Stanford CIS

Cultural barriers to international technology outsourcing

By Stanford Center for Internet and Society on

India is the poster child for the success new technology can bring to developing countries.  U.S. businesses have been outsourcing all kinds of high-tech service jobs to India in the past few years because the low wages have proven irresistible and India is one of the few developing countries with the educational infrastructure to support the demand.  Well now it seems the "hype cycle" is running out of steam as the outsourcers are underwhelmed by the Indians' performance.  As U.S. companies reassign the labor to domestic workers, they say the Indian programmers and software engineers couldn't deal with fast-changing requirements and had much lower productivity.  To me, this seems like nothing more than a lesson in cultural awareness.  For the high-tech company looking to minimize costs with cheap foreign labor, there is no tolerance for anything short of complete fungibility of human performance.   This means no allowance for any non-economic cultural factor that can't be quantified in their financial forecasts.  Who could blame them for failing to suspect there might still be differences in our cultural values? I mean, who could’ve known that the Indians might not want to put in an 80-hour work week, take night classes and still get paged at 2AM—surely, the Indians would embrace this American model of success?  So, should this make us proud as Americans that jobs are coming back because we turn out to be more productive workers?  I guess it depends on how much you value productivity over, say, quality of life.

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