Thread: "Crowd-Sourcing" part II

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

"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. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot. ... f-its.html

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 ...

Hey Mish,

The 'crowd sourcing' you described in today's post is exactly what happened in Alberta, Canada with Infrastructure and Transportation departments in the early/mid 1990's. These government departments were slashed some huge amount like 80%, basically laying off all construction staff and most engineers, and keeping mainly management.

The construction staff joined or started construction firms, and since then all highway, road, bridge, etc. construction and maintenance is done through public tenders.

Not sure if you've heard of Ralph Klein, our premier at the time, but he's the one who led this and took Alberta down a path of balanced budgets and even debt elimination. There was a lot of pain when it happened, but now, 15 years later, that's still how it works.

Projects are completed through competitive bidding, and the new P3 system (public private partnership) takes it a step further by spreading the risk. This way if the construction company screws up, taxpayers aren't on the hook. The Edmonton Ring Road was built on P3 and it boggles the mind how fast it went up. There were some issues, and the construction company was on the hook for essentially 'warranty work'.

Crowd sourcing makes sense for public sector for sure since there is a distinct lack of accountability and fiscal prudence. At least private companies are driven by profit, so you would think they could stay efficient.

Klaus

Jeff Howe a writer at Wired who coined the word "Crowd-Sourcing" writes ...

My word gets misused a lot, but this is as brazen an abuse as I’ve seen. If the subcontractors are a known quantity, and the employer is purposefully hiring them back on a project to project basis, that has nothing to do with crowdsourcing, which is all about the open call, ie, anyone could apply to fulfill the order.

We already have a word for this, it’s called “freelancing.â€

Please explain to me what the meaning of "is" is in this particular context, and it's usage within the phrase in question and it's revelence within this question.

Truthfully, I really feel for those people that trusted the big companies promises that their pension would be there, unless of course they were the ones that voted as they were told and sold themselves and countless others down the river. Paying income taxes since '64, and working construction independently since '68 taught me one important lesson, put away money in good times to fund the bad times, and there have been several since 1965 when lbj and teddy kennedy opened up the floodgates of unchecked immigration, and these poor folks are just the latest casulty.
Get a clue, your vote counts when you vote together, look at the pos in office right now.
Don't allow anyone to split the conservative vote in Nov,, And get out there and vote!!!
Also need to change the access of voter registration to not allow the court system to forcefully demand you work for them for slave wages.