Hoist the Boats? - A

Hoist the Boats? - A response, in Reason, to the IT outsourcing story.

Alan Cooper - a Bay area GUI design guru, and one of the people who got me into my current line of wor, once famously predicted that by 2020, American software companies would consist of

• Project managers
• GUI Designers (fingers crossed)
• System and Data Architects
• Business Analysts
• Technical writers, who'd take the product of all that analysis, architecture and design, and bundle it all up into specifications to send over to India, Russia, China and Poland, where all the programmers would live.

Last weeks' infamous IBM story, of course, could well bode ill for the code-geek market in the US. But not all, apparently, is lost:

"According to people who actually negotiate outsourcing contracts for a living, your costs are more like $22 an hour for each warm body once all the third-party finders' fees are paid. An experienced programmer's take in India would be around $11,000 out of total cost of over $40,000. That's still quite a gap from the $60,000 an American might demand but once the all-important question of productivity is factored in, it may not be much of a bargain.

Simply put, once you leave the U.S. you are leaving behind the world's best, most proven pool of programmers. That's is not to say that there aren't excellent programmers in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But large-scale, world-changing software development ain't easy. The Net bubble devalued just how hard it is to build neat technology.

He's right, of course. I've worked on offshored software development - it's freqently not pretty. And th dotcom boom did create a pseudo-romantic mystique - the code-slinging ubergeek who could create killer code in a month of 32-hour days, then cash out bigtime - that doesn't jibe with the real world building of software.

So maybe not all is lost, here.

Posted by Mitch at July 31, 2003 08:32 AM