The vaunted "work 24x7 in multiple timezones" usually fails, because the idiot in the Third World country has zero initiative or creativity, so if he has any questions he twiddles his thumbs until the end of his shift when he fires off an email asking for clarification. If you're *lucky* the American tasked to answer it, can read between the lines enough to do the Third Worlder's job for them without it actually showing...if you're unlucky you waste 2-3 days going back and forth.
This plays hob with schedules.
The compression of schedules can come out of QA (which it usually does, since nobody in management has the intelligence or competence to ask the proper questions of developers). The result? Shoddily written product which is sparsely tested.
You have wear-and-tear on employees who are expected to come in early or stay late in the vain hope of catching one end or the other of the offshore developers' shift.
You have people who have to write specs in nauseatingly unnecessary detail, so that that Third World "world class EXPERTS" can follow the instructions to the *letter* for every possible contingency.
You have the problems of knowledge loss by high turnover in the offshore resources; intellectual property theft; and higher overhead caused by management having to hold their hands all the time, often with site visits to put the heat on them.
Then you have the problem that for all their arrogance, when someone from a non-Western culture screws up, their culture is "shame-based" meaning they will first lie through their teeth, then feign language/communication barriers, then hint at discrimination, rather then admitting in a timely fashion they screwed up and not only fixing it, but doing a deep dive analysis to find the root causes and fix the process.
good explanation.
All of the things you wrote can certainly be true. I can give you a perfect example of some of the “follow the instruction to the letter” idiocy I have seen in the past:
We sent a mock-up over to offshore with an area highlighted in yellow saying, “Change this area to [x]!” When we got the work back in the morning, not only did they change to [x], there was now a nice yellow box around that part of the web page. *facepalm*
On the flip side, I had a guy who would spend two hours at the end of each day writing fairly explicit instructions to his team of 3 offshore resources. For that 2 hours investment, he got 24 hours worth of productive work. Nice lever.
The key is to find a firm that you can trust and that understands you aren’t going to take any BS. Then, once you have a good rapport with a company that has a decent bench, you can say, “I need 4 people in a week for a 6 week project.”
Some of the posters here who think I can get that domestically are living in fantasy land. I’ve had open FTE reqs that took MONTHS to fill because IT unemployment is so low where I am. (Some are saying it is now *negative* in my market, which makes sense given that I’ve actually imported 4 of my last 5 FTEs from other states.)
So, call me a “traitor” if you want, but my company needs the job to get done. If hiring domestic resources will take us months for a job that could be *completed* by offshore in the same time, which do you think we’ll pick to grow the business?
Also - for the record - this model HAS grown my FTE staff by more than double in the past two years, and this is not a small department.
So - while I absolutely *despise* Trump - he is actually right: outsourcing creates jobs in the long run.
BRAVO !