As an IT project person for a Fortune 500 company that does a lot of business with IBM, and who has first hand knowledge of IBM’s offshoring and deals with them on a daily basis, let me just tell you this; you get what you pay for.
The work we get from offshore development is about 1/10 of the quality that we used to get from in-house developers. This may save money on the actual man hour to produce a segment of code, but in the long run, it costs more to go through 5x as many testing, shakedown, and patching cycles than it does when you get it right the first time.
randog is 100% spot on - it is a myth. You may show a return on a bottom line in one focused area, but the shoddy quality of work spills over into costing more in others, which by the way, aren’t offshored.
I hope Boeing has some good QC procedures in place, for their own sake.
“I hope Boeing has some good QC procedures in place, for their own sake.”
They don’t. They have that silly “Six Sigma Black Belt” superficial fluff for quality control.
I am in the IT industry and we have a saying. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Maybe you need to tell your companies to hire Americans to do your IT jobs. You ll get charged a bomb and yes you ll get better code. But what is the criticality of the IT project in the first place? Theres no point in spending a fortune to buy a BMW if all you will use it for is to take a terrible road on which you cant drive faster than 30 miles/hr.