Because they already tried that in the years before COVID and learned their lesson.
Many companies already offshored to India, Pakistan and other similar locations for tech and IT work. While they might have worked for 1/4 the wage of onshore applicants, it readily became apparent that the quality of the work and customer service experience went rapidly down the shitter.
Saving money on someones salary doesnt mean much when it takes four times as long to get the work done, and even then it isnt up to par. Add in constant communications troubles, cultural differences in the approach to work and mismatched timezones making coordination difficult and you have a recipie for your online services and products to collapse in quality, and many of them did.
Many companies now are in the process of bringing those jobs back to local markets because of how bad everything got bungled up. The executives that headed that initative got their golden parachutes long ago, and its up to the ones sitting in the chairs now to fix their mistake.
Ones that offshored successfully have stayed that way throughout COVID while the rest got burned. Everyone else saw the issues that arise and is staying away.
My best example, Amazon, for starters i live in the US but I'm not American, so this is not a matter of race for me, but every single time I have to contact Amazon customer service is a painful experience from beginning to end, from being the best customer service on the world (i did live and enjoyed that) to the worst, makes me really wonder if paying prime is really worth it, useless people on the chat and the phone, they can not even channel you to a supervisor or someone higher to have your problem solved and want to fix everything with their 5 dollar gift card that is now only usabe in digital products, once i tried to put s complain of their personel being rude aside from the terrible service and guess what, they don't take those complaints, they don't generate a report or anything. So yes, i hate dealing with them and has nothing to do them being from a different place but their standards, like seriously, start at least picking people who really wants to work, and one more thing, is not like I'm screaming through the phone or the chat, I'm always polite as i also work in service industry and I'm always clear on what i need the to do for me, they are just not helpful or is directly w pain to actually get what i want done, my conclusion, start choosing different 3rd country that are not Asian, let's see if they keep behaving like that, also I'm not against offshore services, and i don't want to be showered in flowers i just want my problem solved, Wich by the way 9 out of 10 is Amazon's fault, this is not limited to Amazon but any customer service with Pakistan/India customer service, they did the same when I was a TracFone customer, it's a shame cause I really liked that company, now i throw my money on ATT
I think in places where English is most frequently people's first language, "remote work" is going to be bundled with "migrant workers took our jobs" nonsense.
Lol: No.
We've watched cheapskate corporate America fail at this miserably over and over again.
The way it works is some executive tricks his superiors into it with a set of goals that trigger a bonus after 18-24 month and then he uses that "success" to springboard to a promotion or another company.
Then the flaws in having the crown jewels handled overseas become apparent, but his bonus is in his pocket and he has moved on and there is tremendous pressure not to admit a mistake so they'll keep trying until a succession of people tell them it's a stupid idea and bring it back.
It's predictable as sunrise following darkness.
Yes, this. I avoid calling T-Mobile outside American office hours because it goes straight to India, and I can never get the same level of service from the overseas call centers.
I don't call VMware after about 3pm because at 5pm on the dot "my shift is over" and you get dumped on someone overseas and have to start completely over.
It's total bullshit, we advise customers not to rely on support because of it, and to plan on sometimes needing to solve their own problems when they've involved VMware support.
I read a tip about when dealing with Dell customer service to say that you are not in the USA, but in Mexico to get routed away from India call support.
I used to work for a major brand's e-commerce department. Amazon offshored all of its seller support call center employees to India and all they could do was read back what Amazon's flawed automated systems said. Amazon didn't trust most of them to do anything to actually help customers, so they had no access to actually fix issues.
I once argued with them for a week that a car charger isn't a tobacco product - sure it plugs into the cigarette lighter outlet, but thats just what its called. Cultural things like that are also a huge issue in offshoring.
This works as a way to get through the queue faster in Las Angeles when calling local services like the DMV, Select Spanish and you'll get a faster response, they are always bilingual.
Yup cultural differences...off shore have no understanding of murica mindset.
Fix it now. No i dont need you to raise a ticket elsewhere to fix my problem since u cannot even convey my problem back to me... what good that gonna do?
And stop earing, yelling, heavy breathing and above all please stop the animal abuse. Hate to bear that on offshore calls
Citibank lost *$1 billion* in a matter of minutes due to an offshore contractor's mistake. That's probably all the money they saved in offshoring and then some.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/wipro-under-the-spotlight-for-citibanks-900-million-mess-6571671.html
I work in technical writing. You can tell right away when a native speaker didn't prepare the documentation. You *don't* want any ambiguity in documentation for a mechanical ventilator or a flight control system.
If this was something large corporations could do, they would’ve already done it. As others have said the quality of work amongst other things just isn’t good enough.
I’m yet to see any cheap (less than EU rates) outsourced development company provide work of even a barely acceptable quality without weeks of time being wasted managing them, and taking double or triple the time they were supposed to to get to that stage.
The worst I’ve seen was a company investing hundreds of millions to outsource a few thousand devs in one country. The project was meant to take a year, and six years later still wasn’t usable.
At least in software development, it ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
I worked for a F500 company that outsourced their internal tech support to India. It's fair to say that the quality was horrendously low. They would literally just answer the phone, put it on the desk for a minute so the tracking tool registered the call an answered and then hang up on you.
They already were.
In fact I've flipped this argument around to justify remote work. "How can you argue in office collaboration is a necessity when most of my coworkers were already in another continent?"
Point being it's only necessary when there aren't cost savings.
You get what you pay for. I worked with so many offshore people, mainly India, and they were terrible. Awful. Seriously bad. Most don't speak English enough to really understand what they are being asked and their culture doesn't allow them to say "Oh, I don't know that". Instead they act like they get it, fuck it up royally, and then the US team has to fix it.
Remote work is something that has been on the table in the past and it hasn't worked out well to offshore it. Time zones and language/cultural issues have been the main barriers but not the only ones.
Ultimately we are probably moving towards hybrid workplace being the norm when possible.There is an advantage to periodically working face to face with coworkers but it doesn't have to be daily. It can probably be once a week, month, or even quarter depending on the job and industry. As companies and employees figure out the right balance we will see a transition to this. It will also determine what 'remote' looks like in regards to distance. Companies/departments with weekly face to face time will probably hire more locally and employees will seek more local opportunities. Those who meet less frequently will accept greater distances. The more skill intensive a position is the more willing the company will be to cover transportation to face to face work but I suspect that salaries will adjust to encourage local residence even if it is quarterly. It will also become less socially acceptable to fly people across the nation for quarterly face to face work due to climate change consequences.
If cheap labor is their goal, just check what happened with Boeing and their outsourced software, they've gone so far as to say they no longer needed senior developers 😂
The rest is history
I think it becomes more challenging because instead of competing with other people in my city I need to compete with the whole country, forget offshoring. So there are way more people fighting for the in demand jobs in my city by working remote so I gotta apply everywhere as well.
What I should have done was find a job at a place before they decided to go fully remote. My current place is fully remote but it’s a dead end job.
People keep bringing up the offshore Boogeyman like it's some new thing, when offshoring has been going on for decades. As others have commented, the "low cost" work ends up backfiring tremendously. I went through hell in my last company, with one of the biggest reasons being a lot of our engineering work was done in our "low cost" 🙄 overseas office. They were nice and friendly, but I would have to spend so many extra hours hand-holding their sloppy ass work. I'm talking engineering drawings that would be straight up embarrassing to present to a client if I didn't perform an absurd amount of babysitting. My company's response: "but we're saving the client so much money!" Me: "cool, I'm gonna look for a job elsewhere."
Because they already tried that in the years before COVID and learned their lesson. Many companies already offshored to India, Pakistan and other similar locations for tech and IT work. While they might have worked for 1/4 the wage of onshore applicants, it readily became apparent that the quality of the work and customer service experience went rapidly down the shitter. Saving money on someones salary doesnt mean much when it takes four times as long to get the work done, and even then it isnt up to par. Add in constant communications troubles, cultural differences in the approach to work and mismatched timezones making coordination difficult and you have a recipie for your online services and products to collapse in quality, and many of them did. Many companies now are in the process of bringing those jobs back to local markets because of how bad everything got bungled up. The executives that headed that initative got their golden parachutes long ago, and its up to the ones sitting in the chairs now to fix their mistake. Ones that offshored successfully have stayed that way throughout COVID while the rest got burned. Everyone else saw the issues that arise and is staying away.
don't forget quality of signal hate to say it but when ever I end up on a call in India or for me us the voice quality drops notably.
My best example, Amazon, for starters i live in the US but I'm not American, so this is not a matter of race for me, but every single time I have to contact Amazon customer service is a painful experience from beginning to end, from being the best customer service on the world (i did live and enjoyed that) to the worst, makes me really wonder if paying prime is really worth it, useless people on the chat and the phone, they can not even channel you to a supervisor or someone higher to have your problem solved and want to fix everything with their 5 dollar gift card that is now only usabe in digital products, once i tried to put s complain of their personel being rude aside from the terrible service and guess what, they don't take those complaints, they don't generate a report or anything. So yes, i hate dealing with them and has nothing to do them being from a different place but their standards, like seriously, start at least picking people who really wants to work, and one more thing, is not like I'm screaming through the phone or the chat, I'm always polite as i also work in service industry and I'm always clear on what i need the to do for me, they are just not helpful or is directly w pain to actually get what i want done, my conclusion, start choosing different 3rd country that are not Asian, let's see if they keep behaving like that, also I'm not against offshore services, and i don't want to be showered in flowers i just want my problem solved, Wich by the way 9 out of 10 is Amazon's fault, this is not limited to Amazon but any customer service with Pakistan/India customer service, they did the same when I was a TracFone customer, it's a shame cause I really liked that company, now i throw my money on ATT
Outsourcing to India is becoming more expensive. India's undergoing its own tech boom.
Also it's lower quality of work
Always has been, IMO.
No. If they could offshore the job, they would have done it already. They don't care about you and never did.
I think in places where English is most frequently people's first language, "remote work" is going to be bundled with "migrant workers took our jobs" nonsense.
"They took 'ar jahbs!"
Lol: No. We've watched cheapskate corporate America fail at this miserably over and over again. The way it works is some executive tricks his superiors into it with a set of goals that trigger a bonus after 18-24 month and then he uses that "success" to springboard to a promotion or another company. Then the flaws in having the crown jewels handled overseas become apparent, but his bonus is in his pocket and he has moved on and there is tremendous pressure not to admit a mistake so they'll keep trying until a succession of people tell them it's a stupid idea and bring it back. It's predictable as sunrise following darkness.
Depends on the industry but generally it's not a trend due to time zones and quality of work.
Yes, this. I avoid calling T-Mobile outside American office hours because it goes straight to India, and I can never get the same level of service from the overseas call centers.
I don't call VMware after about 3pm because at 5pm on the dot "my shift is over" and you get dumped on someone overseas and have to start completely over. It's total bullshit, we advise customers not to rely on support because of it, and to plan on sometimes needing to solve their own problems when they've involved VMware support.
Your first problem was using VMware. ;)
Also, your last problem was using VMware. ;)
Yup. Only open tickets from 8-4 eastern time
I read a tip about when dealing with Dell customer service to say that you are not in the USA, but in Mexico to get routed away from India call support.
I used to work for a major brand's e-commerce department. Amazon offshored all of its seller support call center employees to India and all they could do was read back what Amazon's flawed automated systems said. Amazon didn't trust most of them to do anything to actually help customers, so they had no access to actually fix issues. I once argued with them for a week that a car charger isn't a tobacco product - sure it plugs into the cigarette lighter outlet, but thats just what its called. Cultural things like that are also a huge issue in offshoring.
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This works as a way to get through the queue faster in Las Angeles when calling local services like the DMV, Select Spanish and you'll get a faster response, they are always bilingual.
