Black Raven Dragoons

[Zancarius]

Really lame...

MS Flight Sim was one of my few favorite MS products. Guess it's a casualty of their recent job cuts, but I find that hard to believe. I actually suspect it has something to do with the fact that flight sims are a niche market, and MS would much rather focus its efforts on consoles, which make much more money.

[Snobal]

:Le Sigh: I've gotten all the MSFS's since 2004... the bastards.

[Zancarius]

Dude, I had the one (FS 2.0 or something) when I had a 486. 'Course, I was young and didn't remember much aside from the fact that it was really damn hard to fly with a keyboard.

I've had just about every single one since then, too. It's sad.

[Highgrade]

All this and the fact that they sent my job to india and i have to go back to working with the general tech support populous lol

[Snobal]

Yeah... That's a real bitch. Its ironic that Bill Gates is one of the wealthiest men in the U.S., yet, he's still a cheap bastard.

[Zancarius]

Here's what's funny...

Microsoft had about $40 billion in the bank before they start layoffs. Really, rough economic times like this don't mean squat to a company that could afford to pay its employees even if it were suffering moderate losses for a year or two. It's just an excuse to fire the people who can't pull their weight and get rid of them. To that extent, I can't really blame MS.

[Snobal]

You have to question the way Gates went about outsourcing the India, though.

He originally wanted to get this bill passed to allow him to heir and bring over engineers from foreign countries like India. But once they passed it he fired all of the American engineers (Jeez, I want to be one of those one day...) and immediately outsourced straight to India. Who'd-a-thunk-it?

[Zancarius]

The hilarious side effect of what you described comes on the heels of recent complaints where some US managers are whining about poor or unintelligible documentation.

What makes this so delightful is that they often can't hire a technical writer; unless the writer is well-versed in technology and can actually read the code, they can't write documentation while exhibiting a reasonably thorough understanding of the source. Plus, if they have a complaint, India is on the exact opposite side of the world. Sure, it seems nice being able to have 24/7 coverage across the globe when supporting a product, but when the product is authoring code that benefit diminishes into a fanciful dream. Unfortunately, one might imagine that upper management should have foreseen this problem. Specifically: Management can't very well decide to walk down the hall and have a meeting with the developers (besides, we don't have any developers--we fired them). Furthermore, few managers enjoy the notion of waking up at 2:00AM just to meet via a video conference (plus latency) with their shop in India.

Technical support is one thing; interaction isn't department-to-department, it's customer-to-company. The customers are the ones who bear the brunt of outsourcing overseas, and since they are often deprived of the ability to contact the company's US offices, management can typically relax knowing that their decision won't suffer from anything worse than a bunch of whining customers. Once those complaints subside, it's smooth sailing; they're going to stop eventually as the public resigns itself collectively to the bygone days of homegrown, "proudly made in the USA" technical support. Plus, if the company is lucky enough to offer an otherwise high-quality product with few worthwhile imitations, the customers will likely decide to stick with shoddy technical support instead of risking the purchase of a lesser product (and if the customers are another development firm that happens to be locked in with your product--even better!). Let's not even talk about the customers who, by way of fate, locality, and geography, have no other choice than to use your products, outsourcing ain't so bad. (Hi, Qwest!)

Unfortunately, department-to-department interactions are another mess, and I think US firms are going to be bit by this, Microsoft in particular. I read an article some time back detailing the pain of scheduling meetings with another shop in timezones 12+hours ahead. See, when the developers are down the hall or, worst case, in another building on the same campus, it's easy to schedule meetings. Need to bug them about something nagging but otherwise insignificant? No problem! Unless you've outsourced, that is. Then you're left with a choice: Foot the bill of frequently communicating to your [insert foreign country here] offices your gripes about feature X or take notes, stock up the problems/complaints/feature requests, and pray that Jesus will save your sorry hide when you have to finally get in touch with your foreign office.

Now, imagine some wayward ship that just set anchor in an unnamed gulf waiting to cast off--and once they do, their anchor severs every undersea cable that could possibly route your precious video conferencing packets to those foreign offices. It's going to be a long day, that's for sure. (Or perhaps it would be easier just to go home and sleep it off; no work is going to get done anyway until repairs are made!)

Sometimes, having the developers withing "arm's reach" (so to speak) is a decisive "win" for both sides. It employs Americans, it keeps resources here, and most importantly, it gives managers and developers alike the ability to communicate at a moment's notice.

And we wonder why the quality of software is now so grossly exceeding what the "suck scale" is capable of quantifying!