Long Term Effects of Outsourcing 628
simulate writes "There have been several postings about outsourcing and offshoring in the past
few weeks. Is outsourcing just a fad? In Outsourcing
Programmers is Bad Strategy for Software Companies
author Michael Bean compares offshoring to the enthusiasm for Internet startups
in the Nineties.
He claims
that
outsourcing programmers is bad for companies not because
of the programmer layoffs, but because technology companies lose their
capacity
to innovate.
Offshoring is a mistake
when technology companies confuse operational
effectiveness and strategy." I don't think the comparasion to Dot Bombs is entirely accurate - the trend to globalization overall has been going on for decades. Still interesting piece.
Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
effects (Score:2, Insightful)
is outsourcing just a fad? (Score:2, Insightful)
idiot
At some point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
This would be similar to the people on eBay who just sell drop-shipped items.
If you ask me, India is on the way to the Shoe Event Horizon, and it will only take one piece of protectionist legislation in the US to tumble the whole house of cards.
US Programmers vs Off Shore Programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
Outsourcing = Capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Problems with outsoucing (Score:4, Insightful)
The bottom line looks great, when you start digging around your new app, or code you find that the quality is generally missing.
Gasp! Actual insight! (Score:5, Insightful)
The hard part about realizing the gains from outsourcing is that most firms aren't up to managing such a long-term, strategic relationship in the manner that's required. When the work is done in-house, you can trust that the developers have your company's best interest in mind - when dealing with an outsourcer, their ultimate goal is to extract as much money from you as possible. If done right, it can be worth it, but as we've seen, many firms haven't been up to that challenge.
Re:It'll get worse before it gets better... (Score:5, Insightful)
the autor is a tad confused... (Score:4, Insightful)
the author seems to be under the impression that the success and innovation of a product is purely in the hands of a bunch of software developers. this is rubbish. innovation in the software industry is also about building a product to solve a particular problem - and well. if the functionality is well designed (say with some good interaction design) by a US-based company, the specifications can be written up in the US and sent to the Indian shop for authoring. in a well designed component-based framework, the "glue" can be built in the US whereas the components or specific objects can be farmed out at a lower cost.
Outsourcing Primary Development is a Bad Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Design in America is confrontational. It has to be. That's what makes American software products good. When a company takes it's core software and ships it overseas it looses that drive from employees to make the software better.
This is not to say that software developed elsewhere cannot be good but it does mean that software developed in India must use an Indian model for design and development if it is to be successful. For an American product competing on a slight technological advantage this is bad.
HP, as a sidebar, tends to outsource end of life stuff to India.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Outsourcing = Capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outsourcing = Capitalism (Score:2, Insightful)
Writing Software is Inexpensive (Score:2, Insightful)
We all generally take it as a given that software is expensive to develop, but that's really not true. Only the design/requirements phase is expensive. If you know exactly what it is that you need to write, in great detail, then the actual generation of documented, working code isn't that time consuming.
This is why open source software has been successful in recent years. The feature sets of operating systems, office suites, web servers, and database management systems have all stabilized to the point where we all now know exactly what each of these applications ought to look like. As a result, teams of enthusiasts and hobbyists can write credible, enterprise-applications at negligible expense. Open Source works well in precisely the same situations that offshoring works well. That's not to say that Open Source developers can't also be innovative, but I do claim that anything you can offshore successfully you'll probably be able to Open Source successfully as well, for exactly the same reason -- the expensive up-front design work has already been done.
Add to that the fact that the cost of reproducing software is nearly zero, then Open Source becomes an economic inevitability. Kudos to Stallman for starting the movement, but it would have happened eventually anyway I think, because eventually society gets wise to the fact that corporations are re-selling the same zero-cost product over and over again, and somebody somewhere will get the idea into their head that there is an obviously better way: write it once and for all and then just give it away.
