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Lowering the Odds of Being Outsourced
Lam1969 writes "Computerworld points to a study by the Society for Information Management, which concludes that the best thing young IT workers can do to avoid being outsourced is beef up their management skills. The article quotes Thomas Tanaka, a recent computer engineering graduate, describing a recent job interview: 'While the Santa Clara, Calif., resident has generally been looking for entry-level software jobs with IT vendors, he recently had an interview with a financial firm looking to fill an in-house IT position. That's where his lack of business background was exposed.'"
Professor Weinstein, if you want to know his name.
And a lot of people listened to him and minored in business. The problem is, when companies require x years of experience managing or in engineering/IT to get a job, where will we get those people?
I don't get it.
That we are -ALL- going to be managers.
It is really sad to see them lying to us (and maybe even themselves) so blatantly.
Many of our outsourced positions now include outsourcing the project lead level as well.
The only thing that is going to save our jobs is higher wages overseas.
Why should you spend $50 grand and 4 years of your life to get a degree with NO FUTURE?!?
Sure if you are a genius- go for it. But if you are joe average "B" / low "A" type person- there are many easier degrees with better job prospects than IT. IT SUCKS.
No respect, no pay, no security, rampant age discrimination, constant retraining- and even then you have to be "lucky" to get experience at the hot new technology or you are out on your kiester in as little as 2-3 years.
Don't listen to the propaganda/lies that are suddenly being pushed over the last few months (in conjunction with the H1B issue oddly enough... HMMM!).
Lots of poeple can be hard workers.
Not many people can be good manager types.
Not many people can be hard workers for -LESS- than minimum wage when they are trying to pay back a $50 grand debt that they -CANNOT- declare bankruptcy to get out of when they get the shaft.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Everybody did notice that they study was for Information Managment, no? People think that we will keep managment here, while sending the tech jobs elsewhere. Not likely. In fact, as the tech jobs go, so will the managerial jobs. Anyinterface position will be those that can live in both cultures easily.
Personally, I would argue if you really do not wish to be outsourced, then become a marketer or become the company owner.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
is to get into management? doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of getting into IT? That's kinda like saying the best way to avoid losing your job in the steel mill is to get a degree in medicine.
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IT is to enable people to make money, not to make money in of itself. If you can't come up with technical solutions which drive that goal, it doesn't matter what you can do technically.
I know, I know, you didn't think you were going to 6 years of school to help Bob in sales increase the stock value. You thought you were training to make all of your 1337 virtual networks interface in new and creative/exciting ways with the latest database. You were wrong. Nobody cares about your network. Nobody cares about your storage. Nobody cares if you use Linux or Windows. They want to know how you can help them "do", which in most cases is make money. IT is somewhere in the social hierarchy around Janitors: "Don't tell me what shoes leave less scuff marks, just clean up the damn spot!"
If you can't express how you are able to leverage technology to help them make money, you're applying for the wrong job, I would recommend a job in higher education. Lots of tech jobs where the newest, latest and greatest gets applied to making newer and greater.
I'm not sure if switching over to management would be a good idea. If anything, management is easy to outsource. They're so out of touch with the reality of the company's everyday business that they can just as well reside on Mars.
Snide comments aside, the idea of getting management skills up is not so far fetched. I'm one test short of being a certified bank auditor. Add in a well rounded knowledge programming (including ABAP), a bit over 8 years of experience in computer and network security and a few more goodies that can make some impression on my resume. And so far, it's never been a problem to find a well paying job.
If you can "only" punch code, you're replacable. Yes, your code will blow anything created in India out of the water, it's 10x faster and 10x more secure, 10x easier to read and 10x more stable. But it's also 10x as expensive. And your management doesn't give a rat's behind about secure, stable and efficient code. Security doesn't matter (until shi. hits the fan, and by then the client has paid), stability is something the client has to deal with and efficiency is unnecessary when you have machines that have 1000x the horsepower needed to run any office application. Management wants cheap code! So try to have some "additional value". Give your prospective employer something he can't easily hand over to India.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wish I'd had your professor. It took me a while to figure out that, as technology people, our value comes down to two things: how well we can document business requirements, and how good we are in some domain. And if you can document business requirements, your competency in some domain becomes secondary. So the question becomes, how do you get the experience if you don't have the experience? And the answer is: you find whatever the hell you can, fight your way into it, and then hold onto that job for dear life until you have five years and some certifications.
Finding God in a Dog
I interview lots of tech folks. The things that set the best of the best apart are leadership skills, ability to think in a deep analytical fashion that starts with looking at the assumptions, curiousity and ability to communicate with good, articulate answers and thoughtful questions.
Very few techies have these skills - anyone that does is so amazingly useful to us that we'd never be able to oursource what they do.
The problem is that I don't know if these skills are the sort of thing you can just learn. I've seen plenty of techie MBAs that have no aptitude for leading.
Can this stuff really be learned?
I was able to do the job for $6K, plus cost of hardware. Their IT guy -- who gets $60K/year -- had already invested a month on the task and didn't seem anywhere close to completion. I did the job in two weeks.
And walked away.... leaving the $60K/year IT guy to maintain, upgrade and generally find some way your solution can live with the rest of the network. And all the while he's removing malware, cleaning systems, reimaging machines, desperately trying to get people to stop using "password" as their password, harranging the local ISP, trying to get the 68bit WEP key changed, supporting blackberries, upgrading hardware, relicencing software, debugging the company website, fixing the bosses' kids laptop, ordering replacement parts, plugging mice back in, kowtowing to the database admin, giving everyone gadget advice when they come calling, unjamming the printers, and trying to find a new job.
