Outsourcing Winners and Losers 831
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has an article on the winners and losers of the outsourcing trend. It's a Q and A session with a distinguished panel of experts on the topic, including Professor M. Eric Johnson, who says that, 'Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.' Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers? Ouch."
Off-Shore (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking to them it seems that the majority of their time is really spent rewriting the code in a more readable, more secure format. However, they don't have the time or manpower to do it all.
Therefore, more bugs get in the final product...
What an odd system... especially in a hospital were errors can mean lives.
davak
coders are less advanced than architects (Score:4, Interesting)
What's missing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well said (Score:5, Interesting)
Bioinformatics, wireless technologies, AI, robotics, there are so many fields which are budding. So many opportunites. Why do we have to look back at the financial software jobs that went away? We have much more interesting projects to be done.
Not better overseas, not worse either... (Score:3, Interesting)
These statements naturally assume that Norht American and European coders are smarter, but for those coming out of college now, this is not the case.
Example, I remember at one CS program, the OS class was 9 weeks of learning how to _use_ Microsoft Windows.
Poor souls...
-B
Well it's kind of true (Score:5, Interesting)
I know I could outsource my coders, but that's mostly due to the design being complete enough that anyone can just sit back and code up exactly to spec. It's not hard to code when given "you need a box that takes in X out puts Y and here's how you convert X to Y". I would guess that you couldn't outsource a design of " We need something that does Z. I suppose my job could be outsourced but I already find dealing with the customers over the phone in the specification gathering stage quite difficult. I happen to know their markets quite well and that tends to be how I get through. If I didn't understand the market then I'd be screwed. So yeah someone that knows the market including all of the little local issues(taxes, strange holidays, legal issues...) could do my job from just about anywhere in the world, It's over the phone anyways. Someone that doesn't know of the little things couldn't do it.
When I looked into outsourcing our coding I decided not to.
Reasons include
- my programmers are already paid slightly below national average and the cost savings wouldn't be huge.
- My programmers are proven known pieces in the puzzle. I know which guy does what best and I can pretty accurately estimate delivery schedules based on that.
- I like working with my guys, they help out a lot when I do design or come up with ideas on things we may want to try.
- shipping jobs away from here doesn't help me or anyone else enough to be worth pissing the locals off.
- If I screw over my workers by shipping their jobs away, who will be their to back me when the owner decides someone else can do mine.
Easy for them to say... (Score:2, Interesting)
If they are going to have a round table discussion of this issue, they should at least have representation from someone who is affected by the outsourcing rather than just a handful of ivory tower elitist phonies.
"More Advanced Project Management" (Score:2, Interesting)
They can't just sit in their cubes and complete isolated tasks that no one outside of their direct managers know about. The solution providers that get noticed by the people who make the decisions to outsource are the ones who understand that technology in and of itself isn't a reason to keep someone employed, not when that same technology can be mastered by someone at 1/10th the cost.
What is needed (and is sorely lacking) are people who can connect the pieces, be it technology or corporate understanding and provide global solutions, particularly in situations where the questions aren't even known yet.
Where I work, many of the programmers if not checked on every 30 minutes just sit around and waste valuable time. They don't try to learn about the business. They don't try to integrate their current knowledge with future technologies. They don't try to position themselves for the changing corporate environment. And then they get shocked when they get laid off or rumors of outsourcing prop up.
I don't particularly like Microft technology but most of our products are built on top of it and can be extended by things like VBA/VBS. I'm trying to learn it so that I can give the upper management the things that they want. To that end, I've bought books, gone to Kinkos to blow up object models, etc. On more than one occassion I've been asked why I'm doing such things by the other programmers. I try to explain it to them but they just act like I'm stupid.
Maybe I am, but I think I'm being pragmatic.
How long before we can outsource at the C level? (Score:4, Interesting)
Outsourcing is an extremely short-sighted solution to increased quarterly profitability. It simply boils down to the fact that C level people and their cronies COST TOO MUCH and in order for them to keep receiving the same level of compensation (while keeping shareholders happy) they need to squeeze out every last bit of cash out of every other expense.
