Continued discussion on the future of outsourcing
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
So, to restate my position, I think as jobs dry up in the west, it will no longer be worth paying $5 an hour for bad and unmaintainable code from the third world.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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So, to restate my position, I think as jobs dry up in the west, it will no longer be worth paying $5 an hour for bad and unmaintainable code from the third world.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
Except that companies have become accustomed to paying $5 hour and the cost of living in most areas won't allow a person to accept that rate. I completely agree, and have seen it repeatedly, that it works out to be more cost effective to hire local talent. It's done right, with good quality and more responsive to the client needs rather than multiple iterations over longer periods producing poorly designed and written code.
only two letters away from being an asset
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Except that companies have become accustomed to paying $5 hour and the cost of living in most areas won't allow a person to accept that rate. I completely agree, and have seen it repeatedly, that it works out to be more cost effective to hire local talent. It's done right, with good quality and more responsive to the client needs rather than multiple iterations over longer periods producing poorly designed and written code.
only two letters away from being an asset
Mark Nischalke wrote:
Except that companies have become accustomed to paying $5 hour and the cost of living in most areas won't allow a person to accept that rate.
I realise that. I am more thinking that the gap between what a dev will charge in a depressed economy, and that $5 an hour, will be small enough to make it easier to point out the benefits of a locally available, English speaking, experienced, professional developer. Especially if they have outsourced previously.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
Airbus recently outsourced A320 in China. I generally had a fear from airplanes, but that was before; after this news I’m plainly terrified…
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Airbus recently outsourced A320 in China. I generally had a fear from airplanes, but that was before; after this news I’m plainly terrified…
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
The building of them ? I know a lot of repair is done out of country now.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
A friend of mine was involved in a SAP project for a major company that went well despite being partially outsourced. I suspect 2 things contributed to its success. The first is that SAP's hard enough to use that idiots can't fake it for even a short period of time. The second is that instead of handing over a pile of requirements and saying "you've X months to implement this" and letting them go for X months the US and offshore teams were both working on the same parts of the code base at the same time, passing it back and forth as they went home for the evening. Answering "What did my partner do to the code I was working on overnight?" meant that there must have been a lot of informal code review going on providing a continuous idiot filter.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
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The building of them ? I know a lot of repair is done out of country now.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
It’s a full scale copy of the factory in Germany. The first airplane is already out of the assembly line. I’m behind the fricking Websence in work, so if you find a link to this news with more details you could place it here.
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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A friend of mine was involved in a SAP project for a major company that went well despite being partially outsourced. I suspect 2 things contributed to its success. The first is that SAP's hard enough to use that idiots can't fake it for even a short period of time. The second is that instead of handing over a pile of requirements and saying "you've X months to implement this" and letting them go for X months the US and offshore teams were both working on the same parts of the code base at the same time, passing it back and forth as they went home for the evening. Answering "What did my partner do to the code I was working on overnight?" meant that there must have been a lot of informal code review going on providing a continuous idiot filter.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
That second half was the only reason the work I did, turned out at all. I checked the code daily and constantly reminded of missed deadlines, missed features, poor code, etc.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Airbus recently outsourced A320 in China. I generally had a fear from airplanes, but that was before; after this news I’m plainly terrified…
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
link please ?
This signature was proudly tested on animals.
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A friend of mine was involved in a SAP project for a major company that went well despite being partially outsourced. I suspect 2 things contributed to its success. The first is that SAP's hard enough to use that idiots can't fake it for even a short period of time. The second is that instead of handing over a pile of requirements and saying "you've X months to implement this" and letting them go for X months the US and offshore teams were both working on the same parts of the code base at the same time, passing it back and forth as they went home for the evening. Answering "What did my partner do to the code I was working on overnight?" meant that there must have been a lot of informal code review going on providing a continuous idiot filter.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains. -- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Yes, that's the way good project should be handled. It adds time though for the constant review that most managers don't understand.
only two letters away from being an asset
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link please ?
This signature was proudly tested on animals.
http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=3110278#xx3110278xx[^]
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Yes, that's the way good project should be handled. It adds time though for the constant review that most managers don't understand.
only two letters away from being an asset
Hopefully the continued decline in quality will eventually cause folks to realize the value of local developers. There is still a great market for good local guys and gals!
