Hi John !
I have serious doubts about that line. A failure is imminent when managers under estimate the project dead lines and work their employees like cows. It is also likely that a project will fail when you hire people like mad and expect every one to apply their knowledge within two months of crunch training. And dont get me started on the way people get allocated to projects. There are so many places where there is scope for improvement. It all starts with learning to say no. What you describe exists of course, one can say in a
word than badly managed remote-lead projects are much more prone to failure than badly managed local projects. In particular projects based on a pure cost-killing goal are doomed by advance.
But one cannot any longer ignore CMMI and "software factory" factors, which clearly allow to efficently lead a project with good quality standards either remote or local, providing that a valuable local integration person exists to localy integrate and validate the remotely developed solution. The local integrator is the key factor out of sensibly allowing the success of a remote offshore project. Thanks to them, success ratio of offshore projects could (should ?) climb from present 50% to 80%.
IMHO these localized team leaders designed to efficiently lead remote teams and guarantee good local integration are the perfect ultimate inshore weapon for Asian IT industry to outsource most of non-military projects and workaround all labor visas issues. The 65,000 H1B cap in particular will be completely irrelevant and ineffective when hundreds of thousands IT aliens will be indirectly present in US through their local US citizen project integrator.
I am on your side about the ethical point of view. This trend may become catastrophic for whole software industry if it is badly applied, in particular it could (and probably will, US IT education is already shrinking fast right now) completely kill IT education in US since no US fresher could ever find a local developer job to begin his career when hundreds of thousands always cheaper than him remote alien developers are available through local team leaders. Who in US would pay an IT education while US universities are simply the most expensive in whole world when local beginer positions become scarce and chances of reaching expert level allowing good wages tiny (10% at most) ? In a matter of a very few years the whole IT population in US could collapse to a tiny population of specialists and local integrators, the only ones left able to earn decent IT wages considering local cost of life. It shouldn't be done for ethical reasons (and disastrous economical reasons on long term too, but pointy haired deciders never think ahead so much) but it can technicaly be done so will be tried anyway.
Best regards.
Eric LEMAITRE
CNAM IT Engineer, MS/CS (RHCE, RHCX, SCJA, SCJP, SCJD, SCWCD, SCBCD, SCEA, Net+)
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