Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!"