Technogeek wrote:
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.
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...
Quote:
You being "pretty sure" about anything means exactly nothing.
You having one anecdotal experience does?
Edited, Jun 4th 2010 5:08pm by gbaji