First of all, if you do not know what is offshoring then I would like to direct you to an excellent website full of information about offshoring. Today, I came across two articles about offshoring. They contain opposite views. The first article titled ' Offshoring might be security hell' talks about the security risk associated with offshoring. Then, I read the article titled 'Offshoring to India: the people factor' that states the strengths of India in offshoring. After reading them, I realized one thing- offshoring is becoming a very hotly debated matter.
India is becoming more and more attractive as an offshoring destination simply because it can offer much cheaper labor than the western countries. As a result, western companies are flooding in here and the signs are already visible that India is running of fresh talents to meet up the growing demand. As a result, salary of tech workers is increasing at the fastest rate in India. However, still, India is much cheaper than western countries in terms of salary of workers. The problem is maintaining the quality of the workers. C. J. Kelly says in the first article in discussion:
"According to the story, "The National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) in Delhi has set up a national skills registry (NSR) of employees of back-office operations and call centers in order to provide employers with information about potential workers." But this guy wasn't in the database. I just wonder what the hiring process looks like over there. Guy walks in off the street, gets hired in a call center, after all, how many brain cells does that take? Is put to work without the background investigation process and voila, he has access to sensitive information."
I have covered this topic too in my blog. Now let us turn our attention to the second article. Soumen Basu says:
"The India advantage picture becomes clearer when we look at information thrown up by recent research. A.T. Kearney has pegged India as the number one destination in their Offshore Location Attractiveness Index for two consecutive years (2004, 2005). India has been ranked number one among forty countries with a score of 6.87, which is about 12% more than the nearest competitor, China, at 6.14. These scores are calculated on three parameters - financial structure, business environment and people and skills availability with a weightage of 40, 30 and 30% respectively. A further indicator of the strength of India's demographic advantage is the fact that the median age of India's population is 30 years. The bulk of India's population is young and relatively more productive than in other competing countries."
Thus in two articles, we get clearly opposite views and that is the thing worries me about the future prospect of offshoring industry in India. The scandal related to HSBC call center has surely exposed the loophole in the recruiting system in Indian industry. This scandal is not going to die down very quickly as opponents of offshoring in the west will try their best to keep this matter alive. Well, for once they have a strong point. And, companies like HSBC will surely become under more pressure not to go for offshoring jobs at the cost of security. Such an event can become a PR nightmare for companies like HSBC and the more they happen the less they will be interested about sending call center jobs to India.
Now, the time has come for Indian companies to act decisively. They should realize the concern of the western companies and consumers. Financial fraud is a very grave matter in USA and Europe. Industry leaders have to come out very strongly and take action against individuals and companies who do not maintain standard procedures in recruiting their employees.
What is your view about it?
My view? Simple: enjoy it while you can, because it won't last for long. Granted, there will be work for programmers for longer than call centre workers. Indian programmers would do well to make sure they _always_ remain cheap, and make very sure that the West knows it.
The call centre jobs have already started to disappear, beginning with the lowest paid echelon: the front line (that is, initial outbound cold-calling 'lead builders', and inbound call takers). The reason is that recent big improvements like the open sourcing of IBMs ViaVoice are beginning to make it possible to handle the front line with bots. Chatbots. They've existed for many years in chat rooms, and all the time they've been getting better and better at passing the Turing test (Google it if you don't know what that is).
The reason that chatbots are taking over the front line is simple--and utterly compelling--economics. If an Indian lead builder is cheaper than a British one, how much cheaper still is a bot which works 24 hours a day, every day, never falls ill, never takes a holiday, always follows the script to the letter, and needs not a desk, chair, toilet, telephone, pension, health benefits, heating or cooling, or even a call centre? Utterly compelling, isn't it? And yes, they really are getting good enough to fool the average caller into thinking they're dealing with a human being. They understand spoken English--even with strong accents--and they speak English, either Standard or accented any way the client wants. Call centres are beginning a stampede into oblivion. Today.
Programmers? They'll certainly be around for longer as a species; but it would be very foolish for anyone to believe that they will be able to sustain an entire lifetime in that career. Regardless of one's willingness to keep up to date, to learn new languages and techniques, and to work evenings and weekends, programming is a career which today runs out, for most people, somewhere in one's mid forties. The reason is again economic: school leavers and graduates are much, much cheaper than older folks. I mean, we all expect to make more money next year from doing the same work as this year, don't we? It's unsustainable in the long term; and right now the long term is about twenty five years in. If you check nerd sites like slashdot.org you'll find them littered with ex-programmers who, regardless of abilities and willingness, just cannot get programming work any more.
There's one piece of information on your CV which matters a lot: it's the one that HR people call DOB. A quick program for programmers:
if (DOB LT 19600101) {
thisGuyWillBeExpensive = true;
forgetThisGuy();
}
Note that it doesn't matter a bit whether the guy actually IS expensive; what matters is that the employer thinks s/he will be; so dropping your rate won't make any difference because you'll never get the opportunity to announce it. Your CV will just be binned immediately.
I feel sorriest of all for today's young programmers, because the indications are that the now-25-year career is getting shorter still. Ten years ago, it was close to 30 years. Now it's 25. In ten years time, who knows? 20? 15? Add that to the collapse of pension schemes, greater life expectancy, and the unwillingness of today's young to reproduce (and thus create another generation of taxpayers), and you've got a recipe for...not much fun.
Have a nice day today, for tomorrow won't be pretty.
Posted by: dalroth5 | July 3, 2006 5:39 AM | Permalink to Comment