Outsourcing to India

[shaunbhoy]

eek it says you are professional and courteous?

Come on then. What is YOUR solution, as you seem to be so opposed to raising your game?

[eek]

A condition of my redundancy pay out was that I had to spend a next year teaching the Indian developers what to do (read as "how to code" even though they had CV's that read like an agents wet dream). And you know what, to a fault they all worked hard and were great guys 'n girls. But they all lacked a vital skill. Inovation.

I don't think innovation is a skill its something you are either born with and foster or let it wither and die. Innovation requires the ability to think, argue, accept that you may be wrong but still be willing to take risks. To be honest its a something I see very rarely in any IT bod ignoring where they come from.

[eek]

Come on then. What is YOUR solution, as you seem to be so opposed to raising your game?

oh and

[Cr1spy]

I don't think innovation is a skill...

You're completely right. I should have said "Ability to innovate". Suitably chastised.

I suppose I really meant adaptability / problem solving and (in my experience) it's not really that rare. Pair with a good programmer and you soon see some clever innovations!

[lje]

Well my current contract is to set up an offshore development group (not outsourcing - these are additional roles to help with a period of exceptional change over the next few years). So without this approach I may not have a contract...

I firmly believe that clientco needs to keep (and indeed grow) its on-site staff numbers as it's essential that the core knowledge is retained within the company. However, allowing the simpler work to be done abroad allows the techies at clientco to do the more interesting stuff. It also means that the overall cost of flexible resources is reduced (which is good for future contracts). It wouldn't be possible for clientco to do all of this purely in the UK without getting much larger premises with all of the associated costs.

None of this is reducing the number of UK jobs as it wouldn't be possible to do all of this in the UK at a price that makes financial sense. So clientco would be forced to undertake less change.

There are all kinds of ways to upskill with offshoring/outsourcing in mind. How many people can work with people in other countries really successfully? Motivate the team? Get the quality required? Not have to rewrite everything? The ability to do that is a new skill set - if you can master it then you'll probably be in a contract for a long time to come.

[d000hg]

What a fun thread.

[xoggoth]

I only looked on here to see why PatriotMan had been banned, for disagreeing with total nonsense it appears.

Accept it, upgrade your skills, move on, seems to be the summary of it. Does it not occur to some of you that if there is too ready resort to such outsourcing, that newcomers will never be able to acquire the basic skills in the first place? Do you imagine that somebody fresh out of college should be a much in demand specialist? They need to learn the basics first and that means doing the less skilled roles to start with.

It can be sensible to allow some things to be done abroad and move our own economy into more profitable new areas but this process needs to be controlled because we may end up destroying the whole dynamic of our economy as we will never manage to train people to do those new jobs. We see this in manufacturing contracts too, contracts are awarded to foreign firms because of a supposed lack of expertise here. The result? Next time round there are even fewer British bids because no British firms or British workers ever got the opportunity to acquire the expertise or learn the skills.

Is this a level playing field? It is not, because other economies like China and India are much more closed. Even the Germans have more sense than we do. We need proper control of our trade, to ensure it is reciprocal and not to our long term disadvantage.

This idiotic committment to globalism is destroying us.

[eek]

I only looked on here to see why PatriotMan had been banned, for disagreeing with total nonsense it appears.

Accept it, upgrade your skills, move on, seems to be the summary of it. Does it not occur to some of you that if there is too ready resort to such outsourcing, that newcomers will never be able to acquire the basic skills in the first place? Do you imagine that somebody fresh out of college should be a much in demand specialist? They need to learn the basics first and that means doing the less skilled roles to start with.

It can be sensible to allow some things to be done abroad and move our own economy into more profitable new areas but this process needs to be controlled because we may end up destroying the whole dynamic of our economy as we will never manage to train people to do those new jobs. We see this in manufacturing contracts too, contracts are awarded to foreign firms because of a supposed lack of expertise here. The result? Next time round there are even fewer British bids because no British firms or British workers ever got the opportunity to acquire the expertise or learn the skills.

Is this a level playing field? It is not, because other economies like China and India are much more closed. Even the Germans have more sense than we do. We need proper control of our trade, to ensure it is reciprocal and not to our long term disadvantage.

This idiotic committment to globalism is destroying us.

To an extent I agree but at least you've backed your comments up with logical thought and a plausible argument. PM did none of those things.

[sasguru]

I only looked on here to see why PatriotMan had been banned, for disagreeing with total nonsense it appears.

Accept it, upgrade your skills, move on, seems to be the summary of it. Does it not occur to some of you that if there is too ready resort to such outsourcing, that newcomers will never be able to acquire the basic skills in the first place? Do you imagine that somebody fresh out of college should be a much in demand specialist? They need to learn the basics first and that means doing the less skilled roles to start with.

It can be sensible to allow some things to be done abroad and move our own economy into more profitable new areas but this process needs to be controlled because we may end up destroying the whole dynamic of our economy as we will never manage to train people to do those new jobs. We see this in manufacturing contracts too, contracts are awarded to foreign firms because of a supposed lack of expertise here. The result? Next time round there are even fewer British bids because no British firms or British workers ever got the opportunity to acquire the expertise or learn the skills.

Is this a level playing field? It is not, because other economies like China and India are much more closed. Even the Germans have more sense than we do. We need proper control of our trade, to ensure it is reciprocal and not to our long term disadvantage.

This idiotic committment to globalism is destroying us.

Bollux, woolly thinking. Business is about making money not solving societal ills. If it is profitable to do something here, well and good, if not it cannot be sustained. Who is to control the process as you state? Government? Contracts aresometimes awarded to foreign firms because they are more competitive. That is how it should be. End of story.
Perhaps the honest truth is that Britain was only good at exploiting "lesser" countries under the Empire, its been crap ever since.

[xoggoth]

Government?

Yes. As the Chinese government does rather sensibly. Does it occur to you that the world's currently most successful economy is one that is very carefully controlled in the interests of its nation? Total economic laissez-faire is almost as damaging as excessive government micromanagement. Not to human society as a whole perhaps but to individual nations.

The purpose of any goverment should be to serve the interests of their own people, not global society.