7 ms·

> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with tha

> [...] what they outsourced were their bottom tier workers, the unproductive people. That might be true to some extent, but I think there's a problem with that line of thought. People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing. The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want.

dannypgh 6y ago
I think this just means employers will still have incentive to hire people to be employees (as then they benefit from the employee's growth), rather than contract out work to firms which may reassign or replace the (now valued, experienced) employee. When you contract out instead of hire, you're giving an incentive to a firm to get the work done as cheaply as possible, and that's not always the right trade-off. The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.
danielfoster 6y ago
This. Not to mention it has become much easier for anyone motivated to learn valuable skills online-- now there will be more opportunities to apply them. Someone in the Philippines learning Python on Khan Academy today could very well be competitive for a senior engineering job in 10 years if the career path were possible. I've met countless skilled technical people who could not a get job at XYZ company simply due to visas, not qualifications. Now working for these companies can be a real possibility.
- bluGill 6y ago
  You forgot to account for domain knowledge. You can be better than me at python, but I know my area and customers. When I'm given a half complete spec I can make good choices for the most part and get done without getting clarification. I can guess what version 2.0 will need well enough that most of the time those features will drop in quickly while major refactoring is required to get them into the better programmers 2.0. Of course there are tradeoffs. A programmer who is much better than me has advantages in quality (assuming you are much better, in my biased opinion I'm great)
  - blawson 6y ago
    Domain knowledge isn't always valued the same by those writing the checks, whereas 50% cheaper is far easier to quantify.
- tharne 6y ago
  You're probably right about this, but I'm betting we'll see political parties in countries all over the world start putting up roadblocks to this sort of thing. It's already happening to a degree. There a number of what you might call "reluctant Trump voters" where I work. The most frequent (and often only) argument you'll hear from them in favor Trump is around immigration and H1-B visas. You'll also notice that the Democrats in the U.S. who are surprisingly quit around Trumps efforts to reduce H1-B issuance. I'd be willing to bet that unrestricted competition for a limited number of high-paying jobs in the developed world would fuel the Nationalist parties and movements that we've been seeing more of in the U.S. and Europe.
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    My opinion has been that it's good for US workers if foreigners immigrate and become citizens, because even if they make less than most Americans, they make more than they did in their prior country, which means they are improving the global market for labor, from the point of view of workers. But having classes of people who live in the country but have special restricted rights and never become full citizens worries me. I wish we could move away from the idea that citizenship is a reward for following the rules and instead consider that making people citizens is a benefit for (maybe even vital to preserving) society.
disabled 6y ago
Yeah, and the posters thinking that this will help wealth inequality (either among the general population or just among tech workers collectively as a whole) are hopelessly naive. It is practically guaranteed to make wealth inequality worse, and now tech workers will start to feel a lot of pain, more like the general US population has. This is going to happen faster than other times when offshoring has occurred in various industries historically too. Just think about it. You can bet contract work is going to be commonplace, and you can kiss your benefits goodbye. If you do not think this will happen to you, well, you’re next on the chopping block. Work will become hyper competitive for benefits and for full time status. A good employee will be someone who answers emails 24/7 and within minutes of it being sent, night or day. The work will never end. Surveillance technologies for remote work will remove any semblance of freedom when you work from home. This is all very unlikely to be made illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Also. populism uprisings that occur in a respective country last on average for 30 years, so you better be thinking in the very long-term for how bad this could actually be.
- cl0rkster 6y ago
  I'm confused. Perhaps you could clarify how honing your skills to be valuable as a remote worker is somehow the gateway to the rich eating all of us. My personal experience with remote work is that it allows me to be present as a father in my children's lives and also to be more productive. I'm not saying everyone will have that experience, but for me it's an excellent fit. As far as productivity, if we look at productivity increases since 1950, we should be working half as much for the same productivity/pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443). With voices like Andrew Yang trying to shift social values to valuing the underappreciated like stay-at-home mothers through a UBI, this seems like a positive path forward. I know things seem dark right now, but in my powerless position, I choose to believe there is a better, more positive path forward, and I put my energy into pursuing it. Frankly, I've never met a rich guy whose nose I couldn't bloody. I've rarely met one whose spirit I couldn't cut deeply in less than 15 minutes of conversation.
  - rtikulit 6y ago
mc32 6y ago
