Friday, January 02, 2004

1:45:53 PM   Offshoring companies "are paying Chinese wages and selling at U.S. prices," said Alan Tonelson, of the U.S. Business and Industrial Council, a trade group for small business. "They're not creating better living standards for America." - U.S. companies moving more jobs overseas // The bottom line is they are trying to pocket tons of money, they are not looking to cut the cost of their products.  Imagine if they just switched to off shore labor and all of our software products would have their prices slashed to 15% of their current costs.  Why are we not slashing prices for our products when we slash our costs by off shoring ?

11:28:38 AM   Setting the table for good sports - Steve Rosenbloom

11:23:43 AM   Eric today lists 15 people he'd like to see have a blog.  I'd point to it but the permalinks which popped up for awhile have disappeared.  The Tribune just doesn't get it.  Why on earth does something this good go without the basicest tools of blogging ?  It's kinda like the Cubs.  We still come despite the ineptness.  Maybe we should act like good Sox fans do and stay away ? Oh and the key person on his list ? Steve Rosenbloom.

10:44:40 AM   What do you get when you pay 15% of what the American software developer charges ?  Some elsewhere have pointed to this section on costs .  My experiences have been more along these lines from the same article: "I've realized that with programmers under my own roof, I used to get away with a lot of shaky project practices in scope management, discovery, documentation, and testing. If you don't have these processes well under control, outsourcing will burn you severely. If you don't know what I'm babbling about, don't even think about outsourcing overseas. It may sound cheap and easy, but I've seen two companies get in over their heads, and with disastrous results."  My limitted experience says it doesn't matter how cheap they are or how SEI level 5 they are, if you can't communicate with them, you are in deep sh*t.   Most software development teams can't specify what they are developing particularly well and trying to get them to specify their needs for a team which is half way around the world is just short sighted (or blind) project management.  Only time will tell, if they do their job 15% as good as Americans the results will be catastrophic.  If they have reasonable quality and the American's can specify what they need, it just might work.  I have my doubts on both fronts.

10:30:21 AM   First post for the new year cuts right to the quick in software.  Everyone wants to "offshore" their software development.  My first experiences here have not been good but my experience is limitted.  Here is an article with some actual numbers in it. The Changing Face of Offshore Programming