Re: [PLUG] Interesting Outsourcing Article...

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Friday, September 12, 2003, at 06:26 PM, Paul wrote:
> Chris Mann wrote:
>
> > What scares me more is that even if there are resources for displaced
> > workers, I'm not sure that would help. It's rough seeing so many 
> > people
> > I know out of work (in the IT sector) and more and more jobs going
> > overseas. Sadly, I don't think any of those jobs that went overseas 
> > are
> > coming back.
>
> If the jobs aren't coming back, what's going to happen to Computer 
> Science students when they graduate?  Are schools training people to 
> join the under/unemployed?  I understand that it's good business for 
> the schools because they're making money, but would it be better for 
> the /country/ to either make jobs available to Americans or to reduce 
> IT training?
>
> Have we moved from the Information Age into the Executive Age, in 
> which there are only peons, executives, and foreign IT professionals?  
> I know that is over simplified considering that we need lawyers.

Computer Science graduates should have no problem to the extent that 
they really are Computer Scientists and not simply programmers with 
fancy degrees.

... if we had fewer lawyers, we would have fewer jobs moving overseas.

The thing to remember about executives is that they are incapable of 
producing anything.
That is why they are executives.

From my perspective, the whole outsourcing thing is actually overblown. 
The problem really is that the Companies are gone, not the jobs.

Outsourcing really can make a big difference at a large firm, but its 
impact at a small or medium size firm is far less clear. There you have 
more of a situation where the "solutions" (I hate that word) being 
offered are what the business is after, not payroll reduction.

What is missing today are American Body Shops to offer alternative 
"solutions."

We saw a HUGE number of companies vanish at the end of the 90s... not 
"just jobs." The end result was that a huge pool of competent and even 
qualified bodies was dumped into the market. A lot of those bodies were 
in fact Green cards or H1bs ... who went home, and stared their own 
companies.

They could not have done that in 1990. And in fact, they did not. It 
wasn't until the "glut" of communications created by Global Crossing, 
MCI, and the other telecoms provided the infrastructure which made 
those companies able to compete.

Remember, historically, something short of 10% of the American labor 
force worked for Large Companies.

So, the question to be asking is not -- Where are the jobs? Rather ask, 
Where are the companies?

There is a LOT of Venture Capital around today. But it now expects a 
company to actually be capable of making money... not just looking for 
the next sucker at the IPO.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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