[Coco] Re: I'm signing off - 6309 Microprocessor Enhancements

[John E. Malmberg]

In article <019701c4065a$97061cc0$1ec074ce at bc.hsia.telus.net>,
"Neil Morrison" <neilsmorr at hotpop.com> writes:
>
> On "Lou Dobbs" on CNN he had a guest who claimed that the software
> being created outside the USA was not only being done for less money
> but was of better quality. I believe it.

That is not true, and there are many public articles that show otherwise.
Note that the word "created" is significant.

There are high quality off shore software operations, but they are not
significantly lower cost than their U.S. equivalents.

But there is also a large quantity of poor quality software being produced in
the U.S. and off shore.

If the low cost off shore programmers were as talented as the myth, they
would be selling a Windows clone that was free if copyright infringment and
significantly eating into the PC market.

It takes good project and company management to keep the projects on track and
under budget.

But there are pointy-haired bosses that believe the myth, and will act on it.


Just like the back in the '70s, there was a belief that the Japanese import
cars were of superior quality.  And this was reinforced by a public statment by
a mid-level U.S. Auto executive.

At the time though, the real surveys were showing the same percentage of
defects per vehicle, U.S. or Japanese.

The Japanese reacted by instituting strong quality controls to make the myth
more of a reality and it took them some time.  The U.S. automanufacturers did
not apparently wake up to this as a selling point for a while.  Now they have
closed the gap for many of the equivalently priced vehicles.

And it was Americans that the Japanese hired to put these quality control
procedures in place.  The same ones that that the American plants would not
listen to.  At the time, the union view was that these quality control people
were hatchet men to remove jobs, so they fought putting in the changes.

As a result, there was a bubble where the average Japanese car had fewer
defects than the American counterpart.  But that bubble appeared much later
than the popular belief is.

Much of the data that I have for specific examples can not be revealed becuase
of prior or current employment confidentiality agreements.

>  His guest implied (without
> specifically stating it) that the problem was with the US
> programmers, however in my experience the source of the problems is
> poor project management. I spent 3 years working on some very large
> software, and the design decisions were made in an unbelievably
> arbitrary manner. And forget about using CASE.

Poor project management has been frequently sited as the cause for both U.S.
and off shore projects to fail.

But I have met many U.S. programmers at all wage levels that should have been
fired for gross incompetance, yet some of them get repeatedly hired at higher
salaries than I make.

I also have met several "off shore" programmers that are just as clueless.

And yet, these people think they are good programmers, and people keep hiring
them because it can take years for a project to to get to the point were the
quality problems are visible.  And a large number of projects get killed off
for other reasons so the defects are never visible.

The dot-com boom and leading up to it was great for the incompetent
programmer.  By the time someone discovered their mess, they had job
hopped to at least two other companies.

Based on what I saw from cleaning up the messes that job hoppers had left
behind, frequently it would be believed that the project fell appart because
the "expert" had left, and the successor was not as good, because all of
the "expert" status reports were good and showed a 80% completion at the time
the expert left.  The reality was that almost nothing was working, but a lot of
almost useless code had been generated.

I have seen people coming out of colleges with computer science degrees that
had no idea what a symbolic debugger was, or using editor macros.  And when I
asked a "professor" at one of the colleges about that, they said that was a
master's level concept, not undergrad level.

But there is also a large pool of local and off shore programmers that are very
competent.  But those off shore programmers know their value, and are not
"cheap".

> But there are plenty of jobs that cannot be offshored. I even looked
> at funeral directing, which is basically party planning for a guest
> who won't be coming back! The nasty stuff is done by technicians.

Our school systems trains us to be employees, not to be managers and business
creators.

It seems that the most jobs in this country and profitable businesses are
created by people that do not go to business school or colleges and just use
their common sense.

Those will be the people that come up with the new jobs, not the politicians or
the unions or the professional "experts".

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net
Personal Opinion Only