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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."
large pool of qualified applicants in the market today
qualified. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means
We freely sent off our manufacturing, then our IT, and a good bit of agriculture. But thankfully, we still have a great service industry, lots of restaurants, etc. That'll keep us safe in times of financial/world troubles.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
U.S. companies outsourcing jobs to foreign countries: bad for the U.S.
Foreign companies outsourcing jobs to the U.S.: bad for the U.S.
Seriously, why is this such a surprise to everyone? When you going a global economy, it's like opening a flood gate; initially there's a huge rush out (everyone outsources), then some smaller waves back (people demand more insourced jobs), then - well, then it all balances out (US Company A outsources to India, Indian Company B outsources to the US, Mexican company G outsources to the UK, UK Company L outsources to Oz, etc etc).
In fact, isn't this exactly what everyone was telling us would eventually happen 8 years ago? So shouldn't we have been expecting it?
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Another story about outsourcing to 3rd world countries!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Its just a THEORY... just like EVOLUTION and GRAVITY
Market theory is well tested and proven...
This sounds a bit weird "Large pool of qualified applicants in the market today". What large pools, there is a shortage of qualified applicants in the IT industry as a whole, or is this just in issulated areas of the world? In Denmark at least there is a HUGE shortage of qualified people, especially if your a softare developer.
There is a LOT of bureaucracy to comply with, and a lot of countries are now offering simplified corporate taxes and regulations to boost interest in their economies. Eastern Europe is a very good example. Not only have many of those countries adopted flat corporate taxes, which cut down on the cost of compliance, and the rates are pretty low and getting lower. The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.
It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?
Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.
Wasn't there a Dilbert comic strip where Dilbert's company outsources to X who outsources to Y who outsources to .... who outsources to Dilbert's company.
;)
And everyone lies a bit about meeting the SLAs and so quotes cheaper prices.
So does this mean that when Indians call for tech supported, they will get angry because they can't understand the American accent of someone claiming to be Raehan?
"Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnant or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today."
TFA only mentions the Indian tech industry. I'm sure you could make a case for a world-wide effect from this, but the article doesn't mention it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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
it's communication with co-workers and the difficulties that come integrating remote teams.
My brother-in-law is a developer for a big fininacial services operation, and they attempted to outsource a project. Eventually management gave up and brought the work back to the home office, as the quality of code coming out of the outsourcing house was crap. Basically, a lot of the code they sent back was buggy or hard to integrate and had to be debugged and redone by the on-site developers.
But I'm not sure that that's an indication that the coders were poor (though that's a possibility). Basically, you're asking folks to communicate across both a language barrier and time difference that just makes it really difficult to do so with good results. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult. Considering the difficulties that folk speaking the same primary language and sitting in the same room have communicating, I think it's safe to say very difficult.
Moving your "onshore outsourcing" to Georgia or wherever might address language issues, but the problems that come with integrating a remote team aren't going to go away.
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Moreover, you seem to think this is automatically bad. As a generally benign tax-paying and extremely low crime population, I hardly think Atlanta will suffer from inclusion of these H1-Bs.
RTFA, and consider using better language next time -- "gaggle", "ploy" -- just smacks of a snooty, condescending attitude.
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."
We need internet FAST ENOUGH(which it isn't) that we can hire indian doctors for the poor.
Thats right. I am sure outsourcing to india would save the lower incomes a good penny.
Robotic Surgery with a doctor all the way in India or China?
Sounds good to me. I am sure the medical lobby will deem it too dangerous since they care for us so much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First, the bad news was that jobs were being outsourced. Now the bad news is that the jobs are coming back to the US.
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.
You must be joking. Models in market theory are mostly oversimplified. Often to the extent that the results are useless for practical purposes.
Why do you think investments in stock markets are still a risky business? Because all the investors do not listen to the academia? If models and theory in physics would be that unreliable nuclear power plants would regularly go boom!
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
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.
