Two Reviews of Yourdon's 'Outsource?'

Ben Rothke writes "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race is a persuasive overview of the outsourcing phenomenon. Author Edward Yourdon's premise is that outsourcing is not going to disappear anytime soon, and -- given the success that many companies have begun enjoying during the past few years -- it is not likely to level off anytime soon. Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector. In a nutshell, this is Yourdon's book of how to prepare yourself for the inevitable." Read on for the rest of Rothke's review, as well as Jason Bennett's different take on the book. Outsouce? : Competing in the Global Productivity Race author Edward Yourdon pages 227 publisher Prentice Hall rating 10 reviewer Ben Rothke, Jason Bennett ISBN 0131475711 summary Excellent discussion about outsourcing and what you can do to save your job

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.

Comments

How to avoid being outsourced v.1.0 final

[Neil Blender]

Don't be a cog. Cogs get outsourced. Cog == bot. Good day.

Solution

[fizban]

Outsourcing is now a mainstream phenomenon and is affecting more and more workers, in nearly every knowledge-based sector.

So, if you want to avoid being outsourced, find a job that requires no knowledge. Management, marketing, PR and McDonald's come to mind.

If the Dollar continues to weaken...

[mikeophile]

The EU will be outsourcing to the US for cheap American labor.

Of course, there will be complaints about our funny accents being hard to understand.

Forget Yourdon. Listen to your friend Phil.

[crazyphilman]

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