Thursday, November 13, 2008

Outsourcing

While listened to the The Moth Podcast today, I heard the October 20th episode which is entitled "My Outsourced Life" and features a guy named A.J. Jacobs In it, Jacobs recounts his experience in hiring an Indian outsourcing company (Brickwork India) to handle some work tasks for him, before eventually hiring them to handle a plethora of personal tasks in his life. The story is also recounted in an article he wrote about it in Esquire which can be found here.

While his experience was entertaining and interesting, at the end of the podcast, Jacobs was talking about how he had been racked with guilt that perhaps in hiring this foreign firm, he was taking jobs away from hard-working Americans. That is, until he received an email from a guy who had an IT job that was outsourced to India. After reading Jacobs' article, the guy hired an outsourcing firm to find him a job, which they managed to do in about a week.

This has really got me thinking. I am currently trying to find a job, in real estate, which is proving to be quite difficult, not surprisingly. If this firm can really do what they guy said what they did for him, I believe I would seriously consider hiring them, assuming if I could manage to gather up the necessary cash.

This post doesn't really have a particular "point," however I just really found that one idea quite compelling.

3 comments:

Patrick said...

You should try it. Alternately, we could trade jobs back. Wouldn't that be great?

Unknown said...

Yeah, you should try it. It's a good idea. You might want to visit www.taskus.com, they can surely do that for you.

trip said...

Patrick,

Thank you for the offer, but I believe I will pass. Although it would be nice if you were to "replace" me in the MRED program.

marie,

Yes, thank you for your suggestion of taskus.com. I emailed Brickwork to see if they might be able to help me, but they said that they currently don't have the capabilities handle that. Taskus, on the other hand, does indicate that they offer such services.