Slashdot Mirror
Network Management Outsourced to India
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "The latest wrinkle for outsourcing companies in India is long-distance monitoring of corporate computer networks in U.S. and Europe -- services that could be worth tens of billions of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Growth is expected as factories become more computerized and remote services expand to include controlling plant temperatures from afar and even monitoring who enters and exits the premises. 'Theoretically,' says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., 'anything on a network can be managed remotely from India.'"
Great idea until you have one of them patch a server and it doesn't come backup. If you can't get feet on the ground within an hour then you are useless.
...Until hardware starts to fail.
Your saying that things can be managed remotely.. on a network. WE NEED TO ALL FEAR FOR OUR JOBS! FIRST ROBOTS NOW THIS!
oh wait.... wasn't this story first posted on CHIPS & DIPS like a thousand years ago?
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
Actually, we do this where I work. The cost savings are ENOURMOUS... you would do it too. For example, to hire three full time IT staff (with 1 manager) full time, we run over $500,000 per year. But they don't really do anything... so we cut our staff down to one person, and outsourced to India -- the cost is now $8,500 per month.
Be afraid, very afraid...
Look at the picture in the article. I've seen happier faces behind the counter at McDonalds. You can have those jobs India.
http://religiousfreaks.com/But aren't, since there are people willing to do them for less. You'd think the Wall Street Journal would have some economists on staff...
>
>'Growth is expected as factories become more computerized and remote services expand to include controlling plant temperatures from afar and even monitoring who enters and exits the premises. Theoretically,' says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., 'anything on a network can be managed remotely from India.'"
"Practically", say several million skript kiddies, crackers, and Slashdotters, "anything on a network that can be managed remotely from India, won't remain on a network for very much longer. And it's spelled 'Hilarity', not 'Growth'".
In one word: DON'T! Users don't much like Asian tech support. And it isn't that much worse. Higher level stuff truly _is_ worse.
"Theoretically," says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., "anything on a network can be managed remotely from India."
Oh really? I learned a LOT of theory based ideas in school, but once I entered the working world, the REAL world, things were vastly different.
Become a plumber, house painter, doctor, whatever. It's probably going to be a long while before teleporting works well enough to take house repair and similar work overseas.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Who in their right mind would do this other than a bean counter ???? I work in this shit every day and am sick and tired of dealing with offshore data-admin-development centers. I call and speak with "Bob" and tell him i need a restore of a local GMP server .... and yet as always its a big friggin hassle...and never gets done properly .... ack.... i need to grow crops or paint houses for a living....this ain't working..... but it never ceases to amaze me the idiots that think this is a "good" idea and beneficial for the company.......
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
I was talking with a middle manager for a European cell phone company the other month. She was telling me that production was in China, most of support was in China, and they were moving R&D to China as well because by that point the Chinese engineer knew where that particular technology was going. So I said, "Basically you're a subsidiary of a Chinese company then". She told me that it was the other way around, and we argued about it for a while. What I found interesting is that the company had basically no product-line positions left, all they were hiring was sales and marketing.
Let's outsource the military. Let's outsource the politicians. Let's outsoruce the police.
oh wait.
Maybe outsourcing is a bad idea.
Maybe globalism is a big mistake.
I wonder how companies that outsource off shore feel about net neutrality?
You can hardly get good managed services when the dude is beside the boxes, good luck with that remote hooha. Also, as others have pointed out if the network is truly down down down, they're powerless.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
There is a point at which this outsourcing crap needs to stop, and this is it. Don't leave the management to someone off-site if you know the entire plant is computerized to a high degree. Don't leave the techs with a phone call to India: "Hello, ah, yes, my Complicatron3000 just went down and gave 'Ha. I'm finished working. Tough shit.' for an error message..." "Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?"
It needs to stop now. When the management is no longer physically accessible and able to work personally on the network/machine/computer/whatever, there needs to be a line drawn. Corporate overlords: let the people who understand the systems do their jobs. Cheap, unexperienced labor is usually not nearly as well-done as on-site, skilled labor. Save money in the long run: spend a little extra now to keep from having to rebuild all of your materiél.
</rant>
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
We have a winner! Give the man a kewpie doll.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
China Threatens Inda Eminence
Achille Talon
Hop!
1. Local service is better for reason X,Y,Z
2. Remote service is better...
It all depends how much you value local service.
While I believe going to offshore-whatever the vast majority of the time negatively impacts a company's bottom line, the PHB who dreamed up the scheme to go offshore dodges blame because:
1. Good service? Bad service? Who cares! Offshore is cheaper.
2. Most consumers happily trade today's low price for tomorrow's customer service nightmare.
A good sysadmin has to stay out of firing range by concentrating on valuable skills that won't soon be replaced by a lower-cost version of their skill-set.
I'd be very interested to hear if the Microsoft certified people stand a greater chance of being axed than a *nix experienced sysadmin.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I work for a very large international company that does network monitoring for large enterprise clients. We monitor from Toronto, Boulder, Rochester and Bangalore. The support we get from the group in India is no worse that the support that is delivered from North America.
As long as we're not using Tivoli, everything is fine.
Theoretically, anything on a network that can be managed remotely from India can also be managed by an expert system running on a CPU on that network... without the added expense of long distance communication and employees, and without the added failure modes of having your international links go down. Plus, the programming for the expert system should be around the same magnitude of difficulty as writing the scripts for the Indians to follow, and anything either one of them doesn't recognize is going to get escalated to a higher-up anyway. So why is outsourcing network management to a person in another country a big win over outsourcing to a machine? Neither one of them is capable of pushing the damn reset button!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Have you ever noticed that you get a WORSE level of service over the phone (or otherwise remotely) than in person? Sure you have! Here is the reason: There exists LESS accountability. /. posters have pointed out), HARDWARE fails too.
For exmaple, when I have the ability to drive down the street and GET IN TO SOMEONES FACE if I am not satisfied with a product or service, you know what? I tend to get better service!
