Increasing the Value of the Domestic IT Worker? 1032
KoshClassic asks: "To state it simply, in today's global economy, the IT worker in America is in direct competition with IT workers in countries such as India who are willing to do the same job for less. Much of this willingness has to do with standards and costs of living in these other countries, and without lowering ours or raising theirs, the American IT worker can not compete on even terms if the only consideration is cost. What should American IT workers be doing to differentiate ourselves from our overseas counterparts, to add the kinds of value for employers that will make them want to look beyond direct costs and see other benefits that will make it worthwhile for them to keep these jobs in the US? I'm not sure what the answer to this question is, but I am convinced that the answer lies in trends and industry wide changes, rather than just individuals polishing their own resumes. When an employer decides he needs to fill a programming position, what is going to make him want to fill that position in the U.S. rather than overseas, even before individual candidates are considered"
Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be a little more costly, but no one said defending principles or even freedom would come cheap.
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Insightful)
It may be a little more costly, but no one said defending principles or even freedom would come cheap.
Exactly which principles or freedoms are you defending by not buying from companies that use overseas workers?
The freedom to deny people in other countries jobs? Or the principle that the rest of the world owes American residents something?
If the cost/benefit of the product is the same then it doesn't matter if it's made in New York USA, Newcastle UK, Nalanda India, or Nanjing China.
Support companies that make products that are worth buying at prices that are worth paying - wherever they are made.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
And say that you were modded Insightful... Well, you can continue to shop at WalMart, but you won't see me there... Even if their prices are better. My values with respect to the human condition are obviously quite different than yours and some moderators...
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, according to your point of view, exploiting third world countries inhabitants, running sweat shops, etc are both legitimate and moral decisions by companies?
Under what point of view are any IT staff in India or other current "offshoring" favourite countries working under "sweat shops" or being "exploit[ed]"?
Outsourcing of IT jobs is currently producing better living conditions for those doing the work in India and elsewhere. You only need to look at the past Slashdot story [slashdot.org] where the Indian people doing these jobs responded.
Yes there certainly needs to be protection for child workers et al, but simply boycotting things made overseas is in no possible way the method of achieving that, and simply reeks of arrogance and toy tossing.
My values with respect to the human condition are obviously quite different than yours and some moderators...
Your values are clearly short sighted and narrow. Depriving people in India of jobs just because you feel Americans are somehow "entitled" to them does not place any value on the "human condition".
Re:The Myth of Exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
The fallacy of this viewpoint is the assumption that exploitation and coercion are separate. Maybe in some airy theoretical world, but not on this particular planet. The problem with the fallacious viewpoint is that you can use it to justify child labor, inhuman working conditions, and chattel slavery. "Hey, it's just 'exploitation,' the same way I exploit my skills or the farmer exploits the land, so stop complaining and shut up, okay?"
Comparing the "exploitation" of your skills with, say, child labor in Hong Kong -- that's just word games. There is very little exploitation of human labor in the Third World (or, to use the new politically correct term, "the South) without overt or implicit coercion, not to mention numerous human rights abuses [corpwatch.org].
"Don't blame the corporations for doing what all corporations do. You might as well blame the wolf for killing the sheep." Please! Corporations are human enterprises, not imponderable forces of nature. If we have problesm with corporations, the solution is not to sigh heavily the way we would about an earthquake, but to change the institution of the corporation. It's not like trying to move a continent or stop the sun in its tracks, and to make it sound impossible is to be complicit with the abuse.
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
And what exactly do you think is moral? That the brilliant engineers, doctors and scientists over there should give all this up and get back to being unemployed/underpaid? Does that sound more moral?
I repeat - just in case this comes up again - the software, biotech and engineering firms that dot Bangalore and other cities in India are *NOT* sweatshops - they have wonderful work environments. Get over your prejudices.
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Informative)
You are joking, right?
In case you aren't:
- Many Walmart stores lock their night employees in. As in, they can't get out until the morning, even if their shift ends in the middle of the night. There was a story in the NYTimes (only available paid now) about how people who were injured on the job during those shifts were told that if they went to the hospital, they'd be fired.
- Walmart managers tell new hires that if they unionize, they'll be fired.
- Walmart stores put small local retailers out of business, and replace the jobs they offered with minimum-wage positions.
There's more, but those are the main reasons I won't shop at them. If you are honestly looking for information, just do a google search on the first topic and it should hook you up with a plethora of sites.
Wal-mart's doomed business model (Score:4, Informative)
1) Their business model is to always lower their prices - you've probably seen the happy face ads on TV. In order to do this, they demand that their suppliers lower their prices. If the supplier refuses, Wal-mart threatens to look for a new supplier. Because Wal-mart is so big, the loss of such a contract can be devastating to most suppliers. So the suppliers cut costs to meet Wal-Mart's demands, laying off workers or moving operations overseas. (There was a good article about this about a month ago, but it's expired.)
2) They no longer let me use my bank MasterCard as a credit card because they don't like the fees MC charges.
3) Their practice of offering lousy employee benefits is encouraging other retailers to do the same.
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Interesting)
Because they have so much market clout, they can force a label or studio to edit out those portions they don't like, else Walmart won't sell it.
Now, you might say: This is just fine! They should only sell what they want to sell!
Well, I have no problem with that, except that they found that if the CD or movie has some little sticker that says that it is censored, that people won't buy (as much) of it, thus the mechanism they use allows them to censor without labeling.
I have a problem with this.
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Informative)
WalMart's not disallowed from anything -- it's they who chose not to build in Inglewood under the same rules as all other businesses.
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
The U.S. has laws governing polution, working conditions, benefits, etc. When American investors take their money and invest in overseas operations that aren't bound by those rules, people in both countries suffer. Locals lose jobs, and the country that takes on the work continues its policies instead of making the lives of workers better.
As well, the more a country depends on exports -- especially in the case where the investors are foreign -- the less it will focus on improving the working and living conditions internally. This also keeps the internal market from improving.
Keep in mind that the main reason for increased mobility of labor is to benefit the capital class of investors. First, they have access to depressed labor markets and lower costs due to fewer restrictions on their behavior. Some of that "trickles down" to the consumer, but not much. Second, local workers are forced to accept lower wages and fewer benefits to compete with foreign workers. This is the real win for capital as they can force all workers to the lowest common denominator.
