Congratulations to those of you who’ve managed to stay employed over these last several months. You deserve a prize and that prize is…an all-expense paid trip to India! Or China! Or the Middle East! Wherever, so long as you get your ass out of New York (London, etc). Or maybe that’s WHY you’ve managed to hold on to that paycheck from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and so on and so forth? Because you haven’t put up much of a fight when told to pack your bags? I don’t know, it’s so hard to tell, what with the hostages being given explicit instructions to answer all queries about being involuntarily shipped off with responses like:
It’s not that there isn’t enough to do [in New York]…it’s more of a reflection of our clients and the growing businesses in China, India, and Middle East.
And:
People understand that this is important. It’s clearly that growing our franchises in key emerging markets is an important strategic priority. It’s not like you’re being shipped off.
And:
I love it here! Getting sent to Mumbai was the best thing that ever happened to me! I would advise all would-be employees to apply directly to this office and save themselves the trouble of starting off in New York and having to wait a few months before being offered the privilege to relocate. I think of this as a promotion.
On the off chance that the aforementioned doesn’t sound like something you’d be interested in, that’s cool, too. It was a pity gig anyway, and your job’s being outsourced as we speak. Even the “data-intensive jobs from higher up the food chain…done by $250,000-a-year Wharton M.B.A’s.” And after that, “more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors.”
Leaving Wall Street For A Job Overseas [NYT]
I figure you can live like a king on a good salary in India. Except that its in Mumbai…
how long before the emerging markets boom goes bust?
i guess it’ll be off to africa then. the more thngs chagne, the more they………..
how long before the emerging markets boom goes bust?
i guess it’ll be off to africa then. the more thngs chagne, the more they………..
I dont know where you guys get your “Information” but you are losing credibilty by the day. This is not happening all over the street, far from it. Peopl who support the buy side in equities and fixed income arent being shipped off to foreign lands.
Yeah, “modeling opportunities in the Middle East”.
@4 “Posted by guest, Aug 13, 2008 12:33PM
I dont know where you guys get your “Information” ”
um, the nytimes?
@12:35, the Times is deez nuts. I would rather get my business info from the Post. The times should stick to the sunday style section, what they know best.
“I dont make money, I print it”
The CNBC special on Dubai was okay, not sure after being in NY you can deal with a place with no public drunkeness allowed.
nyt, shouldnt one only read the paper for the op-ed section and only when they want to get mad? oh, and other countries do suck. try doing m&a in cairo.
more from the captors:
“For many bankers, moving abroad is an experience they had always wanted. For the banks, the relocations are a way to retain skilled workers who might otherwise be caught in waves of layoffs that have already claimed 80,000 finance jobs globally.”
The real story here (which is being ignored) is that you should be very wary if you are not really adding value. That is, not doing something that someone in India or the Phillipines would do maybe 95% as well, for 25% the price.
ya, in India it would be more like 5% the cost to hump spreadsheets/ bookbind/ ball.
jai jai bombay!!
-retail lakshmi
Tom Friedman is flat. That tool thinks a call center in Mumbai is going to change the world economy. How many times have you called an airline and got somebody in Mumbai that can’t speak American, dammit.
I have an idea. Send laid off New York/London finance geeks to Mumbai to work at call centers. You know their English skills will be above average and they can start a facebook group of people that got fired and can’t afford to stay in NYC or London.
Does anybody know if they serve burgers in Mumbai??????
American, that sounds like a tight language to learn. Look on Amazon and didn’t see any books for it though.
Tom has actually gained some weight
Slightly off subject, but Dell has their call center in India. I f*ck*ing hate it, they can’t understand anything (nor can i)!!!!!!!!!
We’re not talking call centers. See 12: hump spreadsheets, insert pics in powerpoint, get it off to the US 95% ready. Someone in NY with an acceptable level of English language skills can then spend 10 minutes editing. Added bonus: they do this while we’re sleeping so that its ready by morning. None of this is new news.
Recently heard a comedian comment “If you lose your job to a guy in another country, maybe your job sucks.”
hmm.
@ 14 – I hear the Sheikh Shack in Mumbai is the “bomb”!
Aren’t hamburgers sacred in India?
Holy Cow – No burgers at McD’s
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/02/asia_letter/main2640540.shtml
they have furburgers
upstairs at leopold’s is the planet of women. Seriously
It reminds me of this very sad incident from America’s past:
http://www.nysun.com/arts/banished-the-forsaken-by-tim-tzouliadis/82839/
“…the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs”
“Most of these expatriates… were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.”
“They came to Russia full of enthusiasm and eager to acclimatize… the migrants were quite unprepared for the poverty and lawlessness and in many if not most cases decided to leave. Protests and appeals to the American authorities qualified the émigrés in Moscow’s eyes as troublemakers and led to their arrests, followed by confinement in concentration camps… accused of “espionage” and isolated in the Gulag from which few were expected to emerge alive.”
Outsourcing to India, one of my favorite things. Not.
The credit card “customer service” desks that are located there are the worst. I had a negative ten dollar balance on a credit card account I wanted closed. I had to call five or six times and speak with various overseas “customer service” reps who weren’t fluent enough in English to grasp anything outside of their standard script.
Finally, an overseas “customer service” rep promised a refund check and a closed account. Two months later I got a notice that the supposedly closed account was 60 days past due, and that my negative balance had been wiped off the books due to “reversals of payment credits” and late fees.
Huh? What payment reversals? What happened to my ten dollars? The ten dollar dispute continues. I just don’t talk on the phone any more; I write letters.
I can only imagine the agony of trying to get computer assistance from overseas reps.
Some MBA has suggested that corporations start to get their routine legal services from Indian lawyers for a fraction of the cost in the United States, since India has an Anglicized legal system. Oh, please, please do try that!
Indian outsourcing… on the IT side its even more pathetic. Pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
@24 You have serious nationalist blinders on if you are comparing professional expats to those who bought into Soviet-era propaganda.
I’m reading this from Shanghai now, where I’ve been for three years,and have worked in Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul over the past decade. It’s been a fantastic experience overall and I don’t understand why anyone WOULDN’T want to work overseas. NY (or London) will always be there and a little international experience will be of benefit when (or if, in my case) you ever decide to return.