Outsourcing

The Japanese economy is _not_ in good shape, and it hasn't been for a long time.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

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Reply to
Doug Miller
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Now I remember why I set a filter to highlight your posts.

Thanks, Tim!

Kevin

Reply to
Kevin Craig

They have, and they don't look good...

We had a prime minister over here who for years tried to convince us we had to become competitive when measured against countries that sleep their workers under a banana tree and feed them banana peel.

His period in government is now remembered as the worst period of economic mis-management ever in our short (200 year) history. I'm just wondering...

It's not, it can't be, it will NEVER be good for the citizens. It's all a load of pure unadulterated crap.

Reply to
Noons

Odd. I've bought several shirts at Walmart. On one, a sleeve fell off in the first washing. On another, the placket came unraveled. On two others, buttons were off during the first wearing. I went back to LLBean after that. Shirts are still made in Malaysia, but at least there's an attempt at quality control.

Slacks? They're better. Material is half as thick as stuff selling through LLBean or Land's End, but hey, what the hell. Buy a dozen pair and they will wear for years.

And yes, the Bean and Land's End products do cost more. It's about like the whole outsourcing argument, though: I get 4-6 years from an LLBean shirt and

5-7 weeks from a WalMart shirt. Price differential? LLBean costs about 2-1/2 to 3 times what the WalMart stuff does. Work it out.

As I said, shop rags.

Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle

Reply to
Charlie Self

All I can say is, my experience with clothing from Wal-Mart is 180 degrees apart from what you describe. As I type this, I'm wearing a shirt that I bought at W-M so long ago that I've forgotten exactly how long it was, but it's somewhere in the 5-8 year range. It's showing some wear at the cuffs, collar, and pocket (to be expected at that age), but the all seams are still tight, and all the buttons are still attached -- and this is typical of the shirts I get there. I have three or four other shirts that I bought at the same time, and they're all in similar condiiton.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

For a copy of my TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter, send email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.

Reply to
Doug Miller

I'm in fundamental agreement with this statement. The choice to leave one employer to go to another is under-exercised.

However, it's important to note that this choice becomes ever more difficult to make as employees approach retirement age. Loss of retirement benefits makes this a non-choice for some.

There's no way (IMO) to make a blanket statement either in favor of or against labor unions. As a mechanism for workers to cooperatively deal with workplace problems when management is unwilling to institute solutions, they're effective. When the union becomes a mechanism for the exercise of greed or sanctioning of laziness, they become one of the worst of possible problems. I've seen both scenarios.

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Rich, I agree. I, too, work with a bunch of extremely intelligent and gifted people from India, Bulgaria, Russia, etc. Each and every one of these people have ajob here because they perform.

On the other hand, there is one (count it: ONE!) person from the Indian outsourcing comapny who has potential. I am not saying is good at programming using the products our ERP is built on but has potential. The others go from bad to as bad as it gets. And, like you said, each one of these people were touted as being something wonderful. Our problem is that they are hard to get rid of. We almost have no choice other than take what they give. I would rather have my mother program here than at least one of them--and she has a hard time nagivating WebTV, for crying out loud!

They do have an extensive network and they use it and cultivate it very well. That is how they get things done. There is no way an Indian programmer--or any other profession--is better than an American or whatever nationality, it is the marketing of them and the way they are marketing India as being the IT Mecca.

Reply to
Ray Kinzler

Ahhh! ADABAS... :)

I'm sure you know this now, but CMM Level 5 has damned little to do with

*results*. It's all about process, procedures and policies with an intent to deliver a quality product.

Next time someone mentions Level 5, remind them that NASA was one of the first, and their sh*t still explodes from time to time.. :)

Reply to
mttt

Funny thing is -- plenty of folks are stockholders and don't even know it. Their pension plans are in equities. Heck, chances are their local government and Church is in the market.

Changes my perspective on this. Makes me worry more about my obligations, as an employee, to our shareholders. A lot of Blue-Haired Grandma's in the Corn Belt are depending on me for their returns...

Reply to
mttt

Read the thread on this between you and Charlie and will confess that I'm in your camp on this one. Think you nailed it, and well.

