How I Joined the Outsourcing Revolution
by:
Nader Ghali
Mention “outsourcing” to a applied scientist and you may as well be uttering profanity. The word suggests all the evils that have befallen the Information Technology sector since the Cyberspace bubble burst a few years ago. We’ve been endlessly regaled with tragic tales of American companies who have closed up shop for many a of their I.T. positions, only to “offshore” those same jobs to programmers overseas working for less pay than their American counterparts. A brain drain is taking place in the once extremely
secure computer programming profession.
Rather than give tongue to the darkness, however, I found myself recently lighting a candle (or fashioning the problem worse, depending on your perspective). You see, simply over six months ago, I joined the outsourcing revolution. I am therefore writing this article part
as a confession, my own personal “mea culpa” of complicity.
No, I haven’t put myself up on the auction block to activity for Indian rupees.
What I did was stumble upon several “reverse auction” web sites for outsourcing talent. If you haven’t detected
of them, they go by the name of Elance.com (the largest site to date) or Guru.com. Several of these sites give companies an possibility to source
their projects to freelance workers like programmers, graphic artists and writers. Freelancers from all over the earth contend
for open bid requests, offering to do these contract jobs for a fixed price.
I happened upon a site called Rentacoder. Unlike the two sites mentioned above, Rentacoder didn’t require a subscription fee. Their take was a straightforward commission out of each project cost. Inside
minutes I denote
my resume and profile. Then I had a select to make. Which projects to bid on? In addition to programming projects, they as well listed writing jobs as well. I definite
to bid on several of the writing jobs first, simply to see how it went, and because I had always wanted to do several freelance writing on the side.
Within my 1st week, I won a bid to write a document on Policies and Procedures. I completed that assignment, got paid, and then won another bid—a series of articles on stock market investing. Really before long I was addicted. I unbroken
doing more writing…a technical white paper…web site content…economics articles…sales letters…a chapter in a novel…on and on. My payments were electronically transferred to my bank account, in New Economy style.
This addiction has fully grown into a decent part-time financial gain
for the past six months. I’ve worked for clients as far away as Australia and Turkey, in addition to clients in the East and West coasts in the United States. I became fixated with how easy it was to do business this way over the Internet, wherever
the whole earth became my market. Then I got hold of a book called Free Agent Nation, by a fellow named Daniel Pink. It was simply about how “teleworkers” such as myself are transforming America by doing business this new-fangled way, working for “gigs” instead of permanent commitments to one employer. I was part of another Big Thing.
Don’t misunderstand, I haven’t quit my day job simply yet.
Am I deed rich?
Hardly. I do a few hundred extra dollars a month, and yes, I do get competition from workers in India. But now I am competitory
with them. The winning bid, in this case, doesn’t always go to the lowest bidder. Writers from America have an edge in this arena. Several buyers of writing services prefer native English speakers.
As I said, however, there are programming jobs denote
on most of these sites too. Can programmers from the United States do a living strictly off these sites? Probably not. But programmers who choose to freelance can use these sites to supplement their financial gain
patch acquiring through normal staffing channels. They power do several meaning connections in the process.
So there it is. I got it off my chest.
“My name is Nader Ghali, and I joined the outsourcing revolution.”
I feel more better. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go do several more bids.
Just simply about THE AUTHOR
Nader Ghali is a computer applied scientist living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, wherever
he writes on a variety of issues. He can be reached at mrnader1@go.com. A sample of his writing portfolio can be seen at http://www.topwrite.net.
