Offshoring the Economy

[unixronin]

A sobering article in Fast Company magazine says that as many as 14 million jobs in the US could be offshored.  It's not just IT any more.  It's accountants, customer service reps, medical transcriptionists.

"More than just outsourcing IT or anyone's job, we're outsourcing the American middle class," says Bronstein.

I find myself increasingly thinking it's time to abandon both this career and this country, and find some other way to make a living, somewhere else.  I just don't know what.  I still don't know if I could handle the schooling to become a pharmacist.  I'm seriously considering retail; I'm told Home Despot pays $16 an hour.  Our friends wolfspaw and stoda already abandoned IT to become massage therapists.  And frankly, I seriously think that the US economy is going to crash as a result of offshoring -- the ultimate manifestation of the shortsighted Wall Street quest for short-term profit.

A partial list of Fast Company's "at risk" jobs:

• Extreme risk:  Accountant, industrial engineer, production control specialist, quality assurance engineer, helpdesk specialist, telemarketer
• High or moderate risk:  Automotive engineer, computer systems analyst, database administrator, software developer, customer-service representative, CAD technician, paralegal/legal assistant, medical transcriptionist, copy editor, journalist, film editor, insurance agent, lab technician, human resources specialist
• Low risk:  Aircraft mechanic, artist, carpenter, civil engineer, headhunter, interior designer

We're not just offshoring jobs:  We're offshoring our economy.

Comments

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I'm excessively bitter, and I've been employed in tech all through this. But I've watched it devastate the local economy and the lives of friends who have lost houses, etc. I've also watched them lay off employees in San Jose and replace them with 3 others in another country. And I hate being part of that "increased productivity" because I know what it really means. Some of our engineers are looking like walking ghosts, lately, due to overwork. It's not like they get paid extra for 60-hour weeks, because "salaried exempt" means "we own your ass". Let's face it, it's the rape-and-pillage Victorian economy of robber barons, all over again.
But some economists are realizing that the final product of offshoring might be having to raise taxes on the middle class, because they're exporting the tax base, too. And how do you make it up, when you're not getting enough money, because the wage-earners aren't bringing in the bucks like they used to? And the rich CEOs and corporations, who have government in their court, will always find ways to avoid paying it out of *their* pockets.
Besides, I have my reservations about qualifications of those offshore engineers. I have had surreal conversations with our India engineers, where I am patiently explaining to them that Tcl isn't the same as UNIX, and they're not Getting It.

BTW, what makes housing expensive is supply-and-demand. If we didn't have idiots in Silicon Valley willing to pay anything for Bay Area real estate because of low mortage rates (fueled the same way as the tech bubble, valuewise), it would cost the same as a house in Fresno (less than half). And of course, a lot of that is location, location, location. You can buy Tara on 60 acres in Tennessee for the price of a San Jose tract house. (Conversely, commercial real estate here goes begging. Over half the buildings in the vicinity of my work have been for rent for 2 years, now, because the economy sucks so badly.)

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Well, they could quit working those hours. They could quit working for those people who they feel value them too little. That's essentially the balance, isn't it? "I work this job because I feel that the value I recieve for doing so offsets the effort I put into it."

I also work a 60 hour a week job (that is sometimes an 80 hour a week job) that pays me several 10's of thousands of dollars less than my .com boom job did, and I'm living in San Diego now instead of Albuquerque, so the reduced salary goes away even faster. But I consider what they are paying me to be enough to keep me coming to the job, since the other job options are less appealing (nothing, or Burger King, or other "jobs which do not deal with computers that I like").

Computer people got spoiled during the boom. There's no reason that we should have been making as much money as we were, except for the fact that there were not enough of us, so prices went up. Now there are too few jobs and too many hackers. Companies should hire more hackers and pay all of them less, instead of overworking the ones they have, except lots of programming companies are located where cost of living expenses are high, so you have to pay people a reasonable wage, and lots of hackers still think they can get stupid money for dealing with computers.

And housing costs are high in the Bay area due to supply and demand. But that's due primarily to a lack of surface area in which to put houses. Eventually, in low rent parts of the world, you get down to where housing costs what houses really cost. The houses in SF aren't intrinsically worth more due to construction, but mostly due to location. There are lower cost methods of building housing that you can't use, because the government won't let you. So in places where land is cheap (say, Albuquerque) the percentage cost of a house is much higher than it should be due to government intervention in the construction methods.

And I didn't say that all housing costs were government induced, just that they were unneccesarily made higher.

-Ogre

[jilara.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the problem. Everyone is "addicted to eating and paying their mortgage," as I've heard folks say.

I know that's why I keep at it. That and being able to help out underemployed friends who had trouble keeping a roof over their heads. I'm plotting my exit to my next career, for when I pay off some stuff, a few years down the road. 25+ years in this field, constantly pulling other people's chestnuts out of the fire, is finally getting to me. (My problem is I still care. I still need to believe in what I do, which is bad for my ulcer.) I've been up and down with tech, and mostly underpaid, but that same factor has kept me employed, ironically. But it's an ultimately abusive line of work, and it seems like it's getting more and more that way.

I had the common sense to ditch the high-paying wretched.com job that was making me crazy, at the height of the boom, and go back to nuts-and-bolts tech, down in the firmware where I started. "But you're giving up all this money" people said. Yeah, but at what cost? Sanity? Those guys were bottom-line slavedrivers. But it made me aware of how corporate types think...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, they could quit working those hours. They could quit working for those people who they feel value them too little. That's essentially the balance, isn't it? "I work this job because I feel that the value I recieve for doing so offsets the effort I put into it."

Unfortunately, too often these days it's more a case of "I put up with this shit because I have nowhere else to go, it's this or flipping burgers." I know quite a few people who'd tell their current employers to FOAD at the drop of a hat if they had another job to go to, because they're being treated so badly.

And, realistically, when you consider the hours that people were being asked to work AND carry a pager for off-hours calls, I don't think a lot of those boom salaries were that unreasonable. I don't think the bubble was so much one of computer geeks as a whole getting overinflated salaries, as one of "entrepreneurs" touting overinflated business offerings with no grounding in reality, and stupid venture capitalists lining up to throw dumpster-loads of money at them on the mere promise that some day there would be a business plan and maybe even a product.