Slashdot Mirror
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."
Well, /. does not source 'new' news, it merely brings stories together in a mish-mash that is more-often-than-not revevant to the /. target audience.
/. is not a live feed from Reuters, if you want that then hire a Reuters machine, this sort of story on /. to sit back and think about, a week or even month here or there doesn't matter much.
Does it matter if this story is highlighted one week later than another? It is relevant but even this article doesn't bring some hot-off-the-press story, it is a sit back and think about it piece. The tech outsourcing trend, as mentioned in the article, goes well back to the 90s, so if an opinion piece is published now, or last month or next week, it is equally relevant as we're talking about long term trend.
To extend your argument would be to say "why didn't BusinessWeek come up with this idea sooner?", why not a month sooner if all the facts were still in place,or a month before that? Or, as this is not new information, just a collection of old information with some insight, why couldn't you have done it?
karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go.
What really kills me about outsourcing is that companies don't realize just how they are damaging their future in so many ways. I will give just two.
1) You lay someone off here in the U.S. as an example. Guess what, that is money that is not going to be used to buy products that most likely the parent company makes to some degree. Does someone in India buy dishwashers, tablesaw, etc. Not to be mean but not in the volume as here.
2) Tribal knowledge that is desperately needed to stay within a company for future development. That is all gone, and personally the quality that comes from an outsourced job is short of atrocious. That comes from watching quite a few projects at two different companies go completey down in flames.
Sorry, outsourcing is going to tear this economy in the U.S. to pieces. Quick short-term gain for a long-term failure!!!!
Well, it's not news in the original sense of the word, but it seems to be yet another example of the other kind of news, the institutional news. This means that something becomes news if an institution that's known to be a news source -- Slashdot, for example, or Google News (they also list(ed?) press releases as news) -- reports it as such. Being reported by such a source somehow makes a fact more true, more reliable (If it isn't on the news, it didn't happen, right?) See, for example, how people still feel the need to read about a car crash they witnessed. Or how several hundred people felt the need to read about Saddam Hussein's capture on Slashdot -- they probably wouldn't have believed it otherwise...
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
When you and everyone else will pay more for locally produced goods then the Chinese crap at Walmart they'll change.
We want everything to be cheap. Extremely cheap. And even cheaper. As soon as a manufacturer starts demanding money for US-made quality people being to bitch about high prices and coporate greed. Nobody is paying a fucking dime more just because it's US-made. Why should we do ? Slave child-workers will to it cheaply in Tibet or Taiwan. Oh, and evil company outsources my job to India, these evil bastards, they are just in for the money, these bloodsuckers !
Take e.g. Apple. Saving US jobs by US goods in the US. But when they charge prices to substain these US jobs everybody whines about teh evil Steve Jobs. Just look at the frontpage and the "iPod battery costs money= TEH EVIL" stories. And this bigotry doesn't even rule Slashdot, it rules the whole country and makes it on the frontpages of NY Times and Newsweek.
Outsourcing justs means: we get what we pay for.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
As a recent Ph.D. graduate in Chemical Engineering, this is nothing new. When I entered graduate school 10% of my fellow class mates were US citizens. Our finest graduate schools in the technical fields (engineering, physics, medicine) have been training foreign students for a long time now.
Global workers trained here are just as effective and talented as native US workers. The notion that US citizens are somehow more innovative is just that a notion. They get the same education what US citizens get. They are equally as qualified, and WILL work for lower salaries in their native contries. The real reason that US students aren't going into these fields is that they don't have the work ethic or the dedication for it. They would rather sell wireless phones for commision and make a quick buck than educate themselves for the future of our country.
In terms of solutions to this problem:
The answer in NOT legislation. This problem has to be solved by the US providing technical people where it is obvious that they are the best people for the job.
In terms of developing countries: In particular this is a great opportunity for India where they can bring about social change in their country. Well at least until some time down the road when we outsource their jobs to some other developing country.
Outsourcing to other geographical locations is not new and has happened to manufacturing, and it is happening with technology now.
That's all well and good, but if your job was the one making the product at $1, and they decided to outsource it to [insert country here] for production and you're now unemployed and have no income, does it matter that the item which used to cost $1 is now $0.50? You can't afford it because you're worrying about your [insert payment schedule here] bills.
I am not a protectionist/communist/anti-freetrade person. I actually think capitolism is the way to go, but unless we get our act together and start inventing new technologies and exploiting them here, we are in for some rough times ahead.
WTF? Over?
Speaking from experience with H-1B contactors and L-1s working in the U.S., the cost savings these companies seem to "realize" for I/T is not as rosy as one would think. Most managers that make these decisions can barely understand a balance sheet and an income statement, but they can certainly read a stock price. When outsourcing looks like an option, you have to look at all the hidden costs that lurk about doing it before you dive in.
