Friday, April 2, 2004

Outsourcing: It's not that simple.

Just ran across an interesting article about how outsourcing and overseas development, as it has affected CollabNet.

Interesting stuff.

I'm not sure what I think about it.

I know there are reasons to move some stuff overseas, and it may have saved the jobs of many developers here in the US, and I know from personal experience that they're a good group of people and are trying to do the right thing...

That said, I don't know what I think about the fact that they don't hire entry level people here in the US because it just doesn't make sense on a cost basis, and I'm interested in all the questions about the culture differences making it difficult for the overseas developers to come up to speed and contribute as equals. I mean if you can't hire local people right out of school, how will they ever become the senior developers you are willing to hire? And if the overseas talent you do hire right out of school can't ever overcome the cultural issues to the point where they aren't afraid to challenge their higher ups, something that's needed in any senior engineer, where exactly does the next generation of leaders come from?

It seems like if everyone did this we'd be setting ourselves up for a big problem ten years down the road.