about these issues. As the slashdot sig goes, the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. I am glad you and your friends are having a good experience with work, but your situation is not representative of reality for most Americans. You can't just look at what is immediately in front of you and think, "Things are going well for me; therefore, things are going well for all Americans."
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But we all know that reality has a well-documented Liberal bias! Besides, when did this administration care about anything as fungible as reality? When did the American populace start thinking of reality as a type of TV show? Where do I go now that I've gone too far?
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Taxation on what exactly? Payroll is tax free! That should make the middle class GROW rather than SHRINK!
The American tariff code has over 1000 pages!
And you don't have to deal with a single page of it if you make everything here that you market here- tariffs only deal with OTHER nations. If your
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However, that routine stuff that was outsourced used to be the things that entry level people did to learn how to do the more interesting stuff. I see fewer companies willing to take on and train somebody. Even when they don't out source they wast their experienced people's time with trivial and unin
Re:In more trouble than most realize... (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, you didn't need that disclaimer, your post looks like a powerpoint sheet: a nice bulleted list, it has manager all over it.
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Decimation... (Score:3, Interesting)
True enough, 90% would be a massacre.
I'd say that mostly you are right, but 'Adapt to survive and thrive.' is easy to say but for a lot of people it is hard to put into practice. Personally I don't have any trouble being a IT employment-nomad and moving every s
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Wrong attitude for businesses to take, seems to me -- competing on cost alone results in a race to the bottom, which is what we seem to be experiencing. I've worked with Indian teams, in person, and they are
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There are a number of cases of this to prove the point.
Walmart and cronies, and the people who shop there, are mainly to blame for a lot of this IMHO. They kept demanding lower and lower prices from manufacturers, which resulted in many of the manufacturers needing to cut costs. Slowly over the years manuf
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Your points are absolutely valid. As the economic favor hits India and other nations, they will experience the same costs increases that have been experienced in the US over the last 40 years only in a fraction of the time. This makes the cost of doing business overseas less attractive than the cost of doing it internally. This explosive growth can become problematic if the area doing the growth (industry/country/region) can't handle it.
As long as there is a computer located in the US, there will be a n
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I want to raise a counterpoint to your point 2: 2. Isolated protective measures to limit outsourcing will ultimately fail. If you put restrictions on US companies that increase their costs while overseas competitors have no such restrictions, US companies will be at a competitive disadvantage ultimately hurting their growth and their employees. I'm not sure I agree with this, although I think that protective measures
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It's unacceptable to make a claim like
without citing some thorough research. Being able to find an instance where tariffs fail is not the same as proving that tariffs never work. As an example, I've been working in Switzerland for the la
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Unless you are willing to use deadly force to enforce your laws, your laws are worth NOTHING.
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William Grieder's "One World, Ready or Not" proposes something very much like this towards the end of the book. It's about ten years old, but he was already seeing these trends very clearly. It's a long book, but you sound like the sort of person who would find it absolutely gripping.
I'm looking forward to reading this book [amazon.com] by the same author.
Anyhow, I think it would be very much worth your time to read.
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I think the best first step is to get rid of the federal reserve banking system. Fiat currencies (paper money) are the direct cause of massive trade imbalances between the United States and the rest of the world.
See my other post in this thread [slashdot.org], and the posts I link to too.
Consider that the only reason Chinese goods are still cheap is because they've pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar at a fixed ratio. In a free market currency system, as the trade imbalance with China grew, the
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Kind of, I mean, nobody's being killed...
I've always thought it was legitimate to use decimate when you're refering to removing a small, but not insignificant, fraction but doing so in a particularly harsh way. For example, "Our profits were decimated!" wouldn't work because a slight reduction in profits
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Once Indian tech companies realize that they can str
Need A Systems Engineer? Maybe I Can Help (Score:2)
Dig a well, Plant a Tree, Have a Son
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But you could (not that we do) put tariffs on the garments and steel that 'American' companies try to send back here from the nations they outsourced to. Thus if an American corporation decides
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Of course outsourcing/offshoring is not "new", and of course you can point to as many failures as successes with it. All of this completely dodges the point. As the original article clearly stated, the problem is, for every I.T. position that is sent overseas, we get nothing in return from the nation
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Forgot the best references, but wik
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1. One can make economic sense and still be a traitor to patirotism; the health of a country does not always make economic sense.
2. Here's a restriction that WILL matter: If a company wants to do business outside of the United States, it can no longer do business inside the United States- and vice versa. I see NO reason to allow businesses to be multinational. How long will they stay in business if they've been cut off from their primary consumer market, and all of th
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