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I think there are at least a few factors at play here.
1. Yes, the US dollar is falling, and many European countries are now
outsourcing to the US for manufacturing and warehouse storage
(midwest).
2. Companies are learning that outsourcing isn't a solution in itself.
It takes a lot of effort to make it work, and more times than not it
also requires a work culture shift that many companies are either
unwilling or incapable of making.
3. To use India as an example, their costs are rising year over year
as their country continues to leap into the high tech arena. There's a
huge population of highly skilled and experienced techies in India,
and you'll see that in the "tech hotbeds" there the cost of living is
rising dramatically, along with salaries.
4. Companies are seeing the benefit of on-site management and face
time for project teams. Yes, virtual teams are still the soup du jour,
but you'll find that very few operate without some form of face to
face contact, whether it be web cam or travel. Those travel
arrangements aren't getting any cheaper as fuel prices continue to
rise; everything is going up as a result of higher fuel prices, from
flights to shipping costs of getting those laughable little packs of
peanuts from the distributors to the planes.
There are likely many other factors involved, but yes, many companies
are either shying away from or cautiously using outsourced labor.
Bill
On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 11:17 AM, Nancy Allison <maker -at- verizon -dot- net> wrote:
> A long-term contract finally ended when the company outsourced most of its tech writing to a company in Canada. Canadian labor was more expensive than Indian labor, but still cheap enough to be attractive. The fact that the company was in the same time zone was also helpful.
>
> Now, two years later, I've just come across an ad for a job in my old group, at the same hourly contract rate that people were getting before the outsourcing started.
>
> I am very curious whether anyone else has seen any indication that the falling dollar is making the hassles of outsourcing less attractive. (I should add that my former client is not rebuilding the entire in-house doc group. I don't know what the story is about that one contract. I may be over-interpreting.)
--
Bill Swallow
HATT List Owner
WWP-Users List Owner
Senior Member STC, TechValley Chapter
STC Single-Sourcing SIG Manager http://techcommdood.blogspot.com
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