Would you like some curry with that pink slip?...

You know what, India sucks Rhino nuts.

Actually I take that back. India is fine, it's greedy corporate cost cutters who suck!

I'm an Information Technology professional. You know my kind. We're those folks who piggy-backed that economic boom of the late 90's and all? Yeah, that’s us. We're also the people who got cornholed by Wall Street in the year 2000, because a bunch of greedy corporate sleazeballs decided they could manipulate the market by inflating the value of "Dot Com" stocks.

Yeah, you know my kind. We're the "wave of the future" and "in demand".

In demand , my ass.

We're expendable techo-dweebs who haven't got a union. We're a bunch of hardcore gamers who used to get a paycheck. We're living with our parents after tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education, all because the industry ate itself alive 4 years ago.

Wanna piss a techie off? Ask them what they would like to do to the "Guidance Counselor" at their local college who told them they should become an IT student.

Watch his/her face contort as they remember how they were told that IT was the "In Demand" profession of the futue. Run when you see the steam coming off their heads as they dream of the gloriously violent things they wish to do to those who swore of financial freedom and personal success to the chosen few math whizzes out there who could wrangle this techno-future-landscape -- full of opportunity and an endless sea of silicon based employment.

Then watch them snap back into reality as they have to fill the next order of fries at the local burger joint.

Now the IT sector has had 4 years of recovery. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is well over 10k again, and Nasdaq is sustaining a hefty chunk of new growth too. You see "dotcom" ad's on Television all the time again, and tech sales are through the roof. It would seem like now is the time for the IT professional to wipe off the dark memories of the Tech Boom and get back to business.

The problem is India's practically infinite pool of smart, educated, English-speaking people...eager to work for the equivalent of your pizza budget. The people themselves aren't the problem...it's that they're in danger of being "outsourced" to the point of destroying the American IT Professional for good.

Today's Indian call centers, programming shops, and help desks are just the beginning. Tomorrow it will be financial analysis, research, design, graphics -- potentially any job that does not require physical proximity. The American cubicle farm is the new textile mill, just another industry on the way to the graveyard.

The emergence of India is the inevitable result of the migration of work when the corporate heads and the bean counters need to cut costs. India's roads and politics are still a mess, but cheap fiber and a glut of satellite capacity have liberated an army of knowledge workers. Never before have we seen such a tremendously significant percentage of highly skilled professional jobs, outsourced overseas.

IT line workers don't have their heads in the sand, either. We've been screaming about this on Capitol Hill, trade publications, mass media, you name it.

The problem is the CEO or chief information officer who's listening to the chief financial officer. This traitorous bastard will cut anyone as long as it can make his bonus check look fat. It's been around since the dawn of the American worker, but in this example -- it's being overlooked by seemingly every official we have.

There are cases where it does and where it does not work, of course. It's common knowledge that while an Indian applications analyst can check off necessary items on a list provided by the software manufacturer, he/she can not intuitively "feel" what the American consumer needs, or wants directly. It's merely a cultural thing. Indian workers are as intelligent as you and I. Just because the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) lists India as the only country where the Bubonic Plague still exists, doesn't mean their techies are any less savvy.

They're just not Americans.

Yet most companies are being driven by the hype to follow the herd. There is some solace in history, however. Agricultural jobs turned into even more manufacturing jobs, which decades later turned into even more service jobs. The cycle of work turns and turns again. Free Market societies work like that for a reason.

Of course, there's another part of the cycle: anxiety. It used to be that factory workers worried, but office jobs were safe. Now, it's not clear where the safety zone lies. It's not a matter of blue collar versus white collar, anymore.

The collar to wear is Nehru.

For US workers, the path beyond services seems uncertain. But again, history provides a guide. Thirty years ago, another form of outsourcing hit the US service sector: the computer itself.

That led to a swarm of soulless processing machines, promoted by management consultants and embraced by profit-obsessed executives gobbling jobs in a push for efficiency. If today's cry of the displaced is "They sent my job to India!" yesterday's was "I was replaced by a computer!"

