[lbo-talk] tech jobs abound - in India

[alex lantsberg]

i spent a bunch of time talking with one of my professors about all of this
yesterday in our discussion of the new int'l division of labor.  we know
this already, but its virtually guaranteed that more tech work will end up
getting shipped offshore, as will other basic services that can be
informationalized.  something that stand out from the discussion (ulhas,
please correct me if her take on this wrong)...as dennis suggested, india's
internal capacity to take more of the high tech work is rather limited.  the
national state has not done enough to build its internal social (or capital
for that matter) infrastructure to continue to take wave after wave of
offshore services.  the work is also not spread in an even plane across the
country, but mostly concentrated in a few cities which are rather poor
outside of their modern urban cores.  these city-regions would be ideal
candidates to take on some of the developmental tasks, but they have no
money since the national gov't has tight control of the pursestrings.   she
reported to us of interviews with some indian tech entrepreneurs who are
already looking to do some offshoring themselves.

china is much more the player to watch out for.  the engineers leaving US
grad schools are about evenly split between indians and chinese.  its just
that the chinese engineers are much more low-key than their indian
counterparts.  moreover, the chinese state is doing much more to build
internal markets than india, which is mostly US/europe oriented.

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org]On
Behalf Of Dwayne Monroe
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 3:49 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re:[lbo-talk] tech jobs abound - in India

Wojtek posted:

Cool.  The arrogant US techies meeting their just
desert.

*******

Dios Mio!

Why do so many people, particularly on the left,
celebrate the unemployment of US tech workers?

But of course, I know that many IT workers were
'arrogant'.  Perhaps this is the explanation.

Wait, do I know this?

No, no I don't.  Most of the people I worked with were
women and men who love tech (software development,
hardware, network engineering, what have you)
gravitated towards the profession motivated by this
love and, at rare and good moments had fun.

There was hype, there were countless articles about a
'new economy' and some of my friends were fooled for a
time into believing they were residents of Olympus.

But do they deserve to be unemployed because of this
human, human all-too-human moment of foolishness?

Is this really "their just desert"?

And, let's assume that some of these Indian IT
workers, who're told now that they're the vanguard of
the nation's future, look in the mirror and discover a
bit of the old ultra-arrogance.  When the global labor
market for IT abandons them in favor of the yet still
cheaper will this be their "just desert"?

Where's that asprin?

DRM

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