alt Hacker NewsRemembering when I lost people to offshoring in the mid 00s. I made the case, with metrics, that the quality was nowhere near as good and the spec overhead was non-trivial.
Management's response? It doesn't matter - for the price they could get cheap offshore workers to do it over again 5 times and still save money.
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At least offshoring was seemingly stable. Here we're all waiting for the rug pull.
Serious question, what sort of FAFO timelines did you see?
(And I assume that there's a sliver of people who never went this route in the first place, and another sliver who never stopped).
I could see a republican administration banning this entirely, though they would just find cheaper workers in the U.S.
I wonder when this comes from other white class jobs— process engineering, autocad drafter, electronics design.
Although obviously I wouldn't like it happening to me, if the offshoring quality was as good as the original -- and I'm sure sometimes it was -- I can't find any valid objection to it. It is, after all, just a different bunch of people being paid to do some work. Why must it be "us" who get that work? Why can't it be "them"?
Being replaced by a machine is different -- but still, not in a way that I can authoritatively say ought not to happen. If you could get your shirt made by a woman, or the same shirt made by a machine that costs 5% of what it would cost to pay the woman, you will pick the machine 99% of the time. Almost anyone would.
Being replaced by other people, or by a machine, is a very sad thing for the person being replaced. But I can't persuade myself that all by itself it is morally wrong in any sense.
It's better to work for companies that understand time/opportunity cost, and so won't penny pinch on something which will make them lots of money.
The "it saves money" mindset is bad for everyone, distorts everything away from valuable work and investments that generate the most revenue.