Slashdot Mirror
The New Face of Global Competition
Valluvan writes "Here is an article in Fast Company on "The New Face of Global Competition". The article is focused on Wipro, a big IT company in India, but applies to many other companies in India that have been highly successful. A long article with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML, but brings out the business facts well enough."
Other industries will follow as the necessary skills and infrastructure become more wide-spread.
The rich world will continue to specialise in those industries which require the latest cutting edge infrastructure and skills, and slowly discard the rest.
This is very reminiscient of the "Godzilla has arrived" mania that swept the US back in the 1980s. Mayne serious people then believed that Japan was going to buy the US (in cash) and then enslave us all in their Toyota factories. We know now how wrong they were.
India is certainly becoming a force in the global IT industry, but let's not get swept away by Fast Company's muscular prose and usual hyperbole.
Also, I think it's important to remember that real economic growth comes more from innovation than from cheap labor. Companies are willing to pay developers $150K a year if the products they're creating will cover those costs and return a large profit to boot. A lot of the work being offloaded to India (or at least the work that my previous employer shipped there) was maintenanced release testing, legacy OS ports, code cleanup, etc. Nobody was asking them to design the next killer app.
Of course, maybe it's good that these waves of paranoia wash ashore every few years. They prevent us from getting complacent.
some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML
These days you can "program" in UML. The actual underlying code is C++ or Java generated by the CASE tool from your UML diagrams, but it's still programming, just at a higher level. For example, instead of programmatically declaring a member variable of a class, you click on the UML class diagram and add a property, instead of typing class Z extends X you drag a line.
You usually have to go to real code to actually implement methods, but using a RAD tool to layout your GUI, a CASE tool to do all the object defintions and database connectivity, only writing code by hand when you have to, is a very productive way to work. Programming Swing or Motif or MFC is very repetitive and can be highly automated, as can writing wrapper code for database tables to present them cleanly to objects.
You'll get a lot of geeks sneering that a text editor is the only way to write code, but that is an obsolete way of working. Computers are built to automate repetitive tasks, and once you've written one form or report by hand to show that you can, doing it again is just a waste of time.
Perhaps you should read the article closely.
[blockquote]Six years ago, Fast Company proled a team at Lockheed-Martin that wrote nearly perfect code ( "They Write the Right Stuff," Dec : Jan 1997 ). The team's claim to fame: It was one of only four outts in the world to achieve Level 5 certication from the Software Engineering Institute. Wipro has Level 5 certication in three different categories. It's eye-glazing stuff, but an amazing achievement.
Such accomplishments conrmed that Wipro's developers weren't just cheap: They were cheap and very, very good. [/quality]
Trust me, these folks are VERY concerned about their careers and their industry. They are also very concerned about quality.
Which is why we should be worried. It's why we should strive to produce better code and strive to do it quicker. It's why we should stop reading Slashdot so much and work more.
Outfits like this are not fly by night charlies that churn out crap, they are some of the best in the world. We (software professionals) will either step up to the plate and hit a home run and prove our worth or we will get run over like textiles and electronic manufacturing.
The nascent internet industry (yes, it's still very young) as well as application development in general is NOT a mature industry as were textiles.
Don't be so quick to cede entire industries, writing them off as "discards". India's getting the business for TWO reasons, cheap labor and EDUCATED labor. It's no secret that the American education system is, shall we say, lacking in almost every regard except being flush with funding. We may be losing the industry simply because they are better at it, not just cheaper.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Considering the conflicts with Pakistan and the past fear of possible nuclear or conventional war in the region, do companies work that into their calculations? What of other kinds of issues in foreign countries that companies outsource to?
I'd figure foreign outsourcing would bring in a hell of a lot of variables one would have to work with.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Whats worse, the BOD has been seeded with European managers. Now, dont get me wrong, I have nothing against europeans, but you cannot take a company that has been doing NE Corridor style work processes for 20+ years and suddenly kick it over to the "european" business model. Things apparently get done a lot more slowly over there.
I can't help but feel that the USA is in danger of losing its global dominance because of the general attitude of Americans that "We're just better". Your insight above has prompted me to say this, but some of the other responses to this article also make me think it.
It is true that the USAs economic success is in part down to the intelligence, innovation and hard work of its natives. But it is also down to its unique historical position of being a very young country with a single unified people. (In other words, a huge homogenous market - a startup company in the USA has a massive easily accessible market on its doorstep. That's not so true in the rest of the world.)
Don't sit on your laurels, Americans. The rest of the world isn't as stupid, or as lazy, as many of you seem to think.
You'll get a lot of geeks sneering that a text editor is the only way to write code, but that is an obsolete way of working.
For anything but GUI drawing, good old text editors still beat all these point-and-click thingy.
Writing and adjusting your code is faster with text editor (unless you type with two fingers).
Non-boilerplate coding can't be done with point-and-click interface, be it UML, RAD or whatelse. Programming is not about changing superclasses and adding member variables: at some point you have to implement actual algorithms. At this point you have to resort to text editor and all the glory of CASE tools fades, since when you actually do want to change superclass you have to move your hands off the keyboard to mouse, swith to different window, and often you are not allowed to change CASE-tool-controlled parts of code by hand. I've yet to see any evidence that a CASE user beats competent developer with editor in terms of performance.
Those thinking of pointy-clicky interfaces being a magic wand should go and try writing bubblesort with mouse.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.