Sorry you have lost your job, it sucks (me too).
You should check out this little known federal assistance program which provides for training, extended health coverage and more. Your firm will have to confirm that they have shifted work overseas, but otherwise no paperwork or penalty. If you file for unemployment, your counselor should be able to help with this. It would cover you and all your affected coworkers.
The full quote starts “They get their IT work done for cheaper.” That’s perfectly idiomatic English, at least around these parts.
Not in most places. It sounds like hick speak.
shrug That’s your opinion. I’m just reporting on how it’s been spoken in my neck of the woods (Chicago.) I can guarantee pretty much nobody would raise an eyebrow at that construction. edit: Googling the exact phrase “get it done for cheaper” suggests it’s not an uncommon way to express that thought. I’m surprised that anyone would characterize it as “hick speak,” but, then again, people get funny with language.
Uh, it isn’t that bad. I would have said, “The work can be done more cheaply there.”
Is that horrible, too?
I don’t think the OP had racist overtones – just using “some Indian” as shorthand for “someone whose native language is probably not the language they’re speaking, and whose low salariy is low because their credentials and training are likely of a lower quality than non-outsourced support people I’ve encountered, and who is likely just working his or her way through a script to deliver canned suggestions of things I’ve already tried, and who has just lied to me about his or her first name.”
Like others, I think it depends on the task being outsourced. If you’re providing support for a game console, where there are two or three options that boil down to, “restart the console,” one awkward way of asking, “is it plugged in?” and four or five options involving checking the cables, it’s easy to outsource. But if you have to tell people to open a terminal window and type in “regedit,” click on a particular icon on the left to expand the folder and then look for a string that starts with a pattern of the form, “S-1-9-44 …,” it’s just not going to work.
These things also have a tendency to fail in instances where the managers think they’re outsourcing a well-defined task, but the actual task inolves many subtle details and additional problem-solving capabilities that they either don’t recognize or don’t think are important.
A business exists to make money. The more money the business makes, the better off everyone is from a long-term/overall perspective. Outsourcing improves the bottom line, so by definition it is a good thing.
for the owners.
Slave plantations were good at making money, too.
Remember, the OP asked :
That’s a little simplistic. Not all activities benefit as much (or at all) from outsourcing (whether to India or anywhere else). Something like software development is the exact opposite of outsourcing manufacturing in that software is creating 1 single item with tens/hundreds of thousands of intertwined critical details. Manufacturing (which, like everything, has it’s challenges), has a phase in which you are repeating the process for thousands or millions of items.
One of our vendors uses development companies in India and Eastern Europe. The stuff takes 10x longer to create than if I did it. It is typically riddled with landmines (I am truly surprised that anyone can code something to be as brittle as these things are, it seems it would take extra effort), and it is coded as if infinite computing resources were available. Typically I have to deconstruct what they did to tell them how to change it for proper performance, and I spend much more time in testing alone than if I developed it. Additionally, there is an extra burden in creating specifications that can’t really ever replace having someone right there part of the team designing and working with users. We have spent 5x more on this project using cheaper labor.
This is not to say that any specific nationality is good or bad at developing software, these are my 2 points:
I don’t have the energy to write in depth at the moment but I want to say I totally agree with the OP. The software company that I work for has been outsourcing to India and Brazil and laying off people in the U.S. And this is not just call centers, this is development. In regard to India, our development estimates are based on cost per Indian at one third that of someone working here. My former manager, who was from India but came here for school and worked here for 20 years, moved back to India a year ago with the intention of remaining. But he can’t stand it and is planning to move back here. People don’t show up for meetings, they cancel meetings and don’t tell anyone, etc. I have been on conference calls with him and his new employees and it is clear they really don’t know what they’re doing. Furthermore, costs in India are going up rapidly. Real estate there is getting very expensive (so they tell me) and the workers are realizing they can demand higher wages.
Eventually I think this outsourcing fad will burn out. In the meantime we are all angry, threatened, disillusioned.
However I do want to point out that I work with some very brilliant and wonderful Indians here in the U.S. By no means am I slamming Indians in general. But I think in India the work environment is disorganized and relatively unproductive.
I don’t think it’s a fad that will burn out. Labor intensive jobs always move out of areas with high cost of living when there are alternatives. I think it will correct itself and become less binary, meaning the following:
The trick for U.S. (high cost of living) technical people is to make sure we stay ahead of the curve. We need skills that are less easy to offshore, things that are less of a commodity.
It would depend on the company doing the work in my experience. I have worked in a few companies in India, and the work ethic and environment in each of them was staggeringly different.
Larger companies have hordes of middle management, whose main focus is not to get the job done, but to keep the client satisfied. This is a fundamentally flawed way of working. The people doing the work would be doing fine most of the time, but bad management would get in their way. The concept of ownership of code, and pride in the work is sorely lacking as a result.
