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When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. If yo

When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. If you have a remote team, you'll still have teamleaders and/or managers that keep things in sync with the company goals. This is of course quite a caricature, but it illustrates the issue unless the company is willing to allocate manpower to be in continues dialog with an outsourcing company.

freddie_mercury 8y ago
> When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances. And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on. Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.
- dnomad 8y ago
  But, as your own comment makes clear, outsourcing simply means moving work from an expensive city to a cheaper city. It doesn't mean collaboration between a bunch of random Joe Schmoes living in various tiny villages here and there. The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider. It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    > once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet This is the important point. > freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea. That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  There has been a tendency in software development in traditional companies to follow the waterfall method. Make a glorified spec, hand it over to the company that develops it and hope they meet the budget and deadline. There is plenty of examples where that is not the case, but outsourcing to an entire different company does not lend itself readily to mingling with the outsourcing company to interfere with their process. I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.

freddie_mercury 8y ago

> When you outsource you throw a spec over a wall and wait for them to throw the finished product back at you at some point, hopefully before the deadline. I have worked for an outsourcer and that's not what happened. I know dozens of people who continue to work for outsourcers, that is not what happens. They have daily standups with the team in Toronto, London, Berlin, etc. They fly back & forth at least monthly. They have video calls nearly daily. They have shared Slack instances, shared Confluence instances, shared JIRA instances. And that's not just in software; when Tesla outsources a part, they don't just throw a spec over the wall. When Apple outsources manufacturing, they also don't have this caricatured approach. When Nike outsources manufacturing, they have Nike employees in the factories. And so on. Since your caricature doesn't reflect the reality that I have years of experience with, I'm not sure it adds much to the argument.

dnomad 8y ago
But, as your own comment makes clear, outsourcing simply means moving work from an expensive city to a cheaper city. It doesn't mean collaboration between a bunch of random Joe Schmoes living in various tiny villages here and there. The reality though is that remote work will always be priced down. Even if remote workers show up everyday by some kind of robotic telepresence, once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet. Everybody seems to think its corporations that are resistant to remote work when in reality its actually workers who are very hesitant to take on remote roles and do not want to be seen as some sort of outsourced and easily replaceable remote provider. It will take a sea change in the culture and desires of workers to make remote work a real possibility at scale. Workers will have to embrace a vision of themselves as freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  > once that remote role is established there's enormous pricing pressure from literally every other worker on the planet This is the important point. > freelancers without any deep connection to any one company or city. This is happening... but very, very slowly since most workers are terrified of such an idea. That's because outsourcing and freelancing are mostly a mechanism for fleecing labor. Workers SHOULD be terrified of this.
hvidgaard 8y ago
There has been a tendency in software development in traditional companies to follow the waterfall method. Make a glorified spec, hand it over to the company that develops it and hope they meet the budget and deadline. There is plenty of examples where that is not the case, but outsourcing to an entire different company does not lend itself readily to mingling with the outsourcing company to interfere with their process. I would love to outsource some of out development, but to align that work with our goals, I would need a full time senior dev with intimate knowledge of our company and customers working with them managing all they do. Otherwise it's not a given that we get the code quality that ensure we can evolve the software the way we need to in the future.