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Techies Asked To Train Foreign Replacements
Makarand writes "David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Bank of America (BofA) is moving thousands of tech jobs to India and has asked its techies to train their Indian replacements or risk losing severance pay. Although there is nothing in writing that says precisely this, the employees have been made clear about this responsibility in their meetings. BofA is outsourcing tech work to Indian companies whose employees do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid. According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years."
> the folks in India as idiots, your argument gets drowned out by apparent bigotry.
Apparently you've never dealt with those idiots! Even though only the best of the best Indian students come to this country, they're still very poorly educated and very unpleasant to others. The ones that stay in country are even worse. It's very difficult to find degreed Indian engineers that can do basic math and solve basic problems. Their schools are horrible and just churn-out grads that have no idea what they're doing. People complain about the public schools in the US, but they have no idea how much better even the bad schools in the states are as compared to the joke that is the Indian school system.
When we opened our development and call center in Mohali, I spent seven weeks there interviewing programming candidates. I gave them a simple problem they could solve in any programming language. It was something any US high school student should be able to do after a two semester programming class. I know because I taught a high school class for four years after leaving Sun to move to GA so my wife could be near her ailing parents. Even in a state that most people think of as having a very subpar education system, most of the students did better than the degreed programmers from India. They were pitiful. After wasting six months of my life in India attempting to train those idiots to do basic programming, thankfully my employer finally gave-up. They were complete idiots. I can't believe you would object to the word idiot. Obviously you have no experience with them.
Technical incompetence aside, the fact that they're just unpleasant to be around is a bigger problem. Here in the states (I grew-up in New Zealand and moved to San Francisco when I was 14) the people are much nicer and more helpful. Every day I was there I was shocked at just how rude the people in India are. That unpleasantness obviously carries over when attempting to get them to do work, and you certainly would never want one of them to talk to a customer.