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D.C. Awards Obamacare IT Work To Offshore Outsourcer
dcblogs writes "Infosys, an India-based offshore IT outsourcing firm, recently announced that it had won a $49.5 million contract to develop a health benefit exchange for the District of Columbia. The contract was awarded to a U.S.-based Infosys subsidiary, Infosys Public Services. That's one of the larger government contracts won by an offshore outsourcing firm, but it's unclear whether any of the work will be done overseas. The District isn't disclosing any contract details. An FOIA request for the contract has been submitted. Infosys is one of the largest users of H-1B visas, and has been under a grand jury investigation for its use of B1 visitor visas."
for why the H-1B system ought to be massively reduced and US contracts should be awarded only to actual US companies instead of shell-game "subsidiaries."
These kinds of contracts are supposed to be bid out to the lowest bidder.
If that actually happens: people complain that a company like Infosys wins the contract.
If it doesn't happen: people complain that the government is overpaying for IT services, and back up their allegations by quoting a much lower price someone in the private sector got (...from Infosys) as evidence that the government is inefficient.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Because it would cost D.C. about 5 times more if it was done here?
This is too bad. I very much want to see the new healthcare plan succeed. Now the conservatives are going to say "See? See? Told you it doesn't work! No one deserves reasonably priced healthcare. Let The Free Market sort it out."
And to be clear, it wouldn't have been much different if the contract were awarded to IBM, Accenture, etc. The problem is the level of abstraction that an outsourcer adds to the project. Having the coders offshore just makes it worse.
I've been on a couple of Infosys projects in the past (both as a third party contractor and an FTE) and for the most part, they're just like any other outsourcer -- super-expensive, taking forever to do anything, etc. Code quality was garbage, just like any other firm . Indian or not, that's the root of the problem. Everything can be done cheaper in-house, but the accounting tricks employed by business make it expensive to have FTEs.
Obamacare + foreign workers = WIN! (for you click-whoring editors)
By this logic, probably every government IT project has some element of either outsourced labor or parts manufactured overseas. Right now, I'm trying to find an article that I can reduce to a headline with big tits, gun rights, and failed Bush foreign policy in it...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It would be great if immigration policy could be decided based on something other than the interests of suppressing wages and controlling the workforce.
Agribusiness loves cheap labor from Mexico. Keep 'em coming, but keep that deportation threat over their heads so they don't get uppity about those "wages" and "working conditions" things.
Then the wealthiest companies America need tech workers and don't want to pay American wages. Since they can't pile in illegals to run the data centers, get those h1bs rammed through congress. There we go, cheap tech workers who are nice and easy to control because they don't want to get deported after two weeks if they lose their job.
Feudalism. Fascism. Whatever, it's a racket.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Number? Studies? Actual data? I keep hearing this kind of crap. The problem is every time a project I was on got associated with off shoring it ended up costing time and effort here to cover up the screw ups.
Again, present actual facts. I am sick and tired of the same old sound bites that just never seem to be true.
Yes, but it will cost 20 times more to be burdened by and the be forced to fix a shitty first implementation.
Do it right the first time or you're going to pay even more to do it right the second.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
You forgot the water fluoridation and vaccination conspiracies, Comrade.
Yeah, because American companies have an excellent track record with government IT projects.
Everyone, except for small companies, is using H-1b programmers. InfoSys, Tata, and the like have discovered that an American front company can get them past the "we want to support American companies" view of business so they started buying up their American competitors.
Since we can't get away from foreign programmers, then we need to ensure that the job they do is good. What the D.C. and the U.S. really need are decent lawyers who won't let something like this become a honeypot that any vendor can raid as they see fit. If InfoSys makes a bid, they should have to live up to it.
Average salary of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average salary of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
'nuff said
sudo make me a sandwich
The people in power have been outsourcing everything possible to off shore work, against the law in many cases (several pieces of DOD work have been outsourced to South American countries). The only thing they are trying to keep local are the people needed to implement a police state when desired.
You only need to look at what they are doing and compare that to the state of our economy to figure out that they want the country to collapse. They are trying as hard as they can to make it collapse without being obviously criminal.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You want American corporations such as Google and Apple to get these so that they can later dodge the income taxes rather than giving the contracts out to foreign companies who contribute nothing to the American tax coffers.
Because it would cost D.C. about 5 times more if it was done here?
Then maybe we shouldn't do it anywhere.
