4 ms·

1) Bravo to the Times for dressing up rural realities in terms that urban elites can understand. It's cool to care about gender equality and all, but it don't

• HillaryBriss 9y ago
  > it will be _the_ fastest sector to fly to the cheapest place on earth to do it isn't that idea about 20 years old?
  • mistermann 9y ago
    Not really, especially considering we're only fairly recently getting really fast global connections. Also, shrewd programmers have been keeping the ball moving with a never ending stream of new ways (libraries/frameworks/platforms) to reinvent the wheel which has created a massive number of jobs for a long time. Some day this may come to an end as well, and I think the cloud might do it.
• tim333 9y ago
  >it will be _the_ fastest sector to fly to the cheapest place on earth to do it. Software outsourcing has been a thing for decades now and if anything seems past its peak as people find their programmers in Bangalore don't actually do as well as they hoped.
  • revmoo 9y ago
    Good developers are expensive in India just as they are in the US.
  • pgeorgi 9y ago
    > their programmers in Bangalore don't actually do as well as they hoped. Which is because they went to the rock bottom bidder and that came at a price: you got the newbies, and the outsourcing company was training them on the job (ie _your_ project). I heard stories that some companies rotated out their folks into higher paying projects (which existed) once they gained sufficient experience, replacing them with the next batch of newcomers - making the cheapest customers pay for "intro classes" (also known as amateur errors) during the entire project's lifetime. If true that would be a shining example of "you get what you pay for".
  • Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    Companies have been burned by outsourcing production to India where they didn’t get the quality they wanted and cultural differences are difficult. However, companies have gradually had more and more countries to outsource to, and Eastern Europe with its large young, “westernized” or “americanized”, well-educated and English-speaking population is, if anything, more and more popular for companies looking to relocate production or acquire staff.
    • acdha 9y ago
      I think you’re looking at the wrong factor — Eastern European outsourcing has plenty of the same failures, and for the same reasons. Most of the companies which jumped on outsourcing did so because their internal processes were failing and then spent the next few years learning that adding communications overhead and conflicting incentives doesn’t improve that situation. That’s a hard lesson for many companies since it means accepting that the root cause was management rather than the workers.
  • SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    One of the biggest difficulties with outsourcing is also one of the biggest difficulties with software in general: sufficient specifications. Hardware production outsourcing works well. You design the product, prototype it, create a specification that describes every necessary detail, and find a company to make your device. This engineering design process is expensive but does work well. Your onshore workers are the engineers, designers, and the like. Your offshore workers are the production staff. Software production outsourcing works poorly. Creating a thorough enough specification for production is exactly as difficult as creating the program. You have all the same types of onshore workers, but there's no production staff!
• mrtksn 9y ago
  I don't know about that, microphones and cameras are universally available but it doesn't look like the hotspots of the creative industry changing that much - despite local successes like Bollywood or the Turkish TV series. I think the troubles caused by the decline of the old industries are largely due to the culture of investing your life in a company and only getting a salary out of it. The software industry is closer to the creative industry where you try to extract as much as value possible and move on. Blockbusters and failures, agism, giants becoming outdated and loosing value like ageing milk and more culturally appropriate ones taking the scenes is not something that you can outsource.
  • zaroth 9y ago
    My kids were watching Tinkerbell movies on Netflix. Then I saw the credits. Check out the Animation Department: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3120408/fullcredits/animation_department?ref_=m_ttfc_12 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt3120408/fullcredits/animation_depa...
    • mrtksn 9y ago
      Some animations are even outsourced to North Korea. My argument isn't that jobs won't be outsourced but that the impact is different. The idea is that the industry will stay where the innovation happens and for innovation to happen well understood part of the work will be outsourced to a place that is willing to do the hard work for cheaper.
