Book fair and lunch

I attended the local book fair this week-end. This is an annual street fair, with booksellers, authors hawking books, writers organizations, the local library, local museums, authors reading their books, some stages with musicians, and a set of food carts (complete with unhealthy food). The weather was warm and sunny and the fair was well-attended. I bumped into one person with a "I see dead code" T-shirt. We chatted briefly.

Today I lunched with a former co-worker. We talked about a number of things from technology to politics. We both agree that the economy is improving, albeit slowly. We also discussed offshore IT contract work, and can see some benefits and some costs. The costs seem to be harder to measure, so the easy-to-measure lower salaries tend to outweigh the decline in quality. Savvy development managers will see the problems and get a full understanding; inexperienced managers will miss the problems and eventually wonder at the later production problems and customer incidents. A bleak scenario indeed!