Offshore Lore- Myths and facts of white-collar outsourcing

Reason ^ | July 30, 2003 | Jeff Taylor

[BrooklynGOP]

ping!

[LizardQueen]

Upper management thinks that IT folks are people with skills equivalent to factory workers who assemble parts all day. Most of them don't understand the process at all, and how it straddles a weird area between art and science.

And the difficulty of developing good software increases as the distance between the programmer and the end user increases. There is no substitute for face time - phones are ok, but throw in phones and a great cultural divide and it's going to get real interesting.

I hope this offshoring trend comes back to bite them in the rearend.

[ReaganRevolution]

particularly software companies, more effective. Highly collaborative, imaginative work might suffer in the hands of technically adept but inexperienced programmers.

We found this out in my company over that past several years. There was this huge push to have our programming done in India. The data we received back from them was crap. We had to do more work to it once it got back then if it had been done here in the states. Also, the turnover rate in India was incredible. You never dealt with the same person twice. We have backed off from outsourcing. As companies try this, they too will learn the hard way.

[hopespringseternal]

Upper management is often comprised of what can best be described as very successful and very dishonest used car salesman types.

To get the dollars in, something has to go out the door. Whether it has any quality, usefulness, or value is a detail that can be offset by increasing the amount of bullsh!t you throw out the door with it.

To that end, they are more than happy to lower standards and costs by going offshore. Customers are happy to see the price go down. Everybody is happy until someone has to actually use the piece of crap.

[Lazamataz]

Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?"

LOL! Good point.

[Lazamataz]

You sound like a developer. You are too much in-the-know.

I hope this offshoring trend comes back to bite them in the rearend.

It will. And we stand to profit handsomely to fix all the crappy Indian code.

[Lazamataz]

ping

[LizardQueen]

We had to do more work to it once it got back then if it had been done here in the states.

And any time you have to rehab someone elses code, no matter where it was written, it will almost always take longer than rewriting it from scratch. Management doesn't usually understand this, either.

Computer code is like a picture of the inside of someone's head and their thought processes. Some people can get the code to work but it's so scrambled that it's impossible for anyone but them to read and understand. I've looked at a lot of spaghetti code and sometimes wondered how the authors ever could figure out how to get dressed in the AM ::lol::

[LizardQueen]

I've been a developer before - I keep ping-ponging between the apps development and the sysadmin sides of the house. Currently I'm on the sysadmin side. My true love is operating systems and I get more of a chance to play with them in this job than in others.

I've been in IT about 15 years, total. I've seen all this stuff come and go - Six Sigma, TQM, onshoring, offshoring, insourcing, outsourcing. This trend doesn't worry me too much in the long term, but I think we're in for some rough sledding in the short term.

LQ

[Alberta's Child]

My programming skills are so pathetic (I am not a programmer by trade) that when I came across a problem last week that was perfectly suited to a "nested loop" programming process, I had to download an old version of GW-BASIC to solve it. It ran for about four hours to compute all the different combinations and permutations, but I eventually got the answer I needed.

The best part of it was that the software programmer on our staff here had no idea what the heck I was doing.

[StolarStorm]

"Your dealing with people who are too smart to just sit back and train their replacements"

Not true. Many have been doing just that, including some on FR. Thankfully, I've got a good reserve of cash so I can tell any employer that expects me to train a replacement to shove their severence package. IT folks have got to work together and refuse to assist company's efforts to outsource. Perhaps an IT union is necessary.

[harpseal]

An excellent analysis of how management is not doing their job when they are outsourcing offshore.

[harpseal]

To all pinged above if anyone wants on or off my ping list let me know.

[ChromeDome]

It will. And we stand to profit handsomely to fix all the crappy Indian code.

If there are any of us left to fix the crappy code.

-ChromeDome

[Mr. Bird]

I hope this offshoring trend comes back to bite them in the rearend.

If the quality of overseas labor is so bad, it undoubtedly will. Unfortunately, the offshoring trend is not discouraging the millions of people who are wasting their money on "computer training". I don't care if offshoring completely stops, the companies return, and a thousand new IT companies sprout up. There are too many people looking for tech jobs.

Community Colleges and certain specialty schools are luring unwitting workers into paying exhorbitant fees for various certification programs. Run an ad for a LAN Administrator and you'll get hundreds of qualified candidates. Run one for a radiologic technologist, and you'll get maybe two people. People should pay attention to what's going on out there.

[harpseal]

The best part of it was that the software programmer on our staff here had no idea what the heck I was doing.

Then clearly you need a better software programmer.

[StolarStorm]

Maybe he just didn't communicate the problem well.

[LizardQueen]

There are too many people looking for tech jobs.

This is very true. The dot com boom made the career look like an easy ticket to a million bucks so everyone and his brother tried to jump into it. The problem, too, is while there are a lot of people looking they often aren't very good and/or don't have any real experience ("Paper MCSEs"). And even some of the people who have experience just suck (we have some of them working at my company - they're too hard to get rid of).

I don't directly hire people but I have helped my bosses interview before. I always look for the people who really understand what the button they're pushing actually does to the system. There are thousands out there who can push the buttons, but only a few of them actually understand why they should push that button or what the effect on the system will be.

LQ

[samuel_adams_us]

The real problem is that management doesn't like their IT people. It's a competitive thing, the salespeople don't like their IT people either as they are threatened by them in an intellectual way. The people here who don't care about IT jobs leaving the country, it's because they don't like engineers either, probably because they couldn't cut the mustard to be one, or they don't like the fact that they don't get paid as well. All of the IT companies are run by people who treat their developers like cattle and think that all developers are interchangeable instead of treating them like what they really are, specialists in a certain area of software engineering, much like doctors specialize in certain areas of medicine. As my old math professors, C Brase and S Ulam, once told me, second semester calculus separates the men from the boys, the engineers from the business majors. As Albert Einstein once said, "Great Spirits have always met violent opposition from mediocre minds" and the same is true today.