Outsourcing To Rural America 887
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running a story about Rural Sourcing, a company attempting to make outsourcing to rural America as cost effective as sending jobs to India."
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Outsourcing To Rural America
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"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" -Ronald Reagan
The Difference (Score:5, Funny)
Indians speak better English.
M
The other kinds of Indians (Score:5, Funny)
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians? I'm sure somebody on the reservation could help you admin your Apache server.
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Insightful)
Dell just located a 700 person call center here and plans to double it's size...... Come on over...
Re:Arkansas isn't so bad... (Score:3, Informative)
Acxiom...one of the largest dealers and maintainers of 'people data' started in Conway, and has expanded into Little Rock. Trans-Union relies on them for data needs...so, they do indeed handle a lot of data.
Alltel is based in Little Rock.
Steven's corporation and many other financial houses are in AR. So...it isn't quite a po-dunk as you might think. Hell, in Little Roc
Thinking in Hopi and Navajo languages (Score:3, Interesting)
Why contract with South Asians when you can contract with businesses run by good old American Indians?
This is not as funny as it seems. I often though Hopi would make excellent computer programmers. People who speak Hopi fluently can you tell you that the language does not support ambiguity.
Navajo is another language that may be good for "thinking like a computer programmer". The language's grammar has something similar to the "type-safety" found in OO languages like C++ and Java. The type-safety
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:4, Insightful)
And US citizens wonder why so many want to kill you, at whatever cost to themselves...
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't wonder why, I know why: they want what we have.
If it was just about being conquered, then you... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that the US and Canada did conquer many tribes and take away a lot of land, but most of the remaining tribes weren't conquered, rather they tended to settle with the US and agreed to a series of treaties. Eventually the US government decided to settle with the tribes uniformly so they could co-exist with the states, while being bound by federal law.
Now, if I can address you last comment.
Personally, I think the Indians should feel lucky that we gave them anything at all instead of just assimilating them into our society as just one more ethnic group in the already-growing melting pot.
If you were an Indian, that statement would probably sound a lot like: Personally, I think the Jews should feel lucky we didn't gas and incinerate them all.
While saying circumstances could always be worse is technically a valid point, it's appalling and bad form to use it to play down culpability for any atrocity.
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Informative)
It's used by the military for an unusual property -- when DU munitions strike armor or metal, they basically vaporize themselves in a heat flash, allowing DU shells to cut through tank armor.
Unfortunately for anyone nearby, or living in the nation being attacked, when the DU vaporizes, it leaves an extremely fine radioactive dust in the air, which then settles and pollutes the area, as well as being inhaled
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, the reason why they went through tank armor was because, by volume, they're the heaviest thing you can throw at the enemy. High mass, small impact zone = massive penetrating power. Thus they can cut through armor not because they're on fire, but because they're bullets which are 15% heavier than lead, and a
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Insightful)
I live in the State of Washington where indian casinos are all over the place. I have to say that the casinos don't help the average indian very much.
The tribal elders get a nice kick back from the big gaming companys ( Trump, etc.) but that doesn't pull the average indian up any. They may get a yearly profit sharing check but that just means that they can have a plasma screen and DirectTV in the single-wide. Few of the
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easy for you to say that -- you can move to any other town or state, and still remain in your own culture. Imagine if the situation was reversed, and you lived in a little pocket of European American culture, and 99.9% of the rest of the country was Native American. Would you still find moving away to be such an easy option?
Re:The other kinds of Indians (Score:4, Insightful)
After a while I went to Japan; yet another "alien" culture. Learned the language and some of the culture, worked, etc. No problem.
I am not special and nowhere near unique; there are millions of people who do this kind of stuff all the time
Oh, please. (Score:4, Interesting)
A little more about me (there is actually a point to this, please bear with me): I'm 50 now, and I live about 20 miles from a major indian reservation in Montana. In my various travels, I have met many indians (both native Americans and "India"ns), Aussies, English folk, uncounted large numbers of Chinese, ditto South Americans (serious time in Florida, remember), quite a large number of Japanese, and lots of uprooted east coasters on the left coast and vice versa. Southerners up north, and northerners down south. I've been hanging with a girl from Kansas for about ten years.
