Foreign tech workers on a cruise ship? SeaCode was first to try

[Blue_Tires]

SAN FRANCISCO -- As novel as the concept sounds, Blueseed was not the first company to take "offshoring" so literally.

In 2005, a San Diego company called SeaCode proposed housing foreign software engineers on a cruise ship three miles off the California coast.

The controversial plan to bring low-cost, offshore labor so close to California shores came under fire as a "slave ship" and "sweatshop on the sea."

But Roger Green, an entrepreneur, and David Cook, a former tanker captain who had gone into technology, said they were simply trying to help American businesses.

Their idea was to give companies the benefit of the lower payscales of offshoring while doing away with some of the downsides: the time difference, the challenge of overseeing work being done so far away, concerns over the security of intellectual property in other countries and the high cost of redoing work not done properly in the first place.

"We were interested in giving American companies a level playing field to be productive and create good products at good cost," Green said. "Articles said we were trying to run slave a ship, which was totally crazy. That's not a sustainable business model. I don't know any company that would use a company like that. We planned to ship in people from all over the world, pay them a fair wage to live in a private cabin on a ship that used to be a cruise ship. That didn't seem like slave ship to us at all...."

.....Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija have come up with a new twist. They want to put foreign entrepreneurs on a cruise ship 12 miles off the coast of Northern California, within commuting distance of Silicon Valley but out of reach of restrictive U.S. immigration laws.....

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-seacode-was-first-to-try-to-put-foreign-workers-on-a-cruise-ship-20130319,0,546155.story?track=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fmostviewed+%28L.A.+Times+-+Most+Viewed+Stories%29

[lpbk2713]

1. " ... simply trying to help American businesses"

My ass.

They were blatantly skirting immigration laws, labor laws, and the tax code.
Just to name a few offenses that would make most rethuglicans proud.

[Yavin4]

2. Will They Make Them Code To The Beat of Drum?

Throw them overboard when their builds fail?

[southernyankeebelle]

3. I don't know what it is going to take for the american people to finally say its enough. We seem to

be such as passive people sometimes. I guess until more and more people living on low wages then maybe people will wake the hell up. We can boycott these bastard and their products. Stop spending money and they will see how it will effect their businesses.

[Scootaloo]

4. After seeing a Rich People Cruise Ship in the Gulf of Mexico not too long ago...

I can only imagine what might go wrong with this stellar fucking idea.

Keel-haul the perpetrators.

[denverbill]

5. This is a perfect example of why we need government regulation.

In the absence of laws, corporations, and people, will do ANYTHING which is not strictly illegal in order to make money, no matter how repulsive and immoral.

I have no doubt they can scam some Indian programmers into getting on the ship and once they are there, they are completely at the mercy of the ship's owner. I'm sure their hours, working conditions, pay, housing, meals, etc will all be abysmal and nothing like what they were promised. And there will be no shortage of unscrupulous American companies willing to save a buck and screw over their American labor force.

[hunter]

6. Writing code that someone else will own is horrible work.

I got burned badly many years ago when some of my work got sucked into the defense industry, vanished. Once I quit the company my connection to the work was also vanished and I earned a reputation as a "troublemaker." (Best leave that one off my resume.)

If I write open source code anyone in the world can build on it and I get to claim it as my own forever.

Nothing good comes from proprietary code, these "slave ships" included.

[Egalitarian Thug]

7. "simply trying to help American businesses" circumvent labor laws.

Yeah, this is going to go well.