Outsourcing: Not Safe for Work

I've taken Workbench back from Vivek Seal.

I appreciate his efforts -- especially considering some of the abuse he took -- but remain unsold on the notion that outsourcing is beneficial to Americans. Seal's clear on the fact that it helps India, of course, but the most he offers us is a platitude that's laid on downsized employees all the time -- you ought to develop skills for another job that'll make you more valuable:

I know many jobs are being lost but there are many new jobs which are being created. A person has to forecast what kind of a job is indispensable and should strive for that to retain one's job. I am absolutely sure that now the time is here where a person cannot relax in his job and must keep adding extra qualifications and training on a regular basis.

No one who offers this advice ever provides an example of an indispensable new job. For geeks like me who gravitate to software development and related professions, I don't see anything that can't be done in places where $15,000 a year buys an aspirational middle class life. When I was 20 in 1987, a computer science degree was a pretty solid path to the American dream. Today, even software project management is being outsourced. What do career counselors tell college freshmen with undeclared majors when they express an interest in programming? They ought to wire their chairs and dispense a corrective electrical shock.

I don't begrudge Seal's people taking their shot at the Indian dream, but I think it's in Americans' self-interest to make outsourcing as expensive as possible.

In April, Information Week reported that the cost-saving benefits of outsourcing are exaggerated:

... while more companies are turning critical IT and business functions like help desk support and customer service over to third parties, who in turn often send the work to subsidiaries in low-cost countries like India or China, they're saving less from the process than is widely believed. In India, programmers and service workers are paid anywhere from 80% to 40% less than their U.S. counterparts. However, the overhead associated with outsourcing appears to be eating up the bulk of those savings. Factoring in transition, legal, advisory, and management costs, outsourcing typically lets a company reduce the expense of a particular function by 15%, TPI says.

A 15 percent savings seems pretty vulnerable, considering the hassles involved in moving a company's labor to the other side of the planet. Americans don't like jobs moving overseas, because the fears of a shrinking middle class are one of the things on which red, blue and purple America agree completely. Companies like Dell are vulnerable to the publicity associated with moving work to India. If outsourcing became the dolphin-unsafe tuna of this decade and that 15 percent savings dropped, it could be extremely tough for workers in places like India to compete with Americans closer to home.

If that happens, I hope Vivek can find new training in something more indispensable.

Programming · Politics · Outsourcing · 2006/06/06 · 36 COMMENTS · Link

Outsourcing: What's in a Name?

A name, your preview to the world, may mean everything to someone, but in call centers in India they choose an alias name for themselves to make Americans life easier. Whether they are able to do it or not is a separate issue altogether.

You all must be surprised to know that the U.K. companies are much more broadminded as compared to the U.S. ones in the accent, name and even the culture of an employee (maybe because of our past).

In fact all the voice-based processes in India are divided into the U.K. and U.S. units. The U.K. ones generally do not require you to choose an alias name or to make your accent British, in fact they let you keep your original name and ask you to try speaking in a neutral accent.

Indian youth just go totally ballistic in choosing an American name. Famous ones are "Mr. Anderson" or "Mr. Smith," more Hollywood names like "Tom", "Will" for the Adams and for the Eves it is "Nicole" or "Marie," etc. They do this so that you people will get a feeling that you are talking to someone American and not some Indian dude.

But as far as I know, many companies are letting the employees use their original names instead of the fake ones. Is it helpful or not is what you people have to analyze. So what do you think: Should the Indian call center executive welcome you with an Indian name like "Mr. Rangaswamy" or with much familiar name to you like "Mr. Smith"?

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

Outsourcing · Politics · 2006/06/03 · 34 COMMENTS · Link

Outsourcing: Drop the Accent

I have received many comments that Americans are getting pissed because of the accent of the offshored employees. I just had a meeting with a top executive from Vertex, which is one of the biggest BPO companies in the world (right now they are Eurocentric), and that young gentleman told me that many of their British customers are happy with the work being done in India -- and in fact the customer satisfaction is headed towards north.

