Slashdot Mirror
The New Face of Global Competition
Valluvan writes "Here is an article in Fast Company on "The New Face of Global Competition". The article is focused on Wipro, a big IT company in India, but applies to many other companies in India that have been highly successful. A long article with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML, but brings out the business facts well enough."
...stupid errors like saying developers code with UML Hey, I code with UML -- just like I code with HTTP and WAP.
Other industries will follow as the necessary skills and infrastructure become more wide-spread.
The rich world will continue to specialise in those industries which require the latest cutting edge infrastructure and skills, and slowly discard the rest.
To me the first "surprise" success that came out of Asia was Creative Labs (of SoundBlaster fame). I mean, sure, we all know Yamaha and Fuji and the rest, but Creative Labs was just a soundcard manufacter... Now their products run the gamut from digital cameras to MP3 players... and they own the two remaining American professional synthesizer companies - Ensoniq and E-mu. They have research labs in the States and "back home"... Mind-boggling, really.
I got a sig so you would remember me.
The issue I've seen with using foreign workers (we've hired plenty of them on H1b visa's, by the way) is you tend to get a large quantity of work but not always a large quality of work. Some of the software houses in India will churn out a plethora of code for cut rate prices but you're stuck with what you get.
I prefer to hire locally now, and pay a little more for someone who is concerned with their actual career, as opposed to someone who is simply shooting for a quick couple bucks and not at all concerned with the industry or the quality of their work.
This follows the classic theory taught by Mel Brooks in "The Mythical Man Month" where he talks about how you cannot draw a linear conclusion on the quality of code based upon the diagonal matrix of time vs lines written.
Warmest regards,
--Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Is that you??
And it is more boring than my hometown, Canton OH. This article gets the basic business facts right, but it neglects the massive operations companies like GE and Intel are running/starting. Many companies are doing their work inhouse at low cost here.
Makes me want to kill someone. At the very utterance of it an anything other than a purely scientific or geographic sense. The company I contract for has gone "global" now. Every possible place for that damned buzzword to get jammed in has been used.
Whats worse, the BOD has been seeded with European managers. Now, dont get me wrong, I have nothing against europeans, but you cannot take a company that has been doing NE Corridor style work processes for 20+ years and suddenly kick it over to the "european" business model. Things apparently get done a lot more slowly over there.
You wouldnt think there would be much of a difference, but its subtle, yet huge. Just the minute changes in our response contracts are huge.
Going from a 4x8 SLA to a proposed 8x36 on a hardware repair? (Which might sound great.. but it means less money, and once you have been 4x8 for five years, its REALLY hard to switch gears).
Our "accident prevention" issues are now tied to India, Sri Lanka, Korea, and europe. And we _all_ pay when some plant in some third world country where emissions arent an issue suffers some injury. I am all for "safety in the workplace".. but you should really be only tied to that which you have some influence or control over.
Its a completely different business culture, and some cultures just shouldnt mix like that.
YMMV, of course.
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
but it doesn't say to much about us lot as erm.. a species
I'll take the bait posed by your cultural ignorance.
In India, the concept of a nuclear family hsan't taken hold among the masses.
Why ?
1) A billion people in that much land.
2) Taking care of elders is a vital edict of the culture. You don't send them off to "elderly nursing homes."
3) Just because he lives them with them doesn't mean he's financially dependent on them. Likely the other way around.
Having worked on a project in which large portions had been outsourced to Wipro, I can say that saying they can code Java and follow OO methodologies is lot like saying that because I have seen a football thrown, that I can play football.
Another issue many companies haven't yet realized, is that the majority good engineers in India, have left India. Those remaining for the most part are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
This is very reminiscient of the "Godzilla has arrived" mania that swept the US back in the 1980s. Mayne serious people then believed that Japan was going to buy the US (in cash) and then enslave us all in their Toyota factories. We know now how wrong they were.
India is certainly becoming a force in the global IT industry, but let's not get swept away by Fast Company's muscular prose and usual hyperbole.
Also, I think it's important to remember that real economic growth comes more from innovation than from cheap labor. Companies are willing to pay developers $150K a year if the products they're creating will cover those costs and return a large profit to boot. A lot of the work being offloaded to India (or at least the work that my previous employer shipped there) was maintenanced release testing, legacy OS ports, code cleanup, etc. Nobody was asking them to design the next killer app.
Of course, maybe it's good that these waves of paranoia wash ashore every few years. They prevent us from getting complacent.
The article falls over itself to heap praise on the Indian IT community (I think it ran out of adjectives eventually), but one particular line stood out to me:
They are as good at doing all of that as anyone in the world. Perhaps better. And they are cheaper -- on average about 40% cheaper -- than comparable American companies.
By what metrics are they "As good or better than anyone else in the world"? What ridiculous verbal spewage from someone throwing together a ridiculous little article. The Indian IT industry has gotten attention for one reason and one reason alone: They are very cheap (though the percentage cheaper is steadily declining to the point that it'll be a moot factor), however claiming that they are as good or better than anyone? I'm not being arrogant, but I find that there's a stunning lack of Indian software in the commercial software arena: which would be TRUE proof of homebrew abilities in an arena. Instead the industry is relegated to throwing together post-design highly-redundant type apps for countless life and bank organizations.
I'm not blindly claiming that India isn't a credible force in the software development force, but so are many other countries: This doomsdayish end-of-the-world attitude of this article just strike me as ridiculous.
ergo98
I took a business (MIS) course as an elective during my last semester at University. I had a man with a PhD swear up and down that UML was a programming language...of course, he also had some strange ideas about how TCP/IP packets are chopped up for delivery.
-Ben
A long article with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
Is it any wonder Pud used Fastcompany as the parody basis for his better site?
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
These days I cannot imagine how a company can be compatitive without outsourcing, unless ofcourse they are prevented to do so by law.
Better they appear in Fast Company than Fucked Company
Trolling is a art,
some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
These days you can "program" in UML. The actual underlying code is C++ or Java generated by the CASE tool from your UML diagrams, but it's still programming, just at a higher level. For example, instead of programmatically declaring a member variable of a class, you click on the UML class diagram and add a property, instead of typing class Z extends X you drag a line.
You usually have to go to real code to actually implement methods, but using a RAD tool to layout your GUI, a CASE tool to do all the object defintions and database connectivity, only writing code by hand when you have to, is a very productive way to work. Programming Swing or Motif or MFC is very repetitive and can be highly automated, as can writing wrapper code for database tables to present them cleanly to objects.
You'll get a lot of geeks sneering that a text editor is the only way to write code, but that is an obsolete way of working. Computers are built to automate repetitive tasks, and once you've written one form or report by hand to show that you can, doing it again is just a waste of time.
Perhaps you should read the article closely.
[blockquote]Six years ago, Fast Company proled a team at Lockheed-Martin that wrote nearly perfect code ( "They Write the Right Stuff," Dec : Jan 1997 ). The team's claim to fame: It was one of only four outts in the world to achieve Level 5 certication from the Software Engineering Institute. Wipro has Level 5 certication in three different categories. It's eye-glazing stuff, but an amazing achievement.
Such accomplishments conrmed that Wipro's developers weren't just cheap: They were cheap and very, very good. [/quality]
Trust me, these folks are VERY concerned about their careers and their industry. They are also very concerned about quality.
Which is why we should be worried. It's why we should strive to produce better code and strive to do it quicker. It's why we should stop reading Slashdot so much and work more.
Outfits like this are not fly by night charlies that churn out crap, they are some of the best in the world. We (software professionals) will either step up to the plate and hit a home run and prove our worth or we will get run over like textiles and electronic manufacturing.
It was a flippant remark made against the sterotype that we're all fat, wear braces, have pocket protectors, and live with our parents...
Now, obviously, this isn't negative, but it's amusing when it's true, even inadvertantly.... (and i didn't say i was exempt from any of those categories either :p)
The nascent internet industry (yes, it's still very young) as well as application development in general is NOT a mature industry as were textiles.
Don't be so quick to cede entire industries, writing them off as "discards". India's getting the business for TWO reasons, cheap labor and EDUCATED labor. It's no secret that the American education system is, shall we say, lacking in almost every regard except being flush with funding. We may be losing the industry simply because they are better at it, not just cheaper.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Another couple hundred million people ensuring I'm never going to get a job. I'll just have to work an inane patent on jobhunting, then sue them all on a DMCA technicality.
What ever happened to distance independent work / telecommuting, and so on? That was the Next Big Thing(tm) in the 1990's. Instead, part of this globalization trend seems to be to turn the best farmland into the best business parks. In the U.S., the asphalt of Chicago covers some of the richest farm land in the nation. Places like Sweden have be enthusiasticly paving the Mälar river valley and the plains of Scania. Germany and most other countries are doing the same? It's not possible for every country to import food and certainly not economically feasible (yet) for India to think about it.
It would be more effective to knock down the Indian variants of the late Cabrini Green -- urban renewal would be good for the people living in the city, and it would keep the programmers closer to the cafés.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Dude's named "Fred Brooks". Not Mel Brooks.
By the time we get the Wipro stuff into marketable form, we've spent more time and effort on it than it would have taken to do the job ourselves from scratch.
