Top tech cos moving jobs to India

[OhioChick]

14 May 2008, 1041 hrs IST

BANGALORE: Belt-tightening by global technology giants -- fallout of US economic slowdown -- is likely to reinforce India as the most preferred offshoring destination.

Top technology firms are actively moving part of their workforce from the US, UK and European markets to lower-cost destinations like India.

They cite availability of local talent, better delivery and conducive environment as key offshoring reasons. While they may not admit it, firms would be looking at stepping the gas on offshoring to curb bloating costs and to lift margins.

Networking and telecom software major Nortel, for one, has recently decided to move almost 1,000 jobs from the US and the UK to low-cost, high-growth destinations like India, China and Mexico. The move is aimed at both restructuring business and reducing costs, Nortel Networks global services president Dietmar Wendt said.

The company plans to double its $2.1 billion global services business over the next three to five years with a significant portion coming from multimedia and contact centre services.

http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/3038358.cms

[liberal N proud]

1. I will have to find my report again

The one I used to prove to management that outsourcing in our business was not what it was cracked up to be.

[OhioChick]

2. I'd love to see it. n/t

[liberal N proud]

3. It is buried on a server at work

I used it to prove how much rework would be required and how poor the quality of the work coming from India.

It wasn't a report that I wrote but something I found online, can't even remember the source at this moment. It was 3 years ago. I was new in my position and was in a meeting with general manager when he suggested that we should look into outsourcing our design team. I fought to keep my people and one for the time being.

[OhioChick]

5. Good for you for helping to keep your co-workers.

Several years ago, I was called in on a project fucked up by Accenture. (They offshored it to India) The company I was called in to was a mess...it was a multi-million dollar deal and they halted Accenture's work. The company took a financial hit and said they'd never outsource again. To be quite frank....it was one hell of a mess.

[liberal N proud]

8. Here are a couple of very good links on Outsourcing:

Calling a Change in the Outsourcing Market - Deloiotte
http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/us_outsourcing_callingachange.pdf

Outsourcing Part 1 By: Robert Green, CAD Manager's Newsletter
http://management.cadalyst.com/cadman/CAD+Manager's+Newsletter+Archives/CAD-Managers-Newsletter-156/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/364762


Hope everyone can find these useful

[OhioChick]

9. Thanks for posting...

Bookmarked for later.

[ChromeFoundry]

4. Speaking from experience

I can tell you that every large project I have been called in to fix was due to the company trying to save money by offshoring the work to India. Each time it was a miserable failure. Funny how all these companies beat their drums to the drastic cost savings, but after the fact, they never publish their miserable failures and how over budget the project ends up.

I know offshoring does not work. I have earned a decent living over the last few years, re-architecting and repairing "shit". Until these companies learn, my current job will be "technology-janitor".

[AdHocSolver]

6. Whether the work is done in America or India, the same amount of crap will be produced because...

most of the "decision makers", i.e., the management, are technologically incompetent, and often as dumb as rocks as well.

I worked in the computer field for over twenty years and most of the time I fixed other peoples crap code. The stuff they get from India won't be any better quality, and there won't be any savings in money. While there were some notable cases of seriously bad programmers, even when the programmers were pretty good, the management of these projects was often so bad that literally one could see millions of dollars worth of work thrown down the drain because of mismanagement.

Interestingly, two projects that I worked on which were the best managed and had the best code were cancelled for political reasons due to political infighting among upper management. Both projects were the best organized, contained the least buggy code, were well documented, were the most maintainable, and actually implemented just about every requirement in the specifications.

The project managers were talented and experienced, were well organized, and the team they assembled was a joy to work with. Unfortunately, the senior management didn't know what gems they had in programmers or the software we developed. They tossed the software and the team for the flimsiest of reasons.

Most of the projects I worked on or observed wasted millions of dollars due to mismanagement. It was all covered up and the programmers often paid a price for failures that were beyond their control. Offshoring the jobs to India won't prevent this huge waste in resources. It will just provide another layer of excuses and obfuscation for executives to cover their asses.

[FatDave]

7. As a professional programmer who has seen his share of bad code...

...the worst stuff I've ever seen is from offshore. The sad part is, the original Indian programmers, who mostly came to the US to work circa 1998, were actually really good coders. Indian programmers developed a reputation for quality, and it was that reputation that allowed a lot of work to be sent to India. Of course it also allowed any 2-bit bunch of yahoos in Bangalore to open a code shop, and they've now destroyed that early reputation. But they're still cheap, and that's usually enough for the suits.

[cascadiance]

10. Every time I travel back to the Bay Area for office meetings I'm amazed how many MORE Indians...

... are now working in the workforce here too. Though we had a lot of Indians working in the tech wofk force 10 years ago too, it was still not a "majority" of the developers you had on people's staff. Now I think that's different, at least in the Bay Area.

The bottom line is that if you have the following variables in place that we've had more and more of in recent years:

1) An Indian student growing up in India has their education paid through a bachelor's degree by the government. Their big decision is just whether they pay for a graduate degree or not, which almost guarantees them a job in Bangalore or a H1-B Visa job here in the states. Their universities still aren't as well regarded as our universities, but still their paid for Bachelor's degrees are held in greater regard than someone with a "paid for" high school diploma here. Pursuing a tech job IS one of the best tickets for success in India, no matter what one's skill set.
2) High school students here looking to go to college are faced with a lot larger college tuition costs today than 10 years ago. It's not as practical now to work through college and pay down most of one's college debt like it used to be. Now it is a big debt chunk that one has to pay off in the years to come. Taking a risk on an increasingly risky tech job in the states is just not an option for many students, even if they are very sharp and would be decent engineers if they applied themselves to it.
3) The cost of living difference doesn't affect even those working as H1-B Visa employees over here in the states. They might pay a little extra now for an apartment to live in, but if they are able to put money away for savings, which they are more apt to do with a family living on FAR LESS expenses back in India, even at a lower salary they come out ahead of the U.S. worker who's here all of the time and has our cost of living expenses for our families here. So this leads to underpaying tech professionals here.
4) I remember when it first just started with the customer support people, and people on the lower end of the tech totem pole. It was rationalized that still the higher end tech jobs still went to employees here in the states. However if you cut off the entry level jobs here, over time you see a reduced number of domestic employees working in the field, and the experience builds up for Indian workers (either here as H1-B visa workers or those overseas). Now the brain trust is more in India's hands.
5) We still have some residual generations of decent people in our work force, and some that still pursue careers here despite the inequity, but time is running out now... It's not just about investing in our people's education, though perhaps getting back to the free college bachelor's degree that California students had under Governor Jerry Brown would be a good start. We need to stop the H1-B Visa program, and renegotiate things like NAFTA, etc. soon. If we can get a strong commitment to providing decent tech careers for people here, we could still reverse this equation. We still have a lot of good American workers to help bring in a newer generation. But that won't be the case forever.
6) It's just a matter of time before we don't have even enough domestic tech workers to staff the more sensitive secret clearance jobs in building out our military technologies too. Then what do they do, hire more "spies" from China? When it gets to that point, I suspect even Republicans will get "alarmed", but by they it might be too late then.

Mind you, some of my best friends working with me are Indians. I have NOTHING against them personally. And I do actually like environments where I work with them. But the equation we have now is not sustainable for our nation's long term health.