Shipping your job overseas

[Clocker]

http://money.cnn.com/2003/07/22/news/economy/jobless_offshore/index.htm

How do you guys (especially in IT) feel about your jobs being shipped over to the cheap labor in India and other countries?

I'm seeing the trend in my field (engineering) as well. It is amazing how organizations can only see dollar signs and not realize the poor quality of work that comes out of some of these cheap labor countries. I don't know about IT stuff but you would not believe some of the idiotic automotive engineering feats and analyses that have been performed by this cheap labor in the name of saving $.

C

 

[blakerwry]

Yeah, I've heard bad things about Indian tech support. Knowing how some of them are educated (you can get a University doctorate degree by paying money, not by being a good student) I am not surprised.

I personally don't feel for the safety of my job. My company is growing and recently hired several new employees (including me). But if more and more IT jobs are shipped overseas then it's likely my company will have to try harder and harder to compete.

It's possible that a 10 year old company like the one I work for could go under eventually.

 

[Handruin]

My last project was moved to India for this exact reason...

 

[blakerwry]

India sounds like a disgusting place in some respects. Their class system is really out of whack. Treating people lower than dirt and never being able to better ones self seems like an absolutely terrible way to live.

 

[Fushigi]

The Indians I know (who live & work in the US) are well educated and polite. Their command of English is better than most US high school and college graduates. What they lack are the societal nuances and slang.

Companies have the right to send jobs wherever they feel benefits them the most. After all, a company is in business to make money. Nothing else. There are no moral or ethical obligations. The company's employees may have morals and ethics (may being the operative word of late) but the company as an entity does not.

What companies nowadays do that is destructuve is tuning operations to have a good quarter or two. You don't hear about companies discussing their 3 and 5 year plans like they used to. They are so focused on keeping the stock price up that they forego investments in customer satisfaction, product quality, and product support. They are sacrificing the future for a better today (think Republicans and the environment for a good analogy).

Outsourcing jobs to cheap labor/foreign countries is just a part of this process. It's getting a lot of IT press right now, but the same thing happened when Ford shifted a chunk of vehicle production to Mexico, Chrysler to Canada, etc. Back in the 80s there were a bunch of jobs outsourced to Ireland.

Am I for it? No. Can I do anything about it? Yes, I can do the best job I can possibly do in hope that my employer sees the value of keeping me vs. someone they could pay 30% of my salary to. But of course there are no guarantees.

 

[blakerwry]

Most of the Indians I have known have also been well educated and polite. (the ones about my age) Although I have met some that seemd to hold onto many of the traditional Indian views about class and gender. Nobody I have met is intolerable.

 

[Clocker]

I agree with you Fug. It just pisses me off when I see my friend laid off so that their job can be done in a half-assed manner by somebody in India.

Here's a great example: A meeting was held to show some top executives the capability of our engineering operation in India. A presentation of a door analysis was performed. The question was raised as to why the numbers produced by the analysis were soooo off from what would be expected (i.e. a gap of 150mm when a gap of 5mm would normally be expected). It turns out that the two Indian analysts who were hired because my friend was (for all intensive purposes) fired had put a LH door on the RH side of a vehicle model. I'd say we saved a lot of time & money shipping that job to India!! :evil: If nothing else, I'm glad management got to see that example of their 'great' capability in India.

I guess the root of it is that accountants have no idea as to what goes on in the real world. Making money at the expense of time and quality is a losing long-term proposition...

C

 

[Clocker]

What's even worse is when your employer requires you to write 'standard work instructions'. These are basically procedures that are so detailed any idiot could follow them. Why would they ask you to do this? So that the job can be performed somewhere else where the people doing it don't have a clue, of course. We're writing manuals to eliminate our own jobs. It's kind of demoralizing.

C

 

[Mercutio]

Ack! Huge .sig.

It's nothing but short-sightedness.
Contract employees show up differently on a balance sheet. Contractors from the US are hugely expensive, but contract workers from outside the US are cheap AND don't show up on the balance sheet as employees. Problem solved.

Honestly, there's some things this works great for. I could care less if I have to wade through "Rafat" on Level 1 tech support rather than "Cody". I could care less if MSWord was written by some guy in Banglor rather than Redmond.

But guess what? The guys who survive in IT over there? The first thing they do when they get money is to come to the US. If you're an indian IT guy making (average) $6000 a year, a *shot* at a $60k in the US position would be worth it, right?

The digusting thing is that the government agencies (Indiana Workforce One, US Job Bank et al) are still laboring under the assumption that IT is the "hot" place for jobs... so my company is constantly getting new guys who were welders and press operators and drivers and whatever, who have been sold this bill of goods. There's pressure on two sides: Experienced folks who came to the US for something better, and people who just shouldn't be looking in the IT field right now.

