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Should Engineering be Outsourced?
I talked about outsourcing engineering jobs a while ago. I want to go talk about it again. I am firmly against outsourcing engineering jobs. When all the side effects are considered:
- It doesn’t really save companies any money in long term.
- It ships some of the best paying jobs outside United States.
- It brings the quality of final work sharply down.
I work in the automation industry. I’ve seen many plants where the engineering design portion of the job was done in India or Pakistan and a totally different engineering team tries to implement it here in U.S. That makes the commissioning itself 10 times harder. Troubleshooting problems after plant start-up is even harder. Some of the reasons are:
- No one has any idea what the original engineer’s logic was behind most of the program in PLCs.
- The design practices are extremely poor (at least in the plants that I’ve seen) in India, Pakistan, Middle East, etc. This has a lot to do with technical support available to those engineers.
- Even if design practices are not poor, they are different than the conventions used in U.S. which means that technicians are going to have a heck of a harder time troubleshooting.
Companies outsource the engineering jobs because they think it saves them money. It might save them money during the design phase itself, but when you look at the long term side effects of outsourcing, it actually ends up costing them the same or more.
Besides whatever happened to creating jobs here in United States?
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