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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."
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!
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.
2) It can easily be arranged that an Indian court will not convict. What Indian juror can find against his or her neighbors?
3) All products require innovation. Indian programmers are not usually innovative; it's not a quality of the Hindu culture.
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.
5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you.
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.
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.
8) Non-technical managers know they cannot manage technical projects, so they outsource to move the problems as far away as possible from their area of responsibility. Often outsourcing is contracted by managers working against a company, not for it. When your company begins failing, the managers who avoided responsibility by outsourcing will get another job and tell their friends and neighbors, "It was time to move on."
9) When you outsource, you avoid dealing with issues in your own country. Eventually, with enough avoidance, your country will become less livable.
10) The Hindu culture prizes conformity to authority. If there is something wrong, Hindus would not feel comfortable telling their bosses.
11) Do not think you can magically avoid Hindu self-defeat; you have only to visit India for a few days to learn that they are masters at self-defeat. People in the U.S. are professionals at self-defeat; they voted for George W. Bush and they voted to pay their own money to become involved in a never-ending project of killing Iraqis. Amazingly, Hindus are even more self-defeating than people in the United States.
12) It is often very difficult to see that your company is failing until it is too late. Bad technical support causes hatred for your company and hatred for your brand name. You probably will not notice the submarine of dislike until it surfaces. Citibank, are you listening? No, you aren't.
13) Bonus reason! Remember, in the Hindu culture, the people in the U.S. company are not a member of any caste. That means they are untouchables; they are so socially inferior they are considered second-class human beings.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
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
How many people here have called tech support and gotten someone with a thick Indian accent named "Steve"?
Look you racist piece of crap, regardless of wether you get an american, indian or ancient time traveler from latin-only speaking rome, as long as they can read from a script (which is exactly what every support person does) they can have the job. YOU need to be intelligent enough to ask the right questions and participate in the support call - something you obviously have problems with. Or maybe you are just a biggot, either way you seem like an asshole to me!
Horns are really just a broken halo.
India is a great place for development,as they have very skilled programmers for cheap wages and "tech speak" has less problems with the language barriers than customer service.
You have a couple of flawed premises here.
One: "tech speak" has more problems with language barriers, not less, because we techies are usually trying to solve complex technical problems where accurate communication is essential. If you or I have to repeat what we say several times to communicate the point, or understand the point, it's a problem. And this is a problem I've experienced firsthand. I work in a shop where we have a majority of "onshored" Indians in development, and a lot of our development offshored to India as well, so I have to interact with people that are "fresh off the boat", Indians that have been here 6 years and speak English as well as I do, Indians that have been here 8 years and speak English worse than some of the FOB's, and offshore people who speak 2 or 3 words of English and about 15 words of Hindi per sentence. And in the latter case, "tech speak" isn't enough to bridge the gap.
The second flawed premise is that the very skilled programmers in India are working for cheap wages. I've met quite a few very smart Indians. They've all been very aware of their market value and had a savvy business sense. Most of the offshore guys I've interacted with aren't that great, and are probably just collecting skills for their resume for when their H1B comes in or they win a green card lottery. They have the Internet in India too, and they know getting paid $8/hr (which is how much Wippro pays their guys in India while charging $25/hr for them) while their counterparts in the US are getting paid $40/hr is a raw deal. That's why turnover is high, and the guys you work with this project probably isn't going to be the same group you work with next project.