India Will Need to Recruit 120,000 Foreigners

indi_jobs writes "After all the noise about jobs moving from Europe and USA to India, ZDNet India is reporting that 'India faces a massive shortage of workers with European language skills over the next five years which could see the country needing to recruit up to 120,000 foreigners...' Looks like the jobs may be moving to India but they might require the original people to do some of the jobs!" From the article: "Evalueserve said the ramping up of non-English speaking capability by the Indian offshore firms is an attempt to capture a larger share of the continental European outsourcing market, and reduce the country's high-risk exposure of more than 80 per cent of business coming from the UK and the U.S. economies."

Business plan.

[team99parody]

I keep thinking I should hire some random guy in India (doesn't need to know computers - just have a phone # in india) to be the "CEO" of my own personal consulting company and sell consulting services to the local businesses. When large companies buy our services, I then hire a bunch of the unemployed silicon valley .com victims for minimum wage to do the actual work.

Benefits all around

• Layed off .com programmers are cheaper than Indian workers.
• Layed off .com programmers are in the same time-zone so can service the clients better.
• Indian CEO is cheaper than US CEO.
• Indian Headquarters makes big companies more likely to sign up.

pretty nervy sales pitch for India

[yagu]

From the article:

warned that only a small percentage of the two million English-speaking graduates per year turned out by Indian universities actually have good enough English to work in customer-facing offshore operations.

I don't know what to make of India's "taking" of the market the way they have. And, I don't know who to blame. But, I do know:

• India definitely has not solved or stepped up to solving the "English" problem. Of the last ten support calls I've made to any company (not just computers), I'd guess I was talking to someone in India nine of those calls, and of those nine times, not one time was I able to carry on any kind of reasonable communication with my "support"! (And, working in technology, I've actually been complimented on my better-than-average ability to understand people with heavy accents! Sadly, this doesn't always translate nicely to phone conversations.)
• Companies outsourcing support have glossed over any consideration of customer support and/or satisfaction in favor of perceived "large" savings. I see this as incredibly short-sighted, but maybe not "fightable", as it appears everyone is going this route.

I guess I blame India for short-sheeting the buying public claiming to provide "equal" services for far less cost... It's disingenuous at best, downright unethical otherwise. I'm guessing they'll have similar level of service for non-English European countries.... Heaven help those consumers when they start making calls for help.

I guess I blame corporations for "bottom-line" decision making over customer satisfaction.

Sidebar: Does anyone wonder why, if India can provide "equal" service... for far less money (i.e., "phone" support) why "phone" services like 911 haven't been sent overseas? I don't.

Sidebar 2: Suggestion: if you do need support for something, I can't suggest strongly enough... keep calling, and hanging up until you get someone who you can easily understand (NOTE: that could end up being someone in India, but empirical data suggest otherwise)... Maybe if we all did that, the skew would be back to English speaking support.

Plan B

[Doc Ruby]

The foreign workers will cost less working in India by serving the rest of their life with cheap Indian labor. This is how the entire economy of a country like England or the US gets "outsourced" to India. Because soon enough, the foreign workers will drain the local nontech labor pool of its best workers to serve them, and more people will need to be imported. It's almost as damaging to the local, less skilled, labor pool as it is to the foreign economies cherry picked for its workers. While the transplants ramp up India's economy, many of its globally competitive advantages, like unfettered environmental destruction and labor commoditization, will eventually catch these migrant workers short.

Maybe it's time we just fill a "B Ark" [bbc.co.uk] with service personnel, and turn this brain drain to our advantage.

Re:ROFLs

[JWW]

What the shortage in India says to me is that businesses are all so caught up in getting on the next bandwagon that they always go wayyy overboard.

What was particularly appealing to them wrt oursourcing was that businesses were so mad at themselves for overdoing things during the internet boom that they were more than happy to overdo their "revenge" on the workforce.

Re:Supply & Demand

[tekiegreg]

It's been happening to some extent already. I remember when you could find an Indian programming contractor for $15/hr (This would be a good programmer with a decent programming skillset). Nowadays it's about $20/hr which is approaching the low-end of U.S. Programmers now. Granted you can find low-end U.S. programmers now about $25/hr from my epxerience. In fact at that point is it worth the extra overhead and inconvenience of having your programmers that far away? Hmmmmm.....

Just filling the gaps, I guess.

[ErichTheRed]

The outsourcing countries have major advantages that we would require significant adjustment to overcome:

1. They've got a huge workforce of people who are overjoyed to work. If your choice was between call center/coding/offshored clerical work and whatever job you could get back in your village, what would you choose? I'm actually working on a partially outsourced project now...a couple of our developers went over to India to work, and they report that people are more than happy to work 15-16 hour days.
2. The standard of living is much lower. Everyone doesn't need the newest car, latest clothes or an expensive house. In the US, a lot of the salary inflation is because keeping up in the consumer universe is so expensive.
3. Education is considered important. Those stories you hear of immigrant students doing much better in school are true. It's considered shameful to fail in most other countries. True, we may not be graduating as many scientists and engineers because the employment prospects are so dismal, but I think it's mainly because parents don't push their kids to do well as much as they do in other countries. If/when I have kids, they will be education robots...nothing but study until they're finished with school. That's the only way we can compete.

