Dan Gillmor: The Human Cost of Outsourcing
The callousness of American executives who force employees to train their lower-paid replacement is amazing. I don't know how these managers can look other people in the eye, or themselves in the mirror. America is outsourcing itself into trouble over the long term even though the short-term economic reasons for doing it are compelling. Once we could tell ourselves we'd just move up the value chain, but this won't be easy anymore. As this nation's leaders systematically undermine public education, disinvest in basic research and ignore powerful demographic trends -- including the new availability of several hundred million well-educated, motivated, English-speaking workers elsewhere who are willing to work for a quarter of what we need here to have a middle-class existence -- they are just begging for trouble. And running half-trillion-dollar budget deficits and historically high trade deficits will only magnify the woes when the bills come due. I don't have a magic answer. No one does. But if we don't start dealing with this now, we are in for horrendously difficult times to come.LA Times (reg req): Outsourcing Ax Falls Hard on Tech Workers. In the months leading up to his layoff, Cotterill was assigned to work alongside programmers from India who are taking over tasks formerly done by Americans, a process his company calls Knowledge Transfer, or KT.
This is a pretty personal issue for me. I am trying to hang on to a job in IT as I age and the job market continues to suck.
