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Can you even imagine what a nightmare farming out software development to these places is like?
Don't get me start on that one! One of my clients had a ton of money invested in some custom written software (we're talking over $100,000), and the SW developers were going to come out with a new, Windows version (the old SW was all DOS based, while the new SW was SQL2K based). They were thinking about changing SW vendors, but they had a "history" with this developer, and liked the way that he was able to provide support when they needed it. After about another $220,000 investment, now they've come to realize that he's farmed out the software development to India, and when there's a problem in the code, it takes a while to get it resolved!

For instance, there's a module which allows them to fax from a certain screen... For some reason, it's sending a country code to the fax server! So, the question needs to go to India, and from past experience, these sort of problems seem to take about 2 - 3 weeks to get resolved!

If my client would have known that this developer was farming out his SW, they never would have stayed with him, but now with nearly a quarter of a million $$$ invested, it's too late to go anywhere else. Boy, are they pissed!

Amen to this! And in cases where the development is done offshore and turned over on completion, they are finding out that the code is a nearly un-maintainable, un-documented pile of spaghetti. They also LOVE to hide behind the "it wasn't in the specifications..." BS when they turn over crap that doesn't work. As long as the trade journals keep sweeping these facts under the rug and touting the "huge savings of outsourcing" the trend will continue.

As long as the trade journals keep sweeping these facts under the rug and touting the "huge savings of outsourcing" the trend will continue.

Actually, the trade journals have been pretty consistently spelling out warnings on this. The basic theme is "saving on labor is possible, but..."

What's really driving this, in my opinion, is some financial chicanery on the part of executives. In effect, they're misleading their investors by promising reduced labor cost without impact to productivity or quality. But almost none of them are able to keep up with quality and productivity. The investors can't see that in a quarterly financial report. It's the sort of thing that will take a couple of years to be widely noticed.

In the mean time, companies will demonstrate products that were developed largely onshore - before the offshore fad kicked in - alongside reduced offshore labor numbers. Most investors will assume the company has figured out how to change their development processes before kicking the work offshore, so the current products are a good measure of what their quality will look like going forward. They're going to be shocked when they discover most companies kick the work offshore to claim the labor savings LONG before putting much thought into how that affects their development practices.