February 22nd, 2005

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The Long View
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Bullish on the Right Brain

I finally got around to reading the latest issue of Wired. There’s a really interesting piece on the re-emergence of right-brain thinking in the workplace, and how traditional left-brain jobs are most at risk for outsourcing:

But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that’s where the work will go.

The gist is that any basic knowledge worker activity–and that includes portions of traditional alpha careers like lawyers and doctors–will get automated or outsourced. That’s one reason I got out of pure technical writing–I recognized that it’d be pretty easy to outsource how-to manuals to the developing world. Marketing writing, on the other hand, is far trickier to outsource, because of the cultural sensitivity it requires.

Comments: 7 Responses so far

Ross
February 23rd, 2005
1:14 am

Phew! I’m safe. Good ol’ graphic design - how I love you so.

Thanks for the thoughts on the topic. I heard something on the news about that too, and even how of all these “tech” jobs being outsourced to India and developing countries, many of them are still mundane - stuff that we westerners would hate to spend our time doing - like retyping 40 pages of scanned paperwork, or entering doctors notes, or over phone technical support. Intern type work. And if you can outsource these jobs to India, it leaves us more money to hire a person here in the states - hypothetically speaking of course.

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Andrea
February 23rd, 2005
8:49 am

Many Canadians would happily accept those mundane jobs. The average income in Canada is $24,000, Wal-Mart is the largest private employer, and truck driver is the most common position. It’s only the empowered and educated who have the opportunity to be choosy about work. Execs often say that no one wanted to do such boring work in the first place — because the execs would never want to do that work and it makes it easier to ship a job overseas. However, 45% of Canadians have only high school diplomas — almost a third never graduated. And half of Canadians are illiterate or functionally illiterate. Many of these people aren’t in a position to give up work just because it’s boring. Outsourcing offshore is about the money, not the mundane.

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Chris
February 23rd, 2005
9:13 am

uh, Andrea? Better check your stats before making such claims: http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/famil21a.htm
It’s not nearly as bleak as all that (unless you lean to the left — waaay to the left)

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Sue
February 23rd, 2005
11:09 am

Having experienced the “cost savings” that is tech support in India, I have to say I’m firmly opposed to the view that these jobs can be done “just as well” overseas. Companies are not factoring in the impact it makes on the customer to know that their tech support problems are a “cost center” that has to be dealt with in the cheapest way possible. Thanks to Dell Canada’s delightful tech support (cold)line, I now know how frustrating it can be to spend hours on hold to talk to someone, then after a ten minute diagnostic call (on a crappy phone line) be told I have to call back to the SAME number and choose different options, because tech support can’t transfer me BACK to customer service to deal with my problem. Why is this? Why, because tech support is in India. This makes me no fan at all of outsourcing overseas, and even less of a fan of Dell Canada. Arrgh.

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Andrea
February 23rd, 2005
11:33 am

Hi Chris,

I see now that I was reading from the 1998 numbers (albeit on another page). However, a jump to $28,400 for males and $25,200 for females still results in fairly low incomes. According to JobFutures, $18.46 is the average hourly wage for adults (25- to 54-year-olds) in Canada. Full-time work is anything over 30 hours a week (which roughly gives you $28k for the full-time worker). About 1/5 jobs are part-time, so that may drop the number, too.

Andrea

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Ross
February 25th, 2005
11:24 pm

One company that has outsourced its technical support is Nextel. And oh man, was that a NIGHTMARE to deal with. Nextel obviously went for the cheaper, English-optional tech support. I left Nextel solely for that reason. The language barrier was just too much. I would have gladly spoken to a canadian for all that. I’m all for supporting economic growth in other countries and out-sourcing some work - but obviously not at the expense of increased US (or Canadian) unemployment.

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mercan
November 10th, 2008
8:22 am

saçma

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