The above is one main reason that our border with Mexico is so lax yet the rhetoric about the evil migrant worker is so crazed. Seriously, if we really wanted the border to be secure, it would be secure. But the investors here want all that cheap labor to make local labor even cheaper. And thus NAFTA was born.
That would possibly be true if consumers actually knew what the cost/benefit analysis was. But are you aware of the true costs of the shoes you're wearing? Do you know how many pollutants are pumped into the ecosystem to make them here versus in China? Do you know how the Chinese workers are treated?
Of course, if you did know ... would you even care?
NAFTA put millions... (Score:4, Insightful)
In short, it's been an almost complete disaster for all the countries involved, because of the speed of the changes. Even manufacturing facilities transferred to mexico, only lasted a few years when they were moved again to yet another nation, leaving more workers stuck with no jobs after getting their hopes up for a few years.
It's nuts, and has been pointed out, it's really only gone to benefit* the top 1 or 2% of the worlds richest.
*temporary cheaper consumer goods "advantages" are offset by longer term economic decline caused by loss of actual purchasing power due to job loss, underemployment or shrinking wages accompanied by inflationary monetary policies and over extended credit all around. In many nations, the IMF/world Bank conmen have had a hand in it, by loaning "money" they poof create out of thin air and using the borrower's nations natural resources and other assets as collateral. It's international loan sharking on a massive scale, usury gone amok.
The whole deal is interconnected, quite complex, but the gestalt is, yanking around the worlds economies to here and there instead of concentrating on *each nation building a core vertically-integrated, diverse and self-supporting economy FIRST* is causing severe global economic problems that will in a lot of cases lead to even more severe "boom and bust" scenarios that historically, once again, only go to benefit you know who, the connected string pullers who are already rich as croesus..
In short, it's a scam. They rotate around the bones they throw to the various populations then move on to the next set of suckers.
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ironically the labor movements spawned from this Marxist thinking tweaked the capitalist system enough to allow for government intervention on minimum wages, workplace safety, etc. As a result the workers became part of the consumer class, ushering in the prosperity the western world knows today. I work hard to buy a big screen TV that Bill builds. Bill uses his big screen TV making wages to buy a car that George builds; George uses his paycheck on the computer I sell, etc.
However, the third world manufacturing facilities-- many of which are in dictatorships or quasi-Facist states which intentionally keep their citizens poor to make them focus on survival rather than revolution-- can ignore labor laws and make widgets far cheaper than America or Europe. The country's economy doesn't grow much since Jose Seis-pack's wages are barely above subsistance level, and while it's cool I can buy six bags of ramen for 99 cents it doesn't make it morally right. Maybe we should have a trade policy that dictates a minimum wage based on a country's GDP / U.S. GDP times the U.S. minimum wage or something like that.
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Insightful)
So you're willing to accept that certain groups within one country could be screwed while other groups benefit, but when you consider each country as a whole group, both groups benefit? While this is possible, I don't see that one can accept both premises in all cases. For example, when the U.S. pushed for NAFTA and Mexico was forced to drop its tariff on U.S. tomatoes while the U.S. kept its own, the Mexican farmers got screwed but the consumers won (cheaper American tomatoes), and thus Mexico as a country benefited. This makes it acceptable?
When did I say this? Each country uses tariffs in an attempt to protect its local industries. The U.S. uses its economic might to impose its will more effectively and in many cases is far more protectionist than developing nations -- the ones who need to be protectionist but give in, usually because this keeps the leaders in power. Yes, the country as a whole benefits. The citizens suffer while the U.S. props up the dictator who lives lavishly while U.S. investors profit, so it's a win-win. Bring in the cheerleaders!
Those developed here because the citizens had the desire and conviction to fight and the country had the capital to do it. When a nation depends heavily on foreign capital, a higher percentage of the profits leave the country. Yes, the countries are very productive, but they keep far less of that productivity in which to further invest to build their own industry.
As well, A Chinese citizen has less desire to enact environmental legislation knowing that many investors will move the plants to other countries, affecting their livelihood. In contrast, when our legislation was put through, it was still more cost effective to keep plants here than to move them, and thus workers were not cutting their own throats by pushing for the measures. Yes, their wages decreased slightly, but they still had jobs. Of course, now we're seeing mass flights as it finally becomes cheaper and easier for each industry to relocate.
When NAFTA was first being punted around, corporations talked about free movement of labor like it would be so great for workers. What that means is freedom to exploit labor in the best market. Workers calling for a pay increase? You mention to the union leaders that the plant might just have to be closed and reopened in Mexico. The workers, of course, are now free to move there and compete with the Mexicans.
Slavery was exceedingly beneficial to the U.S. economy and capital class. Should we be recommending it to developing nations? I'm not saying that nations won't progress through stages, but you should understand that the corporations that invest in foreign markets don't sit idly by on these issues. Just as they did in the U.S., they use their economic power to slow the progress of reform. Given that many of the cases are places where the U.S. props up the country's leaders as well, you can bank on a bleak outlook for labor and the environment.
They sure do.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
Take care of your home first. I am all for goodwill and charity, but GO$#$#IT, we (the US) are not the world's fscking police, babysitter, sugardaddy or pimp.
The Monroe Doctrine looks better and better.
There's nothing wrong with keeping money close. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or it could mean, as it does here, keeping money and jobs within your country. Keeping the trade deficit less up (can't say down, can we?) Researching which companies outsource and giving them your patronage instead of buying a Dell might keep a laid off Dell techie with three more years experience than you from getting a job you otherwise would have been given.
Going out of your way to support companies whose policies you support is an admirable thing to do. It encourages corporate values that go beyond shareholder value, in a culture where corporate ethics need a lot of shaking up.
Re:There's nothing wrong with keeping money close. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. On more of the cheapest foreign goods that take skilled jobs out of our childrens hands. Great. Little Billy can grow up to be a sales clerk, because that's the only job Americans are good for anymore: selling stuff to Americans. That'll keep the dollar strong.
Why is it so sheik to be a libertarian these days, anyway? Adam Smith is dead, literally and figuratively. His models don't work in the information and power asymmetric world we live in, no matter how well they worked in agrarian America.
Example:
If branding as a marketing technique can yield positive gains then consumers are not rational as per his assumptions. Banding works. Therefore, one of the key assumptions behind the free market model fails: rationality. QED. The other assumptions are just as trivially broken today as well. Symmetry of information. Right. Go fish.
Twenty percent of the people in this country control eighty-five percent of the resources. But that's nothing: the top one percent owns fourty percent of the resources. And these aren't the hardest workers, and they aren't the smartest people, either. I've met enough of them to know. They just have always had enough money to make more of it. It's the new monarchy, not meritocracy.
The GDP grows, yet jobs disappear, and average salaries drop. More people enter the workforce than leave it. So where the hell do those earnings go? Not to the people who earned them. Their jobs get cut, or they take a paycut, or they're getting paid a dollar an hour.
Don't you feel robbed by your free market? That alchemy of the 21st centry?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Preach it, brother. (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution really is legislation. This situation is no different than the environment in that respect. Sure, it's in the free market best interest of every production company to have no environmental standards if not required by the government, but if that's allowed, pretty soon nobody can breathe or drink water anymore.
My solution: Make it disadvantageous to outsource/trade with countries who have protectionist policies preventing U.S. workers from competing for their jobs. (This has the added side effect of making the common slashdot refrain that outsourced IT workers should look for jobs in India or China 75% less ludicrous.) Do the same for any country that won't match our labor health and environmental standards. If another country can compete even up with the U.S. in an industry without poisoning the air or forcing children to work in factories, more power to them.
That won't stop all outsourcing, nor should it. But it would be a step in the right direction.
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the people who I know aren't upset because of trade, they are upset that the fucking playing field is majorly slanted against the American middle class.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the people who I know aren't upset because of trade, they are upset that the fucking playing field is majorly slanted against the American middle class.
The major problem with "free trade" is that it requires that all sides play fairly. A nation that isolates itself from having its some of its markets open to outsiders, but then wants to play in ours is not taking part in free trade.
Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human - Aphorism 25 (Score:5, Interesting)
In any event, if mankind is to keep from destroying itself by such a conscious overall government, we must discover first a knowledge of the conditions of culture, a knowledge surpassing all previous knowledge, as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. This is the enormous task of the great minds of the next century.
my comments
Sadly, Nietzsche naively believed this problem would be solved in the next century... Yet, people still focus on the simple aspect of free trade not realizing how small an issue it is in the grand scheme of human progress. Nietzsche wrote that nearly 140 years ago, and ultimately the same simplistic morality still reigns. "Everything will work out in the end" they say, all the while ignoring how rapidly our civilization is declining.
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway, enough from me. I'm going back to accumulating useless possessions and filling my local landfill with garbage.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly what part of that doesn't sound like isolationism to you?
Re:Vote! (Score:4, Insightful)
--
Retail Retreat [retailretreat.com]
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it sucks when those markets start getting a little _too_ free, eh?
I expect you'd like those fines to apply to clothing manufacturers too. It would be too bad if skilled professions like tailor, cobbler, milliner all got commodified and moved offshore wouldn't it? Obviously you're happy to pay three times the price for US made clothing.
And obviously we don't want other countries to know too much. I mean imagine if Finland started to acquire knowledge on how supercomputers work. Or what if Pakistan figured out 3D graphics software? That would be bad for the US.
Yes, let's have lots of trade barriers! That _will_ help the profession.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a free market. Free doesn't mean "this group of people cannot, no, WILL NOT compete, ever, under any circumstances, no matter what they do, say or give up."
Even if IT workers here were twice as productive per unit cost, they would still get fired, because "productive" is subjective, while dollars are objective. Any time the argument becomes subjective, the liar cheat fuck managers can lie, cheat and fuck people out of
Re:Vote! (Score:5, Insightful)
I happily accept the WTO rulings against the United States government as a sign that the rest of the world actually *wants* free trade. It's not about getting screwed or "doing ourselves favors" ... it's about the very concept of free trade being fair, which it undoubtedly is.
Re:Vote! (Score:3, Insightful)
The workforce here should compete. That's a better solution than trying to get the gov't to legislate to protect its workers.
Get a new Job? (Score:5, Informative)
Here is America's job future for the next 10 years:
waiters and waitresses;
janitors and cleaners;
food preparation;
nursing aides, orderlies and attendants;
cashiers
customer service representatives;
retail salespersons;
registered nurses;
general and operational managers;
postsecondary teachers.
For further reading:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/economy_of
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/job_data.
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/where_jobs_go.ht
Re:Get a new Job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get a new Job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Get a new Job? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, that's the trouble isn't it? If Asian workers are taking what used to be $75/yr jobs in the US and doing them for $7.5K, the US workers no longer have disposable income. How do you propose to increase income in the US? And before you point to biotech as the Next Big Thing, I saw an article today that it is the next industry on its way offshore. And I'm quite sure that nanotech will be gone before it even arrives.
The trade advocates have not, and can not, tell us how the middle class in the US survives when the "knowledge workers" can only make 15K/yr. How do we prevent the US economy from doing an Argentina?
Re:Get a new Job? (Score:4, Insightful)
But even this is slightly off the mark, because General Contractors, Plumbers, Electricians, etc already make more than your standard IT flunky. More than your standard IT Manager. And those jobs aren't going anywhere.
But if you don't want to compete, you will be a waitress. So? You thought you were going to get paid the current equivalent of approx 100k/yr to work on an assembly line? It kills me that people think jobs will be given to them, that they can live in the neighborhood they grew up in and get everything handed to them with no effort. Wake the fuck up. If your job gets sent overseas, then you chose poorly; the handwriting was on the wall and you didn't read it.
I am a little bothered when engineers go wanting for jobs, because we didn't get to party that hardy (usually) in college. But even there, I think it has more to do with folks not getting offered a job that they like, in the place they want to live. I see enough work for folks who want to work and planned ahead; most of the crying seems to be coming from people who didn't have any savings, made poor choices, and want something handed to them.
andy
Re:Get a new Job? (Score:4, Insightful)
I went to school for CS in the beginning, and realized, hey, I don't want to be a code monkey my whole life, I want to be calling the shots. So I switched over to advertising/marketing, and started learning about business.
You see, now that I have basic business skills and people skills, I am much more in demand than someone who's job it is to push buttons. I know that its important to make a product, but as we've seen time and time again, its not necessarily the product that sells the product, its the marketing behind it.
Also, while I understand that the difference between the job market for advertising and IT is different in that people get fired when their job goes overseas in IT, in advertising, its just a slow period for the agency, and people get shuffled around between agencies basically. But still, people in advertising have come to accept it as part of the job. You WILL get laid off, its not a question of if, but when. And thus we've developed some serious networking skills, which I'm sure would benefit any IT worker.
Adapt dammit! That's what humans do! That's great that you are in a field you love, but if it doesn't pay what you wish it paid, guess what, maybe YOU need to take the initiative and either get new skills, or figure out a new way to make money. Because things aren't going to change any time soon despite how many articles may be posted about the subject on Slashdot.
Mods, I don't mean this post as flamebait, but it really irks me that people feel it is alright to sit and bitch and moan about their lost job when they take little to no action to better their skillset or connections. These are basic business skills, and despite whatever fairyland some people choose to live in, IT is a part of the businessworld, so they have to play by the rules too.
What should... (Score:3, Funny)
Sucky, sucky...me work for you for long time.
Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)
Your employer moves the data center to India.
Re:Well (Score:3, Funny)
Communication (Score:5, Insightful)
My job might be more easily done by someone overseas, but my boss has told me how much he values having me right here and being able to walk over and talk about a project.
Bring management skills (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bring management skills (Score:5, Interesting)
1) They know that what they are asking for now are "purple squirrels". What this means is that they are asking for something they know is very hard, if not impossible to get.
2) They stressed the importance of understanding the BUSINESS. They felt that knowing a business and IT makes you invaluable.
3) Get a higher degree. I go to one of the few graduate level Schools of Information Science in the country (http://is.cgu.edu [cgu.edu]). Or, if you already have IS skills get an MBA.
4) Most of the CIOs believe that outsourcing is just a passing trend, and that we truly have hit rock bottom of IT hiring. They feel it can only go up from here.
5) Everyone who attended this roundtable (which included people who were IT professionals but not CIOs) agreed that outsourcing is just another tool and not suitable for everything else. Knowing and learning what "everything else" is, is therefore the key to getting a job.
Just a few musings, maybe they'll help. -6d
Learn project management (Score:5, Interesting)
Me, I despise project management so you are welcome to those jobs.
Re:Learn project management (Score:3, Insightful)
Face to face... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's one thing IT workers will never be able to duplicate...
Re:Face to face... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Face to face... (Score:5, Insightful)
We spent so much time distancing ourselves from management and users (granted, it's justified and understandable) that they end up not caring who (or where) we are.
Good head (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good head (Score:5, Funny)
Business. (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to go to India to find tech workers who don't speak English. (Or at least don't know how to use it.)
The solution (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, they should be switching to car repair [slashdot.org] - a market with a labor shortage, a desperate need for people with strong technical skills, and something that is unlikely to be outsourced until cheap teleportation arrives on the scene.
Become a cerfied FORD mechanic. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Or (for those with actual people skills) switch to nursing. There are huge shortages of nurses already, and the demand's gonna go nowhere but up, as our baby-boomed parents and grandparents get older and less healthy. Of course you'll never get rich as a nurse, because the money will never be there for that, but you're not likely to get laid off due to overseas outsourcing.
"the same job"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue from my experience that many do not end up doing "the same job", at least in terms of what they bring to the table, and the results they generate.
There may be people with similar or more impressive resumes, but work alongside of them for a while and you quickly learn that not all developers are created or grown equally.
That's not to say there are not worthless American developers. Ideally you'd replace THEM with the brightest, best performing offshore people.
At least when hiring American developers (speaking from a US point of view), it's easier to ascertain the ability of an applicant than it is by email or phone overseas (and in some cases, you don't even speak to them).
Lastly, sometimes it's not such a bright idea [yahoo.com] to outsource a measurably valuable part of a company.
Being bilingual (Score:3, Insightful)
This is all sorting itself out as we speak (Score:5, Insightful)
However, the Indian and Chinese economies are reaching points where their own citizens are crying out for advanced services. Who will code them? Those Indian and Chinese programmers. Yes, eventually the Indian and Chinese economies will force salaries up, closer to US rates. When an Indian worker's salary reaches 75% of the comparable American's.. guess what? Outsourcing will not make economic sense anymore.
From my own experience of shopping around for coders, the rates the Indians charge have SHOT UP in the last year or two. Two years ago, if I were a big company, I would have outsourced what I could. Now? No way! The salary expectations of US workers have fallen, the Indian rates have tripled, and now it makes more economic sense to hire a local American worker!
But, as always, I suggest that American workers simply work on their natural benefits.. The benefits are that they can meet me 'in the flesh', that we share a culture and can understand each others' jokes (damn necessary on big projects!), and they tend to be smarter, and not just code monkeys. If you can reply to my e-mails within the work day, be pleasant on the phone, and sound excited about the projects I'm giving you.. you're going to be hired over a half price Indian any day of the week.
Re:This is all sorting itself out as we speak (Score:4, Insightful)
Until you got to the part about code monkeys. What makes you think that American workers are smarter than Indian workers? I've met plenty of Indians that are very smart and better educated than I am.
Other than that, you've hit most of the major bases. It's easier working locally (face-face communication and time zones), Indian prices will rise as more outsourcing occurs, and we share a common culture that is bound to make communication more effective.
Work it, boys and girls!
It's not a matter of smarts (Score:5, Interesting)
Feynman talks about it in his biography, fragile knowledge is I believe how he describes it. For example: He tought in Brazil for a time. He was at an oral test of a student that did quite well. However, after the test he asked the student some more questions to see if he really knew what he was talking about. One question he asked was for an example of a dimagnetic substance. Well the student had defined dimagnetism corretly during his test, so this should be easy. Alas, he had no answer. Why is this? Well it's because to that person, it was all memorization. He had memorized the definition of diamagnetism but didn't understand how that actually related to electon shells.
Now along these lines someone may understand the theory, but not the practical application of something. Try it some time. Challenge people to give you real world examples of theories they supposedly understand. Make them give you more than one. You'll find many people at a loss to do it. The reason is not that they don't understand the theory part fine, they just lack the greater understanding of it's relation to the real world to be able to generate an example.
