Thomas George wrote:
The assumption that skills of an average off-shore professional is lower than resident ones is naive. The quality of software depends on the skills and enthusiasm of the team, and the processes that they follow.
True but a bit misleading.... in 20 years of working with outsourced/offshored projects, I've seen three or four MIT-level geniuses. But having actually managed (non-US) teams and companies that were doing offshore development for American clients, I can tell you that they are few and far between... and those that do go into the craft tend to burn out fast and leave because the process and environment is so opaque, inefficient and corrupt. Dilbert's PHB is Jack Welch or Edsger Dijkstra in comparison. There are often high-functioning English speakers running the project who push along battalions of generally very young, very inexperienced "developers" who go out onto the Net, find something that looks kind of close to what they (think they) have to do, and then try to modify it to suit - without any real understanding of the problem domain, the code they're swiping (excuse me, "adapting", often GPL-licensed code pushed into commercial apps), or even any sort of best practices or engineering principles. I've seen teams of "certified" Java "developers" whose "certifications" are clearly Xeroxed (not Sun-issued originals), who proudly told me that they got "100%" marks in all their courses - after paying to get copies of the exams beforehand. This is apparently highly prevalent on a well-known, highly populous south Asian subcontinent. But the fictional people (corporations) use these cheaper-by-the-trainload real people to tell their shareholders (other real and fictional people) that they're "saving" so much money in software development, they can afford to give all of the CxOs multi-million dollar bonuses this quarter. When high-profile projects fall behind or deliver crap, that's taken in stride: "The reality of the software business is that nobody does it much better than we do." Pure, unadulterated bullstuff -- and that's the *only* pure thing left in what was once upon a time a proud, decent and honorable craft.
Jeff Dickey Seven Sigma Software and Services Phone/SMS: +65 8333 4403 Yahoo! IM: jeff_dickey MSN IM: jeff_dickey at hotmail.com ICQ IM: 8053918 Skype: &nbs