You know who the least respectable of the bunch are? The ones who never left home. That's right. The (American) indians I've met in the cities and the schools, those people are smart and interesting and looking to do something with themselves. The indians I've met here, however, are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. They live off the dole, they drink like camels (if camels drank alchohol) and they don't do squat worth anything to either their little microcosm or American society at large (unless you count providing justificaiton for major amounts of employment in the FBI, the BIA, and several other large government operations.)
In sharp contrast, the "furrin" folk I've met have been a delight to interact with, both personally and professionally. They, somehow, managed to drag themselves out of their "own cultures" without complete mental collapse, intolerable levels of angst, or having to scuttle back home to get that welfare/dole/tribal-residency check. I have noticed that in many cases, particularly Japanese and Chinese and Korean folk, they tend to turn their living spaces into little cultural "nodes" in a space made up of American culture. Seems to work very well, too - they have a place to go that is culturally "them", and they don't implode like postal workers.
Now... you seriously think American indians are so involved with their culture, of all things, that they actually are so mentally disabled that they can't get out of an area about the size of a typical large state's county? If that's truly the case, then we should probably just toss the whole rez idea in the trash - because keeping their culture is too expensive for them.
Now me, I don't think it is the culture, that is, the indian-ness of them. I think it is the welfare "we will reward you if you stay here" approach that we do to them. I think it is the "we will give you more for each baby you pop out" that we do to them. I think it is the "you can put casinos here, while folks outside the rez can't because mommy and daddy government say so" that we do to them. That's right. I don't blame them. I blame people like you, who, in their haste to be all touchy-feely, don't give minorities and the disadvantaged room to compete on an even playing field because you smother them with "aw gee, baby got a boo-boo? Lemme give you a check for that."
I say, let them have the land. Let them celebrate whatever they think they have to celebrate. But make them compete on an even playing field with everyone else, and pretty soon, you'll see that they are like everyone else. The potential is there. I've seen it, and I am certain of it. First shoot the social workers. Then shoot the lawyers.
<mutter>freaking psychobabbling social-worker morons...</mutter>
Re:Oh, please. (Score:4, Insightful)
To say or imply that people can come to the United States from various third world repressive shitholes in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe, with no or limited english language skills, immigrate to the United States, and within several years be a functioning succsessful and contributing part of our culture, yet think that the Native Americans somehow need more "help" in order to succeed, is to denigrate their entire race. I am sure that there are some exceptions, as I have met and seen a few of them, but, overall, the results of government handouts is a failure.
As for the rest of this tread, we moved here to get OUT of a big stinking, crime ridden metropolis of 2+ million. Cost of living is so much lower, and a traffic jam is what happens when a herd of deer of flock of wild turkeys need to cross the road... It was a total quality of life improvement, although if you measure the results in dollars, we are now down near poverty level income. It is amazing, however what so little money can do, when you are debt free and don't have a mortgage or car payment. No way I could have a semi retired lifestyle if I was still in the Denver Metro area. For an equivilent lifestyle, I would need to earn many times what I can get by on here, since I would still be trying to pay off a 200K+ mortgage. Instead, we have 3 houses, with 2 of them rented. We have found that living in a rural community gives us a life, and the big city was slavery, where you worked 60+ hours a week, just to pay for the basics. I have also noticed that many who have never been lived in a rural area think that what you have out here are just a bunch of dumb fsck hicks. I have found that a major portion of the residents are well educated, and a large percentage have moved here from the big cities for the same reasons we did. No, we don't have the opera, 12 screen theaters, 500 restraunts and clubs, and large shopping "mauls". But, that is something we didn't really care about since (because of working 60+ hours a week) we didnt have time for, or enjoy anyway. We have instead, clean air & water, no commute, happy safe children, decent neighbors, almost zero stress, bike and hiking trails, downhill and x-c skiing, hunting and fishing, and the time to enjoy it all.
Re:Oh, please. (Score:3, Insightful)
The welfare needs to be tapered off to zero, especially the "have a baby, get a dollar" welfare programs. Education must be imposed. Actual jobs created - even if they are artificially created - and those that do not work, like the rest of humanity, get to starve. Those that do low quality work, also get to starve, because they get fired.
Our government is King Turd of Shit Hill when i
Re:The Difference (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe Southern California. Dude your system has some seriously bad karma going on.
Yea what ever. If you look at the school system ratings you will find that best schools tend to be in the more rural states. Here is the top ten by % of students that graduate. Only one state New Jersey could be called urban.
