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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. "
So they're finally realizing that you can't skip the analysis of an action, just because it's the hot new thing all the management consultants are raving about?
Man, no wonder the economy fell flat on its face. The CEOs didn't notice their shoelaces were tied together.
...
Lets set up tariffs. They want to farm there work offshore, lets make it so expensive to do so that they will lose money outsourcing.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
So they're finally realizing that you can't skip the analysis of an action, just because it's the hot new thing all the management consultants are raving about?
Nope. They're realizing that the current Offshore IT fad is over-rated. Come the next fad they'll be praising it to high heaven as if there had never been any other fads. The IT industry has no long term memory at all.For me, jobs going offshore exposes the fault in our economic system, and shows how in many ways it is very primitive.
At the turn of the last century people imagined a time when everyone would live in luxury and not have to work. Machines would be able to do the work, and the majority of people could just relax and have a good time. The idea is even more possible today - we can create machines to do most jobs these days, and we should all be living in a work-free time of abundancy. So why aren't we? The simple answer is that our economic system won't allow it - in our system, in order to be able to have stuff, you need money, and to get money you have to work. They crazyness of this situation is highlighted by the fact that periods of adundance now actually cause recession - things become "too cheap", defalation occurs, people can't make money, everybody looses when things are plentiful.
How does this relate to offshore IT? For me it is exactly the same situation. If someone is willing to do my job in another country, then great, I should be able to put my feet up and relax. But of course it doesn't work like that - I loose my job and have no money.
People say that our current economic system is the best system because "it works" but I don't buy that. In many ways it is fairly crude. I think if an alien came from an advanced planet and looked at us today it would think, "look at those idiots working most of their lives when they've already most of the tools to live a life of luxury!"
From the article:
"A good American programmer will push back and say, What you're asking for doesn't make sense, you idiot," Zupnick says. "Indian programmers have been known to say, This doesn't make sense, but this is the way the client wants it."
What a bad comparison: compare a "good" local worker to a generic "bad" offshore worker, rather than comparing good-good or bad-bad. I look around and see plenty of local programmers who adopt the "build-to-specs-regardless" stance without hesitation. Similarly, many of the projects here that involve overseas development involve far more communications meetings to work out the details prior to building applications.
There is no shortage of poor programmers here. Blanket statements like the above only steer people toward looking for poor qualities in foreign developers, while ignoring those around them.
This is complete bullshit. You've failed to define "works".
Does it lower cost in the short-term? Yes.
Does it improve the quality of support? Arguably no.
Does it improve the quality and tightness of the product? Arguably no.
Does it strengthen the company from within? No.
Does it lower cost in a reasonably reached fashion that increases internal productivity and doesn't make the other 10,000 workers in your company pray every night that their job (that required $20,000 of schooling according to your posted job requirements two years ago) isn't going to be shipped overseas to someone else? Likely not.
I don't know if you call this "working", but I don't.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
There are a lot of positions available that pay very good - maybe better than at an IT company. The position requires you to do more than a single task and that makes you more valuable in the long run. You have a small IT staff but a lot of work. You're move valuable there than in a shop like at a telco. There's a whole lot of companies out there that needs top IT people to support their specialized industries and these jobs are all here in the USA.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
There is another aspect to offshoring that everyone seems to be missing. It goes like this:
I send out a spec to my carefully chosen offshore vendor and they dutifully develop the application at a lower TCO than I think I can do it for.
While they're developing it, they have a secret 'shadow' team - maybe in a completely separate company - that takes my spec and produces an enhanced version 2.0 of my application. Now they can bypass me and market directly to my customers, competing with my (now out of date) v1.0.
Oh, they can't steal my Intellectual Property like that? Think again. And you think you're actually SAVING money???
These last two are almost certainly true, but it's how they compare to the first that matters. The engineers always want to make the best product, and understandably so if they take pride in their work. But management has to consider the possibility of making the second-best product if it's a damn sight cheaper. It can certainly be a good move.
Does it strengthen the company from within? No.
That's pretty nebulous, and doesn't really translate effectively to the company's bottom line. Strengthening the company by reducing costs might be worth more. And it's questionable how a company would strengthen itself by keeping overpaid, underskilled, non-management-material American coders on the payroll.
Does it lower cost in a reasonably reached fashion that increases internal productivity and doesn't make the other 10,000 workers in your company pray every night that their job isn't going to be shipped overseas to someone else? Likely not.
Like hell. First, the most motivated worker is the one whose job is on the line, like it or not. It may not be pretty, it's the truth. Hell, remember the dot com boom? Where was the employee loyalty to the company then when employees were shopping themselves to the highest bidder? That shows how taking a hit for a "stronger company" gets the company nothing. Why should they take that cost hit for nothing when their employees leave anyway when the economy gets good?
Face it, today neither labor nor the company has any loyalty to the other side, as neither has earned it. Bottom line is if your job can be performed by an Indian almost as well as you do it for 20% of the cost, that's what they'll do.
If anyone has any actual numbers to counter this, I'd like to hear it. All I know is that the American auto industry strengthened itself immeasurably after moving manufacturing jobs overseas. For one, it actually became profitable again and stopped hemorraging market share to foreign manufacturers.
And that's the kind of jobs we're talking about here. We're not talking about people on mission-critical projects fearing for their jobs. We're talking about code monkeys, the equivalent of the assembly-line bolt-turner of the auto industry. That under-educated person has never had security in any other industry, and I fail to see why the code monkey should expect anything different.
What it means is that the economy will no longer guarantee $60,000 a year and job security to someone who can only write mediocre code with no other skills. Most other people are probably safe.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
All of this outsourcing is a thinly veiled attempted to commodidize not just IT, but IT services. Look at every stinking product coming down the pipeline. It's all designed for a chimpanzee to use. Sure it can't do half of what the previous version did, but it uses MicroSoft's backend, costs 3 times as much, and we can hire a teenager to feed it.
So what if all these rosy assumptions explode and take our customer service with it. We sure showed those IT people who was boss. Who needs them...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
My experience with a small shop in the US in Oregon was almost exactly the same, totally and utterly useless gung-ho "we can fix it" cartoon like characters. And of course with any Microsoft code that has ever escaped into the wild you couldn't exactly bandy about the word quality.
Shit programmers exist everywhere. There are shit hot people in India, there are crap people in the US. The trick is to meld the good people in both areas to create decent teams as the client needs to speak NOW to someone, and that person HAS to be in the US. But the basic work can be done by top quality people in India.
It does work, and I for one have had good experiences of it, and I'll tell you one thing. Its a damned sight easier to get rid of the shit person on your project in India than it is in the US.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Why in the world would the whole IT industry collude against skilled workers out of *spite*? Pat yourself on the back all you like by saying you are worth your weight in gold, but by saying that you specify the very reason the commoditization of IT services *is* about money. Like you said, you are *expensive*.
If you lost a job to an Indian IT worker, I suggest you *compete* instead of *whine*. (Glad I had karma to burn on this. I can't believe it got modded insightful.)
Boom Shanka