Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Outsourcing in India
aaditeshwar writes "Economist has an article on the current and projected state of outsourcing IT and other business processes to India. The biggest problem seems to be that the talent pool of skilled workers will not able to keep up. Currently there are about 700,000 people working in IT and outsourcing, which is likely to grow up to 2.3 million by 2010, but only 1.05 million new graduates will qualify from local colleges in the next 5 years leading to a shortfall of 500,000 workers! All this despite the fact that almost 2.5 million students graduate in India each year." From the article: "In IT the growth in Indian exports is expected to come both from the software market, and from 'traditional IT outsourcing'--such as the remote management of whole systems, a market now dominated by the big global IT consultancies. This is expected to rise from 8% of Indian sales now to about 30% in 2010, while software-development's share will fall from 55% to 39%. In business-process-offshoring, the big industries will remain banking and insurance. But rapid expansion is also expected in other areas, like legal services."
Eastern Europe has a lot of IT/programmer types.
Since some of them aren't employed, they're part of the burgeoning spam/trojan/virus/worm market that has been growing over there. Organized crime too.
Once the Companies have run out of Indian workers to shift jobs to, they'll move to Eastern Europe sooner or later.
And by Eastern Europe I mean former Soviet Block countries & their neighbors.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
It is ALL outsourcing. Why separate IT from, say back-office banking, insurance and other tasks...
Heh, or are they trying to distinguish "IT" from trivial paper-pushing.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
When they run out of people to hire in India, or when workers in India are expensive relative to workers in some other country, they'll move on to that other country - it's pretty much as simple as that. The quest for the most effective labour for the lowest price will never end.
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
In my opinion (14 years of consulting), the India craze did cause a significant dip in rates for US people but even couple years ago we already were scratching the bottom of the barrel. I think the shortage of programmers is a global thing and caused by primitive immature tools and processes and outsourcing is not a magic bullet. My typical client cannot coordinate people across the room let alone across the ocean.
that they start outsourcing journalism to india
As far as I know (from cousins, friends, and general chat from India), there is still a strong demand for the outsourced jobs. Almost tens of resumes per open position, so the prediction of "short fall" looks to be based on shaky ground. There are so many factors involved: there is a large pool of current workers, not all positions require an "IT" degree, and that many jobs may not be created (may move to other countries, or be simply automated).
The unemployment rate in India is still staggeringly high, and the couple of million jobs that *might* be created will be quickly gobbled up.
I suspect that the industry agenda is to continue to have a huge surplus of applicants (or even increase the applicants to positions ratio), so that they can put a downward pressure on the salaries. I'd call it Walmart-ization of the IT (and non-IT) outsourced industry.
S
complains about the lack of programmer graduates from the US.
Does anyone wonder why few Americans want to take up programming any more as a career? There's no jobs for them - the corporations crying about a lack of programmers refuse to look to the US to hire any.
And when BPO hits the banking sector, you can kiss the security of your identity goodbye.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
...that current outsourcing trends slow enough due to a competent IT worker shortage in India (for what piddling amounts the US companies are currently willing to shell out for outsourced positions anyway), such that the US labor costs can drop slowly. This would allow existing US IT workers can continue to find *some* work and do nice things like FEED THEIR FAMILIES until the global economies even out. This will likely take years though, so I'm not holding my breath.
At the megacorp where I worked we tried filling a Perl/sysadmin type position to work from India for a YEAR. I know those poeple are out there, they just need to pay them more $$$.
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
And I've recently decided that my management was too expensive so Ive outsourced it to India.
I want to say this will be the case, but it's worth noting that computers just aren't affordable for the average person. The average salary is about 15-25% of an American equivalent in the IT world, and that's astronomically high for India. That may or may not get you a car.
/. and related places there aren't more people chiming in about their experience in India. I mean, some of us have been over there to train people. Collectively the IT folks in America are getting more impressions of experiences in India. Hopefully more of those impressions will come to light as discussion continue.
My point is it's not like the US where someone can sit at home, get a computer, and learn computer skills quickly. Someone in India has to take the time to learn computer skills somewhere. I'm not sure where the qualified applicants are going to come from.
Completely offtopic, I'm astounded that after all of these India posts on
We're in the process of hiring 100 Engineers from both India and Pakistan, with the plan being to bring them into Mainland China to work in the telecom industry.
