[ale] IT moving offshore

[Jim Philips]

This brings to mind my work experience from 1994. I was supporting a 
point-of-sale system sold by NCR/AT&T (they were merged at the time). We 
wanted to do some customizations. First, I tried to use my own modest skills 
to understand how to do this. But the application was coded in Japan and the 
manuals were a nightmare. I spoke with one AT&T rep on the phone who joked 
about the manuals being in "Japlish". When we wanted more extensive 
customizations, we had to turn to a hacker/consulting firm. Their job was to 
find a way for us to print out our product list in alphabetical order--a 
function that wasn't built into the application. They spent months hacking 
into the code and working with programmers who had little command of English. 
The whole project was a nightmare and resulted in a lawsuit. So, this is some 
of what can happen when you farm out coding to a group that doesn't speak the 
language of the users. I'm sure companies are a little more sophistcated 
about it now, but I don't know how they could solve all of these problems. If 
source code is closed, then you must rely on being able to communicate with 
the programmers. And you must have documentation that is written in clear 
English. On top of that, you need a support crew that not only understands 
the code, but can communicate in the native language of the users. That 
support crew must also be able to communicate with the programmers. None of 
these realities is going to go away. But some companies will live through a 
world of hurt before they get this point.

On Tuesday 21 May 2002 07:26 am, Geoffrey wrote:
> Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> > This begs the question of why any Americans should bother going to
> > school to learn how to write software, as horrible as that sounds.
>
> This will probably come across as a racial/prejudice statment, but it is
> based on personal experiences.  For those of you who feel it comes
> across that way, all I can say is I'm as open minded as anyone can be I
> assure you.


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