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Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing
quantumstream writes "CNN/Money is reporting that high wages are causing some software companies to look to other countries for outsourcing, including Eastern Europe and several other SE Asian countries. Gartner Research believes a drop of 45% in India's share could happen in the next two years. Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?"
With companies constantly looking for new ways to increase profits it was only a matter of time before they found a place cheaper then India. And in theory it is only a matter of time before they run out of places to find. As more countries make the transition from 3rd world, the people living there will begin to realize they are worth more then the $5,000 a year they are making. Hopefully one day it will come back to the best person for the job gets the job, no matter where they are geographically, or how expensive they are
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As with any disruptive mechanism, the original value proposition is driven lower and lower to the point where it is as commodity as the market it surplanted...I am thinking a dot.bangalore crash may be just around the corner. And we are yet to see the real long term negative effects of short-sighted, cost driven offshoring.
Folks..
Lets not kid ourselves here, the poor developers in India are exploited. The average salary is around $390/month, the kids down at the local fast food joint here in the US make more money than that. Sure the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books, computers etc, still cost the same or more than they do here.
I've worked with several out-sourced Indian teams, and to be honest... you get what you pay for. Just like everywhere else, they have good programmers and bad programmers. Unfortunately, the nice people in India have a tendency to what to "please" you, so instead of giving you accurate, clear-cut information, they tend to tell you what you want to hear.
They also have very little motivation, unless they are working for a big company like IBM, which has a reputation for a solid career, most developers aren't going to pull the allnighter or get the job done to meet the deadline.
Out of about 30 code reviews I've done for Indian teams in the past month, I would say I've turned them all back for one coding mistake, bad design, or flat out not fixing the problem. The quality is poor.
I've also spent time building teams in India, and its been pretty much hit and miss. Some teams do great work and are very successful, other teams spend their time trying to negotiate to do less work and have longer times to complete projects, to the point where we've just dropped Indian teams and finished the work ourselves.
Outsourcing costs more than its worth, better off hiring some students and getting two or three good developers vs. 20 bad ones in a different time zone.
People want something for nothing, and are willing to enslave others, then justify it to themselves because they're "saving" these people from poverty.
Only one place those goddamn cost cuts are going. Into the CEO's pocket.
We need to cap CEO salaries to something like 4 times what their best people on the ground earn. Don't think it can work? Check out Korea's ship building industry.
Capitalism and a "free" market are all well and good but it's not a perfect system and there do need to be controls.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It's not ironic. It's economics.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere."
I am sick of hearing this nonsense. This fairy tale idea that capitalism will bring its fruit to everyone and all will be equal. It will never happen; capitalism creates inequality, not equality. Just look at the US and how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. It's no different on a global scale. As long as the rich are willing in their greed to screw up whole nations - as the US is doing right now and has been doing for a long time - there will be plenty of starving people who will work for pennies under sweatshop conditions.
Granted I am a firm opponent to outsourcing, but Dells have been getting much cheaper in the past few years. For 1500 two years ago, I got a 2.6GHz/512MB/17" LCD/Radeon 9800 Dell/CDR, and my mother just six months ago got a 3.2GHz/1G/19" LCD DVI/Radeon X300/DVR for significantly less, something like 1200. I don't think that's just because of the natural rate at which technology becomes cheaper.
What are you smoking? I actually have some Indian friends who work for American companies doing things like programming and call center staff. They worked their ass off to get their education (which is harder to come by in India). Instead of being relegated to begging, dirt farming, or other forms of hard subsistive labor, they have an oppritunity that was never avaliable to them before to bring themselves and their familes out of abject poverty and gain self suffience.
