Outsourcing Growing Beyond India 374
PreacherTom writes "One of the most controversial aspects of the global economy has been the newfound enthusiasm of companies, freed from the constraints of physical location, to outsource jobs. No country had embraced tech outsourcing with more passion than India. Of late, problems are beginning to arise in Indian outsourcing: engineers will start a project, get a few months' experience, and then bolt for greener pastures. The level of attrition can cause the turnover of a project's entire staff within the course of a year. Combine this with salaries in Bangalore that are rising at 12% to 14% per year and it is no surprise that companies are looking beyond India to a slew of emerging hotspots for IT, such as Brazil, China, and Vietnam. Will Ho Chi Minh City be the new Bangalore?" From the article: "India remains an IT outsourcing powerhouse, with $17.7 billion in software and IT services exports in 2005, compared with $3.6 billion for China and $1 billion for Russia... India's outsourcing industry is still growing at a faster pace than that of... other wannabe Bangalores... By the third year of an outsourcing deal, after all the costs have been squeezed out, companies get antsy to find a new locale with an even lower overhead."
What did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't know about the mysterious "they" (as in "what did they expect"), but I expected exactly this. Free market at work. Supply and demand, etc.
Re:What did they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Anyhow, the more people get working, the more demand there is, which means more sales.
If you were to suddenly wave a magic wand to make half the US population disappear, then would that suddenly mean a flood of job openings due to all the people suddenly not showing up for work? No, that's stupid -- there wouldn't be a flood of job openings, si
Re:What did they expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a zero-sum game.
"Desperate" is a very relative measure, and as India, China and other countries in the Asian sub continent improve their wages, education and quality of life to make greater wage demands, where will the multinationals go? And do you think those that have gained skills and wealth will suddenly drop back into subsistence farming, or maintain at least some quality of life? You know, after SE Asia is raised above the poverty levels it currently has, there isn't a great deal of the worlds populace left to exploit for 10 cents a day... and most of it is in Africa.
Keep the work moving, keep employing new people in new countries, and we might, JUST MIGHT even out the worlds wealth distribution a little.
It's a negative sum game (Score:5, Insightful)
America's booming IT industry is a thing of the past, as the entry level jobs needed to train people for higher end jobs no longer exist in America. Our IT industry will continue to shrink until it's completely gone, and all that is left in America are people jobs. The low paying cashier and medical clinic crap, with a smattering of middle class nursing jobs and doctors being crushed by malpractice premiums in malpractice award-capped states.
For globalism to succeed, successful nations must be impoverished.
Now where, you ask, is all the growth coming from? Simple. America is drowning in utterly unmaintainable consumer and national debt. Eventually that all has to be repaid.
Pray ye diligently that ARMs stop rising and that home prices stop falling in the superhot markets of today, or you may find yourself eating the words you're thinking of responding to me with - because that's all you'll have to eat when the shakedown comes.
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Re:Still can't get around one basic economic fact. (Score:2)
Errrr, no, that's "Pay bananas, get monkeys." If you pay peanuts, you get elephants.
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Re:What did they expect? (Score:4, Interesting)
For the past two years, I have been an independent contractor for Oracle Egypt, Xceed (the largest call center in the middle east) and some other firms.
Yes, these "professionals" *think* that they are worth what their contemporaries in the U.$ are getting, but the plain truth is that they are not.
They are not productive. By that I mean they lack consistency, attention to detail, and follow-through. This includes employees at all levels, from administration to management.
Process, an abused word in the American work-place is a "newer" term in many countries.
Many of us underestimate the cultural expectation of service and professionalism in the U.$. that we are assimilated into long before we begin professional work.
This attitude and perspective is MISSING in the "professional approach" among professional in developing markets. Most of them think that their technical skills/development merit their position and pay, which I have explained and demonstrated to them will not be enough to KEEP the job.
Sadly, 9 out of 10 professionals at Oracle Egypt want to be told what to do. They resent having to explain themselves, sell their solutions to customers (explain what they hell they propose and why the customer should implement their solution), and especially lack the communication skills to build customer rapport.
The unstructured and self-managed work environment is a challenge to them, and they wind-up in a corner asking each other what to do, and their managers form India offer/set no better examples and are usually in the corner with them.
I keep thinking, one day -a divorced, childless pre-menopausal white woman is gonna ride-down on y'alls asses.
European customers of Oracle are HAVING FITS about the level of service professionalism that they are receiving.
