Can China Pull An India?

ricst writes: "The New York Times has a story about how China is trying to leap ahead of India as the world's second-largest producer of software. Apparently the Chinese are trying to learn everything they can from the Indian software developers. It's not clear that if China becomes a strong competitor to India that 'jobs will be lost or simply not created' in the U.S. My guess is that the most creative software opportunities will remain in the US for some time, and the more routine development efforts will continue to be transfered overseas."

Comments

Remote engineers...

[Pengo]

Just like Dilberts company had their secret Albonians, our company had Romanians.

Our company did it for two years, and for a good reason we don't do it anymore. Not that there is no good work that comes out of it.. it was just a nightmare to manage. Our software is not one that can just be packaged and shipped, but was an ASP (Java) that requires constant work and modifications for new customers.

I suppose with something like Windows applications it might be easier to outsource, but web based applications it was a managment nightmare and ended up just not working.

I will not go into the differences of culture and work ethic or the irritations due to time zone differences.

Re:Remote engineers...

[ppetru]

Being a romanian myself, I feel obliged to add the fact that this is a generic issue with telecommuting: there are certain kinds of work which simply don't fit in, no matter if the team is romanian or indian or chinese or whatever.

On the other hand, if you have good management, outsourcing can be a godsend, for a couple reasons:

• It can be cheaper
• It allows easier access to otherwise rare or expensive talent or expertise
• If there's a time zone difference, you can turn that to your advantage and literally work around the clock
• The culture difference can be an advantage too: different ways of thinking lead to a bigger pool of ideas, and generally results in tighter code/design discipline.

(none of the above depend on each other).

In conclusion, I think there's a general misconception about outsourcing, caused by the false assumption that cheaper always means worse. Sure, you get what you deserve if you hire a-dime-a-dozen {romanians,indians,chinese,whatever}, but there are also good people out there, and they are way cheaper than the US counterparts. You can have a top romanian programmers for around $1000-1500 and I can assure you they'll be sharp even by the most demanding standards.

India is a free 'enterprise' country

[starrmpic]

And I dont mean that in a rhetorical sense. Very few people realise that while it is a 3rd world country and somewhat socialistic in its inclinations in the past, entrepreneurship is very active in day to day life. Companies like Infosys, Wipro and others were started by enterprising people in a political environment that sustained it.

China definitely has the talent and the schools to grow it. What china lacks is the personal and social freedom in day to day life. China could be a very prosperous nation if it became somewhat democratic.

Do not underestimate their talent and skills

[Ldir]

We have not used international outsourcing, but I have had employee developers from these countries. I had a client/server development team of up to 26 employees and contractors. This included one person each from India, Pakistan, China, and Malaysia. The balance of the team was mostly good ole' corn-fed Midwesterners, with a couple people from other parts of the U.S.

I won't try to generalize too much based on four individuals. Based on my limited experience, however, I would never underestimate the skills and talent of developers from Asia. Everyone on my team was at least good; several of them were great. These four were all in the top 25%.

In particular, the man from India was an absolute star. I've never met anyone who turned out such high-quality code, well designed and well structured, in so little time. As a plus, his work ethic was outstanding. He was a manager's dream.

Our woman from China was close behind, a solid #2. We handed her an extremely difficult system; she jumped in and devoured it. Similar work ethic, similar high-quality code, extremely valuable to us.

This is NOT a criticism of our American developers. Three or four of them were stars in their own right. As mentioned before, the entire team was good or better. It just happens that these two individuals were from China and India, and they happened to be the best of the best. When I did annual evaluations, those two always got the highest scores on the team.

Maybe I got the only two stars, but I doubt it. Both of them were already in the area, and the Midwest isn't exactly known for being the center of the software universe. I'll bet there are plenty more where they came from.

In short, those countries do have highly talented people. They can produce extremely skilled developers. We must not assume that they can't handle the "creative" work, or we may be asking "Do you want fries with that?" and wondering whatever happened to those good paychecks.

Re:The most offensive Slashdot article _ever_

[slashdot.org]

Yeah, that statement annoyed me a lot too.

The poster seems to assume that all India and China has to offer in terms of software development is programming houses that provide services to US companies.

Although it's almost impossible to avoid any racist issues when discussing this matter, I do believe the use of these houses is a Good Thing.

First of all, it provides a way to distribute money from the US to countries that have a lower standard of living. Secondly, it promotes education. The combination of the two has proven to be very succesful in increasing the standard of living in places that need it.

In fact, much of the great free software we all use has non-US origins.

In fact, some of the not so great, not so free software was made in the US. :o)