On rare occasions it is a pleasure to be part of this big beautiful industry known as IT. Granted the pleasure no longer comes from the work, given the newer tools really suck and management is all gaga over having systems written with them not because they are good, but because they can get cheap labor, or so they think.

The past couple of weeks have been part of the new pleasure you get from working in IT. I was contacted by a pimp looking to send me to one of the south western states to do some OpenVMS development on a system I had worked on years ago. “Why?” I asked. “They had contracted with one of the largest computer companies on the planet to have a replacement system written in Java on AIX which would completely replace the OpenVMS system. That large computer company had given the project to their off-shore team so it was going to cost peanuts. I know this because I was told that four years ago when they were looking for someone to shepherd the OpenVMS system to the grave.”

“Well” responded the pimp, “I don’t have all of the details, I only know that the Java/AIX system is no longer being worked on.”

Where are the stories in the press about off-shore project failures of this magnitude? If the trade press really employed journalists instead of paid typists for that marketing firm called Gartner, we would be reading about these failures. This phone call was not unique. I’ve been getting quite a few of them lately. Of course a lot of them come with a contract looking to pay illegal alien wages rather than U.S. citizen wages (see previous posts), but still, we should be seeing stories like this in the free weekly trade rags. Their biggest advertising clients are off-shoring projects which are dramatic, large scale failures, and we read nothing about it.

Oh! That’s right! They would never stoop to printing the truth about their advertisers.