I wrote this series of jokes, with some help from a few
friends. Each joke involves the same twist on
outsourcing IT jobs to India, without resorting to the typical xenophobic
junk that you encounter in Slashdot forums. (That is,
I never mention anybody in a call center named Sanjay.) Enjoy!
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To secure our website, we wanted firewalls on
all of our network connections. We outsourced this task
to another Indian firm. All they did was hang a bunch of
dream catchers over our ethernet ports.
I think we hired the wrong kind of Indians.
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To find the right kind of Indians, we sent our recruiter
to a job fair. She came back with a few resumes
that looked promising. But, we had no idea how to contact
them. Where we expected to see phone numbers and
e-mail addresses, they all contained instructions
for how to send them smoke signals. I think
they were the wrong kind of Indians.
-
Eventually we hired some Indian software developers.
They created the software we needed, and it seems to work
fairly well. But their contract just expired, and we can't
figure out their code. All of the functions and variables
have odd names like StandsWithBits and
DancesWithIntegers. Indeed, they were the wrong kind of
Indians.
-
For the most part, things are going well. Our website is
thriving and business is good. But we want to improve the
performance. We heard we could do this by making our
software Multi-Threaded. We tried to
outsource the development of a
threads package to an Indian company, but all they gave us
was a bundle of Navajo blankets. Yeah, they were the
wrong kind of Indians.
I've tried to make another joke that would relate some
computer concept with totem poles, but so far
I've had no luck. One friend suggested something about
vertically scaling the software stack. Another, something
involving the head of a linked list. If someone can
think of a decent joke along these lines, I'd love to read
it.