Re:effects (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tech Consulting (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but in the industry, Accenture is a byword for disaster. Every project they get involved in runs vastly over budget, is late (sometimes years late) and often doesn't even do what it was supposed to in the first place. NIRS2, anyone? Accenture (and the rest of the Big 5, EDS, etc) is a vampire feeding on the clueless... their slick suits sell gargantuan consulting and systems implementation projects to managers who are intimidated by technology. They'd get laughed out of the building if they pitched to the savvy (free tip: if any big consulting firm pitches to you, make it a condition of signing a contract that the people who do the pitch will be working full time on the project. Watch them squirm, because the consultants business model requires that they dump cheap newbies on you to free up the experienced to sell more engagements).
I worked for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) so I know how those guys do business. I left after two months
Yeah, I used to be a management consultant too, so I know all the tricks
Re:Outsourcing == Bad Security (Score:2, Insightful)
But they DO outsource. The Government outsources all the time. Haven't you heard of government contractors? In many agencies all the technical work is done by contractors while the actual civil servant government employees are left in middle management positions to act as project management for the contractors.
Re:US Programmers vs Off Shore Programmers (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they are (probably) saying that typically outsourcing firms are set up to do grunt work, and the parent company performs the high-level "thinking" work that gets handed off to the contractor. This ignores that fact that lots of great ideas are generated down in the trenches, and since there are now two barriers (geography and the contractor barrier) between the thinkers and the trenches, this source of new ideas could get lost.
Of course, eventually the outsourcing countries will probably develop the means and confidence to start doing their own design and high-level work and bootstrap themselves above just doing "grunt" work, but that takes years to build the level of infrastucture and reputation needed for that.
Opening a subsidiary is not exactly outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
For example of innovations in subsidarys outside US see
http://www.iht.com/articles/121488.htm
and the slashdot story
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/2
Bad economic security, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovative CAN happen offshore (Score:3, Insightful)
Weird... (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on my trip, I don't think good programmers should worry. More importantly, if you have the skills, you are way ahead of your Indian counterparts right now (emphasis on right now). Keep improving your skills and becoming more and more expert and you will continue to be employed. Focus on fad languages and "me too" web designs and you're putting yourself in front of a train. I can't tell you how many people in India listed C# and Java as their primary languages...C'mon now, we all know that those are good for small things and prototyping, but they aren't languages you write OSs or such in.
Offshoring and outsourcing are not bad in their own right, but managers who think it is a panacea will be bitten for their lack of vision. The world is going to be global. Get used to it. Recognize that we AREN'T worth more than Doctors and other professionals.
Every profession, when it is in its infancy, has the potential to create very wealthy people relative to the norm. After a time, those new professions become common and the lucre standardizes lower than originally expected. Our incomes in the West will decrease somewhat. I think it sucks, too. That said, the cost-basis for India is growing geometrically now (from 4k to 7k to 18k in five years). Guess what? Those programmers in India who are good are unwilling to be without the amenities that you are I take for granted...good phones...broadband...etc. The infrastructure must grow and that costs money...so you have to pay them more...and costs grow.
Get over it, grow in your profession, become an expert and highly sought-after. It doesn't matter where you live...it matters what you know and can demonstrate.
Dave
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
You are joking, right? If you knew anything about IT (hint: there's a lot more to it than the web) you would know that finance, pharma, telco etc are in the driving seat as far as advanced IT goes. Why do you think Sun, IBM, Oracle et al are selling the top-end kit to? Any company that can use technology for competitive advantage will drive (i.e. pay for) innovation to happen. Finance and telco created a whole new industry, data warehousing, which forced the development of mass storage, fast networking, massive parallelism. Pharma created a whole new branch of computer science, bioinformatics.
The innovation that happens in the public eye is trivial compared to what happens in corporate cubicle farms and data centers.
The reason Western software is innovative is because it is driven by the needs of Western companies. The reason India doesn't innovate is because (aside from Western companies outsourcing to it) it doesn't have large or complex enough domestic businesses competing with each other to push IT as competitive advantage.
Re:Outsourcing == Bad Security (Score:2, Insightful)
Quite true. The big difference here is that the US Government has a system of clearances and other regulations for Contractors to follow, along with enforcement. The Feds can send the DIA or FBI to investigate Contractors and can arrest and imprison violators of its rules. A US company sending its Software to India or Russia does not have those same advantages. They could ask local law enforcement to investigate / arrest violators. But they may find that the local government IS the violator!