:)
During our recruiting so far, we're seeing a yield of approx. 5% after all interviews and testing, but that is prior to them coming into the PRC. We've gone thru nearly 4,000 candidates since Sept.
For the record, I'd source domestically, but mgmnt. wants to curry favor with the home countries, so the burden to fit them in is on me. At least the bonus program is in my favor
I go through at least 40 or 50 resumes in the US (Metro NYC area) to find one person worth hiring. And these are resumes that have been supposedly pre-screened by headhunters. Resume counts mean nothing if those tens of resumes represent poorly skilled people.
I dont trust these numbers, IT numbers leave out IS and other comp-sci, engineering people who also do the same programming, dba, systems/network engineering.
I think a few things will happen.
Government will have to figure out how to tax those people, the outsource loophole, the company doesnt have to pay insurance, workers comp or benefits. The biggest problem is we outsource work for one of the high end middleclass sectors and drop the pay in 1/2 to 1/3 when the cost of living stays the same in the US. While those people offshore dont pay local taxes. When enough people start feeling the money crunch, expect some laws passed.
Software programming will be cheap, you can buy custom software quickly. I know some web developers who work with a couple outsource groups who just send the specs, and the company sends the completed software. While its not perfect, its cheaper and only takes 20-30 days. Good enough for first generation software.
And last, there will be some scandles about IP issues and copyrights.
I understand there are other countries that are catching up as well in the area of skilled IT workers and solid educational facilities to prepare budding technologists for the market. Infrastructure is almost there, although cell phone capabilities aren't quite on par with the rest of the world. There are also some rolling power outage issues as well in the western corner of the country. But, it's only a matter of time before the salary dfiferential makes outsourcing to this country attractive.
They seem anxious to have a recovery in domestic employment market growth. They haven't seen significant growth in the domestic labor market for hundreds of years. The pieces seem to be almost in place for the Nacirema to start benefiting from IT outsourcing just like India and other parts of the Far East.
Every outsourcing story I've heard has ended in disaster, overrun budgets, wasting thousands of dollars sending employees to India for months at a time, and unmaintainable code ... all the while not being cheap enough to justify any of it.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Because it's cheaper, maybe?
There's plenty of geek talent in the US for the hiring.
Will you work for $5K per year, no holidays, no vacations, on a 60 hours per week schedule?
Seems like that will benefit the most people in the long-run.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I was an IT worker in India. I am Indian. Indian IT companies recrit all sorts of engineer i.e civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical etc apart from comp sci. Since most engineering students have atleast a common denominator of traits like analysis, rigourous coursework, maths etc. the IT companies know that they can train them in sofwtware with relative ease. Of course the CS grads get the more better technlogy to start with (says database. java etc) while the non - CS ones may have more maintenance, mainframe, testing kind of job to begin with. Most IT companies take grads and subject them to 1-3 months intensive introductory software training courses just like a mini college course. Check for example the infosys global education centre Also large Indian companies are in turn opening offices in China , Hungary etc to outsource the outsourcing.
I'm the network engineer for a company considering setting up an engineering / design shop in India. I just got pricing for a DS3 Internet circuit there. HOLY SPANDEX, BATMAN!
/constantly/, so you'd better plan on two of everthing for redundancy.
A straight E1 circuit (2Mbps) to the Internet is about $4000/month, and about $3000 to install. (All prices in US dollars) Not cheap, but not bad.
A 2xE1 (4Mbps) jumps to over $10,000 per month.
Once you hit DS-3 which is scalable in the sense that once you have the circuit installed ($17,000 one-time fee), you can go from 0-3 Mbps to start all the way up to 45Mbps, your rates go from $16,000/month for the 3Mbps up to over $80,000 PER MONTH for the 45Mbps.
Depending on what you're doing there, the straight E1 isn't that bad, but you really can't pump that much data through it. The ds3 prices are through the roof. Plus, I've been told that the infrastructure there is so bad that shit fails
Now if you're truly outsourcing all of this and therefore feel that you don't eed to worry about the sunk costs, fine, but when you pick the cheapest-of-the cheap bid, that most likely means that they have a crappy DSL out to the 'net that goes down at least once a week for 24 hours at a stretch. "sorry, couldn't {manage your network | take your callcenter calls | upload those CAD files you REALLY REALLY needed by 8AM the next morning} because our local loop was down because some dude running a backhoe trying to upgrade our highway system just yanked our a thousand strands of fiber."
