I am a Papad
Kishore
SCJP, blog
If H1/L1 limit is reached, the work would be outsourced at a lesser cost.
Similarly, most current predictions are not as ominous as they first sound once the numbers are unpacked. Most jobs will remain unaffected altogether: close to 90 percent of jobs in the United States require geographic proximity. Such jobs include everything from retail and restaurants to marketing and personal care -- services that have to be produced and consumed locally, so outsourcing them overseas is not an option. There is also no evidence that jobs in the high-value-added sector are migrating overseas. One thing that has made offshore outsourcing possible is the standardization of such business tasks as data entry, accounting, and IT support. The parts of production that are more complex, interactive, or innovative -- including, but not limited to, marketing, research, and development -- are much more difficult to shift abroad. As an International Data Corporation analysis on trends in IT services concluded, "the activities that will migrate offshore are predominantly those that can be viewed as requiring low skill since process and repeatability are key underpinnings of the work. Innovation and deep business expertise will continue to be delivered predominantly onshore." Not coincidentally, these are also the tasks that generate high wages and large profits and drive the U.S. economy
9.5 A Bogus Threat
Industry lobbyists have threatened that if the yearly cap on H-1B work visas is not raised, employers will ship software work to foreign countries, where the labor is even cheaper.
This is a bogus threat, demonstrably so: Programmer wages in India are much lower than in the U.S. Given that, why does the industry want to bring Indian programmers to the U.S. as H-1Bs? Why not just employ those programmers in India in the first place? The answer is that it is not feasible to do so.
While it is true that some companies have experimented with having work done abroad (mostly old mainframe software), this will not escalate to become the major mode of operation of the industry. The misunderstandings caused by long-distance communication, the problems of highly-disparate time zones and so on result in major headaches, unmet deadlines and a general loss of productivity. See the author's analysis at
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/ImmigAndComputerIndustry/SVReport.html
for extensive details on this point, including many quotes from industry figures.
For example Bill Gates says (San Jose Mercury News, March 9, 1997):
For a company like Microsoft, it's worth a real premium for us to have very strong collaboration. We have found projects that make sense to do other places, in Israel, in Tokyo for example. But it makes sense for the bulk of our operations to be in one location and for the foreseeable future we're going to stick with that. We will spend what is necessary to have most of our development groups at our headquarters and have them meeting face-to-face every day. We want to make sure there is a place where customers can come in and talk to us in person and make sure the products fit together in the right way.
These problems are so severe that Northwest Airlines, which had experimented with offshore software development, decided to move operations back to the U.S., according to a November 1, 1999 report in CIO Magazine. NWA's vice president for information services, said ``It can be difficult to work through language barriers and time-zone differences.''
Symmetrix CEO Paul Hiller is engaged in a joint venture with a company in India. He said that the problems of long-distance communication had really impeded progress on the project. He added, ``You really need to be able to talk [about the project] face to face.'' (Interview with the author, July 20, 1995.)
This point is made quite forcefully in UC Berkeley Professor AnnaLee Saxenian's study of the computer industry, Regional Advantage (Harvard University Press, 1994, pp.156ff). For example, she quotes Tom Furlong, former manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's workstation group in Palo Alto as saying, ``Physical proximity is important to just about everything we do...The level of communication is much higher when you can see each other regularly. You never work on the same level if you do it by telephone and airplane...An engineering team simply cannot work with another engineering team that is three thousand miles away, unless the task is incredibly explicit and well defined - which they rarely are.''
Just look at Silicon Valley. This is the most ``wired'' place in the world, yet those massive Silicon Valley freeway traffic jams arise because very few programmers telecommute. They know that face-to-face interaction is crucial to the success of a software project.
In the May 29, 1998 issue of the Raleigh News and Observer, an article describes Rila Software, a firm in Bulgaria hoping to do software subcontracting work for American companies. Again is shows why this will not become a major mode of operation:
Still, Triangle companies involved in Year 2000 solutions say that hiring Eastern Europeans is not a panacea to any labor shortage. Mike Pileggi, a manager who helps distribute Sapiens International N.V.'s Year 2000 correction product, said foreign software shops are not always as quality-driven as domestic ones. And it can be harder to supervise their work. Sapiens uses a group of 30 to 40 programmers in Russia, but it took significant time and investment to give them the adequate training. ``They have some very key core skills [in Eastern Bloc countries],'' Pileggi said. ``But even at the discounted rates, it can end up costing you more in the end.''