1 NEW JERSEY 87%
2 NORTH DAKOTA 86%
3 UTAH 86%
4 IOWA 85%
5 NEBRASKA 84%
6 SOUTH DAKOTA 83%
7 WEST VIRGINIA 83%
8 MONTANA 81%
9 WISCONSIN 81%
10 MINNESOTA 80%
The big urban states of California and New York are ranked 35th and 39th.
My home state is at the bottom of the list. Why? Our schools suck. Too many retired people that do not want to pay for good schools because "they already paid for their kids to go to school". Well when they get the snot beat out of them by roaming gangs of drop outs we will see. When will people learn that you will pay for schools or for prisons.
Re:The Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Graduating a higher percentage doesn't mean better schools. In fact, it could mean lower standards...
Re:The Difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Many of those same states also tend to have high ACT/SAT scores too. The schools are certainly not the giant kid warehouses that you'll find in many metro areas. It's not uncommon to have teachers that not only taught your older siblings, but probably taught or went to school with your parents (depending on the subject, with the same books - our algebra teacher didn't want to get new books. The 20-30 year old ones were still in good shape and had harder problems than any of the new ones). The goo
Re:The Difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah California and New York have high education standards hehe.
The mods take down the guy who posted facts (here they are btw) http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_31_tab
and mod +5 the guy with the "but, but..." retort that has absoultly no basis in fact. I'll ofcourse now be modded down for pointing this out. I love it
Re:The Difference (my experiences) (Score:5, Interesting)
My basic point is that less-well-to-do families have a harder time producing children that do well in school. Economic health is a good indicator for many other problems that less able students face. Lack of proper nutrition, lack of proper materials (i.e., paper, pencils, clothes, shoes, coats, etc.), parents that are less able to spend quality time with the kids, kids from families with a poor social life together, stigmatization from their peers, and families that just resent the kid for ever being born.
You can quibble with me on details and specific cases, but I've been there and seen all of it in action throughout my life. I was a poor kid, but my mother was smart and loving enough to do the right things to help me get ahead in life. She's now a teacher, teaching many children from the POOREST parts of southeast Georgia.
Her kids are the poorest economically and educationally. She does her best, but there's no escaping the effects of simply being dirt poor.
So, in a roundabout way, my point is that comparing performance by economic groups is probably a better way to compare school performance in each state. I don't have the data for this, but maybe I'll look into it.
My suspicion (and I've been told by others that there is data to back this up, any pointers are helpful to confirm this), is that middle-class and up kids do quite damn good across the nation. Poor kids don't do so good across the nation. Differences in other states can probably be correlated to distribution of incomes among populations across the nation.
In other words, poor-performing schools and states are more likely to be such because of a larger share of economically poor families (students) to better-off families.
Bad public schools are (mostly) a myth (Score:3, Insightful)
Private schools appear to be better than public schools simply because the parents care enough to pay for what they percieve to be better than what they could get for free. These parents that care take part in their child's education to a much greater extent.
In my home town there were 4 large public high schools and 1 large private high school, all 5 about the same size (there were pe
Re:Bad public schools are (mostly) a myth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Difference (Score:3, Insightful)
Some years ago, an auto parts manufacturing company that I did a lot of contract systems development for moved from Illinois' second largest city (Rockford, some sixty miles from Chicago) out to a completely rural area a hundred and twenty-odd miles even further away from Chicago. I mean, I had to drive out there a few times to upgrade some equipment and I was amazed at just how rural it was. I passed farmland, cows
Re:The Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't always say that about the urban northeast
Re:The Difference (Score:4, Informative)
no, his/her sentence is correct, if you wanted to use well it would be:
speaks English perfectly well
as well is an adverb that should modify a verb, whereas in his sentence, good, an adjective, modifies the noun English.
Re:The Difference (Score:5, Funny)
Well, in our defense...our schools are a bit remiss in not teaching ebonics...and it does make it hard for us to talk to some of you NE urbanites...
Uhhh... (Score:5, Funny)
So rather than "Tank you vor calling Cisco, dis is Singh, how may I help you?" I'll hear "Thanks fer callin' Cis-coe, this is Billy-Joe Jim-Bob, what's yer malfunction?"
It's a joke, lighten up.
