25 Years Old and an Offshore IT Manager

dcblogs writes "The Chinese outsourcing market, at $1.7 billion last year, is growing at 38% a year, according to research by the Everest Group. This is creating opportunities for Westerners who want to go to China, learn the language, and help these Chinese offshore companies reach overseas markets. There are job opportunities for people with management experience or who are young and willing to gamble. Here's the story of one 25-year-old who started learning Mandarin on his plane ride over to China, three years ago, and is now an international development manager for an IT offshoring firm."

Comments

Poor quality....

[cavtroop]

I didn't RTFA, but maybe this is why quality is not so great in offshore products? We have unqualified people flying over to 'take a chance' and end up in management roles, without the requisite experience needed to get the job done correctly.

Re:Poor quality....

[Vectronic]

I agree... well, half agree, the other half disagree's...

Sure, some "take a chance" and end up failing, upon which, they should be fired, or sent back, even though often don't...

However, some people are just (arguably) born "wif da skrillz" and can get going sooner, than having to waste a bunch of time building a resume and getting papers with fancy symbols on them...

But, I also think that people under the age of 35 should be able to run for Presidency (of the Government)... for the same reason, infact I think it would do the country (whichever country it may be) a lot of good, even if the candidacy was only allowed every 5th election or something.

But, no matter how many hoops people have to jump through, there will always be people who are bad at it, and those that are good, may aswell give them a chance earlier on...

Re:Poor quality....

[ErichTheRed]

I tend to agree...for the most part.

Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants from people who have been displaced by cheaper workers. One of my relatives works for a large consulting firm who does tons of IT outsourcing engagements for large companies. He's got a different take on things...He told me that most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.

Obviously, these two extremes aren't 100% indicative of the whole issue. The actual facts are:

• Employers are shifting a lot of work offshore to take advantage of cheap labor. This is almost always the reason for doing this.
  
• Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.
  
• Even though the work ethic is better, projects tend to come in late. Maybe it's language, maybe it's the distance, whatever.
  
• Quality tends to suffer. Why? Part of it has to do with skill level, but I think the other part is that requirements are filtered through several layers of project managers and analysts.
  

With these facts in mind, what's next? I'd hate to think that there will be no more purely technical jobs here. I'm not a project manager, and don't want to live in a country that can't do anything other than manage projects. On the other hand, how do you convince an employer that you can do a better job than someone who makes 10% of your salary? This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great."

Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink. Getting people who are just not suited for the work into other jobs would probably be the best thing yet for code and system quality. Example pet peeves from my side of the house (systems) are developers who have no clue about things like code optimization and don't know the code they're working on inside and out.

The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!

Re:Poor quality....

[pillageplunder]

It's interesting to see folks "going after" off-shore products and the "level" of quality. Quality isn't just a part of the software, it is an overall approach to any project. I find it a cop-out when folks blithly trash off-shore products with snippets like the one above. As one who has extensive experience in IT and in the Construction business, the parallels are many. Without a solid foundation in either field, anything else you build on top of it will be crap, REGARDLESS of whether its "off-shore" "on-shore" or anything in between.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, we have "not so great" products over here too. And the managers all went to YOU NEE VERSITYYYYY. Maybe all this shows that the years of "education" we have to go through here just aren't necessary for these types of jobs? Maybe you resent the years of expensive adult daycare you had to go through to achieve less?

Re:Poor quality....

[93 Escort Wagon]

One of my relatives works for a large consulting firm who does tons of IT outsourcing engagements for large companies. He's got a different take on things...He told me that most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day. I'd prefer not to speak disrespectively of your relative - but on what basis is he making this sweeping statement? Has he actually toured those companies that've hired him and observed the work ethic of those soon-to-be-fired workers?

This basically sounds like he's rationalizing in order to legitimize the fact he's making money from other peoples' misfortune.

Putting on my hat as an IT consumer: I've had the opportunity to compare a few companies' outsourced IT services (tech support) with their previous onshore support. I can't think of one instance where the quality of support didn't plummet once the service went offshore. There's no good reason that it has to be that way; but when cutting costs is the only motivation, decline is inevitable.

Re:Poor quality....

[Jack9]

Seems a lot like the lead character from Cloverfield. Probably much more common than I expect.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants from people who have been displaced by cheaper workers.

Labor abroad is subsidized by a dollar that is overvalued against specific currencies. Your 3rd grade understanding of supply and demand is impressive, but insufficient to understand the real reason why labor is moving overseas.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

Most outsourcing goes to India, and the software quality usually is crap because:

1) The cheapest programmers are fresh out of college, where due to budget constraints they've typically they've had little if any actual hands-on programming experience! IIT is good, but most Indian schools comp-sci is a complete joke
2) The outsourcing shop turnover is very high (30%/yr typical) because the market is so hot. Employees just cross the hallway to a higher paying job at the drop of a hat
3) They endemically lie on their resumes, so even the little experince you thought they had is non-existant. Sad, but true.

The only IT outsourcing that I've heard sucess stories from are for testing (to detailed test specs) rather than for development. IOW think of them as cheap labor, and you'll be OK (as long as your specifications were thorough and unambiguous). Think of them as a cheaper alternative to your experienced and competent domestic team, and youll be disappointed.

Re:Poor quality....

[pla]

Many arguments about offshore development often are nothing more than xenophobic rants [...] most of the people complaining about quality of offshore work is done by the same people sitting around on IM and surfing the web for 7 out of 8 hours a day.

From the middle-America stereotype of xenophobia, to the mid-management paranoia about lazy programmers. Well done, old chap! Well done indeed!



Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why

No. This counts as a peeve of mine, which you appear to have bought into whole-heartedly, and it all centers around your comment that:
This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great".

I take pride in my work - The quality of my work, not the speed with which I can satisfy the spec (a document I consider myself lucky when I have a halfway decent one first place). The problem comes about when you consider the specificity of the task - You have apples and oranges trying to compare in-house coders to outsourced ones, because they don't do the same job. Yes, I do want my programs to "work great", not "just work".

Put simply, outsourcing can work, as long as you have someone in-house who understands, at both a business and technical level, what the company needs - And can document that in painstaking detail for an outsourced dev team to implement. In the real world, that doesn't happen, because "software engineer" doesn't mean "code monkey". My job involves about half coding, half badgering management to make up their damned minds about feature-X... And then re-writing feature X when management changes its mind a week later.



Put another way: Most halfway-decent American coders, given a sufficiently detailed spec and only the thinnest of contractual obligations to implement it to the letter (exactly what offshore coding houses work to), could do any given take in a tenth the time/budget as well. And when that "working" app crashes at 2am resutling in the loss of millions of transactions, because your MBA-wielding Head of Outsourcing doesn't understand the difference between "RAID" and "backup", just take comfort in in how much you saved by not going with lazy in-house programmers.

Re:Poor quality....

[frank_adrian314159]

Even though the work ethic is better, projects tend to come in late. Maybe it's language, maybe it's the distance, whatever.

Here are some reasons projects come in late:

• Bad specifications. In general, most organizations do not know how to write specifications to the level of detail necessary to allow off-site teams to produce work only using the specification. This is usually discovered in the integration or installation phase of the project and thus, almost always causes lateness.
• Time zones cut communication. For all of the talk of people working in other countries while you are sleeping, quite likely the scenario is actually other people waiting for answers in other countries while you are sleeping. It makes a hell of a lot more sense to offshore north-south rather than east-west. It's a lot easier on workers, too, who usually either have to com ein early or stay late (or both) to get the "face time" in.
• Lack of a software engineering culture. No matter how bad you think your managers are in the US (or Europe), at least a fair number of them will have come up through the trenches and, even though they don't know how to manage people all that well, usually understand that niceties like source control systems and systematic testing are a good thing. It takes a couple of generations of people working in the industry, pushing best practices ahead, before one can reliably find these practices understood as necessary and adhered to. The software engineering cultures in India and China are not necessarily at the point where best practices in software hygiene are being followed consistently.
• Poor communications technology and non-native speakers. Phone lines between here and there still suck. Your ability to be understood over noisy lines still sucks. Even though most (all?) Indian programmers do understand English, it is still painful to try to listen over sucky phone lines for long periods of time (Also, will someone please tell non-native speakers of English that speaking fast only cuts down on their intelligibility?). Chinese communication infrastructure is even worse. And most of Chinese workers (outside of project managers) are nowhere close to fluent in English.
• Autocratic management. In general, it's easier to say nothing or to leave than to try to fix something that's broken. This is true every where, but it is especially true in societies that are culturally autocratic in nature. Given the growth in India's technology, would you rather try to fix something where you were or move to a new job with a 20% pay increase? They're no more stupid than we are. In China, it's a bit more difficult in switching jobs, but the issues are still similar.

It's not that any of these things are permanent, nor are they a reflection on individuals' abilities. I've worked with people in both China and India and they are just as smart and (maybe) more hard working than we are. It's just that the software engineering culture, the communications infrastructure, and the management culture isn't yet set up to produce good software without a great deal of intervention from team members with a lot more experience in software engineering practice and management. It will come... it's just not there yet. There is "no royal road" to software engineering maturity. Give them another ten to fifteen years and I expect that they'll have everything in place to make these projects succeed (probably by just sending entire projects there), but for now, it's a real gamble when you offshore development. Expect to put in a lot more effort on the US (or Europe) side to make it succeed than you expected to.

Re:Poor quality....

[ErichTheRed]

This basically sounds like he's rationalizing in order to legitimize the fact he's making money from other peoples' misfortune. You are correct in your observation, I think. I've seen plenty of lazy IT workers who just do the minimum to keep their (very high salary) job, and I've seen committed workers who produce good quality stuff. He's probably colored by the fact that the lazy ones tend to complain very loudly while the good ones keep quiet and do their job. In my experience, there's also a lot more lazy people, adding to the observation.

The central problem is that we're stuck in the middle. We have to convince management that we're worth the extra money. This is sometimes impossible due to the very large salary difference. In addition, lower-level IT managers do their best to shield the top decision makers from things like missed deadlines, over-budget projects, etc. These major problems get rolled up into 2 or 3 bullet points on a PowerPoint slide. Similarly, all these cost numbers are rolled up into one line in a balance sheet. 100K for a developer vs. 20K for what seems to be an interchangeable developer is a no-brainer.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Outsourced quality is low, language & cultural barriers are a major stumbling block. Subjectively the quality of support I've experienced went from hands on to unintelligible gibberish over a noisy voip line. The end result is that most often I have to resolve my own platform hardware /software problems on time I previously devoted to our customers. This makes the quality of my work suffer, I wind up working longer hours, not to mention the fact that the amount of time needed to resolve a single fault ( I mean resolve, not close the trouble ticket in Beijing because a call has been placed and answered) is an order of magnitude longer.

This can't be good for our KPI, but in the short term it makes the call center money & shifts the support burden/cost onto people not qualified or intended to bear it. If i wanted to do IT support, I'd have joined the It dept, as it is I HAVE to not only support my customers but also a plethora of driver & os vendors.

Outsourcing support to outer mongolia is NOT a good idea if quality of service, customer relationship, customer satsfaction or SLA's are your concern. It is a good idea if you're in the call center bussiness in asia, though

Re:Poor quality....

[Sentry21]

One of the recurring issues I've seen in American attitudes towards offshoring and immigrants smacks largely of racism and racial superiority. A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever.

In my experience, I've noticed that the immigrants who 'take our jobs' generally take one of two types of jobs:

1. Undesirable jobs that 'white people' don't want to do - e.g. janitorial work, low-paying service jobs, monotonous jobs like security guard, or hard jobs like construction (hours in the sun, hours in the rain, etc.).
2. Highly skilled, educated jobs involving science or technology.

The reasons I've come up with to explain this, and I could be completely off here, are as such:

1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar. They don't take for granted that there will be food on the table, good working conditions, and a roof over their heads. They work for it because they know what it's like to go without it (or they've seen it a lot closer than 'we' have).
2. They know the value of hard work. You don't get something for nothing, but people these days (myself included) try to get their something for as little as they can. Poorer Americans in particular are always looking for the 'quick fix', because they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them.
3. Once they get something, they work to keep it. They know that there's always someone else who'll take their job if they don't want it, there's always someone else who wants their apartment. They know they can't coast, because there's no safety net to protect them. I've seen a lot of people get hired for jobs and then act as though the company can't do without them, sometimes immediately. The result is that the company puts up with them as long as they need to, then lets them go.

Point three was particularly emphasized during the dot-com boom, where anyone who could install Linux demanded a six-figure income, stock options, company car, and six weeks of paid vacation a year. When crunch time came, there were a lot of people who would gladly do this supposed $120k job for a measly $60k, and who wouldn't barter for anything other than their wages. Suddenly the arrogant 'I'm the king of the world' geeks found themselves a lot less welcome than they had been.

I've considered that this most likely extends from the American Supremacy doctrine that most Americans seem to be taught - that America, God bless her, is the best country in the world, and everyone else is just jealous because they're second-best. This seems to engender an attitude of American people being better than non-Americans, because... well, I'm not sure. Everyone seems to have their own reasons that they come up with from their own personal experiences or opinions.

All this wraps up to an immigrant workforce who's willing to get their hands dirty andwork to earn their wage, and who won't take their employer for granted. Sound good to you? Sounds good to me.

Now let's consider outsourcing. The average salary for a Sr. Software Engineer in the US is around $90k according to PayScale.com. Not bad, that's more than I make. In India, however, the wage is about 580,000 rupees, or around $13,500. You could pay someone in India pretty well by Indian standards and still save a ton of money by American standards.

Most opponents of outsourcing point to several things at this point. First, foreign workers aren't well-educated like American workers are. Secondly, the quality of their work is lousy (possibly as a result). The problem with these two statements is the staggering number of completely incompetent, short-sighted, narrow-minded 'programmers' I've seen with degrees from universities in the US. The fact is that while a good education makes a b

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

First off, the labor is cheap because there are no rights for labor, consumers, and in many cases human rights, and there is most certainly no standard for human dignity. In the west we don't call slavery "living".

Second, they may or may not have a better work ethic, but the reality is their education is more like a bottom tier trade school than a western university. This reduces their flexibility on the job. Further, many of the cultures in these outsourced labor pools stress much stricter obedience and hierarchy than those of the west, even further reducing flexibility.
This results in stilted performance (you know. the guy who simply reads rigidly from a list on the customer help line?) and a lack of creativity (or in the presence of creativity, the lack of initiative to push it forward, as that would mean asserting yourself to authority)

This means work quality suffers.

as for your example of code optimization, that's precisely what is glossed over in the training overseas personnel receive.

They get taught how to code in all the buzzword languages, but never the heavy algorithms courses people who get a cs degree receive in the US or EU

Re:Poor quality....

[Valehru]

I went out to China in 2005 with very little Chinese and went straight into a Business Analyst role. Mainly pimping my wares for a Chinese software company I found that if you were willing to work hard, learn the language and get the job done then the world is your oyster. I'm 26 now, I think that it would have taken an extra 5+ years to get to my current level if I hadn't gone over to the middle kingdom. It's very much a sink or swim environment over there, if you can't hack it then there are always smart Chinese guys willing to do the job.

Re:Poor quality....

[plasmacutter]

As opposed to smug anti-american frothing, right?

I've responded on the "lack of education" front, and it's not from some purveyed stereotype. It's from accounts of professionals who have come to speak, and professors who have traveled abroad and witnessed the training programs.

You can't judge this by the people who came to the US to work in these fields. They tend to be the creme of the crop.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I have earned my job. I got educated and acquired the skills to land the job. Now I have to get paid 20K a year because someone in India will do it for that?

I'm sorry I am entitled to a high wage. We built this country to a high standard. We made these companies great and they earned tons of money in the process. Now we get paid back by having a lower standard of living?

I bet there is someone in China or India who will do the CEOs job for 40K - is management hoping on that train?

Re:Poor quality....

