"Crowd-Sourcing" part II; Email from the Creator of the Term; Other Readers Chime In Too

I received a lot of emails about “Crowd-Sourcing” IBM to Cut 3/4 of its Permanent Staff by 2017?. Let’s take a look.

Steve Writes …

Mish,

I’m currently working at Intel and was responsible for outsourcing my test team over the past decade. I’m personally being let go next Monday after 13 years and have experienced what you mentioned about crowd sourcing. I’m currently trying to get an interview with an international company that has a job offering exactly what I’ve done, but as a contractor with no benefits. You would never find this level of experience and knowledge about a job being offered as a contractor ten years ago. This is very clearly deflationary as you mention and will only increase at least for the larger companies involved with manufacturing.

I believe the jobs that can be outsourced either have or will be which means almost everything including all levels of skill and technical acumen. The only reason for keeping someone, a group or a type of job such as accounting locally in the US is because these employees have information that is not easily electronically stored or have information that is needed immediately and can’t wait for one day to receive it from Asia. I don’t believe that the reason for keeping accountants is due to fear that data will fall into the wrong hands as this information can easily be kept away of from any group of employees as necessary.

My feeling is that most of the accountants haven’t been outsourced because the information they have and not necessarily on their computer or have access to, is information that the business needs from time to time in an immediate nature and upper management hasn’t yet figured out how to wean themselves off of this instant access to critical information.

My test team was in this position of having critical information ten years ago but through outsourcing, this critical information moved overseas and hence my group’s demise.

Regards,

Steve

BG writes “The post on IBM is a great one. On my trips back and forth to India, my flights are full of H1 B visa engineers who come here and take work packages back to India. This is bad news for US IT folks.“

Klaus from Canada writes ..