How you call this slavery boggles the mind. You'd personally throw them back into abject conditions, wouldn't you?
hah exactly. look at the people who push outsourcing and captialism - they are all rich, and intent on getting richer at anyones expense. having said that, while capitalism isn't perfect it's the best system we have.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
1. Some "consulting firm" is involved in a study instead of some non-profit organization.
2. When that firm is Gartner, who've been known to make all kinds of outrageous claims to get publicity.
3. They come up with nice, easy numbers like "Gartner Research believes a drop of 45% in India's share could happen in the next two years." Anyone who've done any research or studies, knows that numbers ending in 5 or 0 don't have special meanings in reality. The only thing that it matters to are readers, especially PHBs. What this suggests is that Gartner just pulled some number out of a hand to get more publicity, again. 45% is much easier for a PHB to rattle off than 73% during a meeting.
I have no strong feelings about this "news" either especially coming from a source as unreliable as Gartner. The trend is probably true but the number is probably bogus.
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Offering someone a job, even at what you consider to be a crappy wage, isn't enslavement.
It isn't necessarily a bright idea either. A hefty chunk of the really smart people overseas tend to emigrate to where they'll get paid nice wages. Managing projects on the other side of the world, through culture and time-zone barriers, isn't very easy. Clueless PHB types at big companies are torching resources by following this outsourcing fad but it's very difficult to outright sink a huge corporate ship, short of pulling an Enron. Our clue^H^H^H^Hfearless MBAs are trying though.
What we should do is make it as easy as possible to start and run businesses. Pass the Flat Tax so we won't have to waste so much time and money figuring out how to comply with the tax code. Heck, that step alone would give a huge boost to small businesses who can't afford platoons of tax attorneys and accountants (and "donations" to Congressmen to encourage the writing of favorable tax loopholes). Tort reform would be nice too.
Make it easier to start businesses and the dumb ones won't be able to stay in business so long.
The truly rich are a small portion of the American population. You blame them for the global inequality that exists, yet you and the other 295 million Americans fail to do anything to truly limit their influence.
Chances are you're wearing cheap, imported clothes made in the same sweatshops you're here speaking out again, bought at a WalMart owned by the rich people who you are blaming for poverty.
If you want results, you'll have to actually take a stand. Perhaps buy a sheep or a cotton tree, grow your own wool and cotton, and make your own clothes. Others would have to do the same. Bitching here will have very little, if any, effect.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Well, the irony of Canadian wood is that you Yankees want it, but you just don't want to pay much for it. And now you're flouting a treaty and keeping an ill-gotten $5 billion. Other countries in negotiations with the US over free trade agreements pay heed. American politicians are corrupt servants of industries too incompetent to compete.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This fairy tale idea that capitalism will bring its fruit to everyone and all will be equal.
Any person knowledgable with the correct definition of capitalism would point out that it has never been intended to create a socialist utopia. Capitalism is just a system to facilitate the distribution of goods/services based on exchange at market value, vs. the alternatives. Ever hear the "man is fundamentally flawed, and so are all of his creations" argument? Name me a better alternative (something most "progressives" are completely incapable of doing).
It will never happen; capitalism creates inequality, not equality.
Inequality of the inputs (people's ability, intellect, motivation, education, family history, work ethic, honesty, etc.) causes the inquality of the outputs. Pass a string into an integer in C and I'd expect you'd be blaming the weakness of the language, not the programmer.
Back to the available options, would you rather have a system where the lazy or dishonest people suffer, or one where they rule over the resources? I personally abhor silver spoon yuppies, having dealt with them and their purchased degrees throughout my career. The worst system for them is pure capitalism, as they have nothing of value to offer (other than spending their fund money which only lasts so long). Yes, the data does indicate the US is moving towards a meritocracy, where the competent, educated and motivated rise and rule over others through their command of capital. I'm always shocked when any potentially intelligent slashdotter opposes this system, but then again, it takes some of us more time than others to realize utopian ideals don't work when not everyone is equally intelligent, honest and motivated.
As long as the rich are willing in their greed to screw up whole nations - as the US is doing right now and has been doing for a long time
Comments like this just show extreme historical and international ignorance. I've traveled throughout Europe, North and South America. I've found the US to be the least corrupt of all nations I've worked within. If you want to see concentration of wealth in the privileged few, get your ass to Venezuela (which has gone from bad to worse) or to any oil-producing middle eastern nation. The same families have been running the show for hundreds of years and there is no opportunity unless you produce for them and give them their take. It's no different than the feudal system the Europeans pushed throughout the world. Chavez only shifted the balance towards a smaller set of elites, all getting more of the wealth.
