use Perl

• examples? (Score:1)

  by brev (1827)

  Can you give me a few examples of IT jobs that cannot be moved to another country, and why?
  
  Exclude the ones where physical and cultural proximity is important -- requirements, sales, UI design, customer hand-holding.
  • Re:examples? (Score:2)

    by ziggy (25)

    Can you give me a few examples of IT jobs that cannot be moved to another country, and why?

    Exclude the ones where physical and cultural proximity is important -- requirements, sales, UI design, customer hand-holding.

    A good portion of government and defense related IT jobs cannot be moved offshore. Some of that work is done by offshore subcontractors, but certainly not all of it. And there is a limit to how much can be sent offshore due to political, legal, security, or privacy issues. With added r
    • Re:examples? (Score:1)

      by brev (1827)

      Hang on a minute. I thought the gist of your post was that offshorable IT == lower-skill IT. So I asked for examples of IT jobs that were so high skill they could not be exported.
      
      Now your objections are more about the whole outsourcing concept, which applies within as well as outside the USA. (Hawaii is quite a few timezones away.)
      
      Did I misunderstand your original post? Otherwise I'm still waiting for examples.
      • Re:examples? (Score:2)

        by ziggy (25)

        So I asked for examples of IT jobs that were so high skill they could not be exported.

        Actually, I was arguing the inverse -- it's not that high-skill jobs will not be sent offshore, but rather the jobs that will be sent offshore in pursuit of lower labor costs are low skill IT jobs.

        For example, accounting systems are a very well-understood domain for IT. Yet each large company's accounting system has unique wrinkles. At the very large end of the spectrum, it's not a problem amenable to a generalize
        • Re:examples? (Score:1)

          by brev (1827)

          I think I see what you were saying now. So the limits to outsourcing have to do with the separability of IT from domain knowledge. Since the domain knowledge resides in the USA, the more interesting jobs will reside in the USA.

          That may be true for the short term, but I'm not sure about the long term.

          • one day soon if not already, important customers/markets will not be American.
          • even for American customers, domain knowledge isn't all that tied to the USA. American companies consult around the world too.
          • Re:examples? (Score:2)

            by ziggy (25) on 2003.12.29 10:37 (#26860) Journal

            So the limits to outsourcing have to do with the separability of IT from domain knowledge. Since the domain knowledge resides in the USA, the more interesting jobs will reside in the USA.

            That's a good chunk of it. Some work will remain here (or in Canada, or Switzerland, or ...) because there's a critical mass of learning and people available to crack a problem. There's no reason why India or China can't become the leading center of computational astrophysics, but NASA Goddard will probably remain one of the leading institutions for some time to come, just because it takes so long to gather all of the expertise together -- from the theoretical physics to building and running beowulf clusters, to writing massively parallel applications.

            India and China will probably be peers with the likes of NASA Goddard, CERN, and other centers of theoretical physics at some point in the future. Maybe they'll surpass the existing labs. But India's gain won't be America's loss. Even if India becomes the focus of this research, that doesn't mean that everyone at Goddard is out of a job because of cheaper wages elsewhere. I suspect that situation will be more common than bleeding-edge jobs moving en masse to India.

            Today, Indian programmers do 'bolt-tightening'.

            I never said that Indian programmers are limited to low-tech jobs like 'bolt-tightening'. I said that the best kinds of jobs to send offshore in pursuit of low wages are the ones that have meager domain requirements. I'm also very aware that Indian programmers are also doing some cutting edge work, like those at ThoughtWorks. Those kinds of jobs aren't sent abroad in pursuit of lower wages, but in pursuit of talented workers.

            Remember, I'm arguing against the meme that all work will flow to India based on lower wages alone.

            Tomorrow, look for them to want to move up the food chain.

            Certainly.

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