Overseas Workers Taking Over Our IT Jobs

[Almantas]

Hi guys!

I recently came across few interesting articles, which emphasize that more and more IT jobs are being outsourced overseas (especially to India) and most IT professionals in Europe and USA will soon face massive lay-offs as a result of this. In addition, I've also spoken to a friend of mine who specializes in app development and another friend who is a pro-coder working for Facebook. Both of these friends confirmed the fact that fear among IT professionals of their tasks being outsourced is very real and growing.

What's your take on this situation? Do you believe that most IT tasks will eventually be sub-contracted/outsourced to countries where labor doesn't cost anything and most guys from Europe and USA will face massive layoffs, or do you think that such possibility is over-rated and over-exaggerated by media and people who are naturally insecure?

Just some food for thought. Interested to hear your opinions on this.

 

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[TeaEarlGreyHot]

There have already, for a long time, been a large outsourcing of development jobs especially being outsourced to India. India is being smart, they saw our need before and have been training many people to fill in those positions over many years. I don't think you should panic just yet, however I think that we could be smart and do more to prevent this from growing. For one, offering more specific classes. Lots of college students just take CS and think that will prepare them well for a job in software development, but in reality they come out knowing a bunch of irrelevant stuff and not having any experience writing good code. Computer science is itself a career that is rather different from development.

I also feel like learn to "code" or "program" is a big fad right now that results in tons of people learning web development, while less are learning about software craftsmanship.

 

[ddzc]

This is true for customer service and tier 1 technical support roles. If you know your stuff and are specialized, you will never have to worry about being laid off or finding work. I get emails on a daily basis from companies in the US and Canada who want to hire me for my services.

Also, outsourcing isn't the solution, even for customer service/tech support roles. I've been in the industry for a decade and do consulting, I've seen a lot in my years. I worked for a company who outsourced all of their front tier customers service roles to India and laid off a ton of employees. They saved some nice money for a year maybe and then it went downhill. The service was so poor, they lost clients at an insane rate and they ended up moving the department back in to Canada and rehired locals. This whole process costed them millions of dollars in loss revenue. It was a stupid decision.

I've worked with the odd consultant from India at a couple of companies and their communication skills and performance are extremely poor. They all get fired in months and never last. The savings aren't worth it for any medium-large organization.

As long as your skilled, specialized and certified in IT, you will never have an issue finding work, at very good rates may I add.

 

[_Master_Shake]

In 2006 when I was starting college this was the exact fear that I had. I ended up going into Industrial Engineering. Do I regret it? no. But then the smart phone explosion happened. And Facebook. Sometimes I wonder where live would've taken me if I ended up studying computer science.

 

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[jlwilliams]

It's not new and it's not ending anytime soon. If you are a fifty something with a family and mortgage and a corporate salary IT job, this is bad. If you are an entrepreneur, less so. If you are the aforementioned salaried employee, better start a side hussle and start it yesterday.

The pitfalls of outsourcing are real, but hiring people to work in your business isn't exactly a piece of cake either. I don't know if the issues with outsourcing are really more or less than hiring face to face, just different.

Decades age American manufacturing fell in love with outsourcing. That lead to tough times for a lot of people, and over time the scene here changed. Now we don't have as much manufacturing, but we have some good manufacturers here. We also don't have the down side to big factories. Most of you are too young to remember it but you can YouTube the video of the river on fire in Ohio back in the 70s. That was ugly. Moving back to today and tomorrow, IT jobs going away will hurt, but the scene will change. The world won't end, it will change.

So the obvious question is; what are you doing to create value for that changing scene?

 

[Xavier X]

Couldn't help posting that.

It's a bad trend, but one I can see continuing, at least in the short-haul.

It's all about the bottom line.
Same reason individuals import and flood the US market with sub-standard goods from China.
Same reason individuals hire people in India to write code for that small startup project.
Same reason individuals hire ghostwriters in developing countries, on UpWork etc.

So, if we as individuals are actively engaged in almost identical practices, I don't think there's much room to point fingers at corporations.

I believe time will correct this, when there's enough long term data to show significant downsides to the trend.
In the interim, it is what it is.

 

[Michael Chiciak]

Only grunt work gets outsourced. The quality of offshore dev work is usually much less than an average onshore dev. Software devs are in high demand now, I would not worry. Only bad companies outsource all their work.

I have been at 4 corporations and never had a problem, even in 2008.

 

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[ZF Lee]

This is true for customer service and tier 1 technical support roles. If you know your stuff and are specialized, you will never have to worry about being laid off or finding work. I get emails on a daily basis from companies in the US and Canada who want to hire me for my services.

Also, outsourcing isn't the solution, even for customer service/tech support roles. I've been in the industry for a decade and do consulting, I've seen a lot in my years. I worked for a company who outsourced all of their front tier customers service roles to India and laid off a ton of employees. They saved some nice money for a year maybe and then it went downhill. The service was so poor, they lost clients at an insane rate and they ended up moving the department back in to Canada and rehired locals. This whole process costed them millions of dollars in loss revenue. It was a stupid decision.

Shit, it must be Ferriss and his 4 hour workweek mahogany plaguing the world!
Outsourcing may obey Comm of Time and Scale, but the Comm of Control is sure gonna be weakened as hell.
People sure are greedy, always looking to cut down costs at the expense of the client.

 

[Digamma]

Yes, the world is ending. Those damn factories taking work away from the common farmer!

 

[David Young]

Outsourcing is inevitable in one form or another when the difference in cost outweighs the difference in value, i.e i can get it much cheaper somewhere else for only a slight drop in quality. I don't believe that this will go on for ever, not least because the standard of living and therefore costs are increasing in the developing world - wage inflation in India for example has been double digits for a couple of years and the middle class is expanding very quickly in China. This also touches on a more controversial subject- will "localisation" start taking over from globalisation and if so will this be for the right reasons?

 

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[johnwmintz]

In my previous job, their helpdesk was outsourced to India. It was difficult getting telephone support. In my current "slowlane" position, I work in IT in a factory. They could possibly outsource my job but it would be difficult not having a person on site to troubleshoot.

 

[lifeNchoices]

Outsourcing is usually one on process oriented jobs. MACD's. Basic troubleshooting and software testing. Innovation is something that is usually kept onshore as most culture's can't figure out whats good for us. This is where we come in. I have off shore IT workers that work for me, and even when I try to hire the best I find over there, they usually suck at solving non technical issues due to language barriers, dealing with northern US folk vs Southern, and dealing with a guy/girl at an industrial place vs a corporate setting. These are all issues that outsourcing can't solve and where we come in to make a living. I'm not saying I like off shoring, but I don't make the rules I just play the game and fill in the lane.


So my advice for anyone getting into IT is learn the solution side as much and even more than technical side(there are several exceptions and I'll cover them below). Technical skills should not be your first priority as much as the business skills that identifies the need and set's up the solution to the problem. The technical side can be broken down into process and repeated over and over for new customers.


The exception to this:

New tech. Deep learning/Machine Learning/AI is going to be very hot and they will demand high bill rates for the people who take advantage of it. I can imagine that some people can be on the cutting edge of this and make some gains. Eventually the masses will want to learn and by then you should be in the place to make money off it selling a way for people to learn it in a fastlane business.