Re:Uhhh... (Score:4, Funny)
Now I'm headin' dahntahn to da sowside. Gonna pound sum Ahrns and watch Cow-er and Da Stillers whup sum more arse this weekend.
-Ab
Re:Uhhh... (Score:3, Informative)
Water is pronounced "wooder"
With is pronounced "wit" ex: Gimme' 2 eggs wit scrapple
Beautiful is pronounced "Beauty Full"
Curb is pronounced "curve"
"The Eagles" are "da' Iggles"
"I'm goin down the shore this weekend" - Trip to Wildwood beach
"Up the mountains" - Trip to the Pocanos
Schuylkill is pronouced the "School Kill"
"Widges" means With Us - ex: Yo, we're goin to the bar
Arthritis is pronounced "Author-Ritus"
ACME is pronounced "Ack-A-Me"
Bagel is pronounced "Beg'
Count me in. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Count me in. (Score:5, Interesting)
The commute sucks cause everyone has to drive to a subway station first. Then take a subway as the 2nd part of commute.
Even if you want to drive, chances are you won't find parking.
The office lease is far more expensive in the center of a city than some suburbs.
The network speed is the same.
The company may be in some skyscraper building sharing it with 50 companies. That means your company is on the 20th floor. Management gets all the window office, and everyone else cubes.
Re:Count me in. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, there is a trend, at least in the Chicago metro area for companies to put offices in suburbs. They got big high rises in the middle of nowhere. ANd i'll tell you... they SUCK as far as location goes. The only things they have going for them is a cheaper leases and parking. A reverse commute can be just as nasty and, again, public transporation is not an option. It is a car or nothing. It is also more difficult to carpool becuase the chances of a friend going to work in the same area as you is slim.
-matthew
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, I think there is a certain amount of cachet from being located downtown.
Third, there are lots of good places to eat lunch.
I used to work for a company in downtown Seattle that was pretty much like what you are describing. Management got the good window view of Elliot Bay and everyone else got c
Re:Count me in. (Score:5, Funny)
That's why people live and work in cities. Try getting that kind of convenience in a rural area.
Re:Count me in. (Score:5, Insightful)
And THAT'S why oil costs so damn much and Americans are so damn fat, everybody!
Hey, you know those buildings that the subway passes by on its way downtown? The ones that are within walking distance of the subway stops? People live in those buildings, and they don't need to drive to the subway station. In fact, often they don't need to own a car at all!
Does the phrase "transit-oriented development" mean anything to you? No, I didn't think it did.
jf
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that in civilized countries, "downtown" is a pleasant place to live, with lots of services and jobs close to popular apartments for both families and singles. No need for everyone to live in huge monotonous suburbs with one car per family member.
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Insightful)
The commute doesn't suck if you also live in the area. The general philosophy of zoning in the US is atrociously bad. By zoning large commercial areas away from large residential areas you create traffic. By
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, we call "bums" "homeless" or "vagrants".
There are less of them, because the population is not as dense and because we tend to try putting them to work instead of propping them up forever. A lot of field and construction laborers are homeless men picked up on a corner and driven in the back of the boss's pickup truck to the job site. That doesn't happen up north because of all the labor unions.
Rednecks typically work for a living, either at manual labor or one or two steps
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, but the crank is great!
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Funny)
In the country you can do the things you'd get arrested for in the city.
Ever blow up your old tv instead of just throwing it away? How about doing 150mph on a dirt road?
We also get to do a lot of the things y'all pay tons of money for when y'all come visit us, for free. Do you know what it costs to rent a 4-wheeler and go ATV riding? it's pretty bad. We grew up doing it. You like horses? There is a horse farm behind my house.
And then there's the food. I have a
Re:Count me in. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have to park
You see, in the city, we can do without cars. How long does it take you to drive to the grocery store? I can WALK to it in thirty seconds.
Never mind not needing a car, I usually don't even need a subway.
Different strokes for different folks and all that shit.
Tim
Re:Count me in. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's quite liberating to be able to be car-free in the city. The suburban "american dream" with a status-symbol car and a useless lawn is BS. We need to counter that spawl with smarter New Urbanism [newurbanism.org].
--
Good For America! (Score:4, Funny)
America - I love this place!
Re:Good For America! (Score:3, Interesting)
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh great (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, this isn't anything new. In Wisconsin, we had several big companies move (American Family Insurance, Lands End, etc.) because they could run their operations far cheaper while still being within driving distance of Chicago. It's really a win-win situation for everyone.
