My wife and I are living in India for over a year now. And as a result, we are gradually starting to learn a little more about the culture and mentality here. In my organization and with Digishock we do a lot of outsourcing from India. We do not do this to save costs or to test the availability of the people here. We do this because we believe in the skills of the people here and want to offer a fair working environment.
Personal experience with outsourcing from India
Under the term outsourcing we are easily stretching the availability of Indian people. At several larger organizations in the Netherlands I have seen how they view Indian development as an unlimited source of human capital. Inexpensive, easy to replace and always accessible is the norm. Additionally, I will admit that Indian organizations themselves are hardest on their employees. In India, the competition is just much bigger. For you 50 others if you don’t do it right.
And that is why there were projects that changed their project manager five or six times within six months. This is of course extremely short-term thinking because all knowledge and skills are not transferred and people have no ability to grow because they change jobs too often. This is an example, but it’s a trend that is common. Its consequences are clearly visible within the work culture. It leads to an authoritarian culture of tasks in which developers do not dare to show their own initiative and do not think, but do what is asked. A bit of the Taylor approach with a pure focus on output and if we are allowed to learn anything from Charlie Chaplin then we know that this method doesn’t quite work [1].
The strengthening role of Indian culture in the current way of outsourcing
Some things are culturally determined. In India authority is more important and it is a masculine culture so it is important to prove that you can work hard or at least pretend to do so [2]. From this point of view, people work 6 days a week and work until late in the evening, usually up to eight hours, but sometimes longer. India has the highest number of working hours per week in the world. As can also be seen in the graph below. On average, men from the city with a permanent contract work just over 10 hours a day six days a week.
And all that is not such an issue, but the replaceability is. When you are fired in Indian culture it has an impact. There is no financial safety net and the status of family is extremely important. When someone no longer finds a job due to dismissal and becomes indebted, it can happen that someone in the family takes on the debt and then commits suicide. I now make a very direct connection from dismissal to suicide, while this is usually not the case. There are many reasons why people do this, but the reality is that suicide is more common in India [3] and financial instability is one of the causes.
What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.
Let me be upfront: “I am really in favor of outsourcing from India”. I really believe in the collaboration in which we share our prosperity for knowledge and are therefore also greener (Indian people have a lower ecological footprint). It remains important look at people. Since we only see them through the camera with Indian English, it doesn’t mean we should see these people for their output, but also for who they are and the potential they have. Seeing someone only for their output is just really easy because it is culturally acceptable and it can suit us in the moment. The other day we had a client who said to me at 1:30 AM, let the Indian developers finish it. That is not an acceptable way of outsourcing. Basically it boils down to an elementary wisdom that was taught to me in elementary school:
What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.
Working in the evenings and weekends is fine every now and then. You also need a certain pressure and motivation to hone each other, but there are limits and the responsibility for outsourcing from India lies with us. Because Indian people are not likely to set their boundaries in this because of the culture they are in.
