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The Changing Face of Offshore Programming
teambpsi writes "BusinesWeek Online has an opt-ed piece on the trend in offshore programming pricing going up, with domestic rates going down. As a contractor, I've seen the downward pressure on contract gigs now to rates lower than what I was charging over five years ago. Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore, I wonder if this might be the start of some bigger trend -- maybe 'buy american' could be our new battle cry ;)"
Dell Computers recently announced that it was bringing its customer service back on-shore...
Another poster spoke of the specifics of Dell, so I will not touch that. However, Capital One is beginning to bring back [some of the] work it mailed off to the other side of the planet, as they have been losing accounts hand over fist by customers pissed off about not being able to converse with support personnel due to a language gap. Sure, the labor is cheaper, but is it cheap enough to compensate for lost business? Apparently not, in the case of CapOne.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
I don't know how the legality of the system works, but you can sue people for breach of contract and such here, I do not know if you can do that with overseas contractors, is it more of a "buyer beware" methodology?
International legal battles can be done (though only if the amount in contention is over a certain minimum), but it's very, very expensive.
This is NOT "Keynesian" economics. As written, I doubt the poster has a firm grasp on the differences in classical and keynesian theory.
Why is it ok for large companies to benefit from freetrade but wrong for regular people to?
How much time and money do you spend lobbying Congress? I thought so.
As for your doctor comment, some hospitals are sending xrays/mri scans oversees to be read.
Processing of medical records goes overseas too. There was a recent story on Slashdot about a woman in Pakistan basically holding sensitive medical data hostage over a contract dispute. Also, within the last year or two an M.D. in Australia or Hawaii or somewhere operated on a patient in the U.S. with a robotic arm and a fat data pipe. I think that was more proof of concept, but still, they may as well outsource surgery now too. Hire a nurse at a fraction of an M.D.'s salary to oil the robot and turn it off if it goes on a crazy killing spree, and save some money :-)
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I don't think you realize what "Keynesian economics" is.
Also called "Reaganomics," it's when you run up a deficit during times of an economic slump. It encourages the economy to rebound and more quickly get back on its feet. If you balance it out by underspending when the economy is good, you average out to stronger growth (because if you spend too much when the economy is good, you'll overheat).
What you're thinking of is perhaps David Ricardo, who developed the idea of comparative advantage. Even though one country A might be absolutely better at doing everything than country B, country A can't do everything, so it specializes in what it does best (activity 1) and country B do the things that country A does well but not best (activity 2) and trade for can trade activity 2 for activity 1, making everybody better off.
But what you're talking about above is more like assymetrical information, where you don't exactly know the true cost of the product or what the market is willing to bear, so until it's resolved, prices are unstable.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
BusinesWeek Online has an opt-ed piece...
I believe the phrase you're looking for is 'op-ed' as in 'opinion-editorial'. Used to describe articles in newspapers that express a point of view usually opposing the paper's official editorial stance and published opposite the editorial page.
This is neither an 'opt-ed' piece nor an 'op-ed' piece. It's just a column.
China is communist in name only. They're a capitalist dictatorship.
The real reason Dell moved corporate support back to the US was because they have run out of the engineering talent pool they have so proudly talked about using. This talent is moving quickly to non-voice BPO work with companies such as IBM, MicroSoft, Oracle, Accenture, etc. They have been using liberal arts grads, undergrads, etc. Computer support is difficult without the background. We've seen this before. Dell's follow-up announcement the day after stating they were committed to India was to quell investor concerns. As stated elsewhere, investors only care about one thing. Lehman Brothers cancellation of their in-house support required knowledge base with Sybase, something WiPro and TCS couldn't meet in the end. Indians are good at this - staying on top of the "hot" technologies. I don't think that the expertise (that comes with years of experience) exists there yet. BTW - Some companies are touting US support for all customers. MPC (formally Micron) made such an announcement recently. They took a jab right at Dell stating their top support is not just reserved to corporate customers.
No. Running up a defecit is not Keynesian economics. Running up a deficit either during a slump or to encourage a slumping sector/industry is called Keynesian Pump Priming. Keynesian economics is a complex economic theory practiced by many economists today. Keynes was a visionary in the field of economics whose theory would later help to explain many of the economic irregularities present in the 70's and 80's around the world. If you learn economics from an undergrad-level text, you're generally learning from Keynes and those who refined his theories.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
In as much as it's got a 4000 year old university system, an excellent mathematical history, etc. etc. etc.
Those cultural institutions were left largely intact by the British, unlike the Chinese equivalents which were uprooted so drastically by the 20 years of civil war, the cultural revolution etc.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
This article from a South Carolina newspaper sums up what infuriates me about the entire situation. Here we have Federal and state programs such as food stamps being outsourced overseas. One wonders how many unemployed Americans actually having to use the food stamps might be qualified to work on the help desks--not to mention the other projects described in the article. The politician who rants about "using tax dollars to erode the tax base" makes a valid point.
Then there was this article not long ago on Slashdot, describing a Pakistani medical transcriptionist who decided to cash in on the Great American Dollar Giveaway by blackmailing a patient from a California medical center. At least a US transcriber could've been tracked down and legal sanctions brought to bear.
I think there are some fundamental issues that transcend coding. How much are we willing to give up in the legendary new "race to the bottom?"
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
"Currently, while companies can easily move money around the world for hiring in cheaper countries (aka globalization), the free movement of labor is very restricted. Perhaps freeing this up would attract labor to the US, which, while cheaper, would create a less extreme situation, since these immigrant employees would still have to be paid with a US cost-of-living in mind."
That's exactly the problem with the current form of globalization -- it is too one-sided in favor of the corporations. Companies can drive down labor costs by being able to send work to cheaper locations, but workers can't so easily push up their wages by moving to countries where the work is more lucrative.
If Indians were as free to move to the US, Canada, Europe, or Australia as the products of their work can, the employers in India would have to pay more to keep them from fleeing, which would decrease the wage difference between India and the other countries.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
This is pretty much just splitting hairs. Many people refurn to such practices as "Keynesian spending." Just because it wasn't newton who investigated much of simple harmonic motion doesn't mean it isn't a "Newtonian" system.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.