Thats what network management is, a service.
Any manager with half a brain would not do this. They would realize that (as other
Lesson; you need good local people!! Always have, always will.
Please have the tireless generosity to note that all my future meta-moderation and precocious-buttock repartee will henceforth be conveyed to your worthy consideration by "Smitty" and "Pete" in Bangalore.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
All your corporate secrets can be sold on the internet to the highest bidder.
Of course, some businesses don't need security, and don't give a stuff about the security of their employees records. So they needn't worry about their corporate data being accessible to anyone with a packet sniffer and some open source decryption software. And anyway, the American government has probably already collected and leaked their secrets, and the UK government is probably passing a law at this very moment requiring all secrets everywhere to be held on a database in Novosibirsk (sp?) on a computer owned by hackers.ru (but with Tony Blair having your GPG key for safety).
Thinks... Maybe I should not mix the coffee with brandy)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
http://www.topology.org/pc/watchdog.html Yes they can push the damn reset button :)
This is a good idea for some companies, and a bad idea for some companies. Don't be so quick to assume that every company that implements such a program is instantly going to have all their systems go down in flames. Some companies will have good experiences, and some may have bad experiences. We're seeing comments in both directions in this very discussion thread.
I'm sure that companies that outsource their network administration have an emergency lifeline in case of severe problems. It would probably be most cost-effective to have your main network administration in India, but have a local company (which contracts its services to multiple companies) only for problems that require a physical presence.
However, if your company's system experiences truly earth-shattering complications on a regular basis, maybe you ought to be outsourcing your network administration to Indian professionals who offer a tenfold talent-per-dollar increase over your existing resources. If nothing else, it's a better value for the 300 days out of the year when all the servers need is some remote babysitting.
This is freaking IN-SANE! These people are not all our friends and assumes we will always be allies. Imagine the opening shot in a future conflict being data networks and phones at thousands of businesses shutting down at once. All your web searches being re-routed because the corporate fucktards at Bellsouth decided to save a few pennies letting Indian support centers handle large chunks of their network maintenance.
I'm not saying Indian admins are reckless or incompetent. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to turn over too much control of our information resources over to a foreign country, just like it's a bad idea to depend on a fragile line of oil tankers connecting us to a bunch of wild-eyed goat herders for our transportation fuel and trusting the Chinese and Koreans with all our manufacturing capability. If push comes to shove they'll do what their government tells them to do. This is all going to come around to bite us in the ass one of these days.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Hey, it could happen!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
But it's much tougher--if not downright impossible--to remotely improve that network.
Organizations who are interested in outsourcing are also generally interested in growing their business; and when they grow, so does their infrastructure, including their networks, both in size and complexity. Expanding a network involves a tremendous number of physical resources and processes, including obtaining and installing cable, routers, servers, software, etc. Trust me, you want to have a knowledgeable network staff *on-site* to coordinate such a movement. I suppose that someone across the ocean could simply call up contractors to install all of this stuff, but the cost in time and efficiency, especially during the troubleshooting phase, would be enormous.
If your company wishes to maintain a stagnant network--one that can't adapt to the growth of their company; then by all means, outsource all your network management. Just hope your hardware never breaks.
I don't think anyone thinks it's beneficial for the company.
It's beneficial for the exec doing the offshoring
SO TRUE!
It's been about 5 years so my experience isn't current, but unless they've suddenly become highly trained, clueful, and motivated, I can't see this being any more successful than the other failed outsourcing to India attempts. The software developers over there working on our projects ignored requirements, standards, and schedules. They were hard to communicate with (culturally _and_ linguistically), and timing was of course always delayed because they're not working when you need to talk to them.
So, of course, they're cheaper, and people will go with them. Eventually they'll either fail, or get smart, and need someone local. By then they'll hire whoever India is outsourcing _their_ stuff to. There's whole continents we haven't started to do this with, yet.
Question: What do you do when the network goes down?
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
long-distance monitoring of corporate computer networks
Very first thing that came into my mind.... What if someone decided to convert some of these into botnets and start renting out. Can we legally do something to them in that scenario.
Hey, I bet there are some pretty smart MBAs over in India who could do the job of most managers and CEOs twice as well for a quarter of the pay. As an added benefit, with remote management, worker morale would improve.
I hope shareholders sue the boards of any companies that don't outsource their management, they are costing those shareholders money.
Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boys, your turn is coming.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I like to put my vital infrastructure in the place most likely to be involved in a nuclear war this decade.
Got a toll free number ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Any company that relies on India, Sprint, or any other managed service provider for their network are fools and deserve to reap what the sew. As another poster indicated, there is most certainly a lack of accountability to ensure that someone's routers, systems, or whatever stay up considering that odds are they have other clients that probably pay more than you do, so guess what.. if push comes to shove, you know who is going to be getting serviced first and who is going to be waiting and kicking themselves in the butt for the money they saved by using an Indian or any other managed resource company.
How much do you TRUST a 3rd party to be the keepers of your company's critical data? Because once you've chosen that, you really have no other security options.
I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
Do what's fun. Do it good. Tell people about it. The rest just happens. Meanwhile you can offer writing procedures for network admining for outsourced admin services. At a more specialized rate that is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
From the comments I read, most everyone is pointing to the security point or the hardware failure point. Those are very very good points, but what about the fact that they are TAKING AMERICAN JOBS AND GIVING THEM TO OTHER COUNTRIES!!!
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
It seems that this race to the bottom cost for anything is going to end in China. For a time, at least. Once China truly floats their currency, this may change. You thought speaking to tech support in Chennai (India) was bad? Wait until it's Shanghai where the accents are twice as thick.
What I think companies don't ask themselves often is "SHOULD we do this?" Not simply "Is this cheaper", but "Is this wise?" There seem to be few companies out there brave enough to go against the race to the bottom and instead focus on quality. And as time goes on, and quality continues to decline, customers will care much more about quality. The internet also plays a role in this as it allows customers to connect and complain about companies (i.e. www.bestbuysux.org, and thousands of others).
