[PLUG] Re: Jobs to Canada

[Phil Tomson]

On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Karl Kulaga wrote:

> <soapbox>
> Ok, a couple of things. The definition "tech jobs" of rather broad. Call
> center folk are "tech jobs" 

OK, I wasn't including the call center jobs as 'tech jobs'.  If you had 
said 2/3 of call center jobs have gone to Canada|India I would believe 
that statistic could be accurate.

> as are product design engineers and the IT
> person in a momNpop. There is a big difference between these folks, and I
> don't want to offend call center folks too much, but if you're reading this,
> you're probably not one of the folks who I'm basically calling human IVRs
> 
> Call centers? /wave, gone to Canada or India if the company doesn't care
> (aka Dell) if their customers can understand their tech support.

Yeah, those job are going or already gone, but I'm not too worried about 
them -they're not really very good paying jobs.

It's like this silly baseball stadium: They keep saying that it will 
create jobs.  Sure it will create something like 15 really good paying 
jobs for players (that's if they manage to get a team) who really have no 
connection to the area and then it 
will create another couple of hundred minimum wage jobs.  Of course it 
will also create construction jobs initially, but in the lone run it's 
minimum wage jobs.

> 
> What does it comes down to?
> Canada gives bigger kickbacks, 

Can't say as I blame'em.  Engineering/programming jobs are high paying  
(or used to be) and thus are good to have in your economy (and tax base).

Oregon's problem isn't that we're not paying enough income,property and/or 
sales tax, it's that we've lost a lot of these high paying engineering 
jobs - hey, I used to pay several thousand dollars / year to Oregon in 
Income tax, but for the last year and a half or so I haven't been paying 
anything (no income) and I know lots of folks in the same situation.

> 
> As a side note btw, apparantly the Republican Party just outsourced
> fundraising to call centers in India. Not making a political statement or
> whatever, just thought it was interesting.

Seems 'par for the course'  for the CEO party.

> 
> 
> Programmers? /wave, Canada, Ireland, or India.
> 
> Again, India is dirt cheap, but you get what you pay for. I've heard nothing
> but nightmares from companies who outsourced programming to Indian
> companies.

They're still working out the kinks.  I have no illusions that somehow 
only Americans can program... 

> 
> Engineers, etc, are probably going to stay here, or American companies are
> going to buy ideas from overseas. Pretty simple, but there isn't a whole lot
> of folks designing new products compared to the total number of tech people.

Hardware engineering jobs are going to India too.  They're making a 
push to do a lot of chip and embedded design over there.
...No, it's not just the programming jobs going over.

> 
> Phil - I didn't know about the intel thing, but it really doesn't surprise
> me. Also makes me wonder how the state is planning on collecting the
> additional tax money from those folks who are unemployed but not on
> unemployment.

An unemployment tax of course.

...but in the end, I doubt that even in five years that 2/3 of tech jobs 
(even if you include call center jobs) will have left America.  1/3 would 
probably be more like it (and that's bad enough).

Phil