They complain about the "non-technical" work expectations, the (life-long) continuous learning expectations and especially having to do such on their own time.
Microsoft call centers are popping-up all over developing markets because it is a tool used by Microsoft to stem the use of non-Microsoft "solutions" in developing markets.
For example, here in Egypt Microsoft is the preferred vendor to the Egyptian government, Xceed (contact center) is owned by Telecom Egypt and the Egyptian Ministry of Information and Telecommunications. The work environment is what I can only imagine what a working in prison to be.
Egypt is a low-risk environment, and most of these professionals refuse to even learn about open source tools and technologies. For now, there is no threat of an Egyptian solution-provider in this market competing AGAINST Orace, M$, etc.
From what I have observed, all this 'outsourcing' is doing is helping to build a middle-class in developing markets so that there are customers with the income to consume western goods/services.
It's working, too. These markets have bodies, but not necessarily brains.
Oracle Egypt has pretty much aggregated all of the professionals in the region who are not working for their business partners and customers and is WAREHOUSING them to keep them form Microsoft -who incidentally was only doing product activation for Europe and is now recruiting for DB professionals -most of whom already work for Oracle.
Now, M$ is poaching and driving the cost of "labor" up. These "professionals" will jump ship for more undeserved money, IMNSHO.
BTW: Oracle-Egypt's pay scale as far as I can be nebby enough to find out ranges from $500 p/mo for "Customer Care" to $1000-$2,000 p/mo. for Oracle Analysts. Xceed pays from $150-200 p/mo. for "call center" employees. Administrative staff make from $300-500 p/mo.
Until they start using the magic word -"FIRRREEEE-DUH," no change is gonna come. They just don't have to.
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There's will come a time when the supply of IT workers will match or exceed the demand.
Take an econ class. You don't even know how to use the terminology right.
And as technology improves, the run of the mill business programming will become so easy (adding, updating, deleting data from RDMSs, biz logic, etc...) that the only need for real programmers will be for systems and development software (reason why MS Office is soooo popular! You wouldn't believe how many VBA apps I've seen on Excel!!! And all you
Re:Supply.... (Score:4, Informative)
There are about 300 million people in the US
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I did a minor in Economics at university (major in CS. I'm a developer too), with pretty good marks, particularly in the introductory courses, where econo-jargon is defined. I don't see anything wrong with his statement.
You can have an available supply of IT workers exceeding the demand for IT workers. And, of course, when this happens, the price
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I know it seems a little pedantic to quibble over terminology but when you start thinking like this you can end up with all sorts of nonsensical conclusions. This is a case in point. Since we are talking about curves that intersect curves, talking about one as being higher than the other makes no sense.
This terminology and the difference between demand and qu
Your are odiously pedantic. (Score:3, Interesting)
The post to which you replied is clearly describing instersection of curves and how each curve compares against each other once the intersection takes place.
The rampant anti-intellectualism in many western societies has to do with the hyperactive use of jargon in many fields of expertise.
To everybody sane and that knows a minimum of economics, the statemnt was clear and simple, qualities some people that have learnt a bit more than most in some fields shou
Re:Supply.... (Score:5, Insightful)
You may be right, but the "higher levels of abstraction" will,
in my opinion, call for more knowledge, not less, requiring
more skilled persons, not less.
Until the point that we have true AI, that is. ( And it will
still be true, but handled by the AI. )
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20 years ago you could produce what was considered commercial quality code for those days and make a living off it with knowledge that was equivalent to 1-1.5 years of university education, sometimes less. Nowdays 4 years of college are not always enough to get you through your first day in the job.
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Outsourcing is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Too freakin' bad, free traitor. I call them like I see them; outsourcers deserve no better.
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That's something that really always bothered me. I did make the *wrong* assumption that you worked for a larger company- but the general trend is towards providing not enough funds for R&D as is, and this general trend just means that there will be LESS funding available. Capitalism sucks a
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Good bennies- but I can see their point about the rest of the compensation being pretty rotten- especially since (I'm the new guy so I didn't have to go through this) they had a wage step freeze for the past 4 years.
Outsourcing is good, loyalty is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh yeah, that includes patriotism as well btw. Typically they want you to die for their benefit.
Re:Outsourcing is good, loyalty is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, no, "they" don't: "Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." (General Patton)
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When, in the last 40 years, has America made a product worth buying? Everything stamped "Made in America" should really be stamped "Packaged in America".
