Good point!
Yet the market -- the buyers, the filterers of resumes -- they have a faddish view of what they need. That ignorance -- blindness -- is a malignancy born of fiat money, like so many other vices. Fiat money rewards no-account, risk-avoiding decisions and arbitrary randomness and penalizes rationality. The only rule is go-along.
I will argue the "better" part of the proposition here. The importation of many incompetent programmers from India during the internet boom days and the subsequent "anyone can be a web designer" schools had led to some very sloppy programming in the late nineties and early 2000s. As someone in the business since the 80's, I was appalled at the quality of programming I came across in my consulting business. Bad process, bad programmers and high costs led to a lot of dissatisfaction on the part of the business units funding these efforts. Thus, you can get bad process and bad programmers but for a lot less cost by subbing to India. This at least had something of a balming affect on the business units.
``The idea that corporate America is stepping up and hiring again is ludicrous,'' Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley & Co.'s chief economist, said in a Dec. 9 televised interview with Bloomberg News.
Mr. Roach should know. Although every firm on the street has done some outsourcing, Morgan Stanley has practically no IT department in the US.
While outsourcing, as the migrating-jobs trend is known, benefits companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc., it has triggered a debate about whether the U.S. economy is better off
Microsoft is not a big outsourcer relative to it's staff size.
Microsoft Corp. employs 250 workers in India and is on track to double its workforce to 500 by 2005.
Like I say, 250 is not a lot but it's growing. Many other companies have benefited more than Microsoft.
Both Bear Stearns Cos. and a unit of American International Group Inc. have hired Satyam Computer Services to develop software and maintain computer systems.
Nearly every firm on the street is using Satyam. Those that aren't use TaTa.
To answer the challenge, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer last month said in New York that the U.S. must churn out more math and science graduates. That would raise the supply of computer engineers -- and push down their salaries to about $50,000 a year, he says. That's about what the average U.S. high school teacher earns.
Others have pointed out the fallacy of this argument already. The reason I spent my Friday nights in the science library while getting my electrical engineering degree was so that I could add more value in my career than others who were studying business, liberal arts, pre-law and of course, education. If I'm not going to be paid for my effort, then what is the value of that study? (Hi Open Source fans!) The reason that India graduates so many engineers is that compared to other fields of study, engineers will earn much more during their career in India. Much more so than those answering the phones and even they live better than 80% of Indian citizens.
Many people besides Ballmer have suggested we need to increase the supply of engineers. They never finish the equation to see if the results equal the inputs.
Though most of my attorney friends are miserable with their careers, the number of attorneys in the US just crested 1 million. I presume there is value in the effort to pass the bar. Though I was debating with a friend of mine weather an Indian lawyer who passed the New York bar can practice law from India. It's coming I think.
The competition from overseas comes as growth in the U.S. workforce slows after increasing 54 percent between 1980 and 2000, said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America. The workforce will grow only 3 percent in the next two decades as the baby boom generation, born after World War II, retires.
And this is really a major factor. My generation, Generation X, is small in number. Thus the decrease in jobs may in fact reflect the decrease in elementary school enrolments from 30 years ago. That's when a lot of school buildings were turned into school district administration buildings or just sold off to developers. (Yes, new suburbs are experiencing growth pains but the overall school attendance has decreased significantly). Immigration has helped and the secondary baby boom (20 and younger -- Generation 9/11) will bump it up but not to the same level as the 50s and 60s.
Now if only we could get those Indian programmers to contribute to US Social Security, we'd be all set.