India - wave of the future?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

The "offshoring" of work that began with manufacturing jobs is only likely
to increase, and it's a definite threat to technical writers too. The
problem is simple: people outside the first world are willing to work for
far less money than we are (because their living costs are lower and they're
more desperate to survive), and increasingly, they're every bit as
knowledgeable and competent as we are. Not universally and not now, but it's
coming.

Indian technical writers pose a particular threat to our livelihood because
India has a long history of English colonialism, thus many Indians have
received an English education as good as our own. In fact, judging by the
quality of North American public schools these days, I'd suggest some Indian
schools may even have a better educational standard than we do. The only
"cure" for this problem is for us to produce such high-quality documentation
that our value becomes immediately apparent to even the dimmest
pointy-haired boss. That's never going to happen based on the evidence to
date.

The threat from China is even worse. I visited China last fall as part of a
delegation on technical communication, and it appears that university
graduation now requires basic competence in written English. The overall
standard of English is pretty low now, but that will change; some Chinese
kids are already studying English as early as 6 years old. Given low Chinese
wages and the determination of the Chinese to succeed, the lack of ethnic
strife (unlike in India), and the large amounts of money available to throw
at solving problems, you can expect a serious threat to our employment from
China within a generation.

The "buying time" solution involves making our value known to our employers,
and making sure they know exactly what they're going to sacrifice by
outsourcing work. Pointing out that laying us off means that there will be
that many fewer people who can afford to buy a company's products is the
best solution, but fails the pointy-haired-boss test.

Hate to be a wet blanket here, but we've got a big problem coming. No
obvious solutions either. The current situation has been called "reverse
colonialism" or "the revenge of the third world", and it's not hard to see
why.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

"Wisdom is one of the few things that look bigger the further away it
is."--Terry Pratchett