Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I don't teach economics 101 nor taken a class. What about the other corporate departments that are being outsource?

The company I previously worked for not only outsourced product manufacturing to South Korea with assembly in the USA, after I left. They also outsourced customer service (CSR) to south Asia. Texas VCs bought the company and are trying to maximize all returns on their investment.

Companies like American, that produce branded products, have a whole department that helps their sales reps with moving customer support, be it email, physical letter, and or phone, to south Asia to reduce office management costs in the USA. They also could just be outsourcing invoicing while CSR is a local provider.

Manufacturing is a simple concept that is heavily politically pushed. The other departments that are needed to support products seem to be ignored. ML has a great likelihood of perpetuating this with real-time vocal transitioning. The CSR in India can sound like some person from New Jersey and break the accent barrier. This would put the customer at ease when sharing the same vocal tones. Consumers would be none the wiser.






At the end of the day, everything but 1) product development (R&D) and 2) corporate leadership are fungible and prone to outsourcing to the lowest cost locations until they get moved to a place where quality drops off enough that the company backpedals a bit. All those corporate departments are largely filled with commodity staff, so this shouldn't be surprising.

I'm not saying that in a judgmental or harshly negative way -- I've personally worked in cost centers for most of my career, and although I think highly of myself and my peers, we're still just assessed bluntly as part of COGS.


Product Development, R&D, etc is absolutely fungible and outsourced, even by some ostensibly big names.

If C-level could be outsourced while keeping shareholder returns, it would be


See IBM

The companies I had direct involvement with that outsourced R&D at least partially had names starting with J and N.

At least with J, if they outsourced the full part of one of the project, we would have it done faster and better XD




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: