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Why Outsource When Workers are Willing to Telecommute?
An anonymous reader asks: "Corporations and management resisted telecommuting for years, now jobs flow to distant nations. Did telecommuting become acceptable because of the greater distance? Because some form of on-site management persists? Because labor laws are favorable? Because a well paid middle class is a political threat? Is it really as simple as money? I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work. Must I leave my country to do so?"
Workers in India are cheaper.
Is it really as simple as money?
short answer is yes.
I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work.
Not as cheap as someone oversees. What is considered good money in India wouldn't be a living wage in Silicon Valley, or in most of the United States.
Agreed. Many developers in India are paid $6k a year. Would you rather have one employee working from home or 10 employees in India? Who will be more productive?
One advantage of having your workers in your office, despite labour costs, is that you can throttle them when they screw up, and the laws that cover labor are known to you directly. Any additional contractual law is also easier to enforce. Also, you can physically chew them out if they keep screwing up, so you have more direct management control.
If they work from home, you don't have nearly the same control as if you walked over to their cubicle to yell, and they're as expensive as they would be in India, to boot. So, you gain nothing by doing this.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
and comments at a -1 threshold. ;-)
Not only that, but even if you cut your rate to $10/hr, there will be a third-world person who will do it for less.
You will never be able to be cheaper than a third world person, because a third-world person pays third-world prices for rent and food.
(Cost of paying someone overseas + overhead costs of remote management + costs related to misunderstandings/errors + inconvenience) is still less than (Cost of paying you to sit in your underwear and "work" for 2 hours a day in between slashdot postings).
There are two obvious factors that favor foreign outsourcing to domestic telecommuters:
1) The outsourcer is still likely to be much cheaper.
2) The outsourcer is (presumably) an organized unit with a high degree of standardized processes, etc. that are difficult to implement across a telecommuting workforce.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This may not pertain to *everywhere*, but it is a common problem. A lot of the reason it hasn't taken off is that the parent company assumes liability for what happens to you or your 'office' while you're working. In many jurisdictions, they also have to inspect your work area, etc. I imagine it is a support and legal nightmare.
Because even is you telecommute, an employer has to pay you a minimun wage which in your country may translate to 3 times (or more, or less) the minimum wage of a similar employee in another country.
Not to mention health care and other benefits paid by the employeer
IMHO
will work for Karma
most likely you're paying the guy in calcutta 40$ or even perhaps 30$ per hour for that work (all the overhead). i think the question is why is there such resistance (not widely available) to software developers telecommuting?
no, but will you get the same quality of service?
We need more H1-Bs so that we can train
them here. If outsourcing is to become
a more important part of our economy, then
we need to have Americans train the people
who will be taking their jobs. This is just
the way it is folks, get used to it.
Besides, it'd be nice to go to McDonald's
and order fries in English and have some
one who can not only operate the cash register,
but probably wrote the software for it.
First, I'm pretty sure it *is* all about the money. Having said that, I don't think the workers receiving the outsourced work are telecommuting. My understanding (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that they are employed by a company and report to work at a physical location. They have supervisors looking over their shoulders making sure they're not surfing the web, reading slashdot (*cough, cough*). I don't think they're hanging out at home in their underwear watching Spongebob, which is/was the fear managers had of telecommuting. Moot point now, eh?
Lower salaries are the main reason, but throw in fewer benefits to be paid, cheaper medical, lower taxes, simpler (and fewer) regulations, and so on.
You can look on it as exploited workers overseas, or spoiled workers at home.
i'd take a job here for 12$/hr. and im still having no luck finding a job.
Perhaps I'm a bit biased because of my current reading ("A People's History of the United States"), but isn't a well-paid middle class a buffer from complaints of the lower classes? It makes sense to me.
Opinions were like kittens / I was giving them away
Most of the outsourcing or moving of jobs overseas that I've seen (and what happened where I used to work) is not to a bunch of people sitting at home. It's opening up a whole office there, that functions just like an office anywhere, with managament in place, etc.
I think the typical "telecommuting" sense is that people are working in isolation, typically from their home. I see that as only marginally more acceptable now than it was before. Some companies embrace it, some don't, some do a little.
Jobs flowing overseas is something different. It's not just telecommuting on a grand scale.
It's ironic. For years, many businesses didn't like employees to telecommute because of communication problems, and the boss couldn't keep an eye on you to make sure you were working. In my mind, telecommuniting 1-2 times a week is great, as long as you get the work done.
And yet many of these same places have no problem outsourcing the same work half-way around the globe. Judging by the poor quality of some of the code I've seen from these outsourceing places (not all), there are a fair amount of communication issues, and then places aren't getting the work done properly.
Double standard?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Since the outsourcing companies are charging basically the same amount as if they had real employees, we should form companies that say they're outsourcing to India, but we're actually outsourcing to telecommuters in america.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work. Must I leave my country to do so?
Yep. And you must also accept a salary of around $5,900 a year, assuming you're relocating to India. You said you would be willing to work cheaper, but I doubt you'll want a job at that salary.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Would you rather have one employee working from home or 10 employees in India? Who will be more productive?
Base on my experience with Indian development work?
One local person (regardless of ethnicity, country of origin, religion, etc.) who speaks fluent and clear English.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
I don't know what your experience is, but I've worked at several companies that relied on off-shore resources for some engineering. Sometimes it was collaborating on a project and in some cases entire mini projects were assigned to the off-shore engineers.
In every case, massive re-engineering needed to be done.
It sounds stupid to say this, but these guys just aren't as good as the seasoned tech people we have in the US. They can't see the big picture. They lack the comprehensive technical immersion that we in the US have. This immersion gives us a greater understanding of technology, how it works, how to architect it, etc. Most off-shore engineers were in non-technical jobs before they managed to go to college and learn how to program. They just don't have the background that we do. In 20, 50, 100 years I'm sure this technology gap will fade and perhaps even vanish, but certainly not in the short term.
The real question is; will they let you keep your programming job if you are willing to relocate to India? Are you willing to live in Bangalore, Pune or Delhi for $12-14k/yr?
I guess you would have to look at the purchasing-power-parity for that salary in those locations before making that decision.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
To buying products made in the USA?? I can remember just a few short years ago when that made in the usa tag meant you got a better value for your dollar. The product might have still been made in a sweatshop, but it was a sweatshop in the USA!!.
I think that the way to convince middle and upper management to stop going overseas for tech workers is to convince them that although it might cost more to employ workers in the US, you get more value for your dollar if you stay at home, you get better code, better communication, and better management of the project.
Its time to stop whining about the jobs leaving, and find reasons to keep them here... and show IT managers why they should do things the RIGHT way, teach them about value, not just about bottom dollar.
But thats just my 2 cents...
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
can they actually afford the equipment to telecommute? (ie, computer, internet access, etc.)
"When a ball dreams, it dreams it's a frisbee"
While I'm sure most here will play up the labor issue, the clients of my company's outsourcing solutions are paying mainly for on-site management of staff, project evaluation and management, and centralized billing cost-structure. If you use telecommuters instead of an outsourcing solution, you're still responsible for lots of administrative work, like payroll and project management. The main advantage of outsourcing is not only cost management in a labor sense, but in an administrative sense.
I think I'll stop here.
I mean, think about it. Not only does your company not have to pay health/dental/etc benefits, but they don't have to worry about taxes, workers compensation, and any number of other potentially nasty things.
Corporations outsource because, in the bigger picture, it's definitely cheaper. (Yes, I'll be the first to argue that maintainability, etc. etc. is not as good, but PHBs don't look at that).
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
... and I can assure you that this kind of goofing of is rarely a prob... oh -- wait a minute -- God I love the sound Squidward makes when he walks. Cracks me up every time. Hold on -- let me freshen up this martini and I'll be right back...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
To the boss, the fact that the fully clothed workers' hourly wage is 1/4 that of the unshaven half-naked ones is another big factor.
It is because instead of paying a half way decent rate they can get them for $15-$20 an hour. My concern is how will OUR economy recover, when major corporations are sending all this development money over seas. What about the H1's here? When will the companies that brought them over in planeloads, say " Why should I pay you 60,000 a year, and pay for your H1? You go back home, and work for me for $15.00 an hour" At least they bout cars, houses, clothes. Remember, when we lost manufacturing? Do not worry they said, High-tech will save us. Well in 5-10 years, our high-tech industry will go the way of American Manufacturing. You will see other companies subsidising their programmers, so American companies can get them for $4.00 an hour. You will see our economy go slowly down the drain. You will see Indian companies coming over here, buying our American Companies, much like Japan did. I want to know about things like HIPA! When they send medical claims over seas to be processed, who will ensure that the safegaurds have been put in place, that our Government now requires? As a contract programmer, everyday more and more of my clients are offloading their work offshore. This isn't in N.Y. or Silicon Valley, this is in Mid-America they are doing this too. If you are going to school to learn programming, switch your major, become a rapper.
The average Indian programmer costs $20/hr in wages and benefits while the average American programmer costs $65/hr.* Therefore you would need to take a 69% paycut in order to be competitive. You would be better off moving to your favorite part of the country and waiting tables.
*Source: Arizona Republic, July 14 2003
I've heard of companies who are outsourcing to India where the executives who are making the decisions to outsource to the Indian companies actually have ownership stakes in those same Indian companies. Ethically, that is, IMHO, dubious at best.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
It's only paper, after all. However, the love of money IS. I think it's ALWAYS as simple as money.
Businesses need to cut costs to stay competetive, this is not in dispute. As has been said, it's cheaper to hire someone overseas. Technology has made it easier and easier to do this, as time goes on. Now instead of foreign technology jobs meaning that you pay illegal immigrants 50 cents a day to register Hotmail accounts for your spam empire, we have professional jobs for intelligent people being moved across the ocean.
The funny thing about technology is that we seem to take two steps back for every three we make forward. And like anything else, it impacts people who have nothing to do with it (technology). I would compare it to the blue-collar truck driver who lost his job when the dotcom he worked for blew up.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
>I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work. Yes, but how much cheaper? I'm sure that corporations would love to employ thousands of domestic telecommuters for the same price as they are paying engineers/programmers in India or China, if for no other reason than the good PR they would get for it. Of course, if we could import the cost-of-living from those areas here, then we might actually be able to get by for that much (little) money.
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
I have a friend who used to live and work in Texas. He was spending 3 hours a day just commuting to and from work. Was not permitted to Telecommute.
He got the bug to get out of there. Decided to move to Alaska. Once the company knew he was leaving, he was able to strike a deal and telecommute from Alaska!
Makes absolutely no sense business wise, since now he is much too far from the office to come in even if he had too, but if American business always made the choices that made sense then Scott Adams would be out of work.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
1) Fewer worries about information security
2) More oversight of employees
3) Telecommuting requires capital outlay to set up systems
4) More oversight of employees
5) Sometimes teleconferencing and videoconferencing just can't replace a real meeting
6) More oversight of employees
7) Outsourcing farms out the most expensive part of real employees--insurance costs.
My experience working at Best Buy's corporate headquarters showed that items 2,4, and 6 were pervasive among middle management, while the remaining were reasons the Board of Directors was happier with outsourcing.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I get the feeling that most slashdotters, when they hear "outsourcing to India" picture some run down building with old computers and starving Indians in cheap work clothes who are happy to program for $2 an hour or less, working in sweatshop conditions.
This isn't necessarily the case. India does have almost 1 billion people; not all of them are poor, or uneducated, and not all of them work for nothing.
The fact is, a software house in india may produce work just as good as one in the US, at a fraction of the price, simply because the overall cost of living is so much less.
Educated, intelligent programmers who appreciate their jobs, which are good by their local standards, and these sofwtare firms are competing on a global scale with every other firm out there. And winning.
This isn't the garment industry.
With outsourcing the employer is contracting
with another company, and the employer
has more legal remedies if the contractor does
not deliver (and deeper pockets to attack).
With the telecommuter, the emploer's remedies are
much more limited.
The other difference is that the outsourcer is
presumably employing professional mamangent to
oversee the remote workers. With the telecommuter
the employer has to rely more on trust.
Finally, I'm not sure the submitter of this item
really meant outsourcing versus exporting
jobs to a foreign subsidiary of the company. If
the latter, then my legal remedy argument doesn't
hold, but the oversee and trust argument does.
...as slacking off and not really working by the overwhelming vast majority of PHB's who run corporate USA. In other words, if the workers are not at the office, then they're not working, period.
Except for the PHBs themselves of course, if you're one of them, then telecommuting is deemed both valid and cool, and shows to your golf-playing peers that you are "progressive".
There is a very simple answer. When you outsource you have another company accountable for the quality and timing of the work being outsourced.
Plus, someone takes responsibility for managing the workers, and for the final result. Frequently, outsourcing contracts include a "performance clause" that basically says that if the work done is not adequate, the client does not have to pay full price for the outsourced work.
With an employee off the street (or off the net in the case of telecommuting) the hiring company undertakes the risk that the work will not be of adequate quality as well as the management overhead.
If someone comes up with a way of managing telecommuting employees that makes companies comfortable, then I'm sure they'll do more of that than outsourcing. As it stands, decisions to outsource are (at least in my experience) often made because the organization lacks a specific skill set, and this most often is allowed to happen b/c management wasn't prepared for the decision that they are forced to make. This makes things like performance clauses sound very appealing.
Amazing magic tricks
Why shouldn't companies do this. Programmers make themselfs a commodity in the 90's jumping from job to job as soon as someone offered them more money. But this will not last when they have trouble understanding the screens because the programmer can not understand the instructions and write the program completely wrong.
Should be from the are-more-links-in-a-post-always-better dept. The poster wasted his time anyway, because no one reads articles.
>>Are you willing to live in Bangalore, Pune or Delhi for $12-14k/yr?
Forget it. India has laws barring non-Indians from working there.
Yet the US is cool with H1-B's. Weird.
Huh?
I think that's the book I had that book in history class last semester. The book was good, but the lousy professor would give us these "geography" quizes which were basically randomly picked locations from maps on random pages. Arrgh!
Telecommuting is for individuals employed (or contracted one-by-one basis) by the company.
Outsourcing is a contract between two companies.
You should not compare (or ask us to compare) apples with oranges.
Maybe the US software industry sould reorganize as similar to the Indian outsourcing industry. Ie. you would be employed by the oursourcing company, which would contract with IBM. If you can keep the overhead low (by eliminating executive pay by means of forming co-ops), and implementing high-quality standards (ISO 9000 9001 90001 90002) and consistenly meeting and/or exceeding expectations, you would be able to maintain a stable employment and a striving company EVEN IN THE US!
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
You have to spell out in extreme detail exactly the specifications for what you need. You need to write pseudo-code for them. You need to write function stubs. If you don't do all this, you aren't going to get what you wanted.
And yes, at that point, we could write the whole thing ourselves and just get it done here. But try explaining that to your local PHB.
There are many reasons to outsource. Some of them are:
- You don't have to find and employ qualified people yourself.
- Usually you get a fixed price on most tasks.
- You don't have to pay idle workers
- You get better documentation (because without you can't outsource successfully)
As I see it, the only chance you will have as a telcommuter is if you can find an agency that will sell a software development group to US companies, with a project manager and all - that manges to actually make sure people work. Knowing the culture etc will help make such a group successfull in smaller projects where outsourcing overhead is too large, or where lots of changes will have to be made over the development cycle.
BTW: Here in Denmark, you can get young freelance programmers for $30/hour - They might not be good, but they are cheaper than offshore, and can work well if in an experienced group that knows which tasks to delegate.
Disclaimer: I am not american, and not living in the US, but I have been teaching local employees in Asia + Africa, whom were ment to work as developers on outsourced jobs. I am no longer a software developer, but I am higher up the food chain.
Um, Linux is "out sourced" as in its developed by a mildly interconnected bunch of people and its a decent product. [so to speak].
The problem with computer sweat shops in India is greed. Anyone and their brother with two weeks of IT training can become a "highly trained MCSE engineer" and then get paid 10% of what a US worker would get paid.
It isn't that India folk are stupider. It is that they pick the bottom of the barrel [and many jump in to fill in].
