I've got some personal experience with this. So let me share them to outline the issues we face in IT.
I previously worked as an IT Manager in Dubai. I was responsible for managing our outsourcing requirements. We hired people from US / UK, Eastern Europe, Russia, India and Pakistan. Let me profile them:
- US / UK - Very expensive ($50/hr-$100/hr range), reliable, outstanding work ethic, excellent results
- Eastern Europe - Little expensive ($25/hr-$50/hr range), reliable, good work ethic, excellent results
- Russia - Similar to Easter Europe - amazing hackers / system engineers - but cannot be trusted for the same reason
- India - Inexpensive($8/hr-$20/hr), somewhat reliable, very little work ethic, results vary dramatically
- Pakistan - Inexpensive($8/hr-$20/hr), completely unreliable, very little work ethic, good results
Initially, I would choose the contractor who was best suited for the job. But later, following a temporary nationalistic kick-in, I decided to up my preference for Pakistanis. That turned out to be a mistake. The guys were surprisingly talented and intelligent. I, frankly, had not expected them to be. But appallingly unmotivated and unreliable. I was constantly making excuses to the upper management to cover on their behalf. It's amazing how much embarrassment I endured for these guys. I takes a long time to develop a reputation for delivering things on time, and my preference for these guys was fracturing the trust my managers had on me.
One find day, after a long heated meeting, we decided to cease working with Pakistanis and Indians. We had enough trouble from the Indians as well - they're notoriously difficult to work with. They won't tell you about showstopping issues until its too late and pretend everything was in order. You had be excruciatingly specific with the requirements or they'll end up building incomplete stuff without batting an eyelid.
Anyway, a few months earlier, I moved to Karachi (personal familial reasons), and decided to freelance here. After a short while, I noticed I was just as unreliable as the guys I had worked with. Let me list out the issues I faced:
- The power cuts were simply too much to manage. Even a descent UPS dies out. I had to choose between powering my laptop + internet or keep the fan running during the summer.
- Internet is painfully unreliable. Here's what I tried:
- Evo - weak signal.
- Setup and antenna for the Evo - still unusable.
- Quebee - no signal at all.
- WiiTribe - worked quite well because they had a tower installed a street down from me - but it would go down often because the tower's backup generator was unreliable.
- PTCL - don't get me started here - took 2 months and a dozen yelling visits to the exchange before I could get a stable connection. Even now, it dies out whenever it wants to.
- So I have 3 connections now to keep me operating. PTCL, a backup WiiTribe and a second backup Evo (Have to go down to a coffee shop to get it working).
- Working from home, no one thinks of my job as serious. So my phophos, mamus and random neighbors feel it's fine to keep me running errands. This might sound like a joke, but this is quite a serious issue. The contractors I worked with kept telling me that they had to run errands for their relatives, but I dismissed them as cheap excuses myself. We're a very family-centric society so we cannot escape this.
- Security issues - if I don't feel like working from home, most often, I don't have a choice. It's unsafe to go around with a laptop in a place like Karachi.
Most IT freelancers cannot afford to fix the first two issues nor escape the next two. So they're bound to be found unreliable.
A few months ago, I decided to start up a small outsourcing company. I had a steady stream of work coming in and even had to reject plenty because I didn't have the time. I started by looking for the talent first. The way I'm used to finding talent is by posting on online classifieds - I tried plenty of them, even the paid ones - but there were amazing few responses. And the people who did respond had nothing to do with my requirements. They were simply throwing their resumes left and right. I am not sure why I didn't get enough responses - is it because people are resigned to finding jobs by 'sifarish' alone? Post a job in a classifieds in the UAE or anywhere in the West, you'll be handling resumes with spades.
I realized that even if I had started a company, it would've been impossible to manage in a place like Karachi. There's a strike every other day, the IT sector is useless without electricity and a reasonable internet infrastructure, and the security issues simply compound all of this.
Sorry for the wall of text. Please note that whether you're Indian or Pakistani, my intention was not to insult you. I merely stated the facts as I found them from my personal experience as a means to explain some of the issues we face as freelancers / wanabe entrepreneurs.
) have spend millions on LAPtop scheme, bhai IT ke education PC/laptop k baghair kesay a sakti hai
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