Alternative to India & China as an offshoring location, no..no..we are not talking about Russia or some other island, we are talking about a "600-cabin cruise ship and park it off the coast of El Segundo, Calif., just over the 3-mile border that marks international waters.

Two San Diego entrepreneurs have come up with this very literal twist on offshoring software development jobs.The two founders of SeaCode, David Cook and Roger Green, are confident their plan to pack the boat with engineers who will write code day and night will float.

Check out this Forbes article which gives the complete details or head to the companies site to understand the opertion better,

Some excerpts here......Their plan:

• Classify their workers as "seamen," so that they're protected by international maritime laws that skirt the need for those pesky immigration visas
• Workers will fly in and out of Los Angeles International and board the ship with a sailor's card from the Bahamas, where the ship likely will be registered. This lets the company avoid U.S. payroll taxes on the foreign coders.
• Plans to dock in Long Beach once a month to resupply and dispose of waste.
• Programmers--sorry, seamen--hired from places like India and Russia would have their own cabins, work eight- or ten-hour stretches on either a day or night shift and have the rest of the time to sleep, play shuffleboard or take a water taxi to shore. Cook imagines a four-months-on, two-months-off work cycle.
• SeaCode's pitch is that it will still charge the same rates as developing-world firms (Green says Indian firms hide behind amazing markups) while offering clients freedom from killer flights to India, Israel and other faraway destinations to check in on projects. Work will also get done faster with two shifts.

Prashanth Rai