Loyalty is good if reciprocated (Score:2)
Always? Sorry, I disagree. Loyalty goes both ways. Yes, some people abuse it to get things done cheaply - and those are often the most memorable or newsworthy ones. But less newsworthy are the people in power who show loyalty to their underlings.
I'll bet if the Indian management simply paid their people what they were worth - and added an occasional attaboy - the engineers would stay
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We've had this discussion before. (Score:5, Insightful)
But why would that country's people be any different?
The fact is, once the outsourcing staff has the knowledge and experience that was previously YOUR expertise, there is no reason for them to keep working for you. Eventually, they start their own companies in your market and replace you.
Don't focus on short term profits at the expense of long term survivability.
Re:We've had this discussion before. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a discussion we need to have. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is far more profitable for a CEO to wreck and sell the company than it is for him/her to actually spend time running the company.
Re:That's a discussion we need to have. (Score:4, Interesting)
Simple, do the same as they do for the IT staff already: Pay them what they are worth in a salary, and if they do a good job, they get to keep working there. Others have some good suggestions too on this. If you don't do something about this though don't expect stupid actions that generate short term profits but long term mediocrity to end.
To put it in slashdot parlance:
1) The senior executives come in, make their short term profit for the company and collect their bonuses,2) Things go to shit (since their short term plans don't work for the long term... they don't care anyway, their eye is on the bonus) and they get fired,
3) Take a huge severance and... profit!! (well except for the shareholders)
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Tie the CEO's yearly salary/bonus plan to a stock option plan they can't sell until 10 years from that date. Make it pretty lethal and impossible to sell or get any benefits until then.
Perhaps, make it worth thei
Re:That's a discussion we need to have. (Score:5, Insightful)
A former manager of mine had an insightful take on this:
Back in The Good Old Days(tm), employees (including top execs) would work for a single company for many years, then retire, drawing a pension. Because of that, there was built-in incentive to make sure the company had long-term stability.
Nowadays, executives are disposable employees like you and me. Therefore, they have no reason to care whether the company is long-term profitable. They know they'll be elsewhere in a few years, so why not plunder the company in the meantime?
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So people in the poorest countries will keep getting better and higher paying jobs so they can feed their families and eventually move beyond subsistence to some relative level of prosperity?
I hope those senior executives keep getting those huge bonuses then.
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You think those bonuses have anything to do with philanthropy? You think senior executives care about anyone least of all someone living in a mud hut? RTFA. They care about short term profits that fit in their own pockets. I once heard someone say that they believed that senior executives, and especially these modern bonus taking CEOs are mostly if not all, sociopaths. I tend to agree with that.
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Used to be good employees that are loyal were extremely valuable to a company. Now they've decided that Intellectual Property is all thats needed and employees are disposable. I hope this philosophy fails miserably.
Re:We've had this discussion before. (Score:5, Insightful)
In all reality, this is a significant part of what globalization was supposed to do... improve the economy of the nations that are the worst off economically. There was only a small window of time where the megacorps could make the insane profits off trade disparities. That window is closing as trade gaps begin to narrow between countries that have products or services to trade and the supply and demand begin to equalize.
Why prolong the inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Teach it to the Venture Capitalists (Score:2)
The group to teach this to is not so much the management (who operate on short time scales and dance to their investors' tune) but the Venture Capitalists (who are in it for a long-enough haul to cash out, and write the tune).
A few years ago I was working with some people who were trying a startup. They couldn't get funding without having an "outsourcing strategy". Over 95% of the
Why outsourcing is bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Big indicators have been the outsourcing of work from India to China! The fact that customer service companies in India cannot communicate with the average person in western English speaking countries on a level that is equitable. The high turnover rates have always been there as a problem that was politely ignored in favor of lower initial labor costs.
Any project manager can tell you that trying to lead a project of software engineers that is not only geographically separate, but separated by as much as 12 hours from the part of the company that needs the software.
All of that is not news, or shouldn't be. What is news is that more and more companies are finally realizing this. There will be companies that continually hunt to find short term savings, like gold rush miners, but in the end, customer service and ease of development will drive down the desire to outsource work.
Yes, I know that Bill et al have proclaimed that there is a shortage of IT workers in the US, and apparently there is a glut of degreed IT workers in India. The trouble with such claims is that those Indian IT workers (no matter how many degrees they have) do not have any kind of realistic understanding of the western world's business environment, and often I swear that they really have no idea about software either, but I suppose that is borne from not understanding the business culture as well.
