I was going to post this under the "American Jobs, Foreign Labor" post but I realized it was a huge tangent. Call this a warning if you will. This happened to me and my family and it will happen to you.
The future of the technology revolution is bleak for Americans.
The parallels to what happened to Blue-collar workers 20-30 yrs ago should give you a clue. Just to recap, labor was cheaper in other countries. Other countries didn't have so many rules about child labor, health and safety standards, etc. Trade barriers broke down.
Capital simply went, like water, toward the path of least resistance. That's free market capitalism. Its a good thing in general, but if you're living in a country like the U.S. with lots of regulation of industry and high standard of living, you will NEVER compete with a guy named Juan whose company dumps toxic waste directly into a purple river and pays him so little he has to live in a cardboard shack. We cannot have Fair Trade with Mexico and China. We can have "Free Trade," but it ain't gonna be fair.
Now the tech revolution is upon us. Like the manufacturing industry before it, the center of the industry is the U.S. (for now). Only problem is that the "product" is completely ethereal. It's intellectual property and bits of data that can be moved around at will through a variety of means, including sattelite transmission, no cable/phone lines/fiber optic required. I could be sitting in a swamp in Bangledesh with $5000 worth of equipment and be writing code to beat the band. No infrastructure required, keep that in mind. Having advanced infrastructure kept heavy industry from leaving America for a good 50 years. That barrier for tech industries is non-existent.
There's a LOT of people in India, Pakistan and yes, even Bangladesh who want YOUR programming job. I know because I work in the HR industry and I see the resumes. This is not a racial slam, in fact, if Americans had half the gumption that some non-Americans have, we'd have one hell of a country.
This is just the way of the world. Right now, the tech industries are led by visionaries, dreamers and innovators. It won't always be this way. Henry Ford was a visionary who built his company from the ground up and changed the world. Then Capitalists took over and now a Ford is mostly made in Japan and Korea. Then the pieces are assembled in Mexico. Don't think that technology will be any different. It will actually happen FASTER because of the nature of the industry.
There is absolutely no reason a business person/Capitalist would hire American Engineers/Developers or whatever to sit in very, very expensive office space in Silicon Valley with all of the associated costs when he could have a guy in New Dehli doing the exact same job at 1/2 the cost. For that matter, we don't even need an architect doing his/her work here in the U.S. Other examples abound.
Right now, the business people are not in charge but that will change. When it does, the same thing that happened to people like my father will happen to you. I know you don't think it will ever happen that way, but then again, when my dad was turning down $15/hr jobs in the early 70s he never thought anything like that could happen to him either.
The future of the technology revolution is bleak for Americans.
The parallels to what happened to Blue-collar workers 20-30 yrs ago should give you a clue. Just to recap, labor was cheaper in other countries. Other countries didn't have so many rules about child labor, health and safety standards, etc. Trade barriers broke down.
Capital simply went, like water, toward the path of least resistance. That's free market capitalism. Its a good thing in general, but if you're living in a country like the U.S. with lots of regulation of industry and high standard of living, you will NEVER compete with a guy named Juan whose company dumps toxic waste directly into a purple river and pays him so little he has to live in a cardboard shack. We cannot have Fair Trade with Mexico and China. We can have "Free Trade," but it ain't gonna be fair.
Now the tech revolution is upon us. Like the manufacturing industry before it, the center of the industry is the U.S. (for now). Only problem is that the "product" is completely ethereal. It's intellectual property and bits of data that can be moved around at will through a variety of means, including sattelite transmission, no cable/phone lines/fiber optic required. I could be sitting in a swamp in Bangledesh with $5000 worth of equipment and be writing code to beat the band. No infrastructure required, keep that in mind. Having advanced infrastructure kept heavy industry from leaving America for a good 50 years. That barrier for tech industries is non-existent.
There's a LOT of people in India, Pakistan and yes, even Bangladesh who want YOUR programming job. I know because I work in the HR industry and I see the resumes. This is not a racial slam, in fact, if Americans had half the gumption that some non-Americans have, we'd have one hell of a country.
This is just the way of the world. Right now, the tech industries are led by visionaries, dreamers and innovators. It won't always be this way. Henry Ford was a visionary who built his company from the ground up and changed the world. Then Capitalists took over and now a Ford is mostly made in Japan and Korea. Then the pieces are assembled in Mexico. Don't think that technology will be any different. It will actually happen FASTER because of the nature of the industry.
There is absolutely no reason a business person/Capitalist would hire American Engineers/Developers or whatever to sit in very, very expensive office space in Silicon Valley with all of the associated costs when he could have a guy in New Dehli doing the exact same job at 1/2 the cost. For that matter, we don't even need an architect doing his/her work here in the U.S. Other examples abound.
Right now, the business people are not in charge but that will change. When it does, the same thing that happened to people like my father will happen to you. I know you don't think it will ever happen that way, but then again, when my dad was turning down $15/hr jobs in the early 70s he never thought anything like that could happen to him either.