wasn’t i just writing about

an impending backlash

against the “offshoring is the answer to every question” mindset?
business week

joins the club by looking at the

the hidden costs of it outsourcing

:

“On paper, it looks extremely attractive. A Russian
programmer charges 80% less than an American. But when you parse it
all out, the total cost of offshoring a given IT job is generally
comparable to getting the work done domestically, says Tom
Weakland, a partner at management consultancy DiamondCluster. It’s
just that few companies are aware of these real costs. “Most
companies can’t accurately measure their productivity and costs
prior to and after outsourcing,” says Weakland. “Most look just at
wages.””

i’ve found that people who think offshoring is a
panacea for cost reduction also subscribe to the

“masses of asses”

school of thought:

“”Masses of asses” refers to the old-school IBM way of
programming, just throwing a whole lot of average programmers on a
project, because surely more programmers means it will get done
more quickly. If you want a road built quickly, you add more
construction workers. Unfortunately, its a bad analogy to software
— adding more programmers to make software quicker is like adding
more mothers to have a baby quicker. Again, this is nothing new.

The key is small focused teams of good people. If a project is big,
subdivide into well-defined components with small teams developing
them. “