Stop Offshoring
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
You wonder why I have such a negative experience with offshore workers and H1Bs? Let me give you a peek into what my work life has been like the last three months because of them. I've been on a project to migrate data from a customer's old application to their new platform. However, there's a catch -- the old data is proprietary and the customer will give us export files from it that we can then import into the new system.
Guess who's in charge of creating the export files? Yes, our nemesis, the Indian H1B employee. At the beginning of the project, I thought it'd take a month to complete, given the amount and complexity of the data. It has now been three months with no end in sight. The reason? The exported data that I'm getting is full of crap! It's as if H1Bs do no QA whatsoever on their output and just toss it over the fence for us to clean up! So in addition to trying to import the data, I have to look for errors, fix them if I can, or report them back so that I can get cleaner data files.
As a result, I have been working 14-hour days for the last three months, including weekends! I'm doing my job AND theirs! Why? Because they are too incompetent to do the job properly. Here is another example where a company (the client in this case) thinks it can save a little money by hiring a cheaper worker, only to have their projects slip way past the original target dates, and the added expenses of paying for my time in cleaning up the mess.
The good news is that everyone now realizes who is responsible for the delays. Yet the client can't do anything at this point because H1Bs are the only people who know their data. They're held hostage by incompetent idiots because they wanted to save a few bucks. Let's hope they learn their lesson when they (eventually) switch to their new system.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
You still think your data is safe after it's been offshored? Not according to these articles:
The Security Implications of Outsourcing
Government Bureau Offshore Outsourcing Firms do not Respect Private Data Report Says.
Stories of offshore companies disregarding privacy laws and forgoing background checks of their employees should make you very nervous about who has access to your data. As a result, a survey cited in the first article revealed that nearly two-thirds of companies were cutting back on their offshoring contracts or taking a closer look at vendors' security practices.
