Anecdotally. Okay.
Finish the thought. Why are wages in India going up?
Right. 80% of the work in corporate IT software (like systems integration and customization) is working directly with the business team to understand what they really need, which is never what they think they need. When trying to do this with a fully overseas IT team there are time zone issues, communication gaps, intercultural challenges, etc.
Companies have been outsourcing to Tata, Cognizant, Cagemini, Accenture etc. for decades and it still generally sucks even if middle management in those outsourcing firms has gotten better, their interests aren’t always aligned with their clients.
In terms of actual companies whose core business is making and selling software or online services they will continue to be better off competing for the best talent which will remain in the USA.
I think, much like the threat of AI, outsourcing will change industries but maybe in ways that actually increase demand overall. I really don’t expect knowledge workers to be screwed in the USA in the next 20 years.
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Middle managers are getting better.
They will keep getting better.
At the same time
- greater and greater cultural exposure
- easier and easier to work remotely via teams etc
- greater and greater investment in education
- improvement in training and communication tools
The full ramifications of the work from home revolution definitely not fully known, but you all think things will be the same in the future as they were in the past.
All the trends are pointing in one direction.
Feels a little like those folks who said that japanese electronics would always be cheap and terrible.
Doctors can at least change states, lawyers cannot without passing another state bar exam, which generally includes a “moral character” investigation and often proving that you attended an ABA accredited law school (or attended and unaccredited law school and passed the “baby bar” before the bar). Surf is correct about the difficulty. Like doctors, lawyers are a cartel, and there are like 160 lawyers in the House, more in the Senate, probably more in state legislatures.
I worry about many things, but foreign competition or AI in the legal field are not among them.
Chinese companies were abusing the system in the patent and trademark office, so while individuals can file their own trademark or patent (very bad idea), the PTO now requires that each foreign applicant have a US lawyer.
edit: heard an interesting stat last week: 60%+ of Chinese doctors don’t even have an undergraduate college degree.
Tbf, needing an undergrad degree didn’t use to be required in the USA, and is basically a scam that it’s required today
Just saying I work with outsourcing a lot and it’s a lot farther away than you make it sound. There have been companies in my industry (big pharma) which outsourced most of IT and gave up after 5 years and moved to more of a 50/50 hybrid model.
Sure competitive forces will always be a challenge where ever wages or profit margins are high but there are serious issues to offshoring. It’s not like greater cultural exposure is cheap or easy. For example, the best talents at the Indian consulting firms might be given a 3 year foreign assignment in USA or Germany at a client site and really learn how the business works but they only do that with a select few and mostly to keep them from getting poached.
In terms of education there is rampant cheating and intellectual dishonestly among Indian, Chinese, and middle eastern students. I think this is somehow not so easy to eliminate in their cultures, because the important thing is getting the score not learning the material. This cheating even extends to like remote job interviews.
India in particular also has major issues with employees job hopping, probably the only country I know of that is worse than USA in this regard. Companies in my industry have tried to open up their own Indian development shops to cut out the big outsourcing firms and learned they just pay to train employees who immediately leverage their certifications into a better job elsewhere.
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Interestingly, places like UK, Australia, and maybe Canada (not sure) have undergraduate law degrees and then require a few years of apprenticeship (forget what it’s called) to become a lawyer.
I’m all for lawyers and doctors having undergrad degrees, because it ensures some minimum level of competence and because they are influential professions and I suspect it’s beneficial that at least some have studied a variety of other subjects.
We outsourced to Infosys. It took us years to get them up to speed to where they were productive at all. My work sent management over there many times, and even sent me and the other lead programmers over there to train them. That’s not cheap.
If a dev in India was really good, Infosys would bring them to the US to work with us and facilitate communication to the devs back in India (IE - lots of brutal midnight meetings that they knew the company devs would never put up with).