Then, as now, the potential for disruption seemed infinite. Data crunching was just the start. Soon "electronic brains" would replace most of the accounting department, the typing pool, and the switchboard. After that, everyone assumed the modern corporation would apply the same technology to middle management, business analysis, and, ultimately, decision making. If your job was emptying an inbox and filling an outbox, you were begging for someone to draw the I/O analogy - and act on it.

In fact, the computer terminology I use everyday is littered with traces of what were formerly jobs: printers, monitors, file managers; even computers themselves used to be people, not machines.

Computers have, of course, reshaped the workplace. But they have also proved remarkably effective at creating jobs. Bookkeepers of old, adding columns in ledgers, are today's financial analysts, wielding Excel and PowerPoint in boardroom strategy sessions. Secretaries have morphed into executive assistants, more aides-de-camp than stenographers. Typesetters have become designers.

True, in many cases different people filled the new jobs, leaving millions painfully displaced, but over time the net effect was positive - for workers and employers alike. At the same time, we learned the limits of computers - especially their inability to replace us - and our fear of a silicon invasion diminished. By 1988, the computer had moved from a threat -- to a weapon.

In "Working Girl", Melanie Griffith has both a stock market terminal and a PC on her desk, and uses her skills and knowledge to move from secretary to private office. By the time Mike Judge made "Office Space" in 1999, the PC had faded into just another bit of cubicle furniture.

We are now in the Desk Set period with India. The outsourcing wave looks awesome and unstoppable. Like the mystical glass house of the 1970s "data processing center", India's outsourcing industry thrums with potential and power, as if it were itself a machine. Today, the outsourcing phenomenon is still mostly in the batch-processing stage: Send instruction electronically, receive results the same way the next morning. But the speed at which the Indian tech industry is learning new skills is a big problem.


The US Government has made a huge effort to assist the American skilled worker before. Farmers, steel workers, you name it. The problem is, they seem to think we computer people can handle this one ourselves. Or it's just plain ignorance. For some odd reason, people seem to think of IT people like myself, in a very mystical way. We're those mysterious people who make magical things happen with those boxes of silicon. You have to be really smart to be a computer guy...yea. It's as if your everyday employee thinks we're so smart we never have any problems. We can handle anything.

But some US firms now outsource their PowerPoint presentations to India! This is a blow to the pride of dorkass middle-managers everywhere!

I'm worried that I'm not going to find a job in the field I went to school for. I worked very hard, and kept a 4.0 GPA, all so I could be successful at what I do. I constantly stay on top of my field, and dedicate myself to continued education and training.

I'm also super cool. You should see my Pokemon collection!

I know for a fact that I am one of the most adaptable people in my field, yet I find myself wading in a pool of unemployment thanks to a bunch of 50 year old dinosaurs with PhD's from San Jose. They all moved back down here when the bubble burst and fought with us mid-career guys for the same help desk jobs. Can't blame em...they were born before me and got to go to school longer as a result. They deserve it.

I'm just hoping that some US Senator, or maybe a lobbyist somewhere, will see that there is a REALLY big chunk of American workers being forced out of usefulness. If there are less jobs here when the IT sector can really get a move on, then we're all toast.

Moderate rates of international outsourcing fuel competition and innovation...but this is just dangerous. I don't want to have to go back to school for another 4-6 years to make some new career out of an industry that could find itself being done from Bangladesh in a decade.

I could find comfort in historical patterns, but I'm not all that sure. It's not hard to see how outsourcing to India could lead to the next great era in American enterprise. Today, even the really innovative firms spend too much money maintaining products: fixing bugs and rolling out nearly identical 2.0 versions of some quazi-effective software they came up with years ago.

Less than 30% of R&D spending at mature software firms goes to true innovation, according to most trade consulting firms. Send the maintenance to India and, even after costs, 20% of the budget is freed up to come up with the next breakthrough app. The result is more workers focused on real innovation.

What comes after services? Creativity. And we Americans kick ass when it comes to creativity.

I dunno, maybe I just need to create something new again. I carved out a niche market for myself once. I can do it again. Maybe I should push for one of my inventions to become a viable commercial thingamajig.

Or I could just become a porn star. I mean, if I charged by the pound…Ron Jeremy would be out of a job, man.