Yeah protectionism is sooo bad, or maybe you somehow do not seem to understand that contrary to BS rhetoric, it does work for Japan now and worked for USA in the past. Instead, this nation actually promotes offshoring by Free Trade Agreements and tax breaks. You're right, let's just keep going down this road of sending every job we can to sweatshops. It is bound to work wonders for this consumer economy. Oh wait, the wonders have already happened, if you open your eyes.
Have you ever considered that maybe your commission cut is crap and no quality worker wants to work for you because either A) better places to work at or B) can't make worthwhile money with you. Maybe anyone worthwhile is already working elsewhere and is happy at their position. You are getting the riffraff and you obviously have a revolving door policy, almost every commission base business does. The fact is that you are the one who is lazy and do not want to recognize that fact. To find quality contractors on pure commission base takes time & work. Go hire a Mexican, whose cost of living is rock bottom and who will work for pennies, cause that is apparently what you need. As someone who has worked with the Indian counterparts, all I know is that their work quality is horrific (for the most part). They may bust their ass for hours, but the result is crap. As someone who used to supervise these operations, I would rather have a "lazy" American who knows how to do the task quickly, efficiently & correctly rather than a "hardworking" Indian who will waste hours upon hours, deliver the task late and with the wrong result. Get it through your heads. The corporations are not replacing American labor with equivalent counterparts. The quality of product/service takes a significant hit. That's where the "cost savings" come from, if they even do, as a lot of this nonsense has a lot of lies behind it, especially on the numbers. The fact is that any Indian IT counterpart who is actually worthwhile, will not work for the average wage that is being paid in Mumbai or Bangalore. Thats why all these offshoring firms are moving around from one Indian city to another, looking for cheaper and significantly worse labor. The numbers do not even make sense on paper anymore if you have to pay the premium wages for Indian labor. Bottom line is that you get what you pay for.
Same here... Two examples... my partner and i are a bit coded out after 10 years... love the Design and Architecture part of custom software dev but you get 'code burn' doing left brain logic all day for years... Its why so many programmers are always pissed off for no good reason... IMO... Code Burn... anyway... Example 1: Being burnt out - we tried working with an American Project Manger who was supervising our specs to an Indian company for XML and ASP.NET ecommerce work... We only wanted them to code a simple VB.net ASP.net page that would pull data from a SQL Server Backend DB (TSQL queries) and push / load it into a text file and ask the user where he wanted to save it with a windows dialog box... Far from Rocket Science... We waited for four months and watched them come up with - NOTHING - that worked or was even close to our specs yet the American Project manager worked with them all the time on other projects (which must have been extremely simple stuff since ours was not hard at all)... Finally to prove a point my partner and I cracked out the whole solution IN 2 lazy slow careful HOURS and then emailed it to the project manager in disgust. Example 2: Just this last 2 weeks... To test out the bid estimate and work process of a number of Indian coding companies we sent them a simple request for VB programming that would pull data from one table and parse it by a field that had year ranges in it and insert the parsed data into a specific table that would only have 1 year for each record... Pretty straight forward... My partner could do this in one hour - TOPS... Me... in about 1.75 hours to write all the code... build the forms, etc... One Indian Company came back with a bid of $80 for 4 hours of work... we Okay'ed it and now are waiting 2 weeks for them to deliver... nothing so far... Another Indian company bid $575 dollars ... with my jaw hitting my knee in shock... we told them to take a hike... you can outsource routine IT work until doomsday but custom creative software / database and website IT workers, not my examples, can work from anywhere... <img src="http://www.enflow.com/p.gif">
Any companies engaging in such an error as you describe above, would make quiet a nice short. If you know of any, go make yourself rich.
