Outsourcing Article

I get a daily e-mail from the Washington Post about technology news. Today's digest (registration required...it's free though) has a good review of the outsourcing of technology jobs. It really gets in to the individual human impact of what is going on.

There are some really good pullquotes from the digest:

It may be that competitive organizations have no choice but to play the labor arbitrage game to survive. It may be that a new wave of innovation and creativity will lead to new industries and new jobs. But in the meantime, millions of smart, talented, diligent people are losing something, and that will change them and their families forever. Their loss should never be discounted, dismissed, or ignored." [from "Fast Company"]

Also from Fast Company (emphasis is mine):

"If you're just laid off, you can tell yourself that the economy swings back and forth, but if it's outsourced offshore, it ain't coming back. It still exists, but it just exists in another place. The IT industry in the United States has gone from being a very high-level, well-paying industry to being very low-paying sweatshop labor, and that's an inexorable trend," Bronstein told Fast Company. She also said, "More than just outsourcing IT or anyone's job, we're outsourcing the American middle class."

First it was the manufacturing jobs. Now it is the tech jobs. What is next?

One question that was raised from a recent Salon article I read was whether or not the savings were truly real. I'll see if I can find the article, but the gist of it was that between the increased cost of oversight (long distance phonecalls, airfare for execs to go back and forth), the decreased quality (due to marginally trained people and poorly written specifications) and the lack of suitable followup support (due to the high turnover of some of these contract firms), that the exercise is less cost effective than initially touted.

The article is here: "When Offshoring Goes Bad" (Salon requires you to get a "daypass" if you are not a subscriber, but this article is worth sitting through the ad).

There is a definite parallel to the manufacturing sector. My brother works as a machinist for a company that makes tools that other companies use to build parts. The company is suffering because there are Chinese companies making the same tools, at one-fourth the quality, but for one-fifth of the price (I don't know the exact cost differences, these are here for illustration). The question becomes, what is the long term impact of buying inferior products?