I hate to tell you this, but I've been working with Indian IT workers onshore and offshore for the past 7 years. And people who think the quality is high from offshore, don't know how to measure quality. Those guys can certainly deliver exactly to the specs they've been given. Of course, the real trick is in writing the specs to fit what the client really wanted, because automated code generation tools can do the same thing.
It's not a question of whether the guys in India are sharp or capable. You could take excellent American workers, stick them halfway around the world and watch their productivity and quality take a nosedive also. And unlike Indian workers, they wouldn't have language and cultural barriers to ovecome.
Also, the reason you're so impressed by the Indian workers that come to America is because they send the best of the best over here. The average Indian IT worker is not as good as the average H1-B.
One may argue that these sort of methodologies do not lead toward "innovation." I would assert that the sort of work that they are doing - and that their American competitors were doing - was not all that innovative in the first place
I'd agree with you here. One of the things I have told execs intending to offshore is that if they want to persist doing low quality IT work, I suppose they might as well do it cheaply. But doesn't it make more sense to do high quality work instead? I just get blankly stared at. The level of understanding of how the work gets done is frighteningly low among most IT execs.
These jobs are not being replace by a new industry built on the ashes of an older obsolete industry, it is merely a more efficient use of capital. This may in fact be a first modern economic history.
Beware of any "first" in history. It usually means things are not as they seem. And I think that's true in this case. This is not a more efficient use of capital. It's an accounting gimmick. Those low hourly rates offshore are proving very slippery to tie directly to actual productivity.
India didn't become more productive than the U. S. overnight. That's their goal. But they have not arrived. This is the next "free lunch" in IT. It follows the dot-com boom, and shows remarkable similarities for its total neglect of market fundamentals. If you recall that was another "first" while it was booming. Not so unique in retrospect.
1) The American people will not stand by and watch a major part of technology jobs be sent overseas without resorting to political remedies, even if those remedies are in the long term harmful to the nation. The disaster of the demise of manufacturing as the backbone of our economy is too close in time and experience, still too etched on their fathers' faces for us to imagine otherwise.
Total agreement here, regardless of all the rest of the above. For some reason Republican political leaders are neglecting the politics of this situation in favor of spouting general macro-economic theory. That's not going to fly. There is a real political problem here, and it needs real political attention.
2) The will not be swayed by a high blown macroeconomic argument coming from elites whose live or children's lives are little effected by outsourcing. They will indeed toss those people out of office or tax the devil out of them.
This one is so obvious I am baffled why it seems almost universally ignored by Republican strategists.
Yes, they deliver to the original specs, by hardcoding everything so that even minor changes are a major event.
I hate to tell you this, but I've been working with Indian IT workers onshore and offshore for the past 7 years. And people who think the quality is high from offshore, don't know how to measure quality. Those guys can certainly deliver exactly to the specs they've been given. Of course, the real trick is in writing the specs to fit what the client really wanted, because automated code generation tools can do the same thing.
Let me preface this by saying that I have been in technology close to 30 years as an academic (Berkeley Stanford and NYU,) a bench engineer and scientist in EE and CS (Bell Labs and IBM R&D,) worked in the big six as a senior manager, in several major investment banks on Wall Street and in medium sized technology firms that either sell technology or technology services. During the last 14 years I have either been a SVP, an EVP, a CTO or a CEO, and I am currently a Managing Director. I put up both Sigma Six and Level 5 certified shops and have had monthly personnel budgets in excess of a million dollars. I have outsourced everything from production to QA to separate Research and Development in all the major markets, and have traveled to S. America, E. Europe, Russia and India to deal with these sort of organizations. And not just in software. I mention all this not to impress but to point out that I have a fair grasp of the development life-cycle,QM/MA issues and formal project/program management approaches.
If we could roughly divide the Indian market offerings into three tiers: 1) The "lower" tier (or tiers, really.) The "Tata" tier and the partially or wholly owned subsidiary tier. I believe it is that lower tier that you are finding issue with, and perhaps rightly so. In those other tiers you will find customers like Sony, Toshiba and Motorola receiving quite fine embedded real time work that sits on major consumer products, you will find customers like Citi group receiving quite nice customer facing n-tiered web apps, and you will find some of the major NYC money-center and investment banks outsourcing difficult mission critical apps. In the wholly or partly owned area you will find no less a technical exemplar as D. E. Shaw - perhaps the leader of sophisticated in house financial software - with a major software R & D infrastructure in Bangalore.
I can take you up and down wall street and show you major work going on that is at the highest level by any international standard. I cannot imagine want your standard would be, and I would assume that these people know quality when they see it as they can afford the very best and do indeed expect it. Many of the principals involved come from the highest levels of Computer science be it the academic, the practical engineering or the business sides. Some of them have run major divisions for the likes of IBM, SUN, Microsoft, Oracle and Intel. Some of them wrote the ISO standards. It may be that you are not looking at the entire picture.
If you were farther up stream and got the sort of quality that you are talking about someone took you for a real ride and I would suggest that you seek legal remedy.
Lastly I would point out that the projects I have seen have little to do with automatic code generators, though you do have the caliber of programmers that can go off in the corner and write compliers to generate code if need be. As to writing specs, I am some what unclear as to what you mean. There are clear formal, iterative approaches to Requirements Management and in all the cases I have mentioned there is a quite sophisticated technical and business management team on the client side. If they sign off on the specs how can the outsourcer be faulted for meeting the spec?
As time goes on more and more high end work will be done over there: I stand by my position.