Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Outsourcing

I remember when I was a kid, my mother always told me to beware of strangers. Somehow I developed this strange notion of strangers being bad men with nice chocolates. Now that I have grown up though, I seem to notice that most helpful and generous people are strangers, as I see here in Cornell. In fact, I believe I am yet to meet the most insightful and helpful people in my life, as they are all strangers for me now. Pun intended.

It isn't a surprise at all therefore, that most companies across the world have also realised the importance of strangers and are relying upon them for a major chunk of their work. Besides, strangers always seem to have our best interests in their mind, unlike our own people, who surprisingly, sometimes do care for our good. Companies don't always have to look out for the best quality of work output when it comes to outsourcing. Any low paid employee in India who will be more than glad to accept a sandwich as a reward is sufficient for the job. The fact that we chaps come out to be talented and speak good English is an added bonus. For other countries where people might be talented but suckers at English, the employer can always learn swear words in the native language and make threatening phone calls late at night to scare them to extract better work at lower pays.

Scott Adams goes a step further in suggesting the USA should outsource its governing work to India for its own good. I shall not be surprised if this happens soon in the near future. Italy has already outsourced its government to India. You may pull out an argument by saying, "But hey, Italy practically has no government at all; the crime rates and all are so high - it isn't a stable government that is in power there." And I would say, "Exactly."

Considering the rate at which outsourcing to India is increasing, I don't think the day is far where India shall be doing the entire work in the world, and other countries will be either fishing or lying on the armchair in their front porch. What this means is that I am both benefiting and losing out by deciding to settle in India for the rest of my life. Of course, since I do most of the work of the world, I will be paid a obscenely high salary. But if things go wrong, the whole world would know who to put the blame upon. But there are other advantages too. When I am in the mood, I can always call in ill and skip work for the day. The consequence of this could be a massive global depression, as I shall be a major part of the workforce throughout the world. Won't that be fun?

3 comments:

Bastet said...

Lol ! Good Post.. can see some Scott Adams' influence here :D And, since you ll do all the work in the world, while the rest r relaxing, u ll be happily doing all the cribbing as well :D But, dont expect me listen to it.. I ll be in the US, on an armchair on my porch, by then :D

Shirley said...

I do customer service in the US for a company which also has many employees in India. Does it bother me that jobs are leaving the country? No. But I can tell it bothers a lot of the customers. The English of the outsourced customer service representatives may be excellent, but their accents are frustratingly difficult to understand. I've heard so many complaints about this, I got rid of all my corporate stocks. I'm not going to invest money in a company that cares so little about their customers, as to have phone representatives who cannot be understood.

Sid said...

Willow

Thanks for your views. I appreciate that our accent and your accent are different, and most people from either group find it hard to understand the accent of the other. But I don't quite agree with your point being that companies that outsource the customer care work to India don't care for their customers. I fail to see how the person on the phone being in the vicinity of the customer helps. And most BPOs in India do train their employees to speak English in an American accent so as to make it easier for American folks to communicate with their customer care agent. What say? :)