Note to readers: Normally, I don't include the names of companies involved in Advice Line inquiries, except in their roles as providers to the IT industry. I'm making an exception in this case because I think its identity is useful in understanding the situation and my response. And masking the identity of the company in question would have been difficult in any case - Bob Dear Bob; The following Q& Note to readers: Normally, I don’t include the names of companies involved in Advice Line inquiries, except in their roles as providers to the IT industry. I’m making an exception in this case because I think its identity is useful in understanding the situation and my response. And masking the identity of the company in question would have been difficult in any case – BobDear Bob;The following Q&A recently appeared in the daily Lucent newsletter… 5ESS DEVELOPMENT MOVING TO CHINA? — What is to become of the 5ESS landline developers in the United States, as most of the development is slowly being moved to China? I understand the transition to China because it is directly related to cost, but what new skill sets should I learn to survive in development in the United States? When is the total movement of U.S.-based development jobs to non-U.S. facilities going to stop? Or is all of 5ESS landline development moving out of the United States? — Question from Naperville, Ill.RE: 5ESS DEVELOPMENT MOVING TO CHINA? — As you are aware, on our path toward profitability, we have taken many actions to improve how Lucent operates — not only by directly reducing expenses but also by having more efficient systems, processes and organizations, whether in research and development, administrative, marketing or sales. In some teams, this has included increasing the percentage of employees located outside the United States to continue to serve our customers with quality at a lower cost point. In switching, we have consolidated research and development facilities into a small number of locations around the world including the United States, China and Poland.We will continue to review Lucent’s operations in all parts of the business to ensure that we have the most effective organization to serve customers and simultaneously become profitable. As a global corporation with a large customer base in both the United States and China, you should expect that we will continue to have R&D teams in both of these locations, as well as other strategic locations around the globe. In regard to Lucent associates growing their skills; R&D associates should always seek to learn and apply newer, more efficient technologies and continue to be valuable contributors by pursuing innovative, cost-effective ways to keep the products they work on at the leading edge or in a market leadership position. Lucent has a well-earned reputation of being a provider of leading-edge technology. We have built strong technical teams that lead that effort and we will continue to need to leverage those expert skills in our product offerings. It will take this type of continued dedication by all employees for Lucent to achieve profitability by the end of this fiscal year. — Dave Geary, vice president and general manager, Convergence SolutionsMy questions are: What is happening to the quality, “above minimum wage” jobs in America? Does corporate greed and management untrustworthness trump ethics and patriotic concern for your fellow American worker? Is the IT industry going the way of the American Steel Industry? Doesn’t anyone realize that these lost jobs hurt our own economy? What is the IT professional to do… become a nurse?– Concerned at Lucent Dear Concerned …I don’t know that you’re going to like my answer. Here it is anyway: Yes, the IT industry is, to a large extent, going the way of the steel industry. Which isn’t to say it’s all going offshore, because that isn’t what happened with steel either.With steel, the old manufacturers, trapped in their 1940s way of doing business, withered. Meanwhile companies like Nucor did (and last I checked continued to do) very well. Think of what you have to offer an employer as your product, and what you do when you look for a job or try to keep the one you have as marketing and selling that product, and I think this will make the point clear. If not … imagine you’re Lucent and you have to compete with other PBX providers in an incredibly tight market. You have to build all of your costs into your pricing. You’ll buy your chips from the lowest cost provider that delivers to your specifications; likewise engineering and programming. What else can you do – charge a lot more than your competitors and try to make it up in “brand management”?The fact of the matter is that American technical professionals don’t want to compete on price with their Asian and Russian counterparts. That’s fine, but if we don’t, we’d better find some other dimension in which we can compete successfully, because there’s nothing in the social contract that obliges our customers … the companies that employ us … to pay more for the same service than they have to in the labor marketplace.In fact, I think it would be pretty easy to construct an ethical argument that if American programmers charge more than their Asian counterparts for the same services, then it’s the American programmers who are guilty of greed, not their employers. It comes down to how you define “fair price,” I guess. – Bob ——– Technology Industry