Re:Information Technology Is a Commodity. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:At some point.... (Score:5, Insightful)
it will only take one piece of protectionist legislation in the US to tumble the whole house of cards
Or for Pakistan to threaten to nuke them again, as they were doing just a few years ago. The first time a deadline is missed, and money is lost, because of instability in the region, I think we'll see lots of this work come back. Businesses don't appreciate uncertainty.
OTOH, if outsourcing becomes entrenched enough for long enough, then it becomes in America's interest to protect their stability with our own military force projection; witness Taiwan, or military protection of oil interests in the Middle East. How long until we turn this cusp I don't know--it has to be a factor of how much of their capital investment tax-paying-and-Congress-lobbying American Corps have to lose, and if the cumulative amount is enough to risk sending US boys to die for.
But that is the final result of India gaining outsourcing dollars--they are liable to become another Taiwan, which means that US boys might well be sent to defend India against China or Pakistan, to protect US Corp's right to unemploy those soldiers when they get home. India must appreciate having another friend in the world, considering China's expansionism and Pakistan's recent threats--so they'll be sure to play this for all it's worth, as soon as US Corps are extended there enough.
globalization irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not what he's talking about; it doesn't matter where the programmers are. The point is that if the programmers aren't really part of the company, the company is less likely to have the capacity for long-term innovation.
Is outsourcing that bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Is this really so bad idea?
We have American programmers, Indian (or Chinese, etc.) programmers, consumers and shareholders of software companies. Out of these 4 groups, only one loses, the rest benefits. I see it as a net gain. So this is rather a social problem (for unemployed), not economical.
2. Is there anything we can do about it?
If the same work can be done cheaper abroad, there is no way to stop it in the long run. Even if you do, the programmers abroad will not disapper and will still be competing. They may start to work on their own and sell you the final product.
3. "technology companies lose their capacity to innovate".
There is no vacuum in economy. If someone loses, someone can take advantage of it. Even if American companies stops to be innovative, the innovations can be done in other countries. Chineese are quite poor now. Isn't it fair to give them a chance to develop?
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It'll get worse before it gets better... (Score:5, Insightful)
when you plan for the future you plan and project for 5 years... today they dont care about anything but how we look next quarter.
Short sightedness is creating this phenom.. and it's due to non-leaders being in leadership roles.
we can get inkjets for everyone instead of a new pair of color laser printers as it's cheaper this quarter.... to hell with the fact that within 1 year we will spend more in ink than the cost of the 2 laser printers and the supplies to run them for that time period.. don't laugh, that was the last manager's meeting's topic... to buy 30 $39.00 inkjet printers instead of 2 HP color laserjets.
we will continue to see companies fail and further deth sprials until these companies start getting leadership that actually has a clue how to run companies/business.
Management (Score:3, Insightful)
Many developers suck. Most management can't tell which ones to keep. Thus, they toss them all out and try their luck at the foreign labor.
I'm no statistician, but maybe if you hire 3X as many foreign workers and let chaos do its thing, you'll come out ahead. Or maybe that's their hope.
Re:At some point.... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it would be fun if some of these outsourcing centers got their own salespeople in the US and starting cutting out the US companies all together.
Once all the actual work is done elsewhere, why keep the margin-sopping executives on board?
Re:Gasp! Actual insight! (Score:1, Insightful)
No, no you can't. The in-house developers -- like everyone -- has thier own interests in mind. A company (read upper managers) doesn't even have the company's interests in mind.
There are folks who attempt to do the 'right thing', though in the current environment the companies aren't financially strong enough to support them. If you get screwed enough -- and there's always plenty of screwing going on -- CYA is the rule and superceeds anything that would pass for company loyalty.
The only exceptions are for folks who have never been abused -- usually fresh graduates.
What do you do? (Score:2, Insightful)
Start your own company and create your own job.
