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Editorial

Pros and Cons of Tech Offshoring? 120

Posted by Cliff from the bane-or-boon dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "There's an interesting analysis of tech offshoring at the moment posted on Membox. It looks at the pros and cons of the practice in two separate articles. Since this is a big issue in tech at the moment, it's good to see the arguments on each side given so clearly. What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?"
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Pros and Cons of Tech Offshoring? More

Pros and Cons of Tech Offshoring?

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  • fear, mostly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hitch ( 1361 ) <hitch@nOSPAm.propheteer.org> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:22PM (#13297348) Homepage
    I haven't seen a lot of jobs actually go away because of it, but a lot of people are jumping ship out of fear - and we're having to hire lots of new people to replace them.

    • Re:fear, mostly (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:30PM (#13297422) Homepage Journal
      Where do you work? If you haven't been downsizing and are still outsourcing, I want to send your company a resume. I'm sure several thousand others will as well. You're completely right about the fear- but if your company has succeeded in avoiding downsizing while outsourcing, that fear is mostly baseless in your case, where it isn't baseless elsewhere. For instance, I can show you closed factories right here in my home state of Oregon that were built by HP and Intel- those jobs left for China and India. I know people from Microsoft who were downsized and their jobs moved to the Windows Research Center of Hydrabad. If your company never downsizes, I know plenty of engineers who would like to work there.
      • I'm looking for a DICOM developer with five years experience. I'm not getting many hits. Maybe those hordes of unemployed software engineers everyone keeps talking about is a myth.
        • After looking at the Introduction to DICOM [nottingham.ac.uk] I think your problem is that DICOM is not a programming language, but is rather a file format, and thus you can't hire a "DICOM Programmer". Any code monkey experienced in basic object oriented work from any higher level language ought to be able to handle all the DICOM work you want- I'd suggest advertising for a Visual Basic programmer if your shop is mainly Windows, or a Java programmer if your shop is mainly Linux. Any higher level programmer can use the free
          • Brzzzt! And thus we learn the hazards of quicky introductions to complex domains. If you saw how thick the DICOM specification is you wouldn't be so smug.
            • And if you saw how thick my natural language interpreter source code for my senior project back in 1995 was, you'd know that I'm not scared by complexity of a relatively simple file format.

              I'd still have to say that by asking for specialization in a FILE FORMAT you've painted your box a bit narrow.
            • That's the question you need to ask yourself.

              The WORLDFLIGHT flight operations system I worked on at NWA for the better part of a decade was a very complex online transaction system. Over 1000 discrete transaction codes, 2 million LOC (Fortran) even with very heavy use of the external subroutine library, roughly 30 feet of paper *programmer* documentation, additional end-user docs, vendor docs, language and platform manuals, etc.

              I could probably bring someone up to speed so they'd be effective in a bug hun
        • ...that they could walk into a room filled with several dozen experienced programmers, interview each one, and fail to find a single "qualfied" candidate.

          Remember that not everyone has formal experience using the same set of specific products or tools that you have, and that many things (like file formats) are relatively easy for almost anyone to pick up and work with if they're even remotely competent.
      • didn't say "never". we've downsized plenty - but darn little of that has been because of moving jobs. mostly it's been because of product changes and reorganizations.

        I'd rather not say where I work.
        • didn't say "never". we've downsized plenty - but darn little of that has been because of moving jobs. mostly it's been because of product changes and reorganizations.

          If it wasn't for your competitors outsourcing, you wouldn't need to reorganize and have continuous product changes- because you'd still be playing the game on a level field.

          I'd rather not say where I work.

          Why? Are you ashamed of working there? Still, doesn't matter- if you can't escape the downsizings, then you haven't truly escaped the

  • Wrong question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:26PM (#13297386) Homepage Journal
    The study of economics is based on a simple problem - human wants are infinite, but the resources to satisfy those wants are only finite. So the question becomes - How do we satisfy our wants with the most efficient use of resources?

