Slashdot Mirror
The Hidden Cost of Outsourcing
Alien54 writes to tell us CNNMoney is reporting that outsourcing may not be as big of a bargain as some might think. From the article: "With consumers enjoying more choice than ever before, evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention. To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
So now we are expected to cry tears for the people who manage the IT systems being replaced?
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
If this were true, Dell would not be the number one mfg of computers after losing 75% of their base. How many people here have called tech support and gotten someone with a thick Indian accent named "Steve"?
The problem (if you can call it that) is that Dell offers decent CPU's for cheap. Rather it be for the home or business, people are more willing to take the chance on a computer that's $200 than their competitors.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Some of the best and most polite service I have ever received has been from overseas.
Waiting 30mins to speak to an overpaid local that gets drunks everyweek is a terrible experience.
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
The article is terse, inapplicable to those many markets which are almost entirely price-sensitive, and ill-supported. Pension policies don't really compete on price; they are about service and ROI.
And people often say that they will take their business elsewhere, but then stick to the cheapest vendor when push comes to shove. Self-report is not the best indicator of actual behaviour, especially for a hypothetical.
What's a pension?
How about intellectual property? Spend millions of dollars in the U.S. on research and development and then outsource the manufacturing to China and then wonder why the Chinese develop a very similar product. Duh!
I remember a few years ago around 2003/2004 reading article after article that IT in USA is finished all the jobs will go to India, CHina and other. But here we are few years later and the IT job market is pretty good, atleast I think so. Its probably still tougher for somebody with no expierence than it was around 1999/2000. But I am no longer afraid I won't have a job in the IT sector... atleast under current conditions.
Outsourcing does not mean, bad service. It's about getting a service from abroad with most probably lower costs. It's evident that same quality of service taken from India, or China is a lot cheaper than the one taken from US or some other European countries. Companies should be more selective on outsourcing, then they won't lose customer due to bad service, but in no way there's a direct connection with outsourcing and bad service.
...I don't stagger back in amazement that some finance hacks have finally stumbled upon the bleedin' obvious.
The author is thirty years behind if this the first time he's run across this idea. There have been shitloads of studies done over and over again that show that most (i.e., >50%) people leave/switch because of shitty service from their existing supplier/provider/brand/etc.
It's a good thing that inhouse customer service can't be terrible!
Seriously, this just means that you have to be careful who it is who provides your outsourced service just like you'd have to be careful who it is who provides your inhouse services. The big difference is that outsourced service contracts are generally easier, quicker and cheaper to terminate and replace if they're don't meet the agreed standard.
"a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
People say they will take action all the time. How many actually do? Well they do take action. They tell all their friends how shitty "the company" treated them. They go into detail about how "the company" doesn't care. And then next money they send "the company" a check for the bill.
Replace "the company" with practically any business name.
This article is evidence that its best to let free markets decide the value of things such as out sourcing. So long as consumers have choices, they'll be free to make choices based on what they value. In this case, people don't like the out sourced solution and they are moving to the competitors product.
This is all a lot more neat, clean, and effective than a heavy handed reponse from a clumsy government. Consumers always win when they have an array of free and voluntary choices.
Most people resent having been sold a product/service and find out that their most personal details are in the hands of a company that exists in a country that does little to recognize privacy laws of the originating nation. Yes, there is a problem in the U.S. but it is being pursued daily to tighten the laws at hand.
Additionally, getting a "script monkey" on the support-line does an unbelievable amount of damage to customer confidence in the company in question. Knowing that you will have to endure the reading of a fixed script that, at it's conclusion, will not be relevant to the problem at hand anyway does not underscore confidence. Colloquial understanding and language nuances go completely over their heads.
Cheaper is not always better.....
/*Dave
What is this "pension" thing they mention in the article?
I used to fear clowns...but I'm discovering that chimps are far, far, worse.
From the article "A 2005 Gartner study predicts"
Okay, I understand Slashdot seeks subjects which spur debate but this one is on the edge. First this is a study which is "predicting." That's the first clue that something is wrong about this, you can make stastics say anything you want. But the real problem here is that they automatically assume that outsourcing will result in a bad experience. Who says? You can have a bad experience with a customer service person (who is American) and just doesn't give a damn. There is no golden rule that the people working for you have any more motivation to help you than an outsourced worker. The article quotes human nature as why they won't identify with the organization...bull. This is nothing but a hyper-general statement to support their conclusions. (Aside from the words likely to, tend to, which are all assumptions.)
The real problem is not that there are companies which are outsourcing -- it is that companies are not caring whether the service rendered is good enough to begin with. If you set a level of expectation for anyone working on your behalf and follow through to ensure that level is being reached it won't matter whether you have employees working at home, in the office or in another country. Far too many companies simply outsource and say do it without monitoring the level of communications to make sure they are doing it right. Saying that outsourcing will automatically cause problems is just an over generalized conclusion.
The one point they did get right though is that it is silly just to compete on price alone. That is actually true, however, they are trying to make this point by generalizing on something which may or may not be true and by missing the real point of customer service.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
"evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention."
To me this is a remarkable indicator of the high cluelessness level of a very large number of businesses. This is such a basic truth, it's like "Please open mouth to breathe".
Happy Customers/Happy Employees can make a successful business even if the product is just 'adequate'. People resist change more when they are happy than not. F---ing duh.
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
It's far easier and cheaper to bribe the employees and admin of a data center in Pakistan/India/Russia than it is to bribe someone in the US.
They'll be aiming at tapping some poor admin chap in Bangalore to cough up an entire data center's repository, and when they get all that data, whammo. More IED's, purchased on your credit card.
Then one of those IED's blows up a buddy of yours serving in Iraq. To add insult upon injury, you get to deal with the FBI when they come beating down your door thinking you bought the bomb that blew up your buddy.
Impossible? Hardly. Not even remotely improbable.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
From the article, "you'll soon figure out that competing solely on price is a fool's game"
Quote below taken from DNUK's website
... found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service ...
I keep thinking about that whenever one of my witty, insightful and intelligent comment is modded down by some idiot moderator on Slashdot. Why do I keep coming back to same abuse day in and day out? I really need to go somewhere else.
There are other hidden costs to offshoring deriving from cultural differences and communication problems. I was involved with three software development projects that had been outsourced to three different firms in India. In only one case was there a marginal win, despite net billing rates that were perhaps half of what we would have paid for domestic IT talent. Much of the cost overruns arose from miscommunication backed by a desire on their part to not appear incompetent. The engineers would come here for several weeks to gain understanding before returning to India to work on the project. Despite this, I found out there were fundamental knowledge gaps that should have been cleared up in the first day, let alone two weeks after they had returned to India (and billed us for two weeks of apparent head-scratching). In my opinion, the only way to make technical offshoring work is to make it onshoring, by opening a local office in the country where the talent lives. I doubt there is a similar solution for offshoring customer support.
Clearly you don't have any experience of the postgraduate environment in our universities. Half of the brightest students are Chinese, and they take their doctorates and fantastic brains home with them.
They don't need our or anyone else's stinking IP. You've been reading too much western propaganda.
And by the way, "Intellectual Property" is a term created by lawyers for the purpose of getting the different issues all mixed up so that they can profit from "expertly" separating them again. Don't fall for it. Talk about copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets separately.
IP == Internet Protocol
When you call JetBlue airlines and talk to one of their reservations agents, you talking to someone sitting in their home. ALL of their reservations agents are home based. They get away with cheaper labor and a happier workforce.
Not that there's anything wrong with Indian call centers but half the time I can't get past the Indian accent to understand what the hell is being said. There is a limited amount of things they can do as well and to say that Indian call centers provide "customer service" would be an overstatement.
When you call a company for customer service you should be able to get someone able to bend the rules if circumstances warrant. The "paid parrots" of Indian call centers can't do that.
Often this is not the case. As a part-time marketeer, I can tell you that often what I do to lure customers away from my competition is:
1) "educate" my target segment to expect a higher level of service (change their expectations)
2) tell my competitor's customers that my competitor does not offer that higher level of service (given the new expectations, make them feel unhappy with their current provider)
3) make damn sure my own company offers the higher level of service when my competitor's now-unhappy customers go looking
4) don't compete on price; higher service can demand equal or higher price
5) repeat as necessary
Believe me - I'm not the only out there doing this either.
Americans only care about the bottom dollar. Having lived in the UK I can't stand service in the States. It may have changed, but when I was there you got a person after less than a minute with most support type phone calls... People in the US don't seem to be willing to put there money where the support is.
In some processes, we witnessed huge improvements in productivity and turn around time - with huge improvements in customer experience and cost savings far over anticipated. Feedback has come from excellent customer response, internal recognition etc.
