I'm not an economist; and I must admit, I am failing in my duty as a citizen of a democracy, in this case U.S, in 1) keep myself reasonably informed of the issues affecting our lives, 2) think deeply about them, and 3) participate in the political process based on the decisions I arrived from doing 1) and 2). So in this case I can't speak intelligently about the overall effects of outsourcing IT jobs to India or China. What I have done meanwhile is spending a lot of time at work, which happened to be in IT. If I may, I like to take the conversation to a slightly different direction. I would like to question the basic premise here.
I think for software development at least, we're not at a stage where it's an engineering discipline yet. We're ready for outsourcing the whole process overseas. Making software is still not the same as making sneakers. And I haven't seen any signs of that changing dramatically in the short to medium term.
For the past 11 years I have worked as an consultant and employee at Fortune 100 telecommunications, finance, entertainment, broadcasting, and food & beverage companies, companies whose names you probably hear everyday. There were all great places to work for, but none of them would I put at even CMM level 2. I have seen a lot of medium and large projects succeed and fail. For ones that failed, not one of them was because the programmers were too expensive. The failures I see were mostly caused by failures in management, and occur mostly in analysis and design phase of the projects.
I have worked with outsourcing companies as early as 11 years ago, when I first started out. In the area of pure technical expertise (languages and tools), I think they have improved a lot. But they fail in the same area of analysis and design, areas where it's crucial that you 1) understand complex operations and business rules of the industry and your company, 2) communicating with users who, a lot of times, don't even know what they want, and not used to think about their own business process in such systematic manner, and 3) translating those requirements into design.
Where I have seen success is where the local analyst programmers here have done all that work, and wrote very detailed specs, complete with prototype, on what has to be done (mostly reports), and shipped that to India. In projects where they have to take over the whole development cycle, even when it was version 2 of a product, they have failed very badly. Not a single success in my experience.
Companies don't save money when their multi-million dollar projects fail. In fact they lost money by outsourcing. So I think the more immediate question is not whether we should outsource or not, but whether we can outsource or not. As a profession I don't think we're mature enough to actually take advantage of outsourcing yet.
However this doesn't mean the management won't try outsourcing anyway. It's the new rage. Everyone's doing it, you have to do it to stay competitive right? Who can fire you for that?! Well, I think in the short to medium term a lot of people are going to learn some very hard lessons. And I hope, unlike the internet bubble, all that lost investment won't translate into a lot of lost jobs. But I think it will take a few spectacular failures before the management community realizes that.
Outsourcing is still coming. It's the long term trend. Here's the second thing I want to question. Don't think there's nothing you can do personally about it. Regardless of whether it's immoral or illegal, you need to think about what you should do if it became fact of life. We all need to ask ourselves, what is it I can do that will be valuable to a company that a person working thousands of miles away can't do for cheaper? I believe there are answers, and there is time enough to react and change.
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I'm not an economist; and I must admit, I am failing in my duty as a citizen of a democracy, in this case U.S, in 1) keep myself reasonably informed of the issues affecting our lives, 2) think deeply about them, and 3) participate in the political process based on the decisions I arrived from doing 1) and 2). So in this case I can't speak intelligently about the overall effects of outsourcing IT jobs to India or China. What I have done meanwhile is spending a lot of time at work, which happened to be in IT. If I may, I like to take the conversation to a slightly different direction. I would like to question the basic premise here. I think for software development at least, we're not at a stage where it's an engineering discipline yet. We're ready for outsourcing the whole process overseas. Making software is still not the same as making sneakers. And I haven't seen any signs of that changing dramatically in the short to medium term. For the past 11 years I have worked as an consultant and employee at Fortune 100 telecommunications, finance, entertainment, broadcasting, and food & beverage companies, companies whose names you probably hear everyday. There were all great places to work for, but none of them would I put at even CMM level 2. I have seen a lot of medium and large projects succeed and fail. For ones that failed, not one of them was because the programmers were too expensive. The failures I see were mostly caused by failures in management, and occur mostly in analysis and design phase of the projects. I have worked with outsourcing companies as early as 11 years ago, when I first started out. In the area of pure technical expertise (languages and tools), I think they have improved a lot. But they fail in the same area of analysis and design, areas where it's crucial that you 1) understand complex operations and business rules of the industry and your company, 2) communicating with users who, a lot of times, don't even know what they want, and not used to think about their own business process in such systematic manner, and 3) translating those requirements into design. Where I have seen success is where the local analyst programmers here have done all that work, and wrote very detailed specs, complete with prototype, on what has to be done (mostly reports), and shipped that to India. In projects where they have to take over the whole development cycle, even when it was version 2 of a product, they have failed very badly. Not a single success in my experience. Companies don't save money when their multi-million dollar projects fail. In fact they lost money by outsourcing. So I think the more immediate question is not whether we should outsource or not, but whether we can outsource or not. As a profession I don't think we're mature enough to actually take advantage of outsourcing yet. However this doesn't mean the management won't try outsourcing anyway. It's the new rage. Everyone's doing it, you have to do it to stay competitive right? Who can fire you for that?! Well, I think in the short to medium term a lot of people are going to learn some very hard lessons. And I hope, unlike the internet bubble, all that lost investment won't translate into a lot of lost jobs. But I think it will take a few spectacular failures before the management community realizes that. Outsourcing is still coming. It's the long term trend. Here's the second thing I want to question. Don't think there's nothing you can do personally about it. Regardless of whether it's immoral or illegal, you need to think about what you should do if it became fact of life. We all need to ask ourselves, what is it I can do that will be valuable to a company that a person working thousands of miles away can't do for cheaper? I believe there are answers, and there is time enough to react and change.