Fury and Fear In Ohio As IT Jobs Go To India (computerworld.com) 607
ErichTheRed writes: A company called Cengage Learning now joins the Toys 'R Us, Disney and Southern California Edison IT offshoring club. Apparently, even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users. As a final insult, the article describes a pretty humiliating termination process was used. Is it time to think about a professional organization before IT goes the way of manufacturing?
A professional IT organization? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:4, Interesting)
If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.
You too will soon be "outsourced" and regret your opinion. I'll smile at you as I walk into Wal-Mart.
After being laid off from the best job in the world as a DBA that paid more than I had even made, I took a much lower paying job with the Air Force, and am now a "career civil servant". Sure, I'm not making the "big money" anymore, but I have a much better health plan then you will ever have, and my job will never go away.
Have fun at Wal-Mart.
Re: A professional IT organization? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm an IT professional at Walmart. We're very happy, thanks. :-*
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:5, Interesting)
WalMart pays in the top 5 nationwide for IT and devs, just so you know (per a /. story on the best-paying employers).
And don't be so sure that civil service jobs will never go away: the pendulum has swung quite far in the "bloated government" direction, and one way or another, it has to swing back eventually.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Much like manufacturing: the offshoring is a temporary measure while automation replaces human workers. Meanwhile, the companies that provide the clouds are paying top dollar for US talent. Food for thought.
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Except there is next-to-no automation in the outsourced manufacturing. Why automate when depressed, third-world wages are cheaper?
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:5, Interesting)
The automation is in the US factories. US manufacturing output has never fallen, decade-over-decade. US factories have become more and more automated first as jobs went overseas, and now China is seeing declines in outsourced-from-US jobs, as the robots are taking over and manufacturing increasingly returns to the US, job-free. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from the US was a temporary measure, slowly dwindling.
IT is at the front of this curve (unless you're a software dev, but I don't think of that as "IT"). The writing has been on the wall for years, and the destination is inevitable. Plan accordingly.
This is what technology is: efficiency. This has been happening for over 300 years, it's not going to stop now.
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically some manufacturing moved offshore to get cheap steel.
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a (Score:3)
Shipping costs and more control drive automation in US manufacturing.
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week to start with a slow slide down to say 20 from that. Just to make automation fit in better while softening the blow of people going on welfare / disability. Also need some kind of basic income system to replace disability / welfare / etc.
Now there is some abuse of disability / welfare but some times the system penalizes work in a way that people are better off not working. Or in other
Re:We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hour (Score:4, Interesting)
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week
France has a 35 hour work week and an unemployment rate that is double that of the U.S, and also France has a lower labor force participation rate overall (by about 10%).
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
> If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways.
if you believe this then i have a bridge to sell you :)
i've worked for countless companies over the years that have tried to outsource to India (and China, and the Philippines, etc.) and every single one of those projects was a disaster. the majority of those programmers are nothing but bad code monkeys who write terrible code and even worse documentation. the ones worth hiring are getting top dollar themselves. then you get to try to coordinate a project with people on the other side of the planet and who are 12 hours off from your work day. if you want to make it work you need to send some of your people over there to actually lead the team- and even then the results are rarely worth the trouble. the main problem- at least to India and China- is that they're often taught through rote memorization. if a problem comes up that requires a novel solution, or if you are trying to troubleshoot an obscure issue- they lack the skills to solve the problem.
you'll get much better (higher quality and far more creative) work when you outsource to places like Poland and Ukraine- but then you often run into language barriers.
for every company that outsources- there are 10 new startups looking to hire people.
people have been sounding the death knell for IT workers in the US for the last 20+ years. if you think it's going to happen any time soon- well- let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
More like the AMA or the Bar Association.
Re:A professional IT organization? (Score:5, Informative)
If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.
Read TFA:
"Cengage...had outsourced accounting services earlier in the year"
"The layoffs affected workers across IT, including networks, desktop support, database administration, developers, data warehouse and other systems."
Also have a look at this, which lists the 33 jobs most likely to be outsourced...noting that many of them pay quite well indeed. Or did. They probably don't anymore.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta... [theatlantic.com]
To put it all in context, you may want to consider the quantity of jobs being outsourced - which is in the millions:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/... [statisticbrain.com]
How will that "professional organization" be... (Score:5, Insightful)
any more successful than unions at "saving American jobs"?
