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. |
I had also seen this happen first-hand, but it didn't stop the corporation I used to work for from going down the path to believe their "brilliant" management plus cheap labor equals success. Code gets sent to the Indian developers, who then come back and use some code that was really questionable, and the error handling was very undeveloped. Quick turn around but utter garbage. But hey, the corporation felt they need it, so in an initiative they were advertising on national TV, they were simultaneously cutting funding to development in the area. Next up, throw out all the workers, and then wonder why you can't find anyone who knows their proprietary stuff, which really has no use outside of their own internal use and projects. So, you are let go? Well, good luck finding anything else. As far as brilliance goes, the corporation considered Unix System Admin on part with computer operators. Back in the day, before the outsourcing madness brought on by Y2K, the department in the Unix area would go out every week for lunch. It seemed nice for team building. Well, it was done because they were losing someone else in that area.
But hey, what I do I know, they have to be booming now. They are multinational after all.
