job hunting part 1

My company is off-shoring. Which means that the guys are charge are saying that they’re sending some of our workload to India. And it also means that all of us rank-and-file types have decided that this probably means that they’ll send all our work to India within 2 years or so.

Since we’re currently running with about half the staff we need for the amount of work we have, more employees should be good news.

But more employees who work for 1/6 of what you earn will in fact make you nervous.

The VP of our division has emphatically assured us that this isn’t the first step to sending the whole ball-of-wax to India.

But that’s what they would say, isn’t it? In fact, that’s what they have to say if they don’t want their current work force to leave while they’re ramping up stuff in Punne (that’s the town in India. I think it’s pronounced "puu-neh". But I really don’t know.)

Corporate America used to love India – -but it was a dysfunctional love affair.  On paper, it looks great. Salaries are less than 25 percent of what they are in the US, everyone is a genius with an incredible work ethic and they all speak inpeccable English. Why wouldn’t you relocate your operation there.

Except, like lovers, what you get isn’t always what you were promised initially.

In the last 10 years, IBM, Dell and various credit card companies have had support centers in India that they have to close down because too many customers complained about not being able to understand the customer service reps. Off-shoring wound up costing them money in terms of lost marketshare when customers went elsewhere. Communication was the big issue, but infrastructure deficiencies and rampant corruption also make India a lot less appealing than it looks at first glance.

So – why is my company doing it now? It seems like that trend has come and gone.

It’s a good question –and one I don’t have an answer to.

We are already running into communication problems. The Indians are taking about three times as long to train as was planned for. They’re flying some of us over to India to continue the training over there. (And then there’s the second problem I mentioned. India has the power and internet infrastructure of a third world country. Power doesn’t always work. Network uplinks aren’t always reliable etc. The tools we have that are slow in Colorado and New Jersey move at glacial pace on the other end of the world.)

But, as I mentioned above. I don’t know — I might be panicking. it might just be that the Indians really are going to be part of a new second shift that helps cut down on the backlog. Maybe corporate isn’t lying to us.

But I can’t bet on that.

So – I’ve been job hunting.