This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Scoble talks about outsourcing
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
On the way back to Seattle, I sat next to a guy I won't name, cause I didn't tell him I was gonna put his comments on my weblog. He's Vice President of IT at one of the world's largest title insurance companies. Thousands of seats. Big deal, all over the world. Uses all Microsoft products.
He told me they are shipping all of their development work over to India. 50 developers affected. Many were from India to begin with.
Why are they doing that? He told me, it's all cost based. Moving developers over to India, saves tons of money
IMHO, the cost savings for this kind of work might end up being nebulous. Why? Well, I'd be willing to be that the management - the people who come up with the development requirements - will not be moving to India, nor will their jobs. That means that all the user representatives will be US based, and the developers will be 9 to 12 hours distant in timezone terms. Meaning, communication with these people will be fitful at best. Software just isn't like manufacturing - it's not automatic, and it requires a lot of communication. Either the Indian developers will be on nightshift (to allow for communication), or they will be effectively incommunicado. In the former case, you can expect a lot of turnover. In the latter case, expect a return to the glass house era of apps being "thrown over the wall".
It's not about the quality of engineers in India; it's about their remoteness. I simply don't think that you can get timely delivery of applications that actually meet your needs with a staff that remote. It's hard working with a distributed staff - trust me on that one! The Cincom Smalltalk team has people scattered across North America (with a few in Europe) - and communications are more difficult as a result. If the developers were 12 hours away, I'd never properly communicate with them. The question I'd ask that manager Scoble spoke to is this - "So, how do you expect to manage requirements with a staff that is out of synch (time-wise) with your management and users? Heck, if it saves money, why didn't you outsource management to India?". Whatever answer applies to management applies at least as well to software development.
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