Slashdot Mirror
Ask Indian Techies About 'Onshore Insourcing'
This Slashdot interview has a little twist to it. Instead of using email, I'm going to relay your questions 'live' to people I meet while I'm here in New Delhi, speaking at LinuxAsia2004. Offshore outsourcing has gotten a lot of attention on Slashdot (and NewsForge) lately, but I figure that from this end we ought to call it 'onshore insourcing' instead. Feel free to ask other questions about 'geek life' in India, too; I'll ask as many questions as I can of as many people as I can, and post their answers when I'm back in the U.S.
And this was not the case here in the USA during the "Dot Com Boom"? I sense an invalid argument...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I'd ask: what are you all planning to do when your jobs go to Russia as soon as you become too expensive for the US corporations? Plan now, because it's starting to happen.
Hopefully you guys are able to weather the storm better than us.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
11K a year is about minimum wage, BTW. So the people in most US cities who are making your lattes, flipping your burgers, and bagging your groceries are expected to live off of that.
(Ultimately, it should be hoped that living costs will come down in those US cities, but the monkey wrench in the works is housing: people are not willing to sell their homes for less than they paid for it, and with low interest rates on financing, they haven't felt a reason to yet.)
How do you feel about the American programmers that are angry they lost their jobs to outsourcing? Do you think they have a right to be angry?
You don't have to be bitter, it works both ways: many european companies prefer hiring US firms to do software or hardware projects, depriving local computer engineers of their jobs, because of the higher taxes and stricter employment regulations in the EC. Nobody in the US seems to complain about this, or feel bad about jobless EC workers, so why should Indians should feel bad about the US programmers they put out of a job?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Only in the U.S. would "medical" and "dental" [insurance] be considered benefits. In every other country I'm familiar with in the world, medical services are either universal, or non-existant; in such countries, the idea of an employer subsidising medical insurance seems as ludicrous as an employer subsidising your public library membership.
I'm assuming this is not a serious post...
1. How's it feel being detested by most of an entire industry back in the US of A (with the exception of the bean counters) ?
I'm a developer in the US, and I still have my job, but I'm having a hard time finding a software job in the geographic area where I want to move. But I don't detest the Indian people, nor do I feel that they've "stolen a job" from me. They're people like us. They want to make a living, they want to provide for themselves and their families, they want what most of us want. Jobs are available, and they're taking them. It's not like they're gathering together in some secret clubhouse buried under a cavern in the Himalayas and plotting how to make Americans' lives miserable. The reason this is happening is because of globalization, and personally, I still haven't decided if I think it's a good thing or not. I'm not going to have the knee-jerk reaction of "Of course it's bad", because the fact is, monetarily speaking, one of me is worth about four top-notch Indian developers. At the same time, though, enrollment in CS and engineering in US schools is plummeting, with the exception of foreign students. Globalization is great until relations break down between us and the country where our talent pool lives.
So speaking as an American programmer whose current livelihood is threatened by globalization, I can say that I hold no grudge against India, Russia, China, or any other country whose citizens are no less human than I am, and whose governments have the same capacity for corruption as my own. My job is marginally safer, since I work for a defense contractor. But it's just a matter of time before my job goes away too, and I'm willing to change careers if I have to. Sure, I could rail against India and American CEOs and bean counters, but that won't put food on my table.
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"Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of"-TMBG
I would not phrase the issue the way you have quoted.
I would instead, with experience in the matter, address the dichotomy this way:
It's not that the Indians are not capable of all those things; they are. But it is a matter of maintaining your core competencies, and ownership of design. Any outsourcing contractor has only one stake in the success: money. You have a stake in the success in many ways, and should always work to refine your own designs until they're perfect. No other firm in the world cares how effective your products are. These offshore companies excel at turning a definition into a production: that's their business model. The outsourcing houses are not geared up to do your designs for you, to read your minds, to focus-group your market, to educate you, or to replace you.
Paraphrasing the old maxim, Make it work, make it work well, then (get someone else to) make it work cheap.
