Builder.com Writers Outsourced to India 755
An anonymous reader writes "Builder.com, which is part of CNet.com, is now outsourcing some of their writing to India. The funny thing is, the editor claims it's not as much about money as because he's 'getting a better interface with producers of the content.' He claims CNet isn't giving up control, but if they're the publisher, and he's the editor, and they can't hire and manage their own writers, why shouldn't the Indians just put up their own website to replace CNet, and we can all read what they write direct? I mean, we're all going to be buying software direct from Indian companies soon, so why not?" Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. OSDN also runs sites like devchannel.org which are more-or-less direct competitors of builder.com.
heh, funny thing is.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh man (Score:3, Interesting)
It's times like these... (Score:2, Interesting)
At least I'd be getting health care and not be thrown out on the street.
Re:heh, funny thing is.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yesterday, my stepfather had a problem with his email. From his end of the phone, he's not sure if the people trying to help him even understand what he was complaining about.
His resolution? He's now looking for a new ISP, and perhaps his own domain name so he won't rely on his ISP for email. Some things you can live without for a few days, but when you have a small business like his, ability to send and receive email is critical.
Visit any Campus and ... (Score:2, Interesting)
The Asians and Indians outperform the Americans
by a ratio of 6 -4
Thats why your job is going to India
Its silly to think they lack the "American"
intellect, or fail in sophistication.
Study Math and Science and study it like its your
life,not like its one big frat party.....
Exporting America: false choices (Score:5, Interesting)
In none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a news organization addressed the facts.
March 10, 2004: 11:12 AM EST
By Lou Dobbs, Lou Dobbs Tonight
NEW YORK (CNN) - You may have noticed recently that I'm being attacked for my views on the exporting of American jobs and my calls for a balanced U.S. trade policy.
Gerard Baker of the Financial Times called me the "high priest of demotic sensationalism."
An editorial in the Economist magazine accused me of embarking "on a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda" and "greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault."
Lou Dobbs comments on recent attacks of his views on the exporting of American jobs and U.S. trade policy.
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Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal excoriated me, I must say, in high style for my troglodyte views on outsourcing by saying, "It's as if whatever made Linda Blair's head spin around in 'The Exorcist' had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich."
Washington Post columnist James Glassman has simply accused me of being a "table-thumping protectionist."
Those quotes are from some of the most respected news organizations, and there have been dozens of other articles critical of my view that outsourcing American jobs is neither sound, smart, humane nor in the national interest.
Makes a fellow think
I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
Number one: We're not creating jobs in the private sector, and that's never happened before in our history. Our economists and politicians need to be coming up with answers, not dogma.
Number two: We haven't had a trade surplus in this country in more than two decades, and our trade deficit continues to soar.
Number three: We've lost three million jobs in this country over the last three years, and millions more American jobs are at risk of being outsourced to cheap overseas labor markets.
That seems to me, at least, to be more than sufficient evidence for all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, to question critically the policies of both parties that have led us to this critical juncture in our economy and our history.
Check out the "Exporting America" list
Frankly, I would love to be proved wrong in my views, and I would gladly change my position, if only my critics would answer a few questions factually, empirically and straightforwardly.
One: How many more jobs must we lose before they become concerned about our middle class and our strength as a consumer market? Two: When will the U.S. have to quit borrowing foreign capital to buy foreign goods that support European and Asian economies while driving us deeper into debt? Three: What jobs will our currently 15 million unemployed workers fill, where and when?
My critics and proponents of free trade and outsourcing suggest I'm a protectionist because I want to curtail the export of American jobs to cheap foreign labor markets just to reduce wage levels, and to eliminate our trade deficit and to pursue balanced trade policies.
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Our principal trading partners, Canada, China, Japan and the European Union, all typically maintain annual trade surpluses and pursue balanced trade. Why don't my critics call them protectionists? Why not call them economic isolationists?
My critics, and proponents of the status quo, are offering false choices. They say we must decide between protectionism, or economic isolationism as the president said today, and free trade. I'm sure they believe those choices are the only ones available.
But maybe they also fear our policymakers may discover a middle ground for a desperately needed new U.S. trade policy: a balanced trade policy in the national interest.
Re:If outsourcing upsets you... (Score:2, Interesting)
First, I said "if it upsets you" and secondly, free trade implies some sort of equality of trade partners. There's no such thing as free trade with China because they aren't a free market (Communist state with near-virtual slave labor), nor with India as they don't have a modern economy. Free trade is only "free" with an equality of partners playing by equal rules. For example, the US vs. Europe.
We're also free to boycott who we want.
