The New Road

so do we now meet with our Indian doctor on-line and have them prescribe our medications and/or treatments? Or will those Indian doctors come over here and work? If they['re working here, what's the problem? Half the doctors in this country right now are Indian/Pakistani or Oriental anyway.

Actually there are indian radiology firms that are reading and diagnosing for hospitals here from over there.

What Lori was talking about was on TV. I actually read another article about full medical procedures for reduced prices in India. So in answer to your question, Americans would fly to India for the procedure.

Ooops posted in the orca thread:

I agree with your opinions on outsourcing and the detrimental effects that it has. However, how do you counter all the CEOs (Oracle, Sun, AutoDesk, Microsoft, etc.) who say that they need to outsource to be more efficient/ptrofitable and that they can't pass up the deal (Indian programmers are 20% of the cost of American, or so they say). Do you believe software developers should unionize? I haven't seen that unions stop the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.

I think it's a combination of our profession getting it's act together as a group, as well as our own professional development as individuals, combined with actions by the government to equalize the situation. I believe American engineers can compete, if the playing field is leveled.

Want to hear a shocker? I talked with representatives from Compuware recently and was told that a field survey they took came back with the fact that 75% of Java projects are failures. I'm not surprised. I don't think anyone in management at American companies has all of the answers for a project from day one. Projects need to iterate to be successful. This is just a fact of life and when you add the distance and time element into the picture you lose the ability to iterate. When that is the case more projects are bound to fail.

75%. Think about that. Three out of every four. I've never been on a project which has failed to ship. And yet the average is that three out of every four Java projects fail.

My main issues with outsourcing have to do primarily with it being done irresponsibly, as well as what I think to be that American companies are being sold a bill of goods by the those advocating outsourcing. You kind of hint at it with your observation that distributed development is extremely hard to do well since it involves a lot of interactive communication and iteration. You can't just ship off a design half-way around the world and hope to get back a finished software product that is exactly what you desired. The "waterfall" approach to software development has proven to be not the best way to go with large software projects. I think fundamentally "computer science" is not yet a true science, and therefore can't be commoditized for anything except the simplest software projects. And the feedback I've heard so far is that a lot of these offshore projects have turned out to be major cluster****s, with the American compnay eventually bringing the work back in house after wasting all that time and money. While myself and other software developers seems to know this, those in control right apparently do not. Bush's ecnomic advisor recently said that outsourcing is a good thing (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/13/opinion/main600351.shtml). What's even scarier is where CEO's like Carly Fiorina (HP), John Chambers (Cisco), Scott McNealy (Sun), Larry Ellison (Oracle), etc., are all saying pretty much the same thing - if we can get an offshore programmer for 1/5 the cost of an American programmer, then they're going to do it. And this leads me to my second point...

I think offshoring is being done irresponsibly in that the long-term consequences are not being considered, such as:

1) The Intellectual Property issues and the privacy issues re American consumer financial and medical data being offshore. They don't have the same laws over there that we do, and even if they did, they would be a lot harder to enforce remotely.

2) The erosion of well-paying middle and upper-middle class job base. This in turn is going to affect consumer spending and taxes that can't be put back into the govt. The gap between the poor and rich will grow even wider. How about if we outsource the CEOs?

3) The disappearance of all "knowledge-based" workers in America, without any jobs taking the place. It seems that if the job involves bits and not atoms, then it can be offshored. It seems that his country is going to consist of nothing but CEOs and fry cooks. I even heard an MIT professor advise that these "new" jobs should be better retail jobs, LOL. I already know too many ex-engineers working at the Good Guys.

4) Since most CEOs and senior executives work their way up the ranks, how is this going to happen with the intervening white collar jobs if they're all going over to India, China, etc. This too will affect our ability to start new companies too since this is usually done by people with some experience under their belt (dot commers excluded).

5) This country can't be a miltary superpower without being an economic superpower.

6) The dependence this country will have on other countries for IT needs. Since IT is becoming almost as vital to day-to-day living as electricity itself, what happens one day up the track when we get in bad with one of these countries and they decide to use it as leverage against the U.S., i.e. they threaten to cut us off or corrupt our data?

7) American companies are cutting costs right now, but what if all this offshoring ultimately affects the quality of their goods and services, which it already has in certain cases? These companies will go down the tubes and then they'll be no jobs.

OK, I hope I don't sound too alarmist, and although there are still other reasons to be concerned about it, I should probably give it a rest right now. That said, what specifically can we do? Write to our politicians?

To find the solution we need to look at how we got here. We got here because there was an MBA/Accounting meme that started circulation about five years ago that said that there was a lot of savings in outsourcing. We need to start a new meme within the same MBA circles which is critical of outsourcing for all of the reasons you mentioned.

We already hear an outcry against outsourcing from the obvious sources (those that lose the jobs). What we need is an outcry from the same MBAs and Accountants that, whoops, it really was a bad idea after all.

Yes, getting the MBA/big consulting groups buzzing about "onshoring" or even perhaps "rightshoring" (that sounds like MBA-speak, no?) perhaps could make a difference. I think the reason it is so popular is because it is a lazy way to cut costs. CEOs are under extreme pressure today to cut costs, especially since we're in a recession (I perosnally feel we'll be in one as long as we have a "jobless recovery").

The alleged price ratio of 1 American programmer to 5 Indian programmers, allows one to almost get the cost savings of a lay off, without giving up hardly any resources. Also, especially since the bubble bust, I think it's been easier to sell offshoring (cost reduction) than it has been to sell onshore "Big "Five" (what a scam) consulting, where programmers and project managers are paid in the range of $175-$225/hour. Perhaps this bubble needed to burst anyways; a lot of these "consultants" are mostly recent grads anyways. So, I think one other thing that got us into the situation we're in is that for so long these big consulting companies (Anderson, KPMG, PWC, etc.) have been over-billing for under-qualified talent. I think the Indian offshoring is partially a backlash to that.

It really bothers me when I hear CEOs like Carly Fiorina (HP) complain about the American educational system and say that's the reason they have to offshore, when in reality they're just doing it to cut costs. There's plenty of qualified Americans to go around for most job openings these days. The job market is very competitive; it's an employer's market. It also bothers me that these CEOs who complain about the educational system do nothing to fix it and, actually, just make the situation worse by offshoring jobs. Who would want to major in something with dim prospects for employment? So, these complaints become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

So, while political action should be taken, and might be somewhat effective, we really have to change the mindset of CEOs. They ultimately make the decision to offshore or not. They're probably intelligent people, but they've all seem to have fallen for the same sales pitch ("get it done cheaper in India"). They have to understand the "hidden costs" of offshoring.