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Two Reviews of Yourdon's 'Outsource?'
Ben Rothke (continued)
For those Americans who would hope their representatives in Washington would get involved and pass laws to stem the flow of jobs overseas, there is little that Washington will likely do to help knowledge-based workers whose jobs are in danger of being offshored. While the loss of jobs is a crisis to many of us, Yourdon makes note of the oil crisis of the early 1970s and a speech that Jimmy Carter made in April 1977. Carter said "If we fail to act soon we will face an economic, social and political crisis that will threaten our free institutions." Nearly 30 years after Carter made that speech, oil is at an all-time high and nothing has been significantly done to reduce our dependency on oil; or to find a better solution.
If Congress is apathetic when it comes to an effective energy policy that affects an entire nation, it is clear that preserving the jobs of C and Java programmers is likely to be at the bottom of any congressman's to-do list. In 2005, national security, Medicare and Iraq are just a few of the issues that seem to be far more pressing to the nation than the loss of programmers.
The book is written about outsourcing in general, but has a heavy slant to programmers whose jobs have been outsourced to India. The prime advantage India has over other countries with cheap labor is a large base of workers that speak English. While the salaries in China, for example, are even lower than in India, the language barrier is significant.
The main claims of proponents of outsourcing are of increased productivity and major cost savings. Whether these claims are real is to a degree immaterial, as the perception among CIOs is that outsourcing has an immediate cost savings. This is primarily due to the fact that the salaries and benefit costs of overseas programmers are radically less than those of their U.S. counterparts.
From a productivity and efficiency perspective, many Indian firms are CMM level-5 certified, something that their U.S. counterparts can't attest to. At the end of the day, is better and cheaper code produced in Bangalore and Mumbai? Yourdon states that it is hard to find hard and fast answers. But with outsourcing the rage, there is the perception that Indian firms are more productive, formalized and efficient than their US counterparts is being accepted as fact. For many, perception is reality, and the reality is that jobs are being sent overseas by the thousands.
Outsource:Competing in the Global Productivity Race is written for (and beneficial to) anyone who feels that his job may be in danger of being outsourced. The book is well-written and pragmatic, and Yourdon notes that there are no simple answers to be found, nor are there any obvious choices. The book guides the reader who is working in a knowledge-based position to better determine where the trends in outsourcing are going and how to best save their job and simultaneously prepare for the inevitable. It is not that every knowledge-based job will be outsourced, but rather that the potential exists that every job could be outsourced. With that, it behooves everyone to get make sure they are prepared.
In 1992, Yourdon wrote Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. In the book, he predicted that U.S. programmers would "suffer the fate of the Dodo bird" as companies shifted jobs from American workers to those overseas to take advantage of lower pay, less labor regulations and higher productivity. Yourdon admits his prediction was partially incorrect. U.S. programmers have not gone the way of the Dodo bird and hiring is resuming; but in spite of everything, huge numbers of jobs are being sent overseas.
While Decline and Fall of the American Programmer was focused exclusively on technology workers, Yourdon writes that every knowledge-based job is vulnerable to being outsourced. From radiologists to tax preparers, telemarketers to architects, and more.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of Outsource is the composed manner in which Yourdon writes. Outsourcing is a controversial, political and extremely emotional topic, and Yourdon provides a balanced view of the outsourcing phenomena.
One of the solutions suggested to stemming the flow of jobs overseas is protectionist federal regulations. Yourdon believes that such measures are doomed to fail, in that you can't protect knowledge-based worked in the same way that steel and agriculture products can be protected. Yourdon admits that there might be some short-term benefits to a protectionist strategy, but will fail in the long-term. His view is that protectionism is simply blaming someone else for the existence of competition; and such an approach does not solve the problem. His solution, and the overall advice in the book, is to make each and every American knowledge worker more prepared to face competition from overseas.
