Reply to: The Times picks up on Migrant IT Workers

[Moscow Mule]

I don't really know what you lot are on about technology wise, but rest assured offshore companies are more than capable of the same underhand tactics when developing for mid-range.

Our particular favourite was "connectivity problems" on every delivery date for 7 consecutive deadlines. Strange how it would work perfectly at all other times....

[bobspud]

Great, biased story bob. Doesn't mean outsourcing is not on the increase or is likely to slow down or stop in the near future. This is the market in which we find ourselves, it's time to face up to that fact.

I truely wish it was biased. The last 5 projects that I have been involved with, all showed at least one of the component stages from my story.

I spent nearly three years trying to develop a managed development platform that could be managed by admins on less than £25 per day but would stop the off shore workers solving programming issues with hardware fixes my favorite was turning off the domain authenticators in weblogic so that the hardcoded password authentications didn't fail in live...

A collegue called me the other month after he gave root to the offshore team 3 days before go live only to have them fix LIVE to look like their own dev servers. Someone ran chown -R oracle:dba / to _ALL_ of the the live servers before bothering to look at the error logs Then thought the best idea would be to solve it with a reboot

This was the point where he discovered the missing netbackup catalogs...

[oracleslave]

It rings a few bells with me oracleslave, and it does read like personal experience.

Am not disputing that. Actually my experiences have been mostly rubbish too and I could quite easily add my own story to this thread. Ultimately the fact remains that despite all these horrible experiences, the outsourcing trend continues to increase in both the public and private sector and as I alluded to earlier there are masses of jobs that I just don't see coming back on-shore. As the Barbarian stated, if the ICT rules were clamped down on really hard, things might improve but I'm not holding my breath for the govt to change these anytime soon. All imho of course, I've been wrong before....

[Zippy]

Great, biased story bob. Doesn't mean outsourcing is not on the increase or is likely to slow down or stop in the near future. This is the market in which we find ourselves, it's time to face up to that fact.

It rings a few bells with me oracleslave, and it does read like personal experience. The server configuration dodge was tried on me (amongst many other things). And the last bit of the system which the offshore co could 'handle on their own' still hasn't been implemented. You have obviously had a different experience ...

[oracleslave]

Once upon a time

Great, biased story bob. Doesn't mean outsourcing is not on the increase or is likely to slow down or stop in the near future. This is the market in which we find ourselves, it's time to face up to that fact.

[bobspud]

Explain this then.

http://www.computing.co.uk/computing...hows-recession

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articl...-Equaterra.htm

The game is really simple:

The organisation hires a well paid consultant to write them an RFI/P.
The guy that writes the document calls themself an EA or TA. But they have spent so long with their head in an £800 per day trough they have lost _ALL_ their implementation skills. The business really does not want to be too specific about what they want, so a 500 page requirement document is written that anyone could drive a bus through (and will later)

The bodyshop comes along and submits a price made up of the costs of the cheapest muppets they can hire + a massive chunk to pay for their in house management overhead (managers secretaries HR directors etc) and then a profit on top.

The client looks at the bill for a few million £, and then assumes that it will buy them some fairly good professionals to do the job (This would be a sound assumption if there was not a bunch of non fee earning parrasites to pay.)

documents are signed and work begins...

Going back to the TAs that are neither technical or architects. They put together a massive tome of a design document, mostly written in floral awful english. (This is because the only thing they know how to do these days is generate paperwork, and massage their egos in meetings)

Now the contraced company throws as many monkeys with dev stations at the badly written design and they try and understand what the hell they are supposed to deliver...

Massive amounts of weblogic licenses are bought and frameworks are put in place but because the poor sods in bangalor were only stood at a bus stop last week, they haven't got the faintest idea how to use the tools, and so begin coding just as they were taught. (that includes opening their own connections to the database, hard coding passwords and IP addesses and remembering to leave all the filehandles wide open) THE TECHNICAL BIT WHERE SOMEONE (THE TA) TELLS THEM NOT TO SUCK THE RESULTS OF FULL TABLE SCANS INTO MEMORY EVERY TIME A USER REQUESTS A LOGIN PAGE falls by the wayside.

