Son of Echo with Sing-song Accent

03/13/2007

Paul Munnis


I bought a new Broadband Router for my home network from D-Link, a Taiwanese company that makes electronics. They sell through U.S. Distributors. Soon I needed technical assistance because my network is a bit complicated. That meant I needed to call their technical assistance phone desk and so I dialed their 800 number.

It was the start of a nightmare.

I was connected to an outsourced person in New Delhi who was not too good at speaking English. To make it worse the company uses “Skype-Out” a cheap international Internet calling system using VoIP to connect to the Indian telephone system which itself is just awful.

Now VoIP can be notorious for creating echoes when the equipment is mismatched and these echoes were just plain wicked. Add that to the poor English speaking skills and you have bad communications squared.

In the end I had to give it up. It was simply unworkable. I debugged the network myself.

If anyone wants to know how outsourcing is working and how well globalization is going they won’t get a thumb’s up from me – rather just the opposite.

What’s worse it has cost D-Link another customer. Maybe they don’t care but we’ll see how they do. Almost all network customers need assistance these days since networks are often hybrid and are growing in complexity. Customers will not have a good experience with D-Link when they need technical help. If this is the future of electronics then we are in deep trouble and so are the companies doing outsourcing to India.

It’s not just about India since I also needed to deal with my medical prescriptions that I get through mail-order. I needed to change my Internet authorizations so that my wife could have her prescriptions tracked on the Internet. I got an outsourcing firm in Mexico and a really rude lady in a bad mood.

After getting her supervisor on the phone and reverting to mixed Spanish / English, I finally got my needs met. More evidence that globalization is a total flop.

I am very aware of the demographics of Gen-X and the retirement of Baby Boomers. I am also aware that this is causing a shortage of qualified workers in the U.S. workplace and that outsourcing isn’t just about saving a buck -- it’s also about filling jobs that go vacant due to a lack of qualified people to fill them. We have been growing computer installations and networks at a high compound growth rate exceeding 43% per year. We graduate people with the skills to handle the technology at a rate of about 30% per year. There is therefore a growing gap of 13% and it is compounding annually.

Today people with good technical skills are in strong demand. That will not diminish and outsourcing isn’t a solution that works very well.

Outsourcing is made a bit dramatic by writers like T.J. Freeman as they blame the U.S. Education system for the gap and yet as most people know intelligence, measured by IQ is evenly distributed over populations regardless of ethnicity or race. Thus in the aggregate Americans are not dumber or smarter than anyone else. It’s just that there aren’t enough of us thanks to the low U.S. birthrate in the early 70’s. Couples failed to produce pair replacements and so here we are 30 years later with lots of people retiring and only a few people to backfill them.

Productivity gains were supposed to fill the gap but in the case of the service sector it has obviously failed to materialize and so I got Son of Echo with a sing-song Indian accent.

This was not too good of an experience. If it hasn’t happened to you yet- it will.

America has always solved our talent pool problem by raiding other people’s talent base. It used to be called the “great brain drain.”

Consider Europe as a case in point. Opportunity is poor in Germany for those with high IQ’s. They are not as valued there and thus opportunity for them is poor. Many just pack it up and come to America and they are soon employed and working. If they are average or low IQ they don’t fare all that well and they end up back in Europe. But if they are high IQ and have or get the needed education then they can and they do ride H1B visas to American citizenship. This has been the secret of America dealing with getting its share of more brains than the normal distribution curve allocates to us.

What I have just said also holds for Indian nationals too. We have many who have immigrated to America and with their high skill base they now form the cornerstone of American science and technology. We value them.

This then is the front door of immigration, a door that we are not focusing upon so much today because the backdoor of illegal immigration draws so much press attention. But the front door needs tending. We need to accelerate the brain-drain from the former Baltic States and maybe from the mid-East too and wherever we can find genuine talent we need to recruit it. So when Bush talks about a Guest Worker Program well it’s a bit daffy. We already have one and we are using it for all its worth and we will continue to do so.

It’s not that “no Mexicans need apply” either. If they have the talent and the education we want them. What we do not want is the tailings of their low IQ pool nor even the mid-range of their IQ pool. We want the best that Mexico has to offer and if we can’t get it then well we just have to look elsewhere.

As for low IQ labor I think what Bush must have in mind is some sort of limited time system of worker passes consisting of day, week, month, quarter, and annual passes that are not H1B in nature. Implementing these however will take a lot of talent to create and manage the databases and policing violators -- talent that we need to put to work in dealing with handling medicine and insurance claims and policing sex offenders. Bush has never given details out and has been very vague on what he really proposes with his program.

In summary, outsourcing is a flop; we have a demographic crunch; we need to bring into America good talent to supplement out own talent pool using H1B visas; and historically the talent found South of the Border has not been good enough to meet our engineering and science demands. The raw talent is there though and we know it is so because IQ is distributed as a normal distribution curve throughout all nations and ethnic groups. The next challenge for American immigration policy then is to figure out a way to farm that talent in nations where we have no say in education policy and develop the talent for recruiting by the U.S. using opportunity as our way to draw immigrants via H1B.

Many are looking to the Internet and to Internet education as the solution. So far we have done our recruiting through admissions of foreign students to U.S. Colleges and Universities but as the cost climbs at these schools then it is harder to get foreign students to apply – they do not want to graduate but be in hock for the next twenty years over education costs. Using the Internet we might be able to leverage the training paradigm and reap the benefits of the talent pool from other nations. The key is keeping opportunity for all people readily available inside of the U.S. borders.