Of the books 10 chapters, the most compelling is chapter 6, which provides seven strategies in which to deal with the threat of outsourcing. The first is to be proactive, with the last being to consider a career change. Yourdon does not promise and secrets or miracles in the chapter and attempts to provide some common, yet often overlooked, sense.
Outsource ends with the following quote: "I was taught very early that I would have to depend entirely upon myself; that my future lay in my own hands." This book shows you how.
Jason Bennett's take:
Information technology outsourcing has been a hot topic of discussion for many years now, but Ed Yourdon has, with varying degrees of success, been writing on the topic since 1992's Decline and Fall of the American Programmer. His initial prophecies were somewhat early and off the mark, however, prompting his 1996 sequel The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. Now, eight years after his mea culpa, Yourdon has returned to the issue with what can best be described as The Decline and Fall of the American Worker.
Am I overstating his thesis a bit? Probably, but such exaggeration seems to be a Yourdon stock-in-trade (see his Byte Wars or especially his Time Bomb 2000! for some over-the-top predictions of doom). Overall, his thesis is fairly standard: the Third World (namely, Eastern Europe, India and China) has a lot of very educated people who, thanks to the Internet, can now do your job for your company from their country, and for a lot less money. This makes you expendable and them employable. Since there are a lot of them, unless you're really good, there's a decent chance your job is at risk. Yourdon expands his reach beyond the typical programmer or sysadmin to encompass all types of knowledge work, from reading (and diagnosing) x-rays to accountants and tax preparers. Eventually, he concludes, 10%-15% of current Western knowledge worker jobs may be lost to outsourcing, depending on various factors, including salary and productivity.
Yourdon's main solution to the problem can be summed up as "more productivity," by which he means business process changes as well as better measurability (CMM is mentioned several times in conjunction with Indian outsourcing firms). His point being, if you earn five times more than an Indian programmer, but are ten times more productive (and can prove it), then your job is safe. If your productivity is not up to snuff (or you can't measure it), you're more likely to be caught up in the rush. If you can't be more productive, (or not productive enough), he has various suggestions for making yourself less vulnerable to outsourcing. He also goes on at length about how companies can do offshoring, if need be, and what he sees as good national strategies to invest in education and job training to keep workers well-tuned to what the economy needs. In general, Yourdon sees offshoring as inevitable (and impossible to stop via protectionist means), but also as a challenge that can be met if we face it head-on.
Overall, while the book may be informative to someone who hasn't thought about the issue of offshoring much, or who has a fairly shallow understanding of the issue, I didn't feel that Yourdon addressed the problem in a particularly deep or thorough way. Offshoring, like any kind of trade, has broad implications for economies that are difficult to perceive. For example, will India's domestic demand for software increase as Western jobs are outsourced and its economy improves, and will that redirect programmers from offshoring positions? In his discussion on medical outsourcing (both of diagnostics, as well as actually traveling to other countries), Yourdon neglects to mention the legal implications of this trend. If an Indian doctor misreads your x-ray, how do you go about suing him? Finally, Yourdon does not address whether these productivity measurements are truly meaningful: A CMM level 5 shop can produce bad software just as well as a CMM level 0 shop; it just means that it can produce it badly in the same way each time.
In sum, this book is a good first read on the topic for someone who has not had extensive exposure to the issue, but for anyone who has been studying the problems for some time, the issues raised and solutions presented may seem elementary.
You can purchase Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Don't be a cog. Cogs get outsourced. Cog == bot. Good day.
Should take note of the history of such solutions. The government usually makes things worse because laws made of political expediency don't think through all of the ramifications. Nor do most of us.
Do you want to get rid of insourcing? Those Toyota and BMW plants in America?
Outsourcing allows some companies to add more workers in other areas or even stay afloat.
Do you not think that other companies (overseas or otherwise) will not avail themselves of that labor market?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
In general it all started with telephone tech support, but more recently it has encompassed programming as well. I'm starting to think the only Tech jobs that'll be safe over here are those that require a physical presence.
