Level playing field? An american needs to make $50 hour just to make the ends meet while an Indian or Russian is willing to do the same work for $5 hour with no benefits, cause it's still a royal compensation in those countries. Some level playing field it is. This is very true. And if we all get off the high horse, we'll realize, that some will adapt and make it, while lots of middle class folks are going to perish. They are not all Rocket Scientists you know, just qualified Software developers, accountants, engineers, CS/Tech Support people etc. They just cannot compete with $5 hour competition from overseas and have no chance to become rocket scientists either. And even if they did, business does not need that many rocket scientists anyway. And even if they needed them, Russian rocket scientists are just as good or better and will be able to significantly undercut american rates in forseeble future. This is probably 50% of the middle class or more we are talking about which may disappear pretty fast. I can't imagine how it's going to be good for the country.
Investment banks intend to outsource about 8% of the US financial research jobs in the next 5 years. Highlights: ... India to expand outsourcing basket with new services
I did my MS from Penn State, which is an OK university (top 10 etc). If you look at the faculty listing for teh department of computer science, you will find that about 80 % of the *faculty* are foreigners. I just did that yesterday (not in relation to this thread, but to see what was going on at Penn State) and I was astounded !
Few weeks ago, I was amazed to find out that a fresh grad from a top univeristy in China earns about US$160 per month at Shenzhen. In US, if you are over 40 and unemployed, it is very hard to land another good job. In China, the cutoff age is 35. :eek:
This outsourcing hype sounds like dotcom mania. I have seen several reports on job outsourcing to India and other countries out sourcing industry and they sound and look distinctly familiar to the dotcom reports. I am in regular touch with senior managers and VCs active in this space. It is classic internet/dotcom type bubble hype. Internet was supposed to obliterate everything. During the mania I was COO of one of these dotcoms. I have a report from one of the top most consultant company in USA predicting the space we were in will be a 20 billion industry in few years. There were around 40 companies in that space, guess what not even one survives today. I have seen recent report from the same consultant predicting job outsourcing to India will be similar sized industry. Same is the case today about outsourcing. There is incredible hype around the business, largely fueled by some big consultant companies, venture capitalist ,the Indian media and Indians. You have to understand the motivations of all parties involved. The consultant want client and more assignment, the VCs wants investors and want to exit through IPOs. It sounds and smells like bubble. R&D jobs will not go to India or any other countries, part of the processes are going but the vital processes will not go for the simple reason you can not duplicate customer experience. There are number of companies like Unilever and P&G tried this and they realized you can not duplicate customer experience in another country. A scientist who has seen a laundromat only on television or few visit to USA can not create a detergent if rest of his country uses bucket wash and maids. Even though foreigners earn more Ph.D.'s in USA, they do not go back to their country they become US citizens. There is no problem if American kids want to be on Idol, entertainment is one of the largest export and most successful export of USA Even in the IT field most of the new new things which are happening are happening in USA like business intelligence, wireless, nano tech. What you hear about Intel and all other is lot of PR hype and incremental advances. There are significant issues companies which have outsourced processes are facing and customer dissatisfaction is high. Which does not get reported. There are significant infrastructure issues involved in most of these countries. There are huge political risk. Like typical dotcom mania only the hype gets reported. The job problem in USA has a lot to do with overbuilding during the bubble era. Take software programmers, during the bubble so many jobs were available in startups, those jobs are never going to come back. Same is true of lot of management jobs which were created during the mania, if those companies do not exist those jobs do not exist. USA has a distinct advantage over other countries and that is it has a strongely ingrained entrepreneurial culture which is engineered in to peoples DNA, and political process as long as that remains there will be new jobs created by new companies. The crash broke down this machinery due to the backlash against VCs and IPO's. The machine has just about started rumbling.
