I'm clinging onto my job.

Our new buisness model is to win jobs, package them up, ship them to India,
Recieve work back, check, re-work, and close out.

So we win jobs and then pass it all to India etc.

I then keep lookin on this board and see questions like

"hello, i am from low Cost Center XYZ, i have 2" pipe @50f how do i stress please tell me sir"

Somehow, all things considered, i am asking myself why i should bother with answers to these. are not accelerating our own demise?????

No i'm not racist,
No i'm not protectionist,
no i'm not a nut,

I'm just an engineer watching all of the enginnering talent and industry in his country bleed to death due to low cost centres.

Dear SUPPERPIPER,
I am entirely in aggreement with you.
Low cost carriers provide low quality services. That's the point which our business owners should take into account.
But, .............

Your frustration is completely justified.

But someone from a low-cost centre might think like this :

I am an engineer doing the same job like an engineer in Europe etc and all I am getting paid is a small pouch of peanuts while he is getting kilograms of gold.

And I think he too is completely justified in his frustration.

Aye

Hi All

If in a suburb, a resident alone is making huge money with the rest of the residents losing jobs ,the eventual outcome is economic disparity leading to collapse of the suburb. I think the world is also is presently in the same model. Some locations have an affluent lifestyle while others struggle for a day's meal. It is for us to decide whether continue living with such a disparity or try to bridge that for overall harmony. My 2 cents worth.

Well i want to say some thing on this topic.. I have just started my career.In my little career i had seen that businessmen are exploiting basics needs of human in south asia. People here can do nothing except working with low cost center. I dont thing that people here lack talent or skills. Reason for the low quality work is over burden and poor wages


But what that engineer can do. Should he leave his job and then die of hunger with all his family which is dependant on him?

From one side people are trying to integrate the world and from the other side we are disintegrating and differentiating. Internet and mobile phones are spreading and people unite to a single world. After that we want to divide. Your frustration is very clear. But it is only by chance the other guy is living in the other part of the world. If we do everything ourselves then there is no more business. For doing more business and finding more markets outsourcing started. If stopped no more business and no jobs again. But this divide is every where. In a country each state is divided. Each state is further divided to districts etc. Again south and north, east and west divides. Class and cast divides......

People learn things like that only. Of course it took long time for some one to learn. No teaching then no more learning and no learning no more teaching. Then there is no use of this forum!! If one person do not answer, other will do. So it is better to be the first one to give a correct answer!!!!

I have a question wheather in EUROPE Engineer never Do mistake and rework
Tell me in which project in europe bcoz of good qulity engineer you have commisioned the plant before time

Hey Super Piper, I hear you loud and clear. I'm currently working as a Technical advisor in one of the "High Value" (translate:"Low Cost") Engineering centers. I do get strange questions from allegedly highly experience people. I do have Engineere that make the same mistakes over and over again. I've bulleted the items on checklists, they check off and sign complete, and are still not completed or are done incorrectly.

And the gem from S:

"But someone from a low-cost centre might think like this :

I am an engineer doing the same job like an engineer in Europe etc and all I am getting paid is a small pouch of peanuts while he is getting kilograms of gold.

And I think he too is completely justified in his frustration."

This is why you just don't get it. There is absolutly no justification in his frustration. You agree to take the job at the pay rate offered. As a proffessional, you should give 100% or better. What other Engineers in other countries make is not the point and should be of no concern to you. The point is, you agreed to do a job for a certain pay rate, and you should perform that job to the best of your ability. You will probably be the first one to complain when someone other than you is chosen for ex-pat assignment at a better pay rate. If you worked hard and learned your job instead of copping an attitude, it might have been you that EARNED the promotion to a better paying assignment. East, West, In-pat, ex-pat, client, contractor or any other category or location of employment, you EARN what you get by working hard, not by being jealous of others. I know people in my office are paid significantly lower than I am. I am 12,000 miles from home and it is a sacrifice. Based on their performance, their ability to adapt and learn, their ability to work to a schedule and quality procedures, and attitudes just like your example, some of the local Engineers here are OVERPAID!!!!!!!

I forgot to add that there are some excellent Engineers here, also. I would take them on any project I work on, no matter the location.

