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<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 2113 -- 7/25/2010 >>>>>

A China-based outsourcing company called Bleum requires that all job
applicants for computer science positions have a minimum IQ of 140. Bleum
recently announced that it will hire Americans who are willing to move to
China -- but, according to Bleum, it couldn’t find enough Americans that
met its minimum requirements for intelligence. Bleum decided to lower its
minimum IQ to 125 to compensate for the weak talent pool in the United
States:

An IQ test is the first screen for any US or Chinese applicant.

"The lower IQ threshold for new US graduates reflects the fact that the
pool of US talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of
Chinese talent, Bleum said."

Chinese outsourcer seeks U.S. workers with IQ of 125 and up, by Patrick
Thibodeau, Computerworld, July 7, 2010 [story and link below]

So the Chinese are going to give Americans a break on IQ because of the
smaller talent pool in the U.S. At least they understand our standards of
Political Correctness well enough to know that it would be politically
incorrect to say that Americans, on average, are not as smart as the
Chinese.

Bleum claims that it normally only hires geniuses that would represent the
99.6 percentile of the American population. (Chinese IQ is supposed to be
higher than American on average, but the tails of their IQ Bell Curve may
be smaller -- i.e. fewer geniuses. I haven’t been able to find good
numbers on how it nets out.)

To put it another way, only 0.4% of the population would have the
opportunity to apply for a job at this company -- the "crème de la
crème"! Or maybe we should say the "soya of the soy milks".

In case you have never heard of Bleum, click this link to find out more:
http://www.bleum.com/company/about-bleum.shtml
About Bleum. (Note: it now says it accepts people with IQs above 130!)

I’m not an expert on IQ like Steve Sailer. But thanks his ample research
on IQ I am probably in the 99th percentile of the population when it comes
to understanding what IQ tests mean!

http://isteve.blogspot.com/
Sailer Blog

So let me share a few thoughts on the issue.

The Chinese are obviously using the IQ scale developed by Lewis Terman in
1916 that rates these IQs as follows:

* Over 140 - Genius or near genius
* 120 - 140 - Very superior intelligence

In order to get a grip on what kind of people numbers we are talking about,
China has a population of approximately 1.3 billion. Therefore, the 99.6
percentile would be about 5 million people (assuming a distribution similar
to whites -- it could be higher).

To put this in perspective: according to the BLS the United States has
about 1.3 million workers in computer software engineering and programming
-- which means the Chinese could in theory replace the entire U.S.
computer profession almost four times over if IQ was used to screen job
applicants.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm
BLS statistics on CS occupations

Fortunately for the U.S., not all Chinese geniuses are computer science
graduates -- some of them are probably still using water buffalos to farm
rice. But this threat to the U.S. is very real, especially considering that
India probably has an even larger population.

IQ is a crude way to predict performance in computer science, or most other
professions, because there are many factors that go into a successful
career besides cognitive abilities. On the other hand, the U.S. military
has proven that IQ has a direct correlation with performance.

Without question, there must be a minimum IQ that computer programmers need
in order to function in a modern workplace environment. But judging by the
wide range of IQs for CS professionals (see this table: Modern IQ ranges
for various occupations, (Based on a University of Wisconsin
study[PDF])programmers have a wide variability of IQ scores that range from
about 100-125.

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx

I have personally known computer programmers that would probably test
fairly low on many IQ tests, because many of their skills such as reading,
writing or math are substandard. But they were whiz kids once they are
behind the keyboard -- hence the term "geek" (Contrary to popular opinion
computer programming usually requires very little math). As Steve Sailer
explained, alchemists can’t change lead into gold, but lead is useful
anyway.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/080504_alchemists.htm
Alchemists Can’t Turn Lead Into Gold, Educrats Can’t Eliminate IQ. (But
Lead Is Useful Anyway)

Could it be that people can be too smart for computer jobs? I don’t have
enough evidence to judge that scientifically, but the case of Bleum
suggests an answer of "yes" to that question -- because although it only
hires above 140 IQ, it isn’t exactly the envy of the world. It has used
the 140 IQ screen for at least five years, so there’s been time to prove
this approach. It hasn’t translated into greatness yet. I’ll bet most
readers have never heard of Bleum.

Of course, Bleum’s problem could be that the only geniuses in the company
are the programmers -- not the marketers!

Basing employment on IQ isn’t very fashionable in the United States. It
tends to be considered inherently racist because the large average IQ
between different races [America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve] and
is arguably illegal after the disastrous Griggs vs.Duke Power decision.

America and the Left Half of the Bell Curve
http://vdare.com/sailer/iq.htm

Bleum doesn’t disclose how it chose an IQ minimum of 125 for Americans.
But I suppose that, hypothetically, it could be motivated by a preference
for racial groups like whites or Asians who consistently score higher in IQ
tests. Or it might be that IQ tests are a valuable tool that the Chinese
get to use and we don’t because there are no easily-offended minorities
in China -- further proof that diversity is not strength.

There are many questions that could be raised by Bleum’s IQ tests. So let
me tackle an obvious one: Why would a genius work for Bleum?

According to Dr. Norm Matloff, the 90th percentile of wages earned by
American workers in the computer field is about $109,170. [On the Need for
Reform of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Work Visa in Computer-Related Occupations,
University Of Michigan Journal Of Law Reform. Fall 2003]
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/MichJLawReform.pdf

Coincidentally, the 90th percentile mentioned by Matloff correlates roughly
to the 125 IQ that Bleum set for American workers. The 90th percentile
isn’t genius level, so we would expect people with higher IQs to make
even more.

Considering that geniuses should easily be able to make six figure salaries
in the U.S, which job would a genius be likely to choose -- a job in the
U.S. or one in China working for Bleum?

In my opinion the answer is obvious to anyone who reads this quote from
Eric Rongley, the American-born founder and CEO of Bleum:

"In fact, according to Bleum’s Mr. Rongley, getting the best in
China won’t be as economical as people expect it to be. ‘Most
companies hire the cheapest resource. I hire the best resource.
If you want a company of superstars, you can’t pay them $3
(per hour) for a project manager or 50 cents for an engineer.
Yes, sometimes they manage to get code developed for crazy low
prices. They have interns working on their projects.’
[SPECIAL REPORT: Outsourcing to China, by Jacqueline Zhang,
Sourcingmag.com, August 2, 2005] [see below for link]

Fifty cents an hour?

And, while Bleum may pay more, it doesn’t seem very eager to advertise
its salaries either. There are lots of job openings listed on the career
page at Bleum, but salaries are conspicuously missing.

One final note: According to Computerworld and numerous other webzine
articles there were five Americans who got jobs at Bleum. Almost all
mention of the five American geniuses stopped about July 8th.

Since then I have spent hours searching the internet to find out find out
who the lucky Americans are that are moving to Shanghai for the honor or
working at Bleum.

It would seem to reason that there would be at least a little fanfare about
their identities. But so far I haven’t found a single picture or any
other clue as to who they are.

Why is there such great silence about the lucky winners?

web version:
http://www.vdare.com/sanchez/100722_china.htm

ARTICLES:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178913/Chinese_outsourcer_seeks_U.S.
_workers_with_IQ_of_125_and_up
Chinese outsourcer seeks U.S. workers with IQ of 125 and up
Bleum Inc. sets IQ threshold at 140 for its hires in China, however

http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/c050802a.asp
SPECIAL REPORT: Outsourcing to China, Part 1

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178913/Chinese_outsourcer_seeks_U.S.
_workers_with_IQ_of_125_and_up

Chinese outsourcer seeks U.S. workers with IQ of 125 and up
Bleum Inc. sets IQ threshold at 140 for its hires in China, however
Patrick Thibodeau

July 7, 2010 (Computerworld)

A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new U.S. computer
science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates
to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out
job applicants.

In doing so, Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to
college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an
IQ of 140 on the company's test.

An IQ test is the first screen for any U.S. or Chinese applicant.

The lower IQ threshold for new U.S. graduates reflects the fact that the
pool of U.S. talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of
Chinese talent, Bleum said.

In China, Bleum receives thousands of applications weekly, said CEO Eric
Rongley. Rongley is a U.S. citizen who founded Bleum in 2001; his career
prior to that included stints working in offshore development in India and
later in China.

The company employs about 1,000 and hires about 1% or less of the people
who apply for jobs there. "It is much harder to get into Bleum than it is
to Harvard," Rongly said.

Shanghai-based Bleum has been recruiting new computer engineering graduates
in the Atlanta, Chicago and Denver areas. If a student meets the minimum
requirement on an IQ test, he then take a skills test, similar to the
hiring process Bleum follows in China.

Bleum has already hired its first U.S. recruits -- a group of five people
who left for Shanghai this month, said Rongley. They will work in China for
year and then return to the U.S. to work.

Many employers do measure intelligence to cull candidates from pools of
applicants, but they typically call the exams aptitude tests, said Dennis
Garlick, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los
Angeles, and author of an upcoming book called Intelligence and the Brain.

An IQ of 140 is extremely high, representing about the top 1% of the
population, said Garlick. But he said that even though some studies have
shown a correlation between IQ and job performance, IQ is a "crude
assessment tool" when it comes to sorting out job applicants.

IQ tests tend be inaccurate at the upper end of the scale as the questions
become more complex and it becomes "debatable what is a correct answer," he
said.

IQ is also an indirect measure of job performance; a high IQ doesn't
necessarily mean a worker will achieve a certain level in job performance,
"because an IQ test measures abstract reasoning in a general context, and
on-the-job performance requires abstract reasoning in a specific context,"
said Garlick.

But for a person who does score high on an IQ test, "you can reasonably say
that the person is likely to be able to understand typical abstract
concepts as they are applied in business, understand instructions, follow
them, and then generalize them in a new situation," said Garlick.

Mark Finocchario, national director for recruiting at the Eliassen Group,
said that his IT staffing and recruiting firm in Wakefield, Mass.,
administers technical skill tests, but not IQ tests, for some clients. The
importance of the skill tests varies depending on the client. Most clients
view the skill tests as academic and rely mostly his firm's assessment of a
candidate's experience. "Experience is huge," he said.

For its own employees, Eliassen uses what it calls an EQ test, which
measures how an employee may operate in a stressful environment, as well as
their sense of social responsibility to the team, said Finocchario. The EQ
test "provides a measuring stick on how someone will adjust," he said.

Rongley believes that higher-IQ IT workers are more productive. "The point
is not that they are typing faster, but they are finding a faster solution
to the technical problem," said Rongley.

Moreover, unlike many of the larger IT offshore development companies,
Bleum is focused on long-term engagements with its clients, not on one-time
projects. Over time, it hopes to hire 100 to 500 U.S. workers to help
support North American customers.

China's technology labor force is largely young; the massive government
ramp-up in science and engineering education is a recent development, and
the labor force doesn't yet have a broad pool of people with deep
experience in technical disciplines. By seeking high-IQ employees, "we're
compensating for the experience gap," said Rongley.

He also said said that the number of students seeking computer science
degrees, which has dipped in the U.S., is on the rise in China.

"China has a much larger talent pool than India does, and it has much less
demand for that talent," said Rongley, who added that the number of new
computer science graduates each year is about 300,000.

India dominates the offshore outsourcing industry, helped by the fact that
it has a large English-speaking population. The largest Indian IT vendors
have in excess of 100,000 employees.

The impact of China's larger talent pool may be evident in an international
coding contest conducted annually by TopCoder Inc., a Glastonbury,
Conn.-based software development service.

Last year, about 4,200 people took part in this coding competition, which
includes events such as algorithm-writing contests. Of the 70 finalists, 20
were from China, 10 from Russia and two from the U.S. The top winner was
Chinese. The contest is sponsored in part by the National Security Agency.

Bleum has a policy of requiring its employees to speak English, and many of
its hires have already been through English-language programs widely taught
in the schools. The company uses a system of levels for marking capability
with English, with the highest level reserved for those who achieve accent
neutralization, said Rongley.

"In China, for a long time now, anyone from eighth grade and above is being
taught English," said Rongley. However, what those students don't have is
an opportunity to practice, he noted, adding, "We create the environment
for them to practice all the time."

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.sourcingmag.com/content/c050802a.asp

SPECIAL REPORT: Outsourcing to China, Part 1

By Jacqueline Zhang

According to some reports, China is just a few years away from catching up
with India as the destination of choice for companies looking to outsource
all or parts of their operations. Others say, no way! Too many barriers sit
between it and success. The important question right now is what recent
developments in China mean to your organization and its outsourcing
strategies.

Taken at face value, China’s presence in the service provider world is
good news, since much of the impetus to outsourcing is cost management,
particularly in the area of labor. China’s cost advantage -- which can
translate into as much as a 70% savings over US salaries -- sounds
compelling.