    From the pro article. I've seen this a lot- but there is at least one economic theory, distributism, that claims that human wants are just the mortal sin of greed and human NEEDS are what we should be focused on satisfying- and human needs are indeed finite.
    • There's 6 billions of us. Surely it IS possible to evaluate just how much stuff we NEED to live - food, clothing, lodging. The stuff we WANT, however? Infinite, because as soon as we get more we begin to want other things.
      • 7 billion. But distributism doesn't require that you take the numbers that big- distributism might be thought of as "democratic communism", where small communes vote on what they will buy from outside the commune, and what they are able to make themselves. WANTS are surpressed not only by the ideal of mortal sin (distributism is, after all, a Catholic-influenced concept, as it came out of a combination of a rather rose-colored reading of the rights granted to serfs during the 1300s and Dorthy Day's Cathol
    • I guess if you give two hoots about "mortal sin" that might be attractive, but for those of us who value individual freedom, I'll take our (US) current system, thanks. It may not be perfect, but it is incredibly dynamic and reallocates resources towards productive areas more effectively than just about anything else out there.
      • I guess if you give two hoots about "mortal sin" that might be attractive, but for those of us who value individual freedom, I'll take our (US) current system, thanks. It may not be perfect, but it is incredibly dynamic and reallocates resources towards productive areas more effectively than just about anything else out there.

        Whenever you reallocate resources, you're playing a zero sum game, which means when you give resources to the more productive you're stealing from the tables of the poor. And when y
        • The economy is not a zero-sum game. In order for me to become rich, I do not have to make someone else poor. Economic activity generates wealth. There is not a fixed-size "pie" that must be distributed in chunks. When the economy is booming, everybody is better off (in theory). During a recession, everybody loses money. By encouraging economic activity, everybody will benefit. Sure, there are situations where people can and will be exploited, and some are too greedy and too willing to take advantage of thes
          • The economy is not a zero-sum game.

            The economy is not- but resources ARE. The earth is finite, it's impossible to have infinite resources in it.

            In order for me to become rich, I do not have to make someone else poor.

            Prove it- do it. I've yet to see anybody become rich without making somebody else poor.

            Economic activity generates wealth.

            True enough- if by "wealth" you mean the useless digits in federal reserve computers and not actual physical goods.

            There is not a fixed-size "pie" that must be
            • The economy is not- but resources ARE. The earth is finite, it's impossible to have infinite resources in it.

              Not infinite, no, but as plentiful as they have always been on the earth, and as plentiful as they are likely to be for a long time yet. Check out the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy. What we consider a "resource" and what we consider "waste" fluctuates in response to supply and demand.

              Prove it- do it. I've yet to see anybody become rich without making somebody else poor.

              We'd have to define

              • Not infinite, no, but as plentiful as they have always been on the earth, and as plentiful as they are likely to be for a long time yet. Check out the Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy. What we consider a "resource" and what we consider "waste" fluctuates in response to supply and demand.

                And thus, when you have more people, the per capita share of resources goes DOWN, not up. Thus you can't increase your personal share of resources without taking those resources from somebody else.

                We'd have to define
                • And thus, when you have more people, the per capita share of resources goes DOWN, not up.

                  But the real price of the goods needed for survival, as a fraction of income, has been going down for all of recorded history (with some local bumps around depressions, recessions, revolutions, wars, etc.). Which means that the amount of effort needed to obtain the same minimal standard of living has been decreasing over the centuries, at the same time that the population has been going up and up (and UP). So somethin
                  • But the real price of the goods needed for survival, as a fraction of income, has been going down for all of recorded history (with some local bumps around depressions, recessions, revolutions, wars, etc.). Which means that the amount of effort needed to obtain the same minimal standard of living has been decreasing over the centuries, at the same time that the population has been going up and up (and UP). So something's not right about your assertion...

                    And it also means that a parasite class has arisen t
            • In order for me to become rich, I do not have to make someone else poor.

              Prove it- do it. I've yet to see anybody become rich without making somebody else poor.

              I suggest you try to understand where the value behind money comes from. When I say "the value behind money", I'm referring to everyone's ability to make consistent (but not identical) pricing decisions ($3 can be exchanged for a gallon of milk most places in the continental US). Why is $3 worth about the same as a gallon of milk? It is clear from
              • I suggest you try to understand where the value behind money comes from. When I say "the value behind money", I'm referring to everyone's ability to make consistent (but not identical) pricing decisions ($3 can be exchanged for a gallon of milk most places in the continental US). Why is $3 worth about the same as a gallon of milk? It is clear from your remark that you lack understanding of that very important economic process.

                That's because there is no reality behind this economic process- it's a myth. I
                • we left the gold standard behind in the 1950s.

                  Whoops. All the gold standard did was tie the dollar to a quantity of a somewhat rare mineral.

