Boss Bitch

Prepare for a life without cheeseburgers.

I've spent the vast majority of the last 11 years dating Asian women. I am perfectly capable of handling a rice-heavy diet.

I've spent a lot of time on the phone tonight talking to friends and family about this. The opinion is unanimously in favor of me going. My mom's response was, "sounds like a no-brainer to me."

Something I was going to mention eventually is that my girlfriend and I broke up about two months ago. So I'm single. The only thing that would keep me here would be my dog but my ex would be more than happy to have me leave him with her.

I just sent an email to my boss telling him that I would like to begin the process. My discussion with him this afternoon was informal so who knows if they'll actually make an official offer... but I'm going to give it a try.

Those I know that have taken opportunities such as this would do it again.
I personally would look at my family. If I have parents or siblings that are not doing well, I could not go. And I did not go.

CS, where about in India would that be? Bangalore? My first reaction would also be; go. It would be the experience of a life time, don't underestimate the differences in culture though, it can be very rough there.

There are some drawbacks though...

Can't speak for the rest of the country but a friend just got back from 5 weeks around New Delhi. Said it was five weeks of hell. Unspeakable filth and mess, no real "nice" builtup middle class areas to speak of, just lots of sprawl. YMMV

Delhi can be horrible, as Kolkata can also be. Bangalore is called the 'garden city' but don't get too excited about it. I've been lucky that our development partner is in Mysore which is genuinly a nice town. But yeah, India is in many respects still a third world country.

Oh. CS. If I'm not on iChat, you can email me or shoot me a PM with any Qs you have regarding India/offshoring.

CS:

The tolerance for "undeveloped world conditions" is something that is definitely tolerable for those who know what they are doing and why they are doing. Career, adventure, broadening are all valid reasons. I am talking with my India-born colleagues about your situation right now.

That's a whole lot of Thali specials.

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Hmm. What should I do?

Go!

I would be living and working in Bangalore.

This is where I would live.

That looks very, very nice. Will you be working with Infosys Cloudscout? Their campus in Bangalore is out of this world as well.

No, I'll still be with Accenture working for Best Buy.

What is the impetus for them wanting you to go?

His co-workers don't much like him.

Who does?

We currently have about 20% of our team's resources offshore... two months ago that was only 10%. We are required to have 50% offshore. I've been given the responsibility of planning and implementing the offshore strategy for our team. This is an exceedingly difficult task. The decision makers who passed down this mandate have no idea what it is that our team does. They look at all of these other teams who have successfully balanced their percentages and immediately assume that it's possible for all teams. QED. The thing is, all other teams are single-purpose. It may be a frustrating transition for them but, in the end, a database is a database and you can document its design and operation.

The people on my team have to wear too many hats. We are an integration team. Whereas the database people have their server clusters running Oracle or SQL or whatever... and the web people have their server farms running IE or Apache... etc., we have literally hundreds of applications and services that we need to somehow herd into a limited resource multi-purpose environment. We don't have the luxury of installing individual servers for each application in every store. We get one server per store and we have to figure out how to get everything to work on that single server without the whole house of cards crashing down. At the "desktop" level, we have an even wilder challenge. The corporate desktop people get to cheat. Everybody is an administrator on their own computer. But we can't do that in retail. We have to figure out how to make dozens of applications work properly in various combinations on different machines. Many of these applications aren't designed to work without admin privileges. We also have to make all of this work in over 1500 remote locations in 5 countries (and growing) where we can't always rely on the WAN links being functional.

We have cash registers, workstations, kiosks and handheld devices all running Windows XP. Over 60,000 computers right now with more being added daily. Corporate has less than 1/3 that number and yet we're one of the smallest teams in the organization.

Everybody on my team is brilliant. Seriously. I've worked at a lot of companies in the last 19 years. This group is, by far, the most unbelievably talented band of misfits I've ever run into. Everything we do requires a degree of intuition that only comes from a foundation of sanity-crippling creativity and technical knowledge of immense breadth and depth. We do the impossible and we make it look easy. This is our biggest problem. Our stuff just works.

