[extropy-chat] 'Unskilled jobs to go in 10 years'

[Samantha Atkins]

Brian Lee wrote:

> Outsourcing benefits the entire economy. Of course some neighbors will 
> lose jobs, but on the whole everyone benefits from low cost goods and 
> can buy more other stuff while some people lose jobs, transfer jobs, 
> learn new stuff, whatever.



Intelligent transfer of jobs to areas where the same quality work can be 
done more cheaply makes sense.  However, what we have now is often not 
very intelligent.  Out-sourcing has become a panacea for many public 
software companies.  Wall Street and other financial players nearly make 
it a requirement or at least ask for a strong why-not.    It is not 
intelligent when companies assume that the code is all and can be picked 
up by any reaonsably competent software team successfully and relatively 
painlessly.  This is very seldom the case.  The code has its own inertia 
and quirks that the current onsite developers understand.   The onsite 
developers, if they include the architects of the code, have 
considerable business and technical knowledge relevant to the code in 
question that can seldom be properly captured for transfer in a 
reasonably complete manner.   Even for QA only transfers it is not 
uncommon to experience delays of 6 - 9 months before an offshore team is 
fully up to speed and workable processes in place.   So this is a far 
cry from a panacea as many companies learn painfully. 

Folks can't "buy more stuff" if they have no income for significant 
periods of time while they are attempting to "learn new stuff".    The 
real world is not so simple.

- samantha