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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
... 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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!
There's a number of ways to categorize what makes someone in the "working" class and what doesn't.
One is to observe that even someone on welfare in the US has a higher standard of living than many people who work 70 hours a week in much of the Third World - and that this is a consequence of the incredible difference in purchasing power and wage power between, say, the US and Indonesia. After all, we buy their labor to produce shoes and clothes that we buy at a tiny fraction of our own labor costs - that differential is a "privilege"/advantage that anyone in the US enjoys. Meanwhile, the cost for first-world-produced goods and services remains extremely high for much of the 3rd world (a Uruguayan friend of mine laments how a single GameCube game costs half the entire monthly salary of his wife, a biologist at a Uruguayan university.)
However, another way to look at it is alienation of labor - do you own the fruits of your own work? By this more classic Marxist description, even some 6-figure earning people are "working" class. Other metrics like this are whether one owns one's home, or how many paychecks away from homelessness one is. The capital-gains model is one of these ideas: when one's wealth and power comes from "ownership of the means of production," then one can be thought of as in the ruling/upper classes.
And another way is more cultural, dealing with type of work: a plumber making over 100K a year is considered by some more working-class than a low/mid-level manager making 60K a year in a small company, and both are considered "lower" than a college professor making 45K a year. There's an idea called "cultural capital" that expresses the idea that certain types of work have a cachet that isn't reflected in the amount of money they earn.
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.
With English like that, I bet it's hard for them to understand you.
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.
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!
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
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/
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.
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.
Dude, who codes in fluent and clear English?
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
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!
No, all that was true before he moved to Alaska. What he really proved was that he was willing to walk away. That's what gave him the leverage in negotiations.
I gave up Kobe beef, and am now just getting by on USDA prime. The horror!
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.
>
>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.
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.
Yeah; I get the drift - you're one of those Einstiens who thinks that 250 million Americans can treat themselves as self-promoted companies, and we'll all be better off for it.
There's perhaps 1% of OUR industry that can do that; and other industries have even smaller percentages of self-promoters. The whole concept is ludicrous on its face; this is not a solution for the masses, even in IT.
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.)
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
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.
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
BTW, dido is in the Philippines (not mentioned in the post).
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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
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.
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.
Outsourcing means giving away the whole problem (and it sounds good in management circles too).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I worked for a US credit card company (a Dean Whitter subsidiary) that did just that -- they shut down heir offices on the coasts and built two new Ops Centers, one in Northeast Tennessee, and one in South Dakota. Then they replaced all their $50k/yr+bennies city dwellers with $7/hr college students working part-time.
I heard a couple years ago that they shut down the center in Tennessee where I'd worked and outsourced those jobs to a firm in India... Don't know if the one in Sioux Falls is still going or not.
Wonder where they'll ship the jobs when it's time for the Indians to get screwed like we did, and the New Yorkers before us?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"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...
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.