While I have seen some decent quality products come from China lately, I doubt very seriously if China is up to the task of highly complex technical support. I'm not saying they're stupid, but how good is the education there? How good is the average educated person's english? How much do they understand about American/Western culture? And how much do we (that is, our companies) understand about Chineese / Asian culture?
I believe it is the intangibles such as cultural understanding that will ultimately kill many of these attempts.
... this story is sooooo 2003! ... or was that 2002?
HR and accounting? I mean seriously, what is so "special" about IT that makes it the most frequently outsourced field. There is no technical reason that the bean counters and HR monkeys could not be outsourced just as easily.
Have a Shocky-Monkey.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is an intelligence test people. If you do not get the next step that is the obvious solution to managers who came up with the idea of outsourcing then congrats. You are an idiot.
The solution to the problems that arise when you outsource the management of your non-outsourced systems? Outsource the systems.
TADA!
Why not? They are outsourcing everything else aren't they?
And don't think outsourcing is anything new either. How many of you work in companies that have their own cantina's. Used to be a member of the company meaning they had heart for the business and were for instance willing to work overtime along with the other workers.
Been outsourced to special companies meaning nowadays it is all the same generic crap with zero attention to the specific needs of the company. Like for instance making the cooking equipment available to people having to work the nightshift.
Offcourse now everyone is crying because it is their job that is going away. If you didn't protest when the thee lady was outsourced then don't expect anyone to protest because your job is going away.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
..move everything overseas and quit having me subsidize your business via the security the United States provides (via it's legal system, police, military, etc infrastructure). I'm getting tired of paying taxes to subsidize businesses that won't provide I or my countrymen jobs. There's a reason it costs less to outsource, and it's not because we're all a bunch of lazy gluttons in the U.S. Good riddance.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Given that corporations have been very careful to put their primary servers inside the corporate firewall to protect them, blasting the system load and application status over the public internet would seem to be retrograde. If there's a "Big Brother" or MRTG server in the DMZ that can see the internal servers, then there's a machine crackers can use to bypass all internal security measures. And what are these Indian IT guys going to use to log in, anyway? There's a frightening possibility that connections will be through raw telnet or the most basic setting on Terminal Services, and that corporations will simply plain-text e-mail the usernames and passwords required to the Indian company managing their systems.
All this ignores the bandwidth issue. Most companies can barely afford to get the pipes they need. If you're now going to fire RRD databases and SNMP streams over to India, you're going to eat into that bandwidth. As soon as you throw in virtual consoles for GUI management (and that's the most likely way they'd control most of the boxes), you're talking severe network hogs. This means that corporations with insufficient bandwidth will kill their connections entirely or have to spend more on additional bandwidth than they're saving by outsourcing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The middle and upper levels of management will follow because frankly, distance does matter, despite what Wipro think. Eventually they will be wholly Chinese companies owned by foreign shareholders. I don't really have a problem with this, it pushes the chinese economy up, makes them more expensive.
It'll level out, the important thing is to allow the currencies to float freely, which isn't happening at the moment. That's what you should be complaining about to your MP/representative.
Deleted
When we see a headline titled "Management outsourced to India" then we will finally see some kind of pressure put to stop this.
But seriously, why wouldn't a 30k per year, indian masters in business administration manager be able to manage just as effectively as a 4 million dollar per year manager (and hey- he'd have better contacts with the new movers and shakers).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age
Being the buzzword that it is (and the role I work in) pretty much nixes having the network administered in India.
Having someone on the inside can get a fair grasp of what's fallen over. Your main gate goes down, and if you're on the outside, it could be a gateway falling over, or the whole place has gone up in smoke.
Which plan do you put in action the second things happen? Who knows where all the latest places the switches, routers, servers, power lines, gas lines and so on are?
Who knows the users and techs on the ground well enough to pull a team together when things are bad, seemingly out of thin air? And the channels in the company/organisation well enough to know who needs to know what?
That, I think, would be the local admin. There are some things that can't be outsourced. Part of having a plan to survive the unknown (which is what business continuity is all about) involves having people there, on the floor, when things are bad, that have the skills to make the right decisions when they're needed.
If those skills are on another continent, without the visuals, and communications channels, kiss goodbye to your company when it hits the fan bigtime. A quickly hired local consultant won't understand the business, so can't rebuild/continue it.
Basically, outsourcing that level is gambling with the company. If everything goes fine with never a problem, you save a shed load by outsourcing.
If it all goes tits up, bend over and kiss your ass (and your company) goodbye.
Funnily enough, this last week I had a server that was causing problems shipped to my house so I could do setup and testing effectively. Once I've finished soak testing in a day or so, it'll be shipped back to its home for the local network guy to plug it in.
Sometimes there's just no substitute for locality.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Could'nt have said it better !!!! I was pissed when i first posted my earlier comment after spending all of today on the phone with our overseas support group. But you post is a little more to the point than mine. !! Kudos !!!!!
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Such a job, which should take 15 seconds (maybe a minute, with all the buttons one has to click on) ended up taking 6 days!!! I kid you not.
First, the clown in India wrote back the next day with some gibberish. He clearly didn't understand either the problem, or English.
Next day, he wrote back something else. More intelligeable, but he still didn't understand what was going on. Then silence. Finally, I pinged him again, telling him what a simple job this was, and why was it taking so long? He finally "got it" and made the change.
If they had the operation over here, I could've simply walked to his office and shown him what to do.
6 days of lost productivity. I sure hoped they saved a ton on the IT budget there, because they lost a lot with the downtime.
As soon as a I destroy the internet.
There's nothing new in outsourcing tech jobs but I wonder how much money the US could save by outsourcing jails to China.
I have seen some losage hardware where you can't do much of anything with out a web page or a GUI. It's web page's and a GUI's that make the job look easy, but imposable to automate. Its that sort of bad imbeded OS's that take man hours from our real day to day jobs. Thus the need to find cheap labor. Come on we are talking about computers here.