Moral of the story - any change needs to be properly planned and executed. Outsourcing itself does not imply reduced levels of customer service - bad planning and irrational budgeting does. The process reengineering that goes with most outsourcing work can very often lead to very real gains in productivity and customer experience.
"I really need to go somewhere else."
I would if I could find a forum that had some of slashdot's qualities without all the downsides.
I use myself as an example. My buying behaviour is often determined by the service that I think I might get, even if I don't think I will need service. In other words, I worry about what might go wrong.
Example: I don't actually NEED a laptop. I might buy one if the deal is good enough. There was a deal on Dell laptops that was hard to beat. I was seriously thinking of buying one so I did some research. I found web sites where people discuss the service they have got from various companies. Dell's record seemed to be miserable. One guy took weeks to convince the service rep. that his laptop was actually broken. OK. No sale; and if I ever do find that I NEED a laptop it sure won't be a Dell. So, on that basis, we can conclude that at least some consumers do pay attention to the service they think they might get. Bad service does cost sales.
But since this is nothing new and Dell continues to sell it also means that either this does't happen to a lot of people or people just don't learn.
I buy from local shops and NEVER call in with a problem. I put the defective product on the counter on a shopping day (thursday evening or a saturday) and speak loudly about how I want it repaired or replaced. Works wonders. Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks or that a single wrong pixel in a lcd is acceptable. It is offcourse. If your stupid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh Slashdot, why are you being so left wing?/ 03/1712242&threshold=0
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03
Just yesterday the President [God be upon him] was telling us that Outsourcing is GOOD for the American workforce. Please don't contradict what the President [God be upon him] says!
Yes I'm being sarcastic, thank you for noticing.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
now this is called FLAIMBAIT...
Parent is unbelievably rascist and ill-informed. Blame it all on 'Hindu culture'? Americans are untouchables?
But this:
"5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you."
is out and out rascism. Mod it down off the chart and delete his account.
What next, Indians smell of curry? Troll.
This is the thing nobody apparently gets.
It is an utter waste of time to study scenarios where customer orders product and pays for it, vendor ships product, customer receives product, end of story.
The _important_ metric is always the worst case scenario where the customer ends up falling in between the cracks in between different departments within a large organisation, nobody the customer contacts has responsobility, nobody has authority, nobody has motivation, nobody has their ass on the line if it escalates.
Anyone can sell acreage on the moon, you judge a company or business by how badly its worst mistakes fuck customers over, and you place the responsobility for that exactly where it belongs, on the directors conference table, and let it run down right through the company.
The reality is the bigger the company the more likely its reaction to a fuck-up being escalated through inaction is to undulge in ever more psychopathic behaviour.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
so... whats your plan... from
Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis
You want Americans to share the Indian offshoring profit , & U.S. citizens pay to kill *Hindus* !!!
well futurepower... you really do stinks..
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
Some people have 1) Never been to India, 2) Don't believe in the 4th amendment of the U.S. constitution.
Whoa dude... I was totally fooled!
My neighbour recently bought a Micron Transport 1000 (http://www.mpccorp.com/smallbiz/store/notebooks/o verview_transport.html) because he liked the features...
Additionally, its wholly USA based (incl. customer service)... (this also probably influenced his buying decision)
After he had a faulty motherboard, I was asked to see if I can repair it... coz he is not into hardware..
I called their rep... Couldnt understand the strong 'chinese' or 'asian' accent...
I finally had to request her to hand the call over to somebody who speaks English with a an 'understandable' accent..
That is my experience...
Here, take a cookie. I promise, by the time you're done reading it...oh, well!
Go here to read the full joke: http://www.computer-jokes.com/humor003.htm
Punchline: "Simple" replies the pilot, "I asked the guy in that building a simple question. The answer he gave me was 100 percent correct but absolutely useless, therefore that must be Microsoft's support office and from there the airport is just a while away."
Tech support has always been bad. Even when it was home grown Americans offering it. (I got a version of this joke in my email in the early '90s.)
Many posters (and posturing Congressmen) seem to forget that. It won't get much better if it weren't outsourced. There hasn't been some magical improvement in Americans since the '90s. It was bad then. It's bad now, and it will continue to be bad.
Outsourcing is irrelevant to the discussion of bad tech support.
And I bet that the minute that IT people have internalized that fact the current wave of labor solidarity is going to evaporate and it will be back to libertarian flaming. Not that IT people like to admit that this issue affects them at all (see what happened to my first post in this thread).
There are two issues here, one is outsourcing, the second is outsourcing to the cheapest of the cheap. There are good customer service centers outside the US, but those are not the ones Dell uses. As a result they have an ultra-shitty reputation for customer service, particularly in the UK. Thats not good when computers are practically a disposable commodity that have a lifetime of about 2-4 years.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
So, pundit, how do you stop that darn relative from copying a low-quality product innovated by a second-class human being? I would have thought that the Hindu self-defeatism would be enough
Dumbass
Okay first the disclaimer:
/.ers on this (maybe I should be submitting this to Ask /.) Is the quality of the outsourced job really terrible?
I'm currently working as a Customer Support in a local company in Malaysia where we help our client's client (mostly from the US and UK) troubleshooting their generic computing problems over the telephone.
Anyway, I've been working for a almost a year now and from what I've seen, the company I worked for has been recruting really skillful/talented people (most of them have CS degrees from Australia) to do the support.
However as you may know, most of these people speaks really poor, non-standard English. To make the matter worse, most of them (including me) have problems with our clients' American/English accent. Personally I'm sad that I've had clients that hanged up on me because they couldn't understand me in some occasions.
Okay so now, I would like some opinions from my fellow
What is "FLAIMBAIT"?
Here in the U.S., "pension" refers to an employer controlled retirement fund. The employer decides how much employees contribute, what to invest the money in, and how much is paid out to retirees (generally based on years of service with the company). They are very rare, few companies offer them, and fewer employees stay with the same company long enough to get any benefits.
This sounds more like what we call an IRA, where the individual goes out and finds an investment company and puts however much money they like in whatever funds they like and withdraws whatever they like when they retire (there are tax penalties if you withdraw it early).
From the article: To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service. So all that really means is that we would have to see we acquire more customers out of the 25% put-up-with-bad-service segment and lower our service to the absolute minimum that customer base will still tolerate. Let's let our competitors deal with the 75% customers that are touchy and demanding.
I can't speak to Outsourcing in general but I recently posted this in my journal it seems especially apropos in the light of Outsourcing and Offshoring software. I think it cuts both ways and really you should look for talent no matter where you are looking for people:
Unfortunately, with code, it takes the test of time and change to tell if a programmer is a truly talented one or just capable of writing volumes of drek that holds together. The audience that can read code is small and those qualified to judge its quality is even smaller. Just like the population of people qualified to judge Samoan poetry. Yet that's just what you've hired someone to do as a business person who employs programmers... you've hired someone to do a thing which you have no knowledge of how to judge whether they've done a good job or not. Hence the fear of software development and the desire to create a generic "seal of quality" such as certification. So when you hire fifty people at half the price of the five you had before and they produce reams of Samoan poetry you can't read but it seems to look about the same... you might feel you got a good deal. Unfortunately for everyone the quality of their prose has nothing to do with the size of the pay check. But, both prose and paychecks affect the bottom line.
[signature]
Fido's cell phone customer service in Canada is a great example of this. It's not outsourced, either... all Canadian CS. The vast majority of their CS reps seem to be poorly trained and they don't really care whether they give a correct answer or solve your problem. Oh, and they won't transfer you to a supervisor. If you have an issue they can't solve immediately, they'll just repeat what they've said before over and over ad infinitum. It's actually well-known among many customers that the only way to get good CS at Fido is to assess the skills of the person you're speaking to and if they're not helpful fast, hang up. Call back, try the next rep. Oh, and always get the ID of the person you're speaking to, even if they seem to be helpful. You'll need it later, when you find out that they a) lied, and b) didn't do what they said they would.
Outsourced service does not have the corner on the complete incompetence market. =)
(Fido does have some good reps. In fact, I've gotten excellent reps twice... out of literally months-long issues.)
~ Leilah
Well, here's a true story. A DG (I will not mention which DG) of the European Union has outsourced it's software system that is responsible for the registration and follow-up of requests that basically seek funding of the EU government. That same project is running on it's last legs. The reason is quite simple.
After version 4 and 5, which worked but were not 'modern' enough (not using EJB's in a J2EE server) version 6 was outsourced, and contractor architects designed a J2EE application that should bring the next installment of the software which was untill then running just fine. The rules were a little more complex than before, and some political choices undoubtedly had their effect on the overall design of the system, but so far so good. Of course, the EU is a 'fair' institution, meaning that everybody should be allowed to bid on a contract that allowed the contractor firm to (and here it went terribly wrong) design and implement of a subsection of tha entire application. Ok, ok, not the best solution in the world, and you know, maybe this would have worked if the staff (of which most of them serve lifteme sentences):
- had at least been knowledgeable of J2EE
- had reduced the complexity induced by splitting the application
- if the number of contractors involved in the project would be limited.
