Wicked Fragments

"Requirement: A requirement is an essential attribute or characteristic of a system.  It is a condition or capability that must be met or passed by a system to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed document or need."

I got another interesting call today from a recruiter.

<ring>

Me: "Bob Smith" (I really need to stop doing that)

Dipshit: "Hi Bob, am I to understand that you are the IT manager for HoHo Software?"

I'm already on my guard.  Salesy dude, asking me if I'm the manager, which means he has no idea who I am or what I do, really.  I wonder to myself how he got my name and number and knew enough that I was at least in IT, but whatever... he's a jerk, so he needs to burn.

Me: (Slightly icy) "Well, I would be an IT Manager for HoHo Software.  What can I do for you?"

Dipshit: "Well, I just had this candidate come across my desk that I think would be perfect for you.  Tell me, do you do any .net programming?"

Ok, so this guy has said like four total sentences and we already know volumes about him and his uselessness.  Let's evaluate what we have so far...

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This is a first in a series of posts on outsourcing. 

I've been on the fence about this particular topic for quite some time now, but I think I have finally decided that outsourcing work to other countries is wrong.  The point I am stressing here is regardless of whether or not outsourcing works- the point for today is merely that regardless of how effective it is financially or otherwise, that it is flat-out wrong. 

Yes, that's a pretty flat remark with no conditions.  It is simply and utterly the wrong thing to do, and in this writing, I aim to illustrate why.

Let me just be upfront here and say that if you look through this document for some sort of commentary about how we need to protect American jobs, or "buy American" or anything of that ilk, you won't find it.  I believe that protectionism and that general philosophy to be utterly foolish and purely emotional.  It has no basis in civilized reality, even if it has an obvious origin in the human survival instinct.

That is, however, one of the more (if not most) common arguments against outsourcing.  What then, is so bad about outsourcing if not simply protecting our own private interests as workers?

There are many, but for this post, I want to focus on Quality of Life.

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