A CNN television report on February 7, 2000 reported:
[Internet entrepreneur Joe Kraus] knows why Internet services, which by their nature can operate anywhere in the world, still cluster in Silicon Valley.
``It is ironic that the Internet is a global phenomenon - yet if you're not in Silicon Valley, it's really hard to get a sense of the pace and the connections between those companies. So many of the ideas get transferred in hallway conversations, meetings over lunch and the casual interactions of the companies that are proximate,'' said Kraus.
There's a lot of idea-sharing across the backyard fence and at other social gatherings in the valley. The ambiance alone, he said, helps drive the industry.
``I think it's very difficult to be a successful Internet company that isn't based in Silicon Valley,'' said Kraus.
Actually, the computer industry has the lowest percentage of overseas research and development of all major industries. (D. Dalton and M. Serapio, Global Industrial Research and Development, Dept. of Commerce, 1999, cited in cited in Building a Workforce for the Information Economy, National Research Council, 2000.)
In an October 9, 1995 Wall Street Journal article, William Schroeder, chief executive officer at Diamond Multimedia Systems says ``There is a `natural limit' to how many skilled jobs can be moved abroad because of the costs of communication and other factors.''
Their English is not up to where they can communicate with US customers until they have been here for quite some time."
TNT<br />MCP, SCJP 1.4,
Originally posted by poornima karanth:
I understand, Rufus, your point of view . However I do not agree about poor communication skills.
Indians are very good in written English, probably because our education system is modelled after the British. However, spoken English with especially Americans is still a barrier to cross.
Ever Existing, Ever Conscious, Ever-new Bliss
MH
Originally posted by Capablanca Kepler:
But does language really plays an important role in technology?If somebody has mastered all 50 word lists from Barron's guide,does it mean he knows technology well than others who know less English?
Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
Yes you are right. if he knows the technology well he must be able to communicate to others , right?
MH
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
Originally posted by Capablanca Kepler:
Might be in his language not necessarily in other language.But person with good communication skills does not necessarily mean he is great technologist.Stating what Mr.Matloff said in one article:
{
..These kids have an excellent daily working vocabulary,� says Matloff. �Good for them. But it doesn�t mean they are �brilliant� engineers
}
They did not *write* a test. They took a test. Hell, I thought the guy was an author.
England and America are two countries divided by a common language.
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Actually, that is a UK/US language difference
Mike Gershman
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD in process
Originally posted by Scott McKinney:
"There's communication skills, and there's language skills, and the two are not identical"
And it's a matter of semantics. For all intents and purposes they are identical.
[ April 09, 2004: Message edited by: Scott McKinney ]
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
Then there is the Indian term "fresher", meaning, I think, a job applicant fresh out of school
Originally posted by poornima karanth:
[However Alan & others, Indians are much better compared to Japanese, Chinese.
This was not quoted by me, but by Bill Gates who had paid a visit to our Company during his visit to Bangalore.
Originally posted by Scott McKinney:
And they will continue to fail until either software gets easier to write (remember CASE) or people value and use communications within a project team.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
Originally posted by Warren Dew:
In my personal experience, it is somewhat easier to understand and communicate in english with Chinese immigrants than with Indian immigrants. Bill Gates' opinions are his own, and they might reflect more on him than on any real differences between the groups.
Knowing the grammar better might not help communication if one doesn't also know word connotations and idiom. for example, one might write a document that appears to be perfect english, but actually miscommunicates badly because of problems like the "write test"/"take test" problem. (Consider "I contract to write unit tests for your 2,000,000 lines of code, running them on my Linux cluster, for $5000." Rather different if you substitute "take" for "write".) In my opinion, such a document is far more dangerous than a document that's written in what's clearly broken english; in the former case, one might proceed a long ways before realizing there was a miscommunication, resulting in a lot of problems down the line, while in the latter case, it's more likely that one will seek clarifications immediately, avoiding future problems.
Consider Paul's rocket mass heater. |