Good news for those whose high tech and software jobs have been outsourced--though it may yet be a bit of time before things swing the other way:
formatting link
my own experience with Dell's outsourced phone help, it isn't just the productivity that is a problem. The depth of knowledge is not there, as the guy states. The clown I got finally wanted me to format my hard drive to cure a problem with a worn out CDRW.
When I went back to email help, I had a guy here in 3 days, he replaced the CDRW in about 4 minutes and all is well.
Charlie Self "Wars spring from unseen and generally insignificant causes, the first outbreak being often but an explosion of anger." Thucydides
This article is right in line with my observations on the job. The gist of it is that given the prerequisites of clearly defined requirements and an established design pattern that outsourcing can be effective.
However, those are two very big assumptions that I have yet to see on any project I've been on. I would also argue that given those requirements, you could farm out the work to recent college grads or interns just as cheaply and easily.
I used to manage two FOB Indians that were in house in our company at ridiculously low hourly rates. We dumped them when they spent two months working on a feature that any of the other developers would have screamed, "F*ck it! They don't need that feature anyway" - and have been right.
Nice to see a little sanity in the hysteria over programming jobs moving off shore. I have seen a number of articles like this recently concerning the hidden difficulties and costs in trying to manage software development overseas. I would especially be nervous about the loss of control over the intellectual property. I am sure some jobs will be lost overseas, but I believe it will be the large companies who can set up and control an overseas division, rather than contract type work.
Yikes! These were features their managers had asked for? Then they were fired because they didn't tell their managers the features were unnecessary? That doesn't sound like a problem with the programmers...
I have to disagree with you. Maybe the feaures were part of the original design but one has to look at the return on investment of the feature. Is there maybe another way to perform the same function? What is the value of the function? Is it a 'must have' or is it just one of those things what would either be nice or cool?
I guess what I am saying is somehting like "Is it worth spending that much time on it?"
Also, if this feature was so darn difficult, why didn't the programmers say something? Why did they sit there and spin their wheels for two months?
We outsourced our ERP system to an Indian firm and I must agree that they leave a lot to be desired. We work with a languge called NATURAL on the mainframe. One of the Indians, who we were told was a CMM Level 5 programmer who was experienced in NATURAL (ha!!! What a lie!!!), was told to add a field on a screen (which is called a MAP). This field was on a database file and was already defined in the program. All he needed to do was find a place for it on the MAP, include a label on the MAP. Then, to make everything work, just compile the program using the new MAP and the field will instantly appear--no 'programming' involved.
It took this guy 2 freaking weeks--working weekends, too!--to get it to work. He called us DBAs and told us the database file was screwed up. Then he said it was hsi user id. Then he said there was somehting wrong in the environment.
These guys follow a script and cannot deviate from it. They are like little robots--little confused robots. If those two guys in the original post were told this feature was needed, they just worked to make it happen come hell or high water. They do not seem to have much common sense and they certainly cannot think for themselves.
Sorry. It may seem cruel but it is the truth. Actually, it may be the management of these comapnies that force this to happen. Seems to me they can milk the clients much better if it they force their people to work on a useless feature for two months.
I beleive what it all comes down to is the ole addage of book sense vs. common sense. We all know a lot of people strictly from either side, and very few people that seem to draw from both sides. It is the ones that draw from both sides that seem to awe and amaze those that struggle with a task on a daily basis. MOST (not all) business people only look at the short term bottom line and the current metrics only draw from the book smarts (how do you quantify common sense in the accounting books or in the share price ?).
Some of the same acculades were given years ago to the Japanese. That the were supposedly eating our lunch, and the reason was because of the education system. Now you are hearing the same metrics being lauded with respect to the Indian workers. Sure they are smart, and their eductaion system pumps them out, but book smarts is not where the work gets done.
I will take a person with a basic knowledge of the problem, and lots of common sense, over a person with a in depth knowledge of the problem and very little common sense any day.
Ray K>>>I used to manage two FOB Indians that were in house in our company at
It's not a tough one for me in this instance. As noted, Dell's outsourced phone help is, to be polite, shit. You don't want to hear my full description when that twit told me to format my hard drive to fix a CDRW problem.
If being wrong is how another country is competitive, then we are truly in some bad trouble. It hasn't got a damned thing to do with government programs. It does have to do with the fact that U.S. tech people are paid about 3 times what Indian tech people are paid. But, according to the experts, they are then 6 times as productive.
Whoops. Where's the competition?
Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle
"Competition" is not defined by your single experience - it is a macro-level activity. The market is not "smart", it just seeks to be efficient. That means market-driven behavior sometimes tries new things that are dumb - like outsourcing support at the expense of customer satisfaction. But, absent goverment fiddling, the market always corrects itself, as it did in this case. You cannot legislate money or economies, they just have to work it out for themselves.
