| HappySqurriel said: Having worked as a software developer for many years now, I can with some level of authority that somewhere in the range of 80% of software projects that have been outsourced to India and/or China fail to meet the requirements, are low quality and unmaintainable, and demonstrate significant cost over-runs which make the project as expensive/more expensive than a project developed locally. The reason for this is simple ... Developers in the western world are so lazy that we will put in many times as much effort into solving a problem once than repeatedly solving it over and over again, and as a result we steadily become more productive. Simply ask the average developer how much more productive frameworks and tools developed over the last decade have made them and how much less menial work they do to understand this. In contrast, the firms that you outsource work to are paid typically based on time and materials and there really isn't much incentive to be all that efficient; and (on top of this) the cost of managing a product developed in a different time zone in a different company often with language and cultural differences is significant. Beyond this, the enitre nature of the industry is changing and we're moving away from large companies building their own widgets that they assemble into gigantic applications that monopolize a market to one where small companies share widgets and produce small applications in a highly competitive market. This change has made it impractical to "throw more developers" at a problem, and you need a handful of quality developers who can produce a solid product. While this would imply that we need fewer developers the opposite is true being that the number of projects that can be developed is unbounded being that you only need to focus on a viable niche that hasn't be saturated.
Similar changes are happening in several industies like the news and entertainment industries, but even clothing is changing. Today there are websites devoted to printing t-shirts with designs on them that were submitted by users and we aren't that far away from having tens of thousands of individuals/small companies making money as t-shirt designers. We would be in a much better place if we just accepted that we're not going to be "manufacturing the t-shirt" or even "printing the design on the t-shirt" and realize that we will need to be the ones who "design the t-shirt and make the graphics that are displayed on it" and focus on royalties from intectual labour rather than wages from physical labour. |
Having purchased thousands of dollars of dev work from Indians/Chinese, I can vouch for this.
Generally, the quality of coding work from 3rd world countries is just like their manufactured goods - crappy. The only way to really have quality Chinese/Indians doing work for you is to have an American or Westerner in charge of them all, ensuring that quality is up to snuff (which of course, employs Americans or Westerners with executive level salaries, ect). But again, it is some times easier and cheaper to simply pay an American, Candadian, Aussie, Greek or whomever I've hired before a $20-$25/hr wage to get work done in 5 hours as opposed to an Indian which is $10/hr but may take a week to get something done with shoddy coding that is rarely optimized.
The reality of industry is that as productivity rises, the ability for 1st world countries to automate production on durable goods will increase, thus absolving the problem of outsourcing jobs: Can their robots work cheaper than our robots? Not likely, nor enough to overcome shipping costs and the like. The real key, then, for job growth will be to ensure regulatory and tax structures are better than said countries, which as long as they are 3rd world, will suffer as they usually are steeped in corruption and undemocratic processes, which can discourage business.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
