Offshore Outsourcing: It’s Not Just for the Big Guys Anymore

Poster announcing employment opportunities in call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) operations on a wall next to the Shavij Nagar bus station in Bangalore. Image from Wikimedia commons.
Poster announcing employment opportunities in call centers and other business process outsourcing (BPO) operations on a wall next to the Shavij Nagar bus station in Bangalore. Image from Wikimedia commons.

I always think of the offshore outsourcing of work as the purview of large companies like Ford Motor Company, Nike, HP and Apple. But this is simply not true anymore. Now a company of any size, even individuals, can effectively find a person in another country to do a task cheaply.  If the task involves no physical shipping and only electronic transfer of files or information, you can conceive of a task and have someone in India working on it within hours.

I decided to try it with the making of a logo for this website. I used Odesk. There are many other sites out there. I created an account and had an ad up within 5 minutes. The hard part was how much to offer for the job.

My comparison is what I paid for logo design for my company’s logo. I could have had a local designer do a quickie for about $600 but decided to pay for quality. We had several meetings in person, my logo is brilliant, I love it. The total cost was $3,000.

Graphic showing developers and outsorcing. Image by Shunit Fainaro and taken from Wikimedia commons.
Graphic showing developers and outsorcing. Image by Shunit Fainaro and taken from Wikimedia commons.

The Odesk logo was an experiment in outsourcing, which is supposed to be a huge savings, so a third of the cheapie bid seemed reasonable to me. I was a bit nervous and thought I might be insulting people, but I put in a $200 bid price and hit post.

Instantly, 10 thumbnail files of Indian faces that had the correct qualifications for my job were all staring at me. They all had their hourly rates posted and most were around $3.33 an hour. Really!? $3.33 for someone who knows Photoshop, has experience in logo design specifically, and speaks good English. Hard to believe.

Within five minutes I got a response to my ad. An Indian contractor would do it for $180. This sum would be about $50 more than he had earned on his 6 previous jobs (Odesk shows you this information). He was designing logos for a flat rate of as low as $6—and they were good.  Sure he would do it for $180.

 The amazing magnitude of the cost savings in offshore outsourcing hit home.

Then the moral dilemma set in. Oh god, now I feel obligated to hire him. He probably has kids. He is probably right now hoping beyond hope. Oh the responsibility. But wait! I do not have to pay that much! I could just pay $6!

In the past, it was easier to shove off any guilt for outsourcing on corporate America. Now me and my one-person, self-funded company are facing the same dilemma. I still haven’t hired anyone to make my logo. For some reason I have frozen on the issue. Perhaps I should pay the $180 and then we both get deals of our lifetimes. And if people like me drive the prices up for Indian workers, uhm thats good right?

About The Author

I really enjoy field trips. I love being in a cool place and having someone tell me about it. The problem is, you can’t always find a professor or park ranger-type to tell you all they know about the local rocks, plants, and history. So I decided to combine my love of things natural with mobile technology.

Related posts

1 Comment

  1. Tom Scully

    You have created another, Mobile Ranger being the first, site that engages and informs in an easy to digest way. I learned more interesting information about the area I have lived in for 4 decades than I knew before. Keep up the really good work!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *