Philippines: The country that never sleeps

I have cousins that work at help desks in the Philippines, and their work schedules are designed to match US time zones. After work, they hang out at bars with happy hours designed for them - I believe around ten in the morning. They hang out, then go home to sleep for the rest of the day.

Globalisation at work.

I'm a Filipino Developer, this is actually an alternative for us developers in the Philippines, instead of going abroad working overseas which will be very far from our families, we got a lot of opportunities from foreigners who wants for outsource their development projects, it earns us quite substantial income, though its not as high as when your really working abroad, being with your family and seeing your children grow up mostly makes up for it. Staying up late is not that hard as me myself is most productive at night when kids are asleep. I know most programmers share this work time.

Very interesting. I think a line graph would have been a better choice than the stacked line graph -- the undulations in the bottom layers make it hard to see the phenomenon being discussed, which is the flatness of the Philippines.

I'm sampling a few points from the chart and will try to create the corresponding line graph.

Filipinos are great for business process outsourcing. They tend to have fairly good written and spoken English and have a decent work ethic.

I'm not as big a fan of them for software work. For coders, eastern Europe is your best bet, with Brazil picking up a lot of steam in the last few years as well.

Great article, Panos!

Of course, there are other effective ways to provide a real-time worldwide workforce without relying on folks staying up all night. MobileWorks pulls it off by employing trained workers in both hemispheres: for instance, Latin America.

Mechanical Turk is an example of how not to do this – the performance disparity between random US and Indian workers there causes more trouble than it's worth.

Originally from the states, I've been renting a condo here in Manila for going on 6mo, neighboring IBM, Dell, and several other BPO buildings. I keep on US time and can vouch for it being just as busy at 4am as 4pm. I've heard mixed reviews on retaining employees, but English is ubiquitous. I've had to call AMEX and I end up talking to someone down the street, but wouldn't have guessed until they brought it up.

Philippines has a chain of hamburger joints called "Burger Machine" whose branches are often open 24x7; their song includes the phrase "the burger that never sleeps".

I'm curious: What are specific examples of "variety of tasks" and "crowd applications" that the author is talking about? Are we in some kind of cyborg software revolution?

sounds like an anti-Indian propaganda.Were you not a bit too critical?Are you implying that all Filipinos are excellent technical workers?I spent a lot of time in India and found my share of both,and I think majority of them are really good ,dedicated technical workers.