America's Future Is In Software, Not Hardware 630
New submitter tcjr2006 writes "Obama's State of the Union focused on the return of manufacturing jobs to America. This New Yorker story makes the case that the manufacturing jobs aren't going to come back, and he should be focusing on software. Quoting: 'Yes, there are industries where manufacturing jobs can be brought back to America through proper tax incentives and training programs. But maybe he should have talked more about the things that he could do to keep software jobs here. He spoke of federal funding for university and scientific research. But a real pro-software agenda would also include reforming patent law to stop trolling (and perhaps eliminating software patents altogether); increasing H-1B visas for highly skilled coders; stopping Congress from defunding DARPA, whose research helped create Siri, the iPhone’s talking assistant; and opening up the unused, federally owned wireless spectrum. That agenda wouldn’t bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs back, but it would help to keep the company’s coding jobs here. And it would certainly help develop "an economy that’s built to last."'"
What a load of bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're already farming out software.
It's not as if anyone with the means, i.e., money, is trying to reverse the trend.
This doesn't even pass the bellylaugh test.
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BMO
America's future can be in both (Score:5, Interesting)
We just need to do away with old labor intensive methods of manufacturing.
If we mechanize enough then the labor costs become irrelevant and we can bring the manufacturing home.
To that end, we should invest heavily in additive manufacturing and other technologies that will let us leap frog the competition while rendering their cheap labor irrelevant.
Re:visas for highly skilled coders (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Software will be outsourced just like hardware. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard some interesting arguments for putting QA overseas, but keeping the main development folks local.
Basically, the idea is:
I've never participated in something like this, so I don't know if it's a great idea on paper that sucks in real life, but it seems on the surface that it could be useful.
Of course, you could probably get similar effects by outsourcing to more than one place with sufficient offset in their time zones.
Re:Software will be outsourced just like hardware. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Defunding DARPA is a good idea (Score:4, Interesting)
Or perhaps the internet would originate in academia, where... well, it'd look much as it does today, really. Because that is where historically our internet came from: Born of the military, adopted and raised by academic institutions, and set loose upon the world like a sheltered teenager suddenly invited to the wrong type of party.
Re:It's all moot anyway.... (Score:4, Interesting)
In part, absolutely it does.
When we don't respect teachers, treat them like babysitters (and expect to pay them a salary consummate with that of a babysitter's), instead of hiring out truly intelligent, motivated folks for the job, and treating them like the professionals they are, we cripple our kid's education.
When we stuff 40 or more kids into the same class for budget reasons, there is no way that the quality of the education decreases.
When our textbooks are 30 years old, when they don't reflect recent history or innovations; when we don't have computer access, we are not preparing our kids for modern life and jobs.
All of these things lead us to solutions such as teaching towards tests, instead of real education. And often in buildings that are falling apart around our kid's ears.
And then to top it off, we cut pell grants and subsidized loans. We make college education a privilege for the rich, and thus, we limit the scale of the net we throw for those who might truly become of value to society based upon their merit and value as an educated member of society, limiting their potential, and thus limiting our societies potential.
Throwing money at the problem won't fix all that ails it. But it sure will go a darn long way.
What this announcement REALLY means? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll tell you...
It's time to jump ship and get out of IT. It's about to crash. No, I don't mean .com style. I mean industry/career-wise.
I'll explain...throughout modern history, there is a tendency to tout a career choice or field as a long-term career. The truth is, it almost always fails to be and is usually done at the peak of that career's value.
There was a time that being a butcher was an excllent local career choice. Until suddenly, no one went to the local butcher as the big grocery store became the supplier (this mainly due to the advent of the automobile which made such travel inconsequential).
In the 70's there was talk of electrical engineering being the field to be. Manufacturing of electronics. In fact, IBM let Microsoft own DOS because HARDWARE was the place to be. Then that all became automated and outsourced, suddenly you can buy an entire computer for less than the operating system. How things have changed.
The two big ones mentioned now is healthcare (in particular, nursing) and software.
Let's look at nursing as I believe it's ahead of the IT curve right now. I have been amazed by how many friends I have who are back in school pursuing nursing degrees. At least 6, and I don't have that many friends. LOL
My wife is a nurse. Let me give you some insights on that career path. Her hospital won't hire any nurse without prior experience. Is this unusual? Nope, come to find out that few are. I've met a number or recently graduated nurses. They've done their four years. Made the grade. Taken on the debt with the thought that they were entering a field in which they'd be guaranteed a job and not have to worry about unemployment. It wasn't a glamorous career, it's dirty, messy and hard work. But at least they'd always have a job, right?
Well, every nurse I've met who has graduated in the past year is still trying to find a job. That's right, they've sent out resumes to dozens of hospitals. No job. As I said, my wife's hospital will only hire you if you've got a number of years of experience. Right now there are enough nursese floating around many regions that hospitals don't want to hire and train a new nurse.
Oh and yes, there are many nurse positions in certain cities and regions. Where they hired highly-paid travel nurses.
But that's changing, and it's also largely because of seasonal clientelle numbers. They don't want to add full time permanent staff. So they bring in an expensive travel nurses to cover 2-3 months when they're more likely to have higher number of patients (summer for accidents) and (holidays for heart attacks).
http://nursinglink.monster.com/benefits/articles/193-why-cant-new-nurses-find-jobs [monster.com]
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-07-09-1Anurses09_ST_N.htm [usatoday.com]
I expect the IT industry to soon follow the same slope...
I have experience with this (Score:4, Interesting)
Or rather I have experience with cleaning up afterwards.
I seen it all and NEVER in a good way.
