‘Chic Geek’: Computer Science Major Rebounds

Original Article

Summary goes here!

The bottom line is that the IT job is off-shoring. The reason is, of cause, cheap labor.

However, we need to ask ourself: Is it OK to support/compensate our own labor if people in other country can do the job cheaper? We have to realize that this is no different from buying toys or consumer electronics from other country. We need to ask ourselves, why can't we make it cheaper here in the United State? The answer could point to our social needs. Like we want a better society where employee are protected from employer. These are good causes and sooner or later those other countries will follow the same path and their cost of producing goods will rise.

All of these, however, did not change the fact that our labor is more expensive. We can keep arguing that our IT work force is just as good as those in other countries. But that would not help. We need our engineer/IT to be better than those in other country. And, why shouldn't we expect that? We have spent much more money in our education.

Let's look at other US high tech industry like the fighter jets and the space program. They are the best in the world. We need


========== My comment on InsideHigherEd.com ========
I appreciate the links provided by Scrawed. The bottom line is that the IT job is off-shoring. The reason is, of cause, cheap labor.

However, we need to ask ourself: Is it OK to support/compensate our own labor if people in other countries can do the job cheaper? We have to realize that this is no different from buying toys or consumer electronics from other countries. We need to ask ourselves, why can't we make it cheaper here in the United State? The answer could point to our social needs. Like we want a better society where employee are protected from employer. These are good causes and sooner or later those other countries will facing the same situation and it will cause their products to cost more. The point is this: If we are doing the same thing those people can do, I don't see how can we get paid more. We simply have to do things that they just can't do yet. For example, the Space program - yes, I know they are catching up too.

Anyway, we simply need to do better. We shouldn't even set our goal at the same level as those countries are and we shouldn't! We spent much more money in education than they are.

In the case of IT, we should understand that unless we are talking about highly academic/mathematical programming (pattern recognition, compression, encryption), a lot of them are simply labor intensive jobs. So. How many of us can do those? I think those are the training our work force needs - a REALLY good understanding of math. Same applied to other knowledge.

Sure, it's hard. But don't we think we have the best education system?