High cost of Indian jobs prompts shift in outsourcing trend

A STORY IN the Wall Street Journal claimed that the wages of techies in high tech cities such as Bangalore mean that US firms are beginning to hire at home rather than abroad.

The newspaper claimed that in 2005, wages for software developers were a quarter that of folk in places like Silicon Valley.

But that's changed now and Bangalore engineers, it reckons are now earning 75 per cent of the going rate in the USA.

Not that it's all good news for the USA, because, the Journal said, some outsourcing firms are hiring staff from eastern European countries where labour is still cheap, or in Asian countries like Vietnam.

And it only seems to be the top engineers that are affected by this shift because many big IT firms are still building up staff in India. The Journal quotes Intel's CEO Paul Otellini as saying that wage inflation in India is four times that of inflation in the USA. µ

L'INQ
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