Wipro's Azim Premji - 'The man who wants to take your jobs'

[Bob Keyes]

Rather than quoteing a bunch of people and possibly misquoting, I am going
to just get on the soapbox.

For the past thirty years, the US has been losing jobs as manufacturing
moved overseas. We were told that the pain was temporary, that the
drudgery of low-paying manufacturing jobs and their pollution wold be
replaced by better manufacturing jobs, and clean, frienly jobs in the
service industry. Computer jobs, specifically software, were the promise
of the future.

First Japan ate our manufacturing jobs, then Taiwan, and now red China.
Oh yes,somecompanies in the service industry did well. WalMart, for
instance. Your shirts will be made in China, and your paycheck will be
made in Bentonville, Arkansas. But how long can even this go on? The U.S.
Trade deficit is getting horrible again, even though the dollar has been
so devalued. When will there be no more money to spend?

And now India steps in and wants to take our service sector jobs. Cheap
global fiber optic cables spanning the world have made this possible. I
have dealt will one of the call centers that US companies are now using in
India. Horrible, worse than useless, I will vowed never to buy from that
company, Dell, as long as they had such horrible support. I have heard
that there was much similar sentiment, and Dell moved its support center
back to the US. They also want our programming jobs. I have seen some of
these products, and heard from friends of the horror stories of Indian
outsourcing companies. They produce crap code, worse documentation, and
have clever people in the U.S. that make you swallow it. Oh, yes, the per
hour rate is so cheap, but they number of hours it takes to produce any
code, and the almost non-existant QA doesn't make it worth while for a
company to out-source offshore.

We put up with crappy manufactured goods from China, and now we have to
put up with crappy software from India. You thought that Microsoft write
bad code? So of it is,but its hundreds of times better than what is coming
out of India.

So what about our jobs? Why can't the U.S. keep a competitive edge? Why is
it so much cheaper to work overseas? It's because the U.S. has a certain
built-in 'friction' or 'overhead' in doing business. Our taxes are high,
to help pay for everything from wars, to health care, to education, to
graft. There's also labor and environmental laws because we want to live
decently. The U.S. became expensive because it could do so. But we forgot
how it works. We thought it would be great to rade with this less
fortunate countries, to bring them up to our level. We looked at the
restoration of war-ravaged Japan and Germany as examples of American
economic leadership, and decided it was worth trying to replicate this
(Sadly, American popular culture gives very little credit given to Japan
and Germany in their recovery).

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