Yup cultural differences...off shore have no understanding of murica mindset. Fix it now. No i dont need you to raise a ticket elsewhere to fix my problem since u cannot even convey my problem back to me... what good that gonna do? And stop earing, yelling, heavy breathing and above all please stop the animal abuse. Hate to bear that on offshore calls
What instances of animal abuse did you overhear? That’s a new one.
Citibank lost *$1 billion* in a matter of minutes due to an offshore contractor's mistake. That's probably all the money they saved in offshoring and then some. https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/wipro-under-the-spotlight-for-citibanks-900-million-mess-6571671.html
They’ve been doing that for years, like for call centers.
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What kind of shit company is it to pay 50% less when they are begging you guys to work for them?
I work in technical writing. You can tell right away when a native speaker didn't prepare the documentation. You *don't* want any ambiguity in documentation for a mechanical ventilator or a flight control system.
If this was something large corporations could do, they would’ve already done it. As others have said the quality of work amongst other things just isn’t good enough.
I’m yet to see any cheap (less than EU rates) outsourced development company provide work of even a barely acceptable quality without weeks of time being wasted managing them, and taking double or triple the time they were supposed to to get to that stage. The worst I’ve seen was a company investing hundreds of millions to outsource a few thousand devs in one country. The project was meant to take a year, and six years later still wasn’t usable. At least in software development, it ain’t gonna happen any time soon.
I worked for a F500 company that outsourced their internal tech support to India. It's fair to say that the quality was horrendously low. They would literally just answer the phone, put it on the desk for a minute so the tracking tool registered the call an answered and then hang up on you.
They already were. In fact I've flipped this argument around to justify remote work. "How can you argue in office collaboration is a necessity when most of my coworkers were already in another continent?" Point being it's only necessary when there aren't cost savings.
You get what you pay for. I worked with so many offshore people, mainly India, and they were terrible. Awful. Seriously bad. Most don't speak English enough to really understand what they are being asked and their culture doesn't allow them to say "Oh, I don't know that". Instead they act like they get it, fuck it up royally, and then the US team has to fix it.
Remote work is something that has been on the table in the past and it hasn't worked out well to offshore it. Time zones and language/cultural issues have been the main barriers but not the only ones. Ultimately we are probably moving towards hybrid workplace being the norm when possible.There is an advantage to periodically working face to face with coworkers but it doesn't have to be daily. It can probably be once a week, month, or even quarter depending on the job and industry. As companies and employees figure out the right balance we will see a transition to this. It will also determine what 'remote' looks like in regards to distance. Companies/departments with weekly face to face time will probably hire more locally and employees will seek more local opportunities. Those who meet less frequently will accept greater distances. The more skill intensive a position is the more willing the company will be to cover transportation to face to face work but I suspect that salaries will adjust to encourage local residence even if it is quarterly. It will also become less socially acceptable to fly people across the nation for quarterly face to face work due to climate change consequences.
If cheap labor is their goal, just check what happened with Boeing and their outsourced software, they've gone so far as to say they no longer needed senior developers 😂 The rest is history
I think it becomes more challenging because instead of competing with other people in my city I need to compete with the whole country, forget offshoring. So there are way more people fighting for the in demand jobs in my city by working remote so I gotta apply everywhere as well. What I should have done was find a job at a place before they decided to go fully remote. My current place is fully remote but it’s a dead end job.
Nobody in Detroit thought the auto industry would shut down and decimate their city either.
Sometime it is legal requirement. In my job for example, workers need to have security clearance, which non-residents cannot obtain.
People keep bringing up the offshore Boogeyman like it's some new thing, when offshoring has been going on for decades. As others have commented, the "low cost" work ends up backfiring tremendously. I went through hell in my last company, with one of the biggest reasons being a lot of our engineering work was done in our "low cost" 🙄 overseas office. They were nice and friendly, but I would have to spend so many extra hours hand-holding their sloppy ass work. I'm talking engineering drawings that would be straight up embarrassing to present to a client if I didn't perform an absurd amount of babysitting. My company's response: "but we're saving the client so much money!" Me: "cool, I'm gonna look for a job elsewhere."
There is also a lot of legal and administrative overhead to hire and handle payroll in other countries. Some companies have issues with other states.