How about the real question, since companies are ephemeral entities with no real way to measure their "americanness." Why have we inserted pointless middlemen of contracting companies into our government's process of managing itself. The fact is that it's an internal project, and having developers working for the government wouldn't really cost us much more. We've yoked ourselves to the wagon of privatization, without really caring what that means. I'm not entirely convinced of the value of having entire industries built around providing workers to the government when the government can damn well hire its own employees.
Yeah, because all companies have an excellent track record with government IT projects.
FTFY
sudo make me a sandwich
If this ends up being like their programmer outsourcing, you will pay 10 people to do the work of one over here, then you will still have to fix it when the work comes back
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I work for Accenture, my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality. I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and him loudly, it is the facts.
Average salary of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average salary of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
'nuff said
Average quality of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average quality of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
'nuff said
Pretty much that.
What no one thinks about is the for an outside source to provide you with something they have to charge what that costs and profit. Now if you need a single trinket that works, but if you need lots of work done hiring directly can be substantially cheaper. For this kind of thing I would think some direct hire and some contract workers would be best.
Shopping it out has to be the most expensive way to do it.
US companies do business in India? Wait.. To get in there you have to fight to pass innumerable hurdles thrown in your way.
How about China?
If the world was a level playing field, I'd probably be ok with the H1 Visa scam bullshit. But I'm not (and I'm a Brit in the UK). Globalisation is fine, I have no problem with it in its bassic capitalist basis. But it has to cut both ways. If China and India get to grow their middle class by working on US workload, then US companies should have the same access to do the same in China and India.
I watch real time each week. Its somewhat weird seeing the slagging off the republicans get there. The dems in the US seem very very friendly to immigration, and to globalisation, and seem to take a lot of funding from the Apple and 'Media' funding. In the meantime on an observational level, seems to me the bone marrow of America - the middle class person is under seige. I can't fundamentally understand off shoring, from a business perspective. Even in raw capitalists terms - eroding the middle class is eroding away your own customer base long term.
Globalisation in the west now seems to be 'worry about the H1 visa holders', and immigrants, and 3rd world - more than your own people. Screw them. Very strange way to proceed.
Its ok to have a concern about minorities and immigrants, but its got strangely out of kilter.
We`re all equal
Average quality of a government systems administrator - Priceless
sudo make me a sandwich
Except outsourced overseas IT doesn't have to suffer the consequences of a bug. Government employees (excepting congressmen) do.
they are also preparing....the bigfoot attacks
I work for Accenture, my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality. I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and him loudly, it is the facts.
So in the name of helping the american economy you should clearly accept an 80% pay cut to make yourself competitive with someone from India :)
(PS - This is a joke, in my experience offshoring to India is an utter disaster as your average indian outsourced development company will never give you an honest assessment of time involved in a project or actually admit when they are going to overrun the deadline before they do, causing any sort of confrontation is just too alien to the local culture even when it is better in the long run)
I dont read
spagetti code that does not work is what they just purchased.
companies are trying to reduce their labor costs and have enough money to lobby the government. They don't care about the citizens of any of these countries, it is a means to an end.
I also loved the the Martin Luther King statue was done in China
Average salary of systems administrator in India - ~$4,000 US
Average salary of a systems administrator in Washington DC - ~$75,000 US
Availability of your systems administrator when the shit hits the fan:
Outsourced to India - ~The third Thursday after Monsoon season ends.
In-house in DC - ~Already waiting in your office with an apology and an action plan.
Which one do you want to explain to the board you hired to save $71k/year, while the company hemorrhages 10x that per day in downtime because of your savings?
Now in fairness, I've worked with Indian H1Bs, and they pretty much have the same skills profiles as Americans - Half can just about get the job done when nothing exciting comes up, a quarter suck, and a quarter rock. But despite that, outsourcing still simply doesn't work for one simple reason - Management views it as waving the magic green wand and making a pesky project someone else's problem; when in reality, outsourced work requires more careful management than traditional in-house development.
Any PHB who thinks coding something to spec means a job well done, has never actually looked at the craptastic quality of most real-world specs.
I know Booz Hamilton has at least one opening.
What I mentioned is not a private company, this is the US Government shitting on US Citizens. The difference is huge!
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Do you compare the bills you both have to pay?
Cause, you know, in my homeland in Eastern Europe I can get along nicely with 1/5 of a German salary....
I know and completely agree with everything you said. However, as far as the government is concerned, they look at $$$, not at the quality of work or any of the numerous important factors which you spelled out.
