Outsourcing Growing Beyond India

PreacherTom writes "One of the most controversial aspects of the global economy has been the newfound enthusiasm of companies, freed from the constraints of physical location, to outsource jobs. No country had embraced tech outsourcing with more passion than India. Of late, problems are beginning to arise in Indian outsourcing: engineers will start a project, get a few months' experience, and then bolt for greener pastures. The level of attrition can cause the turnover of a project's entire staff within the course of a year. Combine this with salaries in Bangalore that are rising at 12% to 14% per year and it is no surprise that companies are looking beyond India to a slew of emerging hotspots for IT, such as Brazil, China, and Vietnam. Will Ho Chi Minh City be the new Bangalore?" From the article: "India remains an IT outsourcing powerhouse, with $17.7 billion in software and IT services exports in 2005, compared with $3.6 billion for China and $1 billion for Russia... India's outsourcing industry is still growing at a faster pace than that of... other wannabe Bangalores... By the third year of an outsourcing deal, after all the costs have been squeezed out, companies get antsy to find a new locale with an even lower overhead."

Comments

What did they expect?

[dctoastman]

When people find out what they are worth, they start demanding it. Pretty soon, the entire world's IT population will be high-salaried, no matter where you go.

Re:What did they expect?

[Afty0r]

As long as money, products, and information are free to traverse national borders but people aren't, tehn as soon as one region wises up and starts demanding what they are worth, the megacorps will simply move on to the next desperate region. They will let the uppity region become poor again before moving back in.

It's not a zero-sum game.
"Desperate" is a very relative measure, and as India, China and other countries in the Asian sub continent improve their wages, education and quality of life to make greater wage demands, where will the multinationals go? And do you think those that have gained skills and wealth will suddenly drop back into subsistence farming, or maintain at least some quality of life? You know, after SE Asia is raised above the poverty levels it currently has, there isn't a great deal of the worlds populace left to exploit for 10 cents a day... and most of it is in Africa.

Keep the work moving, keep employing new people in new countries, and we might, JUST MIGHT even out the worlds wealth distribution a little.

Outsourcing is bad

[Marxist Hacker 42]

But turnover is the real project killer. But what did they expect? Worker Loyalty after they proved that they had no loyalty? The strange part though is how this infects EVERYTHING- I moved to government for stability, but my sub-sub-department of application developers has a 26% annual turnover rate; for the simple reason that in America we've destroyed the loyalty of the workforce! Now we're doing the same in India. If you treat people like widgets, expect them to act like widgets- and move to the most ecconomically efficient place for them to be.

We've had this discussion before.

[khasim]

So you see high staff turn-over in India. The "solution"? Move the project to a different country.

But why would that country's people be any different?

The fact is, once the outsourcing staff has the knowledge and experience that was previously YOUR expertise, there is no reason for them to keep working for you. Eventually, they start their own companies in your market and replace you.

Don't focus on short term profits at the expense of long term survivability.

Re:We've had this discussion before.

[theshowmecanuck]

This will keep happening until companies stop paying huge bonuses to senior executives for short term profits.

Re:We've had this discussion before.

[shawb]

To be precise, big businesses will keep doing this until the savings no longer justifies the inconvenience. One of the biggest barriers to outsourcing that most countries have is language. As a long time British colony, many Indians speak relatively fluent English. The problem will be finding another country with a significantly large English speaking population that is affluent and educated enough to learn the white collar jobs, yet not so affluent that they want/need to get paid a lot of money to continue working. True, there are probably going to be people who know English in every country, but not in the same numbers as India. Most of the other countries with English as a primary language have economies that are too strong to outsource white collar jobs to, or at the very least are like South Africa and have divided economies with a wealthy English speaking population alongside a population that is impoverished enough to make outsourcing profitable for both parties, but doesn't speak English fluently enough to converse with the standard U.S. (or other English speaking) office-worker or customer. I'm sure a similar problem exists to more or less extent in developed nations that natively speak a language other than English... Japan being the first to come to mind. If there are developing nations with a significant population that speaks the native language of a developed nation, it will simply not take very long for the developing nation to develop a strong enough middle class that outsourcing to that country becomes less and less cost effective.

In all reality, this is a significant part of what globalization was supposed to do... improve the economy of the nations that are the worst off economically. There was only a small window of time where the megacorps could make the insane profits off trade disparities. That window is closing as trade gaps begin to narrow between countries that have products or services to trade and the supply and demand begin to equalize.

That's a discussion we need to have.

[khasim]

How can you structure a CEO's (or other CxO's) salary/bonus plan so that their incentive is to keep the company productive and viable instead of "shedding" all the "unprofitable" sections (such as IT) and outsourcing them to raise short term revenues, cash in the bonus and leave for another company?

It is far more profitable for a CEO to wreck and sell the company than it is for him/her to actually spend time running the company.

Re:That's a discussion we need to have.

[mutterc]

A former manager of mine had an insightful take on this:

Back in The Good Old Days(tm), employees (including top execs) would work for a single company for many years, then retire, drawing a pension. Because of that, there was built-in incentive to make sure the company had long-term stability.

Nowadays, executives are disposable employees like you and me. Therefore, they have no reason to care whether the company is long-term profitable. They know they'll be elsewhere in a few years, so why not plunder the company in the meantime?

The following is a long diatribe....

[Bright Apollo]

...for which I offer no apology.