If you want to see old money power, deal with the high and mighty Swiss. Their alleged neutrality has no moral basis. If your slaughter would make them money, they'll take the check. So either start holding all the worlds crooks accountable, or admit you're a useful fool and sheep for them. Granted it's a dangerous game to challenge old money authority, but ultimately all of us have to decide whether to think for ourselves or continue to be someone's slave.
Also, take the recent big articles in New York Times and Fortune, calling out for MORE subsidizing of fundamental technology, because corporations can't develop it themselves. It's so costly and unprofitable, the public must subsidize the costs and risk, so private companies can privatize the profit.
Normally it's not widely admitted, except when politicians like Bush start shifting the subsidies around, making enemies.
Protectionism is just a tool. Whether it's useful (and for whom) depends on the situation.
Offering someone a job, even at what you consider to be a crappy wage, isn't enslavement.
So if you say "here do this work, otherwise you'll end up poor and starving" isn't enslavement? It isn't far from it if you ask me. The only decent option is to ask someone else for a job, but if everyone in a position of power is offering the same conditions, guess what you're back to the same conditions: work for me or die.
At the very least this is servitude. You do get some choice in who gets to be your master.but honestly I don't think it's that far off enslavement.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Protectionism is mostly a tool for making certain industries profitable at the expense of everyone else. It takes a brave and enlightened government to resist the urge to throw up trade barriers. The Bush administration isn't one of them.
I've been working on a little theory that the whole outsourcing phenomena is reflective of a much deeper economic problem that's been developing in the U.S. over the last 20+ years.
The last great bout with price-inflation in the U.S. was in the late 1970's, after Nixon cut the dollar's theoretical gold-peg (theoretical, because only foreigners could redeem dollars for gold), and while the economy was absorbing all of the dollars that'd been "printed" to pay for the Vietnam war.
Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979->1987, solved the Inflationary crisis of the early 1980's by hiking interest rates to obscenely high levels. His entry in the wikipedia says that inflation was reduced from 9% in 1980 to 3.5% in 1982. The cure wasn't easy, however, as it induced a recession and much joblessness. It was thought that Reagan was going to be a one-termer.
Anyways, today is like the 1970's all over again. We've had tons of newly printed money spewing out of the government since about 1995. First it fueled the dot-com bubble. The government opened the money-faucet even wider after 9/11. The effect of having more money in the economy is that prices go up for scarce items with high demand. Hence we have home prices that seems to grow without end, and the price of oil going through the roof.
The difference between the 2000's and the 1970's is that Giant Corporations seem to think they have a way out of paying American workers the increased wages price inflation forces them to demand: outsourcing.
Remember Little Boy George's hundred-billion $ economic stimulus package that got passed soon after 9/11? In decades past, Americans (er, USians) would've taken the money and gone out and bought products built buy other Americans (USians). Those producers would take their profits from all the sales and use them to invent new things to sale, and new American factories to build them in. Closed circuit, stimulus gets recycled in the economy over and over again.
In the new system, Americans take their economic stimulus to go out and buy stuff "made in china" And profits from that sale allows chinese entrepreneurs to go and build a new factory in China. Open circuit. So Georgie Boy's stimulus package went around once.
There's nothing wrong with trade, so long as it's a two-way street. But at least in the last 4 years, Americans have been buying goods from China, and the chinese have been lending the dollars they've made in the sale back to us, to pay for our illustrious leader's silly little jihad against self-induced terrorism (See Harry Browne's When Will We Learn [part 2], and his other 2001 articles for what I think is a lucid explanation of how the U.S.'s foreign policy has lead to the problems we face today).
Getting back to the subject at hand: the primary problem is not that there's a trade imbalance, but that the Federal Reserve's willy-nilly printing of money allows the imbalance to grow much much larger than it ever could otherwise. In hard-money times, if China accumulated an excess of dollars, those dollars would become worth less in world trade. Chinese products would become more expensive for Americans to buy, and American products would become cheaper for the Chinese.