Our people in Bangalore are similar: good people, but pretty much turn-the-crank implementors. I'm glad we have them because so much of our work really is turn-the-crank work, but I'm quite happy making periodic trips to Bangalore to train them while spending most of my time doing Kewl Stuff at home.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It's one thing to write code that works but commercial code for real products must be audited for security flaws and must also be maintained for future development. Not a very good long term solution in my mind.
Perhaps if you need a quick one-time job hacked out and you don't care aboot security then this might be a good solution but otherwise the hidden long term issues make it non-viable solution.
--Rosie
Considering the conflicts with Pakistan and the past fear of possible nuclear or conventional war in the region, do companies work that into their calculations? What of other kinds of issues in foreign countries that companies outsource to?
I'd figure foreign outsourcing would bring in a hell of a lot of variables one would have to work with.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
At what point did all US and Canadian IT personnel become slackers?
I've personally worked with very talented US IT workers who put in the 15-18 hour days, with degrees from quality universities.
Why is it so "mainstream" to slam US IT workers these days?
It seems business folk like to latch onto a tech concept, exaggerate it's claims, then run blindly with it like lemmings to a cliff.
This recent love of Indian software companies strikes me like the love affair businesses had with the Internet in the late 90s. "We can run our businesses so much cheaper on the Internet!" "Banner ads will pay for all our expenses and then some!" Of course, no one bothered to really ask the question whether or not the Internet was profitable. All they saw were dollar signs and were more than happy to ignore the negative aspects of this new business paradigm. I don't think we're going to have a software "crash" like we did with the dot com bust, but anyone who thinks they can pay a little bit of money and magically get high quality code from the underpants gnomes...er, I mean India, they're going to be disappointed.
Oh, c'mon. The writing's been on the wall for over 20 years now. So much 'knowledge' and 'innovation' has originated from Europe and the Far East since then & it's beginning to be noticed in mainstream journals like Fast Company. Those of us in the industry have already known this for years ....
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Within two years, Wipro says, three-quarters of the employees its customers see will be local nationals: American, European, or Asian.
This means that any advantage the Indian's have had by being able to compete on price is going to be erased. Then they will just be another EDS or IBM Global Services division.
-nd
the more interesting article is about how Carly Fiorina has destroyed (or is destroying) the good name of Hewlett-Packard.
You must conform here. Groupthinking wins. Challengers lose. The cycle is perpetuated by the groupthinkers being granted karma, leading to mod points and the ability to promote other hippietech conformists. It's gross, and must be changed.
"The new face of global competition" is nothing innovative, just some really bright people that are being exploited to work long hours for low salaries because they live in an impoverished country.
Meanwhile they pull down the salaries of professionals working in america, and those lower salaries combined with the ever increasing fear of losing one's job (which is another result of global competition), so professionals decrease their spending and their standard of living and the result is a recession, we may not be able to get out of.
I am not racist and really like the fact that India is breeding smart hardworking engineers, but wish they were payed decent salaries for their sake and our own sake.
At least there is one thing that never changes. Fast Company is as always willing to give blowjobs to large corporations. I wonder what the folks at fast company received for thisd article. And i wonder if they are under pressure from third world journalist with no ethical standards.
what type of crack are you smoking?
keee-rist...
the "no child left behind" act is a way to further defund schools, that have been horribly neglected.
why? republicans like to spend an obscene amount of money on defence, and have no extra money for their constituents.
... hi bingo
Chill it, dude. Guy wasn't ridiculing Indian values, just that the stereotypical white male American geek still stays in his parent's basement even after he's grown bald. :-)
from the article ..."Yeah, it's weird," says a manager from a big U.S. media company sent here to oversee his company's nascent outsourcing operation. "It's like we're training our own replacements."
Yep. Thanks to Harris Miller who made his mark by globalizing
agriculture (importing more guest workers) and is
now applying his nefarious techniques to high tech. No wonder his favorite book is The Prince by Machiavelli.
Hyper-globalization has failed. It was a radical social experiment that has not brought higher growth rates but has brought higher income dis-equilibrium. The super rich get super richer, the rich get richer, the middle class get more clogged roads, and the poor get poorer.
It's time to restore our borders and tax this outsourcing crap.
A lot this competitiveness is based on differences in cost of living or cost of doing business. Well, after deflation hits the US, $8000 a year is going to look like a good salary to a US programmer.
So,
Large companies are outsourcing their IT needs to India, and elsewhere.
Is it just me, or is this a worrying trend? Have we not learned anything as consumers and tech workers that we are simply shooting ourselves in the foot by doing this?
What about having companies purchase and buy products and services made here (Canada in my case). Should we not choose to employ our fellow workers rather then fill the pockets of a foreign company?
Geez, no wonder the tech/IT fields are hurting.
Buy local...
"employers were loyal to employees"
In the 80's? Are you for real?
The myth of the loyal company seems to die hard. People believe it stopped sometime right around when they were born.
It has never existed; or I should say, if it did, ir probably existed through the 40's and part of the 50's, but that was more out of necessity than any great moral force.
When I was a kid (in the north), the battle cry was "they're moving all the good jobs to the south!". Who knows if it was true, but certainly, there was never any qualms about moving factories to the cheapest place.
Nothing new here at all, except a new generation grows up and finds out the world is a little bit harder than it looked when you were a kid.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Just because you live in a borderline country where most of you can't afford a house or decent car is no reason to attack us.
Hungry developers and consultants are hungry for money for themselves and not for the CEO. Hungry Indian IT workers don't want to be wealthy but Indian standards, they want to be wealthy by world standards. Sure there are still a good number of years of growth but in the end, $8k a year per developers isn't going to last.
Reminds me of a commercial a few years back about some 'Engulf and Devour' type conglomerate board meeting:
"Should we make salsa or oven mits?"
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Firstly, I am in Indian but I dont work in India. Now to the crux of the matter. Its trur that Wipro is a great company. Infact during the peak days of dotcom boom, its chairman, Azim Premji was the second richest person in the world just behind Bill G. Wipro does have many good engineers like most big Indian software companies. But if you look at the salary of the guy, around 21000 USD, its not that low. Thats how the global economy works I assume. Eventually skilled people from poor countries get richer and to retain them the corporations have to pay more, and so the cost edge reduces gradually. Thats gonna happen with India as well, sooner or later. The only thing which is stopping this from happening is that India has a population of 1 billion, so we obviously have more skilled people as well, but still we have seen a gradual increase in the pay in IT industry and I dont think this trend is gonna stop. So eventually the competition between India and the rest will not be on price but on quality. Even my present company outsources work to India but again we feel that the quality of the work is not very good. But we can't go to a big company as it disturbs our budget calculations. But even then, now the consensus is emrging that we should give some work to a big Indian company. In future this cud be any company in the world.
What's under yellowstone?
...who probably believes telnet is "too hard" and that GUI's are the only way to accomplish stuff.
I run into people like you all the time. Blindly throwing around TCO and then failing to admit that you really don't know the first thing about computers.
Oh, you might have a job in the IT industry; you might even do something marginally technical.
But if the GUI tools went away, you'd sit in a corner and cry.
I guess its our fault for not raising the bar higher to "experts".
with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
:
Uninformed errors, maybe. Or blatant, significant, major errors. Whatever. But why stupid? Do you really need to be arrogant and insulting? Yet another "1337" syndrom, I guess. Sigh...
Repeat after me 50 times, I'll put it in a language you can understand
Knowledge!=Intelligence
Ignorance!=Stupidity
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
You'll get a lot of geeks sneering that a text editor is the only way to write code, but that is an obsolete way of working.
For anything but GUI drawing, good old text editors still beat all these point-and-click thingy.
Writing and adjusting your code is faster with text editor (unless you type with two fingers).
Non-boilerplate coding can't be done with point-and-click interface, be it UML, RAD or whatelse. Programming is not about changing superclasses and adding member variables: at some point you have to implement actual algorithms. At this point you have to resort to text editor and all the glory of CASE tools fades, since when you actually do want to change superclass you have to move your hands off the keyboard to mouse, swith to different window, and often you are not allowed to change CASE-tool-controlled parts of code by hand. I've yet to see any evidence that a CASE user beats competent developer with editor in terms of performance.
Those thinking of pointy-clicky interfaces being a magic wand should go and try writing bubblesort with mouse.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
These shoes are made for walking
And thats what they're gonna do
One of these days these shoes are gonna walk all over you!
With that in mind, do you want some shoes?
Want some shoes?
"Even in this small example the CASE tool generated 50% more lines of code!!!"
But! The real thing to look at is binary size.
Our compilers have gotten more efficient over the years, so the source code may be bigger, but the binary stays about the same, or smaller.
You tend to get what you paid for. In particular, I've been with companies that have outsourced work to Wipro, and that experience was not a good one. Obviously, mine is just one experience, and their success to-date must mean that they're doing at least something right. Still, I have found that, if you're working in the US at least, you can find the right people here at home without the logistical nightmares of working with companies 12 time zones away.
You call this a signature?
I hope people who do this get their sorry asses burned (sorry) when then next Indian-Pakistan war starts, because those boys will be playing with nukes.
And when that happens, my hourly rates are going through the roof. Particularly for companies who outsourced to India.
It is gonna be sweeeeeeeet.
Remember Edward Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer"? That was years ago, but it covered the same topic. Yourdon opened his book with an alarming chapter that fits the title, but at the end of the book he concluded that India is not a threat. It was in part because the demand for software work is so high that even India's universities cannot keep up. Later, he followed up with "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer". Go figure.
