Globophobia Cures

Clay Risen, my counterpart at The New Republic, has a great piece up deflating the panic over outshoring.

Comments

[Russ D]

Such bad writing at the NRO, headache inducing.

To me, there's no difference between having a job outshored or having it given to a guest worker on an H1-B visa.

[sally]

Bob Herbert of the NYT has a piece on this issue:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/158129_herbert27.html

[TG]

Clay Risen is clueless. Two examples: "...an American employee might be tasked with the design, implementation, and testing of a software program; under restructuring, his employer might hire an Indian, at one-tenth the cost, to do the implementation and testing and then hire an American to do the design work." Great notion, but -- as with chefs versus waitstaff, or architects versus carpenters and masons -- far fewer designers are needed (or desired) for a given software application than software programmers, testers, and documenters. It ain't anywhere close to a one-for-one tradeoff.

Two: "The Trade Adjustment Assistance program already provides assistance to workers displaced by nafta-related factory closings; a similar program could easily be crafted to respond to offshore outsourcing. Indeed, requiring companies that outsource to contribute a portion of their savings to training programs would both internalize the costs and provide the necessary funds." Manure. If companies in this country could cost-effectively train US workers, they would already be doing so. Instead, they'll train even more of those less-expensive workers in other countries and create those new jobs there.

The model established by the transfer of manufacturing jobs to cheaper locales assumed that displaced local workers could be retrained for jobs that required intellectual capital. Now the intellectual capital is even more easily pushed around the world to wherever value can be added ever more cheaply... what new types of jobs are these white-collar professionals going to be re-trained to perform? And how long will it be until those new jobs are also moved outside the US?

Don't get me wrong -- I do not argue in favor of legislative efforts at job protection. I'm just quite tired of these ignorant pundits nattering on about how new jobs will (magically?) appear to replace the jobs lost. Maybe they will, maybe they won't -- but superficial comparisons to the example of manufacturing jobs only demonstrate shallow minds at work.

[B]

I agree with Russ. Take a look at enrollment at the master's level in electrical and computer engineering in our nation's universities, and you'll find mostly Chinese and Indian nationals.

[B]

I agree with Russ. Take a look at enrollment at the master's level in electrical and computer engineering in our nation's universities, and you'll find mostly Chinese and Indian nationals.

[Mikiel]

The tech company I work for recently "outshored" a segment of our programming work to India, and I'm glad they did it. We write server/client software and our domestic developer's didn't have enough time to develop both. As a result, our server was "pretty good" and our client was, well, something less than that. Now the Indians work on the client and our developers work on the server. The result is that our productivity has gone way up and we create a better product. Our server is now "great" and our client is up to "pretty good." With a better product we've increased sales and managed to increase our local staff. In other words, outshoring some of our work created domestic jobs. In our specific case, I don't see a down side to the arrangement. The alternative for us was losing good developers to larger companies because of the long hours and laying off staff because of poor sales and high costs. I suspect much the same is true for many of the companies outshoring.

[M2I]

Outshoring white-collar jobs is a great idea. We should be doing this now with most pieces of the government.

Think of how much we'd save by outshoring the IRS. And the goodwill it would generate for the job creation overseas.

[Todd Fletcher]

I think there's also a limit to how much development can be outshored. Everywhere I've worked the number one challenge is getting all of the developers on the same page, and we're talking about people sitting next to each other. For very large, well defined projects with loads of documentation it might work, but lots of development is of the shoot-from-the-hip type. It's hard to see how you could outshore that.

[SPUR]

There is a better article about outsourceing over at Wired:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html?tw=wn_tophead_3

[Swamp Justice]

I work at a tech company. About 50% of my co-workers are not US citizens. They don't have H1Bs or green cards. This is a new experience for me.

[spur]

"I work at a tech company. About 50% of my co-workers are not US citizens. They don't have H1Bs or green cards. This is a new experience for me."

What part of Mumbai do you work in?

[Erik]

Interestingly enough, the tech stuff is possibly moving, but the customer oriented jobs have been moving back after years of offshoring being threatened. Dell announced back in November something like 3-5000 jobs were going stay here. Many of the Philipino & Indian start up call centers are getting moved back to the US. Or at least to South Africa.

