IBM's Profit May Rise as Shifting Jobs to India Reduces Costs 1795

Kamal R. Prasad

Because location still matters in employment. I'm quoting actual figures around today. Most tech work isn't all that transportable; when it is, the people doing to work will need to take full charge *of* the work.

If folks can make the offshoring thing work, great, but the vast majority of tech work is helping the customer understand their own needs. That doesn't travel well.

But what offshoring emphasise is quanbreasty, and that might not work out very well long term.

That's always possible, but in many cases, there is actual productivity increase. I've seen significant increases when real changes in process made an improvement over the old "two steps forward, one step back" ad hoc methods.

If you'll think about that for a minute, increased compebreastion *should* move work towards lower price. If that's the case, then that moves the work down the skills scale, and *reduce* productivity per hour. I think the increases in productivity are just an artifact of more technically proficient people moving up organization hierarchies and influencing policy towards improved productivity.

Some of this is that the industry, frankly, has gotten rid of a lot of deadwood that simply went into tech not because they liked tech, but because they thought it was a gold rush.

Well, there are significant numbers of $3000 machines out there. Most people can do with less - I think this 'un was $400. And in the mid '90s, the $3k figure started drifting downward. But the spectrum is much wider now.

Um, not really. I wish it were otherwise, but Software Is Different. Read that ACM paper...

Hardware is significantly componentized. Software still resists this almost absolutely, except in narrow domains like skins for WinAmp. That's why it's more tractable as a service discipline.

No, I disagree. The top five percent of programmers outperform the other cohorts combined. It's a freakish discipline. Process just makes it possible to steer the ship, and possibly increase team size.

-- Les Cargill