It's funny how several posts assume that because the best research results happen at US companies, the scientists conducting that research are born-and-bred Americans and attended only US schools. My dad was a math professor for over 30 years and chairman of his department for eight years--most of his colleagues as far back as I can remember came from overseas universities. It's true that schools like University of Moscow, etc., are better than US schools--the American education system and its students are far behind the rest of the world. My dad would travel to European math conferences to meet the world's best mathemeticians, who are often from Russia and Eastern and Central Europe. But why then do we still produce the world's best R&D and businesses? Well, it's not the quality of our schools. It's our legal protections, free-market economy and high standard of living. Top researchers and students from around the world immigrate to the US to advance their careers because here they can keep the fruits of their labor and earn as close to their market value as possible. I read an article about a year ago about how the US puts out thousands more patents every year than all the other nations put together. This is for the simple fact that: 1) international patents aren't protection enough for the researchers/companies to cash in on their R&D investment whereas US patent protections are better-enforced, and 2) many top researchers in other nations see the compensation for their efforts either taken away or limited by their foreign employers or governments. Think about it: Say you're a guy in China, getting ready to go to college. You can't afford to go to a US college yet, so you barely get into a highly-competitive Chinese college (yes, their universities are very good, believe it or not) and work three jobs to make it through. Getting any less than top honors is not an option. Then, using your honors and top grades, you get your only ticket out of China. You get a scholarship to go to a decent US school for your Master's degree, and you work as a TA, making peanuts and getting a green card by working for a local company. Once again, nothing less than top honors are acceptable--no keggers and frat parties for you! You get into a good US university and finish your PhD. After a few years in post-doc, you get a job with a good research firm and are paid the equivalent of 200 times what you would have made in China with the same education. What's more, the quality of life is far better in the US, where you get credit for your discoveries, can travel and speak freely at scientific symposiums, and are completely free to build your own career however you want. Contrast that to China, where you would be controlled as a national resource and would have less political freedoms and mobility than the average Chinese citizen. (This story is almost exactly my dad's story.) This is why we see such a huge number of foreign-educated researchers in US companies and universities. Even though the world's best mathematicians may be in Russia and Europe, the vast majority of top foreign researchers aren't nationalistic enough to insist on staying in their birth countries and instead choose to pursue the US standard of living. So, before you claim how good Harvard, et. al, are, take a look at their faculty and student statistics and note the very high percentages of foreign-educated professors and students. Foreign universities are indeed better than those in the US, but our schools attract the business-minded students, while theirs tend to keep pure academics--scientists who are more interested in advancing their science than applying science to business. So, as long as we keep importing the world's better minds in droves and exporting the less-demanding jobs, we'll keep our top economic ranking. And, if we fail to stay the best economy in the world, it won't be because our companies are exporting jobs. It'll be because our government's economic, political and social controls have gotten to the point where the US is no longer the most attractive place for the world's better minds to work. At that point, I wouldn't hesitate to emmigrate to whatever nation is then the best with the freest economy and political environment and the best standard of living. (In other words, we're number one because we're the freest nation in the world--if we were to impose protectionist policies to restrict job exports or try harder to redistribute wealth, the end result is less freedom for and less attraction of the world's best workers/producers.)
dchang0, that was my POINT exactly. A lot of phds are awarded to foreigners. A lot of faculty from top US schools are foreigners. And many of them are pure academics too. Not all of business minded. Pure math. Pure physics,etc. But everyone wants to stay here because of our high standards of living. My point is to project much much farther down the road when perhaps the US standard of living is lower or other countries catch up. A lot of Indian entrepeneurs are coming back to India NOT out of nationalistic pride, but for $. They are starting companies there and capitalizing on the outsouricing boom etc. Or at least that's what I heard. And while it's TRUE, that we are probably still the greatest country on Earth with the best political system, tbe freest, the highest standard of living on average, and having lots of individual choices. However, it does NOT apply to every Americans. If you are poor, uneducated, lower or lower middle class, you'll STRUGGLE harder than before because of the jobs you once had will no longer be there. And not everyone can go to a top school and do research nor would everyone WANT to. Some people are happy do their accounting, programming, financial services or whatever they do. Not everyone wants to be an academic or science researcher. So, what do you do about those people? That's the reality in the US. We are a great country only if you can seize those opportunities. If this trend continue will can become a 2nd world country with serious dicthomy! And it's not just the lower class. A large segment of the Middle Class will disappear. Then what?
misctrader: Does ANYTHING apply to ALL Americans? Are we all rich? No. Are we all happy? No. Are we all in good health? No. Do we all need PhDs to keep our jobs? No. Is there any country in the world where no one has to struggle? LIFE IS A STRUGGLE, and we all do what we can to survive, and beyond that, advance ourselves. If there are Americans who don't want to do what it takes to stay afloat in this job market or tomorrow's, too bad for them. Higher education is fast becoming a prerequisite for even average jobs, and there's nothing we can do about it or "do" for them. They have to do what it takes for themselves. If we do try to "do something" for them, we'll only accelerate the destruction of the middle class. After all, redistribution of wealth simply means stealing from the able and willing and giving it to the able and unwilling in the name of the disabled. And that only drags everybody down and pushes the highly-mobile better and best workers out. I congratulate those Indians you described for their entreprenuerial spirit. They are bringing the American dream back to their homeland, where millions more Indians live in squalor than Americans. I hope that every country can advance as much as we have, and I hope that we are wise enough to stay out in front leading the advance. If we don't, then we'll surrender our top spot to some other nation. So, we can whine and mope, refuse to adapt, and try to install protectionist policies that are doomed to fail, or we can get ourselves in gear and make ourselves more marketable, individually and as a nation.