It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense.
It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket".
And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
I used to agree with this (at least the headline), but then I lived through the Biden administration.
Fundamentally Americans want to consume more services and especially goods than the people living in America produce. The only ways to square that circle are
1. To get more people. But by 2024 prime age labor force participation was at essentially record numbers[0] so there aren't more people available domestically, and we saw in the election that swing voters are not fans of mass unskilled immigration.
2. To produce more with the same people (i.e. increase productivity). But in most cases this is up to technological advancement and not in the hands of policymakers. There are probably some sectors that could benefit from deregulation (e.g. construction) but those regulations have their own constituencies that don't want to see them go.
3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters hate this.
4. To import more from abroad.
In the end "offshoring" is the only politically viable option.
>3. To force people to consume less (i.e. inflation). Voters hate this.
Inflation from immigration/offshoring restrictions is not evenly distributed. It's essentially a purchasing power transfer from everyone else to low-skilled workers (who no longer face competition from cheaper overseas labor, so have more bargaining power and hence can demand higher wages from society).
The vast majority of Cloudflare's "customers" are paying 0 to 20 dollars a month, for virtually the same protection coverage and features as most of their 200 dollars/mo customers. That's not remotely in the realm of avionics price structure, be it software or hardware.
It is the aggregate they pay that counts here, not the individual payments.
A better comparison would be to compare this to airline passengers paying for their tickets, they pay a few hundred bucks in the expectation that they will arrive at their destination.
Besides, it is not the customers that determine Cloudflare's business model, Cloudflare does. Note that their whole business is to prevent outages and that as soon as they become the cause of an outage they have invalidated their whole reason for existence. Of course you could then turn this into a statistical argument that as long as they prevent more outages than they cause that they are a net benefit but that's not what this discussion is about, it is first and foremost about the standard of development they are held up against.
Ericsson identified similar issues in their offering long ago and created a very capable solution and I'm wondering if that would not have been a better choice for this kind of project, even if it would have resulted in more resource consumption.
> as soon as they become the cause of an outage they have invalidated their whole reason for existence
This is a bar no engineering effort has ever met. “If you ever fail, even for a moment, there’s no reason for you to even exist.”
There have been 6 fatal passenger airplane crashes in the US this year alone. NASA only built 6 shuttles and 2 of those exploded, killing their crews. And these were life-preserving systems that failed.
Discussions around software engineering quality always seem to veer into spaces where we assign almost mythic properties to other engineering efforts in an attempt to paint software engineering as lazy or careless.
The NASA example should highlight the normalisation of deviance. The Challenger o-rings had failed before and while engineers were very vocal about that, management overruled them. The foam impacts and tile loss were also a known factor in the Columbia disaster but the abort window is very small. Both point to perverse incentives: maintaining the gravy train. One comment made the point earlier that if Cloudflare were more thorough they would not have captured the market because they would be slower. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast but YMMV. At the end of the day everything can be tracked down to a system that incentivizes wealth accumulation over capability with the fixation that capability can be bought which is a lie.
Boeing only makes this class of software quality because they are forced to by law. No one does it unless there is a big expensive legal reason to do so.
Indeed. But: if we want to call this level of infrastructural work 'software engineering' and the impact of failure is as large as it is then that's an argument for either voluntary application of a higher standard or eventual regulation and I'm pretty sure CF would prefer the former over the latter.
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