But as it has been, the Chinese pegged their currency to the dollar (hence, no relative adjustment in the value of the two currencies), and that was just fine for Georgie, 'cause the chinese bought plenty of U.S. bonds to pay for his silly little war.
I think i'm rambling now, so I'll quit soon. My main point is that Giant Corporations are outsourcing today to hide rampant 1970's-style inflation from their customers.
Outsourcing is also done to prevent the natural "leveling of the playing field." In a closed-circuit economy, if no one want
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So if you say "here do this work, otherwise you'll end up poor and starving" isn't enslavement?
That's not the offer. The offer is: "I'll pay this much for this work." If the person to whom you make that offer doesn't want to do it for the price you're paying, then he goes and works for someone else. There is competition for labor, even in India.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes, because everyone in the world is dreaming of living on the street, eating out of garbage cans, and sleeping on heating vents.
Or did you think all poor people have a house, two cars, and satelite TV?
We care less if it's in India, Vietnam or Europe. When will they ever come back to Mainland? Is it possible ? No.
The BPO definition will widen from call center to urine and blood sampling to stock research and auditing.
Adding to American woes is the dick-head immigration policy where we are neither getting enough graduate or P.hd students nor the ones graduating are working here.
Ultimately, China and India will de-stabilize the economic balance created and get richer. Lets accept the fact and begin to work harder or perish.
Trust Microsoft/Trust ManagedCode!
Does that mean all of the Spanish-only speakers came here to the US???
Indivduals in Latin America who speak English usually can live a pretty good lifestyle on the income they make down there. Certainly a good number will immigrate, but they don't have to immigrate for economic survival reasons.
Many of the economic migrants are uneducated/undereducated, so they likely have little knowledge of English.
So, yes, a far greater percentage of non-English speakers come to the US than what are found as a percentage of the original country's population.
India = Indo-European languages.
True, but the Slavic languages such as Russian are also Indo-European languages, and they can introduce just as much of an accent barrier as anything else. What matters is not the lineage of a language as much as how its phonology differs from that of English.
African and Semite languages are about as far from Indo-European as you can get...
Afroasiatic languages are more closely related to Indo-European languages than are, say, the Uralic-Altaic-Japanese-Korean superfamily or the Amerindian superfamily. Go look up "Nostratic" to see how (comparatively) close Afroasiatic languages are to IE.
Dude,
I don't mean to be harsh here, but a job is not property. It's an exchange of your labor for money, and if your customer can get the work done cheaper, he's entitled to do so. Bottom line: it's his money, not yours.
That being said, I took a look at monster.com and found over 1K hits for "tech support". If that's what you want to do, there are lots of places looking for support people. They may not be in your town, they may not be at the wage you used to get, whatever, but nobody *owes* you anything that they haven't committed to in a contract.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I know everyone has their own tech support nightmare stories but my point with this one is why even have a tier one or general support line at all? More often then not, it is 100% completely useless and gets you nothing. I guess the status quo keeps them there but they could save even more money getting rid of them entirely.
If everyone could actually read and follow simple instructions, there would be no need for a legion of underpaid monkeys to do it for them.
I do agree that certain products (not just problems) should be automatically escalated: the kind of person who buys a KVM is also likely to hook it up correctly. That said, what is the deal with DOA KVMs? How can any single component be so consistently shitty from so many manufacturers?
The issue here in software programming which is skilled labor as opposed to who has the fanciest manufacturing plant.
It's a fallacy that electronic hardware manufacturing does not require skilled labor. Sure the people running the machines don't require alot of skill. But essentially they are the equivalent of call center people. Those factories also need:
Technicians - Maintain equipment
Mechanical Engineers/ChemE/MatSci/EE - develop machine processes, techical documentation, troubleshoot complex problems
Industrial engineers - layouts, material flows, production improvements
Business educated people - manage supply lines
Other college educated - managerial, training, quality,etc.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Eventually is a very long time.