Our record for success has worked against us. Since we have consistently delivered everything we've been asked to deliver over the years, outsiders believe it must be easy. There's a sort of broken logic at work wherein consistent success doesn't earn respect or recognition for the talent and effort it requires.

So how do I do this? How do I take a system that has been carefully crafted over many years to be as efficient as possible and redesign it? How do you take a high-performance, precision-tuned sports car engine and graft a 2-cycle lawnmower engine onto it and expect it to perform just as well?

I'm not trying to disparage my offshore people. It's not fair to compare them. My team is made up of people with tremendous experience. The lowest level person we have on our team has been in this field for 5 years. Most of the team has over 10 years and some of us are approaching 20 years of experience. The offshore resources I'm given are fresh out of college. They have no practical experience. The people on my team here pretty much all have networks at home that they tinker with. Some of our offshore people don't even have a computer at home. If you'll forgive another automotive analogy, we have a stable of Formula One race cars and now we're supposed to win the same races with Geo Metros.

We've grown accustomed to being asked to do the impossible but this is the biggest challenge for us yet. We can't do it by writing documentation and making "decision trees". In fact, anything that could be distilled in such a manner has already been automated by us. If something is simple enough to be clearly documented, it can usually be scripted so human interaction is no longer required. What's left is the stuff that requires skills and intuition that only come from experience. You can't document intuition so I am going to go out there and work with them to try to teach it instead.

Very well put CS, it describes very well what you are going to run into. As Bill said before; some of these guys are a little wet behnd their ears.

In my experience it's been more than that. Not only are they wet behind their ears, but cultural differences make things incredibly hard. I don't know how things are in the US, but in Europe (or at least in Holland) it's quite easy for the lower echelons to say no to a boss. When something doesn't make sense, it won't get done and they'll tell you why in no uncertain terms. But Indians (as you may have discovered already) will always say yes. To the most insane requirements even. But then you discover they cannot deliver and all hell breaks loose, because you only discover this after the deadline.

You definitely have your work cut out for you, but for the management in your company to think, they are going to save money, it's quite redicilous. But it only takes one major cock up and significant loss of revenue for them to see it.

CS:

Don't take this the wrong way. I respect what you are saying your team has accomplished up to this point. I don't think there is much, if any hyperbole in your description of the talent /dedication of the team you are part of, yet I have to question the sanity of the higher-ups that are MANDATING a certain percentage of LOW WAGE COUNTRY outsourcing.

Now if the organization really thinks that they will be expanding their retail footprint into the out source country it is one thing, but somehow I do not sense this is part of the plan.

Basically, as I see it, the higher ups see a way to "go cheap" and they want that so that they can fatten the profits for a short time and then cash out.

Meanwhile the talented motivated, cost effective team in MN will be demoralized, disbanded and cast aside. Multiply the lost wages by the other firms still pursuing the same foolish strategy and one need not extrapolate too widely to realize their won't be too many people left with wages sufficient to drive to the store with the big yellow price tag and stock up on electronic do dads...

I am not really protectionist, in the "build a trade wall" sense, but I really think the firms that MANDATE moving jobs to LOW WAGE COUNTRIES are out to destroy themselves and their business.


As you said, the success of your team comes from CREATIVITY, practical knowledge that is BOTH broad & deep, as well as INTUITION that comes MOSTLY from years of battle scarred WORK.

In my experience, any effort to TEACH these as 'skills' is DOOMED, as the wet-behind-the-years types that will be around you in the initial off shore knowledge building/ transfer phase will quickly be scooped up by BETTER PAYING firms both LOCAL to the LOW WAGE COUNTRY as well as those that will send this newly enlightened people BACK TO THE USA as H1Bs & L1s, where if they have GUMPTION and a bit of GRIT will quickly realize just how UNDERPAID they were in their homeland. If they really can figure things out they will even do a stateside MBA or MS in some tech field and likley NEVER look back...

It just got more interesting.

I still have a job. I have not been demoted.

As of today, this cannot be said about several other people around here. Eek.