I’ve looked at several data points and statistics for the past like two decades, and the problem is not that technology is not advancing, or that it is somehow getting worse. No, in fact, it’s slowly progressing at a snail’s pace but it’s definitely advancing. The problem though is that leaders in tech are squandering the opportunities available to them, and hindering those that once made technology great.
The biggest threat is definitely outsourcing. You have an entire country of 50 huge ass states. What do you do with that, exactly? You strip the jobs from those states and transfer them to another country overseas, Philippines, Malaysia Thailand, India probably gets the most of them. Any way to cheapen the product that you’re providing in the USA, while simultaneously stealing from those who live in the USA by removing their jobs from them. Long-term, this is not sustainable. Because if you look at layoffs and job shrinkage in the USA and where jobs are actually going, they are not meaningful places. Jobs are being created in lower paying industries, outsourced from higher paying industry is, and the highest paying industries like managerial positions, are not moving at all. It’s embarrassing to say the least.
People think that they are doing a good thing by raising the stock price and jacking it up as high as they can go. Sure, your investments are increasing slowly over time. But the pool of investors becomes smaller because less people can afford to invest, and now you don’t have an educated group of investors, you have a smaller and smaller list of elites that keeps growing, and isn’t wholly owned by everyone in society because the majority of stock owners for big companies are the rich. People who can throw any amount of money they want into a company. So you don’t have good decision making for tech companies.
Bad decision making is what we have come to today, big companies making horrible decisions because they are poorly led by elites who don’t know what they’re doing. Just look at Microsoft if you need any example of this, which of their products is actually well built today? Every one of them functions like crap, their gaming division is collapsing, computers are moving towards copilot which is the worst AI model and platform I have ever seen in my life which is crazy because they I just came out and they are already the worst. But still, they are ruining computing with that, windows 11 is terrible in every single way I can imagine. It is bad decision making every single step of the way.
Then, we have the collapse of industry, the final stage which we are approaching soon. As you can see, big tech in the USA has started to fold in on itself in a way that has never happened before. Microsoft bought out Activision Blizzard and is basically for all intents and purposes, now a monopoly in the tech industry for gaming. Activision Blizzard barely has any competitors, other than maybe EA games which owns so many different smaller gaming companies that it has swallowed up and basically deleted to own the IP for. So tech industry is basically collapsing in on itself, we haven’t seen the worst of it yet but soon, there will be very few tech companies left, only big ones, no choices available and if you want to play games or enjoy any sort of technology you’ll have very few options.
Bonus: alternative market is growing rapidly which is really concerning. The alternative market is what I call Amazon’s scam products. They don’t have any logical name to them, each of them has a different name entirely, they’re mostly just Chinese gibberish, but you can find watches, tablets, any sort of technology on there, there is an off-brand made in Asia or elsewhere cheaply, that has no reviews other than bot generated reviews to make it seem like a real product, and these are not actually tested for anything, I would assume. Not tested for safety, not tested for dangerous materials chemicals or any of that. This is a symptom of widespread poverty, especially among the middle class. People simply can’t afford to buy name brand products anymore. It’s not possible to buy a Samsung or Apple watch every 2 years, so what do they do? Go on Amazon and find ‘Ufolgewits’ brand.
Man…
You’d think you’d have realized that capitalism was the root cause at some point of typing that…
In our economy, what matters is how much the numbers go up. At a certain point the only way to make profit keep increasing is to outsource and cut quality.
Like, you think it’s just because they’re dumb, but you’re not looking at the same metric.
You want long lasting corporations making steady profits and quality products…
But that’s not what’s best for the people who own the stock. All they want is their number to go up as fast as possible so they can sell when it’s high. Then do the same to another company.
You want to change that?
Vote for progressives who want to tax stocks to incentive long term investments rather than the current system.
This isn’t a tech problem or a even a management problem. It’s an economic one.
