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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.
Outsourcing can work well for simple or self-contained projects.
The problem comes when you try to mix outsourcing with in-house development. It gets real hairy when you have to guess what was changed overnight.
Also, if there's a mistake or a weak implementation (band-aid), then it takes 3 days to go back in forth through emails explaining what's wrong with the implementation and how to fix it. Often when it's time to upgrade the band-aid, the outsourcing contract has already ended and it becomes your job to fix it. There's a sense of ownership that you lose with any form of consulting, regardless of whether it's from an international or a local consulting firm. I doubt any cost-benefit analysis made by non-programmers ever incorporate this kind of work.
While outsourcing may look good on the surface, and as TFA says CIO's perceive it as a cost savings, there are many other factors that have yet to be analyzed.
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Yourdon is one of those chiefly responsible for the Y2K pre-non-event panicking in the streets. Of course, he had some books out on the subject so it was in his financial interests to scare people.
Y2K came and went, Yourdon's predictions fell flat, and now he's trying to scare you out of your money to buy a book on something else that he doesn't really know about.
That he's getting any attention after Y2K is amazing to me.
Grunt coding or tech support may be tedious, but such jobs are a good place for someone just out of college and with no practical experience. A tedious and low responsibility job gives junior employees a chance to learn how things actually work as opposed to how they are supposed to work. Internships and temporary hires can handle this apprenticeship role to a certain degree, but I don't think it is sufficient.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Would you care to explain your reasoning behind that "obvious" solution?
Is the idea that with lower taxes - and therefore either massive public debt, or inadequate government services - our standard and cost of living will eventually fall to that of India, or what?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
No. Corporate taxes have been on the decline for a long time.
Corporate tax rates have nothing to do with the issue of outsourcing.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
But it doesn't have to be. I did telephone tech support for almost a decade before my call center was outsourced, and I'd love to be doing it again. If you like talking to people, like solving puzzles and like knowing at the end of the day that there are people who's days are better because they spoke to you, tech support is great. It all depends on your attitude toward your work.
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Economically, this stands to even things out, which is more in line with the socialist view and less in line with the capitalist view. Perhaps you should read the definitions of words before you use them?
As India and other countries start taking more jobs, and gaining ground in "mindshare" or respect or whatever you call it, and as their domain knowledge increases, they will raise rates to reflect their power in the marketplace. As India as a country grows economically, inflation will settle in compounding it further.
As soon as the cost-effectiveness of doing work overseas starts to fade, less work will be considered to go there - in reality, at that point it will be a battle of labor laws and how much control the outsourcing company has over the employees under those laws.
I think you can figure out the last part, which mostly revolves around the word "union". People who work hard to obtain the knowledge they have do not like to get stepped on.
Of course, any good socialist already knows that capitalists are just tools to help socialism grow anyways.
If you want a concrete example, try to make money on rentacoder.com - good luck with that.
An hour's worth of work in France or Germany now buys more than an hour's worth of work in the US. The US is ahead on per capita income only because of longer working hours. And it's not ahead by much. US per capita income was 2x of that in France in 1980. Now it's about 1.2x, and when the dollar drops a little more...
The head of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute was over at Stanford a few weeks ago, chewing out Americans for letting the Government lose all the manufacturing jobs. Germany didn't let that happen.
Congress can turn this around any time it wants to. Never forget that on election day.