I plan to start a new company soon which deals with outsourcing, except you will pay large premiums for me to come in and fix the disaster created by the offshore developers. Mark may words boy, and mark them well, offshore outsourcing is going to be one of the biggest largescale disasters in the history of US business. However as I read the ever increasing reports of outsourcing disasters [computerworld.com], I am beginning to realize that there is money to be made here!
Also, I wonder if C-Level types forget about the geopolitical instability of the world. Isn't the US at war right now? What if Pakistan decided to go cut all the fiber optic cable connecting India to the US? Oh the mess this is going to create. I laugh at the nearsighted fools!
Re:Wow... low level (Score:5, Interesting)
Another important factor is the fact that application development has changed a lot. Design is becoming much more important and the coding has become easier. Mostly because a lot of low-level work is done in libraries allready. It's now possible to just say 'fetch that file using http' instead of openning a socket, sending a request and read and parse the answer. And that's just one example. The fact that computers have become faster and cheaper makes a difference as well. Optimizing code has become less important. From a managers point of view this means there is the choice of spending two extra day on optimizing memory usage or just buy 1gig of extra ram. I know wich one is cheaper...
The good programmer you are looking for likely mainly has to be a good designer. What most bad programmers mis IMHO is the ability to analyse a given problem, chop is into pieces and work out a technical sollution. Every good coder does that, knowingly or not. When you separate this part from the actual coding you can simply document the sollution and have a 'decent' programmer to write the actual code. Most big company seperate the design and implementation anyway so taking to coding somewhere else is not that hard, but might make a big difference since 'decent' programmers tend to be expensive over here.
Ouch to you (Score:4, Interesting)
Flamebait it is, but it's also all too true (Score:4, Interesting)
And half of those programmers graduating from a university aren't only below average, they're totally inexperienced too.
I don't know how many times I've come across newbies to multithreaded coding who can't figure out why their "cout" calls are all intermingled, or other knuckleheads trying to call "sleep()" in a signal handler.
Recent graduates also have very little experience in writing maintainable and robust code.
Re:Theory vs. Practice (Score:5, Interesting)
A nice side-effect for inflated egos is that outsourcing allow bigger idiots to be successful in management.
Now I'm wondering: Where is the obviuos flaw in my reasoning that I'm missing?
Someone's about to get an email (Score:5, Interesting)
To use an analogy, how many individuals have you known become team leaders or shop bosses in a manufacturing plant without actually at least working near or around a plant floor. I'm going to say not too many. Thus, this sort of thinking will end any sort of software project management as well.
I like this choice quote too We will require different services, medical devices, all kinds of things to support an aging population.
Of course, instead of actually producing things that will make our lives better and move us ahead in the world we can focuses all our energies on something that none of the world seems to want to pay for prescription drugs, life-saving procedures, and incredible medicial devices. The whole entire world looks to us to subsidize this stuff so they can get it on the cheap. I don't see a lot of Indians or Chinese companies coming out with these products, but I see whole lot knock-offs and piracy coming from them. We cannot export those products.
As much as I like to say free trade, free trade is only free when everybody plays by the rules. No one plays by the rules, we slap a tarriff on products, but other countries subsidize their industries because they worry about their own workers unrest (Steel comes to mind). I think their is a very large difference between the manufacturing movement of the 80s and now. In that time, you could go back to school (government subsidized) retrain for a new position and get another job. What happens when you have already gone to school, your now sitting on $50,000 worth of college debt, and somebody tells you sorry...you shouldn't have done that, but your more then qualified to take a $30,000 a year job. What happens when your paying $283 on month on a student loan which is 20% of your entire salary after taxes. I'm thinking you wouldn't be buying a whole lot of stuff. (Not me thankfully at the moment, that's why I am paying down my college debt as fast as possible.)
Used to be education could get you ahead, now you just have to live in another country and work for an obscenely low wage in comparison to the US.
How long can we be make good project managers? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with that reasoning is that the good project managers once were code monkeys. It was while doing the grunt work that they developed the insight which led them to be good project managers. You know, inside understanding of modern technology and practices...
How much longer can we be a land of managers-only? And how good will our managers be if they never did the work in the trenches, because that stuff was outsourced? It seems to me that we can't avoid outsourcing management jobs if we are outsourcing the lower-level jobs.
Re:it's their loss (Score:3, Interesting)
In Critical Thinking class, this is called a false dilemma. Discuss.
None of this bullshit matters. (Score:2, Interesting)
Then, there are the project managers. I'll admit, there are occasionally good ones. But, all too often, you end up with a PHB: Always leaning on you, looking over your shoulder, trying to force technical decisions on you despite the fact they don't know what they're talking about, trying to set insane schedules and unreasonable deadlines. Because a programmer is generally on salary, PHB's try to force him to work unpaid overtime, often sixty-plus hours a week, because that makes the budget stretch. Or SEEM to stretch, but with suits, that's good enough.
Finally, there's the clear difference in status between management and staff. Programmers are treated like peons in private industry, make no mistake. We're serfs, no more and no less. I used to work in a place where programmers were hired in a wobbly-chair, lamp-in-the-face process. Salesmen would get a fraternity style "rush" complete with sushi and beer. If that doesn't say it all, I don't know what does.
Add it all up. Private industry = dilbert-inspired hell.
This whole outsourcing thing is just the final icing on the cake. It proves once and for all what management thinks of us: that we're replaceable, nearly-worthless, recipe followers. Fine, I say. Fine with me. I'm GLAD to have their feelings clearly delineated for me. It spares me from having to even briefly consider working with or for them, and it prevents me from ever thinking about building any sort of third-party tool that they might find useful.
I'll stick to other sectors of the economy where my contribution is appreciated, like the public sector or maybe the non-profit sector. And, I'll push my state representiatives to require citizenship for all public-sector programming, including that which is produced by third parties. After all, there IS a security issue here: public sector, government work should NOT be done outside of this country. Public-sector programmers should be bonded, insured, and thoroughly checked out. It might be a good idea to set up regs for banks to do the same -- and any other entity that has to handle private data.
This isn't "protectionism". It's simple common sense.
Re:Wow... low level (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I see programming as an art, maybe we'll see a day where programmers will hire agents to represent them. You'll mount up an project and then send your agent to pimp it for you. Agents will represent a lot of programmers. Instead of going door to door with his shrink wrapped prepackaged boxes, he'll have feature lists from all sorts of project with associated costs for implementation of client requests. He'll be a walking talking actively seeking to get you SOLD version of Freshmeat.
Bring the Students On! (Score:5, Interesting)
Lets consider a world population of 10 billion with average life expectancy of 70. If the average person spends 6 years in university (things are getting more complex), then we're looking at 850 million post-secondary students worldwide at any given time. Google suggests that 1 academic staff for every 10 students is not an unreasonable number, so that's 85 million jobs -- that's almost the entire US workforce right now! Add all the support staff to provide services to the academic staff and run the surrounding infrastructure and you've got yourself an economy!
hmm, low-skill coders? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let the perl regex marathon begin!
Seriously, I work for an insanely large international telecommunications company and our project managers don't even understand the basic technologies involved in the projects they're managing. I don't envy their job, but I have a hard time believing that their (basically administrative) skills are any more important than the skills of those of us who actually make the stuff work. If PM skills supercede mine, I wonder why I'm always on (endless) conference calls explaining things to them.
*shrug* Their cluelessness is pretty good job security so I don't complain until they hit utter braindeadlessness.
--K.
Re:Wow... low level (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm currently an embedded systems developer, and I think I've found my niche, the work's interesting and I have the opportunity to optimize my work, and not have to rely on libraries.
I guess this sort of situation is analogous to making things the old fashioned way, like making homemade ice cream, where you can enjoy the process of making it and enjoying the final product, even though it takes more time and effort than running to the local grocery store. I guess embedded work and a few other things ( research? ) are the only places in which programming is still an art form.
Any Evidence for That? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well it's kind of true (Score:3, Interesting)
To focus on the relevent portion:
as the manager/designer
All agreed. Looked at that way, of course your programmers have an easier job than you. Programmers who don't do design are a very different animal from those that do. The long term monetary value of software lies almost entirely in the design. The short term value lies almost entirely in the ability to solve a given business problem. That implies the actual application of keystrokes to magnetic media has relatively little value.
But this all assumes that software development can be successfully compartmentalized into requirements / design / coding. For my X dollars I'll take one designer programmer who can talk to business users over ten non-designer programmers who can't. The latter produce components that meet the written requirements but have a nasty habit of not furthering the business objective. For a quick thumbnail check of this hypothesis, ask yourself: How much of my time each day is spent either explaining the design to the programmer or explaining how to correct an implementation to match the intent? How much time is spent with the programmer saying, "I wrote what the spec says", which it may do, when it doesn't match the business need?
Your system may work well for you. If it doesn't, consider looking into agile programming. Generally speaking it requires more programmers with the potential to become designer/programmers (in my humble opinion, the other type are not worthy of the title programmer), but the functional-unit-of-software output will be higher per dollar (at least it is in my experience).
And all that said, I'm not saying designer programmers have a harder job than project managers. Good instances of either are worth size cash, and bad instances of both dramatically outnumber the good.
Re:Well said (Score:3, Interesting)
Because this economy and this society is actively opposed to entrepreneurial thinking. Try to get funding for a robotics company. Try to get anyone to listen to a truly new idea. Try to get another company to buy your "unproven" product. Fuck, try to get someone to answer the #%*(@$)@#(_! PHONE at a large company.
If you speak up at work, you get fired, so we must teach people not to speak up so they can keep their subsistence-level job until it is stolen and shipped elsewhere.
Entrepreneurs do everything wrong. They are impatient, driven, focused and constantly interrupting. They take risks in a risk-averse society. They push people who only want to wallow in their grayness.
And when entrepreneurs go to find capital in this capitalistic society, they get a door slammed in their face so hard it makes their ears ring for a week.
That's why people would like to keep their job for a few minutes.
Re:Wow... low level (Score:3, Interesting)
What I think the OP meant is that it's hard to recognize good programmers. Just because someone's degree says "MIT" doesn't guarentee they're any good, nor does the lack of any degree mean they aren't. Nor, as a handful of people suspect, is the opposite true. I suppose another programmer could tell a good programmer by reading his/her code, assuming a large body of that code was available for examination. Even if one is, it doesn't describe how long it took to write, and it will take a long time to study.
AFAICT, no one has found a solution to this yet. Education, experience, certifications, reputation.... Nothing seems to reliably seperate good programmers from bad -- and there are an awful lot of bad. Maybe someone'll come up with something soon.
Different Skills, Not Higher/Lower... (Score:3, Interesting)
Working primarily as a Project Manager/Analyst, my skills focus on the big picture stuff: deadlines, requirements gathering, task integration and problem solving on the human side. Coders, though, work with a different view: algorithms, flow, architecture, interoperability and problem solving on the technological side.
The tone here seems to focus on "who's expendable?" whereas I can't see that either is. Companies may see some logic in sending coding overseas to save money, and in some cases they might be right. In my opinion, though, overseas coding is rife with issues some of these businesspeople haven't yet discovered or factored in (language/interpretation, differing standards, differing cultural concepts of time, telecommunication issues, post-project maintenance costs/difficulties being but a few).
It reminds me of the discussion between Brian and Bender in The Breakfast Club:
The problem is ... (Score:1, Interesting)
We're a lazy bunch, and your average CS graduate today sucks shit. Sorry. They got into the field because it seemed like it had good money -- not because they enjoy it. To them it is a job, not a passion. They scrape by on minimums in their courses and aren't pushed by their professors nearly hard enough. They haven't had any math and can't analyze problems well, they have very poor english skills even as native speakers, and in the end they're no better than their counterparts in other countries.
There's no reason to hire Americans when Indians are just as good. If you don't think any Indian can do a job as well as you, then you're just deluding yourself. Graduate students from India are often just as good as the best and brightest from America.
Opinions are like... (Score:4, Interesting)
EDS tried to grow lowbuck coders in the 80's. They got lowbuck code. Business today is trying to import low buck code. And that's what they're getting.
I'm not too prejudiced about very much, but I really beleive the best software is written in a backyard hotrod, garage tinkering society.
Oh, and before I foget to add, most of our "project managers" have the tech savy of my grandmother. Our end customers are 4 out of 5 times more knowledgable than the people we get to manage our projects. I was once part of a twenty man team that built an IBM mainframe computer center from scratch, and consolidated 3 centers down to it, in a 4 month period, start to finish. And in that 4 months we changed all of our 2000 user's ids (for performance reasons). We brought the datacenters down Friday PM and brought online the new datacenter Monday AM. Zero problems. That was without project managers; just a kickass director of IT and twenty "empowered" guys accountable for their work. Today? Well I'm currently working on a team that is taking 4 months to install a network diagnostic system to fix a problem that has been plaguing us for 14 months! But I guarantee you we are project managed up the ass.
Sorry..... I feel better now. Thank you for listening...
Re:Those that do (Score:5, Interesting)
Note my question marks in my original post as I didn't mean this to be taken as a truth.
I would be ashamed if any of my former teachers saw my comment... or my spelling...
Teachers rock ass and do not get paid for it. Teachers and programmers share the quality that they are underpaid for their work.
My comment was a reflex at somebody in academia making judgements without any experience.
I am sad that my comment has brought out the anti-teacher shmucks.
Davak
Re:Wow... low level (Score:5, Interesting)
Umm... if you enjoy eating charcoal, sure... Try just cooking to 160F; about three to three and a half minutes to a side depending on thickness and what heat source you're using.
And yes, I made much more money as a chef de cuisine than I do as a network admin. I just got tired of greaseburns.
Re:Outsource CEO/CIO/COO (Score:2, Interesting)
1) IT is hard
2) But he figured out a way to make our next set of decisions by paying 2! companies over a million to come in and evaluate us.
and 3) They both, amazingly, came up with the same suggestions!
so 4) Don't you think they are probably right?
Scott Adams is a god!
How to become a decent project manager. (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, what if somebody wants to be in charge of a software development team some day? What should that person do? Do you get a B.A. in English, work as a school teacher for several years and then become a VP of Development? I think not. I think that every decent development manager started to work as a software coding grunt. Without low-level jobs there will be no high level positions. Period.
I have not seen any recent Comp. Sci. graduates who can become managers right out of school. Most of them were hoping to get these 'low-level' coding jobs (not to be confused with positions related to assembly programming) and work their way up. Today we ship all these position abroad because somebody wants to make extra profit and get yet another personal jet. Tomorrow we will have to import (or outsource) project managers because nobody will be able to replace them.
Finally, the trend to move software development to other countries does not mean that our projects end up in the hands of highly trained professionals as many manages like to say. People of different trades and backgrounds will notice that software development is profitable because "you get to work for American corporations." Mark my words, in several years the rest of the world will experience what we have gone through during the late nineties. Many countries will face a surplus of barely skilled developers who ended up in IT because of the money.
Re:hmm, low-skill coders? (Score:3, Interesting)
I help run a much smaller company, and one of my hats is project management. I can't imagine trying to manage a project and not understanding the underlying technology, albeit at a much higher level than those doing the actual work. Our coders are well worth their price, but part of that is because I can ask them stupid questions (I know they're stupid because one of my other hats is coding).
The thing is, I need to be able to ask them stupid questions, ask the client stupid questions, and then synthesize it into something remotely intelligent. I need to keep both parties happy, balance client needs against what's reasonable to ask of my team and take responsibility if it all goes to hell. I need to think of as many things that could go wrong as possible and make sure we have the resources to deal with them if it happens.
If your PMs are just glorified clerks (and I've met enough that are), then they're of no more use than some wizard-reliant VB coder. I hope that I'm at least competent at what I do (we're still in business, anyway), and that I can make our coder's jobs as easy as possible. But I've found that more and more, I view the time I spend coding as relaxation time. There's a lot less stress when all I need to do is make something work.
(And it sounds like your PMs should be fired. Feel like moving into managment? ;) ).
Just wait... (Score:1, Interesting)
Then we'll learn the disadvantages of sending crucial jobs to other countries.
Of course, like the Enron-type accounting scandals, it won't be the guilty parties that feel the pain, but rather the little guys were are out of work and trying to pick up the pieces. All the executives will be riding down on their golden parachutes.
Oh, and I also really like the way this fuckwad economist tries to divert blame away from the execs. How does she explain the 1000% rise in their average saleries over the last 10 years??? Cost of living...???
When the revolution comes, may the Ken Lays of the world and their voodoo-economic apologies will be the first against the wall.
Some comments (Score:5, Interesting)
Coding: People here are complaining that coding is classified as a "low-level" job. A lot of companies have been treating coding as a low-grade skill for quite some time. A team of high-level people design the thing, and they hand it off to the lowest-paid workers that can actually implement it. These low-level American jobs purposefully don't leave much room for creativity, and the pay is not really that great. Outsourcing those jobs to India is merely a continuation of this trend and follows the manufacturing sector where the jobs of feeding the machines and putting stuff in boxes have mostly gone to China.
Management: A lot of /.-ers are complaining about how management sucks and how its so much easier than programming. This is false. Management is really hard and takes a lot of skill. Most mangers suck, of course, but most programmers suck, too. You never notice the rare good manager who takes mediocre programmers and makes a successful project, but a bad can have great programmers and get nothing done (of course, of you have genuinely bad programmers, you're screwed no matter what). The Indian industry will mature, and a lot of management and design jobs will eventually be outsourced there, too.
Quality: Think about any physical thing you buy. It probably has "acceptable" quality and doesn't cost very much. After a while, you get a different one, which probably has newer and better technology that you wanted anyway. (If everything you bought was a minor masterpiece, you'd pay for it by having out-of-date technology; it's the price of our fast-changing world.) If you want better quality, you have to pay a lot more, and the product, or large portions of it, are much more likely to be made in the US/Canada or Europe. Sure software quality sucks, but mostly it does what people want and is cheap. A lot of people are willing to put up with problems to pay less. In the end, the top software jobs will stay, just like the top manufacturing jobs are still here.
One problem really is that we don't know how to design software in a predictable way. Attempts to design inexpensive software are often more expensive in the end, and trying to do a great job can lead to bloated projects that are never done. Many expensive American projects really suck, and probably some cheap Indian projects are great. The field currently just doesn't have the maturity for us to say with any predictability "if we spend X dollars we will get Y quality." When/if the field reaches the predictability of manufacturing cheap software will be made in developing countries, and great software will be made in mature countries.
Protectionism: While short-term measures can allow an industry to restructure itself and become more efficient, long-term protectionism never works. Consider the recent steel tariffs. I'm not qualified to say if they were the right thing, but the idea was to allow some short-term period for the steel industry to get it together because we all benefit from a competitive industry. A long-term tariff, however, makes American products made from steel products more expensive. American consumers could then buy less, and American products can not be sold overseas.
The same is true for software. India currently specializes in grunt-work coding. Protectionist measures will save some American grunt-coding jobs in the short-term. However, what will happen in 10 years? A fraction of those Indians will get mad skillz. Indian software companies, now with competitive-quality coders, and benefiting from cheaper labor than their American counterparts, will clean up. The American industry will ultimately suffer. Its better for the bad American coders to find a different field or get better skills now than later. Think about it, it may suck to lose your job now, but its worse to lose your job from a dying industry when you're 10 years from retirement and have no recent skills or training.
Do I laugh or cry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do I laugh at the absurdity of this? Coding is not a "low-skill" job. Far from it. Programming in C is a high-skill job. Programming in C++ is a high-skill job. Heck, even programming in C# is a high-skill job. Ditto for PHP, Perl, Python, etc. He must be thinking of the one-off Visual Basic script he wrote last week...
But I want to cry at the same time, because the PHB's believe this crap. Offshore development to India? My company did this because they thought coding was a low-skill job suitable to outsourcing to low-skill workers. Not only is this insulting to developers here in the US, it's equally insulting to the developers in India. It's the new Anglo Imperialism!
I've been told flat out that my only future in the company is to be a project manager. I've done that and it sucks. I would rather be developing and coding. I don't want to have to schedule time on Outlook just so I have a block of time available to schedule all my myriad meetings on Outlook.
Hmmm, maybe this attitude that development is "low-skill" works explains that shoddy quality of commercial software these days.
Re:Wow... low level (Score:3, Interesting)
Open Source levels the playing field. Back in the days of proprietary systems, you had to have some sort of access to an expensive central computing resource -- which were not available outside of western countries. No access, no learning.
Now with open source, anyone with access to commodity hardware produced in the last decade can all sorts of useful things. Getting questions answered does not require a $50,000/yr support contract with a vendor, just a google search or looking through source code & documentation.
Re: Coders don't think about software architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
My company was a small American firm who put out an embedded system that was considered by all to be the gold standard of our industry. Then we got bought out (because the founder retired) by a huge multinational German company.
Two years later we were trying to figure out why the Germans were pissed at us. No matter what we did we were treated like dirt. We increased marketshare and they were mad. We win a prestigious international award and they were mad. We couldn't figure it out. We gave them golden eggs and they acted like we gave them goose shit. We made one BILLION euros last year on a product and they laid off half our developers and outsourced their work to India in retaliation. They even flew out corporate "brass" just to *yell* at our software managers. Seriously! We heard the yelling from the other side of the wall.
Finally a German insider told us what was wrong. We never made our deadlines. We had always worked this way. We would estimate a ship date three years in advance, before we ever came up with requirements or specifications. So we would often miss the target by a few weeks. This was anathema to the Germans! It was intolerable. We were considered incompetent bungling fools because the one major product during that two year period was two weeks late to beta testing. Not to ship date, which we made, but to beta testing!
In one incident, I myself was seriously ill and was hospitalized. When I came back to work I found a waiting email message demanding to know why I was late on my project.
Re:Advanced project managers... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Those that do (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite highschool teacher (calculus) would always reply with that when asked why he becaame a teacher.
He was of course joking. The real reason was he did not want to fight in Vietnam and ended up likeing the job.
If you cannot have a sense of humor about something like that I am sure the students will eat you alive.
Also. Good luck. You'll probably need it.
Re:Wow... low level (Score:4, Interesting)
We've been through 260 resumes, interviewed 15 applicants and found precisely 2 hits, with a third we'll hire because he's borderline and we can't stay here forever...
At least in my case, it is clear to me that outsourcing is taking the low-level, hack jobs that a newbie would get back at home...so where does that leave the new college grads? Hopefully our university system provides sufficient training that our people can compete...
If India has a very competitive software engineering environment, I sure haven't seen it yet. I HAVE seen that the top universities, such as IIT Mumbai, DO produce world-class engineers, but other schools are not up to speed.
Re: Coders don't think about software architecture (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, here's a few ideas...
Start your own programming business. When companies want to outsource, they can outsource to you. A programming business run by a programmer has got to be better than what exists now, and I should know, I've worked at one.
A lot of programmers have no real interest in or ability to run a business though. We are also fairly interchangeable, unless you're very good. You can't do without us, though. Any large business needs programmers. Sounds like the perfect reason to unionize. The very way we're being treated now is the reason unions started in the first place.
A third option, my personal favorite, is a government certification much like doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and many other professions I can't think of now. It certainly wouldn't guarantee employment, but it would allow employers to know that when they hire someone, they're up to a certain standard, and it would also add a needed level of accountability.
A mix of the three would probably be the best thing, but any one of them would help if they were widely done.
Re: Coders don't think about software architecture (Score:5, Interesting)
Programming is also unlike crafts. In fact, I think considering programmers craftsmen is unfair. A craftsman is an artisan, like a painter or a woodcarver. No two items he creates are the same. He doesn't go through a lengthy design period; he merely creates whatever thing of beauty he is working on.
Painters and sculptors don't simply start hacking away at it. Craftspeople do go through a lengthy period of design and planning. In painting and sculpture, these are called studies. Even a cursory glance at art history shows this fact.
Further, a single item he creates is expensive, because each item is unique and represents a huge investment in time. So I don't think this comparison holds up either.
This relates to the value of what the worker produces, not the process by which it is produced.
Programmers are like craftsmen who have very low reproduction costs. Each work is essentially unique, just as each of a painter's works are uniqure. But the programmer can reproduce his for next to nothing, while the painter needs more time and effort to reprodue his works. And, yes, painters routinely reproduced popular works. For example, Gilbert Stuart's portraits of George Washington were so popular that he essentially made a living by generating over 100 copies of his own works.
If you want an accurate model for computer programming, the closest model is that of the mathematician, because really, computer science is a branch of mathematics. It is the branch that deals with implementation and design of algorithms. In a sense, programmers model thought processes; things humans would have to do manually if the computer didn't exist.Programming is not computer science. 99% of all programmers never devise a new sorting algorithm, never write a theorem prover, etc. Programmers apply the discoveries of computer scientists, but that doesn't make them computer scientists. Craftsmen apply the discoveries of scientists (new pigments, new metal alloys, etc.) but that doesn't make craftsmen scientists. Programmers are like craftsmen. They just have much lower reproduction costs.
no, THIS is where it ends (Score:3, Interesting)
What makes you think it'll stop there? If a US-based Fortune 500 company becomes a hollow shell with all its sales, service, and manufacturing going overseas and only orders coming from an administration increasingly clueless about what the end users and major customers want because nobody within several time zones has to deal with them, sooner or later, the outsourcers are going to wonder what the hell value US corporate management adds to their company products.
Whether this means unfriendly takeover ("We'll buy your stockholders out at 5 cents on the dollar and give you a golden parachute") or the top management at the outsourcers taking data farm hard drives by the truckload to the new facility conveniently placed by coincidence right down the block and locking up the old building with large signs saying "Report to this address!" depends on circumstances.
What happens to the people who made the decisions? They'll have cashed out and retired by then, or maybe left the US to find a place they can take through the cycle again.
Who gets hammered? US based employees, stockholders, and the most hapless CEOs... the least lucky of which will get to turn off the lights as he walks out the door.
Who won't notice? By and large, the service will be just as miserable under Indian management as under American.
What happens if the US management tries suing? If you want to sue Indian business peoples in India who know who to pay off and how much, go ahead, I want to watch. Or all the former outsourcers have to do is go limp and refer anyone who has problems to the former US managers... if it's a bank or a major service provider, the end users will do whatever they have to do to get their services back...
Re: Coders don't think about software architecture (Score:3, Interesting)
Breakdown of the World Economy (Score:2, Interesting)
That sound suspiciously like sociallism to me.
Guess what? Marx was right. Capitalism does beget socialism, esp. in a Democratic Society, and the ruling class and rich want to assure their place in the world, and stave it off.
Sociallism can be brought about peacefully through Democracy, but the rich won't allow it.
Basically, how will the brainwashed masses vote when unemployment reaches 33%?
Which is why the Bushies and Diebold are in bed together. With globalization occuring, the extreme right(read, the rich) can expect to be out of elected positions for a long time.
To stay in power they need to hijack Democracy, or else lose to the people.
My children will inherit some extremely dark times.
Re:None of this bullshit matters. (Score:3, Interesting)
First, I am not unhirable. I work for a government agency, so I don't have a noncompete, IP agreement, or nondisclosure agreement to worry about. I could leave any time I wanted -- but why would I? I'm already in paradise.
Second, if you read the trade rags and pay attention to the industry, you'll realize that it is the generalists who are being outsourced to other countries because they're basically plug-and-play. So, go ahead and be an "adaptable specialist" if you think that'll work out for you. But don't cry to me when A) you get outsourced, and B) you can't find a job because you haven't got enough specialized domain knowledge.
Third, any programmer who's any good at all finds himself specializing within a few years in some particular area of study. If you think this isn't true, you've been working in entry-level jobs too long. Good luck with that.