Re: Re: Offshoring: San Jose Mercury News article?

["Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>]

Not only that, what about the loss of information and knowledge?

Who's to say that someone won't just walk off with intellectual property and
sell it to the highest bidder? Are laws in other countries (a) strong enough
to discourage that, and (b) enforced?

The financial incentive fo such acts is probably greater when the standard
of living is lower. ($5000 for copies of confidential paperwork is a month's
pay, more or less, in the U.S., but it's how many years worth in other
places?)

Already we've seen reports of offshored medical information being lost, and
at least one offshore worker threatening to release confidential information
if they weren't paid more. The evidence is mounting that security and
privacy of information aren't as well protected in overseas locales, no
matter what the company internal policies are.

A lot of this offshoring is coming not from companies, too, but from
contractors, who in turn contract out the work again, sometimes several
levels deep. How can the company that started this chain even believe it has
control over what's going on (no matter what the contract says)?

Offshoring information seems to be a bigger and bigger Pandora's Box that is
a whole different can o' worms than offshoring manufacturing.

Chuck Martin

"Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote in message news:219547 -at- techwr-l -dot-  -dot-  -dot- 
>
> This is the aspect of off-shoring that is, or should be,
> of the most concern to policy-makers, not to mention the
> companies that are doing the off-shoring.  While moving
> unskilled and semi-skilled labor overseas is painful to
> those whose jobs are eliminated domestically, moving
> knowledge development jobs overseas is also providing
> education and training of the sort needed to start
> competing companies.  The foreign engineers and writers
> of today's offshoring US companies will one day become
> the founders of their own countries' domestic industries
> using the knowledge and skills they got working in the
> trenches of US employers, while in the US what should be
> the next generation of knowledge developers is flipping
> burgers and thinking about changing their majors
> to Business Administration instead of getting their entry
> level developer experience.  While the "cutting edge" may
> be a sexy and somewhat more secure place to work, most of
> the profit in technology comes from selling things in
> large quantities "after the cutting edge has passed."
>

> ------- Original Message -------
> On
> Tue, 11 Nov 2003 13:21:13 -0500 ?wrote:
>
> Also, when I said skills I also meant the knowledge in the technology
> sector in which you work. Off-shoring and outsourcing happen after the
cutting
> edge has passed. Stay on the cutting edge of technology and your job will
be
> safer.



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