US workers see hard times
High-tech firms tout outsourcing as crucial to survival
Chris Gaither, Globe Staff, Nov 03 2003 Framingham -

Andre Brassard keeps sending out resumes but has largely given up on the
profession that employed him for a decade: writing software.

In his old department at Mindspeed Technologies Inc., most of the
software engineers are gone. The work Brassard and his colleagues did is
now largely done in Ukraine for one-quarter to one-third the cost.

``What has happened to me is irreversible,'' Brassard said. ``It's not
like the downturn of 10 years ago. Then it was just bad times.''
..
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``Right when you think about Employee 11, you should think about
India,'' said Ravi Chiruvolu, a general partner with Charter Venture
Capital, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that invests in fledgling technology
companies. ``My view is you should not start a company from scratch in
the United States ever again.''
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Lumenare Networks .. When the board hired new executives .. one of
their first moves was to fire 12 contractors writing software code for
$180 an hour and replace them with a team of Indian programmers earning
$10 to $20 an hour in Noida, a suburb of New Delhi.

Within a few months Lumenare was saving so much money that Phillip
Cavallo, the chief executive, moved all software development and
maintenance to India, despite resistance from some of his upper-level
managers. He laid off 30 American programmers in Sunnyvale and hired
replacements in Noida.


`Software engineers - India produces about a million of them a year -
are a commodity,'' Cavallo said in a phone interview from India, where
he was visiting employees and trying to sell software to Indian
outsourcing firms ...

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