Just finished a couple of fun books by Bill Blunden: Cube Farm and Offshoring IT. Cube Farm should be required reading for young people considering careers as computer programmers. Blunden goes from an enthusiastic undergraduate studying Physics at Cornell into a world that claims to be short of technically educated folks but in fact has few jobs for physical science nerds (“Adam Smith’s invisible hand was giving me the middle finger”). Blunden ends up waiting tables for three years, going back to get a master’s in operations research, and then selling himself as a Java programmer. He ends up at Lawson Software, a firm that competes with SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft in business software. For young folks who are inspired by Bill Gates and the handful of programmers who’ve crafted popular games this book is a good introduction to the life of the average programmer.
Offshoring IT is a weaker book but it contains some fun facts to know and tell. For example, we learn that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spends $86 per subscriber per year on information technology. And that New York City has stopped relying on India to process parking tickets; they’re now handled in Accra, the capital of Ghana, by workers making $70 per month.
Blunden makes the point that offshoring is a good way for a corporation to circumvent age discrimination laws. Companies, especially in IT, like young workers. They’re cheaper, have more energy, incur lower health insurance costs, and don’t draw retirement benefits. Microsoft, for example, tries to hire the vast majority of its people straight out of college. A company could not legally fire all of its older-than-50 workers and replace them with Americans fresh-out-of-college. Yet it is legal to fire an older workforce in the U.S. and replace it with a young workforce in India, China, or the Philippines.
For young people inspired by Alexander Fleming or Marie Curie, this book may be even more of a wakeup call. After all, at least he was able to find work as a Java programmer. (If you think the fake IT shortage is bad, then you’d really be horrified by the fake hard science shortage at the graduate degree level).
Yes, as a physics professor, I share your horror at the “fake shortage” of hard scientists. Federal research budgets (ultimately, where many of the graduate students’ future salaries will come from) are declining in many fields and stagnant in others, and basic research in industry is all but extinct. Yet student interest is increasing — we’ve seen our undergraduate majors and graduate applications grow by a large factor in the last five years, even as the number of foreign students has dropped due to visa issues. Sometime soon there will be a nasty crunch; expect a generation of waiters who know how to calculate partition functions and spin-orbit coupling corrections.
On a lighter note, my favorite computer book is still Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine.
I don’t know if you’re really down on the career decision of programmer Phil, or you just wish for people to be more realistic about what they will get.
During lunchtime I was chatting with a fellow developer about the PS2 game he’s currently playing with his kids, Sly Cooper 2. We talked about how impressive the memory management must be and marveled at their use of some interesting loading techniques. Afterwards we went back to our 9 to 5 of writing reporting software for call centers. Dull, drab work for some, but really are the problems all that different? It’s probably more glamorous to say you’re working on a cool new PS2 game, but for the guy writing a list management routine it doesn’t really matter much if that list is items in Sly Coopers bag of goodies or the names of agents that took a call in the past hour.
I feel extremely lucky and grateful for being in a development role. I work a straight 40 hour week (many work more, but none of us are putting in coal-miner type hours) sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable office. I get to answer challenging problems and toy around with new technologies. I am comporably overpaid compared to 99% of the people in the US, but at least I know it. Don’t tell my employer but I certainly am not going to become a roofer if the salaries of computer programmers were all cut $20,000 by some mysterious force overnight. We’ve got it great, it’s a great job.
>>I feel extremely lucky and grateful for being in a development role. I work a straight 40 hour week (many work more, but none of us are putting in coal-miner type hours) sitting in a comfortable chair in a comfortable office. I get to answer challenging problems and toy around with new technologies.
I like working an IT job too, unfortunately, Matt, many such jobs have left these shores or the positions have been forfeited to cheaper non immigrant visa workers. I think that was the point (at least partially) of Philip’s missive. And the extent of such loss, is greater, I believe, than media reports have captured. From firsthand experience, I’ve had to train foreign replacements in three positions within the last 3 years. And now, in my current capacity, as an independent service partner, my business takes me around the country to see that every big company has embarked on a large scale outsourcing of application development and/or support endeavor.
