Letters to the Editor
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California Is Expensive!
Apparently, this company already has an office in Silicon Valley. For other Indian companies, though, I suggest you look at other parts of the USA, where housing costs are fractions of Silcon Valley, and where wages are lower.
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It isn't just the money
The job market in India is so frothy right now, that recent university grads are snapped up very quickly. They stay at an employer for six months and then jump ship for a hearty raise. Then, they keep jumping each year or six months to get their salaries up. I honestly don't blame them.
The real problem is that American companies are dealing with high turnover among their overseas brethren and a low skill level. Here you are with a mission critical resource in Mumbai and the server goes down. You stay up late, call their IT guy and find out he's gone and has been replaced with someone right out of university or, worse, they have not found a new guy. So, you wake up your IT guy to call him on the phone and walk him through the reboot sequence. This is not pretty.
That brings me to the notion of 24 hour support. I don't believe management cares about 24 hour support. They want "cheap". You can always pay local people to work the night shift, but the key word is "pay".
Lots of companies do not know in the slightest how to spec out a project, either. 75 percent of a programming job is that initial design phase, where you document out what you want and how to do it. The language should be unambiguous and readily accessible. Let's face it, most people like to noodle along and pull an all-nighter. This is great when you have a bullpen full of cowboy coders with 5 years experience each and a case of Red Bull. This is not great when you have a rapidly changing group of folks with 6 months to 4 years experience and a vague design document. "Make it so" does not fly when you have people who need supervision.
It is interesting that jobs are returning to the U.S., but you know there are managers who think they're doing themselves a favor by finding the cheapest talent they can. Right now, it is heading into China and, from there, to Russia. I'm looking forward to it all moving to Mexico, so when a server crashes there, our IT guys are awake and at their desks to coach the newbie in Mexico City.
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No it's just fortuitous
This is a company that started in the US - moved overseas and then back again. But they work for themselves, producing their own product for their own use. And it made the decision that the cost differential of maintaining dual sites outweighed the benefit.
If Like.com was a service provider it would have simply looked for the next cheapest place. Like Malaysia, Vietnam, South Africa, Angola, Kenya, Tanzania. It would have looked at the labor burden, factored in the necessary infrastructure investment, looked at the language skills and proceeded from that point. In fact those places are already cheaper than India, the problem is all of the other sunk and ancillary costs.
If none of these places was acceptable then you move on to the next higher tier: Argentina, Brazil, China, Russia, Poland, Mexico, Romania.
India is just a place, not a solution. If they're not cost effective then someone else is. Soon Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria will give the Indians a run for their money in the race to low cost service.
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Does not add up
A tailor had to flee Guajarat during WW2? Never heard of such a thing. What type of persecution/danger was he fleeing from?
"Ironically, life isn't always about skill." You think?! Except when it comes to H-1B programmers being touted as god's gift to US corporations, I suppose.
Finally, when a corporation retreats from its outsourcing strategy, how does that become "reverse outsourcing"? I would have thought reverse outsourcing would be when an Indian corporation hires Americans when it cannot find qualified (or cheap enough?!) Indians.
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About time!
Development and communication moved slower due to the distance and teams.
I've been saying this for years. And that's not even taking into consideration the differences in languange and culture! I've worked on projects with teams in both countries and it doesn't work anywhere near as well as management seems to think it will. I'm just glad that in the meantime their salaries have been increasing. I'm hoping that the experience gained in India will allow local companies to begin and take off for a local market insead of having to market everything to the US and Europe.
Now if only we become used to each other enough that when I call a call center and someone with a heavy Indian accent answers, they can introduce themselves by their real name instead of saying, as one person did today "Hello, I'm.... Mary. Can I help you?"
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Communication
Communication with people from other cultures can easily turn into a nightmare, especially if there are too many chefs in the kitchen and too many unqualified people in the middle micromanaging what they don't understand.
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Competing Dynamics - Same thing applies in manufacturing
In manufacturing, starting in the 1970s, we developed great sophisticated, lightning-fast, immediate-flexible-response Just-In-Time supply systems. And then we sabatoged that whole priciple by offshoring our parts suppliers.
Instead of getting just exactly the correct (smallish) number of dash assemblies from Lansing or Romulus on the same day, we started ordering from China and elsewhere. And now three months delivery is considered lightning fast. Plus, usually, once the parts get onto the Chinese truck and the Panamanian freighter, they are invisible.
These data guys are finding out this same thing, in their own business. And these data guys are the guys who are supposed to be milking every last microsecond out of our supply chains.
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Thanks
Andrew - thanks for writing this article and including so much about my father's history. I really appreciate it. - Munjal Shah