Several years ago, I took the plunge and married a nice Irish girl. We lived in the U.S. for a bit, and then moved here to Ireland. Since the move here we have been living off her teachers salary and the saving we had accrued in the states. The odd jobs that I’ve worked haven’t managed to keep the beans and toast on the table. So it’s even more unusual to find myself working for an Outsourcer. The company I had been working for in the U.S. had been threatening to do the Outsource thing, but we moved before it happened.
I can sympathize with people who are faced with that prospect. And having found what it’s like from the other side. I can confess that it’s not fun being the employee who is ‘taking’ the job from another. Even if the position could not be filled in the U.S. the smell of fear through the ether(net) in the form of email, or oozing through the phone line during conference calls is very offensive. And the defensive tactics used to fend off more outsourcing (see other rants) can be extraordinary, and totally ineffective. Hearing stories from other anti-outsourcing strategies, most have not only failed to prevent the outsourcing, they have caused it to happen sooner.
From what I have seen, the bean counters that believe that any outsourcing is a good thing, are oblivious to such tactics. And hence they matter not.
I illustrate, one of my previous posts mentioned the tactic in place was to not document anything. The belief was that if you didn’t know how everything worked without the current employees to ‘keep it altogether’ you couldn’t outsource it.
Wrong! The systems were working, and even if a bus would run them all down tomorrow, the business could hire people to document what was happening, and to reverse engineer the necessary documentation. The cost to the business, time!
Time to replace employees, something an outsourcer could provide quicker than a businesses own in house HR department. Time to document, reverse engineer and reproduce processes to operate the systems.
And time, as in no new deployments, upgrades or enhanced features until the new team (outsourced) could be comfortable with the change.
The benefit; (and you thought there was only a downside)
The business gets a new team (outsourced, cheaper, no ‘deadwood’) that operates with formal processes with baseline documentation, configuration control and with developmental efficiency’s that it didn’t have before.
The anti-outsource strategy also fails the original developers.
NO documentation, means more work, no controls, less recoverable, subject to errors. Making the work harder on the employees, less safe to operate for the business, less useful, and more trouble for the in-house customer who uses the system. Less productive.
From a bean counters point of view, much more expensive than outsourcing a blind application.