Slashdot Mirror
India Will Need to Recruit 120,000 Foreigners
indi_jobs writes "After all the noise about jobs moving from Europe and USA to India, ZDNet India is reporting that 'India faces a massive shortage of workers with European language skills over the next five years which could see the country needing to recruit up to 120,000 foreigners...' Looks like the jobs may be moving to India but they might require the original people to do some of the jobs!" From the article: "Evalueserve said the ramping up of non-English speaking capability by the Indian offshore firms is an attempt to capture a larger share of the continental European outsourcing market, and reduce the country's high-risk exposure of more than 80 per cent of business coming from the UK and the U.S. economies."
To attract new workers in India and people (as many as 120k) to India, wouldn't they need to offer better benefits, less taxes, higher pay, etc? At that point, wouldn't it make more sense to bring the work back to this side of the ocean?
karma
My resume is on my web page.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
i guess they're gonna need to outsource back over to this side of the ocean.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Looks like the jobs may be moving to India but they might require the original people to do some of the jobs!
Ah, the joys of documenting others' code.
Given that non-English language skills are the problem, Americans are still out of luck...
To combat the labour shortage, India should outsource the work to North America and Europe. Lots of surplus labour. And the way wages are climbing in India, the West might be able to do it cheaper.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Benefits all around
English-speaking language skills could also be in short supply.
I find this hard to believe considering the proficiency in English I see evidenced in the average Indian help desk I've frequented. I'd venture to say some of them speak even more weller than some Slashdot editors.
With the supply for workers holding these skills staying the same while the demand increases, that means Indian wages will shoot up. Considering that companies only save about 10-20% by going to India, you can bet offshoring to India will cool off. That's great news for US workers.
I dont know about anybody else, but I find it freaking hilarious that they need more people to handle all the jobs that we outsourced over there.
No. Not particularly...
The fact that India is getting more work than they can handle (for the moment) does not make me smile. Quite the opposite in fact.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
as a reduced price lunch.
It looks like the supply end of the curve is dropping as the demand curve goes up. Before you know it, this could result in an increasing cost of outsourced workers. Combined with the exact opposite curve in the countries doing the outsourcing (i.e. low demand == lower cost workers), a balance will soon have to be struck that will again restore tech workers to a thriving market in both America/Europe and India. No, there's not going to be another "tech boom". That's over with.
:-)
I have to say that I found the article rather amusing, as I've ran up against many of the "English speaking" Indian call centers. (I'm looking at you Citibank.)
Q: What do you get when you mix an Indian accent with the British flavor of English?
A: Something completely incomprehensible to an American.
It's amazing how many cues exist in the accents we use in our language. American English is actually quite forgiving of foreign accents, but it frustrates me to no end trying to understand the Indian on the other end. It's not that he has an Indian accent. The reps actually tend to speak English quite well. The problem is that the slight Indian accent completely throws off the British accent (which most Americans are unaccustomed to anyway) and makes it very difficult to comprehend their speach. Add the quality of a telephone connection on the mix and you've got a communications disaster far worse than the bored utterances of the previous Floridians. (Who were no shining examples of pretty speech themselves.)
Ok, I'm done complaining. I'm sure I'll soon be hearing from all manners of Indians, British, and Floridians who all feel slighted just because I had a bad customer support experience. Cheerio!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Globalism is great. Eventually Africa will be used as it really is the last spot of untapped labor (although a tad risky at the moment).
The current exchange rate is 43.5 to 1. They won't be outsourcing back anytime soon.
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I'd venture to say some of them speak even more weller than some Slashdot editors.
I agree, except for more authenticity, I would have written it: "...some of them speak even more weller then some Slashdot editors.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
The foreign workers will cost less working in India by serving the rest of their life with cheap Indian labor. This is how the entire economy of a country like England or the US gets "outsourced" to India. Because soon enough, the foreign workers will drain the local nontech labor pool of its best workers to serve them, and more people will need to be imported. It's almost as damaging to the local, less skilled, labor pool as it is to the foreign economies cherry picked for its workers. While the transplants ramp up India's economy, many of its globally competitive advantages, like unfettered environmental destruction and labor commoditization, will eventually catch these migrant workers short.
Maybe it's time we just fill a "B Ark" with service personnel, and turn this brain drain to our advantage.
--
make install -not war
What the shortage in India says to me is that businesses are all so caught up in getting on the next bandwagon that they always go wayyy overboard.
What was particularly appealing to them wrt oursourcing was that businesses were so mad at themselves for overdoing things during the internet boom that they were more than happy to overdo their "revenge" on the workforce.
I keep seeing stuff like:
The outsourcing countries have major advantages that we would require significant adjustment to overcome:
1. They've got a huge workforce of people who are overjoyed to work. If your choice was between call center/coding/offshored clerical work and whatever job you could get back in your village, what would you choose? I'm actually working on a partially outsourced project now...a couple of our developers went over to India to work, and they report that people are more than happy to work 15-16 hour days.
2. The standard of living is much lower. Everyone doesn't need the newest car, latest clothes or an expensive house. In the US, a lot of the salary inflation is because keeping up in the consumer universe is so expensive.
3. Education is considered important. Those stories you hear of immigrant students doing much better in school are true. It's considered shameful to fail in most other countries. True, we may not be graduating as many scientists and engineers because the employment prospects are so dismal, but I think it's mainly because parents don't push their kids to do well as much as they do in other countries. If/when I have kids, they will be education robots...nothing but study until they're finished with school. That's the only way we can compete.
So in comparison, we have an expensive, undereducated country with a poor work ethic. No wonder we're losing this battle!