"Those of us in the industry have already known this for years ...."
What industry would that be, Petey.
In entire IT industry was developed in England and the US.
The only thing India has brought to the table are underqualified programmers who think SEI certification guarantees results.
You live in a fantasy world Petey, and I'm not going to disturb it, but rather enjoy it.
You're welcome!
it's not just IT . Any knowledge work that does not require geographic proximity cna and will move to India. Welcome to the global economy.
I'm a senior in CS at UAH and I've already disuaded at least three or four people from majoring in Computer Science. "Yeah buddy, all the jobs are headed to India, General Business, Accounting, Management, that's the ticket." Less competition for me in a few years :)
"'m not being arrogant, but I find that there's a stunning lack of Indian software in the commercial software arena: which would be TRUE proof of homebrew abilities in an arena." Well, Indian software industry is mostly active in services business and not in the products. As far as a shunning lack of commericial software, you would be surprised how many commercial softwares contain software from Indian companies, and for that matter how many embedded devices that you use have software from Indian companies. I know that my first company sold the bluetooth protocol stack to a pretty big laptop manufacturer and now they use the stack in all their bluetooth products.
What's under yellowstone?
I want to agree with you, but over there there's a big vacuum of poverty that will absorb decent pay for a long time before major wealth envy sets in.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Step away from the tree, with your hands up!
Now presently your correct. Expertise will not disappear. However things WILL change. Compare say the process of building a building. I don't think anyone would say that an architect isn't creative, and that a modern building does have some custom components to it. But it also has a lot of standard parts in it as well. It also has well defined steps, as well as standards that must be met. Software development is headed that way. A LOT of programming is repetitive. How many times have you programmed the same (with minor variations) algorithm? How much code out there is truely original? Even unique buildings, and unique gadgets are composed of standard parts. The CASE tool user not being in the same league as a developer with editor speaks more of the presently primative state the development process is in, than anything else.
I wonder if this has anything to do with this?
4 /f ig1.html
h tm l
The follow URLS point to the decline of the empire... How low can it go, before people realize what's happening to them.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/incineq/p6020
http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Gini_supplement.
This is a known Troll. Won't someone, for the love of god, MOD THE PARENT DOWN. What he is saying makes no sense.
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.
Yes Japan is mired in a deep recession, but Japanese companies sell the top-selling sedan in America and dominate consumer electronics.
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the Atchievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire Brave Ludd was to measures of violence unused Till his sufferings became so severe That at last to defend his own Interest he rous'd And for the great work did prepare Now by force unsubdued, and by threats undismay'd Death itself can't his ardour repress The presence of Armies can't make him afraid Nor impede his career of success Whilst the news of his conquests is spread far and near How his Enemies take the alarm His courage, his fortitude, strikes them with fear For they dread his Omnipotent Arm! The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims At [the] honest man's life or Estate His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames And to those that old prices abate These Engines of mischief were sentenced to die By unanimous vote of the Trade And Ludd who can all opposition defy Was the grand Executioner made And when in the work of destruction employed He himself to no method confines By fire and by water he gets them destroyed For the Elements aid his designs Whether guarded by Soldiers along the Highway Or closely secured in the room He shivers them up both by night and by day And nothing can soften their doom He may censure great Ludd's disrespect for the Laws Who ne'er for a moment reflects That foul Imposition alone was the cause Which produced these unhappy effects Let the haughty no longer the humble oppress Then shall Ludd sheath his conquering Sword His grievances instantly meet with redress Then peace will be quickly restored Let the wise and the great lend their aid and advice Nor e'er their assistance withdraw Till full fashioned work at the old fashioned price Is established by Custom and Law Then the Trade when this arduous contest is o'er Shall raise in full splendour its head And colting and cutting and squaring no more Shall deprive honest workmen of bread.
Not that I expect you to actually get the reference. It would appear to me to be deja vu all over again.
If your company can get someone to do your job for much less than you make, you will lose your job. In the end, it really is just that simple. I've always done my best to stay flexible and not get pinned down to where I depend on a single job and have no other options. Having worked with plenty of engineers and programmers who were getting near retirement age, I learned their lesson without having to suffer their pain. When a company knows they can push you around and you won't or can't leave, you're doomed to be treated like trash. With a BS in Engineering, I took a year long program in C++ and UNIX to switch fields and now I am finishing my MBA to switch fields again. Financial planning pays very well, has good hours and Joe six-pack doesn't want to talk to someone in India or China about their future finances, they want to go to an office down the street for a cup of coffee and a chat about their portfolio. People can make all the anti-capitalist/business comments they please but my strategy is to live well and provide for my family, not be a keyboard slave for an incompetent manager.
I've been watching companies outsource to India and elsewhere for years. Every single episode has been a flaming catastrophe, yielding unusable product and hideous code.
The funniest instance was when a friend's team at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) outsourced to India -- outsourcee outsourcing to an outsourcee, 2 layers of bad abstraction Total mess, complete garbage delivered, even by Anderson's standards it had to be rewritten.
The problem is not, I think, that people overseas are dumber than people in the US. The problem is that outsourcing is bad, for many reasons, including differences in motivation between outsourcer and outsourcee, and loss of control. Overseas outsourcing can mean an astonishing lack of control, and a long, long link between the ultimate customers and the coders, which invites mayhem.
Never again. Never again. And I tell you, I don't feel so worried now that I've worked with these Indian firms and Indian developers. Not worried at all over the long term.
Before Japan started making cheap cars, their economy was similar to India's. They weren't a high-tech nation, and the Yen was very poor compared to the dollar. Then the figured out how to make cars, and how to sell them to the comparatively rich Americans. They found that even charging large amounts (taking into account the Yen/Dollar exchange) for their cars they could still attract buyers, and pay their workers well. Lo and behold, given time the value of the Yen went up due to all the money being dumped into their economy. As the relative value went up, the profit margins went down, and now Japan has been in a recession for the last 12 years.
Now, apply that model to India. What we'll see is a mad rush where everyone tries to save money by outsourcing projects to India. The US companies will see huge savings (I disagree, but that's a different argument) and the Indians will see huge profits (again taking the exchange rate into consideration). However as the Indian rupee gains in value, the economic attraction of other countries to outsource to India will fall.
Hence, the economy is constantly balancing itself.
This lesson brought to you by Travis
...makes you stronger. Our country typically makes its mark with innovation. Then the Japanese perfect what we do, the Europeans do it with style for a premium price, then the rest of Asia makes it out of plastic for $0.10.
We therefore cannot stop. I see this trend of outsourcing as a cattle prod to create something which indeed only my talents can accomplish (for now) or which at least gives me a few years of lead time.
Corporate America reacts to what tries to kill it. Part of the reason they scramble to outsource everything *is to keep alive* in the face of hostile unions, oppressive taxes, lawsuits and health care costs. Thus they hire people that adapt to our current climate, who in turn lead their companies to Enron-dom. Thomas Edison is the *last* person you'd see running GE today...
Also, what can kill others makes you stronger. Our country's military and ability to bail people out gives us political and therefore economic advantages. People lucky enough to live in America enjoy this advantage.
Does it hurt to hear them lying? Was this the only world you had?
Classic xenophobia cannot deflect the brutal truth: foreign companies are producing equal quality for less cost.
I'm actually 100% serious here for those short-sighted thoughtless managers who really feel that gutting their organization is their only hope.
Comparison
Canada - Approximately 40% less expensive than development in the United States
India - Approximately 40% less expensive than development in the United States
Canada - Worldclass education system that spans the entire population
India - Spotty and poor coverage education system that is for the wealthy
Canada - 18.5 million phones for a population of 30 million. Excellent telephone infrastructure that was the world's first (in concert with the system in the US)
India - 27.7 million phones for a population of 1,045 million people.
Canada - One of the world's best data backbones and data distribution throughout the entire country. Data is cheap.
India - Data coverage is spotty at best, and requires global spanning for things like video conferencing. Most connections require traversing multiple data carriers (whereas between most Canadian centers and American centers is a single carrier)
Canada - Stable, peaceful nation with natural geographical protection.
India - Could be in a nuclear conflict with Pakistan tomorrow.
Canada - One of the world's least corrupt criminal and political systems.
India - Horrendously corrupt political and criminal systems. Maybe your big development center will be shut down because your competitor paid several thousand rupies to a politician.
Canada - Buys almost entirely from the US, meaning that every dollar spent here generally goes right back to the US.
India - Buys very little from the US, and most dollars that go to India go there to build a competitor that my, ironically, eventually put companies like Oracle and Sun out of business. These companies are basically sponsoring their own demise.
I won't even both comparing as there is no comparison . The only reason why anyone would even imagine going to India today is because it's the big thing they read about in articles like this. The reality, though, is that Canada is a better choice both from a moral choice, but DEFINITELY from a practical choice.
There is risk everywhere. How many Indian business parks have been the target of jetliner-missiles?
I know this proess of outsourcing has already begun but finally its hitting full steam. At long last the arrogant and formerly overpaid techies with arrested social development are getting their comeuppance and how!
No more latte sipping, all black wearing "consultants" pulling in $300/hour. And never again for that matter. The profits shall now go back to the shareholders and executives where they belong!
Now all we have to do is repeat the process for the BioTech industry and enjoy the next boom it will bring us! Then we get to watch as THOSE jobs are exported to Indians who played with chemistry sets all day after school while they were growing up.
