Yep. I’m in IT. We have plenty of americans that can participate in the field. My friend used to manage a bunch of programmers and, way back in the late 90’s, he was watching a bunch of contractors work. He suddenly realized that the americans, billing out at $75 an hour, were really no better than the Indians, billing out at $17.50. He wondered why we had the americans. His company ended up being on the bleeding edge of flooding his IT work with Indians.
What they found was that the ability to speak fluent english had value. But that was after many years. Having even a single Indian/Chinese/Pakistani on a WebEx call that has a hard time speaking in clear english messes up the whole project. I come from a time when all project members were americans that spoke fluent english. I long so much for those days of efficient meetings and solid project implementations that I’m considering just getting out of the nonsense I have to put up with today.
Most companies have no idea how much it costs them.
The language problem eventually solves itself. The English speakers are much more useful asking how you like your steak done, or is there anything else you need. All the programmers can talk Hindi to each other.
You'd be surprised. In the past 30 years in my career I've been through four cycles of outsourcing to foreign companies.
Three of the companies that outsourced I left. I've been with my current employer 15 years now. This is the first time I've been with an employer long enough to see the outsource --> back to insource part of the cycle.
Outsourcing for us was an unmitigated disaster. It's been so bad our internal business partners asked us to re-insource starting last December. You can imagine how difficult that's been in a Chinese Virus addled world. Even still, our operational reliability has already dramatically improved, our change-control windows are met for the first time in three years and the number of "red" downtime incidents were cut by 2/3rds.
Yep, our business partners see the difference between cheap Indian IT outsourcing and good old fashioned American intelligence and diligence.
Now you know why all of the urgent requirements from hell include this line:
- excellent verbal & written communication skills