Or as the economist Keynes put it, "In the long run, we will all be dead."
Protectionism does the following...
1) Hurts the poor by raising the cost of goods.
2) Funnels money into inefficient businesses.
3) Cost the taxpayer money to support the regulatory agencies, subsidies, etc.
4) Gives the government a means to further distort the economy by tailoring their tariff policies to favor special interests.
5) Strangles what remaining export industries we have by encouraging tariff wars with foreign governments.
6) Leads to more pain and dislocation in the future by putting off inevitable economic restructuring.
7) Is frequently practiced by autocratic countries.
Economists don't take into account the huge national security risks that globalism presents.
Bingo. Economists still haven't figured out a good way to put externalities into the equation. If the goal of the country is to increase next year's GDP at all costs, then listen to the economists. The externalized expenses of increased unemployment numbers (the real unemployment numbers, not the crap the Labor Dept. puts out), stagnant wages, and increased costs of living have been largely absorbed by increased reliance on credit (thanks in part to the housing bubble). None of these figures puts any red ink to a balance sheet, so why should the economists care? Their job is to serve the holy God of The Market.
As of late, the GDP for the US has been growing rather well, but, for some reason, the rising tide hasn't lifted all boats (or if you prefer, the pie is getting bigger, but only the top 1% are getting a bigger share of the pie). According to supply-side "trickle-down" economics, this isn't possible. Apparently self-interest isn't quite working out the way it has been theorized to work. I have a feeling that when China decides to stop subsidizing us, we'll find out that our economy (and country) has been bankrupt for years.
Oh yeah, speaking about their English accent which probably might be their third or fouth language, how many languages can you speak without accent? Stop looking down at the third world countries. You are not any better....
Okay, I have to address this one. I have quite a bit of experience with Indians and their somewhat limited mastery of spoken English, both from tech support as well as a TA I had at an American university.
First, I'll say this: often their grammar is superior to the average American's. I have no doubt their written English would exceed that of many American's. And I fully understand that English is probably not their primary language. You ask how many languages I speak without accent. Just one...English. I can speak broken Spanish with what I would assume is a horrendous accent. But do you want to know something important? I do not try to offer technical support to Spanish speakers, or try to teach at a Latin American university.
To be fair, most English-speaking Indians speak much better English than I do Spanish, so the comparison is not absolutely fair. But if I cannot understand them, the effect is the same. I am actually impressed by the number of languages many non-Americans speak. But if you are trying to teach a class at a university in the US, or trying to offer tech support for a US company, and you cannot be understood, you are not accomplishing the job you are being paid to do. This actually bothers me less in the tech-support example, because I can always just call back later and try to get a better representative who I can understand. But in the education example, it is often a choice of staying in the class and hoping you just don't even need any help from the instructor (or ever need to understand what they are asking/telling you), or dropping it and hoping you can pick it up later. And hoping that you aren't in the same boat later. And you're paying a lot more for those credits than you are for tech support.
And it isn't necessarily racism. I've had a white European (German, specifically) TA I could barely understand as well. And if companies switch to Eastern European call centers, the problem will likely be the same. I cannot tell the color of your skin over the phone. But I CAN tell if I can understand you.
And yes, if I went to a street in Bangalore and rounded up 10 guys, I'm sure 9 of them would be smarter than our president. Hell, one or two might even be more effective speakers (in English) than our president (ever heard the guy talk?) Most of us are not trying to say than Indians, or anybody else from the countries being outsourced to, are stupid. Just that their English is damn near incomprehensible.
Nor do they take into account the fact that labour isn't just a drain on the company profits, they're also the people that buy the stuff that companies produce. I have yet to see an economic positive in making it so that your customers are unable to afford your products.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
So if you say "here do this work, otherwise you'll end up poor and starving" isn't enslavement?
Enslavement is when a person is owned by an other, and can be bought and sold as property, as well as raped, tortured or killed at will, just as you would be free to destroy any other property.