                  If we were on a gold standard and all of the people died tomorrow, how much gold would a gallon of milk be worth? The gold standard doesn't change the answer to your question.

                  Economics is always about an agreed upon valuation. Which you're calling a myth because you think that gold has intrinsic value. But it doesn't, so that theory's kinda kaput.

                  And whew! Talk abo
              • I see what you're trying to say- that labor is the basic value of money, thus things that are harder to create cost more. But that's not so- the stockbroker and the banker are paid the best of any employee in this economy, but they produce no actual goods. Likewise the stockholder and the venture capitalist are extremely well paid for produceing no products at all.

                I agree with you and with Marx that the value of money comes from the labor of the people. But in the last 150 years, a small minority of peo
                • I see what you're trying to say- that labor is the basic value of money

                  Not exactly, though you're a lot closer than the other poster. I hate to disappoint you, and though I do really like much of what Marx wrote, I'm not a Marxist.

                  I assert that the value of money comes from the value added to resources and products, expressed through the differences in the costs that go into the product and the revenues captured when the product is sold. The difference is measured as profit, which is aggregated into the
                  • I assert that the value of money comes from the value added to resources and products, expressed through the differences in the costs that go into the product and the revenues captured when the product is sold. The difference is measured as profit, which is aggregated into the value of the enterprise as measured by its investors.

                    In other words- for the employees and the consumers, there is no value to money at all- it's something reserved entirely for the investor class.

                    If there are 1000 investors who e
                • Oh, and I'm sorry about the situation you described earlier. The biggest and most frustrating thing about the world is that it really isn't fair and some of the worst things happen to the nicest people.

                  Here's hoping you can find a way to get out from wage-slavery (that's what it really is, even for well-paid wage-slaves) and to a state of independence.

                  I'm trying to do that very thing, and I'm doing my honest personal best not to screw anyone over in the process of achieving independence. The day to day r
                  • Oh, and I'm sorry about the situation you described earlier. The biggest and most frustrating thing about the world is that it really isn't fair and some of the worst things happen to the nicest people.

                    Actually, to me, the worst thing about it is that near as I can tell, back during the civil war the Republicans used their emergency war powers to start this cycle. Back then of course, they were trading wage slavery for chattel slavery- which is a bad deal for the slave, since he goes from being provided
                • I see what you're trying to say- that labor is the basic value of money, thus things that are harder to create cost more.
                  That's only one component in the equation, and to many people it's a pretty small component.

                  The biggest factor is the bargaining power on all sides of the equation. This is why a union worker and a non-union worker doing the exact same thing are paid differently.
                  • The biggest factor is the bargaining power on all sides of the equation. This is why a union worker and a non-union worker doing the exact same thing are paid differently.

                    The majority of America has no real bargaining power- union or no union. If bargaining power is the majority of the value of money to you- you're sunk. The oligarchy sets the prices and if you don't follow that pricing structure, you will be put out of business one way or another.
        • Whenever you reallocate resources, you're playing a zero sum game, which means when you give resources to the more productive you're stealing from the tables of the poor.

          BZZZZZZTTTT!!! Wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

          Centuries of historical evidence suggest otherwise. If you want to offer people the choice between being a 21st century "wage slave" (interesting oxymoron) and a 13th century peasant, by all means do so, but the growth of goods and services production in the 1st world countries over the last 15
          • Centuries of historical evidence suggest otherwise. If you want to offer people the choice between being a 21st century "wage slave" (interesting oxymoron) and a 13th century peasant, by all means do so,

            Yeah, right- like we're allowed to offer people that choice. Every time it's been done, the IRS and the local government steps in and confiscates the land for back taxes on income that was never actually created.

            but the growth of goods and services production in the 1st world countries over the last 150
            • In reality what it represents is large countries stealing resources from smaller countries. Per capita, your first world rich people use 40 times the number of resources of a substinence farmer in a third world country- which means that 40 people are starving for that one person to be supported in luxury.

              I was kinda hoping you'd make that idiotic argument. Global per-capita GDP has grown 2.1% [wikipedia.org] annually from 1950-2003, which tells you right away that something more than a zero-sum game is at work.

              And the gap
              • I was kinda hoping you'd make that idiotic argument. Global per-capita GDP has grown 2.1% [wikipedia.org] annually from 1950-2003, which tells you right away that something more than a zero-sum game is at work.

