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

[peak at mail.polarcomm.com]

Perhaps what we ought to do is to get more offshore labor 
unions,then when labor overseas costs as much as it does here 
there would be no reason to go offshore.
Just my 2 cents!!
Eric 


---- Original message ----
>Date: 10 Mar 2004 11:33:48 -0600
>From: wb8tyw at qsl.net (John E. Malmberg)  
>Subject: [Coco] Re: I'm signing off - 6309 Microprocessor 
Enhancements  
>To: coco at maltedmedia.com
>
>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
>
>
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