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Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

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Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#31

Post by anigbrowl »

zalzane wrote: post #24
noonespecial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve a…

The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics

Absolutely you could. Indeed, it has arguably already been done, albeit indirectly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#32

Post by quanticle »

zalzane wrote: post #24
noonespecial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve a…

The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics

I don't know about impulse response and signal filtering, but the Soviets did try to model their economy with linear models. Cosma Shalizi put up a good analysis [1] of why this is very very difficult. Simply put, any kind of "real" economy has so many variables (in the kinds of goods and services, their various quality levels, and the locations in both time and space that goods and services have to be) that any kind of linear programming quickly gets swamped by the sheer number of variables that have to be adjusted in order to compute an optimal outcome. So yes, in theory you can model an economy using a linear system. It's not even an NP problem. But in practice, the computational complexity is high enough (though still within P) that even toy economies with as few as a thousand elements become impossible to optimize with linear programming.

[1] http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#33

Post by julie1 »

People are not tired of this kind of FUD?

Whatever you do good devs are a limited resource, and all that is made to try to walk around the problem worsen it:

- outsourcing ? => You have to compensate in supervision and you lose in quality. (Indians are not bad coders, but there is something called the Babel tower effect that creates a lot of signal perturbation/costs)

- agile? => Trying to cut on correctness and detailed specifications to ship value faster result in insecure useless softwares. Ofc a startup owner does not care of the sustainability of his product because he will cash out a lot of $$ before the problem will happen. But what about the customers and the economy relying on it?

- Web as an UI because web dev is less expensive than GUI devs/shipping? GUI devs then where making atrocious bugs because they were clueless on asynchronuous coding (reentrant code) and money related data still needs to be transactional (transactional is a property that is exclusive of distributed). Devs that understand this class of problems are still few, and Web dev is causing even more problems.

- The Cloud? It has non linear costing! If you x2 your customers you cannot predict your pricing unless you make fat margins, and swap KPEX and slowly linear OPEX for strongly growing non linear OPEX is kind of totally mathematically irrational (except for the one doing fat margins).

- Containers? In 1999 the problem of the GUI was already the dependency Hell. Well, now instead of solving the satisfiability of dependencies (NP complete problem) in one closed system you do it on a set of M containers that still requires internal KSAT solving (yes instead of solving one KSAT, you solve N KSAT coupled to M KSAT). (so we created the DevOps and more security holes!)

When automation can replace people, it means the industry does not requires skilled people. That is not the case.

Can't you see there is a trivial contradiction in the thesis of this article?

Seriously this insanity never ends? IT industry is just bullshiting the rest of the economy to sustain its totally insane model and paying our daily wages.

I would be happy of this waste of money (I am a still a coder) if only people were not starving in the streets and our economies were not suffering and thus creating instabilities all around the world. I long for the internet 2.0 bubble to explode soon so that we can get back to an economy that profits to everyone not only the IT crowd.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#34

Post by tluyben2 »

QuantumChaos wrote: post #29
tluyben2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indians are willing to work under these conditions => willing or don't (think they) have much choice? And i'm sure rows of long, room wide desks without any separation between 1m workspaces with touching chairs and cameras pointing at you to keep you in your chair is not normal/allowed in the US? It certainly is not over here. I see quite a lot wrong with it. It keeps the prices low, sure. I didn't say the companies…

Yes they do have a choice. Their choices are more limited because they live in a poorer country. On the American companies, didn't you said I hear some companies actually get work done this way and are very happy with it, growing continuously without worrying about who does the tech; Not saying you're 100% wrong on outsource being a safe option for managers, but you really did say that American companies were happy w…

I indeed did say happy. Should have the context on my screen when typing replies. You have a point of course; they do have a choice. Sort of. If you are not very talented but you did get a CS degree (which holds for a lot of people), what are you choices really?