I keep telling people admins, here at work, that if you can't automate your not dooing your job.
When my systems are not working and simple remote corections don't work I get an e-mail. Then I fix it or call the hardware repair man.
the result is more time for rogue. Oh, ok more time for real job. Now that I no longer need to monitor my hardware.
Got a source newer than 2001?
I think the next logical step should be to outsource all of the brilliant managers to India and China. Look at it this way - you move them and their families to those countries and pay them the going rate in local wages. Now ther's a bean counters dream - lower wage costs with little or no benefits, healthcare, and pension, and they get the bonus for thinking of it! What a country!
I'm sure they have networks there that they could manage. They don't need to support
some redneck at some factory in the middle of the southwest that who's id doesn't work
PHB: "we outsourced our network management to india. but the timeouts are causing the NMS's to freak out!"
REPLACED EMPLOYEE: "that's So Not My Problem, anymore!"
SNMP used to stand for Saturate the Network with Mangled Packets. but I guess they won't get mangled if they take too long to get here (ever seen the actual network latency from india to the US? I have..)
(ob disc: I do SNMP for a living; close to 15 yrs now, actually. wonder how much longer there will be a need for SNMP _engineering_ here in the US? sigh.)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
to india he will be.
Here's an idea on how else to cut costs: outsource CEO, CFO, CTO, CIO, etc. jobs to India, too! Hmmmm, sounds different when your own job is at stake? Still, if it could save $millions a year, why not? Open source software has shown that it is possible to develop large applications (e.g. Linux) without in-person meetings. Something tells me it will be only a matter of time before some management functions can also be outsourced.
"The reason you pay $9 for an asprin at a US hospital is because once every few years, the asprin fails to fix someone's headache. Then the person sues for $20 million."
That's only part of the problem. You can play wack-a-mole trying to find all the symptoms. Or you can get to the core problem. Our "save me at all costs" mentality. A lot of our problems stem from that attitude.
Keep in mind that I am not a big fan of off-shoring any activities. However, many IT functions can be outsourced, and much of the risk can be managed. Not eradicated, but managed. Afterall, that is exactly what one does in Information Security, you manage risks, not eradicate risks.
Depending on the company's function, and the layout of the network and systems, the risk may be acceptable. For example, if the company places an application on an internal segment of a tiered network, and a local staff manages that small segment, the risk is much the same as having an application available on the Internet.
I doubt many people would suggest we all just shut down our e-commerce systems because there are too many "bad guys" on the net. Instead, a manager would examine the risk of being involved with ecommerce, and balance it with the potential gains.
My Manager had given a project the offshore attempt to India last month.
Guess what it came back here and was done here in less time and money than Wipro bid on it.
I guess India can't manage any application simply because there is a network. They totally failed to handle the application. It wasn't even that complicated.
India is a myth.
Conservative Safe Self-reliance vs Radical progressive Friendly AI.
Would you let the AI the power to Push the button if it sees fit?
What tasks can be turned to programs and let to frienly AI?
I don't know about you, but I trust software I've written myself a LOT more than I trust somebody overseas whom I've never met... although what I really distrust is closed source software written by somebody overseas whom I've never met.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Well if you have you can deploy your "saved state" production server with enterprise Virtualization solution like ESX server from VMware (before the evil patch that downed your prod server) from US/Europe location using some management software like Akimbi, then you really are not needed to administer your systems. Anyone can baby sit and with virtualization technologies treating servers like some appliances the chances are pretty hot that these jobs too will disappear within 5 years time. So make sure you pick up some other job OR move to India :-)
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
That makes perfect sense: What few tangibles we actually make in the US can't compete with most Asian/Subcontinent-produced products in price or quality. We make the products crappier to save on costs, and now will outsource the fat-middle jobs to another country to further reduce costs.
But wait! The fat middle is usually the group doing most of the consuming! What does that mean when tech management employees' fairly high paying jobs march on overseas? There will be even fewer middle classers here to buy the junk we sell at the big box stores. Further weakening the economy and diminishing any chance we have of ever becoming a country of producers again.
Maybe it's time we find some industry that will help this country do something other than just consume and *gasp* is not a financial/credit product.
Driver bad.
Amerikaaner: I get a blue screen
Indian: Sir he wants you scream
Chinese: *@*#%!^($#@%(*!&
Rural Chinese: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!"
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Interesting how the same folks who complain about losing jobs to Inda/China/wherever are wearing Nikes made in Philipines and listening to an iPod made in China and are probably running a Finnish OS on a computer mainly made in Taiwan or Korea. There's nothing special about geek jobs. They're the same as any other jobs. If they can be shipped overseas and done cheaper --- well that's what is going to happen. The only way to avoid this is to keep ahead of the pack or to get a job that can't be relocated (for now anyway). Crying about it does not help.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, there is a use to outsourcing/offshoring. Mainly, if you don't offshore or outsource many tasks, people from other more advanced or productive jobs will have to do the grunt work jobs. Your mythical man month theory may apply to certain advanced software dev. But business logic is pretty damn easy and there are qualified workers outside the US who can do it. US unemployment stands at 5-ish percent. All the goods you see coming from China, require millions of people to manufacture. So, if you want to force everything to buy onshore products, be prepared for a reduction in quality of life and reduced access to modern technologies. In other words, live with the services of the sixties, where the average person didnt have a home computer (i understand it had not been invented but today there is a support structure behind it and content/software that requires workers), less people had cars, life sucked if you're a minority, and there won't be the people to run so many channels of TV like we have today. Be prepared to work harder, for less.