Problem solving is something else that being smart in the book/school sense doesn't imply. This usually stems from not understanding the overall relations of the theories and not being able to apply them, but in general there are plenty of smart people that can't solve novel problems. They can work through a constrained "problem" when it's just figuring out the result of something, but have trouble when presented with a novel situation where they need to come up with the method, as well as the result.
Soooo (the point to all this), this seems to be more prevalant in the workers in the outsourcing plants than in domestic workers. This is probably because many (even most) of the workers in those plants are doing it for the money, not the love. They did what they were told to do to get a degree so they could go do this. To them, it's just another job like working an assembly line, but one that pays better. Because of that superficial level of learning and lack of care, they aren't going to be the creative thinkers and problem solvers.
Now you, of course, find that in plenty of domestic help. The
Re:This is all sorting itself out as we speak (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't mean that there aren't very intelligent Indian or Chinese coders out there - In fact, I work with several of them. However, I also work with several that are reasonably intelligent people (they do have that MS or PhD after all) but are horrid developer because they lack the passion for for engineering.
Look at it this way - in the US or Western Europe (though to a degree less so), if you're a smart guy you can go into almost any field you want and bring home a decent salary. In India or China, your choices for bringing home mad bank are limited to getting a job in EE or CS. Being an accountant in China sucks ass, so even though running numbers may be your passion you're not going to do it if you feel you have some aptitude in programming or circuit design.
So what you end up with is not a less educated or intelligent workforce, but one that didn't go through a natural filtering system. We saw this here in the US during the
Tim
Maybe (Score:3, Funny)
nah!
Do you think you stand a chance? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Location. The programmer is nearby and likely in the same time zone making questions easier to ask and schedules easier to sync.
2) Language. While most Indian programmers speak English, they speak it with a heavy accent that is difficult enough to understand, even more so over the phone. Local programmers most likely speak with the same English dialect as the program manager
3) Labor laws. America has some of the most lax labor laws in the Western world. "Fire at will" laws allow employers to get rid of dysfunctional employees at the drop of a hat instead of having to deal with heavy government restrictions like in France and Sweden.
4) Guaranteed ownership of ideas. Local programmers are much less prone to simply taking their employer's ideas and reselling them to the next bidder. Foreign companies with vast distances between them and their hiring companies sometimes decide that because they wrote the software that they have the right to redistribute it. Lax foreign IP laws and (lack of) enforcement do nothing to discourage this kind piracy.
But in the end it is the hiring manager's decision. If he wants to go ahead and make the decision to forego all the benefits above in exchange for maybe 100,000 a year cost reduction, then there really isn't much you can do to stop him.
Start your own business... (Score:3, Insightful)
Build up relationships with customers who appreciate that you are reliable and have the ability to understand their needs first time around.
If your clients are the type that don't value that relationship and will send work OS just to save a couple of bucks, then maybe you don't want them on your books?
Then again, if you don't provide a reliable service, then why shouldn't the jobs go the eager masses abroad?
I'm a web developer. I'm already competing with template-style businesses, cheap developers abroad, clients' cousins who can do it cheap, and the like. Yet my (2-person) business in Australia is growing each year, has many long-term clients, and shows no sign of falling over due to losing clients to cheaper workers in India.
One thing we do with our key clients is to arrange review meetings (at least yearly) at which we run through the achievements of the last x months and lay down our plans and thinking for their sites in the months to come. I think they appreciate that we're there as their partner doing a lot of the thinking and strategy for them. We try to make sure that the money they're spending is providing them with an asset that gives them some return (whether it's PR or direct sales related). I can't imagine that many of them would even think of taking the work away from us and sending it overseas where they would be starting a working relationship from scratch, and have less a chance of personal service from people who really understands their business first-hand.
Take it to the next level (Score:5, Informative)
My advice to them has been to establish yourself as indispensable. If that means bucking for the "promotion" to 2nd tier, or product contact, or product development, then do it.
Strategicly, the BEST place to be is the domestic Handler, or the technical liason of those outsorced partners. (It has the best job security, for now.) Organization will need someone to make sure that their oversea workers are remaining up-to-par, so they will need to:
A) Know what the right answer is.
B) Make sure that the outsourced workers are providing that answer.
C) Hold the outsourcer (and the geniuses who decided to save money with these outsources) are held accountable to their decisions.
Granted, this is a fraction of the jobs that can remain after being outsourced. However, in my personal example, we are now using our original technical support staff as a 2nd tier unit for our global outsource call centers. (Not because we can, but because we NEED to, as our outsourcers are not as adept in supporting our product as our veteran staffers here.)
Re:Take it to the next level (Score:3, Interesting)
In part, this means making sure that whenever the outsourcer fails and causes expenses or delays as a result, you should at least note that somewhere. Having such a log is very valuable when the outsourcer's contract comes up for renewal, as it makes it very easy to generate a dollar figure for wasted employee time or impacted sales as a result of an outsourcer error. If that n
minimum wage?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Money and benefit to society (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem here is that companies are able to make money in ways that do not benefit society. We need to ensure this is not the case by changing a lot of fundamental systems, and this is itself fundamentally difficult.
So any move towards lowering the standard of living in a country, for example by outsourcing to a third world country should not be rewarded. I don't know what the answer is. Taxation and legislation are the only two ways I see this happening but I'm no expert in this area.
We should definitely be striving to raise standards of living worldwide, otherwise you have large groups of people with nothing to lose wanting to take the wealth out of wealthier nations. Never a good plan no matter how good the technology you defend yourself with is.
Re:Money and benefit to society (Score:3, Insightful)
It could be argued that outsourcing to a third world country is exactly the right thing to do, given a global view of things.
The goal isn't to raise the standard of living everywhere, but to make the standard of living the same everwhere while being reasonable.
As you recall from history, the Roman Empire fell because the Romans got lazy and complaciant. It became everyone agianst them, and they compleatly missed it. To busy
Re:Money and benefit to society (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this flaimbait? Come on!
Flexibility is Security (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the current administration has the interests of big business above those of the common IT worker; the IT worker has to become a guerilla of sorts.