Unlike unkilled and semi-skilled manufacturing jobs, where the tasks performed are route and routine, a lot of programming jobs require heavy amounts of cooperating and coordinating to get a successfull result. The proper analogy to draw with your client is that of the homebuilder/architect and the homebuyer. Although the programmers may be Mexican immigrants who work less than minimum wage and get paid cash under the table to send to their poor families in Guadalajara, these folks still need the same amount of (if not more) specific direction to build a home that will be fit for you and your family to live in. Translating back to I/T, you may be mired in many, many more meetings, buried in email, and endless phone calls with your overseas colleages just to keep the train on its tracks and moving in the right direction. Be careful what you outsource.
Ever heard the old addage "too much of anything is not a good thing?" Same principle here. A proper mix of outsourced labor and internal I/T staff can build successfull solutions with less cost than the tranditional MIS department (in less time is another story). Some jobs are perfectly suited to be outsourced, such as the DBA, data-warehouse specialists and some of the programming. The traditional PC helpdesk has also been successfully outsourced overseas, but you better hope that your callers can tolerate the Bombay accent on the other end of the phone.
Some jobs cannot be outsourced without expecting a downturn in quality or a corresponding increase in time spent doing your project, such as technical writing, quality assurance, project and program management and many other jobs that require intense amounts of personal and communication skills. Hardware, network and software installs should NEVER be done by outsourced personnel. You also want to keep the programmers who are working on the big things, such as architecture shifts and regulatory changes (e.g. HIPAA) on staff for the tight projects where you don't have the luxury of time on your side.
Outsourcing CAN be done, without firing your entire I/T staff, alienating everybody and stirring up bad blood. Find jobs for the folks who are being placed out or train them to do the jobs you aren't sending out of the company.
And even when you get to the state where you can do offshore and realize a gain, you still have to keep busy monitoring everything much more vigilantly. Outsourcing companies charge vastly different prices for the same tasks, and contracts don't span very long. There is also the question about what happens to your intellectual property when it's going out of your country's borders: if you are compromised from an overseas vendor you may be left with little or no recourse (which is why so many CEOs are lobbying Congress). The cost of securing a favorable contract with an overseas parter also adds to the cost, unless you are doing it through a U.S. firm (but don't think that those international legal firms' fees WON'T be passed down to YOU). I doubt that most PHBs will get outsourcing done right without paying a large sum of dough to outsourcing specialists (hmm maybe a new career option to layed off I/T workers?).
Where does this experience come from, you ask? Well, I was replaced by Indians several years ago, which then followed up with a massive layoff at the company I used to work for. They are paying less money for the labor, but since I left they have had more projects fail miserably than before. They may have let off with benes and pension plans, but they traded it in for huge sums of airline fees to sh
A year ago I got laid off from my high-tech job -- not because it got outsourced, but due to industry consolidation. Many of the headquarters strategy jobs ARE redundent when two large companies merge. Fortunately, I was in a position to retire and am back in graduate school, studying economics this time. There's a fascinating long-term economic question implicit in your situation, and mine.
Your job, you say, can't be offshored because you have to be present to do it. However, the students that are the root source for your job have to have enough money that they can afford to be there (your description is almost certainly college of some sort, not K-12). In many cases Mom and Dad are paying some or all of the tuition bills. If Mom's high-paying research job goes to India, they will have a harder time paying those bills. Fewer students at school, fewer sysadmin jobs. Presumably the Indian researcher can now afford to send their kids to college (in India, they're not being paid enough to send them to the US), where there will be increased demand for your type of sysadmin. Indirectly, your job can be sent offshore.
When a big multinational corporation moves jobs from one location to another, the demand for goods and services at the first location must decrease. We have seen this operate on a small scale -- the big factory that employed many of the townsfolk closes, and soon after that other businesses start to close or scale back because demand decreased. Now we get to see if it is possible for it to happen on a national scale -- if enough companies send enough jobs to India and China, can they cause significant decreases in demand for goods and services in the US?
I think it was Keynes who first described "the corporate paradox of thrift." While a move that lowers costs may be good for an individual firm, if all firms make similar moves it may be bad for all the firms collectively IF the cost savings is translated into decreased demand for goods and services. TTBOMK, this has never actually happened. Improved productivity eliminated an enormous number of farm jobs 100 years ago -- they were replaced by manufacturing (and yes, I'm sure there were people who really wanted to be farmers who permenantly lost that type of job). Cheap overseas labor and improved technology eliminated a lot of manufacturing jobs -- they were replaced by jobs in growth fields such as IT. Will there be new growth areas this time, or will we see permenantly higher unemployment and lower incomes?