Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore

Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by devonkim on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:43PM (#10465557)

When you deal primarily with people whose primary roles and careers have been driven entirely by Taylorist managerial principles (fundamentally, the belief that managers are the ones that know best and most efficient instruments to allocate workers and efforts instead of relying upon workers themselves) then you're somewhat forced to deal with the language of contracts where people are interchangeable with the term and it's a reality you have to just deal with if you do business with them. It's treating all your workers like you're playing Starcraft rather than trying to manage an elite Navy Seals team where each person is fully capable of independent actions and thoughts. Rather, most large companies are used to rather low quality labor and I might dare to say that some companies prefer their "go do something" labor as fairly narrow while their managers are showered with praise and glory constantly for the work of those they're managing.

It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations. I'm not advocating that this is correct, but much like slavery and flat world theory, I hope this becomes outdated and struck out as both completely ineffective from a business standpoint as well as unconscionable.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by bpyne on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:13PM (#10465825)

Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line. Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume. People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers. Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by cbsmith on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @02:46PM (#10466427)

> Unfortunately I think we're still stuck in thinking of software development as being like assembling a product on a manufacturing line.

Really? Seems like most people describe it these days as a craft.

> Assembly lines reproduce a product model in volume.

Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line.

> People forget that developing the model takes loads of time from designers and engineers.

But they know design an assembly line for a new task takes loads of time from designers and engineers...

> Software developers are the designer, engineer, and assembler all at once.

You can break of that work if you are working on a project of sufficient scale.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by serge2k on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @04:01PM (#10466952)

> Right, and software development is the process of building the assembly line

It's more like the process for developing the prototype.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by cbsmith on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @07:25PM (#10468134)

No, you prototype out the assembly line when you are working on it (actually not that different from how assembly lines are designed), though I guess in some cases you sell the assembly line itself, rather than the services it provides or the products it produces.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by strangetimes on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:34PM (#10466757)

> It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations.

Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true.

I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by gaius on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @04:45PM (#10467274)

"An engineer". "A worker". It's not hard, if you haven't succumbed to the HR mindset.

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Re:Why Software Outsourcing Doesn't Work Anymore by pnathan on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @03:56PM (#10466915)

In this context, the narrative was around hiring a single individual, not moving a thousand-person division of engineers onto the project. In a large-scale system, you also have to deal with the entailments of all those thousand people: the managerial overhead, the administrative overhead, the offices, etc. "Resources" becomes more appropriate, because it is more than individuals.

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