I can validate this argument further because when I was there in Convergys two years back, I remember my team manager was maintaining the quality of the calls above or around 90 percent (same or above the US/European levels) -- quality: first call resolution, empathizing and going the extra mile. The quality evaluators I had were from the UK itself and the company was Capital One (which is unheard in India but is quite popular abroad).

Our team was hitting the quality targets, which were above the standards maintained by their US/European counterparts again and again. The big greedy "corporates," as many of you say it, are no fools to offshore their business so that they can drive away their customers. There are set quality standards for the BPO industry, which is met by the vendors to maintain their promises.

Also, I must tell you guys that the average education level for a call center job in India is at least a graduate degree (bachelors in commerce, economics, arts, etc.) as compared to school-level education there. For all you people who are not happy with an accent, just imagine the time you called up someone in your country and try to compare it without having this inherent hate for outsourcing. You may very well realize that it is not all that bad -- I mean the accent.

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

Outsourcing · 2006/06/01 · 58 COMMENTS · Link

Interview Request: Americans Affected by Outsourcing

I am very keen on doing a story about Americans who have lost their jobs due to outsourcing. Global Services reaches an audience of around 50,000 in the U.S. and I really would like to know the views of the CEOs, CFOs, CTOs and others who have lost their jobs. If you have any suggestions for people I should interview, send an e-mail through this weblog.

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

Outsourcing · 2006/06/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

How Outsourcing Looks from New Delhi

I am really excited to blog on an issue which is so dear to my heart. Beforehand I must tell you that I have seen this industry from all the angles, I was a CCE in Convergys India (Gurgaon) and was working in a UK process so I have the real floor experience, then I worked as a feature writer for India's national daily The Pioneer and tried to analyze the ill-effects of outsourcing, like aping Western culture, sleeping disorders (insomnia and bad health) etc. If that was not enough many Indian Left parties were against outsourcing as they were and are against FDIs in India. And finally I started to know this industry in detail after joining Global Services. So at the age of 23 I have researched a bit on the outsourcing industry.

I know it is very tough to convince anyone who has lost his or her job because of outsourcing, but blaming India and other countries will not solve their problems. Various reports and studies come out with contradicting statements like "outsourcing is over" and others say it will stay forever, some will say India is losing its advantage and some will say India can never lose its advantage.

From my own views I can very well say that outsourcing is extremely beneficial for SMEs (small and medium enterprises) as I have seen that many companies who were about to close down their shops because of the rising wages -- and also after the dot-com bust -- came to India for survival. They not only survived but also started to compete universally. But as usual, revenue-wise, it is the big companies who gain the most.

I know many jobs are being lost but there are many new jobs which are being created. A person has to forecast what kind of a job is indispensable and should strive for that to retain one's job. I am absolutely sure that now the time is here where a person cannot relax in his job and must keep adding extra qualifications and training on a regular basis.

Curbing free trade is not the best idea anywhere, as all of us who have had our business economics courses in college must know. Restrictions over free trade affects both parties.

I just wanna ask one thing: If some American company invents a machine that can replace 100 laborers working in India, does it mean that the Indian company should not buy that machine which is economical and efficient? Just because the situation is the other way around, there is a such a hue and cry about it -- that we should make a policy to retrain those displaced and provide them employment.

End of the day, all of us benefit from software that is cheaper and more uniformly distributed. If it wasn't for us, software would have become much more expensive.

This post was written by Vivek Seal.

Outsourcing · Politics · Programming · 2006/05/30 · 85 COMMENTS · Link

This Weblog is Being Sent Overseas

For the next week, I've outsourced this weblog to Vivek Seal, 23, a technology reporter for Global Services in New Delhi, India.

Seal recently posted a comment here touting the benefits of outsourcing:

If a person from Bangalore is able to do a job in less than half the cost and with more efficiency then that rationally a best thing for all the parties around it. No matter what. ...

All I wanna say is give India a chance to improve this world.

We hear a lot of dire statements in the U.S. about how our jobs and our standard of living are being lost to workers overseas, especially in technology. Seal covers this trend and is in part an embodiment of it, working in journalism for a media company that's partially based in the U.S.

As a technology writer and programmer, I'm facing competition in both fields from Seal and the people he covers in India.

Since he believes in outsourcing, I decided to give him a chance to make his case directly to an American audience by outsourcing this weblog.

He's not being paid for the work and has full editorial license to write about anything he likes, since anyone who reads Workbench has absolutely no idea what I'm going to cover. If you have any questions for Seal, please use the comments on this weblog.

Programming · Politics · Outsourcing · 2006/05/30 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Adding Atom 1.0 Support to RSS Sites

I switched to Atom 1.0 on Workbench two months ago, a move that hasn't been as smooth as I'd like because of one popular aggregator that doesn't support the format.

This site is created using Wordzilla, a LAMP-based weblog publishing tool that I've developed over the last year. Writing code to generate Atom feeds in PHP was extremely simple, since most of the code used to generate RSS feeds could be applied to the task.

Atom uses a different format for date-time values than RSS, so I had to write new date-handling code:

// get the most recent entry's publication date (a MySQL datetime value)
$pubdate = $entry[0]['pubdate']);
// convert it to an Atom RFC 3339 date
$updated = date('Y-m-dTH:i:sZ', strtotime($pubdate));
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<updated>{$updated}</updated>n";

This produces a properly formatted Atom date element:

<updated>2006-05-27T11:03:17Z</updated>

One thing I haven't been able to do with Really Simple Syndication is indicate an item's author, because RSS requires that an e-mail address be used for this purpose. Spammers snarf up e-mail addresses in syndicated feeds.

Atom supports author elements that can be a username instead:

<author>
  <name>rcade</name>
</author>

The most significant difference between RSS and Atom is the requirement that Atom text elements specify the type of content that they hold, which can be HTML, XHTML or text.

The content type must be identified with a type attribute:

<content type="html"><![CDATA[I own some Home Depot stock ...]]></content>

My Atom feed offers the text of weblog entries as HTML markup:

// get the entry's description (a MySQL text value)
$description = $e['description'];
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<content type="html"><![CDATA[{$description}]]></content>n";

Putting this text inside a CDATA block removes the need to convert the characters "<", ">", and "&" to XML entities.

When an Atom element omits the type attribute, it's assumed to be text.

The following PHP code creates XML-safe text for entry titles:

// get the entry's title
$title = $e['title'];
// convert the title to XML-safe text
$title = utf8_encode(htmlspecialchars($title));
// add it to the feed
$output .= "<title>$title</title>n";

The last difference I had to deal with is Atom's requirement that each entry have a title. Because I haven't written titles for all entries on Workbench, I wrote a function that can create a title from the first 25 words of an entry's description:

function get_text_excerpt($text, $max_length = 25) {
  $text = strip_tags($text);
  if (strlen($text) <= $max_length) {
    return $text;
  }
  $subtext = substr($text, 0, $max_length);
  $last_space = strrpos($subtext, " ");
  if ($last_space === false) {
    return $text;
  }
  return substr($subtext, 0, $last_space);
}

I switched to Atom whole hog, dropping the RSS feed and redirecting requests to the new Atom feed.

I quickly reinstated the RSS feed because I'm getting 4,000 requests a week from subscribers running Radio UserLand, which doesn't support Atom 1.0. Trying to subscribe in the current version, Radio 8.2.1, results in the error message "Can't evaluate the expression because the name 'version' hasn't been defined."

That's the only popular aggregator I've tested that doesn't support Atom 1.0, though I've read that the OPML Editor's River of News also can't handle these feeds.

I'm not going to support both formats on new programming projects just for Radio, because its users ought to nudge UserLand to upgrade Atom support to version 1.0. I'd like to redirect RSS requests to the Atom feed so that all subscribers are seeing the same thing and sites like Bloglines offer one subscription count. But dropping existing RSS support makes little sense.

Atom's content type requirement is a great improvement to syndication, allowing publishers to specify exactly what they're using a feed to carry. The RSS engine built in to Microsoft's next version of Windows produces RSS 2.0 feeds that have an extra type attribute in each description, even though it's not defined in the spec.

Wordzilla · Rss · Php · Mysql · Linux · Atom · 2006/05/27 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

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