An additional problem MBAs sometimes miss is that when you export jobs to contract orgs is that this accumulated institutional knowledge is lost—it’s no longer held in-house. Conversely it contributes to the expertise of the contract org. But not all orgs think long term. Or they get enthralled by “core competency”.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  I don't think this is really missed by the MBAs, HN's favorite punching bag. These types of opportunity costs are absolutely a part of the make/buy decision process (but maybe undervalued?). I think it has much more to to with the "enthralled by core competency" aspect.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    I'm confused by your use of "enthralled by core competency". I think if an MBA is actively dissembling the structures that brought a successful product together and exerting destructive control over any further research they absolutely deserve some criticism.
    - varjag 6y ago
      There is a huge incentive for the management to find core competency in the cheapest item on the balance sheet.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Some executives stay long term, some build portfolios, guide companies through a given stage and jump to the next. They can then say they “saved” this and that by offshoring. What happens 5 years after they leave is of little consequence. Institutional knowledge informs why a solution works better than a shiny. The contract org will push through what works best for them, more than what’s best for your org long term. Contract orgs like checking off Hundreds of NIST or CIS controls as if that in and of itself means anything substantive.
    - 6y ago
gizmo686 6y ago
The "moving target" problem is significant for countries (or geographic regions in the case of large countries or open borders). However, for an individual company, it is a tragedy of the commons situation. Why should a company A pay more to train a bottom tier worker into a high tier worker, when said worker will then be able to move to company B who offshore's its low tier workers. In effect, company A is subsidizing company B's training program.
- fludlight 6y ago
  Attrition significantly drops if you treat people right. Many of the ones that leave run right back.
bartread 6y ago
> People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing. I think the validity of this point depends on how you understand "bottom tier". When I read "bottom tier"[1] I tend to read that as a combination of "people who suck at their jobs" and "people who are doing things that are highly commoditized or commoditizable". The former interpretation in particular has nothing to do with seniority. [1] And I'm reading it this way probably because I'm back-projecting based on experience of working with some outsourced/offshored workers who sucked at their jobs.
- pnutjam 6y ago
  People who suck at their job can learn, and become better. Not all, but everyone was bad at something before they leveled up. Highly commoditized positions are also a great way to learn about less commoditized work. How many old rich people used to say they started in the mailroom.
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    How does one deal with a culture of decreasing vertical mobility within a particular organization. They may suck at their job and be shuffled between the bottom tiers of increasingly flat management structures. If there is no room for growth this model fails, many older people did move vertically but this practice has been almost deliberately been removed from corporate life.
    - sgt101 6y ago
      Junior employees must have deliberate exposure to responsibility and challenge in a structured environment that supports them if the are to grow. This is the job of middle management, who are the first target of every MBA driven reorg. Hence the end of development.
      - 6y ago
l8rpeace 6y ago
> The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want. This is how Microsoft operated for a while. Entire support ecosystems were built around Redmond, from non-core competency support (design, boutique marketing, food services, maintenance) to core competency augmentation (vendor, off shore, near shore, local). They still employ that model but to a lesser extent. They've moved away from it based on labor market trends and local competition (more companies have moved to the greater Seattle competing for resources). So I don't know if its a universal doctrine or model that will be employed, but it does seem to have a time and a place.
Avicebron 6y ago
Yea, it's already happened to some extent in the life science industry. It's part of the reason our biotech industry is in shambles. Many of the companies I work with dream of "going virtual", doing research at an unaffiliated lab, taking credit, moving that research to a massive CMO, then dissolving any physical assets, layoffs, and then there is a just a board, execs and profit. It's totally destructive to actual human progress.
- narrator 6y ago
  I don't think outsourcing manufacturing is destructive of human progress. You got huge companies like AMD and NVIDIA , who certainly contribute to human progress, who outsource all their manufacturing to TSMC because only a few companies worldwide can make those kinds of semiconductors.
  - dbuder 6y ago
    Bad example, cutting edge semiconductors are not like anything else. Even drug research.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Back then, Commodore had an advantage over the competition because they had MOS Technologies as a subsidiary and could rapidly iterate on hardware design. Same in the life sciences business. Nothing is easier than dreaming up a compound, but then you encounter reality, some compounds may be difficult to access synthetically, there are unexpected interactions, and these issues are best sorted out when synthetic chemistry, crystallographic support and the life sciences people are all in the same building. Fabless just doesn't work well outside semiconductors.
    - azinman2 6y ago
      Which is why the trend with Apple is to do everything in-house (SoC, etc). Tight vertical integration facilitates difficult software-hardware technologies.

