The Last To Go

I’ve made my living for the past decade, since getting out of economics school, on the technical side of the business world. My selling point is a rare ability to communicate between the business and software development types. However, that ability is becoming more and more common as the geeks have learned business, the business types have learned geek, and the production line has been exported to India.

So I struggle with changing the catch phrase on my résumé to “rare ability to communicate between India and the business.” Furthermore my ideological distaste for globalization leads to a struggle to hate myself for having exported white collar jobs to India. Unfortunately, however, it’s the way I’ve stayed alive in recent years - being on the project team that automates bits and bytes in such a way that uneducated 20-somethings can support multimillion dollar, enterprise-critical systems for dimes on the dollar.

My type will be the last to go. We were once rare, high paid geniuses who could translate business talk into Boolean logic. But now that we’ve done such a good job at automating the enterprise, every project seems to be taking what we’ve simplified and off-shoring it. The same subject matter experts with whom we shared lunch a year ago, picking their brains – and in the process learning about their kids and struggles – are rapidly being replaced by hourly labor in call centers staffed by slumdogs.

We will be the last to go because when we’re gone, there will be nobody left. The information economy, made possible by the corporate media’s love affair with “The Flat Earth” has led to a distinct class system of owners, paupers, and those with the “rare ability to communicate between India and the business.” Once we’re gone, it will be the slums for most of us.