It is my humble request to moderators that please stop these types of post from this forum & bar the user's membership who is involved in sending these posts. Because this is not the place where we discuss such things. We are here to discuss something related with stress jobs.

Please look into this matter.

good grief,

OFF TOPIC obviously has no meaning to you, but hey ban me,

'Its not what you do, but how you
are percieved to do it that counts'

If the Quality of work being given to the client is good then the outsourcing program is working. If it ends of being cheaper to have the initial work done poorly, checked, sent back to be re-worked and checked again then that is acceptable as long as the output is Safe, on time and on budget.

The Walmart modal has been so successful at lowering prices it is continuing to be applied to other areas of industry. Engineering is becoming a comodity item in the same way steel or valves have. As engineers in high cost ceters we need to prove that there is added value for our added wage. If we cannot show we are worth 10 times what a person in a low cost center is worth then the company is right to export that work.

Another problem is that our immigration policies are designed to take the top people out of these countries. There Doctors and Engineers have a much easier time immigrating thus steeling the Top End talent after they have been educated and trained in their respective countries

Superpiper,

I think your concerns are quite common among people in similar situations to yourself. I have worked for company's that have 'low cost execution centres' and my understanding is that the quality of work returned has generally been poor. But like you say the cost of rework needs to be assessed against the front to back costs associated with a project fully executed in Europe.

Something I think one or two people are missing here is that the 'low cost centres' are used because that's exactly what they are - low cost. Why do they think that external organisation's are needed to check/verify their work? As long as they stay low cost and the quality is such that once rectified it stays overall cheaper they will continue to get work.

Perhaps people working and living local to low cost centres should take in to consideration (with respect to the money we're paid), how much the cost of living is in the UK. I bet they'd fall off their chairs to know the average house price...it's all relative.

I've only been directly involved in pipe stress for the last 4 years or so. For the most part I work alongside qualified/Chartered Engineers who have provided me with a good base to work from. I haven't been on this forum for a while now as I was finding it quite tedious trawling through posts which to be quite honest, were very worrying. I often wondered if people asking how to stress a 2" 50 Deg F line had seen a critical line list, General Engineering document or even attempted the tutorials in Caesar II.

I appreciate everyone has to start somewhere, we've all been there. But as a minimum they need to have the right level of qualifications and an understanding of how the code interacts with the software. Sorry to bang on a bit this is an issue that a lot of people find very frustrating.

My education was in India and spent around 12 yrs in India working with differnt global EPC companies at their low cost centres. Currently I am working in the UK. I have also worked with the US offices of the global EPC companies.

Having worked on both sides, following are my honest views:

1) There is no shortage of good brain or engineers in india or the third world that way.A vast majority of students in the top engineering schools of UK and USA are students are from these countries and they have commendable performances.

2) A good percentage of scientists in NASA are of Asian origin.

3) Indian Institute of technologies and Indian Institute of Science are ranked within first 500 technical schools of the world.

4)There is however a specific problem in India and third world countries in terms of EPC work.The specific problem is that of lack of experienced engineers doing the engineering work. In India and that way in the third world, people don't want to be engineers but managers so the best brain goes that way.In an EPC environment, within 4-5 years, eveybody wants to be a project manager and not an engineer ( that too a stress engineers job is least covetted and perhaps least rewarding). Hence , quality is compromised.Also, most of the young engineers that I have worked with in India , do not want to learn the fundamentals and want to do a garbage in and out in the computer.This is where I agree with SUPERPIPER that quality gets deteriorated.

5) Havaing said the above, I am also noticing the young engineers in this part of the world, also going by the same way. However, till the time the old timers are still there in the market, the western world will still have better stress engineers than what is there in the low cost centres.

6) So in my humble suggestion, the low cost sentres should take the criticism in a good spirit and remember that it is not lack of talent but right talent doing wrong job is the real reason for low quality job and try to motivate ( reward) experienced engineers to stay as engineers and not become managers.Only then the low cost centres will stop producinh low quality work.

Regards

Superpiper should come back in a few years, I am sure the developed world did not just wake up to find themselves developed, someone had to do the leg work and that someone represents the older generation. I have seen some terrible young engineers UK engineers even the most basic of skills is not there, believe me they are terrible and they can't wait to be project managers.