By Hiawatha Bray | April 25, 2005
Don't start with the pirate gags -- eye patches, pieces of eight, Johnny Depp with a cutlass. David Cook and Roger Green have heard them all.
Still, it is hard to resist the analogy. Here we are, with thousands of American software engineers clamoring for more work, and these two guys have a plan to carry even more jobs offshore. Not to India this time, or to China. Just ... offshore. They figure three miles out in the Pacific should be far enough.
Roger Green is a software entrepreneur. David Cook was once a supertanker skipper who spent 15 years hauling crude oil through the world's sea lanes. Now the two men have announced a remarkable venture called SeaCode, a company that plans to hire 600 superb software designers from every corner of the world and house them in a luxury cruise ship just out of reach of US immigration law -- but close enough to bid on multimillion-dollar US software contracts.
It sounds goofy, but Cook and Green say that since news of their plan got out last week, their website's nearly been hammered flat by engineers around the world who are eager to sign on. Of course the SeaCode concept isn't nearly as popular with Americans worried about the loss of jobs to foreign competitors.