Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

The article is about the high turnover (attrition) rate of employees
at companies in India that companies in the US and Europe use to do
work that they think is more expensive in their own countries.

So Company A in the US outsources work to Company Z in India because
the Indian workers are skilled and work for less money than domestic
workers in Company A's country. But before the employees of Company Z
can do they work, they have to be trained to meet A's standards and
needs. Because those employees know that they are both a limited
(finite) group of skilled workers, they tend to move on to new and
better-paying jobs more quickly than permanent employees at A would.
That is the attrition: the loss of trained employees.

The rate of this attrition is going up as more and more companies
outsource services.

In addition to the high-tech positions the article talks about, a lot
of Indians work as medical transcribers for American doctors and
hospitals.

I had to do the same thing. Frankly, this whole business about what
newsgroup provider one uses is pretty snotty and snobby, if you ask
me. I know that nobody asked me, but I don't care about that.

Though it isn't very clear, it seems to be referring to turnover of staff.
Attrition means a gradual wearing away, and so the staff in the companies
concerned are leaving and either not being replaced or being replaced by kless
experienced people.

Sure. I hadn't noticed anyone criticizing users of Google Groups as
loons. Full-featured newsreader programs have more benefits like easier
management of posts and killfiles, but a person can get by with Google.

What infuriates many us is that for over a year, the obvious Reply
button of Google Groups did not quote previous material, so we were
getting follow-up comments connected to absolutely nothing. We had to
keep telling people of a workaround solution.

Changes a week or so may have fixed this -- my fingers are crossed.

Maybe as a test, you'd be so kind as to reply to this and show whether
the old material appeared automatically?

1.  Attrition means the loss over time of men who
are not replaced.  It came into general use during
the First World War to describe the sort of battle
that is finally decided not by geographical control
(the classical or staff college resolution) but the
exhaustion of one side, which could no longer
replace casualties lost in battle.
2.  Offshore is the modern business buzzword
for abroad, overseas, in foreign countries etc.
3.  On the rise is colloquial journalese for increasing.
Newspaper headlines often use gerunds in place
of other varieties of verb.

In the Information Technology industry, offshore
attrition means (from the point of view of one
country, usually the USA) the tendency for work
done last year by Americans in America to be
done next year by foreigners in some other country.

Twenty years ago if you booked a room in the
(US-owned) Holiday Inn in Helsinki, your booking
would probably be processed by either an American
or a Finnish person.  Nowadays if you do the same,
your booking is likely to be processed by an
English-speaking person in India, who has never
set foot in either Finland or the USA.   From the
point of view of the Finnish and US governments
this work has been "lost" to foreigners.