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
I've often said that programming has become the new factory work of our day. Any time that a product or service becomes a commodity then the value is reduced and quality becomes less of an issue than price. Because coding is now a commodity, to the bean counters in the head office it makes no sense to pay $80-90k a year when they can get someone in a different country to do it for a fraction of that cost. Local programmers may be the ones who have to go back in and clean up the mess (which is likely to be due just as much to the mess that international project management creates as any lack of skills in third world coders), but as anyone who's been in the business knows, programmers don't have a significant voice in high level business decisions. Like factory workers of old, they're just the hired help. Many people disagree with me about the factory work analogy, but I suspect time will unfortunately bear me out, at least in the US. As supply continues to increase both domestically and globally, dev technology continues to dumb down the arena to make it easy for anyone to sling code without any particular talent or education. Fast forward ten or twenty years from now and it's unlikely that coding will be the equivalent of today's $80k job. When it takes no more skill to crank out yet another business app than it does to work on a factory assemply line, the pay will come in line with the latter. That said, global outsourcing is not the sole villian in this play. Supply and demand coupled with dumbed down dev platforms would have ultimately created the factory work scenario just the same. The fact that those making a good living in the US are now competing with those in other countries working for the equivalent salary of a burger flipper simply expedites the process. On the bright side, each new generation of programmers will be raised with lower and lower salary expectations, and thus they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.
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I've often said that programming has become the new factory work of our day. Any time that a product or service becomes a commodity then the value is reduced and quality becomes less of an issue than price. Because coding is now a commodity, to the bean counters in the head office it makes no sense to pay $80-90k a year when they can get someone in a different country to do it for a fraction of that cost. Local programmers may be the ones who have to go back in and clean up the mess (which is likely to be due just as much to the mess that international project management creates as any lack of skills in third world coders), but as anyone who's been in the business knows, programmers don't have a significant voice in high level business decisions. Like factory workers of old, they're just the hired help. Many people disagree with me about the factory work analogy, but I suspect time will unfortunately bear me out, at least in the US. As supply continues to increase both domestically and globally, dev technology continues to dumb down the arena to make it easy for anyone to sling code without any particular talent or education. Fast forward ten or twenty years from now and it's unlikely that coding will be the equivalent of today's $80k job. When it takes no more skill to crank out yet another business app than it does to work on a factory assemply line, the pay will come in line with the latter. That said, global outsourcing is not the sole villian in this play. Supply and demand coupled with dumbed down dev platforms would have ultimately created the factory work scenario just the same. The fact that those making a good living in the US are now competing with those in other countries working for the equivalent salary of a burger flipper simply expedites the process. On the bright side, each new generation of programmers will be raised with lower and lower salary expectations, and thus they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.
And until we are on the subject, when exactly the Apocalypse will come?
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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I've often said that programming has become the new factory work of our day. Any time that a product or service becomes a commodity then the value is reduced and quality becomes less of an issue than price. Because coding is now a commodity, to the bean counters in the head office it makes no sense to pay $80-90k a year when they can get someone in a different country to do it for a fraction of that cost. Local programmers may be the ones who have to go back in and clean up the mess (which is likely to be due just as much to the mess that international project management creates as any lack of skills in third world coders), but as anyone who's been in the business knows, programmers don't have a significant voice in high level business decisions. Like factory workers of old, they're just the hired help. Many people disagree with me about the factory work analogy, but I suspect time will unfortunately bear me out, at least in the US. As supply continues to increase both domestically and globally, dev technology continues to dumb down the arena to make it easy for anyone to sling code without any particular talent or education. Fast forward ten or twenty years from now and it's unlikely that coding will be the equivalent of today's $80k job. When it takes no more skill to crank out yet another business app than it does to work on a factory assemply line, the pay will come in line with the latter. That said, global outsourcing is not the sole villian in this play. Supply and demand coupled with dumbed down dev platforms would have ultimately created the factory work scenario just the same. The fact that those making a good living in the US are now competing with those in other countries working for the equivalent salary of a burger flipper simply expedites the process. On the bright side, each new generation of programmers will be raised with lower and lower salary expectations, and thus they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.
I think to a degree you are correct. Which is why we must move up into management if we intend to continue to flourish. I think it's the only decent way to make it.
