Post #139,441
2/2/04 9:20:48 PM
2/3/04 4:41:08 PM
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Re: This may be the end of US as we know it
The talk of outsourcing to India, China, Russia was intense back in the early 90s - it seems it has taken over 10 years for the trend to really start having an impact.
In the early to mid 90s I had the chance to visit Bangalore (India) & parts of China where it was made quite clear that whole new businesses were being set up to export IT & programming skills from those two countries in particular as well as to set up call centers.
Even in Hong Kong, large volumes of IT work was/is being shifted across the border into Shenzhen (a special economic zone between HK & Guangdong (Canton)). The wages remain substantially lower & the workers extremely hard working, keen & smart.
I do think it will have some impact but that is proportional to the dramatic changes we can expect to see in the way that IT evolves as multi-partner applications & solutions evolve around XML, Web Services, The solution automation tools, and Grid computing facilities.
It seems it has the potential to match when the masses of country folk who migrated to the newly industrialised cities for jobs as textile workers, then got caught short when countries in UK & Europe introduced automated looms (machines) to replace manual labour. In France, the violent reaction from workers triggered the introduction of the word 'saboteur' (someone who threw a wooden clog shoe (a Sabot) into a weaving loom, to wreck it).
Most of us know little of these people, the 'Wat Tyler's of the past. I wonder if this outsourcing news, combined with a rapid change in IT technology, is the precipitation of a modern worker (IT) crisis ?.
Doug Marker
#1 Corrected aspect re intro of automated looms to replace manual workers
#2 Added below link
[link|http://www.beachonline.com/sabot.htm|http://www.beachonline.com/sabot.htm]
Edited by dmarker
Feb. 3, 2004, 04:41:08 PM EST
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Post #139,633
2/3/04 4:39:37 PM
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Re: added UPDATED comments
#1 Added web ref to 'sabotage' & how manual workers revolted against automation of their jobs
[link|http://www.beachonline.com/sabot.htm|http://www.beachonline.com/sabot.htm]
Extract
>>
* sabotage: The picture on the left shows a pair of sabots - French wooden shoes, also called klompen or clogs, depending on the country. During the Industrial Revolution, machines replaced workers at an alarming rate throughout Europe, and the once stable economy of Guild and craft shop members who had performed manual labor for generations found their very welfare threatened. To protest machine replacement of workers, the workers would toss their shoes into the machine works to make them stop - sabotage.
<<
The stories in the above link do seem to parallel what is begining to happen in IT now except in IT there are really two core drivers ...
1) Repetitive IT work is being farmed out to countries like India & China
2) With the introduction of Web Services we are seeing automated software tools replacing analysts & programmers. Many of these tools can now be used by business analysts, the back-end services can be designed & built as off-the-shelf components in places like India & China.
Also, further into the near future, there are new generations of software tools that use UML like models as input to generate the required systems automatically. At some point we will cross a threshold where these automated tools grow & the use of traditional craftsmen (programmers & analysts) fades.
That will be compounded by a shift to outsourcing the hardware & common systems (such as appears to be the potential with GRID computing)
Doug Marker
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Post #139,635
2/3/04 4:49:43 PM
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Something missing from the parallel
Where's the sabatage? You would expect the offshore sites to be hit with DDOS attacks and destructive viruses (virii? Who cares) daily.
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"If you don't vote, it's your fault!"
jb4
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Post #139,649
2/3/04 7:18:55 PM
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Was thinking of this today - the new saboteurs are already
among us - I think that the hacker cult is the modern equiv to the French Saboteur
These are the modern worker equiv who look like adopting the moral rebellion against 3rd world outsourcing and automated software tools that may eventually diminish their employment opportinities.
The reason it seems this way is because of the so called justification of this latest virus as being done to punish 'evil' SCO for their dastardly greed & avarice re Open Source & Linux.
Isn't this virus a 'clog' in the works for SCO ???
Doug Marker
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Post #139,652
2/3/04 7:54:16 PM
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Red herring.
The SCO attack, I'm certain, is there just to distract from the real purpose of the virus, which is to backdoor XP computers for spammers.
No hard proof, but it feels that way to me.
"I'll stop calling this crew 'Orwellian' when they stop using 1984 as an operations manual." - J. Bradford DeLong
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Post #139,657
2/3/04 8:50:35 PM
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That seems a good guess
I think another reason we haven't seen a destructive worm yet is it would impede the further dissemination of worms.
Joe wormwriter thinks to himself- "I could make this devastating and bring down multiple thousands of systems. But how could I tell If I'm the best unless I leave a 'clean' field for others to show their wormwriting skills on?" That or how much money is expected from the spammer-patrons.
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"If you don't vote, it's your fault!"
jb4
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Post #139,646
2/3/04 6:45:35 PM
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Yeah, right
We've heard that "Business People can use these tools" about everything, from spreadsheets to Visual Basic. Pull another one, it's got bells on.
As to programmers... Crappy programmers doing crap works are a dime a dozen, and dime goes a looong way in India (for now). Some code I now see at work looks like it was done in the poorest third world sweatshop anyway.