Answers on Outsourcing (Score:5, Interesting)
A finance professor argues against placing blind faith in outsourcing. His views follow.
March 12, 2004: 8:18 AM EST
By Rory L. Terry
The following is a guest column by Rory L. Terry, an associate professor of finance at Fort Hays State University.
NEW YORK (CNN) -- A great deal of effort is being expended to convince us all that the outsourcing of jobs under the rubric of free trade is a good thing. I would like to discuss some of these arguments.
Our labor force is not better trained, harder working, or more innovative than our foreign competitors. The argument that we will create new jobs in highly paying fields simply is not true. We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation. To assume that we are inherently more creative than our foreign competitors is both arrogant and naive. We are currently empowering our competition with the resources to innovate equally as well as we. Consider the number of new non-native Ph.D.s that leave our universities each year; consider our low rank in the education of mathematics and the sciences; and consider the large number of international students enrolled in our most difficult technical degree programs at our most prestigious universities.
Most of our best, high-paying jobs can be exported.
1. doctors (even surgeons)
2. mathematicians
3. accountants
4. financial analysts
5. engineers
6. computer programmers
7. architects
8. physicists
9. chemists
10. biologists
11. researchers of all types
Our trading problem is an externality
An externality exists in economics any time there is a separation of costs and benefits, and the decision maker does not have to incur the full cost but receives the full benefits of the decision. The fact is, there is no economic force, no supply and demand equilibrium, no rational decision process of either business or consumer, that will make an externality go away. Classic examples of externalities are when a business dumps toxic waste into a nearby river and the downstream residents incur the costs of cancer. The business is able to lower its costs and pass those lower costs on to its customers, and never pay for the treatment of the cancer patients. We have laws in this country against dumping and pollution because they are externalities -- they require a legislative solution.
Cost reductions and other benefits provide a strong incentive to outsource jobs. A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways, including the following:
1. Extremely low wage rates
2. The circumvention or avoidance of organized labor
3. No Social Security or Medicare benefit payments
4. No federal or state unemployment tax
5. No health benefits for workers
6. No child labor laws
7. No OSHA or EPA costs or restrictions
8. No worker retirement benefits or pension costs
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs, including the following:
1. Tax incentives provided by our government
2. Incentives from foreign governments
3. The creation of new international markets for the company's products (which ultimately empowers the company to turn a deaf ear to this country's problems and influence)
4. The continued benefits of our legal system and the freedoms that we provide
The net effect of all of this is lower costs, higher revenue, higher profits, higher stock prices, bonuses for management, and the creation of wealth for a subclass that benefits from low taxes at the expense of the rest of us.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker. As a society and as a country, we experience many costs from outsourcing, including the loss of jobs, social costs, higher costs of raw materials and loss of national s
Elegy for a Profession (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.itunemployed.com/xaraya/index.php?mod ul e=articles&func=display&aid=264
Elegy for a Profession
A song of the discarded
Hello, Corporate America. Do you know us? Do you remember?
We are I/T.
We are the men and women who helped you build the 21st century.
We flocked to the new technologies, taught ourselves the skills we needed when colleges could not, and forged the tools you asked for.
We signed up willingly, knowing that of all professions, ours was the one where today's knowledge would be tomorrow's obsolescence, where last week's skill is worthless now, and where falling out of touch with progress is career suicide.
And we knew, some of us, that ultimately it would be impossible to keep up with the pace of change - but we tried anyway.
We are I/T.
We are the ones who embraced the idea of 7 x 24 operations, who willingly condemned ourselves to odd hours, unpaid overtime, and ever-increasing expectations, so "expensive equipment could be used most efficiently."
We are the ones who gave up families, friends, and "life outside" to spend endless hours building, fixing, and changing the systems that kept you going and growing. We learned that the dream of a 40-hour workweek would never, ever apply to us.
We are the ones who carried pagers when they were almost exclusively the tools of doctors, pimps and drug dealers.
We are a young mother, sitting in a cubicle at 3:00am, troubleshooting a software problem while her new baby sleeps in a carryall next to her desk.
We are a husband, called from his bed in the dead of night, on call not to save a life, or rescue a trapped motorist, but to rebuild a database index, or repair a broken disk drive. And sometimes, the problem was fixed, and it was the marriage that stayed broken.
Do you know us? We are I/T, too. We are the family of a "computer geek", who learned that vacations, holidays, and sick days did not mean freedom from stress for our loved ones, or uninterrupted time with us. We watched as our parents and spouses took cell phones, laptops, terminals, and manuals with them everywhere, ready to give up our family plans on a moments notice to keep your business running. We heard the phones ring in the middle of the night, at the park, or during dinner. We tried to understand.