Outsourcing is neither good nor evil, but the motivation behind outsourcing tends to be overwhelmingly merciless and short-term. Taking a knowledge activity and attempting to turn it into a commodity or near-assembly line function is, I suppose, a managerial Holy Grail worth undertaking in different guises each decade.

Consider H1B visas. Is there a shortage of IT workers in the US, or a shortage of *cheap* IT workers in the US? Most major media publications are overwhelmingly guilty of dropping the telling adjective, and the quotes they gather all support a lack of IT talent, no qualifiers added.

We who work in this space, live in the space, can confirm some of this. It *is* hard to find a superior talent for an IT position above entry level. However, it's not impossible if you have a salary and excellent position to offer.

So, when I read about outsourcing arbitrage and the chase for ever-cheaper talent, I just wait it out. Eventually, all of the talent, cheap or not, will come to fore and then the real shoot-out over quality and reliability can begin. Does anyone truly believe there's a hidden cachet of Polish supercoders who haven't been discovered because they lack the Internet connectivity? Does anyone see the inherent flaw in that premise, and by extension, any argument like it?

I'm not overly impressed with a single outsourced individual or group in my eleven pro years of IT, and that includes old Anderson Consulting of 1995 up to Patel Consulting of 2006. The prestige of the firm should only get them an interview: talent and not cost is what you'll need to survive.

As a final note, what, if anything, will the US do if it successfully outsources all of its IT functions? Does anyone expect anyone to major in CS in this country, knowing that electricians make far more and took less formal schooling? I think not. You can't outsource a physical service.

-BA

Outsourcing is good, loyalty is bad

[Colin Smith]

Loyalty is and always has been a fairy story told to you by people in power to get you to do things for them cheaply.

Oh yeah, that includes patriotism as well btw. Typically they want you to die for their benefit.

Re:Outsourcing is good, loyalty is bad

[mi]

Oh yeah, that includes patriotism as well btw. Typically they want you to die for their benefit.

Err, no, "they" don't: "Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." (General Patton)

I disagree

[2nd Post!]

I disagree that outsourcing is bad. Generically that is like saying hiring a babysitter or a neighbor or anyone other than yourself is bad. So what are the indicators that outsourcing is bad? Just saying there are indicators is not the same as showing that the indicators are bad.

1) If you hire your son to mow your lawn, there is nothing stopping him from hiring his friend in turn... ala Tom Sawyer. If the job is unacceptable, make the terms part of the contract.
2) Customer service is not a function of outsourcing, it is a function of cost. You can have equally horrible customer service inside the US itself.
3) High turnover is also not a function of outsourcing, it is a function of management. If an employee has no training and advancement path then it is up to the employee to figure out their own. This is true of any company in any country.

All these problems would exist if the companies in question practiced homesourcing, where a company like IBM hired a temp agency in Alabama to support their developers in San Jose.

Again, why give work to a neighbor or a friend when you can do it yourself?
Answer: Because division of labor and speciality encourages increased productivity when both parties can do separate things more effectively than both parties replicating work.

In this case the flaw with outsourcing is that there was not a good reason or a good implementation for the division of labor.

The race to the bottom

[why-is-it]

By the third year of an outsourcing deal, after all the costs have been squeezed out, companies get antsy to find a new locale with an even lower overhead

This is the biggest problem I have with globalization: we have removed all constraints from capital and freed it from all other considerations. It is truly a race to the bottom - who has the lowest labour costs, who has the fewest environmental restrictions "wins" some starvation wage jobs until we can find someone else who can be exploited even more.

The fear used to be that jobs were being sent south to Mexico. But when Mexicans workers start demanding fair wages, we sent the work to Viet Nam, where people earn $2 per day. But even that looks pretty expensive when there are people in China willing to work for $.50 a day.

It's exploitation plain and simple, and we don't care because we are insulated from the uglier aspects of it. Of course, we are getting screwed too - those over-priced sneakers are now manufactured for a fraction of what they used to cost, but we still pay roughly the same price at retail. At least the shareholders are happy, but if they could find someone who would work for $.25 a day, they would be even happier.

Whenever someone argues in favour of a living wage, we are told it is too expensive. What a shame that poverty has become an official requirement of our economic system.

If we found ourselves working in the sweatshops for less than a buck a day, I wonder if we would be grateful...

Re:Supply....

[Duhavid]

They said that about COBOL as well.

You may be right, but the "higher levels of abstraction" will,
in my opinion, call for more knowledge, not less, requiring
more skilled persons, not less.

Until the point that we have true AI, that is. ( And it will
still be true, but handled by the AI. )

It's a negative sum game

[Travoltus]

At least for America's workers, whose wages will never recover from the downward pressure of globalism.

America's booming IT industry is a thing of the past, as the entry level jobs needed to train people for higher end jobs no longer exist in America. Our IT industry will continue to shrink until it's completely gone, and all that is left in America are people jobs. The low paying cashier and medical clinic crap, with a smattering of middle class nursing jobs and doctors being crushed by malpractice premiums in malpractice award-capped states.

For globalism to succeed, successful nations must be impoverished.

Now where, you ask, is all the growth coming from? Simple. America is drowning in utterly unmaintainable consumer and national debt. Eventually that all has to be repaid.

Pray ye diligently that ARMs stop rising and that home prices stop falling in the superhot markets of today, or you may find yourself eating the words you're thinking of responding to me with - because that's all you'll have to eat when the shakedown comes.