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ex machina

masses of asses and offshoring analytics

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. "

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10/29/2003 09:26:00 PM 0 comments

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