Slashdot Mirror
Pros and Cons of Tech Offshoring?
An anonymous reader asks: "There's an interesting analysis of tech offshoring at the moment posted on Membox. It looks at the pros and cons of the practice in two separate articles. Since this is a big issue in tech at the moment, it's good to see the arguments on each side given so clearly. What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?"
I haven't seen a lot of jobs actually go away because of it, but a lot of people are jumping ship out of fear - and we're having to hire lots of new people to replace them.
You see, without that little doohicky, the universe stops.
http://propheteer.org
The study of economics is based on a simple problem - human wants are infinite, but the resources to satisfy those wants are only finite. So the question becomes - How do we satisfy our wants with the most efficient use of resources?
From the pro article. I've seen this a lot- but there is at least one economic theory, distributism, that claims that human wants are just the mortal sin of greed and human NEEDS are what we should be focused on satisfying- and human needs are indeed finite.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
By sending jobs to other countries you end up ensuring that your potential customers can't afford your product, as they have no income.
rooooar
My former employer succeeded in outsourcing their operations to EDS, and are still a happy EDS customer.
They then tried a second cost-reduction step, offshoring their development to a well-respected firm on the opposite side of the planet. The timezone problem was a nuisance, but not a serious problem except when doing maintenance, so they offshored maintenance to the same company.
This seemed to work, but on looking at the financial results a few quarters later, they realized they'd done a very brave thing: they'd inadvertently offshored their software budgeting decisions. With both maintenance and new development in the hands of a supplier, the supplier was the only person who could make credible decisions about how much to spend. And the spending was growing.
So they turned around and started onshoring, hiring some of the folks who had been the offshoring team and moving them back to Canada, co-locating them with the user groups and the budgeting managers, and go control of their own budget back.
They're now genuinely reluctant to allow anything to be done remotely, including having me dial in from home. They want my body withing shouting distance of my manager!
Losing cost control can make you a little nervous if you're a big company, because it can rapidly make you a small company(;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
Daniel Drezner has some interesting analysis on his site. His linked articles, especially the Foreign Affairs one, are also good.
I, by the way, am pretty agnostic on this issue, and linked to only one side because it's the only good discussion I've seen. (As opposed to, say, Lou Dobbs using an hour of CNN every night to rant about evil Mexicans.) I'd welcome similar links on the anti- side.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
My company was using TCS for a while, then opened their own office in Hyderabad to cut down on the middleman-costs.
According to several reports from Indians here and dealings with some of the managers there, Hyderabad is getting like Silicon Valley in the late '90s. People can simply walk out whenever they want, they'll find a new job the next day. There's a lot of turnover because of that.
Also, wages are going up. A couple of our test guys (who are dealing with hordes of Indian colleagues, of course) have noted that the wages are coming up to where it's not that much less expensive to hire in India. (It's still cheaper than the U.S. of course).
I had always predicted / feared that once this wage parity started happening, companies would start offshoring all their jobs to other places (China? Romania? the Congo?) but that does not seem to be happening, probably because few other countries are teeming with English-speaking programmers as India is.
This means that there's some hope for the trade equilibrium predicted by classical economics / big-business apologists, rather than the "race to the bottom" where every country becomes Third World, predicted by me and some fellow paranoids.
What effect do Slashdot readers think offshoring is having on the industry?
About the same effect that Dutch Elm Disease had on Elm trees.
Between H1B's and outsourcing, the industry has decimated the software engineering profession. Many of my former co-workers have bailed out after months and even years of unemployment. And these were not "Learn Web Programming in 21 Days" people - these were people with Masters degrees (or higher) in CS or EE and years of experience. In many cases they've gone back to school and have started new careers and they're not coming back. A the same time US college students and high school students do not regard software development as a good career. Enrollment is CS / EE degree programs in the US have dropped dramatically.
I'm already seeing articles about 'problems' with outsourcing in trade journals. I'm also seeing articles from industry groups about lomming 'shortages'; which always end up blaming the US 'educational system'. Makes me want to whack these people with a large clue-by-four.
[Insert pithy quote here]
So, offshore more, please!!!eleventyone
Yeah, right.
...that they could walk into a room filled with several dozen experienced programmers, interview each one, and fail to find a single "qualfied" candidate.
Remember that not everyone has formal experience using the same set of specific products or tools that you have, and that many things (like file formats) are relatively easy for almost anyone to pick up and work with if they're even remotely competent.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
That doesn't make it a common skill in the general programmer population, however, and that's my point.
We use a lot of specific technology in the airline industry, also, but over the years we learned that the probability of finding someone who knows those formats, languages, or systems/environments was just about zero unless they'd actually worked in the airline industry before.
Because of this, we decided that some level of basic technical training was going to be a fact of life regardless of who we hired, and in the long run that turned out to be better. A person with good previous general software development/support experience proved to be more valuable than some of the folks we'd hired who already knew the specific technology!
Don't be too sure that someone couldn't learn about DICOM in a week. I had a contract once where I knew the main language being used but I didn't know anything about the specific database in use, any of the text editors, or the general programming environment, and I was writing productive code at that site (and modifying an existing program) inside four hours, mainly thanks to their willingness to teach me what was needed.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.