This story is really about how outsourcing work to foreign countries is coming back to bite the people that thought outsourcing was a good idea to start with.
Those who won't learn from history
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When I bought my last computer, I was offered a service package and the package contained in no uncertain terms, explicitly "non-outsourced customer support
I disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
1) If you hire your son to mow your lawn, there is nothing stopping him from hiring his friend in turn... ala Tom Sawyer. If the job is unacceptable, make the terms part of the contract.
2) Customer service is not a function of outsourcing, it is a function of cost. You can have equally horrible customer service inside the US itself.
3) High turnover is also not a function of outsourcing, it is a function of management. If an employee has no training and advancement path then it is up to the employee to figure out their own. This is true of any company in any country.
All these problems would exist if the companies in question practiced homesourcing, where a company like IBM hired a temp agency in Alabama to support their developers in San Jose.
Again, why give work to a neighbor or a friend when you can do it yourself?
Answer: Because division of labor and speciality encourages increased productivity when both parties can do separate things more effectively than both parties replicating work.
In this case the flaw with outsourcing is that there was not a good reason or a good implementation for the division of labor.
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Global outsourcing harms everyone except those to whom the work was outsourced. When I move the work to another country, I help that country and its inhabitants, but I harm my own. I make those other people more competent by paying them to learn - since you can't really help but learn as you work. I'm not paying people in MY country to learn. In addition, the money is leaving the country, so it cannot be used here any more until it is used to buy more goods/services. Because we are helping train the worker
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If I pay my son to mow the lawn but he hires his friend, at half price, to do it for him, who is building physical stamina? Who is learning how to cut grass? Who is learning how to use a lawn mower? How to maintain and fix it?
So my son is now harming his own family and helping his friend's because he is paying them to learn and money is leaving your household and will not be available again until it is used to buy something, as well as decreasing the likeliho
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I don't believe that India doesn't have a right to grow, or even that it doesn't enrich us all. It does. However, if change occurs too quickly it has a destabilizing effect. India is feeling this effect now, but more importantly in the day-to-day lives of Americans, we're feeling it more.
You can't stop progress but allowing it to progress unchecked is not a good idea either.
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In that respect the best you can expect to do is live life carefully in your own sphere: Don't buy cheap/disposable when you can buy quality/durability, don't overconsume because it requires too many trade offs in price/quality, and live like it m
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Err, and why is your community so sacred? You're probably very well off in the general scheme of things. When jobs get outsourced, that helps to create more wealth. As people get wealthier, they can afford more interesting things, like stuff YOU make, like clean air and water, like stuff that hasn't been invented yet.
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There is no such thing as a trade deficit between countries; any more than there is a trade deficit between you and your local supermarket. They never buy anything from you, and yet you keep buying stuff from them. It's *exactly* the same situation between US and India.
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I.T. workforce from the stars! (Score:4, Funny)
After those workers start demanding higher wages, an alien slave trader will set up a trading post to provide cheap labor and the Men in Black (MiB) will be put out of business after the industry lobbies the government not enforced the alien immigration laws.
Reap what you sow, suckaz (Score:2)
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Like seriously?
Alternatively do you think people in the US are willing to pay more for software in the US in order to employ US workers?
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There are so many flaws in this thinking I don't know where to start.
First of all, CEOs don't reap what they sow. They'll only be CEO for a few years, they'll make a shitload of money, and when they leave they'll get an even bigger shitload of money as a golden parachute. You can't blame someone for taking that kind of work, and the long term implications of what they do won't affect them. Somebody will reap what they sow, but it won't be the CEOs.
Secondly, when did they "kill the industry" in the US?
Will this make Sea-Code more viable? (Score:3, Funny)
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We haven't figure out how to make India work... (Score:5, Interesting)
So far I have not come across many Fortune 500s where outsourcing actually worked in the end - that means not just a lower rate but comparable quality. There are plenty of CxOs that announce how much money they saved and all, but if you talk to the techs they almost consistently have another story to tell. For each 100 hours of outsourced work I estimate the average will be about 40 hours of US time to review and fix the programs... And those 40 hours will eat up all the cost savings you had in the original 100 hours. Its sad - but in the end for a million line codebase that has a certain quality, it doesn't really matter where you do it - the cost will be the same... The only ones that have a big advantage there is the russians. No idea why but their quality is usually better than you find anywhere else and the prices are reasonable too.
