(idea) by _Yup Tue Mar 21 2006 at 23:03:08

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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Finally we got a group of Indian software developers in for interviews. We asked each candidate to demonstrate their proficiency in computer programming. By the end of the day, all we had were a few copies of this: 
      #include <stdio.h>

  int
  main(void)
  {
     printf("How, world!\n");
     return (0);
  }
    I have a stinking suspicion that these 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.

I like it!