Here's my hypothesis on outsourcing: the best people (no matter where they live) are hired locally, so if you aren't hiring locally, you're not hiring the best people. If you have prolonged experience with outsourcing, you'll notice that the better performers disappear after a while - they are being hired by someone local to them. On top of hiring the people who cannot otherwise find a good job, they might not speak your language well or at all, they are awake different hours of the day, and you are limited to communicating via telephone and webcam.
I find this idea of PDI particularly distasteful because (a) there is no hard evidence so far, and (b) it makes "us" look better. History shows that people believe a lot of dumb things when those things make them look morally superior.
I didn't find the PDI thing too bad. It's a relatively simple assessment of how people react to authority. Consider it a distance to autonomy. The lower the PDI, the closer the average person in that group would consider themselves autonomous.
Some countries value individual drive and an equality along all of the power spectrum where those in managerial positions are more like guides than commanders. Other countries have different cultures and values where those in obviously higher positions are deferred to and deserve to be treated with all respect their title confers on to them.
Neither is better than the other, just different. And in order to work better with these other cultures, each side must understand the values held by the other side and reach some sort of middle ground where we can communicate with each other effectively.
I do like your 'hired locally' hypothesis. It makes sense.
My take on why the best jobs and the best employees are local jobs and local employees[1] is modeled in terms of the bandwidth and latency issue of communications.
I did a lightning talk at the 2009 Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference using that theme. I posted the text and slides of that talk on my blog:
"the best people (no matter where they live) are hired locally, so if you aren't hiring locally, you're not hiring the best people. "
By this logic people who get paid for working on Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel or Hadoop must be bad developers? They are distributed all over the world.
Good point. The best I can say is that life is complicated and inconsistent. If you are an attractive project, you will get good developers no matter where you and they are. People will make it work. But most people outsourcing are not sexy, high profile, open source projects. If you are a boring corporate project looking to pay bottom dollar by hiring elsewhere, you're going to get what you pay for.
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Here's my hypothesis on outsourcing: the best people (no matter where they live) are hired locally, so if you aren't hiring locally, you're not hiring the best people. If you have prolonged experience with outsourcing, you'll notice that the better performers disappear after a while - they are being hired by someone local to them. On top of hiring the people who cannot otherwise find a good job, they might not speak your language well or at all, they are awake different hours of the day, and you are limited to communicating via telephone and webcam.
I find this idea of PDI particularly distasteful because (a) there is no hard evidence so far, and (b) it makes "us" look better. History shows that people believe a lot of dumb things when those things make them look morally superior.
I didn't find the PDI thing too bad. It's a relatively simple assessment of how people react to authority. Consider it a distance to autonomy. The lower the PDI, the closer the average person in that group would consider themselves autonomous.
Some countries value individual drive and an equality along all of the power spectrum where those in managerial positions are more like guides than commanders. Other countries have different cultures and values where those in obviously higher positions are deferred to and deserve to be treated with all respect their title confers on to them.
Neither is better than the other, just different. And in order to work better with these other cultures, each side must understand the values held by the other side and reach some sort of middle ground where we can communicate with each other effectively.
I do like your 'hired locally' hypothesis. It makes sense.
My take on why the best jobs and the best employees are local jobs and local employees[1] is modeled in terms of the bandwidth and latency issue of communications.
I did a lightning talk at the 2009 Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference using that theme. I posted the text and slides of that talk on my blog:
http://jerryjousting.blogspot.com/2009/11/joe-plumber-and-co...
[1] Distributed companies do work, but it is a lot harder to make them work well.
This is an excellent comparison. I can only upvote you once, but you deserve more.
"the best people (no matter where they live) are hired locally, so if you aren't hiring locally, you're not hiring the best people. "
By this logic people who get paid for working on Open Source projects like the Linux Kernel or Hadoop must be bad developers? They are distributed all over the world.
Good point. The best I can say is that life is complicated and inconsistent. If you are an attractive project, you will get good developers no matter where you and they are. People will make it work. But most people outsourcing are not sexy, high profile, open source projects. If you are a boring corporate project looking to pay bottom dollar by hiring elsewhere, you're going to get what you pay for.