But, of course, there’s more to consider than simply hourly labor cost.
Quality of work, reliability, efficiency, flexibility, ease of
communication and cultural issues are just as relevant in laying out an
outsourcing strategy, as are macro factors such as geopolitical risks.
Accordingly, this multi-part report begins with an overview of the current
IT outsourcing landscape in China. We follow this with a quick discussion
on the issues every decision maker and manager should think about before
sending work to China.

Shortly, we’ll publish interviews with people on the ground in China who
offer their practical advice for working with China-based service
providers.
Low Labor Costs as Pull Factor

The most outstanding virtue of China as an outsourcing destination is the
cost. In fact, China is often mentioned breathlessly as "cheaper than
India."

According to Bryan Huang, president of BearingPoint Great China, an
engineer costing $4,000 a month in the U.S would cost only $500 in China.
And that’s for an engineer in Shanghai. According to ChinaHr.com, the
salary level of an engineer in places like Xian or Dalian is closer to $250
a month. In short, the cost can be said to be between a sixth to an eighth
of what it would be in the U.S., the variances being accounted for by
regional differences.

Though there are analysts who argue that China is, on average, on par with
India in terms of cost -- Ian Marriott, Research Vice President of Gartner
being one of them -- the fact is, in monetary terms, China’s pull will
increase as salary inflation drives cost up in India, the current dominant
offshoring destination. India’s IT industry, blessed by high demands but
beset by lagging human resources, experienced a 14% salary inflation in
2003. The trend is set to continue, which means that, based on a 13%
compound annual growth rate, Indian programmers’ pay will nearly double
by 2010. Already, according to JP Morgan, some Indian companies have put in
place offshore floor rates of $23 to $24 an hour.

This labor cost advantage will be sustainable for a time to come. China has
a large, expanding and sustainable pool of IT workers. Chinese
universities, which matriculated 140,000 students in 2003, are predicted to
churn out IT workers at an annual rate of between 150,000 and 200,000. The
2,000 Chinese universities (with current enrollment of just about 10
million students) can easily increase the numbers when the government
decides there’s a need.

The ultimate testament to the importance of this virtue comes from India,
whose firms, looking to continue their dominance and growth, have decided
to make China part of the solution. Nandan Nilekani, CEO of Infosys
Technologies, declared that the company needs "a deep reservoir of talent
as well as an alternative low-cost center like India as we continue to grow
-- and only China can match up."
A Background and History of China’s IT Outsourcing Industry

The software outsourcing business in China is still in its infancy. Most of
the growth and attention is recent.

Cyrill Eltschinger, who started I.T. UNITED in 1998, before China was on
anyone’s map as an IT destination, attests to it: "I can tell you for a
fact that pitching China-based high-end engineering services was -- up to
the 2003 timeframe -- a hard sell and a long shot."

The numbers show it. China’s software exports, which include software
outsourcing, was a miniscule $250 million in 1999. It grew to $2 billion in
2003 and is estimated to be $3.2 billion in 2004, according to
International Finance Corp.

Since China didn’t open up until 1979, there was little industry to speak
of before that. In the 1980s and until the mid-1990s, much of the limited
pool of engineers’ talents and energies were spent on reverse-engineering
key hardware technologies. "It was driven by the government and focused on
things such as circuit design and technologies with mixed civilian-military
importance," explained Thomas Brizendine, a senior partner at market
consultant GCiS China Services in an article published in China Business
Review.

In the ’90s, as China developed and IT needs expanded, the industry
diversified and shifted in focus. It developed a large number of relatively
basic information systems involving, typically, simple manipulation of
databases. These systems were developed independently with little thought
on integration or overall design issues.

In the late ’90s, thinking about software integration began to emerge in
some quarters. But the Internet bubble became a major distraction. When
that floated into the sunset, it left in its wake an industry that is still
-- on the whole -- new to systems thinking, component-based design, true
objected oriented design, and development capabilities and best practices.

The recent flurry of activity that helped put China on the outsourcing map
came about partly as a result of government support and promotion, partly
because of Japan’s push to move much of its software development work to
China, and partly because a number of large foreign companies -- GE,
Microsoft, Dell, SAP and HP, for example -- started up R&D centers in
China.

Nevertheless, presently, non-domestic outsourcing business accounts for
just 10% of the industry’s total revenue (compared with around 70% for
India). Of this, according to McKinsey & Company, about 65% is contributed
by Japanese companies demanding low-value application development work.

