> if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing
This isn't just corporate America, it's all of America and all of humanity. Anything that's not plug and play has higher costs, higher risk, higher delays, and less chance of success.
Sudden and unexpected changes that increase uncertainty make it harder to invest in retraining, rather than easier. Increased uncertainty always decreases investment, because there's higher risk.
These are very very basic management considerations to anybody that runs a group, a lab, a small firm, or a large firm.
This largely ignores the uncertainty and costs of a revolving workforce, and the value of having a workforce that all knows each other, the way the company works, and cares whether it succeeds.
When I was younger, I did a bunch of short-ish stints at various companies (I think average tenure was a hair under 2 years) because someone else would offer more money, more exciting work, etc. It was incredibly inefficient for the employer. "Waiting for my laptop/credentials to be issued" was like a full percentage point of my time there. I barely cared whether the company did well because I wasn't going to be there long enough for my RSUs to swing wildly either way. I never got to the point where I knew offhand who to talk to about niche parts of the product, and never became "that guy" for anyone else.
Frankly a lot of our stuff was higher risk and took longer because of the revolving doors. People important to a project would leave in the middle, or the person who wrote an important system would quit so we were left with whatever tribal knowledge we had.
Things worked well when the lady that wrote our invoicing system 20 years ago was still around but in security now. Things went poorly when she quit 6 months ago and now I have to reverse engineer it to figure out why I get stack overflows on invoices that contain an image.
I'm not "ignoring" that, and a retrained workforce is also a revolving workforce.
When I run teams or companies I invest heavily in giving employees opportunities to train for new skills, level up on their existing skills, and grow into greater responsibility and knowledge domains. But that always needs to be balanced with the rest of the needs. When my runway is uncertain, that reduces the ability to plan for adding training for existing employees rather than bringing in a consultant or a new hire.
The existing workforce is literally the most expensive in the world. And if you add to that its toxicity, what specifically surprises you?
Assuming they're referring to litigation risk. Anecdotally, laying someone off in San Francisco basically means paying a $30k settlement.
If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.
the US is terrible at protecting american jobs for americans. i am not overly educated on this but it seems like a lot of countries, europe specifically, are extremely protective of their jobs.
i don't think americans are somehow inherently more worthy of employment and opportunity than people from other countries, but it does seem like it may be a playing field that isn't very level if a lot of other countries are protecting jobs but the US isn't. in addition to our cost of living being tremendously high compared to the countries we outsource our work to, it isn't even an option for an american to go get a job in (for example) india and send home paycheck to support family in the US.
I personally would like to see some sort of system where we account for discrepancies in regulations related to worker protections, government subsidies, and environmental standards through taxation (e.g. Chinese crap is no longer as cheap as it is right now because we account for the substandard worker conditions and environmental damage being done), but I think restricting the labor market too much would be incredibly damaging.
I recently finished Peter Zehan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning and in it, it explicitly says that the American economic order was created in such a way that the loss of American jobs over time was by design.
Basically, as the American worker and consumer expects more and more, we need a larger international system to support that ("a rising tide..." analogy). However, we let the profits derived from such a system wind up in a smaller and smaller group of self-interested people who don't give a damn if the whole system goes belly up, because they've "got theirs". Such short-sighted thinking.