Working on a piece about U.S. tech jobs going offshore, specifically,
to India.
I think part of what's so hard for people to deal with, as
you can see in recent coverage of the phenomenon in the SJ Merc, Business Week,
Time, etc., is that the legend of America's technological
unassailability that went hand-in-hand with the tech financing boom
survived the equities crash and even the recession pretty well. People
figured that the Troubles were mainly due to the overheating in the
stock market, and once that mess evened itself out, we'd be back on
track. The people who got put on pedestals/magazine covers - the heroes
of the late 90s - were engineers and programmers.
Now the economy and
employment pictures look to be coming around or at least stabilizing,
but suddenly everyone is freaking out about India, which is where a lot
of the new software engineering and programming jobs are being created
- by U.S. tech companies. Smart people are smart enough to know that
America has no monopoly on smarts. There was some noise in 1997 about
tech-savvy immigrants coming to the U.S. and doing formerly high-paying
jobs for rock bottom prices. But that gripe was nothing compared to
this - having the jobs done in a place
where the cost of living is a fraction of what it is here. Easy choice
for U.S. companies, and are their shareholders going to complain that
their labor costs suddenly dropped
by 60%? Not likely.
But there's more to it: first, the U.S. companies save money and
perhaps get stronger and bigger and hire more people in the US who can
do stuff that can't be done in India; or they just keep hiring more and
more people in India and growing bigger and bigger and their stock
prices get bigger too, which their shareholders like.
second, the end product is still being sold by a U.S. company - maybe
to customers in other countries, even India. So that's money to the
U.S..
That said, everyone I've talked to agrees that it sucks to be in a job that
gets offshored. The remedies
I've heard suggested are: 1. lots of retraining (as soon as you've
figured out how to do one thing, get ready to learn something
completely new). 2. Some kind of insurance pool that goes into a
retraining fund for displaced workers.
