Posted on 02/12/2004 12:47:06 PM PST by logician2u
Have at it.
(My apologies if I missed someone. Perhaps one of you will ping him or her?)
We're told to keep the original titles, so I did.
I think it relates to the first paragraph ("yellow peril") without being unnecessarily alarmist.
I think you may have labor confused with money.
A dollar is exactly equal to four quarters or ten dimes, and where it's spent is unrelated to its intrinsic value.
Where labor is employed is totally related to how much worth (value added) is assigned to the product.
If the software engineers don't speak English, or have any way of understanding what the project is they are tasked with, they won't put out a product worth testing.
You are exactly right that communications become complex when you have your labor force half a world away.
But American ingenuity has tackled complex problems before.
I think the article is really just using the term "software" like the term "widget," to illustrate an economic point.
But your post is quite accurate about software development. It's a lesson a lot of offshoring companies are going to learn the hard way.
As far as employment is concerned, why should anyone be constrained to doing something for their neighbors, or somebody in the next township?
We have a global economy. The whole world is our marketplace. There are plenty of products and services that Americans can provide that no one else can.
Why revert to cottage industry when the whole world is hankering for our goods?
The article emphasizes the static view, but the dynamic view is even more promising, as people are inventivized to learn new things and do things that are truly innovative.
I'm an artificial intelligence research analyst and I can't find work.
So, I go back to school, get another undergrad degree and add a graduate degree to boot. I'm looking at anywhere from 15K to 50K for in-state tuition for both degrees.
And then I start at the bottom in my new career, making a recent grad's salary at age 37 (presently).
Makes me wants to start a business instead.
Well in that sense, the challenge is whether the ingenuity for increasing productivity among onshore developers will provide more value than focusing that ingenuity on improving communication with offshore developers AND increasing productivity (because the market will demand that between Indian software companies, just like it does between American ones). While the overall challenge is greater for the offshore model, the cost of offshore labor is currently cheap enough to make the fight interesting.
My money in the long-run is on onshore development. Too many built-in advantages for offshore to overcome in the long-run.
Which doesn't mean Indian software dries up. I see two significant areas of continued future growth for them:
1. Onshore development for Indian businesses. Just like Indian workers have communication and culture problems working with American companies, that becomes a built-in advantage dealing with Indian companies.
2. Augmenting shortages in U. S. tech labor. People seem to forget that's how we got so tightly linked with foreign IT workers in the first place. Only a few years ago, if you listed an open software development position, it was unusual for a U. S. citizen to even apply for it. The positions were opening faster than our domestic labor pool in that field. Projections of the tech labor market show that problem growing even greater than before as the recession ends, the Baby-boom generation begins retiring, technical investment recovers from its post dot-com bust, and the U. S. tech industry returns to growing faster than the universities can supply new workers (no doubt exacerbated as many people leave the tech field due to the threat of offshore workers replacing their jobs).
It's a short list. Stealth bombers...that's about it.
Everything else can and will be provided globally by those offshore. R&D can be practiced anywhere. Management and entreprenurialism are not unique to America, so except for some nifty, taxfunded weaponry, there's nothing the rest of the world can't do just as well, except open their borders to OUR products and services.
Now you're talking. After 20 years doing AI research and other things in big high-tech companies, I dabbled in start-ups and then joined a dot-com company. Two years later, I was dot-commed out, started up another company and took a related teaching position to pay the rent. That company failed, but the teaching position was a great opportunity to re-tool myself ("The best way to learn something is to teach it"). Another start-up began to take shape about 9 months ago, and this one looks like it's got legs.
At 50, I'm out of money, but my intellectual capital continues to increase. Owning part of a business is the best way to sure that I actually benefit from that intellectual capital. It hasn't been easy -- and I don't expect the next few years to be easy either -- but I'm still hopeful.
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