Re:Oh great (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, those same jobs that paid $50,000 in the big city are only going to be offered for $40,000 in the rural areas.
Sure, you'll be able to afford more housing for the buck, but lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products) cost about the same all over the country. You could actually end up with less buying power by following a job out to greener pastures.
Wahoo! (Score:5, Funny)
One hopes this expands my job prospects here... not that it matters too much, I love my job.
Modern Techies Cut Off From Cycle Of Life (Score:4, Funny)
But will they be able to survive without pizza deliveries?
Re:Modern Techies Cut Off From Cycle Of Life (Score:5, Funny)
No, they will not. But of course that means there will be even more rural jobs, as thousands of pizza delivery people migrate from NYC to service the IT boomtowns of the south
Re:Modern Techies Cut Off From Cycle Of Life (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Modern Techies Cut Off From Cycle Of Life (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Modern Techies Cut Off From Cycle Of Life (Score:3, Insightful)
Inconvenience factor (Score:5, Insightful)
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . . Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
Re:Inconvenience factor (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Inconvenience factor (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Inconvenience factor (Score:5, Interesting)
Also if you are dealing with hardware it is a lot easier to get something overnighted in country than having to deal with customs.
Just what we need... (Score:4, Insightful)
At least the guys in Mumbai are *trying* to enunciate.
(I grew up somewhere that has a native accent thicker than Brooklyn's, and currently live in North Carolina, so I have a legal right to make these jokes)
Are they the "smartest" place to outsource? (Score:3, Interesting)
this post intended to be humerous and or ironic. please treat as such.
Re:Are they the "smartest" place to outsource? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/stateiq.a
Dont see how this would work... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dont see how this would work... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Dont see how this would work... (Score:3, Informative)
Hacking inthe heartland (Score:5, Interesting)
I landed in the Kansas City area after the bubble burst in Boston. Living costs are quite modest here, and it is a pleasant place to live. The hacking is the same. That does not stop my company from outsourcing to India though. Slavery is very attractive to business.
Re:Hacking inthe heartland (Score:3, Funny)
manuel castells arguably predicted this (Score:5, Interesting)
In his trilogy on "the information age", manuel castells looked at the evolving and future structure of current society. One of his suggestions, which I remember clearly, is to forget looking at first, second and third world as being rigidly defined around countries (i.e. the idea that some are "first", others are "second", etc).
He suggests that the world is really becoming a patchwork of first, second and third - so that even so called advanced countries (on average) have third world areas, and even third world countries have first world areas. When you look at it this way, then it shouldn't be surprising about "outsourcing" from advanced economic zones (e.g. SF) to third world zones (e.g. places in the deep south).
Either way, I found this conceptual idea of his to be a very powerful one.
Re:manuel castells arguably predicted this (Score:4, Interesting)
I have not read the book, but it does sound interesting. However, comparing "places in the deep south" to third world countries either (a) overestimates poverty in the deep south (depth and breadth), (b) underestimates poverty in third world countries, or (c) both. I'm not saying poverty doesn't exist in the U.S. - it definitely does - but it does not compare to poverty in third world countries!
Funny, that... (Score:5, Interesting)
While in a manner of speaking I'm all for this, it's already been done to death.
Throughout the last 100-someodd years, the rest of the US has looked to the South as "cheap labor" -- most of the factories that've closed here paid just at or barely above minimum wage, with no option for any real pay raises, and offer conditions that no state in the North would accept. Perhaps this is just a return to that trend. I can only hope that the trend of severe employee abuse won't carry over.
Send em to Ohio (Score:3, Funny)
We need work!!!!!!!!!!
New call-center hold music. (Score:4, Funny)
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
Most folks'll never lose a toe
But then again, some folks'll
Like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel
Definite Selling Points (Score:5, Interesting)
You want to pay $150+ an hour for a Chicago guy to do the same thing that we'll do for $75 an hour?
This can bite you when they find another firm offering $50/hour. At some point, it's just not cost effective to run a business that cheap... not to mention that you'll have a harder time finding qualified employees to work for so little.
If I could make the salary of a comparable California worker, but live in Indiana, I'd be doing very well.
Ob Troll (Score:5, Funny)
I keed!
Could be a good idea (Score:3, Funny)
Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley: Get paid $80K, pay 28% federal tax plus 9-10% state/city tax. House costs $500K-$1M.