Why would it be a short? Besides the fact that it's already too late, why would it be a short? It's the public who should be shorted, by accepting deteriorating quality from these companies. The cost savings come from a downgrade in quality, and since almost every company followed this trend, the consumer just follows along. The accounting games behind these offshored operations are quite intricate. The end result is that to make the numbers work, the quality is cut away. BTW, an interesting story. I won't name the firm, but if you research, you can figure it out, as they are known for this type of nonsense, hence lag their competitors. Being obsessed with endless cost cutting which destroys quality of operations, they found themselves losing one billion in a lawsuit that they should have won. Some sheisty investor sued them for some stock deal, it was mostly a frivolous lawsuit. The judge ruled in his favor because the firm was unable to come up with logs of the emails exchanged. He actually stated that this is the reason why he ruled against them. He gave them a 9 month extension to do so and they were unable to bring them to court. So why weren't they able to come up with the email logs? They were saving money on operations and hence did not store them on the servers for more than a year. Do you think much has changed after? Barely. That's the type of mentality running these corporations now. Here is another sidenote. A key result of this Indian offshoring has been a destruction of morale here. There is no incentive to do good work, because often, you make your Indian counterparts look bad. That raises eyebrows among management who is getting paid to hold up these initiatives. There is no incentive to perform above the minimum, in fact, there is a trend toward performing worse than before and bring down the standard to the Indian counterparts. Trying to bring the standards back up, which always involves critisizing the offshored operations, puts the employee on the sh*t list of management. That's the real colors of globalization and "free trade", which are not what most of your proponents think they are. Idealism & reality often differ a lot. The offshoring scam, is not really the cause, it is more of the symptom, but it is also a key factor as we watch USA go down the tubes.
Decades ago, like in the 1970s, IBM was known for taking good care of their own employees My impression was that if you were a good and loyal IBM employee, you were assured of a comfortable retirement. It was somewhat remarkable at the time. I had a friend whose father worked in one of the IBM divisions. Any of the old farts around here remember that?
My commission cut is 50% to the contractors, with the average fee being $25,000 per physician placed. I cover the advertising costs and find the candidates. All they have to do is find the clients/job orders, which is not that hard at all. They can earn six figures each year working from home. I am far from lazy. I work about 60 hours a week and earned close to $600k last year. As for Mexicans, nothing wrong with them. They work hard and bust their ass.
Outsourcing in the info technology field has just gone so far......but you know what the real outcome has been ? POOR QUALITY. Yep: 1) Tested Interactive Brokers API this past summer....riddled with bugs, omissions, poor documentation, etc. In the end, I COULD NOT USE IT ANY LONGER....it would just stop collecting price data without warning. 2) Tested Genesis's Excel interface software.....unbelieveably, SAME THING. It would just blow-up after working for 15 minutes or so. 3) Needed to use Java 1.6 for it's speed with another trading platform. The vendor said NOT TO USE IT. Reason: bugs, bugs, bugs. It's been 6 months since it's initial release now. Now I'm "stuck" with a CPU-eating monster with the 1.5 release. As a side note, nothing besides Google's contribution has been happening to the world of software since Year 2000. Also, I attended a NAG conference for Quants thinking this would be one area where American programmers would be welcome. WRONG: 90% of attendees were Indian, Chinese, Russian....many with poor communication skills.
