[ale] An Indian perspective on Indian outsourcing

[Vaidhy Mayilrangam]

I have kept away from the outsourcing threads till now.. 

As a person who worked in US and then moved back to India, I consider
myself having a fair idea as to how the market is on both sides. 

I have seen people complaining about how elite they are, how much they
invested in their programming careers and all of it is now gone. 99% of
what gets outsourced is either a maintenance project or YABS (Yet
Another Billing System). IMHO, these do not require any great skill,
simply grunt work.

Further, not all work gets done offshore. There is quite a bit of stuff
that needs to get done before coding can start, a all the way from
pre-sales till design. After the coding is done, there is quite a bit of
work involved in implementation and some crazy thing called account
management. 

There are two big things I can see as to what comes after coding...

Assume outsourcing is going to happen and fill in the gaps.. It is
called value-added reselling and works very well. Getting a H1-B and
getting their employees to US is neither cheap nor easy. They do it
because it is cost effective for Indian companies. A decent pay for H1-B
is in the range of 60 - 75K. IT folks in US can sell their services to
Indian companies at a comparable rate and get gainfully employed. Yes,
it requires that you understand the culture on the other side,
understand the problems on the other side and be willing to work with
the team.

HP has consultants who get projects, send it to India for execution and
front-end at the customer place. I do not see why this cannot be done by
others too..

The other option is to be the customer yourself. After all, you
understand the business needs better than anyone else outside the
country. Find a untapped market, have a marketable idea, get an offshore
company execute it while you concentrate on marketing and sales. Why
offshore company? Simply because it will allow your seed money to go
much longer.

I am pretty sure everyone knows what comes after information..
Specialized information or knowledge. It is such a blatant lie to say
people went from farming to industrialization to information and we are
struck..

To take an analogy with medical profession, you had witch doctors who
become unschooled doctors who became educated in medicine to become
surgeons who became specialists and now ultra-specialists. Is the
profession stopped now? There is still so much we do not know and it
keeps on growing...I do not see why this would not work for IT industry
as well. There are still so many domains that people can master. 

After all, with software, the utility is only limited by imagination...


Obviously, I might be biased and take everything with a big rock of
salt..



-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of
Geoffrey
Sent: Friday, January 30, 2004 4:36 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Indian outsourcing


Stephen Touset wrote:

> I think what's unclear here is that we're both justified in our
beliefs.
> I'm seeing it from a completely utilitarian perspective, in that some
> people may be hurt, while there's an overall improvement, and you're
> seeing it from the paradigm of a man who needs to care for his family.
> Neither one of us is wrong--we simply have different priorities.

BUT, you don't understand the issues of 'caring for a family' unless you

have one.  After my daughter was born, I told my Mother, "you don't know

how much your parents love you until you have your own child."  I would 
give my life for my daughter, and there's very few people who can say 
that about anyone that is not their child. (if any)

Someone else noted having done the 'sleeping in a car' thing.  I can 
tell you it would be very easy for me to find myself reducing my current

status of living to such a state in order to maintain IF it was just me.

  I could not fathom doing so with a family.  I can't even imagine the 
pain of telling my daughter she can't go to college because Daddy 
doesn't have the money.

Along with that, there are some of us who have other vested issues.  For

example, I personally have over 15 years in this business.  My education

is in this field.  My previous employer invested large sums of money to 
get me to that point.  And finally, I really enjoy this business.  It's 
real easy then to say, oh, just go sell real estate, now isn't it.  Yeah

I know, life ain't fair.

I can't now recall who it was who said it (Pizza?), but where does one 
go from here?  Farming->industrial->information->???  One of the huge 
differences here is that for the average farm hand and industrial 
worker, you were basically moving from one task to another, neither of 
which required a tremendous amount of skill or knowledge.  I've done the

factory work, I know.  What we're talking about now is a large group of 
people who have some very specific skills.  Many who are highly skilled 
and/or highly educated.  Many who have spent a lot of time and often 
times money in honing those skills.  It was very easy for me to make the

transition from driving a fork truck to IT.  Where is that next step?

There's a huge void there.  There's not a progression to a new and 
growing field now is there.

As for whether this whole thing is going to be an overall improvement, I

don't see it that way.  There's no new growing field for all of us to 
move to.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey                     Registered Linux User #108567
Building secure systems inspite of Microsoft

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