John H. wrote:
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:02:51 -0500, DownTime wrote:

John H. wrote:
Can you speak Chinese?
No, and I have no plans to learn it either.

Then you'd better hope the USA maintains an interest in world affairs.

Glad you brought that up, what good to the USA has come about by
off-shoring jobs and manufacturing? The lead-based paint in children's
toys and poisoned foodstuffs is enough for me to check labels and choose
to only buy American from now on.

The government didn't offshore, the companies looking for profits did that.
There is a big 'anti-corporate' push coming from a segment of our society.
Why should corporations put up with it? I'm sure, if a certain segment runs
our government, we'll soon see the CEO's following their jobs and
manufacturing. Why be considered the 'bad guy' by those running the
government?

I am not saying to ignore them, or anyone for that matter. I am just
questioning the so-called need to give away billions of dollars annually
in the name of aid to foreign countries and entities for which there is
practically zero return to the USA.

The off-shoring of jobs started as a way to save corporations money, the
truth of the matter is it rarely if ever pans out to be so. The ROI of
these projects is not what you might expect. Have you had a look at what
the companies & top tier folks who supply Asian Indian IT talent are
making? The numbers are mind boggling. The workers who come over are
generally well-educated, but making a fraction of the pay an American
counterpart. The corporations these folks work for make HUGE profits.
The end result is the companies hiring these folks as sub-contractors in
the name of saving money on the per-person cost, are simply fooling
themselves. They end up paying close to the same amount at the end of
the project for what they could have hired locally. But they now have
the feel good sensation of off-shoring to save money, but the project
bottom line proves this is a myth.

General Electric started the big push back in the early 90s. The word
then was GE wanted to sell more products to the growing country of
India. Steam turbines, locomotives, large scale products. The Govt of
India wanted something in trade to help their economy, about the only
reasonable product or service useful in any way to GE was 'IT services".

It started out decent enough, at least initially the resources coming
over were able to communicate effectively and get the jobs done.
Eventually greed took over on the part of their homeland firms and we
had documented cases where the resume and person interviewed over the
phone turned out to not be the person who eventually showed up to do the
work.