Re:US Programmers vs Off Shore Programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, there are still significant downsides to "offshoring" divisions of any company, especially programming. One would be the potential of a competitor latching on to this and using it as a "Support Americans" marketing ploy, this worked quite well for the big three auto makers in the 80's, if only short lived. Another would be the long term prospects of your company. Succesful companies are built on hard working employees that prove themselves in the trenches of their respective companies, rising through the ranks to middle and upper management. I don't know of too many companies that survive on exclusively hiring individuals that have no prior experience in their industries. A good mixture of fresh with experienced management is preferrable, in my opinion, but too many of either can be a problem.
That's my 2 cents.
Executive Thinking -- Indicator of Success/Failure (Score:1, Insightful)
Successful companies have (most of) their top managers for the core bussines come from the trenches. Unsuccessful companies tend to hire "executives" (overpaid MBAs who don't have any loyalty to the company).
In the long run "executives", not knowing anyting about the core bussines, tend to solve problems by appointing people/blame, while from-the-trenches-managers tend to solve the problems in the manner that suits the core bussines (since they understand it).
"executive" driven companies will tend to do Outsourcing (as an ultimate tool in "people/blame appointment"). Other companies will maybe offshore (but do it in an Insource and not Outsource manner).
"executive" driven companies (not only hi-tech) will in my opinion fail in the long run.
NONE of the big long-term successful companies is executive driven (e.g. Intel, M$, Cisco,
My experience with Indian workers (Score:2, Insightful)
My experience so far has been that it would be impossible for Indians to produce a quality product on their own. Sure they are well "Trained" but from the hundreds of conversations I've had with dozens of Indians, I can tell you that they did not grow up with computers. Half of them didn't even know what Linux was till I told them. They had very little knowledge of DOS systems or window systems prior to Windows 2000. In fact, most of them had experience with one, and only one, program: VB.
It seems they are trained only for what they are told to do. There is no innovation in them. I've yet to see one Indian make a decent suggestion (aside from the Indians that grew up here, or grew up with computers, of course). The just-off-the-boat indians do what they are told and that is it. You have to hold their hand through the entire process. They have very little conception of object modeling or GUI design standards. And I would be willing to bet that training costs almost outweigh any cost advantage, as they need training in any and all programs you ask them to use.
In addition I have found their code to be generally sub-standard. They forget to take things out of memory and often don't understand fundamental programming concepts. This is an example javascript code I've experienced several times from Indian workers:
variable = "Something " + "" + " something else";
When asked about this it takes me a while to explain the difference between client side and server side code. Having not grown up with computers, they had a huge problem understanding why concatenating server-side variables with client-side script is unnecessary.
I've also found them to be pretty rude, especially as managers. It is a cultural difference. Here, managers are expected to be friendly to their employees. In India, apparently, maybe its a sign of weakness to be nice to someone "under" you. Could be a throwback to the caste system, who knows.
My solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
These companies might be innovative, and they might even be creating innovative software, but they are not "software companies", and hence the outsourcing option is a viable one.
The great-grandparent post claimed that software companies (i.e. companies which produce software for profit) cannot outsource. The grandparent post pointed out (rightly) that such companies employ a tiny fraction of all software developers.
How long until (Score:5, Insightful)
They can skip the normal growing stages of setting up the megacorp, because they already have it. Offices, research, staff, software, it, they lack everything but the name - right now. Once some of these companies lose a contract with our corps, theirs nothing to keep them from setting up their own shop under their own name. This is the next trend in outsourcing - megacorps themselves.
There is NO compelling reason for these companies not to do this. They are making large profit from back of the house, it's inevitable they'll want the profit from the front of the house as well. The irony is that these large corporations are training the competition and replacements and most dont even see it coming. Is it arrogance that causes people to overlook this inevitability?
It depends: Is Software Strategic or Not? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, it really does depend on the situation -- generalizing to all "software companies" is a dangerous practice, for one approach (either outsourcing/offshoring or not) doesn't work for everyone.
Re:US Programmers vs Off Shore Programmers (Score:2, Insightful)
When you follow the model of using contractors to do the "assembly" of your software, they're not going to do any innovation on your behalf; they're simply going to follow (hopefully) the spec that you gave them, no more.
This is true for contractors from any country. It just happens that off-US-shore contractors are relatively inexpensive, so the assumtion is that those are the ones that US companies are going to go with.
I think that your question is a very good one, though.
-- Scott
Re:outsource the CEO too (Score:4, Insightful)
Say an American programmer works for $30/hr and an Indian programmer works for $3/hr. $27/hr savings, not bad. Say a CEO works for $1.2M/yr, $600/hr. The outsourced Indian CEO will work work for $3/hr. $597/hr saving - great!
Could be a cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, in the 1990s there was still a pool of people for these orgs to use in re-insourcing. If large quantities of work move from the US to India, both current and future IT experts will move to other jobs and not be willing to return. Which could prevent a continuation of the IT insource/outsource cycle which realisitically has existed since the 50s.
sPh
Re:It'll get worse before it gets better... (Score:5, Insightful)
About two months ago I emailed the owner of sunmamanagers with a request to see if there's something we could do about the suspicious flood of incredibly newbie and elementary questions we'd been getting lately, all from Indian-sounding names @yahoo.com. I don't really care that they're Indians, but for Christ's sake, Sun Managers used to be about "I'm an experienced sysadmin and this absolutely strange thing that isn't covered anywhere is happening," not "I need a script that will do . Please help."
Re:US Programmers vs Off Shore Programmers (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't matter where your company is based or where you outsource your programmers, if your software company outsources all its programmers, then it can't support innovation. The reason I specifically mention US companies outsourcing from India is because that's where the big trend in outsourcing programmers has emerged.
This trend in the US as described in this article [charterventures.com] and elsewhere is for a shell of a company to exist with a headquarters in the US with the president, marketing group, and sales all in the US and the programming staff all in India.
If you're building an innovative software company, you need to retain your best and brightest programmers internally. Software companies entirely based in India can successfully innovate over the long-term, as can US companies or companies based anywhere else. It's this recent trend of US software companies outsourcing all their development that's bad strategy.
One other point I'd like to make while I'm at it-- I'm only talking about software companies outsourcing programmers. For example, a pharmaceutical company can outsource programmers because they don't sell the software they're creating. But it must hire its own research scientists to develop new drugs if it wants to stay competitive.
Requirements, Not Programming is key to Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there is a step before "writing" software that is easily overlooked. And that is figuring out the Requirements of the system to be designed. This is where I believe the innovation lies. A lot of good code has already been wasted chasing bad problems - unless you believe that those "objects" have found reuse elsewhere in large quantities.
The people who identify the need and then figure out the "requirements" are better off in the US as they are close to the problems there. Many offshore programmers who have never seen a scanner at a checkout of a grocery store are ill-equipped to understand all that might be required of the checkout counter in the real world. But once someone identifies what is required, then it is possible to put together a solution. The solution can be academic and the solutions depend on who has framed the problem - but the solution then is not as hard. What is hard is understanding what the problem is. Understanding what the requirements are.
Coke and Pepsi do just that. They have bottlers all over the world - and they still have been able to maintain the "secrecy" of the recipe. The point in operational excellence is that you have to not only look at the process of improving the manufacture of the product, but also its delivery and logistics. At a certain stage of his business, it is conceivable that Jean-Marc's might be like Coke/Pepsi. Outsource the chocolate production to supply worldwide.
Wrong. Most of the cost of clothing is in the inventory and predicting the fashions. Have you seen how many shirts go unsold for every shirt that you buy ? I can bet that keeping the inventory, getting rid of old fashions, and other marketing battles cost much much more than the shirt itself. The cost is mainly in the movement of information about the shirt - what is required, where is it required, when is it required, how much is required, etc. All this outweighs the cost of manufacturing at the assembly line in influencing the margins eeked out from the clothing business.
Again, I believe the first step is understanding the Requirements. Then is the design. nhen is the coding. Then is the debugging. Then is the testing. Then is the recoding. Then is the etc. etc. A lot of these steps don't need "innovation" - they require competence.
The game is about requirements. One who can understand the requirements are, and can understand that the business benefits of implementing the solutions are more than the technical costs of implementing them - is going to win. That is the real innovation.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing innovative ever happens in a "corporate cubicle farm." Period. Truly innovative, entreprenuerial people leave the "corporate cubicle farm" as soon as they possibly can because risk-averse middle management has made it clear they have no use for competent, creative people.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
I have worked in programming jobs for over 9 years now.. both within US as well as many other nations across the world. Right now I am living in India.
All I see in this discussion group are rehashed stereotypes. Let me address these;
Misconception 1 - American programmers are better.
Not necessarily. Indian programmers aren't necessarily better either. The averages are about the same. But there are exceptional programmers in both camps and then there are a lot of duds.
Misconception 2 - Indians are not innovative.
One of the aspects of being in a developing world is that budgets for research and development are always very hard to come by.. But not any more. Indian companies are throwing money at research and development now...Everyone here knows that the service industry for pure outsourcing cannot last for ever.. So there is a desire to innovate and get into new areas.. to innovate as much as possible when money is not a problem. This is not just true of India - look at China, see how fast they are innovating
I have played a lead role in a very large project for an American publishing company - this project would not have had the slightest chance of even taking off the ground if it weren't for our team.
The American end of the programming team was quite antogonistic when we started - had some really racist remarks thrown my way. But within a month, we had won their confidence and I have had multiple mails from the same people about what wonderful work we had done. One of these projects later went on to win a Java Developer Journal award.
PWC was involved in another part of the same project and there was a desire within the American programmers to have PWC thrown out and have us take their place. NOTE: Not from the management but from the programmers. The only reason this didn't happen was because there was an ex-PWC chap in the management team.
I have worked on other projects as well which were being managed and programmed by American teams - which were floundering. Since we have taken over, these companies now have a product they can sell.
This is not to say that we haven't had failures - we have had our share. But please don't make it seem like we are incompetent idiots who can only obey orders and even then do the job badly.
Few of the jobs are at software companies (Score:3, Insightful)
It is this large bulk of jobs going overseas as people become more and more effective at managing international projects that has me diversifying my income this year.
Offshoring and out-sourcing arent the same (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:At some point.... (Score:3, Insightful)
In a Indian newspaper's own words... (Score:2, Insightful)
Where are the Case Studies (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, the author can only present the statistics about HP and Oracle doubling their outsourcing legions. Not very encouraging...
Re:Your professors are teaching you 1995 business (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Your professors are teaching you 1995 business (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened in the 90's is that everybody invested in IT, and therefore everyone's cost basis went down, and that led to lower prices for everyone, which is good for consumers, while neutral to the bottom line. Now you have people running around as a result saying that IT didn't help.
Trust me - if you don't invest in IT, and your competitors do - it will eventually come back to haunt you...
"globalization" is not new (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite a lot longer [mit.edu] than that. Actually, the level of global economic integration is not much higher today than in 1913.
Re:It'll get worse before it gets better... (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, me three. It's come to the point where I don't even want to post real sunmanagers-type questions because I figure somebody who can't even install RAM in a 420 will try and answer me.
I think we need sunmanagers-karma points or something. But then it would probably degenerate into expertsexchange (where bad advice is dispensed at least as often as good.. which is worse than it being all bad!)
Those who fail to learn from the past (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll readily admit it. I'm old. I've been in this business for nearly thirty years. I've seen a lot of changes, but I don't want to concentrate on IT history. Instead, I want to talk televisions.
Back in the day before most slashdotters were alive, there were American companies that designed and manufactured televisions. First, manufacturing went overseas, and it was managed from the US. Next, middle management was moved because it made more sense to manage the plants using local talent than trying to do it from the US. After all, time differences, cultural difference and just plain cost was enough to justify it. What this did was educate new competitors, and mentor them so that they didn't have to suffer the pain of starting low on the learning curve. Guess what, companies like Admiral and Motorola, who were leaders in home televisions are either gone, as in the case of Admiral, or dropped the product entirely, as is the case with Motorola.
This was not necessarily a bad thing, as it ended up benefiting the consumer, and helped spread wealth overseas. However, there is no one capable of designing a TV that could compete with the imports in the US today, except for those individuals working on HDTV, which was mandated by law.