One project saw the creation of a game platform completly outsourced to India with just the content created locally. Delays ran into a year and a half (and in the online game industry that is roughly a century) and when it was done there were HUGE mistakes that took ages to fix. The code was piss poor with gigantic performance issues and a setup requirement that consisted of very specific product versions often not available anymore for download.
The "problem" was simple, the Indian developers could code but had absolutely no eye for quality beyond making it work for a single scripted demo.
I have gotten finished web projects from China with chinese comments in the code and every page of a website being its own page, so the menu code was copy pasted in every single page rather then an include. And the menu code had evolved over time so even search and replace couldn't fix it. Spend more on fixing that then it would have cost to develop it from scratch. But hey! Cheap chinese coders!
As for QA itself... I have seen tests being done by Russians where they completely failed to catch obvious bugs making you wonder what the fuck they tested. Well, the answer became clear, they tested they could run it and labelled anything that didn't work as "oh that probably wasn't finished yet so lets not do it"...
Are Russians, Indians and Chinese incompetetent and stupid?
YES, those that work in those kind of firms are. You see, why would ANY competent person work in one of these places? Russia, China, India, they got their own software industry, only the rejects from their own industry would work for foreigners for minimum wages. The idea that you can get the elilte of developing countries working in sweat shops is beyond insane.
The simple fact is that software development is something you buy around the world so WHY would a company that can deliver quality charge a far lower price just because it is located somewhere else? Since when is capatilism about charging the lowest price you can rather then charging as much as market is willing to bear?
If someone sells you software development at dump prices, that is probably a good indication of what you should do with the resulting code.
Re:Again with the visas (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't find a software development job in the Bay Area, the problem isn't foreigners, it's you. As a developer who just switched jobs in the past year, I can tell you that jobs are plentiful. Tech companies are doing well as a whole, and the success of the biggest employers (Google, Facebook, Apple) has put excellent pressure on the market, from an employee perspective. Yes, even considering their no poaching agreement, they're driving up wages across the valley.
Re:Not if theyr'e H-1Bs. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but an H1-B visa allows you to convert to a green-card after 3 years. It takes a while (took me another 2 years, but hey, the same company that gave me an H1B also paid for the green card, so that was fine by me).
I'm from the UK, I didn't come to the US for anything much more than the sunny CA weather and the money... The company that now employs me bought my (small) company, and one of the conditions of sale was to relocate to the Bay Area. They really didn't have to twist my arm *too* much, but there's nothing inherently superior or overly-wonderful about the software industry in the US compared to anywhere else.
There's a few very large and successful companies (more so than elsewhere) and a whole slew of smaller ones (which is the same as anywhere). On the other hand you have to offset:
- the "police state" trend (even the cops here are far more aggressive than back home, how the cop who shot a handcuffed man in the head on the BART in Oakland didn't go down for murder I'll never know) :) and the measly vacation grant.
- the TSA. One thing to say: WTF!
- the fact that there's no universal health system to speak of. Only when I'd lost the NHS did I truly understand what a blessing it is. I get a great health-plan from my employer, but given that healthcare is tied to your employer over here, that's like having a lifesaver vest that dissolves in water... Oh, and it's more expensive than the *real* lifesaver vest. Another WTF! moment
- the fact that education is so expensive over here. I'm not talking about the "best of the best", even the lowly state schools are ridiculously expensive. My wife (a JD/MBA) has only recently finished paying off her student loans and she's getting towards the harsh end of the 30-40 range. I went to one of the "best of the best" colleges in London (Imperial College, for Physics) and it cost me a grand total of £2500 over 3 years. They paid me £17,000/year to do a PhD, not the other way around.
- a minor niggle : the low number of public holidays - ones actually *observed* by companies
Now I've worked off the "golden handcuffs" my employer placed on me, the last stock options are vesting this year, and the housing market is getting to the point where my currently-underwater house is getting back to the black, I think by the end of the year it'll be good to sell. My soon-to-be-born son will be American but have English citizenship by birthright, so I'm thinking we ought to move back to the UK in the next 2-3 years (before school becomes an issue).
I've paid well over half a million dollars in taxes into the US economy over the last 7 years or so. I'm probably the sort of person the US would like to keep (at least from a fiscal perspective), but the country is on such a destructive spiral, that I can't see any way it'll be a good place to raise a child and retire in. It'll take some sweet-talking to convince my wife (who loves the Bay Area), but I honestly think the US is not a good long term strategy for me and mine.
I've been asked if I was ever going to apply for US citizenship, and I used to joke that the UK citizenship was my fall-back option. Now I don't think of it as a joke.
I'll miss the weather.
Simon.
Re:Jobs are a necessary evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, it depends how far into the future you go. Garbage collection should be pretty easy to automate really. Right now, my garbage is collected by a big truck that drives along the street and uses a mechanical arm to pick up each container and dump it in the back. The recyclables have a separate truck. We already have driverless cars almost working; making a driverless garbage truck should be easy. Now, if you're talking about dumping out each wastebasket, that can be done with robots; remember the Jetsons had a robotic housekeeper. Obviously, that's much farther into the future than the automated garbage truck, but it's still possible (remember too, back in the 80s, everyone thought we'd have robots like this in just a decade or two; remember the crappy movie "Runaway"?).
Law enforcement, too, can be automated with robots (this one's even farther ahead than the garbage-collecting robot). Remember THX-1148? Their cops were all robots. And really, society would be much better off with robotic cops too; the human ones do a terrible job, and can't be trusted. Just look at all the police brutality cases, and how the US government is censoring any journalism or video of these. Also look at Singapore: a lot of their cops are Gurkha soldiers from Nepal, because they have a reputation for impartiality, unlike any local people who would be expected to side with their ethnic faction. But most places don't have the practical ability to outsource their policing to impartial outsiders the way a small but very rich city-state can.