OutSource do you need it?

In this text, I will describe the general attributes of Out Source companies based on my experience of interacting with them.

As you know, OutSource companies make money on the difference in the salaries of engineers between the first world (Western European countries, NATO bloc, Japan, Australia, New Zealand), the second world (CIS countries, China) and the third world (all the rest).

In what cases do they use the services of OutSource companies?
1–When in the first world (in the golden billion) there are not enough hands to implement any projects. Some kind of diffusers, construction equipment or car steering rack.

2–When product companies do not want to keep a large staff of employees and decide to get rid of internal social contradictions, such as employees’ demands to improve their rights, pay vacation, maternity, sick leave. Product companies have decided:

And let’s organize hiring through the company’s OutSource. Let OutSource companies take care of their employees. And we (product companies) will buy the result of work from OutSource companies and sell the goods with our markup (and sticker). Let’s cut checks.

It has become much easier for product companies. They can quickly hire only when they are developing and quickly get rid of excess employees during the sales period. This scheme can be called a money pump.

3–In the west, somewhere in the internet valley, a grocery startup has emerged with the dream of creating a product that will be loved all over the world, a startup that wants to “stand on its own feet”. Little investment. You can’t hire local engineers, they are all busy and receive 10…12k USD per month. In such cases, the West resorts to the services of OutSource formations.

4–OutSource gives those projects that product companies in the first world do not want to do. Disdain. Happenes. Something boring, uninteresting. If we talk about the dirty work in electronics programming, then this is

a–fix other people’s bugs in someone else’s Legacy spaghetti code.

d–write documentation on someone else’s Legacy code
b–do all kinds of reverse engineering of protocols, source codes from binary code.
c–write simulators and run on simulators instead of real hardware.
e–write code in assembler (same as eating buckwheat with tweezers)

All these measures are in their purest form. colonial policy!

How does work in OutSource look like from the side of an ordinary employee?
To say right away – nothing good. From the side of an ordinary employee, work in OutSource is in its purest form galley. You have to work very hard and very fast. 2-3 managers will follow you. They will remind you to do your dirty work. They can call at 2 am and remind you to do something.

Total secrecy

Access to corporate information (technical specifications, device circuitry, source codes, protocol specifications, binary package structures, datasheet(s) of microcircuits, description of microcircuit pins) will be given to you strictly according to micro portions. And no one from management is surprised that this is not normal.

For example, a screenshot of a piece of circuitry with 2 LEDs. original the code cannot be copied locally, since it is only going to on remote server. You can edit the code only when connected via SSH via Putty in vim or in a lagging RDP. I pressed the key and after 6 seconds a symbol appeared on the monitor. How amazing! datasheet on the processor too. under a secret. The device itself (printed circuit board, PCB, Target) is similarly connected to remote server across the ocean via JTAG and CAN, so that you do not fussily photograph the markings of their microcircuits. In general, from you there will be in every possible way be protected. And no one from management is surprised that this is not normal.

Do not ask for more than you are entitled to at this particular moment in time. IN out source companies need to solve problems “With minimal immersion”. You have to get used to working in the information vacuum. Literally looking into the tube of a rolled-up sheet with circuitry, you immediately rush to look for a bug in the firmware code. According to the manager (who is a humanist by education), you supposedly have to guess fantasize and on the basis of this, fix what is supposedly considered a bug in the program, even if it is a hardware bug. In general, be prepared for such a circus.

In truth, as they say in the West, it is impossible for a “passionate engineer” to love a product that an organization develops if the engineer does not really know anything about this product due to secrecy. Therefore, product motivation here will not help you in your work. You will have to come up with some kind of non-product motivation. For example hatred for one’s country Or something like that.

second rate

OutSource is total alienation. Employees are treated as temporary and inferior contractors for product companies. As for consumables. The customer in the first world, as a rule, is not satisfied initially, in stress and takes it out on the OutSource (a) employees, who naturally do not feel sorry for the outsorce (a) employees, as they say,

in a different legal field

They won’t even address you by your first name. In all letters, you will be addressed by your click in Telegram, since there are already more than 7 such Ivanov and Aleksandrov there. They will push the engineers around.

There is also such a bad concept as an internal OutSource. It seems to be a building from a food company, but a transparent room (aquarium) has been set up for the employees of the OutSource department inside the open space office of a food company. With workers from the “aquarium” you can do whatever you want. Give them the noisiest and heaviest desktop computer, the smallest mouse (to hold it with three fingers). The oldest monitor from the iconoscope. The most uncomfortable table and chair with torn armrests. By the way, you will be asked to seal the camera lens on your smartphone with special stickers issued at the reception(e). They will give the most boring tasks (fix other people’s bugs). Scold for being late. Get fired for no reason on the same day.

OutSource’s motto is “The economy must be economical”

OutSource companies are also no less cunning, they absorbed the unemployed and also decided to save money. They started working only with individual entrepreneurs (individual entrepreneurs), transferred all their employees to remote work so as not to pay for office rent, electricity, heating, water supply, and so on.