However, the closer you get to the infrastructure and the larger the system, the more demand will be placed on the quality. My prediction is, in 3-5 years the houses of cards that are now being built in sweatshops in India and such will start falling apart. And then the real programmers, Indian or otherwise wil be able to name their own price. Chinese Army COding does not work, no matter how cheap teh soldiers.
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Post #139,648
2/3/04 7:09:17 PM
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I fear you may be missing a serious shift that is occuring
Manual programming and the traditional analyst role has no future.
Yes, we have talked for years about how tools will eventually shift solution development from rooms of app developers to business savvy people using tools, the point is, that shift is actually starting because the underlying technologies needed to make it happen are here.
This looks like another era of when a major shift is going to occur in an industry & some will deny it & other will adapt.
Life's cycles.
Doug Marker
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Post #139,658
2/3/04 8:51:57 PM
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Trained people spend weeks producing buggy unusable code
at $30 per hour. Business analysts will do it much more expensively, much slower and at even worse quality.
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Post #139,681
2/3/04 11:50:11 PM
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One of us hasn't been to China :-)
From IBM newsclip
IBM's involvement in China dates back to 1934, and IBM opened its China office in 1992. Today, IBM China has 14 branch offices, two fully-owned subsidiaries and eight joint ventures. One of IBM's eight research centers is located in China, where more than 300 technical and research talents are developing the latest technology solutions such as pervasive computing and wireless solutions, and IBM's customer services center is the largest of its kind in China.
This is just *one* such venture.
Doug M
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Post #139,719
2/4/04 9:49:21 AM
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I do agree that real programmers happen everywhere.
It should be easier to find 300 good people in China or Russia (may be not in India, the cream may have been off that market). However, it's hard to find 3,000 good people in one place, and it's impossible to find 30,000. I do object very strongly that Bloomberg approach to developement (hire a 1000 "programmers" at 1/3 the price to do a job that a 100 good people could (and should) do) will work just because the prices are lower now.
And I'll never believe that business people will ever write code. Some will, sure. Talent happens everywhere in that respect, too. But you introduce an "if", and you're down the slippery slope. You add "for", and it's an avalanche. Then the "while" falls on you, and you're buried. I am not even talking data structures.
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Post #139,823
2/4/04 6:13:56 PM
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ICLRPD for the programmers among us (new thread)
Created as new thread #139822 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=139822|ICLRPD for the programmers among us]
I was one of the original authors of VB, and *I* wouldn't use VB for a text
processing program. :-) Michael Geary, on comp.lang.python
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Post #139,852
2/4/04 7:26:48 PM
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Re: managed to be there when IBM started up, also India
Have a lot of interesting stories I could tell about working with the Chinese in those early days (1st went there in 1989 just after TienAnMen).
They were a PITB to deal with at first and the ones IBM hired could be accused of being an 'arrogant elite'. But the changes that occured there between 1990 & today as so staggering as to contradict mt early opinions as to how far they had to shift to 'get real'.
The people one deals with there today are so transformed that the 15 year interval seems like a complete lifetime.
IN the past 3 years, the programmers my employer of that period empolyed (HK Telecom), were right on top of all the latest trends and technologies. If anything they seemed to be forging ahead compared to what I knew of IT back in Australia and what IT is still like back here now.
Re India
In the 1980s - I often had to train groups of Indian programmers in CICS Cobol & DB2, in New Zealand, brought in to do bulk contracts for short periods. They were also 'best of best' type people. I also spent time in India at different places and was always staggered by how hard the kids had to work to get on 'top' academically. (Saw same in China). I would never want to work continuosly as hard as I saw HK people work (one bad habit I saw in HK was that even when very sick, they would come to work (& spray germs on the rest of us), alsoIi often saw them forgo leave, they would rather be at work except for special family type holidays).
In Australia today there is a political bruha boiling over the fact that Australia's big Telecom company (1/2 govt owned) recently cut 400 or so IT professional jobs by outsourcing a chunk of the work to IBM who let the actual contract to an IBM joint venture with TISL (Tata Information System Ltd) in Bangalore India. Tata are an Indian conglomorate every bit as big as the traditional Jap & Korean Zaibatsu & Kiretsu.
The IT spokespeople here in Australia are making a lot of noise about this deal & some polititians are demanding the contract be reversed (no hope).
Things are changing for us in IT, it is a good time to keep a finger on the pulse of IT evolution as roles are undergoing significant changes.
Doug Marker
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Post #139,956
2/5/04 8:38:03 AM
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I think we're in agreement here
To veer a bit to Marxist side, the divide is not between American (Austarlian) and Indian(Chinese) programmers. The divide is between good and bad ones. And the good ones will not stay cheap for long, even in India or China. Just you wait.
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Post #139,660
2/3/04 8:52:49 PM
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ICLRPD (new thread)
Created as new thread #139659 titled [link|/forums/render/content/show?contentid=139659|ICLRPD]
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"If you don't vote, it's your fault!"
jb4
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