Letters

[Read Sam Williams' "When Offshoring Goes Bad" and Katharine Mieszkowski's "The Global Market at Work."]

I used to outsource myself here too.

Although I used nothing more than my phone line, my head and my computer, Los Angeles City started demanding city taxes as a business operating in the city limits from me. Based on my federal and state tax returns, I owed them about as much as she tithes.

Mind you, I was not using any city services that I already did not pay for with my property taxes, and sales taxes. No traffic, no visiting clients, no parking spaces taken up, no noise or pollution nuisance for my neighbors who did not know whether I was in or out.

As for the sample site of SmartWebby's work, I think you get what you pay for. This looks like a newspaper full of small print and uninviting columns in Microsoft blue. Computer time is taken up loading a dumb sunrise photo.

Who crafted the run-on sentence passing for a survey question to let you discover that old folks use computers?

I guess we will have to go to India, move in with someone else's parents for a fee, and start working under the hanging laundry in the balcony to get these jobs. Oh, I forgot. We cannot get work permits as noncitizens.

-- Sylvia Sur

I'm no longer in the software development business, but many of the problems this article described with outsourced workers are completely familiar to me -- except I wasn't working with outsourced workers. No firm methodology, poor data models, nonexistent or sketchy specs -- all commonly plagued U.S.-staffed projects during the dot-com boom. Clients were too impatient for tangible results (i.e., something they could click) to spend the necessary time planning and describing.

In my experience, programmers are highly literal people. You need to tell them exactly what you want, down to the last detail; otherwise you may end up with what they think makes sense (which may be a disaster in terms of usability or visual appearance -- how else did the original Netscape end up with Times text on a gray background?). Insufficient specs create problems when the programming team sits around the corner from you; when they're half a world away, it has to be worse.

But this isn't the fault of Indian programmers -- it's the fault of business or account managers who are unwilling or unable to take the time to understand what the programming team needs to produce a superior product, and it's a failure on the part of the project manager to adequately communicate the team's needs to the client (internal or external), though project managers are often placed in an impossible position by managerial expectations. I've never worked with outsourced Indian programmers, but my experience with foreign-born and trained programmers was nothing but positive: they were highly skilled, highly professional, and generally a pleasure to work with, as much as any native-born American programmer. The problems your article describes sound to me like "project disasters" not "outsourcing disasters."

-- Maia Gemmill

"In general, when senior management makes a decision to outsource, there's political pressure to pretend it's working just so they don't look stupid. That's happening here, too. Everybody has to grin and bear it just so Joe Schmoe at the top doesn't look like an asshole."

That's the real bottom line, isn't it. All those executives who claimed they "earned" all those salaries and benefits when the economy was booming but, when the economy goes bust, well, it's not their responsibility or fault the company depreciated likewise. Their success was only in being better con artists and liars. Beyond that they're really not worth more than any other specialized employee. The personal rewards many received plainly did not match any personal risks they took.

-- Richard Dunn

I'm certainly glad to hear that some of the companies responsible for destroying the careers of I.T. professionals in the U.S. are feeling some (but not enough) pain themselves.

However, I take issue with some of the managers trying to get what they see as revenge against "recalcitrant" (perhaps a better term would be "uppity") American programmers. Contrary to the opinion of the Anonymous COO, most of us are just looking for a job which will pay a reasonable (American) cost of living while letting us stay in our chosen profession. Even during the dot-com boom, most of us were making less than six figures.

Most of these "managers" are blind to what they're throwing away. For instance, Mr. Raynor complains about the "pushback" when developers had to fix the same bug six times. A skilled software professional will leverage the code so that the bug only needs to be fixed once. Isn't that more valuable than an automaton that copies and pastes the same code in a dozen places?

I was also a little surprised by some of the cost figures. For instance, who pays $1,000/day on U.S. programmers? For that price you could get five American programmers. I wonder how much upper management is making at that company? In fact, when are we going to see upper management being outsourced? The cost savings to companies would dwarf what they save on I.T.

Thank you for this piece.

-- Mike Gollub

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