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The Pragmatic Programmers Interviewed
jpkunst writes "An interesting interview at the O'Reilly Network with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, who recently started their own publishing company. Many topics are covered. Dave has this to say about outsourcing: 'To get job security, developers need to position themselves as highly effective business-value generators, working with the rest of the company to solve common goals. If you sit in your cube waiting for a spec to be thrown over the wall, then you may be in for a wait -- that spec might be in an envelope on its way to Bangalore'"
I am a programmer, but my main value to employers is that I spent ten years working in other capacities: management, sales, construction grunt work, you name it. As a result, I usually don't *need* specs from analysts or product managers, because I usually have more business experience than most of them and can figure it out for myself.
Most of the programmers I've worked with lack this experience, and as a result end up having to be told what to do because they don't understand the full context of the problem they're being asked to solve. They often come up with elegant solutions to the wrong problem...
But system administration still can't be outsourced.
You think?
What if the data centre itself moves to India? What if all your desktop users run all their apps via Citrix, with the server farm in India? Sure someone has to physically set up a network in your office, but then all the routers and switches can be remotely administered.
Unless by "system administration" you mean changing toner cartridges and cleaning sticky mice. Yeah, that can't be outsourced.
It's got to be done right here at home by people whom we trust implicitly.
You trust your bank, right? Their call centre is probably in India by now. Very very few jobs can't be outsourced in one way or another.
Except for management, you might think. Well, you'd be wrong. Managers in the US have this dream where all their work will be done at low cost offshore, and they'll rake in the profits at home. What happens when the offshore companies realize, hey, we know everything we need to about the business now, we've done all the work - why do we need management over in the US to cream off the profits? Already there are Indian companies like Tata and Wipro doing an end-run around US-based consultancies and pitching direct to customers. Won't be long before there are actual Indian investment banks, telco equipment manufacturers, accountancy firms, competing directly with US-based firms who now have no staff of their own.
The US in particular and the West in general doesn't realize that it's simultaneously educating its competitors and losing the skills needed to compete. In 10 years, all those hollow management-only companies will totally implode.
We hired some chimps from a huge international consultancy. The document they produced is so piss-poor we are on our sixth draft. In the time this has taken (2 months) with two very expensive consultants working full time and two in-house developers checking their work part-time, we have
The threat of offshoring has been massively over stated. More and more companies are seeing that this process (send the requirement to India) is simply not cost-effective. It may take some time for all PHBs to see this but it will happen. That's business.
There is (hopefully) a happy ending. The outsource providers tendering for this gig are charging in the region of 700UKP/day (about $1200/day) for a Java programmer with about 3 years experience (I'm not making this up). Most say that they can cut that cost by about a third if we offshored. Well, gee, that's still more expensive than hiring some local contractor with 7 years experience who can sit down and talk to the business people. We're getting "buy-in" from management to save money and not offshore. We'll have a decision soon and it looks good.
Agile methodologies will be the saviour of the Western programmer.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."