I think a lot of experienced IT are going to wind up in the place where I'm at (er, half of my week, anyway): contracting for small and mid-sized businesses.

For my students I sort-of compare it to being a plumber. If you're big enough, you can afford to have a plumber around all the time, but most plumbers work for a different (company) every day of the week, 'cause no one can afford them, and 'cause no one needs them around all the time.

The good news is that at least some of the time, a company needs a computer guy right now, so when we talk about jobs going to India, we can at least remember that location is always going to keep us in the game for some things.

 

[Clocker]

Good insight, Merc. I wish that applied to engineering a little more. That's why I will be trying to switch to are area of my organization that requires onsite people to do the work...

Sigs will get better once we optimize the look...

 

[Mercutio]

If it makes you feel better, C, for as long as there's been manufacturing there have been moving factories to lower labor costs and factory workers complaining about lower quality in country X.

Eventually all the manufacturing in the world will devolve to the poorest town in Ethiopia or something.

From an economic standpoint, these companies don't really owe us anything. They come, they hire people who work, and at some point, they decide to pack up and go. It disgusts me that they do it, but it is the company's right to do so. For me this is the side effect of viewing no employment as permanent (for me it's more like, "Hey, thanks for giving me money").

Companies should live up to their obligations, though. For me the most disgusting thing of all isn't "My job went to India" or "My job went to Mexico", it's "my job is gone and now that my company doesn't do business in this state I can't get disability compensation" or "My company moved and left without funding its pension".

 

[jtr1962]

What's even worse is when your employer requires you to write 'standard work instructions'. These are basically procedures that are so detailed any idiot could follow them. Why would they ask you to do this? So that the job can be performed somewhere else where the people doing it don't have a clue, of course. We're writing manuals to eliminate our own jobs. It's kind of demoralizing.

Kind of funny you mentioned that because the last place I worked had a penchant for asking us to do things like that. Their justification of it was "What happens if you die tomorrow and nobody knows how to do your job?". My short and sweet answer was hire somebody with a good education and analytical ability and they'll figure it out same as I did. What I was basically doing was repairs, but past the minimal level of training they initially gave me I was eventually able to figure out how to fix almost anything(even boards that were somewhat water-damaged). The time came not too long before I was officially laid off that I asked to document everything. At the time I was asked I didn't know about the closing of the NYC shop. I also didn't know that I was the only one to be offered a job at their main plant in Virginia. In any case I turned their request cold(remember at the time I didn't think they were laying people off so my decision wasn't based on that). The reason I gave them was very simple. My ability at repairs wasn't based solely on what I had learned working there in two years. Rather, it was a combination of my education, troubleshooting projects I made for myself, and just plain analytical skills. In short, they wanted me to somehow document four years of college and everything after. It plain couldn't be done. In short, management doesn't have a clue what it is even to repair something, let alone to design it from scratch. I told them if they have a kid fresh out of high school that they hire to replace me try sending them to college and then having them build projects on company time for a year or two, although by then they'll probably be asking for more than I was getting so where's the savings? My very short answer was you can have it done right, or you can have it done cheaply(which never is cheaply when it needs to be reworked by someone like me again).

I didn't take the job they offered(incidentally at no pay increase) since Virginia was hardly a place I would want live and I didn't like the company's penny pinching mentality. After the NYC shop closed I continued to work as an independent contractor for my former boss(who bought the NYC shop out and somehow did manage to make it earn money(maybe by caring about customers?). The main plant in Virginia went completely out of business(no surprise there, and it seems not transferring there was a good decision in retrospect). Unlike his former bosses, my ex-boss knows the value of a good worker, and doesn't bat an eyelash when I bill him at $50 to $60 an hour(his ex-bosses thought $11 an hour was good money). He'll use cheap labor for basic everyday tasks but any critical design or repair work I get, not some "engineer" in India making $7 an hour. It's worked out well for both of us, although he's never had enough work for me to approach anything resembling a decent living.

I guess the moral here is that pinching pennies just thinking about the next quarter is bad business. This isn't to say a business shouldn't try to eliminate fat(which incidentally is usually the same highly paid clueless executives who are brain dead about what running a business actually entails). But mortgaging your future by cutting R&D, or driving away customers with poor service is just plain bad management. When the local K-Mart closed a few months ago, I knew the reason that caused the dropoff in sales. It was so obvious to everyone but management. To try to save a bit here and there the number of cashiers were cut to the bone. Many times I would walk in, pick a few items off the shelves, see a 20 minute line, and just put the items back and leave. Many people just dropped them on the nearest shelf instead. Besides the extra labor wasted restocking the items they represented potential sales never realized because of poor customer service. For some reason management thought people will come into a store and buy what they need regardless of the wait. Sometimes if it's big shopping you will but for a few impulse items never. Many a time I walked in, saw the lines, and walked out. Doubtless many did the same.

