Thread regarding Sears layoffs

The real offshoring bottom-feeders are moving work from India to even cheaper sources these days... Bangladesh, eastern Europe, etc.

Off shore I.T.works very well:

1. support. they can cover the nightly batch runs and handle problems instead of paging someone at 2am here

2. If you have very detailed specifications , you can have programmers off shore do coding then review during the day here

Does not work as well during the early phases of a project where details are less defined and a lot of collaboration and face to face meetings with users and stakeholders needs to be done.

I have heard a lot of complaints about off shore help desk but that is maybe a Sears issue where folks there haven't been trained properly or maybe they are understaffed.

From what I have heard the pay gap has been shrinking and due to pay competition overseas, I don't think the ratio is 5 or 6 to 1 any longer. Some of the programmers from India tell me that yes the pay here is higher, but our health care expenses are many many times higher than in India.

"Culturally, Indians are less likely to question people in power (not just India, Japan has this same issue.)"

I also noticed that with Indian programmers here in the US, I'd have conversations like this:

Programmer: do you want x or y?

Me: x

Programmer: here are all the reasons x won't work

Me: ? Why did you offer it as an option in the first place??

Once you figure out the approach, it works fine. But that's with me being in the same room with them! I can't imagine how inefficient the process would be with outsourced programmers and Skype or whatever remote tech you'd use.

They aren't lesser programmers, they are just used to working in a different way.

Oh, and to answer your question, those bring in the bucks along with older Intermec hardware. Really, anything Windows Mobile era or older.

@1jkf 90% finished on moving everyone to SE. We switched carriers a couple of months ago and got a hell of a deal that way. We mostly keep the 5Ses on hand as spares more than anything.

Sorry for the wall of text, there is a lot of info I'm trying to get across and typing as thoughts roll out of my head can be a bit crazy

The analogy isn't flawed, I never equated a US programmer as a Ferrari, and even if I did, the analogy would still hold up, sure it may go fast, but its expensive and you give up things like actually being able to do work with it. Each piece must be identified for its own strengths and weaknesses and then you must compare it to the actual problem you are trying to solve.

There typically is a skill and critical thinking gap between a US programmer and a Indian one, although the skills are typically less actual programming related.

Part of it is strictly cultural, but most of it is of "our" own design.

Culturally, Indians are less likely to question people in power (not just India, Japan has this same issue.) While this sounds great, it's not. Questioning decision is important, because it will allow you to get to the best possible solution. You would be surprised how much information and adjustment goes on in even the simplest meeting, but we never think about it, just like you never think about how you tie your shoe.

Many companies, Sears included typically have "handlers" on both sides for communication, sometimes multiple levels of handlers.

Also language is an issue, I'm not saying they don't speak english, they do, but they are not immersed in the language. Context, subtext, and nomenclature is very important, these things can be easily missed (even with US based programmers, but the Offshore resources typically bear the brunt of it)

One of the biggest issues is that the US side is not equipped to deal with Indian programmers, system owners and users typically have no clue how to direct programmers. Most US programmers have soft skills to work through the issues (some don't.)

Indian programmers that are typically hired for "cheap labor" they already have a bias against them, the same issue occurs in our stores. You offer minimum wage, you get minimum workers, the cycle repeats.

SHI can be great for specific tasks, but it requires specific setup on the domestic side. It requires supporting documentation and it requires the correct incentives. Typically, the incentives is to close as many tickets as quickly as possible. If you can't answer correctly, close the ticket. If they need a better answer they will open a new one and you can close that one quick again too. This creates a lot of problems. Although that part is more about general SHI vs offshore programmers.

A better way of thinking about it all is to think of how automobiles used to be built. You could have a factory floor with a mechanic building each car 1:1, and you need a mechanic because there are a lot of things that you are required to know to build said car. Now throw that same mechanic on an assembly line, sure he can do it, but you are now overpaying him because he is only putting a single component on, you can get away with less skilled labor.