Growth in the outsourcing business presently is still driven by domestic
demand, where customers are primarily small and midsized Chinese
enterprises that want their software customized to their needs. The reality
of the domestic market is that many projects are below optimal scale and
that suppliers often compete on price (and not necessarily quality).

(We should point out that the sophistication of the domestic software
companies is also directly related to fact that Chinese enterprises do not,
in general, rely on IT for competitive advantage. The game is about price,
distribution and relationships, even though there are a few companies with
fully integrated ERP programs.)

This is changing. China’s industries and institutions are starting to
spend more on IT and are going beyond basic systems. "The longstanding
habit of burying software costs inside the hardware costs, while still
common, seems to be coming to an end as clients become more sophisticated
and system demands increase beyond what is available from simplistic
software solutions," according to Mr. Brizendine.
The Vendor Landscape

This backdrop explains the fragmented vendor landscape. The Chinese
software industry is awash with small companies. Of some 8,000 IT services
companies in China, about three-quarters are small operations with fewer
than 50 employees. Only five companies have more than 2,000 employees,
according to McKinsey. Although the data is a bit dated, in 2002 the China
Software Industry reported that the average revenue of its members was a
modest $600,000.

McKinsey also noted darkly in its publication, The McKinsey Quarterly, that
"The top 10 IT-services companies have only about a 20% share of the
market, compared with the 45% commanded by India’s top 10." Currently,
there is no company in China with a status and recognition in the global
market synonymous with that garnered by India’s Tata Consultancy
Services, Infosys or Wipro Technologies.

This fragmentation feeds into and explains why many of the Chinese software
companies haven’t been able to amass the kind of higher level skills
needed to handle projects larger than one-off contracting work.

Though there’s a rush towards capability maturity model (CMM)
certification, as of the beginning of 2005, only six of China’s 30
largest software companies are certified at levels four or five.

The implication for any company looking to outsource to China is that,
though the landscape is crowded, finding the right partner can be
difficult.

The challenge in working with smaller companies is that they make for
riskier partners in terms of reliability and on-going viability. They have
difficulty retaining the best people or gaining experience in large,
complex projects. Scalability may be an issue. Also, because projects and
resources are limited, so is training. In fact, though the universities are
graduating thousands of engineers a year, competition for the most talented
and experienced people is high. Bigger shops such as IBM and Nortel
Networks, which are establishing their own development centers in China,
are gobbling up the top talent.

Of course, large size isn’t a stamp of validation either. The major
Chinese software firms often started out as or are engaged in hardware
distribution, corporate network system integration, software/hardware
systems integration and software development. These companies expanded into
the outsourcing business because of increased competition in their original
industries and new opportunities in the services market.

The result, noted a report by International Finance Corporation (IFC), is
that "in many cases, the largest, most well known software groups in China
will conduct several (or perhaps all) of the above IT business lines along
with software outsourcing, displaying little focus compared to IT companies
in more mature markets." Using Digital China as an example, the IFC report
critiqued the "giant with revenues of RMB 15 billion (USD $1.8 billion)" to
"lack a clear business focus."

The IFC report also questioned the ability of companies primarily skilled
in product-oriented software development processes to transition smoothly
to service-oriented software outsourcing.

Then, there is always a danger of conflict of interest when a company is
not a pure-play outsourcing vendor. There is more risk of intellectual
property infringement if a vendor is also in the business of building and
selling software.

Still, it is not mission impossible to find a good medium sized service
provider. Affiliated Computer Service, Inc. (ACS) outsources application
development to I.T. UNITED, which currently has 125 employees. ACS, which
is itself a large business process and information technology outsourcing
player, says it is happy with the work I.T. UNITED has done.

In fact, with more media attention and effort on the part of the Chinese
government to promote the industry, it has become easier to identify some
of the better and larger players.

For example, Managing Offshore newsletter and NeoIT, an offshoring advisory
firm, identified a "Top 10 to Watch in China" in its first Offshore 100
study. It also included six China-based service providers on its "Meet the
Offshore 100" list.

However, not every company on the list is actually ready for
English-speaking foreign business. For example, Sichuan Yinhai Software
Limited Liability Company, number seven on the list, was unable to answer
inquiries from this writer because there was -- we were informed -- no one
ready to communicate in English. (The company Web site, Yinhai.com, is
entirely in Chinese).