. February 11, 2008 SouthAmerica: I did order a copy of the following book and I will start reading it as soon as I receive my copy of the book. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. By: Ha-Joon Chang. Published in 2008 by Bloomsbury Press. *** Here are some book reviews from Amazon.com: Review # 1 Ha-Joon Chang(C) demonstrates that the standard neoclassical international trade theory (model) applied by the economists at the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF),the Import-Export bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and advocated by Thomas Friedman, is basically an artificially constructed , purely mathematical, blackboard and chalk model that generally ignores major, relevant variables and necessary political and social prerequisites, as well as the time it would take to implement these kinds of institutions. The current collapse of Kenya is precisely the type of failure that results from the gross ignorance of the economics profession of the ancient wisdom of Adam Smith. The so-called " miracle" of Kenya was a chimera from the beginning. The absence of these institutions (overlooked, in general by C) doom the application of the model from the beginning. The theory works only if certain prerequisites are in place .For example, necessary prerequisites are (1) the existence of political, corruption free legal, governmental, and political institutions that enforce contracts impartially and uphold the rule of law, and (2) the existence of an independent, impartial, corruption free judiciary that will apply the law fairly. These necessary prerequisites do not exist in China, India, Africa, Mexico, South America, and Central America. They have evolved and are functioning effectively in the First World countries of the West and Japan. These institutions are barely present in the Second and Third World. These countries can be regarded as "infant" countries. C extends the argument based on the protection of infant industries to the protection of infant countries in chapter 3.The standard free trade prescription can only apply to " grown up"(1st world) countries. C overlooks, in general, the extremely important policy discussions carried out by Adam Smith on pp.434-439 of the Wealth of Nations that support his overall position (1776;Modern Library (Cannan) edition). Smith (a) supports retaliatory tariffs if there is any probability greater than 0 of changing the policy of the offending country; (b)supports revenue tariffs ; (c)would dismantle protectionist tariffs carefully, in very slow gradations, in order to prevent the collapse of those industries that are being opened up to imported goods, and (d) recognized that a 100% free trade policy is a pipe dream, given the social and political realities of any society. I recommend this book. C can easily get a full 5 stars from me by explicitly connecting his analysis to the wisdom of Adam Smith. Adam Smith would fire all the economists at the WB, WTO, and IMF for gross incompetence and negligence. **** Review # 2 One of the principle complaints of conservatives is that all education in America is deliberately skewed with a "left-wing" bias from kindergarten to college. And yet the field where this "bias", (if you accept this view) is clearly undone is the field of economic education. Whether you read the business section of the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review or National Public Radio, the actual bias present is really for the neo-classical economic model (AKA, neo-liberal economics) of the laissez-faire variety. Dr. Chang, a professor of economics at Cambridge and former World Bank researcher, deconstructs in general and in detail many of the prevailing myths of the neo-liberal school of economic development. My favorite chapters were these two: Chapter 1-The Lexus and the olive tree revisited. In this chapter Dr. Chang explains why he thinks that NYT columnist and author Thomas Friedman is full of crap about the benefits of globalization for ordinary people [pages 19-40]. Chapter 3-My six-year-old son should get a job. Says Chang: "I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs. Daniel Defoe, in the 18th century, thought that children could earn a living from the age of four. Moreover, working might do Jin-Gyu's character a world of good. Right now he lives in an economic bubble with no sense of the value of money. He has zero appreciation of the efforts his mother and I make on his behalf, subsidizing this idle existence and cocooning him from harsh reality. He is over-protected and needs to be exposed to competition, so that he can become a more productive person. Thinking about it, the more competition he is exposed to and the sooner this done, the better it will be for his future development. It will whip him into a mentality that is ready for hard work. I should make him quit school and get a job. Perhaps I could move to a country where child labour is still tolerated, if not legal, to give him more choice in employment" [page 65]. I found this tongue-in-cheek style of criticism of global capitalism both hilarious and enlightening. There are many more examples of Chang's knowledgeable and funny criticism of neo-liberalism I could list here, but I don't want this review to be a spoiler. So go read Chang's book. ***** Review # 3 "Free Trade" has been progressively wrecking America's economy for at least two decades. Meanwhile, economists in our colleges continue, almost without exception, to warn of protectionism while extolling the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo - written long before today's gross wage imbalance between Asia and the U.S., instant communications, and fast, economical international transportation. Finally, a Cambridge economist, Ha Joon Chang, brings facts and common sense to the debate - aided considerably by the free-trade ignoring successes of his native country, South Korea - eg. Samsung, and Pohang Iron and Steel. (And then there's Toyota - started out in textiles, was