This is liable to turn into a long winded rant, but right now, at the outset of typing this I don’t intend it to be.
I’m just so frustrated with my company. My company says that on-shore development is too expensive and that they will save money by moving as many aspects of development off shore as possible.
Now, there’s truth to that. There’s no way that I can compete with $5/hr coders. They are cheaper. No doubt about it. They can also be just as good as any American developer. So the arguments about quality are lame. Granted, bad communication between on shore and off shore teams can lead to misunderstandings which may look like bad quality, or be used to prove bad quality by those who are against off-shoring but in the end analysis there is little to no difference between American coders and offshore coders in terms of intelligence, ability or the quality of code produced.
Unlike Rory I simply don’t buy that the reason for off shoring is American laziness. That’s just the product of lazy thinking or the overwhelming desire to write yet another un-funny comic. Do I chat over IM? Yes. Do I spend too much time doing things that aren’t productive? Yes. But that does not mean I am lazy. In fact, I want to work a lot more. I am a much happier person when I am working. The happiest times of my life seem to correlate directly to the times when I had a steady amount of challenging work to do.
Is off shoring the evil culprit that is robbing me of challenging work? Well, yes. But it’s a minor part of the problem. It’s the treatment of a symptom and not the disease. So what’s the disease?
The disease is Bureaucracy.
Let me give you an example. One of the requirements for the project I am on right now is that we receive a flat file feed and import that data into a staging area of our system. The import code has already been written and most of the tables already exist. We simply need 1 (one) new table created. That’s it, just one table.
But here at BigCo we can’t just have one person do the analysis, do the design, log into the dev environment and create the damn table. Nope, that would be too easy. Here at BigCo I have to open what’s called an RFS (paper work) and pay a third party $2k just to LOOK at the request. Once the request had been processed (several days of waiting, it could have taken up to two weeks), I received a message from our Information Architecture (IA) Group. They are responsible for doing the logical data model. The message I received wasn’t to actually do work, it was to set up a meeting with the Data Architect in the UK. Another week passed. Finally I was able to meet with the Data Architect. I show him the design that I have already created (that’s right boys and girls..it’s not too damn difficult to do logical model of ONE DAMN TABLE!) He then tells me it will be another 3 days before he will be able to complete his logical model.
Keep in mind that this is our IA group. They don’t actually create the tables. They just do the logical modeling. So it’s going to take the Data Architect three days to do a logical model of one table that I have already done for him. I am, however, assured that the DBA from Information Management ((IM), the group that will actually create the table) will be on the call when we review IA’s logical model. That way, we can turn the work right over to IM and the DBA can create the table for us to use.
Fine. Whatever. I’ll wait the 3 days. After all, Christ did it right?
So on the third day (Tuesday) we have another call to review the logical model of the one table that I had already done. With a couple of minor exceptions it looked fine. But guess what? No DBA on the phone. He wasn’t available so the Data Architect from IA is going to set up another meeting for later on in the week. The next day I get an e-mail saying that the meeting for the turn over will take place on Thursday (a full 3 days (the first call was on Tuesday morning) after the initial three days that I was told to wait.).
Fine. Whatever. Even though Christ only did it once, I’ll wait another three days.
Today I get another e-mail canceling the Thursday (today) meeting and rescheduling it until next Monday. Of course even if the call happens on Monday and the DBA gets the logical-model-for-the-one-table-that-I-already-created-but-was-redone-by-IA he may not create the table for several days. He may say that I have to wait another week.
I’ve just looked through my e-mail and my fist contact with IA was on the 13th of this month. It has been 13 days and I still don’t have my one table and I don’t know when I am going to get it.
And the worst part of all this is I feel as though I am the only one who finds this repugnant and wasteful. You see the problem is not that Americans are lazy, nor is off shoring the root of all evil.
The root of all evil is bureaucracy.
The cohesive wholeness of a task is fractured across multiple areas of responsibility that have little to no real interaction with each other. Once you make 17 different groups responsible for the delivery of one widget, accountability is lost. Why? Because all I have to do is start pointing fingers. Then the next guy points his finger and on and on into one big circle jerk we go. Management can’t decided who to hold accountable…or maybe the worker bees in each area are able to convince their management that they aren’t ones responsible and so in the end nothing is done, and nobody is held accountable for it. Maybe, on very large, high visibility projects some heads will roll. But on smaller path projects they never will.
What does this do? Well it drives the cost of development astronomically high. When all is said and done my one table will cost BigCo $8,000. That’s a drop in the bucket for BigCo, but it adds up. We now have upwards of 10 people working on creating one table. News flash: OF COURSE DEVELOPMENT IS GOING TO BE EXPENSIVE WHEN YOU HAVE SUCH RETARDED PROCESSES!
It also breeds a cynicism in otherwise hard working people. The culture of “it doesn’t matter” begins to spread because everyone is always waiting for everyone else to do something. Eventually people just get sick of trying to beat the system and get their job done. Eventually they just start surfing the net and chatting on IM because they’re tired of trying to find challenging work. Eventually most people just give up.
Then management calls you lazy and sends your job to India.
The funny thing is that the reason why India is “better, faster, cheaper” is not just because of their pay rate. It’s because they don’t have this fracturing of responsibility and insulation from one another. They all (at least in case of Big Co.) sit in the same building on the same floor right next to one anther. They reap the benefit of concentration (as opposed to fracturization) in getting their work done.
The joke is that the pattern that has played itself out here in the US will only repeat there. Wages will rise. Costs will increase. Eventually the beaurocrats will setup shop and insist that development follow “organized processes” that drive the cost of development even higher. Then jobs will bleed from India into China or Indonesia or wherever.
I suppose that trend is unstoppable. But it’s only unstoppable because people don’t care to address the deeper problems. It just seems to me that we should work out inefficiencies at home (and possibly save some jobs for the good ‘ol USA) before we ship them off shore.
-Neil