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Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

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Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#91

Post by sfifs »

dominotw wrote: post #87
anupshinde wrote: post #38

Nice article and on the spot. There is a difference between offshoring and cheap-shoring (i.e what I call offshoring at very low costs). Most of the bad experiences you get from India are a result of cheap-shoring. You get what you pay for. Cheapshoring undervalues good engineers and overvalues a lot of bad engineers. I have seen this for almost 15 years (from the Indian side), and I don't like it. While some people…

>However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight Thank you for your insight. Curious, what makes you say this? Is the current system trending down that path?

basically commodity work can as well be done by the next cheap market.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#92

Post by lake99 »

shagie wrote: post #66

The article does generally reflect what I've seen - not only with outsourcing, but also reflects the general cultural predisposition of people that I've worked with, in the US, from those places. A bit on India with the churn that was mentioned I've seen explained as that it is difficult to get a promotion within the company - you need to get hired by another company to move up. With one contract shop that I've worke…

About churn, promotions are one of the issues, and the other is a good salary. Many companies are quite exploitative (that's one way of looking at it). If you can't play hardball with your HR, your freshly hired subordinate's salary might end up being much higher than yours. One way that HR can operate is to reward talent and productivity. The other way is to reward negotiation skills.

I can't empathize with the other points that the author made about India -- because I've never worked on an outsourcing job.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#93

Post by dominotw »

sfifs wrote: post #91
dominotw wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, all that is coming to an end - probably sooner than later. These biggies will either have to trim down significantly or collapse under their own weight Thank you for your insight. Curious, what makes you say this? Is the current system trending down that path?

basically commodity work can as well be done by the next cheap market.

but i think that's opposite of what op is saying. I got the impression that 'cheap sourcing' has failed and businesses built around it are failing. You seem to be implying cheap sourcing is moving elsewhere due to price.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#94

Post by [deleted] »

eequah9L wrote: post #68
krisroadruck wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel what you are saying but... that IS the reason people offshore. Why else would they ship jobs out of the US, deal with funky hours, bad phone connections, and often times very thick accents (which when combined with bad phone connections often render conversations 80% understandable at best) if not to save money? I would feel like crap if I was in that position too but I don't know how you go about solving it a…

Shortage of local talent might be another possibility. On my team, about half the people are not local--I'm a remotee working from a different country, and a bunch of other folks are outsourced from India and Ukraine. I don't have insight into how much the outsourcing costs, but a figure of $50 per hour has been floated in this discussion. At that point you are pretty much back to local wages, so my guess is it's not…

[deleted]

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#95

Post by sk1981 »

rubberstamp wrote: post #85
sk1981 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel bad - lots of people just assume it's all about saving money, but sometimes the reason is the available to talent in Bangalore. I don't have any proof except what I have seen over the past 11 years. Most of the places I have worked had pretty good pay in Bangalore ( > 80000USD ) and it showed in the work they do. Also, if any of the good employees who were planning to resign, we did try our best to see if…

Quick search for developer salaries in Glasdoor lists avg salary in Bangalore at Rs. 500,000 which would be approx 8,000 USD as opposed to > $80k. The max I could find was for Microsoft and Amazon, which was $19k.

Average salaries are not a good indicator as there are lots of variation in Bangalore. Firms like Amazon, Flipkart, Walmarts, Ola (not sure of Microsoft) and lots of startups and financial firms pay quite high for their core engineering team.

For example see this : https://www.glassdoor.co.in/Salary/Goldman-Sachs-Vice-Presid.... Average is 60K USD and max 82K USD. Technology does not includes the securities division, where some people do technical work but are paid much more. (Note that to be VP here is not a very senior position )

In my previous firm (a financial firm) we paid people fresh put of college from 16000 USD (support tech) to 45000 USD (trading tech).

I was involved in compensation at my last two firms and was looking for a new job for the past few months - hence I had exposure to this, but sure how to prove any of this though.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#96

Post by adrianN »

slowmotiony wrote: post #82
ido wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$60k puts you in the same order of magnitude as other western countries: E.g. ~$65k gets you a senior developer in Berlin (=€60k) and similarly in Canada (=90k CAD), so a lot more competition in that bracket.

Is it really that low in Berlin? That's like 3k net a month isn't it? Probably half that when you rent an apartment. At this point I'd just not bother, get some easy minijob gardening or something and apply for social housing and Hartz IV.

I'm not senior and I make about that. Rent is about 12€/m^2 (heating etc. included), so relatively cheap.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#97

Post by rwallace »

_0nac wrote: post #53
jister wrote: post #50

"But conversely, the Microsoft stack that I worked in and we were increasingly unifying around in Pfizer was simply much harder to find competence in" That's probably because the developers that are strong in Microsoft stack were already out of the country most likely pirated by companies in Singapore or in other parts of the world. Majors banks in Singapore had been pirating IT people in Philippines from QA to Proje…

Did you mean "poached"? You can't pirate people...

Let's not tolerate the use of "poached" either; it implies (in a "ha ha, only serious") way that people are property, and it's been a long time since there was any excuse for tolerating that idea. The proper words are "hired" or "recruited".

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#98

Post by ferentchak »

dominotw wrote: post #89
txttran wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).

> very high quality English speaking devs Thats exactly what OP is saying you'll get in India for that price. Unless your assumption is everyone in India/China is low quality at any price.

I think they were more mentioning that you can get around some of the timezone issues and other annoyances distance creates for the same cost.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#99

Post by philovivero »

acd10j wrote: post #35
CountSessine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your value to your employer? If you're not willing to stay late to do a cross time zone meeting then I agree that you're worth a bit less to your boss than you otherwise would be. Personally I would rather accept a bit less pay to be rid of a nuisance like a boss who thinks I'll inconvenience myself and my family for stupid shit like adjusting myself to his outsourced labour's schedule. I do stay late when shi…

So you Americans now are embracing being full-time assholes after electing trump.

The new Godwin's Law I guess.

Re: Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines

#100

Post by wavefunction »

acd10j wrote: post #35
CountSessine wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your value to your employer? If you're not willing to stay late to do a cross time zone meeting then I agree that you're worth a bit less to your boss than you otherwise would be. Personally I would rather accept a bit less pay to be rid of a nuisance like a boss who thinks I'll inconvenience myself and my family for stupid shit like adjusting myself to his outsourced labour's schedule. I do stay late when shi…

So you Americans now are embracing being full-time assholes after electing trump.

You seem to be asking if we're joining you?

The USA is a country of some 300 million people, and if you think the 20% of the country's population that voted for him somehow represents everyone here you're completely wrong.

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