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Jobs to India -- A Broad Look
dumpster_dave writes "Wired has an excellent 7 page article on the current and future trend and nature of IT outsourcing from the United States. The conclusion: the smell of inevitability--the economy will survive, though your job, as it is currently, will likely not. Outsourcing is expected to expand from Service and code projects to the creative aspects as well, with obvious correlations experienced in the manufacturing industry during the 70s and 80s. An excellent read that provides good coverage of the perspectives of players on all sides."
Outsourcing everything to India was in vogue around '97 or '98. It didn't work then and it's not going to work now. But everyone forgets the problems and history repeats itself.
If you don't like this fad, wait five minutes...
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
I was just reading up on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and how we have to be responsible for everyone who ever touches or affects our digital documents (and we are financially responsible for damages real or perceived). Our lawyers seem to think that if you read the law strictly (as any lawyer trying to sue would) that means that any offshoring that results in any damage or dissemination of data could cause us an enormous amount of money. We already carry a $100 million bond against accidental release of data (we deal in multi-billion dollar international contracts) and our carry gave a big 'NO" to outsourcing in any way shape or form. Hell, I can't even get opensource software in here because if something goes wrong, there is no one to sue.
Crazy world...
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
The six Hexawarians are sympathetic but unmoved. They disagree with the very premise that cheap labor is hurting the US.
Seriously, then they need a brain refresher. This is one of the core issues, and it's really simple: Companies seek to maximize profit and minimize expenses. Expenses decrease with cheap labor. If cheap labor is outside the U.S., and can be logistically implemented for the company as such, there's a good chance they'll move some operations offshore. And this has in fact happened.
And they think it's somewhat laughable that, because things aren't going exactly our way, ordinarily change-infatuated Americans are suddenly decrying change.
How on earth is this a laughable thing? Change for the better, change for our better, is a totally pragmatic and understandable goal. When this goal is hurt, yes, we decry it. There's nothing laughable about that at all.
Translation: We're not just cheaper, we're better.
Tell that to Dell.
The coolest voice ever.
Yes you heard me , let them NOT move to india. The last thing I want as an Indian, my country to be columbia/mexico of the IT industry. I think indians should be ashamed to be the janitors of IT industry.
Also for those of who are going to point to M$ and IBM and HP research centers being moved to India. I would rather see our own Indian companies becoming more self relient and working for the benefit of Indian consumers than US.
The more India depends upon foreign lands to create local jobs, the less it becomes self relinet and lesser powerful.
India for one should take lessons from its colonial past. Rememer East india company came as traders looking for spices and ended up ruling the country for 200 years. This time its going to be different, its economical slavery that we should be afraid of. In this day an age no power is better than economical power and serving joe six-packs for their problems loggin on to AOL, though a short term profitable business , is ruining the resourses of the country.
I am not ranting against US. Infact exactly the opposite. The US and its companies should also strive towards self serving economical structure.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Have anyone considered the privacy and security issues when sending this information to foreign companies? The call center for American Express in India may not have the same security and legal protection for your records -- but then again with the patriot act, we don't have any privacy anyways.
Fight Spammers!
About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. My employer is none the wiser. I pay him $12,000 to do the job I get paid $67,300 for. He is happy to have the work. I am happy that I only have to work about 90 minutes per day (I still have to attend meetings myself, and I spend a few minutes every day talking code with my Indian counterpart). The rest of the time my employer thinks I'm telecommuting. They are happy to let me telecommute because my output is higher than most of my coworkers.
Now I'm considering getting a second job and doing the same thing with it. That may be pushing my luck though. The extra money would be nice, but that could push my workday over five hours.
You make excellent points, James--but the fact remains that this trend means that certain types of jobs will have less demand in the US. Readers of Slashdot are more technical than the average American and many of our livlihoods are impacted by the shrinking demand of the technical labor force in America. So while the net sum may be the same for other Americans, it still sucks if you're an American programmer. (Cheaper programmers is probably a good thing for say... a salesman.)
So I toss a slur across her desk. I call her a protectionist.
"Oh, and I'm proud of it," she responds. "I wear that badge with honor. I am a protectionist. I want to protect America. I want to protect jobs for Americans."
"But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next."
She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."
love is just extroverted narcissism
I agree, and I feel like the effects are evident already. Ive completed a MS in CS, and it seems harder and harder to find jobs that let you "get your foot in the door". Everybody wants 10 years of blah-blah experience, but how do I get experience with specialized enterprise development tools when I do tech support all day? I mean, I cant even get an interview at my own company (300k employees, worlds largest courier service...) because I dont have copies of BEA software installed at home to play with.
I mean, if it's guaranteed that those entry-level/junior positions are going the way of the buffalo, I will have no experience for those mystical "pure knowledge" positions, should they ever appear. Have I mis-invested 7 years and tens of thousands of dollars on the wrong college degree? Should I just say F*** it all, give away all my hardware, and go get a paper MBA from Sallie Struthers and become a store manager at a Target or something? It's like having a degree in model ship building. Sure it's hard and it takes decades to be considered a master, but only a few really make money for doing it the old fashioned way, and most people just get their model ships from a store that buys them from overseas where they are made for cheap.
