Can you name any good programs that have come out of India? Because every occasion I know of when work has been sent there has been a disaster.
Well, I'll tell you about a failure instead of a success.
There was this project in which I was the Senior Consultant/Technical Architect, implementing a certain Supply Chain planning software, and there was a huge amount of data integration involved. Now, the sales team (Americans, all) had promised the moon to get the contract, so when I actually sat down with the client, I was horrified with the client's expectations, both in terms of work and timeline. I (and the Project Manager, both of us Indians) started convincing and negotiating the timeline and scope with the client. The client was naturally pissed and we had to take a lot of shit from them during the discussions. The issue was escalated to senior management (Americans again), and we received instructions from them to 'find a middle path' since we couldn't 'afford to lose this client'. In the end, we ended up with requirements that involved just too much customization to the pre-existing product (and a very aggressive timeline too).
Now, when we began building the team, pressure was put on us by some members of senior management (Americans, btw) to keep the number of billable resources to a minimum so that we wouldn't exceed our budget. We got together 10 resources (much less that what I'd have liked), out of which 3 were crap (But hey, that's bound to happen in any project, anywhere). I started asking the client for access to a dump of their data, or at least a subset of it. Now, their data maintenance was outsourced to a third company, and with all the bloody bureaucracy there ('Data security issues', interdepartmental protocol, and so on), it was 3 weeks before we started to get some data. Realize that I had returned to Bangalore now after taking all the shit from the client during the requirement discussions, and was building the technical team and kick-starting the project offshore. So all conversation with the customer was telephonic, not to mention the timezone issues. We had an 'on site coordinator' (American btw), but though he was technically good, he wasn't efficient in getting things done, pushing the client for data, and so on.
When we actually got the data, we found that the code we had written so far (remember, we were working blind all this while, with only the 'documents' to guide us) needed significant changes. And they never gave us a complete consistent dataset - it was all trickling in one by one, and extracted at different points in time. So we got data for salesorders which referred to certain items, while the items dataset had none of those items! Lot of such inconsistencies made life hell for us, and our database.
I won't ramble on and describe all the other shit that we had to face on that project, but the end result was an over-budget, delayed project. Which was implemented in the end, but only after the 'Indian offshore team' was blamed for all the ills of the world. As far as I know, the client is still using the product and is happy with it now - their retarded end users have got a good feel of the product by now, I suppose. But who got blamed for no fault of theirs? The Indians. Who worked their asses out to successfully finish the task inspite of being fucked from all directions? The Indians. And who gets blamed and vilified in the end? Yep, the Indians!
I have heard (and seen) similar things in several (not all) projects.
Best bang for the buck: Nuke Iran.
Nope. Carpet bomb Pakistan. They're biting America hard in the ass - taking billions of dollars in aid on the one hand and cultivating the Taliban on the other. Afghanistan can be won only if the Pakis are given a hard kick on their backside.
What is algebra, exactly? Is it one of those three-cornered things? -- J.M. Barrie