Exactly, the correct comparison should be "technical analysis" in stock markets, which can be applied to any stock you like with the same level of (un)success.

Without an underlying theory of how things work, which also needs to be somewhat correct, trying to predict future trends simply by using past data is just dumb curve fitting - with a curve of enough degrees of freedom, you can fit any data, but that doesn't mean its prediction would be any better than random guess.

You mean, like providing education, health care, law enforcement, etc to the people, so the "workforce" don't have to pay for private teachers, medicine, or private guards? Or infrastructures like roads, mass transit trains, electricity, clean water, broadband internet, etc, so the workforce don't have to live near the company, buy electric generators, etc? Or lower tax rate, which is effectively higher pay?

Where do you draw the line?

If companies stop at that, I think most people would be fine with it.

But with the endless chase for ever MORE PROFIT, it is not enough for an employee to generate enough value to offset their own cost + profit, they have to generate more value than their hypothetical offshore counterpart.

So if you cost $100 and generate $120 value, but the other guy in India cost $20 and generated only $25, well, the company can hire 5 India guy to generate $125 for the same cost of $100, so bye bye to your job.

YOU would think that the guy in India is crap, producing only $25 value, less than a quarter of yours, but you are in fact competing with 5 of them, which combined to give more value to the company than you could!

THIS is the reason offshoring will never give you good results, NOT because of some inherent incompetence of the people in the other country, but because the company is unwilling to pay for good talent!

I have seen this mentality more than I cared to - "offshoring is to cut cost, so we can't pay enough for qualified people!"

I mean, this is CRAZY. All businesses complained about the difficulty in finding talent. Considering that the USA (for example), is only about 5% of world's population, while India and China combined have like 40%, even if the portion of qualified people in those 2 countries are just 1/10 compared to the US, it would mean, but raw numbers, there are almost (80%) just as many qualified people there as in the US!

But of course, being talented as they are (and 10x as rare in their country compared to as in the US), they would command a higher pay relative to their countries average worker, but that "higher" pay would still be significantly LESS than what the same qualified staff in US would be taking.

It would still be a win-win situation, to have a bigger talent pool, just as highly qualified staff, etc, etc. But NO, offshore is a LOW COST resource pool, we CAN'T pay anyone that much more than the average salary! Yeah, the insanity of HR everywhere, we pay the average salary but want the top-tiered employees, and only those with passion, too!

So, essentially the same TEXT in audio format? Doesn't that simply proved the point that the TEXT is already the, conceivably, most concise and precise representation of your idea?

And yes, I have used and taught other people to use webMethods in the past, over 10 years ago when it was still "new".

It might be "successful" in the sense that the company is financially successful. But "successful" in the sense it lets you program better than text? Only if you consider taking 5-10 times as long write the same logic compared to writing plain text in Java as "better". Good luck trying to debug a program from its visual representation.

People who learned webMethods before learning Java have trouble understanding basic concepts as exception handling, and have even more trouble with OO concepts such as polymorphism, or even basic Objects, as they cannot see the objects in the visual representation of the logic flow.

THIS. The same reason why picture books only works for story for pre-school kids.

When the thought one wish to express reaches a certain level of complexity, it went beyond what a 2D image can express.

Ok, I suppose you also "get" English writing. How about, as an exercise, show us a "better" visual depiction of your own post above without using text?

Or how about the OP posting his question visually using a picture?

Can't do that? Perhaps text IS a very good way to express thought and logic? Good luck on your search for something "better" (whatever that means), the past 2 decades have already been littered with numerous carcasses of "visual programmer" tools that can't do the job.

This was also my first thought when reading the summary. His question already proved that he doesn't "get code" at all. \