Potato I have

Kevin Clary asks Spolsky if he will be offshoring any of hisdevelopment. He replies:

We will not be “offshoring” our software development because you don’t outsource your core competency. I’m not a software broker, I’m a software developer

There’s a very long comment thread. Other items that caught my attention:

• separating design and coding activities
• market pays for value add; virtual company a joke
• executives prefer docile offshore to strong-opinioned in-house IT who wants change a lot
  software viewed as cost-center or profit-center
• UI complexity and shrinkwrap vs. backend business apps (shrinkwrap easier to offshore)

My own offshoring experience has been mixed, but there have been some positive surprises, and I definitely have seen it “work” in some sense. But in those situations, I couldn’t say that software was considered a “core competency.”

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2004 at 18:27 and is filed under swdev/offshore. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.