Likewise there are many stupid people who live right there in the US who have the same MCSE diploma. The trick the CEOs realized is why hire a dozen MCSEs in the US for 55K when you can hire some MCSE overseas for 5K.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Sure, I agree about the money, but it's also about whining. Are you a political threat? You sure are. You make your $80K and whine that you're exploited, mis-treated, screwed-over, and your boss is Dilbert's boss. You want your employer to give you a lifetimne job, but you can quit any time on two week's notice. If you take an additional breath beyond the quota you've established, you want overtime.
And then we have to listen to you tell us how you're the universe's great gift to your employer because you know how to initilize a variable and by God you've forgotten more about programming than I will ever know.
At least the guys in India are thankful for the opportunity.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Companies did embrace telecommuting before. It did go through a phase when it was hot, but things eventually cooled down. I remember reading about this on my "Social Analysis of Computerization" class. The reasons given were that:
- Teleworkers are harder to monitor.
- Apparently, telecommuting hit productivity hard.
- Workers aren't in office enough to get promotions.
- In the office, there aren't enough people to keep ideas going.
- Working at home can be distracting.
- Telecommuting breeds resentment among co-workers since they are anonymous to each other and also because non-telecommuters might dislike others getting such a "rosy" deal.
Ultimately, however, it came down to managers being distrustful of new ideas. They dislike having to put such a high level of trust on employees that they rarely see. They like things the way they are right now and wouldn't really like to see them change. Maybe after some time passes, when many current prospective telecommuters rise to managerial positions, we might see telecommuting establish a strong presence.
Posting messages for the betterment of humanity..
It sounds stupid to say this, but these guys just aren't as good as the seasoned tech people we have in the US. They can't see the big picture
In many cases, they can't see the big picture because they are only given small amounts of code to create or port rather than being given a larger perspective. One simply has to look and the many hundreds of programmers for IE to see this.
They lack the comprehensive technical immersion that we in the US have.
This may be changing faster than you might expect. The Indian government has made tech education a central component of their economic plans and judging from the quality of some of the programmers I've run into here in the US, we should be worried.
Most off-shore engineers were in non-technical jobs before they managed to go to college and learn how to program.
Oh? What is your evidence here? There are a great many folks that are getting targeted education in tech in India and elsewhere that brings them straight into their programming courses.
In 20, 50, 100 years I'm sure this technology gap will fade and perhaps even vanish, but certainly not in the short term.
I'm thinking 2, 5, 10 years.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I don't believe you because as has been pointed out here at Slash many times, English *is* the language of tech, and *most * Indian developers speak it fluently. It is not a problem that they are Indian, it is a problem that because of their economy, they work cheaper. I think this discussion can do without the ubiquitous bad jokes, if the services where sub-par, we would not be out-sourcing there. Give it up, Indians are excellent coders. Problem is, the work for cheap.
Your salary is only about half of the expense you represent to your employer. You might be willing to work for half salary; would you be willing to work for half salary and pay for all your health care benefits? If you're not a telecommuter, your employer pays for the space you work in; are you willing to work in half a cubical? You need to have some administrative staff support; do you think the people who do those jobs are willing to cut their salaries in half? And work without benefits? (Yes, I know their jobs are at risk, too.)
... well, it might not be a coincidence.
I'm not saying outsourcing is a good idea. I'm saying, if you want to understand it well enough to deal with it, you should understand it well.
P.S.: Even if your employer cuts back, and makes you pay a bigger share, health care costs to employers in the U.S. are outrageously high. If you hear a story about a pharmaceutical company reporting record profits, and then a story about a company outsourcing its software development because programmers in the U.S. are too expensive
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Telecommuting from my experience, is when one employee basically works from home. Outsourcing is quite different, in the sense that US countries are not hiring a bunch of individual Indians to work at their homes remotely. They have their own offices in India, employees commute to work just like everyone else, and there's surely a management team there overseeing the office.
So to make the original analogy more appropriate, commpare this to when Intel has a sattellite office in another state. Now, instead of Oregon, the satellite office is overseas. And it has everything to do with money.
Whoa Troll. Are you implying that nowhere but your country of origin things get done? It sounds more like a specialization problem (or perhaps errors choosing an outsourcing vendor). Or maybe you were suffering from a communication problem?
Last time I checked, there were smart people all over the globe. I doubt your experience is the norm. heck, a lot of the tech on the web is built from non-US people.
Yes. So sorry to see you leave! More jobs for me!!
Uh, not really, thus the entire point of the parent post. Rather than hire you or I for "only" half our salaries an allowing us to live somewhere cheaper, companies would rather hire someone in India or Eastern Europe.
So someone moving to such a place doesn't actually leave more jobs for us, it merely acknowledges that fewer and fewer jobs remain for domestic IT workers to take.
And now even IBM has gotten in on this, effectively "legitimizing" such reprehensible business practices.
Well, we may all suffer for it, but eventually corporate America will realize that you can't sell products to people who have no money. So just let them keep laying us off, and when the starving mobs appear in the boardroom with torches and pitchforks, they can't say they couldn't see it coming.
I have not dealt directly with outsourcing but I have yet to hear of one long term success story.
Most of the stories go something like:
"Outsourcing saved us a bunch in the beginning but then they started charging us for every little change we wanted to make."
IMHO outsourcing often is used to hide the fact that costs are out of control. Costs in areas that are not needed at all or are very ineffecient. Management never blames themselves so they decide that it must be the over paid techies.
My roomate has a great idea. Outsource management! I hear tons of complaints about ineffective managers. Why pay managers so much when you can get a monkey to contribute nothing (ok maybe a little) to getting things done?
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Because that is the pay cut you will have to take to be competitive with India. That is not BS but the numbers from a company that outsources and the pay adjustment for India. And by the way they have no problem coming in to the office, so they also have a logistical advantage over you.
You should read The Mythical Man Month, and then rethink your question.
jason
jason
Have a good day?! Impossible! I'm at work!
i've done the "waiting on tables" gig during school, and after 5+ years of sitting on my ever growing arse each day, i'm not sure my body could handle that straing and exercise. i would certainly do more than split the difference and take 30$/hr for a telecommute position.
maybe technical jobs over there don't have quite the prestige they do here in america, and therefore the industry doesn't get as bright of people as here in the US. maybe these firms offering cheap engineering resources aren't very selective in who they hire, since they are only looking to cut costs. whatever the reason for the discrepancy in quality of work, i'd like to think there's something more to it than just that americans are better engineers across the board. i know plenty of good engineers who immigrated from overseas and weren't "immersed in technology" their whole lives.
"Forget it. India has laws barring non-Indians from working there."
They do issue temporary work visas valid for 1 year. My former company had several guys from the U.K. down there working and at least two of them that I know of had their visa's extended beyond 1 year as well.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Was it a conspiracy against the working class when you bought Nike sneakers made in Indonesia? Or drove a Japanese car? Or bought a monitor made in Taiwan?
Why Outsource When Workers are Willing to Telecommute?
Have you heard of work being outsourced to individual developers in India? How can you compare an individual willing to telecommute with a team working on an outsourced project. Forget India for a moment..Would you feel it was a betrayal of the "middle class" if your company in New York outsourced its system administration functions to EDS in Kansas?
but if you outsource to India you don't have to pay benefits. Remember that big settlement that MS had to pay, which gave contractors benefits? It was because current law (IANAL) says that you can't just hire contractors to get out of paying benefits.
This all means that even if your area has 1/2 the salaries of The Valley, you'll still be paid significantly more than someone in India.
Must I leave my country to do so?
Yes! Follow the jobs. You'd be surprised that the standard of living, working conditions, vacation, family/work balance, flexibility, job security...overseas can make the U.S. look like one giant red white and blue sweatshop. Sure, the pay is higher in the U.S. but can you call 70 hour work weeks with little or no vacation, or job security living?
If exporting jobs isn't "unamerican" than certainly following those jobs overseas isn't.
The people of the U.S. should write their representatives and demand a law requiring that any nation that accepts our companies and jobs should accept our workers. Right now it is a one way street, companies are free to export jobs but employees are stuck behind visa laws. Until this inequity is fixed we will never have a truely free global market, and companies will continue their headlong race towards the bottom in pay.
Eventually there will be some sort of equilibrium I suppose, but that seems to take a while (again look at Silicon Valley), right now you can capitalize on the differential, sort of a smuggler's economy.
Maybe I'm biased because I don't have children but I don't care how much money I'm making. As long as I'm eating and have a roof over my head, I really don't ask for much. I'm leaving for Eastern Europe next week and I'll find a job that will pay me less than $7 an hour. I don't care; I want to do what I love and get paid for it; that is all that matters to me. Maybe my desires are misaligned; maybe everyone else needs to realign theirs.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
For those of you who work at companies where outsourcing has been used, how has it affected you at work?
At my company, in the past when we had layoffs of course that meant more work for those of us who remained. That being said, management was never so dumb as to think that they could get twice as much done with 50% less people - expectations were reduced to some degree (though not to high enough a degree, in my opinion) given that there were fewer of us.
Lately, however, we've had layoffs where those who were layed off were replaced with outsourced Indian developers. Expectations on our overall team (both those of us in the US and our team members in India) are in accordance with our team size, and herein lies the problem - for all pratical purposes (that is to say, actually developing useful code), our Indian colleagues do not count. I mean no disrespect to them, but between communication problems (most of them are reasonably fluent in English, but bad phone lines, thick accents, and the need for precision when discussing technical areas make for a bad combonation) and perhaps an insufficient understanding of the systems we work on and/or the technical subject matter, their work is often substandard and has to be redone by those of us in the US. And, since it is those of us in the US who are ultimately held responsible for the success or failure of our projects by the powers that be, we're sort of up that proverbial creek without a paddle.
Anyone have similarly bad experiences, or are we the only ones?
I mean, I've had the experience of being "fortunate" enough to still have my job after a few rounds of layoffs. After the first round or two we didn't really have any replacement for the lost labor, and so being one of the remaining people was bad enough cause we had to pick up a lot of the slack. On the other hand, our management is not unrealistic to the point where they expect half the people to do twice the work, so at least that mitigated the damage I felt to some degree/
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
The problem with workers telecommuting is that they need to be managed individually; the lure of Indian outsourcing is that someone else is managing them. In short, if the relationship with the Indian shop is set up correctly (specs go one way, code goes the other), the management overhead goes down as well as the cost. The interface is (theoretically) cleaner. I've never heard of an Indian outsourcing arrangement where the coders were in India and their immediate supervisor was in the U.S.
The comparison with telecommuting is shallow, and not very good.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Tell me - the clothes you are wearing at the moment - where were they made? Indonesia? Thailand? China? What about 90% of the stuff at Walmart, K mart, Target, and even the mid range department stores?
There is no difference between you and I buying a $20 pair of jeans from Walmart, that came from some asian sweatshop - I mean - outsourced factory - and IBM, Microsoft, and anyone else outsourcing their IT development.
First of all, this entire discussion is just going to get people all worked up. Emotional responses will drive the flow and so many useless words are going to be written on this topic. It is such a shame. Instead of taking the time to do research and think through this "problem" people will just whip off postings of little value. For being so intelligent, most folks here prefer to complain and whine and groan. As usual, even through feelings are strong, no real analysis will be provided and we'll only hear opinions.
Second, if you think for a moment that this isn't going to continue, you are smoking crack. More and more jobs are going to flow out of the United States, and other countries, to countries where the cost of doing business is lower. Notice that I say "cost of doing business" versus salaries. Listen, this isn't just about jobs and salaries and benefits. Those things are a very small part of this trend. You need to look at the entire picture and you need to think about how organizations are determining costs. It is cheaper for many reasons to move jobs to other countries.
Third, you can bet your ass that the output of folks in China and India is as good as the United States. I have first hand experience that demonstrates that quality is no longer an issue in most cases. That's one data point, sure, but I've heard similar stories from my colleagues and I've seen the reports. One more time: Quality is not an issue. "They" can do "our" work, if that is how you think about things.
Fourth, any and all jobs are up for grabs. Forget about competition from other humans, you also need to be concerned with competition from machines. Machines will outsmart us, and they will take our jobs this century. You can go into nursing, for example, but even face-to-face and touch-n-feel jobs are not as secure as you think they might be. With technology, any job can be eliminated, reduced, or changed. That last point is critical -- jobs and job types change over time.
Fifth, the only "solution" to the "problem" of job loss to other countries / technologies is to stay on top of the game: educate yourself continuously, never stop until you die. This keeps you happy, healthy, and employed. Another helpful hint is to be ultra flexible. In your job, your life, your thinking, your location. Be ready for change, and stay ahead...through education and training. Do whatever it takes to be the best, absolutely the best, at what you do. But, don't just focus on that skill or that area. Educate and adapt. Innovate. Treat yourself like a freakin' miniture company. Write articles, network, build value, sell yourself, remain as mobile as possible, never settle for what you have. Be like David Bowie and think of yourself like a product (Madonna, and other smart entertainers do this also). Are you getting the drift here?
Pffft.
How to Download YouTube Videos
> Forget it. India has laws barring non-Indians from working there.
Reference? Indians that I talk to tell me
otherwise.
The term "software" is changing faster than just about everything coming back and have in an organized unit with computer sweat shops in an hour. You go slowly down there working class (that is, the same control as exploited workers compensation, and better off is higher standard of staff, project management to be overcome are sending all suffer for management at best. Understanding is something different. It's not sure that $20 an organized unit with costs. Even if I don't have ownership stakes in quality of the world, rather than the standard of living, working conditions, vacation, family/work balance, flexibility, job in the fact that for what? A mud house?
I'll work cheaper if I can choose where I live and work.
Really? How's $1000 - $1250 per month sound? (that's gross, not take home) Current estimate is that tech workers in India cost about $2000 - $2500 per month, including overhead. In the US, total cost of a white collar employee is about 2x salary.
Must I leave my country to do so?
Yes. India is beautiful though, as are the eastern block countries (check out the Mediterranean coast of the former Yugoslavia). Learn their language and run a tech department and act as liaison to US companies. You may not even have to take a huge pay cut, and compared to cost of living you'll be living like a king.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Instead of telecommuting we a guild. Our Guild takes over the responsablity for a contract so someone at the company make sure the job gets done. 90% of our projects are telecommute jobs.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
What's the point to doing ALL that, in that time I could implement the damn thing myself.
a lot of the tech on the web is built from non-US people.
Yes, but point out some tech that was developed outside of the G8 and their satelite nations (e.g. I count Mexico, Gnome's origin, as a US satelite and all of Europe as part of the UK/Germany/France triangle.
Nations like South Africa do contribute, but only in relatively small ways. Is that because they're stupid? Of course not! But the reality is that large technology infrastructures cost trillions of dollars to produce, and spending that kind of money requires some serious means and motivation. The US and Europe had both during the Cold War.
What I find interesting is Australia's contributions. I frankly don't understand why Australia is so technically literate. Not that it's bad, but I am curious what factors pushed them to develop their tech so much.
There is a big difference between outsourced and open-sourced. People who work on open source in general are very good at what they do and do it because they love what they do. Outsourced is a bunch of people doing it to get paid...it is just a job for them and when the day is over they could care less about the bugs and issues.
Don't confuse the two, we open source people devote lots of our free time to develop code and we do it because it is what we are good at and what we love and never get paid for it.
That's what everyone said about products "Made in China". How often have you heard people say they were willing to pay thrice as much for an American product because the quality was better. Yet people continue to shop at wal-mart and China keeps exporting more to the US.
That's because your salary is only a fraction of your total cost of employment.
There's your payroll taxes (your company pays half your obligation).
There's workman's comp, which is all gray in the area of corporate liability should you electrocute yourself trying to telecommute from your laptop in the bathtub.
There's OSHA regulations and costs (see my point above about laptops and bathtubs).
etc.
Companies don't outsource to individuals in India. They outsource to COMPANIES in India.
Go ahead and form your own 1099 company and bid for some of those outsourcing contacts as your own company.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
For example, you go to old navy and buy a ten dollar t-shirt that was sewn up in China. I can vouch for the fact that the quality is crappy and this shirt will get a hole, tear, break within a year or two. But who cares? It was ten bucks, and these things still sell like hotcakes. Heck they are so cheap when the shirt tears, you throw it in the trash and buy another one, and you're still spending less money than if you bought some cashmere T-shirt from Versace.
