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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
For one Silicon Valley company, hiring Indian programmers wasn't about greed, it was about survival. A special report from Chennai, globalization's ground zero.
Apr 1, 2004 | In an auditorium on the Chennai campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Brian Behlendorf is stumping before 200 engineering students. The pony-tailed founder and CTO of the Silicon Valley start-up CollabNet is here, ostensibly, to talk about open-source software. The event has been organized by the Indian Linux Users Group-Chennai; the 30-year-old Behlendorf, who coordinated the growth of the hugely successful Apache Web server project in its early days, is one of the heroes of the open-source movement.
But he's also an executive of an American company that has outsourced a significant part of its operations to India, placing him at the center of the firestorm that has erupted in the United States over the globalization of white-collar jobs. So he can't avoid addressing the issue of what has really brought him to the subcontinent, even as he adds his own unique twist to the debate.
"Outsourcing is a sensitive topic in the U.S. for political reasons," Behlendorf says. "But the open-source community has been doing outsourcing since the beginning." Programs like Apache and Linux and many others, he argues, were developed by thousands of volunteers from around the globe -- an example of massively outsourced labor. In a sense, the move by Western corporations to outsource programming operations to developing nations isn't just about cutting costs, it's about adopting a new software development model.
Behlendorf's audience is receptive to his remarks. It is made up of students from one of India's most elite engineering institutions -- a school that's harder to get into than Harvard, a school so competitive that its tens of thousands of applicants are known as "aspirants." The men, who make up the majority, are dressed in button-down oxfords and belted khakis, the women in flowing salwar kameez. There's only a smattering of geeky T-shirts: "2001 Welcome to Linux: It's now safe to turn on your computer," reads one.
After Behlendorf has finished speaking, the students come up to the podium to pepper him with questions. When he finally leaves the stage, a dozen engineers follow him out into the humid night, intent on spending every possible moment with him until he disappears into the car that will take him back to his $130-a-night room at the Sheraton. Then, the students walk away into the dark, a loose group scattered below a jumbled canopy of banyan, neem, mango, tamarind and eucalyptus trees populated by dangling wild monkeys.
Behlendorf isn't here in Chennai for the second time in 10 months just to spread the open-source gospel. He's here because the boom in offshoring is resulting in a tight labor market -- in India. In the topsy-turvy logic of globalization, it's Behlendorf who's here to court the engineers: highly educated, technical talent that costs a fraction of what it commands in the U.S. Recruiting such talent is becoming an ever more competitive endeavor for companies looking to join the offshore flood.
In the U.S., the rush to outsource labor internationally is increasingly being seen by workers as an us-vs.-them zero-sum game. As they watch one corporate behemoth after another -- IBM, GE, Oracle, HP, Google -- send significant portions of their operations offshore, their agitation is burgeoning into a political hot-button issue. According to a new Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans say that outsourcing will be "very important" when they decide their votes for president. And 61 percent say that they are concerned that they, a friend or a relative might lose a job because the employer is moving work to a foreign country. Analysts' estimates that 3.3 million jobs are likely to be lost to outsourcing by 2015, and that 14 million are vulnerable to foreign competition, have turned India into the new Japan in the imagination of American workers: an ominous economic threat to their livelihoods. Despite assurances from economists that the furor is so much protectionist alarmism, the nagging question remains: How can you compete with a worker who makes a 10th of your salary?
But for Behlendorf and CollabNet, the outsource-or-not-to-outsource challenge is no cut-and-dried case of greedy American corporations sending jobs overseas. Behlendorf, as befits his open-source roots, is an idealist. Taking a global perspective, he believes that spreading the wealth internationally is good for the world in the long run. He and his fellow executives want CollabNet to be a truly global company, with no distinction made between employees in one country or another. But even more to the point, CollabNet's main product, SourceCast, is a set of software tools that facilitate development among teams of programmers working in different locations.
In other words, CollabNet's developers, both in the U.S. and India, are hard at work writing code that makes it easier for workers on opposite sides of the globe to work together effectively. CollabNet even "eats its own dogfood," as the saying goes, using its main product as the development environment for writing the SourceCast code.
One important market for SourceCast: corporations that outsource.
CollabNet's story is symbolic of a larger truth about the globalization of white-collar jobs -- particularly those in the technology sector. If Silicon Valley now faces an uncertain future as a center for software development, the seeds of that uncertainty were planted not in India or China or the Philippines, but right at home. The build-out of the Internet and the tremendous advances in computer technology over the last decade have opened up new passageways between disparate economic realities. And no one has embraced one of the central premises of the Internet age -- easy interconnection between everybody -- more than software engineers. The immense strength and vitality of the open-source software phenomenon is a clear testament to that.
It wasn't so-called "Benedict Arnold" CEOs or greedy shareholders or even the ruthless laws of economics that crafted these new virtual workplaces where job performance is measured purely by your output on the screen, no matter where you log on from. Technological innovation and investment opened up the doors for coders in India and China and everywhere else. It is one of the tremendous ironies of the digital era that the easy flow of capital and labor to every inch of the globe, made possible by the superhuman efforts of American and European programmers, has ended up wreaking havoc on the job security of those very programmers.
Got a problem with that, Silicon Valley? Don't blame India, and don't blame the CEOs. Blame yourself.