After the BioTech Boom/Bust cycle there will be a prolonged global recession that will only be ended when the world's final Boom/Bust scenario begins, the Second Space Race.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I work here in the States for the financial services arm of the first company you mentioned. The writer failed to point out how many companies aren't just outsourcing to India, they're actually setting up their own branches there. If my co-workers have a computer problem, they have to spend half an hour on the phone with the company's (I'm trying to avoid mentioning the name explicitly) main IT staff in India (until they figure out, like they've been told repeatedly, that it can't be fixed remotely), file an IT case, and then one of our on-site IT staff is sent to the rescue. Unbelievable.
"We are far too easily pleased." --C.S. Lewis
Hey, guys:
Here is what I think is going to happen:
First, the outsourcing trend is going to worsen. Corporate America is going to increasingly ship its IT work overseas to companies like Wipro. Mostly this is because corporate America is greedy, short-sighted, and fairly stupid, and has absolutely no problem with skewering the economy and destroying the middle class if they can squeeze a little more profit out of the system in the short term. India, which seems fairly pragmatic and which wants to improve its position, will capitalize on this and take all the work given it. This doesn't make India evil; the SITUATION is pretty rotten for the US though.
The result of this is that the U.S. IT industry is going to be gutted. As companies discover that outsourcing works, they'll outsource other jobs as well, including that of the managers who fired all the IT staff. Why have IT staff in India and not managers? Move everyone offshore except the executive, sales, and client-service staff. Hell, even some of those can go -- India is already the site of several call centers.
As a result of this trend, which will accelerate over time, the only jobs available in the US that pay well will be for executives and support staff. The only corporate IT that's going to be done in the US is going to be low-level tech support (for the executives) and some consulting (for network setup at a new location, etc). The consulting will mostly be done by -- you guessed it -- Indian representiatives of consulting firms. There may be a few Americans left, who suck it up and take the low salaries. Who knows?
There will still be a middle class, it'll just be a lot smaller. They'll be people who do things that you just can't outsource. Mechanics. Plumbers. Electricians and carpenters. Cops and Firemen. They'll be local, and they'll serve their communities. Computer repairmen might make a living doing house calls. You might be able to make some money setting up home networks and such. Government will still be strong, and lots of programmers (and a whole variety of other white-collar workers) will work at the county, state, or federal level. And, of course there's always academia, if you can stand all the backstabbing and infighting. The middle class will get a lot smaller, but it'll still be there.
The majority of people will be working class, either in retail or some sort of support function, like security or building maintenance. The economy will shrink, possibly a lot, and prices will fall because of this. Some communities will be hit harder than others.
I don't think it'll be a total disaster, it'll just be a change. Local economies will be more visible, people will be more connected to their community as a result (because jobs won't be for companies anymore, but local businesses).
I'm still not sure how I feel about all this, but I'm pretty sure this is what's going to happen. As for me, I'm staying in government, and I'm going to try and build some kind of side business doing consulting for regular joes and small businesses. Local, small, and comfortable. No worry about outsourcing there...
Just my $.02...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
....Wipro's developers follow Six Sigma practices.
That means they are high quality developers at bargain prices. Not just dollar an hour coders who don't know what they are doing.
Does anyone have a clue as to how American or other Western programmers are supposed to compete with this?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
They are positioning to take on Accenture, EDS, Andersen, etc.
These companies have too many MBA's with nice haircuts.. Nothing ever gets done, except for more analyses and ass covering.
When one of them finally starts to attempt actual implementation, they try to fill your building with more of the parasites.
If this is WIPRO's model, we have little to fear.
Also, 40% cheaper than Accenture or EDS still leaves us with some FAT profits, IF we can get our proposals heard by upper management.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
I don't have any opinions either way on the 'Oh No The Cheap Labor Is Coming' issue, but I have worked with Wipro quite a lot -- in fact I've worked for two large companies that outsourced large amounts of labor to Wipro.
In both cases, the result was terrible -- Wipro sent out terribly nice and bright people with no knowledge of what they could expect in real world business at all, paid them nothing and treated them like medieval serfs.
Naturally the quality of their work was somewhere between 'bad' and 'actually worse than if nobody had done it at all'. Not the fault of the programmers, just a natural result of the silly business model. By the time both companies learned what tasks could be given to Wipro and which ones couldn't, both companies had lost huge sums of money, both in fees paid to Wipro and in the various disasters caused by frightened Wipro serfs.
What particularly struck me was the indifference Wipro showed to its own employees. On the other hand, I've also dealt with some semi-cheap labor outsourced from eastern europe and it worked out very well because the outsourcing company cared about what it was doing.
The story is not 'Cheap countries benefit at expense of US!' so much as 'Nasty outsourcing companies benefit at the expense of everybody else, until people get wise to them!'
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I work with Wipro guys all the time at several large clients. On average, they are ok, but I have yet to run into anyone outstanding. They are a safe bet for large projects, but not a provider of top level talent from what I've seen.
Additional thought:
I've just thought of one more thing: some sectors which might have trouble outsourcing could be the utilities, telephone and cable companies, regional ISPs, etc... So a clever IT professional might be able to find good work in such an industry. Actually, a range of jobs will probably survive in all sectors like this. So that's cool too.
It might not work out all that badly for us overall... It won't be the Great Depression again, maybe just depressing.
Interesting note: the article mentioned that as education becomes more widespread in India and conditions there improve, companies like Wipro will probably end up outsourcing to even less expensive countries like Thailand because wages in India won't be cheap anymore! How's that for irony? Work for American companies will be handled by Indian companies which contract out to, say, Cambodian companies (which may in turn subcontract elsewhere). Amazing.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Over the past few decades, the life insurance business has lost nearly 10% of its companies and 3% of its headcount each year on account of corporate mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations. But the potential gains from technology and consolidation are harder to obtain now, so the headcount reduction will now be jobs shipped overseas, including software jobs. Most of the headcount for US insurance company 'home office' (ie neither sales nor claims work in the field) jobs will be offshore in about 10-15 years.
The thing that I found intertesting that I hadn't thought about is not the tech jobs going over seas but other jobs going over seas. If they can setup a computer software engineering center which can turn out code as good as the rest of the companies in the states what prevents them from creating a medical facility and training doctors who also work for cutthroat rates. If you can train people to be good at computer science in india I don't see why you can't train people to be good doctors, nurses, etc and cut medical costs down to the price of a plane ticket.
If all high paying jobs are shipped over then the cost of what the high paying jobs were providing software, medicare, etc falls to the point where you don't need a high paying job to cover it. Just think, the biggest expense is medicare, if that is cut by not paying doctors $300K year then why do you need a high paying job.
There are of course times when patients can't be flown to have an operation but in generally the most expensive procedure could be taken care of in an Indian medical facility with doctors trained at a North American level but costing a fraction.
It seems that there has been comparisons made between textile manufacturing and steel manufacturing and the migration of jobs over seas.
There have been many good points made on how this ultimately is better for the US and better for developing nations and believe to improve the economy over all.
A few things that I felt needed to be pointed out regarding making comparisons between textile, steel and software development.
The workers in textile mills were never considered middle class or even upper middle class. Most of the workers in textile mills lived in the slums. They didn't make middle class wages and there buying power was very low.Textile workers didn't have college degrees either, most didn't even have a primary school education. Also despite all the textiles being produced over seas. The best textiles come from Western Europe, US and Japan. Third world nations produce crap.
Steel mill workers were paid better, but were by no means considered middle class. I have family members who worked in steel mills in the midwest and they didn't have the purchasing power of today's software developers in their day. Most steel workers may have a high school diploma and some have some technical training at a vocational school, but I would say most do not or ever had a college degree. And as for steel mills, most American steel mills went out of business, not because they moved the steel mills over seas, but rather Japanese steel mills could make better steel. And some of it cheaper, Japanese steel mill workers by the way make about the same as American Steel workers. Yet Japanese steel mills are still lit and pumping out steel. What happened to US steel ?
Maybe some development can go over to India, but the wholesale movement to outsource everything to India or over seas is a serious threat to the US's ability to stay competitive in computer technology. There will be very little incentive for people to go into computer science, information systems, especially since most jobs are being over seas.
Software development is being moved off-shore simply to fatten corporate executive's paychecks. After the accounting scandals and dot comedy insanity, I can't believe anyone trusts or believes that corporations will do the right thing. and pass the cost savings they make by off shoring development into R&D and advancement.
I'm not a software engineer, but rather a system administraotr, still it's depressing to see so many well educated, talented people out of work, being forced to train some kid from over seas to do their job.
I'm in an Oracle class and several people in the class are going through exactly that. It is so depressing.
H1Bs is such a crock, the entire H1B and L1 visa situation needs to be revised. My previous company, a few of the developers were H1B visa holders and all of them were payed below industry norm, and for them it was nearly enslavement. My previous company did alot to abuse the H1Bs and the H1B visa program. And I'm sure that they are not unique in this.
Unfortunately I don't have an answer... But something should be done, some protective measures should be made both for foriegn workers coming to the US and for US citizens/green card holders.
Things do not bode well...
...the Indians were all about casinos and tax-free smokes. Good for them, getting into IT.
Hey, this is economic warfare, right? I'm just an over-priced, lazy American software engineer. I studied at your schools and worked at your companies but no more. Tough break for me.
