You've just had an experience which is common to many. We listen to the news year after year, hearing many strange and fearful stories and wondering whether they are true. Finally one day we hear a news story on a subject where we have direct or personal knowledge - then we know.

1) The BLS survey suggests that the percentage of jobs lost due to offshoring was less than 2.5% of the total;

Huh? Sylvester says: "The survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found off-shoring is still in its early stages with less than 3 percent of all job loss due to overseas outsourcing."

Lou Dobbs used to be a pretty reliable Republican. He seems to have done some research into some issues lately and changed his mind on a few things.

As I just said on the other outsourcing thread, I'm all for free trade. I bet Lou Dobbs basically is, too. It's just that when you start looking into some of the details you discover that the "free trade" game is rigged and not all that free after all.

I found this opionion an interesting read:
Lou Dobbs--A Eulogy

On personal experience with outsourcing versus the BLS numbers I can make a small contribution, too. My company employs around 2000 people. We've had many layoffs over the last two years (perhaps 600 people total). But things are picking up again - a hiring freeze was recently lifted, and a project to establish some sort of offshore presence in India is under way. I don't know all the details, but it sounds like they want to just have the offshore operation as a general resource made available to any department that needs some extra programming done.

Then last week my company laid off another 60 people or so, many of them programmers. I bet those don't count as being outsourced, because there is no immediate connection between their jobs going away and the planned offshore operation in India - it's not as if the exact same work they were doing will now be done by someone in India instead. They are just not desperately needed right now, their work will be distributed among other people in their groups, deadlines may be pushed back a little, but not much. But if demand for programming happens to pick up again, we'll just have to send it to India instead.

Note I'm not saying the reporting is fudged or even incorrect - the new operation in India will fall under that category Dan called "jobs created de novo overeas that may have been created in the U.S. instead were it not for the outsourcing phenomenom". But in addition they still seem to correspond to jobs that were lost here.

The real joke, though, is that our new offshore operation in India may never actually do anything useful at all. It is simply not practical or efficient for small groups here to send small batches of work to India when the load becomes higher again. It takes about as much time to manage it as it takes to do it ourselves - we have tried it before, and the results were disastrous.

So what will happen? They will have these programmers sit in India twiddling their thumbs for a while. Then they will decide they have to do something and make up a project for them which otherwise wouldn't have been done (and probably for good reason!).

So what it really comes down to, from my point of view, is that Management is worshipping the offshoring god(dess?) - destroying jobs here and ultimately wasting money at the same time.

By all means, there shouldn't be any laws against such foolishness. There is no way to regulate any of this sensibly. But Dan and you guys who are writing in the abstract here and cheering on the outsourcers, please be aware that you are supporting efforts that in practice often range from nonsensical to counter-productive.

gw

I agree you have a point.

One thing we should get clear on though is that India is not another United States sitting over there just waiting to take our jobs. It's a completely different culture, one which does not in general encourage taking the initiative. In many ways it is not a threat to our economic future. There are many things we are able to do which Indians simply won't be able to do, in this generation at least.

Much of business is like war: things do not go according to plan, screwups happen left and right, and decisions have to be made on the spot to deal with all this. Americans are good at these things and it simply won't be possible to ship this to India. Indians are in general best suited for taking the drudgery jobs that good American programmers don't want anyway. When I see a lot of Indians involved with new innovative projects on Sourceforge I'll be worried.

My belief is much of this will sort itself out. Of course outsourcing is the fad du jour and the VC's are pushing everyone to have an India plan. But like all of these fads it will eventually be discovered to be vastly overrated and then there will be a period where pessimism swings too low and no one wants to outsource. Eventually the right balance will be found. The jobs that are best done in India will be done in India. The jobs that involve personal contact, quick change of direction, and on-the-spot innovation will be done here.

I think the truth is that the computer itself is more of a threat to our jobs than the Indians can ever be.

WichitaBoy: My belief is much of this will sort itself out.

In the very long run, yes, quite possibly.

But it seems that Management takes an awful long time to learn from past outsourcing disasters.

I think it's quite possible that a few American companies will be run into the ground by failed outsourcing projects. They are becoming less, not more, competitive as a result of their outsourcing. (Note I said "a few" - I'm not suggesting this is a general rule, and there are most certainly some great counter-examples. But I wouldn't want to take a guess which one is the more common outcome - more or less competitiveness.)

And now, can someone tell me why this post is no longer linked from the main page? Surely this wasn't due to my complaint that there were too many outsourcing threads?!

"While corporate America increases its reliance on cheap foreign labor, a new report finds that outsourcing simply doesn't pay."

I don't understand this line at all. The survey shows that 90% of companies that outsource are saving money, and 64% of them plan to outsource more. How does that demonstrate that outsourcing doesn't pay?

Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it seems to me that the 2.5% figure on outsourcing is deliberately deceptive if not a flat-out lie.

From reading the background reports (I didn't read the study itself) it seems that the only job losses they attributed to outsourcing were those in which a specific position within a company was eliminated and out-sourced.

However I suspect that what really happens is this: A company previously doing business with a US-based service provider of some sort (say an accounting firm, computer programmer, aircraft repair facility etc., etc.) chooses instead to go overseas to acquire the service that they previously obtained domestically. The US accounting firm, or programming firm, or repair facility then goes bankrupt or lays-off large numbers of employees due to the lost business.

Unless I misread the BLS study, none of these lost jobs would be counted as having been lost to offshore outsourcing.

I guess it's the difference between having your job outsourced overseas DIRECTLY or INDIRECTLY. However if you lose your job because someone in India is now doing it, I'm not sure it really makes a meaningful difference except to the BLS.

“But it seems that Management takes an awful long time to learn from past outsourcing disasters.”

Sometimes outsourcing does not work. Why should this be surprising? There are no guarantees that any economic activity whatsoever will be successful. Your confusion is mostly due to limiting the concept to international trade. What about outsourcing between a firm in Oklahoma and one in Texas?

“I think the truth is that the computer itself is more of a threat to our jobs than the Indians can ever be.”

You are right on target. The increasing computerization of our economy will make us wealthier---and some admittedly will also have to find new employment. The gods of creative destruction exact a cruel price. The same thing happened to those working in the horse and buggy industry when the automobile came onto the scene.

For years before his departure from CNN due to a management dispute and even when he returned after a change in said management, Lou Dobbs was a paragon of reason and economic orthodoxy. What's changed with Lou is not so much his underlying philosophy but the market he serves. When CNN owned cable news he could expand his company's market base by being the conservative mainstay juxtaposed to the center-left reportage that was the bulk of CNN broadcasts. Now that Fox is dominating the news watching habits of conservative audiences CNN is left to orient its coverage to serve the information needs (and prejudices) of its largely liberal audience. What we need to remember is the Lou above all else is a businessman and he's supplying a product to his target market. When that target market changes, so does Lou.

David Thomson: What about outsourcing between a firm in Oklahoma and one in Texas?

Actually, the kind of outsourcing I'm talking about (i.e. programming work) doesn't work well within the US either. But since domestic outsourcing of programming work is usually a lot MORE expensive than doing the work oneself, a company would usually only engage in it when it doesn't have the resources (and can't hire them in time) to do it itself.

There was a lot of this during the dot com boom - start-ups burning through their VC money in the hope of getting first to the finish line. There was a lot of domestic outsourcing happening then, and a lot of failed start-ups went bankrupt as a result.

Arik: Now that Fox is dominating the news watching habits of conservative audiences CNN is left to orient its coverage to serve the information needs (and prejudices) of its largely liberal audience.

That's an interesting hypothesis. I thought that CNN started leaning to the right to compete with Fox News.

I heard a probably unproveable statistic once that the majority of NPR listeners are actually conservatives. Having that kind of a listening base hasn't dampened their enthusiasm.

GW, how could CNN executives lean to the right? What would all their friends say at the cocktail parties? I watch CNN on occasions and I haven't noticed a real change in their treatment of conservatives or conservative ideas. That's fine, they have their audience and so does Fox. After all, if their job isn't to sell advertising, then what is it? God Bless them.

P.S. Heck I've even heard an advertisement for conservative ice cream on Michael Reagan's show. When will this Red/Blue divide end?

Dan:
My daughter had a close call recently when her firm outsourced several software maintenance jobs to India. However, she feels it won't take very long before many of these jobs will be repatriated due to cultural differences.
Lou Dobbs is a very effective communicator; I think he over-played the out-sourcing card--- especially when I noticed that, due to his over-enthusiasm, he lost it a few times while on the air.

The numbers you tout are skewed badly.

A good number of IT workers (in many corporations, nearly 2/3 of total IT force is comprised of consultants/contractors). Many of these are independents who subcontract out to a "pimp" firm, er, consultant firm. People don't get "laid off" from those jobs, their contract is completed or terminated.

So I would say you have to multiply the number by a factor of 2 or 3 to get an accurate representation. That is, if you place creedence in
self-reporting...

On an personal level, I don't need to look at statistics and flawed surveys – everyday I drive by two facilities that used to employ my services that have sent 5-10K jobs overseas and/or supplanted American workers with temporary visa workers. And within a half hour drive of my house, I can tally nearly 20K programmer jobs gone.

Look no further to college major selections where computer science and engineering degrees are dwindling. They're falling rapidly because youth that have contact with elders that work in the profession have shared the bad news and many have diverted their studies. Is this good for the U.S.A. long term? I don't think so.