East Buttfuck, Wyoming: Get paid $50K. Pay 25% federal tax plus 0.0% state tax. House costs $60K-$100K.
If you've saved enough money for a down payment in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can buy a house for cash in rural America. And if you've been there long enough that you actually own your house in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can sell it, buy a house and a Ferrari, and have change left over for a fucking Porsche in rural America. That's right.
Wanna visit the opera? Hop in the Ferrari on Friday after work, tear up the asphalt (long live long straight highways featuring speed limits defined only by the words "reasonable and prudent" -- it's like the American Autobahn!), party your ass off all weekend, and come home on Sunday.
One look at the horrible things he's done to a Ferrari should make any self-respecting geek aspire to make John Romero our bitch. The best part about rural America isn't that a middle-class IT geek can enjoy such a lifestyle -- it's that he or she can pay for it on the interest and tax savings alone.
Who is John Galt? When you leave a high-tax state for rural America, you are.
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
But then you'd own a house in rural America. There is a reason they cost less, fewer people want them. Simple economics.
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Austin, Texas: Get paid $55K (if you could find a $50K job in East Buttfuck). Pay 25% federal tax plus 0.0% state tax. House costs $100K-$250K.
It's still a huge improvement over thte PRK financially, and you still get to live somewhere with interesting people (who aren't rednecks or rabid Bush supporters) and interesting things to do.
Plus, by moving here, you're increasing land values, and making my ($120K) house worth more. So everybody wins!
Wait, you lost me. (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, why was East Buttfuck, Wyoming better then Southern California again?
I'd welcome this in my town (Score:5, Insightful)
Face the facts! (Score:5, Insightful)
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
Speaking from experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that there are a lot of cities in the U.S. in the 100,000 - 200,000 population range that people don't really consider for whatever reason, either as places to live or for corporations. Little Rock, for example, had most of the shopping, dining, etc. of a larger city but without nearly as much pollution and traffic and with a lower cost of living to boot. To respond specifically to some of the comments I've seen in this thread so far: we had Starbucks, pizza delivery, clubs/raves (if that is your thing), a symphony orchestra, and a minor league baseball team (the only thing that I would miss if I moved back would be the professional sports).
I think there is rural, as in one gas station, one stoplight, and a Sonic...and then there is "rural", as in "not one of the 50 largest cities in the US", and I think businesses would do well to look more closely at the latter.
This has been coming. (Score:5, Insightful)
inner bigness (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing to Rural Australia (Score:3, Interesting)
No where else other than the major cities could they hope to get a degree like that in Australia. And having the work experience behind them would have made them highly employable.
I still believe the idea was good, but starting this just as the bubble burst meant that there was little work and after a couple of years it was closed down.
There was a lot of difficulty in attracting work to the centre since there were always about their ability being junior engineers. So we had to attract some senior engineers there as well to lead the teams. That was harder than attracting contracts, since we were the only employer in the area looking for those skills. But fundamentally the inability of the company to attract work for itself let alone the training center was its downfall.
What happened to the people that were there? Many have now moved to the cities to complete their degrees and get work.
Why I came down from the hills (Score:3, Interesting)
For one thing, food. I'm a foodie and I love variety. In addition to burgers and sandwiches, I am walking distance from Philippine, Indian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and even Armenian food. If I want to cook something, I'm less than 10 minutes from Chinese, Mexican, Korean, and Indian supermarkets, as well as a couple of American ones and a fresh-produce store that acts as kind of a permanent farmer's market. Can I get a reliable supply of sumac [kfunigraz.ac.at] or fenugreek [kfunigraz.ac.at], a durian [csuchico.edu], or fresh kaffir lime leaves [thaitable.com] in rural America?
When a friend of mine who was going to grad school in Indiana came back here, the first thing she did was force me to take her out to eat because she hadn't been able to find Thai food for six months.
A lot of midsize towns and cities have cineplexes and shopping malls. Catching "Revenge of the Sith" will be no problem anywhere in the country. But I also like to go see more obscure stuff like "Primer" [imdb.com] -- hard enough to find even in a big city with lots of art houses. Short of waiting for the DVDs or pirating them over the Internet, I doubt I'd be able to find most of the cult films I've seen in nearby theaters if I lived in a rural area. (One theater in San Jose used to show Hong Kong action films and anime every Tuesday night, though it has since changed owners and now shows Bollywood musicals.)
