Congratulations! India is outsourcing jobs to the USA.

You have arrived to your destination. Wipro, a large IT firm from India is planning to hire people in Atlanta , GA.

I follow the outsourcing trends very closely, and this sounds very logical to me. First, about ten years ago, someone has found a golden mine: there was a place on Earth where people were willing to write software for $1 an hour. Some smart entrepreneurs made a fortune by charging modest (by American standards) hourly rates and delivering OK jobs. Since Indian programmers were dirt cheap, some body shops started entertain “nine women=a baby in one month” strategy.  They were giving the same assignment to 9 different programmers, and at the combined expense of $9 an hour someone would definitely get the job done.

Because of poor planning done by mediocre management, enterprise America required more and more software applications to be developed.  Ninety percent of this software would wind up in a waste paper basket, but that’s OK – highly profitable corporations did not even notice this.

Smart Indians quickly figured out that filthy rich America needs help and this was a chance for them to get out of poverty. Especially for those who were not lucky to be born in a high caste family. Hotel, motel, Patel.  Engineers and people with no degree went to vocational schools in India. Armed with the knowledge of programming basics and trained to win in a “technical interview” game they did not have serious difficulties in getting job offers. The H1B visa became a typical way for Indian programmers to get into the country. Then the green card process followed by American citizenship for those who wanted it.

But since there is a limit to the number of programmers America lets into the country, a mass production of programmers in India caught attention of American management and the outsourcing of software development slowly became a norm of life.  Americans got scared, and decided that IT career is not for them.  Enrollment in CS and IS is at its lowest levels.
If outsourcing has started because of lower hourly rates offered by the offshore companies, now it’s flourishing because of the fact that you simply can’t find a programmer in America.  The salaries in India are getting higher and higher, and apparently, they are already high enough to be offered to people in Atlanta, GA, USA.

Now watch carefully what Indians will do while American smarty pants in Academia are discussing curriculums of the Computer Science majors.  No,no,no,no,no, Indians will not participate in these discussion clubs. They will quietly repeat what they did in India.  They will open vocational schools, and will train low-income local citizens of Georgia, Utah, Montana  to give them basic skills to handle if-statements, which is pretty much all that’s needed for 50% of today’s  enterprise projects.  Talking about a cookie-cutter effect…

Everyone will be happy now: a manager of a Fortune 500 firm is outsourcing the project to Bangalore, which offers them teams staffed with native English speakers, the fellow citizens.  Do not expect another Google coming out of these teams, but they will get by.  Enterprise managers will be able to deliver mediocre quality products according to mediocre quality project plans, which will let them to achieve their ultimate goal: career advancement. t’ll take another three years till America will accept the notion that India is THE place to develop enterprise applications, but a large portion of this work is outsourced to the USA.

What’s next? Do not be surprised if you’ll be offered relocation to Bangalore, or else…

tags: it career  outsourcing  

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