Oh yeah, there's also the problem that India gov't managed-monolopy telcomm says that you can't terminate out-of-country VoIP calls into the Indian PSTN. So now you need either two phones on every desk, or softphones, or ??. Again, two infrastructures for them to manage. (If, of course, they feel that their wageslaves^H^H^H^H^H employees need to be able to call locally while at work.)
My guess is that as these hidden 'costs' start to surface, and as the cost of labor increases in India, people will start to move on to the next cheap area. Lather, rinse, repeat, wait a few years, and everything balances out (or so the economists in the group would say??)
I'm astounded that after all of these India posts on /. and related places there aren't more people chiming in about their experience in India
I've only spent a week in India myself, but I grew up in SE Asia (Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia). When I was there in the 1970's, Singapore had a rapidly expanding economy, Indonesia was just beginning to cash in on their oil resources, and Malaysia was a pretty sleepy kind of a place, where the average worker had no hope at all of sending his kids to high school, let alone college.
Today, Singapore is certainly a fully industrialized nation, Malaysia and Indonesia are pretty close, if they're not there yet, and I'm thrilled to see India following suit after about fifty years of stupidly trying to follow the Soviet model of centrally-planned squalor, while the infrastructure the Brits left behind slowly crumbled.
The people I met in Bangalore, Delhi, and Agra want a better life, and they're willing to work harder to get there than nearly anyone I've ever met in the USA or Europe. They impressed the hell out of me, and I wish them all the prosperity they can achieve.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Anyway what do you folks say? ------- Apologies for typos and bad formatting - NO TIME.
It all depends of freedom.
Everyone in the USA and Europe already buy all their stuff from China. Unless you count a second rate OS and other increasingly made abroad IP, I'm not sure what there is to buy from US anymore. I wish it were different. IP is a tenuous export at best, but it's a bogus one when it's based on imported research.
All the money in the world won't really standards of living in China because they are not free. People making goods there will continue to be abused by their owners who pocket it all.
It only takes one non free country to screw everything for everyone.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I would opine about how India and China are going to become giant behemoths and own everything but I remember Japan. Remember movies about Japan in the 80s? Then remember the Japanese recession?
China and India are different. I'm just talking about India here.
Let's be brutally honest: we only outsource to India the dumb shit of life. They are like the Migrant Mexican workers, picking our vegetables or mowing or lawns or making the beds in the hotels: it's just some dumb shit we don't want to do. Calling to dink around with your account or reschedule your flight is just some other dumb shit we don't want to do, so we give it to cheapies cause, you know, what the fuck.
So, if I was India, I would be extremely scared, because one significant advance in artificial intelligence means everything in India gets re-outsourced to robots. Let's face it, there's nothing an Indian can do that you can't do yourself on a website, barring mere technical limitations.
Dig it?
No matter where you come from, where you were educated, if you don't have the two brain cells rubbin together to form innovative solutions to REAL problems people have, you won't get/hold a solid job.
Simple as that.
I don't care how many degrees from whatever school you have. If you can't see past the quick buck to real problems and their solutions you're just a tool in my eyes. People look down on Indians and Chinese because they're a dime a dozen [literally and figuratively] but what makes you think your neighbours in your comp.sci classes are any more competent to do productive work?
I'm all for making money but only off things of value. Otherwise you waste a lot of time trying to sell [re: market] things of substantially lower value [re: intel processors] just to make sure you can stay in business [re: partner with Dell].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
"ID theft happens far more often in the US/Australia than at some foreign call/data center."
"Internet ID theft is far more prevalent"
etc.
Just so you're well armed for these responses...
Here is the tale of two data centers, one in Australia and one in India.
In Australia, a data center manager and its employees are paid more than people overseas; consider what it would cost to bribe them a year's salary. And moreover, they are under the relatively watchful eye of law enforcement. If they steal personal information, they're within the jurisdiction of people who can arrest them and put them away for a long, long time. This makes bribing these workers a lot harder.
In India, a data center manager and its employees are paid a fraction of what Australians get paid for the same work; consider what it would for the Russian Mafia or Al Qaeda to bribe them a year's salary. And moreover, they are not under the relatively watchful eye of Australian law enforcement. If they steal personal information, they're not within the jurisdiction of people who have any reason to arrest them. This makes bribing these workers a lot easier. Plus, it is easier for a bribed worker to disappear within India, or even move out of the country, than Australia. (Aside from the water surrounding Australia, India's borders aren't exactly locked up.)