• savanaly 9y ago
  In response to 2) I am one of those people you think is hilarious I guess. I fully support letting work be done wherever it is cheapest in an economic sense, which often means not in the USA. If and when that transformation happens to my own industry I expect I'll support it in principle, while still being a little dismayed on a personal level at the bad turn. But that isn't a contradiction, I think.
  • Clubber 9y ago
    You'll quickly change your mind when you can't pay rent, or support your family. Principles go out the window when bills are due and there is no money coming in.
• lomnakkus 9y ago
  Lollerskates. Your #2 is predicated on Strong AI. At the current time there's no real evidence that that's forthcoming any time soon. (Hype notwithstanding.) Currently, the most difficult problem with programming is understanding the problem. Absent Strong AI there's no shortcuts here. ... and while we're at it: IF the problem were to be solved -- even if by magic -- then I'd be the happiest person alive. The flaw in your thinking is that everything else would stay the same. It wouldn't. A culture with access to "solve-my-problem-X" on demand would be vastly different and it's not even clear if e.g. "money" or "job" would make any sense in such a world. (Ditto for any number of other concepts we take for granted, but which are ultimately driven by scarcity of resources or the fight against entropy.)
• mozumder 9y ago
  The high-end computer work is largely design-based, which depends on high-end talent. Meanwhile, the US still has the best universities in the world, guaranteeing dominance of the industry. As long as that continues (which itself isn't guaranteed) then the US will dominate. If other countries wise-up, and decide to improve their universities, then you can start to worry. The universities are central to our economy. It's what defines this country. And this will matter in any field, not just computer-science. It could be movies, agriculture, engineering, music, physics, photography, literature, fashion, medicine, business, whatever.. the universities help dominate an economy. At the very least, we have to fight the right-wing conservative forces that are trying to cut our universities.
  • a-dub 9y ago
    1) Yes, the idea of tech jobs going overseas has been around for a long time and in the past has seen varying degrees of failure... but c'mon now, if you've been in this industry long enough, you know that it's all about timing. Just because the world wasn't ready for music streaming in 1995 doesn't mean Spotify is a bad idea today. 2) AI has nothing to do with this. Past outsourcing attempts have failed due to skill gaps and cultural differences. 3) The Internet is very good at superseding local culture with global Internet culture. Over time, past cultural differences will dissolve, especially considering that there is money involved. 4) The Internet is very good at making reference and learning materials available globally on the cheap as well as community support which can and likely will supersede a lot of what today's universities do. Over time I suspect that proximity to universities will have waning importance for all but the most specialized and advanced fields.
    • mozumder 9y ago
      It’s not the reference and learning materials. It’s the PhD researchers that advance the state-of-the art. This is why American universities dominate.
      • a-dub 9y ago
        "Over time I suspect that proximity to universities will have waning importance for all but the most specialized and advanced fields."
• Eridrus 9y ago
  > You do realize where this whole industry is headed don't you? Maybe. But people have already tried this with off-shoring and it hasn't worked as well as people had hoped. I don't think the issue has been internet links being too slow. I've outsourced some software development on Upwork and it's not as easy as it sounds to outsource work, you still need to be very engaged to make sure the people you hire are doing what you actually want. With a bearing factory, the process may be complicated, but evaluating quality is much simpler and completely standardized. Software is not immune to labor market forces, but there is no clear outsourcing trend that I can see, so something would need to change for that trend to start.
  • HillaryBriss 9y ago
    > you still need to be very engaged to make sure the people you hire are doing what you actually want. how much and how well does the customer (in the US) know what they want in advance (as opposed to knowing what they want in reaction to the initial versions of the product)? in other words: are US customers typically able to spec out the product well ahead of time -- or are they relying on a tight, iteration/feedback loop to help define the product?
• mikestew 9y ago
  You do realize where this whole industry is headed don't you? Ed Yourdon said the same thing about thirty years ago (“Death of the American Programmer”). I’m still staying employed at a healthy salary. Turns out, apparently, when all things are considered, maybe the U. S. is the “cheapest place on Earth”.