[ale] Indian outsourcing

[Greg]

Well, I guess it's time for my 2 cents ...  I agree with Andrew.  Life at
20-something and life at 40 are two different situations.  The abstract
theory bs that goes down in chic coffee shops isn't what a lot of Americans
are experiencing and I think that will become evident in the next election.
Irregardless of what your bank account says, it is still one person, one
vote (more or less) and I kinda don't really expect to see Bush v2.0 in
office too much longer.  I keep hearing about the recovery, but most of my
IT friends have left and pursued other careers (real estate seems to be big
for some reason).  Meanwhile the divide between the have and have nots grows
more so in this country.

Also, I probably wouldn't mind if the Indians were better, but it isn't
that - it's that they live in a cheap society that is incomparable to ours.
So let's be fair and level the playing field.  When it costs the same to
live over there as here, then talk about fairness.  Try saddling the Indians
with the same costs of living, taxes and government regulations *then*
compare us with only coding skills as the variable .... I mean you wouldn't
compare 2 different software packages on 2 different boxes, would you ?
(Linux on a 286 and MS on a quad Zeon ?).

I think the whole thing boils down to greed (no, not wanting to make money,
but greed.  There's a difference) ... the same thing that brought us Enron
et al., the Iraq conflict, and a whole mess of other problems -  in society,
in politics, and in business.  And it always ends up bad for someone
everytime.

And as far as working a project half way around the world and expecting it
to work as well as having the folks who are 1 cubicle over ... well .. ok
... I guess common sense isn't that common ...  Funny what consultants and
B-schools teach, but if they are so freakin' brilliant, then why aren't they
all millionaires ?  Being able to go to an actual end user and say "OK, show
me *exactly* what you want" is priceless.  The other option is trusting a
business analyst to get it right - when that analyst is neither the person
doing the job nor coding the software and is possibly unintelligible, or to
be pc "lacking in verbal skills" (i.e. no normal American can understand
their brand of "English") .  While it may work great for some projects
(Linux, BSD), other software projects have different requirements and
environments.

Just my opinion (worth about 50 rupees),

Greg


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org]On Behalf Of
> Andrew Newton
> Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 2:24 PM
> To: stephen at touset.org; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] Indian outsourcing
>
>
> Stephen Touset wrote:
> > On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 12:52, Cleon wrote:
> >
> >>It's incredibly easy to justify or support people losing their jobs
> >>when you haven't lost yours.
> >
> >
> > Last I checked, I haven't been able to get a decent IT job either. Why
> > do you think I have so much time to write entries in my blog?
>
> Do you have dependents or a mortgage riding on that paycheck?  Have you
> spent 10, 15, or 20 years refining your craft?  Once you are heavily
> invested, this is not a academic paper on labor and trade practices, but
> an honest-to-God, real-life, bank-repossessing, heart-ache and despair
> situation.
>
> I do not advocate protectionist policies and certainly think the Indians
> are just as entitled to compete for those jobs as we are, but if the
> answer is "Suck it up, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there" then we might
> as well drop ALL pretenses of civility and regress to might-makes-right
> rules.
>
> And "free-trade" is for corporate shills trying to bleed every penny out
> of a "human resource."  It should be about "fair trade".  After all,
> this lowers prices, but does it seem right to you?
> > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/35190.html
>
> -andy
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>