Obamer's job billFollow

I'll answer your questions, and use really small words so you can understand, once you tell us why you hate America so much.

What we really need to do is to compete less for low wage mass production jobs and more on higher end tech jobs. Parts of the country that are doing this have already recovered.

It's insanity to compete against someone getting 1/10-1/100th of the wage for the same job and then complain about the corporate structure. It's not the problem, it's strictly arbitrage. Those traditionally trained in the mass production jobs can be shifted to service sectors, or to fixed point mass production jobs(in sectors like food production, defense, etc.) or acquire the skills they need to be competitive.

So, what you're saying is we're screwed? Our economy is going to be based on everyone selling lattes to each other...

Beats me. But the problem with "Oh, we'll just become a service sector economy" is that someone needs to have a job to afford those services. We're not all just going to go around sanitizing one another's telephones.

That's a hell of a commute just to sanitize telephones.

I used to be uniformly against having tech support in India, until I discovered the major benefit: Work that I need to have done at 1AM EST can be done by them at 2PM HST. So instead of me having to crawl out of bed to access the servers remotely in the middle of the night, I can have someone else access it remotely while I merrily snooze away.

Same thing goes the other way too - some Chinese tech support is outsourced to the US, so work can be done on their data centers in the middle of the night, when it's broad daylight here in the US.

Manufacturing, on the other hand, doesn't get that excuse.

Ah, words. So easy to say. So hard to say sincerely.

This is moderately relevant and I thought it was an interesting take on things:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/14/opinion/carville-white-house-advice/index.html?on.cnn=1



Carville is basically telling Obama to shape up.

People who are actually qualified enough to solve real problems don't want to work off shift no matter what country they're in. Or are you culturally biased enough to assume that a guy with a software engineering degree and 5+ years experienced is going to be willing to work graveyard shift just because he has brown skin? Mighty white of ya there!


I'll give you the answer from personal experience: He doesn't and he wont. Some companies have mistakenly tried to do exactly what you're describing and painfully realized the error they'd made. That's why in the tech world right now, no one talks about just outsourcing services anymore. They do talk about globalizing it, but it's really not the same thing. They've adopted a "follow the sun" model for these sorts of things. It actually works really well, but it's not the job stealer that some people fear.

Way to go right for the race card, Gbaji

I was speaking more about lower tier tech support. You know, the stuff we're pretending Mildred from the plant can jump right into when the plant moves to Indonesia. Or maybe you think everyone will become highly qualified engineers or something. Or maybe you just had the racist strawman argument checked out for too long and and to use it now before you got late fees. Who knows.

Here's a fun experiment: Call consumer tech support for pretty much any company at 1:00pm local time. Let me know if you reach sunny Lincoln, Nebraska or moonlit Calcutta, India.

Edited, Sep 15th 2011 8:19pm by Jophiel

Although not very much if you sell through a super low margin company.

And this is the plan for laid off foundry workers? Gotcha.

Not that working manufacturing or whatever means you're dumb and can't learn computer engineering but there's a decreasing number of people needed in each skill tier and saying "Yeah! We'll just become a service tech economy of highly skilled computer engineers answering phone calls from Bangladesh when it's midnight there!" isn't exactly a compelling solution. People were proclaiming this in 1998 and you can see how far its gotten us (and even worse with the collapse of domestic manufacturing last decade).

No. This is a counter to the assumption that every time a US company hires someone in India it means that a job was lost in the US. You're the one creating this false dilemma about factory workers losing their jobs being somehow connected to this.


If you want factory work to come back to the US, how about pressuring your representatives to lay off the ridiculous environmental restrictions, government red tape, excessive employment regulations, and dozens of other things that affect the total cost of operating a manufacturing plant in the US many times more than just the wages paid to the employees. We could pay line workers in Taiwan the equivalent of $100k/year for every single one of them and it would still be more cost effective to build a fab there than in the US.

The causes of manufacturing job loss are far broader than just one factor. It's pretty much the entire liberal domestic policy which drives them away. And no amount of claiming to fight for jobs and jumping up and down lamenting the loss of those jobs changes that. You guys make it nearly impossible to make a profit operating those businesses in the US and then blame the companies for moving elsewhere. I have always and will always find that baffling. It's like a crazed serial killer running through the girls dorm with a bloody knife wondering why all the cute girls are running away from him. Come back! I'm really a nice guy once you get to know me!