Indian Software Firm Outsourcing Jobs To US

phobos13013 writes "NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy, even from developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnate or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today."

Why is this so surprising?

[Judg3]

Seriously, why is this such a surprise to everyone? When you going a global economy, it's like opening a flood gate; initially there's a huge rush out (everyone outsources), then some smaller waves back (people demand more insourced jobs), then - well, then it all balances out (US Company A outsources to India, Indian Company B outsources to the US, Mexican company G outsources to the UK, UK Company L outsources to Oz, etc etc).

In fact, isn't this exactly what everyone was telling us would eventually happen 8 years ago? So shouldn't we have been expecting it?

Re:Theories vs Facts

[JeanBaptiste]

Its just a THEORY... just like EVOLUTION and GRAVITY

Market theory is well tested and proven...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I love this game!

[Anonymous Coward]

U.S. companies outsourcing jobs to foreign countries: bad for the U.S.

Foreign companies outsourcing jobs to the U.S.: bad for the U.S.

Of course it doesn't actually mean what the editor's comments say. All we can really conclude is that the Indian company found labor more accessible and/or cheaper in the USA. Or has some totally irrational motive, for all we know.

Doesn't say anything about labor prices either. If it was outsourced because they couldn't find enough cheap labor in India, that's *good* news for wages.

Misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

"Similarly, salaries of IT professionals world-wide are projected to stagnant or possibly fall due to the large pool of qualified applicants in the market today."

TFA only mentions the Indian tech industry. I'm sure you could make a case for a world-wide effect from this, but the article doesn't mention it.

Re:qualified applicants?

[cromar]

Qualified to be payed 20k more than me while knowing less than me after being in the field longer than me and qualified to get promoted to another dept with higher salary. Qualified to write really shitty code I have to maintain^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hrewrite. (And, apparently, qualified to teach a C class once or twice - shudder.)

See, the word isn't misused, it's that the qualifications have little to do with skill or... anything besides politics and ignorance.

It's not WHERE you outsource to

[blueZ3]

it's communication with co-workers and the difficulties that come integrating remote teams.

My brother-in-law is a developer for a big fininacial services operation, and they attempted to outsource a project. Eventually management gave up and brought the work back to the home office, as the quality of code coming out of the outsourcing house was crap. Basically, a lot of the code they sent back was buggy or hard to integrate and had to be debugged and redone by the on-site developers.

But I'm not sure that that's an indication that the coders were poor (though that's a possibility). Basically, you're asking folks to communicate across both a language barrier and time difference that just makes it really difficult to do so with good results. Not impossible, perhaps, but difficult. Considering the difficulties that folk speaking the same primary language and sitting in the same room have communicating, I think it's safe to say very difficult.

Moving your "onshore outsourcing" to Georgia or wherever might address language issues, but the problems that come with integrating a remote team aren't going to go away.

They always have to find negative news

[kuriharu]

Although, it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy, even from developing and underdeveloped regions of the world.

First, the bad news was that jobs were being outsourced. Now the bad news is that the jobs are coming back to the US.

Re:Americans are very expensive

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

The last I heard, the total cost of compliance with our income tax, personal and corporate, is about $286B a year in lost productivity, added bureaucracy, etc. It's ironic, but ending the variable-rate (I'm loathe to call such a stupid system "progressive") income tax in the United States alone, and replacing it with a very simple flat tax would constitute a sweeping tax cut just in terms of the resources freed up from the bullshit compliance efforts.

I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, but I'd like to know if you've been, uh, shall we say "smoking something" since you seem to imply that such cost savings would go towards creating more jobs in the USA. My experience has been that the more money companies save, the more of it that goes into the pockets of upper executives.

It doesn't help too that many Americans view things like health care as their God-given right. Many people don't want to even pay for their own health care. They foist those costs onto their employers, and the result is that we have an auto industry that is collapsing because it has to cut corners on the quality of its cars to price them at the same rate that Japanese companies, which don't lavish effectively unlimited health care coverage, onto their employees. GM, for example, has about $1,500/car in expenses just for health care that it has to pay for its union workers, many of whom haven't gotten the memo: most corporate employees don't get these benefits, why should they?