If you take that unskilled labor and ask them to build the car from scratch, you probably won't have a car at the end.

Programming is not as dramatic, but still applies, because typically you need the infrastructure to support the less skilled. The problem is compounded because there is less skill on both sides, the domestic customer as well as the SHI programmer (again, not in programming skill, but "soft" skills.)

@u1b, the only suggestion I have for you business wise is to completely phase out the iPhone 5s and go to the SE. I have both the 5s and the SE, I like the SE better. It is faster and more reliable.

Are you referring to the Symbol RMUs that Kmart uses or the Motorolla Handhelds that Sears FLS uses?

Very good points on the hardware end. The last time I was in a Sears, they were still using ancient IBM registers that Toshiba (who purchased IBM's POS business a couple of years ago) no longer supports. Hell, they were probably EOL 7-10 years ago to begin with.

I should also say that I (tki/vpj/xlq) actually write scanning software (for LTL logistics, not retail) for a living. We have a partner that we buy our hardware from (FWIW, we use iPhone 5S/SE devices with Honeywell scanner sleds and an in-house app I personally built single-handedly from scratch), and they tell us that those ancient handhelds still used by numerous retailers are an abundant source of profit for them. They literally charge over $1000 per unit for refurbished handhelds. The companies will pay because they're locked into them due to neglecting to modernize their software as time goes on. The sad thing is that you can buy the exact combination I mentioned for under $1000, all brand new. Hell, you can drop that cost down to about $500-600 per unit by swapping the iPhones for iPod Touches if you don't need cellular connectivity.

Crappy programmers exist here in the US, too.

Though, I will say that I constantly hear this from colleagues about Indian programmers: they aren't bad, but they generally require you to be more up front and specific about requirements. I see it commonly attributed to how CS education over there is, but I can't vouch either way.

I will add this data point, though: India has produced many great, skilled programmers that make over $120k on the west coast at Amazon, Google, et al. You know, the people H-1B was meant for until the outsourcing firms started abusing it to import cheaper labor.

I know everyone is looking at this from a software standpoint. You guys need to also look at this from a hardware standpoint also. The Troy data center is approaching 20years old. Of those 17 years no money has been spent to properly keep the data center running and upgrade equipment.

At the same time Kmart Stores are running registers that are close to 15years old and are no longer supported by IBM. Same with the RMU's and Handheld Printers they are no longer supported by Symbol. All of the IT equipment at the Kmart is past EOL.

Now I do not know for sure. Are the Sears FLS registers as outdated as the IBM systems at Kmart? I know some Sears are using the Motorola green screen handhelds for inventory and label printing capibilites. Do the registers at Sears FLS crash daily?

Yes I am an X SHC employee. I only know about Kmart sorry.

(Oh on another note. The registers at my current job Big Lots crash daily. They are newer NCR touchscreen models that runs a Windows 7 POS software. The Kmart registers were more reliable than the piece of garbage that I use at my new job.)

Your analogy is flawed. American programmers are not Ferraris by any stretch of the imagination. If they were, they would be working at Google not dying Sears. You are assuming that there is a huge skill and critical thinking gap between Indian and American programmers but that is not the case. Plus, saying that 1 American programmer salary can hire a team of 6-7 Indian ones, just says you can do it, not that you have to.

You also keep mentioning cultural and business differences as a problem but can u be specific? I work with the teams in India now and can tell you they can do the same thing an American can. They work Central USA time and all speak English.

Stole the words out of my mouth, OP. (@xlq here by the way)

Tangent: the obsession over outsourcing to get a larger head count is backfiring, particularly for the large outsourcing providers like IBM, who continually keeps laying those heads off. You paid for 7 heads, now you have 3 because 4 got laid off on the IBM side. Rinse and repeat.

The MBAs unfortunately do not realize that in today's day and age, IT MUST be a core competency of any business of size. Outsourcing your non-core competency only works when it's actually not a core competency. IT should be one in any modern organization, and is horribly neglected by a large portion of MBA beancounters.

