A note about that. So Indian IT grads are not sufficiently trained on hands-on practical skills. That isn't surprising, the same is true from graduates in any other university, as university is about life-long cognitive discipline and ideas, not business-specific practical skills. The difference though is the Indian response. The Indian companies actually will speciically train their new hires. American companies don't bother, you are considered unemployable scum---which you are not---if you don't arrive instantly knowing the specific details of everything used in some other company in a specific job. The reason is that they can then use this as an excuse that domestic workers are "unqualified" and "uneducated" and that's why they have to import thousands of H1-B's and outsource the rest. In public and to Congress they will say how much American science and math education has to improve while simultaneously canning US workers with high education and skills, hiring others overseas.
It's all hype. Indians suck at meeting deadlines. Their management + communication skills are horrible. You better learn how to bribe people if you want to get anything done in India. China is just full of fucking scam artists.
"It's all hype. Indians suck at meeting deadlines. Their management + communication skills are horrible." There is lot of truth in the above statement. Indian managers are wimps and try to play both sides to be goody goody with everyone.........i.e. saving their own jobs. The quality of work is also lacking when seen over a long period of time. One project does win the order, but to retain it requires long term consistency.
My own personal India story... I work for the largest printing company in the world, ticker symbol RRD. They began outsourcing a LARGE portion of our digital work to India last month. My Indian counterparts now do the "skilled" part of my job while I am left to do "file management" which means I basically drop files on FTP for them to process overnight. The writing's on the wall...why would they pay me $20+ an hour to drop files on a server? My Indian friends make $1.20 and hour. The outsourcing firm receives 1500 applications each day which means they have a pool of high tech employees to fullfill any needs of American companies. Anything that can be sent over a wire will be outsourced to India. The new sweatshops are no longer making just clothes and sneakers....they're taking the middle class jobs from Americans. This is the future of America. Therefore, placing your bets on the Indian economy in my opinion is a pretty good bet. I have taken steps to "hedge" my future by buying companies that will/have taken advantage of this low cost labor pool.
Glad to see this thread alive. As one poster noted from his personal experience: Outsourcing to India is in the terminal stages. It has become a No-Brainer / must have type of Business Strategy if you want to be a player... What I mean by this is, second-tier/3-tier/small shop corporations are no more debating whether to Outsource to India but they are rushing to Outsource and trying to catch the next wave after seeing the tremendous success of it in first tier/bigger corportations. I read a good article/editorial in a recent CIO computer rag on this point... Outsourcing was yesterday's story..... As I noted in my earlier post the phenomenol growth is catching everyone off-guard but Indians are playing/coping this with extraordinary poise. There is always going to be some bad apples in a massive expansion just like we saw some phony .com comapnies in the bubble era of 2000. GOES WITH THE TERRITORY. I think China vs India is a wrong compariosn. Just because they are in the same continent and neighbors you cant group them. This is an entire new thread...but one Big noticable difference I see is : Chinese have been around the block for a while. They have a very strong presence in washington DC. Indians dont have much stronger presense there in the lobbying area at all!!!! So, all this outsourcing has happened with out much help from lobbying by indians but just by American corporations lobbying for India !! (this tells you something about the value of India) I expect this lobbying area to pick up a lot in the next few years and with a little push from Indian Lobbyists the oportunites are unlimited ;-) World economies follow and try to emulate their Big Brother ...currenlty USA . This is already giving a strong boost to Indian economy. With France, Germany and UK trying to capture as much a piece of inidan growth as possible, Singapore is shit scared of losing its status in the SE asia, you see many singapore businessmen in the Indian airport lobbies They are investing heavily in India to ride the wave. Indian Movie industry is going to hit the Hollywood in a small scale very soon. I m noticing indian movie producers/directors hiring American Publicist and Marketing guys to break into this field at a noticable level. Marketing is where they need bigtime help, and they are addressing this ... To people who say this is all hype....please open your eyes and take a trip to the islands of growth I talked about in the last post...you will eat your own words.... Ofcourse, there is some hype to all this too When you consider India still has the rest of the 800 or unfortunate million poor people. That will always be a drag, but the explosiveness of the econominc growth is actually helping them by creating work and all the followon benefits...food/shelter/clothing/entertainment/education etc., At the same time Indians are not going to take over the world econmy but they will be moving the right place where they belong in the top3 .... India has been a penny stock for a long time (like 40-50 years) and it has broken out that 50 years of base, so get on board The big risk will always be the political situation as I raised in my previous post, but the wave of growth is too strong for any temporary political situation to put a scratch or a dent on it.... Best, - Zero PS : I m not trying to hype anything here...just sharing my surprises and experinces on how India has been exploding . I m Just a lucky benefiter of the Indian economic growth.
