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Is Off-Shoring a National Security Threat?
An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'"
We should regulate off-shore produced code and push jobs back to the U.S. the same way we should apply tariffs to products made in China.
Outsourcing the CIA to China isn't a go?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This.
One of the largest cable companies in the US used to offshore their network design. They ended up paying "us" (as in my employer & other companies that work in the same field) to redo all of it & they no longer outsource design.
There is a war going on for your mind.
First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.
Second, you know that "disclaim all warranties" bit? If you paid for the product, the vendor cannot disclaim warranties - so you have more incentive to deal with someone local so you can sue their *** off a lot easier. Given enough lawsuits, all bugs are shallow.
Third - the government is unable to ensure the quality of the code it already buys - how is it going to do that for everyone?
The whole concept is dumb, the article is just troll bait - which explains why it was posted on Troll Tuesday [tt]
It is not about secrecy it is about quality.
The VP at SAIC is saying that if the government demands that the software they purchase actually meets some minimum standard of quality then everyone will throw up their hands and quit. Which he feels will cause more software to be handed off to overseas developers who will do even a worse job than has already been done.
This smells very much like GM & Ford complaining that new fuel standards will be a technical impossibility to reach just moments before one of their competitors roll out models to the showroom floor that make the grade.
Iran "offshored" the control software of the centrifuges on their uranium enrichment program (i.e. bought it in). Google for what happened next.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It isn't just secrecy. It is quality. In india, being a good programmer means getting promoted to management immediately. The only people left to code are those who are failures or newbies. As a result, the quality of code coming from overseas is crap and often broken. They often deliver completely broken code, or code that only works for a small subset of valid inputs, or that has terrible maintainability and performance. Every bit of that code you get back has to be thoroughly vetted and usually scrapped and rewritten from the ground up.
So yes, it definitely increases risk.
Looks like someone hasn't read up on the economic history of post-war Japan.
Or, say, Norway.
Or Germany.
Or... etc. etc.
It's easy to say government is never the answer--simple, clean, fits on a bumper sticker. It's also wrong.
Nope. The problem is described in my journal, it's simple, it's gov't destroying productivity of Americans by destroying the capital savings, which is also the reason that the market now is a casino with people not investing but gambling.
Greed is the only incentive that is real that moves progress forward. The real problem is greed in government, which grows government at the expense of the real economy.
You can't handle the truth.
-Note, I live in the USA, I get that you might not. Ignore the "we" in those cases.
Off-shoring becomes a bit of a problem if you decide you want to fight a war with one of the countries you offshore to.
For example, if we would start a war with India, one of the first things that would happen is the loss of all communication with that country. How many businesses would fail since they wouldn't be able to replace that infrastructure quickly.
How about if we go to war with China? Can we produce all of the parts we currently use in our weapons systems here, quickly?
Yes, in both examples, the USA would be able to eventually produce everything it might need, but it would take years to regain the infrastructure that currently isn't located here.
Where things get really complex is when you consider the off-shoring of natural resources, such are rare metals or oil. If the USA pissed everyone off, it wouldn't have enough resources to maintain current standards of living & fight a war, even with all of the imaginary money it can print.
All of the above could be seen as a positive, though. Maybe if the idea of killing others isn't enough to stop war, the cold facts of logistical interdependence might.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
ITAR is perhaps one of the biggest hidden costs in domestic software development. Investments in s/w products that cannot realize the maximum ROI due to market restrictions force quite a bit of development overseas. If my subsidiary in India can sell my app or service anywhere in the world, but I can't do so with a domestic version, guess where I'll send the work?
Its like when Obama was elected and all the gun nuts got paranoid about possible forthcoming regulations. Everyone ran out and stocked up on guns and ammo. Mention national security and software in the same article and more development work will get pushed overseas in a panic.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's a threat that will eventually bring down every company that does it. It is a cheat, a dodge used to avoid paying market rate for wages while still depending on the market you are taking the jobs away from to remain strong enough to buy your product (which is likely too expensive to sell in the off shore market where you are underpaying for labor).
Ergo: Every company that uses offshoring depends on EVERYONE ELSE to not do the same so that there is still a market for their product. Eventually everyone will offshore in order to not get undercut in price, to the point where Americans no longer make a wage sufficient to keep the economy afloat so that there is sufficient money in the economy to allow the purchase of the offshored product.
In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.
Corporatism != Free Market
The dirty work IS the important stuff.
so you wouldn't mind outsourcing your girlfriend to me for a warmup, as long as you get her back wet and ready for you to focus on important stuff?
