Victor Anderson has just started a thread about yet another U.S. corporation outsourcing IT jobs overseas; Re: OT: Sprint moving application development. Thread #818299 Message #818311

I had the opportunity to work with foreign programmers during the mid 90’s. In fact, part of my job required telephone interviews with potential candidates in India. This was for early VFP 3 development and I quickly concluded that C++ programmers with OO experience would be much easier to cross train to VFP than taking a Fox 2.6 developer and hand holding them through a steep learning curve.

The Indian programmers were amongst the fastest, most clever developers I’ve ever encountered. All in all they were a great bunch of people. They were also incredibly cheap, even taking into account all of the middle men (agencies etc.) and the profit their employer was making, the cost of one U.K. developer was equivalent to at least three Indian developers.

Alas, their first language was not English. Consequently comments and variable, function, procedure names etc. were invariably more difficult to understand. In short, the code could only be maintained by the same developers, a kind of lock-in.

Sprint is a U.S. corporation with typical globalization desires. Its board of directors is probably primarily English speaking. Its IT specifications and requirements will all be based in English. It is highly likely that the developers will be expected to work from English specifications – how many times do you think they will seek clarification, before they realize that this sends the wrong message. I am confident they will do their best to guess the subtle nuances hidden between the lines. Inevitably there will be misinterpretations, leading to poorer quality, errors in implementation and a general downward spiral.

In the medium term 12 to 18 months, Sprint may well cut costs. In the longer term, with second-rate quality they will have the additional burden of having to lower customer expectations. Sadly this may not be a significant burden as quality of service appears to be falling everywhere and en-masse we are pretty much expecting less!

Boycott / Sell Sprint Corp.