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Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe, writes:

MANILA — To hear how far and deep the outsourcing of American jobs has traveled, listen to Christian Mancenon in barely accented English take an order over the phone for HBO from a man in Lebanon, Ill.

“I’m showing here that you love movies,” the 25-year-old Filipino said, while looking at his computer screen in a low-rise building in Makati, Manila’s business district. Mancenon and 600 others work for a subsidiary of Philippines Long Distance Telephone Co. that fields customer calls for Dish Network satellite TV of Littleton, Colo.

Like India, Pakistan, and Russia, the Philippines has a growing share of the world’s high-tech jobs that have fled high-cost places, such as Massachusetts and California’s Silicon Valley. But even workers filling customer orders, with few skills, have trouble competing with the $300 a month Mancenon is paid in the Philippines, one-fifth of what a worker in the United States would get for doing the same job.
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Chris Gaither, The Boston Globe, writes:

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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D.C. Denison, The Boston Globe, writes:

HANOVER, N.H. — From where Diane Noyes is sitting, in a modest college cafe near the campus of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, outsourcing is not a threat.

She’s thought about it, studied it as a member of Tuck’s class of 2004, but instead sees the business trend that is sending thousands of American jobs overseas as a mixture of opportunity and necessity, both for her and the US economy.

“Outsourcing may actually work to the advantage of American-trained business students,” Noyes, 29, said. “Management is something that developing nations will probably outsource to us.”
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