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I had an opportunity to interview Dan Gillmor this year on camera. He was genuinely concerned about where Outsourcing was headed, especially what happens to the US economy if all tech jobs migrate from the Valley to India. He placed the whole situation in a proper historical perspective, a comparison with NAFTA & how it was different this time around, a rundown of the actual numbers of people who were laid off, the impact on the valley, mountains of idle cash sitting on Sand Hill Road, and so much more...I came away with a feeling I had spoken to someone who felt quite strongly about where this country was headed, not your average journo who cooks up a spin so he can pay his bills. Here's his picture he's 5th from the bottom.

: So enlighten us, how did you "find yourself"?
check out his website. looks like he went from being a software dude to a film director.

This is such an awe-inspiring effort. Logging 200 hours of footage over 3 years...I can imagine the amount of dedication, effort, logistics & scheduling that went into making this possible.
Hats off to you!

I'm into my 4th month of filmmaking right now. Logged 20+ hours so far, a dozen interviews under my belt, lots of travel, caffeine, sleepless nights...and I've barely begun. By the time I hope to be finished, I hope to have about 50 hours of footage. Just sifting thru all that, deciding which segment will make the cut & which won't...gigantic effort. I can't even imagine what you're going thru, narrowing down 200 hours into 3 DVDs. I wish you luck & lots & lots of patience.

There was this one documentary I watched recently - "Begging Naked" - that tracked this prostitute thru 7 yeas of her life. 7 years!!! In those 90 minutes of footage, you can practically see the person aging in front of you. The prostitute goes from being a young sexy hooker making pots of money in a Manhattan apartment to an old haggard woman living under a tree in Central Park out of a cardboard box. The person who made this film started filming in her 20s & is now in her 30s & the film still hasn't gotten a theatrical release. And she keeps plugging away. That's motivation for you!

Project Outsourced - the film

At a recent outsourcing panel, the CEO of one of the top-10 outsourcing outfits asked & answered the question "Where do you see yourselves in 5 years".

The outsourcing timeline can be classified into 4 tiers -
Tier 1 - Staffing - bring Indian pgmmers on H1Bs & L1s into US to staff IT departments
Tier 2 - Codefactory - Indian pgmmers in India write code spec'd out by American pgmmers.
Tier 3 - The current outsourcing wave
Tier 4 - The future - No IT department in the USA. All IT needs serviced by Indian outsourcing firms.

So you see, they are already preparing for Tier 4. All IT jobs, including R&D, design & architecture will eventually go to the IT depts in India & other low cost structure countries.

How to compete ?
Well, don't! Don't fight the tide. Do something else. IT has been commoditized. Find another field and get into that. If you must do IT, simply go where the jobs are - to India, Philippines, Russia, elsewhere.

The economics of the situation are so compelling, it makes no fiscal sense for US companies to keep IT jobs in the US.

Sounds scary, but that is what we were told.




Project Outsourced - the film

I began just like you did and made rapid progress, but then plateaued. Here's what works for me now -

a.Skip every other day. The muscles need atleast 24 hours to repair. By working them every day, you are overtaxing them. You will plateau, it is a certainity - ask any fitness specialist or your doctor.

b. When you do run/bike/workout, up the intensity and/or duration. Rather than 30 minutes, shoot for 1 hour, then 2.

c. Best to invest in an elliptical .Since your feet don't touch the ground on an elliptical, you don't bust your knees. At the same time you build rock-hard legs. Plus, you get to vary the intensity on an elliptical by changing the resistance & the incline - very effective.

d. Audio books are a great way to learn something while chugging away on an elliptical. I have loaded up on about 50 hours of philosophy - Locke, Kant, Hume, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Marx, and yes, the usual suspects - Socrates, Plato & Aristotle. As geeks, we are constantly upgrading "tech skills" ( Perl, Java, C++, C# etc. ) while neglecting "life-skills". A sound foundation in philosophy comes in handy like nothing else. Even if you don't care for the subject, you learn things like argumentation, dialectic, persuasion theories, burden of rejoinder...essential skills for making your point when you talk to anybody.

Best elliptical scores so far, at different levels -

3 hours, 19 miles, 2400 calories

1 hour, 7 miles, 950 calories

0.5 hour, 450 calories

Good luck, and watch that caffeine !



They can outsource me, but can they outrun me?:)

Its a sea change from the 80s when IBM was kicked out of India during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's administration.

To really look beyond the short-term glitter and understand what this might lead up to, you must watch Life & Debt, which chronicles the Jamaican tragedy. Once Jamaica agreed to freetrade & opened up its trade zones, in a short span of few months, its entire native diary industry & banana trade was totally destroyed ( Milkpowder was dumped at dirt-cheap prices, and MNCs like Dole undercut the banana trade by bringing in bananas from Mexico ). There are a lot of pluses to free trade, but unless developing nations like India wield their bargaining power carefully, they will sell out to corporations & lose their autonomy.

But a lot of Indians in the panel felt the American ownership of Indian firms was a good thing, and it could erase some of the anti-outsourcing sentiment prevailing here in the US. Towards the end, the panel discussion got particularly heated up with sharply polarized arguments from both sides. A host of people agreed to talk to us about the "sale of India", as one of them put it.No easy answers to be found on this one.