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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (63754)	4/29/2003 8:01:52 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77397

Hi mindmeld, are many IT workers with buku experience that are looking for jobs. Umm, don't you mean boucoup experience? <gg> I only have a few comments, first of all, my feeling is that IT specifically has already gone offshore. My personal view is that so much IT has gone offshore that a backlash is brewing. At Cisco for example most of the real techie stuff, the operations folks, DBAs, coders etc. are offshore. Only the business folks are here and a few others. So IT is a done deal. The issue is R&D, core development. These are the people writing IOS at Cisco, not the operations folks. As far as the notion of "tons of people on the mkt, just lower salaries problem solved"... I would say it isn't that easy. Take your average MIT graduate, working in R&D now, remove their 125K salary + options and they move to another field. It isn't a matter of them taking 50K as a salary and being happy to get it- the people you want in a US based R&D org have a selection of many professions and opportunites. So my only point is, lets not confuse the large R&D staff levels at msft, cisco, intel (where most of the options go) with IT personnel. I don't think there is any question that a lot of IT staff was overpaid in the 90s and there is no reason not to offshore some of this (within reasons). But that is different than your core technology R&D staff. The real issue with domestic R&D imo is the excessive complexity of software for the internet, and whether all this complexity really adds value to the end product (personally, I'm not convinced but that is just me)... to build and manage internet software be it IOS or enterprise apps or web services or whatever, requires way too many "chiefs", and all of these chiefs need to be paid highly, because the skillset required is high. You cannot pay a development lead 75K and expect to get a working product believe me. If its cutting edge stuff, these jobs need to pay over 150K in SV. Just too much staff required, and as proof of the level of complexity of software development just look at Merq the company and stock.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (63754)	4/29/2003 8:19:23 PM
From: Stock Farmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 77397

Bingo. Chambers is saying "If we can't fool investors into pretending our labor costs are competitive, then our uncompetitive labor costs are going to cause us to lose jobs overseas where labor costs are competitive". Two solutions: Fool investors, or deal with the labor cost issue. If this was a capitalist state, we would suggest that market forces of supply and demand should dictate the disposition of wage dollars. So instead we should crank up the presses and deluge the populace with propaganda and stick to the "fool the crowd" scenario? I don't think so. I agree with you that we need to be looking at cost effective ways of getting the job done. It might be that Silicon Valley is in the midst of pricing itself out of the market. Pricing itself back into the market sounds like a smart thing to start doing. Who knows, with all the attention on options, investors might not be so easily fooled for much longer anyway. John