- if each project would have had a propper code-review follow-up and an architecture steering group that had an overarching view on the system
- if testing frameworks had been used to test the software
- if project leads would not have been pushed around like toypuppets, from 'dev' to 'organisation', from 'infrastructure' to 'dev'
- if projects themselves would not have been pushed around. Basically they were extremely good in killing all forms of know-how about their own system. Hand-overs were cabinets full of stacks of paper that nobody reads or cares about.
None of these things were there. Can you imagine the mess they are in? I guess you need a little help, let me refresh what can go wrong: XML stored in relational databases, CMP and XA transaction management all over the place, code that is oblivious to memory and performance consumption, timeout periods that allow sessions to continue to run 3000 seconds, and worst of all, session security is only invoked 'once every n times', and n varies per subsection between 5 and 500. (luckily the application runs within a secured domain, but still.) Some modules implemented their own database operations when the responsibility for the tables they access belongs to other modules. Security is implemented in 3 different ways, and doesn't even have roles and users, like every other security has. Code-reviews are dangerous for your health. Tables are being updated by hand, XML's are being edited by the helpdesk by hand, and 'development' people are filling in forms because the users are unable to, while at the same time they are debugging the database because parts of it have been corrupted.. The whole server system has to be restarted each morning, and around noon at exactly 12.19, 'something' brings the servers to the point where none of the applications respond in a timely fashion. I spell it like d.i.s.a.s.t.e.r.
But there's another surprise.. the new next version 7 is due by the end of the year. And that has been decided politcally. I don't think I have ever seen a bigger mess than this one.
I worked there briefly as a contractual agent trying to clean up parts of the mess and bring rather basic things like source-control under their attention. All events, persons and organisations in this text are pure fictional and do not adhere to reality. They really don't!
With great power comes great electricity bills.
In the boston area, software salaries have been effectively capped. In the company where I work currently (which I shall be leaving soon), a raise that accompanies an excellent review is less than 3%. Complaints are met with the following justification: "You are getting paid about 10 times what someone from India gets for doing the same work. We cannot justify higher raises to the board/investors".
I recently found out that the following policy has been instituted. If an employee gets an offer from another company at a much higher salary, make no attempt to match the salary, just let him/her go. Hire someone else, if necessary at the higher salary. But do not give a big raise to any existing employee!
Unfortunately, this situation seems to be more and more prevalent, my friends who work in other companies have reported similar policies being instituted. I don't know where all this is going to end up.
Magnus.
Some firms will compete through cost while others compete through quality of services. Considering customer-service of a specialized product a non-core part of your business is idiotic: intricate electronics have their own personalities, someone from Dell is not likely to be able to trouble-shoot a competitor's product-specific problem. Consider the difference in incentives between someone like Dell and a contracted company. Disregard the part of the article where they clam that the name on your work-ID effects your quality, that's bunk.
To Dell, satisfying a customer can be meassured in terms of future revenue, while a contractor is going to view each call as a cost to be paid out of their contracted fee. Changing the incentive structure would change the results drastically.
Imagine: You get paid some amount of money per week to deal with customers, out of this you must pay for staff and equipment. More time spent on customers means more staff must be hired. What would be the profit maximizing solution? Spend as little time on customers as you can while maintaining sufficient quality that you contract doesn't get canceled. You know there are no substitues for your services, customers MUST come to you unless they wish to incur the cost of a new computer. If you breed an atmosphere where your workers try to minimize the duration of calls, your quality will degrade and people will not purchase that brand in the future.
Now imagine a setup where you get some smaller amount of money, almost enough to keep your doors open, and your customers rate your performance as "poor", "okay", or "good", and you get paid a small bonus for being "okay", and a larger bonus for being "good". Being "poor" most of the time means you go out of business (hopefully for the customers' sake you lose your contract first...) Pass on part of the quality bonus to your employees and they will spend more time, making sure that they get their extra money by being helpful. In order to realize the largest return possible you will invest part of your profits in training and more staff (for a decreased wait-time).
The contracting firm of course needs to ask if they can do it for less money, but cheaper labor means a smaller fixed cost, so it would likely end-up outsourcing to another firm somewhere were wages are lower, say in rural Kentucky or purhaps off-shoring it to somewhere in the British Commonwealth. Basic microeconomic lessons: if your product runs the same software as your competitors, then your cost/quality combination must be more attractive if you wish to capture or retain that marginal customer; time spent on the phone listening to recorded messages tell you how much your business is valued is considered a cost by consumers; and incentives matter.
Does that mean that good customer service can only come from the United States? That seems fairly sensationalist and egotistical.
A well-run call-center gives good customer service. No more, no less. Bad call-centers exist all around the world. Yes, including the U.S.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
#2 and #3 are flawed. In practice, #2 is often false or provided by sabotage. As a salesman you really have no control of #3 and may be as duped as your customers.
Cingular's "Raising the bar" is a great example. Instead of building out their network, they are spending money on exclusive phone deals and billboards. The purpose of those billboards is to expect a fictional level of service and simply say, without proof, that theirs is better. Having had Cingular and Sprint, I can say their promise is bogus where I live and I enjoy better service than Verizon and other incumbent subscribing friends do. "Education" has to be built on fact.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, there really isn't much of a correlation between poor service and outsoourcing... Wordt customer service I have seen in over 5 decades was a local TMobile helpdesk.
There ARE, however, very real hidden costs to outsourcing that make it a difficult prospect at best; poor customer service just isn't one of them.
The worst is managing the relationship of your US staff and the outsourced staff. I have seen numerous examples of subtle or even outright sabotage of the project by the US staff.
One of the most successful outsourcers in the United States has a "core values" program for it's US staff...the ability to maintain political neutrality while acting as a good will ambassador is a key core value.
Western and Hindu culture are very compatible if you take care to manage the intercultural references, whch can cause major difficulties. For example, many Hindus will say "You are correct" to acknowledge they are listening. What they MEAN is "OK" or "Uh huh", but Westerners often take is as arrogance or judgmental.
Worse yet, Westerners take it as meaning that their point is understood, and it's culturally difficult (impolite) to ask for clarification if the other speaker has gone on to a new point. Its is very important to make sure what you think you are saying is actually what they are hearing.
One minor point on an underlying theme of these comments. Believe it or not, institutional economic analysis shows that India isn't a serious problem for US jobs, not like China is, anyhow. The reasons range from cultural differences (India is highly conservative, for the most part) to the fact that the level of convergence is much higher, as well as a much higher integration of Indians into American culture. I suspect the reason India is getting such favorable treatment from Bush is that they are viewed as a "client state" of America, not an independent nation, probably for good reason.
Because, where ever you go, there you are. M$ astroturfers and other assholes will follow you where ever you go.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
looking at all the comments on /. in general, I think all we can conclude is that "(in offshoring) your mileage may vary, disclaimers apply"
:) ) do you want to use. Everybody says J2EE is hot dos'nt mean my manager will come to me and say "You know what, Oracle10g is great, it has the grid thingie, so we will transport from 9i to 10g"...
we have both examples where it turned out to be beneficial for companies and some cases where it dos'nt
I am more of the view that it depends more and more on the management who is trying to offshore. Just everybody is doing it so mgmt. of Avg-Joe, Inc. also did it without even looking what teh hack do they want from contractors. More chances they will loose. On the other hand deciding intelligently and then choosing contractors wisely could be turned beneficial.
Is'nt it just like choosing which software/OS (other then slashdot where C/*nux is standard
these are just my thoughts...
everyone downmodding this post will be prosecuted for reading my post without first buying a license!!!
Suveys like this do not tell you the number that would switch. When you ask people what they *would* do about such and such if it hypothetically happened, they are just taking a guess. I think they are just giving their opinion about what they think about outsourcing. When push comes to shove, most people won't change a habit or a program or a vendor because of outsourcing; they may just be annoyed for a bit but will soon get used to it. When they answer the survey, they are only guessing at a hypothetical. The only way to really find out is to do studies of actual behavior, which I admit would be really hard.
Currently hooked on AMP
Most outsourcing decisions are made far up the corporate food chain. It's the job of the management staff to handle any difficulties before they are visible to those at the highest levels. As long as the work is passable and any damage canbe contained, no one hears anything and nothing gets fixed.