For exercise and socializing, I enjoy ballroom dance (the competition-style variety, more like figure skating than like Grandma and Grandpa at your sister's wedding). I am walking distance from a giant ballroom studio that gets a crowd of several hundred people four nights a week, and on any given Saturday night I'm twenty minutes' drive from at least four other ballroom venues, not to mention more salsa clubs than I can count.
I like meeting people with all sorts of different backgrounds, and this area gives me that in spades. There is no ethnic majority in San Jose. [brainyencyclopedia.com] Three of my last four girlfriends grew up in foreign countries (China, Australia, and Vietnam) which suits me fine -- I like hearing a completely different perspective on things I find familiar and commonplace. There are certainly immigrant communities elsewhere in the US, but only on the coasts, and pretty much only in the major urban areas on the coasts, do you find such a varied mix of people from all over the place, all getting along just fine most of the time.
Yes, the traffic here can be annoying. But that's why we have telecommuting -- I work from home three out of five days most weeks, so my typical commute time is the 10 seconds it takes me to get from my bedroom to my home office.
The economy here would have to get really bad before I'd consider moving back to a rural area. Urban areas with their melting-pot cultures and abundance of activities that are only economically viable with a certain population density suit me much, much better.
Good for U.S. and good for business, bad for techs (Score:3, Informative)
The rural techs would "steal" jobs from their urban counterparts and would cheapen the overall value of technical jobs.
The truth is there are already a lot of underpaid technical types in rural areas. Today you can consider mechanics technical types and people with these analytical skills do live in rural areas.
I grew up in a small midwestern town. I left. I left because I like computers and I like being well paid. You don't find many computer jobs in small towns and you don't find hardly any decent paying jobs in small towns.
Still keeping the jobs in the US is a boon to the country and getting rural areas jobs will help with the chronic unemployment in these towns. But there is nothing to stop these folks from gaining experience and moving to the city in search of better pay! If that happens there will be a larger surplus of us tech types in the city and our pay will slide closer to the rural folks. So for me, perhaps it is bad.
I am sort of in a 'rural outsourcing' mode (Score:3, Interesting)
We both work fewer hours per week and for usually lower pay, and much less stress. Anyway, it works for us.
The internet and cheap flat rate long distance makes telecommuting possible, but still not as effective as being on site. I try to spend time on consulting, writing and developing a few (very much niche) software products.
The Company Behind the Curtain (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I don't have any inside information, I'd bet the unnamed company is Verizon.
Call up their tech support number and you will hear an American on the other end. Several times, I've talked to someone with a southern accent.
Most of all, it seems the most amaturish support center I've ever called. 9 problems out of 10, I'll get a completely different answer from each support person I talk to. They seem quite determined to pass the buck, giving me any answer they can make up that will require me to call back. You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard some lame answer, that all the problems will be magically fixed "tomorrow", even when they've gone on for weeks. And, of course, they NEVER fail to mark the issue as CLOSED, when they've never solved anything. This screws up the automated phone system, requiring me to call it a "NEW" issue every time I call in about the same thing.
If you're wondering about the 10th time out of 10, I'll get the exact same response from 4 different people, but they'll all be COMPLETELY wrong.
Anyhow, I never understood what was happening there, but this story seems to fit perfectly, and explain the issue.
Of course, I certainly hope I'm wrong, and Verizon support just happens to be terrible. I'm the last person to advocate outsourcing, so I hope REALLY crappy American support isn't the only alternative.
No, thank you. (Score:3, Interesting)
The citizens of these states, especially the "young" people between 18 and 35, have figured this out and are turning their backs on the government of their homes. The past decade has been characterized by a massive outmigration from rural states to Top 50 metropolises. It's a literal brain drain for the communities they leave.
The community in which I live has a special economic development fund that has been an unmitigated disaster, taking tax dollars from our sales tax and giving it to companies who promise to bring in a certain amount of new jobs. There has been, in practice, no accountability and the jobs have sucked. Firms have closed overnight, taking millions of tax dollars with them and leaving hundreds of citizens unemployed with back pay due they'll never see.