Sure, you can take her shopping.
Is sometimes better than the alternatives does not mean is always the greatest thing ever and is always perfect.
Also, protip: history is more than the last 10-20 years.
During the banking crisis, people in the US and the UK heard this a lot about the financial sector -- if you regulate them too much, they'll just move somewhere without regulations. I think there's some truth to that, but I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment.
One of the things I'm all for is professionalism in the IT world. Computers have been around for a long time, and now they're 100% vital to peoples' daily lives. It's time to start thinking about a couple of things:
- Separating the design and deployment portions of the IT landscape
- Making the design part a real branch of the engineering profession, with a set of educational standards
- Making the deployment part a skilled trade, with the necessary apprenticeships and career progression to attract new hires
Having a professional body would allow us to stand up to employers who demand that the schedule be crunched once again to meet an arbitrary date. No one tells a licensed PE who is liable for work they sign off on that they just lost a week of design time because someone said so...PEs are aware that they could lose their license or be sued out of existence. Currently, software isn't considered infrastructure, and so projects aren't run like bridge construction...they're arbitrary, and not grounded in reality.
The problem is that the field of IT is very broad. You have systems guys like me, network guys, software developers, deployment experts, hardware engineers -- it's all over the map. One thing I don't like about the current state of our profession is a lack of training standards. We leave a lot of training up to vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, etc. who have a vested interest in selling product and training a generation of newbies to use their technology. You also have a lot of independent IT people who have no desire to associate with a larger body of professionals, and wouldn't want the responsibility that professional status gives them. Even with the liability, I would be happy to be the equivalent of a PE because (a) I do good work, and (b) I'm well aware of what I don't know, and ask other professionals for help when needed. Other people in our field want nothing to do with this...they like the idea of being a cowboy coder or cowboy sysadmin and flying by the seat of their pants. Professionalism would also mean slowing down, realizing what works in terms of systems design, not trying to reinvent things every 6 months, etc. The laws of physics and properties of fluid dynamics don't change much -- techniques are introduced gradually in other branches of engineering. In our world, it's "new programming language", "new design pattern", "new OS", "new hardware design" every few years, and often it's just a rehash of what's come before.
The other problem, and the one that this article addresses, is that other countries are probably not willing to commit to playing by the same rules if we adopted them. In fact, there would be a huge uptick in business at "Joe's Code Shack" because they would promise unreasonably short turnaround times and just throw labor at the problem. It's not really a national security issue -- the root cause is that no one is willing to pay for proper engineering work and they just want things faster and faster for less money.
I think that a lot of specialized industries are starting to figure out what they can offshore and what just doesn't work when it comes back. I do systems integration work, and I have seen first-hand the disasters that come back from the "code monkeys" when there are no specs and bad oversight. It's not a cost savings if you have to hire a US contractor at 4x the rate of an FTE to wade through the mess and make it maintainable. One problem is that a lot of industries see IT is "grunt work" coding that people don't necessarily notice when it's done poorly. Anyone working for a large multinational who offshores development is probably well versed in things like internal web applications that crash
There's too much of it. They can't do all the work, and they have to let the crappy programmers learn. Trial by fire.
I know a really excellent Indian programmer that's a project coordinator now over several projects. He works like a madman trying to correct and teach people, but the results are still pretty crappy because he's just one guy. Eventually, he'll burn out.
I'd hire that single guy in a heartbeat. There might also be another one in the dozen or so on the project that doesn't do more harm than good.
However, they produce so many document artifacts it looks much more professional to management. Even if some of the documents are verging on criminal negligence. Who in the world thinks a flow chart built by omitting structural constructs (like all the conditional statements, say) makes valid documentation? Someone who thinks nobody will check it, that's who. The docs look awesome, but everyone's worse off having them.
You're kidding, right? Management review code?
Even if the manager is technically astute, their job is the manage, not review code. There should be senior developers doing the reviews, but they're too busy writing code. So the sloppy mess produced by the juniors never gets reviewed.
But even without reviews, testing should be revealing the problems caused by that sloppiness. Unfortunately, I've never heard of an offshore coding company that actually does the testing -- that's usually done in-house by the company who hired them. Which only makes sense -- it's the last line of defense against the code that's coming in.
What really doesn't make sense is that these offshore companies keep getting more business even after they develop a reputation for producing shit code, because they're "cheap."
Funny thing is, although the offshore coders get paid dirt wages, the fees charged by their companies aren't usually that much of a discount compared to on-shore or near-shore coding. It completely baffles me the North American businesses still haven't realized that.
