Offshoring shrinks number of IT jobs | Hacker News Reader

Offshoring shrinks number of IT jobs

computerworld.com

4 pointsvoodoochilo5 comments

I wish these 'More Jobs Are Moving Offshore' stories would accurately describe what non-trivial positions are affected. We now know it's possible to move call-centers offshore, despite actual consumer satisfaction, since it's been condensed to a mechanical process of reading a script and transferring departments when the script has been exhausted. As close to trivial of a business process you'll get. Anything more complex and we're talking a whole different world.

After hiring a few developers and designers from oDesk, I've concluded for myself that it's more expensive in the long run. Not only do you need to take the time to be ridiculously specific with your implementation (add time here), you need to check their code to ensure it's at all maintainable (more time), and clean up when necessary (add more time). At the end of the day, it has cost me a lot more in time. You could strike it rich by finding the right person, but it's good of odds as winning a mini lottery.

If the small scale of oDesk is any indicator of performance for larger projects, outsourcing will not be taking off any time soon for jobs requiring above trivial knowledge. If we have naive CIO's who still believe how outsourcing anything above junior/trivial positions can help the bottom line, we're in trouble. Either way, I've come to greatly appreciate even the junior/intermediate developers I work with locally.

Has anyone had any success with off shoring development jobs? At a large software company that I worked at, we worked with an Indian team, and I found that they were nothing but trouble. They would miss deadlines (with nothing but reassurances that everything was on track up until the day that we were supposed to release), and the code that they produced was both incredibly buggy and had poor code quality. Now, I probably cost the company 10x what they did, but still, I feel like it was a bad expense to offshore. They ended up creating a lot of work and resulted in lower quality products. Alas, software development is one field where it's easy to have very negative productivity. That said, this is only a single experience, so this may have been bad luck.

Yes this is the common theme of outsourcing to other cultures, it has to do with cultural norms and everyday knowledge that we take for granted, the same thing would happen if you took the best American developers and assembled a team and then outsourced them to an Indian company to build software for an Indian market. You in the end have to write the software twice to get it developed offshore, once in a sudocode of diagrams and detailed functional specs and the second time in code by the outsourced team. The end result is that it saves very little and increase the risk of failure. The take away is that it is a bad bet unless you know what you are doing and are doing at a very large scale, for the majority of US companies it is not a good idea. Many are starting to realize this and bringing projects home, which is why I find this article to be suspect.

this has come up here before. see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=174101 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067423

Isn't this article about 10 years late?

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