.. do they "steal" jobs from here? After all companies in the US pay domestic workers to contribute to open source and they would have lost a paycheck by not getting to code a particular feature?
http://reason.com/9904/bk.mf.more.shtml
"A half-gallon of milk cost the average worker 10 minutes of labor in 1970, 8.7 minutes in 1980, and only seven minutes in 1997 the latest year for which data are available. A gallon of gasoline cost 11 minutes in 1950 and now goes for less than half that. But these declines are nothing compared to some price drops. A scratchy-sounding three-minute coast-to-coast phone call cost an incredible 90 hours of work back in 1910; today it costs less than two minutes of work time. A hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity, which cost a shocking 107 hours of worker time in 1900, cost a bit over an hour by 1960; today the cost is less than 45 minutes.
"A typical American at the turn of the century spent $76 out of every $100 on food, clothing, and shelter," Cox and Alm write. "By the 1990s, this portion had fallen to $37 of every $100." Just since the 1970s, food and beverage costs have fallen from over 19 percent to about 15 percent, notwithstanding that we're eating out and bringing home preprepared food more."
Ok? Well i doubt logic matters when hate is involved. People should be allowed to pay foreigners for work if they so choose. Some open source products like Linux originated or get deve;opment assistance for free from outside the US
There goes my career...
They probably don't need to offshore this work, not while our fine Congress, representing the best interests of Big Business, are trying to double the H1-B visa limit for this year and subsequent years with an automatic 20% escalator clause. See "New Senate Bill Raises H-1B Caps, Sponsor Has Strong Ties to Indian Lobby" at http://techsunite.org/news/display.cfm?ID_Content= 5054
This was one field in IT which was always nurtured locally. I just cant believe how on earth someone over there can intrepret our logs, and the complex SAN's in place. ok the idea of call centres and some admin work at the BPO makes sense. But remote infrastructure monitoring doesn't quite impress me. someone here had a valid point reg 7:1 productivity. I couldn't agree more. I hope those exec's out there are not just eyein the benefits! security, somewhere. India does have the pool of smart people who have been trained overseas but they are just very limited.
The main problem with outsourcing right now has nothing to do with "ohhhh... scary foreigners get to do what we used to do!"
Wrongo. It is trying to compete with people who's cost of living is 1/6th ours. The cost to fill up a given neuron with info is simply far cheaper there. Brains are becomming a cheap commodity instead of something prized. If this is not an earth-shattering paradigm change in terms of careers and education, I don't know what is.
Table-ized A.I.
If you leave it to him, US don't need no IT personnel. Anything and everything can be managed from India. At the end everything is electrical signals and travel time of signals between india and US is negligibly small. So, everythign managed from india must be honky-dory. Right ?
Well, we, all the REAL people of the IT world know that, it ain't so. How does the goon in india know that the factory workers are doing a impromptu clean up on their steel mill and the temperature went up a few notches unexpectedly before shutting the whole facility down due to what looks like a hazard from the distance of two continents ?
I hate the wise-ass indial executives of the H1-B exploit farms, making every IT operation so easy that even a monkey can do the same function. I am sorry but, until today, I have worked back to back with many indian IT people, here in the states, and witnessed that, they are the best book followers but when it comes to creativity for solutions, nada ! Lights are on but nobody home.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
How effective would outsourced network monitoring be if the time difference between India and the U.S. is more than 9 hours? Seems like a waste of money to me.
After many decades of English subjug^H^H^H^H partnership with India, Indians are far to expensive and skilled for operations work. It's much better to use such an well known and educated work force for research and development. What a crime it would be to make PhDs push buttons and monitor mind numbing panels for a living. It would be better for them to stay home like their US counterparts, and they will have to if they keep get much more expensive.
For operations work, we need the educated and inexpensive discipline that can be found in all the former Soviet territories. The people who built and named the Kurks obviously have the discipline and razor sharp focus demanded for the job. Moreover there's great economic need for such a thing. I hear there are still many people displaced and unemployed by the Chernobyl dissaster. Remote operations of Nuclear power plants is just the break they need. Due to circumstances beyond anyone's control, they are cheaper than the happily employed people who live next to you. Just think of the savings and how much more money people like Neutron Jack deserve. Their compensation is hardly enough for all the hard exercise they get. Expect the paper value of such forward looking companies as GE, NBC and Microsoft to skyrocket.
Ten years ago, I read a joke but some people must have taken it litterally. The joke was, a clever executive noticed the value of their company increased 10% every time they fired five percent of their workforce. The bold executive soon got into a boasting contest with others. Everyone was fired and the Dow hit 10,000. Oh yeah, well just own all the ideas other people come up with and implement that will work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I work for Dell's Network Support and Managment group, doing exactly what Mr. Premji has said. Dell management decided to relocate or terminate most of the employees/contractors in this group. Yes their are few skeletons left @ Dell to tell the story who also do the physical work for me.
PHB: We need to use Microsoft Windows on our networks.
....
NetAdmin: Windows sucks. It crashes all the time. I have to be in the server room 24/7...
PHB: You can reboot the machine from elsewhere.
NA: I can do that if it was linux using telnet. The Windows GUI sucks
PHB: Ok, go use linux
NA: Done. Now I have linux. It never crashes! I can manage everything from my desk!! I can manage everything from my home!!!
PHB: Excellent. Now we'll let Wipro manage everything from India!!!!
"When I was young, my father had a serious heart attack. He survived, but we lost our house and car. Under the Canadian Medicare system, though, we would have kept the house and car and would have just had to pay the inheritance tax." -- Emo Philips
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
"I'd rather have our system than the free-for-all (aka ****-em-all) system of the USA, where you have to pay up or die on the sidewalk."
Then, immediately, you say:
"Now if only we could be a little more selective about WHO we treat for free; kick those welfare ***-kissers out!"
I apologize if I missed some sarcasm, but your statements don't seem to make any sense.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
No one ever learns the skills to physically fix a computer without doing the "why can't I login?": answer "all-caps is on" grunt work first.
Soon, it'll be to a point where when they need boots on the ground in America, no one will have the job experience needed to be the boots on the ground.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Perhaps it's time to DDoS those offshore links now and then and show them just how dangerous it is to offshore? :)
Sign me up if it goes down. Today's cyber hacker, in that sense, could be tomorrow's patriot, in the history books.