You may think this comparison is apples and oranges, and I kinda do to, but I bet the CEOs and execs outsoursing the tech jobs don't.
Telecommuting will not save your job.
;-).
Working longer hours will not save your job.
Working for less money will not save your job.
If you think it will, then you're looking at this problem in the wrong way. You will never be able to beat the cost of offshore labor. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to. There's a reason it's so cheap...everything here costs 10 times more (rent, food, clothing, etc...) than it does in India and China.
It's like trying to beat Tiger Woods at golf. Maybe...maybe...if you train really hard, sacrifice your family and friends, and everything you ever knew or loved, you might be able to beat him in a round of golf if you were having a good day and he was having his worst one ever.
But a much simpler way to be him would just be to school his ass at Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003' for the PS2. The game is a lot easier if you change the rules a bit
The weakest point of outsourcing is the lack of communication. Developers in India can't communicate with customers here because:
1) English is not their native language
2) There's no face to face communication
3) They're 12 hours ahead
And if you can't talk to the customers, you can't solve new problems. Old problems are easy to solve. Those are the kinds of things that can be effectively outsourced. Building yet another e-business website with a shopping cart and inventory control; Creating one more payroll processing system based on an SQL database; It's the well understood problems, where the customers know exactly what they want, that can be outsourced. Everything else seems to fail.
And that is the IT Industry's saving grace. Using new technology to solve new problems that are not well understood will always have to be done here, because solving those problems requires constant and effective communication with the "customer" (the users of the sofware).
Software is slowly and painfully learning the lesson that manufacturing learned a long time ago: "Build where you sell". If engineers can't talk to the people who will be using thier products, they won't know what to build. Most problems in software are not well understood enough to be completely spec'd out by an intermediary party and passed onto the engineers for implementation. That is why lots of outsourcing ventures fail, and that is why the innovators here in the States will always have a job.
How much experience do you have with Indian coders??? I've worked on a couple of projects and what we got back was a bunch a sub-par code that had to be reworked by a bunch of overpaid us programmers.
The first job was OK.
The difference was, the one project that worked out well was a limited scope, basic online reporting tool.
The project that had to be rewritten required alot a domain knowlege that wasn't properly communicated, and in all fairness to everyone would've taken longer to educate the Indians in our business than to actully do it ourselves.
I believe what you will see heading offshore is alot of the grunt work, but stuff that requires intimate knowlege of the business process will stay here in the US ( for a while ).
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
I agree with the conclusions, but not with the reasonning.
I think the main problem with transcultural outsourcing is the unspecified assumption.
You live in a system where you know a lot of things a specifier know also, and know so much that they are evidences. You don't specify evidence, do you ? You should. Because they are not evident for everybody.
Some basic european assumption like social security for everybody and no first amendement, right of access and recdtification to data about people stored in company's systems,... can make americans cry or wonder. Those can be considered (by PHBs) as details, but we know the devil's in the details. Imagine discrepency with people in other country sharing less history. Misunderstanding is the norm.
Another reason mentionned to me was that when a system didn't work, indians where brought in Luxembourg to correct it. imagine, leaving, even if only for a year, a very poor country, for a western one, with all expenses paid... they add no interest in delivering a working and maintenable system in the first place.
I don't say it is allways the case and all indians are greedy (I'm sure it is not the case), but, when you begin to reason only in economics terms, you should reason as an economist : every human is motivated by it's personnal interest, even if he live in India.
Wow, I grew up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation by the Russians. Now, my kids can grow up worrying about Nuclear Annihilation from the Pakistanis. Or being burned alive for eating a Hamburger - six of one, half-dozen of the other. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Now you all know why Dell customer support sucks. They're half the time they don't even understand us/we don't even understand them. (Hence the reason why my friend had to spend 6 months calling Dell customer support back and forth trying to get his Dell laptop and Dell desktop to network properly.. only to have me set it up for him)
- He had a unique skill set that wasn't easily replaced
- He worked well with his boss, didn't need a lot of supervision, and met his deadlines
- He was respected by his peers - played well with others
If you sum it up, it was a better value to the company to keep him working, even remotely, than to find and train a replacement.****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
No it doesnt. There are a bunch of Americans working in Bangalore (ok, in management roles) in US based companies. I am not an expert in Indian immigration/visa laws, but you could get help from the Indian embassy or in your local Indian consulate.
There are even international schools in Bangalore so your kids can study stuff they do in US.. plus Bangalore has a lot of great pubs!
Outsourced just means people from outside one group work on it. There is a tight nit group of common developers for most OSS projects and people occasionally submit stuff. In a way they are outsourced developers sought out by the project maintainers.
Also the OSS == good logic doesn't fly with me. Most OSS projects are horrible and should have died long ago. For any good product [say XMMS] there are a half dozen related products that suck [those GTK+ media players], etc...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Easy solution - move to India, you'll get a kickass job paying a fat salary (in Indian terms).
Good luck affording the plane fare to come back.
I agree with your opinion on outsourcing results, but not your conclusions. You get back crap from overseas, but if the Indians outsourced a project to the US, they would get crap back.
The problem is that you can't build a good system without access to the customer. I've been in software development going on 30 years, and I've never seen a spec that didn't have holes. And I've never seen a design that didn't have holes. If the coders are 12 time zones away from the designers/analysts/customers, then they are going to make things up to fill in the holes. Which means that 99 times in 100 the result is crap.
Alistair Cockburn has a very good book Agile Software Development that is about methodology, mostly. He says that he has never seen a methodology that works for outsourcing part of a project, like coding. He says that what will work is outsourcing whole projects, including architecture on down. This sheds some light on IBM's recent announcement that they will be moving high level jobs offshore in the coming years.
It's not a terrible idea, and I think most corporations were originally supposed to be structured that way, with the board of directors, elected by shareholders, overseeing senior management. Bad performance? Boot senior management.
There's no reason you couldn't do that now, but you'd have to structure the business in such a way that you really could ditch managers easily. I think the definition of "management" would have to be clearer, too -- I don't think it means the Lumbergh at the end of the hall, unfortunately.
No, but with all those great programmers and engineers out of work, we can make a bigger better robot army to destroy ALL OF THE CEOS
Contractors and consultants don't automatically get benefits. They have to pay out of their own pockets. SOMETIMES, the consulting company offers a medical package a an ok rate, but not always and the savings is still small.
I know a lot of companies that hire contractors to do their work because they're cheaper and they can keep tighter reigns on them. Heck, I'm a contractor. I make ok money, but subtract benefits and what-not, it's that great.
Because when the shit hits the fan it's always the low people on the totem pole who are expected to wave the flag, send their kids off someplace to get shot, and cheer "USA! USA! USA!" like a bunch of fucking idiots. While the fat guys in expensive suits hide in their offices and continue business as usual.
People like Bill Gates wouldn't be where they are if they had been born in India. Those guys owe something to their own country and the people in it. But if they can get a better deal somewhere else, then off they go, pretending that they have no choice.
America now imports something like 90% of the physical goods it consumes. This isn't because business people had to, it's because they figured out that they could. Incredibly, the people at the top think America will somehow survive now by supplying the world with IP, despite the fact that it's about the easiest thing in the world to outsource. So what's the next plan, George?
It's rich, shortsighted, greedy bastards who have painted the US into this increasingly small corner, not the average worker trying to make a living.
This is going to sound like flamebait, and I'm glad you cited a reference, but $65/hr??? That hardly seems realistic - I've seen $3.00/hr (Thats US dollars, mind you) offered for temp. programming assignments. They get around the minimum wage problem by considering it a contract. For FTEs, 20-30 k seems to be the norm for jobs that used to pay over 60k. Companies can get away with it, so they will - even 30k/yr beats working at Starbucks for 6 bucks an hour.
With English like that, I bet it's hard for them to understand you.
You think a well paid middle class is a political threat, wait til you see what an unpaid middle class can do to streetside storefronts, garbage cans and cop cars.
Telecomutting is different from taking jobs outside USA. Do you really believe workers in, for example, India, are telecomutters ? No, problably the majority of them go to work everyday, and problably in a worse schedule than yours...
IT is going the way of the auto industry. Now that many big companies see that they can get a software product from other countries cheaper they do.
Telecommuting is vastly different. I don't like telecommuters. One or two days a week is okay, but any more becomes more of a hastle. Many peoplw will take advantage of this and work none standard hours or work to many hours to get stuff done, or work to few. I am working on a project now and 3 of the members work at home. One guy in the office created an object. At the same time one guy who was telecommuting created a similar object. Both do essentially the same thing. Had they both been in the office they probably would have talked about this and only one would have implemented it. Had management been more interactive they probably would have found out through a conference call. Problem is that managers in the US don't want to manage either, they want to make money and they don't care how it gets done. Most big companies don't give a rats a** about you working at home in your underware, or nude or even in your cube at the office, they want to make money, PERIOD. If they can get decent work out of someone overseas as compared to you for less which do you think they are going to pick?
If all you want is a hamburger are you going to go and buy the $6 hamburger every day or are you going to get 2 x $1 hamburgers that will work just as well? If both will fill your tummy, and both taste like burgers, most people will go for the 2 x $1 burgers, thinking 'they are getting a deal'. Well think of yourself as the $6 buger and outsourcing as the 2x$1 burger. Most people go for the 2x$1 dollar burgers and save themself $4 in the process. Sorry but thats the way it is!
The auto and manufacturing industries have gone the same way. Its okay to buy clothes that were made in Mexico by some child, cause it cost you less in the US. It doesn't really matter which car you bought, cause many of the parts are made OUTSIDE the US. Just go to auto makers web site and see how many companies are actually 1 company. A Ford pickup and Mazda pickup are the same truck, just with different labels on them, and there are MANY cars like that.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
-- Some things are to be believed, though not susceptible to rational proof.
Sorry gang, I'd have to agree with this one as superficially elitist as it sounds.
I've dealt with offshore outsourced developers and sysadmins on a few occasions -- and it's always been bad. My experience has been that the code or systems are always poorly done. It's also been my experience that many of these outsourcing companys claim to have knowledge and experience, but don't.
Perhaps they are so eager to get the job that they overstate their experience even more than we do on our resumes (I'm in Canada). In one case, I actually had to fly halfway across the world for two weeks to correct the problem, and I can tell you that cost my company a lot of canuck pesos to do it. These projects have always taken more time and money than budgeted and usually more than if we'd hired local staff to do it.
I'm not saying that people in the underveloped nations aren't bright, just not experienced. I've also encountered the attitude that delivering the product does not matter, just saying what you need to say to get the contract matters. Why do you care about repeat business in a global market?
"You disturb me to the point of insanity. There. I am insane now." - The Sprockets
Let me just say that, as far as my experience was concerned, telecommuting wasn't that great. I was offered to telecommute one day out of the week, and after a couple weeks of that, I actually found myself going into the office on my telecommute days... to sum up:
1. Technical issues. The VPN was butt slow. Even over DSL the whole process of logging in and getting simple stuff to happen was a pain in the ass. They gave me a laptop that was nowhere near as fast as my work computer, plus, because of the VPN and paranoia, I had to do all work on the laptop, not my home box. Then, some days I couldn't log in for hours. I would actually prefer working on the work box since everything would get done twice as fast.
Totally distracting. Had the TV going, music playing, couldn't resist the urge to do household chores, etc. I'm honest when I say my productivity was likely reduced by 25% just from stupid distractions and the basic "hey, the boss ain't here, I'll post on slashdot again..." etc.
Lonely. I was surprised, but it sucked not being around other co-workers, even just for one day. If you want a quick answer on something you can't just walk to their cube. Have to call them up, inevitably leave a voice mail, or email, etc. The back and forth probably wasted an hour every day I telecommuted.
Team gets fragmented. Our telecomute schedule was like a rotation, so every day of the week one or two people would be out of the office. It made it harder to schedule meetings, also, I seriously think workflow would be slowed, because someone would be "working from home" and people would figure, well, I'll just ask this question tomorrow when I can speak to them face to face (procrastination).
So, on the surface telecommuting sounds like a sweet deal, but I found it problematic. And if I were to take a pay cut for telecommuting? No way. I'd go to the office anyday. Your mileage may vary but I urge anyone to actually TRY telecommuting for a while before assuming "working from home" is such a holy grail.
Actually, the opposite is true.
In the US, it's usually the "geeks" and "nerds" who go into engineering and math. Engineering does not usually attract the best, the brightest and the most driven.
In India it is the opposite. In India, it is actually considered cool to be good at Math and Science in high school. The kids getting the best grades in Math and Science are the ones who carry the most respect there - not the jocks.
One of the reasons for this is that the engineering professions pay much more in India than almost any of the other professions including doctors, lawyers and sports people (except for a handful of sports celebrities).
Mmmm.. Donuts
I work for a rather large corporation. Some of us are allowed to telecommute a few days a week. This may cause some folks here on slashdot to call me un-American BUT I have had the opportunity over the past several years to work with a fine group of developers from India. They were h1b visa holders. Due to the impact of numerous layoffs it became more and more difficult to justify keeping h1b visa personel while laying off American workers. I am just being honest here now, so don't take this personally but the h1b developers I worked with worked harder, worked smarter and consistently turned out outstanding code. They were not satisfied with merely turning out code that functioned but would always attempt to optimize the code in order to make it work more efficiently. They are now gone, two have returned to india and one has taken a job in another state. These members of my development team have been replaced by ionter departmental transfers from other groups within the company. The Indian developers never left at the stroke of 5 when there was code that needed to be finished. I never heard them tell me "that isn't my job" when asked to look at something or to help with some project not specifically assigned to them. I too used to wonder about h1b visa folks and now, off shore development famrs, taking American worker's jobs. I must say truthfully that if the cost is less and the level of professionalism approaches that of the folks I had the p[leasure of working with, it is no wonder businesses are turning to outsourcing. I am not making this a blanket statement but let's face it, many of us Americans are spoiled rotten and act like it too! Call my un-patriotic if you like but I woiuld gladly take the two developers who went back to India back into the group as outsourced labor over the 6 American developers here that "replaced" them. The project would not only be done faster but would have fewer bugs to be fixed and it would be running more efficiently as a side bonus!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
> Outsourcing generally results in inferior product
True
> It sounds stupid to say this, but these guys just aren't as good as the seasoned tech people we have in the US
Last three project my company outsourced to local US companies were a disaster. It doesnt matter if the outsource team is in US or not, because the developers dont give a crap about the project they are working on.
I love you and you can can my manham whenever you want. Big boy.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Brazil and Argentina both are also patched in - relatively poor, but relatively modern and well-educated. Brazil is the birthplace of Conectiva, among other things.
I really don't get where you get your impressions from. Have you spent any significant time in a work environment outside the US?
Ok found out from the website.
...
The procedure is
1. Get a job in India
2. Apply for a business visa for employment. This need the signed employment contract. It is valid for a year, but can be extended
3.
4. umm.. profit?
A lot simpler than H1B- where there are labor approval requirements, degree equivalance checks, etc.
Depending on local conditions (Colorado and Oregon seem to be the slowest coming out of this mess) many of us HAVE been willing to take 70% pay cuts just to keep the mortgage paid and still can't get our phone calls returned.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Firms outsource locally too. The reason outsourcing isn't like telecommutting is because there is still structure where the owrkers are. You can tell if people are goofing off, reading /. all day (*ahem*), or getting their shit done.
-no broken link
Here's a quote from the an article previously referenced on SlashDot:
IDC warns that Bangalore, India's primary IT hub, may no longer offer the world's best IT outsourcing value; that the infrastructure there is saturated; and wages for skilled workers are being bid up, with many new grads demanding annual salaries of $4,000 (USD) or more -- not only in Bangalore but all over India.
Oh my God. The nerve of those Indian developers demanding more than $4k/year. No wonder companies are turning to Romania and China. They're obviously less greedy in those countries.
