BusinessWeek on Outsourcing

hotsauce writes "BusinessWeek has a couple of stories on the outsourcing of white collar jobs to India. One is a cover story on GE's fundamental research lab in Bangalore where scientists work on everything from the aerodynamics of turbines to plastics' molecular structure. The other is commentary on "America's worst-kept secret", and the effects of the upcoming elections on it."

Comments

From an Indian: its more serious than y'all think

[arvindn]

I'm Indian, and I'm just graduating in CS so I keep on top of the trends in tech outsourcing. I think /.ers are actually underestimating the threat from India. For example, one of the most common arguments I see is that all the low level jobs will get outsourced but all the innovative jobs will stay within America. This article shows its not true. Fundamental research is starting to be outsourced as well. India produces huge numbers of Ph.Ds and other highly qualified people as well, but most of them migrate to the US. But recently the migration trend has gone down, and even reversed in some cases. This has opened the floodgates for high-level outsourcing.

Another mistaken argument is that there is only a finite pool of labor in India and so an equilibrium will be reached soon. This won't happen. Because the current level of penetration of computers and internet connections in India is extremely low (e.g: 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband). As this situation improves, it greatly decrease the barrier to entering the IT workforce in India and will continue to bring in an army of new workers for years to come.

As with the open source revolution, the internet changed everything.

Sell at a loss

[nuggz]

Walmart doesn't sell at a loss.
They sell with slim margins, they also get lower prices due to volume.
Their selling price in some cases is even lower then other companies purchase price from the distributer.

Think about selling at a loss, first what do you gain. Secondly how do you explain to the owners that you lost money by selling below cost?

Re:Getting out of IT...

[Simonetta]

What does "nigger rich" mean? Are you a racist?

This is an American expression from the past racist days, yes, but the previous writer used it in reference to a false sense of wealth engendered by current American automobile marketing practices.

The origin of the expression is the still-continuing practice of offering deals to undereducated working-class minorities that seem spectacular at first but turn out to be financial disasters later. At the time that these expressions were used in the USA, the better-educated white majority was expected to be aware enough not make such mistakes. Using these 'Jim Crow' expressions in the current politically-correct environment serves to give the writer the ability to extraordinaryly accentuate a point at the cost of being labeled a 'backward racist' by his audience.

For example, in the case referred to by the writer, a car company will make a giant bloated Sport Utility Vehicle from an old truck design for $15,000. Then they will market it people with misleading television satuation ads for $30,000 - $35,000. People are offered $4000 cash back immediately and no interest payments for a year.

What happens is that people buy these things to get the cash now and the low payments for a year. Then they find that the vehicle depreciates at a much faster rate than the payment schedule for the vehicle.

In a few years they have a giant gas-guzzler that is worth $18,000 in trade but for which they still owe $26,000. When it starts to break down, they get stuck with huge repair bills. If they go to trade it in, they find they must pay the difference between the cost and the current worth with a loan with very-high interest rates.

I believe that this is what the writer means by "n****r rich".

Americans are a bit too quick to dump their colorful but nasty expressions, and a bit too slow to dump the underlining racist attitudes that created them. But they are nowhere near a racist as they were only a generation ago.