re. Thomas' post...
Slash Thread: Jobs to India -- A Broad Look
"Wired has an excellent 7 page article on the current and future trend and
nature of IT outsourcing from the United States. The conclusion: the smell
of inevitability--the economy will survive, though your job, as it is
currently, will likely not. Outsourcing is expected to expand from Service
and code projects to the creative aspects as well, with obvious correlations
experienced in the manufacturing industry during the 70s and 80s. An
excellent read that provides good coverage of the perspectives of players on
all sides."
<
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/04/2223226.shtml?tid=103&tid=126&tid=98&;
tid=99>
Wired Story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html
The New Face of the Silicon Age
How India became the capital of the computing revolution.
By Daniel H. Pink
Meet the pissed-off programmer. If you've picked up a newspaper in the last
six months, watched CNN, or even glanced at Slashdot, you've already heard
his anguished cry.
He's the guy - and, yeah, he's usually a guy - launching Web sites like
yourjobisgoingtoindia.com and nojobsforindia.com. He's the guy telling
tales - many of them true, a few of them urban legends - about American
programmers being forced to train their Indian replacements. Because of him,
India's commerce and industry minister flew to Washington in June to assure
the Bush administration that Indian coders were not bent on destroying
American livelihoods. And for the past year, he's the guy who's been
picketing corporate outsourcing conferences, holding placards that read WILL
CODE FOR FOOD will code for food and chanting, "Shame, shame, shame!"
Now meet the cause of all this fear and loathing: Aparna Jairam of Mumbai.
She's 33 years old. Her long black hair is clasped with a barrette. Her dark
eyes are deep-set and unusually calm. She has the air of the smartest girl
in class - not the one always raising her hand and shouting out answers, but
the one who sits in back, taking it all in and responding only when called
upon, yet delivering answers that make the whole class turn around and
listen.
In 1992, Jairam graduated from India's University of Pune with a degree in
engineering. She has since worked in a variety of jobs in the software
industry and is now a project manager at Hexaware Technologies in Mumbai,
the city formerly known as Bombay. Jairam specializes in embedded systems
software for handheld devices. She leaves her two children with a babysitter
each morning, commutes an hour to the office, and spends her days attending
meetings, perfecting her team's code, and emailing her main client, a
utility company in the western US. Jairam's annual salary is about $11,000 -
more than 22 times the per capita annual income in India.
Aparna Jairam isn't trying to steal your job. That's what she tells me, and
I believe her. But if Jairam does end up taking it - and, let's face facts,
she could do your $70,000-a-year job for the wages of a Taco Bell counter
jockey - she won't lose any sleep over your plight. When I ask what her
advice is for a beleaguered American programmer afraid of being pulled under
by the global tide that she represents, Jairam takes the high road, neither
dismissing the concern nor offering soothing happy talk. Instead, she
recites a portion of the 2,000-year-old epic poem and Hindu holy book the
Bhagavad Gita: "Do what you're supposed to do. And don't worry about the
fruits. They'll come on their own."
This is a story about the global economy. It's about two countries and one
profession - and how weirdly upside down the future has begun to look from
opposite sides of the globe. It's about code and the people who write it.
But it's also about free markets, new politics, and ancient wisdom - which
means it's ultimately about faith.
Our story begins beside the murky waters of the Arabian Sea. I've come to
Mumbai to see what software programmers in India make of the
anti-outsourcing hubbub in the US. Mumbai may not have as many coders per
square foot as glossier tech havens like Bangalore and Hyderabad, but
there's a lot more real life here. Mumbai is India's largest city - with an
official population of 18 million and an actual population incalculably
higher. It's a sweltering, magnificent, teeming megalopolis in which every
human triumph and affliction shouts at the top of its lungs 24 hours a day.
Jairam's firm, Hexaware, is located in the exurbs of Mumbai in a district
fittingly called Navi Mumbai, or New Mumbai. To get there, you fight traffic
thicker and more chaotic than rush hour in hell as you pass a staggering
stretch of shantytowns. But once inside the Millennium Business Park, which
houses Hexaware and several other high tech companies, you've tumbled
through a wormhole and landed in northern Virginia or Silicon Valley. The
streets are immaculate. The buildings fairly gleam. The lawns are fit for
putting. And in the center is an outdoor café bustling with twentysomethings
so picture-perfect I look around to see if a film crew is shooting a
commercial.
Hexaware's headquarters, the workplace of some 500 programmers (another 800
work at a development center in the southern city of Chennai, and 200 more
are in Bangalore), is a silvery four-story glass building chock-full of
blond-wood cubicles and black Dell computers. In one area, 30 new recruits
sit through programming boot camp; down the hall, 25 even newer hires are
filling out HR forms. Meanwhile, other young people - the average age here
is 27 - tap keyboards and skitter in and out of conference rooms outfitted
with whiteboards and enclosed in frosted glass. If you pulled the shades and
ignored the accents, you could be in Santa Clara. But it's the talent -
coupled with the ridiculously low salaries, of course - that's luring big
clients from Europe and North America. The coders here work for the likes of
Citibank, Deutsche Leasing, Alliance Capital, Air Canada, HSBC, BP,
Princeton University, and several other institutions that won't permit
Hexaware to reveal their names.
Jairam works in a first-floor cubicle that's unadorned except for a company
policy statement, a charcoal sketch, and a small statue of Ganesh, the
elephant-headed Hindu god of knowledge and obstacle removal. Like most
employees, Jairam rides to work aboard a private bus, one in a fleet the
company dispatches throughout Mumbai to shuttle its workers to the office.
Many days she eats lunch in the firm's colorful fourth-floor canteen. While
Hexaware's culinary offerings don't measure up to Google's celebrity chef
and gourmet fare, the food's not bad - chana saag, aloo gobi, rice,
chapatis - and the price is right. A meal costs 22 rupees, about 50 cents.
After lunch one Tuesday, I meet in a conference room with Jairam and five
colleagues to hear their reactions to the complaints of the Pissed-Off
Programmer. I cite the usual statistics: 1 in 10 US technology jobs will go
overseas by the end of 2004, according to the research firm Gartner. In the
next 15 years, more than 3 million US white-collar jobs, representing $136
billion in wages, will depart to places like India, with the IT industry
leading the migration, according to Forrester Research. I relate stories of
American programmers collecting unemployment, declaring bankruptcy, even
contemplating suicide - because they can't compete with people willing to
work for one-sixth of their wages.