To: hueyone who wrote (173497 ) 3/12/2003 11:26:42 PM From: Lizzie Tudor Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 186894 that was different hueyone- in Andy Groves time we had no global competition. Believe me I am very close to this issue and have discussed this in depth with lots of people. The truth is nobody ever figured out a way to make a assembly line for software or hardware development in the Model T sense. To get a product out the door from an engineering perspective, you literally need hundreds of management level staff at intel, cisco, microsoft- everywhere. I've been on many many teams where from the beginning cost-cutting was the objective. So we would cut usually QA, then we tried "extreme programming", we moved management to the business analysts- everything but in the end my feeling is, our current development world requires a senior engineer for every 5 juniors, an architect for every major layer and management above that. Some jobs are really intellectually challenging and require academic level knowledge on subject matter (meaning, you can't learn about it from any book anywhere. you just need to "know")- and these types of people are looking for $150K or so, the same money they would make in a competing challenging profession. They aren't locked into engineering I mean, they can go to law or any number of fields. So the approach these tech companies have taken is to spread the cost of engineering overhead over the millions of shareholders with options. Right or wrong that was the approach and I always thought everyone understood that. Anyway its kindof cheating to use options and without them you are looking at paying cash for US-based engineering to the tune of hundreds of millions per year, totally uncompetitive. I am not a big fan of outsourcing but when you look into it really, most of the issues are communicative due to management being in the US with core R&D in india. If there is a way to deal with the IP issues (a big issue I know) then I would move the entire division including VP to Bangalore. I have worked with lots of indian development talent over the years and there is NO DIFFERENCE in terms of quality vs. what you can get here. The one big difference is the creative environment, the marketing side and visionary climate. That stuff is much better in silicon valley- but thats the beta or prototype. But large engineering depts in big stable US companies to me sound like a luxury for those firms who have patents or some other profit protector. What the US needs to do is focus on that assembly line product for software R&D. Basically do what Dell did for hardware, use some approach that is superior making US costs bearable. When we have that we can bring R&D back inhouse but until then some hard decisions have to be made imo. Wrt options, I am convinced the *entire problem* is this US-based development. Thats where most of the options go at cisco, msft, intel. Executives get theirs but the companies that are really over the top are doing too much R&D- Siebel is like that, for one. L