A Boon for Small Town USA?
The article Jobs on Farms, not Abroad is the story of how high-tech companies are keeping jobs in the US by setting up offices in rural areas to cut costs rather than off-shoring the same jobs.
Late last year, two major IT firms, CGI-AMS and Northrop-Grumman, announced they were bringing more than 700 technology jobs to Lebanon that pay around $50,000 a year. These positions are in the same class as the 112,000 IT jobs nationwide that were lost to overseas outsourcing in 2003, according to Global Insight in Boston.
Other technology companies are also putting high-level programming and data- crunching jobs in rural America locales with less traffic and lower rents to cut costs and remove the legal entanglements, cross-cultural differences, and time-zone hassles that come with overseas outsourcing.
For CGI-AMS and Northrop-Grumman, the decision to set up in Lebanon was mostly driven by high labor costs in hot job markets such as Fairfax, Va., and neighboring Reston in northern Virginia. In another instance, DaimlerChrysler recently hired Lakota Express to do its Web design, which it is sending to a South Dakota Indian reservation. Even Dell, which recently announced another major offshoring gambit, is now shipping some of its work to Twin Falls, Idaho. In Cheyenne, Wy., transportation logistics firms, full of young people, dot the interstate.
Whether this is a trend or a temporary thing is not clear, however, there seems to be opportunities for small communities that are willing to take the plunge.
Read it all.
I’m based here in Northern Virginia right next to Fairfax and let me tell you the market is *super* tight. I run a small PHP software shop specializing in Open Source mostly in a handful of commercial sectors and it’s a pain to find anyone other than junior people who couldn’t write a line of code to save their lives.
Then if you look into the sysadmin side of things, it’s even worse. I’ve had a number of customers beg me to take on their work because they’ve been looking for months without any serious hits. Some of them are willing to train a junior person to get them up to speed, but the rest want someone who can hit the ground running…. I end up having to turn down about 1-2 projects/week that fit what we do but I simply don’t have the time and people.
I wonder if any of the Democrats in the Maryland state legislature has read this? Naw… that would make too much sense, and the multi-syllabic words would likely stop ‘em cold.
Here in West PA there are many small IT operations. The computer service company we use, people here have seen me refer to them as Da Geek and Little Sister, are a perfect example. Both worked for corporations which downsized and instead of moving to other states started their own company. They have more work than they can do, and have started headhunting at local community colleges and highschools. There are several graphic arts&design companies and light manufacturing within100 miles of Pittsburgh. Curiously enough companies are fleeing Pittsburgh and Alleghany county as fast as they can relocate. I wonder why{wink,wink}?
This sort of thing has been happening in North Dakota for years. My own small community has seen several businesses move through. Most have been hear for years and have proven to be to additions to the community, a couple have been less than good. We had one leave town suddenly leaving many employees unpaid. But that was a start-up run by a couple of locals.
For the most part, this trend has been good for states like North Dakota. We get an influx of decent-paying jobs (with good benefits) at all levels (entry up to management) and the corporations get a cheaper labor force then they’d find in most cities.
A win-win, all the way around.