There’s been a lot of talk around town about outsourcing over the last couple of weeks and I thought I’d write a little bit about the different ways it keeps coming up in the local design community here in the Greater Cleveland area. There is, of course, the usual disdain for outsourcing amid all of the freelancers I know who wish that they could bid on jobs at any number of freelance bid sites that are out there without having to compete with sub $500 bids on projects that might well take a week or more to complete (even though there are some creative alternatives cropping up).
But what’s been new to my ears over the last couple of weeks is talk of hiring overseas “digital assistants” to help get things done. Basically, the idea is that you can hire a person from India for $8 an hour who can help you complete tasks of all sorts. There are huge firms that have offices full of such people who spent their nights at the beck and call of folks from all over the western world. These companies bill them as being able to handle things like scheduling and organizing and the like, but I know a guy who has an “assistant” that was educated at an American university and codes web pages and manages servers and all sorts of tech-related stuff as well.
At any rate, the whole thing kind of creeps me out. My initial instinct is, if you’re paying some firm $8 an hour to farm your busy work out for you, they’ve got to be taking something substantial off the top, but if I try to get into a cost of living debate with anybody around here the same crowd that was complaining last month about being undercut by foreign bidders on freelance job sites is now arguing that any given “digital assistant” is lucky we’re paying them anything at all and should be grateful to be working in the first place. It’s all very confusing, so mostly I’ve decided to stay out of it.
What I will say, however, is that I embrace outsourcing less as the recipient of my money gets further from my front door. Let me put it this way. I think it’s a good thing to send work to people, and I think it’s a bad thing to send people to work. If I’m trying to find the cheapest able body whom I’ve never met because they’re several thousand miles away from my hometown, I start to feel a little like a boss. If, on the other hand, I can find somebody close to home that is willing to pick up some work for me because I’m too busy or the work is over my head, it starts to feel like a good thing. I love a good price as much as the next guy, but I know I’d hang up the phone if somebody asked me to code a site for them at a rate of $8 an hour, so I shouldn’t really feel too good about paying such a low wage out to others.
I try to embrace my own (slightly more ethical) form of outsourcing. If I have work that can be done internally without costing myself too much money or wasting too much time, I do it internally. But there are plenty of areas where it makes sense to seek outside help. I work with other local designers when I need help finishing up a big project on time. I’ve worked with Josh Kendall for years now as part of our Ohio Township Website initiative. He lives 10 minutes from my house. I’ve recently had preliminary conversations with Jim Palotta over at Studio Barrage about handling any custom graphic work that comes in. He’s a half an hour away at most.
My point is that I’ve got the same resources that anybody on an outsourcing binge has got at their disposal, but I get added benefit for doing so. First, I can actually meet the people I’m working with face to face. I can introduce them to clients, speak with them in the physical world, shake their hands and any other soon to be extinct forms of social interaction that I happen to find value in. Second, my clients are giving me money and, when sourcing some (or all) of the project to somebody else is called for, I’m giving some of it to someone else and so on. Everybody involved in a local model of economic exchange have a vested interest in keeping their money in their neighborhoods. If a client buys a site and I outsource it to India, I’m the only one that spends any of their money locally. If a client buys a site and I source it to my neighbor, their money was given to me for me to spend locally, but then I give it to another designer who spends some of theirs locally and so on. This continues for several cycles until it eventually finds it’s way into the coffers of some multinational corporation. With the India model, it only gets spent once. The longer a dollar bill is able to remain local the better. It creates more jobs, more income and ultimately a better quality of life for everybody in an area.
The Andersonville Study of Retail Economics looked at chain retail spending vs. local retail spending in the mid nineties. Some of their findings included numbers such as these:
- For every $100 in consumer spending with a local firm, $68 remains in the Chicago economy.
- For every $100 in consumer spending with a chain firm, $43 remains in the Chicago economy.
Keep in mind that they are talking about losing $25 for every hundred spent at a chain store that exists in a local neighborhood. What we’re talking about is a “chain store” that resides in an office building overseas. The employees at the chain stores of the Andersonville Study still go home and spent dollars locally. The “digital assistants” that are fast becoming the butlers of the 21st century shut down their computer terminals at the end of a long night and spend your money in places you’ll likely never see it again.