The government is like the guy that needs to buy a lawnmower and finds something on Craigslist. He spend $50 for a lawnmower that works for a month then blows up. So he buys another $50 lawnmower on Craigslist. The cycle repeats. By the end of the year, he's spent $300 buying used lawnmowers because they are "cheaper," when he could have bought a brand-new one for $250 and not had any problems.
sudo make me a sandwich
where you had sick people being drooped / hit with bills with 400%-500%+ markup and other bs like they coded it the wrong way so we will not pay.
health care places that take your money for years and when you get really sick they look back and say you had a zit 20years ago so it's a pre existing condition and you are not covered.
mini med planes that don't cover jack shit it you do get sick.
When you switch jobs you have to change health plans.
The obamacare is not the best idea but it's a good starting point and it does fix some issues and shits other stuff around. As for the 29 hour rule places have been doing stuff like that for years. But is it the best way to fix that? Maybe it should have a higher bar or at least be setup to go after the walmarts that just about dump there works on to medicaid.
I would estimate that between 50-200 people would be actively involved in this project, and probably shouldn't be thought of as "Large", or even "Larger". Furthur, any US government contract 100 million, in my experience, would never be classified as "Large". This is simply anti-political sensationalism.
Effects, directly, note 1, note 2
Another person either
On the dole ( increases govt spending in US ), possibly leading to increase in crime in US
Jobless, possibly homeless ( note 1 ), possibly leading to increase in crime in US
Going after the dwindling pool of jobs in "career", resulting in downward pressure on IT wage ( which reduces tax revenue in US ).
Going after pool of jobs out of career, downward pressure on wages ( reduction in tax revenue ).
Note 1, Lost tax revenue to US govt, decrease in aggregate amount available to spend in US economy
Note 2, Additional tax revenue to India's govt, increase in aggregate amount available to spend in India's economy
There are other cascade effects, prices in US will have to fall, given the decreases in amounts available to spend.
( I.E., you have less to spend, so you move out of your house ( reducing mortgage/rent paid ), you tighten the belt ( spending less on food, and non-essentials ) , which means lowered amounts going to your creditors/people-you-pay-for-stuff, which means, in turn, less for them.....
emt 377 emt 4
part of the issue is HR and the schools / training.
When you have HR doing stuff some time it's not even that they are looking for a H1-B it's just that they don't know about IT when setting the job posting.
Like listing each skills that IT may use or even stuff that they only touch 1-2 times a year or maybe even 1-2 times in 3-5 years and say we want people with 5 exp, saying that we want EXP with tool X and passing over people with tool Y that is just about the same thing or even when tool X is easy to pickup.
Thinking that CS = IT when it does not.
Passing over the tech / trades schools / even in house training that have much less skill gaps then what a CS school gives people.
Passing over people who do it contracting even when lot's of IT work is contracting or thought staffing firms.
Some even it's when PHB are running IT and don't know about IT so they look for key words / say I want X done in Z time and when real IT people say that can't be done they go to H1-B firm that says we can do that even when it ends up going over Z time.
Is Obamacare the official name for this healthcare reform package? Somehow I don't think it is. It's not very good legislation. It's definitely not healthcare done right. But using the term "Obamacare" still seems to smack of bias, especially when you consider that main details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are implementations of the Heritage Foundation's plan that the Republicans were pushing back when the US was trying to get meaningful healthcare reform. US politics seems to be driven by short memories and nasty, hypocritical backstabbing.
If it is so small, then it would not cost much more to do it domestically. This is a disgrace.
Hardly "disgraceful", but yes, it would be considerably more expensive, from a labor perspective, for an American contractor to fulfill the contract. India's per capita GDP: $1510 VS United States per capita GDP: $48100 so at a ration of 31:1, the contract might cost more than 1.5 billion. Personally, I'm glad they are looking for cost cutting measure where they can. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=GDP%2C+United+States%2C+India)
my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality
I'm not sure if you are trying to sell us on the quality of the work done by off-shore workers, or your lack of quality. Either way it works I suppose.
BTW, I'm working 3 blocks north of you, and I've never seen an off-shore team that was of any quality.
Agreed. This is disgraceful. DC should be widely called out on this in the media.
The US mid-west has a much lower cost of living than areas like say California or New York, more expensive than say India or Manila. There are companies that instead of outsourcing move operations into this are of the US and do great when working with other American companies.
I have worked with companies that work with Accenture and when I hear the name I cringe.
