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Well you know there is an old story about John Henry who dug out rock with a pick ax to make way for the railroad being built to connect the east with the west
by Allocator2008 18y ago
Well you know there is an old story about John Henry who dug out rock with a pick ax to make way for the railroad being built to connect the east with the west in the American frontier days. John Henry was really good, but one day a steam engine came along that could do his job just as well. So there was one day a contest. Henry kept up the the machine as best he could, and, in some versions of the story, even beat the machine, but his heart failed him at the end and he died. Moral of the story: no matter how good you are at your job, new ways of doing it will always come along to make your old way of doing it obsolete. It is called progress. Thus it is with outsourcing. It is the wave of the future, it is inevitable. If you don't like it, perhaps you should get to your next meeting via covered wagon and let the rest of us use the new fangled railroad contraption. I for one like outsourcing - more work for less cost. Can't argue with that baby! :-)
- DarkShikari 18y agoSure, "more work" if you measure in man hours; but when you actually go to use the code and find that it won't compile because the Indian coders who wrote it didn't even have computers, and wrote the entire application down on paper and paid to have it typed, you realize you wasted your time and money. Outsourcing is no different from hiring regular programmers; if you wouldn't hire the people you're outsourcing to, why in the world would you trust them to do a good job? True story, by the way.
- pfedor 18y agoIf the results of outsourcing were so bad you all guys wouldn't be so worked up about it. The truth is, the person you answered (currently downmodded to -1) made an excellent point. People who protest against outsourcing are no different from the workers long ago, when the companies first started using machines to perform tasks previously done by physical labor. The workers then went on strikes, were destroying the machines etc.
- johntabet 18y agoNot necessarily a great analogy. I think you are trying to liken cheap, possibly underpaid, labor to machines and factories. While I think that it is entirely possible that cheap Indian (or other) labor could replace more expensive American labor, I don't think low paid labor is exactly the next generation of technology. Something about likening cheap human labor to convenient innovations in technology just doesn't strike me as right.
- stcredzero 18y ago[Citation Needed]
- DarkShikari 18y agoIt was a DailyWTF a while back, I believe.