We are I/T.
Yes, we are the ones who listened when the siren song of ever higher salaries beckoned. Are you surprised? Do not blame us for taking the salaries you offered. Rather, look to yourselves for creating a work environment so intense, so stressful, so demanding that for ten straight years, the schools to teach the next generation found fewer and fewer applicants.
But your demands did not decrease. In desperation, you threw money at us to buy the expertise your own voracious appetite made scarce.
We are the ones who welcomed foreign workers into our midst, when things were so bad you had to recruit overseas to feed your endless demand. While other departments struggled with racism and intolerance, we became a United Nations in miniature, grateful for help from any quarter, any society that could ease the crushing workload. We built a society of equals, holding no prejudice except technical inadequacy.
We watched our budgets shrink each year, while demands for productivity soared, and our pleas for more help were ignored. And we endured the criticism when the inevitable failures occurred, as overwork, stress, and tension took their inevitable toll on our skills.
We are I/T.
We had to learn not only our profession, but yours too. We learned your business practices so well that sometimes we knew more about them than you did; and we are the ones who had to stand by and listen to your "voice of experience" while we watched you make fatal decisions.
We designed the systems you asked for, only to watch as t
Don't let the government take control of this. (Score:5, Interesting)
It should be responibility of the consumer to buy American-produced products, not for the government to control whether we can decide who we hire or not, or where.
Vote with your dollar, but don't let the government have more power to control us.
Also, let us not forget that Indians are people too. Countries are man-made divisions between people, but in the end, we all need to eat, drink, get medicine, and have fun. Is an Indian life less important than an American one?
Really, I don't have much of an opinion on this issue, because I just want to buy cheap, efficient products, and I use Linux anyway so most of the software is freely available. I can see why people are complaining (Americans need jobs!), but then again, so do Indians, and they work for less.
So, again: If you don't like a companies' practice, don't buy their products. Don't let the government have more control.
Re:Good written English? (Score:4, Interesting)
Me type god Englis
Actually, virtually all Indians have a native language other than English. SO, their exposure to English is actually via the written text. Newspapers, magazines, textbooks...etc Barring formal conversations in school, Indian kids* don't speak English. But all of their homeworks and exams are answered in English. So, their grasp of the written form, is adequate.
*I'm only refering to the urban middle-class segment.
Asians and Indians outperform you in College (Score:1, Interesting)
Grades and SAT scores in MATH and SCIENCE
rule the world
Americans will be washing toilets soon.
slashdot's wannabe libertarians (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm truly sorry if you guys are losing your jobs and I wish ill on no one here, but whenever outsourcing comes up the /. community automagically becomes a protectionist democratic bunch.
We are amused by the hypocrisy thrown in ultra-sharp 4mega-pixel relief.
Re:Good written English? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to go ahead and say that an Indian writer may be as competent as an American writer. I think the bigger issue is context and perspective; can an Indian writer offer an American audience the same perspective, from their different context, as an American author?
Re:Before you get all worked up (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading your post I am doing something similiar. I am outsourcing a commercial software project to a friends company in China. I am the one doing all the design, project management and quality assurance and eventually be the salesman too. I don't have the skills to do the job myself, it would take a couple of years for me to get to that point and then I would still need to do the programming. If I tried to outsource it in the US it would be a $200,000 project which I don't have and I still would have to find programmers to actually do the project. outsourcing it to some good programmers and the project costs are $30,000. I could not even consider doing it if I could not do it in China.
My situation is fairly unique compared to large companies trying to outsource whole departments to India. While I have creative control and final say, most management in the US don't have any real design knowledge or quality control when it comes to writing software. They are making the assumption that a person in India is the same as the person in the US ignoring all the things the person who has worked for them has brought. New ideas, understanding business needs, meeting rather unreasonable time expectations are all things that these people do.
I think that you will find that these companies are going to be slowly start losing market share because they are going to stagnate, they will have no reservior of new ideas. They will have a source of cheap labor for their current software, but it will never get better and just maintain a status quo.
Anyways, just ranting..., hopefully someone can find something in there.
Re:Oh man (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism 101: it makes economic sense for a buyer to buy cheap if they can. That's why jobs get outsourced overseas. Wether it's IT to India or cars and sneakers to Thailand, that's the way the world works.
Don't like it? Well, don't be a capitalist. Start advocating something like socialism; you know, the belief that people owe something to society and vice-versa.