Zhonghua Qu and Michael Brocklehurst, coauthoring a paper published in the
Journal of Information Technology, titled, "What will it take for China to
become a competitive force in offshore outsourcing? An analysis of the role
of transaction costs in supplier selection," concluded that the search for
the right service provider and subsequent due-diligence can be incredibly
time consuming "It is also very difficult to find trustworthy information
about Chinese suppliers, particularly in English through the Internet or
other media," the authors wrote. As compared to India’s NASSCOM, the
government-managed China Software Industry Association provides little
helpful information for offshore customers.

The good news: The seeming difficulty of finding a service provider can
well help you separate the chaff from the wheat. RedPrairie Corp., a global
supply chain software solutions company, sent five RFPs when it was looking
for a company to help set up and manage a 100-person offshore development
center. Only one replied. The CEO and founder of Bleum Inc., Eric Rongley,
recounts the story with a chuckle of how his then-young company clinched
the $5 million contract: "Because only we were ready to do business." The
relationship is on-going.
A Questionable Talent Pool

Another risk factor is the talent pool available in China. Though the
supply of workers is abundant, the quality of this supply is, in fact,
still questionable and hence something to consider before outsourcing to
China.

Bleum, one of the top IT outsourcing services firm in China, alludes to it
on its Web site. "As an emerging market, it is hard to find employees with
ten years experience, however, what a developer might lack in experience is
made up for in intelligence and work ethic."

Joseph Hsu, chief executive of Symbio Group in Rockville, Md., which has
operations in Beijing and Wuhan, put the number of architecture-level IT
engineers in China to just 1,000 and compared that to the 200,000 currently
working in India. Far Eastern Economic Review reported "only about 10% of
China’s IT workers have experience in complex programming tasks.
Organizational ability is another stumbling block."

It is an issue that is acknowledged as potentially deleterious to the
development of China’s software outsourcing industry. For example, a 2004
article in the English language weekly Beijing Review reported: "The lack
of capacity to explore the high-end market and the absence of senior
software project managers could hamper rapid development of Chinese
software exports, experts observed at the two-day Global Outsourcing 2003
held in Shanghai on Oct 14."

But the lack of experienced project managers isn’t the only skills gap,
if an experiment done by GCiS is any clue. The company tested over 400
programmers over four months in Unix operations, Unix programming, C
programming, C++ programming, Java programming, Oracle operation, Oracle
programming, component design, and documentation practices.

GCiS had three people -- one American, one Swiss and one PRC national --
averaging over 15 years of software development and management experience
each design the tests. The programmers were tested with basic, intermediate
and advanced questions in all of the subjects. The programmers were asked
to take the test that corresponded with his or her resume.

Not a single programmer passed the intermediate or advanced Unix tests and
-- according to Mr. Brizendine -- "only a very (very) few have passed the
advanced C, C++, Java and Oracle tests." Forebodingly, Brizendine also
noted that "component design mystifies the vast majority and documentation
practices are horrible."

GCiS doesn’t claim the experiment is scientific, but it was conducted in
Beijing, where the better engineers presumably reside. The company
concluded that Chinese programmers are short on technical skills.

It’s also extremely difficult to find individuals with experience working
on specific business applications such as PeopleSoft, SAP, or Siebel
Systems, according to Marc Herbert, executive VP of Sierra Atlantic, a
Fremont company specializing in offshore software development.

This is not to say that China is a complete wasteland where talent is
concerned. Where’s the silver lining? Though Chinese programmers are
short on technical skills, they’re long on intelligence. The trick, said
Mr. Rongley, is to know how to "discern what is the cream," and then to
train them, which is what companies -- the good ones -- often do.

The cream, according to Mr. Rongley, is astoundingly good. "What amazed me
when I first came to China and to Capital One was the pool of geniuses out
here. They can catch up really quickly if you can get the top of the talent
pool."

However, this kind of a landscape means that "China is right now better at
projects where experience does not matter a lot and where raw intelligence
is everything."

Next: What You Should Know about Intellectual Property, Language, Cultural
Differences and the Government in China

Read Part 2 of "Outsourcing to China" here:
http://www.sourcingmag.com/home/home.aspx?i=02_8/2/2005_cn_625_5_00_00
About the Author:
Jacqueline Zhang is a business reporter and researcher based in Southern
California. She has written for The San Francisco Examiner, Asian Banker
Journal and the North County Times. Contact Jacqueline Zhang at Jaczxy (at)
gmail.com.

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