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07/29/2003: "I'm very worried about my life as a coder"

More and more articles about outsourcing are being written everyday. Today for instance, there was this article on My Yahoo! that forecast 1:10 ratio of software jobs to be moved abroad by the end of 2004. It's not a far stretch then to say that in 2010 that maybe 60% of the software jobs will have been moved abroad.

So where does that leave me career wise? Perhaps I should start thinking about law school again. You know the idea of becoming a lawyer keeps digging at me. I don't know why I would even want to go there. I just see it as a position of power, with a big paycheck and lots of respect. Is that a good reason to pursue a field that I know absolutely nothing about? I mean I went into CS knowing very little about it as well! It was more of a mix of parents desires and the fact that I liked to play MUD games and talk on IRC.

The honest truth is that I'm scared of doing law, because I know I have a certain aptitude in computer science that can at least put food on the table. With law, I don't know if I'd even be able to get a job. I mean I'm not exactly a prototypical lawyer in that I'm neither white, nor white-washed asian. On top of that, I honestly have no clue what lawyering entails.

Right now, I envision my future life as a simple engineer with a nice family and flexible well-paying job. But with outsourcing becoming prevalent, engineers like myself could experience the effects of a world economy where each country's labor rates are not equal. Assuming that the labor supplies in each country can provide equivalent goods and that the sunk cost of moving your operations to geographic location is small in comparison to relative savings, then wages in country USA will go down as a result of oversupply of labor.

Dude that will suck.

Replies: 1 Comment

It's inevitable. Let's go start an outsourcing company. We can call it "StealAmericanJobs.com"

Dennis said @ 07/30/2003 10:36 AM PST