Posted on 07/26/2013 10:40:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
Economic anxiety defines the Detroit bankruptcy, and not just in Michigan and the Midwest. Detroit is the urban nightmare, symbolic of America's downward cultural spiral since the 1960s, when optimism about what Americans could accomplish was the national elixir.
The automobile was the national icon: powerful, beautiful and reliable. Detroit's advertising slogans reflected America's immeasurable self-confidence. Cadillac boasted that it was "the standard of the world." Buick promised that "when better cars are built, Buick will build them." Packard, then Detroit's ultimate expression of luxury, smugly advised, "Ask the man who owns one."
The car was the example of infinite American possibility. Americans had just returned from winning two wars, one beyond the Atlantic and the other in the Pacific, and we were liberated to think we could do anything -- in business, engineering, medicine, the law or whatever else struck our fancy. We were free to explore the possibilities of the mind. There was the saying that the first-generation American had gone into business so his son could be a doctor and his grandson could be a professor.
The returning American soldier, getting a college education on the G.I. Bill as the happy alternative to the war he had just won, could look at his reality in a fresh way. Many measured themselves by their ability to make money; others exhilarated in how prosperity freed them to "rise above" money matters to study philosophy and literature. But all that was a long time ago.
The pessimism of the present day affects the way we think about the future in narrower ways. A half-century ago, 14 percent of college students studied the humanities, the reflection of the great ideas that liberated an imagination grounded in what Matthew Arnold, the 19th-century English poet and critic, described as "the best that has been thought and said in the world."
Aristotle said mastering metaphors was a sign of genius. That may have been exaggeration from the man who espoused the golden mean, but the ancient philosopher understood that poetry had its practical virtues (even if his colleague Plato didn't include the poet in his ideal society).
Humanities majors sometimes were referred to as "eggheads," disdained by their more practical brothers and sisters, but mostly they were proud to carry on a tradition requiring that they read the great works from antiquity to modernity. Humanities majors are down now to 7 percent, and they are not exactly high status on campus.
In a digital age, no one much cares that the humanities major is an endangered species. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in a report titled "The Heart of the Matter," makes the case that, like the natural sciences, the humanities feed "mental empowerment." True enough, but the report ignores important reasons why young men and women ignore a humanities major today. Tenured professors smother the beauty and truth of the ancients with arcane jargon, trading the wisdom from the forest for the weeds of multicultural and politically correct revisionism.
That's too bad. Without the passion that stirs the soul with great writing, it's easy to overlook the riches of a liberal arts education. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, he noted that Apple's DNA was not made up of technology alone. "It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing," he said.
Jobs was not alone in recognizing that the high-tech employers seek innovators who employ imagination, metaphor and storytelling, all growing from the rediscovery of great works of literature. Michael Malone, author and teacher, tells of inviting a Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneur to talk to his college writing class. When he told his visitor to go easy on the downside of life for an English major in a tech-savvy world, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur replied: "English majors are exactly the people I'm looking for." The battleground, writes Malone in The Wall Street Journal, has shifted from engineering to storytelling as the means of translating an idea into imagined reality. The study of fine writing and the arts opens the mind to a larger nature, to quality measured not by big data, but by big ideas.
"At a time when economic anxiety is driving the public toward a narrow concept of education focused on short-term payoffs," observes the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, "it is imperative that colleges, universities and their supporters make a clear and convincing case for the value of liberal arts education." That's a hard sell to engineers, economists and politicians watching Detroit slide down the tubes, but there's merit in it. You should channel Steve Jobs.
This is, to a large extent, no longer offered. That's the actual problem. Instead the Humanities major sits through diatribes about race, class, and gender.
They need people that can read and write cursive.
Ugh... that explains a few things. Unfortunately Quest isn’t directly under my control, and I fear our systems suffer as a result. They use Quest to control user provisioning from Lawson. Other than that, they’re barely using the capabilities of the system. I can’t guess if the lack of utility of the system is due to the incompetence of the team handling the product or lack of support from the vendor, so I can’t say one way or another if support and dev suck.
I don’t need an English major, just somebody who can read and write English properly.
I’m working in a large corporate client’s infrastructure group’s offices. The documentation on that stuff is uneven, older stuff is often non-existent, and I have no faith that in 3-5 years when systems going in today need to be refreshed, anyone will know where the doc they do produce will be located.
It’s pretty interesting.
I have a friend who was attempting to struggle through an English PhD at Auburn, and diatribes about race, class, and gender are about right, based on his reports. Plus he realized that as a white male he had no chance getting anywhere in the academic system in that area.
He gave it up, managed to transition into doing securities analysis, and is very good at it. His writing skills are a large part of the reason why.
