is onshore outsourcing always legal? What are the rules? 1

[Crox]

Hi,

I think in the Netherlands it started perhaps even more than 15 years ago that people in India took over lots of our work. Nowadays they even come here while better collegues are without work at home. I don't understand that. See also

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?v...94562&trk=groups/include/item_snippet-0-b-ttl

Is programming typical 3rd world business?

I don't understand this. I would like to understand how this is possible. What happened with our jobs?

 

[fredericofonseca]

private group.

But its normal for companies to search for the elusive cheap work - why pay X to someone here when they can get 4-5 bodies elsewhere.

Many companies tried it and regretted it on the overall. Some still trying it and keep trying.

Others are not having a mix of - top developers here and fodder cannon outsourced - a bit more work for those here as they have to review (and some times rewrite) the code the of the others, but the overall is that costs are a bit lower (and we all know that many developers here are not worth not even half of what their pay is) even if projects take a bit longer

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[Crox]

Hi Frederico,

The euro-green-card should not be given to anyone outside Europe unless there are no people available in Europe. But there are enough! It is not about price, it is about rules, law, etc. People are not free to come unless they are 'special'. But they are not at all! Most of them don't even know anything about structured programming, not a bit.

About COBOL: they don't know what comp-5 is about, external, pointers, functions, etc. etc. Their knowledge seems to be from before 1995. They don't have a clue about slack-bytes. Very important when you are working with XML definitions with lots of SYNC's on unexpected, generated places. Many of them seems not very willing to look inside any manual at all.

Also the language is a problem. Although many people in The Netherlands are able to work in an English language environment, it is still much more nice to use our own language. Also the English pronounciation of most of the Indian people does not sound a bit like BBC English what is good understandable to many Dutch people. The stone-coal English (as we call it) of most of the Indian people is only understandable after lots of hearing-practise.

If you pay peanuts, you buy & create third-world software which does not help at all. It is certainly not state of the art and also not solid.

It is like the old saying: 'failure is not an option, it becomes bundled with your third-world software developers'.

Thanks for your response!

Regards,

Crox

 

[fredericofonseca]

I don't know if this is the case - don't have enough data, neither had the need or interest of looking for it so far - but it would be possible that those that you see from outside are holders of "blue cards" - this being the case its easy enough to get one as these are given at an europe level (excluding a few countries). Unfortunately most countries when posting for particular positions will only post on their own country, and when justifying the need for a "blue card" its easy to get away as most positions will have certain particularities specified that will make it almost impossible for anyone outside that country to fulfill or even to be interested on that position, thus allowing "foreigns" to be called upon.

Not something that has affected me as Ireland has not signed off on the blue cards so impact here is null.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886

 

[k5tm]

Crox and Frederico,

I too have seen a lot of failure when using out-sourcing. When with my former employers, I saw several Independent Software Vendor customers take this option, usually in an effort to 'modernize' the user interface. The result was often not only failing to achieve the 'promised golden prize', but also seeing their market-leading functionality magically appear in competitive products.

SO, it is always an issue of evaluating value, cost and price, which are not the same things. Many managers have almost no way to reasonably and effectively understand how these metrics apply to their own code base (without a lot of work, of course), so they become the gullible customers of those selling 'quick' and 'low cost' in a simple (invisible!) package.

However, Crox, I do not believe that government-enforced anti-competitive measures do anything but make things worse.

And, Crox, I am not sure about that BBC-English thing!

Tom Morrison
Hill Country Software

 

[Crox]

my native language is not English. Working with Indian people, some of them are good to understand from the first time on, some of them I have to listen over and over again because of the way they pronounce . Ever heard of stone coal English? Very difficult if you are not a native English speaker or better said native English listener. I prefer BBC English!

 

[SaltyTheFrog]

I experienced the out sourcing pain right after the Y2K effort. Mainframe jobs just draining away to India and Brazil. When it happned to manufacturing I never gave it much thought. When it happened to me I said "ouch!".

I got into Windows developement around 2001 and never looked back...

 

[dilettante]

Windows development is no safe haven either.

I started my programming career in the mid-1970s and before 1980 we already saw offshoring and outsourcing. Year by year after that the amount of it increased.

By the time Y2K rolled around it was just a fact of life and inescapable.

Just a few years later this had spread to take over almost all .Net development and began to penetrate VB6 maintenance as well.

I took early retirement about 4 years ago and began doing contract programming. Within a year my larger clients all stopped giving me programming jobs, instead asking me to do training. Almost all of this training is getting cheap coders from India and Brazil up to speed on the kinds of work that I used to be doing. I still did get some programming contracts, but the end product is always turned over to outsourced coders for support.

The only good news for me is that these cheap coders either (a.) get good at it and are promoted to the next level of incompetency, or (b.) are cast aside. So they never last more than a year or two and I get hired to come back and train replacements.


I can't understand any of this. It is so inefficient and expensive due to the layers of middlemen taking a cut that I assume there is some government level conspiracy paying them kickbacks that subsidize the entire process. Or perhaps there is some trans-national conspiracy behind it to enrich the outsourcing vendors at the expense of domestic workers?