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I'm not seeing comments about the quality of India's customer-facing pro-grade IT staff here. I've been out of the Unix sysadmin game for a few years but I'll j

I'm not seeing comments about the quality of India's customer-facing pro-grade IT staff here. I've been out of the Unix sysadmin game for a few years but I'll just go ahead and say that IMHO they seemed to be excellently educated and trained, with most workers being multilingual and multicultural. Is IBM making a mistake moving AIX dev jobs there? I am certain that they would not make such a change without considering the quality of the staff there.

skissane 4y ago
There are some excellent engineers based in India - but they are in high-demand, and you have to be willing to pay above-average (by Indian standards) to retain them. And some people aren’t keen on doing that, because they think “India was supposed to be cheap, why pay this engineer so much, that isn’t really that ‘cheap’!” But if that thinking wins, one ends up with an India team without any excellent engineers… I have no idea what IBM is doing though. I know when Microsoft moved SFU/SUA (the legacy pre-WSL Unix compatibility subsystem) development to India, the product quality went massively downhill-probably because they didn’t budget enough to hire and retain enough sufficiently skilled developers. That’s the big risk with moving stuff to a low-cost country - if you do it “on the cheap”, it will be a disaster. But since the whole idea was to cut costs and pursue “cheapness”, the temptation to do that is there