More and more on shore technical resources are thrown at patching the issues that arive with every iteration of agile code (not SOLVING them you may note).

And all of a sudden the end customer is finding that the hardware does not scale quite as they hoped but because their requirments are so full of holes, they get hit with a change control and they now have tripple the _hardware_ costs and unrecognisable service delivery figures.

The bean counters, who have neither seen or understand fun so far, get a bill and start thinking: "christ if we had been paying £500 a day for all our developers this would be turning into a FSCKING nightmare... Thank god the developers are so cheap... "

They really can't equate the increase in on shore high cost items with the riot that is occuring down at fraggle rock...

The project is late, the costs are tripple but the senior team look at each other and say "Well done! We saved a fortune out sourcing that... Although we did make a bit of hash of those requirements best we say nothing more about that bit..."

I have seen more devious tactics used as well. The lowest of which was that the software supplier kept spiking the managed infrastructure by asking the end customer to change their server settings, thus cause their own environments to fall over and "Make the project slip" at key payment gates...

[Diver]

Anseo an stair

HTH

We were first (The Welsh) but the Scots, the Irish and a small offshoot in Cornwall were from the tribes we left behind, so were tolerated.

Celts rule

[norrahe]

Ta for that.

That's got me puzzling over when and by whom I was misinformed (that the Scots and then the Picts had arrived before the Romans but long after the Celts).

Anseo an stair

HTH

[RichardCranium]

Jocks-come-lately? What the hell are you talking about man. Scotland was formed out of the combination of the Pictish and Gaelic lands to drive out the Norse. Scots are Celts.

Ta for that.

That's got me puzzling over when and by whom I was misinformed (that the Scots and then the Picts had arrived before the Romans but long after the Celts).

[Incognito]

All amadáns my man, all amadáns

[Diver]

Jocks-come-lately? What the hell are you talking about man. Scotland was formed out of the combination of the Pictish and Gaelic lands to drive out the Norse. Scots are Celts you fool, Alba is a Celtic word.

You tell the immigrant upstarts

Diolch i ti ffrind

[Incognito]

You should be driving out the Scots, too. They are also Jocks-Come-Lately.

Jocks-come-lately? What the hell are you talking about man. Scotland was formed out of the combination of the Pictish and Gaelic lands to drive out the Norse. Scots are Celts you fool, Alba is a Celtic word.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

Overall, yes. They are also more ubiquitous, i.e. there are fewer niche areas available to us. For example let's assume there is a hierarchy to IT folk such as the following random example.

Support
Junior Developer
Senior Developer
Architect
BI Consultant
Strategy Consultant

In the past I could see loads of niche areas within these roles that they were far less prevalent in. The first wave you referred to tended to be more support and developer related and there were very few good offshore BI consultants or architects for example. That is no longer the case imo.


I still see some niches available, particularly within specific sectors but I think it is ever diminishing.

I still think that if the ICT loophole was closed, it would be back to business as usual for most IT bods here, in the UK.

If I'm wrong, I'll just become a carpenter or a plasterer, I don't really expect my current good fortune to last till the end of my life.

[oracleslave]

Are you saying they seem to be more competent than they were 7 years ago, when the first wave hit?

Overall, yes. They are also more ubiquitous, i.e. there are fewer niche areas available to us. For example let's assume there is a hierarchy to IT folk such as the following random example.

Support
Junior Developer
Senior Developer
Architect
BI Consultant
Strategy Consultant

In the past I could see loads of niche areas within these roles that they were far less prevalent in. The first wave you referred to tended to be more support and developer related and there were very few good offshore BI consultants or architects for example. That is no longer the case imo.


I still see some niches available, particularly within specific sectors but I think it is ever diminishing.

[BarbarianAtTheDoor]

Upskilling can help to some degree but there is a ceiling to that approach too. The outsourcers are upskilling all the time and I think they are catching up.

Are you saying they seem to be more competent than they were 7 years ago, when the first wave hit?