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Yes, but you are guaranteed many things like family and medical leave, workplace health and safety standards, freedom from discrimination for a laundry list of protected classes (race, sex, age, sexual orientation in many cases etc.), a minimum wage, at companies of a certain size (which isn't very big, like 250+ employees) you must be offered health insurance at group rates, unemployment insurance, social security etc. I completely agree with your assessment of how hostile things have become, but what still remains is a huge percentage of the cost of American labor.
They should feel bad because they are being paid about 1/7 what the job is actually worth.
1/7th of what the job is worth *in the US*. In India, I suspect they're pretty well paid.
That's the flip-size of globalization my friend: since the end of WW2, the US have been busy opening new markets abroad for themselves. Now the new markets in question start to have the ability to compete on the same fields as US industries, and the ole globalization tactic is backfiring.
The USA hurt european countries bad in its days too, now it's their turn to get hit by emerging countries. Every part of the globe has had a glorious economic world-domination era at some point in history, be it Portugal, Italy, France or Britain. America's has started to decline. Tough luck, you're watching History in progress.
China and India have slowed down the Japanese economy, and now they're banging on your door guys. Time to get used to 10+% unemployment, like the rest of us.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Sure they won't...
But they might find themselves sadly out of luck because of high "cost to exit". See, the capital involved in IT is the knowledge, therefore, the people. Companies are irrelevant. Trying to change the outsourcing provider means discarding currently invested capital and starting from scratch.
The reason this is not yet evident is because we're not through the first wave of excitement over outsourcing, and not too many companies have tried to switch over to "cheaper" outsourcing provider. But when the realization comes, the hangover will be bitter.
I have just abandoned my Engineering job in US, and returned to Canada.
What you said couldn't be more true. People in the US are screaming about worker right and such, but where I was working, there as this thing called "Freedom to Work Law" which states something to the effect that if you want to quit you got the legal right to do so, and if your boss want to let you go, he can do so at the moment notice - so much for job protection.
The result of such law and working environment? Well, when my boss' in his office, everyone pretends to work hard; when he is off, no one work, Period!
Oh, Med insurance, co pay, and deduction are entirely different matter. Talk about the US education system with its "Left no Child Behind" initiative - what a joke.
By the time all these things figured out, my pay checks was much smaller than what I would make here in Canada, where I have to work for a grand total of 37.5 hours per week.
Did I say my US employer only expects me to work a minimum of 45 hours per weeek?
Yup the previous poster was just trolling.
Bye America.
My first rule of thumb is..."I do not work for free". I work, I work hard, and do what it takes to get the job done, but, I do not work for free.
Look into contracting, friend...at least get paid for the work you do. I'm a contract employee...kind of in both worlds. I get 4 weeks a year vacation/sick time...10 holidays..until last 2 years..didn't have to pay anything towards my benefits..now, I pay $8/paycheck for full coverage (med, dental, eye).
Good jobs are out there, but, you gotta be flexible...and go to where they are...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You might as well ask whether Homer Simpson is insulting to Americans.
I have to weigh in on this one. I am a F&B employee. It is entirely possible to live on 11k/yr. (I actually earn a little closer to 13 to 15k/yr) I deal with people every day who earn in the 10 to 20k range, some even are raising children on these incomes. As far as Starbucks goes, forget the 11k figure. That is grossly inflated. A miniwage employee loses 1/3 of their income to taxes, social security, and medicare. Add in company insurance and other "benifits" and that goes to about 1/2. The goal in F&B is to earn more on less. We never get OT with management approval unless you agree to a "salary" in which case your looking at being at work from open to close every day the store is open, they call this "management training". Paid vacations are usually a sham, you might get it, you might not. Now if you go to another state (like NY or WA) they have higher miniwage for F&B, mostly so those workers can survive in the big cities, get outside that and they introduce tip share. Basically they pay the staff well below minimum, they split the tips from service to raise their wages to the federal minimum, not the state's minimum.
My point to all this is, you have no idea how bad it could be for you. Stop and look at everything in your home, or in your car that runs about $10-15, now eliminate all that and you get a very clear idea of how to live on less.
TANSTAAFL
While there is a degree of truth in your argument, let's not forget, for instance, that HTML/HTTP was invented in Europe, as was Linux.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.