Slashdot Mirror
Indian Software Firm Outsourcing Jobs To US
phobos13013 writes "NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy, even from developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnate or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today."
As an employer, I have to say that this is total BS. If there was a large pool of qualified applicants, we'd have a larger workforce.
The reality is that the market for IT talent with actual talent (as opposed to fluffed up CVs) is VERY tight, at least across
North America.
Outsourcing is not all that cost effective, due to miscommunication leading to wasted effort, weird working hours, telco and travel costs, etc. Organizations outsource because they can't find local talent, and apparently talent is getting pretty short in places like India too - meaning that we're still stuck.
This recent article discusses an interesting paradox India is in: It will have high unemployment among the educated, but only because those educated are not skilled enough to perform the required jobs (including, but not limited to, IT). The point is that India will not be able to come close to meeting the demand of an estimated workforce shortage of 40 million by 2012.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
There are a lot of cautionary tales about outsourcing and often the infrastructure necessary to successfully out source over seas almost negates the cost benefit. You need good bilingual managers, well thought out specifications, a good out sourcing firm or subsidiary, rigorous hiring practices and a "friend" in the over seas government to protect you investment. It's worth it if you need extra capacity with more flexibility (as over seas hiring/firing can be easier). From personal experience hiring an over seas firm does not guarantee any cost savings and if your only looking to shave your costs you may find out like my previous company that out sourcing can be a multi hundreds of million dollar catastrophe.
I've been part of small companies that hired a over seas company to to find out they paid a retainer for almost nothing. I've been part of a large company that spend a couple hundred million and got back a unusable piece of trash. The company was Isreali. Many heads rolled.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Listening to the audio version of the story, I found a few key points:
* US programmers are still much more expensive than programmers in other countries.
* Wipro has software houses in multiple countries around the world, their is their first Software house in the US though.
* US programmers know about the culture and idioms of this country, which is needed for some jobs.
* Any defense contracts must be worked on my US based developers.
Its not what it is, its something else.
I live in Atlanta Georgia and a lot of people are talking about how this company will be bringing jobs to Atlanta. The truth is that while they will be hiring people, this will result in a NET LOSS for Atlanta and the United States.
The way this works is that Fortune 50 companies in Atlanta like Bell South, Coca-Cola, Delta, etc. have contracts with US based firms and employ US based resources. The movement is now to outsource to India. The problem is that they realize that they have to have someone in the United States to actually talk to the customer and deal with problems. These people will be the business analysts and the technical architects that feed the people off shore. While they say that these companies are creating jobs in the United States, the truth is that most of them will be landed resources also from India under H1B visa.
The result of this is that the 50 people in Atlanta that were working in IT are now replaced by 40 off shore people, 5 landed people in Atlanta, and 5 local people. I'm not judging whether it's good or bad or right or wrong, I'm just clarifying what is really happening because most people are way off on this one.
If you will recall Wipro, Tata, InfoSys, InfoTech, Tech Mahindra, Satyam, Mphasis, Panti, and i-Flex have all been nailed for precisely this.
n t/jun2007/db20070626_139605.htm
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/conte
"Moreover, you seem to think this is automatically bad. As a generally benign tax-paying and extremely low crime population"
You seem to be making a great deal of assumptions there that one might think betrays are certain corollary bias.
MOD PARENT UP - 100% Correct
I established an offshore unit in India for an American software company. (I joked that my job was outsourced, but I clung to it so tightly that I went to India with it.)
If you want a kid who read a 3 year old copy of "Teach Yourself Java in 10 Days" last weekend, sure, there are thousands of those all over India. I regularly turned away about 40 of those each week.
An Immutable Law of the Universe: Software is fucking hard to write
Finding people skilled at writing software is not easy. If you yourself are not actually skilled at writing software, you have almost no chance of determining if someone who writes software is bright, or full of bullshit. At that level, it truly "takes one to know one".
Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of VERY smart software developers in India. However, those guys are just as rare as they are in the United States, and just as expensive. Even if you can find one for a cheap rate, it won't be long before another company realizes the developer's potential. Now with "Worked in American outsourced job" on their resume, they are ready to make the big bucks.
