

Its All a Sham - An Indian Techie's Take on Outsourcing - rams
http://expertdabbler.com/2008/10/08/its-all-a-sham/

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sfamiliar
it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other
side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US
programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low
salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that
it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not
having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the
indian developers.

the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with
their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but
they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few
exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't
know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for
help.

in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5
butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that
understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas
developers are more 'technically competent'.

you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of
those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.

~~~
systems
"incapable of self-direction" ... well, as fellow IT worker from a developing
country, I feel sort of offended when I hear such comments. Not that it's
untrue, but more because this seems to be a commong perception.

I know where it comes from, managers in developing nations seems to suck more
than the avg manager in say europe or USA.

Managers in developing nations, tend to give unclear direction and then become
agressive when their subordinates do not do as they were told, so eventually
in many workplace ppl become very passive so not to anger their manager.

What aggrevate the issue is that being a developing nation, it means
opportunities are fewer, and you tend to get stuck where you are longer than
you usually want.

The solution is simple, just tell your new co-workers from this developing
nations, that they are empowered and allowed to do mistakes without being
attacked,thats all!

~~~
jeffool
The line "being a developing nation, it means opportunities are fewer, and you
tend to get stuck where you are longer than you usually want," is very
interesting me. I can't speak to that notion exactly, but here in the US
people very often feel exactly the same about managers in any job so far as
becoming "very passive so not to anger their manager."

It's often much easier to survive the day-to-day by being passive and doing
things inefficiently or wrong than it is to trying to 'do the right thing'. I
don't think I'm exaggerating when I say most management _everywhere_ prefers
employees to do things "their way" over "the right way."

And insofar as how to combat it, your simple suggestion pretty much hits the
nail on the head. Just make sure on-site management understands that too.

------
alecco
The savings of outsourcing sometimes are more related to infrastructure cost
and tax than salary.

If only US workers would like to relocate to a cheaper place it would be a
killer. Perhaps a Silicon Valley branch on a beach paradise in Mexico or
Central America? Some place where half a US salary gives a significantly
better life. Just a thought.

~~~
ajross
Except that the value of all those "expensive" developers in Silicon Valley is
precisely that they are _not_ on a beach somewhere, but right "here" where
they can be hired immediately. That is worth something to the people doing the
hiring, which is why they are willing to pay the added costs of locating a
business there. If outsourced development was always a win, areas like the bay
area would disintegrate on their own.

This is why no one worries about top-shelf product development jobs being
"outsourced" for the most part. If developer talent was fungible in this way,
we'd have seen rampant "outsourcing" to St. Louis and Pittsburgh long before
it became popular in Bangalore or Beijing. The jobs at risk of being moved
offshore are those doing lower-level "IT" jobs. These are the people who were
complaining a decade ago about being replaced by contractors -- it's the same
principle.

~~~
netcan
But should a competing centre emerge in Bangalore of Beijing, it'd be hard to
beat.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
But would it stay competitive for very long?

~~~
netcan
I don't think cost of living in either of those is going to match the US's any
time soon.

Assuming that it contains enough of the right people & supporting services to
build the right complexes, why not? How many of the bay area's mojo comes from
people moving to the bay area for its mojo? They could go somewhere else.

Keeping it should be easier then building it.

But overall, the tech complex shouldn't be a whole lot more difficult to move
then any other complex. I'd say moving the manufacturing complexes out of
China would be harder.

A tech company can be anywhere really, as long as they have the people. the
complex can scale down to one & still be useful. It's more useful as a
complex, but still quite useful without it.

pg has some stuff on how to build a silicon valley (Take one cup of nerd, stir
in a generous sprinkling of rich people & nerds, nice weather etc. etc..

I wonder how much of it is easier then he reckons. Surely there is some bias.
The Auto manufacturing centres of US or Germany probably thought that they
were impossible to move.

Why not start a startup on a SE Asian island? Could live comfortably on 15k
per year (including home visits). Assuming you bring your people with you &
they are willing to be paid in lifestyle. It might be appealing to certain
people. Nice beaches.

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RKlophaus
"I do not understand this logic of 1 guy with normal vision = 5 blind guys."

Well phrased.

The big problem I see with outsourcing is that it's difficult to cultivate
passion in a remote team, and passion is what leads to attention to detail,
refactoring, and all of the other things that make high quality software.

This is what people miss when they say, "open source teams work from different
countries all the time and produce high quality software, how is outsourcing
so different?"

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bigbang
I know a lot of ppl in India who work in outsourced companies. They are pretty
smart than many American counterparts I've seen, but they lack confidence and
decision making. Thier confidence also gets shattered by doing crappy report
generation,formatting,testing kind of work while only some of them are
motivated enough to side projects.

~~~
nailer
I've had jobs in Western countries involving report generation, formatting,
testing.

These are indeed boring. I've given myself a challenge of automating the
living shit out of them:

* First time I learnt bash was to work out how to make server documentation with it (I'd built some shell functions to handle headings, tables, columns, etc.

* First time I learnt xPath was to fix 60,000 GECOS fields of a customers Linux hosts when the customer refused to give us programmatic access to the corporate directory.

You'll be appreciated for the labor you save (if not, leave).

Then go off, find some more interesting problem, and work on that. With good
managers, they'll pick up you're a 'self starter'.

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gaius
If you are in the situation where a company is offering people a decent amount
of money to leave, there are only two choices. Leave now with the money. Leave
later with nothing.

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newt0311
Welcome to the world of mega corporations. The economies of scale in these are
great but so are the dis-economies of scale often due to information defects.
The nth upper level manager has no idea of the individual capabilities or the
individual contract that people are hired under from across the world. Indeed,
with several tens of thousands of employees spread out in (optimistically)
four of five different legal jurisdiction, it is unreasonable to expect a
human to keep track of all this information.

