One of the perennial problems in IT is getting staff who are skilled in the work they’re supposed to do. Since outsourcing has gained momentum, this problem has become worse because, quite simply and in my opinion, the quality of IT engineering graduates from India (and I name them because they’re the biggest outsourcing country) has been sub-standard, to say the least. I may be stating this quite baldly, but I’m not the only one saying such things.

As a regular reader of UK IT online paper, The Register, I often come across comments along the lines of US engineering graduates being quite good, with a few failures, while Indian engineering graduates are quite mediocre, with a few standouts. I also remember reading comments from one poster saying that, after his UK technical team had interviewed and rejected all the technical staff handling an outsourced project in India, future interviews followed two paths: (a) a third person would be present and the phone (now in speakerphone mode) would be muted after each question was asked; after a long pause, the phone would be unmuted and the interviewee would then answer the question correctly; and (b) the technical team was forced to hand over the interview questions, after which all future interviewees recited identical answers to every one of those questions, as if perhaps reading from a sheet of paper.

I find the lack of subtlety inherent in these two scenarios to be both blackly hilarious and mundanely characteristic, even if I do sympathise with the UK interviewer and his team. And, in case anyone’s interested, I find UK and European engineers (that is, engineers who have graduated from UK/European institutions) to be the best I’ve ever worked with — professional, courteous, dedicated. It’s always a joy to mull over a problem with them.

Because I’m in the IT world, I tend to get caught up in the myopia that all things bad only happen in IT-World. I forget that there are other professions that also have to put up with the bane of outsourcing. And so it’s timely that Jeremy Scahill reminds me of it once more. The title of his article is “KBR Was Paid $83 Million in Bonuses for Work That Electrocuted US Soldiers” and you can find it here. I won’t go through all the details, but here’s what caught my attention:

Eric Peters, a Master Electrician who worked for KBR in Iraq as recently as 2009 said that 50% of the KBR managed buildings he saw were not properly wired …. [Peters]  estimated that at least half of the electricians hired by KBR –many of them cheaper-costing Third Country Nationals … would not have been hired to work in the US. … [Workers] from countries such as India, Bangladesh and Bosnia — are estimated to do some 60% of the electrical work for KBR in Iraq. Peters charged that KBR allowed trainees to take notes in to certification tests, making it very easy to be cleared for work [my emphasis --ed.].

Imagine this. You’re driving along an unknown track of a road. And you stop someone to ask about the conditions ahead, and they tell you that the conditions ahead are great, the road is dry and it widens out before too long. Cheered, you continue along your way, only to discover, two hundred metres further along, that your car is now mired to its axles in sticky mud and your cellphone is out of service range. You’re sitting on a clump of damp grass, your legs covered with caking mud, wondering what the hell you’re going to do, when you spy another car coming around the corner. Before you have a chance to do, or say, anything, the second car bogs itself the exact same way you have. And your first reaction, because nothing else seems adequate, is to laugh.

That’s how I feel right now.