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To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (14129)	10/2/2003 3:14:45 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I know Vinod Khosla thinks that, he has stated as such on 60 minutes. He also poured billions into Zaplet, inc. during the bubble so there you go! LOL. Seriously I know what you are saying and there is some truth to it, SOME. But let me tell you something about "brilliant" offshore teams in practice. I had one of these teams working for me in my last startup in 2001. I am sure that this russian team with their exemplary educational background dwarfed my educational background- ON PAPER. (although I believe your avg silicon valley worker, in terms of raw intellect IQ and the like, is right up there with the best of em). Anyway I had this team and we gave them a direction to produce a middleware product to classify customers in Java. The key issue being design, we needed a designer, we made that clear. That is why we paid a premium price for this Russian team (still below US rates). Anyway 3 mos pass and we get back the design. They proposed to store the customer record in the oracle data structure type "object". Then their entire approach was based on object oriented whizbang tech. This is what happens when you hire a bunch of offshore, book smart people- this approach will never work, objects cannot be used for data of this type in the enterprise, anybody with real world data experience with companies that work with software would know this. Shades of IBM in the late 80s and 90s... irrelevant innovation, not close to the customer etc. Small companies with hands on tactical leadership that is capable of dealing with customers on a personal level, in other words NOT a "brilliant" russian team out of Poland, always seem to hit their mark. If Vinod Khosla really believes his own commentary, he will start a company in india and produce products there that win on a world stage. We'll have to see how that pans out. My feeling is that what we are seeing now, is not that at all. We have the design getting done here and coding there. So what coding is a commodity. And with no "offshore liasons" the remote teams can't figure out what to do.

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (14129)	10/2/2003 6:39:38 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

There seems to be a growing dis-incentive for Americans to go into science and engineering fields. America has always had an anti-intellectual bias, reflected by the demeaning of said "nerds", and the glorification of football players, musicians and celebrities. Back in the antideluvian days when I was in school, many tried, but few were chosen for software engineering. It was where the jobs were, but it was HARD! My "Into to Programming" class started with 70 and ended with 12. Now, it seems it's not even where the jobs are.