gone to India!
… and then they came for me.
After the good service jobs get outsourced what’s next?
IBM sees need to shift jobs overseas - Report: Firm seen moving workforce to India, elsewhere
Eight whole percent over 12 years eh? That’s almost 0.75% a year.
Better start to train in something else then.
They are going, going, gone. I always thought that it was very arrogant for americans to think that only low tech assembly type jobs would be exported overseas. What makes people think that “Them furriners aint smort enough to do my job”?
The reality is that many of "them furriners"are highly educated.
And an other reality is that it is much cheaper to transfer the jobs to their low cost furriner country then to lure them furriners with money to the US and other high cost countries.
An other reality is that in this way the braindrain towards those countries also stops.
Which shall lead to the reality that those braindraining countries will have to make some work of their own education system in order to stay where they are now.
Because it most probably shall also lead to development of them furriners countries who until now saw the vast majority of their human capital being lost to the US and other countries.
Salaam. A
Somehow this is Dubya’s fault.
Everything is. One must congratulate the US’ers with this president because he is the ideal scapegoat for everything that can possibly go wrong.
The fact that he adds a great deal to the fact that everything that can possibly go wrong goes wrong makes him even ore valuable.
Since some time I wonder why there aren’t already Bush heads fabricated from the type people throw cans on. (To stay in tune… For US’ers: read this as "from the type Gun People practice shooting on)
Oh God… Thank you… I suddenly realize that you made me discover a new market…
Anyone interested in buying Bushcanbulletheads?
Because the idea of using the image of our president as a shooting target, no matter how much we may detest his policies, is disgusting.
Actually, this is Clinton’s fault. He was the one, you’ll remember, that signed NAFTA into law, thereby allowing this execrable shafting of Americans in the name of profit, profit, profit.
…
What? I don’t owe nobody nuthin’, dammit. Pigs is pigs.
gobear,
Why is it disgusting? Because he was non-elected into the White House?
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t there, especially in the USA, such images made of many people who were legitimate leaders for their countries and people?
Salaam. A
Leaving aside the economic illiteracy, IBM is not considering moving some white collar functions to any NAFTA country, so this is a complete non-sequitur, as well as economically illiterate.
Maybe India joined NAFTA in the last few hours, Collounsbury, LMAO.
There is a way to save these jobs. Dual pricing of goods. You’ll find yourself comparing two identical consumer items at price x for the ‘made in India’ and price 2x for the ‘made in USA’.
Think of your fellow Americans’ jobs before you make your choice;)
Quark, Inc., a fairly disreputable company that is finally – finally! – losing its stranglehold on the publishing industry, just fired all of its American workers, except for the group working on the update-editions of its new QuarkXPress 6.0 software. Once they’re done, they’re canned, too.
Quark is moving all of its software development to India. Which could spell doom. The QuarkXPress codebase is notoriously bad – uncommented, hard to navigate, illogically organized. It took years to move from version 4.0 to version 6.0 (5.0 was basically just a high-priced 4.2), and from what I hear from friends in the grapevine, the reaction to the code in India has been one of terrified bemusement.
Which is not to say that Indian programmers aren’t qualified… but Quark’s bread and butter market is the Mac OS, and Mac software doesn’t have a lot of precedent in India. Compound that with the codebase that’s shakier than Bush’s justifications for his recent expeditions in Iraq, and you have a ticking time bomb.
Not really related to anything. Just thought it was interesting.
I’ll say it. Indian programmers aren’t qualified. Not to say that they couldn’t be…but they aren’t now.
The last company I worked for (I’ll withhold name to protect the guilty) started to outsource some of their programming to India before I left. The result was crap code, crap service and a greater cost. In the last year or two, they started shifting their dev back to the US and Canada.
Like most outsourcing ventures, the company was sold a bill of goods. “Qualified programmers fluent in English etc.”. Right… 
Most could barely speak English (if at all), wouldn’t understand requirements and would generally fuck everything up. Us North American workers were working double time just to fix the crap India was sending us. In the end, the company was spending more in overtime.
The programmers working on our projects had about 6 months of training. Some guy in India started the racket up. He’s the Indian equivalent of Bill Gates. Can’t remember his name. A lot of companies are buying in to the line but it will come back to haunt them. It did the company I worked for.
Sound good to me. Quark is going all in on India. If this move bombs, it’d kill the company. And that would be glorious.
