India's outsourcing bubble is bursting

TalkBack 31 of 80:: Next »; « Previous

Thread View
Flat View

Agreed.: In over ten years of working with and/or observing
outsourced projects, on both sides of the table, I have
seen a lot of good, hardworking Indian, Russian, Chinese
and Vietnamese technical people. I have also seen one
trend that has been absolutely constant with every
single Indian project:

The next Indian-outsourced project that I see finished on
time, on budget, to spec, with fit and finish comparable to
what would be taken as a matter of course anywhere else...
will be the very first. Out of dozens. Since darned
near the beginning of the current offshoring-as-
outsourcing trend.

Oh, you might very well get acceptable results after the
fifth or sixth rework cycle, after you've managed to specify
the defects and omissions in lugubriously mind-numbing
detail that anyone with passing familiarity with the English
language could comprehend... because that's largely what's
needed. Things that an experienced American (or Russian,
or Chinese) engineer would pick up on and just know
to be part of the problem space need to be spelled out in
all imaginable respects to well past the degree that you
can't imagine how anybody could possibly bork it...and
then you pick your jaw up off the floor, because it does
come back borked. It's not that the people attempting the
work are stupid; far from it. But when rote learning and
don't-think-outside-the-box are cultural touchstones,
any innovation - literally anything that brings
enhanced value to the enterprise - is, quite literally, a
foreign concept. Being caught in the middle in a situation
where executive "leadership" insists on offshoring using a
particular model, and customers who quite properly
demand value for money, is not a very fun or career-
enhancing place to be.

We've got to get away from this mentality that preaches
that the very top gets richer and richer while everybody
else makes do with less and less; that it's somehow
beneficial to both build unique systems but remove their
development from the organization that (in theory) knows
most about what needs to be done. We need to stop
dumbing down American education and then blaming lack
of education/skill for jobs being sent offshore - except, of
course, for top management jobs; somehow, those never
seem to be offshored to the lowest bidder. If we don't do
these things soon, decisively and permanently, we will
lose what made much of the progress of the last century
possible - and prevent the next century from progressing
as it could, and arguably should. One bull-session topic
that regularly comes up in my circle of friends is "why
hasn't the 21st century started off like people thought it
would 75, 50, or even 25 years earlier?" The answer we, a
group of professionals, academics and government folk,
keep coming up with is along the lines of "because the
corporate revolution, with its demands for lower costs but
higher executive compensation, redirected the resources
that would otherwise have gone into forward progress."
Until we restore that "redirection", any talk of how to solve
various "problems" and "crises" becomes yet more
rearrangement of the deck chairs aboard Titanic...
which, if memory serves, was herself largely the victim of
corporate cost-cutting.; Posted by: jdickey Posted on: 10/03/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use