Bottom line: You get what you pay for. If you want quality, it's gonna cost you. Shop for the lowest bidder, and you're going to get the lowest quality, too.
But it doesn't matter. Tools like mine will soon make the junior programmer the does nothing but copy-paste-edit code obsolete anyhow.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Yes. This is a national security threat. By definition. You can't have it both ways. Sorry globalists. You can't bully and exploit third-world labor, and then trust them with your proprietary industrial secrets. They will steal them from you, and turn around and use them against you. Period.
The only exception - I guess, is that muslims probably will not use complex interest-derived financial instruments to enslave you, since usury is against islamic law. Straight-up slavery, is not though. So keep on bleeding your own economy until they come over here and take-over. They will be happy to enslave your sons and daughters.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The fix is to require that all businesses that are global to meet the requirements for ALL countries that are impacted by the business. For example, if software development is moved to India then the business must comply with the regulations for BOTH countries. And for the chain of businesses involved, each would have to comply. Example, if Company A in the US hires Company B in England, who hires Company C in India, to do the work then all three companies must comply with the regulations in the US, England, and India for the product involved. A requirement like this would help countries like India raise their standards of living and reduce shifting of jobs from rich countries to poor countries simply for the sake of profit. The same should apply to all products (example, electronics produced in China), not just software.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.
Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.
The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...
Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses
Yes we should let them utilize child labor because, hey, the market *knows* best.
Tax Cuts for staying on shore are *exactly* the same as penalties for going offshore. Seriously, how is it any different? The latter means you have more revenue available. The former means you have less revenue available. That's not a plan forward that's a plan to spiral downward.
the last decade has clearly shown that tax cuts do *not* stimulate the economy. If they did, why are we still in a recession? Why did we have the lowest job growth period in the last few decades during the time taxes were the lowest in 50 years?
Corporate Tax cuts do *not* work. Stimulus on the other hand actively puts money into the economy. Tax cuts just put it in companies pockets and then you *hope* they spend it. We've seen they aren't spending it, so why give them more?
Nobody is going to hire new workers until there is enough demand. It doesn't matter what the tax rate is. If there isn't enough demand, they'll just pocket that tax cut which doesn't help anyone and only adds to the deficit. Better to spend money on stimulus and get money circulating through the economy and creating demand.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Well, I'd say the answer is "it depends".
No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses....let them do as best as they can in the market.
To encourage jobs IN the US, however, I'd say the Feds could lower taxes to corporations, for every documented US citizen and legal resident they hire to give incentive and make it easier to hire US citizens and legal residents
There, fixed for you. The problem is not US citizens hiring vs offshore hiring, but one of
1. hiring numbers - within US soil- of people already (and legally) in US soil vs
2. hiring numbers outside US soil (or worse, the premeditate and systematic preference of H1 visas over US workers, for US jobs, in US soil!).
We do not want to put artificial burdens on private businesses. After all, what is a manufacturer to do? Hire an assembly line worker that puts a head on a doll for $0.50/hr in China vs the same worker at $10/hr? But as you said quite correctly, the Feds can provide tax incentives as a function on the ratio of hiring in US soil...
The current crisis was caused by big government and looks increasingly likely to take down big government throughout the West. Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?
Dude, how can you free-market right-wingers spin everything around so much that you dare to make these claims, contradicting the most blatant reality? Do you take courses on bullshit?
or [the US could] compete on quality like the Germans
Does that mean the US will get to impose hundreds of anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports like Germany?
EU extends China anti-dumping duty for barium carbonate
EU levies stiff anti-dumping tariffs [on ceramic tiles]
Chinese exporters regret EU anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made screws, bolts
Germany's SolarWorld expects anti-dumping complaints vs China
EU Hits China with Anti-Dumping Duties on Paper
EU greenlights anti-dumping duties on Chinese light bulbs
EU Extended Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bicycle Imports
You see, while German manufacturers and workers are busy competing 'on quality', as you say, the German government is actively protecting domestic industry from competition with China throughout the EU. German manufacturers and German workers do not have to compete with disposable Asian workers and indifferent health/safety/labor/environmental regulation.
The 'oh-noes trade war' sentiment that we get from pro-business types and Chinese ministers is a farce. We're in a trade war. We're getting our clocks cleaned. That is the real reason we have thousands of 'business' degree graduates in their late 20s shuffling around trying to 'occupy' Wall Street. The US no longer provides the real growth necessary to accommodate them. They are surplus people; their futures went to China.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
US has HIGHER taxes than Norway and Germany.
