My Tech Career Is Doing Just Fine Because Of Globalization

See KeithBraithwaite.

Who cannot possibly be alone in this. Who else around here is prepared to admit to positive outcomes in the global market for development effort?

And Iraq is good business for undertakers and defense contractors. Nobody disputes that globalization benefits some people or specific companies, but on the whole it is not good for software development anymore than offshoring was good for factory workers. Globalization simply shrinks some fields (and perhaps expands others).

The magic word here is "some", and needs to be applied a little more widely. Globalization shrinks some fields, in some places, at some times, surely? Most dicusssions of globalization seem to start from an observation of a certain field shrinking at a certain place and time, and infer from this a universal shrinking for all time.

Globalization probably reduce the LifeSpan? of a technical career, except for the few exceptions. Ward can probably find another job, but most of his former colleagues are probably displaced by now, on account of their age.

The more technical the nature of the career, the more it is at risk, period. If globalism increases any tech workers in the "mature" nations, it will be liaison positions between techies and users and/or management. Most techies are not given decent training on social and diplomacy issues, and we are thus at a big disadvantage. You can be the greatest techie in a city, but it won't matter if your people skills are the bottleneck which makes management want to use 5 coders overseas instead of you. Are you truly better than 5 overseas workers, and if so can you prove that to management? Even if you actually better, you still need to be able to demonstrate that. LiaisonEconomy.

We need to define globalization, otherwise we are left with an Orwellian term. Globalization is a Declaration of Independence for corporations, who rebel against inconvenient laws from individual nations.

"We are writing the constitution of a single global economy." -- Renato Ruggiero, first WTO Director-General

So what are corporations, and what do they desire? They are legal fictions which gained immortal "personhood" in 1886, from activist judges deciding about taxation of railroad property: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." -- Chief Justice Waite, Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)

The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect newly emancipated slaves, but suddenly the court used it to protect corporations. Chief Justice Rehnquist argued against that judicial activism: "This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a 'person' entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

However, corporations were certainly known to the American founders. In 1816, President Jefferson hoped the US would reject the British example and "crush in it's [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Despite all that, why do corporations seem so respectable? Notice the public relations industry. It spends billions to promote high-minded corporate images, and those billions aren't spent for no reason. http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/profiles/pr_industry/pr1.htm

The Father of Public Relations was Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud. His famous clients included US Presidents and corporations, and he claimed "intelligent men" should "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

See http://www.iiipublishing.com/afd/santaclara.html

And it sure sucks to run in light US manufacturing... Gee I miss web technologies! Not...