Re:How will that "professional organization" be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever looked at international Doctor Salaries? Or lawyer salaries?
Part of the reason those are through the roof is that they have very good lobbying arms. The people who actually run the country (unlike the Dems claim, it isn't the 1%, it's more like the top 20-25% who make $100k. The basis of their power is they always vote, even in odd-year-Mayoral elections, the cheating bastards) distrust unions, so actual unions are quite restricted. But Doctors and lawyers are key components of the hundredthousandocracy, can quite clearly and cogently defend their interests, and arrange it so that even proposals designed largely to screw them (ie: anything that reduces health costs, any form of Tort Reform) don't do that shit.
There are 4 millionish [pewresearch.org] IT Workers in the US. If a few hundred thousand organized themselves into an association, hired lobbyists in every state and in DC (or, more likely, hired some of their members to lobby), they would be quite powerful. They aren't a union, so the GOP won't go into crazy-kill-death mode. Unlike Zuckerberg or San Fran tech entrepreneurs, they look and act like the suburban white-collar types who dominate the country. They say "we want these contracts investigated because we think that the rules weren't followed," and no politician has the stones to get in the fucking way.
No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?
Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.
History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.
Re:No no no (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org... [hopkinsmedicine.org]
That was in 2004. As digitization has spread through healthcare, the practice has only gotten more prevalent.
If you can pipe the data to somewhere else and get someone accredited to sign off on your work so they are the professional of record, you can outsource anything to anyone anywhere. Use a nurse practitioner for in-office visits, outsource case review to a medical professional somewhere else.
Same deal for lawyers. For contracts, research, etc. you can outsource to paralegals. For discovery, have someone else scan, index, and cross correlate everything before you turn it over to the junior partners, but bill at the senior rate.
BTW there are a lot of unemployed/underemployed lawyers...
Re:No no no (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you EVER shopped for doctors based on price? Did you even know that was a thing? Docs just seem to set a price based on whatever, and you and your insurance company figure it out from there.
General practitioners/family doctors could be in every strip mall for in and out service, yet they're not. Anything outside of routine service would go to a specialist which you would pay closer to current market rate for, but the AMA has closely limited the number of doctors in America. I looked at getting a medical degree to go work in third world countries, but they've raised the barrier of entry by charging about half a million dollars in tuition, plus 6-7 years worth of apprenticeship to enter the field. Plus entry tests, etc. The tuition and time alone makes me look elsewhere for a profession.
If you brought down the standard for med school training for general practitioners, you could easily outsource about 60% of general doctor health care. In fact, to meet this gap they have a Physician's Assistant (PA) who is effectively a doctor with a much shorter training schedule at about 90% pay level.
Re:No no no (Score:4, Informative)
When I was a teenager I ended up having my tonsils removed. The doctor thought they looked "funny" and sent off to pathology. Pathology came back and said "lymphoma". So we got to go visit the pediatric oncologist who started doing blood tests, bone marrow samples, and scans looking for cancer.
They were going to crack my chest open to put a center line and start chemo. But the oncologist thought things weren't adding up. I wasn't sick enough. So he ordered a DNA test for the ebstein bar virus (mono). That test came back positive when three other of the regular mono tests came back negative. Apparently mono can look identical to lymphoma under a microscope.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.
Re:No no no (Score:4, Interesting)
Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?
Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.
History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.
Doctors are being outsourced:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6621... [nbcnews.com]
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1... [nejm.org]
Lawyers are being outsourced:
http://www.americanbar.org/pub... [americanbar.org]
http://www.economist.com/node/... [economist.com]
Doctor and lawyer salaries are not high because they can't be outsourced (they can), but because of the fucked up healthcare and legal systems in America.
Re:How will that "professional organization" be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a example from blue collar middle America. In the Midwest food processing, such as meat packing, used to be unionized. The unions were pretty much wiped out by the Republicans. Who got those jobs? Undocumented workers, mostly Spanish speakers. It's not like citizens went from being union workers to non-union workers. Citizens were replaced by non-citizens because they were less expensive to start out with, and undocumented workers will never complain about illegal treatment or dangerous working conditions. That's why there are so may relatively new Spanish speaking communities in places like Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc. And it's also why Trump is able to scream about "illegals" and get so much traction. The real perpetrators are the Republicans and massive corrupt big business interests.
