Offshore and ROI
I've posted on this before - the whole ugly issue of outsourcing. This post makes a lot of sense to me:
To someone like myself, who's been in the computer business for more than a quarter of a century (and always in demand), the prospect of becoming unemployable at 40-something is downright frightening. In the current IT labor market, I'm too expensive to hire. A company can get five people offshore for the cost of one of me.Now, the standard reaction here would be to call for action to block this trend, legislate against it, restore things to the way they used to be. But, pragmatist that I am, I think that's an exercise in futility. The market does what the market does - it's that simple. The only way to influence the market is to offer a better value proposition
That's about right - if you think legislation the the way to go, go look at how well that workd out for the large steel firms that started getting slapped around in the 70's - they spent mountains of money on legislation, and still got waxed. Ron Hitchens is onto the better answer:
The offshore operations, of necessity to keep costs down, will become rigidly structured, assembly line operations (if they aren't already). You need an accounting system? Fine they can do that and do it very well. Inventory? Financials? No sweat, done it a million times. But if you need highly customized, innovative, ground-breaking stuff; software that's integral and vital to a new hardware device or business process or biological model or whatever, you need a tightly focused team onsite that can adapt and react and make it work right now.It strikes me that this pattern echoes the Agile vs. DBUF debate. Offshore by its very nature has a high communication latency and the customer, almost by definition, is disconnected from the development process. This favors the Big Design UpFront approach. For well-understood business processes, like accounting, inventory, etc, this can and surely will work out fine.
And for the more custom jobs? It'll work out just as well for the offshore guys as it has for the large IT shops here. If you think all work is going to trend towards the assembly line - well, I have this bridge....