By contrast, offering someone a job is at worst pointless. If the prospective employee doesn't find the offer better than his current situation, he can always decline it. At best it can improve someone's life immensly. At the utter level of poverty many third worlders live in, a few cents more a day can be the difference between life and death.
Capitalism is the only the system we have. Along with the best system we have I guess you could say it's also the worst system we have too.
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One of the problems is that when you go to Wal-Mart or an expensive department store, odds are its all sweat shop goods. It's sickening, but in a modern society it's unreasonable to live "backwoods" by making your own clothing and such. Sorry, show up to a job interview dressed like a relic from a few 100 years ago and you can't afford to live because you can't work.
Historically the wealthy or noble--whatever you want to call the actual or de facto ruling class in any society--force or effectively force the "peons" to do things. When the average American is starting to look forward to nothing but working FOR Wal-Mart, where else are they going to shop? Increases in wages in this country are not proportionate to the increase in taxes over the past few decades. Not even close. While the "average" American may be the one buying things that support slave labor, it's the fascist combination of the wealthy, the coporations and the governments that have, more or less, made too expensive for "regular" people to do anything else.
A lot of us would like to "buy American" just as much as we'd like to "eat organic." However, in the end things like "wearing any clothing" and "eating anything" and oh, I don't know, "paying rent" win out. This is not to say that the average American is blameless, but placing all the blame on your minimum to low wage workers who have little choice is like blaming European serfs for the vile imperialism of their leaders in the middle ages. Yes, they could have stood as one to fight back and revolt (and did at times), but few people are willing to die and suffer for such things. Are you?
Wal-Mart is just the 21st century "company" store, only the greedy bastards that run these corporations have become far more sophisticated in the last century. For instance, in the USA a lot of people think we "defeated" slavery with the civil war. When, in fact, the industrialists of the north had figured out that it was much more effective to have slaves who had the illusion of freedom.
I mean you're on a computer and so am I. Certainly it's not just clothing made in China and other portions of Asia that's sweat shop material. Thanks to allowing corporations to tap into the high profit margins yielded by nations who allow their people to be treated with few rights and no dignity there's almost nothing you or I can buy in an industrialized nation that doesn't fuel sweat shops in some way. Even if it's "Made In America" or wherever, odds are tons of the parts and raw materials are imported from slave labor camps.
What I do agree with is that we need to take a stand in industrialized nations and particularly in America where it's our damn birth right and DUTY. The best way to take a stand isn't to grow cotton or live like the Amish. All you end up doing in that case is looking like a crazy person who, while taking a personal stand, isn't really doing anything to change the injustice he/she is opposed to.
The best way to take a stand is to simply say, "No." Say no to government. Say no to all the things that create this blight in industrialized nations. I really admire Rosa Parks. She demonstrated how much a simple "no" could change things. Until the people of this country are willing, in a large number, to stand up against income tax, foreign fars, corporate rampages, and similar problems and face the consequences of doing so, like their forefathers did, like the brave minorities during the civil rights movement, we're simply going to dwindle. It's not just a matter for standing up for ourselves either. It's a matter of telling these greedy tyrants all over the world that we will not stand for putting children to work for 16 hours a day making sneakers!
When a nation has no factories at home and is totally dependant on foreign labor, it's in trouble. Dependancy on a thing makes you a slave and a servant to that thing. The solution is easy, deregulate small business (lower their prices and increase their employee wages), penalize corporations with taxes for setting up shops
You are deluding yourself if you think you can limit the influence of the rich. The top 1% of Americans own 40-50% of the wealth in America, more than the bottom 95% combined. Bill Gates alone has more money than the bottom 45% of Americans combined.
The rich own and control the corporations. It used to be that America was a farm society where everyone was self-sufficient and didn't rely on anyone else. Good luck trying to live that lifestyle today. Now, everyone works for corporations. You do what they say, when they say it. They don't care about your free speach rights, they don't care about your right to carry a firearm, they don't care whether you can only work 60 hours this week, and they don't care that you're underpaid for the amount of money you generate for them. They'll take all that extra money you generate and give themselves an extra million dollar bonus. Tough shit for you. You just get the "prevailing wage" of what every other company is ripping off their workers for. You are their slave and they know it. Just try living without them.
