I totally agree with you. I worked for a software company that five or six years ago started on a dedicated effort to move most of its technical staff to India. They hired a boatload of programmers in India and fired a bunch in the U.S. That began a very painful transition -- where the more senior engineers in the US office would have to explain to their counterparts overseas why it is better to use a function as opposed to cutting and pasting the same block of code in several places -- and other rudimentary programming concepts. The turnover in the Indian office was something like 50% a year and so it seemed that retraining was continually necessary. There was lots of contention and politicking between the offices. My experience with that particular group of engineers was that there was a startling lack of personal initiative and ownership. There was a lot of energy put into trying to push the responsibility for failed projects and missed deadlines onto just about anyone else. (Of course, I'm speaking only of my experience and am not painting all Indian engineers with this brush. There were a handful of really solid, hard working, technically innovative engineers with whom I worked.)
Outsourcing will only be successful for those companies willing to invest money into an infrastructure to address these kinds of difficulties -- and then whether it pays off is another question. Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable banking with a company that outsourced -- although I'm not sure if the companies have to be forthcoming with that kind of information. I specifically didn't buy a Dell computer several years ago because they outsource, and I try to keep my money locally (i.e. buy at the locally owned garden center instead of Walmart).
However, I'm not naive enough to think that outsourcing will stop. It will continue, full steam ahead, until it becomes financially burdensome -- either by loss of customers or rising costs whereever they are outsourcing.
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I totally agree with you. I worked for a software company that five or six years ago started on a dedicated effort to move most of its technical staff to India. They hired a boatload of programmers in India and fired a bunch in the U.S. That began a very painful transition -- where the more senior engineers in the US office would have to explain to their counterparts overseas why it is better to use a function as opposed to cutting and pasting the same block of code in several places -- and other rudimentary programming concepts. The turnover in the Indian office was something like 50% a year and so it seemed that retraining was continually necessary. There was lots of contention and politicking between the offices. My experience with that particular group of engineers was that there was a startling lack of personal initiative and ownership. There was a lot of energy put into trying to push the responsibility for failed projects and missed deadlines onto just about anyone else. (Of course, I'm speaking only of my experience and am not painting all Indian engineers with this brush. There were a handful of really solid, hard working, technically innovative engineers with whom I worked.) Outsourcing will only be successful for those companies willing to invest money into an infrastructure to address these kinds of difficulties -- and then whether it pays off is another question. Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable banking with a company that outsourced -- although I'm not sure if the companies have to be forthcoming with that kind of information. I specifically didn't buy a Dell computer several years ago because they outsource, and I try to keep my money locally (i.e. buy at the locally owned garden center instead of Walmart). However, I'm not naive enough to think that outsourcing will stop. It will continue, full steam ahead, until it becomes financially burdensome -- either by loss of customers or rising costs whereever they are outsourcing.