Oh what he wouldn't give to do a job for 6K, plus cost of hardware, and just.... walk away, down that Yellow Brick Road.
May the Maths Be with you!
Make it illegal to outsource to
A) Communist countries (china)
B) Immoral countries that still have a backwards caste system (india)
Problem solved
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
As in the case of all employees, there's good ones and there's bad ones. What determines whether or not you get a good manager is corporate culture. If there's a bunch of good managers all working to drive the company to profit they are likely to hire other good managers (and fire bad ones) to keep that trend going. If, however, you work in a company where everyone is just trying to get pay cheque each month and avoid as much work as possible while sucking up to the boss so they can get promoted, the management will typically hire other morons who won't rock the boat.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Beg pardon, but I believe we *do* have a wide disparity of resources between US and India, which is the underlying cause for the favorable exchange rate. AFAIK the rupee-dollar exchange rate is not fixed; it's set by whatever people in the currency exchange market are willing to pay (and who knows how *those* people make their valuations -- but the theory of efficient markets would have us believe that their valuations are more-or-less correct).
If you were making the same claim about China, then I'd whole-heartedly agree. In addition to having less wealth than us, China mandates the USD-RMB exchange rate, one of the effects of which is to make Chinese currency unnaturally low in value compared to the US dollar. This drives US buyers to import ever more cheap Chinese goods.
India, OTOH, simply has less wealth than we do.
I have a feeling that we might see Indian inflation rise even faster in the next few years. Indian companies are actually outsourcing some of their work to China, and a lot of Indian IT workers who moved abroad in the last decade are choosing to return home with (comparatively) huge nest-eggs.
All in all, the Indian economy is quite healthy right now, and corruption in the public and private sector (formerly a huge problem) are slowly dwindling. Growth rates are rising; with growth comes wealth; with wealth comes inflation.
However, I'd still say your conclusion is about right -- don't go into IT for the next ten years, unless you're a hot shot who can make himself irreplacable to an organization.
Let skilled workers be skilled workers (since it's what they do best), and managers be managers. At the very least, put emphasis on being a leader instead of being a manager. Many can manage, few can lead.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
I'm a programmer, I'm proud of it, and I'm glad I can make a living at it. The head research programmer at my last job was 40, and still hacking Scheme and C. I hope that's where I'll be when I'm 40. Maybe it won't be possible, but if I have to go back to school to retrain, the last thing I'm getting is an MBA. I'm gonna look around for another career I like.
Strengthen your skills! Are you a Cisco guru? Study up and get a CCNA/CCNP... Do you have databse skills already? Supplement that with a script language like PHP/Perl. I'm actually taking TFA's advice and getting Project Management certified to make myself more marketable.
Who did what now?
Anyone else see the irony in this? Why did you go into the IT business? It's because you enjoy technology and you enjoy problem solving. And now you're being told the only way to save your job is by going into management?
I work in a company that is very management heavy, where there's tonnes of rhetoric about about developing leadership skills. I've had more than one manager tell me that the heads-down coder who knows the system inside-out has "very little value to the company." They want leaders, not specialists. Unfortunately, most of the managers who spout this nonsense would have trouble leading a horse out of a barn. They're all very good talkers, but once you start listening to what they say, you realize it's all BS.
The best "leaders" I've ever worked with are the ones who would never stand up and call themselves leaders. They're the ones who've worked in the trenches, have been the heads down coders and learned multiple systems inside and out over the years. They're the ones who have developed an instinct for what will work and what won't. They're not the boot-licking smooth-talking managers who promise the world to upper-management and then have to claw back features near the end of development because they had no clue what was involved in the work that they were committing to.
So yeah, if you want to save your job, go ahead and practice these lines "Yes, sir. Coming sir." Just like the kid from the commercial. Go into management, kiss up to your boss and your boss's boss. Learn to be a smooth-talker. In the end you'll be nothing more than a used car salesman in a more expensive suit, but at least you won't be outsourced.
On the other hand, if you want to save your dignity and have any passion left for the job that you originally signed up for, do not listen to the article. If you're at a company that respects the work that you do, then great. If not, find a different company to work for. They do exist.
You've got one life to live. Doing something that makes you miserable just because it will save you from being outsourced isn't worth it.
> Own the company.
Actually this doesn't help in most cases. While you can refuse to outsource your own company employees, when the customer wants a lower price because your competitors -are- outsourcing, and you can't afford to offer that price, you go out of business.
Running your own company just means you are accountable to a different set of people, not that you avoid accountability.
There is no escape. You just grouse about the state of the marketplace instead of your boss.
Your post looks good from a theoretical standpoint, but hardly holds up in the real world.
"The other option is to find a niche where there isn't enough supply. That includes government work with a clearance, a bunch of positions in health care (I recently discovered that pharmacists have their pick of jobs)"
Oh sure, so I'll throw away my 25 years in IT, my degrees in math, comp sci, and business, and be a pharmacist. Will that niche still be there after I have completed my studies? I had a top-secret clearance at my last job, it hasn't helped me in the slightest. By the way, you can't just decide to clearance any day of the week, your empoyer has to pay for it ($25K - $40K), and it takes about four to six months.
"and the less popular parts of IT. The less popular parts of IT aren't necessarily bad jobs, they just aren't the rent-a-coder jobs that schools keep trying to fill. Rather it's the people that know a complex application or have lots of experience in a unused platform"
And where do you get all this experience? Look at the job boards, nobody is going to hire you unless you already have the experience. Learn a complex app? You mean like SAP? Any idea how much that would cost.