From the duped article, p5: "Your very nature will drive you to fight," Lord Krishna tells Arjuna. "The only choice is what to fight against."
sorry for the rant, but its tough these days
--B
Its not as simple as, yes it will, or no it won't happen. From my experience, it was a mixed bag.
... you get the icture
Used elance.com to find Sidharth over in Bangalore. Sid was cool, spents lots of time with us, hours of Q and A on our online spring break site. He did a good job on the coding, but when it came to getting the ever important cultural aspects of the project, it was a disaster.
Our launch day promoted our Discount Trips to Cancum.
Ummm. Sid, no, Cancun...
Oh. Very Sorry Sirs... next Day. Diskount trips to Cancum
TripInvite.com: Group Travel Made Simple Evit
People poo-poo this point of view, but I have yet to see any of these supposed "pure knowlege worker" positions advertised in the local paper. My guess is they don't exist and never will. They are the very wealthy elite's attempts to smoke screen the middle class.
They're called lawyers, professors, researchers, and executives... If your software job gets outsourced, either go and work at a research firm/university where there is a need for custom software or a company that offers in-person support for law firms or other businesses... As for your complaint about outsourcing the production of consumer merchandise, even if all such production were outsourced it wouldn't mean negative growth. Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services. It seems counterintuitive, but you don't have to manufacture anything to have a high-growth economy. Anyway, once we reduce a practice from an art to a science, it makes sense to export those tasks to a workforce that has been more narrowly educated in order to develop new products or industries in this country. Jonas Salk wouldn't have cured polio working in the neighborhood textile mill...
Silly troll, you make the classic mistake of likening programming to manufacturing. There is *no* similarity, because each programming project is different. No manufacturing plant in the world makes each item different.
Artists and craftsmen make unique items, and so do programmers (yes, even in Java). It is an inescapeable fact.
Outsourcing has a chance at working, not because it is the same as manufacturing, but simply because it appears to be cheaper than doing it locally.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
"When it gets down to it-talking trade balances here-once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here-once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel-once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity-y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes."
I suppose we'd better scratch "software" off the list, eh?
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
- If a resource doesn't give you a competitive advantage, you can outsource it without any damage. But if it is a key differentiator, NEVER outsource it.
Too many companies seem to be forgetting this these days. If it's your core competitive advantage, you can't outsource it.If you need to develop better technology, if your products need to be higher quality, if your customer service needs to be better than your competitors, you can't outsource that part of your business. Any competitor can duplicate anything you've outsourced, often as easily as hiring the same subcontractor, so anything that is oursourced can't be a source of competitive advantage in your market.
There's very little difference between the college tuition "racket" and the socialized welfare/tax/insurance/healthcare racket that goes on in the rest of society.
If you don't like the way it is, fine, but be consistent. Tuition is like any other social program. It benefits the poor at the expense of the rich (wait?! this is what happens when I'm on the upper end of the scale? I don't like that so much...) Don't just protest it because it's inconvenient for you.
The truly dissappointing thing is how much of the money is wasted. Many college students treat education as an entitlement, and fail to take advantage of the opportunities it creates. I say keep raising tuitions until students take it seriously.
I don't know where the fuck you went to school, but here our President is recognized as the highest-paid educator in the country. By "administrators" I mean the people at the very top, who also like to set shit wages for the people below them. If these assholes can throw away $2 million while having a third of the campus under reconstruction and raising their own salaries next year then they very fuckingly much need to be metaphorically shot. I don't know where you're getting "over half", because only Ivy League schools and others like Stanford and Hopkins can afford to give half of their students aid of any kind. I get absolutely no aid and only qualified for a $2,000 federal loan and I pay my own way. On the other hand, at least 2/3rds of the foreigners I meet have some sort of aid, federal or not.
The high tuition is exactly the reason many don't take it seriously and try to get out of it as soon as possible; it's not fucking worth it.
Fuck this shit.
Through the power of lending we can increase our GNP completely through services.
And what happens when the Indians and the Chinese have absorbed so much of our know how through on-hands tech-transfer, that they don't need us anymore? Indian firms are already partnering with US drug companies, not as low-cost manufacturers, but as co-developers. Chinese firms are already buying whole US plants, lock, stock, and barrel, AND the company name/brands (ie, DustDevil). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine a future where the US is nothing more than a stock market, and a few banks - and what happens when foreign banks/stock markets adopt US style accounting/regulation, and start undercutting us?
I think the key problem is that to meet the future you envision (ie, pure knowledge/research/services), we need to train people who are technically and creatively competent to work and innovate in those fields. I don't see that product coming out of our school system, which keeps churning out workers fit for that was hot 5-10 years ago, and not for what will be hot 5-10 years from now.
We might benefit from deflationary pressures on foreign-made products and services for a long time. But we'll have become a nation of extreme debtors, with a bedrock in agriculture and finance, and everything else outsourced.
