Yes, I wish the debate could get past who and what is causing it and move on to how to mitigate or reduce it. Course we've wasted so much time now. We had an opportunity to provide a good example to developing nations but instead we're providing a bad example and surprirse, their environments are complete crap. Look at what China had to do to get the air quality up for the Olympics.

It''s baffling that the argument is still whether we are affecting nature when there are examples you can actually see all over the world. Seems like some people aren't happy unless the lakes are catching on fire AGAIN. Help nature and you help yourself. We don't need to live in mud huts but we have plenty of room to be more sensible.

The problem is that it is often not cheaper for overseas labor to do the work. There is absolutey a ceiling for pay rates but when a company is profitable and larges chunks of that profit are through the use of skilled labor then it usually pays to keep the skilled labor and train less skilled labor to do the grunt work which leaves a company safe and secure as an employee trained an employer is going to have some measure of loyatly. This cost is lost on most businesses today.

We're also talking about H1-Bs and that means Microsoft among many other extremely large shops who absolutely can afford to pay more but choose not to. These programs make it easier for them to do business at the expense of everyone else in the pool.

During the process of job hunting I had to make a lot of decisions, I don't base where I work entirely on pay, quality of life matters, the work culture matters and as such you knowly take a pay hit to work for a smaller company. If that smaller company grows and becomes increasingly successful they should grow your compensation as you have contributed to that success. Different companies will rely on different skillsets and have the option to weight compensation appropriately. I'll give you an example though, due to automation and my negotiating skills I was able to save the company over a million dollars. Did I even so much as get a bonus? How about a pay raise? No? Not only did my pay not rise but the cost of healthcare went up so my take home check is smaller? Now repeat this story with varying levels of cost savings and many people in IT are in the same boat.

Fortunately there are those of us that understand teaching someone that is smart and eager to learn is easy and pretty cheap since it's on the job training.

Identifying those people unfortunately takes people skills that HR and most MBAs lack. That's why I am a firm believer of hiring via word of mouth instead of via monster or whatever job site is out there.

That is incredibly simplistic, there are lots of reasons to setup shop in the U.S. versus China or India especially. How much work are you going to get done with rolling black or brown outs that are common in both countries? How reliable are your workers going to be when infrastructure crumbles from an earthquake. You might not be watching the news but things are a lot more stable in the U.S.

Corruption of government officials in both countries also runs rampant. Finding good people is easy compared to dealing with all of that. There are of course different regulatory problems too, RIM ran into that problem in a big way. Moving to European countries is of course far easier but then you lose savings on labor as they command higher rates just like we do. There is a reason that a network engineer in NYC makes about the same as a network engineer in London.

Econ 101 as you know is far from a complete picture of a state economy much less a country or global economy.

There is also the reality that most people setup shop in the U.S. because they are from the U.S. It would be a very rare occurrence for anyone living in the U.S. to start a company in another country regardless of the talent pool unless they already had a company in the U.S. that proved successful.

I've met a lot of smart people, from all over the globe, no matter where you go you can probably find qualified people as long as you're willing to pay the prevailing wage. You don't go to India and pay a network engineer the same as you pay someone in Somalia.

You know, I would have thought your statement was obvious but parent failed to make the connection.

These days you have to go to college twice if you want to get out without an enormous pile of debt. Do you liberal arts work at a community college and then your major work at a university that has more resources. Of course the more people do that the more community colleges will charge and universities will see attendence drop leading to cut-backs and then you have a complete dismantling of higher education in this country.

I'm not sure why we're so unwilling to pay for education in this country given all the problems it solves but it seems like a bad word these days. Hell, even childhood hunger is back and it was largely solved in the 80s. Surprise, now the quality of work of the students is dropping in areas where hunger is more prevalent. Gotta love going backwards!

This is the problem, companies these days don't want to train their employees to do their jobs, they want them to come pre-trained which is of course ideal but hardly realistic for sufficiently complicated job duties.

I built this network from 3 servers to over 80, I have skillsets in all the technologies used in this company. Those skillsets are hardly unique, there are thousands of engineers in the area that could do large portions of it but probably none that could do it all. To replace me they would need to hire someone with a diverse skillset then train them through on-the-job work or formal education so that they get the rest.