                Really? And where did they get the additional atoms for that GDP? GDP is as much a fake number as anything else- for instance the American GDP fails to take into account our trade deficit.

                In a dynamic economy, of course the gap between rich and poor will increase.

                Which should be a signal that
                • Wow, the lack of basic economic understanding you've displayed here is astounding. Head off to school and learn about a few things like inflation [wikipedia.org], GDP [wikipedia.org], and Balance of Trade [wikipedia.org]. Pursuing the discussion here is a waste of time...

                  (hint: GDP does take the trade deficit into account)
                  • Wow, the lack of basic economic understanding you've displayed here is astounding. Head off to school and learn about a few things like inflation [wikipedia.org], GDP [wikipedia.org], and Balance of Trade [wikipedia.org]. Pursuing the discussion here is a waste of time...

                    Wikipedia is a big part of the problem- it's just a shill for people with an agenda. If you redefine the language you can prove anything.

                    (hint: GDP does take the trade deficit into account)

                    If GDP took the real trade deficit into acc
                    • "deficit spending" and "trade deficit" are two completely different things. The first is how much the government spends over and above its receipts, and the second is the balance of trade. And we don't "create FAR less than we import". We (the US) exports much less than we import, hence the trade deficit.

                      Where you might be confused is the difference between GNP and GDP. GNP, which doesn't back out the trade deficit, used to be cited as the main indicator of economic growth, but was dropped in favor of G
                    • "deficit spending" and "trade deficit" are two completely different things. The first is how much the government spends over and above its receipts, and the second is the balance of trade. And we don't "create FAR less than we import". We (the US) exports much less than we import, hence the trade deficit.

                      No- we've actually swtiched in the last decade or so to creating far less (in real, physical goods) than we import. Most of the Made In America stuff is really just Chinese and Mexican parts assembled he
                    • Watch out - I've heard that this crazy term called gravity is based on junk science, too - you just might go flying off the end of the earth (which we all know is flat, right?) at any moment! Hang On!
                    • Watch out - I've heard that this crazy term called gravity is based on junk science, too - you just might go flying off the end of the earth (which we all know is flat, right?) at any moment! Hang On!

                      The difference being that when I test gravity, by dropping say, a pencil on the floor, it always works. When I test the GDP by going down to my local department store and counting the items stamped "Made in China" vs the number of items claimed to be "Made in America", the GDP always loses out.

                      And don't go
                  • The real problem here is that you accept classical economics as a set of rules that are inviolate and true- and I don't. In fact, I'm to the point that I consider the whole thing to be a big lie- GDP doesn't take the trade deficit into account because if it did, it would be instantly obvious that the United States is no longer a manufacturing country. All we produce is natural resources, which we send elsewhere to be turned into product, which come back and are sold to the American public as "Made in Amer
    • I've seen this a lot- but there is at least one economic theory, distributism, that claims that human wants are just the mortal sin of greed and human NEEDS are what we should be focused on satisfying- and human needs are indeed finite.

      When you figure out how to get six billion people to agree on exactly what qualifies as a need, let me know.
      • Oh, yeah, right- like you failed 2nd grade social studies. The basic human needs are: food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and medical care. Every 7 year old on the planet knows that one.
        • Oh, yeah, right- like you failed 2nd grade social studies. The basic human needs are: food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and medical care. Every 7 year old on the planet knows that one.

          Oh! Well then, as a representative of the world's 7-year-olds, perhaps you can be a bit more precise.

          It turns out that each one of those allegedly obvious needs comes in a variety of forms. If we're going to optimize the economy for needs only, we'll need to know exactly where to draw the dividing line between needs and wa
          • Oh! Well then, as a representative of the world's 7-year-olds, perhaps you can be a bit more precise.

            How more precise do you need to be to say that every human being needs to have food, clothing, shelter, clean water, and medical care for basic survival?

            It turns out that each one of those allegedly obvious needs comes in a variety of forms.

            So what? We care about the people who have NO form of that obvious need, not SOME form of that obvious need.

            If we're going to optimize the economy for needs only
            • What makes you think that YOU deserve to live a life of luxury built upon the poverty of others?

              Funny, I missed where I said that.

              Look, I think your apparent goals (e.g., that nobody should live in obvious want) are laudable. And it turns out, I share them. But I think your proposals are ludicrously simple-minded.