Can you cut your salary demands from $75k to $4k, probably with no health, pension/401k benefits? If you can't, then the argument for telecommuting is moot because someone else will do your job for a hell of a lot less than you will.
I know a lot of Slashdot readers are in favor of globalism, but I don't think they're prepared for the effects of it. Unless you're a plumber or electrician, you better get used to a wildly lower salary and standard of living, because if your job can be sent overseas, it will be, due to this type of astromonical savings.
Not just IT -- engineers, benefits administrators, architects, analysts, animators, call centers, they're even shipping radiologist work overseas because someone in India can read X-rays just as well as someone in NYC.
We won't see the alleged benefits of globalism for decades, so there is probably a long stretch of very rough waters in our future, where entire industries will be eliminated almost overnight by offshoring, and the economic balance of many regions of the US will be ripped to shreds.
The problem is that the change is just too fast to react to. IT is still a relatively new field; when I attended RPI 10-12 years ago there were really no IT courses being taught, it was all CompSci -- data structures, etc. The IT industry as a career has ramped up and burned out in a span of about 10-15 years. That's about 1/5 the length of a person's working years.
How can someone completely retrain themselves every 10 years, when retraining means starting from the ground floor both salarywise and knowledgewise? I'm not talking about evolving, like moving from mainframes to PC's. I'm talking about moving from being a programmer to being a lawyer or an accountant.
How can anyone prepare for a career when there's a significant chance that the career could be totally obliterated in as short a period as 5 years.
Ralph
This isn't a realistic comparison for the current economic conditions. Sure maybe a few years ago you might have seen an order of magnitude difference but not any more. I work with two types of offshore people, the kind that are on site and the kind that are off site, as per the offshore model. The on-site people price is in the same ballpark as contractors, especially independent contractors. The off-site people are about ½ of that. I believe the Indian firms have gone up some and people in the US have gone down a lot.
Take a look at this article in Fortune . With it's high taxes it's long been more extensive to do business in California than elsewhere, but Governor Gray Davis and the Democratic-controlled legislature have enacted so many costly new taxes and regulations that businesses have finally had enough.
A few tidbits from the article:
I have a programmer friend in California that was bemoaning this very negative business atmosphere last week in reference to this article. "In 2001, Abrahamson said, South Coast Building Services paid $500,000 to insure its workers for on-the-job injuries. A year later, the company's bill more than tripled to $1.7 million. This year, the tab nearly tripled again to $4.8 million, enough to erode the firm's profits on its $33 million in revenue."
Quoth my friend "I knew it was bad, but I had NO idea it was THAT bad. 1000 employees, and $4.8 million in workmans comp. Holy fuckin' cow! No *wonder* it's so damned hard to find a job!"
During the Internet boom, the Davis administration spent money like drunken sailors rather than laying the groundwork for sustainable growth. Now it looks like they may finally have suceeded in killing the golden goose.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
That's about 40k a year. For 40k a year i might consider living in India if i had zero job opporunities locally. Of course for 40k a year i'd also consider living in Maine or Colorado or someplace else with very low cost of living. (Okay, i don't know that Colorado and Maine are low cost of living, but i know such places exist in the US, and those seem like reasonable guesses)
Hell, i'm only making 60k a year and living in LA. I'd probably be better off at 40k and living in the woods someplace, and i'd get to work from home to boot! And the mangement of whichever company would have an American programmer who shared their language and culture for the same price as an Indian programmer. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!
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Provoke an Indo-Pakistani war. The problem will be solved instantly - US companies will get a huge scare when communications are cut off and the nukes start flying. Outsourcing isn't so appealing at that point.
Seriously, it's going to happen - we all know it, the peace there is not going to last forever. It would be better for it to happen now before the economic dislocation in the US is too great.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I'm shocked. I've never actually heard of this. Do you have a number?
If you don't have those tools in place at your company, and you want to telecommute - I'd suggest putting them in place *first*, getting everyone using them, then try asking your boss. You can point out, at that point, that the communication is the same either way. Otherwise, standard telecommuting really does hurt teams if they can't communicate as well.
I write code.
Yeah, but India is in the Commonwealth of Nations. If we're talking Americans working there, it might be a different story than British subjects. Of course, IANAIIO (Indian Immigration Officer) nor have I actually done any research into Indian immigration rules.
Where can you make $80K programming? Seriously, I'm not (intentionally) being a jerk, I just want to know. I'm a "software developer" and I make barely more than half that, so I'd just like to know where you can make enough that $80K is the number you just pull out of the air when you think of a programmer's salary.
Hmmmm, that would seem to indicate that the US would see a positive economic boost if universal health care was implemented here. It would make it a lot easier for individual workers in America to "bid" on telecomuting employment opportunities.
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Going to Nola's or Baha Fresh everyday for lunch? Not anymore dude. thats $300+ a month reduced to $100 by bringing my lunch from home. Now that I ride the train, I dont stop at Fry's twice a week to "just look around" like I used to tell my wife. An easy $150 a month saved just by staying out of the book/CD/game aisles. If I need something now, Ebay has it. Drinks after work with my team? Once a week instead of 3-4 times. Thats another $100 saved.
In one year, I have saved enough to help me make down payments on two rental houses, with positive cash flow coming in, that goes straight to the bank until I have enough to buy another one.
If you can give up some of the ego stuff, you can live just fine in the Valley. Now, when I go out in my Viper on the weekends, I dont give a shit about how much the gas costs. I havent filled up in 3 weeks.
I agree with the above poster. India is a ok place to send a completely thought out spec where all that is left to be done is key in the code(I don't actually think I've ever seen one of these in the 5 years I've been writing internal business software though ;) ). Call center type stuff also works well in India b/c most call center employees simply follow scripts as to what they are supposed to say and do.
BTW, from my experience people in India speak great english. Many even speak it better than the majority of americans.
Dude, who codes in fluent and clear English?
For example, here in the US, there are differences in income and cost of living even between states, yet not many people are so into moving to South Dakota, even though the cost of living is way cheaper. If it were simply a matter of cost of living being attractive, the population of states like South Dakota would be exploding, but they're not.
One big reason for this I think is mobility. Once you choose to move to a cheaper area and earn less, you better be set on living there for a good long time, because you'll likely never be able to save up enough money to relocate to a more expensive area. You're basically limiting yourself. A person who earns a crapload in America can literally pick and choose any nation to relocate to. But someone who's "doing quite well" in India will have a harder time relocating anywhere, unless said contry has an even lower cost of living than theirs.
Earning power is where it's at, not cheap cost of living. By and large we still see thousands of immigrants from less affluent nations sneaking across the border to earn more money here, and send it back home! And conversely, we see retireees (who don't care about mobility anymore) from US moving to cheaper countries like Mexico (or, to the country like South Dakota) to live out the rest of their lives cheaply.
But for us working stiffs, I think we inevitably look for the highest wages wherever they are.
Imagine earning the equivalent of US$160 every month. Can you folks in America live with such a wage? That's how much money I'm making right now, and while it's not exactly a lot, it's enough for me to pay the rent and utilities, buy enough food to for me and my girlfriend to eat well every day, and allow us to have a little more fun besides romping around on the bed. :) (it's not enough for us to consider getting married and having children though) What do I do that earns me such a pittance? I deploy and design enterprise Linux systems, and write custom Linux software as well. The fact that I work for a new and impoverished startup company skews things a bit, but the facts remain. Even as much as US$500 a month is considered a very good wage where I come from. Would you folks in America even consider such pathetic wages?
I can buy a pack of cigarettes here for the equivalent of less than 50 US cents. A home-cooked meal of chicken or other meat costs around 75 US cents per person. My daily commute to work is slightly less than one US dollar. Water and electric bills amount to roughly US$8-$10 per month. Rent, US$60 per month. That's what life's like in the Third World, folks. Come by and visit sometime.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Here is a reprint of the main part of the post I read:
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You really think the standard of living and working conditions in India are better than the US?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Currently, I am your average Canadian programmer. I don't do anything special. I work for an insurance company. I do a lot of web work, and some VB. I make less then $20 an hour. I have no idea how much benefits cost, but I can guarentee it isn't a lot. So it would probably just as cost effective to outsource to Canada, where we are just as smart. Plus, in most of the country, English is our first language.
Forget it. India has laws barring non-Indians from working there.
Maybe, I never looked into India, but I did look into Croatia. They're very supportive of foreigners coming in to develop international trade. I can't find the specific information, but this should be a good starting point. The amount of financial and legal aid available is pretty substantial.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Probably the easiest solution is to have the employees working on company machines. Give every telecommuter a laptop, make them understand that they should treat it like a machine at the office, and have your IT people administer it remotely. That way you can provide phone support and not have to worry about employees trying to use obsolete hardware. I even know of companies who provide an Internet connection regardless of whether the employee already has broadband at home: that way you can be more sure that BitTorrent won't be taking up all the bandwidth.
Yes I am. I speak from authoritor as the author of several failing waste of space projects.
Oh, and I want to have your kids!
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I have telecommuted for about two years now (4 days a week on average), but not as a programmer. (ok, some perl crap, but thats 3% of my job) I do the photography, website management, IT and general marketing for a smallish manufacturer/retailer. I find the trick is to make sure you sandbag your best ideas, and talk to the boss from home so he thinks you do your best work in your undies. Actually, I TELL him I do my best work in my undies, which is partially true since my best work happens at 7 am, before the office opens.
:p
There IS a bad side to telecommuting: The boss has a bad habit of calling me around 5pm on Fridays with "ideas" to work on over the weekend. He seems to think that since i work at home, I don't mind working weekends. Which brings up another point: When you work at home, its hard to get away from the office. Also makes it hard to drop off for a beer on the way home. Now I go camping when I can on the weekends to get out of the house, and get away from the temptation of "hey, I got an idea, lemme go write it down" and spending half the weekend working.
Most people FAIL at telecommuting because the temptation to sit around all day watching cartoons is too great, and it's hard to get motivated without the normal rituals of getting up, shit/shower/shave/coffee/drive to get their brain in gear. I've been self employed alot (still own a pawnshop someone else runs) so self motivation isn't a problem, but I can see over half the 20-30 year old guys not getting anything done.
On the other hand, it may teach you to code fast, to try to produce 40 hours worth of work in 8 hours on Monday so you CAN watch SpongeBob all week
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Frankly I'd be very tempted. Then again I'm the adventurous type. But I've always wanted to see India, and... $12-14k/yr is a great deal of money there. That's roughly enough to supply 10 college students with all necessities for a year there.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
You seem to have a misconception of what a MCSE does. Anyone hiring an MCSE to develop a product is about as stupid as hiring someone with a CNE, a CCNP, ect.
All a MCSE does is install software and fix things if they break, thats it. Exchange server breaks, fix it, AD tree not propagating Group policies, Fix it, Printer not printing, Fix it, Some win98 machine stops running, Replace it with XP.
MCSE has about as much to do with product development as the secretary does. BTW good point on linux being outsourced.
First, working at home or off-site as a 1099 contractor has big advantages to the employer. In order for you to get paid, you need to be accountable for your work. If you work for 40 hours, but your manager can't get you on the phone, your work is behind schedule and you leave a trail of posts at all times of day and night on slashdot, you're not accountable and won't keep the job long. In fact, your manager will begin to scrutinize your time sheets, ask for revisions, ask for better logging, ask for more documentation. The upside for the employer is if you develop a sense of trsut, the company only pays you for the exact number of hours you are productive.
On the flip side, in an office environment, as a salaried or hourly employee, your bathroom, snack, smoke, and other breaks are typically overlooked and you're paid for them. Try writing down every thing you do in a day when you do it. Write the start time, the end time and calculate from the first moment you work to the last moment you work how much work you are actually doing and how much of it is break time. For the most part, the employer is getting a raw deal.
Second, as a 1099 contractor, my employer doesn't even have the opportunity to help with my insurance. I live across the country and our provider doesn't help. That's a savings in addition to your salary.
Third, no paid vacation time, no paid sick time. It's very nice for the employer.
Why don't they do this with home workers or single off-site workers? Time and time again, employers have watched their experiements with telecomuters go badly. Performance and quality drops, but the employee expects the same or similar salary.
The industry, the way it is today, isn't because employers are inately bad, but because employees will, on and off site, spend as much time not working as possible, while still receiving their paycheck.
My previous relationship with this company was a strict 9-5 job. If you were in seconds after nine or left seconds before 5, you knew for whom the bell tolled. Our lunch hours and our breaks were scrutinized. Since I moved off site, I actually put in 35 - 40 hours a week consistantly, not including a single second of breaks. Billable hours are hours that produce results for the company, period.
The last problem, which is less obvious, is that by moving off site, your manager needs to have an infrastructure with which to communicate, meet with and monitor you. You think a phone call will replace meeting face to face? Email? Teleconfrencing? Monthly flights to the office? You're dreaming. If you don't have a high degree of value to your company or trsut from your manager, you need to be very carefully managed by someone who he trusts and produces quality results.
The very same thing could happen for off-site or at home workers state side. However, a group of off site programmers with on site management that is successful in the states means money. Hard working, dedicated employees that will pull of the kind of work a boss thinks he's getting by micromanaging you will be expensive, rare or both.
Mod this post up, please!
As "common" programming becomes increasingly commoditized, more and more of it will be outsourced -- just as manufacturing has experienced over the last 20 years. By "common" programming, I mean C++, Java, and the like. Newer technologies, which could be considered bleeding edge, are not what is being outsourced. The stuff being outsourced is the "blocking and tackling" of the IT world. There will always be a place for leading edge technical development and engineering, however, if you think that your 31337 h4x0r java programming is worth a premium -- you would be wrong in most cases. The people making the decisions just don't think so. It goes back to money. If I can pay an Indian 20% of what I have to pay you - for the same skills - then why would I pay you a 500% premium over what the market dictates? While you may think you are worth it, I would counter by asking you: what can you bring to the table that he can't? (and rememeber, we are talking programming ONLY, forget the communication skills argument. For what I pay, I can friggin hire a translator if I have to -- and still have some left over)
There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but for the most part, programming is becoming a commoditized product. Need proof? Check the IT unemployment rolls to see how necessary programming is in the big picture.
But companies are typically taxed on earnings rather than on number of employees. Therefore a company would not save on health costs by outsourcing their labour.
Actually, making the US more of a welfare state might go a long way to placating the unemployed: if a company wants to benefit from the US's legal and financial system, then they have to support some of the US's citizens. (A similar scheme would be to require a certain percentage of employees at US-registered companies to be located in the US.)
you are deeply misguided. The US/Mexico border is far less porous, from this perspective, than you imagine
You have no idea what I imagine, so keep your theories to yourself.
Miguel's education was in no sense a product of the proximity of the US
Up until the mid 90s, just being physically close to the US or a European country was a huge boon in terms of getting access to the Internet, or at least UUCP.
Did he have a PC? Was that more or less likely for being in a NAFTA nation? Guess which nation most of the tech in Mexico comes from?
Actually Miguel reads Slashdot from time to time, perhaps he'll stop by and weigh in. I personally don't think that if he had grown un in Brazil that Gnome would have happened, but there *are* some very impressive technologies that have come out of South America (look at the work done on the 2.4 Linux kernel), so it's not black-and-white.
I'm not trying to say that everyone else in the world is backwards, I'm just saying that there's an obvious technology gap, as represented on any chart of IP allocation, code contributions, machines per household, cross-border patent grants, etc, etc. These are not facts that are usually held in dispute....
Telecommuting vs. outsourcing is like pregnancy vs. adopting. Either way you end up with a kid, but one way you spend a lot of money and fill out a bunch of paperwork, and the other way you get to screw somebody.
There are so many differences it's hardly worth mentioning any - but I will anyway. Liability, insurance, workers' comp., if one guy can everyone will want to, and most employers feel like they have to ride their charges when they're in the office, how can they expect them to work if no one's there to crack the whip?
