Strides is the talk right that a lot of coding is now done off shore (India ) and that impacts on Aussie programmers and their future employability?
Yeah for some reason companies see it as a viable option, but as the other guys said it comes back to bite you most of the time. Well that is my experience.
There was a massive piece of work to build a new cms at work recently. I cant judge it too much cos i was largely excluded from the massive project for 2 years, which i actually take great pride in cos frankly its a disaster, ... anyway, they did have 2 different offshore teams doing chunks of the work, but also hired masses of people locally too, mostly on contract. I do a fair bit of the interviewing and the vast majority of people we get are indian/asian trying to get any position so they can stay in australia.
I have never been a fan of out sourcing development. I even worked as a consultant with a company in australia for many years being one of the merkins doing the work. So i have been on both sides of the fence. In my experience it is destined for failure.
The amount of upfront work alone, to adequately document requirements and explain detail probably offsets any bloody cost saving. Then inevitably that upfront work is never done and so the end result is completely shit and then the cost of fixing and maintaining it after is mind blowing.
One of the main problems is that you actually have no real idea of who is doing the work and whether they are competant. Tho you soon learn. Alot of the companies are just body shops who flip staff around. There is no knowledge build up and its a constant procession of people making the same mistakes.
I honestly cannot understand why companies do it. I can only assume the people making decisions have no prior experience and stupidly stumble into it with no idea. Of course they also dont listen to their staff who suggest its not a good idea ;-)
I honestly dont know if it has affected jobs heavily here in australia because I have been in the same job for about 9 years now. Tbh i suspect companies might be learning a hard lesson with out sourcing overseas. I actually think the bigger threat to jobs is the flood of people coming here on visas who are willing to work cheaper.
