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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed

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To: Dr. Voodoo who wrote (275834)	2/1/2004 1:05:22 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (3) of 436258

Hi Doc, <<<My big fear is that by outsourcing labor we are also outsourcing our innovation>>> India has nearly 1 billion people. My guess is that out of that less than 1/50th of 1 percent of their best educated are employed in the IT industry serving US corporations with help desk and computer programming type services. I tried getting some help from the AOL help desk recently and reached someone from India. It was like a script from a Woody Allen dialogue. That is not really innovative work they are doing. It is still a long ways before they can even take over much of the innovative work that you find in our telemarketing personnel(I must get 4 or 5 calls each day). AOL/Time Warner is probably a very early adoptor of outsourcing. The jury is not in yet, but I doubt there will be much success in this type of outsourcing. My point here is not that people from India can't do this type of work. When they come here to the US, take advantage of our education system, they are very successful. They may initially accept 10 to 20 percent less to get started, but I don't think they will accept much less once they are fully established. Much of this work they are trying to outsource, can't be done. It gets lost in the translation. I have first hand experience in this, in the early 1970's when US computer programmers were making $25/40K a year and programmers in Ireland were making $3k a year. We tried outsourcing to Ireland. A lot of the stuff, however, was lost in the translation and we spent tons of money flying people back and forth to get it straightened out. The remedy was to relocate the Irish programmers here. Get them Visas and Green cards and pay them half what everyone else was getting paid. We thought we were still making out. Guess what? Once they got up to speed, they either moved on or were demanding what everyone else was getting. This outsourcing of high end jobs fear is just that. It is not going to amount to too much. Only the lowest level of overhead work can be outsourced. Even than the ROI will be minimal if any. But, that is the trend, and the trendy will have to try it and find out for themselves. I was there (sort of) . I think I know a little more about it than most. Mary

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