 

[jtr1962]

The time came not too long before I was officially laid off that I asked to document everything.

This should read as "The time came not too long before I was officially laid off that I was asked to document everything." I certainly didn't volunteer to do that on my own. :wink:

 

[blakerwry]

You know, that seems like it should be illegal. Asking an employee to create training material with the intention of firing him and replacing him with someone less knowledgable and then training the new employee with the ex's material(all unbeknownst to the original employee until it's too late).

This is different than "planning for the future" by creating training material to train new employees incase the current one is promoted, leaves, or is fired later on.

The company has a responsibility to their employees just like the employee has a responsibility to his/her employer. It is based on mutual trust.

 

[CougTek]

What's kind of funny to me is that you so proudly support capitalism and yet fail to understand its side-effects. You want it, you got it. No tears for the lost jobs to India, for they suffer more from the actual economic regime than you will ever do.

Capitalism and worldwide free trade isn't motivated by worldwide wealth. It is niveling by the bottom in order to profit to those already on top. Make it the cheapest possible in order to maximize the profit. Perhaps you believe the profit is going in the pockets of the workers? I'm sorry to disapoint you, but having a fairly good experience of the stock market, I'll have to tell you it isn't. A notion many fail to grasp.

 

[Mercutio]

This is why I can't understand why people in the USA who are making $6/hour who use economic incentives to justify voting republican.

Somebody says "I don't believe in abortion, I want school prayer, and so do republicans." That I can believe. But a lot of republicans I've met are nowhere near a place in life where republican economic plans (tax breaks for the wealthy, no estate taxes etc) would benefit them, but they still want those things because "I'm gonna be rich someday."

Whatever.

 

[Mickey]

Am I for it? No. Can I do anything about it? Yes, I can do the best job I can possibly do in hope that my employer sees the value of keeping me vs. someone they could pay 30% of my salary to. But of course there are no guarantees.

^^ Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

[Clocker]

Am I for it? No. Can I do anything about it? Yes, I can do the best job I can possibly do in hope that my employer sees the value of keeping me vs. someone they could pay 30% of my salary to. But of course there are no guarantees.

^^ Couldn't have said it better myself.

I agree with that too. Unfortunately, most employers don't have a clue as to what happens in their business when it really comes down to it. They see the opportunity for short term gains resulting from accounting games rather than long term business prospects that result from good quality and customer service.

Oh well. Somebody's got to get it stuck to 'em. I guess I just better start shooting for a management position so I'm the 'stick-er' rather than the 'stick-ee' !! :lol:

 

[zx]

What's kind of funny to me is that you so proudly support capitalism and yet fail to understand its side-effects. You want it, you got it. No tears for the lost jobs to India, for they suffer more from the actual economic regime than you will ever do.

Capitalism and worldwide free trade isn't motivated by worldwide wealth. It is niveling by the bottom in order to profit to those already on top. Make it the cheapest possible in order to maximize the profit. Perhaps you believe the profit is going in the pockets of the workers? I'm sorry to disapoint you, but having a fairly good experience of the stock market, I'll have to tell you it isn't. A notion many fail to grasp.

I agree with you Coug. Capitalism has it's disadvantages and they are felt more and more in the age of globalization. That's why controls on the capitalist economic system exist. However, because the economy is more and more globalized, it can't be controlled like a national economy. So, companies are more and more free to do whatever they want without restraints from national government.

 

[CityK]

I notice that this article is getting a lot of attention elsewhere too.

If you have time to kill, and are interested in reading from another perspective (investment industry), try the following.

(Note: there are a lot of absolutely clueless morons who post on the following board, but there is an equal number of people who provide some interesting insight)

http://www.analystforum.com/phorums/read.php?f=1&i=38932&t=38932

http://www.analystforum.com/phorums/read.php?f=1&i=38956&t=38956

CK

 

[Vlad The Impaler]

These short-sighted companies are destroying their own future.

Oh dear! We seem to have sacked all of our US workers.....and now nobody in the US can afford to buy our products. Um, maybe we can sell them to the Indian workers we employed. But we only pay them $7 an hour, so they can't afford to buy them! Doh!

Oh dear. If only they were not quite so willing to stuff their fat faces with short term quarterly gains!