[nylug-talk] Why does "enterprise" imply "Java"?

[Paul Robbins]

Michael,
I think Java is just what's hot now (and perl, ruby, etc are moving that
way).  IT management is still at a point where most of them are
accounting/business majors in school and they get into IT as a path to
promotion (not always the case, but it is common).  If the "Enterprise IT"
magazines are all saying Java, then that is what they think is important.
We are currently in the middle of a huge issue where my company outsourced a
large project to an offshore team because in the project bid, they presented
very "pretty" GUI interfaces with Java.  Howerver, now that they are
developing the product, they are trying to do all of the background
processing in Java (and very poorly written Java at that).  It has gotten so
bad that they are talking about pulling me or one of my co-workers off the
projects we are currently working on to go in behind the offshore team and
re-write all of the background jobs.  I am privy to the contract of the
offshore team and I know that I make about twice what they are paying the
offshore guys.  But if it means that myself or a co-worker has to go in
behind a team of 3-4 offshore programmers to fix the problems, I don't think
the company is really saving money.

The offshore team keeps screaming that they need faster hardware and that
they are limited by resources. On the other hand, I am screaming that they
servers are lightyears ahead of the boxes I get to develop on and I have no
problem accomplishing all of the tasks I need. The issue is effecient code
and undestanding the business objectives, which I do not believe they do.

[ Disclaimer: I am not saying that ALL offshoring/outsourcing causes this
type of problem nor that I am for/against offshoring/outsourcing.  This is
one person's individual evaluation of one software team's production.  I am
not in any way trying to instigate a flamewar. If I wanted to do that, I
would talk about Ubuntu. ]

~Paul

On 7/5/06, Michael Bacarella <mbac at netgraft.com> wrote:
>
> Management believes that they can buy pricey enterprise software,
> pricey hardware (either one big one or lots of little ones) and save
> money by putting a team of inexpensive programmers that have Java in
> their resumes to work to build infrastructure.  All you need is one
> King David and a generic army to carry out the orders, or something.
>
> But...
>
> Information technology is perhaps unique in the peculiar fact that
> one developer can literally be 10-100x as productive as the next
> developer,
> but only cost 2-3x as much.
>
> Given this, is there still a good business case for deploying the
> enterprise
> solution with its team of OK programmers versus hiring, say, 2 scruffy
> programmers that can build the same system at a fraction of the cost?
>
> Even if you add in costs of trying to find replacements for the cream of
> the crop talent, you're still saving a lot on hardware and licensing
> fees.
>
> But the debate never seems to even come up: Enterprise Java wins the
> argument
> before it starts.  Why?  If the answer is that in the end, it still saves
> money,
> I can live with that.  But if there is no good answer, it spells
> opportunity.
>
> --
> Michael Bacarella <mbac at netgraft.com>
>
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