A lot of the logic behind not allowing telecommuting may be flawed, but comparing it to outsourcing is even more flawed. Do you have any idea how hard it is to fire someone these days? It may seem easy, but it's hard, expensive and risky. You must know someone at your company that everyone wonders why they're still there. If not, ask someone who works in a union shop. Breach of contract (if it's even an issue) is much easier to deal with than harrasement claims, unemployment disputes, discrimination charges, wrongful termination, or the real sweet quiet guy that kept to himself who you just fired showing up the next day for a little score settling.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
I'm sorry but that's absolutely absurd my friend, $100k is more than enough to sustain a nice standard of living anywhere in Silicon Valley.
The $65 / hour relates to everything a customary US employee gets. This includes medical/dental/retirement/bonuses/life insurance/ etc... The company I work for recently outsourced some work to a country oversees and the engineers there get all those things mentioned above for about $15 / hour.
I gave up Kobe beef, and am now just getting by on USDA prime. The horror!
The trick the CEOs realized is why hire a dozen MCSEs in the US for 55K when you can hire some MCSE overseas for 5K.
Well, as the joke goes, MCSE = Must Consult Someone Else.
I had to scan through a lot of whining to find this intelligent comment! Someone mod it up!
On average, overseas outsourcing will not result in high quality product unless either a better "outsourcing-suited" methodology is designed, or the people with the product knowledge move closer to the programmers. The former is not very likely, but the latter is already happening to some extent.
I predict that most business-related software will stay closer to home, but companies that primarily develop shrink-wrapped software will gradually migrate overseas.
This is because the shrink-wrapped software does not need ongoing access people doing business in a specific location. The business itself is the software, and can easily move to a location where the expenses (programmers) are less, but the income (sales of product) is the same.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
Stop whining about pharaceutical companies and record profits. You clearly haven't a clue regarding the associated risks surrounding bringing a new drug to market. For every 1 that makes it 5 do not. Take incentive away from the pharma industry to put up with the billion dollar lawsuits.. go ahead.. just don't start whining next time you come down with the latest life threating illness and nothing is there to help..
I visited Rio de Janerio, Brazil, and the cost of a nice restaurant meal is about 1/3 what it is in the US, with most other costs I noticed scaled similarly.
...
On the whole, if I could earn even half what I do in the US, I'd be much better off in Rio. And there are still fine restaurants, great shopping, wonderful ocean views, etc.
Something to think about
D
This complaint seems to be directed at three different practices: outsourcing to another company overseas, hiring workers overseas, and not allowing telecommuting. All these practices save a company money, the first two because of differences in salaries, and the second mainly because the company has reduced facility costs (they don't need as much office space). However, these approaches are fundamentally independent and are not even mutually exclusive. Presumably, the most cost-efficient approach would be to outsource jobs to a company overseas (where labor is cheaper) that allows its workers to telecommute from home. Of course there are a lot of options to consider.
;) But I'll be the first to admit there are efficiencies to be gained by having people together in the same office, and even more when all those people speak fluent English (or whatever language, as long as it's the same one as their customers). There are also efficiencies you can get from telecommuting (reduced distractions). I think it all depends on the nature of your job and all the little things that go into it.
Believe me, I'd love to telecommute (I currently commute 26 miles a day each way on Ga. 400 between downtown Atlanta and Alpharetta every day. If you live here you know what that's like
Either way, these efficiencies are not well studied, and so it's hard to justify them against the hard numbers you can present if you want to move those jobs overseas.
Read my keyboard review.
I have read a lot about companies outsourcing development projects to India, but I have no real experience with it. Does anyone actually have any real numbers relating to project costs.
;) I can't see how anyone could really think that just because someone is willing to telecommute, somehow that would make a huge difference in the cost of funding a project.
I saw a post about Indian workers making less than $6,000K per year... but does an outsourced project see those differentials? I know I worked once for a company that payed me $25/hr. but billed my hours at $125+/hr. I'm sure that an outsourced project doesn't see a 90% drop in total cost just because workers in India work for 90% less than Americans.
As far as the telecommuting goes, if you want to telecommute, apply for a job in India.
Now, if you said that you were willing to telecommute and work as a contract employee on a fixed cost contract and you would be willing to pay the company for lost revenue in case you miss your delivery date, then you might be able to compete with international outsourcing. If you think that the cost of putting a person in a cube and keeping 20 sq. ft. of space lit and comfort controlled is what is causing a company to be unable to compete in a world market, you have another think coming.
Can anyone shed some light on the real cost associated with outsourcing your projects oversees?
Just my $.02
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
*cough* Bullshit *cough*
/. readers. Similar percentages are Linux users, OSS fans, etc. The only place the suffer is on equipment because PC hardware doesn't scale down in price as much as salaries do.
1) Most Indian developers are more educated than their counterparts in the US. Check the latest studies comparing US high schoolers to their counterparts. Indian kids spesk 3-5 languages by the time they are 12. They take calculus when they're 15 or 16. And often they have college degrees from the US or Europe. Those that stayed in India for college, went to elite technical colleges. How many MCSEs in the US can say that.
2) "Seasoned tech people" in the US? I've yet to work at a company in the US where there weren't terrible developers, or sysadmins I wouldn't trust with an toaster.
3) I've worked on projects with foreign developers. Yes, it's a challenge. Yes, there are communication issues. But if you put in the time to build a rapport, communicate designs effectively, and stay in touch, projects can run just as successfully as if they were sitting in your building. The fact is that is does take more time and effort than hollaring a change or idea over your cube wall to the co-worker you've known for years. You have to build that trust, and work out a system of communication. In my experience, developers and managers here in the US aren't willing to put in the time to do that, not their foreign counterparts.
Poor project management locally can be overcome more easily than poor project management remotely.
4) Foreign programmers are just as immersed in technology as US programmers. Look at how many Europeans, Candadians, Indians, Israelis, etc. are avid
>
>Going to Nola's or Baha Fresh everyday for lunch? Not anymore dude. thats $300+ a month reduced to $100 by bringing my lunch from home. Now that I ride the train, I dont stop at Fry's twice a week to "just look around" like I used to tell my wife. An easy $150 a month saved just by staying out of the book/CD/game aisles. If I need something now, Ebay has it. Drinks after work with my team? Once a week instead of 3-4 times. Thats another $100 saved.
After-tax, he's saving $200+250+50+200+150+100 = $950/month.
Now dig this. With combined California + Federal taxes on $200K at around 43%, that after-tax savings is equivalent to a pre-tax salary raise of $20000 - about 10%.
> If you can give up some of the ego stuff, you can live just fine in the Valley.
Preach on, brother. You just got yourself a 10% raise, with zero change in your standard of living. (Well, apart from no longer "just looking around" at Fry's, but hey, we all gotta make sacrifices. I'd spend less time "just looking around" at Fry's too, if someone was giving me a $20000 raise for it :-)
Suggested summer read: The Millionaire Next Door: Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy.
But...America has grown to the point of its capatilistic hump that it must out source much of the work. That's why Democracy and Capitalism compliment and hurt each other. OF course so does having a republic of only two truly recognized parties. I would not expect the common American to understand what a parliament is without living with one.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
That depends, laregly, on the definition of contractor and consultant.
If someone works out of your office, using your equipment, and you set their hours, you can call them a contractor, but the law may say otherwise.. this is the position MS and others are getting caught on.
If it walks like an employee, and it talks like an employee.. it may have the rights of an employee.
If all those MS contractors were working from home from their own businesses, there would not be an issue.
With this kind of outsourcing though, to india, we are not talking about hiring or contracting individuals, but farming out work to software houses... and you can be sure there is no way a software house in india is going to somehow make themselves out to be employees of microsoft, unless they really are.
On The Internet Nobody Knows you aren't half a dozen Indian "Java Programmers". Not that I would condone or participate in such a deception; but I have to admit, the prospect of multiplying crappy 3rd world wages into something that could actually provide a living in NY or LA is intriguing.
Has anybody ever tried it?
How much of what of what's done on these jobs is redundant, boiler-plate kind of stuff? I would think that most outsourcing firms have a good library of templates and stuff that they use when they write your "custom code". "Sir, that will take 3 coders at least 5 days". Then, when he gets off the phone: "Sanjay, pull from network library 604!"
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I was a sysadmin at a very large financial institution and was hired as they were outsourcing programming to India. I had to interface with the programming teams there and found them to have a similar range of skill levels and competence that the American programmers had. The real problem was communication. Not just the language barrier (I've been in IT for a while and got used to the thick accents) but communication of the users needs to the programming teams and making sure that the projects progressed to meet those needs. It was difficult enough to get projects specced when the programmers were down the hall! Email and video conferences don't cut it when you are managing a multi-million line project. What eventually happened was that management found the experiment to be a failure, pulled all their development back to the US, and hired the best of the Indian programmers on H1Bs to continue their work (at big US wages too!). Didn't fire any Americans until they outsourced their whole IT to a big American firm. I was laid off soon after that happened (contractors go first!), but I understand the new management is now outsourcing again. Organizational memory is definitely short term.
for us "chomsky reading green party is great idea liberals" The democratic and republican establishment are equally "conservative"
You don't know what you're talking about.
Microsoft lost because its benefits plans were misdrafted. They covered everyone who was in fact an employee, not only those the company considered employees. If they had just written the plans correctly, to cover only those who were treated as employees by Microsoft instead of by law, there would have been no problem.
There is no requirement to provide any benefits for contractors, and hardly any law requiring any for employees, for that matter.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
Is it really as simple as money?
During the 70s and 80s the mantra was for companies to get bigger and bigger, until they become large conglomerates.
These ideas build on relatively dubious arguments. It is true that bigger usually means economies of scale, but this is not really true when one company acquired another that did something completely different (as was often the case).
During the 90s these ideas were replaced by the opposite (and, I believe economically more sound) thinking. Rather than getting as big as possible, companies should identify the activities that they are really good at, and do only that. They could sell and consult on those things, but should outsource everything else.
Most companies would probably not list as their core competencies IT maintenance/ development, payroll processing and telephone support. It follows that it may be a good idea to outsource this to somebody specializing in doing only that.
As for the outsourcing to the US/ abroad it is simply a question of whether the lower foreign salaries outweight the costs of dealing with somebody 12 timezones away who speaks poor English.
Personally I am getting help developing a piece of commercial software right now. While I wouldn't have any moral issues with hiring such help from India, I prefer hiring somebody locally so that we can meet face to face and discuss issues as they come up.
Similarly, I think your best bet is to make sure that you are competitive on the basis of good, simple communication and on a good understanding of the customer and the end user.
Tor
I just modded you up. While yeah, it's *always* about money to an extent - I think you're right on the mark pointing out the "control" factor (which most managers won't readily admit to, either).
Even when you finally manage to prove to your boss that you can do excellent work outside the walls of the company, he/she often still clings to outdated ideas of time management and employee tracking.
(EG. The guy I work for right now has me work on all sorts of projects for him, including producing and editing a computer training video he wants to use in-house. I do all of the work on this video at home, and keep track of my hours. When I get back in to work though, he forces me to religiously punch in and out on a time clock! So basically, I end up with a time card full of handwritten notes about hours I worked outside the office, plus all the time-stamps on it when I came in. Ridiculous - but another case of a boss who can't quite adjust to giving employees control.)
No, you fail to understand what the word means. "Progressive", when applied to tax, means simply that the taxation rate increases as the income rate increases. "Flat" means that it remains constant across the range. "Regressive" means that the rate decreases as the income increases. Labeling any of these things "socialist" is unnecessary. The fact is, the United States income tax is a progressive tax. There have been several movements to try to make it a flat tax over the past decade, and none of them have come close to succeeding.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
Outsourcing why?
..
The major costs driving outsourcing are Healcare/Retirement and Real estate prices..
However, I suggest a simple solution
Pay Salary+401k employee buys their own health insurance..and of course telecommunting to handle real estate prices..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Can I Apply for a job in China like they do to us here?
Of course not.
Just more tools to ruin our economy, I wish this stuff were regulated.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think you have stumbled onto the big missing peice of telecommuting remote presence. I do a LOT of telecommuting and manage a lot of people that telecommute. A lot of this is do to necicity of not being able to get skilled workers in place when a problem arises (I am a network and systems arch aka the glue guy that has to make all the POS programers bloatware work and scale) If you institure telepresence where you actualy have a constant audio and posible video feed along with colabrotive whiteboarding now you have a virtual group you can know who steve is and that he is grumpy in the morning and a Linux zelot and Mary is a workaholic but never documents squat. This gives that general group consiousness.
Now none of this aleviates the fact that I can get programmers for minimum wage or less out of India. The primary problem over there is to many of them were motivated by the decent middle class pay not a talent for the work.
No sir I dont like it.
I don't want to hear from somebody who makes 200K a year. Boo hoo, don't care.
try cutting back on 60K a year, thats a whole new ball game.
Its unbeleiveable that some who makes 200K a year doesn't understand that, and lies to his wife.
Last month I bought 1 latte, and felt guilty for it.
By ego stuff I assume you mean food, day card insurance and housing, cause buddy, thats all some of us have these days.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Certainly not anybody using perl :-)
I would be interested to see some projections on where this is leading in the longer term. I can see the following problems but I have yet to see a (rational) discussion on them:
I can't help feeling a little glum about this, kind of like the weavers must have felt when the mechanical loom came around first. Sure it's just another structural change, but I wonder whether we'll see some surprising consequences from structural changes in the knowledge economy; after all, that's what the dominance of the western countries has been based on in the past.
Which in the third world translates to a little chicken blood and voodoo when you get malaria.
Benefits include a goat chained to a post in the break room for, ah, recreation.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Where can I sign up for this $65/hour? Maybe they're breaking it down like this:
$25/hour: wages
$6/hour: healh insurance and other benefits
$34/hour: contribution to retaining the most photogenic CEO in the area.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Maybe your experience with Indians has been positive.
:)
I've worked with many Indians. Just like everyone, there are good ones and bad ones.
But sometimes it's hard to find the good ones when you can't communicate verbally.
As it was explained to me, the higher class (caste) Indians are often taught English by teachers who speak English as their first language. For the lower classes, it's often taught by Indians who have learned it from Indians who learned it from Indians. It's so far removed from English, it's near impossible to understand.
And of the Indians I've met, more than half were "trained" to program, but didn't appear to be able to think independently. Some were just plain awful. Like I said though, there are some awful American developers too, but they usually find their way into management
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Someone suggested that companies 'outsource' (or 'insource' if you may) to a company within US which in turn employs workers who telecommute thus saving costs. Indeed such a model does seem feasible to implement. We alredy have projects in the OpenSource community which (may) involve developers from all over the world and the resulting code is of a very high quality.
It would be interesting to know if someone has conducted or would be willing to conduct a feasibility study for this. I think the starting point for such a feasibility study would be conducting surveys with companies that currently outsource work and gather information on how much would they be willing to pay for work that was done by companies employing telecommuting workers within the US.
Seems worth a serious thought...
Sorry. Won't work for me, as I only have two mid-90's American sedans, that already get great mileage and the Septa trains don't run all the way to where I work. I already bring my lunch nearly every day (today I didn't for the first time in three months). I never go out for drinks, and rarely rent movies anymore. I bought one CD two months ago. All my money still goes to paying the credit card debts from back in 2001, when I loaded them up to pay for my wife's college degree and then was laid off from my $52K job. Since then I've been working consulting jobs for $17-25/hr (mostly around $19-20) and it's not looking good. If I had your sweet Viper I would sell that bastard in two seconds and live like a normal human being for the first time in years.
And I don't even live in the Valley, but near Philly. Sorry, I can't relate.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I mean I live in germany, I am a computer engineer, and earn about 36K brut (about 19K net) (*). I am nearly as competitive as India !!! Or , from my side of the pond, 75K is overpaid. Your call.
(*) coding on a mainframe for a big company
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I cant stand whats happening. I mean, I am glad for India, wow, its nice of us to provide them with jobs, but its getting crazy.
Where I work uses NTT/Verioshit for its webhost. We are changing that, but they have double charged us for a 1/4 (to the tune of 300 smackers). Imagine talking to a call rep in India somewhere, who despite having a good command of English, seem to fall short in understanding customer support issues. Its taken me 4 calls, and the issue is not resolved.
A couple days later my business gets a call from a credit card company, where the seller is trying to pre approve us for a card. Guess where she is?