Now some people will tell you that India data center workers aren't allowed to bring in potential tools for stealing data. But here's the kicker. I can memorize your name, SSN and mother's maiden name, and tell it back to you in a day. If I can do it, others can probably remember several for a long period of time. It's nothing for the mafia or Al Qaeda to train people to do that. And again, if you're paid a year's salary to cough up so many names, and you're a low paid shill in a piece of shit job, you'll do it for that kind of money. And if the data center manager gets tapped, all security is moot. You can also bribe the security workers, considering how poorly they're paid. Once they're paid off, anyone can walk in and out of there with tools to steal data.
The problem here is, the price for owning the person who has the keys to a data center's hidden treasures, is very low.
Thus, you now not only have domestic ID theft, internet theft, and dumpster diving, but you can also add offshore theft - which is far harder for your country to prosecute - to the mix.
How many straws can a camel carry on its back?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
They were old buddies from Engg college, and they were together for a college reunion..
For no apparent reason, they went into this zoo and passed a monkey.
Being in the same business and from the same college, there was a little bit of a peer competition going on between themselves - they couldn't resist testing themselves against each other -
especially the Infosys guy said to the others: "Why don't we prove who is the best among ourselves?". Why not, said the other two.
The Infoscion said "Let's have a test. Whoever makes this monkey laugh, works for the best firm".
By mutual agreement, the Infoscion took the first turn. Being a pure logical strategist, the Infoscion tried to make the monkey laugh by telling jokes. The monkey stayed still.
As a more practical consultant, the Wipro guy tried to make funny gestures... no good, the monkey stayed put...
Now, comes the IBMer... being the practical guy he was always trained to be, he whispered something into the monkey's ear, and it burst out laughing at him.
The other two were astonished. How did this IBM guy manage to beat them?
No way they were going to accept defeat so easily. So the Wipro guy said "OK, let's take another test. Let's make this monkey cry! !"
So there they went again, applying! the same methods as before.
The Infosys guy narrated sad stories, the Wipro guy made sad gestures,and they failed again... Then, the IBMer again whispered something into the monkey's ear and lo! It started crying, patting the IBMer's shoulder!
The other two just could not believe their eyes! So the Infoscion said "OK, you've won twice. If you can win just this one, we will bow to you. Let's make this monkey run". And he barked at the monkey and ordered him to run. Of course, it stayed where it was.
The Wipro guy, true to his type, pushed and prodded the monkey - still No go.
So...here comes our IBM guy, again, and whispers into the monkey's ear. The monkey just takes off! It runs and runs as fast as it can, as if it was scared to death!
The other two surrendered. Said they: "OK, we give up.You're the best among us, and you work for the Best firm of the three.
But please, please tell us your secret," they begged him.
"Well", said the IBMer, "The first time I made it laugh, I told it I work for IBM.
The next time, I told the monkey how much I get paid...so it started crying.
And finally I told him that I was here for recruitment.
China isn't meaningfully Communist any more, and hasn't been for some time. It's totalitarian-capitalist -- and as much as those of us who live in (more or less) capitalist (more or less) democracies might like to believe otherwise, totalitarianism and capitalism can get along perfectly well together. The deal is, basically, "We'll let you make money as long as you keep your mouth shut; otherwise we'll have to kill you."
Conclusions about the convergence of China and the US are left as an exercise to the reader.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
First things first: Your micro-rant, while cute and seemingly poignant is actually nothing but a simple troll. And while I realize it's best not to feed the trolls, not everything blatantly stupid should go unanswered.
When dealing with something as complex as economics, nothing is quite as simple as "So, how do you like it now?". Outsourcing of jobs from the United States to India doesn't just mean more money in India, period. What it actually means is less income in the United States to afford the products that many of these (outsourced) jobs in India were created to support.
Understand?
By moving a sizable portion of middle income generating positions to another country, we are not spreading any wealth; only distributing new vistas of poverty to our own people.
Do you get it?
Fewer dollars generated in the United States does not mean secure fiscal longevity for another nation. What it means is that when the United States becomes a middle classless society, India will go back to where they were before the mass corporate migration: one billion odd people struggling to find a place in the global economy.
