Outsourcing: I Hate The Term

If everybody (no pun intended) goes online to work, what difference does it make as to where their body is!

Algorithmic Management

This is not an example of the machine taking over the human. It only makes management sense to let algorithms do what they do better.

Machines manage people to do work machines can not do. That is a tongue twister, if you ask me.

Human Workers, Managed by an Algorithm

the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts. .... The best-known crowd marketplace is Mechanical Turk, which Amazon launched in 2005. ..... Turkers, who are based mostly in the United States, make only $1 or $2 per hour. ..... 41 percent of all jobs posted to Mechanical Turk were for generating spam, generating clicks on ads, or influencing search engine results ..... Consider inDinero, a three-year-old San Francisco Web startup whose software helps small businesses track their finances. Businesses can e-mail or upload scanned receipts (including handwritten ones) that then need to get logged—so inDinero sends the images to MobileWorks, which in turn farms them out to workers in India or the Philippines, who transcribe the receipt amounts into online forms.

Outsourcing Software Development To India

"Talking to you about software is like talking to the Maoists of Nepal about politics. They have a script they will read out of, and they will keep repeating themselves until either you give up or you give in. There is no conversation."
- An email I sent recently to someone in India

It can be done, it is a good idea, but there is no magic bullet. You have to know what you are getting into. If you attitude is, build me the best travel site in the world, and I have 5,000 dollars, and see you in two months, you are starting on the wrong foot. Your dreams will be dashed.