Wipro Says New GM Deals Worth Only $27M SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)âWipro Ltd. said on Friday that a 5-year computer services deal with General Motors Corp. was far less than the $300 million reported a day earlier. Wipro was the only Indian company to be awarded work in the latest GM contract. The company's inclusion in the contract was celebrated in India as a major win for an Indian information technology services company. ... Wipro on Thursday had said its share of the GM contract was estimated at $300 million over 5 years. General Motors awarded computer services contracts totaling about $7.5 billion to Electronic Data Systems, International Business Machines Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., France's Cap Gemini and the Compuware Covisint unit of Compuware Corp., among others. $300M worth of hype, $27M out of $7.5B, or less than 0.3%, worth of contracts http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1918925,00.asp Outsiurcing being the last refuge of nept management, I am looking at companies that brag how much work they have outsourced to India as potential short sales.
Extract taken from the Indian Express website QUOTE- New jobs will go to India, warns Bush Press Trust of India Posted online: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 1048 hours IST Updated: Wednesday, April 19, 2006 at 1057 hours IST Washington, April 19: President George W Bush has warned the country's schoolchildren that if they did not have the skills needed to compete with their counterparts from India and China, new jobs would go to those countries. The President was addressing a magnet school in Rockville, Maryland, on Tuesday, stressing among other things, the criticality of such subjects as Mathematics and Science. "If you're living in Midland, Texas, or living in Montgomery County, Maryland, it's important to understand, if children don't have those skill sets needed to compete with a child from India or a child from China, the new jobs will be going there," Bush told the students. "And so, in order to make sure we remain the leader of the world, we have got to continue our focus in education on high standards, accountability, and a new focus and intense focus on math and science, just like as what's happening in this school," he said. Prior to Bush's speech, White House spokesman Scott McClellan elaborated on the 'American Competitiveness Initiative' that was announced by the President. The initiative, he said, was "to make sure that we have an educated workforce with the skills needed to fill the high-paying, high-growth jobs of the 21st century." The President signed an executive order setting up the Competitiveness Initiative and a National Mathematics Advisory panel in the department of Education. The Panel will advise the President and the Education Secretary on how to implement the policy. -UNQUOTE
Unfortunately, having the skillsets to compete with India and China has absolutely NOTHING to do with outsourcing. It's ALL about $$$$$$. I don't care what skills you have...if a business can outsource for 1/10th the wages and zero benefits to India/China then why wouldn't they? If Bush were honest with the American people he would tell them that they have NO chance to compete against low wage outsourcing. High paying middle class tech-related jobs will be gone. The focus for the next generation should be skillsets that can't be outsourced. Manual labor, services, innovation. Not high-tech jobs...they're gone or soon will be. BTW, this is exactly what's happening to my 20 year job if you can sense the bias.
Reversion to the mean, we are seeing with the Indian and Chinese economies. If you look at the last thousands of years. India and China have always had about 40% of the world's population and 40% of the world's wealth. Right now, we these two nations have about 40% of the worlds population and far less than 40% of the world's wealth. These two nations have fell far behind the western nations in the past 200-300 years as the western nations were able to develop strong nation-states, mercantilist economies, and advanced military techonologies after centuries of fighting with one another. However these 'edges' are weakening and are about to disappear, just look at the recent Forbes list of richest people. On a side note, it's funny how Americans still call Native Americans 'Indians'. Three centuries ago, there was a race in Europe to find the fastest and most direct trade route to India because they were tired of buying Indian goods through Arab brokers who were making huge sums of money brokering Indian goods. Well when Columbus accidentally discovered America, he thought he landed in India and started calling the natives Indians and 300 years later the natives are still called Indians. Makes you wonder how many other words in our language that that kind of strange history.