Actually, speaking of sharing ...

[Niall Douglas]

On 14 Aug 2003 at 0:13, João Miguel Neves wrote:

> 1) Anyone who has worked on a software in a real cenario knows that
> long-term maintenance depend as much on clear-thought and
> documentation than on anything else. This means that the language
> barrier would be bad for our technology (*).

Most of the cheap worker imports are the cream of their crop in their 
respective countries. That means they are usually better programmers 
than most western programmers and have excellent english. I know, 
I've worked with them and they're definitely a mark up on the par.

The problem is they can't join western unions, they're tied to one 
job and they work for much less than a mediocre western programmer.

> 2) Long-term development is only possible throught the improvement of
> areas, not through the migration of its people. Those migrations can
> help (they did help in Portugal in the 50s and 60s by creating an
> income and connecting us to Europe), but you need internal development
> as well. IT has the ability to, with low costs, provide huge
> improvements in developments, particularly in services and logistics.

/We/ know that, but companies like banks just look at their IT budget 
and say "can we pare that down?". That means outsourcing increasingly 
and ever more getting more for less. Inevitably quality will suffer.

> PS: I'm not unemployed and I like having more competition, it makes me
> work better ;).

I like competition too, but it needs to be on a level playing field 
ie; skill vs. skill. Right now loads in California are losing their 
jobs, not because they're bad at them but because they're too 
expensive when compared to Indian or Irish workers. I see what's 
happening to IT in the west to being similar to what happened say to 
the steel industry - most of the programming work will go offshore. 
Stuff like support and web page design will tend to stay here.

But the days of the European & American C++ coder are numbered. 
Globalisation enforces no other logical choice. Since globalisation 
would have a few western management execs and everything else 
outsourced to the cheaper third world, it'll have to break someday.

Cheers,
Niall