The Death of Offshoring

I’m writing this on a flight over the ocean, enroute to an overseas destination to do some computer consulting.

In the ultimate irony, offshoring companies are quietly sub-contracting their jobs back to consultants in the U.S.A.! We are under strict NDA, but it's a riot that the cheaper Offshoring is being done offshore, but by USA consultants!

You Get What You Pay For. . . .

If you are an IT manager who entrusted your mission-critical computer system to a foreign “offshore” developer firm, well, you may be paying more than you need. In many offshore systems that I have examined, poor coding practices caused a giant mess, and the rare cases where code is written to-spec, it is obtuse, convoluted, and inefficient and most of it has to be re-done from scratch.

Offshoring (the use of grossly under-trained and unskilled IT professionals) has been the butt of many tasteless jokes, especially the popular joke web site, Primate Programming.

Experienced programmers are out-coding the offshore programmers who only charge $12/hour! There is a manager somewhere who thinks that he is saving a bundle by using offshore development, when he is paying more than if he stayed with the “more expensive” local programmers.

We are mentoring some of the locals understand Oracle concepts, a time-consuming one-on-one job that my consultants specialize in. Yeah, offshoring is officially dead. We will have loads of Oracle people on-site soon. They seem to like it here.