[plt-scheme] Re: Programming for non-programmers

On Oct 14, 2004, at 10:10 PM, Peter Santoro wrote:

> I should have said "suggesting to our children that they avoid" 
> instead of "directing are children to avoid".  I will let my children 
> choose their career field, but I will give them all the information 
> that I believe they will need to survive in a global labor pool where 
> CEOs favor hiring the lowest wage workers.

Few people here may know that I have an MBA-like degree (though 
extremely mathematical in comparison to US schools). One of the things 
we learned in business courses was not to get the cheapest but the most 
profitable solution. Indeed, the business professors had managed to 
sneak exercises about efficiency and profit-maximizing into the CS 
courses that we had to take. One of them is now in HtDP.

If American MBAs really go for cheap -- see if -- they ignore basic 
business facts and it will affect them sooner or later. Of course, the 
problem is that they will suffer from this *after* everyone else in a 
company has suffered.

But, I used *if* for a reason. As I have pointed out before, the 
current savings of moving a software engineering job abroad to a 
country where SEs earn a quarter of a US SE is 20, 25 at most 30%. 
These numbers are available in public studies as well as in IBM papers 
about this years migration of jobs. That's a large gap for now, and 
definitely worth "arbitraging". But the salaries in other countries are 
jumping by leaps and bounds. I predict that this 10-year old out 
sourcing wave [it's only in the news because of the US presidential 
elections; there is no other reason, it is an old phenomenon] will 
peter out in a few years.

Finally, even with all the outsourcing and the post-bubble blues the 
prediction of the industry association is that until 2012 there will 
not be enough software/information professionals produced in the US.

-- Matthias