Are American high tech workers obsolete?

jkinz at rcn.com jkinz at rcn.com
Tue Aug 13 11:16:00 EDT 2002


On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 10:34:24AM -0400, Hewitt Tech wrote:
[[[some lines chopped out of the original to shorten this post]]]]
> 
> Like a lot of folks leaving a big computer company I have noted the extent
> to which American companies have been replacing domestic workers with H1-B
> program employees or simply shipping the jobs off-shore. Last night I
> watched a segment on "The News Hour" (PBS) which featured a conversation
> with Thomas Friedman who had just returned from a trip to Sri Lanka and the
> Indian sub-continent. Tom described the extent of the success of Indian
> companies at both out sourcing and setting up call centers for large
> American companies. He cited Dell, American Express, GE amongst others who
> had moved their call centers to India. I also have friends working at major
> 
> maddog in his "Front Porch" interview mentioned that a bullet item in his
> standard Linux presentation describes the adoption of Linux as 'inevitable'.
> Can we say the same about domestic high tech jobs moving out of this
> country? We have already moved most manufacturing to China and other low
> labor cost countries. The powers that be have been telling America's young
> people that they should look to their future in the "knowledge industry". Is
> there any point in them spending 100's of thousands for an education in
> Computer Science? Will we all be saying "Do you want fries with that?" and
> if so, who will be the consumers that the nation's economy depends on?
> 
> I'd like to hear a discusion. It's been my experience that many if not most
> engineers are just slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun in terms of their
> politics. They seem to take a "Survival of the fittest" approach to these
> problems. The idea of labor unions (and I know there are plenty of arguments
> against them) are heretical to them. Thoughts?
> 

Hi Alex:
I would re-phrase your subject line a little.  American tech workers aren't 
obsolete, they are just much higher priced than similar and less mature 
(read "slightly less capable sometimes") talent pools available in other
parts of the world.

Is the moving of American Hi-tech jobs offshore inevitable ? Sadly Yes.

I saw figures indicating that the costs associated with employing India
based and China based engineers were one fifth and one tenth respectively
of the cost for employing an American engineer.  Note this is the
"burdened cost" which includes all benefits, office space, utilities,
administration etc.  This is not a one for one comparison of salaries.

It is much easier and cheaper to create a software engineering plant 
than it is to create a manufacturing plant. Compare the cost of desks, 
phones, and some PC's to building manufacturing infrastructure and 
importing processing equipment. 

The emigration of tech jobs is not only inevitable, it will happen even 
faster than manufacturing jobs are being exported.

Now any ideas on how American engineers can compete in this type of market ?


-- 
Jeff Kinz, Director, Emergent Research,  Hudson, MA.  "jkinz at ultranet.com" 
copyright 1995-2002.  Use restricted to non-UCE uses. Any other use is an 
acceptance of the offer at http://www.ultranet.com/~jkinz/policy.html.
"jkinz at rcn.com" copyright 2002.  Use is restricted. Any use is an 
acceptance of the offer at http://users.rcn.com/jkinz/policy.html.

    (¬_                                    -o)
    //\         eLviintuaxbilse            /\\    
    V_/_                                  _\_V   





More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list