While people will say: those are 'marginal' taxes, well you know what, with the inflation being what it is, many of the people who actually are in any position to create jobs are paying most of their income taxes in their marginal rate. 35% federal, x% state (depends where you are, can be 0 for Texas, can be 7% for some other places, Illinois, Connecticut come to mind). SS and Medicare, one is 12% on first hundred K, but the other is 3% on the ENTIRE earning. Why should somebody even pay SS or Medicare if they can just afford the fucking treatment and pension out of pocket? Of-course it's because it's a giant ponzi scheme that had to have more heroin shot into it and benefits cut.
If you pay yourself dividends, (like Buffet), then your income tax is your corporate tax (whatever he pays, but it's 35%), and then 15% dividend on top of that, so that's 44.5%.
Germany only wants 40% total even for top hedge fund managers. Norway wants maybe 42-43%. As to USA there are also all these other taxes that don't even exit in many other places, like property taxes. There are still hidden excise and import and sales and fuel and municipal taxes, there are all sorts of user fees on different gov't levels, licenses, etc.
USA is heavily taxed, much more than most countries. In Canada corporate taxes are around 20%, so there are many people with their own 'corporations' for obvious reasons. USA - land of the free, where people ran to, to escape the terrible 'high' tax of King Roger. A 3% tax. Ha. The serfs had to pay 25% of their income to their masters. HA.
When you have conversations with Americans today, you'd think the best things in life are taxes. Well, that's because 50% of them don't actually pay income taxes. There are all other types of taxes as well, but income taxes? 50% don't pay them.
Anyway, the point is that people shouldn't HAVE to pay ANY income taxes. They should FIGHT for their RIGHT NOT to pay that.
Or do they want to remain slaves of the system? Well, the top richest people in USA are using the middle, who pay most of the taxes to be used as scape goats, so the bottom, who benefit from the taxes that the middle pays, will direct their anger at those people. Class warfare 101.
You can't handle the truth.
Bubbles, it's all about inflating bubbles.
You know, they sold worthless Internet company stocks in 90s for a long time as well, they sold mortgages and inflated housing bubbles for a long time as well.
They've been printing lots of fiat since 1913, but especially since the fifties. It takes a while for a problem to rump up. The fall is not going to take a long time, it's going to be dramatic and quick. It takes nothing at all to cross the edge - here USD is still worth 1% of its 1913 value. Here it crosses that boundary of the last percent and nobody wants it anymore.
It's not going to happen right now. Right now, once the DOW 10,000 rubicon is passed, Bernanke will come out with something. Maybe 3-5 Trillion QE3? If not, then he'll have to do TARP2 soon after (TWIST put the previously failed/bailed out banks in the red).
I don't know if it's this year (likely not) or next year (more likely) or the year after (very likely) that USD will become trash, but unless they actually stop and reverse course, it will become trash. Do you think if they follow the same thought process as you (that it's being going on for a long time, can't hurt now), that it won't happen within the next 1-2 years? Hmm. I think it will.
You can't handle the truth.
Hundreds of trillions.
The SS and Medicare obligations that are in bonds, about 30% of all mortgages in USA that were 'guaranteed' by FHA, Freddie/Fannie and that were bought out as derivatives (most of this is garbage, once they mark it to market, it's probably not worth more than 25% of what they want for it). This is on Treasury books. I am not even talking about things that nobody knows about, which can't be talked about, which require a complete Fed review.
But just the social obligations and the mortgages are over 100 Trillion by themselves.
You can't handle the truth.
> If we cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, that's
> actual money that isn't in the economy.
That's Monopoly money (largely unprinted) that isn't in the economy, Mr. Keynes.
Conjure up as much as you'd like, but you'll only postpone and increase the pain. Exponential functions (like our national debt) go on forever in pure mathematics, but not so much in the finite physical world.
We can choose from two kinds of pain; the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. We (and our predecessors) have chosen the latter.
Now is the reckoning.
So, the big governments failed because they gave the banks what they wanted to screw us over? If the governments were any strong they would stand up to the banks, wouldn't they? And your solution is even less government?
Don't you get it? In spite what all the free-market looneys have been preaching for decades, a weak State does not spend less money. Precisely the opposite. A weak State falls easy prey to the big economic powers, and these use it to funnel more money from the people into their pockets. Meanwhile, they get tax cuts and deregulation so they can make even more money.
All these problems started when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher instituted the "small government is good government" bullshit as the new mantra for economic policy.