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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (108988)	7/31/2003 3:04:11 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I've seen a bit of this sort of thing close up: a lot of such work is being done in the Philippines. I think a lot of people have a wake-up call coming. Highly collaborative, imaginative work might suffer in the hands of technically adept but inexperienced programmers. Somebody hasn't been around. The people these companies are hiring are in their 20s, mostly. They have a few billion internet hours under their belts. They have access to exactly the same hardware, software (generally for free) and information that the young Americans do. These kids are not coming out of the village. They come from upper middle class families, mostly, and they are so much like Americans of the same age that with your eyes closed you can't tell the difference. You want to see the Internet at work, find an upscale university in a 3rd world country (we do have them) and hang out with the graduating class. You'll think you're in an LA suburb. It's not like it was in the days when they all watched the same TV. Now they don't just look the same. They are the same. I worked once with a young designer who had just come out of the U. of the P. The client in the US wanted him to use software he wasn't fully up to speed with. The guy he worked for caught him in the office after hours, and discovered the source of his education. The kid would go into chat rooms on the extreme end of the geek spectrum, and ask his questions, posing as a hot young Asian chick. He'd been doing it for years. The occupants would outdo themselves trying to beat their chests by showering him with information. He had all this stuff on file as a reference. Turned out he had no formal tech education at all. Learned everything on the net. Did great work. American companies that go overseas to pick up a bunch of mechanical, unmotivated 3rd world assembly-line programmers (some of them do) get what they came for. You get those in the 1st world too, and they cost you a fortune. Companies that go looking for sharp people who are willing to work can also find what they're looking for. These people are a resource that is not being productively used, because the people at the management and investment level in most of these countries have no clue about what the resource can do. Simply put, once you leave the U.S. you are leaving behind the world's best, most proven pool of programmers. That's is not to say that there aren't excellent programmers in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But large-scale, world-changing software development ain't easy. The Net bubble devalued just how hard it is to build neat technology. True, but even very sophisticated software also involves a lot of grunt work. It makes sense to get the grunt work at the most effective price. Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?" Partly because the good ones all work for Americans, and partly because, as I said before, tech penetration in the older generation in many of these countries is nil. The talent is young; the people with the management skill and financial resources don't have a handle on it. Wait.... Salaries are obviously not the only part of the cost-benefit calculation, but these companies know that. Managing such operations effectively is an evolving art, and has not always worked. People have come away with bad stories, on both sides of the fence. The demand and the supply are there, though, and they will be hooked up eventually.

To: LindyBill who wrote (108988)	7/31/2003 3:24:07 AM
From: kumar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Simply put, once you leave the U.S. you are leaving behind the world's best, most proven pool of programmers. That's is not to say that there aren't excellent programmers in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But large-scale, world-changing software development ain't easy. The Net bubble devalued just how hard it is to build neat technology. Shawn Fanning is the exception that proves the rule. Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?" Perhaps the author of this article ought to have a chat with one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, or (I think) the CEO of Computer Associates. They are both of Indian origin, and I'd hesitate to say "they are worth crap".

To: LindyBill who wrote (108988)	7/31/2003 3:57:13 AM
From: Elsewhere	Respond to of 281500

Or as one software engineer who has worked with out-sourced labor for years puts it, "If software development in India is so great, why don't they have a single software company worth a crap?" While many US software companies have gone bust after the bubble Infosys (NasdaqNM:INFY) is still more than a double from where it started in 1999. Its market cap of $7 billion is a kind of "crap" I'd take as a gift any day.

To: LindyBill who wrote (108988)	7/31/2003 10:06:38 AM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Respond to of 281500

Myths and facts of white-collar out-sourcing While it will take the typical large company a good 10 years minimum to amortize and pay down the learning curve of moving software "engineering" offshore, it is an ineluctable fact that it's been happening and will continue to happen. Companies like HP have been into this for 5 years or more, and when I worked in France a few years back, CAD/CAM companies I did on site support for like Matra Datavision had already moved some development to India and Belarus, to name just two. I had to work on the code from India from time to time to fix problems, and it was not much different from the code written in France and the USA. Programming is still very "easy", in that it doesn't take a decade of training to do the work, compared to being a medical doctor or some other professions. The majority of so-called "software engineering" is glorified clerical work, albeit somewhat more clever on average. As a case in point, I was drafted during the Vietnam era, and as a result didn't finish my electrical engineering training. So I began working in software, which I'd learned as a sideline in school. My current expertise is well beyond graduate school level, but if I had it to do it over, I'd have continued my education and taken an advanced degree in my original field of interest. I am grateful that I've had such an interesting career in spite of everything. But in honesty, it was possible because software is just easy to get into, and now is even easier. The information on it is abundant, the half life of much of the practical knowledge is very short, we have the internet, and we have open source like Linux, BSD Lite, XFree86 and other examples of high quality software work that much of the proprietary code of the world has nothing on in terms of design and quality. Many of the open source code bases, such as the landmark X11 server and libraries have elevated software quality throughout the industry by serving as real world examples of software architecture that anybody can learn from. A much more important problem in my opinion is the way the US is freely allowing semiconductor wafer fab and related expertise to leave the country for places like China. I consider our semiconductor expertise as a matter of national security which is more important than nuclear weapons "secrets" If nuclear weapons were really worth anything economically, Russia would still be a world economic powerhouse, second only to the United States. In fact, nuclear weapons don't really do shit for a country, outside some diplomatic posturing, all the more now that the cold war is behind us. Most of these offshore moves of software and related work are driven by short term profit dreams on the part of bean counters and financial engineers, and few in the US will ever profit from these things, and the real profits won't come for well over a decade because of the very real learning curves involved. But the job market disruption will be immediate and lasting.