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:
Only in the mind of a true class warrior. Cheers. Dell and HP come to mind (called their tech support lately?)
As does Wal-Mart: try reading up on Snapper.
Note that this does not apply to (say) automobiles, since Japanese cars gained market share due to reliability and fuel economy issues, in addition to price differential.
I presume you have no quarrel with the other contentions, since you did not reply to them.
Cheers!
So because you have trouble with Dell and HP tech support and Wal Mart has power to push prices down then capitalism must be a bad idea. Wow.
‘Personal banking is local but banking fundamentals and software to run them are truly global except for the language. With more and more people going to automatic deposit and online billpay, even the ‘local’ banking will continue to drop off.”
The bankers would love for us to believe it. The reality is that when you deal with global bankers you are giving them a say in your community and your lives. We don’t need somebody in Belgium deciding whether or not we get a car loan. Likewise we don’t need a global bank like Bank of America giving illegals bank accounts illegally and providing wire transfers to funnel their money out of America.
More and more companies are realizing there is not a global market. There are regional markets with a very tight alignment with cultures. “globalization” is just another form of wealth redistribution.
“So because you have trouble with Dell and HP tech support”
Offshore call centers don’t work. Companies continue to try but in the end the language, culture, and knowledge issues are just too great. Customers get pissed when the customer service rep is reading from a faulty script and refuses to step outside their process. Forget about getting a manager or real resolution. But I guess customers are wrong for wanting customer service.
“Wal Mart has power to push prices down then capitalism must be a bad idea. Wow.”
Walmart was a great example of capitalism. Now its a great example of a monopolistic empire that is suffocating under its own weight.
JMHO
“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.”
Once built a simple web application using offshore developers. The application had a total of 12 pages. About 4 were complex with the rest being quite simple. It took us about 500 hours to write a 360 page document defining each pages functionality and layout. After this we still had to have it developed, tested, and rolled out.
Sure the offshore developers were 1/3 the price but the rest of the work was significantly higher. A competent local developer could have developed the entire app in the 500 hours it took us to document it for the offshore team.
I also meant was people who had money here, not jobs, but just money that they would have to pay taxes on, would move out. Even change living in another country because of what happens here. Those small countries out there who would love to have these rich people become citizens of their countries.
Fortune 500 are a different story, for one thing they tend to be international in scope in the first place so when they “move” work over seas they’re really just re-arranging internal tasks.
Outside the Fortune 500 though it’s a different thing. And the reality is that the number of companies that outsource is probably only a tenth of what the fear sellers say. Most companies don’t outsource, and with good reason, most companies would not only gain nothing by outsourcing they’d lose a lot. Most companies can’t afford to have a major project failure which your first outsourcing is almost 100% guaranteed to do.
We have anit trust laws, although they are used for political assaults way too often.
Oh, who needs jobs anyways!
Oh, that's right......
The Mexicans..............The Mexicans in this country need our jobs.
Sorry! I forgot.
.
Walmart starts to sell them, sells tons of them. Tells the red flyer company they want to be the exclusive customer and they expect deadlines met. Walmart had put a lot of the other companies selling red flyers out of business, so the red flyer company is kind of in a quandry and has to comply with Walmart. This went well for a while until Walmart started demanding lower and lower prices - red flyer company can't lay off or they can't meet demand... so the whole dang company gets sold off and goes to China where they sure can meet the price point and demand. In fact, Walmart makes a bundle on the red flyer wagons because they aren't any cheaper now than when the red flyer company made them in America.
The town that red flyers were manufactured in was devastated because a lot of other storefront businesses are affected when a company goes bust.
It’s capitalism gone amok - greed capitalism.
What you are saying has nothing to do with project mgmt though which was the job I was discussing. And yes we are moving towards globalization or at least larger regionalization.
About 24% of everything Proctor and Gamble sells is sold at Walmart. With this kind of buying power Walmart can dictate the specs to which the product is manufactured.
This is one of the ways they are able to sell cheaper. Clothes are made cheaper by using lower cost materials with lower threadcounts. Walmart also has fantastic technology to manage their supply chain. Within an hour of a purchase the specific shoppers information has left the store and in in their main systems. They use this to track individual shopper buying habits.
They also use this technology to control their suppliers. Many suppliers are not paid for their product until Walmart sells it.
Which is hard, if not impossible, to define on a uniform or consistant basis but is very easy to use against someone who is more successful relative to the accuser. Just ask Lenin.
The point is that not everything which calls itself capitalism is in fact based upon the completely free exchange of goods and services; if one party has disproportionate power over another, or if one group can distort the supply or demand curve, the textbook modeling goes awry.
The problem is that the *executives* behind the decision to outsource don't get stuck with the lousy service which they have subjected everyone else to; and if enough companies in an industry decide to begin sucking in tandem, and they are able to maintain barriers to entry (whether through expertise, threats against potential customers, lobbying of legislatures, what have you) then they can unilaterally begin offering less service or crappier products for more money.
As far as Wal-Mart, they pushed prices down by forcing suppliers to become more efficient (at first); then by forcing the suppliers to move to third-world countries and to lower the workmanship and materials in their products. The issue is not whether they have the power, but at what point it becomes an abuse of power. Read the earlier article in Fast Company.
Cheers!
Requires close proximity to the end customer (firefighting, auto repair, dental work)
Dental work? Many a crown are made overseas, especially in china where they sell for $20 to the $60 to $100 US labs charge. Some of you out there might have ChiCom crowns in your mouths and not even know it because some dentists are cheap asses.
What caliber gun do they put to those suppliers' heads?
Did you read the article?
Got a link? And I hope it isn’t more Jim Sinclair type of BS.
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