Miscommunication leading to wasted effort, weird working hours, telco and travel costs is only the beginning. When you get on a conference call and the big boss back in the U.S. says on the speakerphone (with a room full of Indian software developers listening), "We don't want him *acting Indian* on us." only then does the difficulty in outsourcing show it's true magnitude. (Yes, this actually happened to me. Imagine being the only American in that room!)
You do realize that the Honda, Toyota, and even BMW plants in the US are non-Union shops, right? UAW is still limited to the traditionally domestic manufacturers and have repeatedly failed to make inroads at any of the on-shored plants.
Maybe we're not making 50 cent squeak toys here anymore, but we are making things like commercial aircraft, power system components, and large construction and earth moving equipment which all these developing nations will need. I heard on CNBC recently that the US still has the largest amount of exports in dollars each year, 20% vs China at 8%. We're making very complex products in the US which require very skilled labor and quality on every level and that's something we should be proud of.
Well, I haven't worked for Wipro. I *have* had them working for *me* and it was an unrepeatable experience -- scared, inexperienced, homesick, basically useless Indian guys supplied on a constantly revolving system, spending about a month on the project and then either disappearing or being rotated somewhere else. The absolutely classic bad side of outsourcing.
They're probably OK to work *for*, though, if you aren't one of those guys.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm actually a fan of Hungarian notation. It's nice to be able to know both the scope and type of a variable just by looking at it.
Or Iraq!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnate or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today.
... In my experience, the pool of "qualified applicants" has fallen to almost zero.
;-). My part of the task was a single requirement that they literally couldn't find anywhere else in the world. I was a bit puzzled by that, because it was actually just a tricky bit of programming of some abstract math and pattern matching (in C), but I didn't quibble.
Hmmm
The explanation is well known to us software people. I remember back in the 1980s, when I ran across an ad for people with at least five years experience in a certain popular DB system. At the time, that DB system had been available from its vendor for almost 3 years.
These, a different variant of this approach is being used more and more. I've registered with a number of the well-known online job sites, and I get a dozen or so job descriptions every day. A number of my friends do this, too. It's quite rare to see a job description that any of us is qualified for. We get the descriptions because some fraction of the keywords match words in our resumes. However, each description has at least one requirement that I don't have. It seems fairly clear that for most of these, the probability is close to zero that a person exists anywhere on the planet with experience that matches every requirement. There is usually a list of other "nice to have" things, but those don't really matter if you don't have the required experiences.
We've tested a few of them that are sorta close by replying, with a more up-to-date resume, but typically there's no response at all. When we get a response, it's usually that we aren't qualified (but they'll keep our resumes in their DB in case an appropriate job comes up).
I have talked to a few HR people, to, of course, and they agree the approach is to write the job requirements to that nobody will actually be qualified. This gives them two options: One is that, if after a phone call they like you, they can say that they'll consider you although you're not qualified, but they may have trouble persuading their managers to pay you the stated rate due your lack of qualifications. So the intent is downward pressure on pay scales, because everyone is now "unqualified".
Alternatively, of course, this is done so that they can report that they couldn't find anyone in the country (the US in my case) that is qualified, so they'll just have to outsource the job. Or maybe look for a H1-B immigrant to hire as a trainee at a much lower salary. Or, of course, a student trainee or intern that can be hired for much less than even the immigrants.
Actually, I did have a 2-year job a few years ago, and interestingly it was a project for a UK firm that had outsourced the task to an American software company. But I got this job because I knew several of the people who owned the company. The team did include several H1-B people (and a couple of Canadians
Anyway, it doesn't seem like "globalization" is the whole explanation here. Rather, IT employees have learned how to classify everyone, even the most experienced, as unqualified for any current job. So you accept an entry-level wage, or you are dismissed as unqualified.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Yup, I'm still in India, never been to the US-an anachronism these days. Sad to say, even an IIT or IIM pedigree doesn't guarantee anything-I've seen quite a few such alumni who don't live upto the hype about their institutions.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Totally off topic, but, for real: They are a huge US ally.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert