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Outsourcing To Rural America
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running a story about Rural Sourcing, a company attempting to make outsourcing to rural America as cost effective as sending jobs to India."
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Somewhat appropriate for an article about rural America.
Not according to This. It appears the 'rural' states aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.
this post intended to be humerous and or ironic. please treat as such.
I landed in the Kansas City area after the bubble burst in Boston. Living costs are quite modest here, and it is a pleasant place to live. The hacking is the same. That does not stop my company from outsourcing to India though. Slavery is very attractive to business.
an ill wind that blows no good
In his trilogy on "the information age", manuel castells looked at the evolving and future structure of current society. One of his suggestions, which I remember clearly, is to forget looking at first, second and third world as being rigidly defined around countries (i.e. the idea that some are "first", others are "second", etc).
He suggests that the world is really becoming a patchwork of first, second and third - so that even so called advanced countries (on average) have third world areas, and even third world countries have first world areas. When you look at it this way, then it shouldn't be surprising about "outsourcing" from advanced economic zones (e.g. SF) to third world zones (e.g. places in the deep south).
Either way, I found this conceptual idea of his to be a very powerful one.
While in a manner of speaking I'm all for this, it's already been done to death.
Throughout the last 100-someodd years, the rest of the US has looked to the South as "cheap labor" -- most of the factories that've closed here paid just at or barely above minimum wage, with no option for any real pay raises, and offer conditions that no state in the North would accept. Perhaps this is just a return to that trend. I can only hope that the trend of severe employee abuse won't carry over.
Then there's the added PR benefit of hiring Americans rather than Indians. Of course, it still doesn't help Americans who are worth a damn, but it's all about the PR...
That's the part I never quite understood about companies that want to be built in downtown areas.
The commute sucks cause everyone has to drive to a subway station first. Then take a subway as the 2nd part of commute.
Even if you want to drive, chances are you won't find parking.
The office lease is far more expensive in the center of a city than some suburbs.
The network speed is the same.
The company may be in some skyscraper building sharing it with 50 companies. That means your company is on the 20th floor. Management gets all the window office, and everyone else cubes.
I've sold my company's services simply by pointing out that my rates (in Indiana) are much cheaper than similar firms in New York, California, or even nearby Chicago.
You want to pay $150+ an hour for a Chicago guy to do the same thing that we'll do for $75 an hour?
This can bite you when they find another firm offering $50/hour. At some point, it's just not cost effective to run a business that cheap... not to mention that you'll have a harder time finding qualified employees to work for so little.
If I could make the salary of a comparable California worker, but live in Indiana, I'd be doing very well.
Get over it. Rural is not all that rural anymore. Most places will have pizza delivery, Chinese food, and Walmart. A large number of farmers are on line, have satellite TV and have been using GPS for years. What tends to be lacking is in some areas broadband and no you will not have 85 pizza places to choose from. I for one would love to move to a small rural town with clean air, not crowds, and home prices that are only in the 5 figure range.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I have been on several projects which involved business units on the other side of the world. There are times when you basically lose a day because you find something in the morning that needs the other team to fix. This can be mitigated by forcing one team or the other to shift their work schedule, but this can cause other problems for the team who are forced to change.
Also if you are dealing with hardware it is a lot easier to get something overnighted in country than having to deal with customs.
Q.
the word you want is pedantic.
Yeah, but you can move to a rural area in the US, try moving to India. I moved from the Baltimore/DC area this year, and I got three times the house I could have afforded back there. Plus a laid back community instead of the uptight 'everyone must paint their homes one of the three approved colors' BS that was common there. People raise families here on 40k a year, you can't even keep a roof over your head on the coast for that, unless you're rooming with 3 other people.
And don't kid yourself, about the only thing I don't have is a wide choice of brick and mortar shopping for PC stuff, and the bookstores around here don't have a ton of software books on the shelves. Since I bought most of that online for better prices before, it just means I can't waste time browsing on the weekend.
Now, if I was starting a company, what would be most important to me would be locating where the overhead is the lowest, but that's just me. The other advantage of setting up shop in a cow pasture somewhere is employee lock-in. Basically, if somebody wants to quit, they have to sell their house and move to find a new job, unlike, say, the Silicon Valley, where you can find another job in the same field right down the street. Which, ultimately, is why companies get located in population centers -- 'cause that's where the pool of potential employees is.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Actually, that's not necessarily the case.
The thing to remember is that the best-and-brightest of India -- the IIT grads -- do not stay in India, most of them are able to grab green cards and work for even more in the US than they could in India.
The current outsourcing population in India is the second tier. Which is still pretty decent, but there's a limited supply of them and eventually they will price themselves out of the market.
The problem in India is that there's no good third tier. You either have at least bachleurs degree and probably a masters degree, or you are almost illiterate. This isn't any sort of bell-curve intellectual gap, it's mostly that the public pre-college education in India is awful. And there's a lot of waste there -- kids who might become great thinkers but because they are culturally expected to be lower class, they are. I used to think that a good way to disrupt the social order there would be to educate the poor, but it's a much more complicated problem than that.
In the US, at least you still have a good population of folks to send to community college.
Gentoo Sucks
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians?
This is not as funny as it seems. I often though Hopi would make excellent computer programmers. People who speak Hopi fluently can you tell you that the language does not support ambiguity.
Navajo is another language that may be good for "thinking like a computer programmer". The language's grammar has something similar to the "type-safety" found in OO languages like C++ and Java. The type-safety comes from the verb-to-noun combinations. This forces speakers to be specific. They can use abstractions, but speaking vaguely is nearly impossible.
I'm sure somebody on the reservation could help you admin your Apache server.
Navajo is similar to the Apache language family. They should be able to talk to the Apache server easily.
They don't even have to do that. A tribe north of where I used to live was paying it's members $1000 per adult and $250 per kid every month. Just for living inside the county. For the area that was a nice wage and if they were ambitious, they could get a job at the casino. Most didn't, so it was staffed mainly by caucasians.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Now, substitue that by income level of families and then we're talking.
My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.
You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.
Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.
So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.
My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.
In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.
I always get the shakes before a drop.
Ironically, the BJP party lost to the Congress party in the last Indian election because the BJP party's slogan of a "bright shining India" didn't resonate all that well with the rural Indians who haven't actually seen all that much benefit from the tech boom in India.
The vast majority of the tech jobs are in the cities in India for the same reason they are in the cities in the US. 1) The cities have better infrastructure by virtue of the simple fact that it's more cost effective to roll out new infrastructure where the population density is higher. 2) If you're a growing business and need to hire 3000 new employees you can't do that in a town of 10,000. 3) And if you need to hire for a very specific skill set you want to do that in an area that has a high concentration of that skill set. 4) If you're a technology professional and you're looking for a job, particularly in a slow economy, you go to where there are the most number of opportunities, the cities, less you find yourself relocating every time you change jobs.
The rural US does have significantly better infrastructure than rural India, but still the closer you are to a major city the better the infrastructure. But how do you hire technology workers by the thousands in rural Arkansas. So replace the "inconvenience" expense of distance, language and culture for India with the "inconvenience" expense of having to manage a highly distributed work force.
In retrospect, I'm not at all surprised the tech boom didn't help rural India that much. Most Indian tech companies completely ignore the Indian domestic market because there still isn't one to speak of. Compares to the US, European and Middle Eastern markets the Indian market is still insignificantly small and can't nearly support the pricing levels that the international markets can. $30/hr might seem cheap to a US CIO, but it's not at all cheap to an Indian CIO.
As a result there isn't a lot of innovation going on inside India to develop products and services at a price point appropriate to the domestic Indian consumer or business. WWII and the rebuilding of Europe helped the US a lot on its path to becoming an economic superpower, but for the most part the US economy was built to satisfy a strong US domestic market; the same was true for Japan. That's not a justification for protectionism; it's just a lot easier to break new ground with innovative products in your own backyard before you try to sell them to the rest of the world.
The US should really start worrying the day India figures out how to tap into its own domestic market of over a billion people and starts innovating. And at the same time the US need to remember that innovation is what made America strong not economics protectionism.
I worked for an Australian company that with a bit of government funding and support from a major university setup a software engineering course in a rural city (100,000 people?), where they would complete their degree part time while working on real contracts.
No where else other than the major cities could they hope to get a degree like that in Australia. And having the work experience behind them would have made them highly employable.
