Bob's Links and Rants

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Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Auf Wiedersehen, Arbeiten!
German company Siemens will move most of the 15,000 software programming jobs from its offices in the United States and Western Europe to locations such as India, China and Eastern Europe, a company official has said. -- The Straits Times

I used to work for Siemens in Novi, Michigan, developing mail-sorting systems for the US Postal Service. That operation got bought out and closed down about a year after I left, leaving many of the employees out of work. I do recall going to Johnson City, Tennessee for training in how to program Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC's). Siemens had bought that operation from Texas Instruments a few years earlier. They made the PLC's there, but there were also probably hundreds of programmers at that facility. I'm guessing that Johnson City will be hit with a sizeable loss of jobs that it can't really handle right now. But chances are that there will be no repercussions for Siemens on the contracting side. The USPS, the Pentagon, and numerous other government agencies will continue to buy from Siemens, with an even larger extent of the proceeds going into the pockets of the wealthy shareholders.

The race to the bottom continues.