When Outsourcing Meets Reality

Photo by Catherine Heath @catherineheath on Unsplash

My company laid off a bunch of staff, and while I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me, I do think it’s rather sad. But what really knocked me sideways wasn’t the layoffs themselves, which I really saw coming over the hill.

No, what really got me was the complete lack of foresight about the blindingly obvious. We were replaced by Tata staff in India, and nobody seems to have given any thought towhich time zone they might be in.

It seems like a frightening mistake, albeit one that I won’t feel the impact from.

Where Are We Now?

During our planning meeting about the handover (“and we hope leaving staff will be professional when handing over their work to our new partners”) on switched-on employee asked a pertinent question.

The asked whether the new partners would be working Indian time (IST) or onshore time. Since that little detail affects minor things like literally everything about communication, handoffs, and collaboration.

The head of engineering’s response shocked me. “That would have been agreed in the contract. We will find it out”.

Oh. We will find it out. Like some kind of Scooby-Doo mystery.

You Mean Nobody Checked This?

Let Me Imagine…

I can just picture it now. A team of execs sitting around a fancy conference table, high-fiving each other about all the “cost savings” they’ve just unlocked by shipping our jobs offshore. Meanwhile, nobody thinks to ask (because they don’t actually do any of the work)

Hey, will the new team be online when we need them?

This is the kind of thing you’d expect to be the first question when outsourcing. I don’t know, maybe somewhere in between “how much will this cost?” and “what services will be covered?” 

But no. 

They’ll just discover the answer when our production issues sit unresolved overnight because everyone’s asleep.

How Do These People Get Promoted?

Seriously, what is the criteria for getting ahead in corporate tech? Because clearly, it’s not competence. If it were, the answer to this question would have been filtered down to all levels, as it’s an operational requirement to be able to contact your colleagues, right?

But no, instead, we’ve got leadership acting like time zones are some esoteric, unknowable force.

These people are like dark matter or the true meaning of “enterprise blockchain strategy”, invisible and unpredictable. Which is almost certainly how they have been promoted up to their level of incompetence.

The Fun That Awaits Us

So, what’s going to happen? 

In one scenario, the contract was signed by leadership and those poor people in India are working some really unsociable hours.

Or best-case scenario is everybody works on their own time and can be efficient since they aren’t exhausted and expectations are adjusted accordingly. 

Because we should want developers, wherever they are based, to be treated humanely and not attempt to find a difficult-to-find bug at 3AM.

What worries me is the inevitable performance reviews after these changes where management will be shocked that productivity took a nosedive and will want answers quickly.

Couldn’t Have Happened to a Better Company

Look, I’ve been in tech long enough to know that layoffs are inevitable. I also know that outsourcing can work, but only if you actually think about the logistics before pulling the trigger.

In this place they’re a kind of corporate disaster zone where decisions are made without the most basic understanding of the implications they will face. As usual it’s the remaining employees who will have to scramble to make it work, and I should thank my lucky stars that I’m not one of them.

Instead, we’re stuck in this delightful corporate limbo where a decision has been made without understanding its most basic implications. And now, as usual, software developers have to pick up the pieces.

I can already hear the next all-hands meeting:

“We need to be flexible as we transition to this new model”

Lolz.

Conclusion

I don’t know why I’m still thinking about any of this. I’m not the one who has to deal with the fallout. I’m packing up my laptop as I type.