Outsource Now

One day an employee sends a letter to H er boss asking for an increase in her salary!!!

Dear Bo$$

In thi$ life, we all need$ ome thing mo$ t de$ perately. I think you$hould be under $ tanding of the need $ of u $ worker $ who have given$o much $ upport including $ weat and$ ervice to your company.

I am$ure you will gue $$ what I mean and re $ pond $oon.

Your$ $incerely,

Je$$y
The next day, the employee recieved this letter of reply :

Dear Jessy

I kNO w you have been working very hard.NO wadays,NOthing much has changed. You must have NOticed that our company isNO t doingNOticeably well as yet .

NOw the newspaper are saying the world`s leading eco NOmists are NOt sure if the United States may go into a NO ther recession. After theNOvember presidential elections things may turn bad .

I haveNOthing more to add NO w. You kNO w what I mean

Interviewing for a job is a very stressful and difficult process — made more intense today because so many companies are reducing their workforce, thus increasing the number of applicants for a shrinking number of jobs. The competition for available jobs is fierce. Yet, you can beat the competition and actually get hired in the job you really want. Here are nine secrets to consider.
1. Discover what you really want out of your work and life. Discover your true passions, desires, beliefs, and talents so that you can paint a picture of your true work and life goals, from your own perspective.
2. Develop and define the job you really want. That’s right! Design and define the job that will allow you to fulfill your passions, desires, and beliefs and maximize your talents. What you are doing is building your ideal job around what you want as opposed to looking at job opportunities that come along to evaluate. Believe it or not, your ideal job actually exits in more than one way and within the personal parameters you set.
3. Find out what companies have positions that meet your ideal position requirements. Look at and research all of the possible companies within the geographical area you designated to discover what positions within these companies you would want. Do not worry about whether they have job vacancies or are in a hiring mode.
4. Evaluate the companies that have your desired jobs. Make sure you would want to work for the companies that have your ideal jobs. They need to have integrity and treat their employees and customers in the manner you would want to be treated. Determine whether they operate in an industry that you want to work in.
5. Research the companies you selected. Once again, do not be put off or discouraged if the companies are not hiring. Why? Because companies are always looking for the right employees and will have to eventually hire new employees to survive. Determine who actually makes hiring decisions, and what is important to them. Many companies disguise this information through HR departments or hiring committees. If possible, try to find out how you can contact hiring decision-makers directly. Get their e-mail addresses, direct telephone numbers, or find someone in the company who can be a liaison for you.
6. Contact the decision-makers and tell them you want to work for them in the specific jobs you chose. Express your enthusiasm for that specific job or jobs. The fewer jobs you designate the better. You want them to know you can be trusted by truthfully exposing your commitment to seeking your dream job, even though they may not have an opening. You are, in essence, recruiting them to work in your dream job. Let them know that you will be very productive because you will excel at the job, and also that you will be a very grateful and energetic employee because you are doing what you love. You are not just asking for a job so they will pay you, but you have targeted a specific job at that company, and you are committed to contributing in that position.
7. Ask them if there are any special skills or qualifications you will need to be accepted in the position. If you do not have the sought-after skills and qualifications for the job, either find a way to get them beforehand or see if you can attain them within the company as an employee. This approach directs attention to what the employer wants and away from your resume compared to others’ resumes. It will also show them your commitment to attaining that job. Stay in contact to alert employers of your new skills, qualifications, and continued interest.
8. If necessary, be willing to take an interim job. This way you can work on the required skills and qualifications, and you can obtain an income while you prepare for the job. You will also be in a better position to take your dream job when it becomes available.
9. Get support from somebody during the process. Some of the secret steps discussed above will probably appear to be daunting to you, which is to be expected. Enlist the help of another person to discuss all of the above steps and to map out the best strategy to get your ideal job. This person should be a trusted and strong supporter of your goal, as well as someone who will offer you another perspective to assist in the execution of your plan. Getting your ideal job is an extremely important objective, and it is worth enlisting the help of someone to actually get it.
Final Thoughts
Employers constantly face the problem of finding and surrounding themselves with the right employees who want to work for them, whom they can trust, and who will be very productive with the least amount of supervision. You will definitely get their attention, when you recruit employers for the specific job you chose, because of your honesty, your commitment, your enthusiasm, and your desire to produce for them. In fact, you may even appear to be too good to be true.
Many times the people who are filling the jobs that you want are not happy in the position. They are not producing or are causing other problems for the employers. Your request for employment for these specific jobs will give employers an option that they only dream about

Pakistan is trying to copy India’s success in luring IT work, but it’s slow going

Think software and services outsourcing, and places like Bangalore, Manila, and perhaps Budapest spring to mind. But Lahore or Karachi? The Pakistani cities might not be on the outsourcing map yet, but the country’s software shops are out to change that. “As a natural course, American companies would not look at Pakistan,” acknowledges Jehan Ara, president of the 250-member Pakistan Software Houses Assn. “So we have to get them to look at us, and once they do business with us and credibility is established, they come back for more.”

