Outsourcing

So, one of the key buzzwords for this election is outsourcing of jobs. I can't say that I'm in favor of it, but I at least understand it. In the Simpsons episode "A Milhouse Divided" Marge is throwing a dinner party and is picking up things she would like to have. She picks up an oyster mallet and then puts it back after seeing "Made in USA" on it. Funny yes, but it speaks to a much larger problem. American products are often seen as shody and overly expensive. Unions demand that they get high wages, benefits, lots of overtime, and also no members get cut at any time. Companies also need to report profits to the shareholders. So, you have to pay 4 times what you might for an object as opposed to if it was made in China. Of course, the companies are paying so much to make the product so they cut corners by getting inferior materials. Couple that with a general malaise that comes with workers who are trying to squeeze every overtime dime and a total lack of fear that they might be fired due to ineptness, and you come out with a bad, high cost product.

That's manufacturing. Now, outsourcing of white collar jobs is a much dicier issue. Right now, a lot of engineering and technology jobs are going to places like India and Poland. They do the work for so much less money, but you have a problem in the quality of work. In my job, I review data packages that come back from places like these and while the technical knowledge is sound, a lot of the decisions related to it are not sound. An example would be a case where an analysis was run on a disk. We wanted to know specific properties related to a new type of machining. The model they ran was quite good, but they returned the wrong type of stress numbers and also didn't catch a simple engineering logic flaw: that if you place a raised point on a curved surface, the stresses around that surface will be higher, not lower. To use an overused phrase, you have to think outside the box to solve problems.

I have to actually do work now. I'll follow up with solutions in a later post.