About 10 years ago my wife and I moved from a beach area in California to North Central Arizona - partly because it is a beautiful place and partly because a much lower cost of living in Arizona has freed us up to be more flexible in our working (or not working). Neither one of us has had a job in an office since our move, and we both only work on projects that interest us.
:-)
Frankly, I can not understand why so many people trade both their time and preference to work on interesting projects for material stuff like frequently buying new cars, homes that are much larger than they really need, etc. I believe that this odd behavior is caused by a lifetime of subjecting oneself to advertising, but that is just a theory
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
So let me get this straight, a single company was found to open a US office, and the implication is that firms outside the US dominate the global economy ??
NPR should adjust the weight they contribute to a single anecdotal case I believe.
In a global economy you'll see Indian companies opening US offices and US companies opening offices in India. You'll see Japanese companies having US devisions that outgrow the Japanese ones and basically everything.
Borders don't mean jack anymore. You pick a place that has the people you want, the market you want and the taxes you want, and go for it.
Would you really recommend IT to school kids evaulating future careers with the canon of globalization pointed right up IT's ass? Things may turn out okay, or they may get worse. But you have to admit the global monkey is on IT's back, making it a risky career choice.
Table-ized A.I.
Back in the 80's when Japanese cars made real inroads in the U.S. car market, people would comment that Japanese cars were built better and more reliable than their American counterparts. Inevitably this would lead to talk of "fat lazy union workers", and would conjure up pictures of some fat slob with a cigarette dangling from his mouth only putting in the occasional bolt if the mood struck him.
The reality is that quality in cars is engineered from the earliest drawings. It goes into the manufacturing process to ensure there is only one correct way to assemble something. It comes about because management is committed to a quality product. Not just the words, but they take concrete steps to ensure what goes out the door is the best that they know how to build.
So the Japanese really were building better cars simply because the management of the company committed to building good cars. The proof was when Honda and Toyota moved manufacturing to the United States with no loss in quality. Nobody cares if their Accord is built in the U.S. or Japan, the cars are simply quality products.
To this day, the myth of the lazy American work persists, I assume partly because American cars for the most part still fall below Japanese standards. Now somehow the Union makes line workers stupid and lazy, which is ridiculous.
A large part of the reason unions arose in heavy industries was because management treated workers so poorly. That culture still exists in American automobile plants and leads to workers understand that the company will cheat them blind without a good contract. So the company treats people poorly and suffers the consequence in the factory.
It's like you punch somebody in the face, and then complain when they punch you back.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Last week on Slashdot: We don't have enough engineers! Should we subsidize those majors in college?
This week on Slashdot: Too many engineers! Salaries are falling!
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.
Movies? Check.
Microcode? Check.
Now for high-speed pizza delivery...
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
especially in IT. if going gets tough in one place, you can just move to another place.
Read radical news here
The situation you speak of is the tendency of employers to only hire people with the exact skill set they're looking for. Much of the time, the people with those skills just don't exist. The solution is not to reject all applicants, but to hire someone who, though they may not possess the specific skills the employer needs, can come up to speed on the relevant technology.
The problem is also one of education. Employers are looking for Java programmers with experience in J2EE, SOAP, XML, SOA, OMGWTFBBQ, and whatever other acronyms du jour they're working with. Universities teach data structures, systems design, and object oriented programming. Obviously, there is a *huge* disconnect between what employers want and what universities produce. In order to solve this (un)employment dilemma, somebody's got to give. Either universities are going to have to start teaching students how to code to a specific standard instead of general concepts, or employers are going to have to pay to train new employees to do the specific jobs they need instead of expecting to find a rhombus shaped peg in a job market full of round ones.
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.
Of all the points I have seen on this thread, the above quote is the most legitimate. I'm a business IT consultant with a focus on custom application development. I'm one of those "technical architects" he speaks of. Our local teams are rather small with our full-time consultants to build the foundation of the applications and we then tap into a pool of contractors to do fill in the implementations as provided by the design me, my fellow consultants and business analysts construct.