Internal to my department I solve this problem by mentoring, if I see someone has a particular personality or interest in something I'll teach them, someone who is a network junkie probably isn't interested in the DBA work. That means I mentor the programmer who talks to the database all day and he gains skills as well as understanding why I don't like it when he builds apps certain ways. As a result we all get along better and knowledge is shared across a number of people rather than staying in one basket.

I did it all out of a stress standpoint, while it's nice to feel wanted it sucks never getting to take a vacation and it sucks feeling like the entire weight of the company is on your shoulders so I cross-train and then the load gets shared across many people. Now I still get grey hairs but at a much slower pace. Of course now the company thinks I'm easy to replace but you can't control that, they would have thought that before anyway since they don't know IT. Increasingly IT workers are seen as mechanics instead of engineers that never see the exact same thing twice.

That's a pretty interesting stance to take, make it easy for me or I pack up and leave!

Quite frankly, if you can't find enough talent in your local area it would be cheaper to setup another office in another area rather than move your entire HQ overseas and comply with a very different set of rules. There is a lot of stability in the workforce here along with stability in the infrastructure that you don't get unless you're moving to Germany or Japan in which case you won't save money on labor.

Rest assured, there are plenty of qualified people, I wanted to look for a new job due to poor treatment by management so I threw a stone and came up with a better job. IT communities in any city are very much a small work, it's not hard to find qualified people unless you're not willing to pay them what they are worth.

While I'll agree that environmentalist have often taken things to the point of people against their own interests the tepco incident had more to do with penny pinching and maximizing profit at the expense of safety. This is prevalent in all companies that participate in the enery sector. Oil companies spill millions of gallons of crude every year and cause untold amounts of damage to communities to which they participate.

Of course, through this whole process we are continuing to deregulate and surprise, the problem is getting worse! The other side of the problem is regulators who participate in the industry and become corrupt through a conflict of interest.

Right now, greed seems to be the worlds biggest problem, solve that and the rest of the issues fall by the wayside.

No offense, but it doesn't like you've used Windows 8, the Start menu is different, I haven't seen anyone ask, how do I open office? Or launch Firefox? Once you land back at Desktop mode users can feel comfortable again. Once they realize that the metro style start menu contains all the same stuff they were familiar with just with lipstick on it they start to calm down.

The thing that I hate is Windows 8 without a touch screen, they screwed the pooch there pretty bad as getting to things like wireless networks, shutdown, and such are much more difficult to access. They tried to give you hints but it's a clear kludge. I'm under the impression they are addressing that with 8.1

Gotcha, so we draw the line when it comes to genecide. We used to draw the line at torture and stripping people of their citizenship but I guess we can move the goal post to make us feel better about slipping into a totalitarian government. Nevermind the fact that we were doing just fine before all of this ridiculous behavior.

That was only after the initial failure occurred though. Fuel pumps most certainly did not always have breakaway nozzles for instance.

Every time you make something idiot proof the world produces a better idiot. Sometimes it's not even an intelligence issue, I had a manager that was dead set against any change whatsoever. When we were developing the new app we engaged her much as she would allow and the final product was still missing giant pieces of functionality because she didn't want change. When your project gets sabotaged like that it's hard to blame the programmer for not knowing every detail of the business when the person providing the business logic is actively working against them.

Alas, that's more of a problem with executive management being on different pages as well. The owner/CEO forcing his will on the president despite objections to timing and scope. Regardless, all that is out of the developers hands and can result in poor quality even if he/she is a skilled coder.

That's certainly how it is at the company I work for. Of course after a few weeks new employees find out that being social and friendly makes for fast and immediate response while the angry person is told that he or she will wait until they have calmed down.

The IT folks in my company are the most social so you definitely ask them where the best places for lunch are and they are highly analytical so they can help you navigate that 401k planning, the joys of a small company.

It would be nice if HR could do more in our company but after many years of working there I've come to the conclusion that is easier and causes less brain damage for me personally to just be helpful. It means sometimes getting overwhelmed because 50 people all see you as a go-to guy but it also means when the rare outage occurs that most of them are pretty calm and know what I'm working on it.

Some people just don't handle stress well, I feel bad for those people as they go through life being rather unhappy.

That's a silly question though, if you take one tree ring from one location then it's local. If you take a hundred from a hundred different locations on the earth then it becomes global.

Don't tease everybody, its the middle of the week still!

I agree with you completely. Steam is an example of a DRM scheme though that actually provides other benefits rather than just breaking perfectly good software. Personally I don't use it but I know a whole lot of people that do.