One thing that always bothered me about this topic, outside fromt he protectionism, was the racism of the issue. "Communication barriers" are usually high on the list of dissatisfaction w/offshored services. When it was broken down, it usually came out to "our customers didn't like the sound of their voices". Yeah, those brown people do not speak the English as good as you or I.

[Hick American]

That's right Erik. When I call someone for some technical assistance I don't need someone that I can understand. I recently had an issue with some VPN software that was supported in India. I had to call three times to find someone that knew what they were talking about and that I could understand. It had nothing to do with the color of their skin or the sound of their voice. Your knee-jerk PC response is sickening.

[Tom]

I find the hypocrisy of the re-heated protectionists bleating about offshoring a bit hard to take. Many of the jobs offshored are going to Third World nations, which presumably is good news for the workers there who are getting jobs they would not otherwise be able to take. And yet the same collectivists who tell us about the "concern" for the Third World are very often the same folk who attack offshoring.

[Douglas Fletcher]

"Such bad writing at the NRO, headache inducing."

Yeah, I looked at the first two paragraphs and I think I'll put off reading the rest until I've had plenty more sleep and a good breakfast. Maybe throw a little brandy into the coffee for good measure.

[dj of raleigh]

> Although it's a $15 billion industry, medical-transcription work is almost always farmed out to small firms around the country; even if all of them closed, the impact on any one community would be small.

[dj of raleigh]

> some suggested the grass roots right might stay home on Election Day

[Erik]

Hick & Jimmy--

The peeps in the US are usually just as helpless as their foreign counterparts. Being able to understand an Indian and being able to figure out what and illiterate English-as-a-first-language means are merely different sides of the same coin. Having managed a customer service department for a telecom, I saw a lot of communication problems that had nothing to do with people's ability to speak clearly.

And Jimmy, the sentence you didn't finish correcting was what we in Hollywood call a punchline. It was bad, but Oscar season is upon us and the spirit of Bruce Valanche is in the air.

But back to the real point; the situation is in flux. Jobs are shifting more rapidly, and old tools for measuring progress are inaccurate, if not imprecise as well. Asking people to guess on top of that gives us alarmist headlines.

[Jason Ligon]

I don't know why it is so hard to grasp the following:

Take a guy who used to spend $500 on widget A, but who now spends $150 on the same widget A. Watch where he spends the money he didn't use to have. Get a job in that field.

[Xmas]

Actually, there is a big difference between off-shoring and H1B visas. Off-shored workers can leave there jobs and find new ones. H1B visa holders are practically enslaved workers who will be kicked out of the US if they loses their job.

The main problem I have with off-shoring isn't addressed in the NRO article. Off-shoring entry level technical and managerial jobs means you are draining the company's pool of future innovators and leaders.

[Keith]

Cheers for Jason!

In my personal case, I'm leaving on Monday for India, on a 6 week stint where I'm going to train and instill corporate values from my suburban-Philly employer to our new office which will include both software development work as well as client service work. I've mentioned it before in these pages, but this arrangement is amazing for my company. We've had very good experience integrating teams in both locations; and the arrangement allows for:
yes, cheaper net labor cost; but more importantly, enabling 24 hours of work on a project without burning out people, and will be instrumental in getting us to achieve a new goal of a 90-day system implementation. Leveraging our good experience with integrating an Indian office is a marketable competitive advantage for us.

My employer has not laid off any US staff, and while there may have been slow hiring, it's hard to tell given the experience of the past few years. If we drive our competitors out of business, well, as long as the means are ethical and legal, that's business.

[dj of raleigh]

My cablevision and internet support services connect to Canada...and I get great service.

[dj of raleigh]

> Although it's a $15 billion industry, medical-transcription work is almost always farmed out to small firms around the country; even if all of them closed, the impact on any one community would be small.

[Jimmy Antley]

"Yeah, those brown people do not speak the English as good as you or I."

as good as you or me", ain't it, Erik?

Yeah, Hick American is right. I've had to ask people if they were speaking English to begin with. Then, when I realize they are, I've got to listen really hard to understand finally that they don't know dick about the technical problem they should be supporting. (Partly, I've got to admit, cause they can't understand the problem due to language).

[AJMB]

Careful that it isn't Quebec dj. ESL is prevalent there too.