| Sumario: | This article focuses on Citigroup hiring college undergraduates for some computer programming tasks instead of outsourcing the jobs to India. Many are the investment banks that have expanded their back-office operations to countries such as India. It's a lot cheaper to hire someone in Bangalore than in Boston, and the state of the markets has meant that banks have been desperate to screw down costs. Now the investment-banking arm of Citigroup has hit on a novel way of reversing the trend: hiring American college undergraduates instead and sitting them at unused desks. Such seats are in plentiful supply, and not just because business is not too brisk and there are fewer bankers than there were. It is also because regulators force investment banks to maintain "continuity of business" arrangements, in which certain desks and whole areas must be set aside in case there is a power cut on the trading floor, or a building is blown up. Citigroup pays them $17 an hour, which works out at about half what the bank would have to pay programmers in India. Moreover, the bank avoids having to shovel off jobs to India (good in the current climate, when there is so much hand-wringing about America's jobless recovery).
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