You simply cannot build a solid economic base on cheap labour alone.
#SickNotWeak
One of the basic reasons that a US programmer is expensive is because the education is expensive.
I'd have to disagree. The basic reason that a US programmer is expensive is that the standard of living in the US is a lot higher, especially in the locations where most corporations have setup shop. This is hardly surprising, given that in the past programmers were a relatively rare commodity and so they developed rather exaggerative salaries (dotcom bubble). Further, companies had to be in larger metrapolitain areas to be take seriously or cities virtually grew around many corporations that clustured together. As a result, the communities they live in/move to have gained rather distorted salary demands due to property rates. Simply moving a corporation to the middle of nowhere would greatly reduce salary demands of the *many* people who are interested in a job. This is the basis for calls to "outsource to rural America".
It sounds like in India it is the case that many people are unwilling to move from where the live but the population density is so high that one can basically go anywhere and find enough people to form a development team. As a result, there isn't a sharp rise in salary demands because the excess spending money of these programmers ends up being distributed around the country instead of a few hotspots.
A similar idea could be constructed in the US by simply locating a broad area with programmers and setting up multiple development houses spread out across the area. Think of it as software franchising. Such places would then be capable of meeting the demands of one or more companies in projects--whether it'd be better if each franchise only served one company or was effectively a contractor isn't clear to me. This alone would greatly reduce the rates of development costs in the US. In the end, the greater wealth of India and shortage of programmers there (long-term ones, I mean) will require some means of utilizing the relatively untapped multitude of individuals who need not live in the most expensive parts of the US. I think outsourcing to both areas is a good idea.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
New US IT graduates may be able to find programming jobs in India. If the "glamour" jobs all go to the multinational firms there, then perhaps local governments etc. will have a hard time competing. If India allows reverse H1B's (B1H), then perhaps a newbie can get experience in such a shop. Sure, the pay might suck, but you gotta start somewhere.
Table-ized A.I.
Honestly I am sick and tired of people ranting about '4 year degrees' from India and incompetent or unqualified programmers/workers from India. The very same people whose ideas about India are pretty much restricted to the Taj Mahal and Bangalore in spite of the fact that they could not point out both their locations on a map of India the size of the empire state building with both places marked in 2000pt arial black.
/. you only hear about programming/IT outsourcing, but if you actually watched some 'news' instead of relying on a bunch of bloggers alone, you might realize that its not just call centers and programming shops, a whole bunch of financial analytics work, medical diagnostic work, even Hollywood animation stuff gets outsourced to India. And oh btw re: the comment about paralegals and drudge work, find out how much a paralegal with your experience makes, and you will realize the futility of your chosen vocation to provide you with a reasonable income.
n tern.php0 810india.htm0 .html
/.
4 year degrees in India are _not_ like 2 year boot camps, they are quite focused, well designed and well executed programs, and I did not even go to an IIT or a tier 1 school in India! Education in India is quite difficult, simply because of the extreme competition every student faces from the 100 million other students, the fact that the coursework is tougher does play some part though. Parents are focused on education and education only, hence the complete insignificance of college/university level sports and/or other activities. The problem you guys face is that its too damn expensive here. My entire college expenses, including living away from home was approx. $1200. As a result almost anybody who can make the cut can afford it. So dont blame the Indian education system for the lack of a job inspite of your expensive education.
Regarding incompetent, inexperienced workers, well considering the large number of qualified workers produced, per the law of averages quite a few will be bad programmers, and stating that its an Indian issue, is not only unfair, its blatantly uninformed. The same statistics apply everywhere. The number of absolutely incompetent American/western programmers I have seen is quite unbelievable considering their '$100,000' education. At least Indian universities do not charge that much for a job screwed up (well some do, but they are usually reserved to educate Indians residing in the US).
Re: Only drudge work gets outsourced, of course on
I agree that quite a few outsourcing projects failed miserably. However AFAIK in most cases they fail not because of incompetent Indian workers but simply because the it being applied to the wrong fucking problem. You cant just use a tool/process willy-nilly because its inexpensive and expect it succeed. On the other hand I know of quite a few that succeeded in spite of that. Go figure!