Except, here's the parting bombshell I'm dropping on your "globalization" party and giddy race to the bottom:
Americans without jobs - or with crappy low-paying service jobs - don't buy cars, computers, cell phone or internet services, satellite televsion systems, PVRs, PDAs, HDTVs, homes or major applicances. You want me to live like a rat and to compete with slave labor in China? What can I do?, You might want to check your market share numbers in slave labor camps, though. And I wouldn't count on those "cheap Indian programmers" picking up the slack, either.
You will never be able to make your junk cheap enough. Your markets will continue to shrink, your company to bleed, your conscience to nag at you as you try and hold it all together and justify your abject sleaziness to yourself and your family as you help destroy the social fabric of a once great nation. Tough break.
Me? Hey, I'm destitute, I can't help ya buddy. I'll be couch-surfing and hanging out at the library 'til the revolution comes to finally burn your sorry "globalized" ass to the ground.
Adios, and enjoy your moment in the sun. Really, enjoy! You've earned it. Bravo!
Glin
While it is true that Wipro and Infosys are benefiting from the fact that companies in the US are outsourcing work to them, it is also true that these larger indian companies, who are CMM certified, adhere by strict standards and therefore are required to invest heavily in software and hardware - most of these are sourced from the US.
Incase you are wondering, Wipro and Infosys do NOT use pirated software. Incidentally, Wipro is one of the larger distributors of packaged software - they are distributors for Macromedia, Adobe, Borland and many other US based firms.
It would be interesting to consider how much money is actually being spent by these Indian companies in purchasing software from the US. They also do purchase most of their hardware from companies like IBM, HP/Compaq and dell.
So money does flow both ways though the amount of money flowing into these Indian companies is much larger.
But the opposite is true for many other industries - For instance,India buys most of its planes from Boeing.. and some of them from Airbus..
Not all is so sky blue for Wipro as presented.
Ericsson is company in steep decline right now and they are trying to rid as many development centers as possible.
The Indian ones were simply sold to someone else (and this happened elsewhere and some were closed completely). Not much of new business as result - only the people and facilities.
As India becomes wealthier, Pakistan will become increasingly envious and resentful eventually nuking them.
Experience has shown that 'shipping jobs overseas' actually CREATES more jobs here at home
...keep dreaming. Read the article that started this thread. India is moving into the high-end of the development process now. It's time we software engineers woke up and smelled the chai.
And what kind of jobs might those be this time? Starbucks? Burger King?
I can kind of see your point when it comes to manufacturing jobs, but now that the 'thinking' jobs are leaving I'm not sure what'll be left for us to do . In the 80's as manufacturing jobs left the US many of those displaced workers were encouraged to get into software engineering since it paid better anyway. What should software engineers be studying now? Dentistry? Auto Mechanics? (at least those jobs can't be sent overseas)
Software development isn't an incredibly difficult skill.. in particular the types of software development that is being shipped overseas.
You're deluding yourself if you think that it's only the lower-end development jobs that are being sent overseas. Check this article
. It's an interview with a venture capitalist about his take on where the Oregon economy is headed. Towards the end he talks about the impact of outsourcing engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He talks about how Mentor Graphics is opening a $40million R&D center in India. When he asked them why, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now personally, I don't think that's the real reason (the real reason is that they can pay Indian engineers about 1/3 of what they pay their American counterparts) but that quote should be sending chills down the spine of every US developer who reads it.
I have made it a strong point to become an expert in system architecture and design, and that has kept me very comfortably employed no matter the economic conditions.
I work for a large US company, one of less than 30 people left after 200 development jobs were given to WiPro. NOT maintenance, but new product development. I survived because of skills as a system architect. But guess what? Those skill were developed in a 20 year software career. The kind of career that US workers have little chance of pursuing today.
As to WiPro "quality". I have yet to see it. What I see is some pretty lame stuff.
Regarding folks here who say "get used to it", trying telling that to my former co-workers as they try to meet the mortgage payments.
What is a US worker to do? You have no leverage. Your employer makes decisions based on cost, not what you did, do, or might do in the future. I'd like to see some serious discussion about strategies individuals might pursue.
(Ironically, the Indian-Americans at my company are more upset than native-born engineers. After all, they had the initiative to come here for a better life, only to see it being threatened by stay-at-home drones.)
"I still don't get why people feared the Japanese in the 80s. They didn't work 18 hour days for $6k/year, even in the 80s."
That's not what we were told by the press in the 80's. The Japanese had a will to win. We were told they were better trained, they had a much better work ethic, the wages were cheaper, and they worked harder.
But come the end of the 90's and the beginning of the new century and the Japanese look the same as anybody else.
I just think we're building Indian IT to be some 50 foot behemouth that can't be stopped. I think reality is probably less sensational.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
From the box at on the upper right of the Wipro web site we learn...
"From the first day in dealing with Wipro, there's been nothing but quality, character, highest integrity, highest quality work"
No one knows more about character and integrity than Jack Welch.
Sincerely,
That Harvard Business Review wench Jack was banging behind his wife's back.
What makes you think a financial job can't be outsourced? There's already talk of outsourcing paralegal work. You send the US legal books over to India, and pay an Indian, Indian wages to do the legal research.
Your trying to tell me that the same can't be done in the financial sector? Dell has already setup Indian call centers and given the operators American sounding names.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
I live in Canada.. I'm not very affected by trends in software development per se. That's one of the reasons I did EE instead of CS.. programming just isn't that complicated at the application level. That worked out reasonably well. The biggest point I want to make is is the low dollar relative to the US, and the fact that most Canadians are more or less culturally the same as their US counterparts. So companies don't get shocked too bad.
The biggest trend though here is companies like EDS setting up HUGE new callcenter facilities. These places pay $10-12 or more an hour (Canadian), or about $6/hr US. That's a lot of money around here. You can buy a nice house for $50-60k cdn if you shop around. There's huge savings in Salary right there. EDS gets well educated people for that - often university educated. That's not heard of in the USA right now.
So.. here's to outsourcing. If the US wants to maintain it's very high standard of living and powerful economy, then they have to get production and productivity up. That's the flip side of global trade. Cheap goods in the short term, but you have to maintain your advantage in the long.
..don't panic
Is this what happened after textile jobs, manufacturing jobs, and automaking jobs were sent overseas? No? It isn't? Then why would it happen now with mere tech jobs?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Trends like this help weed out the crappy workers who leech off of a booming industry like IT. Competition fuels innovation, plus the more America outsources it's menial labor, we will be able to put the saved capitol into R&D. Sooner or later Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans will get of being the world's janitor. Then they will have the equavalent of the labor riots America had in and around the turn of the 20th century. Maybe one day all countries will be on a level playing field, and then we really get to see who's smarter than who.
Jack Welch's affair has absolutely no bearing on his performance as an executive. His leadership at GE is unparrelled. I couldn't care less about his personal problems. The Indians aren't hiring him to tech them all how to be good husbands. They need him to teach them how to be good businessmen.
He still is the greatest CEO that ever lived.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The replies to this article mostly seem to run in two veins:
... blah, blah"
"Those Indian engineers can do OK with the low-end, simple development tasks that we don't want to do anyway."
and
"My job is safe because I'm at the highend architectural level
The first type of reply smacks of some sort of racism that tends to think that no other country can be as good at software development as the US so we don't have to worry about the 'good' jobs leaving. The second type is just naieve.
Sure it _was_ the lowerlevel software jobs that were being sent over to India at first, but now that's changing and we'd better be ready for this change... It essentially means that even after this recession ends and the economy is doing well again that it will still be difficult for sofware engineers (and hardware engineers too, those jobs are starting to go overseas as well) to find jobs.
Why? Because the jobs that are being sent over now will lead to more of the same as companies find that they can significantly cut their costs. In the 'global economy' if you're being paid significantly more than your employer could pay someone somewhere else to do the job (and just as well) then it's only a matter of time... and this is especially true of engineering jobs which are much easier to 'export' than manufacturing jobs were (no equipment or materials to move).
A couple of weeks ago a local paper interviewed
a local venture capitalist and asked him where he thought the Oregon economy was headed. His analysis is actually pretty good... he focuses on outsourcing of engineering jobs and how that will slow the recovery in the high-tech sector. He then gives the example of Mentor Graphics and how they're going to invest $40million in a R&D center in India. When he asked them why they were going to do this, they told him: "they said they can't hire anyone graduating from engineering schools here because they're just not prepared, they're just not ready to go into that sophisticated end of the business." Now of course I think their reply is disingenuous - in the current economy they could find plenty of engineers to staff their R&D center if they built it here, but that's beside the point. The point is that here is a company that's going to move some of the 'sophisticated' engineering jobs over to India.
Another data point: This past summer I did a contract job at Intel. I've kept in contact with the people I worked with there and I've asked several times if they'll be hiring again and of course the reply is always that there's a hiring freeze. Last week I had lunch with one of these guys and he told me that he'd like to hire me again but they can't do any hiring in the US and then added "But if you were in India, we're hiring over there".
Wow. Let's play this one out a little closer to home. Chicago should never have sent all those highpaying meatpacking jobs out to Omaha. That's why Chicago is poor. Even closer to home: are you letting your wife wash the dishes? Don't you realize that's taking away work that you could be doing? She's impoverishing you!
If we carry the argument against international trade to its ultimate, we conclude that everyone should produce everything for himself, and never trade with anyone. Obviously that's goofy.
