RE: Managing Extreme Programming

At 1:24 PM -0700 1/16/03, Alleman, Glen B. wrote:
>[>] our parent firm has a very large design center in India (civil and
>construction engineering) and the motivation is hourly wages for
>equivalent work - not the disrespect.

My point was that people who are not qualified to judge whether the 
work is actually equivalent are just assuming it is and making 
decisions based solely on up-front cost.

If you're actually getting equivalent work for a lower price you're 
very, very lucky.  All too often I see people who work for 
third-world consultancies asking very basic and confused questions in 
newsgroups and on mailing lists relating to the technologies their 
firms claim all sorts of high-quality expertise in.  (And it's not a 
problem with their English skills, either -- those are generally 
perfectly fine.)

>Our local poster child for
>outsourcing is Quark with 80% of the code written in India. So if you
>use Quark Express as a tool your experiencing the $10/hour developers
>(more cost than that I think).

Funny you should mention Quark.  I know Quark, I know people who have 
worked there and I developed several plug-ins for QuarkXPress a few 
years back.  QuarkXPress has historically been a little buggy and 
obtuse, even though they had a whole lot of top-notch developers 
working on it in Denver.  Then one day they decided to lay off their 
American developers and ship all the development to the third world 
(in this case, India) "to save money."

 From what I hear the latest release, QuarkXPress 5, is a net decrease 
in quality and doesn't have the features Quark's customers were 
looking for.  QuarkXPress 6 is a huge revision -- necessary to get it 
to run natively on Mac OS X -- and it doesn't show any signs of 
shipping soon.  I'm also on a lot of technical mailing lists and 
newsgroups where Quark's new developers have been asking technical 
questions.  They are *nowhere near* the caliber of Quark's old 
developers, at least judging from the quality of their questions.  So 
no, they're not paying less for equivalent work.

I see this pattern time and again, and the driver appears to be that 
people who are not qualified to judge equivalence are just assuming 
it rather than trying to become qualified.  To me, that's a sign of 
disrespect.

   -- Chris

-- 
Chris Hanson, bDistributed.com, Inc.  |  Email: [email protected]
Custom Application Development        |  Phone: +1-847-372-3955
http://bdistributed.com/              |  Fax:   +1-847-589-3738
http://bdistributed.com/Articles/     |  Personal Email: [email protected]

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