State of the Market

[jmo21]

The problem with off-shoring that I've seen is that you get complete incompetents who are job-hopping or you get completely green and keen graduates who simply don't have the experience or ability to deliver. Guess what? We've got graduates like that over here at a similar price, who won't job hop after six months.

That's the other factor for off-shoring; their job culture is such that there's typically a 40% attrition of staff over the year - you lose momentum as people jump ship and you know the next junior bod will be on a learning curve and asking the same questions and not understanding the same set of things that the previous one didn't. If we hadn't dumbed down our degrees, we could still be cherry-picking the best for the right jobs.

I dislike offshoring for the reasons you state, but a grad here usually still earns way more than off shore staff.

[ruasonid]

Surely, as a seasoned professional it is up to you to have the skills to point out the error of their ways?

I tried to have discussions around cost vs. quality but it fell on deaf ears.

[m0n1k3r]

Surely, as a seasoned professional it is up to you to have the skills to point out the error of their ways?

It is not an error. It is about managing costs based on annual budgets as opposed to rolling budgets used by more progressive organisations, and about doing what is best for their own personal bonus plans.

[uk contractor]

Offshoring is anti UK IT jobs period! Why can UK companies not be encouraged by our (in) glorious!! leaders via tax incentives to retrain, cross train & retain existing UK based staff anyway! UK graduates are not even getting the entry level IT jobs anymore are they instead they have to fight each other for retail fast food jobs & even then our own people are not usually first choice! Way too much anti UK jobs sentiment coming from UK based employers I thought they had to demonstrate a good business reason why they did not employ someone from the UK anyway or pay an extra £10K to HMRC as a penalty for not hiring UK staff?


Last time I checked the map of the globe UK was one of the smallest countries yet we appear to be no1 in NOT protecting UK jobs for UK citizens! Other countries are very pro jobs for their own workers time UK joined that gang fast!

[m0n1k3r]

Absolute horsecrap.

Absolutely not. They do exist, however in India they don't work for the outsourcing companies, but instead at Microsoft's, Oracle's and other large businesses' own facilities there, or for some Indian startup (they do exist). In Eastern Europe they do likewise, or for one of the higher-end outsourcing companies whose charge rates are similar to senior contractor rates in the UK.

However most companies in the UK tend to think that £200 per day is about right for an offshore developer, and that is the rate range for somebody in India with 1 years of Experience or a graduate (or even still in uni) in Ukraine, and on quite slim margins too for being in Eastern Europe, meaning that the supplier is quite unwilling to be flexible and accommodate the client's whims, misdecisions and indecisions.

[MrMarkyMark]

It is not an error. It is about managing costs based on annual budgets as opposed to rolling budgets used by more progressive organisations, and about doing what is best for their own personal bonus plans.

That's why I said skills to point out the error of their ways, specifically.

Being able to cost based risk approaches to the different way of doing things and explain them clearly.

I, personally, have got people to do things correctly and to a high standard a number of times.
Yes, it will cost more and didn't utilise, previously proven to be lacking offshore staff, however the future benefits are realised later on.

[LondonManc]

Absolutely not. They do exist, however in India they don't work for the outsourcing companies, but instead at Microsoft's, Oracle's and other large businesses' own facilities there, or for some Indian startup (they do exist). In Eastern Europe they do likewise, or for one of the higher-end outsourcing companies whose charge rates are similar to senior contractor rates in the UK.

However most companies in the UK tend to think that £200 per day is about right for an offshore developer, and that is the rate range for somebody in India with 1 years of Experience or a graduate (or even still in uni) in Ukraine, and on quite slim margins too for being in Eastern Europe, meaning that the supplier is quite unwilling to be flexible and accommodate the client's whims, misdecisions and indecisions.

So not horsecrap then

If you offshore to Wipro et al, you're getting dross generally.

[pauldee]

The "problem" with IT outsourcing/off-shoring is complex with multiple contributing factors.

At the root of it is that most businesses tend to treat IT as non-core business, so outsourcing it (like the office cleaners) seems like a logical decision. Once you have outsourced it it's an easy slide down the slope to off-shoring. When you couple this with the ever going drive for "cost saving" and C-level bonuses based on that we have the perfect storm. I have yet to hear about CIO/CTO being fired or losing his/hers bonus, despite the myriad of high profile IT blunders in the last couple of years.

There is also a great misconception about off-shoring, just because in 99% of the cases it's a cost saving exercise, doesn't mean the cust always go to the bone. What i mean is that contrary to the popular believe there are IT specialists in India, East Europe etc. with skills/knowledge on par with UK. And you can achieve cost saving due to somewhat lower wages and office space costs compared to the UK without compromising on quality.

Yes, there are, but these aren't necessarily the ones who get hired. This goes back to my previous point - when the decision is made to outsource, the real decision is to get the cheapest people in. This will therefore mean the cheapest people in India, not the best people in India. In fact, the best people in India aren't in India - they're here earning British rates.

[LondonManc]

Yes, there are, but these aren't necessarily the ones who get hired. This goes back to my previous point - when the decision is made to outsource, the real decision is to get the cheapest people in. This will therefore mean the cheapest people in India, not the best people in India. In fact, the best people in India aren't in India - they're here earning British rates.

Or more likely in America. For now.

[sal]

So not horsecrap then

If you offshore to Wipro et al, you're getting dross generally.

Absolutely, I wasn't debating the average quality of the off-shored staff - it's abysmal. I was just pointing out that ppl shouldn't generalise and think that just because someone works in IT in India or Eastern Europe he/she is crap.

All the large outsourcer are crap, because their main driving force is cost. The irony is that in these giants a lot of the cost is for admin, penalties for breached SLAs and lining shareholders pockets, so there is not much left for salaries. There is an ever increasing number of small companies in main outsourcing destinations that are creaming the top of the talent, value their employees and have high retention rates, able to offer quality service at competitive prices to clients who are in the know.

There is no denying offshoring is bad for the UK job market, but if done right can be beneficial for a company providing both quality and cost savings.

Of course getting it right is not that easy and the big consultancies are not helping the clients much. I worked at HPE and prospective clients were offered a choice of support teams in different geographical locations - almost all of them went for India as it was the lowest cost, they were made to believe that there was no difference in quality of the service as it was all HPE at the end of the day and the SLAs where the same, right, right? Riiiight... There was one client I worked with and when they came on site for a visit we went out, he had one too many and spilled the beans why they kept using HPE services despite the abysmal service - They knew the service will be tulip, factored it in their business operations and were now enjoying close to free IT operations on a multi million contract, because the penalties paid by HPE for the constant breach of SLAs was close to what they were paying in the first place.