[justlurking]

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

In my experience, Bangalore employees aren’t innovative. Their training and culture just doesn’t let that happen.

Given a sufficiently detailed design, they can grind out mediocre code in about twice the time a programmer from Western culture could do it. And after all the bugs are solved by someone else, it can be put into productive use.

This may seem insensitive to some, but I worked at many companies as a consultant. This pattern repeated itself over and over. The bean counters never figure out that out-sourcing is actually costing them MORE money, in the long run.

[Drew68]

The bean counters never figure out that out-sourcing is actually costing them MORE money, in the long run.

The long run is someone else's problem.

[proxy_user]

That depends on the pay. Google employs top people in India, but pays them very high salaries, as much as US workers make.

You hire cheap coders, you get cheap coders. You put out a req for guys with masters or doctorates from top universities, you get a different class of worker.

[willyd]

Exactly.... when will they figure out that $79 an hour x 100 is cheaper than $15 an hour x 600 ?

[bamahead]

100% spot on. Every word.

[ken in texas]

The bean counters never figure out that out-sourcing is actually costing them MORE money, in the long run.

The trouble is, the focus is too often on making the numbers look good for the next few quarters. Little, if any, consideration is given to the long-term effects of changes like this.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

In my experience, Bangalore employees aren’t innovative. Their training and culture just doesn’t let that happen.

How much innovation is needed for the IT department of JC Penney?

As far as a difference in quality, it's true but it's not going to remain an eternal truth. I've led projects in the last 5 years with teams in both Bangalore and in Palo Alto. Has there been a qualitative difference in quality and speed between the Palo Alto team sand the Bangalore teams? Yes. Is it a substantive difference? No - and the difference keeps getting smaller. This is offset by the fact that the expense rates for the Bangalore teams keep going up as the quality goes up, but right now they're still cheaper, and the difference in quality simply isn't big enough to deny them the work.

Specifically about innovation - I agree completely, you're absolutely right. Indian corporate culture is far too risk-averse for true innovation. But that doesn't mean all the developers at those Indian corporations are - a lot of those developers come over here and become a big part of the start-up environment in Silicon Valley. Every time we have a round of interviews, it gets harder and harder to find good young coding talent, and it's so competitive to get the truly good ones - the US can't get complacent.