Indian outsourcing is killing IT

The mailing lists were never easy to read through but if a man put his mind to it and used the delete button swiftly enough you could actually get something out of them and maybe even find a reason to stay on. But ever since everybody in North America cheaped out and started sending all the work to India the mailing lists of every major product have been polluted with the Sanjays and Prashants of this world asking questions that make me wonder why the hell we’re sending out our prized projects to these seemingly incompetent people.

Granted they come cheap but even so judging from their posts and having worked with them on a couple projects I still haven’t found a singular reason why I should trust them to write a simple POJO. Their unaccountability on their mailing list is appalling, I wouldn’t want my company being represented by some dude who’s asking the struts-user list questions like these and putting their company name and his title at the bottom. This just tells me you’re an idiot and have no clue what you’re doing.

I realize that I’m generalizing and that there are always exceptions, but if you Nabble through the Maven, IBatis, Struts etc user lists you’ll encounter posts which make it apparent that the author has the most rudimentary knowledge of the product and of software design and is just hoping to get by. This theme is prevalent across most mailing lists leading me to believe that this is a widespread disease which effects the outsourcing industry. Given the apparently skill level of the people working on these projects, one can only surmise that the quality of work being done in those countries is subpar. Also, posting your resumes and asking for H1 visas on peoples blogs does not help your credibility nor does it showcase your skills. Again, it just makes you look like an idiot.

Here’s an exercise: try posting an ad for a development project on Craiglist and ask for a quote. What you’ll end up getting is tin-canned emails from India that list Gupta Inc. as knowing EVERY SINGLE LANGUAGE AND DATABASE PLATFORM EVER MADE. Then follow up with a random one and actually talk to their “Project Manager” and you’ll notice that the email was just a bunch of bullshit and you’re dealing with a two-man operation run out of a basement on a Pentium II.

Lately I’ve met an increasing number of people who are “managing a team in India” and work for a company with an accent in it’s name. These are the new managers the IT industry is producing, usually they’re in their mid-20’s and consider their new “manager” role a promotion. But when you’re managing narrow-minded developers getting paid the minimum wage and communicating 95% of the time over MSN, the work that’ll get done will reflect the circumstances and talent of the people involved. Software development is an industry where geographic location hardly seems to matter but when we’re communicating requirements, design and expectations entirely over chat, things are bound to get lost in translation. My point? You can’t oversee a project if you’re thousands of miles away, especially if you’re dealing with a guy who’s trying to scrape by. This whole system is flawed and annoying, both from the manager’s and developer’s perspective.

As long as you can tolerate their nerdiness and smell you can generally have a conversation with another North American developer and talk about a wide range of languages and tools without too many awkward moments. Not the case with slave labor. I visited India a couple years ago and had a chance to speak with some developers working at India’s second richest bank. The first think you notice about these people is how specialized they are. If they have a Java job, that’s all they know. Nothing more. Java. Java. Java. If they have a Perl job, it’s all about Perl and they’ll write everything in Perl and not even consider anything else for any reason. The mentality seems to be to get the job done as the lowest price and as fast as possible, nothing else matters. Fair enough, but I just don’t see the price of the work making up for the lack of quality and the general fuckedupness of the process.