Welcome To Chennai
A story broke recently in the Canadian media regarding a few prominent companies who have been (allegedly) replacing full-time Canadian employees with foreign workers who were in the country on temporary work visas.
This post isn't about how right or wrong this practice is - I've spent years working on both sides and I can tell you that if there is legal economic incentive to practice good business, then good business shall be practiced.
However the topic of this CBC news item raises some concern:
Insiders say Canada 'scammed' by foreign worker industry
The story interviews several former employees claiming that the foreign temporary workers were not fully qualified to do their job, and in at least some cases, lie about their credentials.
Whether this is true or not, there is a trend I've noticed which seems to support their claim. It could be that outsourced workers just might not know quite how to do these jobs...
Let's say you live in a developing country... your currency is in the toilet, inflation is rampant, and perhaps you are the sole income earner for the entire family. Perhaps then you have your sights on a piece of the first-world economic pie, and somehow you managed to convince an employer to hire you for a very well paying job (by your standards) which maybe you're not entirely qualified for, but managed to charm your way into nonetheless. Assuming you wanted to keep your new job for as long as possible, you would probably learn as much as you could in the shortest amount of time before they figured out you have no idea what you're doing.
Well, the best way to learn things on-demand is with Google (when I was vacationing in India once I actually learned how to drive a motorcycle by watching YouTube videos.. but that's another story), so wouldn't it be interesting if we could somehow see who is searching for that type of immediate, on-demand information, perhaps because they want to learn how to do their jobs?
We're in luck, because Google has a great feature called Trends that can be used to map this out for us:
Let's start with a basic search term which might be used by someone embarking on a technology career acquired under questionable circumstances...
Search Tem: "What is a computer?"
As you can from the graphic below, our friends in Africa are joining the global technology revolution. From this search we can see that countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica and Uganda have lead the search traffic in the past year for intro tech terms like data, virus, ram, etc. This is quite exciting to see if you ask me.
So once a person learns what a computer is, perhaps they'd want to learn how to operate it, so what about something a little more advanced, such as..
Uganda is #1 in this search term with a Google index of 100... Philippines is second at 54... but look at India - it's ranked third in the number of people who searched for how to program a computer in the past 12 months, world wide. And this from a country who attributed billions of dollars of national GDP to outsourcing, and as a result are presumed to be a country full of professionals. But before we jump to conclusions, remember that India is a country of over a billion people with many areas still in an under-developed state, so all of this on-demand learning couldn't be from outsource employees could it?
To answer that let's ask Google Trends to break down these statistics by city...
Lagos, Uganda is #1 with a search index of 100, followed by Manila, Philippines at 81.
After that, here comes India: Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai - three of the top cities for offshore outsourcing in India. From these cities come search terms such as 'what is c' and 'what is java'.
But let's give them the benefit of the doubt here. Many people in these cities aspire to get into a technical field, so before they can even get their first job they need to know the basics.
Perhaps a more advanced term would show what some of the established, professionally employed outsourcing employees are searching for... For example the hot trend this year is Cloud Computing...
India, #1 again, with Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai leading the way. These cities aren't really big consumers of cloud services like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, but they are home to some large support centers and outsourcing firms. This could by why 'cloud computing pdf' is the number one search term, which yields a number of white papers and instructional books on the subject.
While this is research is somewhat experimental, the results seem to support the claim of the laid off employees interviewed in the CBC story. The moral here is not to avoid outsourcing, but to perform the appropriate due diligence to ensure whoever you are hiring who claims to have the experience required to do the job you're hiring them for.