protected by auto tariffs, and now the world's #1 auto manufacturer and teacher of advanced management techniques.) "Bad Samaritans," as Chalmers Johnson points out, refers to "people in the rich countries who preach free markets and free trade to the poor countries in order to capture larger shares of the latter's markets and preempt the emergence of possible competitors." They are saying "do as we say, not as we did" and take advantage of others who are in trouble. He also points out that all of today's rich countries (INCLUDING the U.S.) used protection and subsidies to encourage their manufacturing industries - anathema in today's economic orthodoxy and contrary to the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. As a result, third-world nations' growth rates have fallen to less than half of that recorded in the 1960s (1.7 percent instead of 4.5 percent). As for corruption being incompatible with high growth, Chang points to Zaire vs. Indonesia. Both suffered from murderous corruption, yet the former's living standards fell two-thirds while Indonesia's tripled. The difference was that corruption funds in Zaire fled to Swiss banks, while those in Indonesia remained in the country to help create additional jobs. "Level playing field" rhetoric is often used to justify WTO and IMF prescriptions. Chang, however, reminds us that this is inconsistent with our practice of segregating sports by size and age, and that it is similarly unrealistic to expect eg. Honduras to compete evenly with the U.S. Chang also points out the strong agricultural subsidies in Europe (milk), the U.S. (corn), and Japan (rice). The good news is that these subsidies keep farming viable in those areas and the nations involved more independent; the bad news is that U.S. corn is exported to Mexico - making economic survival impossible for their farmers and driving them to illegal immigration into the U.S. Free-trade reduction of tariff revenues also plays undermines national budgets in poor countries because they lack efficient tax collection capabilities and tariffs are the easiest taxes to collect. Combined with free-trade-caused damage, the struggling nations are left far less able to fund health care and education for their citizens. Still another Chang insight is his pointing out that pursuit of copyrights and patents are simply a sophisticated form of protectionism that again works against third-world nations by preventing their starting important new industries (eg. drug manufacture) that boost not only their economy but citizens' health as well. Chang sees the U.S. as the worst offender in this area. Chang asserts that self-development of new technology is difficult in third-world nations, using North and South Korea as examples. North Korea has tried to be self-sufficient (and done poorly), while South Korea has assiduously copied wherever possible and is now an industrial powerhouse. Chang suggests that third-world countries use tariffs to protect their developing industries. However, he does not propose that the U.S. do likewise - perhaps in his next book. Nonetheless, "Bad Samaritans" punches enough holes in free trade thinking to help others rethink America's self-destructive commitment to it. Source: http://www.amazon.com/review/produc...82594-0858214?_encoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 .
. Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang A rising star in the field of economics attacks free-trade orthodoxy head-on. Publishers Weekly It's rare that a book appears with a fresh perspective on world affairs, but renowned economist Ha-Joon Chang has some startlingly original things to say about the future of globalization. In theory, he argues, the world's wealthiest countries and supra-national institutions like the IMF, World Bank and WTO want to see all nations developing into modern industrial societies. In practice, though, those at the top are 'kicking away the ladder' to wealth that they themselves climbed. Why? Self-interest certainly plays a part. But, more often, rich and powerful governments and institutions are actually being 'Bad Samaritans': their intentions are worthy but their simplistic free-market ideology and poor understanding of history leads them to inflict policy errors on others. Chang demonstrates this by contrasting the route to success of economically vibrant countries with the very different route now being dictated to the world's poorer nations. In the course of this, he shows just how muddled the thinking is in such key areas as trade and foreign investment. He shows that the case for privatisation and against state involvement is far from proven. And he explores the ways in which attitudes to national cultures and political ideologies are obscuring clear thinking and creating bad policy. Finally, he argues the case for new strategies for a more prosperous world that may appall the 'Bad Samaritans'. A smart, lively and provocative book that offers us compelling new ways to look at globalization - Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in Economics, 2001 Every orthodoxy needs effective critics. Ha-Joon Chang is probably the world's most effective critic of globalization. He does not deny the benefits to developing countries of integration into the world economy. But he draws on the lessons of history to argue that they must be allowed to integrate on their own terms - Martin Wolf, Financial Times, author of 'Why Globalization Works' In this more polemical tract, [Chang] adds the spark of personal reflection ... and some mischievous rhetorical set-pieces - The Economist This is a marvellous book. Well researched, panoramic in its scope and beautifully written, Bad Samaritans, is the perfect riposte to devotees of a one-size-fits-all model of growth and globalization. I strongly urge you to read it - Larry Elliott, Economics Editor, Guardian Source: http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/catalog/book.htm?command=Search&db=main.txt&eqisbndata=190521135X .