Sadly, Americans are quite ignorant and need to read INFORMATIVE things like this.
BTW, D.C. is heavily managed by the US HOUSE which is part of the reason it is a mess, it's an odd situation, not like a state or the fed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
All of the work will be done overseas. The reason is very simple: the government has joined big business in making sure white people stay unemployed.
Face the truth.
I know some great offshore developers, and I also know some American developers that aren't worth their salt. Each assessment needs to be made at a personal level; you can't make a valid blanket stereotyped claim that fits everyone.
What I see causing most of the poor quality work is developers who are suffering from idiotic corporate practices, policies, and rules. "All developers shall submit their UML drawings to the UML Governance Board, and have them approved by no less than three board members, thus ensuring quality software will be developed from them." Very few developers (onshore or offshore) are successful producing quality software in such an environment, and it's especially tough for contractors who feel constrained to follow the letter of the rules without question. Now apply that constraint to a culture that reinforces the idea to accept work tasks without question anyway, and the lack of feedback pretty much ensures you'll get unexpected results.
Take the chains off, though, and you can get spectacular results from good people. You'll never get those results from bad developers, regardless of which landmass they live on.
John
Average quality of a government systems administrator - Priceless
Is that an advertising joke, or a division by zero error? :-)
John
We've already past the event horizon of technology+over population to the point that there will never be enough jobs for the population. Automation has become a cheap, viable, alternative to hiring people for pennies and paying enormous shipping costs. Instead of worrying about who is taking "our" jobs, we should be worrying about how we will be taking care of the population when there are "no jobs for anyone". It will be a very real problem in the coming generations. I don't really mean this in a negative light. It will people to spend more time with their families, learning, exploring. But food and items will need to be properly rationed out to everyone.
They know the spec game inside out, right side left and top side down. They will implement a totally useless piece of software and when you complain they will insist they have implemented exactly what was in the original contract. That archaic grammar book by Wren and Martin is God's gift to them. They will endlessly argue what is meant by "shall" and "may" and "will". Most high school teachers in India still swear by this book as the ultimate authority in English grammar. So you will be forced to amend and correct the original specs. That will trigger all sorts of revised estimates and revised costs, and by the time you are done, you would have spent about 50% more than your highest bidder, taken twice as long, and gotten yourself software that does 50% of what you want, and probably 75% of what you wrote in the spec sheet but 100% of exactly what is in the spec sheet according to Messrs Wren and Martin as interpreted by Infosys.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I work for Accenture, my counterparts in India cost 1/5 of my wage and in many ways equal my quality. I'm not going to stick my fingers in my ears and him loudly, it is the facts.
Well I've worked alongside Accenture for years, and if what you say is technically factual in the slightest that means that
a) You are as technically competent as your Indian peers
a) That standard of competency is not very high.
tl;dr Best to be thought a fool and say nothing, than to speak and remove all doubt
"When I am king, you will be first against the wall..."
Here's a thought, suspend the H-1B visas and educate or retrain US citizens to take those jobs. Corporate America keeps exclaiming that the H-1B visa process is expensive and the only reason they go that route is that they can't find qualified US applicants. Well, use those funds to train your own employees. Then, when the US is at full employment (at whatever that rate really is), if more workers are needed, then bring them in.
A large percentage of college graduates are not gainfully employed in the fields they studied, including STEM. It is hard to argue, that we need to import more STEM workers when we can't even employ the recent graduates. But maybe it has to do with that new math, you know the kind where you can build wealth in America by creating jobs overseas and importing workers for the rest of the jobs here.
What was that called by Reagan? Trickle down economics, where the majority of the population trickles further down the system so the few at the top can accumulate the wealth. If it costs corporations too much to hire trained labor, then either train them yourself (as in the past), cut dividends and executive pay, or find a different line of work. After all, isn't that how economics is supposed to work?
If they have the contract to an American firm, they'd take the initial payment and invest it in lobbying for why they need more money because they didn't understand the scale of the project when they started. They would be late, messy and never get done doing it. Then after being 5 years late, they'll go to court and only the lawyers will end up the better for it.
The Indian company on the other hand will simply develop an unusable product which will represent a product which is a literal interpretation of the original contract but will be a disaster since they'll always choose the wrong meaning of any word which could have to meanings.