There's something wrong with your argument; let me help you identify the problem. When we send those coding jobs overseas, we make it possible for the Indians to buy goods and services from us. The reason that makes us all better off is that we only send them the work that they have a comparitive advantage in. That means that we can do something more profitable here. More free trade (NOT subsidised trade, such as Japan practiced for many years) enriches the entire world.
The classic old example is that England COULD make wine, and Spain COULD make wool, but each country has a natural advantage at making the other, and both are better off trading. This is absolute advantage, and is easy to understand.
Here's an example of comparitive advantage. There is a lawyer who can type 100 words per minute, and prepare a case in one hour. He hires, to do the typing, a legal secretary who can type 50 wpm, but would need 10 hours to prepare a case. Why? Because the secretary has a comparitive advantage in typing, even though he is only half as fast at typing. This is comparitive advantage, and is a bit more subtle.
The secretary faces this trade off: in a 10 hour day, he can type 30,000 characters, or can prep one case. The lawyer's trade off is: type 60,000 characters (only twice as much as the secretary), or prep 10 cases (10 times more than the secretary!). They're both better off to trade services this way, even though the secretary has no absolute advantage in anything.
The situation with international trade is similar. We can give the Indians work that we are better off letting them do, even if they aren't as good at it as we are. Both we and they are better off. There will always be something for us to do, even if we are worse at everything than the Indians. We will always be better off trading freely, even if we are in the position of the slow secretary rather than the fast lawyer.
I realize that this is hard on the people with little education and inflexible minds whose jobs dry up here. They won't enjoy being retrained, but I don't see why my children should live in relative poverty so they can keep on slacking. I don't see why Indian children should live in real poverty to make things easier for them, either.
What a lot of programmers fail to realize is that programming is the 21st century equivalent of ditch digging. No, it's worse than that, because you don't even have to be fully grown. A preteen can do most coding. There's a reason that we call them code monkeys.
If your job doesn't require a graduate degree and a track record of proven creative ability, you are probably a commodity, and you should expect to see foreign competition, and quite possibly loose your career to it.
See what I've been reading.
Give it time. When Indians learn that they can ship off older useless relatives who do nothing but drag/hold them down, the nursing home construction boom in India will break all known records in human existence.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Ah, yes -- Fast Company, the magazine for clueless, jackass MBAs with no creativity or strategic vision. They rely on rags like this to spot "trends." This is one trend that's clearly been spotted, so watch out -- pretty soon you'll have companies spending $ to outsource *single* positions so that they can "be like Jack (Welch)."
While I have to admit stuff like this scares my socks off, its a reality of globalizaton which also gives us 99 cent TV sets at Wal-mart. It will be a rough few years, especially for the less skilled among us.
Now if we really want to stop it, just start shipping our upper/middle management over there. They effectively killed productivity at my former employer, and I'm sure they could work the same magic in India.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
I work for a large corporation with manufacturing plants all over the United States. Handed down from the powers that be we must accept and begin to use WIPRO resources. They have been here for almost 4 months now and we have lost 3 of our experienced developers and a large chunk of knowledge base within the company. We have systems that were once stable that are now barely functioning because they lack business knowledge and use "temporary solutions" to resolve the problems. WIPRO reminds me of the school nurse. They can put a band-aid over a wound to make it quite bleeding but because they don't have enought business knowledge they cannot fix the real problem. This leaves systems that need constant attention and repair. Even when a resource begins to understand what they are doing they are shipped back to India and a new resource is brought in to add more damage. Now we have a plant full of end users and business analysts who have lost all faith in the support of our department. This is causing them to go back to the stone age and record all work in Excel spreadsheets and paper. Thus workflow has been tremendously impacted and morale is at an all time low. This is the story we are seeing with the cheaper alternative.
The one thing I don't understand is if the United States Government can tax imported products why can't it tax companies who choose to import services. Those of you who say that it is our duty to help out those countries that are less fortunate....I think you should go there and help them out. Meanwhile quit starving our economy for people who wouldn't help you if they could.
I think you hit the nail on the head. A lot of us have considered technology the great equalizer but didn't stop to think that we're living above the norm so "equalization" means loss.
But, you correctly point out that as demand for cheap labor increases, the labor becomes not quite as cheap. Hence the sort of "rolling" equalization that you describe.
I think that false economies abound in such a scenario but, hey, why not give it a try?
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
How many farmers are there in the US now as a percentage of the population compared to a century ago? Is the country richer or poorer now? Standards of living have gone up over the last 50 years, despite the auto industry moving overseas.
In the 1950's factory workers earned a lot more than McD jobs now (relative speaking), which is where all the work is now for the similarly educated.
Globalization favors management and marketing jobs over tech and physical work. If you have a nack for management, you will be better off. If not, SOL.
The sun has set on the Age of Geeks (in the US).
Table-ized A.I.
It doesn't look like you read the article - and you obviously haven't been there, or seen it for yourself. While there may be some basis for your economic theory, your notions about the difficulty of system architecture and design making you valuable enough to keep living in the 1st world are utterly mistaken. You (and I) will have to change careers, or move to the 3rd world ourselves, within 15 years. I virtually guarantee it.
In addition, due to other unrelated macroeconomic and political factors, it's getting much harder to "start over" here. Conservative politics and rising higher-educational costs might seem unimportant now, but people always find themselves thinking differently when they land back down at the bottom of the ladder.
As for America as a whole, when in a few more years we find ourselves really on the rocks and try to turn to our vaunted "education and high-skill manpower," we will discover we have neither - the price of the broom-fucking we've given public education (at all levels) over the past 3 decades.
Good luck.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
This is very reminiscient of the "Godzilla has arrived" mania that swept the US back in the 1980s. Mayne serious people then believed that Japan was going to buy the US (in cash) and then enslave us all in their Toyota factories. We know now how wrong they were.
Because Godzilla moved to China and killed US manufacturing jobs *anyhow*. We just got the country wrong, that's all.
The higher the number of pepole using computers around the world the bigger our market as engineers. 1 Billion people increasing their technical capabilities is an OPPORTUNITY, we can make it a problem by sitting back and stopping where we are and allowing other countries to improve. Short term we may hurt, but long term:
- Salaries in India and salaries here will tend to globalize
- Many more people around the world will need the services of capable engineers
- Eventually, and governments permitting, the world economy will be better off than that of the U.S. at its peak (IOW profit!)
But if you want to do the typical modern american thing and bitch, go ahead, I'm willing to compete and take your seat.The only people who should fear competition are the incompetent
Dear Santa,
I have been a very good programmer all year. I pre-declared all of my variables, didn't use too many globals, created classes that used inheritance whereever possible and used descriptive variable names in all of my programs. I helped optimize a friend's sorting routine and didn't pirate any software (that wasn't written by Microsoft.)
All I want for Christmas (a little late is ok, but get it done) is a massive nuclear exchange between India and the Paki's.
Your friend,
Glonoinha
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You obviously have no idea how much of the software you use was written in India. Almost every major American software company has outsourced or established offices there.
The two objections I always hear to their eventual dominance that I can think of off the top of my head are:
1) They're not as good, and
2) They're too far away - pitfalls of distributed development, communication problems, etc.
The first is, more or less, a bunch of ignorant (I'll stop short of saying racist) BS, and the 2nd can't account for anywhere near the kind of trouble that a 75% discount can't overcome - or even a 20% discount for that matter.
The reality is that software engineering is by far the most ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing to date - because there are no transportation costs, and no real possibility to tax or tariff the "product" as it travels over borders.
You have your opinion, and I have mine (whether I like it or not): if you're a software developer planning on living in the 1st world, your world is ending.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
*true
*In fact
*of the dot com boom
*its chairman, Azim Premji, was
*software companies, but if you
*USD, it's not that (or it is not that)
*That's how (or That is how)
*That's going to
*I don't think
*is going to stop
*emerging
*this could be
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I'm willing to kill for my standard of living.
Forget your Randian-myth economy;
It doesn't acknowledge the harsh reality:
if the current "social contract" isn't working,
I am perfectly willing to pursue
alternate methods of behaviour to get what I want.
It's not a matter of money or markets,
it's just that if I get desperate enough,
I don't much care about what happens to the rest of the world.
Abby's brain was perfectly normal.
I knew her brother "the shark", Greg Normal.
I'm willing to kill for my standard of living. Forget your Randian-myth economy; It doesn't acknowledge the harsh reality: if the current "social contract" isn't working, I am perfectly willing to pursue alternate methods of behaviour to get what I want. It's not a matter of money or markets, it's just that if I get desperate enough, I don't much care about what happens to the rest of the world.
Bless you, Anonymous Coward. I wish everyone was as honest as you are. Kill, steal, whatever. As long as you get what you want.
That's a nice look inside your soul, you pathetic little piece of shit.
GF.
"People have made this argument for years, and, lo and behold, the U.S. is doing just dandy, thank you. Many jobs are service related (health care, legal, entertainment, financial, etc.) and cannot be shipped overseas. "Service jobs" do not mean just "hamburger flipping" despite what your local union boss/thug may have told you."
Dandy is a very relative term.And yes some service jobs can be shipped overseas. Technology has made that much easier, just as it has made the present topic of discussion possible.
