Ever since the customer support phone numbers everywhere have started to be answered by “Dick” and “Jane” speaking proper yet incomprehensible english, the issue of outsourcing has kept the blogsphere abuzz.

For a typical programmer, outsourcing simply means that his/her company can now employ someone with similar skills and ability for something like 7 times cheaper as long as that someone resides in Bangalore.

The screams of hundreds of thousands programmers being pinkslipped created a great disturbance in the force. And while brave consultants still have no problem finding new gigs, their rates went down by as much as $15/hour (or so some claimed).

The interesting thing about outsourcing is the deep misunderstanding on the subject why this is such a good thing to have. If you think outsourcing is good because you spend less per programmer’s hour, you don’t know the meat of the story. If you participate in real-life outsourcing projects, the realization comes quickly that there is more to it than price of Chicken Kiev in Kiev.

First of all, the benefits of hiring programmers for peanuts are greatly exaggerated. For a typical US company, the real issues impacting a project are almost always completely clouded by vendor-induced tool histeria and local political backstabbing. Getting project out of the gate is like 6% coding and 90% getting people across the hall to communicate and act for the greater good. Moving those people across the ocean somehow does not help.

The real benefit of outsourcing is even simpler than paying Indian wages for (supposingly) equal talent. Let’s assume that it is true (and it definitely seems so) that 80% of all the software projects fail. Let’s also assume that you as a savvy manager got 40% of your work outsourced and are claiming that the outsourced work cost you only one/forth of what the onshore work does. It means that 32% of your team’s workload is garanteed to fail AND it costs four times less!

And if it is to fail no matter what, paying less suddenly starts making sense. The communication, legal and other barriers that are often named as the reasons for unsuccessful outsourcing efforts do not matter for a project that is going to fail anyway.

And if by any stroke of luck, you, the manager, managed to direct more “failable” projects to India and kept more promising “real” ones here, all the sudden you are the hero.

And this is why outsourcing is good for management no matter what – it is the art of outsourcing of that IT black hole that sucks out the 80% of the efforts and fails anyway.