[tom's a-cold]

# Employers are shifting a lot of work offshore to take advantage of cheap labor. This is almost always the reason for doing this.

Agree.

# Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.

Disagree. They are from much poorer countries, and the compensation gap between an IT job and alternative employment is higher. So they need the income more desperately than a Westerner who is better able to find alternative employment.

# Even though the work ethic is better, projects tend to come in late. Maybe it's language, maybe it's the distance, whatever.

The work ethic, is not better. What looks to you like a work ethic is greater desperation and being on the receiving end of harshly explotative tentacle of globalization.

# Quality tends to suffer. Why? Part of it has to do with skill level, but I think the other part is that requirements are filtered through several layers of project managers and analysts.

And since they're exploited, the can't talk back to the boss. So they'll do what they're told whether it makes sense or not. One of the innovations that drove quality improvements was to empower any assembly-line worker to stop the line if a quality problem was detected. Offshoring has been optimized to balance two factors: cost to the buyer, and how much the middleman rakes off for the transaction. There also tends to be a big emphasis on schedule, since it's a big cost driver for the buyer. But in achieving these optimizations, the system has firewalled off any feedback path that could be used to improve product quality.

I've been working in IT jobs in the US for my whole career. The idea that there is such a thing as cheap, crappy, quality-insensitive commodity computing was always a beancounter's brainfart and nothing else.

Oh, and regarding your wish to see the IT workforce shrink: I was in aerospace during two of its brutal contractions. Don't assume that some kind of Darwinian selection by skill level takes place as they staff down. The selective advantage is to whoever can hang onto a job. That can be accomplished by skills, showmanship, ass-kissing or nepotism. Don't bet on it always being skills. Once we lost 90% of our software-engineering workforce, the quality of the survivors did not improve. The percentage of the workforce who had either family ties to senior management or incriminating videos did go up, though.

Re:Poor quality....

[Maxo-Texas]

I've worked with chinese and indians.

The chinese stop learning english long before they are good at it.

There are a lot less brilliant indians than their used to be. I assume the brilliant indians are mostly working in higher paying places now. The current crop are smart but average.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

100K for a developer vs. 20K for what seems to be an interchangeable developer is a no-brainer.

This has always amazed me. I've worked in the field for two decades, and it is not often that I find somebody worth 100k. In fact, in my market 70k is the norm, and you'd better know your crap dead to rights on your technology of choice.

In addition, the Chinese need to let their currency float. That would kill about 25% of their advantage right there. Now only if we had a president with balls looking out for the middle class...

I know.. doesn't exist.

Anyway, since they seem to have a problem making cough syrup or dog food ingredients without poisoning it (or even toys without lead), it really makes me wonder what's in the code.

I've got a few buddies, most of whom are electrical engineering DROPOUTS who are recoding and repairing multiple projects that were previously "outsourced" for big bucks at Fortune 50 companies.

Re:Poor quality....

[billcopc]

That's because history has proven that any idiot can be President, regardless of age. Perhaps more accurately, we've seen that no matter how hard one tries to do good, half the country will disagree. We might as well have a wheel of fortune that is spun every time a decision needs to be made on national affairs.

Anyway back to the topic, I've met some people who are natural leaders and can lead a company to riches from their teen years. I've also met people who think they're leaders, but they're really just glorified assholes, sadly these are the predominant species. Then you've got people who are neither leaders nor assholes, they just got promoted into the wrong job and are stuck in bureaucracy.

If this young guy is doing good, more power to him! The fact that he's featured in a press article casts a bit of doubt on his character though, at least in my books. Real hard workers don't have time to whore out for attention. If this dude is as good as we're told, he should be contracting his services to other outfits, reaping the big bucks and streamlining global I.T., but he's not. I say fire him, blow up the building, and repatriate the jobs back home... just my random opinion :)

Re:Poor quality....

[garlicbready]

At the end of the day you get what you pay for, cheap but cheerful
you pay cheap you get cheap

I have some experience myself working with offshore teams (Indian instead of Chinese) half of the team of which I'm a part is offshore. Also we have to deal with other technical teams on a regular basis which are also part onshore / part offshore (in a support capacity not programming) Our role is sort mini-project management (low paid work, which is a cross between project management and a call center, usually for the preparation of quotes for individual PC's / Servers etc, but we typically end up getting involved with things far above our station on a regular basis

Part of the problem can be the language barrier you see you'll usually get individuals with skills in communication (such as call center staff who need to have good English) or individuals with skills in a technical role (such as server Support) But it can be quite hard to find someone who has skills in both areas (technical and can speak English fairly well) this is quite rare. This puts added pressure on the onshore staff that are still remaining to compensate, especially when it comes down to someone who is speaking very fast in a heavy accent, trying to describe some technical problem about Active Directory in half English. This leaves the on-shore guys trying to do double the work they did originally with the missing staff (some of the on-shore staff have already left at our place simply because of the added pressure) The best you can do to get around this is to use something like MS Communicator, or some form of IM which at least cuts out the heavy accent

Another problem is that part of the mentality within these offshore areas is to do exactly what your told to do.
in some ways this is good, in others bad.
Somewhat similar to a machine type mentality, "we follow the process exactly as it's written with no room for flexibility"
you can of course tell them to do something different, but this again still takes time to act as interpreter from an onshore perspective
again this puts added pressure on the remaining onshore teams to compensate when something unexpected comes along which they can't deal with

The above point also leads in some cases to a lack of technical vetting, and experience with the way things such as email accounts are configured within the company. The onshore staff who usually know what they're doing can usually pick up on something when someone asks them to setup something that doesn't smell quite right but for offshore individuals this isn't always the case, who usually take the approach, do it anyway fix it later

One example of this was a test distribution list that was setup recently on the email system, with the number of people working within the company (we're talking above several thousand here, we have several companies tied into the same network via domains) you need to be careful about allowing these sorts of lists to feed into higher level lists that include everyone everywhere. (usually if you do have such a list, it's setup in such a way so that only certain individuals can send to it) Needles to say a new "test" distribution list was created by one of the offshore team, at which point some moronic project manager decided to send a "test" email which then went to everyone's mailbox at the same time This however was not the problem, the problem was when several users decided to hit "Reply-All" which of course sent the reply to all users everywhere and these replies where then replied to with messages such as "should I be on this list?" The end result was that the outlook servers ground to a complete and utter halt, with the sheer volume of crap flying around on the system

Meanwhile once the two onshore employees that had been replaced heard about this, they basically laughed they're asses off

One last final comment, another trick they do here over in the UK is to bring the offshore guys onshore, but then still pay them the going cheap r

Re:Poor quality....

[The Second Horseman]

You know what? It isn't quality, it's the fact that they're almost entirely disconnected from the kinds of IT environments you find in American or European companies, agencies, schools, etc. They're working on products to spec, and they've never even seen the environment that the products are working in. So they aren't going to go to their manager, or to the product manager and say "hey, guys, if we do it this way, it's not going to work for customers in XYZ industry - they're relying on a feature in the old version". Or they just don't get how much a product may have to scale - you might be supporting tens of thousands of users with a particular application in a large company or university. They just don't know, and there's no way a specification is going to cover everything required. With the right experience they'd "get it", but that just doesn't happen until it's too late. So a lot of the software doesn't work well, and you waste a huge amount of time working around limitations. I've seen products from vendors "redesigned" by offshore teams who end up having to learn the same painful lessons the original group learned years earlier, running the customer through another round of crap. You're also losing a huge amount of institutional memory in places where this happens, and it matters. If you're supporting customers who have been using a product for 5+ years, when you're planning a new version it's a good idea to know why it works the way it works today. That's often being lost.

Re:Poor quality....

[istewart]

It seems appropriate to chime in here with a recommendation for the writings of Kevin Carson. His in-progress work on organization theory discusses a lot of what you lay out here.

http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2008/04/organization-theory-outline-expanded.html

Re:Poor quality....

[abigor]

Too bad you posted as AC, since your comment is a good one. I'd also like to add that when Chinese management says "Yes, we can do that," it means nothing except that they've saved face in case they fail.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, nobody has anything but anecdotes to provide.

However, I'm an IT researcher (I can't go into any detail) and have been analyzing the services of a few of the largest Managed Service Providers in the world in my field.

I can't say their names, but we have a lab environment and we're running tests on their products nd services and doing direct comparisons between their services and their claims.

One is considered the "premier" service in the US, the other is the "premier" service in Europe and one is based out of India and is considered the "premier" service in asia.

The Indian firm is actually the largest both by revenue and by number of customers using the service. We presumed that this would mean they have a solid understanding of what they do.

The results from Indian firm is horrible.

And by horrible, I mean laughably horrible.

They're sending us reports using a not-entirely-functional EVALUATION version of the commercial software which their US counterpart uses (developed by a US company). Presumably this would be a service they provide for thousands of customers... But they're using crippleware to send out definitive reports to customers and trying to pass it off as comprehensive. The fact is that they're likely not paying for the crippleware, since this particular crippleware is NOT LICENSED for commercial use.

In our examinations, their event detection is non-existent and the actual appliances they sent us to do the detection work just keep crashing.

They wanted someone to sit and babysit them at the datacenter all through the testing. Apparently this is a normal practice of theirs to do the "watch-notice-reboot" on a daily basis. They seemed shocked we were unwilling to park someone at the datacenter overnight to babysit the testing of supposedly "critical infrastructure gear".

In another of our results, we ran 50-some tests. A good score might be their giving 30-35 results, which is what we expected.

The US firm did well gave 32 results, the European firm did exceptionally well finding 39. The Indian firm discovered 4 of them (holy crap?!?!).

I was casually glancing over the logs of the servers (as a bored system admin in the test company might be doing) and noticed 3 of the events just from a cursory peek, so the fact that their software found only FOUR...

We actually showed them the results, showed them the tests and then let them reconfigure and try again... assuming it was a misconfiguration or some silly error.

The second time around they only discovered TWO of the events. (they did substantially worse, after seeing the cheat-sheet)

Woah.

On the other hand, the Indian firm's rates are on the order of 10-20 TIMES less expensive. You get what you pay for.

I'm sad to report that a massive number Asian (mostly Chinese and Indian) clients are using this service with apparently no idea how absolutely awful they are at it.

But how would they find out? While this company is allowed to advertise in China, their *actually effective* counterparts from the US and Europe are not.

Scary.

Sad.

Just an anecdote.

This isn't to cast a dispersion on outsourcing. Frankly, my opinion was pretty balanced before we ran into this testing scenario very recently... but it makes me go HMMMMMMM....

Re:Poor quality....

[Enahs]

The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!

Considering the level of outsourcing and the number of companies wishing to rid themselves of the United States altogether in favor of the growing BRIC market, I'm guessing that if you don't leave you'll be a subsistence farmer, like the rest of us.

Re:Poor quality....

[Fulcrum of Evil]

A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever.

Well yeah, we expect our government to have our back instead of selling us out. It isn't entitlement, just the desire to have the same deal as our parents' generation.

1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar.

Aren't you the racist. Immigrants from poor countries are a: used to a lower standard of living and b: generally less educated, so they take what they can get (to start). Poor people here understand the value of a dollar too.

People complain about Dell outsourcing their call centres, which leads to lousy service. Guess what, I've called cable companies and cellphone companies, talked to their Canadian/American employees, and wondered how these people remember to breathe, let alone use their computers.

At least you can understand them when they tell you something stupid and irrelevant. Neither anecdote really proves anything, aside from the fact that Dell trashed their support so they could spend less doing it.

You hear stories about how foreign outsourcers screw up and run over budget, used as an example of why outsourcing is bad, but how many companies, governments, and so on in the 'enlightened west' run over budget and take twice as long?

it's all about requirements. When you have an outsourcing gig governed by a contract and some requirements, it's harder to do right than when you can just call up the customer and expand on a req. without dealing with a change request. Projects fail for mostly the same reasons - poor requirements and scope creep - outsourcing just exacerbates the first one.

Re:Poor quality....

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Needles to say a new "test" distribution list was created by one of the offshore team, at which point some moronic project manager decided to send a "test" email which then went to everyone's mailbox at the same time This however was not the problem, the problem was when several users decided to hit "Reply-All" which of course sent the reply to all users everywhere and these replies where then replied to with messages such as "should I be on this list?" The end result was that the outlook servers ground to a complete and utter halt, with the sheer volume of crap flying around on the system

I remember hearing about this at MS (first large place I worked). I would assume that any company of any size has had this happen once. Hopefully, twice never comes.

Re:Poor quality....

[pkphilip]

I have been involved in many outsourced IT projects in various roles from developer to project manager.

Many outsourced projects succeed quite well, but there are many which fail catastrophically. There are several reasons for why a project either fails or succeeds and the number one reason is the quality of management.

The problem arises because many firms are not equipped to deal with the challenges of managing a project outsourced to a vendor residing in another part of the world. They assume that an offshore project can be managed exactly the way a project done by an internal team is managed.

But this is far from true.

The way one approaches a offshore project must necessarily be different from the way one approaches work done internally. This applies to IT projects, manufacturing, consulting.. whatever.

Because many firms do not seem to understand that they need to adopt a different style for managing offshore work, they find that their offshore projects start to fail - and since they had success with their internal team before, they extrapolate this to mean that the outsourcing vendor is completely at fault for the projects failing - or perhaps it is because of the vendor's nationality and background.

Some rules for managing offshore work:

a) Be prepared to spend a lot more time managing the work. Your vendor does NOT know your business - you do. So it is necessary for you to micro-manage the work done by the vendor's team until they have an understanding of what you want done. In the initial stages of starting a project, this will involve traveling across to the vendor's office and sitting with them to establish the requirements, designing screens, helping in the design of the architecture, the database etc.

As the vendor gets more comfortable with your style of work, your requirements etc, they will be able to deliver work without too much involvement from you - and then you can step back and reduce your involvement.

b) Be prepared to review work often - at least once in every 3 to 5 days. This will involve doing code reviews, reviewing the database design, reviewing the progress of work on each module etc.

c) Establish rules for how releases are made - how often are *complete* releases issued, how are hot patches released, how is the QA handled for each of these. It is particularly important in the initial stages of the project to receive deliveries at least once in every 2 weeks or so - this allows you to take any corrective steps early steps early when the pressure on you is low rather than right at the end when project deadlines are right around the corner.

d) You need to decide internally as to how long you are willing to wait till ANY vendor is able to deliver to the standards that you expect. If despite a lot of work, the vendor is not showing any improvement, then you should consider changing your vendor.

e) Insist on receiving code for everything done at least once a week. Review *ALL* code initially. If you notice *ANYTHING* which is not exactly like you want it, insist on it being fixed ASAP. Do this a few times and your team will realize exactly what you need.

(a), (b), (c) and (d) implies is that you need an onshore Project Leader.

f) Do QA internally. Anything which is delivered from your vendor must run through a set of exhaustive QC rounds internally. So you need a QA team internally.

g) Setup tools which you can access and which the team can use for project management, QA and bug tracking, document management etc. Use these tools well and use them often.

If you make the mistake of assuming that your vendor understands your culture, working style, domain, team and expectations thoroughly right at the onset of a relationship with them, then you are in for a big disappointment.

To establish a good working relationship with a vendor, the company outsourcing the work must spend a lot of time to train the vendor.

If you aren't willing to go through this effort, then please do not consider outsourcing.

Re:Poor quality....

[rastoboy29]

If you really love it, you are probably also very good at it, and will not likely ever be at a loss for work (barring a major depression or some other catastrophe).

But that is a good reason to save your pennies.

But I think there have been some studies that have shown that the cream of the crop in an industry doesn't suffer during hard times, it's the average to poor performers who struggle to find work.

Which is why I find your thoughts intriguing.  If I'm right and you're right, a good strong recession in IT might be just what we seriously committed types need to actually help gaurantee our long term employability.

Re:Poor quality....

