I feel the below is a bad idea. Not because I've been unemployed for more than a year now and more competition means that getting worse, but because the rich west brain draining the third world of their best and brightest is a particularly nasty form of exploitation.
They should be able to stay in their own countries who paid for their education and develop a competing industry and thus wealth generation at home. Of course, world trade rules are heavily biased against them doing that which is why illegal immigrants are flooding western borders. Many thanks globalisation! :(
Thoughts?
Cheers, Niall
http://www.contractoruk.com/cgi- bin/item.cgi?id=9213&d=193&h=220&f=223
70 countries sign up for completely free EU IT jobs market offer
Yes Please
Last week we reported that in the latest GATS negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade organisation, that the EU had made an offer to the other WTO members (here) to open its door to skilled IT people from other countries, provided those countries opened up their doors to our multi-national companies.
We referred to is as giving away the contents of the sweetie shop, whilst noting that this was just the EUs opening offer.
Well surprise, surprise. Theres been a huge uptake of this offer. Already over 70 of the 130 WTO member states have signed up for it.
Hello Boys
The offer was:-
In computer services, a sector that is key to the development of the Information Society in Europe, the Commission proposes to offer full market access to foreign service providers.
This should enable the EU to benefit from the best performing computer services at the lowest cost, with a view to fulfil our "Lisbon objectives" and have Europe become the most competitive society in the world.
The Commission's proposal addresses the interests of both developing countries that are seeking better access to our market and of EU countries that are in need for state-of-the-art computer services and IT infrastructure.
Foreign computer experts will for instance be allowed to provide maintenance and repair services for computer systems and networks in the EU.
Very Good Response
According to the EU:-
Out of the more than 130 WTO members, more than 70 have committed the sub-sectors "Computer and related" and "Other business", but only 46 have committed "Research & Development" and "Rental & Leasing", and only 28 WTO Members have entered commitments for "Real Estate services".
Its not surprising that so many countries have signed up to what seems a very generous offer, i.e. to open the EU market up completely to non-EU skilled IT workers.
Our industry appears to have been used as the bait to extract concessions from developing countries for our big companies.
According to the EU documents, the USA, Japan and Canada have made similar offers, so it looks as if it is globally coordinated.
India, for one, has said that the offer does not go far enough.
Still Time
The current GATS negotiations are not due to complete until early in 2005, and I presume they will be implemented soon after that.
However, between now and then there will have been an election in the US in November 2004, and there will have been elections in many of the EU states too.
These negotiations have not hit the headlines yet, but there is a growing reportage of the leak of skilled jobs offshore and of the numbers of people who are coming to the UK to replace UK workers.
This is not a done deal.
However it is a deal that the major countries, the developing countries, the major multi-nationals and the major IT consultancies want.
It remains to be seen what the people of the western countries think about it once it has been brought to their attention.
Gerry McLaughlin
It's a stupid idea, for technical and long-term development reasons:
1) Anyone who has worked on a software in a real cenario knows that long-term maintenance depend as much on clear-thought and documentation than on anything else. This means that the language barrier would be bad for our technology (*).
2) Long-term development is only possible throught the improvement of areas, not through the migration of its people. Those migrations can help (they did help in Portugal in the 50s and 60s by creating an income and connecting us to Europe), but you need internal development as well. IT has the ability to, with low costs, provide huge improvements in developments, particularly in services and logistics. Taking the people that are able to use technology just to serve as cheap labour makes it costier for those countries to develop.
I believe in a program like the EU, where a core of members help others to reach a standard and reap benefits after reaching that standard.
(*) I worked for 2 months on a OO system built by 3 different companies (2 of them from India, 1 from USA) through 5 years. Very similar code (the same methods in very similar objects) was done by different people, with different language abilities. Most comments were worthless, the documentation presented a mix of words from english, portuguese and something else. Fortunately the architecture of the system was nice, so I ended up understanding it enough to put it in a working state.
PS: I'm not unemployed and I like having more competition, it makes me work better ;).
A Qua, 2003-08-13 às 19:22, Niall Douglas escreveu:
I feel the below is a bad idea. Not because I've been unemployed for more than a year now and more competition means that getting worse, but because the rich west brain draining the third world of their best and brightest is a particularly nasty form of exploitation.
They should be able to stay in their own countries who paid for their education and develop a competing industry and thus wealth generation at home. Of course, world trade rules are heavily biased against them doing that which is why illegal immigrants are flooding western borders. Many thanks globalisation! :(
On 14 Aug 2003 at 0:13, João Miguel Neves wrote:
- Anyone who has worked on a software in a real cenario knows that
long-term maintenance depend as much on clear-thought and documentation than on anything else. This means that the language barrier would be bad for our technology (*).
Most of the cheap worker imports are the cream of their crop in their respective countries. That means they are usually better programmers than most western programmers and have excellent english. I know, I've worked with them and they're definitely a mark up on the par.
The problem is they can't join western unions, they're tied to one job and they work for much less than a mediocre western programmer.
- Long-term development is only possible throught the improvement of
areas, not through the migration of its people. Those migrations can help (they did help in Portugal in the 50s and 60s by creating an income and connecting us to Europe), but you need internal development as well. IT has the ability to, with low costs, provide huge improvements in developments, particularly in services and logistics.
