Re: Outsourcing developer to India and China - As an Oracle developer I am miffed

From: Howard J. Rogers <hjr_at_dizwell.com>
Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 23:56:08 +1000
Message-Id: <3f856987$0$28120$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.au>

Noons wrote:

> "Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message
> news:3f846a2b$0$22822$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au...
>

>> Of course they obey the same economic rules. Supply and demand is supply
>> and demand whether you're talking widgets or lectures or help desking.

>
>
> Well, actually no. Supply and demand laws apply primarily to products.
> That was where they were defined. There was no such thing as services
> back when that law was figured out. The application of the principle to
> services is a modern phenomena that has not been proven correct. Yet.
>

I think you're just getting wildly speculative now, Noons. If I charge $4000 per day for my consultancy services, I have 1 customer. If I charge $400 I have 10. That's supply and demand, just like it is for Mars bars. They didn't have them then, either. But the law still holds true.

>

>> in which the US, UK and Australia, to name but three, have an *enormous*
>> advantage over China, if not so clearly over India: language. We all
>> speak English. Well, most of us do).

>
> Not sure if that is an advantage, nowadays... :)
>

>> Not entirely sure what 'secular' has to do with it, but I would hardly
>> call the 18th century a 'secular' age.

>
> It most definitely was. Most of the societies back then were
> absolutist monarchies. With a fairly structured and rigid
> social caste system. That is hardly the case nowadays in
> downtown SF.

Then you are using the word secular with some strange meaning that I'm not aware of. It means 'non-religious', and has nothing to do with absolutist monarchies, who in any case frequently defended their absolutism on the grounds of *divine* right.  

>

>> That's a mite unfair, since we haven't had advanced, services-oriented
>> societies for a long term yet. But no matter: the law of comparative
>> advantage says nothing about what the advantage is over or about. It
>> dictates nothing explicit about whether one should refer to manufactures
>> or services.

>
> Of course it doesn't. Services didn't exist back when it was enunciated,
> how can it say anything about them *specifically*?

Come off it. If I offered to shoe your horses, that was a service, of which the cost of the horse-shoe was but a part. Barbers existed back then. Farm labourers had nothing but their labour to offer. Chimney sweeps. Lamp lighters. Piss-pot emptiers. The list goes on and on. Of course they had services back then.

> That is the whole
> point: claiming that it applies everywhere when some applications didn't
> even exist back when it was thought out is akin to claiming that BCHR is
> good for
> 10g because it worked with V6. Which as we now know is far from true.
> Yet you still see plenty of BCHR supporters around.

You've taken a trip on the wild side with this one. Services did exist, and have always existed. And I don't supply more of my services the more I charge, so supply and demand still hold perfectly true for me as much as they do for a widget maker.

>> Economic theory hasn't stopped since Adam Smith, and CA is as useful in
>> economics today as it was when he first roughed it out. And it has been
>> elaborated and developed over many years.

>
> Sure it has. But nothing has been proven as to its long term
> applicability to services or even basic validity in a
> post-industrial society.

Some things are self-evident. Comparative advantage is one of them.

>> Missing the point, I think. No-one is suggesting that finding yourself
>> redundant due to a new outsourcing deal is pleasant, or even desirable.
>> Point is, do you just wring your hands and moan, or take to the streets
>> of Seattle to battle that which you can't win? Or do you get off your
>> bottom and find some new skill, some new niche, in which you can excell?

>
> If you were a middle age family head, you'd find it next to impossible
> to find new skills and niches just like that. Things aren't that
> linear when family responsibility throws its little snag into the works.
>
> And that's why you find so many parents doing the "streets" thing.
> To pretend that they are less entitled than anyone else to a change
> of niche is discriminatory, to put it mildly. Yet, that is precisely
> what is being done (not by you, of course!).
> Hence why you get Seattle. And a lot more to come along the same lines.
> It worked many years ago for other problems, it will work again.

I'm not sure what you are arguing here. Do we simply feather-bed those who can't change (Sure we do to an extent. That's what unemployment benefit is for, along with Medicare (Australia))? Or do we expect them to take some responsibility for their own destinies? Sure we do that too. Is it pain-free. Of course not, and I wouldn't suggest otherwise. Is it inevitable? Yes. No-one is entitled to expect their working skill set to remain in demand for ever, without change or development.

Yes, we've seen it in the past. The smashing of the spinning jenney by those weavers about to be put out of work because the same thing could now be automated at much better quality and much lower cost. Violence in the 1700s. Violence in the 2000's. It didn't work then, because the economic case was unarguable. And it won't work now, for very much the same reasons.

>> Remember the post which started this thread posited the idea of a boycott
>> of companies that outsource. King Canute or what?

>
> Heck. It worked to stop the Nam war, what can you say?

Did it really? I suppose that's some new meaning of the word 'worked'. 500,000 troops, countless billions, 40,000 US lives, Vietnam wrecked, Cambodia ruined and heading for a genocide. The US got much the same terms in 73 that they could have had in 69: Nixon fought on, and all the protests on all the campuses did nothing to stop him.

Regards
HJR

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Received on Thu Oct 09 2003 - 08:56:08 CDT