The comment regarding the infrastructure issues are correct, however that does not seem to have stopped organizations from delivering. BPO providers have usually figured out ways to deal with government incompetence, and will continue to do so until the Indian govt. gets off their lazy asses and does something about it. Fortunately or unfortunately we have a _real_ multi-party democracy which means things get done slowly but when they get done they get done right.
Finally you might be surprised to know that there are Americans interning in India:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/10/business/i
http://www.uh.edu/ednews/2005/nytimes/200508/2005
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,47435,0
So before you go off on India and Indians take step back and actually bother to find out wtf you are talking about, even if you are posting on
I think that you are outright lying, or are very misinformed.
I am Indian and I currently live in the US, but I visit there every 2 years. My uncles have very prestigous positions at Indian universities (BHU, IIT Bombay, IISC) and one family member is a principal of a local college that has a specialization in "IT". I am well informed and well connected.
I also have a degree in EE with several years of hardware/software design and I've worked "IT" for many years as well. This means I can tell first hand if someone knows what they're talking about or not.
I can tell you first hand that the Indian education system *IS NOT* what you make it out to be. The Indian pre-college education system is pretty rigourous, but it also HEAVILY emphasizes memorization and not learning. Indians are excellent at math, but the ratio of creative thinking Indians is low. Getting into colleges means years of "preparing" for various exams which emphasize memorized learning.
Engineering and problem solving requires out-of-box thinking, and that's why Indians frequently don't excel at anything non-theory.
I want to refute a few of your points:
#1 is just plain wrong.
I visited a few colleges that have IT progams and I saw people memorizing lines of code to recite them for exams. Some of these people were in CS programs and hadn't even written a program on their own. They could sure tell me if an algorithm was O(n) or O(n^2) but they couldn't tell me how to debug hardware or software.
When I tried to cajole them into learning things that weren't in their cirriculum (like learning Apache or Linux system administration), I got blank stares and poked fun at. Yeah, who'll be laughing when your Microsoft IIS server gets rooted? Think everyone with a paper degree gets a job? Not when 10 guys are competing for the same job.
If the Indian education system is so awesome, why do all the professors at the *TOP* Indian universities all have Masters + PhDs from *US* institutions?
#5
US programs are "expensive", because among other reasons, we don't live in a shithole, plain and simple. We have environmental laws, a sanitary standard of living, standards of business ethics and so on. It isn't acceptable for people here to just piss on the walls of our college, but you see that daily, even at IISc! (Yes, I saw this and even took pictures I was so blown away by it).
India has enormous health issues with a lot of resource scarcity (which will only get worse). In the US we can breath for the most part, in India, everytime I go, I have to wear a mask to keep out all the air pollution. Water pollution is just unspeakable, if you don't drink boiled, filtered water (or buy bottled water) you'll be sick for a week. Even when I was extra cautious, I managed to get sick several times my last visit.
#6
As far as outsourcing goes, the only people who aren't being slave driven are the ones doing the slave driving. I've seen first hand heard of how companies burn and churn (I've talked to people who run the companies and people who've left them). When you do someone else's dirty work, it's still dirty work.
With all the bribe taking that happens there, it's a miracle anything gets done.
Many of the Indians I know that have migrated from India to the US tell me they hate it when they go back, they now realize how bad the infrastructure there is. That infrastructure is only going to get worse.
In ten years I wonder what kind of life people in India will have. You may have jobs, but if you have no resources left, what kind of life will it be?
Most of what you say is true.
I've worked with indian programmers and they are decent to good.
Couple points.
1) Yes the indian system is so hard that many commit suicide. The japanese used to do this to, once their standard of living came up they got lazy like americans and said, Why are we sacrificing our children to advance- we have advanced far enough.
2) Yes the indian system is hard, so we are seeing the best and brightest- there are only so many best and brightest- as a result wage increases of 18% were observed last year.
3) At that rage, we see loss of savings in 4 years and wage PARITY in 12 years or less.
4) The u.s. will not be a 3rd world country in 12 years.
5) Asia is not going to continue advancing forward without some kind of a setback. And the last time they had a setback in China, they killed about 95% of the people with any kind of education.
So...
Wages will rise there (yea!)
India will have to deal with hyperinflation- taxes will skyrocket, the cost of kheer will go through the roof (It'll be 5 bucks a serving like it is here).
