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?"
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