Incidently, all this braying about the evils of oursourcing, led by people like Lou Dobbs, is wildly out of context. Outsourcing has a place. People _within_ the US do it all the time. For example, many busy middle-class people have found it helpful to "outsource" houskeeping to a local service. Corporations are doing the exact same thing, except the service is not "local". But money does not understand geographic boundaries. It flows where it can be used most efficiently. Outsourcing overseas makes sense in some cases, and not others, but competitive markets will figure that out over time.
Where it makes sense, outsourcing has the effect of lowering the costs of goods and services ... which benefits consumers right here. Have you noticed, the cost of many goods is _declining_? The effective cost of large ticket items, inflation adjusted, is also declining when you consider the cost of money to buy, say, a house or car. Inflation adjusted, we pay less for gasoline than ever in history ... even considering the artificial price increases inflicted by gas taxes. There's a reason for this - businesses are increasingly productive, year over year. One way to achieve that productivity is to outsource where possible. So even when outsourcing is done to an overseas entity, it has local benefit.
I remember the hollering in the 1970s when TV and radio manufacturing was outsourced to Japan. People screamed about losing "US" jobs and how the middle-class was getting screwed, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Well, the displaced workers found jobs, and guess what, the real cost of TVs and radios went WAY down and pretty much anyone could afford them for the first time. Color TVs are now a fixture of almost every home, even for the poorest citizen. This was decidedly NOT the case in, say the 1960s. i.e., Outsourcing, over time, benefits everyone involved.
The only "trouble" we are in as a nation is that the vast majority of the Sheeple want to legistlate success, don't understand economics, and think that a job is a "right". This is cynically exploited by the Congress Critters, "News" Commentators, and other lower life forms to create the impression of impending doom - for which, of course, they have the answer if you'll just vote for them, watch their show, and so forth. No money-grubbing televangelist could every compete with this level of sliminess ...
Just for the sake of argument, why? Internal competition is great, but why do we have to compete with some country where the standard of living is 10% of ours?
Obviously it's good for that country, and for the corporate profits of the outsourcer, but I can't see where it's good for most of our citizens. And they are who our government is supposed to be for.
Nor was my experience "single" for the overwhelming majority of business users refused to buy Dell until it stopped using Indian help desks. That worked. Consumers in general don't have that kind of immediate clout, so Dell is still sticking it to us.
I don't recall say legislation was necessary. Don't recall mentioning it, in fact. I don't recall saying anything about "evils of outsourcing."
Radios? Damned near everyone I knew in the '60s had, and listened to, a radio of some sort. The driving force in the sale of radios to everyone seems to me to have been the discovery that FM was cleaner than AM and could be used over long distances, given the right technology. As far as color TV goes, until the '70s, there wasn't a whole helluva lot of use for it because many stations still broadcast in black & white. Yes, the prices came down. Yes, there was a lot of noise.
Everyone I knew in the '60s who wanted a TV set had one. Not color, but, generally, color idjit boxes were hard to find as well as afford, about like HDTV today...you don't want to know my opinion of people who will spend $5000 and up for a television set.
I don't know anyone who wants to legislate success. I do know a lot of people who think that competence should be a basis for transferring work to other countries, if it has to be transferred.
Never watched many televangelists, have you? I remember my first visual encounter with Oral Roberts, when I was just about 16. Magnificent slime. Since then, the sheen has gotten worse, the slime deeper, and the numbers incredible. TV really does draw in the idiots, both in performances and watchers.
There is always going to be an outcry when work moves. The cotton mills (read textiles) moved south many years ago. Now, they're moving from the south to places most of us never heard of a decade ago. Most companies are also getting garments manufactured overseas, a phenomenon that seemed to kick off in the '60s and early '70s with designer jeans makers realizing they could get their
100 buck a pair retail items for $4. Now, even the 25 buck a pair jeans are made overseas.
The displacement this time, though, is across more industries and deeper than I ever recall reading about it being before.
As for a job being a "right," well, why not? I recall a factory owner I knew who felt that when he expanded, which he did with great care and conservatism, all the people he hired had as much "right" to have their jobs continue as did those who were already there. And he felt that any businessman who didn't maintain the jobs he provided was a poor businessman. John did that for a great many years, but he was fortunate to be the owner of the business, without a board or a bunch of stockholders to answer to. He could plan and work for the long term. Today, that seldom happens.
Oh, yes. The jobs that John provided: he ran that place for over 40 years, without a layoff.
Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle
I agree, but I also think all of these questions should be addressed seriously in the design/architecture phase before a single line of code is written. Since the poster claimed that any other programmer would have screamed "F*ck it! They don't need that feature anyway", it is baffling how this feature made it into the design, possibly made it through several design reviews, and was assigned to a programmer by a manager. If the feature was so obviously useless, why did anyone ever work on it at all?
It is not clear from Jay's post that the programmer didn't say anything. Remember, Jay's post cited a case with an in house programmer. This guy sat in the next cubicle and wasted two months. None of my programmers could waste a week without me knowing about it, and I would expect to be given most of the blame if it went on for months.
Sorry to hear it. Believe me, I understand that you have to fire people if they can't do the things you need them to do in a timely fashion. However, as I indicated, Jay's description sounds like a bigger problem than a programmer who couldn't do the work.
My point was really about color TVs and good "hi-fi" equipment. Prior to these products being comoditized by offshore manufacturing, the prices were out of the range of the masses. Offshoring drove the costs down and almost everyone could (and did) buy this stuff. The meta-point here is just that this is one of many examples of how offshoring produces domestic benefit.
And I probably share that view. There is precious little broadcast or even delivered by cable/sat that remotely justifies a $500 TV imho, let alone one for $5000.
But that _is_ the basis for it - the market ensures that this will happen. Maybe not intially, but sooner or later, it catches up. Your Dell experience confirms this. The fact that Dell was wrong in their original assessment in the matter means that they tried something that did not work. It is not in any sense a general indictement of offshoring.
Perhaps. But tote up all the money that Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Benny Hinn, and the rest of that bunch have soaked their constiuencies out of. It likely would not come even close to what a single bad goverment policy decision costs (like the stupid steel tariffs that thankfully were recently repealed). The big difference here is that televangelists get the _willing_ contribution of their followers. Government extracts money by (the implicit threat of) force - the taxman's gun, so to speak. Government policies are not voluntary - we are forced to abide by them, at least until we can replace the current idiots in government with new ones.
And more people can afford even cheaper jeans at, say, Walmart.
Perhaps, but this is more a reflection of how interdependent economies have become. 50 years ago, economies tracked the nation-state. Now they track global behavior no matter what individual governments want to do about it. Even totalitarian states like China have come to recognize this and have increasingly chosen to adapt to market economies. >
Because for something to be a "right" it has to have some basis or some authoring agent. Something is not a "right" because I say so. Most all of us affirm that some basic rights are, well, "inalienable" - innate to being human. These include the right to be free from fraud, force, or threat.
But a job is a commerical transaction between employer and worker, entered into voluntarily. So long as both parties abide by their agreement with each other, and neither engages in fraud/force/threat, then either should be free to terminate the agreement at-will. Many of the people who are opposed to outsourcing would vehemently oppose an arrangement that requires the employee to stay with a particular employer (the inverse situation). If a job is a "right", then why does the employer not have a corresponding "right" to a stable workforce that gets paid whatever the employer feels is proper? Rights granted to one side of the arrangement but not to the other make for an iniquitous arrangement that is fundamentally unfair.
I once worked for a place like that. On the surface, it was a very nice arrangement. But it also had terrible downsides. There was very little upward mobility in the company because turnover was very low. Incompentence was never flushed out of the system. The company struggled whenever international economic and monetary conditions were not in its favor. I left after 2 (happy) years and did far better in companies where layoffs were the possible.
No employer enjoys laying off people, but it is fundamentally unfair to the shareholders of a company to diminish their return on investment to maintain full local employment at all costs. The employee has a right to be treated honestly, but not to a job no matter what. By contrast, the stockholder has a right to also be treated honestly, and that means maximizing shareholder value. There is a fair debate to be had about whether or not outsourcing maximizes that value, and this will likely vary from situation to situation.
Say a company makes the right choice to outsource - that is, they improve their profits _sustainably_ by doing so. Who benefits? The stockholders because their stock is worth more. The remaining employees because their jobs are more secure in a healthier company. The executives because their variable compensation increases as the company does better. AND ... all their customers because the goods/services of that company are either better or cheaper.
You CANNOT legislate against this. Goverment cannot stop it. All they can do is slow it down. Economic reality always catches up with legislative silliness. Competition is global and money flows where it is most efficiently used. It makes no difference what the unions, the politicians, or the various other naysayers think. This is how it actually works.
We have to compete with countries with a standard of living 10% of ours because they ARE competing with us whether we like it or not. If we try to shut them out by legislating against outsourcing, one of our foreign competitors will take advantage of this artificial imbalance. For example, suppose we made it illegal to outsource, and all computer parts for machines sold in the US HAD to be made here. PC prices would go up _for us_ but no one else. Western Europe would promptly use outsourced manufacturing to build their PCs and ever company that uses computers in the US would be at a significant cost disadvantage.
