The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Business tools for individuals: offshoring

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 15, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Business tools for individuals: offshoring

Ben Hammersley

Big businesses are not the only ones who can benefit from sending work overseas. Individuals can make cost and time savings, too.

OFFSHORING, OR sending work to countries where a workforce charges less for the same thing, is big business.

For big companies it can make a lot of sense. A fully trained Indian programmer, for example, costs perhaps a quarter of her/his British equivalent. And while there are issues regarding the management of the process, and the need for extremely clear communication between the two parties, the majority of these offshoring deals are successful. So much so that IT professionals in the West are increasingly nervous of being replaced, at least in day-to-day tasks, by their cheaper subcontinental counterparts, or the newer businesses from China, south-east Asia, and South America.

Personal offshoring has been done before but what was once the preserve of big business is now available for the individual. I needed a selection of little programmes to do things with my email. But I had never had the time, or the patience, to write them myself. After a visit to RentACoder.com, I was able to file a request for bids from programmers around the world. Prospective coders can view all the requests on the site, and bid for the ones that interest them. Once I had accepted a bid — it was less than £200 for a fortnight's programming work — I paid the money to the site, which placed it in escrow. My coder, a young man in Belorussia, completed the work, and once I had checked it was up to scratch (it was), I instructed the site to release the cash.

I got something I needed for a fifth of the price I would otherwise have had to pay. Indeed, the British price was always too much: I would not ever have spent that much money. But via the web, I could get what I needed for a price I could afford. That it was written in Belorussia, and not in London, made the difference between having it or not. With my coding done, I needed a webpage built. Web designers are everywhere, and web hosting is cheap. It is just much cheaper in India. So, £30 paid via PayPal.com to templatekingdom.com got me a website design, an hour of the designer's time for changes, and a year's hosting for good measure.

I should also note that I am not actually writing this. I am dictating it. Like many journalists, I interview a lot of people, and find that transcribing the interviews afterwards is the least fun part of the job. So I do not any more. Like many legal firms and large hospitals, I have found a company that will do it for me. Mine is in New Zealand, where the time difference works in my favour. At the end of the day, I email the recordings of my interviews to my contact, and by the time I wake up in the morning they are Word documents in my inbox. For a few pounds per hour of recording, this is the working writer's idea of bliss.

CareerLauncher.com, also based in India, offers maths tutoring over the Internet. For between $10 and $40 an hour, secondary school and university students can have maths graduates tutor them over a live web chat. There is the future for you: schools online, teachers offshore.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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