My point is that the US lost not only its ability to compete in these areas, but companies themselves. If history does repeat itself, companies like Oracle will disappear altogether, similar to Admiral, and companies like HP and Dell will change their product concentration in order to survive, similar to Motorola. The consumer will probably benefit, as computers manufactured in India or China will be cheaper, thanks to cheaper local software available for these systems. But is this technology that propelled one of the greatest economic growths ever, something we want to loose?
Innovation not key (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the new goal of business. It used to be "how can I come up with better new products and get them to market", now it's all about manipulating the market itself. I wouldn't be at all surprised it there was an MBA course entry somplace like this:
"Submissive Competition: Maintaining the impression of a competitive market by allowing small competitors. In today's intensely Government regulated business environment, market dominance is often seen as an illegal monopoly. This course will teach you how to control small competitors to keep them from threatening your dominance yet convincing regulators your market space has healthy competition and freeing your business from potentially damaging litigation and regulation."
Re:How long until (Score:2, Insightful)
moderator privilege (Score:3, Insightful)
Then post a comment stating such, like the rest of us do. Your opinion doesn't belong attached to the story submission, even if you are Hemos.
And in the last article you put up, you saw fit to append your own insight too -- you said that Okokrim is the equivalent to the RIAA. This is simply factually untrue. The commenters who immediately corrected you got modded up -- but how come we couldn't mod your comment down?
Offshoring appeals to bean counters (Score:4, Insightful)
Offshoring makes it easier for organically-grown hack-til-works companies to keep doing it the same way. Good planning and understanding the customer is harder to recognize, harder to meausre, etc. Accountants can't track that and companies tend to ignore what they can't track. In the end it seems such companies just end up paying the user more to keep them because they are the only ones who know how to work the resulting hackware.
It looks like a mess, but it seems to be the primary development model because way too many companies do it and survive somehow. The market seems to favor swamp guides over true engineers.
Re:But... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the problem: the people running the business don't understand what the business does or how it does it.
If you were to go down to the manufacturing floor and ask them what the "scrap percentage" was, I'll bet 90% of them could at least tell you how to figure it out; they'd point to a bin full of bad parts and say "count those, and then divide by the total number produced". "Overhead" is a bit more tricky, but it still isn't some magic unfigurable "fudge factor". the only thing that makes it difficult to calculate is the fact that everyone is lying about their numbers to make their department look better. (Notice that I said "lying", not "manipulating". I don't believe in double-speak.)
The only thing keeping accounting from being a science is the lack of integrity in the people practicing it.
Re:There are additional reasons... (Score:1, Insightful)
I know plenty of people who grew up in rich families. Most have an education which was bought, not earned. Not one of them could write a meaningful paper. They bought them.
So much for that argument...
It has been my experience that poor people that "make good" have a much better work ethic and understanding of their subject than their boss cares to.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Or perhaps the reason that banks have more old code and old systems sitting around is because they were among the very first adopters of IT. The fact that a company maintains the same code base for several decades doesn't mean that they are somehow inferior. It means they have a longer lifecyle in mind than flash in the pan companies.
BTW, just judging from web sites, banks tend to employ more advanced encryption, have larger databases, etc., than your typical web site. Of course, banks rarely have good flash animation.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there are many decent, intelligent managers out there, but I have found an inverse correlation between company size and manager quality: The bigger the company the more clueless management tends to be.
Small companies cannot afford dead-weight... otherwise they fail. But once you reach a certain size, it is impossible to maintain as high a standard with employees... there aren't that many around, so you end up with less than ideal people. Once the company is large, you can pretty much counting on finding people who get paid just to breathe somewhere.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:2, Insightful)
Why can't Indians start their own software companies, write their own software and compete the heck out of us?
OK, I will bite.
Indian software companies will have problems attempting to compete in the american market because simply don't understand how american business works. Let me give you an example, would say gather up a team of dozen american programmers and lets say, develop a financial package for Japan? or China? Hell what about India?
The fact that you have technical skill is not a replacement for understanding what needs to get accomplished. To many technical people decide that I have skills I can design something that will work for anybody, however they don't bother with the question, does anybody want it. Want a great example, look at all the abandon, half-completed open source projects that are out there. If they were truly wanted people would be busting their ass to get it done, like LINUX, SAMBA or APACHE.