I had to hang up, I am starting to resent it. I have a hard time talking to these people knowing that our jobs are going over there. I dont feel bad against the Indians, I am sure they are happy for work, I am pissed at the greedmasters and the system that breathes only the "bottom line".
What are we gonna do when we run out of people to exploit? Will Capitalism be over?
Outsourced workers still work in groups with managers hanging over their heads, offices, and time clocks.
... don't.
Telecommuters
simon
home page
BTW, dido is in the Philippines (not mentioned in the post).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Your anger betrays you, monkeyboy. This must have hit close to home. The truth hurts, doesn't it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Distance has nothing to do with it.
I live 13 miles from work. If I were willing to code for Indian prices, they'd not only cover the cost of my broadband, they'd give me a computer to do it on.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
As long as there have been fairly modern economies (the last few hundred years, at least), capital and labor have fought over how they would share the proceeds of their collective effort. Over much of the last century, labor has done better than usual in the United States. Labor unions made a lot of progress in the early part of the century (eg, laws guaranteeing the right to organize). FDR's New Deal emphasized putting people to work rather than corporate profits. Consumer demand was enormous following WWII, the rest of the world was in no shape to produce consumer goods, so there was a labor shortage.
More recently, capital has taken advantage of its strengths. First, capital is more mobile than labor is; it's much easier to move the factory from Michigan to Mississippi (or to Malaysia) than it is for the workers to pick up and move. Second, capital knows what its goals are, and many parts of labor aren't sure: how many people have argued as long and consistently for reducing taxes on earnings as the capitalists have argued for reducing taxes on dividends? Third, capital has never been slow to spend money on equipment if they could eliminate labor -- fewer workers means less of the proceeds have to be shared. Fourth, there's a worldwide labor glut -- guesses of the number of unemployed in China are about 150M, almost as many people as work in the U.S.
What remains to be seen is whether capital figures out that they need labor to get a big enough share to buy the goods and make the whole process work. You can be too greedy for your own long-term good.
Sorry dude but $200K/year is a fuckload of money anywhere except perhaps Silicon Valley and perhaps NYC.
Your point of tracking where your money goes and finding ways to cut costs, eliminate unecessary expenses, or spend it on more effective solutions is valid. Most people have something they could drop or cut (say using the money you currently spend on cable on buying books from Amazon, not eating out, etc). However someone in the $200K bracket is in a far different position than someone in the $20K bracket. If you were trying to live on $20K in the Valley I suspect you would be living so close to the bone that there wouldn't be much for you to cut.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Well, you could live on $100K, or less, in Silicon Valley. People do. I did for a while, the main compromise being that I lived in a seedy downtown part of San Jose (which is still not that bad, compared to a lot of cities).
OTOH, it is very, very easy to spend a 5-figure income here. Especially if you buy a house. You not only have mortgage payments (at least most do), but you get to pay property taxes based on absurdly inflated real estate prices.
This makes tons of stuff easier. Like oh, say, when the network is down between you and the world, you can't telecommute. The guys who all work in the same building, can probably press on, continue to have meetings, and make progress on work. Where you are stuck.
Oh, confidential paperwork doesn't leave the building. They don't need nearly as many VPN connections. There is no one making a connection from a Dynamic range of IP's that are outside of the network operations control.
Telecommuting, you aren't in the same building with 500 co-workers. Now if the started hiring lone guys, on their own island in India, yeah, you've got a point. However, your wrong, wrong, wrong.
What I really don't understand, is why they don't start transplanting business from major cities. Look, there is no god damn reason in the world you have to be in downtown SF to write software. You don't need to be in LA, SF, NY, or any other major city. You can get an amazing number of resouces in much cheaper places then a lot of companies feel they need to be in. It's just plain silly.
Kirby
Boo-fucking-hoo!
My wife and I, combined, made $52k last year. We manage to live just fine on that. Of course, we're on the other side of Sacramento.
Don't talk to me about "giving up the ego stuff" while you're still driving a Viper and a Navigator.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
All my money still goes to paying the credit card debts from back in 2001, when I loaded them up to pay for my wife's college degree
While I'm not someone to dis education, using credit cards to pay for it seems stupid. Couldn't you have gotten student loans?
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
>
> And, probably the worst part is that he is now sitting on that money instead of redistributing it to the mall workers/mechanics in the area, which hurts the economy.
Still a third way to look at it is that at the 39% marginal tax rate (CA State + US Fed + SS + SDI) that a $40,000/year worker is paying, damn near anyone can get themselves the same $20,000 a year raise by doing the same things.
And when a guy making $40,000/year does it, he's given himself a 50% raise. Good thing there's people like you around encouraging people to live beyond their means. Can't have the "already rich" $40,000 a year types "get more rich", can we? :-)
No, they're not. They only think they are, but any native English speaker will tell you that their accent is a huge problem, not to mention their difficulty in understanding common idioms.
There are classes you can take to remove your accent; my company has a series of classes to train non-Americans with speaking and understanding American English, but I guess all the non-American employees there (which is a lot) are too proud to take it, even though they badly need it.
Yeah, God save us from engineers with experience in non-technical jobs.
Nah, God save us from car salesmen writing application software.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Why work cheaper? Handled properly, telecommuting can make an employee more efficient and productive than he or she was before. The company will incur lower personnel-related costs and will save money that way as well. Heck, if half the people at my company could work from home the savings on air-conditioning alone would be significant.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I was reading all the emotional posts up until this one came up and I would have silently ignored this immature comment too had it not been for the fact that it had also been MODDED UP by the retarded ones with mod points for suggesting an instrument of destruction for the selfish interests of one half of the hemisphere.
War? So 60k people get killed on either side so u may get back your 60k salary and living the way you used to?
You just gotta love these people...sheesh...
This is fuzzy thinking. a doctor's net income is the only figure that matters. His office, nurse, receptionist, insurance, licensing, and q-tip costs might be high, but so is his revenue.
Doctors on average are still taking home $200K/year. This masks a range, but doctors can whine about their costs when their incomes drop below six figures.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Fifth, the only "solution" to the "problem" of job loss to other countries / technologies is to stay on top of the game: educate yourself continuously, never stop until you die. This keeps you happy, healthy, and employed. Another helpful hint is to be ultra flexible. In your job, your life, your thinking, your location. Be ready for change, and stay ahead...through education and training. Do whatever it takes to be the best, absolutely the best, at what you do. But, don't just focus on that skill or that area. Educate and adapt. Innovate. Treat yourself like a freakin' miniture company. Write articles, network, build value, sell yourself, remain as mobile as possible, never settle for what you have. Be like David Bowie [morevalue.com] and think of yourself like a product (Madonna, and other smart entertainers do this also). Are you getting the drift here?
This all sounds great, but I am fairly certain the vast majority of people simply want to live their lives without the pressure of outfoxing technological progress. You will find that for most people, war and revolution is preferable to the rat race you propose. Maybe you are just inspired by the kurzweilai.net page as so many are, but your enthusiasm is troubling none the less.
Technology is not supposed to make human life more irrelevant, turning us into bloodthirsty animals fighting for whatever relevence our existence holds for cult of productivity. It is supposed to make our lives easier, how easy is life when it is consumed with a person struggling to market himself to The Man?
No, i think most will be willing to fight for a better life.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I think Software Development and IT are dying in America, and I dont want to go down with the ship, wondering what the hell to do AFTER I lose my job.
Everything I am doing to save money, is to develop the capitol needed to invest in Real Estate and the Stock market, cause I am NOT going to compete with some indian who will gladly do my job in exchange for a burrito.
I don't worry too much about outsourcing, and I'll tell you why. As a number of other readers have pointed out, it's all about the money.
If the Internet has been what it is today in 1980, we would be saying the same thing about Japan. For many years, Japanese workers bled themselves white for peanuts, and the companies they slaved for earned billions of American dollars.
Then what happened? The Japanese worker grew up, and began demanding some of that income for his or herself. Japan is not as competitive today as it once was, and that is largely why. In fact, Taiwan and Korea are kicking Japan's butt in a number of key markets, and that's because, economically, they are where Japan was decades ago.
You can pay intelligent, educated, productive individuals chickenfeed for just so long. Eventually (and I suspect that it won't take all that long) tech workers in India will begin to see the benefits of industry all around them, and will want a piece of it for themselves. At that point, they will no longer be so "competitive."
The idea that a given nation might be able to out-compete us by utilizing what is, by our standards at least, virtually slave labor is not new. The entire tariff system was put in place to prevent our markets from being flooded with cheap imports, with concomitant damage to domestic industries. Perhaps something similar should be enacted regarding outsourced labor.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The savings from telecommuting could rival savings from offshore outsourcing, if the telecommuting is done en masse.
1 _2.html. The result is that Indian programmers are 1/3 - 1/2 as expensive as an in-house US employee when counting total direct costs, not as low as 1/10 - 1/5.)
... and we know what happened with that. Now they are jumping on the offshore bandwagon in pursuit of dubious savings.
If they made the almost the entire IT department telecommute, they could reduce their real estate and other physical overhead costs drastically. They would just need a room for the servers, a few floating terminals lined up side by side like an Internet cafe (ie no space-hogging cubicles) for when people do come in to the office, and a set of meeting rooms so teams can meet once or twice a week.
It would also need a different approach to management and more strict rules regarding being at your home desk during office hours -- there is no good reason for not answering your phone for an hour, because you're not going to be away at somebody else's cubicle discussing anything.
Combine the reduced real estate costs with the reduced salaries that they can pay because people would accept less money in order to telecommute, and US employees wouldn't cost much more than Indian programmers when taking total costs into consideration. (Remember that although Indian salaries are only 10-20% of US salaries, their physical overheads are often the same or more than in the US - for example look at the office real estate costs in Bombay compared to Boston http://www.forbes.com/global/2002/0527/066sidebar
Then after you add in the undocumented and indirect costs associated with outsourcing that result from differences in language, time zone, and culture, and other factors like the relative lack of company-specific business knowledge, you're probably saving MORE by telecommuting than by outsourcing.
But outsourcing is popular now not because they are really interested in saving money; it is happening because it is the latest fad. If they were really interested in saving money, this big outsourcing wave should have been happening 5 years ago when American programmers were hard to find and expensive to keep, and Indian programmers were much less expensive than they are now. But no, the fad back then was to throw megabucks at anything that touched the Internet, and pay six figures for any semi-talented web programmer. They jumped on the dotcom bandwagon in pursuit of dubious profits
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
Dude, if you can read; the cars are PARKED until the weekend. My commute is now 2 hours, although I can work during that time. I even get the occasional thrill of the Caltrain running over some homeless person.
Actually, it's not all about money - at least not as simple as a home worker in the US v an office worker in India.
A highly trained team in India will have numerous advantages over non-colocated team in the US because of the very nature of telecommuting as a way of getting work done. I work in a global position in our company, and my relationship with groups in the US and Asia is nowhere near as established as that with my European colleagues - especially those in the same city and even more so with those in the same building.
Secondly - there's the question of why outsource instead of keeping non-core staff on the payroll even where there's a neglible perceived cost benefit: strategic management.
Modern companies are horribly complicated things to run, and if you're trying to look at things clearly it's much easier and more efficient to view your core units in detail and imagine things like 1st line customer relationship management centres as black boxes where a service is supplied by a third client - you can focus and worry on your groups which form the core of your value.
So it's about being cheap, but also effective and simplying the running of the company.
Ummm ... the cost to the company to employ one person in India is going to be more significant than just $5k per annum. I would think that the projects are negotiated such that the break down would be closer to $5k per month per head.
Of course it would be closer to $5k p.a. if the company itself opened a branch there.
And I would imagine that the final worker would be paid closer to $5k p.a. only.
Look, ANYONE can save money. At 20K though, I would honestly consider going on welfare, and letting us sucker taxpayers give you a free education. The poor lack creativity.
Dude, I would cut up all your credit cards but one if I were you, and get a consolodation loan at a good interest rate to pay them off. Credit cards are the biggest scam on the planet. You need ONE, not 10 like most americans. Instant savings if you cut those suckers up and learn to live a cash existence.
Why do you care about repeat business in a global market?
... probably something along the lines of
Hmmm
outsourcing.epinions.com is called for.
Write scathing reviews against people that defrauded you by pumping up their resumes -- lest other people make the same mistakes you did. It also provides a feedback mechanism to the people that genuinely care about what they have done -- where they have gone wrong.
5. Enjoy a good vindaloo and a lager.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
The writing is on the wall
Agreed. It's not going to happen this year or the next or even the next but it's going to happen. I don't know what the answer is for me yet but my wife and I are keeping an eye out.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Why would anyone want to live elsewhere? I'm getting into Real Estate. There is no better market than the Valley. You can make money both buying and selling. If you cant sell, you can make positive cash flow on rentals.
If you gave up some of those lunches, and stayed away from Fry's, in a couple of years, you could put money down on either a Viper or a house, dude. Think about it. I used to be at Nola's every fucking day, until Baha Fresh opened up. 10 dollars a day minimum for lunch, but usually 15-20. Add that up. Yeah it sucks bringing lunch from home, but it feels great to have investment income. Money for nothing, and if the wife pisses me off, chicks for free.
Very insightful. You can't be a telecommuter if you work for another another company, particularly one that is overseas. And from a psychological standpoint, I believe you're correct in that a person that the decision-makers in a corporation have probably never even seen face-to-face (as in a telecommuter) are likely to be the first to go.
Hope things work out for you.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I can see how you might think that the way I am living hurts the economy, but you would be wrong. The more available capitol in my bank allows them to make more loans and at lower interest rates. This is money beyond what some service industry worker would effect the overall economy. The economy is not about distribution of money, but about economic activity. Few mall workers and mechanics have any effect on the economy unless they are borrowing money for big-ticket items.
Well that gives about 4,800 Trillion IPv6 addresses per star...(3.4e38 addresses /7e22 stars = 4.8e15 addresses per star)
I find the fact that each star would have about a million times the current (4.2 billion) IPv4 address space an interesting thought when it comes to realizing the size of IPv6 address space.
Or, to bring this post a little closer to the topic on hand, each grain of sand (on earth) could have 4.8e16 addresses, or 10 million times the total number of IPv4 addresses.
I would post anonymously too, if I could not perform basic math.
$950/month post-tax equates to approximately $1667 pre-tax (@ 43% total tax). Since we have 12 months per year, that works out to $20,000 per year.
As the original poster wrote.
Bother, said Pooh, as he called in an air strike.
I do live in MA (still high taxes). I make (the equivalent of) 30K, with no benefits. And I can make ends meet, with a little money left over out of each paycheck.
How do I do this? I share an apartment with two other girls. I bring my lunch to work every day. I'm not buying new electronics, and I drive a 12-year old car (which is in very good condition). I get as little insurance as I can afford to (this will hopefully be temporary). I consider buying a coffee, a lunch, or a CD to be a treat (although I do it once or twice a week.) All this leaves me some money to put into savings with each paycheck.
Obviously, if you have a family to support, you can't do all of this - you'll have more expenses. I also don't plan for this to be a permanent lifestyle - but I won't ramp up my spending until I get a permanent job.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Look, ANYONE can save money. At 20K though, I would honestly consider going on welfare, and letting us sucker taxpayers give you a free education. The poor lack creativity.
True, while I don't make 200K/year I have managed to get my expenses down to about 24k/year (after taxes) I could probably get this down even more if I tried. Still it has allowed me save up quite a bit of money over the last few years.
BTW $20K/year may not sound like much for an income but it is more than enough to live fairly well someplace like Wyoming or North Dakota. Even on $20k/year you can afford to buy a house there.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
What these people offer is VALUE. Your argument is like saying that that $2 hamburger from the drive-through didn't taste good. Well no shit, Sherlock. You get what you pay for. Executives know this. If they only need some software to function for a year or two, or it doesn't have to be 100% bug free, then why spend all of that $$ on a US programmer? Good IT people have their place, but where ever you fall in the food chain, cheap and quick or expensive and solid, you still have to offer VALUE.
Darn right . . . If I'm going to make peanuts anyway, I might as well make it doing something that isn't as mentally demanding.