I still believe the idea was good, but starting this just as the bubble burst meant that there was little work and after a couple of years it was closed down.
There was a lot of difficulty in attracting work to the centre since there were always about their ability being junior engineers. So we had to attract some senior engineers there as well to lead the teams. That was harder than attracting contracts, since we were the only employer in the area looking for those skills. But fundamentally the inability of the company to attract work for itself let alone the training center was its downfall.
What happened to the people that were there? Many have now moved to the cities to complete their degrees and get work.
There is folly and foolishness on the one side, and daring and calculation on the other. - Admiral Pellew, Hornblower
A large influx of younger tech workers will probably turn those red states blue. It's already happening in Montana where the influx of people resulted in the election of a democratic governor and a 50/50 split in the state senate. Also states like new mexico and alabama were really close this year.
evil is as evil does
Before America, many of the native tribes of North America lived in fear of constant raids from the other tribes. Now the native Americans have a blue passport that assures them safe passage nearly anywhere in the world. Before America, the natives spoke a language of the tribe and maybe the language of next tribe over the hills. Maybe a few hundred people spoke this language, maybe a few thousand. Now most native Americans speak and understand English, which is understood by a billion people throughout the world. Many natives also speak a ancient tribal language also.
Before America, when a native child got sick, the father will pray and chant with the medicine man to the Great Spirit. More often than not, the child would die. Now when a native child gets sick, the father and the medicine man chant to the Great Spirit. Or they do until the mother gets pissed off and makes him take the child to the reservation hospital. Usually the child recovers fully.
Yes, the land was taken. Yes there were massacres. Yes there was cultural desolation. Yes there were new diseases and ruthless intoxicants introduced that there was no defence against.
But the worst is over. The massacres and cultural destruction will not happen again. Native American tribal values and traditions can rise again and become a valued and trusted part of all North American society. Native Nations populations will grow up to and beyond the levels before the Europeans arrived.
All this can happen, should the people of the tribal nations wish for it to happen and work to make it happen.
It's easy for you to say that -- you can move to any other town or state, and still remain in your own culture. Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you lived in a little pocket of European American culture, and 99.9% of the rest of the country was Native American. Would you still find moving away to be such an easy option?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The "media standard" for how American is spoken is based off of the educated midwestern accent.
Using the key words...holocaust fake
s t+fak e&spell=1
d ay Times_301004.html/ docs/fake/SWCsmokeF ake.html
n g_ trial.html
a s& btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=
Will find you heck of alot of facts that make the story of the holicost not sound as bad as it has been pushed to be. in fact if you look realy close you will be shocked.
It angers me how tv messes peoples minds up.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=holocau
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/fake/WA_Sun
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz
http://www.math.metu.edu.tr/~dpierce/texts/irvi
http://www.google.com/search?q=holocaust+fake+g
Look at both sides one is way heavier and its not very heavy on the victims side. None the less this was war.. but why say what they do and teach it to people as the true history..?!
For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac or fenugreek, a durian, or fresh kaffir lime leaves in rural America?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)
For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.
I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.
The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.
A little more about me (there is actually a point to this, please bear with me): I'm 50 now, and I live about 20 miles from a major indian reservation in Montana. In my various travels, I have met many indians (both native Americans and "India"ns), Aussies, English folk, uncounted large numbers of Chinese, ditto South Americans (serious time in Florida, remember), quite a large number of Japanese, and lots of uprooted east coasters on the left coast and vice versa. Southerners up north, and northerners down south. I've been hanging with a girl from Kansas for about ten years.
You know who the least respectable of the bunch are? The ones who never left home. That's right. The (American) indians I've met in the cities and the schools, those people are smart and interesting and looking to do something with themselves. The indians I've met here, however, are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. They live off the dole, they drink like camels (if camels drank alchohol) and they don't do squat worth anything to either their little microcosm or American society at large (unless you count providing justificaiton for major amounts of employment in the FBI, the BIA, and several other large government operations.)
