Boise-based company going to Bombay?

rayb · Hot Air Balloon

Boise-based company going to Bombay?

Cat Herder · Understander of unimportant things

It's all about the money. And, even though I work for one of the top dog IT firms worldwide, if our government put tarrifs in place to disincent off-shoring our high tech jobs (be it IT or IT related manufacturing), then the companies will find it more cost effective to keep it all domestic.

Execs who talk like this and complain that the government doesn't do anything to incent them to stay are only perpetuating the lie... because the government has taken such a laize fair (sic) approach to this sort of stuff over the past four or five decades. They have been given a free hand to operate under light restrictions, but now they want to have corporate welfare on top to "keep" stuff domestic.

I don't get why business execs don't seem to get it, honestly... there are long term consequences for short term, knee-jerk management decisions. rolleyes

arbilad · Head Chef

I've even led a team of off shore workers (conference calls at 10pm are fun!). There are serious drawbacks to offshoring work.
Besides, the spin doctoring on the CEO's statement reminds me of a Monty Python skit where a bunch of poets are hanging around with the king. They say the most insulting things, then blame one of the other poets. For instance, one of them would say something like "Your majesty is a stream of bat's piss". Then the poet who was accused of saying it would spin doctor it into something like "Your majesty shines out like a shaft of gold, when all around is dark."
This statement and the spin doctoring remind me of that skit because there is little good to say about the CEO's statement, but they do their best to make it sound innocent.

rayb · Hot Air Balloon

Is there any truth to what the guy says? Aren't there serious advantages to doing all your business in a third world country?

arbilad · Head Chef

There are advantages to hiring people over there, sure. But there are also disadvantages. You have to weigh them to see if it makes sense for you. For instance, with one offshore team I worked with their work was consistently awful and unusable, but they weren't local so it was hard to get them motivated. I've heard of other people with results like that - they can't use what they get from offshore workers.
Of course, there are also some very good workers. But even then you have the communication problems. And I'm not just talking language. Many of them speak English very well considering that it is not their native language. But if there is a miscommunication, you have to wait until the next day to resolve it. If you have a miscommunication with a local person, they can walk over to your cube, or at the worst, call you. You then get the miscommunication resolved quickly.
If the offshore people are using a US server for their work, then they can lose an entire workday if the server goes down just because noone will be in to fix it until the next day.
Of course, I'm thinking IT. But I'm sure that there are issues with offshore factory workers as well.

salesortonscom · Wise and Revered Master

I've called some of those India call centers and was suprised at how good their english was. It was the tip off that I was actually talking to someone in India because no one I have spoke to in a U.S. call center sounds that good. I've had to talk to some people at the U.S. call centers who I could barely understand because, to be frank, they spoke ebonics. For the most part my experiences have been good when dealing with call centers in India. India has a younger class of workers that tend to be well educated, speak english well, and are hardworking. While it is sad to see these jobs go overseas it is hard to fault a company when they can save so much money. It is also good for India as they have developed a whole new middle class and have begun fixing and upgrading their own country as a result. India is set to be a major economic powerhouse down the road. I would rather see them do well than the Chinese. The Indians don't have nukes pointed at me.

arbilad · Head Chef

Some of their English is very bad. It depends on their training. Their training is better now than it was. Many customers were verbally abusing indian call center workers when they could detect an accent.
But in my industry, that's not what I'm talking about as much. The people I dealt with had put a lot of effort into understanding English. But knowing a good basic vocabulary or even having no accent is not the same as fluently speaking English. Idiomatic English is very hard to grasp, and so we had to be careful to avoid it like the plague

If we used an idiom they didn't understand, frequently it would be the next day before we could correct the problem.
One thing I learned is that time zones in India are figured on the half hour. The place I was calling in India, if I remember correctly, was 11.5 hours ahead of where I live.
All I guess I'm saying is that offshoring a job isn't necessarily a slam dunk savings. I've known companies to bring jobs back on shore after they couldn't save money offshore.
Of course, some of them save tons of money. There are many factors involved.

rayb · Hot Air Balloon

i would think a CEO would not be overly convinced by "quality of work" type arguments, mostly because it's all relative. If you've got the right processes in place (at least in CEOwonderland) anyone can do the job... it's really about price and productivity and things like that... quality is just a variable in that equation. If an American worker can make 12 skateboards in an hour, and only 1 is defective, but the American worker costs the company 50 dollars an hour in benefits and cost of rent, and materials, etc, while they can hire 2000 Elbonians and though all of them combined make 11 quality skateboards and you have to throw away 12,000 skateboards because their workers are really really bad at creating a quality product, yet the costs for the materials are cheaper in this place and the workers are practically free... they'll hire 2000, create a lot of waste and will give the American workers the axe.

--Ray

-- Edited by rayb at 18:52, 2007-04-26

arbilad · Head Chef

rayb wrote:

i would think a CEO would not be overly convinced by "quality of work" type arguments, mostly because it's all relative. If you've got the right processes in place (at least in CEOwonderland) anyone can do the job... it's really about price and productivity and things like that... quality is just a variable in that equation. If an American worker can make 12 skateboards in an hour, and only 1 is defective, but the American worker costs the company 50 dollars an hour in benefits and cost of rent, and materials, etc, while they can hire 2000 Elbonians and though all of them combined make 11 quality skateboards and you have to throw away 12,000 skateboards because their workers are really really bad at creating a quality product, yet the costs for the materials are cheaper in this place and the workers are practically free... they'll hire 2000, create a lot of waste and will give the American workers the axe.

--Ray

-- Edited by rayb at 18:52, 2007-04-26

Ah, but when you have no product to sell because the Elbonian programmers consistently miss deadlines and what they wrote wouldn't even compile, quality becomes an issue. And I have seen that exact situation.
Note, I am not saying that Elbonians are worse than American workers. In many cases they are just as well educated. But it is a fact of human nature that when the boss is thousands of miles away, it is tempting to take advantage of the situation.