And if you don't want to compete with remote workers, then you better do something that can't be outsourced. Maybe you should consider becoming a chef... it's a little hard to outsource the production of gourmet food.
Here are the flaws in your logic. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's called "cost of living". In the US, you can't afford food, shelter and clothing at 1/10th of what you're making now. You might have a job, but you will not be able to keep it very long living in the homeless shelter.
"Basic economic theory states that as more job opportunies open up in those countries, the higher the median salaries will be."
Yep. It's called "inflation". It happens when more capital flows into a region. So they double their income. They're still 20% of your salary which still means "homeless shelter" for you.
"That means a *lot* of people in the world are going to have much better lives."
Probably. They'll have twice as much money as they had before.
"At some point equilibrium will be reached and the outsourcing will wane significantly."
Huh? It will level off and then fall significantly? I don't see that. I see it leveling off. But that's just the race to the bottom of the wage bucket.
"As an American techie, I'm not at all worried about my career. There will always be work here for people like me who are creative, resourceful and motivated."
At $15,000 a year (before taxes). I wouldn't worry so much about a career. I'd worry more about food, shelter and clothing. But that's just me.
"Hopefully that means that much of the chaff in IT will be eliminated; I'll be working with more knowledgable people in my field--the opportunists who got into IT for the quick buck will be off chasing their next white rabbit."
Statistics. There are a LOT more people in India and China and so forth. Statistically, your skills are NOT at their level.
Here, let me put some numbers to that.
You are in population A. There are 1,000 people in population A. You are in the top 90% there. That means that there are 100 people as good or better than you and 900 people who are less talented.
Population B has 10,000 people (10 times more than population A). Their 90% mark is 1,000 people. In other words, their best people are more numerous than your best people.
So, while you're CURRENTLY competing with 100 other people for a good paying job, when you combine both population, you'll be competing with 1,100 people.
And, of that 1,100 people, 1,000 will have expenses lower than your's. So they'll be able to do the work for LESS than you.
So, statistically, you'll have to convince an employer to hire you over someone better qualified and yet pay you MORE than that better qualified person wants.
Good luck on that.
Re:Answers on Outsourcing (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm from India, I did my undergrad in the US and have worked here for about 5 years (still paying off my loans : ), and I appreciate and agree with your post/comments.
I do have a different take on some of the points you bring up:
1. Externality as you/your professor phrase it, is a definite (or so I'm told from my readings/lectures by not just tech companies but also by economists and academicians) based on the type of capitalism that is practiced in the US.
2. (Actually a continuation from 1) Legislation also needs to have it's cost-benefit analyzed. The US (or should I say US corporations) has (have) been at the forefront of de-legislating in many countries for many many years now and if they reverse their ideologies then will the companies and the politicians in the US thereby accept the losses that this entails (financially and in international political clout)?
Out sourcing has a societal effect that most coporations AND politicians refuse to recognize. As a foreigner in the US I am affected by it too, maybe not right now but will be in the future. I am fully aware that there will come a day when my services in the US wil not be needed (or there will be legislation against my type of job-whores : ) I will then need to be ready to take my skills elsewhere. Back to India? I don't know but I have no problems moving anywhere I will be valued.
Most Americans I've worked with or have had the pleasure of knowing are equally skilled if not more in comparison to the people taking their jobs over-seas, the issue as your professor points out is that the cost of maintaining a work force in the US is A LOT more in the US than in a lower-cost economy. I appreciate you not driving the usual hammer that these countries are just brainless mules, there are mules everywhere aye? : )
Solutions? I am all for isolationism (I understand the fears and the insecurities this evil out sourcing and job-whore like me have brought about) but will that help/allow in maintaining the same standard of living in this country? What little I remember from my economics class mathematically proved that it wouldn't...aaah how do you solve this puzzle? Take up a Canadian style system of govt and capitalism, i.e. accept a mediocre economy for stability (a mix of capitalism and socialism?) personally I think as long as politics and corporations (big money) are allowed to sleep together there will not be a solution for Joe Average (even a techie elite one).
~
ps. if this ended up as a rant I blame the beer, cheers : )
Re:If outsourcing upsets you... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot bies... (Score:2, Interesting)
Slashdot isn't pretending to be unbies unlike say MsNBC (when reporting on technology).
What all this outsourcing IS doing is forcing us to face a reality we were long overdue on anyway.
There are only just so many jobs in a given field and everyone wants to be in the technology field.
Microsoft did you all a favor in that reguards by making it HARDER to use and support Windows. More people washed out and fewer could pay the Microsoft bribe (The liccensing and trainning fee) needed to get into the Windows field. Also Microsoft derailed all the Unix classes so Unix and Linux experts aren't increasing as fast as demand.
