I became a writing consultant after being laid off a number of years ago.  I enjoy the freedom of moving around and being able to pick the projects I want to work on instead of having someone just dump a mountain of papers on my desk and tell me to get it done.  I’ve worked in a number of places on a wide range of projects.  In the beginning, I enjoyed being a part of teams where everyone knew what they had to do, and how to do it.  It was great.  I was able to focus on my work and was usually able to get everything wrapped up on time, or a little early in some cases. 

In the last five years or so this hasn’t so much been the case anymore though.  A lot more companies and corporations have replaced permanent employees with outsourced offshore consultants.  The majority of these consultants are in places like India and Pakistan.  Apparently, these changes have been justified as ‘cost savings’ because they are able to hire these consultants for pennies on the dollar. 

The first time I was on a project with an outsourced consultant, I was a bit hesitant on the efficiency, but I kept an open mind and was optimistic. It was, to put it mildly, a project killer. One of my responsibilities was to assign and manage to work that this consultant was responsible for. I would have rather tried to orchestrate a class of first graders to build a car.  I say that because trying to get this guy to write a complete sentence that was both, on topic and completely in English, was next to impossible.  After going back and forth with him for a few days and getting nowhere, I spent twenty minutes and wrote the piece myself.

As soon as my boss found out that I was the one that did the work, I almost lost my job. His reasoning was that his company was in a contract with the outsourcing company, and the contract stated that the consultants are required to complete all of the work that was assigned to them. He went on to explain that he could have me make the consultant write the same thing everyday for a month for less than he paid me for a couple of hours. The thing that I couldn’t get him to understand was that I was spending about two hours a day trying to decipher his irrelevant ramblings and trying to rephrase the objective in a way that he would hopefully grasp.  None of that seemed important to him.  The only thing he wanted out of me was to know why the project was behind schedule.  In the end, I wrote everything and was able to teach him how to cut and paste what I sent him.

I couldn’t wait to finish that project and move on.  It was, and still is, beyond me how anyone could consider that a ‘cost savings’.  All I wanted was to go back to work on a team of people that could all hold their own.  Unfortunately, that is getting harder and harder to find.  Almost every project I work on now has at least one offshore consultant on the team.  I wish that I could say the results have been better, but for the most part, they are the same if not worse.  It seems that this trend of cheap labor over skilled labor is growing in corporate America. 

On another project, for a major corporation, I was on a team that consisted of three of us in the office and another seven offshore consultants.  That made me really nervous, but it was a small simple project that should’ve been done well within the six month timeframe.  I couldn’t have been more wrong.  Five of the seven offshore consultants had no command of the English language at all, the other two could almost write a sentence completely in English and getting anything that we could use out of them was hopeless.  Maintaining a reliable internet connection with them was even more of a challenge.  After seven months of the six month project, we weren’t even close to being half done.  Management didn’t care about any of out many obstacles; they told us that they just wanted it done by whatever means necessary.  Over the next three weeks the three of us in the office finished the project ourselves.  Upon presenting it to management, we were told that they could not accept it because none of it was completed by the consultants.  After another six torturous months of going back and forth with people that had no idea what they were being asked to do, the project was cancelled. The most aggravating thing about that project was that all of the work was done and sitting there.  The director even told us that it looked great, but because of their agreement with their offshore partners they couldn’t use it.   

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not prejudice in any way or am trying to imply that people from India and Pakistan are idiots.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  I’ve had the pleasure to work with people from all over the world, and I have learned a lot more from working them than I ever did in school.  What I am trying to say is that until the corporate executives and CEOs running all of these businesses realize that they are only getting these people for pennies on the dollar, is because their abilities to do the  work they are being asked to do is only worth pennies on the dollar, things aren’t going to get any better. 

In the end, the old saying ‘You get what you pay for.’ rings true.  You cannot ask someone to do a job they can’t do and expect to get the results of someone that can do the job.