www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4310500.htm
I was home to answer it because I have been laid off from my job as a software quality assurance manager. The call was from a polite lady who offered me the chance to have my home repainted by a San Ramon company. The very slight pops and hisses on the line suggested that the junk call was actually coming from overseas, and from curiosity I pressed the lady to tell me where. The hourly pay rate for phone solicitors in the United States isn't much. But it's so much lower still in India that it more than offsets the increased phone costs. These are not the only jobs that used to be done in America but are now done in India, Russia or Ireland. I mentioned above that I was laid off from my job as a software QA manager. My job, and the jobs of the nine people in my team are now being done in Bangalore, India. Ten jobs that until last month were done in Sunnyvale have been transferred out of the country. That's 10 families with a breadwinner here in California who is now on the breadline. It has literally taken $1 million out of the Silicon Valley economy and injected perhaps half that amount into India's economy. My job with that company and all the other jobs are permanently gone. Even when we get through this recession, and companies start hiring again, they won't be hiring here for those positions -- ever again. All the big computer companies like Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel are patriotically waving the flag in public and asking for new government contracts, but privately moving as much information technology development work as possible out of the United States. Now the trend has caught on with smaller companies too, like my former employer. The Mercury News even carries ads for jobs based in India, such as the one on Oct. These ads are clearly aimed at luring back talent from Silicon Valley to manage all those jobs that have been shipped out to India. The export of IT jobs from America to English-speaking Third World countries is a worrying new trend. First predicted more than a decade ago in Ed Yourdon's book The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,'', Yourdon went on to suggest that American programmers could avoid unemployment by becoming more productive with the help of software tools. His identification of the trend was correct, but his solution was wrong. The first reaction of many people is to suggest we change the law so that temporary work visas (like the H-1B) are restricted or cut off altogether. Some suggest requiring companies to lay off H-1B staff before American citizens. If you make it inconvenient for companies to use H-1B staff, all you are doing is making it correspondingly more attractive for them to ship the entire job abroad. There is nothing we can do about this in the long term, any more than the manufacturing people could do anything when their jobs went first to Taiwan and then to China. A Web site can be built and administered from anywhere in the world, so why not do it in the cheapest place? The export of IT jobs has a permanent vicious cycle effect. As the jobs migrate, there are more and more unemployed people chasing fewer opportunities here. The general unemployment rate in Santa Clara county is 7-8 percent, but among information technology staff it could be 15 percent. The recession worsens an already bad situation, but when the recession ends, the situation will still be bad. Realistic choices for dislocated IT staff are to retrain, to go back to school, or to consider careers in other fields such as social work, legal work, the police, retail sales, nursing and teaching. We may also rethink our priorities to emphasize family over finances, and civic service ahead of careers. It would have to be something of enormous impact, of the scale of the PC or the Internet revolution. In short, we either need to reinvent ourselves individually or we need a new New Economy.
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