Offshore IT outsourcing
Sep 15th, 2003 by Nate
This article is an interesting read. It’s all about the true costs of outsourcing IT overseas.
The interesting thing about this article was that they mentioned United Technologies Corp as being one of the “leaders” of this practice. When I used to work for UTC (more specifically Pratt and Whitney) they were just starting to do stuff like this, and I remember it was all a giant joke. They would take an entire system, like Payroll for instance, and ship the sourcecode overseas to India for Y2K remediation. They would then fire the entire programming staff that supported that system, or put them in jobs that would make them want to quit, or force them into early retirement (we used to call this the “golden shower” as opposed to the “golden handshake”).
Anyway, 6 months later the source code would come back “fixed”. Except wait! It didn’t even compile! Not only that, it didn’t even make any sense what they did. They completely botched it up. So the geniuses at Pratt would go back and rehire all of the old staffers as contractors, at roughly twice their original pay to fix all the problems.
Think outsourcing overseas will save you 80%? If you are dumb enough to try it, I would love to hear your story.
“Y2-KO” - My highly fictitious recounting of Y2K events - by Walde.
When I was at P&W they outsourced all our COBOL Y2K analysis to a crack team of Israeli programmers who’d already proved their muster battling the fabulous Y-9-Billion bug, or whatever year it is in Israel. About a year before I got there, there was a team of about 4 COBOL programmers who had been there since the dawn of time, all of whom possessed super heroic space bending mind powers and intimate knowledge of the secret workings behind Pratt’s largely undocumented legacy systems. Sometime during this period they joined forces with the Israelis to tag team battle the fearsome and loathsome Y2K “Bug”. But when I arrived at P&W, the time of heroes had ended, and history had given way to myth. All that remained of these 4 alien super computer COBOL Kill-Bots was their tales passed on in song by the 4 loafing buffoons and fat-heads that had replaced them (myself included). Like clockwork, the issue of Y2K compliancy would erupt at each of our (what seemed like hourly) staff meetings. Sporting my most insolent slack jawed visage I would tirelessly prod, poke, and spindle at whatever was in my reach until one of my compatriots would produce a Mandolin and recount the tale of the day when the 4 steel munching COBOL demi-gorgons weaved a giant space laser-bat out of Israelis and used it to fire a hailstorm of dynamite into the heart of planet Y2K. But our comfortable security was not to last, when one day several months later………….
[TO BE CONTINUED]
I remember the israelis.. they were a little weird.. really nervous bunch. They would sit in OBB (or was it OBG), they would never look at you, and occasionally you would see them poke their heads over the cubicles, look right at you, then quickly receed back into the cube once they knew that you saw them. When I was king payroll, they were supposed to do work for me, but I quit long before I actually had to make actual contact with them. I’m super glad I’m not king payroll anymore.
A few weeks ago while packing I found some old papers from the P&W pre-y2k era. I found that one picture I made of all the different programs that make up the payroll system, and their depenencies. You remember the one, looked kinda like this but about 100 times more complicated. Good times. Wait, not really.
Holy crap! The nightmarish memories!
For those of you who don’t know, like maybe 4 or 5 years ago steve and I used to work at Pratt. One day they decided to make me the payroll king, and steve was one of my minions. Our mission? Fix the payroll system, so that on january 1st 2000 the hourlies get their pay, and they don’t riot and kill us.
So day one, I sit down, wave my payroll sceptre and make steve draw me a diagram of all the payroll inter-pendencies. What I got was not unlike what you see in the last comment, it sorta looked like a bowl of steaming spaghetti with bits of alphabet soup floating in it. So my second order to steve? “GIVE UP!! START LOOKING FOR NEW JOB!!”
It was at that point I decided the project was a complete disaster, and I immediately went on “work embargo”. I even had a sign above my desk that said “Embargo ON” and when people would ask me questions or ask me how the project was going I would point to the sign and go back to surfing the internet. If I was particularly surly that day, I would squeel “EMBARGO ON!!” just like master-blaster in thunderdome. The funny thing was, everyone thought I was kidding, they thought I was just eccentric or something. Little did they know how screwed we were, how messed up this project was.
3 weeks later I had quit, and steve left 2 weeks after that.
Never found out how that project ended.
Never really cared.
My advice to newbies just starting their careers: If they dangle the payroll carrot in front of your face and promise you a life of promotions and good living.. you run.. you run FAST.
The worst part about it was that they told us that after we fix the Y2K problem, as some sort of horrific reward, we would be allowed to work on the “ERP” project. Yikes!
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mmmmmmn …..Enterprise Resource Planning something to do with capn kirk right?