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Mumbai Bombings Give Outsourcing Community Pause

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the interesting-times dept.

theodp writes "eWeek reports that the big fear of offshore outsourcing customers has become a reality: a major bombing attack in an outsourcing hub. In the wake of the attack, companies are considering their resources and preparedness. Despite understandable fears, people on the ground don't seem to think these latest attacks will have a long-term effect on the growth of India's tech sector." From the article: "The terrorist attack in Mumbai--and conflict between Israel and Lebanon for that matter--raise a series of questions for companies sourcing technology globally. Do you know the disaster recovery plans of your offshore services provider? Are their plans integrated with yours? And how prepared are these providers? "

5 of 248 comments (clear)

  1. Home sweet home by mrogers · · Score: 5, Funny

    Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.

    1. Re:Home sweet home by Anonymovs+Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
      Hard to bomb a wheat field. :-)

      Only a cereal killer would do that.

    2. Re:Home sweet home by Zeinfeld · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Maybe it's time to consider moving those outsourced tech jobs back to a safe, terrorism-free city like London, Madrid or New York.

      Completely right there. This is just self interested posturing, not a genuine concern. Besides which we don't usually talk about the Israeli IT industry as 'outsourcing'.

      Many of the people who flame endlessly about outsourcing are the same people who flame endlessly about libertarianism and how great the free market is.

      What do slashdotters tell the people whose clerical jobs are being replaced by the systems they are developing? There is a bizare doublespeak here: Outsourcing bad, automation good. Historically IT people have been really good at protecting their own job security while making everyone else's job insecure.

      Given the state of the IT job market I have a hard time feeling sorry for folk being outsourced. There are plenty of IT jobs around - if you actually have the skills that are in demand. And that should not be a problem if you really are worth the prices IT people expect.

      The people who have difficulty getting a new position are the folk without formal qualifications and without a depth of knowledge in a useful field. Back in the dotcom boom I came across a consultant 'programmer' who did not know C, Fortran or Java. The only 'programming language' he knew was Delphi.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
  2. Re:Moral bankruptcy by Kohath · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Two hundred innocent people are killed and people are worried that future events like these might cause an IT outage?

    Yes. Specifically, they are people who have the responsibility to prevent or otherwise deal with IT outages.

    The people who think the only moral thing to do in a crisis is to be emotionally overwrought are of no use to anyone when a crisis occurs. You can go sit in a closet and cry while the rest of us solve problems for the people who didn't get killed.

  3. Re:Come on, guys.. by Eternauta3k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    not industrialized != politically unstable. look at uruguay, it's a fucking haven.

    --
    Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.