[quote=no_such_reality]
flu you’re being very literal.
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Well yes, because depending on the occupation, the current level of technology, it dictates how practical work can be outsourced or offshored,
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not sure what local wages are when the global environment is dictating what wages are. Top talent only justifies local presence if there shortage of that talent outside of the area or you’re required to have local presence for other reasons.
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Sure it makes a difference. You don’t think a HVAC guy in Mexico charges $400 to change a capacitor do you? Or a BMW mechanic billing out $150/hr in labor? Or a guy that replaces a faucet that takes about 20 minutes, $100 for the labor alone. There are jobs that can be outsource/offshored, and there are ones that cannot. And some of your desk jobs might not currently be offshored because it’s current or new, but give enough time, it will be, unless you change and do something else that no one else has started working on yet.
Software is a perfect example…When android first came it, it was the latest thing. And to do really easy stuff, most people could probably do it. But short of a simple “hello world” program, people quickly figured out to do anything slightly more complex, nothing existed. So the top architects and designers worked on the stack, worked at the framework, and created a bunch of libraries, toolkits, shared services, so that the not-so-top-talent could more easily build stuff.
And then, you had not-so-top-talent reusing a lot of the libraries/tools/etc to build even more stuff on top of that for the slightly-more-stupid talent to be able to do useful things….
And eventually, given enough time, and enough people working on the same platform, piling things on top of things, you end up with saturation in which your idiot-“programmer” that barely can do anything with threading can finally write a hello world program without even know what threading is, what Binder is, what RPC does, etc….
And for about 70% of work that is left to be done at this stage is pretty much crap work that is copy-cut-paste from some website that someone already wrote about years ago that already solved the problem…So that some guy in some IT shop overseas could write something that worked reasonably well and that solved 70-80% of the problem at 3/10th the cost…Depending on the type of the company, they might only care about 70-80% of the solution and not be willing to pay for the remaining 20-30% of the solution, especially if the company is not really a tech company and just needs some “programmer”.
So yeah, as your american software engineer, you really don’t want to working when just about everyone else in the world can do what you claim is your skill at the current moment. Java J2EE engineers are a perfect example. Dime a dozen. Move on, find something else new, become an expert in that thing, before everyone else is, and milk as much money you can while you are the expert before you and every other expert starts making it easier for everyone else.
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When today’s local top talent retires who will replace them?
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Well, you’ll have a natural death of certain technology. So a lot of people won’t be replaced. And you’ll have a bunch of young people that learned something new that a bunch of old people refused to learn, and those new things will end up being used by the latest tech companies, while things that the old guys learned ends up becoming something like Fortran and Cobol.
And hopefully if you’re one of the old farts that decided to stop learning, you’ve saved enough F.U. money from when you were milking it when your skills were in demand, that you don’t care anymore in your old age. Or you have passive income coming from elsewhere.
[quote]
hint: the guys off shore that already replaced the mid-level talent.[/quote]