If you haven't lost your job yet it's just because they haven't gotten around to you yet.
Re: (Score:3)
The end game on this is Citizens United which means that the American oligarchy can spend as much dark money as they want to buy as much political power as they can get.
Citizens United applies equally to unions being free to spend on political advertising as it does to corporations.
If you haven't lost your job yet it's just because they haven't gotten around to you yet.
I don't believe it is "my job" to lose, I believe I have to earn it against all competition.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Union membership has plummeted in the U.S., from nearly one-third of workers 50 years ago to one in 10 American workers today. [washingtonpost.com] Under the simplest assumption, for every $30 unions had to spend on politics in 1966, they now have $10. That's a factor of three decline. Citizens United legalized unlimited untraceable political contributions. This means the disparity between, say the Koch brothers and unions is even greater.
U
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First, the unions killed themselves. They became rich and powerful while solving the problems they were created to solve, and then the bosses decided they wanted to stay rich and powerful, so they couldn't fade away when their work was done. They abandoned fighting for their workers in favor of fighting for mandatory dues. Populist organizations, like unions, must support the people that support the organization. When they stop, they weaken. If they also turn evil...
Second, the immigration mess is a ce
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They were demonized by union members. Not because of some secret campaign from employers.
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One problem with unions is they pit Americans against Americans. When an automaker wants to open a factory in the South, which is still America btw, the unions protest. So they are too extreme in their protectionism and that pisses off a lot of people. Same with Boeing, they wanted to build their next plane in like Tennessee or something, the unions went on strike.
The other big perceptional problem is that unions protect lazy and ineffective workers. Protecting against unfair business practices is one thing
Re:How will that "professional organization" be... (Score:5, Informative)
One problem with unions is they pit Americans against Americans. When an automaker wants to open a factory in the South, which is still America btw, the unions protest. So they are too extreme in their protectionism and that pisses off a lot of people. Same with Boeing, they wanted to build their next plane in like Tennessee or something, the unions went on strike.
The other big perceptional problem is that unions protect lazy and ineffective workers. Protecting against unfair business practices is one thing, but the stereotype of the union requiring 3 guys standing around watching 1 guy dig and 1 guy hold a "SLOW" sign (road construction) is just too damning. That's not what we need or want, because once again, that goes beyond protecting Americans and into dividing us. Paying 4x the labor cost (for that example) is a cost that the rest of us have to absorb, and that sucks. Then people start thinking, "Oh, I know why high speed rail is so goddamn expensive... fucking unions!" And they have a point. It's really unions plus excessive environmentalism.
Things we have because of unions:
Weekends
All Breaks at Work, including your Lunch Breaks
Paid Vacation
FMLA
Sick Leave
Social Security
Minimum Wage
Civil Rights Act/Title VII (Prohibits Employer Discrimination)
8-Hour Work Day
Overtime Pay
Child Labor Laws
Occupational Safety & Health Act (OSHA)
40 Hour Work Week
Worker's Compensation (Worker's Comp)
Unemployment Insurance
Pensions
Workplace Safety Standards and Regulations
Employer Health Care Insurance
Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees
Wrongful Termination Laws
Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Whistleblower Protection Laws
Employee Polygraph Protect Act (Prohibits Employer from using a lie detector test on an employee)
Veteran's Employment and Training Services (VETS)
Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)
Sexual Harassment Laws
Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
Holiday Pay
Employer Dental, Life, and Vision Insurance
Privacy Rights
Pregnancy and Parental Leave
Military Leave
The Right to Strike
Public Education for Children
Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011 (Requires employers pay men and women equally for the same amount of work)
Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States
If you have ever benefited from anything on that list then you should stop whining about unions and start realizing that without organized workers standing up for themselves the middle class is going to join the lower class in being ignorant and dirt poor.
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This. Probably most of the anti-union sentiment in this dicussion was ingrained via lifelong propaganda. I don't think it's a Right/Left thing. In the so-called "whitecollar" world, unions are particularly repulsive because "bluecollar" has such a negative connotation. Why?
