Outsourcing - your opinions, please?

Why do you ask such hard questions? I have no opinion on outsourcing because I do not know what it is. The word is love

In my experience - as a consumer, as an IT techie and also as part of a very, very big worldwide project - outsourcing is nearly always a horribly bad idea. The only reason people go for it is because it costs less. Stop and think a minute. Why does it cost less? Because you get crap instead of quality. In my three roles, from above: As a consumer, I have consistently had appalling service from outsourced customer services. Every single time. In fact, if I have to call my bank for anything, I will try at various times, until I get their local service instead of the one they hand off to in another country. Not only are the people employed quite horribly difficult to understand, they obviously couldn't care less about me or my problems. They have absolutely no connection to the bank: if their service sucks, the bank will switch and they'll jsut work for some other schmuck who's outsourcing. Why should they care? As an IT geek, outsourced workers are awful. Why? They're not in the same company. They don't give a hoot about the success of the company (see above). They don't have the same procedures. They don't document the same way. They don't write code to the same standards. Communicating with them always has to go through a minefield of crappy managers who also don't care. Their equipment is also, generally, awful - in the worst case, I was working with a team of five developers who had ONE PC connected to the code vault software. In other words, no version control to speak of, no decent equipment and five people sharing one computer. These are developers? Hello? Waste of cash. On projects, it just adds an unnecessary level of complexity. Everything I want, I have to go to my boss, who goes to their boss, who goes to them. That's three different places that my request can be misunderstood. Worst cases on the project? In development, our local team of two (top-notch) devs had to rewrite the ENTIRE app because the five or six imbeciles who were outsourced couldn't do it properly. I had to produce two months of work in ten days because another imbecile didn't understand that it was his job and we wouldn't make deadline otherwise. In testing, 99% of the bugs I found came back because they didn't understand the word "should". We had to change outsourced companies THREE times because each was as bad as the other. When it comes down to it, outsourcing is, in my experience (about three years of working with half a dozen different companies) a false economy. No savings are made. Everything eventually costs more. The only exception to this is server management, as far as I have seen. Small companies can save themselves a lot of hassle by having their hosting done in server farms, and there's some really reliable ones. There y'go. Plenty of reasons there.

I guess my opinion would be if it is outsourced within the states it would be okay, but if they are outsourcing out of the states that would be totally something different. We need all the jobs we have here in the states especially now. A lot of company's are restructering. Even the one that I have worked for 13 years have been doing a lot of restructering over the last year and more changes to come. Just glad that I still have a job.

Outsourcing for most companies has greatly helped in the financial stability of it. With the growing problems in the economy today, outsourcing will definitely ave them a lot of money and time. Problem with outsourcing though is it takes away some jobs that is within the country or the company itself. I personally support outsourcing because that's what's placing food on our table.

I hate calling India to complain about something I purchased in the US! That would be a main complaint for me.

I do not know anything about this really Dawn. I think your job is good though and I think it involves suppling and contracts, but it is not much I would no about. Hope you do not fall asleep in there. YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING THOUGH. OJ.

i do not much about outsourcing but i definetly think,it provided more jobs and the pay is also not bad.