Device drivers slapped together, crap that barely works, apps that look like they were made in VB v1.0, no documentation... The US hardware company that contracts out to India for drivers or utilities is begging for trouble. They get into contractual arrangements, can't back out, and are forced to ship crappy code for otherwise decent hardware. Who loses? ME, on all counts! I could have written my own drivers / apps if the hardware wasn't closed. I could have been hired by the US hardware company to do the drivers if they weren't outsourcing jobs to 5-buck-a-day code-sweatshops. I could have bought a working product if they'd hired an American! They could fix the problems in their products if they had on-site programmers that understood the code.
Yeah I'm flamin' (and I got karma to burn), but I just bought a POS product (that I can't otherwise comment on) that I've been trying to get working for 2 weeks... Only to find out that no new software will be forthcoming because it was written in India. It'd go back to the store if there wasn't an Open Source driver project in the works - but you can bet I'll never buy anything from the US company until they stop contracting with the Indian slop artists.
"I wanted to start a firm in India "
Indians are the "Ferrengi" of the earth. Mostly in physical attributes.
But I digress. Indians aren't good coders; they're meek, mild people who will do as they're told, which makes them great as coders, and bad as system developers.
I say this as a brother to you, figuratively. The indian people are the nicest, kindest people on earth, but there are some aspects to our society that are annoying and this is but one of them.
With so many stories in the recent weeks on slashdot about India, we should have a separate section for India, with an icon as India's map (http://www.mapsofindia.com).
Just how smart these guys are.
I've spoken to Wipro (including Ganesh mentioned in the article) on a number of occasions and the staff are right on the money in the problem space.
I was pretty sceptical about talking to them originally, but I am yet to meet another company that that has as good appreciation of the architecture and realitites of creating n-tier enterprise solutions.
Just my $.02
Oh, wrong! That means that you don't have enough level of abstraction. You suggest the use of tools, that generate code for you --- that's right, move the hard work to the machines, but you don't necessarily need to use graphical language. Programming is about algorithms and abstractions. If your favourite language does not support this abstraction, it is wrong for this problem.
Now, if you want to say "But another level of abstraction will make it slow!" you still don't have right language! Good language can expand inline (like lisp macros) your abstractions so they look as a plain code you would write in inferior language.
Use right tools for the problem.
-- Wanna textmode user interface for ruby? http://freshmeat.net/projects/jttui/
People complained about H1B, now jobs are going abroad with NO control at all.
How Americans will compete against same professional-level people that work at 80% discount?
You obviously have no idea how much of the software you use was written in India. Almost every major American software company has outsourced or established offices there.
This is just ridiculous. Very little (I would estimate Claims that some outrageous portion of it was birthed in India is just ridiculous. I will fully agree that Indians living in the West contributed...of course they have...but the idea that the Indian tech community is anything more than a TINY blip in the global village is just ridiculous.
and the 2nd can't account for anywhere near the kind of trouble that a 75% discount can't overcome - or even a 20% discount for that matter.
Absolutely ridiculous. Firstly software development is not, and has never been a cost driven field: How else do you think it gets by as an industry with 80% or higher profit margins? The only reason that any organizations right now are looking to relocate to India is simple: A desperate last move in tough tech times. These were the same firms that were paying $150K during the height (which was an opposite form of desperation). It's management justifying themselves by doing something.
Under-estimating communication issues is unbelievably ridiculous as well. Have you ever worked in software development? I suspect not because in real world development the client seldom comes with a "This is what I want in nicely documented form, and I'll see you in 6 months when you deliver", but rather almost all real-world development processes are Agile development style processes (whether formally defined as such or not) where there is a constant bantering between the various development groups and the "customer". Hell, you're trying to claim that communications AROUND THE GLOBE with a people who often speak different languages under completely different laws is no big deal yet most companies still don't even allow telecommuting. What sort of dream world are you living in?
The reality is that software engineering is by far the most ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing to date - because there are no transportation costs, and no real possibility to tax or tariff the "product" as it travels over borders.
Exactly as you've mentioned, software development has always been an excellent candidate for world trade: The programmers of India, like anyone else, have always had the ability to create the next Photoshop or Windows. Of course, as you know, they haven't, and the only reason at all that this whole movement gets any support whatsoever is because it's the latest wave of self-justification by layers of HR and upper management. When the tech upturn begins it'll be forgotten into the ether.
Secondly, computer science is one of the most educated fields out there: Saying that it's the most "ideal candidate for 3rd world outsourcing" is just ridiculous in that context. The outsourcing to India is basically occurring to the "Island of the First World", it isn't occurring to some unwashed masses. Education, as you know, is one of the great divisions between the first and third world. Of course the salary in the Indian tech community has ramped up steadily and will quickly reach Western norms.
if you're a software developer planning on living in the 1st world, your world is ending.
Why limit your paranoid extrapolations to just software development? Why not just say "Any intelligence work is going to the 3rd world". Drug research, architecture, electronics engineering, etc. Let's make this even more dramatic shall we?
So, architecture is a high level skill? Maybe you ought to actually RTFA.
Software is easy? Haahahaha. Spoken like a true bodyshop jockey. That must be why geniuses like you who profess the benefits of "software engineering" (i.e: methodology to make idiots look good at following methodology) produces soooo many successful projects. 1/3rd of mid to large size software projects never complete, of the remaining 2/3rds, 2/3rds of them are badly overbudget, out of schedule, and fail to meet the agreed upon criteria. Wow, that some track record. Maybe you should concentrate on world peace next.
A worker gets paid $100 dollars and hour.
He's replaced by two workers in India who make $3 per hour. He then gets a job at Starbucks for $7 per hour, or he doesn't because fifty of his peers got their first.
How many stereo's will the First worker buy for Christmas? How many stereos (made in the USA) will the two workers in India be buying at the local black market for Diswali?
And the U.S. Stereo worker gets:
a) a bonus because sales are so good.
b) laid off
c) doesn't exist, because he became your first worker ten years ago when the factory moved to Mexico.
Starbucks closes because noone spends $4.00 on a cup of hot flavored water in the middle of a depression.
Where did you go wrong:
First off, you seem to think that software coding is manufacturing, when in fact it is a skill which requires constant retraining. (i.e., a knowledge worker.)
Secondly, lawyers don't produce, they feed off of a successful economy, or an unsuccessful one if they practice bankruptcy law.
Thirdly, the things you mention can all be moved easily. The incentive to do so only grows when the rest of the "manufacturing" process is already overseas, and the developers do better with an native management team.
Fourth, I am sure you will claim that "somebody's got to sell the goods to the Americans. Who are out of work because every a critical mass of their knowledge jobs was exportable.
There is no such thing as perfect code.
the bankers and managers who have sold out the American Engineers are the ones who live the lifestyle that you talk about.
These are the people whos jobs should be done away with.
Too bad you don't know any real Americans.
Do you think we all think that you are stupid and lazy?
No, you are envious and jealous.
WE are the ones paying to protect you asses from the muslim hoards while you all sit back and get fat.
Most Americans don't want 'globalization' but it is shuffed down our throats by the 'global leadership class' who have sold us out.
Free trade is very expensive. We want fairness not envious highborn foriegn elites who LOVE to see us fall.
Why do you think we left the old world? Because it was run by money mongering sots.
screw you.
Wipro's Revenue grows 27% year on year Sequential growth in pricing and volume lead to 10% Revenue growth in Global IT business Wipro Limited today announced its audited results approved by the Board of Directors for the quarter ended December 2002.
Highlights of results:
-
Revenue for the quarter was Rs. 11 billion, an increase of 27% year on year and Profit After Tax for the quarter was Rs. 2.3 billion, an increase of 3% year on year. Revenue[1] from continuing operations for the nine-month period was Rs. 31 billion. Profit After Tax[2] for the nine-month period was Rs.6.4 billion.
-
Wipro Technologies Revenue for the quarter increased 23% year on year to Rs.7.45 billion.
-
Wipro Technologies Profit Before Interest and Tax (PBIT) at Rs.2.1 billion was 29% of Revenue.
-
24 new customers added in Global IT Services during the quarter, including 5 that are on the Fortune 1000 list.
-
Wipro Spectramind recorded Revenue of Rs. 564 million and PBIT of Rs. 140 million, which is 25% of Revenue.
Acquisitions:Outlook for the Quarter ending March 31, 2003:
Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro commenting on the results for the quarter said "We see sustained volume growth with prices stabilizing in IT services and growing volumes and with intense price competition in the IT Enabled services. Our 10% sequential revenue growth in Global IT services business was the result of an 8% volume growth and a 2% increase in price realizations. In the IT Enabled services segment, intense price competition resulted in Revenues of $11.6 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2002 against our estimate of approximately $12.5 million. Enhanced operational efficiency contributed to a 4% increase in Operating Margin to Revenue of 25%, negating the 4% decline in price realization that we saw during the quarter in this segment.
For the quarter ended March 2003, we estimate the Revenue in our Global IT Services business to be approximately $162 million, in Wipro Spectramind to be approximately $12 million and in Wipro HealthScience at approximately $2.5 million."
Vivek Paul, Vice Chairman and CEO of Wipro Technologies, our Global IT Services business said "Our Enterprise business which contributes 62% of our IT Services Revenue grew sequentially by 14%, reflecting the strong value proposition of domain based business solutions to our clients. Our Technology business grew 4% sequentially reflecting our technical depth and commitment to our Technology customers who continue to experience economic and business pressure.
