October 15, 2004

• I think this story is ridiculous. It presupposes that offshore contractors aren't good at what they do. There's no reason why a programmer in India can't be equally as skilled as a programmer in Silicon Valley.
• Oooh, National Post logo! Back in the good ol' days of fear-mongering, NP wouldn't shut up about the "brain drain" and what must be done to stop it. Now that reality's proven them completely and utterly wrong...
• I am so glad that these so-called "IT" jobs are leaving the country. Good riddance. We could use a lot fewer rubbish people crowding out the CS classes.
• kenshin - didn't you know that brains only drain into richer countries, like the U.S. Because everyone with a brain thinks that higher crime and high infant mortality is better than living in Canada.
• was ist das "National Post"?
• This article reflects my experience, like, seven years ago. It's a farce now. The quality gap is not noticeable if it's there at all.
• I am so glad that these so-called "IT" jobs are leaving the country. Good riddance. We could use a lot fewer rubbish people crowding out the CS classes The flipside of that coin is this: with fewer students considering CS as a major, quality of education drops. Sure, there are fewer students to compete with in the job market, but as there are fewer butts-in-seats, funding for those programs drops. Furthermore, with fewer graduates, companies will begin considering overseas options and H1B's as a viable alternative sooner than they would if there was an adequate supply of homegrown students. Why? Because they don't have to make an investment in the programs to train these workers up and if they do, the offshore investment is much cheaper. It's not fair to blame offshoring for all the problems of the IT industry anyway. It's way more complex than that, covering everything from economics to the philosophies behind software today. This is a growth cycle.
• Look out the window. The "adequate supply of homegrown students" are pacing about moaning like zombies out of a job. Companies are not considering outsourcing because they don't have enough local candidates. Part of the reason IT feels the outsourcing crunch more acutely is that in the nineties they took on too many people who had no business being there. There is nothing and no-one to blame about increased offshoring; it's a welcome change! Besides, outsourcing forces these software companies to write clearer design specs, which improves the quality of the product overall. Coding to spec is not "one of the most, if not the most difficult intellectual actvit[ies]", as the article claims.
• I run a very small software company (well, mostly myself) and subcontract small bits of work out through rentacoder.com. About 75% of the bids I pick tend to be from Eastern Europe (Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, etc). I've found all their work to be top-notch. I have not been impressed with the bids that have come out of India -- I have yet to see anyone there who can communicate well about a project requirement. Of course this is probably just small potatoes and not in the same league as big business, but this has given me interesting insights. Some of these people are sharp and I do wonder why major shareware and apps haven't been coming from Russia and India. If there is an outsourcing hell, though, I'm hoping that myself, a peon, can clamber up all the granite and metal of all the corporations that will be surely burning there.
• Which is to say, I agree with 95% of what you said, drivingmenuts, but I wish you'd still pretend that we're completely at odds and proceed to flame each other to death. I sure love a pointless debate that ends in grisly death.
• I'm a CS major (post-bac), and what lies beyond makes me hella nervous.
• Oh, crap, fuyugare. I forgot - every programmer is supposed to absolutely believe that every other programmer is completely wrong, on any subject from coding a simple if-then to heat death of the universe. By the way - I do sympathise with some of the out-of-work IT guys. I have a job but I am underemployed (that term doesn't really work very well). Meanwhile, some little CS twerp just out of college has ganked my $75,000/year job. That situation is not likely to change soon, as far as I can tell.
• Flapdoodle??...he expects to be taken seriously saying flapdoodle? ...idiot.
• MONKEYFILTER - "It's also flapdoodle"
• There's a local company here named Acxiom that was listed for several years running in Forbes as one of the most desirable companies in the US to work for. In the last two years they had a layoff, a mass salary reduction, and then another layoff. The last layoff wasn't even because they hadn't made a profit -- they had, just not a big enough profit. Guess where the jobs went.
• Why the brouhaha over "flapdoodle"? Would you have preferred "shenanigans"? Or perhaps "flim-flammery"? MONKEYFILTER - brouhaha, shenanigans, and flim-flammery.
• So when do bloggers get outsourced?
• I don't know, it just sounds so ridiculous that it distracts me from what he's trying to say. Kind of like if Warren Buffett went to a Berkshire Hathaway stock meeting - with a Carmen Miranda hat on! I mean...flapdoodle?!!! Ok, well it's only me, I guess. Sorry, carry on. "Hey Farva, what's the name of that restaurant that you like...with all the goofy shit on the walls...?" "You mean shenanigans?"