One of the things the parent does overlook is that aside from experience and technical skill, clear communication skills are essential. I remember being told back in college in the late 90s I would need strong communication skills (granted English is my first language). I am not referring to only plain English but also an understanding of "International" English (to speak to our Indian associates and any other people who aren't familiar with localized metaphors) and business-speak. In addition, it takes a level of being assertive and proactive.
I don't think you can find a statistically significant difference between those with certifications and those without. I bet you could find quite a difference between those with experience and those without, though.
There is no relationship between certification and skill, positive or otherwise. If I go get a certification, am I worse than I was before? Absolutely not. We all have our reasons for getting them. I think the danger is replacing experience with certifications, or viewing certifications as anything other than rote understanding of technology.
I would also argue that it is easy enough to find someone with a great deal of experience who still sucks at the job. If you've been a bad coder for ten years, you're still a bad coder. Some people just aren't cut out to be engineers, but they still somehow manage to hold down a job for a long time.
US company makes gadgets ready for assembly.
They send gadgets over seas to be assembled
Gadget is sent back to US company for adding to another gadget.
US company claims entire sequence as increase in US productivity.
Is the productivity increase really said to belong to the US company?
Many economists calculating GDP are beginning to question it.
I've seen a few comments from employers in this thread who bemoan the lack of experienced people in the job market.
..."): regular corporate layoffs. To most managers, we grunts are nothing more than numbers in the "Expenses" column of a spreadsheet.))
Whatever happened to hiring someone who was inexperienced, but still sharp, and developing that person? This is how I got my start in 1990: someone who had seen my work took a chance that I'd do a good job supporting the company's LAN, even though I lacked experience, and hired me. With the exception of a few months during the bust years of 2001 and 2002, I've been working in the field ever since (in a variety of different positions, most recently QA testing).
One thing I noticed around the turn of the century was that there weren't any 20-somethings at work anymore. At age 34, I was far and away the youngest person at work. Where will the next generation of experienced old hands come from if not from within? At some point, all the experienced people will be too old to work any more, and then what will we do? The worst part of outsourcing is that we're outsourcing not just today's jobs, but the future of our talent pool.
((Let me cynically answer my first question ("Whatever happened to hiring
cpsJust vbDont vbOutsource ppYour nCode prepTo cntryHungary.
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.
Lies about crimes
Yes, the world market is irrational. It happens every couple of decades. If you intend to try to profit from the current financial irrationality, remember this:
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" - John Maynard Keynes.
First off, companies like Wipro and Infosys have been recruiting at top U.S. engineering and computer science schools for a long time now. Secondly, isn't it obvious what will eventually happen? Everyone is so hung up about outsourcing, especially in information technology, but who cares, seriously? The standard of living in India is rapidly rising, prices are rising, the rupee is getting stronger, etc...there is actually a shortage of labor in India at this point (relative to its incredible level of economic growth over the past 5 or so years). These Indian firms have been creating jobs in the U.S. for a long, long time. It's the same deal with the auto industry - everyone is so hung on up the "big three" auto companies just because they are headquartered in America. When they cut jobs it gets more coverage than Paris Hilton gets when a paparazzi snaps a photo of her pantiless cooch after a night of hard partying at some glorious Hollywood club, but when Subaru builds a new plant in Indiana or Toyota adds jobs stateside no one cares. We live in a global economy - as long as we (as in the United States) can provide qualified, quality laborers (which is another story altogether, but at least the ball is in our court), we have the ability to stay on top throughout this age of globalization. Who cares if you work for an Indian IT firm from an office in Boston? It doesn't make any different to me if I'm working for Accenture or Infosys as long as I have a job.
Totally off topic, but, for real: They are a huge US ally.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert
You're avoiding all of the dubious benefits of Hungarian notation -- capturing semantic information that isn't provided by your environment -- whilst hitting its main problem head-on.
What happens if you change the type of iNumEmps to long, or long long? You'd better hope you remember to change all of the relevant variable names throughout your code.
What you do offers you no benefits, but increases your maintenance burden. Stop doing it.