[cue the "employ the world, screw American workers and their privacy" posters posing as "anti nationalist" crusaders]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
So what if a few people's lives are ruined by unemployment and then offshore identity theft? They are small, forgettable sacrifices to be made in the name of making our illustrious CEOs richer and growing the economy for the rich and powerful.
You working class stiffs should have gambl^H^H^H^H^Hbecome investors by now.
Signed,
your friendly neighborhood Gawd fearing cheap labor neo con
[end right wing parody]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Parametized Automation! Now we can -all- be unemployed! What will keep the world spinning around? The automatons, of course, with base physics to help them.
PHB: We need to use Microsoft Windows on our networks. ....
NetAdmin: Windows sucks. It crashes all the time. I have to be in the server room 24/7...
PHB: You can reboot the machine from elsewhere.
NA: I can do that if it was linux using telnet. The Windows GUI sucks
PHB: Ok, go use linux
NA: Done. Now I have linux. It never crashes! I can manage everything from my desk!! I can manage everything from my home!!!
PHB: Excellent. Now we'll let Wipro manage everything from India!!!!
Cool. That "NetAdmin" needed to be fired for gross incompetence. His bullshit line that Linux can be managed remotely while Windows can not proves that he's either a liar or just doesn't know his asshole from his elbow. And I say that as somebody who prefers to use Linux. I don't go around lying to people about its capabilities in an underhanded attempt to push an agenda, though.
When people lose their jobs, one of the first things they cut is going out to eat, then it's new toy buying, then they start to default on old debt, using the cheaper credit cards, then they start to dodge the mortgage or rent and utilities, then it's living on the street. I've seen it happen to folks, roughly around the 6 to 9 months un or underemployed level most folks are completely hosed.
Eventually the US will lose so many wealth creation type jobs that the remaining "service" type jobs will become obsolete because they fall into the "want" category rather than the "necessity" category. then we are all screwed, and it will be too late to get revenge on the conmen CEO and wall street hucksters heads on sticks because all of them will have fled the country to other places.
Most people are living in denial of this, but really, trading millions of jobs a year so a few very wealthy people can get even more wealthy was never a real smart idea, they just have control of the stock shilling media and access to bribe government because they have the largest sacks of cash to use. It's pathetic, and you can still see people defending the practice, despite every serious economic indicator showing that we have screwed up mightily.
The government keeps reclassifying jobs to make the employment stats look good (the parent burger flipping is now considered a "manufacturing" job). They stopped reporting most of the basic M3 money supply stats (because they have started printing cash by the truckload). They yanked critical normal living costs like food and energy from the consumer price index reports. They lowball and downplay all debt and consider the highest debt levels historically to somehow be "good". We have a LOWER average personal savings rate than during the Great Depression.
Man, there's a big list you can go down. Dollar dropping in global worth against most other major currencies. Stocks trading still at completely absurd fantasyland P and E ratios. Humongous wage disparity between grunts and higher level management, I mean off the scale with the past 200 years of averages. The percentage of actual productive workers in the economy as opposed to busywork "workers". HUGE bloated government bureaucracies, typically any agency will absorb around 2/3rds of every dollar spent on it with taxes just to *manage itself*, the public-service task the agency has to do comes way behind.
On and on.
It's GONE. The second Great Depression has already started by any rational indicator or analysis, what is left is media spin, expanded credit, and an increasingly hysterical and irrational government that is now going around the world labeling anything they don't like as a terrorist threat, and passing laws as fast as they can to make every internal citizen "guilty" of something or another so they can have total firm control.
These guys at the top aren't that stupid, they know it's here and will get worse, these guys are looters and they know full well what the looting will be doing to the US, so this is damage control for the future so they can stay in power and in command and control. They can live with the US as a second world nation, they don't care, these high level folks travel to various developing nations and lack for nothing while there, they dig it, they love that extreme power they have over people when there is such a wealth disparity. They will still have mansions and planes and armies of mercenaries to protect them (cops or soldiers, no difference anymore so we should just stop with the pretending, and the looted money will partially go to pay for their personal bodyguards masquerading as "the good guys for law-n-order and democracy! drivel").
Their dream model is a global state with two classes of humans, a 1% master and 99% wage/serf/slave split, kept in place by a quite vigorus and draconian police state apparatus. We will still have technology of course, the masters want it and will order that it continues, but for the
I've worked for a lot of mid-sized companies that had their IT guy right there. When I had a problem with something, they'd come up and fix it. However, I'm now working for a global corporation with their call center located in India. When my domain login gets hosed (which seems to happen every week for some unexplainable reason), I can't get into my dev laptop without calling them and having them inform me that I need to log into the intranet password reset page. Of course, it's so obvious, only, I can't get onto the domain so I can even get onto the corp intranet in the first place! Then they decide to put me through to some other team located elsewhere. At this point, I might just as well call it a day, or sit on my hands for the next 3-4 hours. The cost to the company of having a developer sit around for a few hours pretty much makes up that difference that the company saves by having their IT guys offshored. Seriously, when this stuff happened at other places I've worked, they'd have it fixed in about 5-10 minutes, long enough for me to grab some coffee. Those guys typically made about 1/4 - 1/3 what I made on the average, so yeah, it was ending up costing the company as much money as they would have saved.
I really don't want to start a flamewar with this comment. It's an attempt to try to introduce everyone to other side. IMHO - its not that everyone in India is useless and dumb (as is being implied by many comments here). The problem usually comes from mismatches in communication, impatience from people, and pure resentment to the outsourcing phenomenon. As I have been told quite often by my clients, "All it took was to get the right outsourcing partner".
India (and for that matter China) dont have everything going totally for them either. Think about all this:
- India has as many geeks as everywhere else. We read Slashdot and work hard to impress US companies that give us work. However, when someone makes a mistake, he/she is lambasted just because of the fact that we are Indians. The same mistake if made by an American would be overlooked. Tensions are really high in all fields of work - The average baldness of India sure has increased.
- Our salaries are much less. There are times at which we smirk at the rates at which Americans do their work. "He took $100/hour to do just that???!!! That takes just 15 minutes."
- We stay up all night to match US hours, trying to help people, and are scolded for our uselessness. A "thanks" really makes our day, because it is soooo rare.
- Security has become such a big issue that we cannot even check our personal email, make personal calls. Thats 10-11 hours of being disconnected from the world.
Inspite of all this, most (if not all) still try to earn a decent living, while getting involved with people across continents, helping solve problems.
The next time you're on the phone with somebody (network support/credit card/whatever) and you're not that much in an emergency, give a thought to the person on the other side of the line. Help him/her help you.
Where are all the mod points when you *really* need them??!!
... Why first world engineers and other knowledge workers need to get organized. If distance or language raise problems, eventually an entire company/industry will be relocated. Unfettered globalization will obliterate the first world middle class. If you are a first world slashdot reader that probably includes you! A vanishingly small number of property owners combined with an overwhelming majority of day workers/slaves with fewer and fewer rights is what constitutes a third world country. Do we want the entire world to become like a third world country? I am only stating the problem in very little detail and do not pretend to have the answers, but something needs to be done while we still have some rights, money and power. Some, yes, artificial, means will have to be found to preserve the first world. I suggest we apply the principles of Open Source to the questions at hand. I have not heard anyone with a comprehensive solution but I am somehow convinced that if some of us we each contribute a small part this will result in a workable approach. Some pieces of the puzzle would include mathematical models, a means of assembling the solution, economic data, psychological insights...and of course, bug reports(criticism).
Fired in March, offshored in May:
I did a server cluster monitoring job for an internet company for 13 months. I was fired and I hear by gossip that 1/2 of my job was offshored about a month after I left.
Offshoring is just a part of the business strategy of pushing for lowest overall labor cost and lowest future labor liabilities.
I found the firing quite painful because I knew the place was a job "windmill" and I was earnestly doing my best.
My firing was a case of if the job hadn't been offshored, I still would have been fired.
I figure the company has a built in program of firing employees to keep average hourly wages down. The job was rigged with performance standards and written warnings. Every month a couple of people left or quit. Out of 140, there were one or two hourly employees with 5 years of employment. The comapany aggressively hired: it ran 17 position ads by my count. I figure about 4 to 5 people quit or are fired every month.
Looking around, I see a few people who are hanging onto steady gigs, a few who are superbly qualified and have a steady gig even though it is burning them out.
And then a big hunk of us are "Employed until you cost too much." The company calculates when the cost of hiring and training a new employee or the cost of getting the offshore team working is less than giving you a small raise and contributing to your 401K savings plan.
That is the day they fire you. If the company uses this replacement cost method of staff management, every hourly employee will eventually be fired. how about this as a lemma: The only way not to be fired is to become a manager.
"no loyalty to those they are serving"
Machiavelli was writing about city states in renaissance Italy, i.e. don't trust anybody who's not from your city and the surrounding farmland (10 miles or so in each direction). It opens up an interesting point to be discussed: what is this 'loyalty' that you refer to? how is it defined, created, maintained? It could be argued that corporate loyalty is stronger than national loyalty in some cases. Perhaps a quick reading of Gellner's writings on nations and nationalism might be in order.
We're based in India, but our websites are hosted in the US. Why? It's cheaper, of course. And we're getting better service, too.
My Work Stuff...
but how long before Africa bottom-lines India? I'd say 10 years, max.
start planning for it - today!
From a pure business centric point of view, it is okay to outsource the "low value" customer service (e.g. customers support for ISP, telemarketing, account management for supermarket loyality card etc). However, I cannot follow the logic of outsourcing inner network operation offsite, esp to a foreign country.
First, file server is a big no-no. For obvious reasons, but, many pro-outsoucing managing probably have not thought about this. But, there can be something more subtle. I worked for a beer brewery before for a process optimization project. Of course, I signed an NDA and it is easy to track me down if something is leaked.
The brewery consider their formulation a top trade secret. With a little bit of logical thinking, you can deduce a whole lot from their process flow (e.g. which ingredient and the amount is added, how long does that take for a fermentation to complete, holding temperature etc, all available from the remote data server). It also provides scope for insiders' trading (oh, firm A seems to accumulate a lot of stock. Let's do something.). It is not the end of the world if a beer formula is leaked. But, think about something more important...
Most of the comments Ive read here are based more on the anger arising out of outsourcing than anything else.A lot of people will just insist that the outsourced service sucks or sosmething else just because of the fact that it was outsourced. I think we need to look at the bigger picture here and understand that any nation that can undercut you in pricing is going to take away your business, be it India,China or Tanzania!Moreover most corporations are no longer just american companies.They are global entities which just a big office in america.So its really upto the corporation to decide where they need to operate from , to help them grow the most. Most of you guys need to take it easy and rethink before you coment on outsourcing again. ;)
PS : Maybe its easier for me to say this cos i havent lost my job due to outsourcing, in fact i got iut because of outsourcing.
Lord of the Binges.
The biggest reason for high medical costs in the US is profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies. Supply side market control also plays a factor. A recently planned hospital was shut down where I live by the other hospitals in town. They didn't want the competition and leveraged politicians to axe the project.
Fine...
They don't get rid of incompetent doctors.
Also fine...
And the only reason such lawsuits exist is because the AMA is not self-policing.
I agree that the AMA is asleep at the wheel, but do you really believe that there wouldn't be any lawsuits if the AMA did some policing? You've got to be fscking kidding. Medical malpractice law is nothing less than an industry. The purpose of life for some lawyers is to go after poorly guarded piles of money. There's a lot of those in medicine when the average jury is considered.
It turns out that only a small percentage of medical expenses can be attributed to lawsuit settlements.
Numbskull! John Edwards would give you an ice cream cone for that. How about the PREMIUMS? Do you have any idea how high they are. Good grief...
What fool would risk the security of their systems like that?
As the reconfiguring and manual repairing become less and less frequent it becomes easier to automate hot fixes by just installing lots of el-cheapo redundancies. Only after a long list of breakdowns have occurred will it be necessary for a crew to manually overhaul the system.
It's the model that the Hubble telescope works on. The gyroscopes will fail but there are enough to keep the device working between servicing.
Right now there is a hue and cry about so much skilled work requiring people, especially in the trades, but in a few years, more and more automation will just take over basic menial labor and then evolve into skilled work. First there's Stanley driving itself. Next illegal immigration is clamped down. Many governments in South America are taking over oilfields. It's all related to setting economic boundaries, such as division of labor. The clues are there. What were we supposed to think, that the actions are independent? What they're not telling us is the continual encroachment of machines into the labor pool.
How hard is it to swing a hammer or slice a grapefruit? The megapixels of cameras are getting higher per dollar while multiple cores in low-power CPUs permit the construction of autonomous domestic robots.
Outsourcing of task T indicates the regard of task T having less value. If all goes well, task T will become solvable by following a large set of rules. After all, remote staff pretty well have to do their job by rules. If they can't find anyone needing to do anything outside the rules, the rules will have evolved to the point that they can be implemented into the interface between the remote staff and the local server. Goodbye, staff.
This being said, the countries that provide outsourcing are growing economically and technologically. It is all too predictable that the people there will be providing automation equipment, as even basic programming tasks become automated and numerous people are left with nothing better to do than solve more difficult tasks, like AI.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
My home burglar alarm went off (false alarm) while I was at work. Someone called me at work and started going on and on in an excited voice in what sounded like Chinese. I couldn't understand a word he was saying. I thought it was a prank call and hung up. They called back again, and repeated the message, and I could just barely make out that they were talking about my alarm going off. By the time I got home the police had given up and were just leaving.
Interesting that they use AMD as a reference. Last I checked AMD was in the business of making components for PC's and Servers. How pathetic is it that they have to outsource the management of their own systems?
Remote monitoring of servers/service and even remote troubleshooting maybe, but as has been said here, what happens when the hardware fails.
Beyond that, true network management (i.e. routers, switches, etc) require a physical presence to configure and plug in jacks, install/replace hardware, etc.
This would only work if a company could afford to be down for 24 hours, the outsource company has intimate knowledge of the network infrastructure, and they keep spare parts on hand for every network device. There seems to be a lot of "if"s here to risk the business on....
David
The comments you refer to arise from anger due to loss of a job or jobs. These are not prejudiced complaints. It is quite normal for people to grieve and develop anger over the loss of a good (i.e., a job that pays).
Comments poste by someone who does not understand human nature, a particular language (English, in this case) or a culture (U.S., in this case) can be prejudice however, and I might easily put your post into that category.
there was a 7:1 difference in productivity between best & mediocre developers
There's two problems with pulling this off: identification of the best developers, and retention of the best developers given typical stupid company behavior.
Managers almost never identify the best from the mediocre. The mediocre developers often can't identify the best from the mediocre. And sometimes, the best believe that anyone who is mediocre now has the potential to become the best if they keep working hard and learning (since they weren't always the best themselves). So, this is a great theory, but how can you get that 7:1 return on a skill attribute that you can't identify?
Even if you get those best developers, they may somehow end up on projects directed by your former "used car sales" type marketing and sales drones. By the time they see the project heading south, they're on the phone to that head-hunter who keeps bugging them and out the door in less than a month. Even if you can get thos best developers with 7:1 return, how do you retain them in the face of Dilbert Inc. style corporate America?
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
The only way to avoid this is to keep ahead of the pack or to get a job that can't be relocated
Or purge corporatists from government, enact trade policies that are fair to workers, strip tax subsidies for corporations who outsource, and work to stop more manufacturing from going overseas and begin to re-establish factories in the states. If none of that works most of us own pitchforks, torches and rope...
They may have your data, you have their jobs.
As I see it the balance is quite even.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
So many of you talk like if the US is becoming a disaster zone.
You are richer than your parents and grand parents in relative terms, you have the lowest level of unemployment for a couple of generations or more.
But here we are, everytime that some jobs (that nobody wants to do in the US mind you, unless you thing that network monitoring is a glamorous job) move elsewhere we always have enough prophets of Doom.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There is not such a thing.
A job has no labels, it is an economical relationship, if you decide to attach political significance to something of an economic nature feel free, but id does not work.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It is precisely because you are a bunch of lazy gluttons that you are in a competitive disadvantage.
No offense, but the salary you need to buy all that extra food that makes you too fat is against you, it makes you more expensive.
And that includes the car (other countries use cheaper means of transport: vespas, bikes, buses, burros), all the latest and greatest gadgets, expensive housing, etc, etc.
You need to review your lifestyle choices in order to reduce your salary pretensions and make you more competitive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
'Theoretically,' says Azim Premji, chairman and founder of India outsourcing company Wipro Ltd., 'anything on a network can be managed remotely from India.'
Yes indeed it can, and what, if anything, is the point? I can understand trying to cut corners and save money by outsourcing lower-echelon personnel such as those who man support lines and so forth (not that that is typically very satisfactory from the customer's perspective) but eliminating your in-house network administration personnel and turning over their responsibility and authority to a company in another country (any country, I'm not picking on India per se) is a foot-in-self-shoot situation. The head of Wal-Mart's IT got asked a similar question about outsourcing IT, and his response was along the lines of "What? Are you NUTS?". Probably the most rational comment I've ever heard coming from Wal-Mart management, but there it is. Unfortunately, I can see bean counters everywhere drooling at the thought of laying off even more high-overhead employees. Well, whatever. They'll get what they're paying for.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.