Also, those complaining about outsourcing are probably wasting their breath. The next round of outsourcing is going to be targeting all the "innovation" jobs in IT like systems architecture and design that we thought were safe. I'm planning to stay in for the long haul and hope that some of this comes back around. However, we need to adjust our expectations to the new reality. If it's cheaper, it will be done. Unless consumer prices and our rampant spending are adjusted, we have no way to compete with people who will do good enough work for 10% of the price.
The real hidden cost of outsourcing is the loss of a talent pool. If and when I have a kid, I'll encourage it to be smart and study, but I think I'll encourage it to be a lawyer or an MBA. They're not replaceable, and the professions (medical, law, etc.) have a very strong organization that keeps the barrier to entry and salaries high. A good example is pharmacy. Pharmacists don't make their own compounds anymore; they pour tablets from the big bottle to little ones, and get paid very high salaries to do it. All they have to be is careful.
I was actually quoted a price to outsourcing some IC design work to Chinese engineers. The price was about the same as my cost for engineers here in the US!! The interesting thing was that there was a disclamer that those engineers were not as experienced as US engineers and so we should expect project to take longer and require greater interaction. I'm thinking WTH, I thought they only worked for like a dollar an hour or something? The truth is of course that the middlemen are taking a cut which drives up the price. But this is just about the only way I could use those resources for small projects. The truth is that the cost of engineers in China or other countries can be lower if taken en mass and entire projects performed there as a whole. But it was interesting to get that information because it just tells me that I'm certainly as competitive price wise with Chinese labor and definitley competitive technically for the right size project. And on top of that, their price is going to keep going up while they get more experienced and their standard of living improves. Maybe we have to stagnate for a while longer but it seems like things should improve for us with time.
Some friends bought a Gateway about a year ago. He was having some trouble with it running for no more than 15 minutes without spontaneously rebooting. I figured it was the $10 dollar power supply that Gateway uses in their desktop systems and swung by with a spare I had.
Well, what a surprise- The power supplies they use are slightly narrow to fit into the slightly narrow case. An off the shelf unit won't work. So we get get Gateway on the line to ask them how much they are going to rape him for a new one. "David" answers the phone, reading from his script. We had had several beers at this point and I was a bit salty because of the unnecessary power supply footprint they were using.
"David" wants to walk us thru a troubleshooting session and I wasn't having it. "David", I said, "Just tell me how much a new power supply is." "$105.00 is the price sir, delivered to your door in approximately 3-5 business days not including holidays..." "Stop David", I barked back, "I get it. I know how shipping works. I'll tell you what, you tell me what your real name is and I think I can get James (my friend) to order one of these over priced and low quality power supplies from you."
"My name is David, sir."
"David... Come on now... What city are you in right now?"
"Umm. Hold on sir.. (20 seconds pause) I am in California."
"No what city?"
"um. I am in... Irvine"
"I'm having a real hard time understanding you. Can you put someone who speaks English on the phone?"
Silence.. 10 seconds later.. "Hello sir, this Robert, I understand you have having a problem?" His english is about as bad.
"Hi Robert. What city are in? The connection seems bad."
Long pause, covers the phone... "I am in Irvine, California. Do you need service or not? We are very busy here."
"My hearing is not very good. I was born with undersized eardrums, could you be so kind to put someone on the phone whose native tounge is English?"
"Umm. I no not understand sir."
"I am having trouble with your accent due to my defective ear drums. Your accent."
"I'm sorry sir, but I can not help you."
Click..
Ok. So I was being kind of an asshole.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
The main factor, as far as I can tell is: "If we outsource, and lay-off expensive Americans, and hire cheap Indians, will Wall Street love us?" The answer is often yes, and that's pretty much a no brainer for guys who are compensated with a ton of stock options.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If at any time in your short life you had developed critical thinking and analytical skills, you might have noticed there is a tremendous discrepancy between the actual number of outsourcing of IT (and other category) jobs and the numbers being "reported" by the mainstream (i.e., corporate-owned) newsies. The number of IT jobs offshored (or American workers replaced by Punjabis and Paks) continues to grow exponentially (you may have to look up the meaning of the word "exponentially").
A lot of the points the parent makes are not worthy of any response as they seem more rooted in bigotry than reason.
1) After you teach the Indian company how to write good software for your industry, a relative of the owner of the Indian company will go into business in competition with you.
This is true in pretty much any business relationship. Whomever you teach how to do a thing for your profit will try to figure out ways of doing that same thing for their profit.
3) All products require innovation. Indian programmers are not usually innovative; it's not a quality of the Hindu culture.
This is one of those bigotry motivated points.
I know enough Indian people to say this is false. You don't have to believe me though- take a look at the list of Nobel laureates. Just wanted to refute one in case anybody was wondering.
4) No matter what the project plans say, programming requires decision-making that affects the long term health of your product and your company. How often does programming require far-reaching decision-making? Possibly as often as once per hour.
The general point here is completely valid, and people will have to learn how to evaluate companies for their work performance. Switching industries- who would you rather hire to do special effects for your eature film: Zenera (my company) or Industrial Light and Magic ?
Well, ILM has earned their reputation through lots of successful high profile projects. You can look at a ton of their work. You'd be smart to go with ILM unless your project is small and you can afford a risk, then you can risk a small unknown studio like Zenera.
My pricing reflects that- I am much cheaper per man hour than ILM. That's my company giving prospective customers a valid business reason to choose us. It decreases risks in case of failure and costs in case of success.
The same is true in any sort of outsourcing- I talked about reputation, but a management team must examine who they are outsourcing to, and their prior work product, in order for the move to be effective.
5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you.
If the parent means to refer to the lack of materialistic motive in their culture, I fail to see the validity of the point.
In general, Indian culture values education. That is valuable- especially in a knowledge industry like programming.
Mostly however I think this "point" is, again, motivated by bigotry.
6) There's a big overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. On the other hand, programmers in the U.S. may spend a lot of time playing video games rather than learning social skills; there is a big barrier between someone with low social skills and the normal world, also.
This sounds like a point, but ends up being a non-issue. Indians, or any other foreign contractors will have to expend their own internal efforts on these issues. Native contractors are likely to use that as leisure time. Both are "wastes" from a productivity standpoint.
(I know there is a point here about leisure time being restorative and allowing people to work more effectively when they are on task- but there are some studies that indicate that what is really needed is time away from the "primary" task, a secondary task is often just as effective as a pure leisure time. Let the shrinks sort it out.)
7) You may not notice the low quality of your product until it is too late. That's why you outsourced, isn't it?: You wanted to avoid giving attention to a critical area.
Anyone who outsources their critical business processes is a fool.
There are valid reasons for outsourcing, most of which boil down to focusing on where your expertise is, and letting other experts do what they are good at for you.
Using Apple as an example, they outsource almost all of their manufacturing and assembly. They focus on design and engineering. (Software and hardware)
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
This was after the India team signed off on the hardware, and the hardware went out for fab. A VERY expensive mistake.
Had they paid a true top dollar, they would've gotten qualified people. Top dollar in India is still the "lowest bidder", and there's a reason for why it's cheap.
Penny-wise, pound foolish.
I'm sorry, but I've dealt a LOT with India teams, and I haven't seen one qualified one yet. Yes, brown people can be just as qualified as white people. But the really qualified ones are here in the States, making the exact same wage, regardless of their race.
Here's a simple corporate solution. Create excessive poverty through many generations in a foreign country. Suddenly introduce the ability for these poor impoverished people a single ray of hope that they can escape their hopeless lifes. A corporation builds schools to teach them how to do advanced things like engineering. It's easy to find good students because you have tens of thousands applying. Some will even leave their families and children in hope of a better life. Complete and utter desperation is a powerful thing that most US citizens are unfamiliar with. Not many americans can say they watched their children die in front of their eyes because their simply was not enough food.
So the corporations train the best of the best out of tens of thousands of candidates, and then takes these shining stars and pay them a dollar a day. When you've been accustomed to nothing, almost nothing becomes incredible and gracious.
Now starts the slow process of destroying the economy in another country, like the US. Without money the US government can't do much to stop the corporations from turning the entire world into a slave factory.
I know, tinfoil hat and all. This is ridiculous and things like this can never happen, and they didn't use to round up orphan children off the street in Europe and put them to work in factories as slaves. The reason most of the children became orphans were poor working conditions the parents had to endure just to feed their family. While all this is going on of course, the rich live in mansions with entire staff of people waiting on them hand and foot.
Not seeing atrocities, like indians working 18-hour one dollar days and not ever seeing their families all so Micheal Dell can show a few more million on his portfolio are really easy to swallow when you don't have to see them and you get a brand new computer for $300. It will only suck when it starts happening to you. Oh wait, your different, it can never happen to you are me.