Western civilization has been addicted to cheap labor since the very beginning. From the Spartan slave state to the modern outsourcing of labor to people who get paid near slavery wages, or just old-fashioned slavery in some cases, even today. Humans are the root of the problem. It’s not a system or idea that’s the root cause, it’s us.
I know it’s pedantic, but ancient Greece is by no means “western civilization”…
They heavily influenced western civilization, but they’re separated by multiple eras and thousands of miles.
And the same thing obviously existed (and still exists) outside of both the geographic and chronological eras.
So I just really don’t understand where that specification came from, or why later you say outsourcing labor is the same…
But this isn’t an immutable human characteristic either. The vast majority of people don’t want it.
It’s just that wealth = power. And with unregulated capitalism the most unethical will accrue the most wealth because they’re the most cutthroat, and the more they have the more they accumulate.
Your hearts in the right place, but you don’t have the details right.
And people give me shit about it all the time, but the details are the important part.
Now more than any other point in my life, we need people to understand what’s really happening. Because it honestly isn’t that hard to fix if we can get everyone on the same page again.
That’s quite a wall of text there. I work in IT, probably the first part of the tech sector to be outsourced, and it has been known as a bad idea for a long time, but it keeps happening. I know of one fortune 50 company that, a little over 1 year ago, outsourced their IT to India. Everything from help desk to knowledge management. They are bringing it back because it was a disaster.
That isn’t to blame India. I’m sure it is full of skilled workers, but you don’t outsource to get the best, you outsource to get cheaper. So what you end up with is the worst workers. And then you tack on a language barrier on top of that and suddenly work in the US grinds to a halt. The problem is, it does save money for a few quarters, the execs who pushed it get their bonuses, and then the real cost hits as systems break down.
It’s the cycle perpetuated by idiots and assholes in C-suite who either do not understand or don’t care because they’ve chosen to prioritize short term profits over making the company sustainable: Outsource to “save money”, lose money because they fired all their competent staff and are left with grossly underpaid, overworked staff on the other side of the planet who often barely give a shit or barely understand, resulting in the company having to rebuild their in house support anyhow, ultimately costing much more money but by then, the execs have probably jumped off with their golden parachute so it’s no longer their problem.
Some leadership is wise enough not to do this, but it’s very, very common.
Not a single one of those tech companies wants to pay anyone what they’re worth, leading to outsourcing where they can get away with paying workers pennies for their labor. It’s disgusting.
No one wants to pay what anything is worth. Think everyone is getting up early on black Friday because they want to pay what things are worth?
The companies are less disgusting than the politicians that let them get away with it. Silly to expect companies to act morally. There needs to be rigid boundaries set by policy if this is going to change.
The alternative market is what I call Amazon’s scam products. They don’t have any logical name to them, each of them has a different name entirely
They’re just referred to as alphabet soup sellers.
The scary part is they’re actually getting damned good at it. IT support at my company is almost solely run out of India. If I put a ticket in and set it to high priority they’ll have it fixed in under an hour. A lot of times it’s 5 minutes. They don’t hide their true names (which I respect) and communication is fantastic. They need to reach out to me a Teams chat is initiated. If I’m not available they try calling. Not sure who they’re paying but they’re good.
American support is slower and less engaged overall. We’re definitely getting out paced.
India is just like anywhere else, you get what you pay for. There’s plenty of cheap dogshit contractors there but there’s also some pretty good “expensive” ones. I say “expensive” because they’re still cheaper than domestic, just a lot more than the cheap ones.
The interesting bit though is that the end state of all this outsourcing is an inversion. As US companies pour more and more money into foreign contractors the quality of those contractors steadily increases which then drives their prices up. Concurrently with that as the domestic market languishes and skills atrophy domestic prices fall. Eventually the US will find itself as the cheap 3rd world country the other countries are outsourcing to. That assumes of course other countries are as blindingly short sighted and stupid as the US. The more likely scenario is that those countries enact subsidies, tariffs, and tax breaks to protect their domestic markets in which case the US doesn’t become the hot outsourcing market and instead just continues to fade into irrelevancy.