Either way, the project will be a wreck because American companies suck at delivering software to the government and Indian companies never actually understand what they're supposed to make... They do make great things... Just not what they were supposed to. Haha
This government and administration is the most corrupt, unpatriotic bunch of criminals to ever curse this country. This is even more proof they do not care about America and Americans, only what is cheaper to pass their projects. They will slowly start outsourcing everything while there are competent American firms who could do this even better. When will people wake up and storm the gates?
I think this is the health care exchange for the District of Columbia not one contracted by the federal government. According to the ACA the states (+D.C.) had flexibility on how to implement the state level exchanges.
My state (VA) deferred to the federal government to implement it.
Obama is the most conservative president the US has had in the past 30 years, and possibly in all of time. This is exactly in line with everything else he has done to produce more money for the wealthiest Americans while under the conservative guise of "it's good for everyone else too". He has consistently chosen the kinds of fiscally conservative actions that Bush Jr, Bush Sr, Reagan, and Nixon all could only dream about.
It is not completely clear from the headline, but the summary and article would make me guess that this contract was issued by the District of Columbia government not the Obama administration.
I saw, "D.C. Awards Obamacare IT Work To Offshore Outsourcer" and immediately thought, IBM?
Oh look, accidenture is here.
Since a government systems administrator wrote the post, it MUST HAVE been a division by zero error. We are not expected to do many things. And the few things we are expected to do, have such a low standard that monkey's on a typewriter could do it.
sudo make me a sandwich
45 times? Where did you get this BASELESS figure from? I work with plenty of Indians here in my US Govt contract, who are getting paid American wages, and do top notch work. So take your pick, Indian Developers in America can do the job at American wages, OR Indian developers in India can do the Job, and Indian wages. here's some advice for you: 1) Ignore Inflammatory Sensationalism 2) Accept the fact that the United States government MUST find ways to do more with less, thanks to the sequester. 3) It IS cheaper, MUCH cheaper, to outsource work to a place where wages are cheaper. Again, I'm happy to see DC being smart about the money they spend.
Are you kidding? The Media is making WAY more than 49.5 million airing all the garbage about the Zimmerman trial.
I'm in finance, not development. But my experience is that you get what you pay for. Good finance people in India are only slightly cheaper than here in the US; add in the off-shoring complications, it's a losing prospect. We save money on drone jobs, but that's about it.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Yes, but it will cost 20 times more to be burdened by and the be forced to fix a shitty first implementation.
Thereby creating more jobs. See, it's a win-win! ~
I agree with you completely. Over the last 25+ years I have come in early to work with the German, French, Dutch, Finnish and Israilis. Every one of them had their own quirks and problems (including me) but we always manged to work together and get the problems solved. I even moved to Germany and wrote software there for 3 years. Had a blast.
I have often worked as a consultant here remotely. It can be tough to keep things together when you are remote. For the last 18 years there has often been been Indians along with the other nationalities in the office. I get along pretty well with them but I never claimed to get along with everybody in any situation.
I do not know what it is with outsourcing to India. It has in the projects I have been associated with be a failure. I believe it is partly culture and partly just the fact that we are pretty much exactly 12 hours out of phase and it makes it impossible to coordinate on a real time basis. I know it seems the concept of CYA is a strong one in the projects I have seen.
Number? Studies? Actual data? I keep hearing this kind of crap. The problem is every time a project I was on got associated with off shoring it ended up costing time and effort here to cover up the screw ups.
Again, present actual facts. I am sick and tired of the same old sound bites that just never seem to be true.
The original poster won't give you the data, because any data that exists doesn't support his/her point. Take the Snowden/NSA debacle. If Snowden were a government employee, he wouldn't be making $200,000/yr even with benefits. Now figure in the salaries of the his supervisors and the owners, etc., plus the profit being made by the company. A government network administrator would have made $60,000 add another 40% for benefits, brings the total to $84,000 or $116,000 less than what was actually being paid.
Outsourcing makes sense in some situations such as temporary positions or extremely technical positions, but the outsourcing of common jobs by the government doesn't meet these conditions and has nothing to do with cost savings but instead is the modern form of political patronage.
I think every Medically Uninsured, and or Gay person could debate your thesis on point. On top of that, the president did what his comic predecessor couldn't do; harm a Bin Laden Kin Folk. I guess when you're involved with the Oil Industry, murdering people is a trivial event?
wages are going down, prices are going up. Sure, _toys_ are cheaper. But housing, food and medicine all cost a _lot_ more. You're lunch is more like $6 or $7 now, even at McDonalds, and you're probably making $9/$9.50.