@OAmjwnZ-fii your reasoning is exactly why it can backfire, its bean counters vs people who actually have to do the work. Offshore resources have their place, I'll be the first to say it (OP here btw) but a support system is required, and that support system typically cannot be offshore.

It all depends on what you are trying to do. Let say you have to choose the best vehicle, you have a choice between a Ferrari LaFerrari at $1.4 mil, a 1998 diesel truck at $6k, and 1991 Honda CRX at $3k.

Is the Ferrari the best... maybe depending on how you are rating things on. If you have to move things around the truck might be the best, if you need gas economy and cheap parts the Honda is going to be your best bet. If you need to get across the country as quick as possible the Ferrari would probably win.

If you look at SHI in the same way, it has specific pros and cons. Yes, you get cheap labor, but there are very big cultural differences, and business difference that have major impact on day to day work. Additional I'm going to assume based on your post you don't know how programmers work, typically you can't have multiple programmers working on a specific functionality, parallel work on the same piece of code just doesn't work.... the old joke is true, 9 women can't pop out a single baby in 1 month. With programming you have diminishing returns on adding parallel streams, because the overhead of keeping everyone organized increases with each additional person.

We are far away from the "golden age" of programmers who were able to throw things together without much input from the business and users. Applications in the past, people were expected to have to get training on and would learn over time and become an expert in such an application. Modern business requires that everything is easy to learn, and provides instant results with little to no training. While this can be possible, it requires a ton of interaction in design and actual programming. Designing or developing a program to do something really isn't hard... what is hard is to identify all the ways it can fail and plan for it to fail gracefully and provide good information on how it failed.

People will always find new ways to break things, in the past you would train them well enough so they didn't but today, the system needs to act as gate keeper. Just look at the differences between the old mainframe systems and the applications of today.

I'm probably wasting my breath on you anyways you sound like one of the wannabe MBA types who doesn't understand the long term impact of the policies you put in place. Meanwhile the people you look down on scramble to keep putting the fires out, while you look at all the money you saved and spin it to get a bonus.

While I know you won't understand any of this, I hope that maybe someone will actually read this and gain something from it.

@fii the fatal assumption being made is that 6-7 programmers is better than just one. That isn't always the case, and it is /very/ easy to end up with too many cooks in the kitchen with that mentality. Programming productivity does not linearly scale with head count. There is a famous book in software development that spends quite some time on this fallacy, called The Mythical Man-Month.

Smart co's build the inefficiencies of the extra coordination into their cost models to recognize managing India work from the US

The key here is how you manage your remote resources. It doesn't matter if it is India, Israel or China. People are the same everywhere. If you put a team in position to fail they will fail in any given country.

LOL. No matter how you slice it, math and finance will always trump your justification (no pun intended). A programmer in the US makes $80,000+ a year. A programmer in India makes about $13-15,000K. I can hire a team of 6-7 Indian programmers for one US programmer. Why would I NOT do that? I have seen first hand a few of Sears' US teams move over to SHI without any trouble. In fact, the workers over there are more diligent and take their jobs seriously. They are also willing to work Central US time, meaning they are clocking in and out in the wee hours. Many of the ones here are entitled and to be honest, not even as skillful. I would even go so far as to call some of the American IT guys I've seen at various call centers just plain LAZY and incompetent.

I was the source of the original comment and wanted to add an additional detail.

Sears actually has a whole other level working against them as well. Many of the SHI members are entry level, and are looking to gain as little as 6 months of experience before moving on to a better company. The first 6-12 months of experience has a HUGE impact on Indian programmers, in which the options really open for them.

Having options means they either get more expensive or leave, leaving Sears with the expensive situation of hiring and training a replacement.

Lots of companies have come to the same conclusion--outsourcing is a false economy in many cases. It can work sometimes but the time zone differences as well as cultural misunderstandings are challenges.