When there is no flow of development orders from the nice first world, then the so-called Bench Time. Employees are paid the minimum wage in the region with the hope that they themselves will quit somewhere. OutSource are non-initiative by nature and always depend on handouts from the masters of the golden billion, just as living organisms depend on the sun.

Moreover, you yourself, as a carcass, are most likely piglets to work remotely. Moreover, even their mother country (USA, European Union) will naturally not be allowed into the country. Again disdain, well, it happens. You will be asked to choose a third world country on the globe, sit there in front of the LapTop (th) and smile.

OutSource company will hire you only on the condition of remote work. And about a roof over your head, electricity, heating, Internet access, cold / hot water, about hard surfaces under your feet, access to the restroom, shelter from wild animals, bomb shelter, silence, lighting, humidity, earthquake resistance of the room, atmospheric pressure, % the oxygen content around you, the ozone layer, the magnetic field and gravity you will have to daily takes care of himself.

At the same time, there is still time to do the main work on the project and, in between times, go to the neighbors in the stairwell in the 24-story human building and ask the neighbors not to drill the wall with a perforator at least today. Moreover, repairs are usually done by workers from Central Asia and they do not understand what you are telling them about working in the OutSourse company in Russian and simply continue to drill further.

Remote work is good only when you live in a detached home for 300k EUR, where all the conditions are there by default.

broken phone

There are a lot of managers inside OutSource. Well, a lot of managers. All of them are usually fellow countrymen. From one district or one school. All these managers basically, attention, humanities! Even technical interviews can only be conducted according to the training manual (by the way, such moments are immediately visible to engineers). From the point of view of a development engineer, it is not really clear inside who is more important: a customer from (Germany, USA, Sweden), what pays money or a manager inside OutSource (a), who cannot even properly formulate a problem statement? A humanitarian manager can operate with such expressions as: “attach wires”, “make friends with the boards”, “revive the board”. Take it how you want. It turns out that managers in OutSource are, as it were, an extra link, which at any moment turns into broken phone.

No means of production

In OutSource companies there is no production base (means of production). According to their ideology, they sell man-hours, where do they get factories from? It’s not even a problem for website development. The problem starts when OutSource venture into Hi-Tech areas, such as electronics, machine parts, car engines. It turns out that the engineer in OutSource does not have the opportunity to transfer the microcircuit to the PCB (there is no soldering station). There is no possibility to make a prototype from plexiglass (there is no drilling, turning, milling machine and 3D printer). No oscilloscope to measure the electrical signal, no logic analyzer, no radio spectrum analyzer, no vector antenna analyzer, no digital power supply, no DMM, not even, corny, the ability to stupidly expose wires (except for teeth, of course) to supply power to the PCB And so on.

Naturally, ordinary employees, engineers, of course, do not like this whole circus with horses. They can’t even fall in love with the product they develop at OutSource because almost all the documentation is kept secret and their hands are effectively tied. And if you don’t love the product, then you won’t make it with high quality, with enthusiasm, with dedication. That’s just how human psychology works. It is possible to work in such conditions only “under duress”.

Therefore, inside the OutSource there is a constant and continuous staff turnover. Another layer of outsource managers is being created who are only busy with hiring, cold calls. Their recruiters are desperately the first to write to engineers on job sites, persuade them to accept a job offer three times, and so on.

Numerous OutSource managers get paid for a (sometimes broken) phone feature. As a result, talented engineers themselves earn less there, since now part of the salary they received in the product company has gone to outsource managers.

Lots of reporting

In OutSource, you have to report for every day. I have nothing against reporting. But when you are required to report in writing for each day with a discretization of 5 … 20 minutes of time, then this becomes annoying. And compiling such daily reports takes about an hour. But this time can be invested in product development.

The fact is that gentlemen from the first world love to sue their employees from OutSource. Give them a reason, and they will immediately sue you for misappropriation of funds.

Therefore, if you write little in the daily report, then you will receive a lawsuit in the mail.

What’s so good about OutSource anyway?
This is a great opportunity to get a job for a manager with a liberal arts education and knowledge of a couple of languages. For crossover people who don’t want to do anything but talk on the phone and attend meetings.

The West is also very, very profitable. It is enough for the State Department to shake another Eastern European country, as a mess, unrest, crisis, collapse of the domestic market will begin there, and thousands of ready-trained engineers will be forced to get jobs in Western OutSource (s) on these galleys.

Conclusion

If you are an engineer, programmer, circuit engineer, designer, and if possible, then it is better not to get involved with all sorts of out-source formations. By agreeing to OutSourсe, you sign an agreement for second-rate. The prosperity of the West is largely determined at the expense of other countries.

Of course, I understand that everything happens in life.

You never know in advance where lightning will strike and from which well you will have to drink.

For some, working as an engineer at OutSource may seem like a salvation.

In general, make the right choice.

Links

https://habr.com/en/post/551728/

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