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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Because we're sitting around discussing this on Slashdot...
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?
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.
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.
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