Is There Any Good Computer Jobs That Are Resistant To Offshoring And Outsourcing?
Posted by China Sourcing CommentatorJul 23
I am a college student that hasn’t declared a major yet. I am interested in working in the computer field however I don’t want to go into something that will be shipped to India within a few years. I’ve heard that there are still some jobs in computers that are hard or impossible to outsource. Is there any jobs that involve computers but are more secure to outsourcing?
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Sad to say, just about any computer occupation can be outsourced to a foreign country because there are a lot of talented and well educated individuals all over the world.
The only type of work that I can think that would resist outsourcing would be something like a field technician who performs work on computers and networks that requires them to be physically present. They would install hardware upgrades and to wire new equipment.
First of all, is is “Are there”, not “Is there” because you are asking about a plural number of things.
And repair of computers cannot be outsourced.
Systems analysis cannot be well outsourced much as inmost cases the outsource vendors have no idea what we want and have little idea what a good user interface looks like. There needs to be people in the buying countries to tell the outsource companies what to do and to make sure they do it right.
Myself, as working for a smaller company, we have insourced our programing as out attempt at outsourcing took far too long. But in our case, the software is an adjunct to our primary product. But we need to make so many different variants for out clients that the time lag to deal with a company in India was unacceptable. And they could never grasp what we needed done.. We need to be able to review results on a weekly basis. My point here is to look for smaller companies that do custom solutions for their own, often not primarily computer related products, and where they need to be very nimble.
In our case, we make professional audio equipment but some of it has a micro controller in it and a GUI for setting it up.
i dont really think so
Having been in the computer field for over 15 years now, every job is subject to outsourcing. I’ve been a consultant for nearly all of those years, so I have exposure to a lot of different companies and investors. The best thing to do is find a company that is resistant to outsourcing their IT work. This is starting to happen more and more, especially in the Silicon Valley.
I definitely see the trend changing back to keeping the work local. A big part of that is intellectual property laws outside of the US not being as stringent. The other part is that the cost of doing business overseas is increasing exponentially. It used to be you could hire a programmer in India for a year at the same salary you had to pay a US programmer for a month. It’s equalizing now with salaries in the US dropping and salaries in South Asia increasing. Companies are also finding that if they hire people in different states (other than California), they can get the same cost as off-shoring.
A lot of my clients are pulling their IT work back in house. Even more of the venture capital firms I work with are looking only for start-ups that do all of their engineering and development right here in the US. Most of the investors don’t even want to see servers hosted outside of the borders.
My advice would be to research companies and find which ones are dedicated to hiring local talent and retaining their employees. Market sector doesn’t matter so much. I have clients in every vertical (finance, high-tech, bio-tech, manufacturing, etc.). So, find what you love to do with computers and then find a company that has the philosophy of keeping IT in-house.