The economy is down officially a half million IT jobs since 2001, and I believe the figure is closer to a million or more (the official statistics quoted on this matter seem flawed to me, since they don’t properly address the consulting/contracter effect of offshore vendor replacing domestic consulting house/indepedents). They’re still pockets of opportunity, in hardware/sever administration and network analysts, but just speak to any CIO in an honest capacity, and it’s a stated goal to move most all programming work offshore.
Movie on outsourcing starring Jason Alexander:
http://www.outsourceoutrage.com/
EDZ:
In the biology and chemistry arenas at least, I think that crunch started years ago. And it doesn’t even begin to touch on those PhDs “in the industry” doing B.S. (or lower) level work.
Matt & Naum:
I share many of your opinions. As for Phil’s comments, to me they come of as a little cynical and a little wake-up call-ish. (But I guess there’s no such thing as a non-cynical wake-up call).
However Matt’s comment about the paycut begs the question, what does one do when the pay cut isn’t just $20,000 (which at my salary level, I could live with though I’d scream bloody murder), but 100%?
On an even more cynical level though, Phil implies that offshoring is an easy way for American companies to get around age discrimination laws. That’s kind of simplistic. It’s not like older American workers are the only ones losing their jobs.
What offshoring really is is a way for corporations to get around American minimum wage laws.
Sometime soon there will be a nasty crunch; expect a generation of waiters who know how to calculate partition functions and spin-orbit coupling corrections.
Scott Adams already predicted that one years ago. Remember the garbage man in Dilbert?
PaulJ:
I don’t think the genius garbageman from Dilbert is a satire of the flooded PhD market. I think Adams did it because he thought the idea of Dilbert getting his most vexing technical and philisophical problems solved by the garbageman would be funny. And he was right!
Standing in line at London Heathrow today I talked to one person, an Australian who worked for a travel company, which did all of its marketing and transactions via the Web. I mentioned that I was a computer programmer. He said “Oh yes, my company oursourced all IT to India.” So that’s one data point.
As for my personal sentiments… please don’t assume that I agree with everything Blunden says. However, I would recommend it to a young person wanting to know what an average person going into IT experiences. It may well be that they will conclude that sitting at a desk all day every day for a medium salary is what they want to do.
I’d also like add that software engineering has become a really boring, tedious job. But, I would guess that this is a result of supply and demand. The comments about writing game software as being glamorous are wrong. I have worked in this industry for 12 years or so. Be thankful you don’t work in it. It was a fun and creative industry to work in, but over the last three or so years, it has become a sweatshop, along with the low wages. What my former employer does is hire software engineers out of school or with a couple of years experience, work them for 80-90 hours a week 6-10 months straight, burn them out, then lay them off and repeat the cycle. Salaries have actually gone down or stagnated every year for the five years.
The hot industry to have been in the last few years has been real estate or commodity related. Gotta love the demand for all those McMansions (I love that term).
First comment – I can’t believe that you have a Ph.D and present an offhand comment from an employee of some company, offhand, at an airport as a “data point.” Did you not pick up any research skills along the way?
Second – the hypocrisy of the whole outsourcing hubbub – from a foreigner’s perspective – is just insane. In the early 90s the US was extremely agressive in telling other countries to reduce their social programs, cut their taxes, open their markets, compete or die.
In the late 90s when the internet “boom” was at a peak – a Canadian could step across the border to the US – and double or triple their salaries – the message was that the US was so efficient – the best of the best – their programmers – and more importantly their economic system was so much better – that the rest of the world could not compete. The damage to countries outside the US was significant – in Canada they called it the “brain drain”. But of course that didn’t matter – it was good for the old U S of A.
