[ajug-members] Wipro coming to Atlanta

[Ron Cordell]

In my experience most mid to large companies don't really have the culture
that allows good software development to flourish, especially here on the
east coast, and so tend to look at the bottom line. They see that they can
get "developers" for $16/hour by outsourcing to various companies whether
they are in India, China, or Romania, and that's what matters to them. There
is a pervasive idea of the "software factory" that drives this, and most
middle managers aren't dynamic or smart enough to actually change that. I've
worked with a number of offshore "teams", each with an onsite "coordinator"
in exactly that situation. At the ground level, the results from these teams
is mixed at best. There are two dynamics that I've seen - one where the
entire project is given offshore, architecture and everything, and one where
the offshore team is an extension to the onshore team. Neither produce good
results in my experience when looking in detail at what was produced, but
that's not what matters to the business people who approve budgets. They see
that they got X functionality at Y price and that's all they care about.
They tend to shrug off issues like performance, maintenance of really poorly
written code, or the fact that they are trying to push the problem of their
poor requirements management under the rug by hiring cheap offshore teams.
One of the major problems with trying the approach of integrating an
offshore team into an onshore team is lack of control over who comes onto
the offshore team. Companies like Wipro, Syntel, Caritor, et al all regard
their resources as interchangeable. The same can be said of any outsourcing
company, onshore or off shore. Without control over who is on the team, the
ability to manage code and architectural quality becomes almost impossible.
People with just a couple of years of experience tend to be moved from a
team member to team leader or even architecture, but can't code their way
out of a paper bag! Yet this is what is sold as a CMM Level 5 solution to
the bean counters.

Others have written on this thread about it not being an individual issue
but a corporate one, and that's true. But I *can* influence a little bit
around me about how people perceive the craft of software development and
create a bubble in my own company that becomes known for delivering a
quality product. In the company where I currently work it's a long, uphill
struggle against sheer incompetence to change things like requirements
management and how projects are run, but it can be done.

On the subject of visas - I recently had two positions open for 6 months
that I was trying to fill from both within the company and without. I was
looking for a more entry level person and a more experienced person. It
finally took an H1-B to fill the entry level person just because I finally
found someone that could actually write a simple method in a class and a set
of unit tests for it. That's all I was looking for, but I went through
literally hundreds of candidates to find someone that could meet those
minimum requirements. The method was slightly more complicated than Hello
World. There's lots of people out there that call themselves software
developers, but there aren't that many that can actually develop software,
and far fewer that understand that developing software is a craft that
requires constant refinement and understanding. When you see it from that
point of view I am a little more sympathetic to the bean counters about what
they pay for developers on a grand scale, but down here on the ground I'll
fight for every inch I can to get Software Craftsmanship.

And finally, to those java bigots out there :) I can't resist throwing in
that while I've spent the past 8 years working in Java, I've switched to
.Net and C# for the time being to be able to explore that platform more
thoroughly. It's just a part of that learning process. There isn't nearly
the community around .Net that there is around Java, but there are some
interesting things to explore and understand the relative strengths and
weaknesses of both as Enterprise platforms.




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