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Wow, another 'China' is going to steal more jobs. lol


this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" - solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - and would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.


You're missing the second order effects. In the old days the route into the industry for non-traditional candidates was to start on the helpdesk or in QA and work hard and then get the nod to move across to engineering if you were good. One of the best managers I ever worked for got her start that way. But if this "menial" work is outsourced, where does that leave us in the West? Without one stream of high quality talent.


It is not new, but it is getting worse now. The IBM case mentioned in the article is a good example.

btw: most western developers also work on simple tickets and CRUD stuff, which is, ironically, the major functionality of most software.




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