Jobs perl or unix or linux seattle

Reader response to Lisa Vaas' May 13, 2002 article, "Fair Trade on Jobs?"

Your article came at an appropriate time since my development team at a global investment bank found out yesterday that we were being outsourced. However your article should have addressed the following issues:

First, while traditional manufacturing has been exposed to global competition for years, why are there still autoworkers in Detroit? Corn growers in Kansas? Textile workers in South Carolina? As for IT, why are there still programmers in Silicon Valley when Iowa is much cheaper?

You fail to mention the role of productivity, and consequently miss the fact that American workers are much more productive than their competitors. Overall, American workers are 20 percent more productive than their closest competitors, the Germans and Japanese. While it may make sense to send large projects having relatively straightforward coding requirements to India, what about projects where creativity is required? How well does offshore handle last-minute changes to the specs?

There is no doubt that the IT industry is changing. However you missed an opportunity to explore the larger issues that are out there for the industry, and stating that "The world is your competition" simply belabors the obvious.

James Kirwin

Even though I believe that what many companies are doing in this area is reprehensible (for example, companies that lay off developers with no severance and move their work offshore), I do want to be careful not to shoot the messenger. I did take exception to one set of facts that you presented: the comparison of Indian rates of $25-$40 to U.S. rates of $150-$200. You're not getting even close to the same skill set within those ranges. A U.S. rate of $70-$100 would be more accurate, would still support your premise and would be less inflammatory.

The only way that I could imagine corporations paying the higher rates for comparable skills would be if they contracted them from a Big 5 (4?) company, in which case the phrase "a fool and his money are soon parted" comes to mind.

Mike McGonagle CTO Exchange Solutions

I read your article with great interest. But my question remains: Isn't anyone concerned about security and espionage? If they are only paid a fraction of the wage of programmers over here, won't they be more easily persuaded to make an extra buck on the side by selling the source code or its vulnerabilities? Are there extra security measures required/involved with (oversea) outsourcing? Everything comes with a price. It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little.

And yes, I hoped companies would see beyond the fast buck and support their own economy, because it is those people who buy your product or service.

Sven Thirion Web engineer Smith Consulting Group Ltd. Tinley Park, Ill.

Excellent article; however, I'd like to comment on the potentially destructive, long-term effects of off-shoring, particularly in the politically charged global environment where United States interests are at stake. While certainly a seemingly cost-effective near-term solution to shore up the corporate balance sheets, ultimately our economy as a whole will suffer with the loss of these (relatively) high-paying jobs.

Companies like AT&T had outsourced their Consumer area to Computer Science Corporation (CSC), which in turn has offshored the majority of Consumer systems with the exception of their Residential Account Maintenance Database. This resulted in the layoffs of American CSC (former AT&T) employees since last August, and the trend is accelerating. Other notable American companies are indeed accelerating their offshore work. This will lead to continued higher unemployment, and not all of these people will be able to switch to project management, even if the PM ranks would support such an increase.

In New Jersey we've seen the considerable erosion of jobs in the telecommunications industry with the majority of those people unable to find employment, let alone comparable employment. Since the salary range reflected is within the $60,000 to $120,000 area, this in turn will eventually reflect a downturn in other areas of our local and national economy.

At a time when America needs to protect its citizens, and the integrity of its data, offshoring is not a viable strategy when we look to the future security of the United States.

Michael Dessoye Advanced Enterprise IM Solutions Inc.

Citing Gartner statistics only serves to perpetuate the myth that a company can always get it done more cheaply overseas. That's just not the case. Check the http://www.slashdot.org site for a thread within the past week on managing overseas development efforts for some real-world examples of this gone awry.

Just as an FYI, some of us over here in the good old U.S. of A, even in high-cost-of-living areas like Seattle, have hourly rates closer to the high end of India's "bargain" $25-$40/hour than the Gartner-cited $150-$200/hour, because we have adjusted our rates downward to what companies are willing to pay in the current market.

For example, I'm a coder with 15 years of operating system and applications-level experience on GNU Linux/UNIX and Windows (Perl, C, C++, Visual Basic, SQL and nearly everything else), who holds Sun and Microsoft certifications, and 20 hours a week of my time is currently being billed at $40/hour. It's half of what I was getting in the dot-com years, but given the choice of 20 hours per week "on the bench" waiting for a $75/hour gig, and working at a discount that keeps me billable during that half of the week, I prefer staying busy at the lower rate.

If U.S. companies don't like paying the big bucks, they just need to get off their lazy take-what-the-usurious-body-shops-offer duffs and actually spend time tracking down contractors with reasonable hourly rates (here's a hint: where you find one, you usually find more than one, as most experienced contractors have a small network of known and trusted colleagues with whom they share leads and larger jobs).

We are DEFINITELY out here in 2002, even if we were pretty hard to find a couple years ago. Time and cost-savers including a minimal (if any) time zone difference that makes meetings and phone interaction easier; ease and lower cost of travel for in-person meetings; and no language or cultural barriers; more than make up for a couple extra dollars of hourly rate.

I could almost buy the idea of outsourcing back in the dot-com era. And today, it's still appropriate for many activities that can be handled AUTONOMOUSLY by offshore groups, without much need for interaction with folks in the United States. But as for splitting development among a few architects in the United States and a few dozen programmers overseas, I just don't think the cost savings is what it's claimed to be. (Plus, I'm tired of all the Indian contract house spam hitting our corporate mailboxes. Who on earth is actually hiring these spammers and rewarding them for unsolicited bulk commercial email????? HELLO! Ask your geeks, if you haven't fired them all already. Such tactics in the name of advertising are not socially acceptable on the Net and should not be tolerated.)

(Name withheld)

The article "Fair Trade on Jobs" begs a full discussion of the root causes of international IT competition. How many of these foreign workers were educated and trained by U.S. universities? I can think of one major state university in the Southeast where over 90 percent of the graduate students and 100 percent of the PhD students in one engineering department were foreign nationals, most intent on returning to their home countries, upon graduation. Most, I suspect, are now working for companies that are competing with U.S. firms.

The universities alone should not be blamed. The financial incentives for the universities to recruit foreign students who pay full fare--rather than needing scholarships, tuition assistance, teaching assistantships or industrial sponsorship--are overwhelming. Equally at fault are the state and Federal government programs that actively recruit students, grant student visas and provide financial assistance to foreign students.

In short, one of the many causes of our IT job crisis is not just the cost but the quality of offshore employees whom we have helped educate in our taxpayer-supported university systems. Much as I hate to admit it, maybe the labor unions had it right all along: Buy American.

Jeffrey D. Wise CEO Apogee Systems Inc.

In this climate of cost cutting, how do we stem the impact of offshore firms taking our jobs and having an impact on our salaries?

When I last looked at your poll: "Are you concerned that more IT jobs are being outsourced offshore?" I believe the response was overwhelming: Almost 80 percent said yes!!