In the environment of intense price pressure in IT enabled services space, our operational excellence and experience continues to provide us with a compelling competitive advantage."
http://www.wipro.com/
Six Sigma is some kind of formalized screw up analysis process of the kind only highly regulated and industries could love. When you see that, you know all involved are clueless. Got your "black belt" yet? Eye glazing is an understatement.
It's easy to find a project manager willing to praise his project to the stars, deserved or not.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There is one way to stop the hemorage of US money and fix this: free software. Think about it, much of this programing is closed source waste and duplication. They are solving the same problems over and over again. No money is saved, even at 1/4 price, if you have to buy it eight times. Just remember that as this practice has been going up, IT budgets have also been rising. Free software could stop this hemorage of US currency and put you back to work. It's not the software that matters, it's knowing how to use it to get something done. Of course, in a free software world, we won't have to think of our fellow programers as "competition" any more, but as our peers and friends. There 15,000 "technologists" could be doing better work at home too. I'd like to see more of them designing semi-conductor masks than rewriting comercial applications for big stupid US companies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You then predict:
First, the outsourcing trend is going to worsen. Corporate America is going to increasingly ship its IT work overseas to companies like Wipro. Mostly this is because corporate America is greedy, short-sighted, and fairly stupid, and has absolutely no problem with skewering the economy and destroying the middle class if they can squeeze a little more profit out of the system in the short term.
I say it is entirely possible that corporate America will not stay clueless forever and will discover, free software. This will end the wasteful duplication of closed source software and indeed require local talent to oversee and develop. Those in corporate America who move in that direction first will realize many savings.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Get over it guy. Taxes there are cheap becoz their gov doesnt doesnt pay them for being unemployed. And no, their gov doesnt pay for their health care too.
Contradictory, incoherent... and you're utterly wrong on pretty much all points. This is your classic "desperation argument." But I won't take any joy when you realize it.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
It means that they hired consultants to produce a heavy procedural document that they claim meets a set of pre-established criteria.
.
What ACTUALLY HAPPENS on the project will more likely look as though the Three Stooges were in charge.
Please note that said consultants aren't going to get paid if they make the company work too hard, so, what you'll see in practice are tems of consultants with a "canned" prcedure up their sleeve - just a few editing changes and boom, SEL CMM Level
I have worked in a purported "Level 5" place, and when I saw how amateurishly work was actually conducted, I looked into the CMM business and determined that in reality we operated at Level 1, Level 0, and even sometimes at the unofficially-defined Level -1.
It was interesting to be making this discovery while also learning how Open Source development gets done. People WHO JUST PLAIN WANT TO were coming up with ReiserFS and Zope and all kinds of other things, and somehow they were capable of doing incredible things and well - things that not only took coding skill but abstract design thought and a lot of it.
You may be producing bunches of innovators (debatable, because many students to the elite US Universities come from abroad), managers, CEOS but you may not be producing enough good technicians.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Don't be afraid, it will not hurt much.
Do you know what kind of software is the one more actively developed? You should know: inhouse development. Yes, internal applications that never will see the outside world.
Well, guess what, here where I work (big bank, think really big) at least a quarter of our developpers come fron India. Also many internal applications are developped locally over there, you will never see those in the "commercial software arena".
it's jsut that you didn't justify anything more. I notice you repeated one of your more glaring racist fallacies again, which is that India can't handle teaching its people CS.
BTW, quite employed. In fact, judging by your level of intelligence, I bet I make a lot more than you do.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
In any population, you have good examples and bad examples, whether it's a crop of apples or programmers. There are good Indian programmers and there are shitty ones, just like there's good American programmers and shitty ones. The fundamental difference is almost all of the India programmers are dirt cheap. Don't argue with me in terms of ROI or quality - straight dollar-for-dollar, they're cheap. Management will use cheap Indian talent for the same reason most people buy crappy tools rather than pony up the big bucks for Snap-On or Mac tools. They still work.
Now foreach (accountant, administrator,customer-support) { s/programmer/$_/g; } and you'll see the larger problem - it's more than just IT stuff that's going over. HP recently moved an accounting group to India. Some companies moved their phone support ops over there years ago; they even go so far as to give the India workers American alter-egos so people stateside don't know the difference.
The 90's saw the importation of 1000's of H1's - they were cheaper, so it was worthwhile to import them, fsck the locals. But what you didn't know, is that HP, Oracle, M$, FedEx, etc were building up the infrastructure over *there*. A company I worked for in the 90's was working with BFL; BFL talked them into shipping 100+ sun workstations and servers, along with switches and routers, to their compound in Bangalore. Not only that, but I had to *train* them in how to run the stuff, and baby-sit them remotely. But now that they're equipped and trained, companies now don't have to expend the cost of a plane ticket and an immigration lawyer. I personally know H1's here that are losing their jobs because their projects are moving to India!
HP's upper management has made it *very* clear in the press that they're moving everything they can to India. Sun, Oracle, M$ and the rest are right there with 'em.
The "there's not enough educated Americans" was and is a smoke screen to justify the H1-B program. The H1's are still coming in at a phenomenal rate, while the unemployment rate for IT folx is in the solid double digits. If the tables were the other way around, and massive amounts of non-Americans were being thrown on the street, the ACLU would be on a murderous rampage.
Some apologists claim "a rising tide lifts all boats" and bringing India into the 1st world will benefit Americans. The only Americans it benefits are the Fiorinas', Gates', McNealy's and Ellison's. The claim is that the rising prosperity of these countries will allow them to buy more American goods. Riiiight - which American goods? The ones made in Taiwan/China/#include ? Furthermore, since we're exported all the know-how as well, there's nothing to keep them from setting up shop and making and selling their own crap to their own people, cutting the American companies out of the loop altogether.
So what does this mean to us in the IT world, or better yet, the country as a whole? In short, we're fsck'd. We ate our seed corn. Corporate America sold our intellectual and technological leverage, so a chosen few could reap tens of millions in salaries and bonuses. The shareholders, for whom it was all supposed to be for (like 'for the children') didn't even do that well in the end. All of the good jobs for middle America are gone. The only thing left that hasn't been hollowed out is the legal profession; even doctors and nurses are being imported by profit-hungry HMO CEO's
Honestly, we were better off when India was just something you thought of when you saw poor starving children on Sally Struthers' infomercials.
And to the head-in-the-sand apologists who say "you're not in any danger if you keep your skills current" - I counter that you're now competing on *price* with a low-cost one-trick pony. Not to mention the 4-figure mortgage.
White Collars Turn Blue
by Paul Krugman
Interesting essay worth reading about this topic.
It's quite real. Why? It's obvious you know nothing about India - you've never been there and you've never dealt with them. But don't take my word for it. Why don't you print out your posts and ask some people from that country what they think? :)
:)
Aw, did I make you upset by not flattering your "thoughts" with an enumerated response? So ironic; your urine-stream of invective is not the demeanor of someone secure in their beliefs or sanguine about the issues.
I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding work in the American factories where they make planes, trains and automobiles.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
So much childish frustration. What is it, ergo98? Stress in the workplace? Haven't had sex in years? Or ever?
Go on, get it all out. It will make you feel better.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Thanks. So, can you speak Hindi?
Oh man. I knew I was done for when you put the the "Bw" in front of your long string of "haha's". You totally schooled me, ergo98.
Oh no - I replied again! I've justified your devilish "last word" insult! Oh woe as me. If only any of it would make me wrong.
Speaking of revisionism, I'm amazed you never gloated about how your Indian friends totally validated your comments as not being racist and ignorant. I'm waiting - I know you'll get to that one soon.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Particularly if the low-wage people didn't quite get the specifications right or small differences in language made a very big difference in understanding or even timezone differences, i.e. only one team functioning when inter-group communication is needed... and large chunks have to be done over at the last minute by really expensive ubergeek consultants. These kinds of problems don't tend to wind up in the business press, but most of us have probably heard from someone who's seen this firsthand.
Even in the area of production, rememember that whether the product is software or hardware, if it's high-tech, we aren't supposed to have people building things unit-by-unit, people are supposed to be supervising production machinery, i.e. an hourly labor rate for a worker is supposed to be spread over dozens or hundreds or thousands of units per hour. If this isn't true, either the product or process is in need of redesign, low-wage sweatshops are simply ways of covering up managerial bungling, preferring to hire lots of cheap labor at what's often a higher total cost than to hire high-skill high wage people to do it right at what should be an equal (all costs considered) or lower or perhaps much lower price.
Would you rather hire 100 people at $1 to dig a ditch or 1 guy with a bulldozer? Yes, that guy's hourly rate might be more than $1/hour. You may now hide under the bed after hearing that.
When I say all costs, remember the price of defective product that's either bounced at the plant or returned by consumers.
Personally, I think that outsourcing is just another management fad and that the smartest companies which will wind up coming out ahead will stay home and cut costs with more efficiency and better technology. Of course, by the time this becomes obvious, the US may not have a programmer community to take advantage of it.
I'm not saying there aren't many good programmers in India, I'm saying that they should be building their own products and selling them on the world market competing against the rest of the world.
Tech Public Policy stuff
When you have 200 programmers trying to write code for one
product, like Win95 or NT, what you get is a multipule personality
program. By definition, the real problem is that these programs are
psychotic by nature and make people crazy when they use them.
-- Joan Brewer on alt.destroy.microsoft
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...