LOL. How quaint. You think the folks driving outsourcing care about efficiency? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Dude, what have you been smoking? LOL
I don't know. A lot of companies have discovered in recent years, that just because certain nationalities say "yes' to any question you ask of them, it doesn't mean that they have any idea how to do what was asked of them, or even the words coming out of your mouth. They'll say "yeah, yeah" all day long, yet comprehend nothing.
Of course, the "cheap" code they produced for you doesn't have any great relationship to what was requested of them, but that's OK, because it can always be rewritten, because it was cheap.
It is sad that American coders laugh at any attempts to educate them about concepts, systems, processes, methods, or whatever else that has been industry standard for twenty or thirty years, while they continue to build in their own job security with crap coding that is cheaper to replace than maintain. Same, same with American DBAs who are clueless about the purpose of a DB system. Same with PC techs, IT security, sys admins, etc., etc., even IT managers all the way up the food chain. Arrogant Americans, bragging about their own ignorance, and back-stabbing anyone who bothered to invest in a few years of education to qualify themselves to enter their field.
Right now, our company is spending $100 million on a system being built by an Indian firm that will likely put many of us on the streets. Yes, there's a lot of grumbling and worrying.
We have quite a few very competitive coders among our American staff, most with around three decades experience, but most refuse to acknowledge that any advances have occurred in the IT field since COBOL and VSAM hit the market. Most of them have never been on an application project team from start to finish, through every phase of the project, participating in every phase, as educated professionals should have done. They know how to compete; but they don't have a clue how to cooperate to conceive, design, build, and launch a system that will be worth more than it costs to maintain.
They have 20 to 30 years experience coding; entry-level, jack-leg coding; but they have and want the job titles and pay of educated IT professionals, and most won't even pretend to learn about newer technologies and methods. Even with company reimbursement, they refuse to get an education to qualify themselves for their current positions.
If the Apollo program had been plagued with this mindset, every single launch would have ended in the gulf stream, if they could even have gotten off the ground.
I’ve been involved in three outsourced IT shops, two mergers, and an acquisition. The bottom line is efficiency. Efficiency in operations is of paramount concern, and a fast handoff of responsibilities to the new bearers is the primary concern of any manager. The longer it takes to migrate those job responsibilities, the less payoff the higher ups get from the process.
If you can hire, train, and put to work 10 Indian or Eastern European workers for the same cost as one American, why wouldn’t you look to do so? That’s the very heart of capitalism, in my opinion: efficiency for a lower cost.
America’s business problem is her taxes. American-based corporations get put through the ringer around tax time, so much so that the larger ones, Hell even the mid-range corporations, need to have entire armies of financial accountants to keep the ship asea. With IT opex often being the largest chunk of a corporations budget, why wouldn’t they consider outsourcing to save money on hiring domestic workers who have a higher standard of living than those in burgeoning business economies like India or Mexico.
So yes, zeugma, I DO think folks driving outsourcing care about efficiency, because I’ve seen it and know how it works.
Ewe maye thing sew and eye mayy thing sow, butt it dont seam two mattur much too sum peepul.
Sorry, but everywhere I've seen "outsourcing" it's been a slow moving train wreck that is so important to the big executives because it makes their numbers appear better that they'll never admit what a dismal failure it is in every way because they plan to jump ship before it crushes the organizations where it has been introduced.
It matters more two some then other’s.
Eye agrea. Butt ive allways thout awl that english stuff was a waist of thyme.
I’ve been through two “successful” outsourcing projects myself. The problem is exit strategy. Oftentimes executives come to leadership, specifically IT in my case, and state, “We need to offshore tech support to save money.” Despite every best- and worst-case scenario presented, they continue with blinders thinking that the end results will be dollars saved. I agree with you, MOST outsourcing projects go terribly awry due to poor project management, mismanagement of budget, failure to temper expectations, and poor relationship management with the new offshore team.
In the cases of success I’ve experienced, we worked (both times) with an outfit called TCS (Tata Consulting Services). They were very professional and eager to assist, and their workers spoke impeccable English. Most of our customers thought they were calling the UK when they got through to support. Additionally, they focused on expectations and set very realistic goals to accomplish the resolution of project goals. In the end, they didn’t save a large sum of money over what they laid out for domestic workers. Additionally, the management group (they tend to travel in packs) wound up leaving the company and leadership decided to hire more domestic workers in one of the companies.
Thankfully, the management types who prided themselves and their teams on effective and efficient outsourcing are starting to fade away. Market changes often dictate a faster approach to shifting winds in IT. What was long-term and slow to form in the late 90s is now fast-moving and rapidly changing.
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