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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."
Those that do... do...
Those that can't... teach?
Who is he calling low-level?
Davak
Half the talent from universities is terrible anyway, no wonder coding is being shot off shore.
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 have plenty of them in-house already.
New York Times reporters have been outsourced by 100 chimps with 100 laptops.
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 (_) --"---
who, since the coder jobs are overseas, probably don't know how to code themselves. Furthermore, because the developers are now overseas, the project managers have to coordinate with the language, distance, and cultrual gap, despite probably not knowing how to program. It's no wonder software development has become ridiculous. By the way, project manager with programming experience for hire right here.
Plus I have a fine art degree... try finding that overseas!
stuff |
My hospital uses Russian programmers. The entire job of OUR coders is to learn and debug the Russian code...
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
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
I don't know about project managers being more advanced than coders, but I am sure architects are more advanced than coders. SO, if the project manager is an architect, yes he is more advanced than the coder.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
Most software doesn't suck. Most users, however...
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/business/yourmon ey/07out.html?ex=1071378000&en=9b0b3f301239bb62&ei =5062&partner=GOOGLE
Slashdot Editors: Is it so fucking hard to get a Google partner link? What do you guys do all day?
While not all coders are rocket scientists, I think the ones who use Assembly everyday are the ones that have six brains. I can barely understand all this converting binary to this, hex to that, etc...
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.
Interesting article, but... The missing point is that a lot of companies see outsourcing (especially overseas) as a solution but a lot of firms end up dumping projects or spending a lot of cash cleaning up mistakes and errors. I have a couple of close friends that are mid-level coders and project managers in for big-name retail firms that are constantly complaining that their jobs have been reduced to recoding poorly coded outsource projects. THE QUESTION IS: Can you really export intellectual work?
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.
...that we've seen over and over. More interesting is the mistaken impression that it's only coding jobs going to India. Look at Business Week for another take.
In the future there are two roads. One is to look backward and hang on to what we think we're entitled to. The other is to recognize what has made America. Our virtues lie in a flexible and open, technology friendly, risk-taking, entrepreneurial, market-driven system. This is exactly the same type of challenge farmers went through in the late 1800's, sweatshop workers went through in the early 1900's, and manufacturing workers did in the first half of the 80's. We've got to focus on setting in motion a debate that pushes us into new sources of job creation rather than bemoaning the loss. There are Republicans and Democrats alike who are involved in this protectionist backlash. They're very vocal right now, and they need to be challenged.
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.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
I can't believe theyre saying coding is low-skill.. its not like just anyone can code.. ive been in and around computers for 12 years and although I'm an absoloute hardware freak I still find programming rather difficult (I guess part of that is because i just can't remember alot of it and I have problems with some math, if anyone has any suggestions that would be nice ^_^) saying that ok yeah maybe it is something that can be more easily outsourced but it is definitely not easy..
'Low-skill jobs like coding are moving offshore and what's left in their place are more advanced project management jobs.'
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
(It's slashdot, afterall - I wouldn't want to be thrown out for actually _reading_ the article).
All of the participants come from a business administration perspective. It's not really a wonder they think moving elements around in a gantt chart is "higher level work" than writing lines of code.
It would be a much easier world for the Business Administration guys if software development actually _was_ a low skill job. If it can be specified well enough to be automated by human drones, it will be automated by machines - and then we'll need a higher skilled developer to supervise these machines.
They should discuss outsourcing management - it's the next logical step.
There is an assumption by protectionists that these jobs are going somewhere else, and all this money has been pocketed by C.E.O.'s who take it home. A little more sophisticated version is: It's being pocketed by companies in the form of profits. One step further and you say those profits are either going to go as returns to the investors in those companies,
A even more sophisticated version is: the vast majority of those increased profits is being pocketed by the upper 5% income bracket.
or they're going to go into new investment by those companies.
Or maybe going to increased CEO salary, or more advertising and spin.....
Those savings enable me, if I am an investor, to consume more and therefore contribute to job recreation, Or maybe job creation in India?
and if I am a company, to re-invest and create jobs. That's important because I agree that we are migrating jobs away, some of which will never return, nor should they. Nor should we continue to subsidize these multinationals with corporate welfare, tax breaks, or military protection..... Also....
It's a race to the bottom if we spend all our energy trying to protect existing sources of job creation, as the politicians in the U.S. Congress are inclined to do. The problem is that globalization is growing asymmetrically, so initially it creates more supply than demand. We're living through that asymmetry right now, and that has caused a potentially dangerous political backlash. The Chinese, for example, are reluctant to transform their habits from savers to consumers because they're losing jobs through the reform of their own economy, and they don't have social security or retirement. Over time there is a rising tide. But the political process is not that patient.
Translation: "Just trust us CEO/globalists/investors, and everything will be fine....
Dennis Kucinich, the Open Source Presidental C
As a coder turned project manager I fell that my current position is harder then my old coding job. The demands are higher the blame falls entirely on me and the worst part of all, I have to deal directly with the customers. As a coder I could work on things in small pieces and just meet the requirments, as the manager/designer I have to know how those pieces will go together and recognize the obstacles before hand. Really for the little extra pay I get for the new job I'd go back to being a coder if it wasn't for the lack of job security.
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.
Great. Another group of pinheads whose livelihoods are unaffected by the changes telling us about the wonderful advantages of outsourcing. Anyone who disagrees is a "protectionist" which just a substitute for the not-so-PC term "commie". And, they fail to mention that most of the countries that the jobs are outsourced to have a very strong "protectionist" bent.
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.
I think what they were trying to say is one-dimensional coders are fast becoming dinosaurs. These days in the corporate world, programmers have to demonstrate added-valued.
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.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
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.
If we could outsource at the C-level there would be significantly more money available to companies to hire IT staff and skilled workers. C-Level = CEO, CFO, CIO, CPO, and of course C3P0.
:) Also, smarter companies that want to hold or gain market share my begin to realize that not outsourcing gives them a competitive advantage and keeps customers happy.
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, 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!
This is the common mistake many big companies make. Offshoring IP development in the form of engineering is bad on so many levels - I have yet to see effective software engineering done by an Asian "offshore" outfit.
I believe this has something to do with Western Culture.
At any rate, the best success I've seen is to turn over detailed designs for offshore coders to implement, but even that can be of questionable quality, unless strict supervision is applied.
Do I seem cynical? I've seen some great IP development flushed down the drain in the rush to "cheap" Indian companies who've bait-and-switched personnel and taken 3-to-4 times the resources and ultimately, MORE MONEY to complete a project, and the results were very poor.
At any rate, there is a big difference between a software engineer and a programmer, and it's more than simply a case of following a software development process. Creativity has been a hallmark of American and European engineering, going back centuries - and it's an integral part of a successful program that develops IP.
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.
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.
ARE low level, and they should move to hell (im not even american, but its the same trend everywhere).
I mean, you dont need good level programming for 80% of the programming tasks of corporate enterprises (sap anyone?)
People that actually get to manage this kind of project should also move to their nearest cronic boredom self management help-group.
Now, if the 'interesting' projects are also moving there, its because 'there' has better educated IT professionals for a lesser price. I do think this is the case for some of this projects, and good riddance to them.
But other projects (granted, only 10% of the it workforce gets to work on this) simply cannot be done anywhere else than in the states. Your job is to struggle for those, or open your own shop.
Fuck corporations.
NO SIG
There will always be market for high-quality programmers.
Higher quality means higher prices, which means higher wages are acceptable.
It's basically a refinement of the market, not a disappearance.
I live in Sweden, which has some of the highest labor costs in Europe. Yet, Sweden has a strong steel industry, despite steel manufacturing being quite a 'low-tech' industry, with cutthroat international competition.
(Coming from Japan, and increasingly China)
How do they compete? Simple: They don't. Sweden switched its industry to high-quality and specialty steel production requireing more skill.
The USA really needs to move their steel industry in this direction, but instead they leveled tariffs on imported steel. (now dropped after trade-war threats)
(Also, note that swedish steel was exempt from these tariffs, for the reason that they don't compete with american steel manufacturers, who aren't in the specialty market)
So, for the software market, I think we'll see something similar. And a choice will have to be made whenether to face reality, at a cost of the lesser-skilled jobs, or give the industry artificial resuscitation through tariffs.
If you hire and pay on the assumption that coding is low-skill, you'll end up with crap programmers generating crap software. Projects will usually go over budget, rarely meet customer expectations, and generally have a miserable experience.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, that matches the behavior of many large companies. They hire chimpanzees, then are shocked when all they get is chimp crap out of them.
Aaaah, the free market and short sighted capitalism, leading the world to the lowest common denominator...
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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.
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.
All i know is that if project managers went on strike for a week, they would come back to find the entire project had been completely redesigned from scratch, it would be amazingly efficient and well structured and it would work perfectly and within budget, whats more it would have 100 new useful features. If programmers went on strike for a week they would come back and find a list of 100 random, totally flawed and un-thought-out things to do on thier desks.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Augh! Don't give me this crap. I cannot believe that you're making some pointless distinction between "coder" and "programmer". Not to mention "engineer".
The fact is that there is a certain (small) percentage of people working in the software industry who are highly talented, and capable of understanding both high-level architecture and the low-level details of what they're working on at any given moment.
There are also some incompetent people - who should not have been hired in the first place. There are people who are capable of simple tasks, and those who are geniuses, capable of anything.
I'm already fed up of pompous pricks making an artificial difference between "engineer" and "programmer". Let's not tar "coder" with the same brush. I've been working in the software industry for many years, and consider myself a "coder", a "programmer", an "engineer" and even a "hacker". So what? The quality of the finished work is what counts. If we had less idiots saying "my role is an architect, not a coder" - or vice versa - then the software industry would be vastly improved.
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.
Now I know coders aren't rocket scientists, but less advanced than project managers?
Just goes to show that MS Project is more challenging to a manager than an IDE is to a programmer.
I for one do not worry about my area of coding being shipped offshore anytime soon. Not sure the best way to describe it, but I guess "small-business custom integration web application development" works.
You take the business knowledge you should have been absorbing along your career path, and do contract work for existing small businesses which require your business knowledge. These companies usually have a unique business model or idea they are trying to leverage the Internet for expanding their revenue.
There will always be small businesses that don't have the luxury of their business model fitting into one of the software packages that was pieced together my a megolithic company that outsources all of their "coding" offshore.
Believe me, there is an extreme shortage of programmers with real business knowledge in ANY area of business. I know because I have been trying to find one to hire for over a year. Not one candidate has shown more than a shred of ability to take a raw idea, and make it a real application that will integrate with the existing business.
If you can take a business idea and apply to an existing business, without having to be taught that business, you are a value added programmer, and you will always have a job. Although maybe as a project manager =)
Having a bookmark to Google does not make you an expert on everything.
Software creation is a mixture of art and engineering.
"Coders" as they are called are 95% of the work and talent involved. The project manager can only provide a direction and control.
The Devil is in the Details. A single coding mistake can represent hundreds or thousands of wasted hours in testing and tech support.
The entire "object revolution" is about making software flexible by modelling the domain and not the problem. This means design up front is out the window because by the time you get halfway through the project things have changed. Design is an ongoing thing to meet the current demands of the environment. You cannot just hand a spec to a bunch of programmers and expect anything except mediocre code that needs to be rewritten every 2 years, costing much more than was ever saved by attempting cheaper development.
I'm not even going to argue why the above is true. I'd rather let the idiots who manage software projects (without exception) cause the collapse of project after project (including outsourced) until it is realized that only programmers can manage programmers. I'm not kidding you I have seen MILLIONS dropped into failed software. By failed I mean absolutely failed. The code was thrown away. In two cases this also caused the collapse of the entire company. I have seen more software projects fail than succeed. And for sure the problem was always management. There is a problem in American business that cannot let control rest in the person with his hands on the materials. Software isn't rivetting. Every programmer involved has the potential to make or severely cripple the entire project. No company is willing to hire two people for every programming job and have one Quality Control the other, hence, the programmers are left alone to make or break the project.
It is hard enough for other programmers to understand what another programmer is doing. A manager is basically clueless and if he attempts to exert control contrary to where the team is going, he is almost always wrong.
I manage two teams, one in Russia and one in the U.S. and while there are very skilled members on both sides, the Russians, who are only doing the work as a 9 to 5 grind job, do the bare minimum of work. They demonstrate the reverse of all the good programming practices we have learned over the years. Variables named X, y and z, C++ code with gotos all over the place, no concept of member functions and that's just the least of it. I am not kidding when I say it is essentially code that looks like someone just graduated from learning BASIC. It is completely unmanageable code and will have to be rewritten eventually. But after all, what do they care? They are being paid by the hour and by doing a good job, they simply do themselves out of a job.
I believe now that no one can organizationally predict good software. The best thing you can do is find some code out there that works well, and buy it. This way you know what you are getting. Investing in a programming project is a quagmire that will take down most project managers and companies. If I were a corporate CEO I would never write my own software. I would find something that already exists and attempt to modify it to fit my needs.
Here in the USA you'll never get a job with a firm as a coder without some certificate from Microsoft. College degrees are becoming irrelevant for programmers, it takes too long to get that BA/BS and things change too fast in the industry. In addition, college grads know about things like algorithms and data structure and can write sorta good code. Writing well designed, debugged code which works takes longer than some guy just hacking it out in VB like they showed him at Microsoft school. As the folks in Redmond have taught us, "when the deadline comes ship it, and we'll fix it in the next release". Quality has lost out to time to market.
(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.
> So, I guess 'those that can' are on the bottom rung, huh?
Have you looked at teachers' salaries lately?
I Agree with the writer of this article. *GASP* yes i said it! Now, listen as to why before you troll me.
Coders have a skill that is valuable. But, a lot of people can do it. Too many actually, creating a glut in the market. And, Indians, Pakistanis, and others in Asia work for so much cheaper than Americans, that outsourcing saves money.
As for Project Managers, it is a VERY different job than programming. Not only must a Project Manager know how to program at a reasonable level, they must know how to communicate exactly what is needed for a project to those who are coding. Especially if that programmer does not speak the Project Manager's native language. Plus, there are change orders, budgets to meet, and other crap that gets handed down from Upper Management. Also, paperwork, timelines, and all kinds of requirements fall on the shoulders of the Project Manager. If something doesn't work, he gets the blame. If it works, Upper Management gets the credit.
I'd rather hire a good Project Manager and o.k. Programmers than an o.k. Project Manager and good Programmers. But maybe that's just me, thinking too business-like for the /. community.
First of all, private industry was never a particularly good place to work. Add up the noncompetes, the nondisclosures, and the IP agreements, and you have a pretty fair approximation of slavery. Think I'm wrong? If you're fired or laid off, you've basically been discarded without the ability to move to a new company thanks to the noncompete. If you try to flee the plantation and start your own company, you'll get hit with the nondisclosures and IP agreements. Even if your product isn't directly related to your old company's, they'll figure out SOME way of making it look related. They might just try and claim that you've built your new company based on things you were working on at theirs -- even if they don't have a leg to stand on, they can afford to throw legal talent at you and they'll crush you in the courts (remember, they have lawyers on staff). Ever try to hire a lawyer while unemployed?
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.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
The problem is that most people don't realise that some items should be crafted and some should be produced.
If it's needed in mass quantities, doesn't require intricate design, and price is important, then it should be produced. If it's one-of-a-kind, complex and difficult, and price is not an object, then it should be crafted.
The paradoxical thing about software, is that since it can be duplicated for free, the commodity items are the ones that should be crafted. So every in-house database front-end should be made in a production-line environment by technician-class workers (these can be outsourced). But operating systems and major applications should be designed with care.
For example: the reason Linux is better than Windows is that Microsoft develops software on a production line while open source uses the craft approach. When a big consulting company like IBM outsources their coding they won't have a similar quality drop because they're producing a bunch of simple products.
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.
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!
The question is: where do we get the project managers of the future?
As someone just about to leave university with a Master's in CS, I think I can say with some confidence that very few companies won't make their PMs start out as developers. Problem is, if there are no coders there's nowhere for PMs to cut their teeth. Clearly if the outsourcing of programming is the future, we need a radically different culture and probably a different education system for software professionals -- maybe in a few decades time the universities will figure that out?
Sounds like Intel.
I once had the distinct *cough* privilege *cough* of having no less that 4 people over the "management" my work. Basically, a manager would whine long and loud enough about how overworked he was until they'd get the go ahead to turn someone below them into a mini-manager who would take up the management of their people. Then that manager, conceivably, suddenly has only one person to manage.
Needless to say we were all a little unclear as to what the first manager now did besides check that the mini-manager was doing his job and maybe make some pretty Powerpoint presentation to show what a great manager he now was.
- I am made of meat.
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.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
You may be right, and the outsourcing to India certainly suggests that they have the concrete skills covered. However before I'd be willing to accept that the universities are all-round as good I'd want to see some demonstration of abstract skills, such as by winning a programming contest.
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
I find it almost amusing, and a bit intimidating, that so many Slashdot readers seem to believe in the inherent superiority of "Western" engineers, architects and managers.
There seems to be a wide-spread belief that people in India and China are somehow less creative, less able to come up with revolutionary technology, that they're most likely only suitable for production or manufacturing, but not higher level jobs, e.g. architectural work.
I hope this is just a misconception on my behalf. I mean - seriously, do you think a couple of billion Chinese and Indians aren't up to the task of leapfrogging the economies of the West? Do you think they are less apt to come up with excellent algorithms, solve mathematical problems, engineer new software?
Don't kid yourselves... Technological changes in Asia will increase growth and output at rates the US, the EU and Japan will only be able to look at in envy over the coming decades.
For them, this will mean higher incomes, which equals better education, and more capital to invest in new ideas... And before you know it, roles have changed, and you're the low-wage US software engineer, getting harsh orders from your parent company's Beijing managers to speed up the monkey-coding and to leave the thinking to them.
There's only one way out of this, and that is to let go of the nostalgia, and, in a very Dilbertesque way, to work smarter; to educate, educate, educate and let creativity flow, to invent, invent, invent.
Stop whining, order a triple caffe macchiato, smell it, and wake up. Roll up your sleeves, and get to it.
at least for airplanes. Was every added pound of wieght increased the opperating costs of the aircraft by $20,000/yr. That's also why you only get one soda, no meal on short flights, and a bag of nuts that has exactly 1/2 an almond and a few cc's of air.
It's also a good reason to have a 'no-fat chicks' rule for flight attendants.
It was the driving force for Boeing to not just build the 777 but go with a composite tail. Technology partially paid for by the B-2 (the unjustifiably expensive bomber that replaces a whole aircraft package that costs more than the first YB-2.)
This type of emotional plea is what Nader is famous for. Think about the children, and make changes based on that which will ultimately get more people, including children, killed. I mean if people weren't paying with their lives, it would really be funny.
And thus we have the code-monkey exactly making my point. He doesn't understand the system, or failure, and would make a change that influences a now dominant secondary (or perhaps tertiary) effect.
Hell, one could probably make a case for allowing smoking on flights because the risks from second hand smoke, even repeatedly recirculated, might be out weighted by the increased ease of crack detection in the fuselage by the ground crews.
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:
- Jack
I work in this industry in Tech Support. I work for a very large and prosperous company that has a completely disfunctional IT department, so my sample space may not be representative of the norm. But from where I sit, from what I've seen, ALL offshore work is crap. Software and Support, complete unmitigated crap.
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...
Easy... just don't waste so much time reading slashdot.
-1, Flamebait
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Low-skill jobs like coding Apparently the man has never written a kernel.
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 once sat in a meeting with 200 company officers (of which I am sad to say I am one). The CIO told us in so many words that:
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!
I remember that a lot of my friends believed that in 1999, but who really buys that now? Sure, I've seen a few instances of remote managment. Some of the project managers at my company (who are Chinese immigrants) manage groups in China. But in the long run (and by long run I mean ~2 years), how can anyone truly believe that China can't produce enough capable product managers who are up to the task and willing to work for a fraction of an American wage? This quote is pure, unadultered (dare I say racist?) arrogance.
-a
It's true, there are a lot of unskilled programmers out there. And there are a lot of skilled programmers out there that aren't very good at commercial development.
When I first started contracting I worked at a company that heaped praise upon me for my ability when I wasn't very happy about the quality of my own work. Apparently the people they hired before me were very very bad at what they did.
I've seen a few people like that since. Mostly they're people who taught themselves to program or did a quick programming course. Their code may be technically excellent, but it can also be very buggy and unnecessarily complex. It's not just a case of knowing how to get something to work, but it's also a case of keeping it as simple as possible.
It was mentioned in another thread that programming is just a case of copying code around and knowing what functions to use. This is partially true. And that's the way it should be. A program should be as consistant and structured as possible. However, this is where the 80/20 rule comes in. 20% of the code is going to be significantly different from the rest of the application and requires some actual thought and skill to implement and will take 80% of the time to develop.
And as for outsourcing, I know a company that some years ago outsourced an application to an outsourcing company in India. At the end of the outsourcing contract, the company was left with an application that was a shell and didn't actually do anything and the company had to write it themselves in the end. Of course, the project was obviously not managed properly by the company, but it raises questions in my mind about the work ethic of outsourcing companies. I don't want to come of as racist here, but India is well known for being a very corrupt country.
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.
I am one of the graduates who is struggling to find a job now and let me tell you one thing: it sucks to work at a liquor store while paying off $345 per month for the next fifteen years. Unlike the majority of dot-com born programmers, I knew that the salaries of the late nineties were inflated. I did not expect to earn $80K after college and something told me that VB and Access programmers did not deserve six digit pay checks. Most of these people were in IT because of the money, not because of their own passion. Now most of them have several years of experience and they compete with college grads like myself. The battle is hard, but I think that as long as I meet software engineers who do not know what threads are, I am going to win. (Yeah, you heard me right: I met a couple of mid-level "software engineers" who had zero knowledge about concepts like threads.)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.
4 such posts in 8 minutes?! You going for some record? Why not go *on* record, though?
Still, excellent. Thanks
668.5
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.
Management trends attempt to drive the craftsmanship out of any effort; the knowledge goes into the system and the workers are just commodity fleshbots. Make the widget easy to make and send it to some place that pays two grains of rice a day.
This attitude is rife in American corporate culture. I'm forty, I cut code and am good at it. However, some people think I lack ambition because I don't wish to become a manager. I'd make a fair to middling manager, but I'm far more valuable in a technical role.
An alternative to this is to take the view that the best people are craftsmen/artisans. It is my (relatively uneducated) understanding that in European countries, the artisan is appreciated more than in the USA. The guy who has spent his life lovingly working with a lathe can tell you all its good and bad points, make the thing sing and dance. Similarly, I think there should be codesmiths: people that really know how to cut code and are valued.
A few years ago programmers were in short supply and you could get a good job (ie big bucks)if you could find the power switch on a PC. Probably a lot of people became programmers yet were not up to the task. The craft of coding became devalued because so many arbitrary skills were thrown into the "coding" bucket though they require different skill sets and levels of understanding (eg. someone building a web page is an HTML coder, vs say someone writing complex OS stuff in assembler). Times have got tighter and, perhaps for the better in the long run, there is a squeeze. Probably mostly bad programmers will get cut, but of course some good ones will be too.
While you're seen as an expense rather than a value adder, you're in a dangerous situation. Perception is important, not the reality. The manager likes to think that good stuff happens because of him, not because some programmer did a brilliant job. Unless the management can see, and are prepared to acknowledge, your added value they just see you as being a cost item and the way to manage cost is to reduce it. If you're perceived to be generic then don't be suprised if the manager picks their programmers from the "two for a buck" bargain bin.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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?
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.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
We need to get involved in our professional societies (IEEE-USA, ACM), and push them to lobby for us (instead of letting the Corporations "speak" for us. we know where they stand!).
Right. I'm sure all the due-paying members of the IEEE and the ACM in India and China will be really happy about that. As will members in Canada and Europe who will see their ability to work in the US slashed as well.
As a card-carrying IEEE member for 10 years I will write letters until I'm blue in the face to oppose any political lobbying on the part of these organizations. They are technical societies. You want to raise hell? Call your congress-person.
All you guys complaining -- those t-shirts, those shoes you're wearing, they were all manufactured in the continental USA... right?
Didn't think so.
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Winner: short term thinking, loser: long term planning.
Winner: idiots with money, loser: people who actually do work.
Winner: people in Europe whose governments tend to protect voters from loss of standard of living, loser: people in the US whose government is leading the race to the bottom.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
- Aircraft are statistically much safer than cars.
- Aircraft travel much faster than cars.
- Air crashes, though rare, almost always kill everyone onboard.
- Aircraft have redundant drivers, and multiple checks against
either pilot being intoxicated before boarding, let alone both.
- Automobile drivers don't have to pass through any checkpoints
before getting behind the wheel, so are much more likely to be impaired.
- A car crash at 90MPH might be survivable and might involve decelerations up to 9Gs. A plane crash at 600MPH would not be, would
involve decelerations much greater than 9Gs, and very few people can
survive that sort of deceleration anyway.
- Weight is much more important in aircraft economics than automotive.
An airplane with 9G chairs would probably have to charge something like Space Shuttle rates of $2000/lb to fly, if it could even get off the ground.
The analysis is probably not so callous as you suppose. Stronger seats on airplanes probably would not increase survivability.--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
The companies that handle the outsourcing soon reach the point where they don't need the US company any more. That happened in consumer electronics and appliances years ago, and it's happening in apparel. If it can be sold through Wal-Mart, there's no need for a US company to be involved in manufacturing or distribution. Branding problems can be fixed with advertising, acquisition, or pressure. Some well-known US brands are already just fronts for offshore operations.
In service areas, if the service can be delivered over the Internet or by phone, it can be moved offshore. Right now, most of the companies doing this are fronted by US companies. But those companies become hollowed out, until they're just brands.
Next, the intellectual property moves offshore. This has already happened in consumer electronics and is happening in semiconductors. No US company can make a CD-ROM drive without licensing technology from Asian companies.
Finally, the money moves offshore.
The US could end up with Third World income levels as a result of this race to the bottom. Don't think it can happen? Twenty years ago, nobody though there would be armies of permanently homeless people in US cities. Or that Argentina would become a poor country. Or that Britain would become poorer than Italy.
In the US, average real weekly earnings peaked in 1973. That's why your parents are better off than you are.
Those that cannot manage: sue.
Those that cannot sue: get screwed.
Those that cannot get screwed: are Slashdot geeks.
The Indians wouldnt dare outsource their jobs. Their economists and politicians know that would be stupid.
This currently makes them wealthier, but for how long?
The "elite" are currently doing the new work. There will be much more work coming in, and more "3rd world university" coders supplied to the dozen Indian provinces trying to under cut each other (tax shelters). Their methods will be documented and automated too. And quicker than it happened in the West, so market forces say their wages will drop, not increase, and standards will get worse.
ps: Ireland is now fucked after helping build the worst windows versions every conceived and getting no taxes for it.
pps: that project manager who posted before, it certainly sound like its faster to have your local coders making the program while you type out the specification and manual, than writing it all first, sending it off and waiting to see how much you have to fix when it returns.
Hey, it's in the article:
"Low-skill jobs like coding"
I don't code for a living, but my degree is in computer science...and to get that degree I had to learn crazy amounts of math (calculus III, diferential equations..etc), algorithms, complexity theory, compiler theory, as well as a whole slew of languages (C, C++, Pascal, Fortran, Java).
How could a profession that requires that much knowledge possibly be considered "low-skill"? Christ! If that's true, doctors will be considered blue-collar workers in the next 5 years! I can see it now: Become a doctor at your local vo-tech school while attending classes at night or on weekends!
Lots of fraternity guys at my college had file cabinets full of business papers availible for "recycled use" by their brothers. They never had any Math, Chemistry, Pre-Med, Computer Science, or Engineering papers though....I wonder why?
We are in this mess now because we've become a nation of managers...we don't actually do anything in this country...but we sure as hell manage a lot. Good management is important in any company, but it can not replace intellectual capital. That's what drives long-term innovation and productivity.
It is easier for a scientist to learn business than it is for a businessman to learn science.
-ted
What a waste! We could have as good a conversation between pundits in Bangalore for a tenth the cost!
Nothing like a little economic reality to get a bunch of Slashdotters up in arms, and to prove once again why "geek culture" has become the elitist shithole that I've tried so hard to avoid dealing with for the past few years. So many posts decrying the audacity of the author to suggest that a programmer's skills are less important than those of a project manager.
Look, I've done some coding. I started with VB, continued on to Java, tinkered with some C++, and hacked on Perl. I wouldn't call myself a "programmer," per se, but I have done a fair bit of coding, sometimes as part of my job as a systems administrator for a small company. And you know what? My degree is in English. I never took a single computer science course in school -- I'm entirely self-taught. The simple fact of the matter is that coding is NOT the difficult nonrepeatable skill that so many programmers think it is. Once you understand logical structure, it's little more than a matter of memorization.
You want proof? Think about it: How many competent programmers do you know vs. how many competent managers? Anyone who's read the rest of the drivel in response to this article can plainly see that the programmers aren't the ones in short supply. And yet so many programmers assume that managers are unskilled, talentless boobs whose value is inflated. It's no different from a construction worker who thinks that the architect is overvalued because he can't drive a forklift.
The Geek Elite has been given a hard wake-up call and they still refuse to admit to themselves that all the hype five years ago surrounding their skills was just that -- hype. Programmers aren't being outsourced because management is grasping at straws to find a way to prove its superiority. They're being outsourced because they are easily replaced by cheaper labor with similar skills.
Believe me, I understand. As a systems and network admin, I once overestimated my own value as well, thinking that my skills were important enough to warrant respect from my superiors -- until I realized that my job was still to do what I was told, like anyone else, and that I was little more than a plumber or appliance repairman. The sooner everyone finds a little humility and admits to themselves that their computer science degrees and taste for cheap sci-fi don't make them better than their peers, the sooner they can get on with improving their skill sets and finding a way to combat the economic difficulties we are currently facing.
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...
Tech Public Policy stuff
It's not just the jobs going abroad, it's the whole outsourcing model that's a problem. While it's obvious that alot of companies have too many employees in IT since the Y2K blitz, many seem to think that somehow companies like IBM, EDS, BT, etc. etc. can save them money. My friend works for one of these companies, and they have been given the task of designing/running systems for a global bank. Now, the bank uses a different outsourcing company to run its networks. That company is annoyed because it didn't win the systems contract, so they are un-cooperative which leads to inefficiencies. His company managers have read the contract with rose-tinted specs...they don't realise that an outage in one system impacts more systems and so the amount of money they have to pay back in outage time is higher than they first thought.... Basically, they have now decided that they have to do things 'on the cheap', and hope that their systems are reliable... I'm not even going into the flaws in the design made by their 'architects'..... Never mind....the bank may loose out with less reliable systems and staff who are not loyal to them. No doubt the outsourcers will continue to persuade gullible companies that theirs is the way forward...
Do you see M$ or Apple outosurcing to India/China? Hmm...
Mr. Bivens - "Government's big roles in the future are to make sure global demand matches supply, and to provide social insurance schemes to make sure the living standards of the workers being left behind aren't sacrificed on the altar of global progress."
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.
cat sig >
Winner: Someone who accepts that the rules have now changed, and adjusts to play under the new rules
Loser: Someone who continues trying to compete under the old rules, who bitches and moans about "the good old days" and "the way things used to be"
Working for a large, notionally-faceless employer has only been common for about the last 100 years; prior to that, the vast majority of income-earners worked in their own small business producing products or services that they would sell directly. You were a baker, a bar owner or whatever, and you sold your goods and services to the other people in your town. Only in the 20th century did it become common for masses of people to work for a single employer and expect job security, so maybe what's happening now is an evolutionary step rather than the end of the world.
What's happening in IT now, with outsourcing of jobs to cheaper markets, is exactly what's happened to many other industries (primarily manufacturing) in Western countries over the last few decades. I'm sure there's ex-factory workers who've been out of work for years who are still convinced that "things will get better", but the majority of those people reskilled and moved on.
I suspect a sizeable chunk of these displaced workers thought their world was ending at the time as well, but it didn't.
There's now many indicators that the days of a majority of people in prosperous Western nations working for large employers may be coming to an end. It's not necessarily a doom-and-gloom period coming up, but sitting back waiting for things to change isn't likely to be the best preparation for what lies ahead.