Not sure about anyone else's experiences, but through work experience I've found that the value of overseas outsourcing is still very limited, applying only to certain projects, and there are many reasons it won't work for the others. In spite of this fact, my employer has begun using 'global competition' as a justification for downward pressure on US salaries. For the last several years, the company told all the US employees that salaries were frozen due to the slow economy and low IT spending. Things are definitely better this year, but instead of reinstituting salary increases, the company is telling us that a lot of work is going overseas and the company must keep US salaries low to remain competitive. I guess in this way overseas outsourcing is helping companies save even more money.
Nicely-put.
Articles and studies such as this are missing the point.
First of all, we need to stop talking about 'open source' once and for all. It diverts our minds
from the true benefit of Free Software, i.e., freedom.
Second, questions such as 'is free software better' and 'is free software more secure' miss the point.
The benefit of Free software is Freedom. If Free Software is more powerful, featureful, secure, and
updated in a more timely manner, so much the better. But if not, remember the old saying: "he who
would sacrifice freedom for a little security deserves neither". Any moral human who cares about freedom
would gladly use software that is technically inferior, if it provides more freedom.
I suggest slashdot would start censoring the term 'open source'. Any articles that talk about 'open
source' software should not be accepted. Comments that use 'open source' to refer to Free Software
should result in that user being banned, and if the user was an Anonymous coward, his subnet should
be banned.
Before you go off about how I am proposing to restrict freedom of speech, remember this:
There is but one legitimate use of totalitarianist tactics: and that is in the defense of freedom.
Freedom at any cost!!!
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
Actually, the cost of outsourcing is having a company that doesn't actually produce anything. Management who can only buy a product from a third party and a brand name are not value-added.
Salaries are overall stagnant and many people have left IT. Maybe those of us left are simply the winners of the Game of IT Chicken.
Plus, software development is highly cyclical. During downturns new projects are cancelled. New projects are about half of all software projects, so the need for developers can drop in half during recessions.
Table-ized A.I.
....or just "work" -- lets keep in mind this is an international community.
Outsourcing (to other countries or just other firms) -- when it comes to highly skilled programming jobs runs into the problems of management and flexibility. You CAN absolutely be successful outsourcing a complex application. You damn well better have a perfect specification with excruciating detail, a timeline that's very quick -- so your market doesn't change mid-process, and a perfect business plan that won't need to change as you learn more about your market. In short -- oursourcing high skill projects fails not because of the project team, but because of the spec. You get exactly what you ask for -- but no additional analysis or reactivity.
Outsourcing lower skilled "telesales" and customer service jobs is tricky to. To be worth while, it has to be not just cheap, but very cheap. That leads to compromising voip audio quality one step too far, it leads to standards of speach skills and accent just one step too low. You CAN have great sounding voip. There ARE plenty of highly capable people who speak very well (much better than my ability to speak their language, that's for sure). Unfortunately, if you work to achieve those standards you erode the very savings you're trying to gain.
Think customer service centers don't know? Here's an annecdote: When I went to close and terminate a credit card, after many years, they transferred me to the first clearly US based service center and native English speaking person I'd EVERY spoken to at that company. His job, of course, was to try to talk me out of leaving. He asked why I was going away and I said "In all these years, the only time decided to send me to a person who speaks clearly over high quality connections was when they were trying to keep me from leaving. That tells me two things. First, it tells me that knows the quality isn't as good with the other centers they have. Second, it tells me really doesn't care.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Although, as I am still there under duress, this will obviously remain anonymous. At the PE (versionne francais, bien sur), this shit involves a particularly oderous app stack called Documentum, in addition to all the over-engineered J2EE crap.
:-)
Nice site by the way. I might buy you a beer sometime and we can swap horror stories
Mr T S
While there are good economic reasons for outsourcing, there are some real issues that relate to being able to maintain quality and handle the cultural/timezone conflicts well. Natually there will be debate on this issue, especially when jobs are at stake. However I am astounded to the kind of "free speech" that is exercised by many posters. As an Indian, I feel rather offended by the quite frankly racist undertones in some of the posts. What is more disturbing is that these posts seem to be something that is quite acceptable to other readers. I respect the right of induviduals to feel a sense of indignation at outsoucing, but the lack of respect that most posters (atleast on this thread) seem to have for other countries and cultures is very disappointing.
But when you can put a heavy hand on things, it fixes those "unsolvable by market economics" problems. Especially when the problems are related to the head not knowing what the body wants. When you cant buy quality anymore, something is very wrong *cough*IBM sale to Lenovo*cough*. It's not that quality isnt wanted, it's that quality is being pushed out by improper information that quality is an undesirable thing to have. That is how one of the assumptions of market economics breaks itself.
That requires something outside of market economics to fix.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Yep, and this is also called "sour grapes" from a troll who probably lost his job to a better programmer who was Indian.
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
That's called misinformation. It's a tactic used in the "free market" to create force that appears desirable. Even IBM has succumbed to this to sell off their PCD to Lenovo. What was the highest in quality is now in the hands of one of the CEOs from the Cursed Brand of Abysmal Quality. It's something to think about when let quality fall by the wayside, knowing that it affects your job as well by supporting an unsustainable practice such as offshoring.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Although, as I am still there under duress, this will obviously remain anonymous. At the PE (versionne francais, bien sur), this shit involves a particularly oderous app stack called Documentum, in addition to all the over-engineered J2EE crap.
Nice site by the way. I might buy you a beer sometime and we can swap horror stories
Yeah everything is french too at the E.C. I haven't exactly left the place, but let's say that my days are numbered. Under double digit numbered. I'll be glad to do some real usefull stuff again. J2EE is so totally over.
As for the horror-stories-with-beer, anytime
With great power comes great electricity bills.
You can improve your chances of getting a good, high-paying, and interesting job in the technology and IT sectors by learning to use a spell checker.
Try practicing with it on your resume first. Having misspelled words on a resume is the fastest way to a long career in the fast-food customer service industry regardless of your college degree.
I have been with my company for several years now and am considered key to the IT infrastructure. By my current employer is having a hayday outsourcing key support staff in our company. Sure they are saving money but the are also pissing off people like myself who now have to struggle with talking with guy's who have bad phone connections, bad hours and are difficult to understand.
Basically, it has gotten to the point where I am leaving to a company that has a clear understanding of when and what to outsource. My (soon to be past) employer might as well outsouce my job too since I am so gone but they will have to hire three people to do it and pay the price in 2 years when the spagetti mess of programs take the business to a halt!
And that's my 10c
I use the site Informed Choices http://www.informedchoices.co.uk/ to keep up to date with sort of crap from emplyers. They really need to be reined in over outsourcing.
I had a great chance for a comparison. I just switched from my POS PC laptop (Hypersonic--they blow for doing real work) to a MacIntel. I researched the move for quite awhile before going over. I had called both Adobe and Macromedia about six months ago and was told that "cross-grading" (moving from one platform to another) was possible for $5.
So. I called Adobe to cross-grade my Creative Suite 2 to the Mac. I spoke to someone who spoke american english and the transaction went through without a hitch. Maybe took 10 minutes at most. The Adobe person told me that they hadn't fully integrated Macromedia's store/customer service into Adobe and that I had to call them seperately.
So my call to the Macromedia store went quite differently. The woman I spoke with spoke english, but with an indian accent. When I explained my desire to "cross-grade" Sudio 8, she didn't appear to know what I was talking about. She kept misunderstanding what I was trying to do, always prefacing her answer with the same practiced apology, "I'm sorry for your frustration sir, but..." That really starts to gnaw on you after you've heard it five times or so. When I went into my explanation, I was interrupted several times by her (with the apology preface, of course) until I finally asked for a manager. I was told that I would get the same answer from her manager. I insisted and she finally said she would talk to the manager herself if I would hold (and she was sorry for my frustration, of course)
After being on hold for awhile, she came back and told me they would do this on a special, one-time basis. I got the cross-grade but it was like pulling teeth. I had called earlier and talked to someone at Macromedia and was assured I could do this. Even the woman at Adobe said that it wouldn't be a problem doing it through Macromedia. I'll tell you, when Adobe finally DOES merge the Customer Service departments, they'd better stick with the Adobe personnel or they'll lose a lot of customers.
Hell, one of the reasons I switched from the PC was my experience with Hypersonic. After the laptop crashing within the first week, the CD-ROM missing a screw and 2 of the 4 USB ports not working, they had me send it back. Two motherboards and three reloads later, they refused to take the machine back. I paid $3500. Because I couldn't afford to replace it, I've lived with blue-screens and outright shutdowns at least once a week for the last two years. When XP x64 came out, I went to get the drivers for the machine (it was an AMD 64 bit laptop I had purchased to run XP x64), they said "it won't run 64-bit XP" and that was it. While the gang there was courteous and tried to be helpful, the policy that wouldn't let me return such an obvious lemon--that wouldn't do what had been promised--soured me on them.
