Stop Offshoring
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
A recent eWeek column compared the quality of work performed offshore with the work being done by Americans. There are a couple of quotes that I want to share because they also express my experiences with Indian workers both here and abroad.
In one failed project that had been staffed from that country [India], he found "uniformly atrocious" code with "almost a complete lack of error processing." He said he also found other cardinal errors, such as absence of referential integrity constraints. "There were pieces of code," he reported, "that were so bizarre that I can't even explain how anybody could have written them."
Even if developers make fewer initial errors, poor response to changes in requirements means a longer time to deliver the code that's needed—perhaps longer than the customer can afford to wait.
Do you still think offshoring is a better option??
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
News.com had a special series on offshoring last week.
I found one quote in the first article that typified the type of unconvincing argument for offshoring that I keep hearing. Again, the writer believes that education will be the key to saving American jobs:
The key to the school's approach is not training students in a particular skill that could soon become obsolete, but rather helping them develop critical-thinking and project management abilities
Ahem, I hate to tell you, but Americans are already better educated than Indians in the area of critical-thinking and project management. However, hiring managers still look for the tech skill du jour, exactly the opposite of what the author recommends. Until American companies learn that the best employees ARE the well-rounded ones with critical-thinking and project management skills, not some foreigner with a semester of Java under his belt, no amount of education will make a difference.
Monday, May 03, 2004
I saw this article in last weekend's San Jose Mercury News - "Jobs that stay here -- but not for Americans". It provides further evidence to debunk the argument that offshoring will result in more net jobs for Americans and supports my observations that foreign countries DO NOT hire American workers when they expand in the U.S.
Yet these jobs aren't available to the local workforce. They are reserved, almost exclusively, for guest workers brought from India on H-1B visas by the outsourcing contractors, according to analysts and industry sources.
"These jobs never make it to the help-wanted ads or get posted online,'' said Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild, a Web-based advocacy group that criticizes offshoring and the H-1B program.
"These companies are managing their offshore contracts using imported labor. But Americans should have the first shot at that work."