That said, there are jobs that can be outsourced and those that cannot. Something like IT would be ideal, something like rapid prototyping, not so much. Well defined schedules and deliverables are essential for outsourcing.
Also, there is a large variation in the skills and knowledge of the people working in India. If people are outsourcing to a cheap company, they will get what they pay for. Good workers anywhere, will not work for peanuts.
another benefit is the illusion of a better available workforce because of the greater tendency to lie on resumes. A recent college grad in America will, chances are, honestly write “an intelligent newbie looking for entry-level position and will grow on the job”. A similar guy in India will more easily lie about “years of experience” (and try verifying that, from your American office). Or, even better, the American exec wouldn’t read the Indian resumes at all - he will just trust that an Indian exec has read them and picked a highly competent team just as he claims in promotional emails. The same applies to the more experienced programmers as well - an American will say “I know Java, I will learn AS3 quickly if needed” but an Indian will say whatever you want to hear.
Meanwhile, nowadays the management is all obsessed with the years of experience - you can be as intelligent and resourceful as the folks described by Shagnasty, but if you got that “experience”, then you are the guy to hire. And, needless to say, if you don’t hire Americans, Americans don’t get that formal experience either, so these execs are not only hurting their own companies by wasting money on lying incompetents but also imposing serious negative externalities on the rest of the economy.
I’m sorry you lost your job. Eventually even the management jobs are going to go to India and China when their local companies out-compete their US counterparts.
Good job training in the future will involve something that requires that work be done on local ground. Something that requires professional licensing or physical skill like mechanical work or construction or government work. Even surgery can be performed over the internet at least in part.
I don’t deal with IT in the sense of customer support, which I believe is what the OP is talking about, but I am in software development. Over the years our company has occasionionally sent projects out to India for coding that are related to our group. They have always come back so full of bugs that we have to rewrite them from scratch. Maybe that’s because we do very specialized, very complex software.
My perception is that the Indians have got it right commercially.
British companies including banks and phone number enquiries call centers have been outsourced to India and in the middle east many jobs that were the preserve of North American or European ex pats are now being taken over by Indians for much lower pay and conditions, though in my experience at a lower quality of performance.
This is good for India but not good for Europeans/N.Americans.
Personally I’m not too happy about it,the standard of living that for example, we in Britain have achieved has taken a couple of hundred years of fighting for labour rights,personal freedoms through legislation and the like.
Unless we choose to lower our quality of life to that of third world countries or bring in protectionism then we will see continuinly greater job losses for the forseeable future.
I hate calling Indian call centers for support (whether technical or otherwise), not because they’re Indian but because they sit there reading off a script and when you ask them a question that’s not on there they’re completely flabbergasted. They have no critical thinking skills whatsoever, as this is not what they are trained to do. They’re also so far removed from the issue that the chances they have much more knowledge about it than you do are pretty remote anyway. It’s a total waste of time.
I was in the same boat. I was supposed to write very detailed specs (for knowledge transfer), serve as an expert resource, and manage the several people assigned to a given a project in terms of technical work and design for our Indian outsourcing group. In reality, it was always send it to them and let them fail on it for so long that it became a critical business situation and then take all the work back and do it myself. The development cost savings over me or one of my onshore coworkers doing it in the first place were negative so we always lost time and money on those types of projects plus it made my weekends hell. There were some brute-force and routine tasks like checking 200 sets of code for a given block of code and making a small but standard change that they were good at and I was happy to give them that type of work but abstract thinking and initiative wasn’t their strength to say the least.
We did pick up on one cultural difference that was causing a huge problem fairly quickly. When we first contracted with our large out-sourcing provider, we quickly found that they would stop work immediately whenever they had the slightest doubt about what they should do rather than work their way through the problem. It terms out that the #1 thing that they were scored on was the number of mistakes that they made. The easiest way to make very few mistakes is to to as little work as possible and push back on other people at the slightest sign of a problem. It could take a day or more before we found out why work had grinded to a halt because of something stupid. We were a little successful at having the accuracy scorecard moved way down the priority list. I make a lot of small mistakes a day but I know how to fix them and they don’t mean anything. All good developers do. It is only the big mistakes you need to worry about or you will never get anything done without experimenting.
The same thing applies to outsourced call-center employees that deal with consumers. A bright person might know that there is an obscure problem that could be related to your USB port problem but they are either not allowed to say it or don’t want to because it is taking a risk that could hurt them even if it fixes the problem and makes the customer happy.
I don’t think that outsourcing of IT jobs is a “fad” that will burn out any more than the movement of blue collar jobs (e.g., textile manufacturing, steel production) overseas was a fad in past decades.
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Moved thread from General Questions to Great Debates.
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