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Monday, December 15, 2003
In other news, IBM has announced that they are moving as many as 4730 programming jobs to India, China, and elsewhere.
Unlike low-wage manufacturing, the U.S. computer-services jobs to be moved overseas by IBM typically pay $75,000 to $100,000 or more a year, according to one person familiar with the operations. In contrast, hiring a software engineer with a bachelors or even a masters degree from a top technical university in India may cost $10,000 to $20,000 annually, analysts say.
That's quite an incentive for work to be offloaded to emerging markets. How will this affect IBM? IBM's director of global employee relations warned that:
Offshoring "is going to raise a lot of tensions," and is likely to foster union activity at historically non-union IBM. In particular, he predicted "to train someone to do a job that you know will no longer be yours" raises issues of "dignity and fairness" that unions might exploit.
That's an understatement. Train for ten years, get canned because someone overseas can do the job for 1/10th of the price. As a software developer myself, I still maintain that offshore developers cannot do the job that onsite developers can do, because the offshore worker cannot know the requirements of the system unless he/she is immersed in the workings of the system, or understands the business case. Executives who only see the bottom line might disagree, for now.
I predict that jobs will stay on-site, but job growth will be greater in the area of offshore outsourcing. If this becomes an election issue, and it probably will, look for some legislation that forbids businesses who do work for the U.S. government from offloading jobs to foreign vendors.
Labels: Archives_2003
.: posted by
Dave
11:03 AM
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