Also, I'd be interested in _which_ logical fallacy you'd like to site disproves the broad statistical evidence of declining wages and what debate techniques you would use to show prices are going down.
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or did Ranton spend the first half of his post saying everything was A-OK because we have the same quality of life as we did in 1960, then finish by saying how much better things are 50 years later (1960 + 53 = 2013)?
Seriously, is anyone buying this? What the hell happened to _progress_? I know slippery slope is a 'logical fallacy' and all that rot, but 'come on. If you think the rich are content with rolling us back just to the 60's in wealth inequality you're nuts.
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people who just plain don't like being told what to do, even when it's the _right_ thing.
Also, the iPad fallacy is just that, a fallacy. Those people aren't worse off because they don't have an iPad. They're worse off because 76% of them are living Paycheck to Paycheck. The highest percentage since the 1940s!
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The jobs aren't going because of need. They're going because people in those countries lack an EPA, access to medical care, a social safety net, low cost education, etc, etc. They're going there because the super rich in those countries, e.g. the real 1%, have made those people's lives hell for their own profit.
I can't complete with some who drinks dirty water, dies of cancer at 45, and if his house catches fire he burns to death before he can open a window. I suppose if I want to tank my quality of life I could. But why in God's good name would I do that for some misguide notion of "Libertarianism"? Christ, if you want to do that go off to Galt's Gulch already. We don't need or want you here.
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it was largely an accident. Following WWII large parts of the world were destroyed and in need of rebuilding. Also, Eisenhower recognized that without a large scale gov't effort we'd slip back into the policies of wealth inequality that lead to so much unnecessary suffering, so he kicked off the Military Industrial complex (or as I like to call it, Weaponized Keynesianism). Finally the cold war scared companies and prevented the global race to the bottom that Karl Marx predicted (but all you can remember about him is that Mao/Stalin used his books for their dictatorships).
The cheap imports won't last. Already the price of almonds is skyrocketing because they're being exported. You will compete and lose on the global marketplace.
Also, what in God's good name makes you think most Americans own stock? Half of them are below the freakin' poverty line, which we haven't changed since the 50s'.
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in 'free' market capitalism like you're probably in favor of Trusts develop that control all capital. Cyclic down turns like what happen in 2008 wipe out the wealth of all but the well connected (capitalism is for the poor, while socialism for the rich).
You're dreaming of an idealized capitalism you were taught in grade school that never has, and never will exist. It just doesn't happen. You will never keep people from using their privilege to your detriment. The only solution is for us all to band together to regulate that privilege. That's called Government.
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Obama himself, however, has publicly embraced the moniker "ObamaCare" and has said he is proud of the name;
I suppose, if that's the case, it's fair. One would wonder why he would want his name attached to it though. That just makes it more of a target. It's already pretty clear that it's going to be dismantled on partisan grounds as soon as there's a shift in power. It's also a bit of an abomination anyway.
Availability of your systems administrator when the shit hits the fan: Outsourced to India - ~The third Thursday after Monsoon season ends.
How deluded are you? I work as a system admin in India with a company that has most of it's clients in US/Europe/Australia and I can't use that excuse. Of course you were using a hyperbole but it isn't even close to reality. The reason the quality suffers when you are outsourcing is *not* because of the competence of the workers it's because they don't really have an incentive to perform. We outsourced some of work to US(To be clearer it was a US based company that we bought out) and guess what the 2 projects with them are 2 years overdue. And here's the kicker they used company funds for personnel benefit and now we are suing them (or trying to, I don't know the details since I'm not in management)
We have India offices staffed with employee developers, not contractors. And that really is the best thing about our organization - we're all in it together, so there isn't an us-versus-them mentality. It's convenient to hold contractors at arm's length, and blame them when things go awry, and it's easy to say "let's end this contract." But it's very hard when you're all reporting to the same boss. That's had a lot to do with our success.
And you're absolutely right about the time difference being an issue. But you can make it work to a degree.
They've shifted their working times to start later in the morning and end later in the evening, and we have shifted our mornings to accommodate earlier meetings. We can get two hours of overlap every day with few problems, and depending on the situation we can get an additional couple of hours. It's enough to have hand-off kinds of meetings, and to discuss a project or specific problem, but not enough to work with them in a coaching, mentoring, or close partnership kind of role. That takes expensive travel, so it doesn't happen as much as either side would like. But when it does, it's great. I have some very good friends who just happen to live on the other end of a long plane ride, and I appreciate that globalization introduced us.
John