No (Score:4, Insightful)
If a "professional organization" means some sort of stupid union, then no. Unions did not prevent outsourcing of US jobs, and cannot. The reality is, if you want substandard work on the cheap, you're always going to get that in India. As my boss says of our products, "(software) products without revenue are built in India, products that make money are built in the US".
We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
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We do all the design work in the US, because our 250+ Indian counterparts cannot design anything correctly. They code by trial and error. You'll never have a best-in-class product that way. We just give them menial coding tasks, and even then 1 US engineer is as productive as 3 in India.
What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.
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What does that single US worker cost, how does that compare to the cost of hiring three Indians, and how profitable is outsourcing in the mid-to-long term? These are the factors that will determine whether this situation will continue to get worse.
I'm sorry, "mid-to-long term"? What does that have to do with the next round of bonuses for the folks making the outsourcing decisions?
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Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
That's funny, I know people who have changed countries to continue working as a doctor, a lawyer, and a civil engineer (with some retraining on local law in each case).
What makes those jobs different is important: by their nature, you can't do them remotely. A lot of the medical industry has moved off shore, but not the part that requires direct patient interaction. Working in the trades is a great way to never be offshored, and unions have nothing to do with it: no one's going to sit in India and wire your house, or fix a busted sewer pipe. There's significant immigration into all those jobs, but it's absorbed naturally.
America and immigration go together, get used to it. The problem with the H1-B system is its awkward, non-tenure-track nature. Have an B1-B automatically become a green card in 2 years, and the wage problem will be solved.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Unions have been successfully neutered by the corporate party (all Republicans and half the Democrats). If they still had power, yes they could stop outsourcing.
The quality of programming coming out of India is improving rapidly.
"(software) products without revenue are built in India, products that make money are built in the US".
40 years ago, you could say "You can go to Japan to buy a hunk of junk, but quality cars are built in the US." and you'd be right!
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
Indian education is primarily by rote, they don't actually promote independent thinking or out of the box thinking. This is true in general asia, where they believe as a younger person, you can't question the elder person. That kind of thinking creates an uneven power structure where the best ideas don't necessarily rise up like they do in western countries. So, until Asian countries learn to depose of centuries of ingrained thinking, the U.S. worker will always trump an Indian one or chinese one.
Sure there are going to be exceptions, but on the whole, a U.S. worker is more productive than a Indian one and also will be able to focus on and solve complex problems. Now, some of the Indians know this and have gone back to India and is trying to fix that, but it isn't going to be easy because of the cultural and corrupt institutions in place. But who knows?
As a person who had some exposure to both school systems, (with primarily in the U.S. education), I'll pick an American worker every time. Hell, if I was in India I would try to get an American worker because I know for my money, I'm going to get a lot more value.
Yes, it's time, and long past time (Score:2, Insightful)
Our politicians don't care about the American worker. Our corporations and their willing yes-men lackeys don't care about the American worker.
But the American worker cares about the American worker, and together our shared interests can at least give us a "bargaining stick." Of course we need to be ready to swing the stick if need be to show that it's a real stick and all.
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TFA Link? (Score:3, Insightful)
Holy tracking link Batman! Try this one [computerworld.com] instead:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3002681/it-outsourcing/fury-and-fear-in-ohio-as-it-jobs-go-to-india.html
At some point (Score:2)
And here we go... (Score:2)
And here we go...the Race To The Bottom for American jobs. Yippee, thanks Corporate America!
I recommend learning a skill or trade that can't be outsourced. Something that's hands-on, or something that most foreign workers simply can't do very well. (Tech writing and actual physical service work come to mind, but I'm sure there are others.)
This trend won't stop until outsourced workers cost enough to make it economical to hire US workers, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
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Or until "incentives" are applied to the corporations that are doing the off shoring ...
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Many try for a security clearance. Contractors, lawyers can often be "the no bid US company" with a long global supply chain of just in time products sold to the US gov or mil.
The paper work is perfect, the products 100% made, owned and security cleared in the USA. Just the actual US workers jobs are all gone.
Re "This trend won't stop until outsourced workers cost enough to make it economical to hire US workers, but I don't see that h
The Invisible Hand (Score:4, Insightful)
Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.
