Posted on 02/23/2008 3:44:22 PM PST by Momaw Nadon
Many of America's top jobs are moving offshore. Which jobs are most likely to be hit by "offshoring" and what can you do to protect and safeguard your career?
The list below shows four categories of jobs:
“My reason for posting this is that my job was recently outsourced.
I am 34 and am contemplating a career in IT.”
-
Frying Pan. Meet fire...
I’m in IT at a large multinational - which was once part of a large American company. I’ve watched 75% of my US co-workers walked to the door in the last 5 years. Our office has lost so many staff, there are rows of empty cubes now.
It’s only a matter of time before all the rest of us are gone.
However I’ve noticed the reason those of us who are still there, are still there, is we provide quick, innovative value to our customers using a degree of specialized understanding of the technology and the industry.
Seems to meet the description in the original article, and I would tend to agree with most of those points.
In this poster’s opinion, there’s about to be the mother of all political backlashes against companies outsourcing American jobs.
Which might just be a good thing. Nothing good comes, from dumbing down and de-industrializing America.
Nothing.
Somewhat true but then there’s the companies who offshore and the prices stay the same. One issue is, I believe, companies who have gotten so dang big through mergers/acquisitions that they cannot control IT - no one quite knows exactly who does what or how to contain or control departments. So they offshore the mess - out of sight out of mind. Which is destined for failure as you really can’t outsource/offshore a mess for long.
I agree with your prediction, but not with the reasons. I'm sorry, but I just don't hear John Q. Sixpack crying about NAFTA and Free Trade agreements. They may not be in favor of them, but... there aren't enough people out of work to make this issue #1.
I believe, people will flock to Obama simply because,
1) He's young,
2) He's Well-spoken,
3) He's promising everyone money,
4) He's promising everyone health care,
5) He's not a wash-up, scowling, unstable Maverick with a bushel full of hypocritical associations with lobbyist.
It's going to be ugly for the Elephants this year... cause we have no message, and no messenger.
Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that what's left here are people in their 40s and older who have come up through the ranks and learned skills from the ground up - there's no one behind them at all - an age gap exists because kids aren't going into IT. There is a lot of potential lost knowledge and I don't know how it will ever be recouped.
What we run up against all the time are (H1b/offshore) people who only know their segment of IT - they don't understand how systems/hardware interact. Causes a lot of outages and confusion.
btttt
Working just fine for Obama.
You call possible default a "cyclic thing"? That's funny. Gosh, how did that happen when we have the most open trade policies in all of our history? The results speak for themselves.
Look out below, junior. Behind the scenes are some terrified guys in suits.
LOL
I could never keep a straight face! I’m annoyed at them as it is!
Far too many otherwise wise and patriotic Republicans, have allowed their antipathy toward unions, to drive them into supporting the de-industrialization of America.
In each World War - America prevailed not only because our young grew up from the first elementary schools bb guns, knowing how to shoot, but also because we had the world’s best and largest, manufacturing base.
Think Sherman tanks. Thousands were turned out quickly, using automobile manufacturing lines. They might not have been the perfect opponent to the German Tiger Tank, but they served the purpose, and helped save the world.
Think Manhattan Project. Every industry in America, was involved.
Could we do either of those now?
Would we even, as a nation, have the innovative capacity at this point?...
Why must everything be about driving down costs?? Even at the expense of our own future.
We’re consuming ourselves! Our own capabilities.
Our children’s heritage.
Gone. For nothing more honorable, than cheap trinkets at Wal*Mart.
Subject to the whims of the Chinese censors, Google, and the vagaries of wikipedia.
In the future it won't be how much you know but how you use all the information that is at your fingertips.
Process knowledge, or broad familiarity with a field which is time-critical (e.g. medicine), or very specific familiarity, so that you can't find the forest for the trees (electrical wiring, plumbing, corporate finance) will not be amenable to this.
Neither will prostitution -- although personalized, CGI, AI porn will give it a run for its money. And even there one would run into bandwidth issues. ;-)
Cheers! Cheers!
The graph applies to those who got wealthy by producing things which increased the aggregate safety, health, or standard of living; or those who improved efficiencies in production.
Many of those who are "the haves" today have done neither: they have augmented their wealth by throwing other people overboard, sacrificing quality, and pocketing some of the difference. Or acted as intermediaries whose help was required by law, and protected by that same law from market forces. Or administrators of vast bureaucracies which themselves acted as a drag on economic development.
Nice try, though.
Cheers!
Maybe 10-20 years ago, I remember some public concern about the security
impact if our rail system wasn’t kept healthy...as in, the need for
a railway to move LOTS of men and material to where it’s needed in
time of war.
But the way our manufacturing base is going, we won’t have the capacity
to build the stuff that would require transport on those rails
(if we got into anything resembling a WWII-style conflict).
Only in the mind of a true class warrior. Cheers.
its court martialled ;-)
What kind of tech support? Is it over the phone?
Yes.
My job has been, almost from the first day, a matter of not only writing, but illustrating and typesetting the entire publication. As time has gone on, we’ve added hypertext and indexes.
Our newest project is a large collection of a data dictionary and interface description, interlinked with cross references and indexes. We use FrameMaker. It’s over 1,000 pages of documentation.
I like it and it’s a good way to make money. I document mostly software interfaces. I’ve documented some hardware too.
As I wrote to busek, my writing has morphed into a larger skill set of typesetting and illustration, and then on into indexing and hypertext. It’s a lot more work than it looks like. It would be interesting to start teaching it instead of doing it myself.
It makes it appear cheaper. Which is all that upper management cares about. Hour for hour, it takes an offshore resource about twice as long as it take one of our U.S. developers to accomplish a task, due in no small part to the knowledge of the system the U.S. developer has built up over the year. But since the off-shore resource costs one third to one quarter the U.S. resource, upper management likes it fine.
Otherwise known as the Fortune 500.
There are two kinds of companies in the U.S. - those who are outsourcing and those who will be.
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