Offshore Coding and Employee Morale
It is understood that the corporations do not owe continued employment to their employees. At the same time the corporations have a selfish interest in keeping employee morale high. High morale improve productivity, reduces turnover, and increases access to qualified workers interested in working in a positive environment. And it is a blessing.
When a corporation announces it will replace thirty percent of its domestic workforce with offshore labor at the less cost, morale likely takes a hit. And the employees comprehend that the concept of a corporate/employee relationship as being domestic is largely fictional, and a frequent casualty of budget cuts and financial pressures.
And the effect is that their loyalty to the corporation decreases, rising turnover and decreasing productivity. Thus, the cost savings realized by moving the ten percent of the workforce offshore, may be countered by a cost increase from the other ninety percent, as they reduce output and increase turnover, and a loss in competitive advantage as highly qualified workers go elsewhere for their interviews. This leads to collapse in the business.
Non valued Programmers
As manufacturing grew into an economic powerhouse of an industry driven by mechanized engines of automation, skilled tradesman became increasingly irrelevant during the industrial revolution. Instead, cheap and easily exploited immigrants and children could be put to work en masse, with minimal skills or training, and replaced just as easily. That was an obvious exploitation.
This enabled the economic and social developments which made the world what it is today, but it also enabled business leaders to view their employees as only instruments, which are a minor case to replace, but nonetheless easily replaceable by any other fellows.
And this mindset fixed into the genetic material of managers and executives everywhere. This reality is not so simple and the programmers are aware about it. Even assuming that programming is a single discipline, without specializations in networking or GUI or databases, the cold fact of the matter is that the best programmers are in some cases hundreds of times more productive than the worst programmers, and obviously the best programmers are much rarer than the worst and they are in need in every firm.
It is meaningless to compare two programmers on the basis of their cost. And it is unfair to say that all offshore coders are less capable than all domestic coders. Here the programmer's capabilities and cost must be considered when determining value. This is a very difficult problem when hiring domestic programmers, and becomes virtually inflexible with offshore coders and they may immerse in confusion.
The ROI of offshore coding cannot be reliably established without some reliable metric. We cannot rely only on cost alone when making the decision.
Projects only as guide paths
A project is typically the design and production of a product in an industrial setting. It is some tangible, physical thing coming off the assembly line. Once a skilled engineer designs the product and produces blueprints or schematics, the unskilled cogs can set to work and produce the product.
Unskilled programmers can build worthless software from masterful designs, and good programmers can rescue abysmal designs through masterful programming. So, software is not a simple thing. In either case, the skilled labor is distributed evenly across the product lifecycle, and is not concentrated on the design phase as is the case with manufactured goods. Also, the design and production teams are not decoupled. Each must interact constantly with the other, to ensure the product being built and the product being designed are indeed the same product, and the best product it can be on the process of coding.
Conclusion
After all, it is difficult to find one point at which the skilled laborers are done, and the offshore cogs can take over and begin production. So, the offshore coders must actually be an integral part of the product lifecycle, as skilled and competent as any other participant. It is unavoidable too.
