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

[Brian Lee]

Of course as far as anything, outsourcing can be done properly or poorly. It 
does not always benefit a company to outsource, but it frequently does.

As for people being layed off, etc for "retraining". While it is true that 
the individuals layed off can't buy more stuff, others who are benefiting 
from outsourcing can. This is why wealth has grown as globalization 
increased over the past 50 years even as industries such as manufacturing 
employed fewer and fewer people.

Outsourcing hurts some people. But on the whole (and especially over time) 
it helps out economies. Of course, once I get outsourced I may become 
irrational.

Of course the real world is not simple, but I try to keep my examples simple 
as I am not an economist.

BAL

>From: Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com>
>To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
>Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] 'Unskilled jobs to go in 10 years'
>Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 16:57:48 -0800
>
>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
>
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