I don't know about you, but I would get bored doing restaurant work. I would rather do something somewhat interesting at low wages than something boring for more wages. However, my family disagrees.
Table-ized A.I.
Also the OSS == good logic doesn't fly with me. Most OSS projects are horrible and should have died long ago. For any good product [say XMMS] there are a half dozen related products that suck [those GTK+ media players], etc...
I'm not saying one side is right or wrong but your justification doesn't support your view. Yes, MOST open-source projects are complete failures (they don't even make verion 1.0). However, the main reason IMO is because OSS doesn't have the same resources. A large number of OSS projects involve less than 5 developers (with at least 2 or 3 not committing much time to it). In fact, a lot of them (check sourceforge.net) are simply one-person projects with very little comittment by anyone. Clearly this does not prove anything (since alternative software development methods involve larger resources)...
You may or may not be able to prove that OSS development does not work... but you aren't doing it here...
KoalaBear33
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
Outsourcing means giving away the whole problem (and it sounds good in management circles too).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The Uber Liberal and Uber Conservatives want to break the system. Bankrupting it is a good way to do it. They are hoping you will be too poor to do anything about it when they install their own particular brand of "workers paradise." There is no middle anymore. A moderate as the media defines it is a marxist leinnist. Meet the new boss same as the old boss.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
My impression is that when companies outsource to India, they don't outsource to individual developers in India. They form a whole group in India, complete with a manager in India. Usually many groups with several layers of management. They have offices, they come into work every day, they have meetings.
Outsourcing teams or departments is something different than individuals telecommuting.
Imagine you have a team of 100 developers working on a fairly large, fairly complex project. Would you have an easier time managing them all in one place, or would you rather each of them tele-commute from a different place, potentially, in all from several different time zones.
I am not claiming that a successful outcome would not be possible with the team telecommuting, (nor am I saying it is), but it is a no-brainer than having your entire team working in one physical location is a lot easier to manage than not.
By outsourcing software development companies are taking a chance, but keep in mind that these companies are amply rewarded in terms of cost savings by doing so. I am sure that there have been more that the occasional failed project from off-shore development, but by and large it is a matter of process, and as more work is sent overseas, the more the development and delivery process is refined, and will soon approach the point where the risk inherent is no more than that of a project being done on-site.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
Oh, I was assuming the person works in or around the Silicon Valley. If not, it doesn't make much financial sense to live here.
And then there's insurance ($300 or more a month... if you're getting auto, home, and decent life coverage through work, you go...)
Typically, you'll get medical and dental insurance from work. The automobile insurance should run you maybe $100 a month. Home and life insurance are hardly parts of a "living wage", so let's not consider it.
Responding to two other posts that point out inaccuracies, yes, I deliberately overestimated food and automobile expenses. A subcompact is probably closer to $300 a month, and food is probably closer to $600 a month.
utilities (you can't run a server without electricity, nor can you live without water, sewer, etc.) which will run you about $200.
Most apartments cover water and trash disposal costs. Electricity probably runs from $50 to $100.
To summarize, from an after-tax income of $5,500, we deduct:
- 2BR apartment - $1,500
- car - $300
- car insurance - $100
- food (overestimated) - $600
- cable - $50
- phone - $30
- ISP - $50
- electricity, etc - $100
- haircut - $20
- others (overestimated) - $500
which leaves a nice $2,250, if my math skills do not fail me too badly. Either way, you're living decently with half of your salary. So where are we now, indeed, Sparky?Cheap is not the factor anymore may be it was a few years back. The work gets done and the programmers from India that I have worked with are simply kickass !!
I remember 10 years ago when the last textile jobs were going overseas. My tech friends (and I) all said it was inevitable, just simple cost competition.
It somehow seems different when it is our turn.
this is not a sig
In my own professional life, I travelled to work with IT service providers and software developers throughout Latin America. There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first, and that much software that gets widely adopted is that which is done in English.
Remember: the "virtual" nature of software is such that it is a far easier sector to develop for minimal capital than, say, aerospace (where Brazil also has a competitive industry) or biotech. All you need is access to a computer. You don't need a supercomputer to develop Linux applications, desktop suites, widgets, etc. And most anyone who has access to a university has access to a computer lab in Latin America. Perhaps an iteration behind in architecture, but it's still there. You'll get more mileage out of correlating the contributions of those countries with the size of their literate populations than correlating them with their proximity to the US.
I don't know whether Miguel had a home PC or not. I know people who were using CAD software in the late 80's in Mexico and Brazil, though, and developing 3rd party applications for them. I know that the Brazilian industrial design sector is pretty heavily IT-focused and based.
But the fact is that Brazil is also a center of computer hardware production, partially due to somewhat protectionist trade policies that create high tarriffs on imports for goods that are manufactured domestically. Dell and IBM both have production facilities in Brazil, and 68% of Brazil's PC's are produced domestically. This is not true for Mexico: while I believe that HP may have a final assembly unit in Mexico, for the most part Mexico imports its hardware from the US. This means, to some extent, that there's a stronger "native" computer culture in South America than in Mexico.
Now, the fact is that renumeration is going to be better for skilled people if they move to the US, and that's exactly what happens: if they can get work in the US, whether they are from Mexico or South America, they will move there. That's the flip side of the outsourcing element, of course: the difference is that it's far, far easier for capital to cross borders than it is for labor. GM and Ford are free to move jobs across the border where wages are lower, but Mexicans are far less free to move up north (legally) to where wages are better. This had been less true in the IT industry before the outsourcing trend began, but this is also beginning to happen in IT.
Oh, India. Very nice country, nice people, nice girls , comparatevily starving and they're also
pirating drugs developed by rich western countries to cure their HIV patients at sustainable prices. Nice idea , nice purporse.
Interesting fact: some company may choose or have already choosen to outsource their intellectual property developement to india. To a country of pirates ??! (pirates according to many pharmaceutical companies for sure). Bad idea in my book.
Oh, but indians accept to be paid a couple dimes...
Yes, it's only because of money. And it sucks.
And it's incredibly stupid.
I've never made $200k/year, but for a couple years I was making $50k. When the bubble burst I ended up getting a job at a liquor store and bartending at the bar next door. My lifestyle now is completely different, but since I'm on the other end of the spectrum it might be interesting to compare my experience.
While I was working at the liquor store/bar one tech recruiter contacted me about getting involved in a starting a webhosting company with a group of other people. Certainly not the best time to get involved in that sort of venture, but I was working in a friggin liquor store for $7/hour, so I figured why the hell not?
I met with the guy that wanted to finance the whole thing and was impressed with how well he had it planned out, and of course, the fact that he had the money to finance it. The deal was, do the work for free, get 3% ownership of the company when it became profitable. The other guys got bored of it pretty quickly and it became obvious that I was the only one that really wanted to make it happen. So, when he decided the company needed a full-time employee, I was the obvious choice. So I became the first employee, making $7/hr.
In the meantime I gave up my 2 bedroom/2 bathroom apartment on the golfcourse, got a 3 bedroom house at the beach, and 2 housemates. I got a 17 year old car, but it's a 5.0 convertible and a hell of a lot of fun. I've been doing freelance work on the side for $30/hr, but only a couple hours a month, so it really just puts entertainment money in my pocket. I work from home 4 out of 5 days a week on average, and my hours are fairly flexible.
After a year, I'm still the only paid employee, and only make $10/hr plus minimal health benefits. My percentage has more than tripled though, but only the next year will tell if it's going to pay off. I actually get to make decisions and have a real influence in what's going on with the company. The webhosting part of the company is only a fraction of the money now, network administration and custom sites make up the bulk of our income. Times are still tough, but we've made progress so I'm still sticking with it.
I only eat out once or twice a week anymore, but as a side effect my cooking has vastly improved. I regularly spend lunch breaks at the beach, I have a tan again for the first time in years, and I'm in better shape from swimming than I've been in a long time. I live in a neighborhood instead of an apartment complex which means I actually know my neighbors and hang out with them.
Do I wish I was still making $50k/year? Hell yeah! Was I happier when I was? Hell no! But our income is growing steadily, and I wouldn't be suprised if I'm making more than $50k a year from now. If not, well, I can always go back to the corporate world.
I certainly wouldn't recommend taking this route to just anyone, but if you're willing to work hard and make a lot of sacrifices, you may find that you can still live a happy life AND not have to deal with all the corporate bullshit just to get a paycheck.
Well, they did in engineering and manufacturing
a few years back. Like IT people think it shouldn't
happen to them?
See ya in the bread line dudes.
I'll disagree with this. A good chunk of my value to the company I work for is the ability to steer some of the other developers back on track, identify problems, or just generally help them along. If we weren't in the same building, a lot of time would be wasted by people not solving the problem or waiting to exchange e-mails to get to the root of the problem.
"Obviously a lot of companies have decided that having an american physically in the office isn't worth a savings of $45 an hour, but once you've decided to hire telecomuters, isn't a $20 an hour American programmer with who management will probably have a lot less communication difficulties a better buy than a $20 an hour programmer from India?"
Don't compare outsourcing to telecommuting. There's more involved than the costs, and each option has different advantages and drawbacks.
Telecommuting saves on office costs, travel expenses, and employees might be willing to work for less. Then again, there's (still) no good substitute for face-to-face meetings, and I generally find that programmers benefit from talking to their co-workers, about work or other things. People perform better in good teams. As an alternative to letting people work from home, some companies work with satellite offices, but this ties employees again to an office, and might end up combining the drawbacks of working in an office and working from home.
Outsourcing has the same savings (office costs and labor costs), but the advantage is that the employees will be working from the same office, and in proper teams. The drawback is having to remotely manage or oversee projects, and the language barrier. I've seen projects being partly outsourced to India, and it was no picknick.
You also have to realise how the PHB thinks:
- "Outsourcing = Good. It'll save money now anbd make my bottom line look good, and everyone is doing it these days so I will not get fired for doing this even if it fails badly" (the old 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' rule).
- "Telecommuting = Bad. Come on, we all know the resources will just loaf around the house all day in their underpants. When projects start to fail (and one will fail eventually), I'll be the scapegoat for making this decision".
I've tried 'selling' telecommuting for 1-2 days a week, and found that many (but not all) managers on all levels are opposed to this: CEO's, Division managers, and project managers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
There is not a mutual fund on Earth that can get me the returns like a flipped fixer-upper in 30 days. The economy is getting better, just in time for me to get out of Technology, and start using MONEY to make money instead of .NET.
Why are jobs exported from the US to the third world ? Because salaries are 20 times higher in the US. But to live in the US, this high salary is needed, since the living costs are as high. So what is the solution: Lower the exchange rate of the US dollar, 20 times if it has to be. The imports will stop and so will the export of your jobs.
Peter, Singapore
PS: Did it ever ocure to you guys that the high prices and salaries in the US are unfair for the third world ?
>>Utter and complete bull sh*t.
I've heard it straight from the horse's mouth...From Indian Nationals working in my shop.
>>Who the fuck do you think manages the Indian employees on the American multinationals? The White, Republican, American managers.
And on my project, we have an Indian liason working in Bangladore. She manages the programmers, and reports to me. I manage her, from wonderful downtown NYC, 1 mile north of Ground Zero.
Huh?
There are many tales of bad code that had to eventually be reworked and largely replaced. Also a lot of tales of getting code that doesn't correctly meet the needs of the project (communication failures, etc).
After enough companies have had bad experiences, I think you'll see the flood level off a bit. Granted, some companies will accept the flawed code wholeheartedly for the cheap price, but things will stop well short of the doomsday scenarios.
This may be changing faster than you might expect. The Indian government has made tech education a central component of their economic plans and judging from the quality of some of the programmers I've run into here in the US, we should be worried.
It's certainly true that we have a lot of very talented programmers from India here, in fact, I helped start my company with two of them. They're good friends of mine.
But from the reports I'm hearing, the quality of tech workers who have been migrating from India in recent years has significantly deteriorated. I've also heard that these "government univerities" have started becoming degree mills.
Like the original poster, I'm also very skeptical of the ability of outsourced projects to succeed. Maybe in the ten year timeframe, but then again, that timeframe may also bring an about an economic "leveling of the playing field" with India, bringing their wages and standards of living more in line with our own and decreasing their status as a source of cheap tech labor.
You can get positive cash flow if your down is big enough to keep your payments low. Especially on nicer areas on the east side. Impossible in SFO, but further down, and on the east side, you can do it.
>>See the blatant stupidity of that argument?
You're missing the point. Probably because your anger and hostility confuses you. My logic isn't stupid, I don't think you're putting the pieces together properly.
No matter, your lack of perception isn't my problem. Have a nice life.
wbs.
Huh?
There is nothing about Gnome or many other such software projects that could not have been done in South America, except for the fact that it usually just happens up north first
You've summed it up best right there. Stop, re-read that and you will get my point. I've said twice now that there's nothing special about the nations I'm pointing out as the hubs of the current technical world other than their current status as hubs of the technical world.
Its a common myth that in India workers need not be paid for salary plus benefits. The law requires that 12.5% of the salary is deposited in a provident fund. The employer must contribute another 12.5% to it. Medical Insurance, gratuity (retirement pension), leave travel allowance, paid vacations, and meal allowances are standard benefits here.
This is a part of it. But they can also exploit their employees more. They are not paying healthcare benefits, they do not have to deal with OSHA, the Americans with Disabilities Act(ADA), Environmental laws, or any fair workers compensation laws. In other words big corporations can piss on their employees and if they complain there is another person willing to take their place.
As proof, does anyone remember the Union Carbide Disaster in Bhopal, India, that killed 8,000 people immediately and injured at least 150,000.
Looking for a job?
Want your resume written professionally?
DON'T USE TUNAREZ!!!
(Cost of paying someone overseas + overhead costs of remote management + costs related to misunderstandings/errors + inconvenience) is still less than (Cost of paying you to sit in your underwear and "work" for 2 hours a day in between slashdot postings)
Tell that to my last company when thier flagship product came back from India as code that didn't compile, tests that could not have conceivably worked even if they did compile, and all in only twice the amount of time budgeted for the entire project... Ah, but you can't they've gone under precicely becuase of that catastrophy. The didn't expect the Indian programmers to be a panacea, but they did bet the farm on them at least completeting the job.
Just becuase you are shipping off code to India doesn't mean you will be getting the quality you can get in the US when you actually pay people what they are worth.
I understand a companies need to show a profit, they are in business to make money. But I think certain rules should follow them if they are US based.
I have specific numbers for my wife, so I'll use her as an example. She works in a call center making about $14.55/hr. The company she works for has been using outsourcing in India and Costa Rica for some time now. They pay Indians $0.50/hr to transfer calls to her because they don't know how/don't want to do their job, this accounts for at least 10%-25% of her calls each day. They pay Costa Ricans $1.00/hr.
Now, of course the alleged cost per transferred call is $3. Supposedly management believes that this cost is worthwile. Even though many of the customers call to cancel their account because they can't understand what the outsourced people are saying on the phones.
My suggestion is this: If a company is US based, they must abide by US labor laws. Especially minimum wage laws, UNLESS the minimum wages laws in that country exceed that of the US. This helps the situation at least somewhat so that even our slightly lower paid US workers won't all show up on unemployment. Oh, and to be considered non-US based the execs need to move their a**es to India too, no point in saying your company is not US based when you get to live the high-life. They can see what it's like to live in a third world country.
I've heard such dumb comments from a COO that we are helping that countries economy! What the HELL about the US's economy, you know the country these shmucks live in?
There is my idea, take it or leave it.
There is a good substitute now!
http://www.apple.com/isight/
I used to take work home initially, but I never got rewarded for extra hours put in. Instead, if I came in late or left early some day, I was frowned upon by my (jealous) colleagues and (troubled, confused) manager. Then I started coming in on time, leaving *on time* (tough one), and *not* taking home any work. I would go to the gym, or hang around with my friends, go watch a movie, read a (possibly technical) book, etc. Follow this, and you'll be fine.
The problem lies in poor management, not in the Indian coders, etc.
