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....

[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....

[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....

[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....

[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....

[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.

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?

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.

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?

[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?

[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).

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.

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"?

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:Work in China?

[plasmacutter]

I assume you live in canada?

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

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.