December 25, 2005

Now That's The Kind Of Recursion Anybody Can Understand

Understanding XML: All I want for Christmas ...

I now work at a company that at one stage made its availability as an outsourcing partner a big point in its marketing plan, but personally, I still don't buy it. There are any number of perfectly good reasons to outsource a certain portion of your development process - you can't get the help you need locally, the outsourcing partners are specialists in a domain that your company doesn't deal with on a regular basis, you're needing help with localization, you're interested in expanding in new markets and need people who are skilled in those markets. All of these are legitimate. What's not, frankly is when you decide that you can use out-sourcing to get around local labor laws and take advantage of a strong differential in the costs of that labor. Santa, I'd like to see each CEO that's decided that they can outsource their labor costs wake up one day to discover that their outsourcing company has just purchased their company with the money that has been given to them and that the CEO's position has been, well, outsourced.