[thelist] RE: Does web design have a future in 'high wage'countries? (wasQuestion])

RUST Randal RRust at COVANSYS.com
Mon Jul 26 07:23:35 CDT 2004


Andrew Bayley wrote:

> Due to foreign exchange rates, yes it does allow us to create 
> and develop web sites for US$5 to US$25 per hour. 

But are you developing sites for US clients?

> How this makes us in any way inferior I don't know.

If you don't write clean, bug-free code, it does. But this is true of
anyone in any country, using any type of operating system or browser.

> India, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and many other developing 
> countries are quite capable of nuturing their own talent, 
> without your help!

Nurturing, yes. But doing anything with it? No. A lot of the
universities in India teach their students Java with one purpose in mind
-- to do work for clients based in the US.

> And, just for the record, India has the highest number of 
> universities in the world, over 7000.  It is no wonder that 
> they are going to put alot of developers from "this country" 
> out of work.  Your hourly rates are a weeks wages to us 
> "foreigners" in "poor countries"

Yes, this is true. But let me make one point, and very clearly. Roughly
75% of the code we get back from our offshore teams fails when first
deployed. This means that it has to be debugged constantly. In the end,
it takes our offshore teams as much as three times the effort to write
clean code. I know for a fact that I write code better than that,
because I build the prototypes, and they all work as expected.

This doesn't mean that all non-US programmers stink. That's clearly not
the case. But it does mean that more universities does not necessarily
mean there are more quality programmers in India than there are anywhere
else in the world.

----------
Randal Rust
Covansys Corp.
Columbus, OH


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