This is probably meant to be a PR puff piece, given the venue it's published in, but the future ramifications if this sort of thing catches on are more than a little disturbing. Outsourcing off Los Angeles?4/18/2005
http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=10959What if you could outsource to a company that offered the cost savings of an India-based outsourcing firm, but whose facilities were just a few hours away?
(snip)
The three plan to buy a used cruise ship and station it close enough for a half-hour water taxi ride to shore, but far enough to avoid H1B jurisdiction. According to CEO David Cook, who was a tanker ship captain before going into IT ten years ago, project pricing “will be comparable to a distant-shore firm.”
By stationing the ship in international waters, the company, called SeaCode, will be able to remain close to U.S. clients while picking and choosing IT talent from around the world—something that tightening H1B visa requirements have made difficult in the U.S.
(snip)
The offshore-on-a-ship concept isn’t the only radical idea here. The ship’s 600 or so developers and project managers will form assorted around-the-clock development teams. When one shift finishes, the next shift will pick up the same project. That unusual arrangement will allow the company to finish jobs in half the time typically allocated while maintaining equivalent quality and control. “A key part of the plan is having everyone together there on the ship,” Cook says. “We call them pods and pod leaders. The pods all live in the same area in the ship, work at the same time, go ashore together. It’s a natural function of what happens on a ship.”
(more at link)
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