Romania: What Happened To The “Giant Sucking Sound” Of Outsourcing
The conventional wisdom is that outsourcing has been very bad for the U.S. Information Technology workforce.
After all, now that a company can transfer the work of a $50/hour U.S. programmer to an equally skilled programmer in India or Romania and pay only $5/hour for the same job, what are U.S. workers to do? Ross Perot once famously described the result of job loss as the “Giant Sucking Sound”…from the movement of the jobs overseas. Virtually every newsgroup, blog and magazine editorial quotes anecdotal evidence of someone who has lost a job in the recent down turn as validation of this theory. Almost all make dire predictions of the end of U.S. I.T. dominance .
It’s too bad that none of these people took the time to notice that the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics survey in July showed the number of jobs in U.S. IT has rebounded to the highs of 2001. (see “Reliving the summer of 2001″ in InformationWeek) If they had, we would have heard a completely different type of “Giant Sucking Sound”… a whole lot of people holding their breaths while forced to ask themsleves “If outsourcing is the awful bogey man I believe it to be…then WHY ARE THE JOBS STILL HERE?”
U.S. IT moves in cycles. 2001 was the height of the excesses of the dot com bubble (remember when people wouldn’t take a new job unless they got a 50% raise AND could bring their pet in to work?). And what goes up unfortunately must always come down. But when people lose jobs, the pain is real, and human nature is such that we need to blame something or someone for the injustice. And who is a more convenient and defenseless scapegoat than foreigners who can’t speak for themselves or defend themselves?
You’d think we’d know better about foreigner scape-goating. Remember when the Japanese were buying up marquis U.S. properties in the 1990s like Rockefeller Center? Everyone predicted they were going to own the country. That never happened. Their real-estate bubble busted, they had to leave town and haven’t been sighted since. And you’d think we’d know better from history about making simple assumption. In the 1700’s, the English gave themselves premature coronaries, because they obsessed over the fact that they couldn’t grow enough trees to power the wood power plants. The invention of the coal based steam engine propelled England into the industrial age, and reduced the dreaded “wood shortage” to a historical footnote.
