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.