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Hello All:
There is a quote in the Sunday Denver Post by the president of an outsourcing company called Technology Crafters:

“There’s a lot of interest,” said Robert Welch, the company’s president. “American software teams are awesome for innovation, but in terms of being able to crank things out in a productive manner, they’re no the best on the planet.”

I find this quotation completely laughable! What a joke! If the Indian software companies were held to the same high standards that the software companies in the United States are held to, their prices for labor and product would be the same. A good example would be that a customer product takes 10,000 lines of “C” code in order to provide the customer with the amount of functionality they need. The Indian programmer writes the code and the documentation in order to install and use this piece of software. The Indian’s American counterpart writes the 10,000 lines of code, the documentation to support the installation and use of the software and he/she will also write the ISO9001 documentation required to go along with the software product which includes the project planning document, the software design document, the software testing documentation, the architecture review board documentation, etc. As you can see it’s obvious who takes more time to produce their product and who does a more careful and a better job. So just how many Indian software companies are ISO9001 certified? I wonder! American IT management would like their customers to think the quality is the same but underneath it all, we all really know the truth.
Let me relay an actual customer event that took place recently, a large Swiss Bank found an operating system defect on their system while trying to write an application to produce custom graphics for their bank statement printing. The function they found the bug in was wcstombs which converts wide character set strings to multibyte character set strings. Anyway this customer was/is paying for 24 X 7 development support and called into the 1-800 number and talked with a support engineer here in the United States. The customer was told that the engineers where looking at it and that they would be updated every morning until the fix was shipped. The software these days is written in India, it was Friday morning here in the United States, the Indian programmers don’t work weekends or overtime and are not required to be called out even if there is a customer emergency. The support representative from the United States called the customer on Saturday morning, Sunday Morning, Monday morning, always telling the customer that the engineers were working on the fix even though they weren’t. The customer finally received their fix the following Thursday afternoon, thus making the delivery of their bank statements late and costing them a lot of extra money for shipping, etc. Previous to this instance that same software had been written here in the United States, the customer would call in on Friday morning and a real software engineers was working on it within the hour, a test fix was usually supplied before the weekend was out and the customer would have shipped their statements on time. Now if you were that customer, would you be happy with your 24 X 7 development support?
I have one last comment, I find it interesting that a Japanese company named Toyota can produce a superior car with American workers and the CEO only earns 1.5 million dollars a year and an American company named GM pays their CEO 30 million dollars a year, uses foreign labor and produces cars with twice the number of defects per thousand cars shipped. I personally believe that the real problem in this country is the inept management running our companies, they cost more, create more headaches and redtape and then pass the blame down to the engineers and those doing the real work.
When will it stop? Enron continues to go on and on and on, this time the management is pushing the blame on the engineers and replacing them with foreign workers when the real responsibility and problem lies with them, they are the ones who agreed to all the extra work for the products, not the engineers and yet they take no responsibility for their own actions.