reesesWeb

Thanks to the global consciousness that Jung predicted, reified in the modern media and globalhypermegasuperinformationhighway, my attention -- as has, I'm sure, yours -- been frequently drawn to a number of different reactions to the offshoring of primarily information-based jobs.

The first-order response is usually terror, because we've all seen the damage done to cities like Flint, Michigan, when other skilled trades crossed the point where they could be done more efficiently, and just as acceptably, overseas. Local economies were destroyed, families were rendered destitute, and the rest of us were subjected to Michael Moore films.

This is an easily understandable reaction, and I'm sure all of us in the tech industry have felt a twinge of uncertainty about what will come in the one, two, five, ten years. Will we have jobs? What will those jobs be like? The certain thing is that we will almost definitely not be employed in the same manner that we are now, and not just for the simple reason that, if you're anything more intelligent and ambitious than a moldy sock, you're going to advance in your career and take on tasks of an increasing responsibility and level of abstraction. Your job, as it is now, will simply cease to exist in the US.

And this is where the second-order reaction takes place.

Sure, we moved all of those jobs involving the actual assembly of cars to Mexico or wherever, but the cars are designed and engineered in the US, right? All of the jobs of higher levels of abstraction and creativity are still done in the US, and they've also created more jobs, because people need to manage those offshore teams, right?

We've offshored a lot of tasks in the past. What happens is that a new industry (textile weaving and garment sewing, car manufacturing and assembly, electronics assembly, information technology) explodes in the US, and employs a lot of people at fairly low rates. Those rates climb, the industry stops being novel and becomes repeatable, and is then migrated to poorer economies, where people earn a fraction of the original wage, performing the repeatable steps over and over again, creating products that are then re-imported into the US.

The process has become, in and of itself, a repeatable process. Document a process, train people in a poorer area, move facilities there, lay off prior staff engaged in that documentable process. It works both within the US, as jobs move from more expensive markets (California, New York, or whatever) to less expensive ones (the South, Midwest, etc.), and without.

Because of this repeatable and predictable process, a lot of people think that the same will happen with information technology. Sure, we'll export the boring work of cutting code for CRM integrations to India. We'll still produce the interesting work. We'll design those CRM systems, or, we'll produce entirely new types of software. Everyone will climb the ladder of abstraction and creativity, and as beings of Western extraction, we'll remain on the highest rungs.

I understand the value of "denial" and "bargaining" in their ability to help one sleep at night, but this is a very naive worldview.

First of all, those jobs are being offshored because they can be done more efficiently overseas. I'm sitting here looking at about an eighth of a gigabyte of offshored Java code, and it's positively hideous. Awful. Some of the worst code I've seen. But, it sort of gets the job done and it was produced closer to scope, cost, and schedule than could have been done with a completely local staff.

Purely awful code. I'll talk about this later. I just can't let it pass without making that comment.

However, the problem is, as is reputed to be in the past, that Americans start out working hard and for little money, and then we get fat and complacent after things improve. We demand stupid wages for minimal effort, producing substandard work. We're truly lazy people, and lazy people should not expect to ascend the ladder of success without working ourselves just as hard, or harder, than people overseas.

In some ways, I think the past ten years have done a large amount of damage to the American IT workforce. During the late 90s, even the most incompetent and non-technical person could all but guarantee a six-figure income if they had the good fortune of living in Seattle, San Francisco (or especially the South Bay), New York, or a number of other cities. That has dried up a little bit, but those people still remain, by the score, in IT organisations throughout the country.

Those people, and we're all those people to some degree, are why companies are looking to offshore IT.

This brings me back to my point. Why is it that this fear of offshoring leads us to the two things we can't do much about, rather than the one thing we can do? Why do we sit around whining about "Indians stealing our jobs," instead of how hard we're going to work to increase our leverage?

Because that's what it's all about. Money in has to produce money out. Right now, technology money spent on Americans is largely thrown away, because we sit around browsing the web, reading or writing blogs, and doing things other than working, while collecting absurdly large salaries. Let me put it this way, if you told your father how much you made, and described exactly what you did all day, would he be proud, or would he cuff you on the back of the head and say that he'd fire any one of his employees who had such an awful work ethic?

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