[XNormal]

> ... maybe this is why quality is not so great in offshore products

I don't find the quality of most "onshore" development that great either. Don't compare offshore projects with shrink-wrapped software. Compare them with the typical in-house or outsourced project and you'll see they suck about equally.

Re:Poor quality....

[HungWeiLo]

There is a great dearth of management in China right now. If you even resemble European or American and tell them you have an MBA from any school that has an English or European name, you write your own ticket.

Re:Poor quality....

[skrolle2]

If you're good, you don't have to worry about being outsourced, you will still have work to do. There will always be a need for local IT talent. There is a tremendous value in having developers close to your office and close to your market, that understands the domain and can contribute above and beyond what you can write down in a specification.

As for the reason to outsource... I've yet to see a successful outsourcing up close, the projects I've seen always tended to drag out much longer than needed and consume lots of local resources to manage it.

I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location. Sure, the outsourced workers were 10 times cheaper but the whole thing ended up more costly because outsourcing still needs a lot of local resources.

I'm sure there are successful stories of outsourcing, I've yet to see one example up close, so I'm not worrying about my own job even though I've been outsourced once. :-)

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

I was reading Sentry21's comment, I'm 100% sure that, for a while, it was rated with a score of 4 on insightful.

Because I have the default post abbreviation setting, if it wasn't a 4, I wouldn't stumble on it at all.

It's sad that after a while when I refreshed my browser, it's rated a 2 now.

Personally, I feel that his/her comment is rather objective and insightful. I work for a large global tech company in the Bay Area, which as you know, have a great diversity in its workforce, and have big presences in countries like India and China, so I deal with many different people and I can see Sentry21's points.

As a matter of the fact, I mean, I would think many who work in the Valley could objectively see that too.

It's just very disappointing that, when someone is saying something that is fairly objective but not what the majority prefer/agree, gets rated down.

Re:Poor quality....

[skrolle2]

Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. That's because you look at the job with your eyes and your preconceptions. You have to look at it with the eyes of someone from the outsourcing country. What are their job options? Low-paid farming or factory work? There's usually none or very little service industry, and along comes a company from the rich west, they build a relatively fancy office with air condition and office chairs and desks and computers and internet. And if that wasn't enough, they announce that they're gonna PAY you for being in those shiny offices and work. You'll get PAID for using office equipment that is much better than what you could possibly afford to buy for yourself. And you'll even get paid better than any job offered by a local employer.

So if you have the skillset for that job, you would work VERY HARD to keep it, to prove that you're good enough to stay, because the alternatives are so much worse. But for us in the western world, if we lose our IT job, there's lots and lots of similar jobs, or we could move to another industry and still have a comfy workplace. We take it for granted.

On the flipside though, and this is something I learnt from Slashdot many years ago, is that those outsourced jobs also attract a lot of scammers since the company will typically hire a lot of people, fresh students etc, there's few ways of knowing if someone has the skills or not since there's no existing industry to get skilled employees from. And since the job is so comfortable compared to the local options, it's worth a shot to just land the job even though you are completely unqualified for it. It's also possible to use the language barrier and distance barrier to delay and obfuscate and cheat and mask the fact that you're totally unqualified.

There's a reason outsourced labour is cheap, the lack of established industry is one.

Re:Poor quality....

[bishopdante]

Ummm, well last time I heard that the filtering through project managers and analysts saved Microsoft money... Oh that's right, Vista is a revolution! It's like ridiculous. Who is to say that you can't write great software in China? Who is to say that you can't write shit software in the US? Y'know, I mean who is to say that good software is harder to write than bad software? Who is to say that all people are not individuals, and that they can be tried out of context by a bunch of opinionated people with too much time on their hands online? I quote SPAF. SPAF was there early. Sure, he has grey hair, and I wouldn't trust him to jailbreak my iphone. I suspect that he was young... er... when he wrote these. Axiom 1: "The Usenet is not the real world. The Usenet usually does not even resemble the real world." Corollary 1: "Attempts to change the real world by altering the structure of the Usenet is an attempt to work sympathetic magic -- electronic voodoo." Corollary 2: "Arguing about the significance of newsgroup names and their relation to the way people really think is equivalent to arguing whether it is better to read tea leaves or chicken entrails to divine the future. Axiom 2: "Ability to type on a computer terminal is no guarantee of sanity, intelligence, or common sense." Corollary 3: "An infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of keyboards could produce something like Usenet." Corollary 4: "They could do a better job of it." Axiom 3: "Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) applies to Usenet." Corollary 5: "In an unmoderated newsgroup, no one can agree on what constitutes the 10%." Corollary 6: "Nothing guarantees that the 10% isn't crap, too." "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." "Don't sweat it -- it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes." "The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts." "Securing an environment of Windows platforms from abuse - external or internal - is akin to trying to install sprinklers in a fireworks factory where smoking on the job is permitted."

Re:Poor quality....

[djfake]

Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.

This is polemic. If the work ethic was so bad here, what would there be to out-source in the first place? No matter where you go you'll find those that work, and those that don't want to. I personally work extremely fast, knock out everything I need to do in a few hours and fuck around the rest of the day. Everyone knows it, but the work speaks for itself.

Higher focus on education? Greater motivation to make money? Do you actually work with people from "these" countries? I had a good friend from India that could do complex math in his head. All that translated to - was that he could do complex math in his head. So what.

Companies go off-shore for one reason - to earn more money. Don't kid yourself. It's always about $$$. Fat cats wants bigger bonus for making "strategic" decisions. My guess is that this 25yo will end up being one of them when he hits 50.

Re:Poor quality....

[CmdrGravy]

Quite true. It's often the case that the business side of businesses just do not understand how they contribute to the success or failure of software projects.

A good example is the place I am working at now, the development team are 18 months into a project and just entering the final stages of UAT. Throughout the entire process they have been fighting against almost total apathy from the business, they haven't read any of the specifications properly or understood exactly what the new system will actually ( many meetings etc booked on this subject had 0 attendance ) and the refuse to release staff for training. The directors, who commissioned the project, do nothing to make their staff provide useful feedback or basically co-operate at all and keep on talking about canning the project altogether and outsourcing it because they feel it's currently taking too long and too expensive.

Now that the system is imminently going to go live and the users have been forced to actually use it there is a constant stream of complaints that it doesn't do that thing they never bothered to mention to IT at any point in the past and is, apparently, actually absolutely crucial to their job.

If this company were to outsource the work elsewhere the outsourcing company would have an absolute field day because the company basically doesn't know what it wants and large parts of it don't seem to want it at all which is the perfect recipe for an outsourcing company to take a very long time producing stuff that doesn't work for a nice big fee.

Re:Poor quality....

[Tesen]

Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink. Getting people who are just not suited for the work into other jobs would probably be the best thing yet for code and system quality. Example pet peeves from my side of the house (systems) are developers who have no clue about things like code optimization and don't know the code they're working on inside and out.

That is an extremely arrogant comment; you're assuming that you are competent at what you do? What is your basis for that? And the fact that co-workers may idolize you (or atleast you think so) is no justification, nor is being rated by your boss who may not be a competent IT worker themselves! I was always looked at as God's gift to the silicon at previous jobs, I was way beyond my co-workers, I was the goto man by them. Then I landed another gig where sure, I am better than some, but I also have team members that far outclass me as a programmer and as an adaptable business developer. These are not arrogant type people either, they understand their background and they help guide me a lot. When they say I've improved, or pat me on the back for good work, I know I've done a good job. If you're measuring yourself on a limited bench mark, that your current co-workers are inferior to you, then you're an arrogant SOB that needs to find a challenge elsewhere to realize how little you think you know.

I used to be a systems guy (and after multiple companies as a contractor, a darn good one it turns out since a lot of those companies were willing to pay top dollars to retain me) but I moved in to programming (where I consider myself a developing developer... i.e newbie to mid level coder). I used to think like you, that the programmers I provided services for (Sys Admin/DBA etc etc role) were bad coders or just plain lazy. Now I understand and have for over the last year, that project deadlines often hamper our code optimizing. Basically, if the user is happy with the system response, then we are. Any possible system disruption should of been sorted out in a development environment and then in a test environment (where QA is meant to verify your project works and causes no issues). If in production, it appears said system is causing issues, then we fix it and we analyze why it caused said issue.

The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!

Yet you are also saying that a part of you wants to see the US IT Workforce shrink... oh yeah, as long as it is not you... gotcha. Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but do you know how much of an ass those comments make you?

Tes

Re:Poor quality....

[expatriot]

The company I work at does a lot of high-level design and testing and has both outsourcing and a large number of non-US or UK workers at branches in US and UK.
The Indian "guest" workers I know personally are at the top of their field but, because they are not in India, they are getting salaries to match.
Projects that are completely outsourced to India do not do as well as internal projects.
To me this points to (local) management being more of a problem than skill levels.
The biggest problem with outsourcing is poor specification (and perhaps an irrational expectation that the poor spec will somehow be transformed into the right spect on site).
The combination of "Western" managers and local employees seems to be improving the situation.

Re:Poor quality....

[Norwell Bob]

they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them. Wow, is that the American Dream? And here I was all this time, thinking that the American Dream meant that any American citizen could succeed and thrive through hard work, perseverance, and honesty. What a fool I've been. Welfare line, here I come!

Re:Poor quality....

[poot_rootbeer]

Yes, I do want my programs to "work great", not "just work".

And it's not just the developers that want this for reasons of pride!

EVERY CLIENT would prefer, all else being equal, to have software that works great than software that just barely meets their needs. Unfortunately, clients usually don't discover how poorly their needs are being met until well after the costs of software acquisition have been sunk.

Re:Poor quality....

[poot_rootbeer]

A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever.

Is this something that has been empirically observed, or is it just a stereotype you've cultivated anecdotally?

The average salary for a Sr. Software Engineer in the US is around $90k according to PayScale.com. Not bad, that's more than I make. In India, however, the wage is about 580,000 rupees, or around $13,500.

1. Is the Indian figure for "Senior Software Engineer", as well?
2. Are the skill sets and duties of a "Senior Software Engineer" comparable in both countries? (IT job titles, you will find, are often not very well-defined, even within a single geographic market.)

You could pay someone in India pretty well by Indian standards and still save a ton of money by American standards.

Assuming, as bean-counters too often do, that the work produced by the $90K American and by the $14K Indian will be equivalent in value to the American company. And there are plenty of reasons not rooted in racism or irrational xenophobia that would refute that assumption.

The fact is that while a good education makes a big difference, the real question of how good someone is depends on how well they learn and how open-minded they are

I don't disagree with this; however, it has been my non-empirical experience that the culture of learning in the United States does put a greater emphasis on open-mindedness, innovation, and exploration than do the learning cultures of other countries currently exporting programming talent.

If they're taught Java in an American university and O'Caml in an Indian university, the American is going to have a better immediate skillset

*sigh* A university education is not meant to be vocational training.

American universities can pump out idiots just as fast as Indian universities do, they just do it for a much higher price.

Maybe so. But a hiring manager stands a better chance of accurately evaluating whether a new grad would be a valuable contributor to their organization when he's sitting across a conference room table and speaking the same American English dialect as the candidate, as opposed to being a nameless resource listed on page five of a project bid document that's being discussed in an international teleconference, represented by a team lead who speaks with a thick accent.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

wonderful post, there are some things I want to comment on:

Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why my opinion is that a high unemployment rate sustained for a bunch of years builds this into society: it's hard to get a job, when you get it you don't want to lose it. If you think it will take you 2 or 3 months to get a job, then you probably are not so afraid of losing it...now if it took you a year or two... (*cough* 2002 *cough*)

With these facts in mind, what's next? This is a globalized world. The worst thing about globalization is not going global.

This is one possible answer:

1. work offshore gets done cheaper
2. companies start hiring offshore services
3. offshore companies see a huge demand, they lack workers so they hire anybody regardless of skill
4. unqualified workers drive quality down
5. bad quality drives companies away, not everybody likes offshore services that much anymore
6. offshore companies learn their lesson, they want qualified workers now, but they can't find them

*magic steps below*

7. specialized and qualified workers now unemployed in their homeland realize jobs are in another country
8. demand in the other country is HUGE.
9. worker buys ticket, and relocates.

This country has been created by immigrants, I find very often that the idea of emigrating is alien to a lot of people.
People tend to think in a categorical way about offshore demand. "oh my god, all the jobs are going to India, if I want to keep doing what I do, I'll have to go to India". There are other places where demand will still be higher than here, that are NOT India. You can probably move to another country with a better situation in your industry. Even though globalization gravitates towards countries that specialize in one area, it's not going to happen overnight...it'll be okay.

if you specialize on something, and there's no more demand for that in your country, you either switch professions, or go where the jobs are at.

I'm not a project manager, and don't want to live in a country that can't do anything other than manage projects. Great! that's the first step.

This is especially hazy in the enterprise software realm, where you have to build something that "just works", not "works great." Well, as a programmer I can tell you that, for the most part, I think either it's in you or not. The industry can be shitty, but when I code something I take it personal and I do my absolute best each and every time, even if it's something small.

The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career! I hear you...same here. I plan on moving in pursuit of what I love doing as long as it's not a country with HUGE cultural differences. If all jobs go to, say, marrakesh, I'll just do something else.

I think satisfaction comes from seeing that you are successful at what you do, no matter what that is.

By the way, I thought I'd provide some details to give readers some perspective on my post.

I'm 30yrs old, married, don't have kids, and lived and worked in 3 countries. So when I say "just move" I realize it could be a lot harder if you have kids, or if your spouse doesn't want to, etc.

Re:Poor quality....

[alexandreracine]

That's because history has proven that any idiot can be President Are you refering to someone currently in office?

Re:Poor quality....

[Austerity Empowers]

I work as an internal designer in parallel to very many offshore groups. That said, I stay as far away from them as possible. Why? They're mismanaged, and have no real long term interest in our company.

The would be supervisors are often very young and have no actual design experience. They know textbook stuff (that is to say: they're rapidly forgetting it), but are pressured to deliver fast/cheap hardware. They choose offshore developers based on lowest bid, the offshore companies know that next year they'll again have to be the low bidder. There's very little incentive for them to worry about the quality of their platform. Further, during development, a lot of corners are cut, and the american supervisor usually doesn't do it intelligently (due to lack of experience, youthful exuberance and his own management demands). In the end, we get something that sorta works, as long as customers use it exactly the way we think they should.

Work ethic is notional, I have not seen any evidence that offshore workers work harder or smarter, just longer hours and are easier for us to badger around. Local workers will refuse to work weekends, or at least charge karma against management for doing it. Foreign workers not so much. That said, we haven't seen a greater amount of work get done.

Finally, because of a large time difference and because of language differences they have no real way to become better. They can't ask many questions (and get good answers), so they do what's on paper and only question the most egregious stupidity.

If they started their own companies, I have no doubt that they'd soon be competitive with US based companies in terms of product quality. But as long as they're contracted workers, I doubt it'll change.

The only way to get higher quality and more technically trained people is to do the work in the US (or your home country of choice). Otherwise students seeking careers will see a shady and unprofitable future and avoid the career. Smart engineers could also have been good doctors or lawyers, the careers aren't that far apart at least in the beginning.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect we won't be hearing much from all those hard-working American sys admins, net admins, and programmers who don't surf the web while they are at work.

By the way, is this your day off?

Re:Poor quality....

[Mongoose Disciple]

And there are plenty of reasons not rooted in racism or irrational xenophobia that would refute that assumption.

I agree. Not the least of these is that it's hard to do such a great job writing a design or requirements that a team half the world away (and, generally, sleeping while you're working and vice versa) can put in a whole productive day without needing to ask any questions. If your offsite team does do this, possibly you did write a great design, but more likely they've made some assumptions that aren't correct about how your business works or what the needs of the users are.

Re:Poor quality....

[Lunch2000]

One of the recurring issues I've seen in American attitudes towards offshoring and immigrants smacks largely of racism and racial superiority. A lot of people, sadly, seem to have a sense of entitlement, a sense that they deserve the jobs or have somehow earned them through no action whatsoever. You know..I see this argument a lot about America entitlement to jobs...and here is what I have to say. If someone wants to come to this country and become a citizen and pay taxes, let them. Let them become part of our economy and culture. Diversity can only help us. Where I have a problem is when
a company that exists in America whose success rests mainly on the largess of the infrastructure that *MY* tax dollars maintain; then yeah, I do feel Americans are entitled to jobs from that company. Many large corporations in the US rely on major tax breaks from the gov. This means that my taxes make up the difference. In short while you may think I am not entitled to *jobs* , I don't think someone in India is entitled to *my tax dollars*, because to some extent this is what happens when a company outsources. Think about that next time you trot out the argument that "Americans are entitled". Given that our taxes help drive and maintain many of the economic giants in our country can you blame us if we would like to keep the jobs that those companies generate?

Re:Poor quality....

[tsotha]

I've seen projects where a local 3-man team of developers outperformed 20- or 40-man teams in the outsourcing location.

Yep. Seen it myself. There's this funny, destructive cycle that sometimes happens with medium to large sized companies. There's an in-house team that works reasonably well, but management sees a way to cut costs by getting rid of all those programming prima donnas. So they make the in-house guys train the people that are going to replace them, and eventually everything gets moved offshore.

But then management realizes they've lost a lot of control over how things are done. The offshoring company has lots of customers, and sometimes our company isn't the most important. We keep hearing things are on track, but when the code is actually delivered it's buggy as hell, and the codebase utterly unmaintainable, so verson two is even worse. Eventually some enterprising middle manager has a proposal:

Sure, the offshore contractor give us the best bang for our buck. But we're having trouble figuring out when things will actually be done, and this is wreaking havoc for sales and marketing. We've been outmaneuvered by our competition on more than one occasion when the offshore contractor didn't deliver. For this one important project, let's get somebody local, somebody who's in our timezone and sits a few cubicles down from my office. He won't be able to bullshit me about how the software is coming along, because he's right here in the office. He'll be an employee, and with our 401K program he'll have an incentive to stay instead of bailing and leaving a steaming pile of crap.

Now, he's just trying to ensure the gant chart for his pet project isn't entirely at the mercy of some outside company, but his plan works really well. So the manager starts taking on more responsibility, more new projects. He hires more people. Eventually the offshore projects are stranded and all the "important", meaning "all", projects are started in house. The department gets renamed "Applications Development".

Then this new manager fresh out of business school wonders "why are we paying local guys so much when we can hire people in the Phillipines for a tenth of their salary..."

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

I make my money cleaning up after outsourced projects, domestic or foreign outsource, makes no difference. A bunch of morons hire a bunch of clip artists and are shocked, shocked when they get skinned.

If they are lucky and the company is still functional they hire guys like me who come in
and salvage a project. Not so lucky
and they are killed off.

Earth to dumbass:
there is no "country that can't do anything other than manage projects". Management means you
know what you are doing, not the ability to
click a screen in some work schedule software, the clicking finger-poker does not manage squat, there must be a large pool of working people to create competent managers, statistically no one who does it well just starts "managing", they need experience in the technical field with well managed projects.

By sending the projects outside the institutions
will kill off the pool of workers and dry up the management source. No more managers, we will be a nation of hamburger flippers.

Re:Poor quality....

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is a total ass. The reverse race baiting is a lame argument.

Re:Poor quality....

[Shashvat]

I bet there is someone in China or India who will do the CEOs job for 40K - is management hoping on that train? Management isn't hoping on that train, but shareholders are hopping onto that train. Companies from India and China run by competent managers are doing very well in the global economy and their share prices are indicative of it. These companies are expanding organically and inorganically into markets that were previously dominated by American Companies. You only hear the big stuff (Lenovo/IBM, Tata/Jaguar, Arcelor/Mittal), but there's tons of small stuff happening under the radar. So yes, those overpaid managers that you're talking about are looking at pink slips too.

Re:Poor quality....

[esperz]

I am a professional software developer (about 15 years in the industry). About 3 years ago I came over to China to with an outsourcing company as the programming manager, helping them develop their internal and external service offering.

I can say from experience that there are many talented and motivated developers in China, they have the potential to do great work if they are given suitable direction. The biggest problem is their lack of good English skills, all the developers with good English skills are too expensive for outsourcing companies to hire. Also as the IT industry in China is not much more than 10 years old getting experienced people is very difficult/expensive. There also seems to be an inability to work through the creative process themselves, they need to be lead.

The upshot of this is, if you want to outsource to China you need to have a good project manager keeping track of the project. Any self-management options will only lead to delays. However with the ability to get two developers for the proce of 1 US developer if managed well, this can be a valuable resource.

Re:Poor quality....

[cavtroop]

I'd say thats the whole problem right there - if you want to outsource, you need very strong and very good project management - something that is really sorely lacking even in domestic projects.

With a domestic project, poor or sub-par project management can be overcome, but add in 12+ hour time delays, language and cultural barriers, and a sub-par project manager will get eaten alive, and the project will be doomed to fail. I've seen that dozens of time myself.

It doesn't help that most PMP's and other 'professional' project managers I've met and worked with aren't very useful. The handful of good PM's I've worked with are worth their weight in gold, though.

Re:Poor quality....

[billcopc]

Current, past... no one escapes my cynicism. What about that failed actor ?

US Presidency has little to do with wisdom, and everything to do with image. It's all just a song and dance.

Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[moderators_are_w*nke]

Its a tech site. Go visit businessweek or something. If you want my opinion, 25 years old is not experienced enough to do it because it's not experienced enough to realise its a bad idea.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiots are often converted to smarter idiots as they age, but I argue that age and experience aren't as important as many claim they are.

Both of our views should be taken with a grain of salt: I'm in my 20s, and I'm guessing you're not.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[Darkness404]

25 years old is not experienced enough to do it because it's not experienced enough to realise its a bad idea.

Youth is sometimes very good in technology. Think of it this way, while someone with experience usually does a better job with cleaner code, younger people tend to go more for speed. If you can accomplish the same job in either 10K lines of COBOL or say 3K lines in Python, which is better? For most older tech people they would say the one in COBOL because COBOL is faster then Python, however if the Python code can be written quicker, it might be better to go with Python. While it is true that most younger technology people produce sloppier code, many older ones don't adapt to more modern coding styles.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[MrMr]

You're probably right and, amusingly, like so many 20 year olds you presume that the old farts you're arguing with skipped from their teens straight to their forties and fifties without learning anything that you don't know already.

Now get off my lawn.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[baggins2001]

Well age can make a difference depending on the experiences you have had since between the time you are 20 and the time you are 35.
I go back to when I was a grad student. I received my undergrad at one school and went to another for graduate school. I taught a physic course for undergrads. When I first started teaching them, I thought what a bunch of morons, where did they get these people. There idiots they can barely tie there shoes, much less learn Maxwells equations. During the next 2 years I met some of the students off and on and realized that we all started pretty much like that. It was reason gained through experience that made the difference. During 2 years they went from idiots that can't tie their shoes to very intelligent physicists.
But there were also the ones that never learned from experience.
But in the mean time I have been complimented a number of times about my patience when teaching.
A bunch of idiots taught me that.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[baggins2001]

To the later no, I do much better than average.
To the former, It's like a weird form of dyslexia. I often go back and read stuff that I've written in a hurry or when I'm tired and say "What the hell was I saying?".
I shudder when I look at it.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing is that when I was 17 I was looking after the master elements for P&O's corporate identity, and many many more. Whizz kid you see. The company MD was 65, we'd chat it all over before the team started, he'd give it the old grey whistle test when we'd finished, and that would be that. When it came to a tech argument, and he decided to get his hands dirty, it all got very, very, very messy. He'd call the wrong shot. By the time I was 18 he knew not to argue. I had blue hair, and shredded combat trousers, and the clients loved it, especially to see me rip away at 3 9600s simultaneously... while feeding the drum scanner and outputting films on the imagesetter.

Tech moves so fast that the youth have as much experience with the tech as anybody else.

Show me the über mid 50s ruby on rails developer. Show me the pwning 60 year old python guru. And also, while you're at it, show me the 70 year old Photoshop zen master.

Trust me, the baldheads are dangerous. They think that they have... relevant experience.

These fucking baldheads tried to tell me that this cutting edge site I built for the creative industries... on behalf of the UK government... wouldn't work properly. But it did. They claimed that it wouldn't work on a single one of their machines. It worked on every single one in my building. I ran around checking. So I took a cab to see what on earth they were whining about, and refusing to sign off. They were telling stories of blank screens covered in code.

It turns out that they were running Windows NT4... Flash4... and splutter shock horror... IE5!!. Their IT manager (some youth) had left... 5 years ago. And hadn't handed over the admin passwords. So no updates for 5 years. This was 2007. They should have fired him anyway, but whatever.

We're talking 40 to 50 dell boxes, all crawling away on NT4. A whole office of them. How on earth they got the project is beyond me. They probably had a powerpoint presentation with nice meaty straplines like "creative" in it, followed by a "money goes up" graph.

They refused to believe that they were literally in the lowest 100th of a percent of online users. They're below mobile phones. It worked on my old blackberry for lord's sake. I showed them that. Did they believe me? No. some 26 year old with 12 years fulltime industry experience couldn't possibly know things they didn't. My explanation that most of the people surfing the site would at least be running windows XP fell on deaf ears. "Jargon" they huffed and puffed.

I fired them. You can't fire a client! Oh yes you can.

End point: years mean little in IT. Or a lot. In 2 years everything can, and will, change. The high level looks low level by next year. Assembler? You serious? Sorry, I'm a graphics guy, I'm sure that if you're making a PS3 game you'll need to use some until they get the devkit right. But you know what I mean.

Grey hairs in IT, well, count the grey at google, and you will find the baldspots in surprisingly small quanitities. And do google manage their IT OK? Sure they do. They didn't even finish college. Nor did I. I actually never started.

I wouldn't confuse China with some third world country, either. Sure, there's plenty of hooky dodginess available there. You should see some of the idiots charging £10,000 for a website in London.

Loads of Chinese, you see. Loads of 'em. Some of them are the best in the world. Some of them suck.

So here we are, it's a brave new world, a digital one. Few really know their onions. Most of them are quite young, and aren't given the respect they deserve.

So they buzz off to some company that will take them seriously.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[bishopdante]

Now, as for the youthful arrogance thing... I was hacking in ResEdit at the age of 10. I was playing gameboy aged 8, in 1988, and not being sad and nerdy. And I had Hundreds of Megahertz by the time I was 14. All to my very self in my bedroom. And I used them. All of them. Show me the guy with the time machine, born in 1965, who did these things at that age. See? That's what makes me different to the previous generation. Now the next kids, born today, who grow up with the iphone as being old hat... think about it. I'll be employing them as managers when I'm 47, and they're 20. Otherwise I'm dead in the water. Innit. Have you heard of age compression?

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[skrolle2]

When I was a kid, I was sometimes told off with the "I'm older than you so I know better" argument, and it would piss me off every single time. How can someone be right and not explain why they are right?!?

As you get older, you will come to realize that this argument is most often true. Age and experience counts for a lot.

However, on the flipside, as you get older, you forget that this argument is not always true, and sometimes the kids will actually be right even though your experience tells you they're not.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[MrMr]

Now, as for the youthful arrogance thing.
Your words, I'd go for 'forgiveable hormone imbalance driven exuberance'...
I was hacking in ResEdit at the age of 10
So did everybody then who wanted to fiddle with icons and menus on a Mac.

I think you should clarify this; Do you mean

a) the stuff you learnt at 8,10 or 14 is now totally irrelevant, and so you know nothing more than people who barely know how to switch on a computer twenty years later, but who have spent the same amount of time as you with web-5 programming?

or

b) you gained a lot of knowledge by playing with those now long-obsolete systems and your experience has an added value even when working on someting completely new?

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

by this, I mean computers were my childhood toys. I consider myself to be part of a generation which was first born in the mid 1970s, and is now prevalent. Those who played with computers as toys as children, rather than those who learned it formally as an extension of mathematics around secondary school.

Different breed. I tell you, we are.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[MrMr]

But if you're a different breed young padawan how come you assume that at the age of 47 you will be capable to manage the 20-year old, who will be the first of the always-on-line breed?

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[DrShasta]

"Age and experience counts for a lot."

I disagree. Age doesn't count for anything. The fact that my mom is older than I am doesn't mean I should be listening to her technology suggestions. I'm certainly not going to be adding pictures of kittens to the background of all my e-mails just because she is older and wiser.

Experience, on the other hand, is *worth* a lot. It doesn't *count* for a lot, though. You see, my dad has a lot of experience with lawnmowers, because he has been mowing his own lawn for 30-some years. If I were to get into some kind of argument with him about how I should mow my lawn, then I might listen to what he has to say, but in the end, he still has to provide me with a good reason why he thinks what he thinks. Experience itself doesn't count for anything unless that experience has led to good reasoning and such reasoning can be transferred to the other person. Your experiences in life will never transfer to anyone else unless you learn how to teach.

Re:Why are you asking management questions on /.?

[Anonymous Coward]

They tied up their time as well as money to bring you onboard, and you left them in the lurch because you couldn't be bothered to make documents that are usable when interpreted using the easiest version of HTML? When I make a mistake I want and need to fix it. I'd be ashamed to release shitty work just because I don't think many people will be able to tell right away. If this is your profession take some damn pride in it.

Pffft.

[Hawthorne01]

When I was 25, I was also a manager.

Ok, so it was the night manager at the local Taco Bell, but that's the same thing, right?

Re:Pffft.

[Anne Thwacks]

Taco Bell needs more highly skilled managers than some of the off-shore outfits, because its easier for irate customers to trash the place.

Re:Pffft.

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be the same thing if you convinced a western company to outsource software development to your taco assembly team.

Judging by the quality I think a lot of the offshoring compaies are indeed in the taco business.

Re:Pffft.

[scosco62]

When I was 25, I was also a manager. Ok, so it was the night manager at the local Taco Bell, but that's the same thing, right? Did you learn Spanish on the bus?

Re:Pffft.

[kjs3]

Funny. The first manager position I was ever hiring manager for was for a software development project manager. This was back when we actually ran ads in the paper for such things. A Pizza Hut manager applied and proceeded to call me every day for two weeks to try and convince me that "management is just management" and since he was such a fantastic manager, all those pesky technical details would just fall into place. He was dead serious. I give him an A for effort, but after two weeks I had to threaten him with a restraining order to get him to stop calling.

Keep in mind

[TubeSteak]

Learning the Chinese language isn't enough.
You have to learn the culture too.

The good news is that being white is a free status booster.
The bad news is that being dark skinned means the exact opposite.

Re:Keep in mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the cats in America just don't taste right without a lot of ketchup.

Re:Keep in mind

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if you actually worked for a Chinese company.
But those of us who have been working where I do for the last five years in a Chinese company find this not to be true. We have found that they are equally discriminating against whites, blacks and hispanics.
Learning the culture means accepting the fact that they are going to be dickheads.
"Sorry but you misunderstood this is a cultural difference".
It doesn't happen very often but it has repeated itself enough that we get the picture. For the most part we just ignore it until you can't and then you leave.

Re:Keep in mind

[TerranFury]

Actually, they're quite tasty as General Tso's...

*bump* *set* *spike*

Re:Keep in mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Also that you would be supporting an oppressive government by doing this.

I Wonder

[jav1231]

Are these some of the same jobs helping expand China's "all seeing eye?" (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/18/1630208P

Hey, as long as we're making money who cares, right? Fuck China in their all-seeing-outsourcing-expanding asses!

Re:I Wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you disagree with China's way of doing things doesn't mean everyone else has to. For every person who complains and complains about another country there's someone opposite that defends it, and neither site usually *really* understands how the actual people in China feel based on their history and their culture. Besides the last thing we want is for the comments in this news to become like the comments in 90% of the other news posts that mention China - it's all the same arguments, same counterarguments, and nobody really does anything with it anyway (apologies due to all those who do - both of you).

