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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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The difference between offshoring to India and insourcing to rural areas?
Indians speak better English.
M
So rather than "Tank you vor calling Cisco, dis is Singh, how may I help you?" I'll hear "Thanks fer callin' Cis-coe, this is Billy-Joe Jim-Bob, what's yer malfunction?"
It's a joke, lighten up.
I'll move from Manhattan to somewhere in hicksville for a job in no time. Fresh air, no subways, no bums. I'm down. Where do I sign up?
Hurray! As part of the Bush initiative to grow the job market in America, skilled, college educated professionals can now make as much money as their counterparts in third-world countries!
America - I love this place!
Somewhat appropriate for an article about rural America.
I can stop worrying about my job going to India and start worrying about my job going to Indiana.
South Dakota gladly welcomes it's new in-sourcing overlords!
One hopes this expands my job prospects here... not that it matters too much, I love my job.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
it will be good news for American techies-at least the ones in rural communities and those willing to move there
But will they be able to survive without pizza deliveries?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians? I'm sure somebody on the reservation could help you admin your Apache server.
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . . Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
Yet another language barrier to surmount.
At least the guys in Mumbai are *trying* to enunciate.
(I grew up somewhere that has a native accent thicker than Brooklyn's, and currently live in North Carolina, so I have a legal right to make these jokes)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
From the prices I've seen listed, it would be illigal to employ Americans (or even Amerucuns) for anything even close to the same amount.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
Like you, I am from the rural midwest, but was blessed with the opportunity to move back to my hometown and run a good sized network.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
Most folks'll never lose a toe
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to do this with that ballot-counting contract...
I keed!
I believe you mean "tech support what don't speak English."
English is easier said than done.
Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley: Get paid $80K, pay 28% federal tax plus 9-10% state/city tax. House costs $500K-$1M.
East Buttfuck, Wyoming: Get paid $50K. Pay 25% federal tax plus 0.0% state tax. House costs $60K-$100K.
If you've saved enough money for a down payment in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can buy a house for cash in rural America. And if you've been there long enough that you actually own your house in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can sell it, buy a house and a Ferrari, and have change left over for a fucking Porsche in rural America. That's right.
Wanna visit the opera? Hop in the Ferrari on Friday after work, tear up the asphalt (long live long straight highways featuring speed limits defined only by the words "reasonable and prudent" -- it's like the American Autobahn!), party your ass off all weekend, and come home on Sunday.
One look at the horrible things he's done to a Ferrari should make any self-respecting geek aspire to make John Romero our bitch. The best part about rural America isn't that a middle-class IT geek can enjoy such a lifestyle -- it's that he or she can pay for it on the interest and tax savings alone.
Who is John Galt? When you leave a high-tax state for rural America, you are.
No, land of the fundamentalist Christians. They all used to be Democrats!
Yes, it's true, they used to be democrats, 40 or 50 years ago. But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans.
They're tired of hearing that America sucks and that people who still hold onto the idea of morals and values are a bunch of bigoted idiots.
People who mock those in rural areas really need to get an f'en clue. Most of the idiots on the coasts have hardly been outside their metro areas, and when they do leave it's just to go to some other city. The people you mock are the most honest, real, hard working people in this country.
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun" - Dan Rather
I live in a small town of about 600 people. A small shop like this (even just 10 workers and a single support person) would make a big positive difference in our local economy.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
I've lived in rural and I've lived in cities. I prefer cities. Rural people do, indeed, *tend* to be honest and real hard working. There are good reasons for this. They also tend to be bigoted and intolerant of strangers. (And there are good reasons for this.)
City people *tend* to be different along those axii, and there are reasons for that. Good, logical reasons. (Like they encounter new people and ideas more frequently.)
I like and admire honesty. I try to be honest. This doesn't cause me to admire bigotry. And I find bigotry too high a price to pay for achieving honesty. (Also an unnecessary price.)
As for hard working...people who are desperate will work themselves to death. That's no moral good. People who are working for themselves will work quite hard for years on end. That may or may not be a moral good, but it's also enlightened self interest. People who are being taken advantage of will slack off whenever the slave master isn't looking. And I consider THIS to be a moral good.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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
I worked at a development shop in Little Rock, Arkansas for a couple of years before getting married and moving to a very large U.S. city (I think it is #4 currently) when my wife was accepted to medical school here, so I think I'm qualified to do a bit of comparison.
I think that there are a lot of cities in the U.S. in the 100,000 - 200,000 population range that people don't really consider for whatever reason, either as places to live or for corporations. Little Rock, for example, had most of the shopping, dining, etc. of a larger city but without nearly as much pollution and traffic and with a lower cost of living to boot. To respond specifically to some of the comments I've seen in this thread so far: we had Starbucks, pizza delivery, clubs/raves (if that is your thing), a symphony orchestra, and a minor league baseball team (the only thing that I would miss if I moved back would be the professional sports).
I think there is rural, as in one gas station, one stoplight, and a Sonic...and then there is "rural", as in "not one of the 50 largest cities in the US", and I think businesses would do well to look more closely at the latter.
I've been working with outsourcing for over a year and 1/2 now. We've been talking about how we should move to some rural area with low taxes, property values, and housing costs for a year now. It just makes sense IF you can get quality individuals working for you. And it will happen more frequently as fed up highly talented individuals get tired of the rat race and decide to move somewhere, uh, less rat racy. I know of one person on the team who now works from Idaho after moving from Chicago. Do the math, Idaho cost of living is < Chicago and they experienced no pay decreases! Another person moved from Chicago to rural Wisconsin and kept the same pay. If the company is willing, you'll see a migration from the cities to the small towns over the next few years. I personally think it's great. The 80's and 90's were an era of migration from these rural areas where the jobs had been drying up rapidly (I'm a case in point, couldn't get a job in my hometown doing what I do, still can't). Hopefully that trend will reverse somewhat. America is loosing it's small town / rural heritage and I believe that heritage is part of what made America a great place in the first place.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
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.
This is exactly what the country needs: "Blue" business/culture centers connecting directly with "Red" labor centers. More intercommunication is the only way to bridge the unsustainably deep divides between Blue/Red communities. American strength in diversity relies also on rural areas, perhaps homogenous internally, but part of the landscape that makes America a microcosm of the world. Why should American globalism rest on a hollow foundation, ignoring the interior solely to harness the exterior?
--
make install -not war
...would have a point. Unfortunately for your argument it isn't.
It's true that the US and Canada did conquer many tribes and take away a lot of land, but most of the remaining tribes weren't conquered, rather they tended to settle with the US and agreed to a series of treaties. Eventually the US government decided to settle with the tribes uniformly so they could co-exist with the states, while being bound by federal law.
Now, if I can address you last comment.
Personally, I think the Indians should feel lucky that we gave them anything at all instead of just assimilating them into our society as just one more ethnic group in the already-growing melting pot.
If you were an Indian, that statement would probably sound a lot like: Personally, I think the Jews should feel lucky we didn't gas and incinerate them all.
While saying circumstances could always be worse is technically a valid point, it's appalling and bad form to use it to play down culpability for any atrocity.
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
Sorry I was busy surfing the chest high waves over at Zuma and enjoying the 70 degree mid November beach weather.
Wait, why was East Buttfuck, Wyoming better then Southern California again?
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
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!"