Hey techies, don't spend that stock option money just yet, Rajhneesh wants your job

J

Jack 99

New member
I was going to post this under the "American Jobs, Foreign Labor" post but I realized it was a huge tangent. Call this a warning if you will. This happened to me and my family and it will happen to you.

The future of the technology revolution is bleak for Americans.

The parallels to what happened to Blue-collar workers 20-30 yrs ago should give you a clue. Just to recap, labor was cheaper in other countries. Other countries didn't have so many rules about child labor, health and safety standards, etc. Trade barriers broke down.

Capital simply went, like water, toward the path of least resistance. That's free market capitalism. Its a good thing in general, but if you're living in a country like the U.S. with lots of regulation of industry and high standard of living, you will NEVER compete with a guy named Juan whose company dumps toxic waste directly into a purple river and pays him so little he has to live in a cardboard shack. We cannot have Fair Trade with Mexico and China. We can have "Free Trade," but it ain't gonna be fair.

Now the tech revolution is upon us. Like the manufacturing industry before it, the center of the industry is the U.S. (for now). Only problem is that the "product" is completely ethereal. It's intellectual property and bits of data that can be moved around at will through a variety of means, including sattelite transmission, no cable/phone lines/fiber optic required. I could be sitting in a swamp in Bangledesh with $5000 worth of equipment and be writing code to beat the band. No infrastructure required, keep that in mind. Having advanced infrastructure kept heavy industry from leaving America for a good 50 years. That barrier for tech industries is non-existent.

There's a LOT of people in India, Pakistan and yes, even Bangladesh who want YOUR programming job. I know because I work in the HR industry and I see the resumes. This is not a racial slam, in fact, if Americans had half the gumption that some non-Americans have, we'd have one hell of a country.

This is just the way of the world. Right now, the tech industries are led by visionaries, dreamers and innovators. It won't always be this way. Henry Ford was a visionary who built his company from the ground up and changed the world. Then Capitalists took over and now a Ford is mostly made in Japan and Korea. Then the pieces are assembled in Mexico. Don't think that technology will be any different. It will actually happen FASTER because of the nature of the industry.

There is absolutely no reason a business person/Capitalist would hire American Engineers/Developers or whatever to sit in very, very expensive office space in Silicon Valley with all of the associated costs when he could have a guy in New Dehli doing the exact same job at 1/2 the cost. For that matter, we don't even need an architect doing his/her work here in the U.S. Other examples abound.

Right now, the business people are not in charge but that will change. When it does, the same thing that happened to people like my father will happen to you. I know you don't think it will ever happen that way, but then again, when my dad was turning down $15/hr jobs in the early 70s he never thought anything like that could happen to him either.
 
Jack 99: unfortunately, I fear that your assessment is correct. I am a software engineer by profession, and my immediate threat is competition from foreigners via the H1-B program. The advantage I have over foreign workers is superior communcation skills. However, that may not be enough to keep me competitive forever.
 
I usually agree with Williams but not this time. His little analogy falls apart when you realize the grocer is not a producer. He's just a retailer.

Never mind that though. Consider this: if the labor/environmental conditions in New Jersey are a complete travesty as they are in Mexico and other countries, and if New Jersey children were going to work at age 12 to support the family so poeple in PA could save a few $$$ on groceries, AND PA was losing jobs in the process, would that be equitable and fair? Because to provide the same product at the same price, PA would also have to lower living standards and send thier kids to work at age 12.

Not a great trade, in my book. Then there's a whole moral/ethical component to doing business with a totalitarian commie regime. Who do you think profits when you buy Chi-Comm goods? Not the individual people of China, that would be the antithesis of Socialistic principles.

Its mostly the Commie Party and the PRA that rake in the $$$$. What was the Cold War all about if not defeating Communism? Are Commies that will sew Nikes for $.35/hour OK while Commies that stand up to the U.S. bad? Think about this: why is China on the verge of MFN status and Cuba is still under embargo? Which of these countries is a real threat to American interests/security? I'll tell you why we treat these 2 commie regimes differently, and it has nothing to do with ideology, which is essentially identical in both countries. Its the money, honey. That and Castro has no qualms about telling us to take a leap.

