Slashdot Mirror
CIO Magazine On Offshore IT
lpq wrote to us with a reference to the cover article from this month's CIO Magazine that talks about the off-shore movement of IT from its traditional bulwarks to the developing world. A selection from the article:"
Think again. There are real costs associated with shipping your IT department (or a portion of it) overseas. Our Special Report covers the Backlash from a growing political storm as well as the Hidden Costs you should be aware of before you join the stampede overseas. "
I've done maintence programming and support for a few applications that have been farmed out overseas. Based on the limited experience with only a few development teams I've come to the decision that farming all this stuff out is a bad idea. They frankly cannot program very well and now we're going back and recoding huge portions of the application in house because they do such a bad job. No version control systems, poor development cycles, hardly no testing, desire to work on the live production servers to make "quick" changes. It's a PITA.
Here's another article I just read this morning at ComputerWorld:
IT's Global Itinerary: Offshore Outsourcing Is Inevitable. An interesting read, and they do make it seem pretty inevitable.
http://www.naplesnews.com/03/09/business/d961376a. htm 4 /c3736054.htm t udy/
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/439595.stm
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/26/077.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/08/30/ilo.s
I found that an even more recent (2003) study that says south koreans work more hours but are not as productive.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I've seen the same thing. If you have really simple stuff, you can do it. Anything larger and we basically had to rewrite it. This has happened on 3 projects now. According to managment there will not be a 4th.
It wasn't just bad, it was even unreadable in places.
Just my 2cents worth, go ahead and mod me down for being redundant........
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
The guys climbing the poles for Verizon make over 75k/yr, at least according to their recent ad campaign.
;)
Those ad campaings were produced by Verizon in order to sway public sympathy away from their (unionized) workers that were about to strike in order to protect their benefits. My wife, brother-in-law, and cousin are all techs with Verizon, and, believe me, they do not make anything approaching $75k/year. Possibly with 30 or so years with the company and 15-20 hours of over-time each week (if it is available), then they might the approach $75k. A better estimate would be around $40k/year. Hell, I wish my wife made $75k, my life would be much easier
TODO: Insert witty sig
It was really about money, why has Hp fired 1000's workers, replaced them with indian workers, and then went out and bought 2 $60 million dollar jets to replace their 1999 ones?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
I think your view of the evolution of the US is unfortunate and at its roots simply pessimistic for pessimism's sake -- or perhaps a little prejudiced? I mean no insult, just my genuine feeling from your post.
You back little of what you say with data, and have peppered your argument with the kinds of 'proletariat overthrowing the bourgeious' Marxist rhetoric that died with, well, a vast majority of the Marxist states. Dialectical Materialism is all but dead, unless you like what's happening in Vietnam and Cuba.
For the middle class, undoubtedly the most powerful entity in the US ecoonomy, to die, and the lower-income segment of the population dominate the population numbers, a huge disparity in wealth would have to occur. Mind you I write 'wealth', not 'income'. Look at the average middle-class American, his/her life is not necessarily so different than that of the elite. TVs, nice cars, vacations, McMansions, all of these things abound. The *relative* cost of material wealth in the US, and for the most part the rest of the capitalist world, is constantly decreasing when compared to income.
It's also pretty easy to find data that debunks your claim that there is a blooming lower-income representation in the US. There is a *huge* amount of mobility in America in terms of income. As long as the lowliest, poor, academically challenged kid can train to become a plumber and make six figures, people in the US will continue to (with notable exceptions) rightly blame themselves when they're unhappy with their incomes/overall wealth. Mobility is alive and well, and small-medium sized mom 'n pop businesses continue to be a backbone for the economy.
Your post was lined with an implicit criticism of materialism in the US. I couldn't agree with you more, there. What famous Marxist said something to the effect that the West would sell the noose to its executioner? Unfortunately, it seems like the charge from materialism leads quickly to religious fundamentalism, a disease that is quickly spreading through all parts of the globe.
First of all, there are serious differences that must not be overlooked. In general, a business might be capital intensive with relatively cheap labor (think automobile assembly plant or oil refinery), or light on capital with relatively expensive labor (think computer programmer). Airlines are both: capital intensive (airplanes and other specialized equipment) and powerful, expensive labor (pilots, etc).
As such, labor cost is pretty much the only thing a software vendor can cut. An airline can go to the Southwest model and use only one type of aircraft to save on maintenance, or try to force unions to lower wages, or try to reduce flights in unprofitable routes. A software vendor is unlikely to save any significant amount of money by making its programmers use a cheaper computer, or take up less office space. This nature of the software business is also why people can write a competitive operating system in their spare time.
Therefore, they try to find cheaper labor. Slashdot anecdotes notwithstanding, it really isn't clear at all to management that the resulting quality is markedly worse. In fact, the same Slashdot anecdotes would suggest that management hardly cares about quality at all. Like I said, I empathize, but I think "stop chasing each other to the bottom" is not an alternative that US businesses can understand and accept. Moreover, even if they didn't outsource to India (assuming the quality really is worse), they still may outsource to somewhere in Europe for similar quality and slightly lower wages. What would we complain about if they did that?
My point is, either you have a problem with poor quality, or a problem with outsourcing. Using the former as a reason to avoid the latter is really a bit hokey. A problem with outsourcing per se, however, is a political question, not a business or microeconomic one.
(Incidentally, this also likely means that setting up an automobile plant in the US is not that much more expensive than one in Japan or Europe. It's easier for the savings in shipping and taxes to make up for the higher wages, so it's not really fair to compare the two.)