That’s fine if they’re all so smart and highly trained. But do those policies work when you have (in America) approximately 3 million teachers who are neither smart enough nor highly trained enough to get hired in Finland? What’s the case for leaving our slower and more incompetent teachers alone to do what they want?

http://economicinterest.wordpress.com/ read my blog if you are interested.

Companies the size of Boeing or Xerox with over 100 thousand employees suffer from a fundamental disadvantage. They have too many layers of management. Once it gets up to 4 or more layers of management, communication suffers in the worst possible way. The Senior Leaders get completely out of touch with the rank and file and stop soliciting input from the folks most able to help them solve the problems the company is facing. Instead what happens is, Vice Presidents in charge of making a division more profitable will follow the outsourcing trend like sheep without understanding the consequences to productivity, communication, and bandwidth. These are the three biggest areas that suffer when Sr. Management takes an outsourcing strategy to market.

So a Vice President will put together a nice PowerPoint slide deck what shows large savings due to cheap labor in India for example, without ever being held accountable for the implementation details. I’ve seen it many times. We’ve just adopted XYZ Partner in India. Great. Oh, you want to _share data_ with them? Well there’s no money in the budget for increased bandwidth, so just apply your workarounds ( incredibly inefficient not to mention frustrating ) for the duration of the project. The time different from the West Coast is right around 12 hours, meaning, if you need to communicate with your counterpart in India, you’d better get cracking first thing in the morning or else he’ll be gone for the day. Some days you’re doing well to exchange two e-mails. As bad as this sounds, e-mail is the preferred communication method because often times you cannot understand a word they are saying on the phone.

And these companies are no dummies. They con the US Partner into buying them development licenses because they are too cheap to purchase them themselves. Every time it comes to pay for something they seem to have forgotten their wallet. Turnover rates in India are far worse than in the US. It’s not uncommon to do knowledge transfer on a particular topic several times due to turnover in India.

You can almost set your clock to it, about 6 months after that VP make the outsourcing proposal with that fancy PowerPoint slide deck, he’ll be off on another assignment, nowhere to be seen when the real low level issues start surfacing. The first level managers and their employees get left holding the bag.

The notion that India’s engineer’s are better educated and more productive is an absolute myth. In 12 years of dealing with them, I have yet to encounter an engineer worthy of holding my best engineer’s jock-strap. It’s a funky culture of not wanting to make waves, so they never address continuous improvement issues. They just continue to apply their workarounds the same way they did yesterday so they don’t have to make waves.

Been there, done that.

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