Before outsourcing, look beyond the hourly rate and consider skills. Then analyze your savings after the project has been in production for a while - and check if your expectations actually came true.
Peter.
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Add Canada to that list. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a university graduate with 15 years professional experience and zero current domestic employment prospects, no unemployment insurance or welfare, a few dollars an hour that the tax man does not know about is most welcome.
I can make enough to survive on for rates similar to impoverished Indians. Its all in your standard of living.
The benefit to my clients is mainly fluency in English (UK spelling) and ease of communication.
They get superior service at rates comparable to outsourcing to the east. And I get to eat, and buy the odd package of cigarettes.
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Well, duh (Score:2)
Mod me down for being unpopular (Score:3, Informative)
But I frankly don't see any reversal of the outsourcing trend
As foreign workers acquire more and more skills, the gap between them and the first-worlders being replaced diminshes. Already we are seeing this: instead of outsourcing to places like India or China, many companies are turning to not-so-poor but cheap places like Easter Europe, Brazil, or Argentina. Countries where technically skilled people exist but were in low demand, but most importantly where the culture is extremely compatible with their clients'.
(Brazilians or Argentines DO have a language barrier, but their culture is much more similar to that of the US than other people in the globe, which makes their skill acquisition faster).
The problem clients have with outsourcing isn't about foreigners or incompetence. It's about managing a herd of cats through virtual teams and bonding with people with the same accent and interests as yours. I know that personally I've had much more success with my customers due to my American accent than my less linguistically skilled co-workers.
sig: Cosas de un sysadmin argentino: http://aosinski.phpnet.us/ [phpnet.us]
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Relax.
The major cause for the big outsourcing boom was that some countries (like India) had large, highly educated workforces that couldn't get at the work due to high transaction costs.
The internet drastically lowered the transaction costs and we say these workers flood into the ma
Has anybody heard of Agile methodologies? (Score:2)
I do. I'm having my most profitable year ever. It seems as if a lot of work has come back to the UK.
Hiring outsiders from half way around the World just doesn't work. If it does, why are companies not boasting about the latest successful product that cost 75% less to make than in previous years? Why are the PR spin machines strangely silent?
All we hear is that some company decided to offshore and hopes to make tens of millions of dolla
The following is a long diatribe.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Outsourcing is neither good nor evil, but the motivation behind outsourcing tends to be overwhelmingly merciless and short-term. Taking a knowledge activity and attempting to turn it into a commodity or near-assembly line function is, I suppose, a managerial Holy Grail worth undertaking in different guises each decade.
Consider H1B visas. Is there a shortage of IT workers in the US, or a shortage of *cheap* IT workers in the US? Most major media publications are overwhelmingly guilty of dropping the telling adjective, and the quotes they gather all support a lack of IT talent, no qualifiers added.
We who work in this space, live in the space, can confirm some of this. It *is* hard to find a superior talent for an IT position above entry level. However, it's not impossible if you have a salary and excellent position to offer.
So, when I read about outsourcing arbitrage and the chase for ever-cheaper talent, I just wait it out. Eventually, all of the talent, cheap or not, will come to fore and then the real shoot-out over quality and reliability can begin. Does anyone truly believe there's a hidden cachet of Polish supercoders who haven't been discovered because they lack the Internet connectivity? Does anyone see the inherent flaw in that premise, and by extension, any argument like it?
I'm not overly impressed with a single outsourced individual or group in my eleven pro years of IT, and that includes old Anderson Consulting of 1995 up to Patel Consulting of 2006. The prestige of the firm should only get them an interview: talent and not cost is what you'll need to survive.
As a final note, what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions? Does anyone expect anyone to major in CS in this country, knowing that electricians make far more and took less formal schooling? I think not. You can't outsource a physical service.
-BA
But you can insource a physical service (Score:2)
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The US hasn't even been able to outsource all of its manufacturing jobs.
What will happen (what is happening) is that there will continue to be a need for some level of IT functions in the US, especially of the "rapid response" variety, but perhaps at a slightly lower employment level or pay level (look at automobile manufacturing in the US, where even foreign companies are building new plants here, but they don't have u
Wow...irony (Score:5, Informative)
Outsourcing is definitely here to stay, but from what I have seen, cost is not the only factor that gets considered these days. (At least, not by the client I'm working for.) They're looking at the whole package, but the biggest thing that has mattered so far are the tools and functionality that the outsourcing provider can bring to bear. At the end of the day, it'll be functionality that matters the most, especially as labor costs in markets like India and China grow. But don't make the mistake of thinking that in such countries lower cost is all they have to offer, because that's not necessarily the case; the provider I visited yesterday had a hell of a great system for handling the complex financial functions that are a main pain point for my client.
Calling Outsourcing "Bad" (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Workers who lost really well-paying jobs to outsourcing:
I'm sorry no one informed you, but one of the economic reasons you were paid so well was that your job was coming to an end. It was always a temporary state. Consider the extra wages a "retraining allowance" paid in advance.
2. Shareholder Demands:
Clearly outsourcing is a cost-reducing effort. As long as those costs are measured in dollars and cents your job is on the chopping block on a quarterly basis. Unless every business owner/shareholder in every country in the world becomes simultaneously enlightened, this is the benchmark.
The new american worker rules are:
There is no such thing as job stability.
Get paid for today's work because there is no promise tomorrow. e.g. retirement and vesting options are mostly vaporware.
If you are lucky enough to be near the top of your wage curve, live at or about the middle of the wage range for your industry if at all possible. This gives you a nice F.U. fund if there's a sudden change in your employment circumstances.
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The new American rules are no different than the old American rules - There never was any such thing as job stability. When I graduated from college in the late '80s with an EE degree companies were laying off engineers by the thousands. This was long before outsourcing. Stability is a temporary condition during economic good times which persists because labor is in tight supply. As soon as the economy becomes "normal" again (or bad), that stability dissappears.
People for whom stability is a primary co
Re:Ask my Dad (Score:2)
Number of years in the workforce 47 +/-
Number of employers: 2 +/-
Longest Stint: 40 years.
Promises companies (and governments) make aren't really binding
My father would say this is the difference between his generation and mine. In his day, people's word actually meant something. Even if those people worked for a corporation there was a sense of personal responsibility in your daily dealings.
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But that's my point. From 1945 through the mid '70s companies could afford to act that way because the economy was growing at a pretty good clip. But when you have a recession, companies cut payrolls - it's just a fact of life. How many jobs did his father have? Co
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The race to the bottom (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the biggest problem I have with globalization: we have removed all constraints from capital and freed it from all other considerations. It is truly a race to the bottom - who has the lowest labour costs, who has the fewest environmental restrictions "wins" some starvation wage jobs until we can find someone else who can be exploited even more.
The fear used to be that jobs were being sent south to Mexico. But when Mexicans workers start demanding fair wages, we sent the work to Viet Nam, where people earn $2 per day. But even that looks pretty expensive when there are people in China willing to work for $.50 a day.
It's exploitation plain and simple, and we don't care because we are insulated from the uglier aspects of it. Of course, we are getting screwed too - those over-priced sneakers are now manufactured for a fraction of what they used to cost, but we still pay roughly the same price at retail. At least the shareholders are happy, but if they could find someone who would work for $.25 a day, they would be even happier.
Whenever someone argues in favour of a living wage, we are told it is too expensive. What a shame that poverty has become an official requirement of our economic system.
If we found ourselves working in the sweatshops for less than a buck a day, I wonder if we would be grateful...
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If you are upset about your shoes, buy American. New Balance 'tries real hard' to make their shoes here, but that's just a bonus that comes wit
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I don't understand how offering someone a voluntary job is "exploitation." If the workers in question had better alternatives, wouldn't they be taking them? Isn't that just another way of saying that the company in question is offering the workers a better alternative than any other?
"Of course, we are getting screwed too - those over-priced sneakers are now manufactured for a fraction of what they used to cost, but we still pay roughly the same
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How low does it go before the going rate for labor is unable to save the laborers from starving? What then?
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Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month.
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Most corporations are completely amoral. A select few are arguably evil. They are all in a desperate search for short-term profits to the exclusion of all else. If they
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And yet .... over the long term, corporations have had to pay people more and more and more money. What does that say about your race to the bottom? Pretty much refuted by the facts.
You don't help the poor by looking at their list of options and eliminating the one they actually chose.
Very interesting article here - (Score:2, Informative)
bonus in the article cited above - a discussion on coding and the communications barrier. And i quote:
Salary Growth Will Slow in India (Score:2)
At the lower end, 12% salary grows by 10 times in 12.6 years and 20 times in 16.4 years.
At the higher end, 14% salary grows by 10 times in 6.8 years and 20 times in 8.9 years.
Given mostly stagnant salaries in the United States and other higher wage countries, India's salary growth is going to be rapidly constrained.
Big surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
What folks are complaining about is simply signs that there's a sellers market for programming skill in India these days. This will raise Indian salaries to the point where Indian salaries plus transaction costs are the same as US salaries. Another thing I've seen is that the average skill level level of Indian programmers isn't as high as it once was. Which isn't the same as saying the Indians are losing skill -- it's the opposite. The time was when nearly every Indian programmer you met was probably brilliant. There are more great Indian programmers than ever, but there are also lots more mediocre ones than there ever were.
I expect India's programming talent pool to continue increasaing, but you can't grow such a skill based industry overnight without compromising a little on quality and losing some price advantage.
There will never be another outsourcing phenomenon like the India. India has had three great advantages: (1) a huge and highly educated middle class population; (2) widespread English fluency; (3) stable government and laws. There isn't any other place remotely like it.
The next great outsourcing horizon will be
Problem not arising, always there (Score:2, Informative)
Rule of Law (Score:2)
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (Score:4, Interesting)
I couldn't find anyone there who spoke decent english who knew anything about computers. The best I could find were straight out of two year trade school/junior college amature windows jockeys. Linux? Perl? Fat chance! It is still very much a third world country. Software is pirated wildly too. Don't expect employees to obey any sort of NDA. Also note that since people there do not have credit cards, car payments, mortgages, and are already heavily dependent on their families for most things they need they are usually free to leave your company at any time.
At least they have cable modem in HCMC even though it can be a bit unreliable. Exepect a power outage once a month too. Expect theft. I have had motorbikes stolen, cell phones stolen, etc.
And the corruption...oh my god. We paid off everyone and were solicited for payoffs by everyone. My coworker overstayed his visa by a day. They wouldn't let him out of the country! The soldier/immigrations officer/policeman (all the same there) took him into a side room and basically asked him how much money he had on him. $60 worth of the local currency (Vietnamese Dong) and he was free to go. We paid $400 in cash to the customs guy to get them to let our IP phones into the country when the official tax on them was supposed to have been much higher.
And on top of it all they are still very much communist and most are quite brainwashed. It is in a similar vein to North Korea only not as extreme. Americans are lazy people who cheat on their wives and fuck in the streets and cannot be trusted. They do not know about nuclear weapons, don't know the cold war, don't really know anything about the world context in which the Vietnam War happened. Everyone treated me very nicely of course. No anti-Americanism at all as long as someone stood to gain money from me and I was paying in cash. They are always very friendly to tourists and smiling and respectful. Just don't try to date anyone there or talk politics with anyone as you will surely offend. If you hear someone say something about history which you know is patently false just smile and nod.
Suffice it to say the project did not go well. Doomed from the start. At least I had the good sense to bail months before the shit really hit the fan and the whole operation collapsed.
Vietnam is a fun place to visit and I recommend it. I will be going back there again in a couple of weeks for Christmas. I just won't be doing business there again until the business culture changes dramatically.
Re:Get over it. NOW. (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, if you are GOOD AT WHAT YOU DO, YOU WILL NOT BE OUTSOURCED.
My, aren't you naive! No need to shout, because life will soon smack you upside the head. A little reality check - Competence does not equal immunity. You can be the among the best, even the best in the industry, or the world at what you do, and some bean counter will outsource you in a heartbeat if they think they can get it done cheaper elsewhere.
Consider that almost half (47%)of the IT outsourcing contracts are cancelled due to non-performance. The sad truth is that the people who make the decisions to outsource are several layers removed from the people who actually perform the work, or work with the customers. Which frequently means that cost trumps quality or competence. The person making the decision doesn't know (or even care) that the people that are being outsourced are good or the best. All that manager knows is that they cost too much.
That will change when... (Score:2)
That will change when they have acquired an in-depth understanding of your IP.
Then some of them may start a new company using it, or a spinoff of it, while the rest go to work for others who could use their experience on their products.
Just like it w
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To say that the Vietnamese has a high literacy rate, and that by extension the country has a large population of fluent English speakers, is also just wrong. You may be entirely correct, but you haven't presented any evidence for it.
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