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BusinessWeek on Outsourcing

Posted by michael on from the learning-hindi dept.

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."

5 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. Natural step. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Only jobs that gives a high revenue can be done by people with high salaries (US&EU for example).

    When the price drops on, for example, software is has to be done by a lot cheaper labour.

    There will not be many software engineering or consulting jobs in the US in ten years or so.

    This can't be a surprise to anyone knowing what open source is all about.

  2. Getting out of IT... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've already planned my exit strategy. I am getting out of information technology next year. There is just no future in the US. Either you work for a small company and risk getting laid off due to the lack of profit or you work for a Fortune 500 company and risk getting laid off for no reason other than some Gold Collar worker thought it was a good idea.

    This will not stop until we have leadership in this country that actually seems to care. Until then, I am leaving IT professionally and making a career switch into one of my hobbies, which is something that cannot be outsourced to India.

    The U.S. is heading straight towards becoming a land of a permanent serf class, a sort of neo-fascist aristocracy ruling body over a nation of paupers.

    1. Re:Getting out of IT... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This will not stop until we have leadership in this country that actually seems to care. Until then, I am leaving IT professionally and making a career switch into one of my hobbies, which is something that cannot be outsourced to India.

      I'm staying in IT, because as an academic sysadmin with a Unix specialty, my job can only be done by someone in the building. I can manipulate my servers and some of the workstations from home -- but that's only about 1/4 of the job. The rest involves face-to-face support of the users, which cannot be done by someone who doesn't show up. The last guy who had my position didn't bother to show up, and so I now have what I think is my idea job.

      Sure, and Indian could do my job. And since many of the professors, students, and members of my community are Indian, it wouldn't surprise me if an Indian were hired in a similar capacity as myself. But, he or she would have to work at our location -- not from India.

      We do have a source of cheap high-skilled labor here, though. I get a "grown up" salary, but when we need extra help, we can hire students for a few dollars an hour. The students who are working for us now are extremely good, and more than earn their wages. Unfortunately for my department, they will both be graduating and moving on to real jobs with real pay soon -- but that's the deal for both of us, and I hope that the experience they get while working for me serves them well when they move on.

  3. I've dealt with Wipro-GE in Bangalore. by djh101010 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I worked for GE for well over a decade. I have dealt with the very people at GE-Wipro in Bangalore that this article glows about. My experience differs from that of the author.

    In the beginning, the helpdesk was manned by GE employees, at the HQ of the business I worked in, in the US. Helpdesk is a hard position to keep staffed with quality people, for the reasons we all know. But, those pesky GE employees were _expensive_, so they walked the helpdesk out the door one day, and brought in an outside contractor known for doing helldesk outsourcing. And there was much rejoicing (at the VP level). Problem is, helpdesk quality fell drastically, as there was a crop of new people who didn't know the intricacies of the systems they were supposed to be supporting.

    Soon, (coinciding, I suppose, with the end of the contract with Keane), it was noticed that the helpdesk was sucking. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, they decided to compound it. With great fanfare and jubilation, they were pleased to announce that the helldesk was being reworked. Oh, by the way, it's being run by a company called "Wipro" in Bangalore, India.

    Initially, there were many problems. Eventually, it got worse. Helpdesk analysts who could not be understood by a western ear, utterly wrong advice, that sort of thing. One coworker of mine, having a bad battery (the Dell explode-o-cell model), called to get a new one. He was told to delete his hardware profiles and that would take care of it. Not just wrong, but damagingly wrong, and not even vaguely logical. Yeah, a battery is "hardware", but that's pushing it. The analysts would identify themselves as "Jim" and "Bob". Just this is insulting - as if we can't learn how to pronounce or recognize the name of someone from a different culture than ours? It's just a sign of not understanding the needs and/or culture of the clients.

    A final note - the article seems to be holding this up as a glowing success. I think it's more than coincidence that GE stock has been consistantly underperforming the market for many years - since the day Jack Welch announced his replacement, in fact. GE was succeeding because of Welch, not because his replacement is sacrificing quality for cost, calling it a "Six Sigma quality initiative", and ignoring the failures that result.

    Hopefully, business executives who read this article, will do a sanity check & see how GE is doing these days, before deciding to emulate a formerly glorious company's unproven CEO's failing strategy.

  4. Blaming poor quality of Indian education by gubachwa · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Secondly, the quality of Indian schools is no where to the same degree of western equivalents, and hence those diploma mills they call universities are no more than trade schools.
    I don't believe that this is entirely true. One exception that immediately comes to mind is the fact that the researchers who discovered that PRIMES are in P were at an Indian University. See this article. The following is an excerpt from it:
    The admissions procedure for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is rigorous and selective. There is a two-stage common procedure called the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to one of the seven branches of the IIT and two other institutions. Last year 150,000 Indians applied for admission, and after an initial three-hour examination in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, 15,000 were invited to a second test consisting of a two-hour examination in each of the three subjects. Finally 2,900 students were awarded places, of which 45 were for computer science at the very renowned IIT in Kanpur. It is no wonder that good money is earned in India for preparing candidates for the dreaded JEE, and graduates of the IIT are eagerly hired worldwide.
    Fact is, there probably are some very smart developers working in India, and there are probably some not-so-smart ones. Exactly like it is in North America. The difference is, smart or not, they will all to work for less than their western counter-parts. I suspect the reason for poor quality can be attributed to the same management attitude that lead to the outsourcing in the first place: management wants things done faster and cheaper. This will lead to unrealistic schedules, which, in turn, leads to poor quality products.