Now, how many people would you think build computer components in the US in such a situation? Let's be generous and say that because of the ban on outsourcing, 10 Million jobs were "created" here in the US. That means the other 290 Million of us who want to buy and use PCs have to pay more to protect them. It just won't work. It is hideously inefficient (from a monetary point of view). Free markets are not always nice, but they are always efficient. Attempting to artificially interfere with them causes nothing but economic ruin, _for the country trying to protect itself_.
Problem is, they're STILL doing it, so the market hasn't made its demands clear.
Didja ever buy clothing at Walmart's? Two wearings and they're great for shop rags.
What does that MEAN? Basis? Authoring agent?
Not so. That's your opinion, and it is the way things operated until unions started up in the late 19th century. The model you present was in place through the Great Depression, and only changed with the coming of WWII. It was iniquitous.
Not the case with this company. Incompetence didn't last long around John.
I'd guess any company struggles when monetary policy isn't in its favor, though I'm not sure how a domestic chair manufacturer would struggle. As for upward mobility, well, you could be certain you weren't going to be president of the company, but otherwise, you could work your way up pretty decently. I know of a number of people there making a good many dollars more than they had ever anticipated being able to make with just a high school education. Are they adminstrators? Nah. Foremen and forewomen and shift supervisors and whatnot.
But, as one guy said something over a decade ago, "Where else can I go and make
45,000 a year with my education?" Without overtime.
That said, there is always a certain amount of turnover in a manufacturing situation, because the work can grind you down physically, if for no other reason. Expansion helps, and this particular company continued to expand. IIRC, John had 50 employees when he took over in 1959. When he had to sell the company (age catches up with all of us) he had over 350 employees. That was slow, steady growth, and done deliberately that way.
But it's not impossible to run the company so that the ups aren't as extreme and the downs are lessened and lay-offs are simply not a part of the operating procedure.
No one has a right to a job no matter what. Competence is the major feature under discussion here, and one would expect that to be displayed on a daily basis, in a reasonably energetic manner.
Charlie Self "I am confident that the Republican Party will pick a nominee that will beat Bill Clinton." Dan Quayle
I couldn't begin to tell how scary outsourcing is. I have seen hundreds of people with Oracle, Java, BEA, experience lose their jobs. Because of the position I'm in I travel to all of the big companies and work with CIO, Directors and EVERY company is outsourcing or is looking at it. Lou Dobbs is a hero to me because he is standing up to this cancer. It is not just IT jobs. It is friggin scary because they are good paying jobs.
I do not want to stereotype Indian, Pakistani's or whoever is involved in Outsourcing. However, they do project themselves as god's gift to computers. Don't get me wrong, there are thousands of brilliant Indians I have worked with over the past 10 years or so. But I have also run into some overbilled consultants who don't know how to code their way out of paper bag or tune a database to save their life. They have a huge network of friends and are very close and call, email, IM each other when they run into problems. You have to admire their determination and their intuitiveness.
If anyone has ever worked in IT Consulting they will tell you that many of the consulting companies oversell the skills in order to get the consultant billable. The same thing happens in outsourcing.
This is the part that only exists in text books and is not proven in reality. Companies that outsource or otherwise focus on the balance sheet almost universally take that focus to the exclusion of any other employee related thinking. The entire focus in corporate America and beyond into the global economy today is to do more with less. Outsourceing is not something that is done in a vaccum - it's not a stand alone process that the company does to buck up profitability so they can afford to support the cost of employees and the cost of doing business. It's a part of an enterprise process that is all about reducing cost and doing more with less. At first blush this may look like the model of efficeincy, but in a world of human beings, efficeincy has to balanced against other economic and social factors - specifically today, keeping a workforce employed at sufficient levels to remain in the consumer chain.
Executive variable compensation increases as merit based objectives are met. This is not necessarily coupled with the company doing better. Doing better is a very loose term. Cutting headcount by 50% can be defined as doing better - it does not in any way suggest or guarantee a better performance by the company. Cheaper labor does not correlate to better or cheaper goods and services. That again is text book, but reality does not bear it out. How much has the cost of a car dropped over the past 20 years as the automakers have implemented more and more robotic technology? Yes, American cars have gotten better but that comparison owes to the crap that the automotive industry was able to get away with for a decade before the Japanese cars invaded their turf. That decade was an anomoly if you look back over the entire history of the American automobile.
True. Nor should we entice our government to get any more involved in our lives than absolutely necessary. They have a scary way of screwing up everything they touch.
You've apparently *never* bought clothing at Wal-Mart, then. That's where a
*lot* of my clothing comes from, and it lasts for years.
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