Indian techies lack creative ability, feel US firms
Eduardo Porter/The NY Times Posted online: Thursday, April 29, 2004 at 1239 hours IST Updated: Thursday, April 29, 2004 at 1253 hours IST
Even as the spectre of high-skilled American jobs moving to low-wage countries like India ignites hot political debate, some entrepreneurs are finding that India’s vaunted high-technology work force is not always as effective as advertised.
“For three years we tried all kinds of models, but nothing has worked so far,” said the co-founder and chief technology officer of Storability Software in Southborough, Mass. After trying to reduce costs by contracting out software programming tasks to India, Storability brought back most of the work to the US, where it costs four times as much, and hired more programmers here. Indian programmers’ “depth of knowledge in the area we want to build software is not good enough,” the executive said.
If it sounds like “Made in the USA” jingoism, consider this: The entrepreneur, Hemant Kurande, is himself Indian. He was born and raised near Bombay and received his master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in the city now known as Mumbai. Kurande is not alone in his views on “outsourcing” technology work to India. As more companies in the US rush to take advantage of India’s ample supply of cheap yet highly trained workers, even some of the most motivated American companies — ones set up or run by executives born and trained in India — are concluding that the cost advantage does not always justify the effort.
For many of the most crucial technology tasks, they find that a work force operating within the American business environment better suits their needs.
“Only certain kinds of tasks can be outsourced — what can be set down as a set of rules,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of Global Insight, a forecasting and consulting firm based in Waltham, Mass. “That which requires more creativity is more difficult to manage at a distance.”
The Indian entrepreneurs in this country — business executives with the cultural affinity and local connections that might be most conducive to making offshore partnerships work — do not fault the work ethic of the programmers in India. But they say the geographic distance and the differences in business contexts can be difficult to bridge. (Executives at Bladelogic, Storability and Connecterra declined to divulge the names of the companies they have worked with in India, saying that it might damage potential business relationships for other work in the future.)
A typical challenge is the difficulty of finding programmers overseas that can go beyond implementing well-known procedures to the next steps of identifying problems and creating new solutions.
For instance, ConnecTerra, a Cambridge, Mass., company that designs software to manage data from electronic devices such as new radar-based ID tags that companies can use to track inventory, tried programmers in India last year. But ConnecTerra, which has 30 employees in the US, ultimately gave up on outsourcing because the Indian firm that it worked with couldn’t deal with the fast-changing requirements.
In the end, many say the advantages of keeping some of the most sophisticated work in the US are related to the factors that draw technology entrepreneurs from India and elsewhere to this country in the first place: Indian engineers and software designers in this country know that the businesses whose needs are driving technological innovation are mostly in the US. It comes down to being where the customers are.
Speaking in defence of the programming industry in India is Bassab Pradhan, senior vice president of worldwide sales for Infosys Technologies. Infosys, based in Bangalore, is India’s largest software services company. Of its revenue of $1.06 billion last year, about two-thirds came from American corporate clients, including Visa, Boeing and Cisco Systems, for which it provides services like data entry, programming and customer technical support.
Pradhan, who is India-educated, disagrees with critics who say that Indian-trained workers lack creative ability. When outsourcing fails, he said, it is typically because “less disciplined” businesses try to farm out projects that are not properly defined. But he agreed that the need for proximity to the final user of the technology does place limits on what types of tasks can be outsourced. “Whenever the pace of innovation is very rapid,” he said, “is when the work should be done closer to the client.”
In the future international division of labour, Pradhan said, the production of the technology will be done in places like India, which can deliver it reliably at a low cost. What cannot be sent to India, he said, is the invention of new business processes and technologies.
