Found out that in 18 months my job will probably be going to some guy in Chennai. Yay. Mid 50s and scraping around for work. What fun that will be.
Mid 50s here as well, and I'm surprised that my job didn't go to Chennai last year. A bunch of guys of similar age and older have lost their jobs over the past year at my company, gone to Chennai.
I'm mid-50s, too, and while not that worried about my job going to Chennai, there are not that many people doing what I do and thus not that many jobs to begin with. Which is why I remain independent and most of my contracts are getting shorter.
Maybe best option (financially) is relocate to India and be that guy in Chennai? lower salary, ofc, but also lower cost of living. Or am I being naive?
Yes, that is naive. It's the kind of thing that libertarian fantasists and globalists like to say. I know that you are neither of those and that yours is a genuine question.
I have been to Chennai for work (3 weeks only). Nice food, interesting place. Ridiculously hot.
The problem with being a white person living in a place like that is that you can't live on a local salary and live local style. Almost everything you buy will have a "rich white person" markup, often several hundred percent.
There is also the issue of getting work permits etc. Unless you are sponsored by a company, you have no chance. And you won't get sponsored by a company unless you have unique skills. And even then, it's likely to only be for a year or 2 until you can be replaced by a locally trained person.
A young man at the company I'm with now, he was telling me a while back about his last job back home in India. He worked for a company that outsourced their international transfers software support and development to India. They sent an old French guy over to train up the locals, and 10 years later he was still there and even older. He would fall asleep at his desk, forget stuff, he sounded a bit like Joe Biden come to think of it. But nobody ever dared say anything negative to him because when the software crashed or when there was a functional issue, the old French guy was the only one who knew how to fix it. That's a very rare example of someone who was able to move to where the jobs were.
