[Closed] WFH => Outsourcing your job

thought this was going to be about outsourcing your own job without telling anyone, then riding your bike all day as the cash rolls in...

I thought the same

😀

I thought the same, reminded me of this guy

Skills!

I have a friend who does exactly that. Get's a contract in at x, subs it out at y and let's someone else do the donkey work...

There was a story in the news a few years back about this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693

Edit: same link as above

I have a friend who does exactly that. Get’s a contract in at x, subs it out at y and let’s someone else do the donkey work

I employed a contractor who did just this, though I only found out once he'd left. He sent the data overseas and paid them 1/5 of his day rate, he spent 1 day a week quality checking it and the rest of the week doing something else.
I admired his initiative.

I also thought this was going to be a Tim Ferris-like 'I outsourced my own dull tasks and now I do what I like all the time' thread.

I can’t see this opportunity not being taken to cut what for many business is there biggest cost.

You can't catch me out by using a double-negative for emphasis. You mean cutting staff costs? You could be right. Many organizations seem to be in the habit of cutting short-term staff costs by outsourcing to the same, or better-skilled staff in locations where staff costs are lower than where the workers currently are.

Some organisations may use this experience as an opportunity to cut other costs like office locations and change the way they manage and conduct business.

Hopefully both these effects will benefit skilled workers who can start demanding the right pay, conditions, and work from previously location-sensitive employers.

Well as long as he was quality checking it not really an issue, that's management.

Good point on the double negative!

opefully both these effects will benefit skilled workers who can start demanding the right pay, conditions, and work from previously location-sensitive employers.

If its only outsourced within the UK, I think there will be an averaging out but any work that ends up overseas I can't see it benefiting UK workers.

I know a couple organisations who have offshored elements of their work and from my perspective it doesn't work well. Quality, control and delivery both decline.

I had the opportunity to run 2 outside IR35 contracts at the same time in the middle of last year. I didn't have the balls to go through with it in the end, but it was definitely doable.

I'm not sure why this keeps coming up over and over again.

Because it's a valid concern. Companies have learnt to get better at remote managment so the barriers are reducing.

When I worked at HSBC they had a big drive to offshore work from the UK to India.
It was cheaper per hour, but it took them longer, wasn’t as high quality and often needed to be corrected, so often it didn’t end up being cost effective.

10 years later they are bringing a lot of that work back to the UK.

If it’s routine, then someone will doing their best to make sure it’s done by a robot, or if it’s “value add” you might as well pay someone hear to do it.

I thought you were going to say you outsourced your job to the kids in lieu of home schooling

Process automation / robotics is going to mean a lot of offshore jobs are going to disappear at our place (US bank) in the next 5 years.

Hopefully that will afford a few more near/onshore jobs are kept rather than that experience being thrown on the scrap heap at age 47...

My old company finished doing this in March, having started 3 years ago, before WFH was a big deal. We came to an agreement when I put in a flexible working request, as apparently someone in Poland would do my job for a third my (uk national average) salary.

When I worked at HSBC they had a big drive to offshore work from the UK to India.

When I worked at a company to which a lot of that work went I tried very hard to raise the skill levels in the Indian team. Management weren't really interested.

I worked for a (then) household name website who outsourced significant parts of the editorial and design work to Bangalore.

It was an interesting exercise, and ended up reassuring me that that kind of creative work has a host of culturally specific but difficult to articulate touchpoints.

So it could work OK if you could accept a certain blandness to the output, but for consumer-facing content in a competitive marketplace - you need a bit of edge and humour.

Now I feel relatively reasonably secure that my over-competitive, under-paid field isn't going to be offshored or AI-ed.

Hooray.

Companies have been trying to outsource/offshore things for 15-20 years, at least.

Sometimes it's appropriate, sometimes it isn't. I'm sure some jobs might get shaken up a bit, but fundamentally, it's been happening for a while.

I've steered myself into being the one doing the automating. Hopefully that'll see me through to retirement!

Because it’s a valid concern. Companies have learnt to get better at remote managment so the barriers are reducing.

I can't say I agree. Offshoring and remote management aren't new, the only thing the Covid-related WFH increase will change is how many companies in the UK consider home-working (of UK employees) to be viable (whether as an option for employees or instead of them having large offices).

The company I work offshored pretty much as much as it could year ago, there's still 5000 of us in the UK as we work on contracts that can't be offshored (either for security/regulatory reasons, client choice or it doesn't make sense from a service delivery point of view).

Most companies these days will have already considered offshoring some of their business, if they've chosen not to it will be for other reasons than the Covid WFH experience would show aren't barriers.

Lot of companies went down the offshoring route in last 15/20 years; far fewer have stuck with it.
Call centre operations were a favourite for outsourcing; a general decline in service levels/quality of response so there has been a trend to on-shoring.
Automation/robotics are being more widely adopted.
The bigger consideration is AI; I'm looking at re-balancing my investment portfolio and 10-20% into an AI fund is likely.

One thing thats also going to be a huge part of offshoring or outsourcing is office space in cheaper locations, and the need for a company paid vehicle that isnt required, internet based video calling should replace that, also no need to stay in hotels overnight along with all those paid hours traveling with video calling, uk plc may well become more productive.

In a few years time a lot of work based in a dedicated building will be warehousing, manufacturing and some secure call centre work, the rest could probably be done in shared space offices rented per day as opposed to long leases.

Going to be a very interesting next few years as new working patterns are made, with offices working longer split shifts, instead of a basic 9 till 5 why not 12 hour shifts, or earlier starts or later starts.

My company has with the last 18 months completed a large onshoring programme...very large company (75000 employees globally).
Robotics and automation are very high up our priority list, but these still need UK based devs and ops teams to manage.
We have no future strategy to further offshore EMEA or Pacific markets.
I’m reasonably senior within the organisation so would be aware of future strategy.

I worked for a UK power company in the early noughties, and they were outsourcing the/my customer service jobs abroad. Project binned just over a year in due to poor service levels and customer complaints.

I think the risks depend on the sector

I'd certainly worry more about automation (aka machine learning aka sorta AI) than I would offshoring. There might be a move away from london waiting allowances, but the offshoring boat departed a while ago (my company is bringing roles back, but generally only in the form of automation with UK exception management - i.e. when it goes wrong).

If your job can be outsourced WFH it can be outsourced WF the office.

Automation is likely to have a bigger impact. As it has in the past with Agriculture. And in recent years some examples in warehousing.

Im quite intrigued by this project https://www.handsfreehectare.com/#

I've spent the last 10 months removing work from our Indian team, I've done it by automating the tasks they were given. They now get done fully, correctly every time and most crucially on time every day. I have more automation to do. In the process I am trying to upskill the UK team, I don't want them doing routine day to day tasks, I want them lookjng at under lying performance issues and improving them. I've managed to get them all a pay rise but the mindset for the wider scope is not there amongst some of them. No one will be at risk until we're back in the office and I can do some one to one coaching, but as said above automation of clerical tasks is the way to go, in many cases anything out sourced can be completed algorithmically with a few people picking up the tasks that fall outside normal parameters.

^^^^ this ^^^^

A lot of tasks we've off shored can automated, we pay TCS to some bobbins stuff but the challenge is convincing management that we can automate this away if given the time to do it.

mrchrispy exactly what i faced when i first started, i was being pushed to outsource more even though i could see what had been wasnt working. Lucky for me my boss is pretty bright and listens to people so over a few months he's seen the benefits of automation and is now all for it. I'm also lucky to have a reasonable in house dev team and what I ask for seems to get prioritised.