Re:I Wonder

[jav1231]

Just because you disagree with China's way of doing things doesn't mean everyone else has to. True. But I have the luxury of being right. A curse, at times but it's my burden.

Why only offshore?

[www.sorehands.com]

Much of recent software quality is CRAP! That is partly because these "kids" don't get a strong foundation in the basics, ie. assembler, C, and hardware. Also it is because people accept crap quality in software. Why write good solid software where it's ok to say "We'll fix it in the next patch?" I had the tech support from Sage, say that one of the new features in Act! is that it releases the resources that has allocated, but no longer needs. When I took C, I would have lost points points when I didn't free an unneeded allocation or close an open file.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is also probably caused by the ridiculous amount of overtime people do and people going on 4 or less hours of sleep. They appear to be and think they are working hard while producing shit quality code that takes even more time to fix.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Darkness404]

No the reason is hardware has improved enough to take over bad programming. Just look at Vista, it is one of the main highlights of this, it eats up RAM very quickly, wastes time in CPU cycles and inherits all the stupidities that MS did on DOS and previous versions of Windows. However, Vista, when computers with 4 gigs of RAM are common and even laptops have 2-3 GHZ multi-core CPUs, Vista will be classified as usable.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Metasquares]

You would have also lost points points for a double free :)

I agree. Knowledge of low-level languages and architecture will help you as a programmer, since you'll understand more of what is actually going on when your program executes. I think some algorithmic theory is also helpful. At the same time, however, there are high-level tools out there that will make your problems easier to solve, and it would be foolish to ignore them. (Whether languages such as C# and Java do this is debatable, but the principle still holds in general.)

Don't wait until someone teaches you these things to begin, though. As much as people like to give "kids" a rap, the most important thing you can do as a programmer is to start early and practice consistently. Good tools can't replace a lack of skill.

Re:Why only offshore?

[ErichTheRed]

This is actually a big pet peeve of mine in the systems world. Ever since the Internet made patching software super-easy, every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it. I've had big vendors tell me the same thing -- "Yep, we know about this bug. It's going to be fixed in the next service pack, due out next February." Some of them are real rookie bugs too, stuff like driver crashes due to memory access violations.

What's your solution though? There's no way universites are going to raise the barrier in their CS programs. I actually came into IT from the science field, so I'm not really well versed in what they teach. However, people like you have been complaining a lot lately that there's a lack of fundamentals. How do we improve the quality of CS graduates?

Re:Why only offshore?

[Darkness404]

every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it.

Many times though, some software with bugs is better then no software at all. Think of Linux for example, it really wasn't any better then GNU Hurd, but it came out first and it was adopted. In fact, some called the Hurd much better then Linux, but because it was out first it was adopted. Today, Linux is very stable and Hurd is not even a beta yet. Now granted, there are some times not to rush out software particularly if it is proprietary, (just look at Vista) and there is a replacement for it. But if it is open-source and needed, then release early, release often.

What's your solution though? There's no way universites are going to raise the barrier in their CS programs. I actually came into IT from the science field, so I'm not really well versed in what they teach. However, people like you have been complaining a lot lately that there's a lack of fundamentals. How do we improve the quality of CS graduates?

Make software with clean code. Make software free. When writing proprietary software it is easy to give in to temptations to write something that will compile and run but doesn't have the cleanest of code. And as no one is going to see the code, its no big deal right? With open source code both the program has to run and the code to be clean for it to be adopted well, (now, of course those working on the project will clean up source code, but if it is a mess to begin with, who will work on it?). Proprietary software encourages rushed-out-the-door projects, open-source doesn't.

Re:Why only offshore?

[drspliff]

I'm not sure if the level has been lowered or not, I've never taken a degree, masters or PhD although I know and have interviewed many that have; however I do find that the most interesting conversations I've had are with PhD students or those who've taken bachelors or masters degrees and have a genuine intellectual interest in tech.

I've also noticed many grad students grumbling about how their just doing it to get the piece of paper to back up their skills, while feeling that all the money has only gone to help people who are struggling on courses due to complete lack of interest; the same kind of people that do management courses for the career path etc.

I then get the same disinterested people interviewing for me who can't go into any depth about any subject covered in the masters degree they've just completed, who can't solve really basic real-world problems that directly apply to the stuff they've supposedly been taught.

Maybe 1 in 20 people are able to attack problems with the right mindset, the ones who if you ask a question they don't know will know the subject in-depth by the next time you ask them; basically the ones I want on my team.

Perhaps it's not a lowering of standards, but just a widening of appeal & larger pool of people - and you say these 19 of 20 are the people who are being outsourced to their lower-paid counterparts?

I'm not surprised...

Re:Why only offshore?

[Hojima]

I'm an EE major at UCF (which is considered to have an extremely good CS program) and I've had to take some classes with CS majors. From what I've seen on course catalogs, personal experience, and discussion, the CS majors know their stuff when they get out. Everyone starts out in C, gets to know assembly (I don't know about 16/32 bit, I just know they used to use HLA), has to take 3 high level math courses (generally calculus), and there are other prerequisites that have some people saying "screw it I'll just double major in math." Plus my roommate says that a lot are just ambitious and take courses like advanced matrix and linear algebra. To top it off, I just looked at the course catalog, and it turns out they have to know computer architecture. It seems to me that the problem lies with upper management, which usually consists of 'C' average douche bags that barely get in on a sports scholarship, then scrape by until they get a bachelors in business management (almost equivalent to an AA degree), and finally use family influence get into a company that pays them to jerk off and take three hours lunch breaks.

Re:Why only offshore?

[mini me]

Higher quality software costs exponentially more to create. The market has decided that it wants buggy but cheap software. Personally, I agree with the market. I could shell out $100,000 for a bug free copy of Act!, but I'd rather take my chances with a $100 copy and I'm sure you would too.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Anonymous Coward]

look at Vista, it is one of the main highlights of this, it eats up RAM very quickly

Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?

Re:Why only offshore?

[cayenne8]

"That is also probably caused by the ridiculous amount of overtime people do and people going on 4 or less hours of sleep. They appear to be and think they are working hard while producing shit quality code that takes even more time to fix."

Wow...where do YOU work at where it is that bad?? I've never seen that type of situation with all the unpaid OT...but, I guess it is out there somewhere. Thing is...no one is forcing you to work there!! Go get a better job elsewhere.

Better yet...incorporate yourself, and work c2c 1099.....they will think twice about working you OT, and if they do need you, you get paid for it.

I will certainly never work for free ever again....

Re:Why only offshore?

[mikael]

It's more because of the tight deadlines and underbidding for contracts that is the cause.

I worked in company had that philosophy to code programming. The whole project was planned to a timetable, with each module give two to four weeks to complete. There was a gold bonus if the project was completed before the deadline with no killer bugs, and a silver bonus if the project was completed by the deadline with no killer bugs.
Any other bugs would be fixed during the handover stage.

If a module wasn't completed exactly to specification by that milestone, then we were just to move onto the next module. Only serious killer bugs were to be placed on the buglist.

As far as inhouse IT goes, it's more important to have some piece of software up and running to generate useful results that it is to have perfectly modular software that can be reused by changing the a couple of inherited classes.

In the long-run taking shortcuts will lead to an evolutionary dead-end, but by that time, Microsoft will probably have come out with an entirely new set of API's anyway. And a good programmer who writes bug-free modular code will probably end up doing himself out of the job because as time goes by, there will be less code that needs to changed or upgraded per job request. A sloppy programmer will end up having the work snowballing up in front of themselves.

Re:Why only offshore?

[stephanruby]

This is actually a big pet peeve of mine in the systems world. Ever since the Internet made patching software super-easy, every vendor on the planet has been rushing software out the door with major bugs in it.

This is nothing new. Ever since the video camcorder became so affordable, that almost any teenager could get one -- the professional camera man cringed. Ever since MS Access came out for $50 a pop and just about any office administrator were given the role of being the unofficial "database administrator" -- and yet just stuffed all their data into just one large table -- all the professional database designers/admins moaned. The same went for Word Processing or even Type Setting, there used to be a time when one needed an expensive professional Word Processing consultant just to recommend, select, install, train, troubleshoot, make the thing print, and/or make sense of the numerous Word Processing packages that came before Word Perfect and Word.

The reality is that this is the way the world works. It ebbs and flows. It evolves. It innovates, then it consolidates. It turns your work into a commodity. And soon enough, your non-technical kid sister can do the same work you used to do ten years ago, only in about a fraction of the time, and in the most sloppily fashion imaginable.

If you want to do something about it, you can teach, you can write a technical book, you can create your own certification program, and/or you can help make the tools that will help the new script kiddies that are about to replace you. After all, those kiddies -- those newbies -- are coming. They're just step behind you. And when they end up getting your job, they're not going to get paid much.

Another option is simply to look for new opportunities, predict where the next waves are coming from, retrain yourself constantly, go into management, start a business, or simply do nothing and -- continue to bitch about how the World is going to hell -- at exactly the precise time you ended up mastering your own trade.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Darkness404]

Hmmm? Even though I think this is some attempt to get a +5 funny mod.... That still doesn't explain why it needs 1 Gig to run anything other then Home Basic, while Ubuntu (8.04) with more advanced 3D effects, more applications, and more drivers, ran just fine on my old Intel M 1.5 GHZ CPU, cheap Intel graphic card and 512 MB of RAM with 3-D effects, and Xubuntu (8.04) runs just fine on my desktop from 2002 that hasn't been upgraded.

Re:Why only offshore?

[ardle]

I've never seen that type of situation with all the unpaid OT... You'd be surprised at the number of IT workers that find themselves in that situation. A starter without much experience requires time to build:
- the understanding required to realise that they are being exploited (either through over-work, lack of training or a deliberately inefficient workflow being implemented in their workplace)
- the knowledge that will make another company want to hire them or allow them to work as an independent consultant
I noticed that you said that you will never work for free again, which suggests that you have been through some similar experience, as I have also (even as a contractor). I have always been willing to pay myself back time worked late on subsequent days (via shorter work days, longer breaks, etc. - nobody has given me grief doing it yet :-) but am aware that, in total, I have worked more hours than I have been paid. I'm getting better at avoiding the long days in the first place but, ironically, the only way you can guarantee this is to become familiar with code and practices in your workplace, which takes time in the first place ;-)
In programming work, the most important point-of-failure is in your head: if you can't understand a problem, you can't fix it, so can't reasonably expect to be paid. I haven't grudged an employer hours I have spent educating myself, only hours spent trying to understand bad code that would not have existed if the employer knew what they wanted in the first place (some poor sod had to code features before a design - or even proper requirements - were supplied, which leads to spaghetti code, copy-n-paste errors, etc., then I come along and I have to fix it in the process of adding another feature).

Re:Why only offshore?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Many times though, some software with bugs is better then no software at all. Think of Linux for example, it really wasn't any better then GNU Hurd, but it came out first and it was adopted. Did it ever reach 1.0? Seriously, it runs on one architecture and has unknown hardware support and the download page hasn't updated in 7 years - who in their right mind would use that? Linux started at about the same time, but had as its primary goal something functional, with little attention paid to ideology. That's probably why it's so popular.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

In the long-run taking shortcuts will lead to an evolutionary dead-end, but by that time, Microsoft will probably have come out with an entirely new set of API's anyway.

So what? MS isn't the only game in town, and anyway, even with MS stuff, you don't need to go use every new API the produce.

And a good programmer who writes bug-free modular code will probably end up doing himself out of the job because as time goes by, there will be less code that needs to changed or upgraded per job request. A sloppy programmer will end up having the work snowballing up in front of themselves.

Right. More likely, the crap programmer spends all his time fixing his broken code, while the good programmer goes and does new things.

Re:Why only offshore?

[potat0man]

Much of recent software quality is CRAP!

Yeah, I wish we could go back to Windows 3.1 when programmers were programmers and quality wasn't just a post on the wall.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Repossessed]

Sorry but, effectively?

If it was effective it wouldn't continue to do caching to the point that active application have to run off of page memory. And yes, Vista *does* do this, get a system with 1 gig (or half) of ram and boot vista, then take a look, the 'cache' will be using up memory even though the paging file is active. If it was done efficiently, where the cache give up allocation when needed, Vista would run just fine on a single gig of memory, somehow this simple fix never occurred to Microsoft though (or rather did, but was one of a long list of useful features that was scrapped prior to the beta release).

Re:Why only offshore?

[squizzar]

But if you think about it that may be the correct behaviour for best performance. I agree Windows memory management is terrible, and often seems to do stupid things, but I think that the case for optimal performance is a little more complex than you mention.

An (horrific and oversimplified) example: I run a simulation with a very large dataset (in the order of hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of data), but it's in the background/not all the data is required at once. In the meantime I open and close firefox a few times. Now in your ideal, as much of my simulation data would remain in memory as possible, and firefox would be left out of the cache. However that won't lead to the optimum performance since firefox will be reloaded from disk each time which will be slower. In fact assuming all my RAM is used up by the simulation data, then some of it will have to page out to load firefox. It makes more sense to keep the firefox object code in RAM even after it has closed since it will respond faster if it is used again, and the simulation data was paged out anyway because there was not enough RAM, so no matter what it will have to be reloaded. It is admittedly a gamble, but I can see the case for paging out data that is incredibly rarely used in favour of having more memory available for a performance enhancing cache. This same behaviour is used on Linux and no doubt other systems.

That said I do agree that Windows seems to cling too much to its application cache, if you have several applications consuming very large amounts of memory and CPU time it seems that Windows is incapable of distributing the resources well. I have used Solaris systems that have had 6 or 7 simulations, each with gigabytes of data running simultaneously on a four processor machine. I only noticed that there was this much load when I went to run a simulation myself and it was quite slow. The responsiveness of other applications and the user interface was barely affected, something which I'd attribute to an operating system that does the right thing with memory and processor allocation.

Re:Why only offshore?

[toddestan]

Not this again. Vista does eat up RAM for application cache. This means it is effectively using the RAM you spent money on. Once the RAM is needed for more important things Vista will release whatever is required. Why have RAM if your OS doesn't use it?

On the other hand, it has to load all that data into ram. This is why Vista will thrash the disk so heavily when you boot it up on a system that has a lot of ram. You're right that it doesn't cost anything to have all that ram stuffed with data, but it does cost performance to get all that data there. As far as I can tell, it really doesn't take that long for any one application to open on a modern machine even without the cache, so why waste all that time and effort loading everything on the computer into ram just in case I might need it?

Re:Why only offshore?

[RincewindTVD]

Genuine question: "Deliberately inefficient"? How does that benefit management/money?

Re:Why only offshore?

[Repossessed]

While Linux does use caching, it also de allocates the cache if something else needs it, the big problem with Vista (as I said earlier) is that it tries to hold onto the cache even when active programs need the memory.

Re:Why only offshore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say it benefits managers, not management: if a manager can lower their manager's expectations, then they'll stay in their job for longer. Remember, when the job's done, there's nothing left for them to manage - and it's not as if they can actually do stuff ;-)

Of course, I wasn't totally sincere in my comments above but I have seen the behaviour and come to the conclusion that something like this must be going through the mind of someone who behaves like this (trying to make themselves or their team seem busy, even if tasks may be ridiculous or pointless).

I've seen it in coders, too - such people seek to generate maximal *volume* of code, rather than maintainability. If the whole codebase is dropped and they have to start again, well, that's what a job is for.

So, it doesn't benefit management (it's not efficient) and of course it doesn't benefit the company's profits (which, I presume, is what you meant by "money". But, from another perspective, it's distributing money more efficiently: where was that salary going to go? Why have employees when contractors are cheaper? That's more efficient, isn't it? You don't have to pay pensions for contractors, either, so you can report higher profits, which will encourage the pension funds hang on to their shares in your company, and maybe even buy more ;-)

Managing people is sooooo fun

[heroine]

Yes, managing people is everyone's goal in life. They get up in the morning and can't wait for another day of laying people off, interviewing people, assessing performance, allocating worthless raises, telling people they're not going to be able to pay their mortgage.

