Re: Digest Number 1422

On Feb 23, 2005, at 4:52 AM, Sanjay Laturkar wrote:

> The good and above-average do not have their livelihood affected
> anywhere. It is mostly the low-tech or labour intensive jobs that took
> flight.

Not entirely true, since there's some fairly fancy FEA and programming tasks that are moved overseas, judging from what I see on a couple of other lists and from some personal contacts. Quality seems to vary widely based on what I've seen, particularly where performance depends on a sound grasp of engineering design and the ability to pose and solve problems which involve ambiguity. Where academic training depends on rote learning and independent thinking in not actively encouraged, the number crunching comes out OK but problem approach and methodology suffer. That's a cultural thing, and can happen anywhere.

When I worked at NASA-Marshall in the 60's you could see a huge difference in the older German engineers who worked at Peenemunde and the postwar crop who were educated after the war. The Peenemunde engineers were incredibly well versed, but tended to be authoritarian (I hadn't worked for anyone with duelling scars before…); their kids and the post-war crowd didn't. We can't let cultural differences make us insular, but we can't ignore them either.

> Plain and simple eonomics at work here, rather than anything else.
Actually this is our problem. I think corporate America has been concentrating on short-term cost-cutting to increase share prices, and if we keep doing that it's going to destroy us. Manufacturing used to be a matter of national pride, but it's very unfashionable these days. We don't manufacture much in the way of consumer goods, a decline which started with the departure of our consumer electronics manufacturing. The same thing happened to steel production and transportation equipment. We used to have a half dozen major commercial airframe manufacturers, now there's only one. Japanese-designed cars are the flat-out best sellers. The Saturn I drive was designed and built separately because the existing GM infrastructure couldn't build cars to compete with Honda and Toyota. Offshoring works when you can afford to be dependent of trade policies of other nations. But if the dollar keeps falling, we're going to be in deep doo-doo. Imports will cost more and other nations may decide that getting paid in dollars just isn't good thinking. So we'll see. Tigers and eagles and dragons can co-exist as long as there's food and space for all; when water gets scarce, co-existence takes a backseat to control of the waterholes.

On that cheerful note, I'll get back to some billable work for a change. ;->

Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.

.......................................| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania