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Reverse Off-Shoring
punkish writes "India is becoming more attractive to information technology workers from Western countries. Some local IT companies, such as Infosys Technologies in Bangalore, are now able to offer salaries and other perks that are comparable to what Western IT talent would find in their home countries. Infosys, which is currently training 126 Americans at its cutting-edge complex in Mysore, expects to employ 300 Americans by the end of 2006 and add a large contingent from Great Britain next year."
Or alternatively, perhaps your job isn't the most important thing in your life. Perhaps you have kids going through school, perhaps you have friends you want to stay in touch with, perhaps your dear old mum needs a hand...
Cheers,
Ian
But crappier infastructure + being a cultural outsider + far from american friends and family = lower quality of life
Philosophy.
I thought your post was particularly interesting, so I feel moved to comment.
The bottom line is, unfortunately, very important. Remember that the companies that can afford to offshore/outshore are generally larger companies which tend to be shareholder-owned and require either equity or debt financing.
The trouble with being beholden to shareholders is that capital really is mobile and shareholders are normally a greedy bunch. If the business does not offer a good bottom line - leading to all the things that shareholders like to have, for example a good dividend or a good rise in the share price, shareholders will tend to want to move their money elsewhere. Assume that you can invest in company A which offers a 4% return on equity or company B which offers a 10% return on equity. Which would you invest in as a shareholder?
You may argue that shareholders are increasingly placing more importance on things like corporate social responsibility and so on, but as a shareholder myself, I can tell you that it's really really hard to make an assessment based on that. The corporate social responsibility movement is plagued by the fact that MANY companies make promises (to varying degrees of compliance) and it costs me a LOT of time and effort to check which ones actually comply with their statements or not. Ultimately, I throw my hands up in the air, give up, and use ROE for my investment decisions.
I disagree that you'd make a bad manager, I think you'd be a great one in certain conditions. You might not be a great manager in a profit-driven, shareholder-owned multinational corporation but the business world isn't exclusively those. There are lots of smaller companies which are more local and people-focused which is where I think your refreshing attitude would be a valuable asset.
Anybody here old enough to remember Japan's rise to a respectable engineering powerhouse? Any of you guys remeber when "Made in Japan" meant it would break in 10 minutes of use?
There's a natural cycle seem to countries go through when they finally get their act together in engineering:
- Growth from low-cost outsourcing
- Growth due to home-grown businesses exporting good IP
- Imposition of copyright and patent protection
- Growth due home-grown businesses selling IP locally, and the death of outsourcing
I think in 1980's, an Indian programmer cost about $2K/year. Now that the outsourcing companies have run out of good local talent in places like Bangalore, salaries are rising to the point that it makes less sense to outsource engineering and programming to India. Countries like Romania look better.
To continue growth, innovators in India will need to create their own businesses to compete with Silicon Valley startups. To some extent, they seem to be started at this. For example, the customer-relationship software I'm using at the moment, VtigerCRM, is a shameless copy of opensource software from SugarCRM, and it's shamelessly copying Salesforce.com functionality. Indian investors are funding the Vtiger opensource alternative, betting they can beat SugarCRM and Salesforce.com at their own game. Maybe they're right.
However, the exported software market is only so big. As programmers in India tire of making money from foreign countries where software is actually worth something, they'll force their government to crack down on IP theft. This will create a local market for programmers, greatly fueling high-tech business growth. It also will mostly kill their outsourcing business, since salaries will then be able to rise above the threshold where outsourcing to India makes sense.
I hope for a similar cycle to be followed in China. When China and India are done with the outsourcing business, we can move to other countries that need to come forward into the new millenium. Outsourcing our jobs is massively painful, but at least we're helping make the world a better place.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
I like to think of myself as a globalist thinker however there are many things about the state of the world as it stands that really sticks in my side.
We absolutely need to be able to cross boundaries freely and work together. It is, economically speaking, the most sanguine decision we can make. However, politics and national ideals intervene.
I have lived in England for the past decade and, falling in love with the country and Europe in general, I've wanted to work in the European Union for quite a few years. However, for any employer to employ me (as a Malaysian), they have to first prove that no citizen of the country can fulfill the job requirements, before they widen their search to the EU in general. After this process has been done, I can be hired as a non-EU citizen. This takes time and money which many smaller companies or charities simply cannot afford so I would tend to be pushed in the direction of larger corporations which have the resources to perform such a search.
Furthermore, the selection process is clearly biased towards professional people seeking employment in large corporations. What if I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and wanted to start my own business? In the UK, I can't do that unless I provided 200,000 pounds of my own cash as start-up capital. Not VC-financed or a bank loan.
The concept of statehood was a great idea in establishing the concept of a national identity and a shared consciousness in the people living in it, but it is now obsolete. The trouble is knowledge and capital move much more freely than they did in the past few decades, but the freedom of movement in labour still has some way to catch up.
Are you crazy? First of all 89% uptime is bullshit, it means the connection will be down for 3 days a month. Second, what does "far" have to do with a DSL connection? You have to be very nerdish to think a DSL connection compares to being actually close to your friends.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
But crappier infastructure + being a cultural outsider + far from american friends and family = lower quality of life
Widening your cultural background + meeting other people and making new friends + broadening your horizon and learning new things in the process = a richer life filled with more challenges and experiences
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
So friends and family are "luxuries of a highly refined caste which are ill-afforded the majority of the human popluation"?
I don't know where you're cut-and-pasting your rhetoric from, but you really should stop. It's annoying, doesn't help your point, and makes you sound like an imbecile.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
You might want to say "greedy in the aggregate".
10 very nice people may invest in your company. If they can do better somewhere else, half of them may very nicely decide to invest somewhere else, which is a perfectly reasonable thing for them to do, after all. (Everybody is all about how other people should make economically-poor decisions for the "greater good", a.k.a., "my benefit", but very few people really step up to the plate and deliberately select underperforming options when they have the choice. Non-zero, but few.)
In the aggregate, these otherwise nice people look incredibly greedy to the company they had the investment in, and the company feels incredible pressure to do better, in a way far out of proportion to the exertion of the investors.
Greed isn't an entirely inaccurate description of the results, but it may not describe motives; I have a hard time calling "investing in a 5% return instead of a 2% return" 'greed'. That's more like 'sensible', not 'greedy', and the opposite 'stupid'. (All else being equal of course, I'm ignoring the risk factors.) Besides, given that the economy isn't a zero-sum game (bolded because more people need to actually realize and internalize that) and that 2% vs 5% difference may very well be real if you're investing in a capital-producing company, it's not even necessarily a good decision for society to take the 2% either. That's the magic of capitalism and the market, to harness "greed" for the greater good of society.
Yes, and those in the developing world give up that necessity every day. Americans can afford to visit family an airplane ride away on a regular basis.
Most people in the developing world don't have families that are an airplane ride away. It's only in countries like America that families can afford to spread out over five hundred kilometres. However, that is a sacrifice that millions of immigrants make every year.
Most immigrants who come over to America are working for the purpose of bringing their family over to join them, so they can settle down and live a secure life in America. Read what the OP is saying, if you can actually distill any facts from his overblown purple prose. He's saying that living in one place is a luxury, that people should be willing to relocate at a moment's notice anywhere in the world to follow their work, and anyone who doesn't is rich and lazy. Basically he's going on an anti-materialism rant (your home owns you) under the pretext of globalisation. Wait till he grows up a little and actually has some of the material he now comdemns and you'll hear a different song.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face