Letters to the Editor
designated_knitter
Published Letters: 88 Editor's Choice: 3
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Racism is wrong... PERIOD!
[Read the article: Who gets to use the N word?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This whole notion that racism is "ok" if it is directed towards the "white" population and/or practiced by a minority is sick and twisted. The notion that it should be tolerated by African-Americans, Asians, Muslims, Fundamentalist-"Christians" etc because they perceive themselves to be persecuted is just dangerous. Because of the racist hateful beliefs of one man, 32 innocent people from Virginia Tech are dead. Because of racism (and the uneducated views of our president), you have Iraq embroiled in a civil war and thousands of Americans dead. Even racist minorities can cause a great deal of pain and suffering -- emotional and physical. How many Iraqis have been killed by American forces despite the fact that the number of American troops is a small fraction of the Iraqi population? How many Americans have died because a small minority of the Iraqi population is willing to die in order to regain the sovereign status of their nation?
Racism is self-defeating. Racism is a form of anger and as long as you have anger in your life, you will never have any inner-peace. That anger keeps you from achieving your full potential because it sucks your intellectual and physical energy. And anger, in the long run, will not produce any desirable results... it simply breeds more anger and racism.
I really wish we could all just move beyond the whole Imus thing... As the events of last week suggest, if the worst thing that we, as a society, have to worry about is some the crass language of a AARP-eligible white guy, then we have nothing to complain about. Tragically, however, that doesn't appear to be the case.
Finally, none of us lives in a vacuum. Everything we say and do does have an impact on others, though you may not recognize it. If you don't believe it, spend some time with kids and you will start seeing yourself in a whole new light. You will learn so much about yourself -- good and not-so-good -- because you will start seeing it in them.
Dismounting my soapbox with a double back-flip!
Respectfully,
Designated_Knitter
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Outsourcing is alive and well...
[Read the article: "The myth of high-tech outsourcing"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Besides income level, another interesting tidbit of information is whether these jobs are short-term contracts vs full-time jobs with paid benefits. It is my experience that IT and Software companies are shifting that staffing model to a "just-in-time" workforce -- hiring contractors for crunch times and letting them go immediately after a product is released. To me, this is a form of "domestic" out-sourcing.
Additionally, it isn't just programming jobs that our outsourced. One of the companies I worked for last year was outsourcing a significant amount of their QA (software testing) work to China. The work that wasn't outsourced was filled with part-time college students who were making 17.00/hour and no benefits.
At another company, they routinely filled positions using short-term (3 months or less) contractors -- most of whom were from India, Pakistan, or Asia. These contractors would often accept a wage that was significantly lower than the typical salary of an American citizen and also offered no job security or benefits. Many of these workers were not even greencard holders. They would become an employee of an off-shore "consulting firm". The off-shore consulting firm would then contract with a regular agency who then contracts with the actual employer. Needless to say, the only people that were really making any money from this arrangement were the employment agencies. By the time each agency took their "cut" (as much as 50%), the employee was earning roughly 20.00/hour. Again, that may sound like alot. However, it does not include health insurance, taxes and with the cost of living in this area (Research Triangle Park), you are left with about 20,000 to live on per year -- about the same as someone working in the fast-food industry and less than the average school teacher -- the benchmark for poorly paid jobs relative to education.
In the last year alone, my income went from 6 figures to 55K with no insurance.
Now you can argue that this is the free-market system alive and well. However, their are broader implications associated with this trend. For example, this practice is increasingly common in pharmaceutical software companies where the software is used to analyze the efficacy and safety of drugs under development. When you have inexperienced non-technical individuals testing software, they are likely to miss many defects which, when used by researchers, can lead incorrect inferences about the safety or dosage of a drug. Do you really want to be taking a drug that was analyzed using software that mixed up pounds versus kilograms? This is a relatively simple mistake but is typical of the type that is not caught prior to software release.
Software is only as good as the people who write and test the it. One reason for the crises in software quality is because many companies are trying to improve their share price by replacing skilled and experienced professionals with inexperienced low-paid workers who have little knowledge of the application nor the history associated with the application. Combine that with the communication issues that arise with outsourcing and you have an industry that is built on a house of cards waiting to collapse.