Indian Offshoring Firm... Offshoring To Mexico

from the cheaper-jobs... dept

There's been a lot of controversy over the past few years about offshoring of jobs, even though the anger towards it tends to be emotional rather than rational. It was exaggerated during the recession years, as companies miscalculated and thought it would save them money (not recognizing all the hidden costs) involved in the process. The other thing is that as more and more jobs went to places like India, those "hidden costs" would become not so hidden and the direct cost of hiring in India would increase. A year ago, there was a report highlighting exactly that: hiring people in India was getting expensive. So, perhaps it should come as no surprise that one of the biggest offshoring firms in India is now offshoring its own jobs to Mexico (via The Raw Feed). This is just the natural economic cycle, but we're sure it will make some people irrationally angry.

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  1. by Withersteen - Jun 8th, 2007 @ 6:28pm

    Good news for me. I just sold out in the States and have moved to Mexico, where I'm currently running an internet cafe. Here's to the coming economic boom- hurry up and build that wall!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  2. by Overcast - Jun 8th, 2007 @ 7:59pm

    hahaha, that's cool :)

    Hey - what's good for the goose...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  3. Here's a fun idea...

    by Lawrence D'Oliveiro - Jun 8th, 2007 @ 10:18pm

    • India's outsourcing builds up thriving industries in Mexico.
    • Mexican illegal immigrants in the US get attracted back home to work in the new industries.
    • Folks in the US start complaining about the "brain drain" which is hurting the US economy, how these foreign industries are stealing "their" workers, and what they can do to retain them!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  4. Re:

    by mvb - Jun 8th, 2007 @ 10:21pm

    Thats funny I am pulling down some medium to large dollars working as an ecommerce consultant for a company in mexico city Double what was available to me in the north eastern US.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  5. by jdragon - Jun 8th, 2007 @ 11:34pm

    And Mexican firms are offshoring outsourcing to iraq.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  6. time shift

    by steelbob - Jun 9th, 2007 @ 5:38am

    I have outsourced directly to India and Mexico in the past. One advantage of Mexico to the USA is similar Time Zones. Post project support is easier to coordinate.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  7. outsourced back in to the US

    by Anonymous Coward - Jun 9th, 2007 @ 8:29am

    Well, at this rate companies will be outsourcing jobs to India so they can go to Mexico, thirty other countries, and in the end, it'll be right back here in the US - making it cheaper to not outsource at all...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  8. by Anonymous Coward - Jun 9th, 2007 @ 9:13am

    And the best thing we can do for our own jobs is encourage the formation of robust labor unions in Mexico and other places where wages are currently low!

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  9. i bet

    by boomhauer - Jun 9th, 2007 @ 6:41pm

    you could probably find instances of any country outsourcing to any other country... going to be a low bidder somewhere. ive heard of indian firms outsourcing to the US.

    but i hope this grows, mexico needs an ecnomy boost so badly.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  10. indian firms outsourcing to the US.

    by Anonymous Coward - Jun 9th, 2007 @ 7:33pm

    which in turn outsources that job to a different Indian firm than the first one - in the same building.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  11. and in the end...

    by boomhauer - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 12:04am

    ..some unpaid intern winds up doing the actual work/code/etc

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  12. It's the deception that annoys

    by Anonymous Coward - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 3:32am

    The whole outsource to India thing was built on a deception. That there was a huge pool of highly skilled programmers in India with top notch degrees and dirt cheap prices and no downside to outsourcing, which was never true. They came out of University with top degrees sure, but with minimal ability. Practice make perfect, not theory makes perfect!

    We have a project out in India now, the programmer (top degree) can't even build a bitmap from the raster data and header info. Pathetic! We spend 3 hours explaining what should take him 20 minutes of programming time.

    We had better results from the Russian programmers, well some anyway, the problem with outsourcing is the company puts the cheapest guys on the project and they're often not good. Because it's outsourced, you don't get to hand pick the people working on the project.

    So when we directly hired Russian programmers, and some didn't work out, they could be fired, but when we do it through an outsourcer, we can't individually hire and fire them.

    It only takes one bad programmer in a team to produce a bad end result. So a single bad programmer assigned by an outsourcer can seriously reduce the quality of the end product.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  13. In soviet russia, india outsource to YOU!

    by Andrew Garrett - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 5:37am

    Sorry...

