Wednesday, February 15, 2006

self-googled

I was in one of those crazy moods as usual and I googled my own name and what did I find ...
- Found a bunch of no-gooders (university folks) who've copied my presentations on certain technical papers onto their own sites
- I share the same name with some Scottish singer
- My name was also the name of one the songs in an album called Over the Border, released in 1997
- Scariest thing I found is that there is someone with the exact name as mine who is in the Tsunami missing list of Thailand!! I'm not kidding ... go see it for yourself. Now that is scary, huh?

Monday, February 13, 2006

Outsourcing work ... Insourcing thendism

The other day, I asked this South-Indian guy on our project-team if he wanted to join me in the cafeteria for lunch. He declined with a smile and said he brought "tiffin" with him. So I told him, not to bring lunch the next day, that way we could eat at the cafeteria. The reason I'm being persistent is the Capital One cafeteria is really good. They have italian, indian, chinese, american and so many different types of food. I've noticed the guy is pretty laid back and doesn't communicate much (or well) with the others in the team. I noticed he always goes and has his "tiffin" with his bunch of friends in other projects. He had declined many attempts by the project manager itself when the team was going out to lunch.

Yesterday I coughed up some courage and asked him why he wouldn't come to the cafeteria. That's when reality hit me hard. These guys are being brought by IBM-India or WIPRO-India over here on these L1-visas. They are doing all the work for cheap for the clients like Capital One. But they get paid $30 a day for their expenses. They are given an apartment & are provided transportation with some taxi-bus to & from work. These guys are all working here, but they have no money to go out & enjoy the American culture. They do not have a car as they do not need or have the money to buy one, neither do they know how long they will be working here. They sometimes work overtime, but do not get paid for it, as their team leads dont report the extra hours worked to the project management.

All these Indian companies send their IT management & marketing gurus here to show their high-class standards & products. They come here flaunting their international portfolio of success stories and varied expertise and descibe how they can help us with their low-cost high-value solutions. But once they leave, the resources (human workers) they send here are not all of the same class or atleast allowed to live in the same class.

If for example I do some work for $80/hour, Wipro/IBM probably tells the client that they would do the same work for $40/hour. But here's the sick part, the actual worker who flew in, is paid back home in India his normal (or slightly raised) salary in Rs. itself. He does not get the equivalent of the $40/hr in Rs. Why? Well these companies may claim that the rest is for expenses. But average cost of a human if you include rent, medical insurance, food, transportation is no way more than $2000 a month. That means deduct $13/hr for expenses and give the rest $27/hr to the worker in Rs. That implies that my shy South-Indian project partner should be making Rs.1,94,400 PER MONTH!! That's close to 2 lakhs!! Even if I were to be the devil's advocate & say that the company needs it's share of the profit, I cannot think of a big enough reason to justify paying the poor chap just Rs.50,000 PER MONTH back home.

That my dear friends is thendism!! We have outsourced our work but insourced THENDISM into this country.