Silicon Valley insider and India specialist, Sramana Mitra says you can get your low-level work, such as data entry done in India for $2 an hour, basic programming for $5 an hour, and webmaster-level work for $10 an hour.
And it's easy to find such workers: elance.com, odesk.com, and guru.com.
She does recommend you interview them (Skype video and audio calls are free worldwide) and ask for references. Be sure they can communicate effectively verbally and in writing--You want to be sure they understand what you want done.
Also, try them out on a $50 or $100 project before hiring them for a biggie.
I'd imagine that reading this is scary to Americans who have invested a fortune in college and expect $30-100 an hour, plus benefits, 12 weeks a year of Family and Marriage Leave, rights to sue for wrongful termination, etc.
It's actually not that scary any more, at least in IT. We were all promised that the low-level jobs were headed for Bangalore.
ReplyDeleteMany of them did.
Then most of those came back.
Right now, Indian IT professionals are helping drive both the US and Japanese IT sector. But in both of those cases, lots of those professionals are guestworkers, not remote workers.
For instance, even in famously-xenophobic Japan is now importing Indian engineers for lower-level IT jobs:
http://www.japantoday.com/category/technology/view/indian-engineers-becoming-backbone-of-japans-it
at this point, a lot of call centers are outsourced and some very low-level, repetitive jobs, but relatively few firms continue to believe that outsourcing most IT work succeeds.
Webmaster work is interesting. For some businesses, it's mostly about image, esthetics and branding. The page does not need to be updated regularly and orders are not flowing through the page. That would be outsourceable. In other businesses, the web page is a front-end to a customer database, and drives orders. For a small business that work may be outsourced (PayPal is just a way to outsource the design, really) but most outfits which are trying to get a lot of business pushed through a web presence are going to move webmaster to 'critical to have in-house' fairly quickly.
I would argue that the effective use of the global labor pool enables domestic workers to focus on more higher level work, like developing technology or analyzing information, creating more value.
ReplyDeleteYou might be interested in trying out outsourcing on our on-demand platform at http://www.optask.com. We've built the first labor-as-a-service platform that enables anyone to outsource a task with one click. You'd be surprised how this could help your day to day work and enable you to work smarter.
"the first ..."
ReplyDelete"labor as a service"
Hmmmmmmmm.
Good screenplay fodder, though. Sneak in someone who's recently graduated from a marketing program and let him deliver this line.
If the audience is awake, they'll fall over laughing. The critics will accuse you of going over the top. And some knucklehead will run off to Texas and file patents on the concept.