A friend of mine who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China where his parents (Norwegians) were thrown out of Shanghai. Their palace of a home had to be left behind. This family were totally disenfranchised and deported penniless.
From this experience he taught me that "your only security is your own flexibility, currencies collapse, and governments fall."
The IT worker in the U.S. is going to have to use the immense brainpower it took to become good at his/her craft to find something else to do. Checking out other industries where there is a dearth of qualified workers is a good start. There are worse things in life than becoming a nurse. That field needs good help. Look around, find a "hole" and fill it. Trying to go against such a large trend is counterproductive.
This is not trolling, this is wishing my IT brethren good lives with lots of money. Remember that one time buggy whip production companies had to go out of business. In a way the home grown I T worker has the same problems as they did.
Re:Flexibility is Security (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy as 1, 2, 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Politicians could save the jobs. But I doubt that they want to. If they agreed with the idea of trying to keep jobs within the country they would have set a precedent with the textile industry. You'd still have your IT job, but you'd pay $400 for a t-shirt.
3) The weak dollar and the strong rupie is your friend. This is how you will lose your buying power, without really noticing it. And it is how you will become competitive with the Indians again. And this is why the U.S. economy will grow slowly and it is the reason that the Indian economy will boom. They are catching up.
80/20 rulez (Score:3, Interesting)
tyranny of distance (Score:3, Interesting)
Be creative - don't be a robot (Score:5, Interesting)
To answer the question, I'd say become a rennaisance man. Learn to use both sides of your brain. Take an interest in the arts, you never know how it'll inspire you to look at technical problems from a different angle. It works for me, gets me hired every time. See the link in my sig for a discussion about this very theme.
I think this is key (Score:4, Insightful)
I work for an Electrical and Computer Engineering department and I'd say that, as stereo types go, the uncreative one is reasonably fair of most of the foriegn students. We have a very large number of Indian students, probably even the majority. They all tend to quite well in their classess. However, none that I have ever met are geeks. They are all here to get an engineering degree because that will get them a good job. They learn what they need to learn to pass a class, which usually doesn't require creative thought or much application.
Graduates like these form the group of people that often get called "code monkeys" (or I guess circut monkeys in this case). They know the part of engineering they've been taught, and are good at doing routine tasks. Now these may be complex tasks, involving lots of calculation, etc, but still routine. They are not very good at being presented with an open ended problem and being required to come up with a solution from scratch, do all the calculations, and then implement it.
I'm sure every engineer and programmer on
Now there are no race limitations on this, code monkeys come from, and are, everywhere. They are generally the people that are in the field for the money, not because they are intrested in, and just go to school. They don't do anything to get a further education (like intern, or hold a different, but related, tech job), just do what is required to graduate.
What I do notice is that a disperportinate amount of the foriegn students are of this type. They are going to school for an engineering degree as a means to an end for their future, not because they really care about what is being tought.
Well, the easiest way to get a leg up on people like that is to CARE about what you do. Learn about and I mean REALLY learn. Understand why you do something, how it relates to what else you've learned, how it is applied, etc. As the parent said, be something of a rennaisance man. Don't JUST code or JUST design circuts. If you are a CE guy, take some programming classess and learn how the code works. Then work to understand the relationship between the code you write and the circuts you design. Get a job doing tech support (universities usually have tons of these for students). Learn how it all actually comes together in the applied world, and flex your problem solving skills.
There are not so many people that can do that. From all the stories I've heard of outsourcing experiences and from what I've observed in students, I think those people are in even shorter supply overseas. They are also needed greatly. A good program doesn't just happen by a bunch of code monkeys sitting down and bashing away, it happens by talented problem solvers designing a workable system, and doleing out the basic tasks to the code monkeys.
A few suggestions: (Score:3, Insightful)
- Be more responsive in the work place. India is in a very different time zone. Face to face answers to inquiries could potentially go a long way. Why wait until tomorrow for a response?
- Be more 'available'. This may mean an extra hour of work out of the day. Maybe don't go out for lunch, eat in so you have the apppearance of being at the office longer. Get there earlier, leave later. Ugh I hate suggesting this, but it's funny how bosses think sitting at a desk == productivity.
Enough participants here can make a big difference. "Yeah, you could spend less with them, but you won't be getting what WE offer!"
Don't fight the tide (Score:4, Interesting)
At a recent outsourcing panel, the CEO of one of the top-10 outsourcing outfits asked & answered the question "Where do you see yourselves in 5 years".
The outsourcing timeline can be classified into 4 tiers -
Tier 1 - Staffing - bring Indian pgmmers on H1Bs & L1s into US to staff IT departments
Tier 2 - Codefactory - Indian pgmmers in India write code spec'd out by American pgmmers.
Tier 3 - The current outsourcing wave
Tier 4 - The future - No IT department in the USA. All IT needs serviced by Indian outsourcing firms.
So you see, they are already preparing for Tier 4. All IT jobs, including R&D, design & architecture will eventually go to the IT depts in India & other low cost structure countries.
How to compete ?
Well, don't! Don't fight the tide. Do something else. IT has been commoditized. Find another field and get into that. If you must do IT, simply go where the jobs are - to India, Philippines, Russia, elsewhere.
The economics of the situation are so compelling, it makes no fiscal sense for US companies to keep IT jobs in the US.
Sounds scary, but that is what we were told.
Project Outsourced - the film [projectoutsourced.com]
Learn how to farm. (Score:4, Insightful)
Forget working for others, until you get a decent offer. Forget about buying all of the latest and greatest, and keeping up with the Joneses and helping the economy.
If our country's shakers and movers (both economic and government) do not see fit to pay a family wage, then they shouldn't expect to do business with the rest of us. Working for a wage is like any other business transaction: if the transaction is not profitable to all involved, it shouldn't happen.
I'm really serious. Besides that, you can take your farming skills with you wherever you go, and really supplement your lifestyle.
not a flame...seriously interested in an answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:not a flame...seriously interested in an answer (Score:5, Interesting)
The companies inflate prices, they inflate wages to higher the best talent and as a result the cost of living also increases. To maintain living in a particular area wages must go up, period. Employees were not at fault for this.