While best will survive (ie, small machine shops, small coding shops, etc.), where will everyone else go? Unless we develop completely new industries that will require jobs in the US, we're going to have a large surplus of labor, just as we did in the 80's during the last big transition. Space exploitation maybe, or maybe US migratory workers going to Mexico and Canada, instead of the other way around?
Ironically, I'd suggest that manufacturing might be the salvation of the US economy - provided that we can lower the cost of raw materials and energy. With mechanization reducing labor costs, cheap energy and raw materials would allow the US to compete with foreign manufacturers, and allow the employment of more US sale agents, distributors, transporters (ie, truck drivers and train engineers), and lower the cost of shipping those goods.
In other words, you want more jobs in the US? Then we either need more nuclear power plants, or we need to invent working sustainable, net energy out fusion, quick.
The middle class is essentially what stabilizes a civil society. Without that you end up either with a fascist dictoatorship (the likes of middle america) or a revolution.
Now, is the FBI actually good enough to control a nation in open rebellion ?
They're taking the dollars because they intend to buy American goods with the dollars.
wrong. they intend to buy chinese goods, because these are cheaper, fool. Americans do the same thing at Wall Mart every day.
That we cannot import more than we export -- over the long term -- is true. To believe otherwise would mean we somehow live in a bubble where foreign countries work for us for free.they do not do it for free. they get your jobs and know-how. they get the dollars, you get the debt.
The special interests will come up with all sorts of nonsense, all manner of jargon to support their fear mongering. They'll talk ofraces to the bottom, living wages, social justice and other such things. but that is what is happening.
But what they really mean is "gimme." (Read: I deserve to be making higher real wages for the same equivalent work because I am an American. no, they mean: it costs a lot more to have the same living standard in the US as in India, so please don't take from me what i need for a living.
When protectionists speak of races to the bottom, they ignore the flip side of the coin: a race to the top). wrong again , fool. a Hindu will accept a 5% wage increase in exchange for your 100% wage decrease. otherwise the offshoring would not be generating any cost cutting. american wages will stagnate while corporate profits will go up. this means the social division of the GDP will become more unequal.
We can rack up debt in the way of trade deficits. Debt which will doubtlessly have to be paid off eventually. i'm sure there are some countries of the 3rd world which will tell you about the benefits of debt exceeding their GDP, because they had a fiscal crisis and their currency got grilled.But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports. so if the REAL value of the paper dollars they have received for their products is falling, didn't they, like, work for you for free?
As American exports increase, they wont. Chinese exports will increase. so too will employment, barring commensurate increases in productivity. maybe those service jobs, knowledge workers? like, the porn industry will be a growth sector. and also security. CEOs need protection from the begging mobs.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
Are you fucking kidding me?
Can you read HTML?
This is grandma quality code.
You're arguing for essentially a national economic policy, but that seems naive at best, and a terrible idea at worst.
Should the US make cars? We should if it makes economic sense. Does it make money? If yes, then make cars. Does it lose money? Then stop making cars.
Japanese arrogance about economic planning in the 70's and 80's has led to a 14 year recession in Japan because everybody thought smart planners were better than a dumb economy. History is replete with the bones of those who thought they could outthink the market.
If anything government planning makes a bad situation worse, because the government has workers that its trying to protect and in doing so it routinely props up inefficient ways of doing business.
But sooner or later the dollar will fall against foreign currencies -- as it is currently, btw -- and foreigners will begin to receive repayment of their loans to us, by way of American exports....
But you are missing two important points:
1. India's population is 3 times bigger than the US. They can suck our jobs and resources bone dry before it makes much of a dent there.
2. After India is probably another country. India was first simply because they know more English.
The bottom line is that brains are now a cheap commodity. Balance of trade won't change this new fact. The Age of Nerds is sunsetting. I thought AI would do it first, but globalism plugging into 5 billion brains for cents per hour is what did it. The inventors of the Internet created a monster which is now eating its creator.
Table-ized A.I.
People in the US will intially become unemployed. Some, not all of you, don't be silly.
That means less purchasing power, economic slowdown, trade deficit.
Salaries by necessity go lower. Your currency devalues.
Then there is a point in which you become cheap enough to be worth to invest again in the US.
Painful? Yes, but frankly some evening out is necessary when you realize how much overpaid people in western countries are.
The wasteful SUVs, gadgetery, cheap air travel, cheap credit can't be artificially provided, you will not starve but will need to become more sensible about your spending habits, which is a good think in my book, since that will allow you to take a lower salary and thus become more competitive in the global market.
It is not going to be fun, but frankly better understand the situation and prepare for it that moan and advocate for supporting inneficient industries and companies only because they are base in your own country.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I even wound up talking to India a few months ago while trying to order a replacement power supply and bigger Hard Drive for a Latitude laptop. Dell outsourced (or used to anyway) the SALES department for laptop components.
I work in a 2-man IT shop with around 75 users, and I have my own Dell sales rep, who has her own team of specialists. When I want something, I talk directly with one of them.
You're a corporate customer with an IT department big enough to have its very own PHB, and you're ordering through the normal sales channels? What gives?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?