Er, the article is not about manufacturing outsourcing, it's about eliminating the last seven remaining Boeing-employed flight training pilots - who were apparently tasked amongst others with quality control of the training pilots from contractors.
Comments on this topic, on this and previous articles, almost universally blame Boeing management for issues including lack of QA. So please take whatever anti-Indian racism ax you've got to grind somewhere else.
edit: Although I do find it funny that your comment generalizes that all HN posters are Americans and that all Americans think alike.
> It's funny that Americans on HN and reddit are trying to blame Boeing's technical incompetence on Indian suppliers and subcontractors. Why are Airbus planes not suffering similar problems and why is Airbus not blaming it on Indian suppliers and subcontractors?
It could have something to do with American business culture as well.
When American companies outsource, they seem monomanically focused on paying the absolute least amount of money per body, which tends to get you relatively incompetent people in any location. They will then engage in brazen denialism that doing something like that will reduce quality.
Maybe European companies prioritize quality more, and are thus willing to pay for more of more skilled people when they offshore.
Don’t attribute to racism that which can be adequately explained by greed. The good thing about greed is that it’s generally colorblind. The bad thing is that it’s much harder to stop than racism, which is rooted in ignorance. Enlightenment tends to beget more greed, and that’s just the American way.
It's pretty mainstream to say that racism is a result of greed. If you're going to force resources to be distributed unevenly in your favor, you have to come up with reasons why you must deserve those resources more than others. If there are convenient physical features to use in that reason, then you'll get racism. So a greed that doesn't have a racism is just one where everyone shares the same features. If your definition of racism is inclusive of distinctions in language or manner, then it's probably not even possible to have greed without racism.
It's the greed that should be attacked, its expression (in racism) is arbitrary.
> The good thing about greed is that it’s generally colorblind.
So I'm saying the opposite of this. Greed is never colorblind, it sees whatever color is convenient at the time.
1. Racism and greed can very easily coexist. Just look at the entirety of American history for examples.
2. Racism is not easy to stop and not as simple as addressing ignorance. Again, I invite you to look at the entirety of American history for examples. You could also look to current affairs.
I think a lot of us, working in pretty much any large industry, have seen what happens when outsourcing goes wrong. Which is of course not to say that it always goes wrong, but, well, it often does.
The typical way it goes is:
- the board has heard that outsourcing can save them millions, and that "everyone is doing it"
- the business signs a big contract with the likes of TCS, Capgemini, Cognizant, etc, paying peanuts
- over the next few years, it's absolute mayhem, and customers and internal users alike are not happy. Internal tech projects and upgrades fail spectacularly, and there is downtime across the everything
- and now answering your question: the board will never place the blame on the decision to outsource, because they made that decision. The business has spent so much money and burned so many bridges in the process, that it may be impossible to go back
I've worked in enterprise-scale companies for 20 years, and for a good chunk of that, I've seen several outsourcing horror stories unfold before my eyes. I've also led teams of offshore developers, and led cross-global teams including offshore workers. I've seen both good and bad.
IME, there are 2 types of outsourcing that companies do. First is wholesale outsourcing of all IT operations - service desk, networking, workplace services etc, and often also including "staff augmentation" for small software projects. I have seen this with Capgemini, Cognizant and TCS, and I've never seen a good outcome from this style of outsourcing. The way it works is that the business pays peanuts, and they get offshore workers who are (largely) completely incompetent - the number of times I've come across networking (or whatever) "specialists" who barely know which way to hold a mouse is truely frightening (I swear I'm not exaggerating). I literally have no idea how the big firms keep getting away with this.
The other style I've seen is consultancy, where TCS, Cognizant, Capgemini or whoever is engaged for 1-2 years to build a specific system. We all know these invariably go horribly wrong when it's a government that's the customer, but I've largely seen these as successful within the enterprise. The offshore personnel assigned to projects tends to be a mix - you'll have a core of competent architects, designers and developers, a few barely mediocre developers, with a supporting cast of totally incompetent developers who have literally no idea what they are doing. These projects are usually ran pretty well, with good engagement with the business. The core of competent people do all the work, with the mediocre ones taking days to complete hours of work, and the incompetent people are basically ignored - it's weird, the customer pays for them, but at best they do nothing.
Oh, there is a third style too, very rarely seen in the enterprise space - shop around and find a small offshore business specialising in software development. I've had great success when I've pushed for this style in the past, with offshore devs in India and China.
HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians, I think anyone who browses this forum for a month would know that, it's hardly news. I also don't understand your critique and would advise you to refrain from generalizing all Americans as an extrapolation of this extremely niche forum.
'HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians, I think anyone who browses this forum for a month would know that, it's hardly news.'. --- This is a generalization unsubstantiated with no data or references. I find no evidence of this
Even within HN, I'd say it's only a small but vocal minority of Americans that express these kind of views. From what I can tell, the underlying causes are animosity about the H1B program, misconceptions about migrant workers, and latent racism.
But to be clear: plainly not all negative comments about H1B or outsourcing fall into the above category.
You're absolutely right - especially the second point. With that said, I often find the xenophobia here a bit disturbing, but (and thats a massive but) to say those are "typical American ethics" (like above) tantamounts to a sweeping generalization. One which does not represent American values at all.
America has two sets of values, urban and rural. I just finished a 3 hour drive between Indiana and Ohio and you will go 30 minutes seeing only trump signs in rural yards then see it slowly swap to Biden and blm when you get into more dense areas then slowly phase back into trump signs as you get back into rural towns and farmland. Very rarely do you see two different signs in the same area, though wihh how polarizing politics is now that could just be to avoid antagonism.
> HN is and has been passively aggressive towards Indians
HN is not a person, so it doesn't have feelings. Any population sample of millions of people, which HN is, is going to surface examples of pretty much whatever feeling or view you care to mention. I'd be careful not to draw general conclusions from this, because people tend to do that as a mirror image of their own feelings and views, not through any objective perception of HN.
You'll notice I stopped engaging with the replies once I recognized there was a texas-sharpshooter being invoked by my subconscious self through the parent comment. If we got a DUI but for using the internet, I would be top10 ;)