Have a feeling this guy either didn't have the mustard to get a job in U. Know. Where. or had another reason for being in China besides the career. There's no mention of what people are allowed to say on that "crystal clear connection" from the back of a cab, either.

Re:Managing people is sooooo fun

[justinlee37]

Yes, managing people is everyone's goal in life. They get up in the morning and can't wait for another day of laying people off, interviewing people, assessing performance, allocating worthless raises, telling people they're not going to be able to pay their mortgage.

Hey, just because you're not an asshole doesn't mean that isn't someone else's dream job. Stop acting so smug and self-important.

Re:Managing people is sooooo fun

[nauseum_dot]

Ever try to find a job @ 25 in Southern WI. I would guess that almost 80% of the people under the age of thirty have a B.S. in something or another. I have to give this guy credit for seeing an opportunity and taking it. Not many people are willing to leave there family for a year to teach English in China for $12,000 a year. I think think of a dozen managers here, who I have worked for, who don't cut the mustard, but companies are too afraid to let them go because the U.S. is so litigious.

Re:Managing people is sooooo fun

[Kjella]

Yes, managing people is everyone's goal in life. They get up in the morning and can't wait for another day of laying people off, interviewing people, assessing performance, allocating worthless raises, telling people they're not going to be able to pay their mortgage. Hmm let's try a rewrite of that for the slashdot stereotype:
"Yes, developing software is everyone's goal in life. They get up in the morning and can't wait for another day of writing meaningless code based on business PHBs that don't know what they want, recieving changed requirements, upcoming deadlines, fixing obscure bugs, taking angry support calls all while getting as little social interaction as at all possible."

Fair description? Probably not. A lot of people really do like to make a team good - in case you haven't noticed being team captain, officer, chairman or any other "management" position is usually quite sought after. You should think IT people were used to be a support system. Well, then realize that managers are a support system so that a large group of people can do something reasonably coherent. Why should an IT manager be any less proud of making his team delivering a kick-ass application than each coder that supplied the bits? Is working around all sorts of lame bugs and design in the code really that much more fulfilling or productive? Having a good manager can easily swing the productivity of a team more than any individual can manage, no matter how brilliant. Or to be more precise, a lousy manager can deteroriate a team's performance much more than any useless coder could. I think those accomplishments as well as the paycheck is quite enough, very few find the raw doing of their work that fulfilling. I certainly take my biggest inspiration from seeing my code doing something useful, not all the design/coding/testing etc. as such, they're means to an end and if the code fails to achieve that end it's no fun. I figure that's much the same with managers, dealing with team problems is no fun but if you can see the team's performance improve that's all the inspiration they need.

Work in China?

[SilverJets]

No thanks, I like my freedoms right where they are.

Re:Work in China?

[plasmacutter]

I assume you live in canada?

I'm american, and I liked my freedoms the way they were before 1998

Re:Work in China?

[sledge_hmmer]

I'm probably going to get burned for saying this, but as much as I fear for my freedoms while working in China, I would still do it.

The fact is, you can almost never get an idea of a culture and a country sitting outside it and reading human rights reports. Accept it or not, the facts on the ground can be a heck of lot more complicated and intriguing than any article or paper could ever capture.

So work in China? Sign me up, because at least it will allow me to be smug about my freedoms AFTER I have seen life from a Chinese perspective.

Re:Work in China?

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks, I like my freedoms right where they are. The bin.

CHeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeap shot! *slam dunk gesture*

Re:Work in China?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you live? Germany?
If it is in the US, WE HAVE NO FREEDOM WHATSOEVER! As our phones are tapped, the NSA reads our snail mail, the FBI reads our E-mail, the TSA strips and do cavity searches on us.
So, unless you like cavity searches, stop with your pathetic Red, White and Blue freedom fighter thing, because the whole World knows that whoever disagrees in the US ends up in Gitmo...

Re:Work in China?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like my freedoms the way they were before 1798.

Re:Work in China?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you live in canada?

I'm american, and I liked my freedoms the way they were before 1998 Yeah, Thanks allot Homeland Insecurity.

Re:Work in China?

[Anonymous Coward]

And "they" know who posts as AC on Slashdot, too.

Re:Work in China?

[SilverJets]

Haha, nice try. You know there is more to the world than just the U.S.A., right?

Re:Work in China?

[SilverJets]

I'm hardly smug about my freedoms and I don't need to live in China to know what its government is like.

Do you need live and work in North Korea to understand the government there?

Re:Work in China?

[fastest fascist]

Thanks, now we know why you're not work in in China. Obviously some people, such as the guy the article writes about, have different priorities.

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

The Chinese outsourcing market, at $1.7 billion last year, is growing at 38% a year, according to research by the Everest Group. This is creating opportunities for Westerners who want to go to China, learn the language, and help these Chinese offshore companies reach overseas markets.

So... the chinese are outsourcing to Westerners? Does that mean outsourcing has become recursive? Are there actually people working somewhere?

And, "Chinese offshore companies"? does that mean they operate on a boat?

Here's the story of one 25-year-old who started learning Mandarin on his plane ride over to China, three years ago

A 3 year long plane "ride"?

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope we won't get a stack overflow because of outsourcing recursivity.

So...

[BJH]

...the article says that what China lacks is senior people with managerial experience, and yet it's making a fuss over a 25-year-old ex-English teacher?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want to know is how a 25 year old is already an EX teacher.

Selling out?

[plasmacutter]

Not many people can say they directly contribute to the pillaging of peoples' employment opportunity for the enrichment of a nation with no labor or even human rights, but, as with all corruption, there is serious money to be made if you can ignore or more preferably kill off those annoying morals.

So basically this guy sold his soul to the devil in a manner worse than even the sleaziest of attorneys.

Re:Selling out?

[timmarhy]

what you think american's have more rights to a job than a chinese person, yet you are claiming the moral high ground? yeah right....

Re:Selling out?

[plasmacutter]

they have a right to THEIR jobs, which they have trained for and worked in for however many years before some sleaze bag in the corporate office handed down memos telling them they are terminated, BUT if they refuse to train their chinese replacements they will be denied severance pay and any other benefits.

That is the concrete moral highground.

Then there is the more abstract moral high ground, such as american investment giving rise to everything that makes the modern age modern, but I won't delve into that area.

Re:Selling out?

[timmarhy]

"they have a right to THEIR jobs"

No, they don't have a RIGHT to it. they have to keep on earning their value. if they can't provide something valuable to the company then someone else who can should get the job. this is exactly what is going to happen with the companies products in the market, i don't know what makes you think peoples jobs are insulated against this.

like so many other people today, you constantly think you have a right to things that you don't. sadly this dilutes real human rights like free speech etc.

"american investment giving rise to everything that makes the modern age modern"

what a load. their are many reasons america is so dominate right now, not the least of which is the fact they kept out of the world wars until the last minute. this meant they were the only ones with capital left to industrialise with later.

Re:Selling out?

[Maxo-Texas]

It is strongly in their interest to refused to train and/or mistrain their replacements.

If management really things saving money is such a great idea, they should be using some of the many fine indian managers who make about 1/300th what they do.

Or if the managers thing that working in a totalitarian or 3rd world country is so great, they should go work there (as the 25 year old is doing).

Re:Selling out?

[mikael]

In such companies, if you ever dare to learn anything beyond those skills that are currently required by your current job, you are treated with suspicion that you are looking for a better job in your spare time. So you can't win either with such a company.

Re:Selling out?

[timmarhy]

notice i didn't say a word about money, i talked about value.

most company's don't care if they pay you a high salary as long as your worth it. if they can get the same value out of someone else for 1/300th the price then they will and i can't say i'd blame them.

Re:Selling out?

[chord.wav]

Maybe he worked at Lockheed Martin before, you never know.

Re:Selling out?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

No, they don't have a RIGHT to it. they have to keep on earning their value. if they can't provide something valuable to the company then someone else who can should get the job. this is exactly what is going to happen with the companies products in the market, i don't know what makes you think peoples jobs are insulated against this.

This isn't about rights, it's about our best interest as a nation and preserving the advantages we've built up over the past 100 years; if you want to talk about it in terms of rights, then the US company has no right to reap the benefits of a US base to build on while screwing that company by pushing the actual work to whatever low wage country they can find. Companies exist for the benefit of the owners and for the benefit of the society that supports them. Stop benefiting either one and see how long you last.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

They let slipped the truth...

[Anonymous Coward]

FTA

Brian Keane, the CEO Dextrys Inc., a Wakefield, Mass., firm with software development centers in [B]Chain[/B].

Yes, you will have to working in chains.

I don't think we have any idea

[smchris]

My wife and I were unemployed about a year and a half ago and we decided to take several very decent classes on 21st century job hunting presented by our state job service. The thing is, it was mandatory networking/extroversion to introduce yourself in some detail each time. I'd say probably 1 in 20 was just back from teaching English on the Mainland (2), Taiwan (1) or Thailand (1). Who'da thunk, because how often are you free to survey a room full of the unemployed?

Note, however, that they were _back_ from those jobs looking for something else so that should hint that Asia wasn't paradise.

Re:I don't think we have any idea

[TerranFury]

I think people do it for the life experience, and not as a long-term career move.

Re:I don't think we have any idea

[hughk]

Teaching English as a foreign language in some far of part of the world doesn't pay that well but it is open to almost any graduate (a TOEFL type qualification is seen as a luxury rather than a requirement in many countries) and although many do it, the life is best suited to the younger person with no ties. Essentially you get board plus some minimal salary.

When was this article written?

[hengist]

lives in a high-rise apartment in Chengdu

As in, the Chengdu in Sichuan province that got hit by an earthquake a week ago?

Re:When was this article written?

[rafikki]

They mentioned in the article that he was 60 miles from the epicenter and had to sleep in the park for a few days afterwards, until the aftershocks subsided.

Re:When was this article written?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article was written during or after the quake. From TFA:

His office was about 60 miles away from the large 7.9 magnitude earthquake in Sichuan Province last week.. The developers ducked under their desks for the two minutes the ground moved and then left the building. Although some windows broke in the office complex and cracks appeared in some of the stairwells, no one was injured. With aftershocks continuing the night of the earthquake, Collins, who lives 25 stories up, slept in a park along other high-rise dwellers. Only when it started to rain near dawn did he return home.

MaesInfo employees were soon back on the job, and Collins, in a cab heading home after work and on a cell phone with a crystal-clear connection, said the pay in China isn't what he may earn in the U.S., but the cost of living is cheap, and the opportunities abundant. "Things are progressing so rapidly," he said, "it's a great place to be."

Re:When was this article written?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you obviously DIDN'T read the article, as he specifically mentions that he slept in a park overnight when it happened, only going home in the morning.

We also felt the quake in Shanghai, and quite a few buildings were evacuated here too when the quake hit.

Re:When was this article written?

[Anonymous Coward]

lives in a high-rise apartment in Chengdu

As in, the Chengdu in Sichuan province that got hit by an earthquake a week ago?

Chengdu was about 60 miles from the epicenter. Read the article, it mentions that he camped out in a park with other high-rise dwellers due to fears of aftershocks. The high-rises were structurally all right to continue habitation.

Re:When was this article written?

[hengist]

My point being, how did he "manage" his people in that situation?

The mention of the 'quake seemed tacked on the end.

Sorry, should have made that explicit.

My bad.

Re:When was this article written?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is. I suspect this article was written over the past month or so, as it repeats a familiar theme in Business news lately about the lack of suitable management in Chinese companies. Additionally, it also contains some fallacies regarding the need for Americans to learn Chinese, as companies are looking for, and are better off hiring Chinese who have advanced English language skills. Few are truly looking for non-native speakers to represent them, though a fluent Caucasian is considered an asset in certain cases. (I'm currently living in China, raising funds on behalf of relief efforts and encouraging greater transparency among charitable groups)

Broken or non-existent exchange markets

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason so many jobs are moving overseas has nothing to do with actual advantages but of advantages induced by broken currency exchange rates. When a dollar is exchanged and spent in a foreign market it should purchase roughly the same goods or services. Unfortunately when you convert a dollar and spend it in a foreign market it can buy anywhere from 0.8 to 6 times as much. The places where your dollar buys 6 times as much are the places where jobs are moving and will continue to move until the exchange markets correct this. In some cases the exchange rate is fixed by policy and the labor advantage is permanently with whichever currency is valued lowest. In some cases there is no free currency exchange at all (i.e. the exchange rate is pegged to the advantage of buyers in one nation and labor in another.) It's a very good model for inducing bankruptcy in the buying nation.

25 is too young

[timmarhy]

if he was a real go getter i could see him in a junior role or an assistant manager at most, but really in a firm that big he can't possibly have enough background. it's not a judgement on his skill, it's just that 25 years isn't nearly enough time to experience all that he needs to. I work for a billion dollar company, i'm older than he is and i've only just pushed my way into managing a small team of 6. not for lack of skill - i'm well respected in the company for my work - but because there is so much more to learn.

Re:25 is too young

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article - his title is "international business development manager" which means he is really an "sales person", no doubt selling his firms services to US companies. I doubt he manages anyone or anything other than his sales pipeline.

BSD

Re:25 is too young

[timmarhy]

i'm talking in general. the specific's of this article don't interest me at all.

Re:25 is too young

[Chibi]

I think you're missing the main reason he was hired. He wasn't hired for his great managerial skills. He was hired because he was a native English-speaker. He's the face/voice that the company would like to present back to their English customers.

So, while it's admirable that you really want to develop your skills, you have to remember that sometimes the perception is what matters more (to some folks, at least).

You do it every time you buy

[EmbeddedJanitor]

You're voting with your dollars. Each time you buy something made in China you are indirectly hiring a Chinese worker and un-hiring an American.

Every time you eat a Californian tomato you're exploiting low-wage Mexican workers.

Alternatively, you're a philanthropist providing people in developing countries with much-needed income.

The facts are fixed, but you can spin it any way you want to.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[plasmacutter]

"Alternatively, you're a philanthropist providing people in developing countries with much-needed income."

yes, and charter's deep packet sniffing is providing an "enhanced user experience"

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Rob_Bryerton]

"Every time you eat a Californian tomato you're exploiting low-wage Mexican workers."

With this in mind, I'll actively seek out as much produce from California as I can find! Thanks!

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that you are completely wrong.

When you buy something made in China, it is extremely likely that the low cost of labor in China is the only reason why said thing is even on the market.

The minimum wage and standard of working conditions in the United States are a wonderful boon to the labor force, but it quite specifically eliminates the economic viability of producing a huge class of products within the US.

Likewise, what you probably meant when you said "low-wage Mexican workers" was "below minimum wage workforce that recieves no benefits or health care".

A large part of the farming industry (meat packing and restaurant industries too) are economically viable in their current forms only because a migrant, largely illegal, work force is available to do the job at below minimum standards required by US law.

Even if you were to strong arm all of the various industries in this situation into meeting all minimum labor standards, you would be unable to find employees to do many of the jobs. In the rare instances that some meat packing plant or industrial farming operation has decided to "go legit" in their workforce, they haven't been able to find enough documented workers to do the job.

It seems that the average or, in this case, below average, US citizen doesn't want to spend 8 hours a day bent over in a field or mopping up blood.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Shajenko42]

It seems that the average or, in this case, below average, US citizen doesn't want to spend 8 hours a day bent over in a field or mopping up blood for minimum wage and no benefits.

Fixed that for you.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[King_TJ]

I would have modded your comment up, if I could. This is exactly right. The *real* problem America faces, if you ask me, is the lack of solid replacements for the industrial jobs we're rapidly giving up to other countries.