dannypgh 6y ago

I think this just means employers will still have incentive to hire people to be employees (as then they benefit from the employee's growth), rather than contract out work to firms which may reassign or replace the (now valued, experienced) employee. When you contract out instead of hire, you're giving an incentive to a firm to get the work done as cheaply as possible, and that's not always the right trade-off. The earlier waves of outsourcing were about shifting things like management responsibility out of the company, and I think that was shown to have unintended negative consequences for a lot of firms. I don't think there's much reason why an employer wouldn't be excited about hiring good, talented people from cheaper labor markets now.

danielfoster 6y ago

This. Not to mention it has become much easier for anyone motivated to learn valuable skills online-- now there will be more opportunities to apply them. Someone in the Philippines learning Python on Khan Academy today could very well be competitive for a senior engineering job in 10 years if the career path were possible. I've met countless skilled technical people who could not a get job at XYZ company simply due to visas, not qualifications. Now working for these companies can be a real possibility.

bluGill 6y ago
You forgot to account for domain knowledge. You can be better than me at python, but I know my area and customers. When I'm given a half complete spec I can make good choices for the most part and get done without getting clarification. I can guess what version 2.0 will need well enough that most of the time those features will drop in quickly while major refactoring is required to get them into the better programmers 2.0. Of course there are tradeoffs. A programmer who is much better than me has advantages in quality (assuming you are much better, in my biased opinion I'm great)
- blawson 6y ago
  Domain knowledge isn't always valued the same by those writing the checks, whereas 50% cheaper is far easier to quantify.
tharne 6y ago
You're probably right about this, but I'm betting we'll see political parties in countries all over the world start putting up roadblocks to this sort of thing. It's already happening to a degree. There a number of what you might call "reluctant Trump voters" where I work. The most frequent (and often only) argument you'll hear from them in favor Trump is around immigration and H1-B visas. You'll also notice that the Democrats in the U.S. who are surprisingly quit around Trumps efforts to reduce H1-B issuance. I'd be willing to bet that unrestricted competition for a limited number of high-paying jobs in the developed world would fuel the Nationalist parties and movements that we've been seeing more of in the U.S. and Europe.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  My opinion has been that it's good for US workers if foreigners immigrate and become citizens, because even if they make less than most Americans, they make more than they did in their prior country, which means they are improving the global market for labor, from the point of view of workers. But having classes of people who live in the country but have special restricted rights and never become full citizens worries me. I wish we could move away from the idea that citizenship is a reward for following the rules and instead consider that making people citizens is a benefit for (maybe even vital to preserving) society.

disabled 6y ago

Yeah, and the posters thinking that this will help wealth inequality (either among the general population or just among tech workers collectively as a whole) are hopelessly naive. It is practically guaranteed to make wealth inequality worse, and now tech workers will start to feel a lot of pain, more like the general US population has. This is going to happen faster than other times when offshoring has occurred in various industries historically too. Just think about it. You can bet contract work is going to be commonplace, and you can kiss your benefits goodbye. If you do not think this will happen to you, well, you’re next on the chopping block. Work will become hyper competitive for benefits and for full time status. A good employee will be someone who answers emails 24/7 and within minutes of it being sent, night or day. The work will never end. Surveillance technologies for remote work will remove any semblance of freedom when you work from home. This is all very unlikely to be made illegal in the US in the foreseeable future. Also. populism uprisings that occur in a respective country last on average for 30 years, so you better be thinking in the very long-term for how bad this could actually be.

cl0rkster 6y ago
I'm confused. Perhaps you could clarify how honing your skills to be valuable as a remote worker is somehow the gateway to the rich eating all of us. My personal experience with remote work is that it allows me to be present as a father in my children's lives and also to be more productive. I'm not saying everyone will have that experience, but for me it's an excellent fit. As far as productivity, if we look at productivity increases since 1950, we should be working half as much for the same productivity/pay (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20766443). With voices like Andrew Yang trying to shift social values to valuing the underappreciated like stay-at-home mothers through a UBI, this seems like a positive path forward. I know things seem dark right now, but in my powerless position, I choose to believe there is a better, more positive path forward, and I put my energy into pursuing it. Frankly, I've never met a rich guy whose nose I couldn't bloody. I've rarely met one whose spirit I couldn't cut deeply in less than 15 minutes of conversation.
- rtikulit 6y ago

mc32 6y ago

An additional problem MBAs sometimes miss is that when you export jobs to contract orgs is that this accumulated institutional knowledge is lost—it’s no longer held in-house. Conversely it contributes to the expertise of the contract org. But not all orgs think long term. Or they get enthralled by “core competency”.