Now your post veers into the irrational. You take the single most extreme example you can of a totally atypical industry and act like it's typical. Yes, we know that the American automobile industry is on a path of self-destruction thanks the autoworkers union. Why pull this extreme example out and go on about it when you even admit "most corporate employees don't get these benefits"? Indeed. Everyone I know has to pay something for their own health care, even if some of the cost is paid by their employer. In fact, the cost me and my co-workers pay goes up every year.

Deregulation, a simplified tax code and making people pay their own way are the only things that will make America able to compete with these leaner, cheaper countries.

Not only am I skeptical that this will work (deregulation doesn't solve every problem, it sometimes leads to worse situations - have you forgotten the California energy deregulation debacle of a few years ago?), again, my experience has been that the more money American companies save, the more money that goes to the upper executives. I would not expect such a plan to result in more jobs. In fact, it might actually result in less because the executives would have even more money to keep to themselves.
Never underestimate the greed of business executives or their ability to safeguard or even increase their own perks.

Re:Theories vs Facts

[zeromorph]

You must be joking. Models in market theory are mostly oversimplified. Often to the extent that the results are useless for practical purposes.

Why do you think investments in stock markets are still a risky business? Because all the investors do not listen to the academia? If models and theory in physics would be that unreliable nuclear power plants would regularly go boom!

Non news

[suv4x4]

NPR is reporting Indian software maker Wipro is outsourcing positions to a development office opening in Atlanta, Georgia. Although, it sounds good for US job growth, the implication is that firms outside the US appear to be dominating more and more in the global economy

So let me get this straight, a single company was found to open a US office, and the implication is that firms outside the US dominate the global economy ??

NPR should adjust the weight they contribute to a single anecdotal case I believe.

In a global economy you'll see Indian companies opening US offices and US companies opening offices in India. You'll see Japanese companies having US devisions that outgrow the Japanese ones and basically everything.

Borders don't mean jack anymore. You pick a place that has the people you want, the market you want and the taxes you want, and go for it.

It reminds me of the dumb things people say

[tkrotchko]

Back in the 80's when Japanese cars made real inroads in the U.S. car market, people would comment that Japanese cars were built better and more reliable than their American counterparts. Inevitably this would lead to talk of "fat lazy union workers", and would conjure up pictures of some fat slob with a cigarette dangling from his mouth only putting in the occasional bolt if the mood struck him.

The reality is that quality in cars is engineered from the earliest drawings. It goes into the manufacturing process to ensure there is only one correct way to assemble something. It comes about because management is committed to a quality product. Not just the words, but they take concrete steps to ensure what goes out the door is the best that they know how to build.

So the Japanese really were building better cars simply because the management of the company committed to building good cars. The proof was when Honda and Toyota moved manufacturing to the United States with no loss in quality. Nobody cares if their Accord is built in the U.S. or Japan, the cars are simply quality products.

To this day, the myth of the lazy American work persists, I assume partly because American cars for the most part still fall below Japanese standards. Now somehow the Union makes line workers stupid and lazy, which is ridiculous.

A large part of the reason unions arose in heavy industries was because management treated workers so poorly. That culture still exists in American automobile plants and leads to workers understand that the company will cheat them blind without a good contract. So the company treats people poorly and suffers the consequence in the factory.

It's like you punch somebody in the face, and then complain when they punch you back.

Re:I love this game!

[GnarlyDoug]

Pretty much. As funny as it sounds, both are bad, at least if they represent large scale trends. Option one means America's labor force is not competitive. The other means that the other countries now have first world economies, infrastructure, and most importantly that the dollar has become so weak that American labor is now cheap.

This is not a case of saying all news is bad news. These two items do not represent the only options. Both are flip-sides of America now being a bad place for capital investment. You can thank our massive beucracies, regulations, byzantine and high tax codes, and increasing Statist tendancies for that. Most of the capital investment is being put into foreign markets now because it can be grown more rapidly due to freer markets and less taxation. The engines of the global economy are less and less centered in the U.S. We are looking at becoming a low-wage work farm for the new economic powerhouses building up around the world. We'll all have jobs, just not good ones.

