Julio’s Musings Around Columbia County, New York

If we outsource our Software Development , we can save considerable labor costs. For each USA based employee we can have 4 or 5 based on current ratios of India development resources. True, if the disparity between where the resources are currently located and where they will be outsourced to is large, you will save some personnel costs but is that the sole determinant whether it is a good idea or not?
Dispersing technology development/support (or operations) throughout the world has benefits besides cost and based on labor rate differentials. If you have a large enough inventory of sites to support that operate 24/7, having a team of System Administrators that overlap various timezones should improve the responsiveness when things inevitably go wrong. Also allows for system maintenance during the slow hours in whatever market the particular site has it’s lull. Also, you can smooth out the demand and supply imbalances in actual engineering resources that make acquiring engineering resources problematic regardless of what the pay scale is in certain markets.
On the other hand, if you are working in a domain that is subject to large amounts of uncertainty and market pressures in leap frogging features, what does a lower labor rate coupled with the latency inherent in time differences and maintaining context get you except 2nd , 3rd or further down in timely meeting the market need?
I have worked in situations where design is in the Eastern Time Zone and Web development on India time. A change in design would easily take 48 hour turnaround just to get the correct understanding of what the feature represented and how it fit into the rest of the product/design flow before anything could possibly be engineered. Given that Frontend Web development is relatively low technology this minimum latency is dysfunctional and has an attendant cost in frustration on the part of the involved product team including executive management as well as missed opportunities in the marketplace.

The aforementioned should not be cast as a criticism of engineering in India as those engineering teams are thrust into a position where success is not achievable.

As I was working during the time of the New York Jets Playoff game on Saturday January 9th, 2010 (working on the computer that is) I decided to experiment with Google’s Realtime feature and a query of New York Jets. Of course I could have turned on the radio or streamed video of the game but I wanted an apparently less intrusive medium.



The screenshot is a point in time during the second quarter. I was impressed with the performance of the stream , most of it coming from twitter of course but also interspersed with a few from Blog/WebSites (Yahoo Sports). It wasn’t realtime as listening to it on radio or watching it on Television but it had it’s own charm as apparently most of the “tweets” were from New York Jet fans which was gratifying. The stream actually had the unintended result of ripping me from my concentration on work and plopping me in front of the Television to watch the remainder of the game in the conventional way. Listening to the broadcast with the un-biased play by play and color commentators I longed for the pure biased passion of the people who were inadvertently part of the realtime stream. There has to be a marriage somewhere in this. Watching sports is an emotional event whether you are rooting for your own team, rooting against a team you dislike, or just have money riding on the outcome (probably the most emotional circumstance).

Outsourcing is not a new topic especially when it comes to Software Engineering. I remember at the beginning of my own career ; the dinosaurs
represented by the mainframe applications and the developers that maintained them. Overwhelmingly Cobol/CICS applications , some of the applications were already a generation old (a human generation that is). Though these applications ran business critical functions, they were not in active development or even active maintenance until the Y2K hysteria took hold as the year 2000 approached.
Taking the little maintenance that was needed to keep the applications operational and packaging them for support overseas with cheaper labor made sense unless of course you were one of the Cobol developers who quickly saw their opportunities dry up. Anyway, with little to no change, tightly controlled operational environments, well defined and documented interfaces, few public facing expectations from mass market consumers and little competition, moving support and maintenance halfway around the world had minimally discernible effect on reliability and correctness of the systems and in many if not most instances had the attendant positive impact of reducing cost.

Fast forward to the world of today and the past decade with the ubiquity of the Web as we know it. Even though a website is more then it’s visual design (sorry Designers) just think of what the rate of change is for the typical website. The domains may stay the same but the user experience is constantly mutating and websites, save for portals have a life-time measured in months, not years. With this type of change, bifurcating development/design/product between far flung timezones creates challenges that though ameliorable, come at tremendous high costs that wash out almost all of the desired “cost” benefit of outsourcing to a longer unit labor rate locale. For anyone that has ever worked on a website, the idea that a visual design is ever final is a mirage. Instead the comps (when you have those) are a development starting point. As the development proceeds and the site takes on sufficient mass, constant revisiting of how the development site looks, feels and operates in a semi real environment drives what changes need to be made to the previous “final” set of design/product requirements. Try to manage this scenario when for example you have perhaps 2 hours of overlap between India and the Eastern Time zone of the United States which during part of the year is 10.5 hours difference. Though the changes come from realtime, usually co-located folks interacting with the current state of the site, the folks remote who are usually the development team are not part of that interaction. Before they can actually adapt they need to reset and understand what the changes are about. Given the small daily overlap between widely divergent timezones , you introduce a large amount of latency as the overlap is used to recalibrate an understanding of what the site is supposed to do now and then you have to wait another day to see how good the understanding was based on the work product from the remote team while you were sleeping.

Next Installment – What Of Web Development can benefit from Sourcing remotely.

As I rush headlong to a new chapter, I am spending even more time on all of these social networking sites which keep one connected in many different contexts (professional, Closest 1000 friends, etc).
Not like I am not already use to it as I am in the business of building web sites and large ones at that, Nevertheless, if one doesn’t exploit every avenue of connecting/decimating oneself on the web it’s like you don’t exist.
This time around as I update my resume, a soft Word Document file is not enough and actually quite nostalgic. Now I will have it stored and accessible on emurse.com , downloadable in various formats including Word Document, with built in analytics as to how many accesses/download and and on my own personalized url at juliomiyares.emurse.com
Does seem like self promotion has really taken off. No longer just for celebrities. Of course all the Social Networking sites has cute widgets that let you publish them as freely and broadly as possible.

It’s already been frequently repeated but what you put out about yourself is available to all with little effort. It’s like you have a slew of pavarazzi waiting for your every move. Of course these are not human pavarazzi but the potentially more dangerous automaton types. They don’t miss anything and They don’t forget either.

Julio Hernandez-Miyares | Create Your Badge

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[tags]Twitter, Emurse, Facebook, LinkedIn, jittr[/tags]

Been thinking. What is the eventual fate of Google? Using myself as an example, of course I use it for 99.5% of my Search queries. It pretty much acts as a rudimentary “braincap”. Anything I don’t know but need or want to know , I start with Google.com. I use Gmail though admittedly it is not my primary address as I prefer a @mac.com address. But, I do use Google Mail to serve as the mail server for my company email @jittr.com. Though I have Dreamhost as my hosting provider, I have “outsourced” the mail service to Google for free and benefit from it’s high availabllity and excellent spam filtering. I use Google as my Content Distribution Network for static Javascript library files. In certain instances have used Google Docs and am actively considering it for future spreadsheet and word documents like activities as I am not inclined to continue to pay Microsoft the licensing fees for their services. I use Google Analytics for Web reporting and though it is related to Search, I use Google as a reference point for vanity (about me) communications.

At what point does the dependency on Google become so great it becomes a must have for the economy or for the national well-being?

Now , it were it were to become a government agency it would have to change it’s ranking algorithms to return results based on some Federal guideline for political correctness determined by whichever party held the reins of power at the moment. Creationism or Evolution, Pro-Choice or Anti Abortion, Public Health option or not, and on and on.
I don’t believe this is so far-fetched in the end.

[tags]Julio Hernandez-Miyares, jittr.com, google.com[/tags]