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The lounge seemed a better place to continue this discussion http://www.codeproject.com/Messages/3109848/Re-hello-guide-me-please.aspx[^]
only two letters away from being an asset
First of a general and a incorrect idea that most people carry is that most of the programmers in India are like the "Urgnt Plzz" programmers in CP forums. In fact I would say that only minority of programmers are like that. The majority may not even frequent CP let alone ask questions in the forums. That being said good outsourcing companies have quality people and they charge more. Not so good companies charge less and hand over "urgent" work to unskilled programmers. Outsourcing will end when it is no longer cheaper to get quality work done at a lower price. That can happen when quality declines or when the income levels increase in outsourced countries to par level (which it has).
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I've often said that programming has become the new factory work of our day. Any time that a product or service becomes a commodity then the value is reduced and quality becomes less of an issue than price. Because coding is now a commodity, to the bean counters in the head office it makes no sense to pay $80-90k a year when they can get someone in a different country to do it for a fraction of that cost. Local programmers may be the ones who have to go back in and clean up the mess (which is likely to be due just as much to the mess that international project management creates as any lack of skills in third world coders), but as anyone who's been in the business knows, programmers don't have a significant voice in high level business decisions. Like factory workers of old, they're just the hired help. Many people disagree with me about the factory work analogy, but I suspect time will unfortunately bear me out, at least in the US. As supply continues to increase both domestically and globally, dev technology continues to dumb down the arena to make it easy for anyone to sling code without any particular talent or education. Fast forward ten or twenty years from now and it's unlikely that coding will be the equivalent of today's $80k job. When it takes no more skill to crank out yet another business app than it does to work on a factory assemply line, the pay will come in line with the latter. That said, global outsourcing is not the sole villian in this play. Supply and demand coupled with dumbed down dev platforms would have ultimately created the factory work scenario just the same. The fact that those making a good living in the US are now competing with those in other countries working for the equivalent salary of a burger flipper simply expedites the process. On the bright side, each new generation of programmers will be raised with lower and lower salary expectations, and thus they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.
I agree with this, 100%. It's one of the reasons I am wondering what I will do next ( although not for a while, but long term, I don't think I will code all my life )
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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I've often said that programming has become the new factory work of our day. Any time that a product or service becomes a commodity then the value is reduced and quality becomes less of an issue than price. Because coding is now a commodity, to the bean counters in the head office it makes no sense to pay $80-90k a year when they can get someone in a different country to do it for a fraction of that cost. Local programmers may be the ones who have to go back in and clean up the mess (which is likely to be due just as much to the mess that international project management creates as any lack of skills in third world coders), but as anyone who's been in the business knows, programmers don't have a significant voice in high level business decisions. Like factory workers of old, they're just the hired help. Many people disagree with me about the factory work analogy, but I suspect time will unfortunately bear me out, at least in the US. As supply continues to increase both domestically and globally, dev technology continues to dumb down the arena to make it easy for anyone to sling code without any particular talent or education. Fast forward ten or twenty years from now and it's unlikely that coding will be the equivalent of today's $80k job. When it takes no more skill to crank out yet another business app than it does to work on a factory assemply line, the pay will come in line with the latter. That said, global outsourcing is not the sole villian in this play. Supply and demand coupled with dumbed down dev platforms would have ultimately created the factory work scenario just the same. The fact that those making a good living in the US are now competing with those in other countries working for the equivalent salary of a burger flipper simply expedites the process. On the bright side, each new generation of programmers will be raised with lower and lower salary expectations, and thus they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.
The other day, the first time you came up with the analogy of devs-factory workers, i.e., a dev being a 'component' or 'resource' that could be replaced, my reaction was, "WTF!". But the more I thought about it, the truer it struck me, and I have come around to accept that.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
they'll be perfectly comfortable with the fact that they're getting paid $20k to do what was once a 6 figure job.
If I'm not wrong, the 6-figure times were during the late 90s boom, right? It may not be entirely fair to compare today's poor pay to the bubble that was always going to burst.
Cheers, Vikram. (Proud to have finally cracked a CCC!)
Recent activities: TV series: Friends, season 10 Books: Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Carpe Diem.
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And until we are on the subject, when exactly the Apocalypse will come?
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
The Apocalypse is already upon you. Everything beyond that is just a matter of degree. :)
Christopher Duncan www.PracticalUSA.com Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes In the US? Explore our Career Coaching.