I used to work for Symantec, well an outsourced call center anyway, and all too often after my introduction when a caller on the line I'd hear "Oh thank god, you speak English!"
Stockholders love offshoring because of the temporary boost it gives them, but doesn't it just really alienate the customer base eventually?
Well at least it helps developing countries...
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
true enough, but.. what's going to happen is that the people who are "do it yourself" are getting out of college (which you have to have), getting certified, doing what they can to wow companies, and getting themselves into debt -- heavily (college loans, etc) then eventually when those guys cant find a job, they will be in the same spot as the manufacturing guys who are living hand to mouth... what sucks even worse is that taking away jobs from the US economy WILL have broader implications as in.. who will buy stuff??.. i guess we should start exporting TONS more goods to India??
It's funny because it's true. Management might get downsized, but I can't conceive of it being outsourced. At least, management above a certain level. So, to be safe, find a job that requires neither knowledge or ethical compunctions. Like PR, marketing, or the executive suite.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Yes. One day I was in the Burger King near the cable car turntable in SF, a popular homeless hangout, and heard two homeless people talking about their old jobs. One of them used to be a printer. Once upon a time, that was a skilled trade with lifelong job security. No longer. Newspaper printing plants used to have huge staffs. Now, there aren't many people in a printing plant.
Worst case scenario: move overseas. Buy a plane ticket, and move. Big deal.
Let me know which alleyway you're buying your work visas from. How many other countries do you think have an H1B-type plan? One that will accept workers when they seem to have plenty on hand already?
After Ed Yourdon's "Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" then the about face in "Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer" and then his Y2K fruit-battiness (He has a video called "Ed Yourdon's Year 2000 Home Preparation Guide" as well as several Y2K sky-is-falling books that border on Art Bell territory) it's wonder that anyone pays any attention to this guy at all.
I mean, he's had to reverse course and say he was wrong so many times that when we writes about something, doing the exact opposite of what he recommends is almost a sure bet.
And yet they are still better off than many of the people in third world countries who may get a chance to make a half-way decent living as a result of jobs coming by via 'outsourcing'.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
You joke, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a job that doesn't require knowledge. Manufacturing jobs have left this country at a staggering rate.
If you're implying that manufacturing doesn't require knowledge, you're wrong. It doesn't require a college degree, but then again neither does programming. Most jobs require knowledge. Some more than others, but manufacturing and software are actually pretty similar in how much knowledge they can require... For the die hard perl-speaking techies, they've got their match in the gruffy old guy who can diagnose and repair any machine on his 3-mile long automobile production line.
The person who can be taught to work the paint machines in an assembly line could just as easily be taught to maintain the current events page on a company's web site.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Outsourcing is not inevitable. Capitalism, all of economics, is a function of our choices - the choices of our leaders, the choices of consumers, the choices of businessmen. Somewhere along the line we decided to ignore morality in making choices, and capitalism has degraded to nothing more than the merciless exploitation of the environment and workers. Even knowledge workers, though it appears that every non-outsourced /. reader assumes that they can never be outsourced.
The decision to "outsource" is made to save money. Nothing more. Not to improve quality - who has proof that outsourcing has rescued any project? Not to save consumers money, nor to save the third world. Not even to benefity "shareholders", but pretty much to benefit upper-management. As competition increases between firms, they are desparate to keep profits growing eternally. Profit growth can occur due to an increase in revenue, or cutting costs. Increasing revenue is damn difficult. Cutting costs makes you a hero - to your shareholders, and you bear no responsibility for the laid off workers, nor the society you betrayed.
We must recognize that those who transfer jobs, knowledge, and the technology of our country abroad for quarterly profits are not captain's of industry but profiteers. Why do we accept the destruction of our factories, our labs, our research traditions? How do those who destroy entire towns sleep at night? I'm from North Carolina, and saw what happened when the textile factories went to China, when the equipment was packed off to Shanghai. Who benefitted - the American public, the managers, or the shareholders?
