I work for the offshore arm of a large multinational, one of 2 Americans working in a Indian division, and I would agree whole heartedly with most of what was said. If your model is a colocated dev group with light Agile, if any, processes then you are in for a long haul. It takes about 3-4 years to create a "expert" on a system if you are trying to produce a programmer/analyst. Those days are long gone if you are going to work in a globally distributed environment. We are working, quite sucessfully, with a very large ODC in India when we changed our model to keep intellectual capitol and design (read reqs, analysis, architecture and design) and offshore the grunt work to India. We find this type of work to be excellent for the Indian grads who have never worked offshore and who fulfill the descriptions above. Managing them from offshore, we can alleviate many of the above mentioned issues. The downside, those of us who have been in the industry and developers, I started in the environ in the mid 80s, will never touch code again and if you cannot move into a architecture and/ or design role, you will quickly become un or underemployed.
If you look at the history, we really screwed ourselves. We sent the jobs overseas when we began to demand exorbitant salaries in the late 90's /.com boom. I remember seeing kids who dropped out of school getting starting salaries in the mid to high 70's. Did any of us think that was sustainable? We did to ourselves what the unions did to manufacturing. We artificially elevated our salaries to a point that we virtually guaranteed our jobs would go somewhere else eventually. Those who were involved in those days woudl have to agree but I sure as pumped mine as much as I could.
India is now experience churn at a rate of 25% and annual salary increase of almost 20%. I give them 10 more years before I need to learn to speak Mandarin.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for the offshore arm of a large multinational, one of 2 Americans working in a Indian division, and I would agree whole heartedly with most of what was said. If your model is a colocated dev group with light Agile, if any, processes then you are in for a long haul. It takes about 3-4 years to create a "expert" on a system if you are trying to produce a programmer/analyst. Those days are long gone if you are going to work in a globally distributed environment. We are working, quite sucessfully, with a very large ODC in India when we changed our model to keep intellectual capitol and design (read reqs, analysis, architecture and design) and offshore the grunt work to India. We find this type of work to be excellent for the Indian grads who have never worked offshore and who fulfill the descriptions above. Managing them from offshore, we can alleviate many of the above mentioned issues. The downside, those of us who have been in the industry and developers, I started in the environ in the mid 80s, will never touch code again and if you cannot move into a architecture and/ or design role, you will quickly become un or underemployed. If you look at the history, we really screwed ourselves. We sent the jobs overseas when we began to demand exorbitant salaries in the late 90's / .com boom. I remember seeing kids who dropped out of school getting starting salaries in the mid to high 70's. Did any of us think that was sustainable? We did to ourselves what the unions did to manufacturing. We artificially elevated our salaries to a point that we virtually guaranteed our jobs would go somewhere else eventually. Those who were involved in those days woudl have to agree but I sure as pumped mine as much as I could.
India is now experience churn at a rate of 25% and annual salary increase of almost 20%. I give them 10 more years before I need to learn to speak Mandarin.