/We/ know that, but companies like banks just look at their IT budget and say "can we pare that down?". That means outsourcing increasingly and ever more getting more for less. Inevitably quality will suffer.
PS: I'm not unemployed and I like having more competition, it makes me work better ;).
I like competition too, but it needs to be on a level playing field ie; skill vs. skill. Right now loads in California are losing their jobs, not because they're bad at them but because they're too expensive when compared to Indian or Irish workers. I see what's happening to IT in the west to being similar to what happened say to the steel industry - most of the programming work will go offshore. Stuff like support and web page design will tend to stay here.
But the days of the European & American C++ coder are numbered. Globalisation enforces no other logical choice. Since globalisation would have a few western management execs and everything else outsourced to the cheaper third world, it'll have to break someday.
Cheers, Niall
On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 02:20, Niall Douglas wrote:
But the days of the European & American C++ coder are numbered. Globalisation enforces no other logical choice. Since globalisation would have a few western management execs and everything else outsourced to the cheaper third world, it'll have to break someday.
Probably after some years, there will raise autonomous comanies in India, China, etc ... that will stop sending money to western managers, and start to make their own business competing (and winning) the western companies.
Simo.
On 14 Aug 2003 09:02:31 +0200 Simo Sorce simo.sorce@xsec.it wrote:
On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 02:20, Niall Douglas wrote:
But the days of the European & American C++ coder are numbered. Globalisation enforces no other logical choice. Since globalisation would have a few western management execs and everything else outsourced to the cheaper third world, it'll have to break someday.
Probably after some years, there will raise autonomous comanies in India, China, etc ... that will stop sending money to western managers, and start to make their own business competing (and winning) the western companies.
Simo.
On the other hand the big advantage those companies now have over the western (cost-effectiveness) will slowly be reduced once the standard of living starts increasing by a more succesful economy. And off course it is not at all sure if none of the western nations (especially the US) won't take any protective measures (the way it is now with steel, farming, etc).
Just a thought, Wim
On 14 Aug 2003 at 9:02, Simo Sorce wrote:
On Thu, 2003-08-14 at 02:20, Niall Douglas wrote:
But the days of the European & American C++ coder are numbered. Globalisation enforces no other logical choice. Since globalisation would have a few western management execs and everything else outsourced to the cheaper third world, it'll have to break someday.
Probably after some years, there will raise autonomous comanies in India, China, etc ... that will stop sending money to western managers, and start to make their own business competing (and winning) the western companies.
I hope so, but if you look at most other areas of outsourcing industry this simply hasn't happened. The third world gets all the pollution, crappy jobs and a tiny fraction of the money. The west retains all the power, profit and the elite jobs. The whole process is called "streamlining" and "increasing productivity" which is what industry has been demanding of the software industry for some time. It's just we were too deaf to hear (software engineering is almost unrepresented by unions, lobby groups or anything else).
If you read former Indian prime minister Indira Ghandi's books on the subject, she clearly illustrates how the world economic structures are deliberately & heavily biased against third world countries being anything more than exploited for cheap labour and lower tax overheads. This is better known in the west as "free trade" rules. Wherever you see "GATT", "WTO" or "World Bank", read "keep the west rich and everyone else poor" agreements.
Cheers, Niall
On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 19:11, Niall Douglas wrote:
I hope so, but if you look at most other areas of outsourcing industry this simply hasn't happened. The third world gets all the pollution, crappy jobs and a tiny fraction of the money. The west retains all the power, profit and the elite jobs. The whole process is called "streamlining" and "increasing productivity" which is what industry has been demanding of the software industry for some time. It's just we were too deaf to hear (software engineering is almost unrepresented by unions, lobby groups or anything else).
If you read former Indian prime minister Indira Ghandi's books on the subject, she clearly illustrates how the world economic structures are deliberately & heavily biased against third world countries being anything more than exploited for cheap labour and lower tax overheads. This is better known in the west as "free trade" rules. Wherever you see "GATT", "WTO" or "World Bank", read "keep the west rich and everyone else poor" agreements.
I think we are getting off topic on this list. Simo.
Niall Douglas s_fsfeurope2@nedprod.com wrote:
They should be able to stay in their own countries who paid for their=20 education and develop a competing industry and thus wealth generation=20 at home. Of course, world trade rules are heavily biased against them=20 doing that which is why illegal immigrants are flooding western=20 borders. Many thanks globalisation! :(
Random thoughts, probably wildly OT, reply off-list please:
Odd mix of extreme-right ("flooding" "illegal immigrants") and anti-globalisation opinions.
Thanks to mismanagement, even countries that have a pension system which looks like it should be sustainable have reduced it to a tax-based system, so shrinking population base requires either immigration or cuts in our pensions.
If there is such a flood of illegal immigrants, why is the outcry not about that, but refugees? I had a leaflet from the UK Conservatives this week stating that they would withdraw from UN and European conventions in order to set quotas for refugees, which is absurd.
There's a paradoxical situation here: we need immigrants, but our representatives also want to preserve our lead over the source countries, which means restricting the amount of wealth transferred back by them.
The language barrier really shouldn't exist still, but you know my opinions on that already http://ttt.esperanto.org/ I think.