
Philippines: The country that never sleeps - Panos
http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.com/2012/04/when-is-world-working-odesk-edition-or.html
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alanthonyc
I have cousins that work at help desks in the Philippines, and their work
schedules are designed to match US time zones. After work, they hang out at
bars with happy hours designed for them - I believe around ten in the morning.
They hang out, then go home to sleep for the rest of the day.

Globalisation at work.

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patrickgzill
If you are ever in the Phils, you can see this - ask to go to Eastwood - they
have a number of condo high rises and office buildings. The first and
sometimes second floors of the buildings, are filled with coffee shops and
restaurants.

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akramar
Yup, here in Eastwood, workers with lanyards and badges all day and all night,
streaming in and out by the thousands. It's quite a sight. Great, inquisitive
people and always friendly.

~~~
patrickgzill
It's cool to have nearly real-time confirmation from someone who is actually
there! ... I found the UCC Coffee shop to be expensive however, but I am a
cheap guy :-)

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philcoders
I'm a Filipino Developer, this is actually an alternative for us developers in
the Philippines, instead of going abroad working overseas which will be very
far from our families, we got a lot of opportunities from foreigners who wants
for outsource their development projects, it earns us quite substantial
income, though its not as high as when your really working abroad, being with
your family and seeing your children grow up mostly makes up for it. Staying
up late is not that hard as me myself is most productive at night when kids
are asleep. I know most programmers share this work time.

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aaronharnly
Very interesting. I think a line graph would have been a better choice than
the stacked line graph -- the undulations in the bottom layers make it hard to
see the phenomenon being discussed, which is the _flatness_ of the
Philippines.

I'm sampling a few points from the chart and will try to create the
corresponding line graph.

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aaronharnly
Here is a non-stacked line graph of the 6AM Monday to 6AM Tuesday data,
created via the appallingly low-tech approach of measuring the pixel locations
at a few timepoints:

<http://imgur.com/3Y7K7>

The Philippines is indeed dramatically flatter than the others!

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K2h
I have seen programs to help with this digitization of graphs[1]. At times
some data sets (the graphs) have no other raw data shown or available, so the
only way to do further analysis is to reverse engineer the only data set you
are given. Low tech is awesome.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converting_scanned_graphs_to_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converting_scanned_graphs_to_data)

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NathanRice
Filipinos are great for business process outsourcing. They tend to have fairly
good written and spoken English and have a decent work ethic.

I'm not as big a fan of them for software work. For coders, eastern Europe is
your best bet, with Brazil picking up a lot of steam in the last few years as
well.

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anandkulkarni
Great article, Panos!

Of course, there are other effective ways to provide a real-time worldwide
workforce without relying on folks staying up all night. MobileWorks pulls it
off by employing trained workers in both hemispheres: for instance, Latin
America.

Mechanical Turk is an example of how not to do this – the performance
disparity between random US and Indian workers there causes more trouble than
it's worth.

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akramar
Originally from the states, I've been renting a condo here in Manila for going
on 6mo, neighboring IBM, Dell, and several other BPO buildings. I keep on US
time and can vouch for it being just as busy at 4am as 4pm. I've heard mixed
reviews on retaining employees, but English is ubiquitous. I've had to call
AMEX and I end up talking to someone down the street, but wouldn't have
guessed until they brought it up.

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patrickgzill
Philippines has a chain of hamburger joints called "Burger Machine" whose
branches are often open 24x7; their song includes the phrase "the burger that
never sleeps".

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Panos
And now we know how the Philippinos that work overnight are being fed.

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philcoders
Just a quick correction, people from our country are called Filipinos. :)

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neolefty
I'm curious: What are specific examples of "variety of tasks" and "crowd
applications" that the author is talking about? Are we in some kind of cyborg
software revolution?

~~~
Panos
Well, we are. Kind of :-)

[http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-
ebook/dp/B005...](http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-
ebook/dp/B005WTR4ZI)

There are many software applications today that are being seamlessly powered
by a combination of human and machine intelligence. For example, Google Books
is mainly digitized with OCR but then ReCAPTCHA is used to bring human
intelligence for fixing the mistakes of the OCR process.

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jimgardener
sounds like an anti-Indian propaganda.Were you not a bit too critical?Are you
implying that all Filipinos are excellent technical workers?I spent a lot of
time in India and found my share of both,and I think majority of them are
really good ,dedicated technical workers.

~~~
NathanRice
In my experience Indian workers are a bad bet. The average quality of work
I've gotten from Filipinos is higher, for slightly less money. Filipinos on
average make more of an effort to understand requirements and seem to take
more pride in their work. The best Indian talent is at a higher level than
what you can generally find in the Philippines, but I wouldn't expect to get
that.

