What most pinhead employers don’t realize, given their focus on quarterly numbers only, is that the turnaround time for anything developed with these foreign indentured servant (A.K.A. temporary slaves) is much longer than using American talent and the quality is much poorer. I speak from experience having been in the position of fixing a lot of crap done by Indians who can barely speak the language.
I have managed teams of Indian workers, both onshore and offshore, and I can speak with authority on this issue. There are a few jams among this group and I count them as my friends but I think this whole onshore/offshore experiment is a catastrophe for America.
So true. The “pinhead employers” you describe don’t have the foggiest as to what goes into constructing a system that users find easy to work with and meets their needs and is easily maintainable. Would it ever occur to them that such systems cost less in the long run? Nah. All they know about is “code” and whose hourly rate is the cheapest.
Ever since I’ve been in IT, employers have been grousing about how much they have to pay programmers, whom they regard as little more than glorified clerical workers. The dream has always been to make programming tasks equivalent to low-level clerical tasks, with correspondingly low wages. First they tried “packages,” then “fourth-generation languages,” then a variety of other pie-in-the-sky stuff - now their latest elixir is foreign, third-world workers - but nothing seems to work out the way they would like.