In sharp contrast, the "furrin" folk I've met have been a delight to interact with, both personally and professionally. They, somehow, managed to drag themselves out of their "own cultures" without complete mental collapse, intolerable levels of angst, or having to scuttle back home to get that welfare/dole/tribal-residency check. I have noticed that in many cases, particularly Japanese and Chinese and Korean folk, they tend to turn their living spaces into little cultural "nodes" in a space made up of American culture. Seems to work very well, too - they have a place to go that is culturally "them", and they don't implode like postal workers.
Now... you seriously think American indians are so involved with their culture, of all things, that they actually are so mentally disabled that they can't get out of an area about the size of a typical large state's county? If that's truly the case, then we should probably just toss the whole rez idea in the trash - because keeping their culture is too expensive for them.
Now me, I don't think it is the culture, that is, the indian-ness of them. I think it is the welfare "we will reward you if you stay here" approach that we do to them. I think it is the "we will give you more for each baby you pop out" that we do to them. I think it is the "you can put casinos here, while folks outside the rez can't because mommy and daddy government say so" that we do to them. That's right. I don't blame them. I blame people like you, who, in their haste to be all touchy-feely, don't give minorities and the disadvantaged room to compete on an even playing field because you smother them with "aw gee, baby got a boo-boo? Lemme give you a check for that."
I say, let them have the land. Let them celebrate whatever they think they have to celebrate. But make them compete on an even playing field with everyone else, and pretty soon, you'll see that they are like everyone else. The potential is there. I've seen it, and I am certain of it. First shoot the social workers. Then shoot the lawyers.
<mutter>freaking psychobabbling social-worker morons...</mutter>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I don't know about the whole creation thing, as I'm not a teacher, but schools in south Georgia (if you live in a city, or even medium sized town) are just holding pens for juvenile criminals. Before I tell this story,let me just say that my teachers were good. I was also AP, in other words taking classes for college credits in high school, so my experience with teachers might not be representative. Anyway, school here is not intended to teach anyone anything, it just keeps the thugs off the street during the day, and that's all. And no, I'm not an old geezer here. But I did wind up in the hospital with a homicide detective busy taking polaroids when I woke up courtesy of those thugs that need an education (they thought I had lost too much blood to make it, so they called homicide to the hospital). The school told the news media that there had been "a minor scuffle between students", and that no one had been seriously injured. The news corrected the story about a week later when my family got pissed about the coverage, but all the school wanted to do was cover it up. Three surgeries later, I disagree on the amount of injury. 7 or 8 on one, you don't win, even if you're Bruce Lee, which I'm not. The thugs involved just wanted to beat someone down to intimidate everyone else, and I looked like an easy target. When it went to court their lawyers tried to claim that their clients should be let off because I had martial arts training and had mananged to break a few bones (ribs, that's all you can really kick for when you have a number of people pounding on you) before the aforementioned thugs ALL piled on top of me. That defense didn't work, a couple (who dindn't get charged as adults) got convicted and expelled, but... Fuck public schools in Georgia. If I ever have kids, I'll do whatever it takes to put them in private school. I'll live on Ramen when I'm 40 if that's what it takes to keep them out of the public school system. Oh yeah, since it was a race crime (I'm white, by the way... who cares as I've already probably already said enough to Google for) the only black detective in the city was given the case. Everyone involved who could be charged as adult, nothing. The detective told the judge in court, with a straight face, that the "records had been lost". The judge wasn't happy, but there wasn't much he could do either. Why do we keep people like this in school? Down south, you have to, or someone will pull the race card (happened in my case with the school board). I personally think that some problems are more associated to income and social status than race, and that some races in this area are lower income, if you look at the statistics. I will note, however, that the school board member who claimed racism was investigated a few years later for letting a crack dealer live with her (I think she got off). I'll also note that all of my attackers managed to get themselves killed in gang-related incidents, except the two that jumped me in the first place. They are in the Federal pen for dealing crack out of a housing project in Atlanta. Is that what you want your kids going to school with? In the same town, they found a 6th grader selling coke. I'll cough up the money for private school if I ever have to, even it means living in a duplex somewhere. I don't want my kids having a cop tell them when they are 15 (my father was military and deployed) "Have a gun? Let me see it. Ok, know how to use it? Good, it's loaded. Ignore Detective so-and-so. Don't worry too much about those death threats to your mother on the answering machine, you need to rest, but sleep with the gun. I'll be back tomorrow when the rest of the pictures get developed". If you can afford to send your kids to something other than the public meat grinder, and you live in south Georgia, none of this is exaggerated or made up. This shit happens, you just don't hear about it.
