There is a major bug on the site. When one hits preview when replying to someone else's comment, the comment then does not save and is lost.

For now, just use the save button and not the preview in comments until I can trace down what is causing this.

Someone posted this on my blog. We should pass it around, especially on Dice and that GlobalCIO site:

Sathish Muthukrishnan wrote:

Outsourcing work to India to save costs (aka offshoring) is a fool's errand. I've been on both sides of the table, and can conclusively say it-does-not-work!

1. In spite of all the negative rap, the average US worker is the most productive in the world. I've repeatedly observed that an average US worker can easily do the job of 4-5 workers in India. This includes the amount of spoon-feeding, breast-feeding & intravenous inculcation of knowledge/experience. I've seen the same across different companies in the past 6 years.

2. The demand for talent is very high in India, and the Universities/Colleges there do a poor job of turning out market-ready individuals. So the cream (2-3%) is widely distributed amongst different companies. The average new-recruit is someone who has poor communication skills, bad attitude (either too subservient or too arrogant) & inadequate technical skills.

3. The IT companies in India take inadequate freshers off campuses, put them through 3-6 weeks of bootcamp where they are brainwashed into believing they are the best in the world. In a practice known as "blending" they are immediately placed on a project where they shadow seniors (people who did the same thing 2-3 years ago). For the next 1-2 years these new recruits generally perform gopher work (there is no mentoring or structured development of the individual). Typically, these gophers form 45-50% of any project team (which explains the poor productivity).

4. Steel-reinforced Blinkers: The IT workers of Indian companies suffer from a certain blinkered vision. Part of it is due to the way of education, where they are brainwashed into believing the written word without looking at it critically and trying the improve things. So, the knowledge acquired is extremely limited with anything slightly adjacent being considered out of scope. The disadvantage for clients is that they are kissing goodbye all chances of continuous improvement.

5. The India-based IT majors are glorified sweatshops. They primarily have been into land-grabbing (using the muscle of various State Governments), stealing 100s of acres of agricultural-land & other prime real-estate in the name of 'job-creation'. They do not create value for their clients or enrich (skills-wise) their employees. There is no innovation, work-culture or excellence. The only advantages these companies have is a method to exploit the wage & forex differential. Once the Indian economy grows bigger (bound to happen), the exchange rate would inevitably slide, and these IT companies would morph into rel-estate companies.

6. More line managers & CIOs are speaking out on the myth of cost-savings from outsourcing to India. Any organization that has means of defining & measuring key business drivers (things like productivity, customer satisfaction, employee morale/satisfaction, etc) is able to prove with solid date the inverse correlation between 'offshoring' and things the company would really-like-to-improve.

Each registered user now has their own workspace where they can see all of their blog posts, their forum topics, their comments and how many replies they have gotten. This should be useful for you to track discussions and conversations and your writings.

The "My Account" is where you can put your website, signature and also lists your blog.

Every user has their own blog and currently all go to the front page by date.

I'm glad to see people consider using the site. It hasn't been used that much, so I'm sure there are problems, bugs running around.

If you let me know, I'll try to correct them. Just post in this admin forum and I'll see it.

The site completely crashed. The database was getting cleaned up and became corrupted. How I'm not sure yet (it should have been), but the site is now restored. Let me know if there are any problems.