well, long since i had this urge to get it off the chest, but cant wait more.
Today at slashdot, the article "Apple Pulls Out of India had the usual run-of-mill comments spilling out saying, how_bad_a_move_is_for_a_tech_company_going_to_india.
even though being a religious slashdot reader and once even getting basked in glory of being slashdotted for porting "gimpshop" to linux from mac (and_the_irony), lately i am getting fed up with /.ers, linus travolds has said he no longer visits slashdot as the old /.er's are no more and the current /.ers dont impress (i think he meant entertain) him much, and i wondered why would he say that?.
today i got the point.
At slashdot, below are some comments just which hit the nail but the nail is on other wall like,
Comment 1:-
"Many companies are coming back to the US for Software Engineering. Especially mid size companies. The company I work for also recently canceled its dealings with its Indian outsourcing firm. They had two reasons:
1) In 2001 with benefits, a decent Software Eng:
$60/hour in USA versus $5/hour in India
In 2006 with benefits, a decent Software Eng:
$60/hour in USA versus $25/hour in India
No longer worth the hassle of communication problems and slow response time to fixing defects.
2) Quality of their work was awful. This seemed to be due to major attrition problems. The attrition rates at the firm we were using were like 50% a year. Even their manager's were job hoping. So nobody really cared about quality since they knew they would be long gone to better pastures before it caught up with them."
Comment 2:-
Don't get me wrong over b, I guess there are great people out there, but first of all: they don't speak English very well (ever called an outsourced helpdesk and you know), second of all: they are not educated as we in the westerner countries, so they need to be educated more and longer on the job while we are supposed to get that education through our schools. It's not the inhabitants fault, but India is pretty close to a 3rd world country.
Next to that they also have a higher constant cost. TFA mentions shipping over some people for education in the states. They can do it 2 ways: ship someone from west -> east and pay big $$$ (250k/year) for someone willing to do that and ship over his family and belongings back and forth every 3-6 months for 30k/year and cover the costs over there for 50k/year. Or ship 20 people every month from east -> west for 2 weeks and cover their costs for 400k/year.
If you don't do it yourself and outsource your outsourcing to a "specialized" company, you'll see that the costs equal the costs you have here but without the hassle of outsourcing, keeping your customers happy only thing is that you have to keep in account the unions.
I don't know, while outsourcing could be helping keeping costs down, I think the only thing that should be outsourced is labour by hand without customer contact. This is not because the people over there don't have brains, but simply because of the differences in language and culture. They are trying to fix that too, but what do you think when you call the D-Link helpdesk and "Bob" speaks with an Indian accent and ask how the weather is down there in Ohio? Yes, they have cue sheets with different lines that people in the US would use, but it just sounds wrong, try it.
And just so I wouldn't break Godwin's law: why didn't hitler outsource his stuff to India?
At both comments, they start and in middle are sprinkled with real_matter but they cant resist to give nice filler of nonsense to the comments , yes its the most creepy thing to think, helpdesk in india start having a localised conversation with client in usa, why cant they openly deal with truth, why dont the MNC's declare all support calls are routed to india, kindly adjust?
Helpdesk in india wont speak good english, its the truth, its gotta be truth, how can people leaving continents apart speak think same way?, even we in north or west india cant understand southern indian english, infact we mock them when we face them, banglore,chennai,hyderabad are all located in South india, despite their claims that they are english_oriented_part_of india, they are not, infact they dont even speak the indian national language, the southern indian states have facistly removed teaching indian national language which is hindi from school syllabus, its the only part of india i have ever been where i felt like foreigner , my trip to banglore was nothing but shocking.
The thing is there is culture barrier, everything is different between a complete USA Localised downtown office and USA_and_India remotely managed office, the way things are asked, the way things are told, the way things are handled when mistakes happen. What would go in localised place would be million times different than what happens in remotely controlled tech-office.
In usa, there must be huge difference in asking salary raise, asking overtime payment, asking official leave, getting reprimanded for going AWOL, getting slap on wrist on making mistakes etc. against how these things happen in india, obviously no company would care to learn "this" things and a employee can know how this happen if he was in Local office at USA.
I would like to share my own story.
When job-hunting two years ago, i used to get regular calls for telecon interviews taking from banglores, i was prepared to settle in banglore, i knew would be my toughest and worst time in life leaving in banglore but i made my heart strong for it.
So during this time, i got my CV selected by someone in chennai, he was just HR at a company "specialising" in hunting good CV's for MNC's. Finally my interview took place, the people in banglore had a round table conference, 3-4 head of this that department were there, everyone introduced etc and it all went super, this was for linux-admin with php/perl scripting. In end they said the HR will let me know if selected for further. (god did i hate that times).
The HR called me from chennai after a week to inform I was selected for final Interview which will be taken via telecon from texas. and that day came. now this was no any_company but guess who? DELL themselves . they had setup banglore-dell and i was going to hired in server-department, the interview from TEXAS began it started all fine, fortunately my english was "okay" in my CV at end i had mentioned about "hobbies include following extreme sports like BMX bike stunts, Xtreme snow-boarding etc etc" the person in texas what and how i know about extreme BMX biking? i replied i follow it religiously via ESPN and Travis Pastrana is my hero who already is legend at such a young age. he was happily shocked and informed he and his wife met travis personally at a biking event some weeks ago.
Now the interview didnt go anywhere as soon as they asked how do i install Oracle on linux and what tools used to manage clusters and lots of such questions , i kept saying "dont know" "didnt do this" etc, they just couldnt figure out why all my respones are blatant NO( there were supposedly two ppl on the other end but the second person never asked me anything ).
In end i openly asked them what is my work profile at Dell-Banglore, he replied we are looking someone to carry forward and maintain Oracle based tasks in Banglore. I simply said in my previous interviews with Banglore-Dell there was not a single word mentioned about Oracle or else i would had prepared, I said in my CV there is just mention of tentative oracle support exposure. He at texas just got bounced too. and the interview ended.
I was surpised like anything, I never had given such a bad interview in my life, all interviews that went were slam dunk, but the deal always broke off on salary or work carried out in company on which i would like to be involved.
Now this is how the super intelligent banglorian-chennai people handled my own personal case and i am not surprised with a bad rap developed around outsourcing to India. I know what i said here will haunt me badly one day in one meeting or one visit or something like that, but the truth is out there, i am just saying it.
The morale of story is, deal with truth and the truth wont come back biting you. I think Apple didnt like the brain bite taken by banglore and i am not surprised.