              The world already produces enough food. This is not because we've devoted a large portion of our labor to that. Instead, it depends upon a lot of advanced technology, careful research, and strong e
              • Funny, I missed where I said that.

                You said that you deserve a broadband connection to the net and a computer- I'm just asking what makes you think you deserve those things while there are people starving in the world.

                The world already produces enough food. This is not because we've devoted a large portion of our labor to that.

                Tell that to the people of Niger- they certainly don't think that the world already produces enough food. Or to the Mexicans forced to come here as illegal immigrants because th
  • What I want to know is, what will happen when all this outsourcing brings the so called 3rd world countries to the same economic level as the 1st world countries? Who will the outsourcing go to then?

    Think about it...

    • To the 1st world countries, that will now be 5th world countries because everybody who doesn't have family money to fall back on will be homeless. (the 4th world countries will be the already failing post-communist states).
    • "What I want to know is, what will happen when all this outsourcing brings the so called 3rd world countries to the same economic level as the 1st world countries? Who will the outsourcing go to then?"

      Can't see that being a bad thing, but too bad it'll never happen.

      The balance of wealth may be flipped some day, but most companies will always be about making more money by spending less. Someone will get more wealth at the expense of someone else getting less.

  • Long term... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Evro ( 18923 ) <evandhoffman.gmail@com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:32PM (#13297446) Homepage Journal
    By sending jobs to other countries you end up ensuring that your potential customers can't afford your product, as they have no income.

    • Re:Long term... (Score:4, Informative)

      by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:53PM (#13297676) Homepage Journal
      Henry Ford noticed this problem, and started the rise of Detroit by building a car that his own factory workers could afford to buy.

      Previously cars were expensive enough that the rich bought them. Now with Fords, anyone could buy them, and the number sold skyrocketed.

      --dave

      • And the thing most people forget is that a very short time after Henry decided to do that- his accountnants sarted estimating money coming in with rulers, because there was no other way at the time to count such large amounts.

        It's too bad computer companies haven't discovered this secret yet.
    • That is based on the assumption that your potential customers are individuals, and the cost of replication is high.

      With software, the cost of creation is high and the cost of replication is negligible. There is no economy of scale for production, but there is for distribution.

      If the cost of creating software can be lowered significantly, it is possible for the cost of software itself to go down. Oh, and those Indians will be buying software too. And there are a lot more of them.

      So your economy of scale theo
    • If you kept the jobs in the US, then no one would be able to afford them. Right now, a shirt made by slave labor costs about $15. How much would it cost if it were made by USians getting paid $8 an hour?

      On top of that, no one really *wants* to make shirts in the US. People want jobs, but not thoes kinds of jobs.

      Offshoring is a way to make sure that the US will continue to get better. We look at the shittiest jobs out there and find a way to send them overseas. Then our workforce trains for better jobs.

      • Re:Long term... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Marxist Hacker 42 ( 638312 ) * <seebert42@gmail.com> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @07:01PM (#13299104) Homepage Journal
        If you kept the jobs in the US, then no one would be able to afford them. Right now, a shirt made by slave labor costs about $15. How much would it cost if it were made by USians getting paid $8 an hour?

        About $15- the price did not go down significantly when the manufacture went overseas. The real difference is that the retailer now makes a 200% profit instead of a 10% profit on the same shirt.

        On top of that, no one really *wants* to make shirts in the US. People want jobs, but not thoes kinds of jobs.

        Tell that to the textiles union- which has been testifying in Congress for the last 40 years to try to protect the jobs of the 500,000 Americans who used to make shirts. They failed because of people like you.

        Offshoring is a way to make sure that the US will continue to get better. We look at the shittiest jobs out there and find a way to send them overseas. Then our workforce trains for better jobs.

        At which point the better jobs leave before they can even finish training.

        Picking fruit, makinf shoes, and writing code are all in the same bucket; no one wants to do it at the price customers are willing to pay. So we offshore it.

        And what is left?

        Retrain for something better and stop bitching already.

        What's better? I want to know what the next target for offshoring is- I've got a bunch of Indians who are perfectly willing to train to do it....

  • A conspicous downside (Score:5, Interesting)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Thursday August 11, 2005 @03:39PM (#13297521) Homepage Journal
    A company I consulted for (and a whole country, but that's a different story) has been through the offshoring process and is now onshoring.

