Globalization is making Brains a Cheap commodity
By
Tablizer
on September 15, 2007
Globalization (offshoring) of jobs is making raw brain power closer and closer to a cheap commodity. Asia is cranking out engineers like Henry Ford learned to crank out cars, and soon there will be one on every corner. Technical careers in the US are becoming more hands-on and customer-facing. We techies are becoming "liaison workers", a bridge between those who actually do the technical work (overseas) and the customers and managers who use the technology. If we don't have or use decent people skills, the boss is more than happy to offshore the work to somebody who does. The glory days of pure technical workers is fading. We now have to take showers and be nice :-) Partying and goofing off at school actually is part of becoming a good liaison worker now.
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Discussion (3)
Why shoul brains be expensive commodity?
Re: "Why should brains be expensive commodity?"
That's allegedly why we're supposed to get an expensive education. Now it appears we need that expensive education just to survive, not to obtain BMW's. Those are for sales executives.
At the NWPTA conference this year, I talked to the guy who came as a vendor for a certain company, but really he is 50% of the company and 100% of the programming team. He's among my company's competition, in that he's developing high-fidelity simulators for training industrial process operators.
Over the last couple years, he outsourced a bunch of work to his birth country, India. And he has regretted it ever since, ended up having to re-write everything he sent over there to be done.
His problem was that the programmers over there could code up the basic data structures, could write to the interface specified, and could produce working and self-contained code for all the classes and libraries he designed... they had no imagination or actual skill to speak of. Dictionaries were implemented using simple linked lists containing keypairs. Several process-calculating components had their functionality spread so obtusely amogst their methods that they would work only if used exactly as they were presented in the demonstration code he sent, instead of working exactly as the interface specification (pre/post conditions, etc) specified. For testing, they tried a single set of inputs and got a single set of correct outputs and called it a day, instead of running through a dozen or two normal cases and all the usual boundary cases.
Surely not all outsource programmers are like this, but this gentleman had a veritable nightmare alive when he received his .tar.gz and bill.
Personally, I would never trust a programmer I couldn't thrash on less than an hour's notice.