Outsourcing as popular culture

Most superhero movies have a bit where the hero has suddenly become famous, become a topic of conversation for the common man. The older Superman movies used Newspaper headlines as a way of showing this. The newer ones have TV interviews, street singers, etc. for the same purpose. The idea is to show that a meme, a concept, is now a topic of discussion not only for the directly affected, but for society at large. I'd like to add Shock Jock abuse - and articles about it - to this category. It's one more indicator that the common American knows and has an opinion about the Debate Over Outsourcing.
Of course, one could argue that the debate became a part of American popular culture the moment it became an 'emotional' issue during the Presidential election. Election campaigns tend to focus on issues that evoke reactions from the common man - you won't find Bush promising "No more GOTOs" in his election speech. By that yardstick, outsourcing ranks among Iraq and Bin Laden as a part of popular culture in the US today.
The Shock Jock stunts - and many more like it, including the usual descriptions on Slashdot of terrible call-centre experiences - point to the fact that the debate is not (was it ever?) a technical or economic one. Never mind that Outsourcing is a necessity in this age, or that it often helps the company; it's 'in' to treat it as a threat to the country.
Expect more stupid stunts in the years to come. My guesses: A comedy movie depicting an unemployed tech worker who goes to Bangalore to destroy an outsourcing company. A couple lines in hip-hop songs, something like "Outsource my a**!" Hacker novels - maybe even movies - depicting an Indian as the bad guy. T-Shirts with smartie comments have already begun to be popular.
Characters in Soap Operas losing their jobs to outsourcing, and emotional hand-wringing following.

More Hyperbole from Bush... and encouragement from The Register

Yet another item in the American media about how Bush is going to stop
outsourcing. Atleast, that is what the title and the first paragraph says.
Then, possibly, the spokesman notices that there are some Filipino guys
sitting in the audience and goes on to retract his statements : “I don’t
expect the sudden pullout by [US] companies from the Philippines. Outsourcing is obviously a growing trend in this country. American companies are trying to lower cost and they focus on the bottomline,” Chandler said. Rrright...
Anyway, it would be interesting to see where this goes. I cannot imagine a tax break that would substitute for getting a workforce at 1/4th the cost. And as I mentioned in a previous article, if you really make outsourcing unprofitable in the US, a bunch of European and Japanese companies are going to walk all over the US. No US company will let that happen if it can help it - so they will be putting pressure on Bush to make some tiny face-saving laws against outsourcing that dont matter at all.
It is a little weird that most of the Pro-Outsourcing reports, like this one, are coming in from Europe, while the Anti- rhetoric is being spouted in the US. I'd welcome any thoughts on why the social climate of the EU is so in favour (when the percentage of the outsourcing is much less there). The occasional protests by displaced workers are all but drowned out by the "every Euro outsourced gains 1.x Euros to the EU" type stories. Strange.

India's REAL competitor

I find myself amused, and a little confused, by this little article . It proclaims that the latest country to join - and lead - the outsourcing bandwagon is tiny Costa Rica. Amusement because of the specious reasons the writer gives to justify his view (and because Costa Rica has a total population of about 40 lakhs). Confusion because the intent - the real intent - of the article is unclear. Two American consultancy companies are glorified as moving to Costa Rica, but the total manpower they have there is about 130 people. The article says Intel, Motorola, and 'other smaller firms' have low-cost work being done in CR, but no figures or details are mentioned, so we have no way of verifying. For all we know they may have five teenagers packing the chips in plastic cases.

They found a guy willing to say that "Wages in India are lower, but Costa Rica's advantages outweigh the slightly higher costs". The advantage, by the way, is "U.S. executives tire of long flights back and forth from India or China along with language barriers". Right, guys, that long daily commute to Bangalore is really taxing, eh? And of course Spanish is less of a barrier than British English.

The professed intent is definitely bullshit. This article is not about any general trend towards CR. It was written either to advertise the two companies mentioned("we're better than the others, we dont go to India, only to CR"), or to try to attract investment in CR. Any guesses?

"India and Costa Rica are the hottest spots now," said Joanne Rainey, owner of Southwest Outsource Purchasing LLC, "China is getting a little saturated."
ROTFLMAO. So remember, Indian Express, ToI, Rediff - our real competitor is Costa Rica, not China.

Creating your niche

Fine, so you're working in an outsourcee company, your company is growing at a good rate, you might get promoted into middle management any day now, and you think this is the time to do something about the direction your career is going in. After all, dont we all know that us outsourcees always get the low-end projects, are considered el-cheapo programmer farms? I've talked before of some brave souls starting up product companies in India as a way of 'moving up the value chain'. That is fine if you want to branch off - but what about the rest of us who want to stay in our jobs but want to be getting better work?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the outsourcing market in India is beginning to mature - companies are beginning to think beyond the baseline - the pay package - in getting work and attracting talent. For some time now there have been attempts to distinguish ones company from the others, to create USPs. Most of these attempts have been so lame that they fooled no one. Witness the rush of outsourcees to grab the CMM certifications - even a casual looking around most of those companies shows that the certification was for name only, a bullet point to be added to the marketing brochure of the company. Fortunately, now that billing rates in India have gone up a little, companies have the bandwidth to hire professional HR people, who can create effective campaigns. That may lead to better work coming in. But this is all upper-management stuff. What about the rest of us? How do we get better work for ourselves?