Also Windows breeds ignorence. Windows simply discurrages users from understanding the PC where as all other platforms (including MacOs) encurrage it.
As a result the complex operation "right click" is byond the users understanding.
Re:Oh man (Score:4, Interesting)
Why are you so sure? What does it mean to be Protectionist anyway? When in history has there ever existed a pure unrestricted free market?
One of the lessons we took from the failure of the Gold Standardduring the 1920s-30s was that free markets when left unrestricted create horrible consequences, one of which being the abuse of weaker nations and peoples by dominant economic powers; and another being the economic collapse of nations with uncompetitive currencies. And yet another lesson we learned was that a major reason why unrestricted free market capitalism dooms a nation is that participants act to protect their own limited interests, and so with every participant "protecting" his interest, the sole guy out there playing fairly is fated to being swallowed up.
I personally think that Filipinos/Indians are being used.
Yes, they are - it's a side effect of unrestricted capitalism, but this is not a worst case scenario. For that, look at the diamond market's effect on Africa.
As an American techie, I'm not at all worried about my career. There will always be work here for people like me who are creative, resourceful and motivated.
How do you know? What makes you so special? I know some very motivated and very creative techies who are still looking for work in their field. Perhaps you are a contract worker in the defense industry, in which case you arguably have more job security than other techies; or maybe you possess some rare talent and skill that shifts this employer's market more in your favor? If you either, then I am truly happy for you. There needs to be a place for American techies in this field.
Typical American responses to your comment (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Copyright which exceeds the life of the author is not something the voting public desired. Intellectual property rights have been extended far past their original intent and people with the money to do it are writing their own laws *cough*Disney*cough*cough*. These laws should not be considered legitimate products of a representative democracy.
2. Shutting down file trading systems because they could be used to transmit copywrited material is like eliminating cell phones because they could be used by drug dealers, or by eliminating sewing machines because they hurt the trade of seamstresses. The current notion that technology should be restricted because it might be used for illegal purposes is is an unfair use of government power.
2. Americans, and citizens of any nation, have the right to have laws that are in the best interests of the general public. This should be the basis of representative democracy. Do excessivly long copyrights serve the public interest? The purpose of a copyright is NOT to simply reward the author, but to reward the author so that he/she moves their work into the public domain. Copyright extention is only valid if it serves the public good.
For example, does allowing the patenting of naturally occuring genes serve the public interest? Or would it be beter for the public to restrict gene patents to use patents as was the original intention for patent laws. Patenting the base codes for finding a particular gene is about as useful as patenting the individual words that a printer can print. The laws simply aren't serving their original intent.
Finally, when all our trading partners are protecting their markets rather fiercely, why shouldn't American workers? The ability to freely use the labor of other countries (even those with abysmal labor rights laws) may help to keep down prices, but it also keeps American wages low. If people in the US don't find this to their advantage, they should oppose it.
If people are trying to reach a 'fair' common ground, you can work with them for a fair solution. If you have powerful opponents out to get all they can regardless of what's 'fair' and the law has failed to stop them, then it's a competition and you fight back however you're able.
The truth about Indian outsourcing (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody wants to really address this issue, but in my experience, when we need something done, we don't get the whiny, flaky experience that is so common with American developers. There are definitely cultural issues which can impede certain efforts, but the Indians know code, especially on a lower level far better than their American counterparts, and they're not obsessively distracted or inconsistent.
The issue with outsourcing isn't half as much about cash flow, as it is a testimonial to the fact that if American developers were half as productive as Indians, it would be cheaper to use them, and we'd have better quality software.
Before you argue this point, stop and look around you. Do you think the quality of the majority of things you use on a daily basis, especially anything made in America, has dramatically improved in the last 20 years? Do you think this culture's work ethic is even near as substantive as it was many years ago? We live in a society where we're constantly taught that everything can be upgraded, we're fed disposable products, we screw in lightbulbs that are manufactured to fail, we sit in front of televisions all day long and can't pay attention to anything, and you want to talk about who can program better? The educational system in this country has been sliding downhill rapidly. The reason India is so appealing is because they haven't turned into ADD self-absorbed mega-consumer capitalists yet, so their production is superior. And what's the US's "solution" to this problem? Pass a law making it difficult to outsource. How ironic.
