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Why Offshore When Canada's Next Door?
Roblimo writes "A study by accounting and consulting giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers claims Canada could lose up to 75,000 IT jobs by 2010 to offshore outsourcing, but could also *gain* 165,000 jobs through U.S. outsourcing contracts. The trick is, according to this story at IT Manager's Journal, that while Indian, Chinese, and Russian programmers may cost 80% less than U.S. programmers, the time zone, language, legal, and other problems involved with sending work half way around the world can eat up much of the labor savings, while Canadian programmers are nearby, speak English with nearly American accents, have a similar culture and legal system, and get paid 40% less than U.S. programmers. Might be time to think about moving North, eh?"
I live in Montreal, Quebec. Half the population in Montreal speaks English as well as any other Canadian. We have a call center here in Montreal. We answer in five languages. English, French, Chinese, Japanese and Arab. The same call center located in Toronto answers in English only. Agents in Toronto even get a salary bonus if they can answer in something else. Beleive me, English speaking people have a hard time learning any other language. That's because English is a pretty simple language. As soon as a little complexity is invloved, they generally abandon saying how useless it is to speak anything besides English. Three major cities are affected by offshoring in Canada: Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Don't worry, our French accent is nothing compared to France! The fact that Quebec is next to America gives us the ability to speak English better than French people in France.