Offshore Jobs

[DesertWolf]

How do you feel about sending work out of the U.S. considering the high unemployment rate in the IT sector?

[EscapeCharacter]

i think it sucks ass, ive been trying to find a job for almost 5 months now, seems to me all the entry level stuff that i need to get is going elseware just so some jackoff can make some more money.

[bdl]

Sending work out of the US when there are tens of thousands of educated, out of work people right here is just plain evil. Any CEO / Executive Officer of any corporation that does so should be hung in the town square by their privities until such time as a) the genitals in question yield to gravity and the evildoer plummets to the ground for lack of something to hold them up or b) they die of malnutrition.

Yes, I tend to feel strongly about taking jobs away from Americans.

[abc123]

Yes, I tend to feel strongly about taking jobs away from Americans.

Doesn't bother me so much.. being Austrlian and all...

[JeC]

Originally posted by abc123
Doesn't bother me so much.. being Austrlian and all...

Same here

Edit: But I've always thought I'd create my own job. But thats just me talking through my inexperences that come with the incompletion of high school 112 school days to go...

[DesertWolf]

Well after I read an article about some state agencies looking at / or already using offshore companies it really pissed me off. The US economy is in bad enough shape without sending money out of country. I read that one Indian company was paying the people it brought over to the states to work the same wages it was paying its people in India, with a $2000 a month living stipend. But the same article also said that alot of the Indian companies were having to raise their prices because they had to keep so many of their people over here in the states, and also they were having to hire some US citizens. So now alot of the companies looking for offshore companies are looking at China. Now there is an option that is good for US security (yea right).

[jeffro]

I think that undercutting anyone anywhere at the expense of the workers is wrong. If someone offers superior services then kudos them!

But to take work somewhere else (another country or province or state) because they make inferior products at drastically lower prices is just bad business no matter where it takes place.

jeffro

[DesertWolf]

It isn't that some of these offshore companies do inferior work, most of them do very good work. But at a time when the goverment is telling us that we need to put money back into the economy..it really seems unpatriotic for companies to be cutting jobs here and then sending the work offshore.

edit:
But I think it is also stupid for a company to cut expenses but cutting jobs, but letting the chief executives keep their million dollar bonuses. but hey I'm just one of the cogs in the wheel so what do I know about big business?

[jeffro]

Very true. I agree with you on both accounts.

They could keep 3 or 4 of the people that actually do the work if they just cut the pay of the overpaid execs. There should be a salary limit imposed by the government.

I know all too well, I am the proverbial, lowest-man-on-the-totem-pole. Any wavering in the budget and my position would get axed. The whole world might come to an end if one of the BMW-for-each-day-of-the-week suits took a slight hit. Some of the bonuses handed out around here are the same amount as my yearly wage.

but then again, what do I know?

jeffro

[joe_bruin]

the responsibility of a business is to make money for its owners and shareholders. if a business can accomplish this by moving jobs from location A to location B, and it has no viable reasons not to, it had better damn well do it.

having said that, the fact is that some aspects of the software world are being marginalized. that is, where 10 years ago it took a highly specialized, highly educated person to produce some software products, today anyone with some level of computer education and enough time to pound on the keyboard can produce the same thing.

so here are the options:
1) become marginalized, and accept that the currently nice programmer salaries are going to drop until they hit minimum wage.
2) jettison the marginalized products (to people that do it for half my wages in utah, or people that do it for 1/100th of my wages in the 3rd world), and keep the jobs that require high skills and high quality to ourselves.

option 2 means that the challenging projects, the complex ones that require a high degree of sophistication, will remain right where you are. the grunt work will move to where the willing grunts are. the question is, which are you? innovative, highly educated, with good communication and problem solving skills, or are you a code monkey that just hits the keyboard for 8 hours a day until you've filled some requirements document written by someone else?

the downside, of course, is that there are less overall jobs. and when there are less jobs, the ass-end of the spectrum (the guys that have been riding high while there was an economic boom even though they didn't really have the skills for it) is going to be tossed out of the market.
if you're at the bottom of the pool (you know who you are), i suggest you go into the dry cleaning business (because more competition in dry cleaning means lower laundry bills for me), unless, of course, you plan on competing with 3rd world labor on price. if you are a good programmer (remember, good grades != good programmer), stay the course, upgrade your skills, keep your contacts, and you will get good, high paying job. if you are just starting out, your life is going to be pretty hard for a while (sorry), since we just raised the barrier of entry. you are going to have to work hard to prove yourself (doing some work on open source software is a good way to do so).

this has nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with reality of business. and while the economy is bad, it was going to happen anyway (although the bad economy currently accelerates the process). the market is changing, and your options are to evolve or die.