It was bound to happen... (Score:5, Interesting)
To put simply, the world is split into the developed industrial and post-industrial nations, and the developing nations. The developed nations (USA, UK, Germany) are typically rich in knowledge assets, whereas the developing nations (India, Mexico, and to an extent, China) are rich in natural resources.We in the US and Western Europe have the creativity and the skills, but tend to be in short supply of labor resources and materials. The reciprocal is true in the developing nations. This permits us to exert bargaining power over these nations, resulting in cheap materials and cheap labor.
Through Western education, developing nations are beginning to develop the creativity and the talent, with which to complement their ownership of the resources. However, we in the post-industrial West (and Japan and Taiwan) are not as able to gain the resources.
This is where things get scary. India has been a good place to pump out cheap code - even if the code isn't innovative or even original. The Chinese are good at assembling parts, despite not being talented at designing them. That's changing. With this growing independence in creativity and talent, combined ownership of the factors of production, developing nations are shifting the balance of power in their favor, and most likely will be able to exert greater economic (and thus political) power over the current post-industrial nations.
In my opinion, American and Japanese ingenuity will continue to save our two economies; however we'll lose much of the bargaining power we already have once it becomes desirable for an Indian firm to outsource some of its processes to cheap American labor. We can definitely expect the price of materials to increase for Western businesses as a result of the balance of power.
In case anyone's interested...
The Great Transformation - The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi ISBN: 0-8070-5643-X
Indian student in USA perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
I came to USA to pursue masters degree and it is a great prestige for my famiy if i complete this program
Everyone was saying , life in Us is the best.This further fuelled my desires
Im gonna finish MS now and probably return back to India becuz of obvious reasons
Whats worse is my undergrad friends are so F**** skilled in programming now that i feel its utter waste to do MS
At the end of day i ahve skills that r not welcomed so much in industry
My indian buddies work for Intel sun Thoughtworks IBM and i bet im no inferior to them in skill when i came here.
Bad decision.Life in USA is materialistically awesome.
Family wise , i dont wanna explain.
I really mean it , u guys should see some laid back countries and relatiosnships of people there.
Re:Excuse me a second here... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's cute. Did you know that the US Army contracts to India as well? Did you know that many of the Bush-Cheney campaign's official sweatshirts were made in Burma? Do you drive an American made car? If so, what country was the engine assembled in? There are a couple of BMW models built here in the US by Americans. Would you buy one?
I'm not meaning to be crass with you... this time. I can feel your pain. If you really want to help the situation though, this "Buy American" crap idea has got to go.
Buying exclusively from an American company that has a predominantly foreign workforce doesn't help things. Refusing to buy from a foreign company that has a strong American workforce only makes things worse.
Here's an idea. We could publicly shame those companies that dump jobs overseas when there is a glut of qualified workers domestically. We could start a movement. Say we get a petition with the names of every out-of-work American who can't find a job due to outsourcing, or who has lost a job to foreign outsourcing. We then create our own virtual Wall. We then make a banner that reads, "I lost my job so that executives can get paid more." or something to the effect. Since top-level executive pay has been increasing dramatically, we'd have a powerful statement. We could go one step further and make a list of companies that outsource and publicize that.
I for one have already taken my Protectionist vow
gah (Score:3, Interesting)
My mom was wanting insurance info from her insurance agent in Arizona... she heard a few clicks,then it got weird and static-y, then someone with an indian accent picked up the phone, and you could hear lots of other people with indian accents on the phone.. andh ewas trying to give her help... but she could barely understand him...she just hung up, very pissed off that her insurance company had gotten so cheap that they outsourced their phone help to india... for a company that's just across the state, She doesnt like the idea of someone in some foriegn country knowing her personal info...
So outsourcing isnt good for the employee, and the consumer doesnt like it.
These companies need to rethink their decisions...
It's not as bad when they outsource more internal, less consumer interactive work.. but when it's something that directly affects the consumer..and they dont like it... it's not pretty.
My complaint here is, how good will editing be from someone who isnt a native speaker of english?
George Soros on outsourcing (Score:2, Interesting)
Interestingly, if one looks at the companies Soros's investment company, Soros Fund Management, holds [hoovers.com], (specifically check the Form 13F-HR [hoovers.com]), you'll discover outsourcing company after another. I spent an hour looking at just the companies starting with "A" and "B" and found over 90% were aggressively outsourcing. Several had financial reports literally bragging about how they've saved investors money through this process.
I had wondered where Soros was at. A few years ago, a Soros disciple approached a company I worked for and strongly recommended the company dispose of its information technology and call center operations to India as a precondition of the fund looking at the company. The disciple insisted outsourcing had worked well and Mr. Soros used it as part of his investing strategy to differentiate investments.