Re:We need more Engineers!

[supremebob]

Companies like IBM and Microsoft say that they need more programmers and engineers all the time. In reality, they need more CHEAP programmers and engineers from China and India. Paying for the experienced programmers and engineers already out there aren't as good for the profit margins.

Re:Which way is that pool exactly?

[wiggles]

The situation you speak of is the tendency of employers to only hire people with the exact skill set they're looking for. Much of the time, the people with those skills just don't exist. The solution is not to reject all applicants, but to hire someone who, though they may not possess the specific skills the employer needs, can come up to speed on the relevant technology.

The problem is also one of education. Employers are looking for Java programmers with experience in J2EE, SOAP, XML, SOA, OMGWTFBBQ, and whatever other acronyms du jour they're working with. Universities teach data structures, systems design, and object oriented programming. Obviously, there is a *huge* disconnect between what employers want and what universities produce. In order to solve this (un)employment dilemma, somebody's got to give. Either universities are going to have to start teaching students how to code to a specific standard instead of general concepts, or employers are going to have to pay to train new employees to do the specific jobs they need instead of expecting to find a rhombus shaped peg in a job market full of round ones.

I'm a consultant and he's right! - Mod parent up!

[ObiWonKanblomi]

These people will be the business analysts and the technical architects that feed the people off shore. While they say that these companies are creating jobs in the United States, the truth is that most of them will be landed resources also from India under H1B visa.

Of all the points I have seen on this thread, the above quote is the most legitimate. I'm a business IT consultant with a focus on custom application development. I'm one of those "technical architects" he speaks of. Our local teams are rather small with our full-time consultants to build the foundation of the applications and we then tap into a pool of contractors to do fill in the implementations as provided by the design me, my fellow consultants and business analysts construct.

One of the things the parent does overlook is that aside from experience and technical skill, clear communication skills are essential. I remember being told back in college in the late 90s I would need strong communication skills (granted English is my first language). I am not referring to only plain English but also an understanding of "International" English (to speak to our Indian associates and any other people who aren't familiar with localized metaphors) and business-speak. In addition, it takes a level of being assertive and proactive.

Re:Hey, its not like....

[bnenning]

US manufacturing output is at a record high [uschina.org] (PDF). It's true that fewer Americans are employed in the manufacturing sector, because efficiency has increased so much. This is good, for the same reasons that free software is good.

Re:I love this game!

[TopShelf]

The other, more upscale angle, is that they need local US resources to work directly with clients to help develop specifications and drive the implementation of stuff developed offshore...

In the Free World, if does not matter.

[Erris]

In the free software world, one owner is as good as any other. If the software is free, it has no owners and the company location does not matter. There is nothing to own but your effort, so there is nothing to "give away".

Foreign owners hiring US workers is the ultimate irony for jingoistic tools who sold their freedom to M$ and others to benefit the "US information economy". If you want US dominance based on merit, you should advocate free software. If you want US dominance at any cost, your persuit of non free software was a mistake. Either way, non free was a loser. Laws like the DMCA have harmed the ability of the US to compete in the world market. They benefited those who grew outside their influence and they will be used by them now that they are big enough. Justice only comes from freedom. Benefits gained outside of freedom don't last long and restrictions will always be turned against you.

thankfully, we still have a great service industry, lots of restaurants, etc. That'll keep us safe in times of financial/world troubles.

That's sarcasm, I hope. Burger flipping will not tide us through the next depression. If the US is to remain wealthy, it needs an industrial base and things to trade things that people want. At the rate things are going, China and India will have superior weapons to match their overwhelming manpower and we won't even be able to bully things people won't trade freely. That would not be so bad if China was a free country, but it's not and our inability to defend ourselves will be the end of our freedom.