Some programmer jobs will continue to require american programmers and american business is going to have to face up to the fact that they are destroying that class of jobs- when they need them back, they'll be expensive to fill - and it won't get better because our population of workers is dropping now and will continue to drop for the next 15 years. After a mild recession next year and a harsh recession in 2010, 2011, it's going to be pretty nice for about 5 years.
6) Indian companies engage in very blatant age discrimination- so I expect they'll start dumping their guys as they approach 40 or 45 just like americans do.
---
But he is right- outsourcing works often. But it is sold as saving 50% of cost sand it is looking like it is really saving 15% as projects are being delivered- still a huge amount but very little inflation will close that gap.
And finally- business is lying it's ass off to american programmers- the line is "You be the senior and they will do the code" but any fool can see, in 3 years business things "and then you'll be gone and they'll be the senior coders.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The indian education system is still a fairly pure meritocracy.
For example, in the US, we might allow folks who make an "A" to go to a special school.
And once enough "A"'s had applied, the school would be full.
In India, you would take a test, and the top 70 scorers get to go- even if 180 of them made A's. Not first come first serve- the top.
I have been told that that concept starts early- by the end of highschool you are either going to a trade school, going to college, or ineligable for further education- all the basis of testing.
It's very harsh and a lot of high school students commit suicide when they realize their life is over before it started (they should probably come to the US instead of killing themselves- here if you have drive you can always succeed).
But that means, that the people who make it through college, are smart and exceedingly driven compared to a similar groups of americans who were not culled so severely.
But it's like a mono culture vs a sexual culture.
If the environment is well defined, they can master it. Once we are thrown back into an undefined environment, it may be different.
But do -not- under estimate indian programmers- a lot of them are competent and they are getting experience now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That there among 100 million East Europeans are different kinds of IT people can hardly be any surprise.
That some of them are unemployed is hardly surprising, considering that there are unemployed people all over the world. That this is the cause for a statistically higher amount of virus production is just a wild guess.
That companies would turn to Eastern European workers only when there are no Indian workers left is blatantly false. There is already outsourcing going on from Western to Eastern Europe. Besides, the Indian market is unlikely to ever run out of workers. They may temporarily run out of workers with the right skills, but as long as the skills are well defined, they have the resources to teach them to millions of new students each year.
The only interesting thing in the post is the strange definition of Eastern Europe as being former Soviet Block countries and their neighbours. This would inlcude Finland, Germany, Turkey, Afghanistan and China, just to mention a few.
The instability largely comes from political corruption, monopolies of any kind, insufficient worker protections, price gouging, accounting fraud and other such elements, where the normal feedback mechanisms cannot work or are even actively prevented from working.
The most screwed-up economies are the ones that are the most regulated. India's economy before 1980 was very regulated and very screwed up. It would take a year to get a permit to import a computer, thanks to trade protectionism. Now India's economy is only slightly screwed-up as regulation begins to be lifted.
Regulation always sounds like a great idea. "The market has failures, let's regulate it." Unfortunately, the track record globally is that more regulation tends to damage the working parts of the market more than regulation fixes the failing parts of the market.
Government regulation has proven to be an incredible tool of corruption, and unlike private corruption, you generally can't get away from government corruption.
But what is the standard deviation? My point was more that there aren't hotspots with overly inflated prices, like Tokyo, Silicon Valley, or Redmond. Prices in Silicon Valley, a prime example, are insane compared to where I live (the Midwest). A simple example is that the median price of a house in Silicon Valley is around $700,000 (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/13 422709.htm). In comparison, the price of a house in the Midwest is in the $100,000-$200,000 range as median.
With a little math (ie, assuming a 30 year morgage), it's possible to show that one has to pay 3.5x as much in Silicon Valley for the house alone (ie, ~$1400 more per month). Take into account things like property tax and higher prices for food due to high property rates or driving farther, hence using more gas, to go to stores that aren't on high cost real estate, and clearly there's a price premium for living in a specific location when there's no real sign that it's even worthwhile (if it were, India outsourcing wouldn't make sense; New Delphi outsourcing might).
Now, if a lot of businesses started hiring across the US, I'm sure wages would increase. But it'd be a more uniform increase without massive spikes over land prices; companies could just move if a county/state was trying to shaft them. And in the end, more uniform hiring across a country does end up improving the whole country, instead of hot spots (like California) having federal funds be the method of redistributing wealth. So, it's great news that average India wages are increasing. There's room to hire in the rural US as well.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h