Get the full story at Business Week

There’s much more to offshore outsourcing than lower labor rates. Industry experts and CIOs with offshore experience caution would-be customers to carefully examine all of the risks, including the hidden costs. It’s also important to protect intellectual property, examine the geopolitical risks in the region where the work will be done and effectively communicate the company’s overall outsourcing strategy to stateside workers.

Offshore outsourcing “creates some stressful situations, some motivational factors and some confidence factors with your own people,” says Rick Greenwood, CIO at GMAC-RFC Residential Capital Group in Minneapolis. Greenwood addresses those issues, in part, by keeping his company’s most important IT work in the U.S.

Get the full story at Computer World 

Day says before sending source code to a country companies should check what laws are available to protect them – and whether they’ve been successfully used by prosecutors. The prevalence of corruption in law enforcement can also stop a case. In many parts of the world, for example, it’s not uncommon for police to refuse to help unless bribes are paid first.

To mitigate the risk of offshoring, Day says companies should use an offshore partner with tight security practices and release only portions of the source code at any one time so that the offshore programmers never have the complete program.

Check out the full story at Computer World

“Good morning, you’re fired and getting replaced by a software engineer from India with an H-1B visa … APRIL FOOLS!” This is a bad joke to play on an engineer these days, because it is just too close to actually being true.

Who are NOT the fools?

Some parties, however, have not been made fools of. In fact, they’ve been playing an April Fools prank on all Americans. Outsourcing companies, 7out of 10 from India, have played a bad joke on American engineers, American companies, American students, and American politicians, playing all of them for fools. The top 10 H-1B requestors of 2006 are all outsourcing companies, who use the H-1B program to train their junior engineers in America, and rotate them back to their country of origin to facilitate outsourcing contracts.  This is a list of the top 10 companies who applied for H-1B visas last year:

1. Infosys
2. Wipro
3. Cognizant
4. Patni
5. Mphasis
6. HCL America
7. Deloitte & Touche
8. Tata
9. Accenture
10. Satyam

International American-based corporations, Microsoft and IBM are numbers 15 and 18 respectively.

The chief of business and trade services for USCIS, Efran Hernandez, said, “ …there is no preference given to U.S. companies over non-U.S. companies. You have to be a U.S. employer … That doesn’t mean you have to be a U.S. company.”

Get the full story at Computer World Blog.

When I read this story about McAfee wanting to buy up security technology companies, I thought about a company I know that is looking to be acquired.  So I read the entire article first instead of forwarding it on to my colleages at that company.

Lo and behold, at the bottom of the article, Sridhar Jayanthi, head of the company’s operations in India, is reported to have said these words, “There is a shortage in the US of security professionals and researchers, and in India the company found a large and trainable talent base.”

Get the full story at Computer World Blog.

Boston, San Francisco, San Jose and Stamford, Conn., could see highest losses

ffshoring may eliminate as many as one in five programming, software engineering and back office jobs such as data-key entry during the next several years in certain metropolitan areas where employment in those fields is the heaviest, according to a study (download PDF)by The Brookings Institution released this week.

Brookings, a Washington-based think tank, has attempted to put job loss numbers around one of the most worrisome issues for IT workers today, while also recommending steps the government can take to slow the trend.

Get the full story at Computer World.

 Companies often forget about cultural differences that may affect security

When it comes to outsourcing IT operations to countries such as India and China, companies often focus on slashing costs and gaining productivity but fail to take into account cultural differences that may affect their security, according to experts attending the Gartner IT Security Summit in London today.
“India is seen as an answer when outsourcing applications but is actually a problem in the security space,” said Gartner India research vice president Partha Iyengar while moderating a panel on offshoring security.
At issue is not so much the security that outsourcing service providers use to protect companies’ systems — such as firewalls and data backup — as it is the cultural differences, Iyengar said. For instance, standards of privacy are often looser in India because it’s a close-knit society where, say, reading someone else’s e-mail wouldn’t be considered much of an intrusion, Iyengar said.

Get the full story at Computer World.

New designations and degree programs may raise outsourcing expertise to a career path.

Godfrey Pinto has great credentials. He has three master’s degrees, including an MBA, and a bachelor’s in economics. He has a solid position, too, as director of offshore outsourcing, a role he has held for six of the nine years he has worked in IT at a large East Coast technology company.

Now Pinto is adding one more accomplishment to his list: earning the certified outsourcing professional (COP) designation. He acknowledges that many people haven’t yet heard of the certification, but he believes it’s valuable nonetheless.

Get the full story at Computer World.