No, this time the fault lay squarely on the Indian coders. They would lie and say that some component was working and passed the tests and fufilled the requirements and design we gave them. We'd believe them, but when we got around to actually reviewing that code, it turned out that not only could it not pass the tests, but that even if it COULD compile (which it could not) it wasn't even fufilling any of the requirements (not even in the same ball park... imagine the analogy of asking for a accounting system and getting back a Flash debugger, not even close to what we asked for). And even if it WERE fufilling the requirements, the code that was written was so poorly designed and implemented that it was absolutly unmaintainable.
Once we had gotten far enough along on the project, and finally saw through the number fudging, slight of hand and bold faced lies, we had already spent too much money and gone too far down the path to turn around and do it right.
And do you know what your recourse is at that point? Not a damn thing. Sure, you could try and sue them in India, but we didn't have the money to do that and still keep alive long enough to look for more funding. Not that it mattered anyway, since we never got the extra funding...
But, lesson learned, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. You can't cut costs down to nothing and still have the same quality.
Workers in India are cheaper.
You cannot directly compare telecommuting and outsourcing, because they are two different things. Telecommuting involves individual workers, with individual skillsets, working at a remote location. They still require management, they can still quit any time, they still get ill, they still take vacations. Outsourcing is not about individuals, it's about functions. If programming is outsourced, then so is all the overhead of employing programmers, such as HR. The outsourcing company takes care of continuity is an individual is not available, for any reason. The outsourcing company takes care of sourcing equipment and hiring appropriate skillsets.
You must remember that salaries are only a fraction of the cost of doing business. Telecommuting can address some of the other issues, such as the cost of providing an office environment. But outsourcing, in theory*, reduces risk because it allows a company to treat an entire function as "black box" - specs in, code out. Managing and mitigating risk is the biggest cost, in both time and money, of every IT project.
In summary, this topic makes no sense because it is comparing two different ideas that address two different business problems.
--
* In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. I was on site with a customer yesterday untangling an unholy mess created by the people they outsourced their helpdesk to. I've yet to hear of, let alone personally experience, an outsourcing project that worked 6 months after it started.
A typical company hierarchy looks like this:
0. CEO
1. various VPs
2. middle management
3. task leader technical management
4. worker bees
Telecommuting puts the remote link in the hierarchy mostly at levels 3 and 4. Outsourcing puts it mostly at level 2. From a corporate command and control view, outsourcing looks better because there should be less communication needed - in theory it's all at the manager-to-manager level.
Of course, we all know that it can't work without detailed specs, which get written at levels 3 and 4, and the specs have to be negotiated and clarified, which means more interchange at 3 and 4.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Canadian Health Care is really inefficent...it has to be.
You have a lot of rural areas seperated by some distance..a lot more than in the US. This creates more duplication of services, and more waste.
The Canadian system does a wonderful job considering the natural geographic problems it has by nature of being Canadian.
telecommute that is. Seriously, my home is for living not working. I think people underestimate how important this is to ones mental well being. Also, the family's well being too. As far as what someone makes in another part of the world is fine with me. I am still in the US and could probably make a mint mining the side of a mountain that a lot of people just built their cute little cul de sac to face. :)
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
I've hear that, in the US, having a car is a MUST. I don't understand then, howcome in India we are able to live without personal cars? Why did we build such excellent public transport?
Because your country didn't embrace the automobile in the same way that the US did. Your country is also more densely packed with people (in general). Very few places exist in the US with reliable public transportation. So if you don't live in one of the cities that does (say you live in the country, or in a smaller city, or in California), a car is necessary.
In the smaller cities, where it is necessary to have a car, the public transportation that DOES exist is under-utilized, because everyone has a car. So there is no incentive to improve the public transportation; but noone wants to use it until it improves (they'd rather use their cars, which are more reliable).
Make sense?
I do agree that USians see a higher standard of living as "basic" than Indians do.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Johnny, Have you met any engineer from Indian Institute of Technology? He or She will cut short your delusions. Foreign programmers are as smart or better than you.
No has mentioned deflation. This is what really needs to happen in the US: everything costs too much, because everything else costs too much.
Once there aren't enough people around making enough money to buy Starbucks lattes, $30 meals, and $1400 apartments in the Boston suburbs, and $30,000 cars, then something will have to give: either we'll get more protectionism from the boobs in Congress (likely), or they'll all collectively understand economics and roll back the regulatory state so the US can again compete in the global market (unlikely).
Either way, lots of people will be ticked, but the first case is (sadly) more likely to get them votes, at least until Reality(TM) finally sets in.
I am preparing for the day when my real wages fall more than 50%. Are you?
Kyle
[ home ]
After a couple of years unemployment, I was looking around for a charity that would take $2000 of my money and make poor people self-sufficient (not just give them grain). Then I realised:
Give a man a fish, you can feed him for a day
Give a man a net and he can catch his own fish everyday
Give a man a computer, education and Internet connection, and he will take away your job.
As an act of charity I am free here in the socialistish UK to give away my job in this manner if I choose to do so. In the United States you are NOT free to become unemployed despite what it says in your constitution, because you'll be giving up the right to good health. So for the people in the United States, telecommuting can be the gift of IT to the starving people of the World, I am proud to be in IT, even if it costs me my job.
It's been US culture to move around for jobs, such as move from the Bay Area to other areas when jobs become scarce. Why not move to India? It's American culture to move to where the jobs are instead of sitting in Bay Area and moaning about rent.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
As to your second question; No.
I do use a press, but the coffee is still pretty gross by mid-afternoon. By that time, I'm just looking for the boost. Taste be dammed.
Right now, I am getting by on about $90, but I am always looking for more ways to cut expenses. Were I not managing a team of developers, I would telecommute myself. I'm trying to put enough money into investments that I can be out of the Software industry in 2 years. If you have a suggestion on how I can milk another 20K, I'm all ears.
LOL! Another Al Gore voter speaks!
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Actually the way I see it is that the Star Bucks employee gets $6 and I get $22+ precisely because It doesn't take 4 years of college and 10,000 plus hours of focused study and work to pull a mocha.
Not these days. There is more demand for retail workers than programmers, at least in the US.
Further, you don't really need college to be a programmer. It looks better on a resume, but is not really necessary if you have the nack and are a self-learner.
Table-ized A.I.
I have done that too. The thing that you missed is that you were BOTH in the office and were able to talk very easily. With telecommuting, how do you get people to use AIM or something like that? How do you get management, who does not want to spend money on conference calls, to buy video cams or any collaborative software?? How do you manage someone who works remotely where there is only communication via phone call direct or email? Some people here have mentioned solutions, but more often managers that barely can manage people in an office are surely not going to manage people remoetly effectivly.
I think you missed the point of my post. My point is that it is harder for a manager to manage remote people than to manage people in an office. That is just a fact! If someone is in the office, you know EXACTLY what time they come in, what time they leave and what they do, when they are away from their desk and you can monitor their internet habbits easier, (filters on fierwall and logging) as well as require them to come to those useless meetings. Managers can 'see' productivity.
When you get into outsourcing thing, there is someone else to do the manageing, of the remote group. It is not one person, it is a group, that is in a remote office. Managers like dealing with other managers and have less problems with this kind of setup.
I'm not saying that it is right, I'm saying that is what happens.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Dude, you're an idiot, and completely missed my point.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You do realize that with proper software processes, the DESIGN of the software is separate from the implementation? The people in India aren't writing the specification.. they are just doing the code monkey work. They get a spec, and have to write the appropriate code.
Like an assembly line.
No pun intended.
Software is becoming commoditized......
When I have a specification for something I want written, I don't want INNOVATION, I want solid code, period. I don't really care if you think some feature needs to be added, that's not what you are paid for. You are not the designer.
And, in the case where this foreign company IS being asked to come up with something... you feel that the foreign worker will not put as much effort into his job as a local one is? Do you think he doesn't appreciate his job? Why is that? Do you think he feels jaded that his job doesn't pay as much as yours?
Since when are laborers innovative?
When the servers crash, I try to fix them, but then my manager comes along and says, "You have to fill in this form before you reboot the server". I tell him that there are customers waiting for the production server to come back up, but he doesn't care. It's long been a dream of mine to form a fist, say "Do you have a violence request form?" and then I punch him in the stomach.
Webcam and screen-capture once every 120 seconds solves all this, of course it should have a warning light and 5 second delay because you don't want to be caught picking your nose or with your hand up your ass.A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Come on, LibertineR is either a troll or a total narcissist. In either case he is not interested in the point presented by anyone else. The original topic was outsorce vs telecommute and his only (off)topic is "I"
Consider yourself a karma millionaire in comparison.
BINGO! This is exactly my point. When they are the managers it is harder to get rid of them then for them to get rid of you.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I'd be willing to work for 3rd world wages and live there, as long as I didn't have to worry about my American college loans. I got suckered into getting a CS degree because that supposedly would get me a job (since knowledge and experience weren't enough). Oh well, I was naive, and I'm paying for it. Of course, I could return the favor to coporate America by moving to the 3rd world and forgetting about my loans, but something tells me a lot of people think that would be wrong.
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
There is still hope with the smaller companies...in fact, when I hear slashdotters talk about opportunities that serve small businesses, the tone typically sounds upbeat.
Although, a large company may cut 80% of their IT workers via outsourcing, a small company with 2 developers, will not be able to downsize their IT staff by 80%.
Also, large organizations will still need IT-savvy people to manage the outsourcing. So, if you want to code, you can work for a small company. If you want to work for a large company, you can still work towards being one of the well paid managers of the complex outsourcing efforts.
Finally, outsourcing can not be done 100%. Outsourcing sounds good and easy on paper, but in reality, companies that outsource are putting themselves at the mercy of another organization that may not always have their best interests at heart.
A potentially interesting separate topic would be stories of outsourcers using their leverage to negotiate themselves a greater piece of the pie.
Come on, LibertineR is either a troll or a total narcissist.
... did I mention my cars?
I make more money than anyone else, and since that means I am smarter than everyone else I must point it out as much as possible. Did I mention my cars?
I get my money for nothing and chicks for free, too, LOSER!! And, I don't need to post anything *technical* as I am too busy being a DOTNET ARCHITECT.
Just pay no attention to the fact that I made all my money shilling for MS, YOU ARE ALL UNEMPLOYED, USELESS COMMUNISTS! And I am a DOTNET ARCHITECT, which is the most intellectually challenging job *ever*. And I work harder than anyone else! I am also smarter than anyone else because
No one can stand me in real life, as they are all leeches and lazy slobs, so I need to try to grandstand on slashdot instead. You better be impressed, or I will call you names!!
LOSERS!!
The probability of an Indian/pakistani war is selectively ignored in the outsourcing decision. The "savings" to the IT budget often translates into bonus/options $$$$ to the managers who make the decision. Other things that are selectively ignored:
Privacy concerns----who cares if our ssn's and birthdates are in the hands of chinese and Indian/pakistani outsourcers.
Financial extortion:"Now that we have all your data I think we can discuss raising our rates now"
macroeconomics: The flow of capital out of the country doesnt have the same multiple effect through the US economy, and tax rates will go up to make up the loss of downstream tax revenue.
I work for a big multinational company (based half in US, half in Europe). I live in Russia and develop software for it (nothing too fancy, though). My immediate business supervisors are in Ireland, many of my colleagues I closely work with are in France and UK. A thick enough intranet link, instant messaging, email and ocassional IP phone calls work very well to keep us in touch with one another. Commuting from my home to Moscow office takes 20 to 40 mins.
:)
We do have local managers that take care about workplaces, office, etc, and local sysadmins -- but my project's head is 3000km away and it's no problem. Higher-level managers show up in different sites several times a year to meet people face to face.
If moving most of development and support to this scheme is any indication, this approach works
I would not like to work directly from home as much, because of more distractions -- I tried this for several months.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Not at that time. Ineligible because she was unable to carry enough credits.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
.... As long as you keep electing people that will not open the borders to migrant workers, there is no chance other goverments will do likewise.
In Mexico we have a severe shortage of skilled people, many people that have no clue about computers but that at least can RTFM become IT experts, nevertheless whne Presiden Fox of Mexico proposed a treaty to allow free flow of workers between both countries he was politely ignored by the leaders of the globalization movement (which I understand it are seizing new oporutnities in Iraq at the moment).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Better code? Like what? Like Windows? (and if it is all written by Indians, then where is your better mnanagement?).
Better management? Like what? Lieke ENRON?
Better comminication? What do you mean with that?
I think some people overestimate the US advantages over other competing companies non based there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... that 'irony' is a synonym of 'ferrous'.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Let's make everybody equal, then it will be fair. Of course, some people are better off because they're smarter or just darn luckier than others. That's not fair either.
Not that I agree with the conservatives, but the left, with its envy-motivated zero-sum economics, cult of entitlement and denial of any form of individual responsibility is no better. If it was, the Soviet Union, North Korea and Cuba would have had H1-B schemes 20 years ago.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I dunno, how about a family of four, for whom the "food" portion is likely a higher proportion of their expenses than for the single-no-dependents guy?
Fast food is expensive stuff. Even if you're starving to death and need to maximize calories-per-dollar, you're better off buying a stick of butter, a pound of sugar, and a small bag of flour to stick it all together.
Or burgers - Lean ground beef: $3.00/lb ($0.75 for 1/4lb). Egg - $0.10 each. Onion - $0.25. Buns - $0.25 each. Spices, condiments, electricity/gas, $0.25 tops. That's a $6-8 ($8 in Silicon Valley ;) restaurant burger, dripping with juices and sticking out the side of the bun, for a little over the cost of a Whopper.
If you gotta drive to the Burger King as opposed to picking it up at work, doing it at home is even cheaper :) If it's time you're worried about, put in one hour on the weekend to make 2-3 pounds' worth, then freeze the patties. On Burger Night, thaw in fridge starting the morning of Burger Night. Total prep time from thawed patty to kickass burger = 15-20 min, tops.
I can whip up a batch of cookies in under an hour. Same calories as store-bought, no artificial ingredients, comparable quality, and about a quarter of the price.
I've got no sprog, but believe that food preferences are learned behavior. If you raise your sprog on homebrew good food, and they probably won't even like the fast food as much.
And what makes jobs requiring a college degree more important than a job that doesn't?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If you can be idiot enough to wish for someone to steal my property, then I hope you lose whatever job you have and have to move back in with your obviously drunk or stupid parents, who taught you nothing. Asshole.
I will check that first thing Monday morning! It sounds like a wonderful idea!
Done and dusted. Message put accross without anybody being hurt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"My friend's company" actually made an attempt to outsource a (web) project to "another country" and after waiting too long for the code, and a few unanswered international phone calls and emails we finally got the code we were waiting for.
It was crap.
You want to pay someone $2 an hour (~4K/year) to make crappy web code?
Find yourself a high school kid.
Or a poor college geek with no life.
At least at that point they are right around the corner, and they can actually come on-site and fix any problems.
And if they end up being really good and writing some good apps for you, you're investing in your future as they may end up working full time for you or at least being a good IT contact when they get out of school.
YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
As my pappy always said:
"If someone's giving away diamond rings for 50 cents a piece, chances are... they ain't worth 50 cents."
You want to send GM plants to Mexico?
Try to get someone down there to work a 50 hour week.
Yeah, the B.S. you mentioned happens ALL THE TIME in corporate America. I hate it, despise it, loathe it, and am tired of living it. That's why I'm working for a real small business literally running out of a guy's garage, and I'm working weekends on getting my own PC sales/repair/consulting business off the ground.
In the long run, I get little job satisfaction from an employer that's too brain-dead to care about my actual productivity, and only wants to see my physical presence between set hours.
I'm the type of person who is willing to put in much more than the standard "40 hour week" if it means a tangible financial return on my time investment. I won't do it for people who don't care or act like it's "just expected of me".
Someone asked why I wanted to work on that training video at home? Well - I have better equipment for doing so at home than my boss has where I work. Why fight his outdated hardware and poor quality video camera, when I own better and faster stuff? Besides, I'm more comfortable working on this type of project as inspiration hits me. I might be up at 1AM and suddenly get a great idea for a segment I want to put in. I don't want to feel constrained by only being able to do what I think of during business hours (while being interrupted by other things going on in the company).