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Home > Archive > alt.certification.cisco > December 2003 > OT- the ebb and flow of jobs
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OT- the ebb and flow of jobs
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| I find it ironic that IT professionals would complain so much about job
losses when in fact, IT as a whole is itself responsible for boatloads of
job losses in other industries. That's not to say that the pain of anybody
who has been laid off should be minimized, or that blame should be sought,
but that a historical and macro perspective needs to be brought to bear
before one engages in accusatory language of corporate greed.
I already talked about how the PC industry annihilated the typewriter
industry, an industry that had existed for over a century and employed tens
of thousands of employees. As the PC industry rose, employing more and more
people, the typewriter industry declined and folded and laid off thousands,
culminating in the bankruptcy of Smith-Corona in 1995. Banks in the 90's
hired more and more IT workers to help them automate and digitize their
processes so that they could offer online banking and online loan services,
and concurrently, eliminate tens of thousands of bank teller and
loan-officer positions. Retailers purchased computer capacity and hired IT
workers to wring efficiencies from their supply chains which allowed them to
eliminate tens of thousands of warehouse positions, and retailers
increasingly automated and Internet-enabled their front end to offer online
sales, which ultimately meant that thousands of cashier and stocking jobs
were either eliminated or were never created in the first place. The
largest bookseller in the world is clearly Amazon, and they clearly take
sales away from Borders, Waldenbooks, BDalton, and the other realworld book
merchants. How much larger would those realworld merchants be, and
consequently, how many more cashiers would they be hiring, if the Internet
and therefore Amazon didn't exist? How many travel agents has Expedia and
Travelocity effectively thrown out of work? My father is a collector of
rare international stamps and he would sometimes drive 2 hours to a special
stamp collector's store where he could see some of the stamps that
interested him. Something happened and now my father can purchase his
favorite stamps whenever he likes and enjoys a far greater selection of
stamps, and meanwhile that special stamp store went out of business. What
happened? One word - Ebay. Companies like Intuit and other enterprise
software companies sell software that allow companies to process their
finances far more efficiently. The result - a company that used to requiree
10 bookkeepers and accountants to close its quarterly figures now finds that
it only needs 2 bookkeepers and 1 IT worker to maintain the PC's that the
software is running on.
I have heard complaints that outsourcing is a matter of fairness. So then
are all the examples above also a matter of corporate greed? For the last
40 years, companies have been buying and expanding their IT infrastructure
and employing more and more IT personnel with the purpose of improving
efficiencies, which usually that thousands of line workers have been
rendered obsolete. The upshot - more IT employment, less line-worker
employment. Is that fair? Online travel companies like Expedia employ
hordes of IT personnel, and those companies have absolutely crushed the
traditional travel agents, who employed very few IT personnel. The upshot -
more IT employment, but less employment of travel agents. How fair is that?
Ebay and the other online auction sites have badly hurt the thrift shop,
flea market, and specialized collector's stores, causing many of them to go
out of business. Fair or not fair? The advent of email, IM and other
network communications has caused a decline of the world's postal system,
especially for international postage. Fair?
The point is not to minimize the loss of anybody's job, but to point out
that the very rationale for the existence of the IT industry is to automate
processes and thereby improve productivity - in other words, permitting your
company to do more with less. Companies don't buy IT gear and hire IT
workers because they think it's cool to have a lot of computers, network
gear, and software floating around their offices. They do so because they
want to improve their efficiency, which ultimately means being able to lay
off people, or not having to hire as many people to support growth as they
would have needed to otherwise. Online companies like Amazon didn't expand
because consumers thought it was cool to give money to these companies, but
because consumers prefer the offerings of those online companies over the
offerings of the real-world companies, so as the online companies won sales
and expanded, the offline companies necessarily lost sales and declined.
Ultimately, the growth of the IT field meant a decline of many other fields.
When was the last time you saw an encyclopedia salesman? When was the last
time you saw an employee of the typewriter industry?
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"nrf" <noglikirf@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:EQuIb.707374$Fm2.613201@attbi_s04...
[cutted bunch of truth]
Everything that you've wrote is truth, and nothing but the truth. That still
doesn't mean that we can't complain about it :-). I'm pretty sure that
people from your posing were complaining too when they losted their jobs.
Ivan
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"Ivan" <john@fly.srk.fer.hr> wrote in message
news:bsu0tm$1d9gm$1@ID-61273.news.uni-berlin.de...
>
> "nrf" <noglikirf@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:EQuIb.707374$Fm2.613201@attbi_s04...
> [cutted bunch of truth]
>
> Everything that you've wrote is truth, and nothing but the truth. That
still
> doesn't mean that we can't complain about it :-). I'm pretty sure that
> people from your posing were complaining too when they losted their jobs.
Sure absolutely, and I'm not trying to minimize the pain in any way. I
believe the real solution to the problem is not restrictions on foreign
offshoring but rather expanded education, job retraining, or other such
initiatives to ease the transition of displaced workers to new fields. The
fact is, whenever your economy advances, somebody somewhere is losing a
job. When the US transitioned away from agriculture to industry in the
1800's, millions of American farmers lost their jobs. Painful for the
farmers? Of course. But would the US have been better off if the country
never transitioned to industry? If 75% of the American workforce still
worked the fields like they did in the early 1800's, the US would be one of
the poorest and weakest nations on earth.
>
> Ivan
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