"Post Mortem" :: Episode 1

today i completed two full years in this company as an employee.. and this being my first company.. and my first experiences with the pulls and pressures of IT.. therefore my reasoning may be skewed and tending to decieve general reasoning.. ( i love this company ;-) ) to mark these two years i 'm writing an introspective trilogy on my experiences within this IT.. this part dedicated to IT and outsourcing in general...

in these initial learning years in IT i have realised that all this buzz around outsourcing is deceiving.. its nothing else except plain 'labour arbitrage'.. its just not about Indian IT expertise.. nor about huge workforce.. it's just that work is being done at the costs that is fraction to what it could have been done in US and the cost of telecom and the ease of technology has made multi-locational facilities feasible for even mid-sized corporates.. but i 'm sceptic as to how long can indian engineer hold on to this cost advantage vis-a-vis US engineer.. the cost of an Indian Engineer rises 15%-20% average Y-O-Y whereas salaries there (US) rises measly.. besides there is this perpetual grouse over efficency.. so does outsourcing really help... i have my doubts.. i believe that the reason why corporations took to outsourcing in such a big way is that post tech-bust no company is willing to deploy huge funds to just write new piece of worthless software or implement new technologies ( that may or may suceed ).. much of the spending is just being done to maintain legacy systems ( Maintenance ).. or automate processess ( ERP Packages ) or move processes on to the Web ( application development ).. and this is where indian IT makes a killing just by the virtue that work is being shipped to india where salary is paltry.. but i think outsourcing doesn't save much.. atleast in fields like application development ( not talking about things like VLSI where savings is huge and India expertise is par excellence ) the efficency of indian workforce is way way less then US based engineer.. then this time-difference ( between India and U.S ) becomes a great bottleneck.. i also find great differences in the working attitudes of a US versus Indian Engineer for things like ownership ,creativity, efficency, resposibility and commitment.. (not to say that we don't have these.. but still the difference is there.. ) and finally the value that is being added is still being added by engineers sitting in silicon valley or san jose... its there that fine products ( killer-apps.. like iPod, Google, Ebay ) are being created..

chalo.. i better finish it off.. i wanted to write more .. and write better.. but feeling sleepy.. i guess the booze is getting the better of me ;-)

~Love Me Two Times~