[rtperson]

I have had personal involvement in one outsourcing horror story, the details of which I'm not at liberty to discuss. Suffice it to say that, while what happened at Sapphire is extreme, it's hardly unique.

But let's correctly name the problem here: simple management incompetence. The managers at Sapphire, no doubt feeling bewildered by all this computer-techy stuff, decided to send all their source code and the entire management of their servers to a faraway place. A place where tech problems magically go away on their own. A place where code writes itself, where productivity is doubled for half the cost.

No company, be it in the US, Canada, Europe, China, India, or Madagascar, can afford to think this way any more. Managers can no longer pay someone else to understand technology for them. We are all technical managers now.