What we can do as members of projects within such companies, is to figure out which kinds of jobs dont yet come to us, and then try to grab those. This applies especially to those who dont want their careers created/destroyed by managements. A thoroughly self-indulgent article in ComputerWorld magazine pointed me to a possible approach. This is an extension of the facts I laid out in my "We dont need domain knowledge" post.

Read that ComputerWorld article, print it out, and stick it up somewhere prominent. This is the exact image which we need to create for ourselves if we are to get better work. The article smugly assures American readers that "Being extremely productive, innovative and capable of solving the most challenging problems" will help keep their jobs from being outsourced. This, of course, is a two-edged sword. If you can show yourself as being the same, you've won part of the game. But the crux of the article is about having domain knowledge: "... know the business well, have helped invent and/or implement technologies that give the company its competitive advantage, and have an advanced knowledge of the technologies that are most important for the company's current success and future prospects."

And that, boys and girls, is what you need to do to raise your price. Your managers have no reason to help you with this. But you, as someone who wants to really get the core part of the project, are going to have to replace/supplant those people who fit the description in this article. Identify these people, and work in the same domain and with the same mindset. That's the only way you can get the good work. Your career as a part of your outsourcers project has to take precedence over your career as an employee of the outsourcee company. [Of course, this assumes that you really like the company you're doing the project for, and want to stay with it.] This involves getting atleast some domain knowledge - you will have to be able to give suggestions and ideas for the project as a whole. Outsourcing companies usually are willing to give project documentation - that is a good starting point. But you'll have to go beyond that.

Try this exercise. The next time you have a problem with your work and need to Google for it, note the nationalities of the people asking and answering similar questions on the newsgroups. 8 times out of ten, the people asking the questions are Indian, with email addresses indicating that they're working for outsourcees, and almost all the productive replies are by Americans or Europeans, who seem to be working at product companies or with standards organisations. Ask yourself, why can't you be the person answering such questions? Why must you only be asking them? That is a good indicator of where you are on the totem pole. Those "indispensible workers" described in the article are comfortable enough with the technology to answer questions by random people on the newsgroups. Try to do the same. It teaches you to think outside the box of your project.

The next level would be to try to get into standards-making forums, or atleast into expert groups on the domain of your choice. You get to talk to people as good as or better than you, and you get to think about the domain as a malleable, open-ended area instead of following standards blindly. Admittedly, getting to this level will require some management backing. If possible, create a 'expert' group on the domain within the company, formally or informally, so you atleast have someone to talk to about the field.

It is shameful how few of us are involved in any kind of research or standards activity. Its probably because the management policies of most outsourcee companies dont specify any incentive for such involvement. But as I said, relying on your management for your career is not going to help you. You have to do it yourself. At the least, you have to be aware of the research activity, enough to understand the directions your project is taking.

Once you are at this level, you're effectively at the same level as the 'indispensible' employees of the outsourcer company. And that is the level from which you can ask for and get the core, hi-tech work you crave.

"The Managing Director himself welcomed my parents"

A good friend forwarded me this article on Forbes : To hire a son, woo his parents.

Interpreting this story in the larger context raises interesting questions. Are software companies getting so desperate to retain people now? I dont think so - given that the quality of work in outsourcee companies does not rise above a certain level (see my earlier posts for an explanation), companies would actually encourage some amount of attrition. So the purpose of this rigmarole cannot be just to reduce attrition as claimed.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with a manager-type, a while ago. He said that the sign of a maturing market is that the USPs of the competing product move away from money. Advertisements begin to talk about quality, dependability, patriotism, and other such waffle. The idea is to differentiate ones product from the others - when the customer doesnt care about what it costs.

It is likely that this move by Sierra is an attempt to create a aura of Quality and Caring around itself, as an attempt to draw attention away from the USP of outsourcee companies so far - salary. Note that Sierra, an American company, is paying less than Satyam, an Indian one. Even so, it is getting good people to join it. Companies are now saying, "Yeah, well, we're paying you less, but check out the amazing atmosphere we have!" Google, for example, has been using this strategy to advantage in its hiring efforts, and the Bangalore/Hyderabad market is now catching on.

The next logical conclusion would be : Salaries in the outsourcee industry must have reached their highest possible range for now, otherwise Sierra would just have increased salaries to get the best people.