Via Brothers Judd blog, we discover that India is now outsourcing jobs.
Thousands of Indians report to Infosys Technologies’ campus here to learn the finer points of programming. Lately, though, packs of foreigners have been roaming the manicured lawns, too.
Many of them are recent American college graduates, and some have even turned down job offers from coveted employers like Google. Instead, they accepted a novel assignment from Infosys, the Indian technology giant: fly here for six months of training, then return home to work in the company’s American back offices.
India is outsourcing outsourcing.
I take India outsourcing personally, since bringing in cheap, and frequently unqualified or incompetent has squeezed American computer programmers, including the one I love best. I've also watched as outsourcing jobs to India has flattened pay here in the U.S. Ten years ago, a $10 an hour job was pretty good and required some skills. Now employers expect more skills, better education, and more work from employees still only making $10 an hour. And it's discouraging if you are making $10 an hour for a skilled job when flipping hamburgers is only $2 an hour less.
But now it seems India has turned the tables and is outsourcing its own jobs around the globe, including the United States.
Wipro, another Indian technology services company, has outsourcing offices in Canada, China, Portugal, Romania and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.
And last month, Wipro said it was opening a software development center in Atlanta that would hire 500 programmers in three years.
In a poetic reflection of outsourcing’s new face, Wipro’s chairman, Azim Premji, told Wall Street analysts this year that he was considering hubs in Idaho and Virginia, in addition to Georgia, to take advantage of American “states which are less developed.” (India’s per capita income is less than $1,000 a year.)
For its part, Infosys is building a whole archipelago of back offices — in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Thailand and China, as well as low-cost regions of the United States.
Nice to know you cost employers so little that the Indians are shipping jobs to you. What's wrong with that picture?
In one project, an American bank wanted a computer system to handle a loan program for Hispanic customers. The system had to work in Spanish. It also had to take into account variables particular to Hispanic clients: many, for instance, remit money to families abroad, which can affect their bank balances. The bank thought a Mexican team would have the right language skills and grasp of cultural nuances.
But instead of going to a Mexican vendor, or to an American vendor with Mexican operations, the bank retained three dozen engineers at Infosys, which had recently opened shop in Monterrey, Mexico.
Such is the new outsourcing: A company in the United States pays an Indian vendor 7,000 miles away to supply it with Mexican engineers working 150 miles south of the United States border.
So remember: outsourcing isn't necessarily to people on the other side of the globe who don't sound like they're speaking English. It could be in Atlanta or Idaho. Could Texas be next?
|