NAFTA encouraged many American companies to build manufacturing facilities in Mexico. The impetus was cheaper labor, no labor unions, no benefits, no cumbersome environmental regulations -- in short, all those things that the Clinton regime was supposed to address in follow-up legislation when promises were made to American trade unions.
But some companies that established Mexican facilities decided that Mexican workers still cost too much money, so they imported Chinese labor to replace the Mexicans. As the infrastructure and regulatory situation improved in the PRC, these same companies pulled up stakes and moved to China, leaving behind a lot of unemployed Mexican AND Chinese workers. (Many of these workers have since illegally immigrated to the USA through the porous southern border.)
Whatever labor gap India may currently have that impacts their offshore outsourcing business, so long as they continue to invest in their human and technical infrastructure, the situation will correct itself. OTOH, the Dubya/neo-con regime in the USA is not only not willing to invest in improving either their human or technical infrastructure, they are hard at work dismantling the remnants of the social safety net by any means possible. It is not hard to foresee that both China and India will be 1st-world world powers within 20 years, while America will have slid into the position of a feudal 3rd-world economic basket case.
The technical people in India and other third-world countries already have a standard of living that's equal or above their counterparts in the USA and Europe. Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.
India, China, and other countries keep their exchange rates artificially low to increase their exports. This is made necessary mostly because the USA and Europe have heavy subsidies on agricultural products that compete with third-world exports. What's the point in subsidizing orange growth in Florida, if Brazil has perfect soil and climate for growing oranges, while Florida is only marginally adequate for oranges? Why does Europe grow sugar beets if sugar cane produces sugar at much lower costs?
In order for less industrialized countries to compete with the agricultural products which make most of their economy, they must lower prices by depressing the exchange rates.
If you are an unemployed engineer in the USA, blame not the CEO who follows a sane economic policy. Blame the farmers and their lobbyists.
http://www.finfacts.com/costofliving4.htm
According to this index, it looks like living in Mumbai or New Dehli costs about 45% of what it costs in New York, and 1/3 what it costs in Tokyo.
Does it really cost 2.29 Rupees for a loaf of bread (I just bought one for $2.29) or can you really rent an apartment in Mumbai for under 3000 Rupees/month?
Hint: When I was in Turkey and the exchange rate was 400,000 lira to the dollar, I wasn't able to get a meal at any restaurant for less than a million lira.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
You're killing me.
You think it is a good thing that in a country with a billion people, there is a labor shortage of hundreds of thousands in the tech field? This country has a BILLION people. BILLION. This isn't evidence of Indian government doing things right, its evidence of them doings going WRONG. What is wrong with these billion people that not even a fraction of a percent of them are skilled enough to fill these jobs?
The problem inherently lies in education. These billions of Indians don't (yet) have the education to fully compete in the tech field. The labor force is not up to par when it comes to actually knowing how to do the job. Oh, sure the COST of labor is what makes them competitive compared to American workers, but in terms of actually having the necessary skills to compete, its still no contest.
In reality, the fact that there isn't such a huge gap between supply/demand for tech workers in the US, especially porportional to the number of people living in the country, is a good thing. Wait, hear me out. Sure it isn't necessarily appealing at first for you, the worker as an individual. Wages are lower when your skills aren't in demand, everyone knows this. You have to look past that though. The fact that we actually have the labor supply to meet our still rather high demand for tech workers says everything about the education of people living in the US. Imagine if the US had such a labor shortage in the tech field. It would be disasterous! It would be a prime indicator that Americans were simply too dumb to fill the positions. An educated population is a good thing at home, and it is a good thing abroad. As the world becomes more educated, we all benefit.
Praising misguided government "labor policies" for a situation that is really the result of horrible education and living conditions, which have been fostered by their ass-backwards goverment for generations, is just something I won't do. If you think that Indian government policy is really so much better than what takes place in America, then feel free to move over there, as already many posts have suggested doing. I for one would rather be homeless on the streets in the US then work in India. Worker's Paradise it ain't.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Generally focusing on the long term is best in the long term. The issue is that the long term can be a very long time. As an example, it was 50 years before Japan paid for their mercantilist policies with a decade of no growth and deflation. Something similar will happen in other parts of Asia, but it could be near our retirement rather than mid career. It takes a lot of grit to stick to the proper policies after 30-50 years of losses.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
When it is true, which it is in this case.
"Ok...Seriously... There is no language called "Indian." It can be used as an Adjective.. but not as a Noun"
However, there are languages called "Indian". As it is a plural, it can be used as a noun. Plurals do count as nouns. The parent you objected to, who referred to "speaking Indian", did not specify the singular, and his wording fits the plural. Therefore, he is correct.
Similarly, there are many Slavic languages. It is also correct to refer to someone as "speaking Slavic", whether or not the specific language is Russian, Macedonian, or Polish.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You really think India is "to blame" for being a poorer country than the US of A and the other Western countries? That and the resulting favorable Exchange Rate is the reason why it's a good deal for Corporations to move their operations to India.
What do you propose they do? Artificially inflate the value of the Rupee, so that it's at par with the US Dollar so their population doesn't "compete unfairly" for American jaabs, and have the resulting rise in the cost-of-living starve out more than 50% of the population who don't earn more than a few Rupees a month?
The whole reason behind the so called "Outsourcing" is the *favorable Exchange Rate* as another poster noted further up in this thread. Unlike the popular notion, the standard-of-living of software developers is *not* lower in the US and China - infact they're among the highest paid technical workers in the market.
I suggest you blame the Corporations who want to put their profits above their ethics, rather than painting blaming a billion people with your "disingenuous/unethical" brush just because they were unfortunate (or fortunate - perspectives may differ) enough to be born into a poorer country.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
It should, because the richer they get, the richer we get.
I'd say that at least in part depends on your definition of "we"
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.