The whole "Free Trade" thing still doesn't work for me. Follow the money and see who REALLY benefits. If you want to talk about "Fair Trade" that's a different story.

And I know nobody thinks about it now (just like auto workers in the 60s, its just unfathomable that YOUR job could go overseas to someone who will do it for less) but tech workers will soon learn the crushing lessons of macro economics. Only it won't be "the other guy" it'll be YOU trying to compete with people a half a world away working for half as much with no health insurance for your employer to worry about and no bothersome labor laws.

There is NOTHING to stop this from happening and Capital will ALWAYS go where it can maximize profit and minimize costs. They've got people on the payroll who make sure of this. Not much you can do about it but prepare as best you can.
 
Jack 99, I suspect you don't know much about the software industry. This idea of farming out software development to a foreign country where labor is cheaper sounds great when passed around in management board rooms (among people who generally don't understand software development) but it's next to impossible to effectively implement. Its hard enough to do distributed software development across town much less across an International Date Line where time-of-day is as much an impedement as language. I've worked for the better part of the last 10 years for a company with a software development division in France. The only way this has worked is for the company to spin off very small, very isolated, pieces of software to the French division while the much more complicated stuff is handled in the US. It isn't that the French aren't capable (they are very capable) but that the geographical and time zone seperation makes working a complex project with a large group of people spread around the world very difficult. You have to remember that software development doesn't just involve programmers but also involves all of the management chain right up to the highest levels. Everyone must be able to communicate efficiently and that only happens when you can be face to face with someone in minutes instead of days. Talking on the phone or sending email just doesn't cut it. On paper, shipping software development overseas sounds great but, in fact, it doesn't work except in very unique situations.
 
It's all a simple case of supply and demand.


What does this thread have to do with guns?
It's better discussed over on Free Republic.



[This message has been edited by ctdonath (edited July 05, 2000).]
 
Proximo-

I'm sure that 40 years ago someone would have told you it was impossible to profitably produce a car by manufacturing parts from all over the world and assembling them in Mexico. Or that it would be cheaper to ship raw iron to Japan and ship the produced steel back to the U.S. than it would to just produce the steel here.

Both conditions now exist. Where there's a will, there's a way. And that language/communication barrier is paper thin as well.

Capitalists will always find ways to cut cost and maximize profit. Its at the heart of the nature of Capitalism. It will happen as sure as the sun will come up tommorow.

Those guys throwing around the ideas in the board room you speak of will soon be running the company. They have complex spreadsheets that tell them how to maximize every penny. Wish I had the example at my fingertips, but one of my professors in college had a case study of what happens when the "bean counters" take over. A company was going to build an office to handle administrative work. They weighed the benefits of locating the building in Milwaukee or Nashville. Nashville won. Why? Cost of electricity was .5% less in Nashville. Cost savings of something like $500 per year. That's what it came down to, $500. Don't think that people with this kind of mentality won't find a way to cut direct labor costs in half (or better).
 
This probably does belong in General Discussion.

Jack 99, if software development were a science that could be reduced to formulas, then the bean counters with their spreadsheets might have a chance to predict and influence it. Those who have written software know that it is as much an art as a science and defies predictive analysis. Software development is a very complex, often chaotic, process that requires close coordination of all elements involved. This requires the active participation of all parties involved from management to software engineering to the eventual consumer of the software. That isn't going to happen when significant portions of the development team are halfway around the world.

This idea of farming out software development to third world countries is nothing more than the current management fad and it will eventually be discredited just like the last popular, foolish, management fad, "downsizing".
 
There are several problems with this. The biggest one is that software development is a highly skilled trade. You can train any 12-year-old to sew shirts in a few minutes. Learning the basics of programming will take 6-9 months and not everyone "takes" to it. It is not a rote operation.

Second, the quality of work produced by degreed computer science professionals is an order of magnitude better than that produced by trade schools. I see substandard programming all the time. The problem is that middle-management in the software industry is generally inept (Dilbert is truer than you'd believe) and doesn't know the difference. Unfortunately, the end user suffers.