This is not to put down programmers in other countries but you have to make something that fits into the market you selling for. Not just write something and expect that because it is a coding master piece that everyone wants it.
Re:Argh... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the old days (I'm talking BBSes here), there was no Google, no "web", and no easily searchable archives of a decades worth of discussions. Most of the online projects had little or no documentation. The Telegard BBS software, for instance, was a pile of mostly obfuscated, uncommented (or incorrectly commented) code. There were no autoconf scripts for building on different platforms. Most of the interesting knowledge was in people's heads, which made the question/answer groups very valuable. There were few enough newbies that answering their questions was not overly taxing.
Now, we have Google, we have the web, we have discussion archives, README files, support "Knowledge Bases" and so forth. The user guides for many projects are still abysmal, but at least the more popular ones have gotten quite good. We also have an enormous amount of newbies. So, in short, the number of people asking questions has increased dramatically, and there is much less excuse for them.
As a list member, why should I expect to have my question answered without bothering to read a README, search the web, check the archives, etc? As a project maintainer, when I spend hours putting together and editting FAQs and documentation, why should I not be angry that the users do not bother to use them?
Sure, there are holes and ambiguities in documentation; there are advanced problems and unusual circumstances, but most of these questions are not about these things. Most, in fact, are not even looking for the information, but a solution: "Can you show me a script that solves exactly my problem?" Reading this kind of question, especially after referring them to appropriate tutorials, tells me that not only did they not do their homework this time, but that the really don't want to know how to do it next time either--- they just want their problem to go away at the expense of my effort. Rather rude, don't you think? It is just salt in the wound that the people asking these questions are the same people who are taking jobs here. These folks won't invest in their own skillset, but they will leach off of mine.
I think, to a large extent, this is where the "old spirit" has gone. In order for some of the politness and openness to come back, there has to be a measure of common courtesy on the other side.
Outsourcing isn't all bad (Score:3, Insightful)
-If you have a rock solid spec, outsourcing is fine. You get the best price for labor, everyone is happy. Sadly a rock solid spec is a mythical creature in my experience.
-"Real" programmers over time will do just fine. During the IT boom, remember all those ads by IT training companies saying "switch careers to a lucrative IT job!". Well, alot of people went and were trained to be programmers and got positions in the industry who really aren't good programmers.
Those of us who are good at what we do and like what we're doing are well aware that a certain "type" of person makes a good programmer. Anyone who got into the business because of salaries or the promise of a cushy job really doesn't belong here. Programming is a mixture of art and science, it takes creativity, a desire to explore and expand your boundries, and a logical mind. It's definately not a 9-5 job, you need to have a passion for it!
Outsourcing is the latest thing, there's going to be some casualties of good programming talent until the market stabalizes and companies figure out what does and doesn't work. In the meantime, we will see less people entering the field who shouldn't be here, and also many less experienced (and less "suitable") people changing careers out of IT. Toss in the demographic loss of the baby boomers starting to hit retirement age and you have the formula for solid demand for good programmers.
Re:Not always a great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, India isn't the only place you could go - Hungary, where I live, is also a great outsourcing destination, even if it's a bit colder.
Or you could go to a smaller place in the US, away from the coasts, and cut your labor cost a lot as well. That might be nicer for you if you wanted to stay in the US and take advantage of its IT infrastructure, honest postal employees, and such.
But when I look around and see that here in Budapest I can hire a talented, experienced, multilingual IT professional for about the same as I would pay for an entry-level data-entry clerk back in San Francisco...
long term trend (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not that different from what happened in the electronics industry after all: initially, parts came from Japan, then whole devices, and now the companies themselves are Japanese. And it was the same with cars and computer hardware.
What should the US do? There is really only one choice: if it wants to retain its strong economic position, the US needs to start the next revolution in a different field. Maybe that's biotech, nanotechnology (whatever that is) or the commercialization of space. But anybody who wants to claim a leadership position can't lean back and say "we'd just like to lean back for a while and relax on the strength of the jobs we already created".
Re:But... (Score:1, Insightful)