Through the ownership of corporations, the rich control the media. The idea that the media is controlled by a bunch of independent liberals is long since past. The majority of the media outlets have combined under a few mega-corporations. They decide what you see on TV, what you hear on the radio, what you read in the paper and magazines, and what you see online in the main news outlets. Good luck trying to communicate a story they don't want passed along.
The rich own the politicians, both Democrat and Republican. If you have the money, you can pay to talk to the politician of your choice. Hell, if you have the money, you can attempt to buy the presidency like Ross Perot. As it stands, the wealthy are the only ones who can afford to run for political offices at all.
The rich own the courts. People like Heidi Fleiss, madame to the stars, get thrown in jail for prostitution, while all the famous and powerful people found in her client list go unouted and unprosecuted. People like Michael Jackson can and do get away with pedophilia. People like OJ Simpson can and do get away with murder. Bill Gates, richest man in the world, could come to your house right now and shoot you right between the eyes, in cold blood, for all the naughty things you say about Microsoft... and not a court in the world would convict him of your death.
Yet, with all this you think you can limit their power by just what, not shopping at Wal-Mart?! Give me a break. You are delusional.
These are nothing but lame excused against outsourcing. Lets be rational. Today hundreds of American companies do business worldwide. You sell Coke, Pepsi and BigMacs throughout the world. In a similar fashion these countries are using their human resource to do business in America or Europe. The point I am trying to make is that it is very natural for different companies in different parts of the world to compete without intervention from the governments. And I guess an average Joe from America just wants the government to intervene. It goes against the spirit of a free market.
Regarding accent I just can not take it that it is incomprehensible. And in call centers in India they get rigorous training on this. And apart from serving the American customers these centers support customers worldwide. When I make a call to some call center to enquire about my flight, I donot expect someone will speak in the same accent as I do. As long as I can comprehend it, it is good enough for me.
Lastly I heard Slashdot is a website about new technology and inventions. Slowly it is becoming a platform for expressing grievances for American programmers. That's not what it is intended for. And this is not at all interesting for readers from other countries. Lets grow up guys. Lets put topics on it what it is intended for. I have nothing against American programmers. I use to work with lots of American programmers and I appreciate some of their abilities as well.
Regarding accent I just can not take it that it is incomprehensible.
Whether you "take it" or not, many tech support workers in India are quite incomprehensible to the Americans who are routed to them.
I transfer calls to and receive calls from Indian agents every single day, and I am exceptionally good at understanding Indian accents (there seem to be several variations within India). I have had more than one person in India ask me if I was in India, because I was literally the first American they ever heard pronounce their name exactly the same way they do (or at least the first American who bothered to). I would rather see my company offshore x number of jobs to full-time employees in India than to simply outsource the same jobs to an outfit where they pay the contracting company on a per-call basis. What is the incentive system at work there?
Having said all that, is not just the pronounciation of the words that confuses many Americans, but also the choice of words spoken that throws so many people off. For instance, "Thank you for being on hold" does not inspire confidence that this person, whose mercy you are at, is going to be able to effectively communicate very complex things to you over the phone, to fix your computer.
--something witty
but the poorest are also generally less poor. U have proof of that? You'd be surprised at the level and extent of poverty in Europe. Please read up before you claim such nonsense
Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?
No- it's the beginning of the "poverty as a comparitive advantage" economic model. Just like we've been predicting for years.
These corporations were getting high off of the fact that they had an easy way to undermine American labor and trade standards- India was the perfect "fertile ground" for that; They had the education system of a developed nation (skilled workers), but the labor standards of a third-world nation. Now that they are actually establishing some standards for themselves, they are losing their "poverty advantage".
Welcome to the new World Economy- a "round robin" game where your nation wins when your standards of living have eroded to a point less than everyone else's; and you lose as soon as you try to start making them better.
Well buddy, I'm one of those employees. So I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
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