Posted on 12/18/2005 2:34:00 PM PST by jb6
The prevailing wisdom on skilled work being shifted abroad - outsourced - is that it is anecdotally alarming but not really a big deal economically. Sure, the thinking goes, some software engineers and others are losing their jobs to low-cost workers in India, but there is always churning in the dynamic American job market of 130 million people. It's what makes the United States economy competitive.
Last Monday, at a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Mark R. Anderson, editor of The Strategic News Service, a technology newsletter, sounded like a traitor to his class. He was speaking to a group of technology executives and venture capitalists, fans of Mr. Anderson but also champions of outsourcing.
The current research on outsourcing, Mr. Anderson said, tends to be static and understates the trend. "The actual outflow of jobs is huge and growing," Mr. Anderson said. "I call this the C.E.O.'s dirty little secret.
"When people really find out what's happening," he added, "our view of India will change dramatically." Steve Lohr
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
But if he and Mr. Hastert hoped to set an example for the remaining 91 percent, they might have opened their wallets a bit wider at the shopping center, the Westfield Fox Valley Mall in Aurora, Ill., on the eastern side of Mr. Hastert's district.
When they stopped at a Champs sporting goods store, Mr. Gutierrez, the former chief executive of the Kellogg Company, bought a Washington Nationals baseball cap, and Mr. Hastert bought a Chicago Cubs hat. Mr. Hastert, a former high school wrestling coach, went on to buy an antique-car calendar and some dog biscuits at other stores. Mr. Gutierrez settled for just his hat. He had to rush to catch a plane, his spokeswoman said. Elizabeth Olson
TOUGH JOB Running a Russian oil company is not for the faint of heart. Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the former chairman of Yukos, is cooling his heels in a Siberian prison after irritating President Vladimir V. Putin, and Boris A. Berezovsky fled to England to avoid a similar fate.
That has not scared Donald L. Evans, the former commerce secretary and a longtime friend of President Bush, according to Kommersant, a Russian newspaper. It reported last week that Mr. Evans, who left the cabinet last January, is weighing an offer by Mr. Putin to be chairman of Rosneft, Russia's largest oil company, as it prepares an initial public offering. Mark A. Stein
THINKING SMALL Ever since Ithaca College announced its CellFlix festival last month, phones there have been ringing nonstop - not just with young directors seeking a break, but also with wireless companies vying to sponsor the event. So far, though, the industry is getting a busy signal.
CellFlix is a film festival for the small screen - the very small screen. It was created for films shot, played and shared on video cellphones. It is open to students worldwide, and first prize is $5,000.
Would-be sponsors are interested because the festival combines young tech-savvy consumers and hip content, exactly what the wireless industry needs to drive sales of 3G handsets and video services. The only problem is, CellFlix is not for sale.
"There's real demand for partnerships," said Dianne Lynch, dean of the Park School of Communications at Ithaca and the driving force behind the festival. "But we're retaining ownership." If successful, she said, the festival could help to make her school a leader in mobile video.
Judging by the phone calls, the wireless industry hears her, but Ms. Lynch is holding firm. "Maybe next year," she said. For now, please leave your name and number after the beep. Bruce Stoff
DOUBLY RARE It is rare for a chief executive to collect a smaller year-end bonus than a junior employee who also happens to be his son, but so it went at Hewitt Associates this year.
Hewitt, which designs personnel-management and compensation plans for other companies, withheld 2005 bonuses from its senior executives, including the chief, Dale L. Gifford, because it failed to meet financial goals. But among those whose stockings contained a little something extra was the boss's son, Scott Gifford, a manager in Hewitt's personnel department. He received a salary and bonus totaling $102,570, according to the latest proxy statement. Patrick McGeehan
I know, because seeing that this happens is what I'm being paid to do by a major Fortune 500 company. The hand-writing is on the wall. I'll be one of the guys turning out the lights.
ping
As someone who's been in IT and seen the "latest" and "greatest" in automated code generation....male cow manuer. Ain't gonna happen, unless you can standardize every company's needs. Oh and even if you automate a portion of the code generation, the humans who then have to interact and work with it waste five times as much time trying to figure out what the computer created then doing it themselves.
This pipe dream has been around since the 1960s.
Pipe dreams can be argued against. Existence proofs cannot. I have seen them.
So have I and they are about as practicle as the flying car.
As a matter of fact, I and another engineer got to "fix" some of that generated crap and crap is exactly what it was.
That was my thought too. The automatically generated code I've seen is brittle and unmaintainable. Translating requirements into code is a complex, iterative process that is wwwwwwwwwway beyond the realm of AI.
Unfortunatley, it is probably not way beyond the realm of most foreign software engineers.
I'd advise anyone whose first impulse is to think with his emotions before engaging his brain to have a look at Thomas Sowell's excellent book "Basic Economics."
application generators are not a "silver bullet", but they do raise the level of abstraction in solving a problem. the first software jobs to disappear were in business applications (many originally written in COBOL) which lent themselves to repetitive tasks and predictable requirements.
system software is the last bastion of the real programmer, and it too can be automated (somewhat). when drivers went from assembly language to C, for example, a lot of old ASM slingers lost their jobs (or had to retrain themselves to C or whatever)
Show me an automated requirements specification generator.
That's been said before--although the subject was the code generated by HLL compilers. The statement is even true. Unfortunately for both assembly coders and Java coders, it's also irrelevant.
Interesting.
Some guy said something and some gathering without a shred of support or evidence. There is no information in this post whatever.
There is no reason that the advance of science and technology must coincide with a stronger economy, more jobs or higher stock prices. New technologies can be economically disruptive, can invalidate business models, and can obviate work roles. I'm not predicting such a future, but it is quite possible.
My girlfriend.
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