use Perl

• not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)

  by mir (51) <xmltwig@gmail.com> on 2003.12.23 15:16 (#26803) Homepage Journal

  I think you are wrong on two counts here:

  First the kinds of jobs that can validly be outsourced are jobs that I want to do. I know because I telecommute from another continent, albeit one with a cost of living that's similar to the US. If I can do it from afar, so can someone equally smart from a cheaper country. And I like my job and I don't think it's a crappy one. It's just that it can be effectively done by anyone with a telephone and a good internet connection

  And even if you were right, if only crappy jobs could be validly outsourced, haven't you worked in corporations before? Once the trend has started, they will outsource everything, even it doesn't make sense. Sure it will be non-optimal, but by the time enough PHBs realize it, you, I and many others might have been out of a job for long enough that we wouldn't be in this industry any more. A policy doesn't have to make sense to be applied. And I don't buy the usual "but in this case you shouldn't work for this company anyway": I have worked, and enjoyed working, for companies that made really questionable decisions in some areas, but which still provided me with a very good job.

  The archetypal job that I do not see being outsourced is salesman, because you need the face to face interaction. Would you rather be a salesman, selling software developed in a cheaper country, than the guy writing that software?

  --
  mirod

  Reply to This

  • Re:not quite... (Score:2)

    by ziggy (25)

    I think you're confusing outsourcing with the everything-is-moving-offshore hysteria.

    Sure, there's going to be lots of outsourcing all over the map. It's not just the blue collar cleaning jobs, but also programming type jobs as well. It's been happening for years, and will continue. The difference is that most of the outsourced jobs in IT are going to IT contractors and consulting firms that concentrate in something, like hosting, development, network administration, whatever.

    Those jobs aren't going
    • Re:not quite... (Score:2)

      by mir (51)

      I think you're confusing outsourcing with the everything-is-moving-offshore hysteria.

      Yes I was confusing the 2. My main point though is that no matter how effective outsourcing or offshoring really is, if it becomes trendy to do it, then companies will _have_ to do it, otherwise they stock will suffer. And anyway the managers will go to seminars, or listen to HPCs (Highly Paid Consultants) that will tell them that that's what they should be doing, and eventually they will.

      I believe the 2 are very similar

      --
      mirod