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All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?
"I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others?" I would suggest it's more that the highly skilled developers in, say, India are not cheap enough to make the outsourcing worth it. Here's a WSJ article making that argument: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118342455118256110.html "Last year, Mr. Shah paid his engineers in India about half of Silicon Valley levels. By e…
"Thats exactly why projects involving heavy C++, Java, Perl, and even PHP have been at the forefront of outsourcing. Those languages do not have a framework for rapid web development." Translation: "I am wearing blinders."
Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…
Coding in general is now a commodity. Coding combined with specialized domain knowledge is not.
"Thats exactly why projects involving heavy C++, Java, Perl, and even PHP have been at the forefront of outsourcing. Those languages do not have a framework for rapid web development." Translation: "I am wearing blinders."
TFA doesn't explain what prevents outsourcing django and ruby on rails. I think the answer may be... nothing. Personally my approach is to do the bulk of the webev yourself and outsource stuff like graphic design, research, maybe some simple press release writing.
Cost Saving = .5X-R
Where: .4 is the factor that given programmers are cheaper. (So I'm assuming that your third world Programmer is half the price of your first world one) X is the total number of hours / days for the project *Note the implicit assumption here that all programmers are created equal) R is the risk factor. Harder communication, Cultural barriers, etc.
So for smaller values of X (say when you're using django not php) - then your expected return goes down. (And the overall influence of the Risk factor goes up - namely it could be cheaper keeping it first world)
The notion that a significant use of java in enterprises is to churn out large numbers of small CRUD applications on brand new database schemas (which is really the only place such huge productivity boost is possible) is naive. In fact, often it is about internal interfacing between legacy systems with horrible, gigantic and contorted schemas that are near impossible to map into such frameworks and thus might actually turn out less productive since things like ROR are built on a whole lot of "assumptions" about what the system looks like that explode on you all over the place when it doesn't.
If there's a turn around in outsourcing then I think it's more to do with the costs of prior projects coming home to roost and changing the perception of it and / or the cheaper USD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if such statistics existed, they wouldn't be that helpful because it pretty much comes down to how successful each company is when they outsource development work. In my own experience, I've managed outsourced teams in China, Mexico, India and Argentina. While doing so, I've worked with some fabulous developers and also many not-so-fabulous developers. I've also hired more than my share of engineers in the US an…
The main thing that local developers have in their favor is they get to partake in the evolution of thought that takes place in any long term product strategy... Yep, that's it. It's not that the people are all that different. It's that a person twelve time zones away is a lot harder to communicate with than a person living next door. Especially if they're not from the same culture. The cultural and distance barriers…
Code has become a commodity. All you have to do is write the documentation very specifically, and some guy in India with a lower standard of living and lower wage will do it for you. No, the code might not be optimized or highly readable (unless you specifically pay him and instruct him to build it in such a way), but the fact is that programming has become easier to do. Yes, iPhone app development is really expensiv…
And then compile it. That is to say, if you've written your spec sufficiently precisely, then it _is_ code, and will compile, thereby sparing the need to hire programmers. The reason that you need programmers is that you haven't written the specs specifically enough, usually because it's essentially impossible to specify (many kinds of) software that accurately a priori.
Furthermore, and on this point I think we agree, there needs to be a fairly wide channel of communication between the engineer and the product manager exactly so that ambiguities in the spec can be worked out. Until the inconvenience of having subtle technical conversations with someone twelve time zones away becomes negligible compared with a face-to-face conversation, local programmers will have an advantage over overseas programmers. (If the boss is overseas, of course, things are different.)
All I can read from this article is US developers are skilled and expensive, while non-US developers are non-skilled and inexpensive.. I might agree with expensive/inexpensive but who says US developers are more skilled than others? On what grounds, study, statistics can anyone claim that?