Also think you'd look to history for analogs - our shift from industrial to information processors.

Yeah - remember when we rallyed around Curtis Mathis? Deplored the death of Zenith?

I think I'm thinking more what you're thinking...

Reply to
mttt

My experience w/ shirts from there was more akin to Charlie's. Shirt tails way too short, fabric way too thin. In this case, it was *not* a cost effective experience for me.

Reply to
mttt

As a director of an IT shop in a competitive industry, I say "Good!" Be scared, be very, very scared.

I've enough confidence in my skills -- and my team's -- to say "Bring 'em on."

Reply to
mttt

Who owns most od the stock? I say it is the CEO and his henchmen who own the lion's share.

How, pray tell, are the remaining employees secure in their jobs? If they can outsource parts of the company, they can outsource almost all of it. Not 100%, for sure, but a huge part of it.

And just how are the companies themselves going to survive? For this race to reach a fantastic bottom-line, companies will get overly greedy and start doing as much as they can in places like China, where there are nowhere NEAR the laws we have in the US or in Europe, and they will start to manufacture the exact same products as we make here. Hmmm, now they will undercut the US and European companies on the same products.

Yeah, I would say this is a real win-win situation--for the people who run the companies and the ones who own THE MOST stock in these comapnies because they will make out the most in the short-run.

I say this time it is a little different. WHy in the world is it better for a country to fire their own citizens and permit people from other countries to come in under things like H-1B, h-2B, and L-1 visas and perform the EXACT SAME JOBS that the people who were laid-off performed? How is that better? Because 24 of them live in the same

2-bedroom apartment and can live on substandard wages in the host country? How is it better when the host country is paying unemployment benefits to laid-off workers but nowhere near the same amount is coming in to offset the amount that is going out because the wages are nowhere near the same?

How does a country like the US maintain its infrastructure? How can people survive when they purchased a house at the going rate but have their real income get slashed by 75%? How can the people who live in the host country AFFORD to keep living there.

I disagree. Places like India are stealing the jobs from American citizens. They are performing THE SAME JOB. I say competition is when somebody makes a better widget in their factory and outsells your. It is not competition when they just push the employeee out of your factiry and take over.

Well, here is another truth: I have know American citizens who said they will just roll with the ounches and attempted to get jobs with places like Tata in Buffalo, New York--but they won't hire Americans. I have know a couple who attmepted to see if they could go to Bangalore to get a job in it--no way. They are not permitted to hire people outside of India.

I think this is artifically interfering with the market--jsut to make sure that the India IT Mecca isn't tarnished.

Reply to
Ray Kinzler

Morris Dovey states:

Look at what I wrote. Check the dates I used. I said absolutely zip about unions today, or for the last 40 years.

Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle

Reply to
Charlie Self

Yup - did. However, evaluation of any solution to a problem isn't complete unless it considers the consequences of that solution. The short-term consequences were more or less as intended. The longer term consequences seem to me to be a mixed bag.

Failure to plan for and account for long-term consequences would appear to be at the very heart of a great many problems - including this thread's outsourcing issues.

(My 2¢ worth)

Reply to
Morris Dovey

I see. So people who are wealthy or company owners are not entitled to optimize the use of their property in any (nonfraudulent) way they wish? Since when does _who_ benefits matter? Either you believe in fundamental fairness or you do not. If you have the right to dispose of _your_ property and money as you see fit, why shouldn't the wealthy individual also have this privilege?

Oh, and for the record, in almost all publicly traded companies of any size, the CEO and their "henchmen" (!?) own a very SMALL proportion of the stock. Stock in wealthy companies tends to be owned in large measure by institutional investors - people who invest the "little guy's" 401K money. Almost every working person in America today is a stockholder, at least indiretly, in one form or another. It is in _everyone's_ best interest that corporations maximize profits and do well.

Assuming a company survives, at some point the company will have trimmed all the fat that it can. This means it will be _healthier_. Healthier companies are better for the remaining employees. No, there is no guarantee that the remaining employess will have jobs for life. But an unhealthy company goes out of business and _everyone_ loses their jobs.

