In Europe programming is considered a blue collar job. From friends over there I hear that it's something you are sent to do if you could not make it in other disciplines. In America it's like being a doctor. Why? Because this is a rich country. It's as simple as that. We have a lot of money to spend, and we have a lot of smart people (in the long-tail). There is no ceiling in America. There is a ceiling in other countries, because after you get to a certain level, you can always come to America.
Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
131–140 of 350 posts
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#132My explanation is that the free market doesn't exist, and nobody really wants it.
In a perfectly competitive free market, wages (and capital gains, too) should correspond to subsistence wages. However, this poses a problem. If all that additional value is created by firms, to whom is it all divided, if everybody gets just subsistence?
In my view, simply, this situation cannot happen. Instead, in the real world, the markets are always full of oligopolies which were intentionally created by all market participants (including employees) to split up all the created value, somehow.
In practice it takes many forms. It is likely that company employees unconsciously form coalitions that sabotage lot of outsourcing. Some of the coalitions correspond to nation states. In fact, should they fail to do it, they will have less income, and will be less relevant, because they will make less spending decisions.
So the result is somewhat random, it is result of dynamic evolutionary pressures that create market friction, and cannot be explained away by forces of free market rationality.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#133Just one idea here not mentioned: software is essentially just business logic run by computer. In that sense, you need customers for software, and wealthy countries have it. Silicon Valley might skew more toward global software products, but I’d take a wild guess that most software is actually more local in scope. That banking or insurance software you wrote in Indianapolis might not work at all for non-US companies,…
Even for global products, they are usually created first for the domestic market and then extended for international use once they have taken off domestically rather than targeting the whole world from the start.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#134My explanation is that the free market doesn't exist, and nobody really wants it. In a perfectly competitive free market, wages (and capital gains, too) should correspond to subsistence wages. However, this poses a problem. If all that additional value is created by firms, to whom is it all divided, if everybody gets just subsistence? In my view, simply, this situation cannot happen. Instead, in the real world, the m…
>In a perfectly competitive free market, wages (and capital gains, too) should correspond to subsistence wages.
Wait, why? You might want to support that claim a little better before you build a whole theory on it. Mainstream theory suggests that in the long run profit will converge to zero, but that doesn't mean that wages, which are the prices set in the labor market, will all converge on the same value. Frankly it doesn't even mean it's not possible to profit while running a business, because the cost of capital is counted against profit when it's claimed that profit converges to zero.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#135It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…
> It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture.
This. The value a programmer brings to the table is almost entirely their cultural knowledge. It's the same reason why rarely do chart topping hip hop albums in the U.S. come from India or wherever.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#136It seems to be missing a very big factor: culture. If your goal is to implement some code for, say, healthcare, it is a lot easier to explain the business process to someone who is already familiar with how stuff is done on a higher level. Whenever you hire someone from a different culture / country, you need to start from the basics by explaining the very core of your society. An American programmer might not be too…
Seems dubious, since the cultural difference between people in the same country is huge and can be much larger than the difference between countries.
The average programmer at Instagram in California probably doesn't have much more in common with the average Instagram influencer or feed-scroller than the average programmer in India (both programmers tend to spend most of their time thinking about computing and abstract math/CS concepts, while the influencer spends it thinking about marketing, social relationships, travelling, etc. and the feed-scroller is all about instant gratification and pop culture).
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#137I think the main factor is literally the stupidity of managers and the fact that real intelligence has almost no value in our modern economy.
Managers don't get hired because of their intelligence - They get hired because they have connections to capital (the right friends).
It doesn't matter what these managers do because most of the economy is founded on oligopolies which are themselves founded on fiat money printed out of nothing.
Western economic power is an illusion at this stage. The numbers look bigger in the west but they're way more fragile and collectively people have less freedom in how
they spend their money - This is why all VCs just copy each other instead of actually thinking about their investments, they know that the system is too fragile to allow them to actually think.
I have a suspicion that investors in developing countries invest in a broader range of companies and it's more like a free market than in the west.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another aspect of culture: how one-sided the communication is. Silicon Valley and Scandinavian cultures are very flat, so it is possible for "the man on the floor" to tell management that it doesn't work to put diesel into a gasoline car. In authoritarian cultures this would be a mistake as it's seen as embarrassing the management by saying they made a mistake. If you want to continue being employed then it is much b…
An authoritarian culture, however, can get work done much quicker while staying with a razor-sharp focus. The whole "democratic" decision-making process takes time and leads to a sequence of decisions spread throughout the time domain, which, taken together, might lead to a suboptimal result compared to what might be achieved by following the steps of an "enlightened benevolent dictator".
You're conflating the "do what they say" aspect of authority with the "drive them off a cliff without saying anything, when they tell you to drive forwards" aspect of authoritarianism. Too many times have I heard people say, "yes we know this isn't what he wants, and yes, we know that he would change his orders if we provided him with the information only we have, but he told us to do this and nobody will be able to blame us for the resulting fallout."
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#139Five or so years ago a major oil company around here outsourced to India.
Shortly after someone from India turned off the power to an entire refinery.
In another story that I experienced myself first hand a huge customer we had had outsourced their IT department.
At some point a critical system went down in the middle of the night putting lives and hundreds of millons of dollars of equipment at increased risk not to mention violating regulations.
These things happens from time to time in large systems, but there is a huge difference between calling a guy or gal who knows it versus calling IT support, hear them tell that they will create an emergency ticket, and then get a call back 4 hours later from a smiling technician that wants to help me.
Long story short: by then we had already got someone on the site to break a handful of rules to get it working again.
I have more of these.
People in other countries are equally smart, often smarter than me, but having a bit of mechanical sympathy and a bit of knowledge of what you are supporting, knowing how to recognize an emergency when communicated from a person from another culture, all those things matter.
Re: Is a trillion dollars’ worth of programming lying on the ground?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that due to the Peter principle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle ) the people making the decisions are not competent to make them.
While this is certainly true, I've felt for a long time that the Peter principle is missing something very important: "Doing the work," "managing the people doing the work," and "making the decisions about what work should be done" are not simply three ascending levels of expertise in one domain. They are three completely different domains. All good so far; the Peter principle takes this into account. Someone who's g…
A more visible medium where you see this happen is in sports. Average players can go on to become great coaches or even managers.