Non-U.S. programmers working for Sun and Informix

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

At 3:49 PM 8/14/96, James A. Donald wrote:

>The fact is a company like Informix has a campus in India, and
>it has campuses in the US that are largely staffed by Indian teams,
>and it will pay big bucks to get its people out of India, even
>though it has to pay them more than ten times as much in the US.
>
>An Indian programmer doing the same job for the same company is
>more than ten times as valuable to that company if he is not
>subject to the power of the Indian government, as proven by that
>companies actions.

My hunch is that a much stronger reason for Informix to want to get its
programmers out of India and closer to its other U.S. programmers has to do
with what Coase called "the nature of the firm."

Friends of mine at Sun have reported to me on the severe problems they are
having with their very inexpensive to hire Russian programmers. The hope
had been that there were legions of well-trained, eager programmers and
mathematicians who could be hired for, say, a few bags of cat food. Sun,
like other companies, set up satellite operations in Russia and farmed-out
various projects.

What they're finding is that the programmers are reasonably well-trained
(and may be much better trained than most U.S. programmers, at least in
some areas...not too many CS majors in the U.S. know  what a Lebesgue
integral is, for example). However, their work is unacceptable, for various
reasons. Sun has taken to bringing over the programmers for a stay in the
U.S in order to acculturate them, innoculate them, whatever you wish to
call it, in the ways of Sun and of other American high tech companies. So
far, it isn't clear if the experiment can be salvaged.

Now certainly part of this is just the "remote control" problem, that of a
bunch of people off on their own at the end of a very long feedback loop.
Phone calls help, code reviews help, video conferencing helps, but perhaps
not enough.

And since the difference between a "mediocre" programmer and a "great"
programmer can far, far exceed any slight savings in salary, the incentives
are clear: hire locals who can work locally, or bring offshore programmers
to the local facility.

I suspect Sun's experiences with Russians are pretty similar to Informix's
experiences with Indians, with Tata Institute replacing Moscow State.

--Tim May

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