Software manpower exports and the power of governments

[Arun Mehta <amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>]

At 13:23 16/08/96 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
>At 10:49 PM 8/14/96 +0600, Arun Mehta wrote:
>> I was trying to explain how incomes and prices happened to be
>> lower in India, 
>
>That was not an explanation, that was mystic word salad.  
>
>It would be an explanation if wealth mysteriously rained
>from the sky, rather than was produced by men.

Huh? And why are we so grumpy today?

>In fact what gets sent to the Indian campus is largely legacy
>work, which is in large part precisely the work that requires 
>the closest contact with the customer, contact with actual 
>working conditions, and the like.

Not necessarily: as an example of legacy work, consider the
conversion of Cobol to 4GL. When you have a working program to
emulate, you can do that without too much customer contact. It's
in new software (where maybe the customer is herself not clear
what she actually needs) that close contact is essential. 

Take another example: you have some old software, and you need to
add a bell or whistle. Sure, you may need to run the modified
software on site for testing, but often that too can be done from
a remote terminal. And even if you do have to travel for the
purpose, it still works out cheaper, since manpower costs are low
in the 3rd world.

>This seems to be a general practice, not just an Informix practice, for
>in an article on "India's silicon valley" I read that the work done in
>India was largely done on existing legacy apps, often in obsolete
>languages and operating systems.

Um, maybe you misread: why would an American company pay to have
software written, that only runs on obsolete machines? Now,
converting that software to run on a modern machine, that's
altogether different -- you have to be able to read Cobol or
Autocoder or whatever, but what you actually write would be based
on modern tools. 

>This is of course the work that places the least amount of the
>companies intellectual assets in India, and thus the work that
>gives the Indian government the least power over Informix and its
>activities.  Informix could abandon the Indian campus and all
>the intellectual assets on which it was working, and all the
>physical assets located there, at any moment and not suffer any 
>serious loss or inconvenience.

A sensible business decision: long-distance security is hard to
achieve. But I doubt that it has anything to do with the power
that the Indian government has (or hasn't) over Informix?

>It is overwhelmingly clear that the question is simply who has the 
>power?  Those who wish to hire peoples services in order to produce
>wealth, or those who can command peoples services because they have
>guns?

Are you suggesting that Indian programmers come to work with like
a chain gang, with armed government guard? You really must talk
to some programmers from India, ask them if the government
commands them this way, but do have some oxygen handy, or they
might die laughing...

>That is what makes most people in some places poor and most people 
>in some places affluent.

Look, governments in the 3rd world are often stupid and corrupt
-- no doubt that contributes to poverty, but that isn't the only
reason. I'm sure one of the reasons is cultural: modern
industrial societies require a high degree of training,
discipline, whatever. Western societies needed centuries of
misery to learn these, we're trying to do it faster, and
hopefully be a bit more humane in the process.

>> Could you please be more precise? In what way does the "power of
>> the Indian government" intrude? 

>Presumably the same kind of reasons as caused foreign companies
>to flee India the first time around.

Other that Coke and IBM, which we already discussed, can you name
one other? In the last years, lots of companies have opened shop
here, including Coke and IBM.

And even these two didn't flee: a new law was passed, they didn't
want to comply, so they left or were asked to leave. In the case
of Coke, I can understand the government not wanting to spend
precious foreign exchange on sugared water in a country where
there is a serious shortage of drinking water. Tim made the
perfectly valid point that such decisions cost the country in
reputation, but the Indian government doesn't mind loss of
reputation in matters it firmly believes in, as in the current CTBT discussion.

Arun Mehta Phone +91-11-6841172, 6849103 amehta@cpsr.org
http://www.cerfnet.com/~amehta/  finger amehta@cerfnet.com for public key