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Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.
Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion. Eventually everyone who is not rich will be sleeping on dirt floors. You better believe that they are going to be really pissed off about it.
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Society thrives when wealth is well distributed. "Free markets" are a race to the bottom in slow motion.
Actually it's working as promised, it's just that the poor overseas are benefiting more than those here in the US. Eventually all sources of labor would equalize in price and then we'd have wage pressure like what happened prior to globalization. The problem is that automation technology is advancing so quickly that prior to full equalization most workers will have zero marginal utility.
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The invisible hand doesn't by mathematical necessity raise all boats though, times change.
I wonder.... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't want to downplay the issue. But... market forces and cheap labor. There are a WHOLE lot of Americans in Vietnam, Korea, China, and South Africa tooling up their auto plants and teaching them to be competitive. Welcome to the real world. H1-B Visas are a red herring, and the sooner IT folks realize it, the better. The bigger problem is all the jobs that are going overseas - but there isn't a fix to that.
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Toyota Prius are built in Japan, but the following Toyota cars are built in the US for the US market: Avalon, Avalon Hybrid, Camry, Camry Hybrid, Corolla, Highlander, Highlander Hybrid, Sequoia, Sienna, Solara, Tacoma, Tundra, and Venza.
Toyota has seven manufacturing plants [wikipedia.org] in the US.
Get a grip! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are an American, with all the benefits that citizenship entails - education, infrastructure, living conditions, security, stable government, rule of law, material and spiritual abundance - that make you the envy of the rest of the planet... why the hell can you not compete with third-world peasants, struggling against oppressive governments, scarcity of resources, illiterate parents, crime and pollution?
Re:Get a grip! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a single house payment here in the U.S. is more than the 3rd world workers make in a year. Give us a 3rd world cost of living and we will easily out-compete 3rd world workers.
Bad Business Either Way (Score:2)
The rote IT jobs that are best suited for labor arbitrage outsourcing are also the ones that should just be automated out of existence anyway or handled auto-magically by your cloud provider. The remaining jobs are the ones where close collaboration with the business makes them far more effective and those are going to be ones that you're going to regret offshoring.
The number of jobs that don't fall into either of those buckets is getting smaller by the day. It's hard to see how this kind of outsourcing has
Not a union, a professional organization (Score:5, Interesting)
I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.
Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this?
- Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened
- Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high
- Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs
- Requiring continuing education
I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.
The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.
To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.
You can't will the free market to your desires (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
> Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company?
As someone who has seen bargain-basement Indian IT work from one of the big offshore body shops, because American IT workers are worth it.
All but two of the Indians I have worked with in the last 3 years have been fucking useless. They have no drive, no curiosity, and no initiative. If it's not in a runbook in front of them, they don't know how to do it. Hell, if it's a slight variation of something that IS in the
Re:You can't will the free market to your desires (Score:5, Insightful)
No 'professional organization' is going to stop free market forces.
Ah yes. The free market. That wonderful ideal the true red-blooded 'murican idolizes, regardless of how hard or how often it bends them over. In fact, they beg for more as they continually elect these "real Americans" back into office again and again no matter how badly they get screwed by them.
The free market. Capitalism. Nonsense. It all ends up, one way or another, of stealing from you and giving to the few. I bet those company execs agonized terribly over doing this. I'm sure they all gave a sociopathic chuckle when they cooked up how they were going to shaft their employees while giving themselves a tasty little bonus since making 1000x the average worker just isn't enough to build a house made of money.
Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?
Of course not, because you know just as well as I do that any such legislation would either be lobbied into uselessness or have so many loopholes you'd swear it was a sweater. Congress is a free market. The lobbyists have known this for decades and the Supreme Court all but legalized paid for politicians. Few, if any, give a rat's ass about me, you, or the American people. As long as Wall Street keeps the money flowing into SuperPACS and Congressional pockets, they can continue the "Us vs. Them" bullshit and stay in office.
Aside from that though, you're argument is ridiculous. Basically you're saying if you accept the same pay as someone working in a third world shithole, you can keep your job. But you can't because in this country we actually have laws and regulations regarding health and pay, things that third world shitholes don't have to care about. Somehow, I don't think repealing labor laws and turning America into a land of suburban third world slums to feed the corporate fat asses their million dollar bonuses is going to work out well.
