The VCs are starting to invest more in start-ups.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Silicon Valley on Tuesday cheered the first quarterly increase in venture investment since the peak of the dot-com boom, saying it pointed to a gradual recovery for the hard-hit business of taking stakes in risky high-tech start-ups.
The rate of investment is still less than a fifth of the amount at the peak of the bubble. Even if it turns up even higher there is a different trend running that looks like it will have a biger impact on US technical workers than a VC investment upturn. Jobs are getting shipped overseas.
Gartner Inc., the world's biggest high-tech forecasting firm, said in a report entitled "U.S. Offshore Outsourcing: Structural Changes, Big Impact" that 500,000 of the 10.3 million U.S. technology jobs could move just in 2003 and 2004.
Jeff Taylor of Reason magazine tries to downplay the threat of foreign programmer competition.
But the catch is that out-sourcing is being embraced without much sign that it will actually make high-tech firms, particularly software companies, more effective. Highly collaborative, imaginative work might suffer in the hands of technically adept but inexperienced programmers.
Here's the thing about inexperienced programmers: if they program for years they eventually become (oh, can you guess it?) experienced programmers. Remember all the industries where the United States used to be the world leader where it no longer is? Computer programming is supposed to be immune to foreign competition why exactly?
Posted by Randall Parker at July 31, 2003 11:26 PM