What is happening now, is employers have been over the course of 3-4 years been demanding more productivity. This means people doing MORE work than they used to at the same or less pay. The cost of living has not lowered in most areas, it's gone up. This means, that now that jobs are coming back people are job hopping because their employers squeezed them as hard as possible with threats of ending their contracts and sending them to the unemployment line. Why stay at a company that had you doing the work of 5 of your ex-coworkers when you can now leave and get paid the same or more and do less?
It's a vicous circle and is why we are always focused on GROWTH. The bubble that burst was a growing pain. They have existed as long as economies have and will continue to exist long into the future.
Why this pisses people off. (Score:5, Insightful)
BusinessWeek has once more surveyed executives of major corporations, and the folks at United for a Fair Economy (www.ufenet.org) have used its data to calculate that the average CEO collected $155,769 per week, compared with the $517 earned weekly by the average production worker. This means CEOs took in $301 for every dollar earned by rank-and-file employees.
Re:Why this pisses people off. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why this pisses people off. (Score:5, Interesting)
CEOs Still Raking It In
Monday April 19, 10:17 am ET
By Selena Maranjian
Has corporate America learned anything from Americans' outrage over CEO compensation excesses, fueled by the likes of erstwhile Tyco (NYSE: TYC - News) CEO Dennis Kozlowski? Not too much, it seems.
BusinessWeek has once more surveyed executives of major corporations, and the folks at United for a Fair Economy (www.ufenet.org) have used its data to calculate that the average CEO collected $155,769 per week, compared with the $517 earned weekly by the average production worker. This means CEOs took in $301 for every dollar earned by rank-and-file employees.
Are such executives really 301 times more valuable than average workers? It's hard to imagine that's the case with so many major corporations not exactly performing in stellar fashion. Sure, some CEOs, such as Berkshire Hathaway's (NYSE: BRK.A - News)(NYSE: BRK.B - News) Warren Buffett and eBay's (Nasdaq: EBAY - News) Meg Whitman, take home relatively little in relation to the return their firms deliver to shareholders. But then, as BusinessWeek pointed out, you have Larry Ellison of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News), who took in some $750 million in total pay in the three years from 2000 to 2003, while his shareholders lost 54%. And then there's Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW - News), who took in $35 million in the same period while his shareholder return was -84%.
Has the picture been improving any over time? Well, yes and no. The high-water mark for this survey came in 2001, when CEOs raked in 531 times what average workers did. That dropped precipitously in 2002, to 282, but has clearly inched up a bit since then. (The wide spread is largely due to the swooning stock market, which took with it the value of many bigwigs' stock options.) In 2003, the average surveyed CEO earned $8.1 million in total pay, up 9% from 2002. Meanwhile, the average production worker's salary increased just 2%. Step back further and the situation is grimmer. In 1982, CEOs took in just 42 times what average workers did.
Believe it or not, average Americans are not the only ones concerned about this. Back in 2002, The Conference Board issued recommendations on improving corporate compensation and governance, featuring some thoughts from Warren Buffett himself. Buffett pointed out that compensation committees often act like lap dogs, rubber-stamping CEO requests for pay increases, as CEOs strive to keep up with each other.
What's needed? A little more backbone in the boardroom, for starters. If you're paying a CEO $5 million per year and he wants $6 million, can you really not find someone else who's talented and would be happy to do the job for $5 million, or perhaps even $2 million? Let's see a little competition for these plum posts.
Share your thoughts on our discussion boards. We're offering a free 30-day trial. Drop in to see what Fools are saying.
Longtime Fool contributor Selena Maranjian owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway, eBay, and Sun Microsystems.
Clearance (Score:5, Interesting)
I could quit my job simply because it's Monday and have 5 offers by the time I hit the turnstiles on the way out. The pay is great (contractor, not gov't employee), it can't be outsourced, and as long as I don't lose my clearance for something stupid, I'm all but guaranteed a job.
Hard to do? Yes. Impossible to get? No.
Can't (Score:3, Interesting)
This presumes that management is interested in fair competition in the first place, which they aren't. Had this actually been a free market, IT workers would have had the opportunity to match costs or increase "skills" before they were fired and their careers destroyed.
But it's much more profitable to inflict suffering on the powerless and then make a television show about it.
It's not the same job (Score:4, Interesting)
I was dealing with another outsourced industry (Score:3, Interesting)
Turns out that shoes used to be a standard measure for any given size. That is no longer the case, and shoes are getting thinner for a given measure of width.
I went to 4 stores in the mall and could not fit ANY shoes to my feet in any store.
Today I finally went to a small specialty store and paid 3 times as much to get a good pair of shoes.
The alternative is numb toes, and down the road loss of same.
We must make it clear to these dim witted managers that the product built in the foriegn coutries is NOT the same product. If they can't even get simple measurements the same, how can we trust them with a complex infrastructure?
Mediocrity will Die (Score:4, Insightful)
In our startup all my programmers make above 95k per year -- the top guys much more -- and they are local. However, no one has a lower qualification than a Master's in CS or EE. Interviews take a full day and then you get probation for two months. The top guys are faster and cheaper by any metric than an outsourcing (we tried Russians, and Indians), even with some outsourced programmers working for $2k a year, some for up to $60k per year. And these outsourced guys were hand-selected and pretty damn good.
Why?
You can divide guys/ladies with a future in the US programming community into two groups -- true hackers, who read pattern books at night, can hack Unix kernel as necessary and play with the TCP/IP stack for fun. They can code in a day what takes others a week and yet make it extensible and bug free. Their skill will save their jobs, since it allows the company to reliably deliver.
Their being local also bring an ability to capture business logic and hence an understanding of the business as it grows will diffuse into this group's code. This we found is impossible with outsourcing. We call these supercoders. They re-use some core libraries and use tools to maximize their performance. They know HOW to code complexity and keep codebases under control.
The other group that have a future are good programmers, but focus on laying out and designing the software architecture, or developing algorithms -- IP. Most have EE or Math backgrounds. In short, they tell the supercoders WHAT to code. They are secure in a company that designs products, because no outsourced company will do your thinking for you or build your IP for you.
If you are in neither group, why do you think you deserve better pay than anyone else who went through four years of college, or acquired a professional skill -- such as a teacher?
How many times should we pay for another string
Sounds sycophantic (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds like the point of view of someone spending high school asking bullies what he can do for them to stop them from beating him up - now he's in the workforce, and after working 60 hour weeks with 24/7/365 reachability by pager during a boom, he is laid off or facing downward pressure on wages due to the owners desire for things to be that way, and his question is - what can I do to make myself more valuable to you?
Well from that pathetic vantage point there are the standard two answers. One is if you were working sixty hour weeks for a set salary, start working seventy hour weeks for the same salary. Your boss will get ten free hours of you creating wealth for him which will make him happier. That's the one generally less favored as workers obviously don't like it, and being only 24 hours a day, bosses can only push it so far. Which leaves the second option of productivity. This is the only thing that people can really see a positive thing about in our (and most of the world's) economy - productivity increases. And they were a lot more impressive from the 1940's to the 1960's. Toward the end of the 1960's productivity growth has been pretty stagnant, except for a bump here and there. But anyhow, this has been the drumbeat answer of course - train, train, train. Bush, one to stand in front of signs displaying pseudo-subliminal messages has been on a big "training" sign background recently. I recall him answering a question recently someone asked about jobs moving out of the country, and he stuttered and said "Well, people should train..." Well, people working manufacturing were told to train for high-tech jobs, but now the high-tech jobs are disappearing. So what the hell does he suggest people train for? Bush is a Republican, but the Democrats are in some respects even worse with regards to this. They're all reading off the same page more or less.
Anyhow, all of this kind of points to what I think. I don't feel like being a rat in a maze running around looking for cheese. There is a business propaganda book called "Who Moved my Cheese?" which tells workers who were laid off or whatever that they should not be affected by it, they should just collect their full six months of American unemployment (note: the length of unemployment in America is pathetic compared to an equivalently sized economy like the EU - German unemployment can last forever, technically), and not worry about why their cheese was moved, but simply adapt without complaints to go off and find wherever the so-called invisible hands have placed the new cheese. To go forward with this analogy, the real problem is the jobs are disappearing, not only from IT but from manufacturing as well. That's because the system is based on the profits of the capital owners (more or less the richest 1-2% of the US), not the wages of the workers (more or less the poorest 90-98% of Americans). I often here people say that the boom was followed by the bust due to "incompetence". In a sense this is correct, but it can imply that unemployment, what the government calls "NAIRU", booms followed by busts followed by booms and the like are not structural problems, but simply errors due to the incompetence of the managers of the economy. Considering that we can see this cycle in this century, in the 20th century, in the 19th century and so forth, as time goes on it becomes more obvious that these are not temporary
Reform payroll taxes - a tax on employing American (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame he was so beaten up over this, because he was right on.
Payroll taxes punish employment. The tax rate might seem small (about 6.5%), but considering most corporate revenue goes to pay wages, this becomes huge money.
Further consider just how poorly corporations compensate shareholders. For the S&P 500, the average dividend rate is just 1.5%, so a 6.5% tax on wages is gigantic relatively speaking.
It's obvious that when a company has a choice, they're going to try to avoid this tax and that means greater unemployment here.
Even when they don't have an outsourcing option, they always have a downsizing option.
Dean was right and it's ashame politics ruined a great chance for discussion about reform.
Tough Talk (Score:4, Interesting)
Americans have one of the greatest education and industrial combinations known to history. Who else has gone to the moon? Who else has nuked anyone?
IT people have to demonstrate the power of computers by achieving greater profit margins and reducing the amount of manual effort required of everyone to earn the same amount. People should be able to retire at 50, but so many people are worried that they have to work until 80. People should only have to work 30 hours per week.
Why aren't people able to telecommute to the point where traffic isn't a problem? Why can't someone run a robot from home? A lot of people go to school to sit in front of a chalkboard - these people can learn from home.
Computers have come a long way but they have to start doing more things for us automatically.
Saying Bluntly- People like things cheap!! (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Hate Apple for OVERPRICED hardware (aka, why don't they release OSX for x86... its cheaper hw you see... commoditize yada yadda)
2. You like Rio cuz they make an mp3 player that is cheaper than the iPod (how'd you feel if you could that iPod 40GB for $99 instead of $599??)
3. You like linux which is, primarily, cheaper than other commercial offerings.
4. You HATE SUN because their hw is expensive (and don't care that its backplane can push 9.2GBps... )
5. "...imagine a beowulf cluster..." you like clusters cuz they allow you to have "CHEAP" computing power.
6. Whined all the way when SUN placed $20 download fee on Solaris x86 to cover bandwidth costs
7. Bashed apple iTunes store for $9.99 album price (what... no CD and still $10!!)
Need I say more ??
Everybody likes things cheap/free. And the dot-com boom produced enough IT workers that in post dot-com era, they're in over-supply... or in short IT workers are a COMMODITY...
Its Indian workers now JUST because internet (yeah!!) made it possible to do work equally well for *most* IT jobs. Sometime ago I was reading about how IM/phone/email has changed mode of communication in office... instead of walking over to co-worker down the hall, you ring/email/IM him/her.... so how does it differ if the co-worker is half-way around the globe... internet just doesn't care!!
If it weren't for the communication boom, you might have been watching cheap mexican workers or H1B workers taking your job...
Face it... everyone likes cheap/free... even the CEOs and PHBs!
Re:coding beats making burgers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:coding beats making burgers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:coding beats making burgers (Score:5, Insightful)
But unfortunately it isn't you who determines what your effort is worth ... just as it is not any producer who determines what his products are worth to the consumer. The consumer (in this case, your employer) determines what your product (your labor) is worth to him.
You are perfectly free to demand high wages (what you think you're worth) -- and employers are perfectly free to not hire you. If you do not wish to work for the going wages, don't work ... just don't complain about being worth more than you were offered, because you're not.
[Note: Nothing in here is meant as a personal attack. I could just as easily have said "If I do not wish to work for the going wages, I won't work ... I just won't complain about being worth more than I'm being paid, because I'm not." And no, it has nothing to do with having low self esteem.]
Protectionism doesn't work (Score:4, Insightful)
This will force the US based companies to pay more, making them even less competative on the global marketplace.
So rather then just outsourcing a portion of the company, they move the entire company or workgroup offshore. Or they cover this extra overhead and remain less competative.
Re:Learn English (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:pay cut (Score:3, Informative)