The factory analogy is wrong. Factories produce large quantities of the same thing over and over. The thrust of the business process is consistency and efficiency. I have always been puzzled why anyone would relate this to programming. Once a program is written and debugged, it can be reproduced with perfect consistency.
The construction business is a much better model, where there is a customer / end-user, an architect and various builders, some of which are generalists and some more specialized. Also, some elements are prefabricated, others have to be custom-built.
The operative phrase here is "people calling themselves IT Professionals...". During the bubble, when it was fashionable to be in the biz, the quantity of these folks increased dramaticlaly and the average quality of the whole industry suffered horribly. It's taken longer than I ever imagined to weed them out. Goodbye! Good riddance! Good luck in food service (where you belong).
To suggest that this is the result of either offshoring or opensourcing is chicken***t. Going offshore only works, and is only economical, if you need an army of programmers. And what worthwhile software was ever produced by an army? There are more then enough good jobs for good programmers in the U.S.A. If your job has been offshored, improve your skills.
And as for opensource, has anybody noticed how many sysadmins it takes to run a data center built on opensource components. Far more "IT Professional" jobs are on the user side than in ISVs. The number of people employed keeping Apache software alone up and runnning is staggering.
FWIW,
~mark
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The factory analogy is wrong. Factories produce large quantities of the same thing over and over. The thrust of the business process is consistency and efficiency. I have always been puzzled why anyone would relate this to programming. Once a program is written and debugged, it can be reproduced with perfect consistency.
The construction business is a much better model, where there is a customer / end-user, an architect and various builders, some of which are generalists and some more specialized. Also, some elements are prefabricated, others have to be custom-built.
FWIW,
~mark
The operative phrase here is "people calling themselves IT Professionals...". During the bubble, when it was fashionable to be in the biz, the quantity of these folks increased dramaticlaly and the average quality of the whole industry suffered horribly. It's taken longer than I ever imagined to weed them out. Goodbye! Good riddance! Good luck in food service (where you belong).
To suggest that this is the result of either offshoring or opensourcing is chicken***t. Going offshore only works, and is only economical, if you need an army of programmers. And what worthwhile software was ever produced by an army? There are more then enough good jobs for good programmers in the U.S.A. If your job has been offshored, improve your skills.
And as for opensource, has anybody noticed how many sysadmins it takes to run a data center built on opensource components. Far more "IT Professional" jobs are on the user side than in ISVs. The number of people employed keeping Apache software alone up and runnning is staggering. FWIW, ~mark