Contrast that with my experience with the Mini I bought for testing with Safari. I experienced a power outage in the middle of installing OS X. I tried to recover but couldn't. (Finder kept just flashing at me, even after a reinstall.) I called AppleCare and the woman patiently walked me through cleaning the thing up. Took over an hour. During the lulls while things were loading, she explained what she thought was wrong, the steps we were taking and why we were taking them. We even talked about Slashdot some and it was probably the best customer service experience I ever had. The FIRST PERSON I TALKED TO was knowledgable enough to diagnose and fix my problem. The woman had training and it showed. So when it came time to replace the Hypersonic dog, I did some research and figured I could go for the MacIntel.
If Visual PC comes out with a Universal Binary (or the Q/QEMU effort succeeds), my world will be complete. I still go to one of my desktop XP machines (via the Windows RDC for OS X) to do Visio, Captivate and some of the other Windows-Only apps.
These companies not only save on labor, frikking congress gave them a tax break to move production and service OFFSHORE. A TAX BREAK.
Now this is the US congress, not the Indian parliament that did that. And before that, when they were doing it with manufacturing, they SAID that "computer work" would be the replacement for heavy industry manufacturing. "Don't worry, we'll be the world leaders in computers and using them, forever". Remember that, are you old enough to remember those promises made back in the 80s when they started to really kill off all our critical manufaxcturing industries? I sure do. How long did that last before even manufacturing computers got shipped out, followed by programming, followed by tech support. What's left for all the millions of kids coming into the market, SALES? A nation of just sales people and managers and wall street shuffle YOUR last money around type assholes? Throw in a few sports players and musicians and actors and politicians on the take, and that's it, that's supposed to be a robust diverse economy?
So now, what's left, we are all supposed to mow each other's lawns for work? Oh wait, CAN'T DO THAT EITHER because they shipped in TWENTY MILLION ILLEGAL MEXICANS to take service jobs and construction jobs and hotel industry jobs.
I think that congress should go looking for their income tax OVER THERE in those places then if they think it's "good for america" to ship jobs out that way or ship in illegals to take the leftover jobs.
And LOOK, since they started this "turn millionaires into billionaires" globalization congame, we have RECORD trade imbalance, record inflation, record government deficits, record personal and corporate bankruptices, record low personal savings, dollar dropping against about any other serious currency out there, and record CORRUPTION, plus new wars that look to be perpetual far into the future and this is supposed to be a GOOD DEAL? WHAT? Where's their proof that any of their congame schemes work except for the 1% at the top? Where is it, all I see is slavemart lowest common denominator crap and the crap job that it is working there.
This is junk economy science these guys pushed on us, a mass congame. The tards at the top pushing it profit from it, no one else does. CREDIT AND DEFICITS are not a substitute for a good economy. It WILL NOT WORK in the long run. It is designed to milk as much real wealth out of the middle class as possible, then blow the dollar out so they can make the heist "legal". It's a big scam, just like they pulled off the "great depression" wealth transference scam.
There is some truth to that. Fortunately there are also local computer shops that they can pay an additional $200 or more (during the warranty period) to when things go horribly wrong and the customer does not want to spend time talking to someone in India.
So what is actually happening is more complex. Customers are not buying computers for the tech support. They are therefore willing to pay local providers for that tech support rather than call people in India.
This works out great for Dell, et. al. because outsourcing to India causes their call volumes to drop so they save money that way.
And more business for local tech support businesses.
The problem however is subtle. Without quality customer service and a real attempt to be able to steer the customer back to their products, the independant service providers often are in a position to maximize their piece of the pie (especially for businesses). This is done by helping people plan to keep their computers longer, minimizing upstream hardware purchases, and encouraging the money to be spent on services instead.
Also it means that the local service provider is put in a strong position regarding the customer's purchasing choices while the vendor is largely cut out of the loop. This process, for example, helps me convince customers to go with Linux rather than paying Microsoft for Windows. I get more of the money, they get authoritative local support, and everybody is happy.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Too bad CEOs don't pay attention to that, and only look at what an outsourcing company claims it can save them while hitting current SLAs. I'm tasked with moving a lot of my duties to India this year. Resources not as adept as those already employed aside, the project is being rushed (they expect this to all be complete in only 6 months. We're talking lan/wan infrastructure, firewalls, application support, help desk, EVERYTHING). It's doomed to failure. During the initial decision to do this, management decided they knew how to design the networks between us and the outsourcing company, rather than trust their employees (ie, me and the guy who is stuck managing the CF that is this project). Again...it doesn't take a genius to see where this is heading.
For the second time, I'm being outsourced from a major US IT company (founded by Ross Perot). From my perspective..........the only winners are the upper management of the company and maybe, if profitable, the shareholders. The losers are the employees who lose their jobs and their local economy. My company is outsourcing over 200 jobs from 1 location. After checking the local job postings for IT related positions.....it's not very good. Most jobs are about an hour to hour and half drive away....(gas money becomes an issue now). If forced to take a lower paying job locally, then I can't spend as much in my local economy....so the local economy suffers, and in the mean-time, US based companies who outsource, keep funding the economic growth of other countries. Their employees make good money and in return boosts their local economy. So in the long run.....how does the USA benifit? How do I benifit?
Why did you talk her out of it? Why did you talk her out of something she was expressing interest in? Was her interest for the money making aspect, or because she wants to know how the machine works?
I can understand if it was strictly for the pursuit of money - one should always attempt to find a job or career, whatever it ultimately is, where one enjoys going into work every day, and furthermore enjoys what they do. If someone doesn't enjoy what they do, they will never be as good at that work as someone who does it for the pleasure of doing it. However, if your daughter was interested in learning about computers for the sake of learning about computers, why supress that?
Indeed, for many diciplines, knowing more about computers will be a requirement, or at the very least allow for interesting opportunities to use that knowledge. For instance, a molecular biologist who understands computers could better utilize bioinformatic techniques, or understand their use by the computer techs - better than just someone who understands biology or computers alone would. An auto mechanic who understands computers could better understand how a vehicular computer does what it does versus a mechanic who doesn't. These are just two examples of many! I honestly wish there were more neurologists (and others in the living brain sciences) who understood computer concepts - and vice-versa! Perhaps we could have better computers - or better brains (or better understanding of brains)! Truely, there are people who have knowledge and training in both, but they are few and far between.
A person who understands computers, computer systems, logical reasoning, processes, and process maps - in addition to their regular training or knowledge - will be a much better person for any job, especially in business. Currently, one of the biggest issues businesses are facing is learning how their own processes, as a system, are working (or more likely, aren't!). While understanding this doesn't require someone who has an MBA and a CS degree, those who do understand both business practices and processes, along with computing systems, techniques, and processes, they can quickly understand and see where those business processes are broken, model the systems, see where the problems lie, then fix those areas to eliminate redundancy, waste, and ultimately increase profits. Furthermore, they are best able to explain and develop logical consistent maps which diagram these processes, and show how and where they are broken, while more importantly, where and how to fix them. The really bright bulbs can see where in these processes the problems that are occurring are happening because of misuse or misapplication of computer technology to what are really "soft" (ie, human coordinated) issues - which are best left (for now) to humans, and not machines.
Please - rethink what you have told your daughter. Talk to her again, find out what is motivating her. Let her know that computer science is not going away. Software development is not going away. What is going away is "willy-nilly" use of computers. What is needed is more people who understand rational, logical system processes and design, and understanding computer systems is something that could be intrinsic to this knowledge. She may still choose (or you may still urge her) to get her major in something else, but I doubt that having a minor in CS would harm her, and ultimately, may benefit her in numerous ways throughout the rest of her life, both personally and with her career goals.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You mean they didn't just fire half their employees and turn off half their equipment? Can't you just add new stations cheaper than moving old ones?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1)Kind of like after the Germans taught the Americans how to build cars they went off and built better cars no wait American cars are still pretty crappy.
2)OJ Simpson Anyone?
3)Indians can innovate. What do you call creating a business model where most of your work comes from a high living cost country so you can charge high rates but you do it in a low living cost country so your costs are lower. Thats real innovative
4)And the point is? Decisions made by an American programmer are different from decisions made by an Indian programmer How?