Outsourcing is not inevitable. We can reverse the trend. But we must first challenge the concept that free trade is beneficial to all parties. How, precisely, has free trade benefitted the US or the Western world? Our trading partners - India and China - do not believe in free trade - why should we?
And for all of the /. members from the States who think that outsourcing doesn't affect them: how much has your salary increased in the last four years? How many extra hours do you accept every week unpaid? How long have your friends been laid off?
The US will become a third-world country if we choose to support outsourcing. Don't shop at Wal-Mart. Write your congressional representatives. Question the leadership of the companies that you own shares in. Don't accept the destruction of our country to make the rich richer.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Buy a plane ticket, and move. Big deal.
It is a big deal. You suggest that coders should just pick up and move overseas, and abandon their families, their friends, their churches, indeed their entire culture without a second thought?
We as a nation often stand aghast when cultures are destroyed in the name of profit in other lands. How can we be so cavalier when it happens to us?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Seriously, I've found outsourcing to be bad business practice for everything but classic, big-iron style waterfall development cycles. (Which is primarily what Yourdon knows about, but enough on that.) Any software that requires an iterative design process is going to be miserable to outsource, whether it's to a company in another state or on another continent.
My experience with Indian outsourcing shops is that the developers can be quite good (although one highly-recommended shop had no idea how to use versioning control systems), but it is not realistic to use them for anything other than software that has been exhaustively documented and architected before development begins. For many projects, especially those in this age of bespoke code, that just isn't a realistic requirement.
You forget all the thousands of coders who tirelessly looked over billions of lines of big iron code.
The reason you don't remember anything bad happening was that problems were *avoided*, not that they didn't exist.
It is fair to say that. But the question is where are those gaps?? I look for them every day (believe me). And no the whole B2B stuff was marketing bs. (Believe me.. i work with SAP B2B stuff) The really sad part is that yes, your company looks at you as an asset or a resource now instead of a thinking individual.. and whats happening is (at least where i work) that these managers who know squat about implementation of business systems are directing the projects... and the knowledge workers are treated like worker bees instead of.... people who are knowledgable .. geez what a concept.. and managers never ask for advice on how things can be done effectively.. and you know thats how it seems the rest of corporate america is too.. basically the "knowledge workers" are probably worth their weight in cash 9/10 times, but they are underutilized...
American manufacturing is in serious decline, Walmart and Home Depot are driving down prices and manufacturers are moving the jobs overseas.
This is destroying the middle class as blue collar jobs disappear.
This is destroying the upper middle class. The owner of the general store, the drug store, the hardware store, etc. have been replaced by the shift manager at Walmart.
This is not a good thing. Our society (and I lump Canada in here as well) is being pushed to extremes of poverty (McDonalds workers) and wealth (Home Depot shareholders). The only middle class left will be the specialized service industry (police, nurses, teachers).
It should be obvious to anyone who can add 2+2 that if you have large wage differentials, then the nature of capitlism is to take advantage of those wage differentials and LOWER everyone's living std. The failure to acknowledge this is, to my mind, proof enough that the "science" of economics is a net negative on the store of human knowledge. But i digress. There is one simple, low cost, easy anwer: raise them up to our level. And to all those /. posters who argue that outsourcing is a 2way street and not bad (eg, toyota plants in Kentucky).... go find the statistics on the change in inflation adjusted take home pay for the bottom two quintiles in the american workforce (e.g., people in the lower 40% of hte workforce by pay) over the last 30 years... you will find that for very large numbers of americans, things are not going the right way.
And as to the ludicrous arguments that more and better education and working more productively will keep us ahead of the Chinese and Indians: How on earth does anyone take this seriously !!! It implys that the average american is smarter and harder working then other people, and that we have a better more foucsed educational system..phuleeze
Final note: even paul samuleson can learn to add; the "dean" of orthodoxy apparently thinks foreign trade is bad (any one have a link to his article in an academic journal ?)