Guess the point was that outsourcing is no longer cheap (it is) and I only know about coders as that's what I encounter every day, I'm not thinking call centre employees etc. So it's rather logical why all try to get a CS degree, as the article probably applies well to call centres or manual labor. For CS is see a bright future; I would just like it more if Indian founders would go for nice, high quality startups offering services for 70% of western prices instead of massive factories hiring anything they can get and selling for 30% (and rising).

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#35

Post by prapam2 »

pavanred wrote: post #26
tluyben2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this; a lot of companies in India just gather as many people as they can with a CS degree in a building (often 1000s) and hire them out in 'teams' to western companies. This is a valid (currently) business plan which makes them a lot of money. It also gives outsourcing a really bad name, but that does not seem to deter companies from hiring these kind of, let's call them what they are, sweatshops. The idea…

>> I hear some companies actually get work done this way.. This statement and lack of any citations with statistics makes me suspect this as an opinion, not necessarily factual. I am a engineer from Bangalore, India. I worked for a few years with companies that outsource teams to many countries across the world. I lived in Bangalore for over 20 years and I know a lot of people who are in similar line of work. Most so…

I had visited a small company working on their bus booking application. The owner had a big screen in front of him monitoring his employees. My ex-colleague who is now working in TCS says they use camera as well.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#36

Post by rtpg »

gboudrias wrote: post #4

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with afte…

I know we always talk about rich families accumulating wealth, but what about corporations? Apple has $150 billion in cash sitting idly, accumulating more every time someone buys an iThing. That's money that's disappearing in the short term.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#37

Post by teebs »

rtpg wrote: post #36
gboudrias wrote: post #4

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with afte…

I know we always talk about rich families accumulating wealth, but what about corporations? Apple has $150 billion in cash sitting idly, accumulating more every time someone buys an iThing. That's money that's disappearing in the short term.

From my understanding of this issue, that money is "owned" by the Apple stockholders, and is incorporated into the company's stock price. If a corporation has a lot of money, its shareholders have that money. Same with anything else the company owns--buildings, equipment, etc.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#38

Post by baddox »

gboudrias wrote: post #4

> The automators will continue to get very, very rich, while the automated will have to find something else to do. Part of me thinks this will lead to make much more apparent the paradox of capitalism: Those with the most money can... make the most money. Over time this means it all gets funneled into just a few families' pockets, until they own everything (which is silly and most likely would not be put up with afte…

It seems that you're missing the fact that the reason outsourcing to India is less profitable is that wages in India have increased enormously.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#39

Post by troymc »

zalzane wrote: post #24
noonespecial wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost like a signaling error. A farmer would gladly grow corn in exchange for a tractor and a mechanic would gladly supply that tractor in exchange for corn, but the corn that theoretically could be factory farmed by automation would be cheaper than the farmer can grown and the robot built tractor would theoretically be cheaper than the mechanic can build so neither do anything. Both farmer and mechanic starve a…

The second half of your post just gave me a vietnam flashback to Linear Systems back in college I wonder if you could actually model economic systems using impulse response and signal filtering mathematics

Most real-world economic systems aren't anywhere close to linear.

Economists do love their toy models, and some of those are linear. They also make wrong predictions.

Anyone who thinks economics has useful, reliable mathematical models akin to those in physics is fooling themselves.

Re: Outsourced Jobs Are No Longer Cheap, So They're Being Automated

#40

Post by thewarrior »

tluyben2 wrote: post #28
pavanred wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I hear some companies actually get work done this way.. This statement and lack of any citations with statistics makes me suspect this as an opinion, not necessarily factual. I am a engineer from Bangalore, India. I worked for a few years with companies that outsource teams to many countries across the world. I lived in Bangalore for over 20 years and I know a lot of people who are in similar line of work. Most so…

I didn't say that; I said I see a rise (also in Bangalore) of actual sweatshops (my definition of sweatshops is tainted by the west and especially the EU; I find workplaces where my chair touches my neighbours rather unworkable; I know actual manual labor sweatshops are much much worse than that) with coders; I never said 'Indian outsourcing companies are sweatshops' as I know that's not true at all. I just see a lot…

I don't think they're literal sweatshops as they usually have air conditioning. :P
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