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John writes:
I may be in the minority here, but when I hear that someone's job was
off-shored, the first opinion in my head is that it was because the
department in general lost their jobs because they were not producing
enough value to support their cost.
...
I attended a senior STC meeting last month. The speaker was Judy Glick
Smith. She spoke about a variety of things, but one stuck in my mind. She
has had a doc contracting/consulting company for 20 years (in Texas, I
belive) and the company is going out of business because her accounts are
being off-shored. She explained the economics of the situation: The
writers in India were being paid $40/week (her figure, not mine). The
contractors she was providing were in the $40-70/hour range. One company
kept one writer on full time as an editor to clean up what was being
delivered from India. Economically, this is a no-brainer. Worse quality?
The editor said the docs were usable. The savings from doing business in
India clearly offset the marginal quality loss.
You can make a million arguments about keeping the knowledge in-house, etc.
But bottom line may keep the company in business. Saving 80K/year/writer
position can have a positive bottom line effect. Tax savings on top of that
is even higher per employee. (BTW--there are very interesting articles
coming out on the hidden cost of off-shoring will be the lack of tax
revenues for the govt.).
I don't like it. I don't do it. But that doesn't change it.
It isn't necessarily the department's value/cost ratio that makes the
decision to off-shore. It may be the company's bottom line. Engineering,
writing, QA are all big off-shore sore points. Judy's story was the first I
had heard with numbers attached, etc. I am just passing on the story. I
don't have any first hand knowledge of writing being off-shored.
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