How many companies have you run, and how many payrolls have you ever worried about? I've helped start/grow, 4 different companies. You CANNOT outsource "almost all" of any company. Sales, marketing, and so forth, almost by definition, have to be close to the customer base, at a minimum.

Yes, some companies will cease to exist. That is the natural order of competition. Please reexamine the past 150 years of economic history in the West. For each major seachange where an industry was lost (electronics to Japan, clothing to China, manufacturing to the 3rd Word), the US economy and standard of living continued to GROW. The health of an economy is not measured in how many companies and jobs we "keep at home", it is measured by how _productive_ the economy is. Almost 300 years ago, Adam Smith (the father of economics) made the powerful case that wealth is only about productivity, not goods, land, cows, or any similar thing. Sadly, this generation of Westerners (who have benefitted enormously from Enlightenment thinkers like Smith) don't even grasp these fundamentals.

As I said, the middle-class "little guys" own most of the stock via institutional investors. You are sadly misinformed about how money and ownership actually works in public corporations - at least in most cases.

The "country" isn't doing it. This is not some Marxist state we live in. _Private sector_ companies are making decisions to optimize their return on investment. These decisions may- or may not be wise, but the marketplae will figure that out for them.

I repeat - please reexamine the last century and a half of economic GROWTH in this country. It involved plenty of "lost" jobs and industries.

This is a fundamentally racist position whether you intended it to be so or not. The word "steal" implies fraud or dishonesty. So you claim that India, as a nation, is dishonestly taking what is rightful the American citizen's? Could it be that India is doing a better job competing in certain sectors? Could it be that some Americans are overpaid for what they do in context of the global economy? No, no, it must be those pesky dishonest Indians...

Your view of competition is really flawed. Competition involves doing the same thing "better". "Better" can mean "with improved quality", it can mean "faster", it can mean doing it a whole new way so it is "more efficient", and most assuredly, it can mean "cheaper". If we take your view of economics, we should all get rid of word processors and go back to manual typewriters because, we're just doing the same thing we always did ...

And I know the exact opposite situation wherein American citizens work for foreign companies both here and overseas. Neither of our anecdotal observations in the matter prove anything whatsoever.

You have a lot of poorly informed options. So let me help your understanding from the perspective of someone who has actually _worked_ with Indian outsourcing. India is NOT an "IT Mecca". For certain kinds of repetitive IT tasks like call centers, production programming, and so forth, they _can_ offer superior value than what can be done domestically. However, Indian IT is nowhere near ready to replace the front-end/creative/design part of the IT process. When the task is entirely specified and more-or-less a manufacturing process, the Indians do really well. But where there is a large degree of innovation or risk or uncertainty involved in the design, the results are quite poor. This is, IMHO, an artifact of the very regimented and government-centric culture of the country.

Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Japan's economy has been a disaster for almost a whole generation precisely because of this sort of nonsense. They are just beginning to recover. And guess what ... they are discovering that sometimes layoffs are required. They are no longer the low cost producer on the block. I'd expect them to start outsourcing work themselves at some point.

Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Remember, I said they made the "right" choice to outsource which led to sustainable growth. It is surely possible to make bad decisions about outsourcing or anything else. But the point here is that a company driven to sustainable growth benefits all its principals: The stockholders, the employees, the executives, and the customers.

This is a corporate governance problem that the market also corrects. If The Board fails to set appropriate metrics for executive comp, then the company will ultimately fail...

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Reply to
Tim Daneliuk

Tim Daneliuk responds:

Which sectors? Companies search for lower prices, not greater efficiency, in today's marketplace. Indians manage to take their place in line by providing, in my experience and that of many others, inferior services and low productivity at much lower prices.

Not necessarily Indians. The word now is that many Mexicans are very unhappy as their vaunted manufacturing revolution grinds to a comparative halt. The jobs are moving to China and Thailand (which also seems to be pulling jobs out of China).

Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle

Reply to
Charlie Self

clothes made 5-8 years ago were better made than that currently available in walmart. it's a race to the bottom.

Reply to
Charles Spitzer

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