5) Yes the reason is most of the wealth of India was looted over 3 centuries of colonialism but then again the Indians are getting rich again. There was a time when 4 centuries back when 80% of world GDP was Indian and Chinese and we are going back to the same. Yes of course it affects how people work. When people have had to struggle to get into a well paying career they take their job seriously unlike somebody in the US who has had the job handed to him on a platter
6) Yes their is an overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. That is why companies offer lower rates so it is worth taking the trouble to cross those boundaries
7) Nobody in their right mind outsources critical areas oly non core competencies
8) If your attitude is managers suck no wonder they want to outsource your job. Whether you like it or not the world is set up where people with soft skills rule people with technical skills. Just face the facts. If you dont like it you should have spent more time at frat parties in college to develop the soft skills needed for management
9) The reason people need to outsource is that the US has an unsustainably high standard of living. When a plumber or Garbage truck driver in the US earns more than a rocket scientist in other countries somewhere the extra amount of money has to be brought in. If Engineers and IT people want the same benefits of being American that Garbage truck drivers and Dockworkers have then they too should put time and effort into forming unions. If not dont blame management for trying to balance the books through outsourcing. You want a really fair system make it so that anyone from the poorest country can come to the US and do the low end jobs. Soon the cost of living will be low enough in the US to be able to compete on salaries with any other country. Or be like the Doctors and Lawyers who use the law from preventing foreign competition.
10) Thats so freaking wrong. A Puritan culture which is bascially what the Americans started out with respects authority a lot more but that doesnt prevent individualistic expressions in the US
11) Well its true Hindus have made bad decisions in the past which allowed their country to be overrun by Muslim and Christian rulers but that doesnt mean they are self defeating. People make bad decisions. The key is to learn from the mistakes. The Native Americans made a bad mistake by not killing every white colonist on sight and they got overrun as a result. Hindus did the same mistake with Muslims and Britishers but they learnt enough in time to survive so I would say they have learnt their lesson
12) OK Companies fail for a variety of reasons . Blaming outsourcing is just a red herring unless you have specific proof of outsourcing leading to the failure
13) OK the caste systems been dead for a while. When I went through school the only place people were asked about their castes was for reservations( India's version of affirmative action for the erstwhile lower castes) . I had friends from all castes and caste was never an issue in our dealings ( In fact I didnt know their castes till we started filling forms for college admission. Man was I pissed that I was a so called upper caste and could not apply for affirmative action). Granted I grew up in a city so their might still be some vestiges of the caste system left in the really isolated villages. Its kind of like the Hillbillys . You know they exist in your country, You wish they were not so backward, you are embarressed by their presence but theres precious little you can do if some people insist on being stupid. In any case anyone who wants to be successfull in today's India better not be casteist.
**Life is too short to be serious**
"Punjabis and Paks" are not mutually exclusive. Both India and Pakistan have ethnic Punjabis and both have states called Punjab (well, a province in Pakistan). Incidentally, most outsourcing goes to South India, not Punjab.
Linus is STILL for fags.
I'm an ex-developer who has made the (sometimes questionable) transition to Software Quality Assurance management. I manage a team of 14 "QA Engineers" at a business services company. Code does not hit our production platforms with out getting past my team first :-)
The development organization at my company is slowly moving dev overseas - we have contracts with a two companies in India and one in Russia. The rest is done in house.
Now, when I see a new patch or package coming from the offshore teams, I automatically double my QA estimates. Why double? Because if I trebbled them I'd get waaay too much push-back from Upper Mgmt. And generally these packages run behind in QA, even at the inflated timeframes.
The code from overseas generates 400% more bug tickets than the onshore stuff (437% last release which completed end of January, in fact). And this is a java app ontop of jboss (its an electronic payment and presentment application for several banks, major cable company, rental car agency, and a few others). So its not the most complex beast out there. The onshore apps are generally much more complex (Solaris 9 and linux mix) and we don't offshore any of that work (yet - there's a push to do that).
I ramble... bottom line, offshoring development has only made my life worse, not better. And the money saved in dev costs is surpassed in increased QA cycles and dev fixes.
Increasingly, American companies seek to get rich by acting as the broker between vendors and custormers in other countries. For example, an American company might see selling the serives of Indian programmers to Chinese customers as more profitable than selling the services of American programmers. This may be true, short term, but ultimately, the customers will contract directly with the suppliers of the services, who have received a free education as part of the deal.
And without any customers in America, (after all, Americans need to have money in order to buy anything just like anybody else..so they need jobs..) ultimately the US economy will implode..
From our own short sighted greed and stupidity, I might add.. Unfortunately..
1) Many Americans have come to believe that buying something or subscribing to a product is tantamount to an agreement in which the provider becomes the slave of the consumer. Therefore any inconvenience is insufferable. Dare to question the consumer or suggest an action they might take? Unacceptable. The only solution is to press the immediate "fix it" button, after which you should apologize for having wasted the consumer's (presumably) valuable time. People tend to believe their material success actually makes them superior. (You would be surprised how little wealth it takes to give people this confidence)
2) Many Americans have had very little exposure to any accent other than their own, much less ever tried to learn a 2nd language. I have had people transferred to me from other extremely capable reps simply because they could not understand the other rep's accent. "I just don't think they should hire those foreigners, i just can't understand a word they say." or even better, "You people don't need to hire someone who doesn't understand English." Of course they come off sounding incredibly ignorant and childish, but welcome to the planet. Of course, not everyone is that rude about it. I have friends (mostly older friends) who I love to death, and who are great people, but they just can't understand foreign accents.
3) Like many other /.ers, people within a certain radius of me ask me to fix their computers. I have tried to help close friends over the phone with their computer problems. Half the time I know exactly what the problem is and have a clear image of their computer in my mind. Most of the time I end up having to fix the problem in person. If someone is having so much of a problem with their pre-configured dell that they have to call tech support, they probably aren't going to understand what the person is telling them to do. (That having been said, I have heard of some incompetant computer support reps; my friend had an Acer rep tell her that the power cord was the reason her laptop was freezing up, and they sent her a new one.)
most people can barely handle telephone support from their countrymen. Even if the rep speaking from India does a flawless job, sometimes the American consumer just can't handle it. randyjg2's comment above was a great example of that. Anyway there's my $0.02.
Indeed, I have experienced plenty of poor customer service from domestic customer service service centres here in the UK, from the likes of Amazon (Slough) and Barclays (Scotland, Glasgow I think.) I often think that most poor customer service is from companies whose whole "customer service" ethos is around saving money, which includes mostly not speaking to customers and fobbing you off when you do get through to a customer service rep.
While most customer service problems (e.g. where's the product I ordered?) can be handled by front line phone monkeys, I firmly believe that every call centre should have a hard core of reps who are empowered to actually make decisions involving money, so if in their opinion a customer has experienced especially bad service do something to compensate them, and make this sort of decision on the spot rather than "I'll call you back".
Sadly, India is often associated with poor service, because it is exactly these companies who have the no service ethos that choose to outsource customer care. I'm out here in India at the moment, and believe me the people you speak to on the phone are much better at speaking and understanding English than the general populous.
Having said that, it does appear that India has turned mediocrity in to an art form. I've never seen any job done especially well over here. Everything from building projects to software engineering, corners are cut. There doesn't appear to be such a concept as perfectionism here. So perhaps this isn't the right nation to be trusting such a core function as keeping your customers happy?
(a) Hire hot Indian women to dote on my rich ass
(b) [redacted]
(c) profit
I disagree with your opinions and I have various reasons and some personal beliefs blah blah blah so blah blah. O edifying rational exchanges in the bosom of the interweb how I cherish thee, laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalaalala.
America's rural areas are full of unemployed hayseeds who have foolishly educated themselves in computer sciences and are still unemployed.
Therefore, let's hire them for a fraction of the cost of professionals in large cities, and look politically good doing it.
Disclosure: I live in Louisville, KY. It's just big enough to have a modest technology community but we are all acutely aware that if any one of the three or four biggest IT shops goes under we'll all be at each others throats for whatever jobs are left in the city. I'm hoping the onshoring phenomenon kicks in soon enough to make a difference in this area.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
In my years of IT experience, I have rarely run across a group of useless self-important hacks as the Gartner Group. Not only do they breezily predict a bunch of bullshit that isn't at all realistic (including predicting a couple of years ago that IT would die as a profession in the US) but when they talk about specific vendors I always end up wondering if that vendor is slipping them a tenner (or more) for every glowing, positive remark they make. Frankly they could be replaced by a Magic 8 Ball and no one would notice.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
But if 100% of customers reported "either no change or worsening in customer satisfaction", then the strategy could still be a resounding success. Surely it would be far more relevant to lump "no change" with "improving"?
It's bad because americans are now becoming wage-slaves to people on the other side of the world, rather than to their neighbors across town.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
You mean they didn't just fire half their employees and turn off half their equipment?
The link said they reduced their staff by 10%, not the 50% you said. That would be in line with removing duplicate functions that two companies need separately, but one combined company doesn't need. For example, one company doesn't need two marketing departments, two legal departments, or two corporate finance departments.
