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Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted
alphadogg writes "The perception that Indian call centers and back office operations cost US jobs is an old stereotype that ignores today's reality that two-way trade between the US and India is helping create jobs and raise the standard of living in both countries, US President Barack Obama told a gathering of business executives in Mumbai on Saturday. President Obama's remarks come after some moves in the US that had Indian outsourcers worried that the US may get protectionist in the wake of job losses in the country. The state of Ohio, for example, banned earlier this year the expenditure of public funds for offshore purposes. US exports to India have quadrupled in recent years, and currently support tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US, he said in a speech that was also streamed live. In addition, there are jobs supported by exports to India of agriculture products, travel and education services. President Obama, who is in India on a three-day visit, said that more than 20 deals worth about $10 billion were announced on the first day of his visit."
Obama should gather a little bit of data on the tech sector. IBM alone has hired 80,000 people in India in the last 8 years. Meanwhile, my colleagues and I have not had raises in the last 5 years. We aren't a group of chump manufacturing people putting tops on bottoms either. We develop a lot of the firmware in the high end systems, and do high level hardware design. We've been told no back fills in the US. The only new people are in cheaper regions.
I'm sure our friends at HP, Oracle, Dell, etc are up to the same nonsense.
The canonical article on this topic, by the founder of HowStuffWorks:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
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That is $ 10 Billion coming in to the US - by exporting products (33 planes from Boeing, 414 Jet Engines from GE, etc.) to India. RTFA ... oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
It is getting to the point where outsourcing will start costing US companies money. In my current employment situation, we outsource the management of the network infrastructure to AT&T. They manage the firewalls, load balancers and switches. However everything is managed from Singapore. Whenever I need to discuss network design decisions or changes with a real Cisco certified engineer, I have to do it on Singapore time. They don't have any engineers in America anymore. All of their project managers seem to be in India. They must be a getting a great discount, because my PM doesn't know jack. Every time I need a question answered, he has to ask someone else.
Anyone who has dealt with AT&T knows that getting change orders processed is a complete PITA. When you add a 12 hour time difference on top of it, it is amazing that anything gets done at all.
Our solution is that we are going to hire a network engineer here in America. AT&T can bugger off. We are an American company. We are hosting our servers in an American data center on US soil. Our vendor should have people who can work with us during our regular business hours. I'm all for having people on the other side of the world who can do things during a midnight (local time) maintenance window. I'm not all for having to wait until 9pm to have a conference call to discuss things. I'm even more put off by dealing with people who barely speak my language and don't have the technical competence to keep up.