Slashdot Mirror
Outsourcing Winners and Losers
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."
I have programmed. I am VERY bad at it. Sure I CAN code but I can't do it well. To find a quality programmer is not easy - I've tried. I wonder if this is why most software sucks ... because people think ANYBODY can do it.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
I strongly feel that programming is a creative process, and anyone that describes it as a low-end job, does noet knows what programming is. It's like out-sourcing art-painters to an other country and letting the important managers of the painting-creating process say inside, to send e-mails like: "Don't forget to use a lot of blue in the right corner, art-buyers like red."
-- (:> jms cs.vu.nl (_) --"---
Outsourcing managers is a big no-no. Suddenly, the company is not American anymore.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The whole interview is a way to blow smoke up the ass of the managerial class that is shipping these jobs offshore, by somehow letting them think that it really is a matter of merit that their job is intact.
It's about legitimation: "my" skill is a high-level, professional skill, and I "deserve" my salary because of it (because the companies are run by people I went to college with, etc.) "Your" skills are replaceable and commodifiable, because I dress more like the people who run the mutual funds that own the company.
The cultural perception element of this sort of thing is difficult to quantify in economic terms, so economists - especially ones busy telling the managerial crowd exactly what they want to hear - tend to ignore it. But it's a reality.
Not that I'm a protectionist for these sorts of jobs, mind you - at the end of the day, I think that the creation of middle-class professionals in the developing world is a good thing. But I can still recognize self-serving disingenuous rhetoric when I see it.
Some may think this is the best way to do things at their company, but it's essentially turning their coding process into a factory job.
Look at it this way: would you rather have the wristwatch that is hand crafted to perfection, works better, and will last forever, or would you rather buy the watch that came off of the assembly line, always loses time, and will break on you in a year or two?
By leaving the coding process to people outside of the company and its interests, and thereby making the whole process more mechanical than creative, they are essentially assuring themselves the lowest-quality product. It's unfortunate if they think that's the best way to go, but in my opinion they will eventually get what they paid for, so to speak.
SO, if the project manager is an architect, yes he is more advanced than the coder.
That's true, but "architect" and "project manager" are different jobs. You may have one person performing both roles, but they're different skill sets, with only a little overlap.
An architect designs the application/project/whatever, at least on a code level, and quite possibly including hardware, network details, etc. A project manager, managers the project - liasing with clients, helping gather requirements, ensuring team members are fully-booked but not over-booked with work, keeping an eye on the deadline and financials, etc. So yeah, some overlap - an architect will need to talk to the client to find out their requirements, etc, but may well not be concerned with making sure that all the programmers have enough to do.
Like I said, the two roles may be being performed by the same person, but there's no reason to suppose that that's the case. I've never actually worked with a technical project manager, let alone one who could do an architect's job. (Conversely, I would make a mediocre project manager, at least at the moment)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
How can you call a job requiring a degree low/unskilled?
You're suggesting that education == skill?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
-If your software project is pushes the boundaries then programming is more difficult.
-If your project is underfunded, underspecified, and open to change, then managing it is more difficult.
Now, where on this spectrum do you believe most software development efforts fall?
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Management people have always sought to devalue programmers. It makes them uncomfortable to think that some of their subordinates can do things that they can't. The current situation is no doubt making those people very happy indeed. Because now a programmer is, it seems, just a low-value job - like telesales - that can be cheaply and easily farmed out to some third-world sweatshop. The manager is once again demonstrably superior to all his subordinates.
I am a technical project leader and have paid my dues. I am so tired of this type of nonsense. If companies would cleanup their layers of management and beaurocracies we would not have to be farming our work overseas. I work for a very large corporation who constantly allow people with cool degrees and no vision attempt to lead the show. I see this in most every company. Managers/Directors should have a clue about technology and architectures. It is more than creating powerpoint slides and playing politics. There comes a time when you have to do the right thing and clean house. I am little tired managers/directors/VP's doing whatever it takes to protect their bonuses and careers at other peoples expense. Sometimes I wonder if we need a programmers union.
: Fuck corporations.
:) ). This is how I, and other insightful US engineers, remain competitive: by augmenting my skill set and making use of my intelligence to build indispensable infrastructure that provides a much greater value to my company than 8 random coders from India or China could.
I take away from this comment that you don't shop around, right? You either randomly buy without considering cost, or in fact search for the highest-cost vendor for a particular product, right? You use pricewatch, but you sort by price in descending order, right?
I'm guessing you don't. Well, then in fact, you should be fucking yourself because competition is driving low-skill jobs overseas. Without outsourcing to cheaper regions, a company cannot compete for the business of those who attempt to find the lowest price.
FWIW, I am a software architect, and was a software engineer for many years. I know that the kinds of things I do for my company cannot be done by a random coder straight out of CIT (Calcutta Institute of Technology, remember?
I'm sure the leftist/statist/communist anti-globalization pro-third-world-status-quo Slashdot moderators will bury this comment, but I hope at least some of you read it. Stop whining; understand the problem; figure out what you can do about it; and do it!
[ home ]
(Note: I didn't read the entire article, so this post may not hold up to my usual standard of fairness. In particular, I might understand Ms. Farrell better in context of other parts of the article.)
By attaching the label "protectionist" to anyone who decries offshore outsourcing, Ms. Farrell seems willing to draw a thick line between sides of the debate. Why? Intellectual laziness, I suppose.
"Protectionism" means using taxing power to favor domestic industry over foreign competition. Her use of the word is analogous to the frequent abuse of the word "censorship": it's not censorship to disagree.
Why would a company outsource jobs in order to create other jobs? They don't have job creation as their motive, and it's disingenous to say they do. Neither do investors consume more than others. The hole in her argument is that money paid out to investors doesn't necessarily end up in consumption, and money the company saves doesn't necessarily end up being reinvested. It may end up as bonuses paid to the managers who decided to offsource (tm), or to make payoffs to analysts.
The real question is this: is it proper to allow loyalty to a particular country to interfere with business decisions? Internationalists would say no, that nations are an artifact of a less enlightened time. Nationalists argue that there must be independent governments in the world, or the world government will have nothing to check it, and so we should be loyal to ours.
What I'm about is quality. Offsourcing is a short-sighted tactic, and I find it difficult to believe that companies trust offshore developers more than domestic ones. I'm missing something. Oh well, they must know what they're doing.
sigs, as if you care.
Interesting views, but you can see that many people don't understand what a manager SHOULD do.
Basically a manager should allocate resources, direct the team and communicate with the outside world.
This doesn't sound like much, but it is valuable, and really not a common skill set.
If a project is going poorly, replacing twelve good developers with one good project manager won't advance the project one iota if the project is already being competently managed. Conversely, if you already have enough developers on a failing project, adding twelve good engineers and removing a good project manager isn't much of a save either.
To try and establish some kind of mapping between the two is absurd. It's like saying "An axle is worth a dozen engines!"; the car isn't going to go far if you're missing either set of skills. If a project is lacking project management, you need more project management. If it's missing engineers, you need more engineers.
Part of what leads to these sorts of statements, of course, is that neither skillset is easy or readily understood by either side of the debate. Coders don't understand how hard it is to do good project management (mostly because they're typically exposed to the lousy sort, and because you can always muddle your way through). Project managers often have no insight into what it takes to design and build good codeTo compound the misunderstanding, they see that there's one project manager and a dozen developers and they think that they're worth a dozen developers. It's a fairly typical management error.
Ideally, project managers would all have heavy coding experience, and every developer would have project management training. If they don't, then it's up to the experts on both sides to educate across the aisle. If your project manager doesn't get it, it's your fault for not taking an hour to explain it. And if you don't understand why the project managers do what they do, try asking about the process they use to put together a project plan, to do resource balancing, risk amelioration planning, cross-team scheduling, and the like.
I'm already fed up of pompous pricks making an artificial difference between "engineer" and "programmer".
I think a lot of this comes from "management" getting tired of "artisans" refusing to ship products on a schedule (even acknowedging that very often, the schedule is set by unrealistic managers that have about as much of a clue on development cycles as would a North American farmer planting soybeans in late August).
Having spent most of my career between the two camps, I've seen a lot of executives get beyond frustrated with even the most mediocre programmer refusing to understand business requirements, instead pursuing greater and greater perfection and subsequently getting paralyzed in the process.
I think this probably contributes to management desiring to falsely perceive technology development as a manufacturing process (and likewise this treatment further encourages the programming folk to believe they're artisans in a guild, refusing the pressures of deadlines). Neither are dealing with the reality very well.
So... tossing assembly line and guild models out the window, is there a conceptual approach that works?
*scoove*
Coders, who implement fairly straighforward little programs according to existing specifications, are not necessarily incompetent, and it sometimes _is_ a good idea to hire a few coders that can so programmining on a rather low skill-level. Yeah, those are a pest. Those and the arrogant hackers who run around calling everyone they think they have to disagree with a 'popmpous prick'.
but what do i know, i'm just a model.
The ONLY political presidential candidate who has stated he would end WTO AND NAFTA is ...
Dennis Kucinich
Dean has hinted as this, but will not commit.
It makes you wonder why the "left wing media" claims he has no chance. Kinda a self fullfilling prophecy by a self indulging ("left wing") media.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
I don't think that the reason coding is outsourced, whereas project management is not is because of the skill required. It is more because of the nature of the businesses involved, and the nature of the coding to be done. In many situations, you can't really get away with outsourcing project management, because that essentially means you don't really have control over the project, and so you don't really have control over your own business ( assuming the project is central to the business, peripheral projects can be entirely outsourced ).
The nature of the coding to be done is also important. One of the facts that I've come to realize in studying computer science is that, to a large extent, the majority of coding work is routine and does not require in-depth knowledge or familiarity with computer science techniques. Most real-world coding consists of pretty mind-numbing tasks of gluing different APIs together in a reasonable hodge-podge. Many of these tasks require only a familiarity with the syntax of a language, some familiarity with a few common APIs, and access to a machine. None of which is very skill-intensive.
During the dot-com boom many people were employed doing coding work at incredibly over-inflated salaries who had read one or two 'for-dummies' type books. This was possible because there was a shortage of coders who could do even the most routine tasks. The high salaries attainable with very little training meant that there was naturally a rush on such teach-yourself-coding books, and suddenly there was a glut of people who could do routine coding. Now, because of that glut, there is an excess of able code-monkeys to do routine programming tasks, which means that much of this work goes to the lowest bidders ( ie Asian sweat shop coders ). Supply & demand is all it is.
But the future is hopeful, I think, for those who are willing to tough it out and obtain Comp.Sci. degrees. Right now we're stuck in a kind of computational limbo where the market is not sophisticated enough to demand really sophisticated software, so there is little demand for people who can design highly sophisticated applications. There are some jobs which require knowledge of high-performance computing, knowledge of efficient algorithm design, AI, etc. but not very many. Right now basic code-monkey work is what satisfies the majority of the market demand. This is changing rapidly, I think. The more consumers get a taste for sophisticated technology, the more the demand for truly intensive software will rise, and the need for more people with real skills ( ie University level training ) will increase.
There is a big difference between a carpenter and an architect. One is a trade, the other is a profession. The confusion that is happening right now in the labour market for programmers is because this type of distinction is just now starting to emerge. It used to be that there were only professionals in the programming world. With the dot-com boom & bust this has changed, and there is now a new class of worker, who programs as a tradesman, not as a professional. The mind-set of the market has not yet come to fully realize this distinction, and so we have these problems. Eventually this will settle out and there will be two classes of programmers - those equivalent to architects with high levels of training, and those equivalent to carpenters with much practical knowledge, but little or no theoretical or 'design' skill. I expect this will occur more and more as the demand for sophisticated software increases, and we'll see the re-establishment of 'programmer' as a profession.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
IT people are being outsourced first because HR does not know how to hire them, and managers don't know how to manage them. Eventually everyone except the VPs, marketers, and salespeople will go. When garment industry jobs that Americans will not do get outsourced that doesn't hurt many people. When manufacturing jobs go, it's painful. When jobs requiring college degrees get outsourced it means a return to the middle ages, with a rich, talentless aristocracy, and a sea of poverty.
The only people you can't outsource are the ones who have to talk to the client directly and the ones who make the decsions as to who to outsource.
If I were starting up a new software company I would go to India or China or Eastern Europe and hire people away from the big outsourcers. Get experienced people pre-trained. Eventually with competition wages may get to 50% of American levels, which is what some people I know (good people, too) are currently accepting.
It's easy to be cavalier about jobs when you are a venture capitalist, a VP, or a journalist; only the journalist can be outsourced, and not easily. It's not so easy once you think that literally everything else can go, leaving American workers working at Wal-Mart.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
In a well-run shop, a good PM is worth a dozen engineers, never mind coders.
Even in a poorly run shop, a good PM is worth 2 or 3 coders. However, a good engineer is similarly rare, and worth 30 or 40 average, as opposed to good, PMs.
Face it, most PMs are glorified clerks. And yes, most programmers are just coders. The fact is that being a typical programmer requires more skill than being a typical PM. Programmers almost universally understand schedules, resources, and budgets, even if they couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag. PMs do not understand what a functions, objects, or design. You can promote a programmer to become a PM. This happens a lot. The opposite almost never happens.
This is because your AVERAGE, as opposed to GOOD, PM is merely a coordinator, not a manager. They take requirements, hand them to engineers for design and estimates, request resources, propose schedules, and talk to the client. This is quite a job, but it doesn't require years of training to do it at all. Being a secretary also requires a lot of hard work and the ability to multitask, but hard work does not equate to high skill levels.
However, PMs are viewed as managers because the traditional job assignments pass through them. To upper management, someone who passes orders to others is a manager. They (in a few cases, correctly) view themselves as skilled, and those below them as less skilled or less experienced. It follows that a professor of Organizational Management will view things as heirarchical down to the chain where the work gets done. After all, if the secretary who types the memo is less skilled than the manager who dictates it, then the programmer who executes the problem given to them by the PM must similarly be less skilled.
So comparing a GOOD PM to an average coder only obfuscates the fundamental organizational bias the good professor demonstrates. Comparing a typical PM to a typical programmer gets at the root of why programmers feel organizationally slighted.
Let none of what I have said suggest that I don't view GOOD PMs as worth their weight in platinum, or that I think that even being an average PM doesn't take work.
How in the hell did the parent post get a score of +5, Insightful? Is Slashdot somehow scripting moderator point distribution to skew to complete idiots?
I've SEEN what happens when a project is done without a project manager... and you end up with the programmers being just as pissed off as the client. No project manager = no enforced schedule + no well defined scope + no detailed development guides + no moderator of disputes. A good project manager knows the limits of their team and the technology they work with, and will protect the team against unreasonable demands. They take twice as much crap from the level of management above the team as the team takes from them.
I think I might have one for your perusal:
First: forget about software being an "engineering" discipline. It is not. Engineering deals with building physical things, to deal with physical problems. Their design process is entirely different from ours. They spend a huge amount of time perfecting a design up-front, testing it in computer simulations to make sure it won't fall apart under load, building a prototype and destructively testing it, etc. Then they spend another significant amount of time figuring out exactly how best to build the product efficiently. THEN AND ONLY THEN do they actually start building the product.
Contrast this with computer science.While the software development process is LIKE engineering in that there is a design and prototyping period which is difficult and requires a high degree of skill, it is also UNLIKE engineering because in computer science, once you've got a prototype you're ready to test and you can distribute it as-is for nearly zero cost.
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. 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.
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.
When you look at it this way, you're much closer to modelling what's actually going on when a programmer grabs his keyboard. We consider the process an individual human would take to achieve some result; then we codify the process as a set of rules that can be automated and vastly accelerated; then we empower a computer, a lifeless, inanimate object, to perform those rules for us.
We're mathematicians modelling thought for the benefit of our society, creating machines which can enhance the power of our minds. WE are the accelerant speeding the growth of our culture, because WE are the steroid that is causing our intellectual capacity to grow faster than it could ever evolve on its own. Just look at the internet itself: it is so much more vast, and has so much more potential than the library at Alexandria. WE created that. WE made this happen.
And, now, we are considered a burden that must be outsourced. It's ironic, isn't it? Corporations who owe us their very ability to do business worldwide have no gratitude or loyalty for us, and are brushing us aside as though we don't exist. We're just line items to them.
But I'm rambling. Your conceptual approach is that of the mathematician. A design process which mixes equal amounts of knowledge, skill, and inspiration. None of which can be planned like an assembly line.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!