rubyconf videos online
November 28th, 2008 tkadom
i have spotted the back of my head in the crowd… :) if you were not there, here are the videos for rubyconf:
Posted in Random | No Comments »
November 28th, 2008 tkadom
i have spotted the back of my head in the crowd… :) if you were not there, here are the videos for rubyconf:
Posted in Random | No Comments »
November 17th, 2008 tkadom
Many people in my industry are blaming outsourcing these days and seem to be lamenting the fact that companies do not offer "Competitive Rates" for local workers. Companies look at competitive wage in a different light. To most companies, Outsourced rates are by definition competitive. A company looks at a unit of work and how much it costs to complete that unit of work. By hourly wage, they see a benefit in paying less for an IT worker from the phillipines who appears to have the same skillset as the IT worker from the states but at 1/10th the cost.
The challenge is in understanding the difference between the two workers. I think most everyone would buy their car from abroad if it was 1/10th the price. IF you got exactly the same car, it would be almost a no brainer! The problem with IT is that management does not understand what it is buying. If the car offered at 1/10th the price only ran on one cylinder and had a history of falling apart after a week, well then the choice certainly would not be that obvious.
The old "If it walks like a duck and it talks like a duck" philosophy does not hold for software construction. What the end user perceives may appear the same, but once you look at the code under the hood you might come away with quite a different view.
You could probably hire a homeless person to code html at 6 bucks an hour and receive similar quality to what you get from some random phillipine workshop. The more established outsourcing shops will have better quality controls, and will at least have a somewhat skilled technologist leading a project. However, you are very likely to have a junior developer who is "learning on the job" doing the actual work. The more experienced guys will be spread to supervise across several teams. The outsourcing shops that get it right are currently in the 20-30/hr range. this is still lower than what you would pay for a local developer, but given the rigorous process you must already adhere to in order for your outsourcing project to stand a chance of success, you might be better off with the guy across the hall who can be more flexible with his time.
Perhaps when dealing with an outsourcing vendor in the future, people would be wise to ask the outsourcing vendor to manage and maintain the application in production as well. The good outsourcing shops would be eager to do so, and the bad ones would quickly run out of funds. Outsourcing is a reality that can not simply be wished away. Trade barriers would just cause companies to leave unfavorable tax structures and relocate where the tax structure is more favorable.
The real challenge is in educating management about what exactly they are buying with their outsourcing dollar. Software inspection as an industry, should be more widely adopted. No one buys a car without running it past a mechanic, yet people appear to be eager to buy their software labor in that manner.
I think on even footing, with a well educated management team and agile development methodology, most companies are better served with hiring local IT staff. This is doubly true for companies that do not have a mature enough development process to support detail communication of system specifications to an external vendor.
Posted in Random | 1 Comment »
November 14th, 2008 tkadom
If you are looking for a great overview of ruby cloud technologies, check out this blog entry covering both morph and heroku
Posted in Architecture, Rails | 2 Comments »