it's interesting to hear this from what some folks think of as the 'other side'. i spent a month in india this may training a dozen replacements for US programmers. this was in a company that has had traditionally very low salaries, and is located in Backwater, VA. the spiel from the CTO was that it's being done to provide 'round the clock' coverage, but in practice, not having an american developer on hand who can make decisions can hold up the indian developers.<p>the problems i saw in the dev team across the ocean had nothing to do with their technical skill: they were for the most part technically competent. but they were by and large incapable of self-direction. there were a few exceptions, but for most of the team, once they got into a corner they didn't know how to get out of, they punted to an american developer and asked for help.<p>in my career i've worked with outsourced labor many times. i'd happily trade 5 butts in seats overseas for one guy locally, or even just stateside that understands initiative and can solve their own problems, even if the overseas developers are more 'technically competent'.<p>you can learn technical competence. you can't learn initiative. getting rid of those on the team with the most initiative can be very expensive.
The savings of outsourcing sometimes are more related to infrastructure cost and tax than salary.<p>If only US workers would like to relocate to a cheaper place it would be a killer. Perhaps a Silicon Valley branch on a beach paradise in Mexico or Central America? Some place where half a US salary gives a significantly better life. Just a thought.
"I do not understand this logic of 1 guy with normal vision = 5 blind guys."<p>Well phrased.<p>The big problem I see with outsourcing is that it's difficult to cultivate passion in a remote team, and passion is what leads to attention to detail, refactoring, and all of the other things that make high quality software.<p>This is what people miss when they say, "open source teams work from different countries all the time and produce high quality software, how is outsourcing so different?"
I know a lot of ppl in India who work in outsourced companies. They are pretty smart than many American counterparts I've seen, but they lack confidence and decision making. Thier confidence also gets shattered by doing crappy report generation,formatting,testing kind of work while only some of them are motivated enough to side projects.
If you are in the situation where a company is offering people a decent amount of money to leave, there are only two choices. Leave now with the money. Leave later with nothing.
Welcome to the world of mega corporations. The economies of scale in these are great but so are the dis-economies of scale often due to information defects. The nth upper level manager has no idea of the individual capabilities or the individual contract that people are hired under from across the world. Indeed, with several tens of thousands of employees spread out in (optimistically) four of five different legal jurisdiction, it is unreasonable to expect a human to keep track of all this information.