Ben H wrote about outsourcing some small bits of coding he needed doing in his recent article for the Guardian: “Swift and offshore”.
However, this chap takes the biscuit:
“About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He’s happy to have the work. I’m happy that I have to work only 90 minutes a day just supervising the code. My employer thinks I’m telecommuting. Now I’m considering getting a second job and doing the same thing.”
(From India Times article: “Outsource your job to earn more!”)
The rest of the article goes on to discuss the slightly-more regular type of outsourcing to India – firms wanting to offshore “non-core” aspects of their business to Asia in order to concentrate on their key strengths.
But us techies should be wary of exactly what Western companies value as their “core business”. As one CEO explained in the India Times article:
“We were a micro-multinational from day one. It didn’t mean I hired fewer people in the US. It meant that I could hire more people in sales and marketing, because I didn’t have to concentrate on building R&D in America.”
Clearly ‘sales and marketing’ are what this (tech) company considers it’s core business over and above the actual building of their product!
The guy who paid the developer from India to do his job actually takes outsourcing to a completely different level, however I must salute him for his creativity.
As a programmer myself in a large corporation in the financial services industry, I see dark days ahead for the I.T. industry in America because of the offshoring movement.
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