    My former employer succeeded in outsourcing their operations to EDS, and are still a happy EDS customer.

    They then tried a second cost-reduction step, offshoring their development to a well-respected firm on the opposite side of the planet. The timezone problem was a nuisance, but not a serious problem except when doing maintenance, so they offshored maintenance to the same company.

    This seemed to work, but on looking at the financial results a few quarters later, they realized they'd done a very brave thing: they'd inadvertently offshored their software budgeting decisions. With both maintenance and new development in the hands of a supplier, the supplier was the only person who could make credible decisions about how much to spend. And the spending was growing.

    So they turned around and started onshoring, hiring some of the folks who had been the offshoring team and moving them back to Canada, co-locating them with the user groups and the budgeting managers, and go control of their own budget back.

    They're now genuinely reluctant to allow anything to be done remotely, including having me dial in from home. They want my body withing shouting distance of my manager!

    Losing cost control can make you a little nervous if you're a big company, because it can rapidly make you a small company(;-))

    • The more that companies dump their dead wood only to find that the offshore guys suck just as much (in different ways), means more work for us independent consultants to bring the projects back in house! Yay!!

      So, offshore more, please!!!eleventyone

  • I think the real problem is lack of quality onshore. It makes the situation a nothing to loose move for a lot of companies. A lot of this has to do with the flood of IT related workers not too long ago. It was the career field of the future and a lot of people went that way. A lot of those same people have no clue what they are doing but still managed to get jobs because of the dot com boom.

    Some of the code I've had to work with/modify might as well have been written in india. I often wind up looking at
    • There are some good and great programmers out there. However, for every one of those I'd say there are 2-3 that don't know what they are doing.

      I think you just described the state of the entire IT industry.

      s/programmers/people in IT jobs/g
    • Some of the code I've had to work with/modify might as well have been written in india. I often wind up looking at minimal to no comments, poorly written chunks of code, and meaningless variable names.

      You said it. I've had code come back from offshore developers that was just horrid. My company had decided to outsource work for a conversion filter to a firm in India (who was a connection of the CEO). The gist of the conversion was to take a token-based structured file format and convert it to an XML format.
  • As IT manager for a small business, I often have a lot of pre-sales questions about products. 1 out of every 2 times I call out to find product information, I get someone on the other end from India. These people can barely speak english and want to type my name and phone number into a database immediately before I can ask a simple question.

    I hang up on them, every time. And as was recently the case with HP, I vow to never purchase products from that company again. Why should I want to support a company if

  • Some informed opinion (Score:4, Informative)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @04:19PM (#13297927) Journal
    If you're interested in some fact-based analysis of this issue (as opposed to the argument-from-first-principles of the Membox pieces and *shudder* whatever the Slashbots will come up with):

    Daniel Drezner [danieldrezner.com] has some interesting analysis on his site. His linked articles, especially the Foreign Affairs one, are also good.

    I, by the way, am pretty agnostic on this issue, and linked to only one side because it's the only good discussion I've seen. (As opposed to, say, Lou Dobbs using an hour of CNN every night to rant about evil Mexicans.) I'd welcome similar links on the anti- side.

    • All reading that proved to me is what I already know: American corporations have become bigoted against left-brained, college educated Americans due to the excessive cost of the wages of such people- and since left brained logical thinking can be done anywhere, it will be done anywhere unless draconian protectionist measures are taken to stop it.

      My personal recomendation- any company that offshores deserves to have it's C-level executives arrested and exiled from the United States, their mansions and sala
      • You don't even have to go that far. Just stop the tax breaks for companies that offshore things of that sort.

        Poof. It's now *more* expensive to move the work overseas.
        • I'm begining to think you're right- given that other guy's testimony that US-OJT'd IITers can now quit being H-1bs and make 1.92 lakhs back in the home country (yes, this means that if you could get a fake Indian citizenship and sneak in as a illegal immigrant there- you too could be a millionaire).

  • I'm hopeful! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mutterc ( 828335 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @04:25PM (#13297978)
    (That will seem odd given my posting history.)

    My company was using TCS for a while, then opened their own office in Hyderabad to cut down on the middleman-costs.

    According to several reports from Indians here and dealings with some of the managers there, Hyderabad is getting like Silicon Valley in the late '90s. People can simply walk out whenever they want, they'll find a new job the next day. There's a lot of turnover because of that.