My wife and I moved from the beach in San Diego to the mountains of Northern Arizona almost 7 years ago. We find the cost of living to be very much lower here (and with wilderness surrounding us for hiking and picnicking, the standard of living much better).
We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.
The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.
Though I don't have any inside information, I'd bet the unnamed company is Verizon.
Call up their tech support number and you will hear an American on the other end. Several times, I've talked to someone with a southern accent.
Most of all, it seems the most amaturish support center I've ever called. 9 problems out of 10, I'll get a completely different answer from each support person I talk to. They seem quite determined to pass the buck, giving me any answer they can make up that will require me to call back. You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard some lame answer, that all the problems will be magically fixed "tomorrow", even when they've gone on for weeks. And, of course, they NEVER fail to mark the issue as CLOSED, when they've never solved anything. This screws up the automated phone system, requiring me to call it a "NEW" issue every time I call in about the same thing.
If you're wondering about the 10th time out of 10, I'll get the exact same response from 4 different people, but they'll all be COMPLETELY wrong.
Anyhow, I never understood what was happening there, but this story seems to fit perfectly, and explain the issue.
Of course, I certainly hope I'm wrong, and Verizon support just happens to be terrible. I'm the last person to advocate outsourcing, so I hope REALLY crappy American support isn't the only alternative.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's quite liberating to be able to be car-free in the city. The suburban "american dream" with a status-symbol car and a useless lawn is BS. We need to counter that spawl with smarter New Urbanism.
--
Power to the Peaceful
The governments of small midwestern states have been pimping out their citizens to businesses as people who will work long and hard without complaining for minimum wage and few benefits. They turn around and tell those citizens they are working hard to bring quality, high-paying jobs.
The citizens of these states, especially the "young" people between 18 and 35, have figured this out and are turning their backs on the government of their homes. The past decade has been characterized by a massive outmigration from rural states to Top 50 metropolises. It's a literal brain drain for the communities they leave.
The community in which I live has a special economic development fund that has been an unmitigated disaster, taking tax dollars from our sales tax and giving it to companies who promise to bring in a certain amount of new jobs. There has been, in practice, no accountability and the jobs have sucked. Firms have closed overnight, taking millions of tax dollars with them and leaving hundreds of citizens unemployed with back pay due they'll never see.
The largest employers in this village of ~40,000 people are (besides the air force base, hospital and school district) a technical help desk contractor, a hotel reservation phone pool, a airline reservation phone pool, an insurance agency phone pool, and an adult vocational training center. Despite the "success" of most of these businesses starting within the last 5 years, the median wage has stayed flat at around $25,000.
There are some bright spots. A home that costs ~$150,000 dollars here would set you back ~$2,000,000 in Silicon Valley. Our arts culture here is very strong thanks to the local university, including our excellent volunteer symphony orchestra. I guess that's about it.
Crime isn't low because of the meth epidemic. I have a buddy on the county's drug enforcement squad and the stories he can tell would make for a terrific Al Pacino movie. Except for our housing costs, our cost of living is comparable to the rest of the nation but the fresh produce isn't as fresh nor as diverse.
Now a Super Wal*Mart is scheduled to open next year and our "civic leaders" are touting this as another economic development success. The truth is the citizens are tired of working two or three jobs to get in 40 hours a week and enough of a paycheck to support three kids in their 70's era trailer or trashy $600/month apartment.
I'm lucky to have a great federal government job as a systems administrator. My wife is a dental hygienist with an almost unbelievably fantastic work and pay schedule. We are very lucky.
But to those who would pimp out my neighbors or "outsource" more shitty jobs to communities like this I say go to hell. If the Indians or Chinese or Mexicans will take this shit they are welcome to it. That's not flamebait or nationalism or anything of the sort. It's the truth.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. There are 80 plus call centers here. Some are small but most employ hundreds. It's about the only thing left after all the other industries imploded (oil, aviation, telecommunications). These jobs typically pay $8-$10/hr which isn't a bad wage for someone with only a high school education. The work itself is another matter.
They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.
The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"