Another excellent point on this thread. There is a big difference between labor-intensive services and innovation. This is why, for example, big pharmaceutical firms still do most of their R&D here in the U.S. even as they move more of their manufacturing elsewhere.
Totally agree.
Without innovation, there may be jobs but the accretive value will be marginalized once cheaper zones are found, like CPAC.
>> Off-shoring redundant technology and business processes is NOT innovation, it’s simply getting easy work done cheap.
That’s true, of course. However, believe at your own peril that Chinese and Indian and Eastern European and Russian folks can’t learn and think and design and innovate for themselves.
Europeans and Americans have no monopoly on brains. And they are already way behind in the perseverance and elbow-grease department.
We have been too busy eating up the fruits of past accomplishments — but not working nearly as hard as we should to grow new fruits. Therefore, if we don’t start “getting it” right away, and reversing the process, the rest of the world will soon be eating our lunch.
Eh. The PHBs don't really understand what's the cheap part.
I work in telecomm R&D and the current effort has about 10 long term USA engineers being thrown into a late project being worked by a group of Indian contractors. A couple are good, but most are DeVry Institute quality coders.
The PHBs believed the contracting house's siren song of quality, but it was a mirage. And they've already lost any price advantage they might have had as the total staff is more than I think needed if they'd staffed initially with USA employees who know the industry and the kind of quality and robustness the company expects, and how to get there. These guys were trained to Microsoft levels of quality ... just reboot once a day.