    Also, wages are going up. A couple of our test guys (who are dealing with hordes of Indian colleagues, of course) have noted that the wages are coming up to where it's not that much less expensive to hire in India. (It's still cheaper than the U.S. of course).

    I had always predicted / feared that once this wage parity started happening, companies would start offshoring all their jobs to other places (China? Romania? the Congo?) but that does not seem to be happening, probably because few other countries are teeming with English-speaking programmers as India is.

    This means that there's some hope for the trade equilibrium predicted by classical economics / big-business apologists, rather than the "race to the bottom" where every country becomes Third World, predicted by me and some fellow paranoids.

    • Let me know when Indian programmers are making US Minimum Wage of $5.13/hr for this work...that's when we'll see companies either jumping out of India for cheaper climes or the possibility of wage parity actually happening.
      • One of our guys (an H1B, I believe), left here (our U.S. location) to go back, taking a job at about 40K USD / year for some other company in India.

        This is certainly not as much as a programmer with equivalent experience might make in the U.S., but it's not so much cheaper as to make offshoring work to him a "no brainer".

  • I was flipping channels on my radio and heard some AM radio guy complaining about offshoring. There are two things he said that caught my interest. (1) It's now highly skilled technology jobs as well as low skilled jobs going off shore and (2) the H1B programs are taking the few jobs that are here away from Americans.

    Peronally, I though this was a bit overblown. It's not like there are no tech jobs left in the US not filled by H1s. At present offshoring is soemthing we should be concerned with, but it's

  • What effect? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rlp ( 11898 ) on Thursday August 11, 2005 @04:33PM (#13298041)
    What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?

    About the same effect that Dutch Elm Disease had on Elm trees.

    Between H1B's and outsourcing, the industry has decimated the software engineering profession. Many of my former co-workers have bailed out after months and even years of unemployment. And these were not "Learn Web Programming in 21 Days" people - these were people with Masters degrees (or higher) in CS or EE and years of experience. In many cases they've gone back to school and have started new careers and they're not coming back. A the same time US college students and high school students do not regard software development as a good career. Enrollment is CS / EE degree programs in the US have dropped dramatically.

    I'm already seeing articles about 'problems' with outsourcing in trade journals. I'm also seeing articles from industry groups about lomming 'shortages'; which always end up blaming the US 'educational system'. Makes me want to whack these people with a large clue-by-four.
  • Some mornings I like to go for a walk. I would rather go to work, but I don't have a full time job. I feel very lucky to have a part time some time job teaching at the local community college.

    On my walk I see the same faces most mornings. Four of those faces belong to people like me. All of us are over 50 years old. All of us have graduate degrees. (Some CS, some EE, all technical graduate degrees.) None of us has a full time job. In fact, I am the only one who even has a part time job. We were all working
    • I'm actually doing the same thing as you are right now - temp work teaching Computer Science classes at a community college. Except I'm in my mid twenties.

      Unfortunately I graduated from college in May, 2001 - worst possible time - when things were crashing, and as such I have no professional experience with computers. I looked into getting an internship or coop, but my college's placement center was absolutely worthless.

      So if it's any consolation, things aren't very good for young people either.

      • In many ways I think people like you, the ones who graduated during the bottom and could not find jobs, are being hurt the worst. I've lived through 3 of these crashes so far and the folks who graduated during the bottom often never did get jobs in their chosen field. They didn't get jobs because by the time the jobs came back, they were seen as having out of date skills.

        The best suggestion I can make to you is to survive anyway you can and when jobs start to become available jump back into school and get a
        • Thanks for the advice. I actually already have a Master's degree, which I leave off my resume because it does more harm than good in my job search.

          My biggest concern right now is health insurance. I did manage to ger a full time job a few years back, before the company was bought out and my division was moved to Canada. My COBRA insurance runs out at the end of the month, and I've been rejected for individual health insurance twice already. It's a scary prospect to be without health insurance entirel

          • No health insurance: Ain't it grand to live in the Capitalist Paradise.

            I have health insurance through my wife's job. Without it, I may well be dead, or bankrupt. I had an appendectomy just about the time my Corba would have expired. Not to mention the cost of medicines and supplies needed to treat the type 2 diabetes I developed after infection I got from the surgery. BTW, I know how very very lucky I am. I have health insurance.

            I have a friend, a young man in his mid-twenties. He to is a college graduate

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