posted on Aug, 8 2010 @ 08:14 AM
It's been happening here in the UK for years. For the price of hiring a 10 UK IT professionals companies can hire 100 offshore workers. Even when
the quality has been shown to drop, even when the new workers have no concept of the nature of the work they are doing the employers don't care.
They work on the principle of a room full of monkeys with typewriters will eventually come up with the works of Shakespeare.
I worked for a Supermarket company, they moved the IT development function offshore, and found it was a disaster. The people doing the work had no
concept of shopping in a supermarket, how the logistics supply chain worked, why customers would be interested in loyalty schemes, etc. Whereas we
could make the logical leap to fill in the blanks, work out issues in the design, and such we found the offshore workers to be technically skilled
they were bound in their thinking, but again the employer didn't care at all as the cost savings were huge compared to the massively increased lead
times in getting the delivered solution right. Also accepting code that met 80% of the needs would be good enough, and was it worth their while to
spend more on closing the gap to get solutions that met 100% of the requirements.
I found the offshore workers to be nice, very well educated people, who were hard working. But they lacked the context of the environment into which
they were drawn. That meant work had to be specified exactly, and misspellings and such would be translated onto screens and reports. Not their
fault, but I felt it was a fatal flaw in the process.
My major concern over this movement of work is security, companies have already experienced problems with credit card details going astray. What
happens when peoples sensitive data is sold on the black market, and suddenly you find your life is not your own, or your details are displayed for
all and sundry to see, or you're blackmailed to keep you medical, sexual, or other preferences quiet from your employer. What happens when our
troops order ammunition to defend themselves and receive a crate of boots because people of ill-intent are coding systems that really should be done
by nationals.
What really appals me is that this reply will no doubt have me marked down as a racist, I'm not, but because I speak out against what I see as an
appalling solution to a non-existent problem, except to enrich the pockets of the rich at the expense of the middle classes, I'll be labelled as
such.
I've lost my job to this problem more than once, but I bounce back, I've yet to see it work as a long-term solution, and heard the CEO of one major
internet security company describe moving to India from the US and UK as an unmitigated disaster, but instead of coming back was moving on to China to
see if that worked any better!!!
You have to wonder sometimes about the sanity of some people, you really do! Quality solutions require quality workers who understand fully what they
are doing and understand the context of the work they are doing, and that costs money! You can't cut corners, it doesn't work, it just devalues
the entire process.