I nominate this coinage for Neologism of the week.
Udhay
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205351,00.html
From the Magazine | Cover Story
In Search of the Next Bangalore
By ARYN BAKER/BANGALORE
A new word has appeared during watercooler conversations in offices
across the U.S. The term is Bangalored. It refers to India's
high-tech hub, and it means your job has just moved to India without
you. But in the shifting global labor market, vernacular can quickly
become outdated. What is the term for a job that is outsourced to
India only to be relayed to China or Romania?
There is none--but one may soon be needed. That's because India,
which virtually invented offshore outsourcing, is becoming a victim
of its own success. Such companies as Infosys, Wipro and Tata
Consultancy Services (TCS) grew into billion-dollar behemoths by
tapping armies of quick-coding, English-speaking, low-wage techies to
do the software programming and back-office tasks that U.S. companies
used to perform in-house. But Indian salaries are rising--the median
annual wage for a software engineer jumped 11%, from $6,313 in 2004
to $7,010 in 2005, according to India's National Association of
Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM)--and the country's technical
colleges aren't producing highly skilled workers quickly enough. So
foreign companies are turning to low-cost markets outside India, like
China, the Philippines and Eastern Europe, to do more of their grunt
work. "China has much the same resources as us: great pools of talent
and a young workforce--and better schools, airports and roads," says
Kiran Karnik, president of NASSCOM.
So is Bangalore going bust? Not necessarily. But the competition has
forced India's outsourcing giants to look for workers beyond its
borders. Infosys, Wipro and TCS have all built outsourcing campuses
in China and are actively recruiting Chinese employees to serve North
Asian markets. Infosys has gone one step further by hiring 300
Americans who recently graduated from top universities. They will
undergo six months of training in India and then be redeployed around
the world. Wipro is considering opening a campus in Vietnam and plans
to hire 1,000 bilingual speakers at a new center in Romania to
service European clients.
So what's the word to describe someone whose job is outsourced to
Romania via India? Wipro's Lilian Jessie Paul likes globombed. Sudip
Banerjee, president of enterprise solutions at Wipro, prefers
flattened, with a nod to Thomas Friedman, author of the globalization
bible The World Is Flat. Says Banerjee: "The jobs will go to those
who can do them best, in the most cost-effective manner. Geography is
irrelevant." That's something Indians are starting to learn too.
From the Jun. 26, 2006 issue of TIME magazine
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))