Imagine my surprise when I've heard Soros himself (as well as his moveon.org group) blaming the current president for the flight of jobs. How is Bush supposed to stop Soros from demanding his holdings "optimize"? Is it Bush's fault that he hasn't stopped Soros before he moves-jobs-on to India again? For those of you who've fallen sucker to the moveon.org ploy, do your own research and you'll confirm what a few of us who have crossed Soros's path have learned first hand. You're unfortunately playing in the guilt trip of a very rich man who must not like how he makes his money. For anyone in IT supporting moveon.org, it'd be like a Linux advocate joining a SCO fan club.
Take a look at the list. Search google for the company name. It's shocking. My only theory is that Soros has the typical upper class guilt trip going where he wants to be thought of a better person than he is per his destruction of IT in the US.
For these Fortune 1000, it's not easy to tell Soros (who may be holding 5% or more of your company) to blow off and keep those jobs in the U.S.
In other news (which didn't make a dent in the U.S. press), Soros apparently has one-upped Martha Stewart [outlookindia.com]. Just like Martha, he's liberal, a Bush hater, a rich fat cat, big business guy, believes he's immune to trading laws, and liberal. Warren Buffet, the U.S.'s second richest man, is also a big time Democrat and despises Bush. I think we can put away the myth that Republicans have a monopoly on "big business/special interest." Democrats seem to be leading the pack these days.
Re:Answers on Outsourcing (Score:3, Interesting)
We have no comparative advantage or superiority in innovation.
The US 'melting pot' has a unique blend of population size and diversity. Some countries are larger, a few may arguably be more diverse, but none can claim both. The different viewpoints and backgrounds represented in the US, combined with a general bias toward individualism, are the wellspring of innovation. A PhD does not automatically grant a license to innovate.
Americans do need to protect this advantage, by investing in education and allowing more immigration.
A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways
Some of these don't really apply:
Avoidance of labor unions has nothing to do with the outsourcing of "our best, high-paying jobs" -- they're not unionized. They're not being done by children either. In fact, in emerging economies, child labor drops as trade increases. (Because countries start to realize that investing in the education of children is better for child welfare and long-term economic growth.) Finally, the shift of responsibility for retirement from employers to employees has been occurring for a long time now -- it's independent of the outsourcing trend.
Besides cutting costs, there are other benefits to exporting jobs
The same incentives that lead to outsourcing also lead to insourcing from other countries -- look at BMW / Mercedes / Toyota plants that have opened in the US.
The costs of the decision to outsource are not borne by the decision maker.
Not all the benefits accrue to the decision maker, either. The receiving country gets more jobs, economic growth, less reliance on foreign aid. The country's purchasing power increases, making it a target market for US firms, who can now compete effectively against other international firms because they have lower cost structures. Domestic US consumers benefit from lower prices. The leftover money can be used to buy additional goods, boosting demand and increasing growth.
Jobs are destroyed all the time -- there's always a better, faster, cheaper way of doing something (innovation is the process of discovering/inventing that new way). Stopping job destruction is like stopping the tide. The real, and still unsolved problem, is how to increase job creation. There are some interesting ideas floating around:
1) Nationalize health care so that employers are no longer responsible for funding it, reducing the cost to hire a new employee.
2) Retarget tax cuts to boost demand growth instead of supply growth (put more money in the hands of poor people who will spend it)
3) Cut the payroll tax to make it cheaper to hire new employees.
The best response to jobs lost to outsourcing is creating new jobs at a faster rate. In other words
Level playing field (Score:3, Interesting)
This raises a really interesting idea. How about our congress critters pass a Technology Level Playing Field Act with provisions such as:
1. employers that outsource jobs to non-US locations automatically forfit CNDA provisions with US workforce. Rationale: how is the US IT worker competing with the Indian/Chinese/etc. worker? (I'd be interested to learn how effective CNDAs are in China, incidentally. There is no comparable playing field). The company has abandoned the US IT workforce, even with one outsourcing employee, so it cannot hold anticompetitive work contracts in effect which harm the US workforce and keep the US workers out of production.
2. apply index-based labor tariffs. Rationale: implement an employment cost index assessing the cost/employee for US regulatory factors such as health care requirements, social security, employer income tax portion, workmen's compensation, environmental compliance, OSHA compliance, ADA compliance, etc. Measure India, China, etc.'s status with respect to the index, and then factor a per-hour cost for the items they are not providing. Assess this tariff per hour of outsourced labor to the outsourcing company, and place the receipts of the tariff into job training tax credits and such.
This legislation would not only benefit the US workforce, but it would finally show compassion to workers in developing nations by demanding these American and European firms not treat them as low-wage slaves. Intelligent Phillipinos, Indians and Chinese don't appreciate U.S. firms paying off local officials to continue poor working conditions, and in the long term, will breed considerable anti-American resentment (just as the US middle class is also increasingly hostile to the process). This sort of legislation would effect positive developments on both sides of the outsourcing process.
Yeah Yeah Yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
From reading this rant you get the impression that the person who wrote it (the ghost of I/T past) is some sort of slave incapable of making a decision for itself or having any sort of personal responsibility at all. You would swear that everybody in I/T was forced at gun point to take high payed, high stress jobs and that their was no other alternative for them. You would sware that everyone in "Amerika" was marched down to the bank and forced to mortgage their house, borrow as much money as possible and rack up huge credit card depts. You would swear everybody was obliged by law to spend money like it was water and not think about the future at all.
Did anyone honestly expect the I/T boom to last ? Did everyone think it was just going to get better and better all the time? That salaries were just going to multiply by two every year? You can blame the bosses up until a certain point but remember you were a willing participant in the whole show. You could have gotten off the ride at any time, you took the money and you took the risks.
I understand the sentiment of the whole rant. I can feel sorry for the techie who's job got moved over sea but why should I feel any more sorrow for him/her than the worker from the "insert industry here" who's had the same thing happen to them. Any one who has ever read anything about the history of trade unionism in America knows that workers in other professions have had it far worse than anything the American I/T workers are experiencing right now when outsourcing happend to them. The difference between a lot (not all) of people with I/T jobs and say for example coal miners is/was that people working in the I/T sector could have put aside a lot of money but a lot of them choose not to where as people in traditional industrial jobs (manufacturing) where this sort of thing has happened before often did not have this luxury, often they were making just enough to get by. Now I am not saying that everyone in I/T who is stuck for a job now was a heedless spendaholic who thought the party would never end, a lot of them are, but that relative to others who have suffered a similar fate people in I/T have not had it so bad.
This experience is not just some distant memory, the author of the rant himself/herself admits that : "Do not blame us, Corporate America, for the cynical attitude we have toward you, for some of us remember 20 years ago, when we could not buy a job, and you threw us out on the street at a moments notice." This has happened before and it will happen again, this is not the last time you will hear rants like this nor has it been the first time I'm sure. Shrugging everything off onto some faceless entity called corporate America and relieving yourself of all personal responsibility isn't going to help you in the long run . Raising awareness on issues like who pay's corporate America's salaries or what companies contribute how much to who's campaign are worth far more in my opinion than mono perspective rants
like this.
Re:heh, funny thing is.. (Score:1, Interesting)
A major company around here suddenly decided that email was no longer a priority. That is when I realised the curtains were coming down. About a year later it very much did.
It can be surprising to see how long a company can survive on its last legs; usually it is because of superhuman effort by the nameless workforce while top level believes all is well and travels on a first class ticked to disaster, taking everyone down with them.
Equally annoying is the fact that these people reappear later as if nothing bad happened, just check the web for the names from, say, top level management of Amiga; they are all back again.
Re:Answers on Outsourcing (Score:1, Interesting)
"Cost reductions and other benefits provide a strong incentive to outsource jobs. A company that decides to move its production overseas cuts its costs in many ways, including the following:"
1. Extremely low wage rates - True
2. The circumvention or avoidance of organized labor - False
3. No Social Security or Medicare benefit payments - False
4. No federal or state unemployment tax - What kind of tax is this ?
5. No health benefits for workers - False
6. No child labor laws - False
7. No OSHA or EPA costs or restrictions - False
8. No worker retirement benefits or pension costs - False
So what was your point again ?
Re:The truth about Indian outsourcing (Score:1, Interesting)
Hello,
My company was recently awarded the contract to
build [insert application]. I have no clue how any
of this works. Will someone please design it for me
and send me the sample code?
Thanks,
Pradeep@yahoo.com
It's getting worse than September use to be on Usenet.
Re:gah (Score:2, Interesting)
I've almost given up on newsforge because of the grammatical and spelling errors in its articles; they're really declining. (Most newsforge writers apparently cannot reproduce that sentence, for instance, without writing "it's" or "their"; usually both.)
Maybe I should change my locale preferances to only list 'en' and no longer include 'en_US'. Would site designers know that regular English requires writers who're targeting readers over the age of 9 to distinguish between 'their' and 'there'?
My boss is Indian. Her boss, my former boss, is Indian. They write English beautifully. In fact, all my immigrant co-workers write wonderfully, unless they're in 'ICQ' mode. It's the ones born on this landmass that need the refresher!