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  14. Outsourcing, we all know it's wrong!

    by reed - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 11:25am

    I really think it is time to revoke the charter of all US corporations. The corporate system is broken. It all started as a way to get better products and better service and at the same time provide good jobs for Americans. We all know service is now crap and all our products that are designed to break within a couple of years nowadays are crap to.

    On top of that benefits are disappearing and wages have gone down slightly for the majority of people over the last 30 years (adjusted for inflation). This is within the backdrop of increased education and worker productivity throughout the US. So if we are all working harder and more educated why aren't we feeling the benefits?

    Well the answer is corporations have no loyalty anymore and are just in it for themselves! This is bad for the economy and bad for our society. It is time we stop fooling ourselves and roll back to the corporations of the early 1900's that had a specific charter, limited operation time, and a board of officers that you could actually hold accountable for their actions.

    We have tried this "deregulation" thing for awhile and it has landed us in a quagmire of corporate interests controlling our government. It is a sad commentary on a once great nation.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  15. Futurama

    by Anonymous Coward - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 11:41am

    reminds me of that Futurama episode with the newspaper routes

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  16. Deja Vu

    by Old Fart - Jun 10th, 2007 @ 8:44pm

    This should come as no surprise. Anybody here old enough to remember the same thing happened in the late 80's to early 90's during the "Let's outsource to Ireland" frenzy?

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  17. Dealing with past Outsouring

    by TechNoFear - Jun 11th, 2007 @ 12:02am

    I am now having to deal with another cost of outsourcing.

    I have issues with the software used in some heavy machinery safety systems (ie UTC was just 'adjusted' forward 17 years to delay known Y2K bugs, fails to record data for approx an hour, resets to default values during operation).

    I can not find anyone who has any idea of how these systems communicate to each other during operation. All this knowledge was lost when the corp outsourced and not retained after the outsourced production finished. It is not in my contract to fix these issues, they just delay my

    The corp sends in an updates to the saftey system that reduces the time that the bug occurs for but dramatically increases the frequencey. My client is forced to do a limited roll-out to test and then expects me to find the bugs.

    I now know more about some of the operation of these 50 tonne machines than the manufacturer or operators (even though I would rather not have spent MY time/$ working it out).

    In ten years time when Y2K hits them (again), MY time/knowledge is going to cost them thousands more times the $ they saved outsourcing.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  18. @reed

    by Brad Eleven - Jun 11th, 2007 @ 4:00am

    I agree that corporations are to blame, but I think the origins are older than these United States.

    "The corporate system ... started as a way to get better products and better service and at the same time provide good jobs for Americans."

    That would have been so cuuuuute!

    Nope, corporations were invented in jolly old England, as a way for investors to limit their losses to their stated investment in a firm, e.g., it didn't make sense to allow venture capitalists to face personal ruin if the tea company they invested in failed.

    However, these entities hired lawyers which argued that the non-person nature of a corporation exempted it from lawsuits filed for non-payment of contractual obligations. The English court responded by granting corporations the status of "legal personality".

    The rest is history. Once corporations were able to claim status as a fictional/legal/moral person, they then claimed citizen rights, e.g., the right to petition elected representatives. They'd have the right to vote if the judges had been open to bribery--and they may well have it someday.

    So their "petitions" to American "elected representatives" got them tax breaks and other incentives to offshore and outsource. I hope their sweetheart deal turns into a nightmare for them, and that when they come back to the Congress for another favor to reverse their fortunes, they'll be laughed out.

    Of course, I also hope that tomorrow's sunrise is made of ice cream.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  19. Labor Wages Just One Piece Of The Puzzle

    by DFAL - Jun 11th, 2007 @ 11:31am

    Labor wages are just one component in the decision to engage in foreign outsourcing. Taxation and regulation are other concerns.

    If you want to push jobs overseas, vote for Democrats who will ram their socialism down our throats and tax everything we make away from us. (Everyone likes working for free, right?)

    Pertaining to the "hidden costs" of outsourcing, this reminds me of Dell's experience a few years ago when they outsourced thousands of support jobs to India; they had to move some of those jobs back because of many complaints about poor customer service. As a result, I will never even consider purchasing a Dell product.

    You get what you pay for sometimes.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

  20. Whatever

    by Shawni - Aug 25th, 2007 @ 7:30pm

    Having seen what the Republicans have done, frankly, I'd be glad for some years of Democratic "socialism" - aka REGULATED CAPITALISM to those of us who don't have our head up Rush Limbaugh's viagra.

    (reply to this comment) (link to this comment)

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