This Space for Rent

How outsourcing works

The American company wants to save money, so they look around for the cheapest possible outsourcing company in the Far East. Then the American company tells their el-cheapo-outsource company to do some work which it doesn't have the technical expertise to do. Rather than admit they don't have the skills to do it, the employees of the outsourcing company dig around on the net and send email to American programmers asking for help with their project.

I'm not making this up:

X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.6603.0
Subject: Needed ur help in writing a Tcl script
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 20:33:48 +0530
From: <***@wipro.com>
To: <orc@pgll.pgrtland.or.us>

   Hi  David

   I needed ur help in writing a tcl script. I found ur mail id on google
   groups.

   I tried downloading a file from a location (The url address is quite
   long), but failed. This is the
   code I tried. Could you please tell me where I have gone wrong. I have
   installed Tcl 8.4.7.0 on Windows2000.


If I were a recently outsourced programmer, I'd be really pissed off at this. As it is, I'll just save it, and if my corporate masters ever start talking about outsourcing me, I'll simply forward this email to them without comment.