And no, they didn't turn off half of their equipment. The previous AT&T customers still use AT&T systems, while Cingular customers still use Cingular systems. And, both companies run on the same kind of cellular network, which was one of the reasons they wanted this deal in the first place.
"The capitalists of the world and their governments, in the pursuit of the conquest of the Soviet market, will close their eyes to the indicated higher reality, and thus will turn into deaf, mute, blind men. They will extend credits in giving us the materials and technology we lack. They will restore our military industry, indispensible for our future victorious attacks on our suppliers. In other words, they will labor for the preparation for their own suicide." -- Vladimir Lenin
You are the first second generation Slashdotter that I'm aware of.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Oh Slashdot, why are you being so left wing?
Well, let's suppose that you are an unemployed techie. What do you do (aside from, hopefully, looking for a job)?
You have all day to read (and thus post to) Slashdot.
Just pointing out that Slashdot post count may not be a representative sampling of techies.
Also, I wanted to point out one good thing about competition in your industry: it is anathema to getting nothing done. You know those projects that just keep acquiring more and more developers and turn into a giant J2EE circle-jerk, but never really accomplish much, expecially given the huge amount of expenditures? The kind of thing that large companies love? Not much fun, kind of morale killing? Competition does a number on those kind of money-wasting projects and encourages those that actually get something done.
Most people I've met would rather be working on something meaningful and useful than something awful.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
From the article "A 2005 Gartner study predicts"
I don't have very much faith in the practical usefulness of Gartner studies. They seem to be rather favorable of whomever pays for their study.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Free markets are not the end-all-be-all of every system.
They are a powerful tool in that they are stable (assuming a certain degree of government oversight). Also, if certain assumptions are met (consumers can be approximated as being informed, so many providers of a good exist that they can be approximated as a fluid) they can produce fairly efficient output. Plus they solve problems that other systems fall prey to where one person is trusted and abuses his position, thus breaking the system.
However, "stick it on the free market" is *not* always the right answer.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
India is seeing something like what we did during about 2000. They are seeing an extremely rapid influx of money into IT, and phenomenal growth in that job market.
.com boom -- lots and lots of people who absolutely should not have been hired to do what they are doing are working in the area, and there is a large chunk of the market that is unskilled. Remember all the horrible, awful, terrible websites made by overpaid people who barely knew what they were doing? Yeah. Think of the same thing, but in a different country.
Not surprisingly, this is having exactly the same effect as it did in the United States during the
India will straighten up their act, the same as we're doing. People and companies will start building reputations, the growth will slow to stability, etc. Not every Indian comp.* Usenet poster will be clueless. It'll just take some time.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
My first Dell issue happened within hours of turning it on. Some application, that I have yet to isolate, insists on trying to load (twice a day) a non-existent file called "Timer.txt".
Windows is no Linux, even with a sizeable collection of free utilities, but you can at least make it palatable.
Use filemon to find the offending process.
My second Dell issue concerns the USB ports. 5 USB 2 ports on the back and 2 on the front, and I normally use most of them -- (1) USB hub for wireless keyboard, (2) USB mouse, (3) USB wireless LAN, (4) USB 3-speakers system, (5) external USB DVD+RW drive (as Dell wanted too much for the internal one, so I went for internal DVD-ROM), and (6) USB hard drive.
You may be simply drawing too much power. Try purchasing an inexpensive *powered* USB hub. Plug that into the computer and plug some of the devices into it (as a bonus, this provides a rather more conveniently locatable thing to plug things into).
The problem is that hard drive failure is so serious an issue that operating systems will understandably make it priority number one and other programs/operations will suffer performance problems or worse (or even worse).
It's not the priority, but the fact that things like the pagefile being on the hard drive and executable code being on the hard drive causes some operations (like memory accesses or simply trying to execute a chunk of code) to take incredibly long.
Computers normally do a good job of faking "multi tasking" but NMI (non-maskable interrupts) rain on that parade.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a media read error will produce an NMI.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The reason people need to outsource is that the US has an unsustainably high standard of living. When a plumber or Garbage truck driver in the US earns more than a rocket scientist in other countries somewhere the extra amount of money has to be brought in. If Engineers and IT people want the same benefits of being American that Garbage truck drivers and Dockworkers have then they too should put time and effort into forming unions. If not dont blame management for trying to balance the books through outsourcing. You want a really fair system make it so that anyone from the poorest country can come to the US and do the low end jobs. Soon the cost of living will be low enough in the US to be able to compete on salaries with any other country. Or be like the Doctors and Lawyers who use the law from preventing foreign competition.
Unskilled native US laborers know that masses of Mexican (or otherwise) immigrants would be the death knell for their subsidized lifestyle (and they would lose their political power that they use to keep more citizens from coming in.) As a result, there is heavy opposition to allowing that immigration -- hence quotas and all the barriers put in place to make it difficult to become a US citizen. Slashdot has a population of people that are skilled workers in vast disproportion to the general US population, which is why you get very little dislike of immigration here -- just outsourcing.
People can exhibit very, very extreme behavior when their jobs are threatened. The xenophobia in Germany against Jewish immigrants was largely just an expression of upset over the job market. The US Great Depression had spread into other countries and Germany's economy was badly hurt, with very high unemployment. At the same time, Jews were disproportionately highly educated, and thus often became professionals. Since this was a class of people that was gaining increasingly in power and wealth relative to unskilled labor and the nobility (which had been clobbered by the Weimar Republic), they were targetted.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Who loves India and Hindus more? Someone who denies that there are serious problems? Or, someone who tries to define those problems?
I think that I love India and Hindus more than you.
More issues:
The single biggest issue is that people in the U.S. abuse people in India by hiring them and not giving them enough training, and not giving them enough authority in the hiring company.
If hiring companies gave their employees in India enough training, much of the cost saving would vanish. That's true of any situation in which the cultural differences are as great as they are between the U.S. and Hindus. I think the differences between the U.S. culture and the Tamil culture, for example, are less of a problem.
Because of the very poor quality telephone support, people who never thought about India, and could not find India on a map, now think that Indians do their jobs very poorly. Enormous damage is being done to public relations between India and the world.
You said, "Anyone who outsources their critical business processes is a fool."
ALL business processes are critical. I stopped doing business with Citibank because they have a really terrible web site, and have not fixed it in 6 years.
Who loves India and Hindus more? Someone who denies that there are serious problems? Or, someone who tries to define those problems?
I think that I love India and Hindus more than you.
More issues:
The single biggest issue is that people in the U.S. abuse people in India by hiring them and not giving them enough training, and not giving them enough authority in the hiring company.
If hiring companies gave their employees in India enough training, much of the cost saving would vanish. That's true of any situation in which the cultural differences are as great as they are between the U.S. and Hindus. I think the differences between the U.S. culture and the Tamil culture, for example, are less of a problem.
Because of the very poor quality telephone support, people who never thought about India, and could not find India on a map, now think that Indians do their jobs very poorly. Enormous damage is being done to public relations between India and the world.
Alrite..I have had quite a few laughs on this site, and yours was amazingly funny..I understand americans are pissed off about losing their jobs to lower wage workers..i wont even claim to have a inkling of its moral and economic ramifications..The only reason i m posting this is to tell you, and people who think along your lines , that they need to stick their heads out of the sand and see the truth. I came to america 3 years ago after graduating from an IIT, which i doubt any of you can even enter, and I went to a top american Univ for my masters..The avg. standard of students here is apalling, and their basic analytic and quantitative skills are way inferior to an average indian.EVen in my company I have observed a lot of americans..Sorry to say none of them have impressed me with their analytic or quantitative skills.I remember doing a course which used elementary probability (i.e elementary for an avg indian).Boy! did the american students struggle..I taught some of them and i had a lot of fun seeing how dumb american people can be ,especially when these guys are graduate students..I see kids here struggling with SATS and GREs and other standardized tests, .I just wanna signoff by telling you that i got a 2360 in GRE and i studied less than 2 months for it..lol..
it's not a quality of the Hindu culture!! lol..did u ever made it past the high school? People like you have no idea whats going outside your country, and yet you make wild preposterous claims..And yeah India is the same country where MK Gandhi was from , though I doubt you even know who he was, coz I dont think you have any cable programs about him..IMO America is suffering from an extreme case of mediocrity in terms of its workforce. I wont even state the bleeding obvious, where this trend is going to lead u guys....I hope there are better educated people than you in your country...Else there is no hope..
Sure I would love to find a great store that just does the business. I had one where I grow up but travelling halfway across holland (american distance, other side of town) is a bit to much.
My current store is okay, you just got to get the right guy and he doesn't do phone support. The monkeys do. You need the manager or techies and they only serve at the counter.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.