Good News on the Job Front: Reshoring Jobs and a New Concept

I'm in the process of taking notes on the book The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee before reading their latest book that provides prescriptions on what kind of skills you need for the machine age. The Second Machine Age book has a lot of great materials and a chapter on what we need to do in this new era.

But I'm still in the process of taking notes and thinking about that first book. Hopefully, by next week I will be ready to do a post or two on the first book as a prelude to doing a post (or two or three) on the second book.

In the meantime, I have come across some encouraging news on the job front area.

The first good news is that outsourcing jobs are coming back to America. Hallelujah! It's about time that corporate America realize that talents are found in America. Wages in South Asia are now only half of what is paid in America so we are getting closer to being competitive. But more importantly, American businesses are now realizing that they need to converse with their outsourced partners on web or app development or design. It is

easier to have team work and collaboration with someone who is in your time zone, who speaks your language, and possibly understands your culture.

And there is also the "Trump" effect. Much as I don't like Trump, he is probably causing a lot  of companies re-think their outsourcing strategies. I suspect a lot  of these companies are not reshoring out of altruism of the heart but out of fear of the "Trump" callout.

Then there is a totally new concept coming out of Airbnb which Thomas Friedman calls self-driving people. The creator of Airbnb wants to create a jobs platform for people to make a living out of their passion. It is a very heartwarming concept and probably gets at what the future skill will require: being human. I won't go into any details on that but read the article for how this concept is currently working.

As Friedman notes, this idea is not the only idea available to us but we need to get more positive about what we can do in the future instead of focusing on the doom and gloom, so I am happy to read articles such as this.