The largest employers in this village of ~40,000 people are (besides the air force base, hospital and school district) a technical help desk contractor, a hotel reservation phone pool, a airline reservation phone pool, an insurance agency phone pool, and an adult vocational training center. Despite the "success" of most of these businesses starting within the last 5 years, the median wage has stayed flat at around $25,000.
There are some bright spots. A home that costs ~$150,000 dollars here would set you back ~$2,000,000 in Silicon Valley. Our arts culture here is very strong thanks to the local university, including our excellent volunteer symphony orchestra. I guess that's about it.
Crime isn't low because of the meth epidemic. I have a buddy on the county's drug enforcement squad and the stories he can tell would make for a terrific Al Pacino movie. Except for our housing costs, our cost of living is comparable to the rest of the nation but the fresh produce isn't as fresh nor as diverse.
Now a Super Wal*Mart is scheduled to open next year and our "civic leaders" are touting this as another economic development success. The truth is the citizens are tired of working two or three jobs to get in 40 hours a week and enough of a paycheck to support three kids in their 70's era trailer or trashy $600/month apartment.
I'm lucky to have a great federal government job as a systems administrator. My wife is a dental hygienist with an almost unbelievably fantastic work and pay schedule. We are very lucky.
But to those who would pimp out my neighbors or "outsource" more shitty jobs to communities like this I say go to hell. If the Indians or Chinese or Mexicans will take this shit they are welcome to it. That's not flamebait or nationalism or anything of the sort. It's the truth.
Outsource to Okla. It's Like a 3rd World Country (Score:4, Interesting)
They are cubicle sweathshops. Poor training coupled with the most micromanaged industry in the known Universe creates a highly stressed work environment where employment is measured in months. Turnover is high but they can always turn around and get a job at another call center for a few more months. With so many people out of work from formerly high paying jobs they have a ready supply of desperate workers.
The best selling point for outsourcing to Oklahoma is that it's like an emerging third world country, but here at home. It's mostly rural with pockets of high technology. The cost of living is low. It's in the central time zone so they only have to get up an hour earlier to take calls from the East coast and stay two hours later to take calls from the West coast. And most people have a high school education. And best of all they speak English even if it has an Okie twang to it.
Re:any time (Score:5, Insightful)
Like you, I am from the rural midwest, but was blessed with the opportunity to move back to my hometown and run a good sized network.
Re:What's better? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Rural America? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it's true, they used to be democrats, 40 or 50 years ago. But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans.
They're tired of hearing that America sucks and that people who still hold onto the idea of morals and values are a bunch of bigoted idiots.
People who mock those in rural areas really need to get an f'en clue. Most of the idiots on
Re:Rural America? (Score:5, Insightful)
City people *tend* to be different along those axii, and there are reasons for that. Good, logical reasons. (Like they encounter new people and ideas more frequently.)
I like and admire honesty. I try to be honest. This doesn't cause me to admire bigotry. And I find bigotry too high a price to pay for achieving honesty. (Also an unnecessary price.)
As for hard working...people who are desperate will work themselves to death. That's no moral good. People who are working for themselves will work quite hard for years on end. That may or may not be a moral good, but it's also enlightened self interest. People who are being taken advantage of will slack off whenever the slave master isn't looking. And I consider THIS to be a moral good.
Re:The difference between India and rural US... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing to remember is that the best-and-brightest of India -- the IIT grads -- do not stay in India, most of them are able to grab green cards and work for even more in the US than they could in India.
The current outsourcing population in India is the second tier. Which is still pretty decent, but there's a limited supply of them and eventually they will price themselves out of the market.
The problem in India is that there's no good third tier. You either have at least bachleurs degree and probably a masters degree, or you are almost illiterate. This isn't any sort of bell-curve intellectual gap, it's mostly that the public pre-college education in India is awful. And there's a lot of waste there -- kids who might become great thinkers but because they are culturally expected to be lower class, they are. I used to think that a good way to disrupt the social order there would be to educate the poor, but it's a much more complicated problem than that.
In the US, at least you still have a good population of folks to send to community college.
Yes, it is a Smoke Screen (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone get the feeling the uber rich of the world are majorly screwing the middle-class and trying to make the divide bigger.
Maybe come next election, the people should vote out all the corporate ho's in congress, senate and the white house. It's time the people get represented, instead of getting shafted. Most of the time projects fail because of bad managers. Who are the bad managers? The guys at the top define the culture and it goes down from there. Those people come from rich families with