Stimulus failing miserablyFollow

I agree wholeheartedly.

Let's see:

People should get off welfare and get a good job, but it's good for American companies to outsource these very jobs overseas.


So........

?

So we see that Virus really doesn't care a damn bit about unemployment.

Take a quick look around whatever room/car/building you're standing in and tell me how many of things in that space were manufactured overseas? That is enough right there to tell you that this is a false statement.

We outsource all of our IT to Canada.

That's true, we are super cool.

How many were manufactured in the US 10 years ago? Or 20? Or 30? Are the things which were built in the US 25 years ago significantly *not* built there now? Is this because of outsourcing of jobs, or because manufacturing plants are ridiculously expensive to operate in the US? This is hardly "new", and isn't what's meant by "outsourcing" or "offshoring" of jobs.

The US has been shifting from direct manufacturing to design, financing, and management industries for decades. The causes of that are many, and to simplistically blame that on the businesses themselves "sending all the jobs to China" is just plain silly. But having said that the total number of manufacturing jobs in the US has still managed to rise during that time period. The reason a larger percentage of the products in your home today are built outside the US isn't because we've lost jobs, but because there's a vastly greater array of products available for you to buy today than there was 25 years ago, or 50 years ago, or whenever.

Think about... how ridiculous you are? Let's see, buying products to sell has absolutely nothing to do with where the business applications are written. Put down the crack pipe. They did it simply to "save money".

They outsourced to India.

You are vastly incorrect, the company I worked for did ALL of it's custom business apps (except for the cash registers) until around 2000. The it purchased some apps, but the bulk of the apps were still internal, because the internal customers liked it that way.

You being "pretty sure" about anything means exactly nothing.

Ok. So they outsourced the tech support for the new applications to India? Or the actual writing and configuration of all software? How important were the custom applications in relation to more standard ones? How much do they represent from a dollar perspective?

Look. We can go back and forth about this all day long. It's possible that the company you're talking about was one of a relatively small number who outsourced work to India for the wrong reasons and likely lost out because of it. The idea that it's "cheaper" to run most IT, engineering, or software development operations in India (or Mexico, or wherever) is false, and most companies figure this out pretty quickly.

The reason most companies do this (in terms of actual cost savings) is because their business has grown internationally, and they need to have people who can deal with issues globally. It's ridiculously expensive (and just plain stupid) to manage shipping operations in Asia from an office in Detroit. At some point you do need people "on the ground" elsewhere. You need to have servers local to where the customers are (and that's not the end people who buy your products btw, but the people who need to access the data relevant to your business). And that means you need to have people there as well.


I said in my first response that "most" companies do this for other reasons, and that is correct. That you happened to work for one of the few who did do this for bad reasons doesn't change that fact. The perception about this is vastly greater than the reality. Even in IT related work, it's still a growing field. Over the last decade, we've been far more affected by various financial problems at a national level than any specific actions by our own employers. The idea that everything would be just fine if companies weren't sending our jobs to China is still wrong, and completely fails to address the real causes of economic losses among workers in this country.

If the government didn't make doing business and hiring workers in this country so expensive, we'd have more jobs. If the government didn't pass "regulations" which ultimately just reduce profits instead of protecting us in any way, we'd have more jobs. If we could shed ourselves of the absurd notion that the working class benefits in any way by "taxing the rich", we'd have more jobs and higher paying jobs. Yet, inevitably, someone attempts to place blame on the companies for outsourcing, as though that's the big culprit...



You having one anecdotal experience does?

Edited, Jun 4th 2010 5:08pm by gbaji

My anecdotal experience is just as good as yours. Just because you type more words, doesn't mean jackall.

Mostly I just like to make fun of you, and I was bored. Go ahead & write a few more paragraphs.

My response is based on the dozen or so times over the last decade in which this same topic has come up, and the consistency with which, upon actual research of the issue (as opposed to wild rhetoric), it's found that the very fields in which "all our jobs are being outsourced" have actually experienced increases in the number of domestic jobs over time, and that the reasons for outsourcing don't statistically match up to the wild claims. Are there examples of a department being outsourced to India and everyone in the US losing their jobs? Sure. But for every one of those, there's many more examples of new jobs being created in both the US and abroad, and many more examples where the positions are outsourced, but the jobs are not (meaning the company finds something else for you to do in the same field).

As I said at the beginning, this is something that is talked about far far more than it actually happens. For the outsourcing of jobs to actually be having a significant macro-economic effect on employment, we'd have to actually find that the number of jobs in those fields available domestically has decreased. Yet, despite all the hype, we tend to find the exact opposite...



Making fun of me by helping prove my point? Ok...

And if you want to know what bored is, try waiting for large volumes of disks to zero out. It's up to 4%!!! :)

Heritage foundation, hahahahhhahahhahahhaa