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Pretty dumb move (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how flexible the IT department was... (Score:3)
I don't know what the situation was like at that company in particular.
But having worked for and with a few large companies, it's not that hard to imagine why they were offshored - the article mentions the company "needed a more flexible staffing model that could better serve the cyclical nature of our business". I'm pretty sure from seeing other IT departments in action, that they in fact could not handle bursting kinds of workload, nor a cyclical business that ebbed and flowed to a large degree. IT departments are typically extremely rigid, and scared of even the smallest change.
IT as a role in a company must evolve or die off altogether. It must change to a form that truly helps a business instead of shackling it.
Vote for Trump if you want H1Bs fixed. (Score:3)
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/08/18/029216/trump-targets-the-abuse-of-h-1b-visas
You've heard of Cengage. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.
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In context. Offshoring of IT. Good way to crash your company.
Where do the consumers come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
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I have often wondered about that as well.
Straw man alert (Score:4, Insightful)
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
The point being that the jobs that got outsourced are jobs that are no longer creating enough added value to keep them inside a high-wage location, such as Ohio, USA
Even at Silicon Valley there are jobs that have been outsourced, but if we examine what kind of jobs that had been outsourced and which jobs still remain we will find that the jobs still remain (and are still being created) in America are jobs that are heavy on the side of creativity
Data entry jobs, even some of those so-called 'programming' jobs have become so routine it no longer makes any sense to employ people doing this low-value jobs in America
In other words, if you are Americans and still want to work in America, find yourself a niche, a niche which add a lot of value to what you do, a niche that no one outside of America can easily duplicate, and you will get to enjoy your job as long as what you do creates more money to your employer than what they pay you every month
You guys may not like what I am saying, but we need to face the reality somehow --- this world's competitiveness has heat up tremendously. USA and Europe are no longer the only places in the world where innovations happen
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I've always found it amusing that outsourcing consultants instruct companies to never outsource their core competency. And the first thing they outsource is Customer Service.
Re:Where do the consumers come from? (Score:5, Funny)
it is called trickle down economics. The 1% will hire us still right?
we should give them more tax breaks just to be certain.
Re: short the stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Except this is bullshit. Consumers only benefit from reduced prices to a point because they have to be able to afford fixed costs such as insurance, food, and rent. Fixed costs that have skyrocketed in recent years. An iPhone being 20$ less means nothing to a family that may have 100$ a month in discretionary income after taxes.
The healthiest economies in the world are the ones that rigorously maintain the middle class because the amount of money in the global economy means precisely dick after people's fixed costs are being met. What matters most to the economy is that money is able to freely flow through as many people as possible because when money changes hands value is created. This isn't about a few hundred thousand jobs. This is about entire communities being impacted because the buying power of the average american is being undermined by cost cutting measures, and as more and more people approach their discretionary income margins the more the economy suffers as there is less capital for luxuries and investment in new technologies.
It is simply stupid to suggest that the economy losing middle class jobs is somehow a benefit.
Re: short the stock (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft: Satya Nadella
So it begins...
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The world isn't binary.
There are middle grounds between corporate capitalism and communism.
Re:short the stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. It isn't a company behaving rationally. It's executives who know that making the company bottom line look better for a few quarters means big bonuses. They can then move on with a great story about how the great job they did before the company crashes and burns.
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No they make it too easy and cheap to source non american employees. American workers laws and protections are laughable at best and mostly non-existent.
Re:short the stock (Score:4, Insightful)
"Better would be to blame idiot politicians that make stupid rules"
Companies work really hard at making sure those idiot politicians get elected and quite often also write the legislation for them.
The fate of Indian IT outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
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I suppose an attitude like that explains why some software is utter shit and why we are neck deep in malware, but I would suggest that software fit for purpose requires skilled developers.
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I dunno about Khosla, but there are 2 types of Indians. The ones who came here on F1 visas, studies here, joined the workforce here and settled down. That group is more compatible w/ the American way of doing business, and have the same business culture as the rest of America. That group is not a part of the outsourcing crowd.
The other are the employees in India of the Infosys's, Wipros, HCLs and Mahindras who are employees of those companies' main i.e. Indian branches, and who are sent here on H1Bs.