take_a_breath 6y ago
I don't think this is really missed by the MBAs, HN's favorite punching bag. These types of opportunity costs are absolutely a part of the make/buy decision process (but maybe undervalued?). I think it has much more to to with the "enthralled by core competency" aspect.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  I'm confused by your use of "enthralled by core competency". I think if an MBA is actively dissembling the structures that brought a successful product together and exerting destructive control over any further research they absolutely deserve some criticism.
  - varjag 6y ago
    There is a huge incentive for the management to find core competency in the cheapest item on the balance sheet.
- mc32 6y ago
  Some executives stay long term, some build portfolios, guide companies through a given stage and jump to the next. They can then say they “saved” this and that by offshoring. What happens 5 years after they leave is of little consequence. Institutional knowledge informs why a solution works better than a shiny. The contract org will push through what works best for them, more than what’s best for your org long term. Contract orgs like checking off Hundreds of NIST or CIS controls as if that in and of itself means anything substantive.
  - 6y ago

gizmo686 6y ago

The "moving target" problem is significant for countries (or geographic regions in the case of large countries or open borders). However, for an individual company, it is a tragedy of the commons situation. Why should a company A pay more to train a bottom tier worker into a high tier worker, when said worker will then be able to move to company B who offshore's its low tier workers. In effect, company A is subsidizing company B's training program.

fludlight 6y ago
Attrition significantly drops if you treat people right. Many of the ones that leave run right back.

bartread 6y ago

> People are a "moving target". What may be a bottom-tier worker now, could very well be a valuable employee in 5-10 years. Many folks have built their career by starting at a low level and then getting promoted and upskilled over time through hard work and commitment. Starting at a low position and advancing is becoming, sadly, a rare thing. I think the validity of this point depends on how you understand "bottom tier". When I read "bottom tier"[1] I tend to read that as a combination of "people who suck at their jobs" and "people who are doing things that are highly commoditized or commoditizable". The former interpretation in particular has nothing to do with seniority. [1] And I'm reading it this way probably because I'm back-projecting based on experience of working with some outsourced/offshored workers who sucked at their jobs.

pnutjam 6y ago
People who suck at their job can learn, and become better. Not all, but everyone was bad at something before they leveled up. Highly commoditized positions are also a great way to learn about less commoditized work. How many old rich people used to say they started in the mailroom.
- Avicebron 6y ago
  How does one deal with a culture of decreasing vertical mobility within a particular organization. They may suck at their job and be shuffled between the bottom tiers of increasingly flat management structures. If there is no room for growth this model fails, many older people did move vertically but this practice has been almost deliberately been removed from corporate life.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    Junior employees must have deliberate exposure to responsibility and challenge in a structured environment that supports them if the are to grow. This is the job of middle management, who are the first target of every MBA driven reorg. Hence the end of development.
    - 6y ago

l8rpeace 6y ago

> The "first wave" and subsequent waves of outsourcing have to a large extent eliminated paths of career advancement for many workers. At first it was unskilled laborers and now it has been creeping up to virtually all technical job descriptions. The wet-dream of MBA's who promote this stuff is corporations consisting of a few C-level people and their board, and then a layer of fab-less product and operations people who just manage supply-chain and services stuff with external vendors. It's an ugly picture but that's what the global supply chain people want. This is how Microsoft operated for a while. Entire support ecosystems were built around Redmond, from non-core competency support (design, boutique marketing, food services, maintenance) to core competency augmentation (vendor, off shore, near shore, local). They still employ that model but to a lesser extent. They've moved away from it based on labor market trends and local competition (more companies have moved to the greater Seattle competing for resources). So I don't know if its a universal doctrine or model that will be employed, but it does seem to have a time and a place.

Avicebron 6y ago

Yea, it's already happened to some extent in the life science industry. It's part of the reason our biotech industry is in shambles. Many of the companies I work with dream of "going virtual", doing research at an unaffiliated lab, taking credit, moving that research to a massive CMO, then dissolving any physical assets, layoffs, and then there is a just a board, execs and profit. It's totally destructive to actual human progress.

narrator 6y ago
I don't think outsourcing manufacturing is destructive of human progress. You got huge companies like AMD and NVIDIA , who certainly contribute to human progress, who outsource all their manufacturing to TSMC because only a few companies worldwide can make those kinds of semiconductors.
- dbuder 6y ago
  Bad example, cutting edge semiconductors are not like anything else. Even drug research.
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Back then, Commodore had an advantage over the competition because they had MOS Technologies as a subsidiary and could rapidly iterate on hardware design. Same in the life sciences business. Nothing is easier than dreaming up a compound, but then you encounter reality, some compounds may be difficult to access synthetically, there are unexpected interactions, and these issues are best sorted out when synthetic chemistry, crystallographic support and the life sciences people are all in the same building. Fabless just doesn't work well outside semiconductors.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Which is why the trend with Apple is to do everything in-house (SoC, etc). Tight vertical integration facilitates difficult software-hardware technologies.