Letters to the Editor
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But it's still not a high demand skill
I'm sorry but it's not. Most, virtually all IT work is simply working the same nuts and bolts over and over and over. There just isn't that much of a need to invent a shiny new widget. And the times that you do, you wind up with an expensive one off. Brilliant doesn't give me a repeatable process. It gives me a kludge I have to hand off to someone else to turn it into that. I need to avoid that mess at all costs. Why? Because I don't want to worry about the one guy who wrote his own Java engine to support his 80,000 lines of undocumented code.
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thanks JudgeMental RealName for discussing my question
about five years ago i heard of the H1-B crisis, then offshoring. i had expected that all these unemployed programmers who had computers, skills and time on their hads would make a big impact on the web. they didn't. the only thing new that has come along since then is blogs. and what are blogs? simple textarea fields. first done by laymen, then, after a while, programmers took the idea and made it easy and commonplace. the time of great creativity was in the early nineties right after it got out of academia but before it was gobbled up by corporations. there's a great mass of creativity out there in the U.S. but it's outside school and work. it's no surprise to me that the letters section is the most interesting part of salon.
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Capitalism Isn't Fair; It's Just Right
David Silverman's short time with his bankruptcy counsel provided him with the best advice - Get over it!
Capitalism isn't fair; being the best person or the hardest worker or a visionary does not mean that you will win. But, capitalism is generally right.
As Silverman started to dream about building his typesetting empire by "rolling up" the fragemented US industry, he had already started to "drink his own lemonade." At that very moment, typsetting was already a commodity, and the cheapest commodity always wins.
As to the concept that foreign outsourcing is somehow to blame for the failure of the business to compete, that is putting your head in the sand so you don't see the entire value equation. You reap what you sew. Sucessful companies sell their goods throughtout the world with the blessings of their governments; those governments can't then stop the use of these same goods as means of commerce throughout the world.
We want to help the people of the world by educating them and giving them the tools be successful. We can't then say "Just don't be too successful."
What the government needs to do is create policies that allow for continuous improvement in the training and technology available to its populous. Don't look to the government to stop commerce, look to the government to empower commerce.
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Solutions are at Hand...If We Can Bring Ourselves to Change
This article's hopeless tone struck me as being ridiculous so I thought I would throw out some solutions that aren't fifths of booze.
1 - Close the tax code/trade agreement loophole
America's outdated tax structure creates a tax incentive for companies to move abroad. Companies leave and forego our onerous income tax, human wages and environmental standards then re-imports the cheaply made good back into America without a VAT. The rest of the world slaps a huge VAT on any american made good entering their ports from the exporting country. Would you keep your company in a place with that double whammy? I would say the answer has been a resounding no. The WTO doesn't seem to mind though, so long as these other countries don't call this a 'tariff'. If the WTO doesn't adjust the playing field, slap a real american tariff on these goods.
2- Responsible investing
I feel that this race-to-the-bottom problem that plagues the globalized world is a product of nascent company owners like me and you. We shareholders hold the power because we own these companies but we all forget what we are investing in. With all the e-trades, we are always the new owners of the companies but take no responsibility. I can almost guarantee that everyone reading this has a least some money in a DJIA-30 or S&P500 index fund and doesn't think twice about where those dollars are really being invested. I've done and so have you. You just see the nice 7-10% year-to-year return, not the rust-belt of america. Closing this chasm can only help.
These are just a couple of things we could do. America does not have to turn into a wasteland for Chinese and Indian people to join us in the first world.
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Outsourcing is not equal to fair trade.
It would be nice if outsourcing meant that we were raising the standard of living for those in the 3rd world, but the truth is that once the monopoly is held, it will control the cost, with most of the profit going to the company, not to the country or its employees. I work in film and I can tell you that filming in Canada is cheaper, but people still get fair wages - cost effectiveness comes from city fees, not by paying actors %75 less. Support of outsourcing causes legalized slavery, not a better standard of living. The only way to guarantee that the standard of living is raised is to make companies that outsource pay import taxes. Outsourcing isn't new. People who got $.05/day wages 20 years ago aren't making US minimum wage. If you want to raise standards of living, raise your ethics - don't support companies that don't pay fair wages. We raised standards of living by passing laws that demanded fair work hours/pay and abolished child labor, not by "outsourcing" the empire. Unions helped guarantee this as well and none of these things exist in poorer countries. Silverman is naive if he thinks Indian companies are importing USA work ethics, (I'm talking the work ethics of his father's IBM, not today's Walmart, which is importing Indian work ethics).
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creative person is never unemployed by definition
Thanks JudgeMental. The world is definitely a mix of two classes of people: whiners and go-getters. The creative-whiners are considered misfit and thrown out of the market. Also there are whiners who think they are creative. The splash you see on the web by people blaming others and claiming they being creative geniuses are the ones confusing Mr Sugarman. A creative mind is never unemployed as thinking does not cost money. They are already working on their next project and thinking ahead. It is likely that they are working as an entry level programmer or system administrator to save time and work on their next dream. I am not sure what the splash on the web means. Knowledge of technology, math and science just assures that you are trained for this century. It does not make any more creative than you already are. Without this training however, you will not be developing RFID chips or biometric payment protection devices or the next second life platform to revolutionize net again. In this changing world, it is almost certain that you will need to change career four to five time at least in a 30 year work life. It is a completely different paradigm that we are not preparing ourselves for. If you are not looking ahead and preparing yourself, you can only downgrade from an obsolete programming language job to a minimum wage job requiring no specialization. If you are not learning the new skills before your job is gone, this market will eat your future with great pleasure. So, no matter if you are any good at being creative, you have to be really good in learning fast and plan for the next wave before it rolls over you. Mr Silverman’s model is exploiting gaps in the market or skills to earn money. In a way, the death of his business is a good thing. He will adapt or he will be vacationing for a long time. The same happened to all the company who earned by programming in COBOL during Y2K crisis. Now either they are gone or they are developing software for handheld devices.