Some words of Caution Please

[Anonymous Coward]

A Number of Indian Companies have opened offices in the UK. However most of the staff are Indians and are paid Indian Salaries
Very few 'local' are employed by them. Then they go in and offer really low prices to outsource you IT Management & Development.
A few staff are here but the rest are back home in India.
One organisation I was involved with was within 3 hours of being closed down (ie stopped from trading) due to total incompetance and lack of skills by the Indian Company who was managing their IT Systems.
Also beware the 'learning on the job' of these companies. Another company sent some developers over here to 'help' me with a major project in London. They had zero no prior skills in this technology area and after a whole year of training by me they were still unable to develop projects for themselves from scratch.
This was the same company who 'won' the IT management contract for a Bank in the Middle East. After 3 months they were thrown out as the entire ATM and Credit Card network was down for the EDE holiday period.
Don't get me wrog, there are lots of very skilled Indian IT workers but in the main, they don't work for these companies very long after graduation. I am co owner of an IT company. The other owner is a very skilled guy from Chennai. H is now a British Citizen and so are his wife and kids. He hates these 'Indian' companies as much as I do. At least he can swear at them in Hindi etc.

Re:Hey, its not like....

[Colin Smith]

We freely sent off our manufacturing, then our IT, and a good bit of agriculture. But thankfully, we still have a great service industry, lots of restaurants, etc. That'll keep us safe in times of financial/world troubles.

Actually. It's pretty much all caused by the petrodollar.

You're too expensive because the petrodollar tends to deflate. There's high demand for dollars to pay for oil, the world over. It makes Americans expensive.

The current world troubles are caused by the US interest in preventing the dollar from losing it's reserve status. Iraq, Iran, Saudi etc.

The current financial problems are caused by the dollar being a debt based currency. Debt increases exponentially, it requires exponentially increasing economy and additional loans to service the debt and continue growing. So liquidity is piled in exponentially, the debts grow accordingly. Eventually you have to get even those unable to pay involved, in order to continue the growth. The crash is inevitable, nothing can grow exponentially forever. However the longer the growth period the bigger the bump. In the past few years the central banks have piled in cash in order to glide over some of the smaller bumps, basically just lining up for a bigger crash later. It's more of an issue right now because the dollar has become less desirable internationally forcing up interest rates.

Re:Hey, its not like....

[megaditto]

To play devil's advocate here, not everybody benefits from improved efficiency. Old, undereducated, less intelligent people cannot easily retrain. This 'they-stole-my-jerb' croud still gets to vote however, so something must be done about their issues.

Sure, some are able to put away their pickaxe or lathe, take up Game Theory or Biochemistry books and courses, and grow into their new high-tech workplace. The others (in America) were better off before globalization moved in.

whatever happened to training?

[SABME]

I've seen a few comments from employers in this thread who bemoan the lack of experienced people in the job market.

Whatever happened to hiring someone who was inexperienced, but still sharp, and developing that person? This is how I got my start in 1990: someone who had seen my work took a chance that I'd do a good job supporting the company's LAN, even though I lacked experience, and hired me. With the exception of a few months during the bust years of 2001 and 2002, I've been working in the field ever since (in a variety of different positions, most recently QA testing).

One thing I noticed around the turn of the century was that there weren't any 20-somethings at work anymore. At age 34, I was far and away the youngest person at work. Where will the next generation of experienced old hands come from if not from within? At some point, all the experienced people will be too old to work any more, and then what will we do? The worst part of outsourcing is that we're outsourcing not just today's jobs, but the future of our talent pool.

((Let me cynically answer my first question ("Whatever happened to hiring ..."): regular corporate layoffs. To most managers, we grunts are nothing more than numbers in the "Expenses" column of a spreadsheet.))

Re:Hey, its not like....

[rocker_wannabe]

Am I supposed to believe a document from an organization that is interested in promoting moving manufacturing to China or the fact that I can't find very many products with "Made in the USA" on them. The manufacturing organizations that I have visited employ mostly Hispanics that don't speak English very well. This leads me to believe that many of them are illegal immigrants that are subsidized by our federal government.

I don't believe the "increased efficiency" for a minute. What I have witnessed is an actual DECREASE in efficiency that has been made up for by using low-wage immigrants. If companies pay half as much for labor (including benefits) they are ahead of the game as long as the employee doesn't take more than twice as long.