It's a natural progression of things for a nation to start outsourcing the jobs that require hard labor and a low level of intelligence or skills. The U.S. generally has managed to educate our people and give our people a high enough standard of living to where the vast majority DOES expect to do better than getting a few bucks an hour for mopping up cow blood or digging ditches.

Where we seem to be failing is at competing in the world marketplace in the things requiring the higher levels of skill. We have a few notable exceptions, like Intel and their processors. But overall, I'm not sure what our future really holds? Everyone talks about the "service economy" we've gone to - but services tend to be more of "luxury" expenses. You can't, for example, really justify paying someone to wash your clothes for you or to take care of your fish aquarium or swimming pool, if you don't already earn enough disposable income to pay for those conveniences. Or say your services are along the lines of advertising and web site building. Ok, great... but you still need to have clients earning a solid income doing something that justifies the expense of that advertising or web site.

Ultimately, it seems like people producing the tangible goods are the ones most able to bring in money from outside the nation. Those offering services generally rely on the disposable income of those located geographically close to them. So our trade imbalance may be what kills us, ultimately.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time you eat a Californian tomato you're exploiting low-wage Mexican workers. Actually you're supporting a better-off mexican worker (income, protection) than a worse-off one.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[pimpimpim]

Sometimes, when voting, you actually have a choice. Try to buy a bike that has not been made in china/taiwan. Bike manufacturer Scott put stickers with american flags on its bikes, next to a sticker "made in taiwan". Thinking you can vote with your money is just fooling yourself.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so sick of this voting with your dollar bullshit. First of all, it's not voting, because in a typical democratic sense you can't buy votes, they don't come based on worth, and one person doesn't just get more votes than another because his daddy was rich and he had inheritance. The "vote with a dollar" argument is such capitalist pandering bullshit that it almost isn't worth mentioning.

Secondly, you aren't provided with a lot of choice in the American market either. Unless you want to spend 100% of your free time researching American made products, you'll likely find the same Chinese merchandise at any major retailer because it's cheaper for the stores to stock it.

Thirdly, most Americans even given a "choice" would choose Chinese made goods because of their price to quality ratio. Sure, a lot of Chinese stuff is poor quality, but when you were looking for a refrigerator magnet quality of workmanship wasn't as high on the list.

Lastly, this is where government steps in. I'm all for free market capitalism and global trade as long as we are all held to the same standard. How is it that it's illegal to trade with Cuba but somehow China is a shining example of globalization? I believe there should be standards for workers overseas in order to do business with American corporations. Clear, concise laws that don't have loopholes. Will this ever happen? Probably not. But it doesn't make sense to act like paying 20,000 a year to a Chinese programmer and 100,000 a year to a domestic one are the same thing. That salary is low because of the extreme conditions of the environment the cheaper worker has to tolerate. Given some type of standards, it wouldn't be that low, and we could actually compete in the global marketplace instead of attempting to compete with overseas slavery while trying to actually make a living in our 1st world country.

Re:You do it every time you buy

[Anonymous Coward]

You're voting with your dollars. Each time you buy something made in China you are indirectly hiring a Chinese worker and un-hiring an American.

Jobs are not zero-sum. Each new job in China does not come at the expense of an existing job in the USA.

Every time you eat a Californian tomato you're exploiting low-wage Mexican workers.

Earning a living is obviously some new use of the word "exploitation" I'm not familiar with. You'd rather they not earn money and feed their families? That by starving to death they wouldn't be exploited?

Chengdu

[burpburp]

TA says that the guy lives in Chengdu. Well that means he's probably dead by now.

Hmmm Jobs In China

[badman99]

I, for one, wish to welcome our new Chinese overlords. :)

Not enough experience at 25

[teknopurge]

IMO, this just speaks to their level of maturity as an IT industry in China if they think a 25-yr old has enough experience in the IT industry to lead a team, let alone communicate facets of all his project experiences.

If the direction is being set by someone that is not a senior, I cannot see any value-add or reason to use these companies.

Translation...

[prxp]

"Translators needed. English and Madarin. Pays well. No experience required."

Realistic View of China

[davidfromoz]

It seems like the only thing that Slashdot knows about China is they are stealing our jobs, repress their citizens and now they have had an earthquake.

Mr. Collins is working for an outsourcing company. I'm willing to be that the reason he got the job was the fact that he understand the language, and perhaps more importantly, the culture of that company's customers.

In my experience there is a tremendous demand for such skills all over Asia. There are great opportunities to do something fun, interesting and very beneficial to your career over there, especially for young people who haven't put down deep roots at home yet. Most people don't do it though.

cheers,
david

Nothing left to make but coffee...

[TheNucleon]

I just got done taking a first-term conversational Mandarin course. It was super interesting. I've been to China and wouldn't mind going and living there a while. I can understand why an adventurous soul would take this opportunity.

Still, is it really our goal to have all technical work done overseas, with us just pulling the strings? Where's the fun in that? I know why CEOs like it ($$$). But do the vast majority of us who _aren't_ CEOs like it?

This is a classic short-term vs long-term issue. When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value (i.e., pretty soon), where will all the money come from to pay for goods (including code) and services produced overseas? We can't be the world's CEO - they won't go for it, and they shouldn't. Our value in the value chain is going to diminish. This isn't xenophobia, really. This is just me wanting our country to have something left to do when the music stops.

Pretty soon, we'll have a bunch of offices here, and nothing left to make but coffee.

Guess I'll keep learning Mandarin :-)

Re:Nothing left to make but coffee...

[timmarhy]

why do you want everyone to stay working class? why not raise up your society to the level where their intellect itself is valuable? people were saying the exact same nonsense when america off shored it's manufacturing and the sky hasn't fallen.

Re:Nothing left to make but coffee...

[falconwolf]

When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value

But the US does produce things of value, food. The US is one of the top food exporters.

Falcon

Re:Nothing left to make but coffee...

[TheNucleon]

Our intellect is only valuable as long as we can sell it. When someone offshore will sell theirs more cheaply, then we are out of luck.

You'd see how quickly this would grind to a screeching halt if they could offshore CEOs. (But, can you imagine the savings?)

Offshoring our manufacturing didn't make the sky fall right away, but keep your helmet handy. The freefall of the dollar is going to drive up import prices. We can't adapt by simply making our own stuff, because we've mothballed our capacity to do so. Chicken Little may yet have the last laugh.

Re:Nothing left to make but coffee...

[Cro Magnon]

And yet, we now import poisoned pet food from China.

Re:Nothing left to make but coffee...

[TheSync]

When the US is left without the ability to produce anything of value

Actually the US makes plenty of stuff. Over the last 10 years, US manufacturing production output is up 26%, and is at an all-time-high. US manufacturing jobs are down though (3.6 million fewer over 10 year), but this is because US manufacturing is becoming more efficient, so people are moving into other sectors.

Our value in the value chain is going to diminish.

That is like saying that New York's value chain is going to diminish because of some start-ups in San Jose. Yes, there will be great ideas and great companies coming out of China and India, while there will still be great ideas and great companies coming out of the US. Everywhere where there is economic freedom will flourish. We'll do fine...as long as we don't damage our economic freedom with unneeded regulation.

Outsource for what?

[joocemann]

Why not stay in and support the country that provided your education and well-being for 25 years? When you let money drive your decision making, you will make stupid decisions. It would be nice if people realized that most of what they are is a product of their culture and country; and if they would then have the integrity to give back selflessly. Money is not the answer.

Re:Outsource for what?

[evil_aar0n]

The guy left for a job as a teacher. To me, that doesn't sound like he was in it just for the money. It might have been for the adventure of it; you know, the "having a life" aspect. I can see it that way: imagine the stories he'll have when he comes back. I'm envious.

Re:Outsource for what?

[joocemann]

Join the service. I did, saw the world and loved it.

Do you have to be asian or can anyone do this job?

[elucido]

I'm all for going to China and doing this. The question is, will I have to be asian?

As far as inhouse IT goes

[falconwolf]

it's more important to have some piece of software up and running to generate useful results that it is to have perfectly modular software that can be reused by changing the a couple of inherited classes.

While I agree it's important to get production code out to where it's used, I'd add that it's important to continue development and have a test bed.

a good programmer who writes bug-free modular code will probably end up doing himself out of the job because as time goes by, there will be less code that needs to changed or upgraded per job request.

I don't think so, unless the programmer is only good with a couple of things. First all too often there's mission creep. Then there's new OSes along with their new sets of APIs. Even once software is released and the bugs are ironed out there will be a demand for a "New and Improved" version. Maybe with new features or options.

Falcon

Re:As far as inhouse IT goes

[mikael]

don't think so, unless the programmer is only good with a couple of things. First all too often there's mission creep.

While I was writing this, I was thinking of inhouse tools for a company which has directors who are just happy using the technology they are confident about, and not necessarily interested in keeping up to date with the latest technology. If
For a company that is forward looking, this is not a problem, but a small company might be tempted to promote the programmer to a new position.

Re:As far as inhouse IT goes

[falconwolf]

While I was writing this, I was thinking of inhouse tools for a company which has directors who are just happy using the technology they are confident about, and not necessarily interested in keeping up to date with the latest technology

In this case it doesn't matter much to the programmers anyway, if it's "good enough" the directors won't care to have the bugs fixed and they will out of work anyway.

Falcon

proprietary vs FOOS software

[falconwolf]

Proprietary software encourages rushed-out-the-door projects, open-source doesn't.

There's space for both proprietary and FOOS software. Photoshop is a good example of proprietary software, despite being worked on for more than 10 years GIMP is no where near having the capabilities of Photoshop. While CinePaint, aka FilmGIMP, is closer I don't know if it has all the capabilities of PS. While I haven't used PS I did use GIMP and Paint Shop Pro, and PSP beat GIMP handily.

Actually open source does encourage rushing software out of the door. Look at how often fixes are released, frequently. Of course many OS projects make it easy to install patches but they are still released with bugs.

Falcon

Re:proprietary vs FOOS software

[Darkness404]

Actually open source does encourage rushing software out of the door. Look at how often fixes are released, frequently. Of course many OS projects make it easy to install patches but they are still released with bugs.

And if you look at a lot of them they are alpha/beta releases and not the 1.0 that you come to expect with proprietary software though. With propriatary software you pay money usually to get a solid release, with open source you don't.

There's space for both proprietary and FOOS software. Photoshop is a good example of proprietary software, despite being worked on for more than 10 years GIMP is no where near having the capabilities of Photoshop. While CinePaint, aka FilmGIMP, is closer I don't know if it has all the capabilities of PS. While I haven't used PS I did use GIMP and Paint Shop Pro, and PSP beat GIMP handily.

But there is a difference, the GIMP is not backed by any major corporation, while Photoshop/Paint Shop Pro are, (and some F/OSS projects are also, such as Linux, RPM, and Ubuntu). So you would expect them to be a little less on features, another thing is, the GIMP developers focus on what means the most to them, so some Photoshop things may be a lot further down the list for them, while to other people they are the must-have features.

Re:proprietary vs FOOS software

[falconwolf]

And if you look at a lot of them they are alpha/beta releases and not the 1.0 that you come to expect with proprietary software though.

What are the 2.5 and 2.6 releases of the Linux kernel then? Or take NeoOffice. While I have version 2.1 it's up to 2.2.3. NeoOffice, neither my version nor the new one is an alpha. I'm not sure about whether either one is a beta or not. My version of Firefox is 2.0.0.6, I don't know what's the current version for Macs. Look at Blender, I have version 2.44.

But there is a difference, the GIMP is not backed by any major corporation

CinePaint is backed by major corporations. It's called FilmGIMP because it's used by movies studios, it started as GIMP but a programmer added capabilities to it that photographers wanted, such as 24 bit colour depths per channel. The maintainers of GIMP did not accept them however some in the movie industry ran with it creating a fork. Here's a list of movie studios and movies that used it, two being Sean Connery's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and Tom Cruise's "The Last Samurai".

So you would expect them to be a little less on features, another thing is, the GIMP developers focus on what means the most to them

That's right, businesses give users what they want whereas OS maintainers only do what they want, which takes us back to there being a place for both FOOS and proprietary software.

Falcon

re: lazy I.T. workers

[King_TJ]

Truthfully, what I've found (and even experienced myself) is, many I.T. workers in the U.S. aren't properly utilized, so they wind up appearing to be "lazy" and "doing just the bare minimum" to get by.

In most cases, these people were hired and sometimes even promoted because they were intelligent, fairly knowledgeable folks who started out adding a lot of value to the business.

But after the first year or two, they tend to get burnt-out, because after they successfully rip through all of the piled-up, outstanding projects and issues the company had before they brought them in, the company starts leaving them to manage themselves. The mentality tends to be one of, "Well, he already proved he's capable of solving our problems efficiently and effectively - so no need to waste time managing him anymore! If we're not getting complaints from anyone, that means he's out there doing his job!"

The thing is though, most I.T. people like a regular flow of challenges. The "putting out fires" stuff is more of a necessary evil than a reason the job is "motivating". The things that provide good puzzles to solve are the projects where new hardware or software is brought in, 99% of the time. And since those involve significant monetary investments - they're the ones that, #1. don't happen that often, and #2. suddenly involve more "managing" than usual, because people have a vested interest in figuring out if they're getting a return on the investment.

So after a while, you have your systems administrator who automated everything he could to minimize his day-to-day support calls, and just sits around web-surfing and IMiing until a good project comes his way.

I am getting sick ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... of this offshore nonsense. As a software engineer since 1993 I can tell you that anyone who really understands what it means to write an software application cannot believe in offshoring.
I have seen so much communication problems between people with the same background and native language and it is so difficult sometime to understand what your customer really expects from you because of his lack of distance from his task (and your lack of distance from yours). Adding thousands of miles and culture difference to that can only be a bloody joke.

The truth is that offshore failures are covered up by the management. I was told once during a job interview in a consulting company that their offshore activities were a technical failure but a big success for their sales developpement. There was a real demand from there customers who too were brainwatched by some IT research and advisory company...

25 not so young really

[Anonymous Coward]

Among people who really want to go into business management, 25 is about right for a person having matriculated normally and gotten an undergrad degree and then a MBA. It's even enough time to have a few years at the entry job, which would hardly be expected to be an entry level job for such a person.

What tech sites exist similar to slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

NT

Age has nothing to do with it

[symbolset]

I'm a geezer, so this isn't about me. Management is about personal responsibility, leadership and attention to detail. Some people will never be up to it. Some have to be trained. Some are capable right out of high school. Choose the right people and you're in the berries.

For a team leader give me the 21 year old corporal just back from Baghdad any day. He'll cut to the facts, bind the team and bring it home every time. He can't help it - he doesn't know how to do it any other way. Move him up fast and he'll be running a few hundred people before Joe Harvard has his MBA.

Re:Hmmm Junk In China

[sethstorm]

...with nuclear tipped weaponry aimed, armed, and fired at them.

Get a better job elsewhere?

[Travoltus]

Uh, exactly where?

Hello, did you not read this article - they're offshoring work. Any tech job that you can try to get is bombarded with super stiff competition. Show me a job listing that isn't bombed with 10,000 resumes. Do note before you try to B.S. me on this, that I run a data center and I personally see these resume floods.

Employers can screw their employees over with unpaid overtime because their jobs are so in demand. IT workers are easily replaceable.

So, basically, if you leave a job that has tons of unpaid overtime, you're going to have crap luck trying to get another job, especially one that doesn't force unpaid overtime on you - or that doesn't do something else horrible. And as hard as my peers treat salesmen (which you are when you go c2c 1099), that whole 1099 thing will run an IT person into an early grave.

My advice is to get the hell out of IT and get into something like insurance. IT is a doomed career path.

Re:Get a better job elsewhere?

