Off-Shoring of Jobs

I am a new member to this forum. Perhaps this is not the correct venue for this post. If it is not, please accept my apology.

I have noticed several postings that have eluded to the subject I wish to bring up. That is the off-shoring of our jobs to inexperienced consultants. I do not wish to offend anyone, but the primary source appears to be India.

I have 20+ years experience and 10+ in JDE. The trend I am seeing is we are training our replacements. We cannot compete with the minimum wages they are willing to accept. My husband is also in the business working for a large investment company. They control most of the 401K plans. This company has sent most of the IS to India where they also built a building for them. This is a company that controls our retirement plans and these plans are now being maintained in India. The incompetence of the programmers there is unbelievable. The smallest task must be defined into finite specifications requiring tremendous time for the programmer/analysts here. Rework is at a maximum, and results are non-existent. Still the practice continues.

Is there any forum that you are aware of addressing this issue? What are your thoughts on this situation? I do not believe I am alone in this perception, or am I?

Thank you for your time. Again I apologize if this is offensive or is an incorrect use of this forum. Jayce

The last user group I went to touched on this issue at a round table discussion and implied the same things you have observed. While the group, composed of CIOs and high level functional consultants, endorsed the need to "off shore" development work, you could read between the lines to see that this only works if a company can provide detailed specs on the customizations and development work needed. In my opinion, this is a HUGE flaw in the argument for off shoring, because there are issues that don't come to light until the development work starts. Application developers have a bird's eye view into JD Edwards that allows them to write the detailed specs needed, but then it would be just as easy for them to write the code then write the specs and then send it out, and have to go back and forth with a developer until it is completed.

For companies that go down the road of off shoring... I say let them have at it. They will either be spending the savings on hiring high priced business analysts to write these detailed specs, or they will spend their savings on consultants to come in and rewrite all the work they off shored.

And if off shoring proves to be the big cost saver companies are looking for, then they will hurt our economy because Americans will not be able to afford the products these companies are selling, because we will all be working at McDonalds.