Re:Swedish code is still legible

[Surt]

That's building a tool (understanding scope and type) into your coding style. Always a bad idea. Build the tools around your coding style, and keep your style as elegant and simple as possible.

As a relatively trivial example of where this goes wrong, refactoring such a variable can trivially result in the code lying to you about the type and scope of a variable. If you instead have a tool that will tell you the scope and type based on inspection, it will never lie to you.

Hungarian notation was a bad bad idea created by someone with a poor understanding of and lacking insight into the problem they were trying to solve.

Re:It reminds me of the dumb things people say

[ceoyoyo]

Which tends to reinforce his point that if you treat your workers well you don't need to worry about unions.

Stated differently, satisfied workers make good products, efficiently.

Re:We need more Engineers!

[homer_s]

In reality, they need more CHEAP programmers and engineers from China and India. Paying for the experienced programmers and engineers already out there aren't as good for the profit margins.

What is wrong with that?
I also want cheap cars, cheap clothes, cheap shoes, etc. I assume a majority of consumers are like me. Why shouldn't companies act in the same way?
If in the quest for cheap goods, I buy crappy ones, then I suffer. Similarly, if MS and IBM hire crappy coders just because they are cheap (something I know is true, at least in IBM's case), well then they will suffer.

I don't understand why it is ok for Joe Sixpack to look for the cheapest product and not ok for EvilMegaCorp to do the same.

Hungarian Notation

[hotsauce]

Oh jeeze, not again. [slashdot.org]

Re:Unqualified Tech People

[Anonymous Coward]

From your spelling and your misconfigured vt100 caret codes I assumed you were a foreigner lamenting about Americans being overpaid. My apologies.
If there is no difference, why pay more?

Re:Hey, its not like....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because going into debt every decacde to retrain for a new career, just because your government condones giving away jobs to the cheapest bidder overseas is a brilliant idea.

By the way, I'm all for shipping the jobs to the cheapest employee around the globe... just as soon as I'm able to realistically buy milk at Chinese prices and rent my apartment at Indian rental rates. After all, how am I supposed to compete when I am forced by the country I live in to require a certain level of expenses for the cost of living?

Re:Swedish code is still legible

[S.O.B.]

Linus also said:

Encoding the type of a function into the name (so-called Hungarian notation) is brain damaged - the compiler knows the types anyway and can check those, and it only confuses the programmer.

Re:Swedish code is still legible

[JimDaGeek]

Seriously, Hungarian notation sucks. I hated doing MS C programming with all the Hungarian crap.

Using crap like iplnvldakljdorSFName is just stupid (yes, I exaggerated that, but you get the point).

I use and like simple constructs. If it is a reference type object, I use a c for the class, cEmployee. Then during instantiation I just use whatever. If I want to be extra anal, I will use on o for the instantiated object name:

cEmployee oEmp = new cEmployee(foo);
oEmp.Name = "Bush";

Honestly, Hungarian notation is just crap and is way outdated. I use simple notations. If it is an integer, I use i, iNumEmps. If it is a long I use l, lNumEmps. If it is a string object, I use s, sMyName. If it is any other object, well that is why and good IDE will list the type of the variable if you just hover for a second or so. I would rather see code that has a variable oFooBar and use "intellisense" to really see info about that object than to have a bunch of stupid prefixes to try to tell me about an object.

You have got it wrong.

[holygoat]

You're avoiding all of the dubious benefits of Hungarian notation -- capturing semantic information that isn't provided by your environment -- whilst hitting its main problem head-on.

What happens if you change the type of iNumEmps to long, or long long? You'd better hope you remember to change all of the relevant variable names throughout your code.

What you do offers you no benefits, but increases your maintenance burden. Stop doing it.

Re:Hungarian Notation

[IainMH]

Joel is opinionated. But he generally backs up his opinions with at least some argument.

I wouldn't trust anyone who says "I don't want to write why he's wrong down". Esp. 'beginners'. Whatever you may think of him or what he says he's been doing this a long time. Most of the time what he says is at least worth listening to. What you do with that information from there is up to you.

Typing is easy. Shaping an effective retort is not.

Prove me wrong. Reply with five or more things that he's so obviously wrong about and why.