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Friday, July 20, 2007

Green Technology: the IT of the next generation
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM
If you're an IT worker and you're not reading Carrie's Nation on a regular basis, you should be. Today she takes on the preposterously sunny Thomas Friedman on his insistence that there are bright vistas ahead in the job market in green technologies:

Sorry, Thomas. Anything having to do with green technology can be outsourced in about five minutes. Our "high-wage engineers and programmers" can make their innovative designs, than pass the work on to H-1B tech workers here in the US or to tech workers throughout the world for implementation or further refinements. And does Friedman really think that the nuts and bolts manufacturing of these contraptions will never be outsourced overseas? The total output of our "green collar" Americans would hardly even be measurable in our GDP statistics.

[snip]

Are we supposed to advise our students to enter into "green collar" professions the way we advised them to enter into engineering and computer sciences in 1990? In the year 2020, would we be advising these same students to re-invent themselves and retrain themselves for other professions?


...professions that will pay peanuts and discriminate against them because they are "too old" by then, no doubt.

I share Carrie's disdain for Thomas Friedman's pat view of the working world, coming as it does from someone whose job is to write a column a couple of times a week and who is in no danger of being outsourced.

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