There’s also a furor over medical transcription work being moved over to India.
There is a terrible shortage of medical transcriptionists in the US, and India has been filling the need (somewhat). However, from what I’ve heard, Indian transcriptionists may be cheaper than American transcriptionists, but there is a language barrier—they are, after all, transcribing the dictations of doctors speaking English, and that is not their native tongue.
Reports are that the quality of the work of Indian medical transcriptionists, while cheap and fast, are not always very good. (And accuracy is a big deal—or should be—when it comes to something like sensitive medical records.) I’ve seen a lot of help wanted ads for medical transciptionists which has in bold lettering, “NO OFFSHORE NEED APPLY.” That is a secret code for “NO ONE FROM INDIA NEED APPLY” 
) I’m assuming that this is because some people have decided that transcription services out of India are just not worth it. (Other companies, of course, will only see that India is cheaper and look no further.)
This doesn’t mean that India is going away in the medical transcription biz, (far from it, I am sure) but that maybe, just maybe, there are some jobs that just don’t transfer over to India all that well.
Yeah, like spectrum’s tale, this isn’t necessarily related to the OP, but I thought it was interesting as well…
Well, I can give you one example of how it could hurt a company like IBM.
I’m currently in a position to choose an outsourcer. It’s between IBM and another company. If I get even a hint that the service I’ll be getting from IBM is from India…I’ll go with the other company. I’ve been there and done that and will NOT do it again. If IBM wants to save a buck, they can do it with another client. Looks like it may be a toss up between incompentent english speaking Canadians or incompetent semi-english speaking Indians. Great.
Come now, you know better than this.
First, the IT consulting firms numbers, in my opinion are shit. They were shit on the upside and I feel confident they are shit on the downside. The business of exageration.
Second, as always comments here largely reflect the idea there is a fixed amount of jobs and labor around, which trade or free markets (trade being one aspect) simply rearranges. This is most clearly not the case, indeed one of the clearest emperically supported lessons one can draw is that more efficient production generally leads to larger pies, that is more work.
Taking our jobs away blather is lazy thinking not generally supportable (some specific niches and/or functions, that is job types may disappear, that is surely possible, highly unlikely the sector).
Further to that, as the cases of Japan, Taiwan and Korea suggest, as developing countries move up in the value chain and compete, they also themselves become markets for developed nations, that is larger markets. The pie gets bigger.
Wonderful, knee jerkism
So, the Indian IT industry is made up of “semi-English speaking” professionals. Odd that was never my experience in interacting with Indian professionals.
But I suppose it is just simply understood.
The way I see it, we make choices all the time. If we get crap service from a company, don’t use it again. But to suggest that we can know in advance the level of service and quality of work we will receive from a company by knowing the nationality of the workers ludicrous. Unless you reserve that for particular countries…
Let’s not go there.
In addition, let’s look at the effect of ‘protecting’ these jobs through tariffs or other interventions in the market.
If companies are forced to hire high priced workers in the U.S., the result will be capital flight out of the country. These companies will set up shop elsewhere. Then the wages won’t just go down, they’ll just GO.
And if you try and stop companies from moving, all that will mean is that the U.S. will lose a competitive advantage to other countries. And then the companies won’t get work at all, and the jobs will go away.
Protectionism didn’t even work in the auto industry. Remember what happened there? When the Japanese started producing better cars, the auto industry cried foul and had the government step in. Tarifffs were placed on foreign cars. What was the result? American cars stayed crappy while the rest of the world improved in quality. Eventually even the tariffs couldn’t stop the inflow of better cars, and the domestic auto industry was devastated. Now they have to learn to compete on an even playing field.
And the only reason protectionism worked at all in the auto industry (‘worked’ in the sense of preventing capital flight), it was only because the auto makers had huge capital investments in domestic factories. Try that stunt with Microsoft, and it could pull up stakes and relocate.
When will protectionists learn that you can’t legislate wealth? You can’t increase efficiency by fiat. If American programmers are under competitive pressure from foreign sources, well then they’d better damned well learn to adapt, compete, or die. In the long run, there are no other options.
BTW, NAFTA was one of Clinton’s great achievements. That, and welfare reform. And the return to protectionism is one of the Bush administration’s biggest failings. That, and out of control domestic spending. Okay, that and out of control domestic spending and the horrible botching of homeland security. Okay, that and…