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Exporting Myself?
sennomo asks: "Years ago, I was told that I needed a degree to get a programming job anymore. So, I went to college. A couple of years and thousands of dollars later, there was still no job for me, in spite of my all-powerful B.A. in C.S. The most common explanation I get is that jobs are being exported out of the country. So, I've decided to export myself. Moving to higher ground, so to speak. I have heard a few others discuss this, but how many are actually trying it? And how is it going for them? Are there any hotspots for American expatriate programmers?"
i graduated with my bachelors last spring without having a job lined up. my main avenue of search were the websites of companies in my area and my school's biannual job fair, and those didnt go well. i didnt want to, but I sucked it up and put my resume out on careerbuilder and monster. found a job in less than a week after graduation. and it pays well too!
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
The reason the jobs are being exported is that the cost of labor is cheaper there. If you want to get hired as a local working those lower wages, you might have some advantage since you can set yourself up as the interface with those in the US. But, you will be making local salaries.
On the other hand, if you want to get hired as an expat (making US salaries), you're probably out of luck. The expats, especially the expat geek, who make a ton of money in a foreign land and get quite a few fringe benefits are rapidly disappearing. Best bet to be an expat is to get hired in the US and then get transferred to a different office. Even Saudi Aramco, who once really recruited in the US for expat postings in Saudi Arabia, is shrinking its US expat force.
A BS and a BA both take 4 years typically... Depending on the school, you can easily spend more on a BA than a BS. You have to do more math to get the BS, which may be what scared the poster off. You're probably thinking of an Associates degree.
As for the "analyst" thing, that's not really what I was talking about. There are plenty of entry level design jobs that involve implementation. The only types of tasks that are getting outsourced with any success are fully speced out. He needs to get in on a new product that needs some independant thinkers instead of somebody to read the spec and write the code as specified. Maintnence of legacy code would also be good for him. If you're not the type of person that can be productive dealing with a legacy mess, you're in trouble, because soon there won't be any jobs for that type of person.
I've thought about what I'd consider doing if my job were outsourced...something along the lines of this.
If I were in your situation, I would get some tech experience (of any kind, even the low paying sort), find a partner or three (ah, there's the rub), and form an outsourcing company yourself. That is, land and manage gigs, and get some outsourced help to do some bulletproof coding for you. You will succeed if you stick to the 'commoditized' projects. You'll need lots of design skill, lot of management expertise, QA experience, and a committment to nothing less than excellence. You need to have a reputation for never fucking up, and admitting it if you do. Then , and only then, can you think about landing serious gigs.
Sure, you need more experience, but you could hone some of those skills working on open source projects in the meantime.
I'm sure I'll be flamed for generalizing and simplifying (of course I have a bit), and hear anecdotes of 'my company spent $xMM outsourcing a component to india and it sucked' but frankly, this is what people have been doing for years, just (mostly) inside U.S. borders. I personally have taken a couple of $80k jobs away from big firms by doing just that. I recently managed a job with a developer in New Zealand, and the 'client' in Chicago, London, and Moscow. (I didn't just land it out of the blue though, and that's another post entirely.)
Of course, I'm not talking about stealing the Ebay rebuild project from IBM, but something smaller, more manageable, with a good chance of success. To put it another way, think the Doctor/Pharmacist role. If you have a serious malady, you probably don't want to use a Doctor on the other side of the world, but once you get your prescription (in this case, a bulletproof technical spec), you don't really care where it gets filled, do you?
With that said, the protectionists may now commence flaming...