I, Cordelia, a Scandinavian girl, have on my team no less than 12 Indian guys!

They are based outside Bangalore, India and are working on my project! There are also three Indian guys who work on my project and are based here in London. (Those are the most senior team members.)

Why have we got this odd set-up? You guessed it – Indian labour is cheaper than British - much cheaper! (but equally qualified…)
The Impressive ‘Campus where my team members work….

Growing up in Sweden until my early twenties, I had practically never met anybody from India. (Granted, there were some Indians in Singapore where my father used to live. But I never knew them, just ate at their restaurants.)

Here in England there are plenty of people of Indian origin. But most of them were born in the UK and there really isn’t much that differentiates them from any other British person.

When I first walked into my present employer’s office in the City of London, I was really surprised at how many brown-skinned people worked there. Really, one in four or so is actually Indian! It certainly stood out from what you’d expect in a London office. I remember thinking “Gosh, they must be doing some kind of reversed discrimination here…. “ Pretty stupid thing to be thinking, but I was really surprised.

Then I was told about the set-up whereby my company has a large part of it’s infrastructure located in India. I hadn’t picked up on that in the interview actually.. In addition, my company is using one of the largest Indian consultancies for further outsourcing. People from the offices in Delhi and Bangalore regularly come over from India and work for a few months in the UK.

With a completely straight face my manager told me that I must get signed up for the “India Cultural Awareness” three-day training course. My boss isn’t exactly politically correct most of the time. So I thought he was just being silly at first. But this is genuine corporate course, run by HR. It teaches about Indian languages, traditions, the caste system and many other things that most Europeans have a very sketchy knowledge of, at best.

Jacob , my boss, was adamant that I must attend, but then dumped enough work on me to make sure that it was completely impossible to fit it in. As a result the actual Indian lady who runs it came to see me and was very concerned that there was no time for me to do the course. Jacob then assured her that “Cordelia will be going to India on business soon anyway and then she can learn all that stuff when she is there” The trip has yet to materialise though!
….meanwhile outside Bangalore….
At first I was really struggling to understand the Indian accent of my team members. For that reason I was really reluctant to call people in India… With some people, I couldn’t understand more than about half of what they said! When I mentioned it to somebody, they said; Actually, they can’t understand us wither. The Indians just have a different intonation that any European would have… The way they speak sounded a bit ‘robot-like’ to me at first. It took a while to get used to, but now it is much easier. Still, some people sound incredibly grumpy! Their vocabulary is as good as mine, or better – the only difficulty is the intonation.

The number of Indian team members based in the UK was larger when I started than it is now. But some of the Indian guys didn’t like it here and actually requested to be sent back to India! I suppose that’s understandable – the British weather is awful beyond words and housing here is pretty bad unless you make a very good living.

Jacob my boss claimed that they have a really excellent lifestyle there, much better than we have here. (Good for them, if it is true!) However in the UK they get very little for their money. I wouldn’t know – it sounded like he was exaggerating. Surely ordinary programmers don’t have gardeners and maids!

However these guys have no shortage of top-notch electronic gadgets, designer shirts, expensive watches and the rest of it, actually. They may be the ‘cheap’ labour, but there is nothing cheap about their appearance! (I don’t actually know how that works out actually. If we only pay £150 as a daily rate for a consultant based in India, then the guy in question would be lucky to get half of that in his paycheck… (I ‘got’ a third of my rate when I did consultancy.) So how is he able to afford luxury European consumer goods such as Swiss watches and Italian shirts with an income of less than £75 /day? I must be missing something… Glad for their sake that they’re able to afford this kind of stuff though.
Romance, Indian Style: I like it!
(And aren’t ’saris’ sexy?!)
From a project management perspective there are mixed benefits with the outsourcing setup. The cost of labour in India is something like 1/4 of what the exact same resource would cost in the UK. This is of course very welcome when budgeting. But time differences, cultural differences, infrastructure problems etc makes the setup logistically difficult at times. When you most need to speak to somebody they may not be in the office. You can not walk over to somebody’s desk and have a serious conversation with them. Everything is done over email or telephone.

There also seems to be a much higher incidence of illnesses and miscellanous other family emergencies happening with Indian team members than with others. The family emergencies also seem to take a lot longer to sort out. When you least need it, somebody jets off to India for reasons that are never very clear. Although I sympathize, as any normal person would, that doesn’t make the impact on my project any less. I found that Indian family emergencies is something I have to keep a backup plan in order to be able to handle. I have to admit that I find it irritating.

There are lots of funny mix-ups as well. The guys in India didn’t at first realise that “Cordelia” is my first name. Several people wrote me emails starting with ‘Hello Neumann…’ We probably mix up their names quite badly too though!

The English team members say they ideally want to shorten Indian names (like using ‘Jay’ for ‘Jayanthkumar’ etc). But they don’t actually do it, as they fear it may be rude. (Second-generation British Indians our own age accept that without any problems.)

As the Indian guys on the team are all around thirty, many of them are currently looking to get married!
I am fascinated by their structured and scientific way of finding a wife. Very cool! It seems a bit rude to probe, but I hope to find out more about how they are getting on when we go out for a team dinner shortly.
(Gosh, I wouldn’t mind it if somebody else introduced me to a ‘fully compatible’ guy the way that seems to be happening in India… )

It is also fascinating to think that the whole caste system thing is going within the Indian group, [correction, it is not: see comment by Gana] and that I am completely oblivious to it. My English team members have known the Indian guys longer and have revealed that ‘such-and-such’ is a really low caste, but ‘such-and-such’ is a high caste….It means nothing to us though, of course, but it’s fascinating.
Indian Fabric, Textiles, Carpets….Gorgeous!
I really wouldn’t mind it if I was able to go out to India for business. My own company’s offices are in Delhi and the consultancy that we use are outside Bangalore in an incredibly cool ‘campus’ where customers are apparently driven around in little golf-carts. Very funky! Indian culture is beautiful and fascinating. I love the fabric, textiles and carpets.

Well, as things are turning out – the Indian team are not as alien anymore as they first felt. I have got to know several of them well and we can have a good laugh together. I suppose the language of IT is fairly universal.

I am not sure what I think of the whole ‘outsourcing to cheaper countries’ concept. I wonder whether it bothers the Indians to know that they are essentially the ‘cheap labour?’ On the whole, I suppose it must be a good thing that these jobs are being created in India. But where is this trend leading?

For the time being I am trying just to enjoy working with this fascinating group of people and not worry about the bigger picture. I have learnt a lot from the whole experience already and I really like my Indian team.