Sorry to be so sarcastic, but this seems so obvious...capitilism, by its nature is heartless and vicious, and the intrinsic nature of capitilism is to race to the bottom. It is sort of like the stock bubble of 2000: no one listened to the old timers. well the economy is the same thing: unrestrained capitilism leads to disaster. No doubt a lesson that will be appreciated in the next depression (before you say something, remeber how optimistic people were about hte stock market)
I work for a fortune 25 company who has outsourced jobs to india, mexico, you name it. And I can tell you that the assessors in India are not like the assessors elsewhere. The shops miraculously are certified CMM Level 5 the day they open - the first day employees show up, before they've worked on any project.
The biggest problem is their culture. They do exactly what they are told without question. Questioning the boss; even asking for clarification is much worse than shipping a defective product to the customer costing millions of dollars. So there are plenty of jobs in the U.S. for software engineers as they have to double check all the work done.
My neighbor went to the hospital with a broken foot. The xray was read by a radiologist in India. When you call the hospital after 6 p.m. it is answered by a call center in India. Insurance companies are looking at saving costs by having common but expensive surgery (such as bypass) done overseas. They also eliminate the risk of malpractice further reducing costs.
The engineer up the street works for the State, he now oversees a team of engineers who approve and revise drawings submitted to the state, in India. The state is looking at outsourcing its accounting and auditing review to India and Russia. The company has a nice American name with a headquarters in the state, but the workers are all overseas.
This is all a factor of "free trade" except it lacks fair trade. India is a perfect example of a country willing to take advantage of our laws (an Indian company bidding on state contracts gets a minority owned business score enhancement) while preventing any US company from doing the same in their country. We then have the "free traders" telling us that India will come around. Why should they? They will have the jobs and no incentive to change their business practices. Meanwhile we will have lost most jobs requiring a college degree. We will become the serfs of those with the money, the few elite left in the US and their foreign owners. And they will be owners for once they have the jobs and the money, buying the company makes sense as they will then gain all the profits.
Gloom and doom? Yes. But it is far less naive then the people who say things like "you always have to look out for yourself." It is this mindset that allows foreign companies and workers to take advantage of the cowards. Those unwilling to step up and say, "we made a mistake with manufacturing, but it ends here. We will not be the serfs of the next generation."
It's not a courage I see in this generation. It is far easier to blame the worker than to accept responsibility for how your government cares for other countries at your expense.
The foreign students are a big part of any technical graduate school; foreign students are the clear majority in engineering, physics, math, and even in the non-MBA portions of business schools. For those few jobs which require the sort of knowlege you get in those schools, no work visas means almost no workers. Those few jobs are the ones which are most likely to lead to the creation of new wealth, so we don't want to see them disappear from the U.S.
Also, one of the most effective things we can do to defang aggressive nations like Mainland China (short of a nuclear first strike) is to bring their best and brightest over here, educate them at China's expense, then employ them here. It makes them and the U.S. better off, at China's expense.
For the U.S., those work visas are a mixed blessing, at worst.
See what I've been reading.
The people doing the cheap labour in India right now will gain experience. They will move up the ladder.
There's nothing stopping them from getting an MBA.
So, in 10 years or so, you have people in India with 10 years of experience in the industry (which ever industry we're talking about) who are quite capable of launching their own start-ups doing exactly what they've been paid to do for the last 10 years.
And their executives will be making 1/10th what our executives make. And there won't be any language barrier at all and the execs will be in the same building as the workers.
So, a new company is formed, doing the same thing as the old US company, but for a fraction of the price.
The only thing left is to let the US-based marketing firms fight for the marketing contract. (and they will be fighting each other down pretty cheap)
5 years
10 years
15 years
20 years
Eventually, given our current off-shoring practices, it will happen.
You joke, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to find a job that doesn't require knowledge. Manufacturing jobs have left this country at a staggering rate.
Whoa, that's a bit elitist, isn't it? Manufacturing jobs require not only knowledge but skill and practice. Try precision sheet metal fabrication, printing, or machining sometime, and see how far you get. I'm sure the same holds true for many other manufacturing jobs. This current wave of outsourcing is only noticed because of the collar color. People who thought it was a problem only for the blue-collar, so-called lower-class are now losing their jobs.
What you are ignoring (and, I suspect, Carter was aware of) is that the oil is running out. The current price per barrel is actually irrelevant when you realise that we either already have, or will soon, hit peak oil production. From that point, it's all downhill, as demand and production costs continue to rise and production quantity decreases.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
You want to have a nice life? You want to be happy and carefree like your buddy Phil? You want to live free, not in fear? Well, read on! I'll hook you up.
First, let's consider "the problem":
A large portion of traditional "IT" jobs are/were in corporations. But corporations' black-hearted owners (rich guys who invest in the stock market, which BY THE WAY is a VERY small segment of the population) have decided that American workers are too stubborn about silly issues like "a living wage", "time with their families", "decent benefits", "workplace safety", and "job security". Consequently, they have created the worldwide job market. Now, the rich can look to countries that don't have pesky workers-rights laws, occupational safety regulations, environmental laws, and other annoying little peccadillos they had to struggle with in First World nations. They don't have to worry about a "living wage" either, because in SOME countries, a living wage is an executive's COFFEE MONEY. And they get to have a nice, deep belly laugh at the expense of all those annoying technologists they USED to have to keep on staff.
Considering this situation, the problem should be clear: How does a smart technologist make a living and find happiness when a huge chunk of his job market has effectively gone down the toilet?
Let's begin. Let's "Work the problem".
PART 1: Filter out unsuccessful approaches to dealing with the problem, and discard them.
FIRST: Never, EVER work for a corporation, even if for some strange reason they start trying to hire Americans again. They were never great employers to begin with. They'd make you sign noncompetes, IP agreements, nondisclosures... And they expected you to work sixty to eighty hour weeks with no overtime, and pretend you were happy to do so. One place where your buddy Phil used to work actually said on orientation day that if the job wasn't the most important thing in your life INCLUDING YOUR FAMILY, you didn't belong there (TRUE STORY). Corporate jobs are worse than anything. Just say "no".
ALSO: Don't keep racking up student loan debt to get higher and higher degrees because some idiot talking head says you've got to "move up the food chain". This strategy is NOT going to work. IBM and several other corporations are already doing research and development in India with Indian Ph.Ds. There is nowhere else to go up the food chain; the ladder has ended and the hatch is welded shut. Save your money.
AND: Don't count on becoming some kind of analyst. Everybody and their mother is already calling themselves analysts. That sort of thing isn't going to last any longer than R+D did. You know who's going to be doing analysis? THE ANALYSIS TEAM AT THE INDIAN OUTSOURCING FIRM. Yep. They've already got one. Don't waste your time.
PART 2: Having discarded worthless approaches, identify viable approaches to pursue.
PRIMARILY, CONCENTRATE ON IT JOBS AMERICANS STILL HAVE A SHOT AT.
Best: Civil Service. The pay is lower than the old corporate jobs were, but those are mostly gone now anyway. And the 50-60k you'll end up with is STILL about double the national average salary. You'll have REAL job security (UNION membership!), excellent benefits, and a nice, nine-to-five schedule so your family will actually be able to call you by name without referring to a cheat sheet. Your boss will actually (gasp!) be NICE to you, your working environment will be civilized, you won't have to sign any scary contracts, and in general you'll be happy. Pick your choice: federal, state, county, city. It's all good. And, generally, you've got to be a citizen of the city/state/whatever to apply for a position.
Second Best: Get a job in the IT department of a university, college, community college, or high school. This is actually very similar to civil service, although not quite as nice (for example, maybe you get a 401K instead of a full pension). Still, it's pretty good.
Lagging slightly: Academics. If you can stay in college through at lea
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!