[fractoid]

Employers can screw their employees over with unpaid overtime because their jobs are so in demand. IT workers are easily replaceable. God, send some of your excess IT guys to Australia! My last job, there was a standing $3000 headhunting bonus for anyone who could recruit a an employee who lasted more than 3 months. My old agent still rings me occasionally to ask how happy I am and whether I'd like to consider switching jobs...

Re:Get a better job elsewhere?

[Wulfstan]

Not so easy with the points-based immigration system. Just being able to "do IT" won't get you the visa, unfortunately, and the Oz government is much stricter on foreign applicants now...

Re:Get a better job elsewhere?

[fractoid]

Hmm... good point, actually. I was over in Europe a couple of years ago and I actually copped a bit of hostility from Londoners because they had so many Aussies job-hunting there, and yet our government won't let them work here for more than 3 months or so. It's easy to forget when you're one of the privileged few how cranky our government can be towards foreigners. :/

It's all in the currency, boys.

[xtremee]

I'm located in South America (AR) and i charge $150 (in our local currency, which is pesos) an hour for my work.
For other companies living in the same country as me that's an outrageous amount of money, but for an offshore company with a currency worth 3 times more (or 5 times, if it pays in euros) is very cheap.

That the currency is favorable for us, third-world countries, is not our fault, nor it demonstrates a lack of "expertise" nor "quality" in our fields.

Oh, and one more thing. I've been programming for 9 long years but i have never earned a degree but when i work with engineers or computer scientists from my country or others that are less experienced they usually don't know what they are doing very well. They usually have a lot of problems understanding that theory is VERY different from practice.

But i have to tell you though, even i agree that it's a very dumb thing to do to put a 25 year old as an IT Manager.

Re:It's all in the currency, boys.

[SpinyNorman]

I'm not sure if you're claiming to be paid 150 ARS (= $47 US) an hour or $150 US an hour, but both seem high, the latter unbelievably so.

It's hard to believe you make $47/hr (almost $100K/yr) in a country with such a cheap cost of living, since that would also be a decent salary in the US where a house might cost you $4-500K.

Re:It's all in the currency, boys.

[xtremee]

I'm not sure if you're claiming to be paid 150 ARS (= $47 US) an hour or $150 US an hour, but both seem high, the latter unbelievably so. It's hard to believe you make $47/hr (almost $100K/yr) in a country with such a cheap cost of living, since that would also be a decent salary in the US where a house might cost you $4-500K. I charge 150 ARS (47.32 US) an hour and most of my work is from offshore companies (currently i do work for only one "local" company which is owned by a big financial group in Germany), that's why i'm "worth" so much. Some people realize that they can get the same experience for half (or less) the price and that's why they call me, or an indian or a chinese guy.

They get the same "expertise" for less money.

immigrants take

[falconwolf]

Undesirable jobs that 'white people' don't want to do - e.g. janitorial work, low-paying service jobs, monotonous jobs like security guard, or hard jobs like construction (hours in the sun, hours in the rain, etc.).

As a white American I've had two of the types of jobs you list, maybe three. I worked in house keeping, janitorial, and I've worked in construction. Specifically working with concrete and masonry. And I got the construction job through a day labor pool I worked at.

1. Coming from poorer, less-educated countries, immigrants appreciate the value of a dollar. They don't take for granted that there will be food on the table, good working conditions, and a roof over their heads. They work for it because they know what it's like to go without it

Though not all many of those people I worked with through the labor pool were homeless. Some slept under bridges, some in tents in the woods, and some in a vehicle.

2. They know the value of hard work. Poorer Americans in particular are always looking for the 'quick fix', because they've been deluded into believing in the 'American Dream' - dream long enough and good things will come out of nowhere. They don't try to raise themselves up, because they expect someone else to do it for them.

Though not all, some of those I met at the labor pools were some of the hardest working people I met. I first went to a labor pool, temp agency, as a student in college. I don't know of any student, except a few disabled students, who worked as hard as some of those at the labor pool.

Falcon

Re:immigrants take

[Sentry21]

Fair enough. I should have prefaced my comments by saying that they, by and large, refer to the current 'instant gratification' generation. Previous generations, even just my parents' generation, are more hard working and industrious.

It wasn't that long ago that people could/would keep one job their whole lives (see the story of Gabe's grandfather in a previous Penny Arcade news post). Nowadays, people change their *careers* seven times on average; I've had seven jobs in the past year (well, I start the seventh this week). Crazy.

Another anti-American rant

[Travoltus]

Oh, this is rich. You have the nerve to accuse us of being xenophobic and then you spout passive aggressive hate like this...

"Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money."

That is a bullshit generalization for which you utterly lack any documentation or evidence to support.

Then you say "Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink. Getting people who are just not suited for the work into other jobs would probably be the best thing yet for code and system quality."

So people who make 10% of our wages and who get into IT are automatically suited for the work? Oh yeah, "because they have a better work ethic than Americans."

And about that whole xenophobia - offshoring is a net loss of jobs for America, in the realm of producing products for Americans. Americans have no place in the global economy, and will have no place until we are reduced to the polluted, abused paupers that Asian offshore workers are.

Oh no wait, I'm sorry, it must be xenophobia to believe that Chinese and Indian workers lack the same workplace safety rules as we do, or that they're paid nowhere near as well as us, or that their skies and water aren't jacked up by laissez-faire corporate pollution that would lead to prison time in the US.

Here's why so many people hate offshoring. It's not just about the wages, which are bad enough. For Americans to compete in the global economy, we have to be paid crap East Indian wages. We have to attract irresponsible corporations by allowing them to pollute the heck out of our environment (go swim out at the Indian Ocean or a river in China and see how much more polluted they are than anywhere in the US), we have to accept the reality of collapsing factories and mines, we have to accept caste systems, undemocratic Governments, and all other manner of horrors in order to compete in the global marketplace.

I'd be happy to see the entire offshore market put out of business by a blood tide of GNU software. You wanna low-price us? Try competing against free.

Learning the Chinese language isn't enough.

[falconwolf]

You have to learn the culture too.

That's pretty much true with any foreign language.

Ni hao,
ni hao ma?

Falcon

they have a right to THEIR jobs

[falconwolf]

No they don't. As far as employment is concerned all anyone has the right to is opportunity.

Falcon

What is wrong with you??!

[Reservoir Penguin]

Is the submitter seriously offering us to go work in an oppressive dictatorship and "help their companies reach overseas markets"? Why not just go to Burma, steal some foreign aid from dying kids and club a baby seal?

When was this article read?

[Anonymous Coward]

It mentions the earthquake.

offshore

[British]

My whole office got shut down and what we were doing for the past 10 years moved offshore to Taiwan. Spending a week teaching QA stuff was, interesting to say the least. I did it. Just took multiple explanations to do it. It will be interesting to see what the next version of the product is going to be now that development is roughly 100% offshored. When I left the company, some know-how about the app left with me. Didn't feel like documenting it since it would take forever to explain.

Where's my article

[Kamokazi]

I've been running IT departments in the Philippines and China for about a year now, and I just turned 25, where is my Slashdot article?

Hey, I worked for Symbio...

[Squeeze Truck]

I work in outsourcing in China and I've worked under a few of these child managers. None of the ones I know speak any foreign language, yet they are in a position to manage teams speaking Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

My experience has been that these guys perform unbelievably poorly, mostly because of their ignorance of the region and lack of language skills. East Asia is NOT the US, or even Europe. There are cultural differences, and then there are differences. The most markedly schism is between the Chinese and Japanese.

Trying to manage the reigon as if it was the same as anyplace else is a recipe for disaster, but these young managers never figure that out until its too late.

Yellow Fever

[HarryCallahan]

They don't tell you about the petite young chinese girls that think the west and it's men are superior and are also in the midst of a sexual revolution and think Sex And The City is a documentary guide for your professional females. No it's all about developing the career.

Red Herring

[Starky]

I am an American who currently lives in China and can assure you, while there are success stories, and certainly fortunes are being made here, the idea that Americans can pop on over to China and be masters of the universe is a red herring at best.

Some reasons that it is not all you might think it is:
1) The salaries are often lower. Much lower. It used to be that multinationals paid Western wages for work in China, but that is not always true today. You'll be told that the standard of living is lower, so that makes up for it, but even though you can live like a king in many areas for $10,000 / year, you aren't going to be saving much for retirement at that level.
2) The salaries are not necessarily going up for Westerners. A lot of foreigners are drawn by the oft-repeated story of the boom economy in China. As a result, there is downward pressure on salaries for Westerners in many sectors with companies offering less to people who they perceive as having a desire to live in China. When I was talking to a friend who has been here for some time about working in China, he said if you express a desire to work in China, they'll offer you Chinese wages.
3) There is a very real glass ceiling.
- Few foreigners really learn the language. It takes about 3-4 times as long to learn Chinese as another European language, and that's if you're really trying. Most foreigners come to China thinking they'll learn the language by osmosis and ultimately return home several years later knowing how to give directions to a cab driver and not much else.
- Moreover, the cultures are vastly different, and it's difficult to establish the kinds of quality relationships that you need to progress in business. And certain concepts such as honesty and integrity are very different here, resulting in many foreigners under the impression that they are establishing sound business relationships and friendships getting screwed in the end.
- There is still a very nationalistic "us versus them" kind of attitude among Chinese nationals, and this bias makes it difficult for a foreigner to be treated as an equal, even if they speak Chinese, in terms of promotion and opportunities for advancement.

While there are certainly opportunities here in China, I would recommend anyone thinking of making a career move to China doing extra due diligence before they dive in.

Expectations

[Hankapobe]

Workers in these countries do tend to have a better work ethic than Western programmers. Questions remain as to why -- my opinion is that there's a higher focus on education and a greater motivation to make money.

It has to do with expectations.

We Americans, and most Westerners for that matter, think that we're entitled to a job, a decent standard of living (house, two cars, big TV, ALL the food we can eat and then some, etc...).

These folks from those off-shoring destinations are grateful that they even have a way to make a living and to buy enough food and maybe a luxury like a car or even a TV.

Now, don't think that I believe their way of life is better. It's just a illustration of my opinion of why their work ethic is the way it is. And when they get more developed, their work ethic will become like ours.

I would also like to note that in those countries the disparity between rich and poor is obscene. Which looks like the US is heading in that direction - why is it that when regular folks get canned, we're living on credit cards after we blow through the last of our saving; whereas, the CEO gets tens of millions of dollars for getting canned?!? Or look at the economy now: sales of luxury goods for the really rich (yachts, private jets, etc..) shoe no signs of decreasing, while sales for poor folks stuff is declining - except for beer.

The answers are simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why so much head scratching.

Although it is certainly true that a lot of people complaining about outsourcing is just xenophobic whining, there are some facts that remain unchallenged by politicians allegedly representing their respective constituencies.

For example the UK is dead set to introduce a system of points (similar to Australia's) in order to make more difficult for people outside the EU to come and work in the UK. All well and good, until you realize that they are introducing no measure whatsoever to regulate working remotely in the UK (that is people working providing services to UK based costumers, this may be mostly call centres, but pertains also to programming, systems and database administration and project management). The UK is haemorrhaging jobs this way and the local parties don't even have this on their agenda.

As for workers in India having better work ethic, you must be joking. They have no say in the matter, they dance at the tune they play for them or the door is wide open. 12 or longer shifts are not uncommon (we are talking techies here, no slave labour, but still) and overtime payments is a western pipe dream. As soon as these same people move elsewhere they pretty much take advantages of all the benefits that working in a place with proper worker protection rights has.

Put another way, anybody working in India would show a similar "work ethic".

And finally about why projects are late and of shoddy quality: many Indian companies have employees with very little real work experience, these people are MCSE, RHCT or RHCE, or whatever, but have one or 2 years at most of real work experience, if lucky, this would not be a problem but these pople are offered as "Senior" (I kid you not, I worked with "Senior" personnel in Mumbai and other places that were 23 years old and have been out of school for 2 years at most).

The fundamental mistakes that they commit are appalling, but is what you would expect from somebody learning the ropes.

Big companies are betting the shop in support by very junior personnel. Eventually the house of cards will collapse, remember, you read it here first.

To compound the problem, as soon as the "Senior" people feel comfortable enough, they move on to other jobs where they earn more or where they are not exploited (normally abroad) leaving their former teams to start from scratch (but the outsourcing firm keeps offering this people as qualified, with the connivance of medium and senior managers in western countries, whose jobs I have not seen outsourced so far).

Outsourcing failed at my former employer!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the Sr. Linux Systems Engineer for the #1 grape juice company. They atempted outsourcincing to India. I was asked to "help the remote team". I looked for a new job somewhere else and left. Last I heard projects sent to India were not ndone to spec and had to be redone. Eventually projects outsourced ended up costing the company more than in house. Evenelutally all the infrastructure and Oracle RAC work came back in house. last I hear the CIO responsible for starting the outsourcing stepped down.. actually I heard he was shown the door.

moral of the story. a 90k in house systems engineer is more cost effective than an oversease outsourced employee costing 13k a year that take attempts to get the job done right. The additional monetary lost is money the business looses by waiting so long for a project to complete successfully.

What are this companies doing

[PacketScan]

This is insanity. Pure and simple..
But why?
As more and more companies move to off shore tech support they are drastically increasing there exposure and risk to loss of customer info or trade secrets.

sounds jelous envy on your part.

[Brigadier]

Obviously this is a person who is used to taking chances, gambling high risk, has significant commitment.

This is the description of someone who quite possible has tremendous talent. Yes it may take an average person 10 years to learn how to run a project like that. This isn't teh requirement for everyone though.

There are highly functional people out there who's ability to learn something, improvise and improve is uncanny.

don't hate until you learn the details my friend.

FTFA: Lives in a High-Rise in Chengdu?

[Anonamused Cow-herd]

Today, at 25, he is the international business development manager for a Chinese software outsourcing company, MaesInfo Corp., speaks the language and lives in a high-rise apartment in Chengdu. Now with soothing massage?

Living in a Chengdu high-rise doesn't strike me as the pinnacle of accomplishment here =P.

Mod parent -5 Clueless

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you are not from the U.S. or you have been exceptionally lucky. Around here in Ohio, there are virtually no tech jobs. Period. I get laid off every other year on average. The IT field is a very unstable field to be in. Everyone around here has either left Ohio or IT altogether. (Too bad I wasn't yet wise enough to do the same. *sigh*) Quality of work means nothing here. You're going to be laid off no matter how hard you work, and no employers give a crap about their employees. That is a given.

Part of me really wants to see the US IT workforce shrink.

Be careful what you wish for. Your time will come, regardless of whether you are from the States or not.

You like problem solving? I'll give you a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The other part of me is a little worried about what I'm going to be doing in 10 years. I love problem solving and don't really want to give up an IT career!

Solve this: Where will you find a job when the axe comes your way? You'll have plenty of time to work on "problem solving" while you are unemployed. Keep drinking the Kool-Aid; by the time you notice the emptiness around you, it will all be too late.

Typical /. troll.

My compliments to the spin doctors

[walterbyrd]

So for every 10,000 IT jobs westerners lost due to cheap foreign labor, one job is for a westerner is created. And this article is trying to make it seem like this is creating opportunity for westerners.

Nice spinning. Damn nice.

food exports

[falconwolf]

I won't say it's the only one, but a big reason the US exports so much food is because agricultural businesses receive billions of dollars in subsidies, which causes havoc with the economies of Third World Nations. For instance, corn is native to Mexico however because US companies get billions of US taxpayer dollars businesses like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill are able to export corn to Mexico and sell it there for less than Mexican farmers spend on growing corn. This is neither fair nor free trade.

Falcon

Old posts are best for farewells

[symbolset]

I chose this post because it's about to go beyond the limit for replying, and in it you've had a few too many Sangrias or whatever.

Perhaps you're just another geek trying to get by in this mixed up technology world. If so, I'll see you again here and that's fine.

If it happens however, that you're an astroturfer it would be helpful if you warned your coworkers about expressing good care as you bid them farewell, because you're on your way out. This account is going to get special attention until it's abandoned.