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Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

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Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#41

Post by walshemj »

tobbyb wrote: post #29
philjohn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is ... unless there's a universal income, or new jobs for all these people, who in the hell is going to buy your products?

That's why products are becoming progressively more expensive including things which traditionally became cheaper with generations. Why focus on the 'fluff' who have lower incomes and will have soon have even less, when you can focus on the 'cream' with high margins, hence $1000 phones and $800 billion cash reserves with no use.

the $1000 phones are luxury goods at motog is a far cheaper smart phone

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#42

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

megaman22 wrote: post #32

I've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and never have I heard a story of where they outsourced IT work and it actually went well. Maybe it saved a few dollars, but invariably it added mountains of inconvenience, delay, wastage and frustration.

"Went well" is in the eye of the beholder, right? If you are beholding a spreadsheet that says it saves money you might think it went well. If you are working with the outsourced firm and have to constantly clean things up, educate them on how to do their jobs, etc. then it didn't "go well".

Sometimes the large corporations are doing mutual agreements, where they outsource $10mil of work and expect that company to then market their stuff in the region.

Quality and employee satisfaction don't show up on spreadsheets and it always seemed like upper management didn't care about that, they were focused on how much money they were saving.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#43

Post by jordanb »

crdoconnor wrote: post #24
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair the low hanging fruit for outsourcing is also the low hanging fruit for automation.

I think that's being completely unfair. Outsourcability is purely about how easy it is to extend a supply chain to another continent without impacting quality control and lead time. Automation is purely about how easy it is to program a computer to do the work. The two have very little to do with one another. In fact, the more automateable a job is, the less likely it will be pushed offshore because managing a highly…

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're right.

For instance, take the garment industry: the big gains in productivity were made a long time ago. It now takes about as many people to make a pair of jeans as it did 30 years ago. But those jeans are very easy to transport. Consequently, the industry is constantly searching the globe for the cheapest possible hour of human labor.

If the garment industry where still seeing big productivity gains then they'd have less pressure to seek low labor costs and there'd be less interest in outsourcing. If jeans went bad when packed into a container then there'd be less ability for them to outsource (goods less tradable) but tradability is orthogonal to automatability.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#44

Post by Kurtz79 »

tobbyb wrote: post #29
philjohn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is ... unless there's a universal income, or new jobs for all these people, who in the hell is going to buy your products?

That's why products are becoming progressively more expensive including things which traditionally became cheaper with generations. Why focus on the 'fluff' who have lower incomes and will have soon have even less, when you can focus on the 'cream' with high margins, hence $1000 phones and $800 billion cash reserves with no use.

"That's why products are becoming progressively more expensive"

Examples ?

Since you mention 1000$phones, in tech you see more and more "premium" products, accompanied by very basic ones that are still quite funcional and dirt cheap, and everything in between.

You can buy a fully functional laptop or smartphone for 100 bucks, and I can remember times when they were both "premium only" products.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#45

Post by crdoconnor »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #34
crdoconnor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's being completely unfair. Outsourcability is purely about how easy it is to extend a supply chain to another continent without impacting quality control and lead time. Automation is purely about how easy it is to program a computer to do the work. The two have very little to do with one another. In fact, the more automateable a job is, the less likely it will be pushed offshore because managing a highly…

Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation because the deliverable arrives down a wire or in a container. What hasn't been offshored are jobs that require a physical presence, these are much tougher to automate.

"Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation"

No. All of those are areas are very unamenable to automation.

* The west hasn't offshored manufacturing that it could automate. It automated it and kept it at home. The manufacturing it couldn't automate went offshore, provided the QC / lead times didn't completely fuck the product (e.g. apparel / cheap plastic toys / electronics / etc.).

* Customer service is fundamentally unautomateable since it's mostly dealing with problems (have you automated fixing bugs in your code yet? if so, maybe there's hope) and people who just want to talk to a human when they buy things. Moreover, you suffer massive quality issues when offshoring it, which is why the companies that do offshore only survive the quality hit because they don't need to be competitive. Comcast outsources its call centers; Netflix keeps them at home.

* IT support is similar - most of the time you're dealing with IT issues, dealing with people and dealing with the broken way people deal with their IT issues. Again, generic, high level problem solving that involves a great deal of human interaction is just about the last thing that will ever be automated.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#46

Post by gaius »

megaman22 wrote: post #32

I've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and never have I heard a story of where they outsourced IT work and it actually went well. Maybe it saved a few dollars, but invariably it added mountains of inconvenience, delay, wastage and frustration.

I've worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, and never have I heard a story of where they outsourced IT work and it actually went well

It only needs to save money for long enough for the executive who proposed it to get their next bonus or promotion. Then they swan off to greener pastures and leave the rest to pick up the pieces.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#47

Post by gaius »

jordanb wrote: post #43
crdoconnor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's being completely unfair. Outsourcability is purely about how easy it is to extend a supply chain to another continent without impacting quality control and lead time. Automation is purely about how easy it is to program a computer to do the work. The two have very little to do with one another. In fact, the more automateable a job is, the less likely it will be pushed offshore because managing a highly…

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're right. For instance, take the garment industry: the big gains in productivity were made a long time ago. It now takes about as many people to make a pair of jeans as it did 30 years ago. But those jeans are very easy to transport. Consequently, the industry is constantly searching the globe for the cheapest possible hour of human labor. If the garment industry where still…

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You're right.

Not entirely. One company I worked for had an office in India where workers had 2 screens on their desks and their job was to re-key from one app into another. It was cheaper to do this than to integrate those two apps. Tho' not really because of the re-work needed due to typos, but senior management will never have realized that.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#48

Post by gaius »

crdoconnor wrote: post #45
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation because the deliverable arrives down a wire or in a container. What hasn't been offshored are jobs that require a physical presence, these are much tougher to automate.

"Yet if you look at what the West has offshored it's manufacturing, customer service, IT support, etc. All areas that are amenable to automation" No. All of those are areas are very un amenable to automation. * The west hasn't offshored manufacturing that it could automate. It automated it and kept it at home. The manufacturing it couldn't automate went offshore, provided the QC / lead times didn't completely fuck th…

The west hasn't offshored manufacturing that it could automate. It automated it and kept it at home

Not entirely true: another reason to offshore manufacturing, if you are a certain kind of executive, is that you don't need to worry about pollution laws.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#49

Post by LeeHwang »

The bigger concern is here is the clear link between automation and increased worker mental instability.

Will automation lead to more populists revolts ? I don't know but we need research into more solutions (besides just basic income), the problem is too big to ignore.

Re: Made redundant by automation, tech workers in India are embracing online therapy

#50

Post by senthil_rajasek »

iovrthoughtthis wrote: post #37
senthil_rajasek wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or anecdotal.

Empirical evidence is just many anecdotes.

Sorry, no. Just went back to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence

and empirical evidence is not just many anecdotal evidence.

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