Remote software development has not happened on a wide scale because of the retarded (I'm being unkind to the retarded) people who manage. Management can't figure out how to deal with someone working out of his house 5 miles away much less with a team of people who speak a different language in a different time zone in a different country with different laws. I had a friend doing programming for a company in Florida (1,000 miles away). They flew him down there every weekend because they couldn't figure out how to work with him remotely. I think they'll SLOWLY get over this, but it will take many years.

Most of the foreign labor pools are for UNskilled labor.

I've worked with Indian nationals at different jobs, and all of them were short-term employees because no one could work with them. Between mediocre language skills and annoying cultural differences, they were more trouble than they were worth.
 
The Y2K problem made huge inroads for developers and outsourcing companies from India & Ireland. At least in my company, the fervor has not yet abated. More 'strategic partnerships' on the way. Brave New World.
 
As far as the Software Development issues you raise go, the cost effective solution will probably be to move the ENTIRE operation to New Dehli. That solves the problem of language and culture barriers. It may be one day that WE are the "outsource labor pool" of the future. Have you thought about that?

I hate to belabor the point, but you guys sound like auto workers of the 60s. Of course nobody can do what you do for less! Never happen, right?

I don't think that the quality of workers is an issue. They might even have a leg up on us in initiative since they get to stumble over some of the world's poorest people on their way to the market. I think something about seeing extreme poverty every day is a huge motivator.

Honestly, I think you guys need to reconsider the proposition. Think about how you (as a provider of Capital) would solve the business problems associated with the high tech industry. Would you plop down your firm in Silicon Valley and pay American techies $80k + per year, plus expensive office space, plus health insurance plus everything else associated with U.S. employment, or would you plop down somewhere in India where labor laws are lax, plenty of qualified talent, no worries about H1B visas, cheap real estate, etc.?

The possibility is real and, IMHO, probable.
 
"When Gilbert Williamson, then president of NCR, was asked about U.S. workers being unable to compete in a global economy, he dismissed the question with this remark: "I was asked the other day about U.S. competitiveness, and I replied that I don't think about it at all. We at NCR think of ourselves as a globally competitive company that happens to be headquartered in the United States."

Many companies still carry fine old American names, but their work forces are becoming less and less American. In 1985, GE employed 243,000 Americans; ten years later, it was down to 150,000. IBM has lopped off half of its U.S. workers in the past decade. Here is author William Greider:

"By 1995, Big Blue had become a truly global firm - with more employees abroad than at home…Intel…shrank U.S. employment last year from 22,000 to 17,000. Motorola's…work force is now only 56 percent American. …Ma Bell once made all its home telephones in the U.S. and now makes none here."

Boeing's Philip Condit says he would be happy if, twenty years from now, no one thought of Boeing as an American company."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ahhhh, Globalism. Hope you like El Salvadoran living standards.
 
All the above comments provide a certain amount of the reason that gummint jobs are popular for many. Reasonable pay on up to pretty good pay; generally light work loads or relatively low requirements for employment; excellent medical benefits; lots of vacation time and holidays.

And the jobs can't be exported.

Helluva note.

Art
 
"...gummint jobs are popular for many. Reasonable pay on up to pretty good pay; generally light work loads or relatively low requirements for employment; excellent medical benefits; lots of vacation time and holidays."

Been a gummint employee since spring of 91 and in two branches (Defense, General Service Admin). Pay pretty thin for many GS employees in both agencies; workload for the DoD was manageable but quite horrific in the GSA; working conditions in Defense were acceptable, if you didn't mind cockroaches, mice and collapsing ceilings that occurred AFTER thousands of bucks of building rennovation; working conditions in the GSA archive center I currently survive in are primitive enough to affect the quality of our mission; medical benefits vary in quality - postal employees have access to very good plans by comparism; vacation and sick time are resources to me - to be hoarded and used with discretion - alot of fed flunkies piss these goodies away. The gummint has and currently is going through the throes of downsizing. Was reduced in force out of the defense dept. A government union, the AFGE, worries about the current administrations' increasing reliance on contracting out government duties their members formerly completed because private sector workers haven't been held accountable for screwing up.
Jeff

And the jobs can't be exported
 
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