Mention “outsourcing” to a programmer and you may as well be uttering profanity. The word suggests all the evils that have befallen the Information Technology sector since the Internet bubble burst a few years ago. We’ve been endlessly regaled with tragic tales of American companies who have closed up shop for many of their I.T. positions, only to “offshore” those same jobs to programmers overseas working for less pay than their American counterparts. A brain drain is taking place in the once highly secure computer programming profession.

Rather than cursing the darkness, however, I found myself recently lighting a candle (or making the problem worse, depending on your perspective). You see, just over six months ago, I joined the outsourcing revolution. I am therefore writing this article partly as a confession, my own personal “mea culpa” of complicity.

No, I haven’t put myself up on the auction block to work for Indian rupees.

What I did was stumble upon several “reverse auction” web sites for outsourcing talent. If you haven’t heard of them, they go by the name of Elance.com (the largest site to date) or Guru.com. Both of these sites give companies an opportunity to outsource their projects to freelance workers like programmers, graphic artists and writers. Freelancers from all over the world compete for open bid requests, offering to do these contract jobs for a fixed price.

I happened upon a site called Rentacoder. Unlike the two sites mentioned above, Rentacoder didn’t require a subscription fee. Their take was a straightforward commission out of each project cost. Within minutes I posted my resume and profile. Then I had a choice to make. Which projects to bid on? In addition to programming projects, they also listed writing jobs as well. I decided to bid on some of the writing jobs first, just to see how it went, and because I had always wanted to do some freelance writing on the side.

Within my first week, I won a bid to write a document on Policies and Procedures. I completed that assignment, got paid, and then won another bida series of articles on stock market investing. Very soon I was addicted. I kept doing more writing…a technical white paper…web site content…economics articles…sales letters…a chapter in a novel…on and on. My payments were electronically transferred to my bank account, in New Economy style.

This addiction has grown into a decent part-time income for the past six months. I’ve worked for clients as far away as Australia and Turkey, in addition to clients in the East and West coasts in the United States. I became fixated with how easy it was to do business this way over the Internet, where the whole world became my market. Then I got hold of a book called Free Agent Nation, by a fellow named Daniel Pink. It was about how “teleworkers” such as myself are transforming America by doing business this new-fangled way, working for “gigs” instead of permanent commitments to one employer. I was part of another Big Thing.

Don’t misunderstand, I haven’t quit my day job just yet.

Am I getting rich?

Hardly. I make a few hundred extra dollars a month, and yes, I do get competition from workers in India. But now I am competing with them. The winning bid, in this case, doesn’t always go to the lowest bidder. Writers from America have an edge in this arena. Some buyers of writing services prefer native English speakers.

As I said, however, there are programming jobs posted on most of these sites too. Can programmers from the United States make a living strictly off these sites? Probably not. But programmers who choose to freelance can use these sites to supplement their income while contracting through normal staffing channels. They might make some meaningful connections in the process.

So there it is. I got it off my chest.

“My name is Nader Ghali, and I joined the outsourcing revolution.”

I feel much better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make some more bids.

Nader Ghali is a programmer living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he writes on a variety of issues. He may be reached at mrnader1@go.com, and a sample of his writing portfolio can be seen at http://www.topwrite.net

I have written a couple articles so far about the downfall of GM and Ford, although I have mostly focused on GM. GM announced today that they are going to offer some 113,000 hourly employees a severance package in the six figure range to leave and waive their rights to their healthcare benefits.

If I were in the position of some of these workers I would have a difficult decision to make. You have to weigh the fact that you would possibly get $140,000 to walk away from GM and the healthcare benefits you have worked years to secure against the fact that GM may go out of business by the time you retire and you would have turned down the package and still not get the healthcare benefits.

I know, you think I am crazy because I say GM may go out of business, right? Most people do think I am crazy when I say that. I bet a lot of people never thought Enron would crumble either and on paper they were a strong company. GM is a failing company on paper. The article above states that GM announced last week a loss of $10.6 billion. They have been losing billions and billions for years. They are well over $300 billion in debt and they continue to struggle with labor issues, declining market share, and more. I would like to know how anyone thinks they can stay in business.

As I have said in previous articles, GM is known for their cars but they are actually just as involved in mortgages and other financial tools through GMAC. GMAC has done well for the past few years because of the recent housing boom but they will pay the price within a couple years, adding to their already worsening financial situation. A former co-worker of mine was an attorney and he did closings on the side to make extra money. He did them for GMAC. He said many of the loans he did closings for were usually for people in bad shape financially. A lot of them were ARM mortgages or interest only mortgages.

What is going to happen is once the rates climb higher these people will end up not being able to make their mortgage payments because the payments will have increased too much do to the adjustable rates. GM is going to end up losing a lot of money on this side of their business as well.

Oldsmobile went out of business a couple years ago and there has been some speculation that another one of the GM brands will be going out of business as well. I have read some “experts” articles that feel Pontiac will be the next to go do to slipping sales. Chevy is obviously the staple of the company, Cadillac does pretty well from what I have read, Saturn is one of the more successful brands as well. Hummer is a niche market and they continue to develop that to market to more types of customers. Saab is a “foreign” car and most people probably do not even realize they are owned by GM so they will most likely make the cut. This leaves Pontiac. The sales on their highly marketed GTO were weak and with good reason. I don’t think you can bring back a legendary name like the GTO and make it nothing more than a glorified Cavalier/Grand Am.
I have always stuck by my belief that bad management has brought GM to the position it is in and the GTO is the perfect example. They didn’t build a car that lived up to the name and yet they were trying to pre-sell the cars for $35,000 or more.

GM should really be studied in MBA programs in management classes. It should be made the example of what can happen when you have an industry leading company for decades fall apart because of some bad decisions. It has got to send, or at least should send a message that regardless of how big a company gets you still need to stay on top of your game or you could risk going out of business as well.

Maybe GM will fix things and end up not going out of business. Maybe things aren’t as bad as they appear to be. If you are reading this and you are a manager be sure to take a close look at what you are doing and make sure it is the right thing to do. If you are just an interested reader keep watching the headlines over the coming months and look for more bad news from GM, I think it is coming.

Scott Bianchi operates http://www.best-internet-bargains.com. He writes on a variety of topics. If you would like to be added to his distribution list for his new articles when they are published just send an email to articles@bestinternetbargains.com.

Many vendors offering Instant Messaging (IM) services have added new capabilities such as voice messaging and file sharing. Among others, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo offer these IM services.

Clients of Instant Messaging services are also easy prey for the community of hackers. Using a simple monitoring program, the plain text from Instant Messaging can be easily captured and creates vulnerability to electronic eavesdropping. .

In one version of AOL’s Instant Messenger, aka AIM, a user was found to have been the target of a hacker attack. The villainous hacker had crafted a URL which, when clicked by the user with AIM on their desktop, allowed the hacker to execute a virus on the victim’s system. What is particularly sinister about this is that AIM does not have to be running for this type of virus to deploy.

Another avenue of attack is when victims are simply sent an HTML email with a link that when clicked will execute one or all of the following: a privilege elevation attack, a denial of service attack, or the installation of a backdoor for later use, to name a few.

Using a computer phone service that operates on secure lines with high end encryption codec on proprietary patented technology that features IM capability will optimally protect you against these vicious hacker attacks.

The above information is an excerpt taken from an in-depth and exclusive Report entitled “Why Hackers Love Computer Phones – A Shocking Report You Must Read!” by Dee Scrip available only at http://www.whypay4calls.com/gtp/to.pl?l=ART-01