it will be all over when walmart starts spreading like a cancer in europe. by buying their useless crap, gullible consumers will be assimilated. mark my words 🙂 i’m now a sucker for foosball tables.

i came up with an idea what i may do when i come back to switzerland in october.. read on to see my mail i sent to etg (the team i lead at kpmg consulting)
working in thailand has opened my eyes to some things we might consider doing in switzerland.

i lead a team of 4 young thais (all 24) that have finished their it studies. their skill set varies greatly, the best of the bunch is like 3 times more productive than the others. furthermore, while they are all quite dedicated to their work, they need some help in the architecture, structure and organization departments.in other words, they need guidance. providing guidance and technological insight is something where etg is quite strong already, and where etg has a lot of potential for the future. i think you would agree with me that all of us have a far better understanding of technical issues than most consultants. this enables us to leverage in projects like the cs project, with great success.

in an ideal world, every project would be well designed from the onset. there would be specifications, a good architecture,coding standards, reuse of code and patterns, to name but a few.unfortunately, these important goals always come second or third in priority. the first and second priorities are usually cost and time to market (or vice versa). this is why we often get bullied to develop using a quick & dirty approach. this always turns out to be dirty only, but never quicker than with a rational approach.

the crucial question therefore is: how can we achieve goals 1 & 2 without sacrificing the other goals?

first, cost. while we are generally a lot cheaper than consultants, we are not that cheap, either. compared to thailand, where one developer can be had for 40 swiss francs per day, that is. compared to that, typical etg costs would be more like 320+ swiss francs per day (salary & some side costs) and, there is a (for our purposes) basically infinite supply of young thais with the necessary technical background.

second, time to market. having a 13 hour work day, instead of a 8 hour work day, would increase output by 50%. of course, nobody wants to work that long. he would not have to, because we would make use of the time difference between thailand and switzerland (5 hours during summer time, 6 hours during winter time). the 50% figure is way too optimistic, of course, but i made it more to make a point than to be accurate.

i could go on and on for many pages, but i think you’ll grasp the basic idea. outsourcing some work to thailand may do us a lot of good.

of course, to make something like this work, we would need a world-class virtual company. communication flow is crucial. it must be very easy to share work results with our partners in thailand, and there should be instant access to technical knowledge on the other side.

needless to say, we need such an infrastructure anyway to set us apart from old, inefficient, monolithic companies (like kpmg) read www.cluetrain.com for some good laughs on that topic..

what would our role be in such a deal? we would do what we do best, or rather, what we strive to do best:

giving technical advice, coming up with new ideas, creating good architectures. being somewhat relieved from priorities 1 & 2 would make it much easier to create REAL good software. and it would be a lot more interesting, too, because we would automatically source out the boring, repetitive work to our friends in thailand, and focus on adding value for the client.

i am considering switching jobs now that my current employer has again made a large fuss about a non-issue. the place where i work has traditionally been dominated by elderly men with few clues. faced with the growing pace of technological change, they must increasingly feel out of their depth. but instead of going with the flow, they try to stem the tide by trumpeting around with their silly corporate policies. completely blind to the real problems, they would rather escalate a “situation” where one of their employees has gone out of his way to get a job done than hiring qualified people or investing in infrastructure.

i feel sorry for all the employees that i have brought to this company. it looked like we might have a stab at changing things for the better, but maybe that was a naive outlook. quitting now would seriously hamper their efforts to get off the ground, and it would be cowardly to leave now. on the other hand they should start to look for themselves.

so in case you have an interesting job offer talk to me. i might just bite.

this crap prompted me to re-read the cluetrain manifesto. although slightly soapy in style, it never fails to deliver fatal blows to stubborn companies destined to die. here comes:

• Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.
• Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their own market and workforce.
• Command-and-control management styles both derive from and reinforce bureaucracy, power tripping and an overall culture of paranoia.
• To traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down.