Reply #16: Mr Vajpayee,

[FormerOstrich]

How can the recent surge be attributed to the visa restrictions blocking skilled workers to rich countries when there hasn't been any restrictions yet? I believe you are talking out your ass. I believe you are threatening us but you personally have not way to back it up.

I keep threatening to start an entire thread with a bunch of my thoughts on this but haven't yet. However, I do want to cover a couple of things on this thread.

1) I believe that the upper echelons thought that IT workers were dumb and lazy. They believed this was reflected in the dismal success rate of projects.

Thus, outsourcing was viewed as the silver bullet.

What they haven't taken into consideration is even though we as IT people are not without fault, management was responsible for the fialed projects. Our skills were not what forced those projects on the shelf. Outsourcing our skills will not correct the problems. It may help divert the attention, but it will not correct.

2) The consumers are obviously willing to accept faulty software. You can see this all over the place. I have very little patience for software errors, but they are literally everywhere.

Worse yet, we are moving more towards a market demanding features versus quality. My experience indicates that a customer is a lot less willing to wait for new function and feature than something to correct their errors.

3) I believe in some cases there is a mindset that outsourced costs less even when that may not be true. With jobs as hard to find as they are I have been augmenting my income with tech support work. Finally, the company asked me if I would do some programming for them.

I picked up the initial stages of the project and that part had been off-shored. Seeing it as an oppurtunity to get my foot in the door, plus not being overly worked I took on that project with zeal. Ultimatly, I ended up charging almost nothing for the work I did. It was so severly discounted it was not funny.

This company is a small business and the co-owner is a developer himself. He should be more astute than a non-technical principal. Well when he recieved my bill he immediately complained that he could have off-shored it for half the price. He stressed that he thought I'd done an excellent job and it wasn't my fault he is just accustomed to the lower rates.

Well, the Indians don't have anything on me at this point because I had worked for peanuts on that task. I have managed software development projects for many years. Yes, I even did some off-shoring development as early as 1997. I have a very good understanding of the effort required for a task. I would have bet him double or nothing on my bill there was no possible way that he could have had that worked performed for less no matter where he sent it. I would have won to.

4) I believe that there has been virutally no analysis on the amount of business practices and personal infromation that is being sent off-shore to countries that do not have to adhere to any of our laws. We do not have to worry about hackers compromising national security when a terrorist could go to work for an off-shore firm and a) learn a wealth of information about a company, their operations, weaknesses, and vulenerabilites. In theory, they could just write their "bomb" into the next version of the software. b) Sell any of the information to those that wish to do us harm.

Remember post-9/11 they were removing documents from the internet because hackers could obtain information from them. Well they can put them all back because sending the software out is probably much more comprehensive and accurate.

5) The low costs are obtained with practices other than cheap wages. I am familiar with and have read of many instances where the off-shore development firm is pirating the intellectual property that is used in developing the software. That include programming tools and other things like the compilers/editores and etc.

This may prove to come back to haunt the companies that have entrusted their intellectual property to those that demonstart a lack of regard for guarding it. This may very well introduce more black market competing products. In other words it might ultimatily hurt the revenue of the company that is outsourcing.


I have more to say about this topic but will let it rest for now. Theres a lot of exposure in this area if it is realized or not. The candidates need to start talking about that angle to it, as the exposure is largely ignored by all.