I’m not convinced the devs in India were anything but billable hours. For the math to work they needed to have like 5x as many billable hours in India as their devs over here (who were making a lot more). I’d be surprised if those 5 devs matched up to the production of the 1 dev who was here in the US.
And then when the devs in India had finally acquired a decent amount of institutional knowledge and things were sort of humming along, our whole company got bought out, and they switched vendors.
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I work in outsourcing too.
I dont know. I just look at the facts you post and draw different conclusions. In particular
- 50-50 hybrid model
- good people in such demand that you cant retain them
- increasing competence from leaders
The “they are just culturally worse” seems a little suspect. But tbh. I think it cuts to the heart of this discussion.
If you start from a position that people all over the world are equally capable of professional growth and performance, then I just dont think you can argue that the cheaper folks arent going to take over the market.
This is what I was getting at when I said the interests of middle management at InfoSys type companies is not aligned with their clients. they are going to maximize billable hours and use client projects to train their worst people. Their good people will be moved into sales or into critical save the relationship projects of the company’s biggest accounts. The client doesn’t actually get what they’re paying for very often and it is a constant fight.
This. This right here is the insight.
Old world. It took years, and a bunch of expensive flights, but you got them there kind of, eventually.
How does that look now in a world where we get really good at remote work, remote team building, remote training?
Okay. So professions that dont have that protection?
Individuals are equally capable but different cultures can produce different outcomes in terms of what behaviors are socially rewarded and punished and in their shared values that lead to different outcomes in aggregate.
Also. I dont think they have to be indian trained. Just india located.
In the world of fully online education. Why shouldnt an india lawyer be fully trained and fully qualified from a US institution?
This is true. But in a world where there are LOTS of more economic reasons for different outcomes, we should be extremely suspect of attributing responsibility to fairly untestable cultural differences.
I hope you get the obvious parallels with racist views about black culture in the US?
If it’s not that easy with programming, where a) first-world devs make a ton of money, and b) working remote is easy - I’m not sure why anyone would think it’s going to be easy with other types of employment.
In any given dev shop I’ve worked at - usually like 20% of the work is fairly rote, with rock-solid requirements, that you could give to a junior programmer.
The other 80% is a combination of programming, requirements-gathering, future-predicting, stakeholder-whispering, steering away from complication, managing expectations. IE - stuff where you need a senior dev with good communication skills who can see around corners.
I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal reports from people who hire devs off upwork. If it’s something routine like “build me a wordpress site”, it usually goes fairly well.
If it’s something like “build this app for me that I have only outlined the happy path flows, and don’t really have time to document every little nook and cranny or think things through, so you’ll need to pull the rest of the requirements out of me” - then it’s a disaster. The problem is so many projects are like that. So now you need a technical project manager to act a go-between, and at that point it’s probably easier to just hire a senior developer to program it and fill the technical project manager/owner role.
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Agreed. Why does this job need to be physically located in the developed world?
Your overall point is interesting, but the obvious counterpoint for me is that North American companies are trying pretty hard to get back to at least a hybrid model and not a full WFH model. The experience of the pandemic had underscored the value of in person activity as much as it has opened new worlds of possibility around fully remote work.
We had all the tele-conferencing in the world. It doesn’t make up for the time difference, and overall it still wasn’t working. Our management decided we needed the face to face stuff.
In my little impromptu classes I was able to see who was really getting it and who looked lost. Also I made human connections with some of them that helped both ways – me to be more sympathetic to them, and them to feel like they could actually let me know when something wasn’t working or I was asking them to do something that didn’t make sense – which is generally a challenge to get Indian contractors to do.
Manager. Sales person. Contracts manager. Recruitment specialist. Health and safety trainer. Vendor support lead. Finance analsyst. Investment modeler. Real time energy trader
We have millions of professional jobs where the labor carries a significant price premium compared to equivalently skilled and educated folks in other countries, purely based on location, and we are entering a world where fully remote work is getting easier and easier.