Study: Not all entry-level IT work headed offshore

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It's more that Innovation

I think American are more expedient that others.

Frequently, politicians and journalists call attention to the lack of broadband market penetration and bandwidth in the US compared to other modern nations (particularly S. Korea) as evidence of the US falling behind.

Why don't we have higher broadband penetration or more bandwidth? It's simple, many Americans won't pay for it. Digital cable is more fun. Current connections are fast enough. It's not worth the extra money for more speed.

Therefore, we should spend taxpayer money (through direct subsidies or tax incentives) to build more high speed infrastructure that consumers won't pay for to deliver them a service that they don't want... Right??!!??

Wrong! Hopefully, as expedient Americans, we won't spend a bunch of money on something unless we see the value....I hope....

Americans will also work hard in order to do less work. The Indian support I've worked with always seem to prefer to do hours and hours of tedious, mind numbing work week after rather than automate it. Why? Because at the first occurance of a problem it will take 5 hours to fix it manually and 15 to automate it. Most Americans I work with would rather spend 15 hours implementing automation than deal with the 5 hour task, and then will just hope the automation comes in handy later...like next week when the same problem occurs.

In my experience, Americans also seem much more willing to accept and learn from mistakes. Once an Indian development team shipped us code that didn't compile. I told them it wouldn't compile, along with some of the offending lines of code. Their response was that it passed all tests, so it must be our fault. Turns out they shipped us the wrong version of the code, and it took bringing in an American consultant from the same company who had worked on the code to figure it out when he realized he was fixing the same bugs he had fixed when the people in India had shipped him the "fully tested" code.

But I haven't met an American programmer who, when you show him something that obviously isn't working, won't THANK the person who found the bug for pointing out the problem and get at trying to fix it right away. (I have, however, had an American manager of a consultant claim a set of bugs were "features" and tell the consultant, who admitted they were bugs, to stop trying to fix them)

I think most of the time the road to innovation starts with a desire to avoid work and is paved with mistakes. I don't think a culture that frowns on searching for an easier way or were mistakes can't be freely admitted will ever be innovative.

Posted by: Erik1234   Posted on: 07/18/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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