Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
Which means eventually your employer will find a way for Indians to do 95% of your work and leave the other 5% to a local tech.
Even onsite work isn't protected from remote work. We've had to get creating in manufacturing over the last 2 years while air travel was banned. We've done a lot of video streaming were a local tech is our hands and feet on the ground. For software changes just have them plug into the machine and then hand over remote access. Development mock-up are also done remote were we used to fly in 20 - 30 people for a week.
Pre-Covid 0% of Manufacturing Engineering was in Mexico. Today it is about 15 - 20%. Why Mexico and not India? Time zones.
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Our Indian counterparts being almost exactly oppositely timed is an asset in many regards as that allows a project to "follow the sun" to be continually worked on. The customer upgrade that began at the end of Friday in Portland was started by myself and an "installer" from Dallas (TX). We handed over to India at night, then picked it back up Saturday morning. This allowed for a smooth go-live Monday morning.
I've maintained that I'm not special and my occupation is not protected, so I have no double-standards when it comes to my seemingly callous reaction to the ever changing jobs market. Our minds and bodies are reprogrammable devices. If something obsoletes what I do, I'll do something else. That's not to dismiss the great discomfort and difficulty that entails, but at the same time, I enjoy a challenge and variety is what makes life interesting to me.
Perhaps the thing I'm least able to identify with are those who dislike learning, are happy for every day to be exactly as the last, and are most content when nothing changes. I don't know what to say to those except that the 21st century was an unfortunate era to exist.
I expect globalization to continue to level the labor markets. I expect technology to continue to raise the floor on menial labor. I expect some form of UBI to be inevitable as that ever increasing floor surpasses the usefulness of the lowest skilled/opportunity individuals.
We're going to have to figure out how individuals who have nothing of societal value to contribute in our materialistic value structure to find meaning. Our suboptimally structured value system is a big contributing factor for the rise in despair, addiction, and crime. Our materialistic approach to solving the problem caused by materialism is foolish.