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India will eventually take ALL IT jobs, including kernel programming and supercomputing applications.
Have you ever been to India? The people you're talking about, the ones that work on the well manicured corporate campuses, are less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the Indian population. The majority of Indians still live in poverty, practice marginal farming or other forms of subsistence living, defecate in the open and have less than an 8th grade education. The Indian government goes to great lengths to hide these facts from the world. They want you to see the glittering IT campus handling all of the outsourced
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Re:Professional organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
A better choice would be to cut the h1b program and start an immediate investigation of the companies involved. But what will happen instead is an expansion and our political class looking the other way.
Re:Professional organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Not yet ... give it time.
pol views on H1Bs (Score:3)
Wonder what Trump and Carly think? If Carly opposes it, she'd have to explain why she presumably supported it while in HP. The Don has said that he's for all immigration that's done legally! Just b'cos he's fond of the wall and wants to end illegal immigration doesn't imply that's he's opposed to legal immigration as well
Dr Ben has talked about the need to get the entire US population productive to match the likes of India & China. Would like to see his proposals
Re:Professional organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
> I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Yes you do, actually.
Re: Professional organization? (Score:4, Insightful)
As a manager I can assure you we're no more organised than the rest of the world.
You certainly look like a bunch of organs to me.
Re:Professional organization? (Score:5, Insightful)
...you say until your job is off-shored, and you can't find another one because they've all been off-shored too.
Professional organization doesn't mean union. It means lobby group. Less focussed on helping individuals with their specific conditions and pay - no direct contact with an employer - but focussed on highlighting the issues, raising awareness of the benefits of a good, strong, local IT workforce, and playing the campaign donation game.
Re: Professional organization? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most professional Americans have a total combined (embedded direct tax) load of over 60% - good luck trying to compete against Indians in that kind of regime. An IT-focused lobbying group is not going to be tackling the correct issues; protectionism cannot effectively compete against market pricing forces.
worked out well for manufacturing, right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those unions worked great for manufacturing and prevented having those jobs go overseas, didn't they.
A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone tells me he makes a point to study weekly, constantly learning. Anyone who is concerned about the level of outsourcing and illegal H1-B usage might keep that in mind.
Re:worked out well for manufacturing, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
> A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone
Recruiters will take any warm body they can shoehorn into a job, as long as 1 or 2 of the required acronyms appear on your resume.
I'm always flabbergasted by people who say the job market must be great, because of all the recruiters calling them. First of all, those recruiters all get the same leads so you may be contacted by 3 or 4 for the same job. Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend. They are there to make money by supplying "human capital" to the Evil HR departments who haven't a clue about how to find good qualified people themselves.
Recruiters are nothing but leeches. They have a huge turnover rate because nobody in the game can stand the stink for long.
doubled my income twice; but I learn, not complain (Score:3, Insightful)
> Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend.
They get paid their commission if and when they provide the best candidate, the one who gets hired. Twice, a call from a recruiter has resulted in a job offer that doubled my take-home pay - that's pretty friendly in my book. Of course my experience may be different from yours because as I said I make it a point to study my field weekly, not to bitch and moan about "the e
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Not if you institute a tax on it.
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If the US stops being the world's consumer of last resort there will be no one to take it's place. The global race to the bottom wage wise can not work, someone has to leech away rent/income away from capital and give it to consumers. It might be better if the redistribution was more equitable globally, but it would be far worse if it wasn't there at all.
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us citizens are the most overworked people. They have long days, work a lot, low wages and very good 'value for the money'. But you americans buy all the US corporate propaganda and sell out your rights because maybe you'll be the one getting rich by a fluke chance somewhere in the future. Egoism, everyone for themselves results in this.
The funniest thing is that taxes are pretty high in the USA, but instead of producing services and regulations helping citizens, it ends up in social services for corporatio
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Fine, as long as all C-level pay is drastically cut as well. Unless you truly think most CEOs are dozens to thousands of times more productive than a lowly employee to be getting their hugely inflated salaries.
Sorry, but it's not being greedy to actually want non-stagnant wages when CEOs are making record salaries.
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The only trickle down we'll ever see is the urine falling on our heads.