So in comparison, we have an expensive, undereducated country with a poor work ethic. No wonder we're losing this battle!

Re:Are Indian workers *that* much cheaper?

[Uber Banker]

Personally speaking, and I don't claim to account for 120k people, I would love it.

I have certain USD denominated costs, and certain local currency costs. USD costs are payments on student loans, savings (assuming I'm USD-block based in the longer term). My local currency costs are accomodation, food, entertainment; if I 'go native' these are fecking low.

I would be pretty happy to 'go native'. Accomodation, in a safe area, should be less, I love Indian food (the real kind, not a diet of lager and tikka masala, and have a reasonably strong digestive system), my in-depth knowledge of Bollywood is lacking but I'm always open to new ideas.

Of course I am not all people. In particular I am not a project manager with 20 years experience, which, I would imagine, would be the ideal target. I do have 4 years at a top financial company with project management, finance, and IT, experience, however. Yet I find myself effectively working a subsistence lifestyle: earn just enought to pay the rent in what is a very modest appartment, manage some entertainment and loan repayments, but have a disappointing level of savings after that. I'm well up for the move. While personally speaking, I think a good proportion of the graduate populations US/Canadian/UK/Australian populations with a similar level of work experience would be well up for it too - 120k is not a large number.

Where do I sign up?

karma: not just for Indians...

[quarkscat]

NAFTA encouraged many American companies to build manufacturing facilities in Mexico. The impetus was cheaper labor, no labor unions, no benefits, no cumbersome environmental regulations -- in short, all those things that the Clinton regime was supposed to address in follow-up legislation when promises were made to American trade unions.

But some companies that established Mexican facilities decided that Mexican workers still cost too much money, so they imported Chinese labor to replace the Mexicans. As the infrastructure and regulatory situation improved in the PRC, these same companies pulled up stakes and moved to China, leaving behind a lot of unemployed Mexican AND Chinese workers. (Many of these workers have since illegally immigrated to the USA through the porous southern border.)

Whatever labor gap India may currently have that impacts their offshore outsourcing business, so long as they continue to invest in their human and technical infrastructure, the situation will correct itself. OTOH, the Dubya/neo-con regime in the USA is not only not willing to invest in improving either their human or technical infrastructure, they are hard at work dismantling the remnants of the social safety net by any means possible. It is not hard to foresee that both China and India will be 1st-world world powers within 20 years, while America will have slid into the position of a feudal 3rd-world economic basket case.

Re:Are Indian workers *that* much cheaper?

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Perhaps I am confused- Aren't we (the US) giving more HIB Visas, and aren't tech leaders saying we need to import more tech workers? (I think I read this on Slashdot that Bill Gates was saying the US will have a huge shortage). So where are these workers coming from? If the US and India are going to need to import workers, who will export them? (I don't mean to speak of people as a commodity, but the words fit)I know that this is a huge world, but what country will do the exporting?
On a side note, I cancelled my satellite radio because I was so angry I called customer service, which is in India, and A: I couldn't understand the representative (and I live in NE Ohio, where there are tons of foreign born people, from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia etc and I am able to communicate with all of them, so it isn't that I have trouble understanding non-american dialects of English). I also switched banks because when I called my bank (my bank has its world headquarters in Cleveland, 20 miles from me) I got customer service in India, and couldn't understand the representative. Most of my Indian friends speak the Queen's English, which is easy for me to understand- so it seems that Indian companies are lowering their standards of hire. And no this isn't an American Centric view- if you are going to use customer service people to speak to people in another country, the people you hire ought to hbe understandable to those in that country.

Re:Business plan.

[faust2097]

That's funny, because all the people I know who are good at what they do here in the Bay Area are gainfully employed and making more money than we were in 2000 [and it's *cash* too]. Hell, I haven't worked at a company that didn't have 5+ open local programmer reqs since 2001.

The people who are still out of work 5 years later must be seriously lacking in any valuable skill other than "inflating executive egos", "blowing hot air" and "getting other people to do their work for them". Yeah, if you were a "producer", "integrator" or "chief creative officer" in '99 you're going to be driving a cab but there's always a demand for people who have good ideas and can deliver on them.

p.s. Please note that "writing some complicated text parsing code that kind of integrated with a database" isn't marketable in the valley anymore.

Re:It's a question of exchange rates

[Panaphonix]

What happens if the few nations that grow sugar cane decide to cut off the supply to certain countries?

90% of their farmers go out of business. Not going to happen. Now, a global warming-induced supply shock on the other hand...

First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
LOLLERSKATES!

Re:It's a question of exchange rates

[gnalle]

The technical people in India and other third-world countries already have a standard of living that's equal or above their counterparts in the USA and Europe. Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.

How many rupees do indian programmers earn per month? 30000?

At the moment I have a position research fellow on a university in Bangalore, and as far as I can see the indian researchers have a somewhat lower standard of living than their (northern) European colleges. But I must admit that I don't know the difference in salaries for programmers.

BTW: Bangalore is a nice place. I can only encourage slashdot readers to go there if they get the chance :)