As colleagues on opposite sides of the globe discuss circuit board configurations and debugging strategies for a project code-named “Doppelganger,” it’s just the start of another endless day for the company. Within twelve hours, Indian workers will end their day with calls and e-mails to California, where managers in the Santa Clara headquarters will just be waking up. “We keep passing the baton between California and India, and that way we can cram a lot more work into a 24-hour period,” said Jeff Hawkey, vice president of hardware engineering, who conducts evening meetings from the office or on his laptop at home. “A lot of nights, I go home, tuck the kids into bed and then get on the conference call.”
“If you want to play in the A league, you have to take on some additional challenges,” Spitz said. “It might not mean that you have to work around the clock for your entire career — at some point, you can step off the treadmill. But if you want to be in the business, then you have to commit to this schedule for some period of time.”
Some worry that the extra hours and unrelenting pace could have dire consequences — namely, widespread fatigue and brain drain in the technology and financial services industries, the most aggressive exporters of white-collar jobs. Steep turnover among sleep-deprived managers could eventually lead senior executives to re-evaluate the benefits of offshoring, said Peter Morici, an international business professor at Robert H. Smith School of Business at University of Maryland. “You simply can’t keep working a full day, put the kids to bed, take a call from Malaysia, then go back fresh the next morning — it’s one thing to do it for a couple weeks, but it’s another to put up with this pain in the neck permanently,” Morici said. “When executives talk about the efficiencies of offshoring, they’re often not factoring in the long-term human toll on management.”
Bombay-based consulting powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services employs 42,000 employees worldwide, including 14,000 people in India who handle U.S. projects. Their shifts are from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., or from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. local time, not including frequent early or late meetings with overseas clients, said Arup Gupta, president of Tata Consultancy Services America. “We can be the ones who put in the overlap time,” Gupta said. “These types of schedules are baked into India’s DNA. We have to earn our money somehow.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7781510/
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