The outsourcing vulnerability
Happened to read the venom spit by Sue Spielman (through Werner Ramaekers). Frustated of a grievance redressal reply for a faulty Symantec product, presumably routed through an Indian call-center, Ms Sue took a crap at outsourching of IT jobs to Indian Companies. It is amply clear from the comments made on her blog that the myopic post was manifestation of her prejudices. Despite of her petty ignorant remarks, outsourcing jobs would continue to pour into India solely because, as one reader rightly quipped, “People (at US) prefer a pidgin English speaking Indian IT guy to one who can rap/rock but is technically naive.” Sue is frustated because of the growing unemployment rates but then we have been reeling under this problem for years.
I would rather not degrade myself to her level by making any racist remarks but the mere fact that both Microsoft and Sun have invested heavily on their development centers in India is proof enough of the technical capabilities of Indian programmers. Her post should not have navigated towards comparing the skills of Indian and American IT professionals but her insecurity and frustation led her to. And the whole crux of this terrible insecurity was summarized by Robert X. Cringely as this:
What's ironic in this IT outsourcing is that the end game has not the big U.S. companies winning, but their Indian subcontractors. This isn't rocket science, and the Indians are going to quickly see that they can cut out their U.S. employers and go directly to the customers. It won't happen immediately, but eventually every U.S. outsourcing vendor will try to bring the work back in-house for this very reason. And we'll be paying for it all.”