KWPro.net

This is an interesting article which briefly discusses a few issues in outsourcing to India.  The most striking point was the whole "quantity vs quality" issue, especially the resume buzzword explosion.  it's quite true that you can get these brilliant minds with tons of certifications and recognition from top universities over there.  but i find those credentials to be papered rather than proven.

recently, i had found an interesting article on the various PHP questions you can ask during an interview written by an Indian blogger.  funny thing was that the questions included non-PHP topics like mysql as well (which demonstrates a misnomer and fault in the person's communication skills).  The questions reminded me of a trivia test to see how much one can memorize.  Along those lines, I met a very good Oracle DBA back when I was working at Racesearch.com.  He claimed that he memorized the entire Oracle 8i book when he went for his certification.  That's an amazing feat.

However, these two examples lead me to my next point in that rote memorization is great, but it does not offer insight to an individual's creativity, problem solving skills (especially in tight situations), ability to communicate and most importantly, whether or not you just gosh darn like the person.

When I was working at Nikko Citigroup, we had outsourced part of our system administration duties to WiPro for an audit project.  On paper, if you saw their resumes, they were littered with credentials and experience.  However, in practice these guys plain sucked.  One guy didn't even know how to use SSH properly.  I yelled at another guy when it took my workstation down after running a multi-tasking script that went out of control.

At HLIKK, we used another group, Satyam, for our e-Business project.  The code came back with all of Sun's Best Practices and usage of design patterns employed.  From a high level, in examining the UML diagrams, it looked great.  In practice, the code stunk.  It was ugly, redundant and you could tell there was no art involved in coming up with employing those best practices.  It seemed like a bunch of junior programmers who were reading Sun's J2EE patterns for the first time and trying each pattern out to claim that they have experience on those patterns, on the technology and in the business realm.  Worse yet, the company had hired a ton of these people and the cost and times went out of control.

I'm not the best coder in the world (if I was, I'd work for Blizzard, EA or Google).  I don't claim to even be a great coder, nor a good coder.  I'm adequate and I know enough to allow myself to be productive.  Better yet, I'm elegant enough to know what works best for me and how to code with good speed, readability and organization (which mostly stems from my writing capabilities, believe it or not).  The thing is that at some point, I realized that just sticking with the books blindly is no good and that you have to have the experience to back up what you put on paper.  That's what I've always attempted to state on my resume.  That I have these buzzwords and I've worked to learn as much as I can about them.  Otherwise, I won't write them down.

The other thing is that I've been in IT now for 8+ years and have learned a lot about coding, best practices and started even doing my own.  It's like what Arn Anderson had said in one interview.  He spent 15+ years in the pro-wrestling industry and formulated a right to an opinion.  Having been beaten up, laid off, threatened, worn out and intellectually hazed, I too have earned a right to my opinion of the tech industry and what I do as a profession.

When I see companies though, blindly outsourcing because upper management have been led to believe that numerous certifications, college degrees and certain gratuitous titles in working for these consulting firms = ROI, I get disgusted. 

Quantity != quality.

I'm not saying that outsourcing is bad.  I'm not saying these people who receive these opportunities are bad.  All I'm saying is that companies should really understand what outsourcing means.