God forbid that people in India or Ghana or wherever might actually better themselves through freer trade. might actually turn the rules established, written and championed by the USA in their favor. God forbid that the giant sucking sound of the 90s – the USA sucking in the best talent in each and every country – might actually produce something of lasting value in countries outside the USA, when things actually readjust to something resembling normality.
Owen: Most of the world’s most talented people continue to come to the U.S. But one of the ways that people demonstrate talent is by choosing to do biology or biomedical engineering rather than computer programming. Thus the migration of Java programming jobs to India does not represent a diminution of U.S. preeminence. It indicates the fact that Java programming, to the quality level demanded by most customers, does not require a truly talented person.
Well, the one revenge we have against all of those HB-1 visas is that we withhold social security taxes from their pay. It makes them madder than hell. Appearantly, Europe refunds their social tax when they leave the country. Plus interest. I Have been on some of the Indian online forums and they are quite vehement about it.
Face it, people – “perks out of the wazoo” IT jobs were here for (maybe) 5 years – and are gone for good. So many people got used to the white-collar comforts for doing what are essentially glorified janitor jobs.
Unless you have some serious understanding of the business you’re programming for – instead of whatever is the latest tech fad and slashdot story – you’re gone. And this is a good thing.
You want to talk outsourcing? Talk to the people who go for dental vacations to Mexico or Eastern Europe!
>>Face it, people – “perks out of the wazoo” IT jobs were here for (maybe) 5 years – and are gone for good. So many people got used to the white-collar comforts for doing what are essentially glorified janitor jobs.
Bleh. I’m tired of hearing about how it was only during the late 90s that programmers were handsomely compensated. Fact is, salaries and bill rates were much higher (when accounting for cost of living normalization or inflation or whatever you want to call it) in the 70s and 80s.
And far as “understanding of the business you’re programming for” charge – well, that’s not the paradigm of how IT slots are filled these days – it’s more along the lines of cheapest that can fill in the skills checklist…
“Biology or Biomedical Engineering.” Well that just seems to be jumping on the latest bandwagon. I also have worked with doctors/medical researchers, and I saw no obvious talent bulge there. Talented people work in all fields. Some fields are lucky enough to undergo a process called “professionalization” where the practitioners – by limiting supply, using credentialism and levels of apprenticeship – manage to market themselves to society as valuable and command higher salaries than expected. Look back far enough and doctors were barbers. This process was well advanced in IT before the mid-nineties – again before the dotcom paradigm of young and supertalented.
The dumbest person I met in University was my biology lab instructor. The dumbest person I’ve met in my life after university was a dean at a Medical school – though certainly I can think of a few other doctors along the way that also fitted the bill. I’m not going to call those data points. Certainly “dumbest” isn’t really a scientific measurement. 😉
“The fact that Java programming… does not require a truly talented person.” Well of course not. But managing the process, determining business needs, delivering products under budget and on time – those are still rare commodities. And thankfully they are especially rare at the huge corporations that do all the outsourcing to third world companies, so there is still plenty of work out there for people who actually know what they’re doing. In fact you can make a pretty good living fixing all the outsourced software. To paraphrase a client – there are bad programmers everywhere. Now there are a whole lot more of them.
“truly talented” – sounds like something that should be reserved for someone’s current favorite actor or writer.
And the US as “preeminent” – thankfully less so every day. Since, oh, 1945. And certainly GB II has accelerated the process. Whatever measure you want to look at – manufacturing output, GDP – or whatever field – medicine, computer science, management – the US is less important than it was twenty years ago – with the exception being military spending. And propaganda output, if you could measure such a thing. And proportion of the population that is in prison. Its like the US is slowly morphing into the USSR.
Perhaps it is especially at high-priced universities that the whole super-talent paradigm is most needed to justify exorbitant tuitions. I was quite impressed reading some of the books from your own reading list – “Snowball Earth” and “The Living Sea” – at how many people doing world-class work – are just down the street from me.
And I really wish that this software had a “preview” function for comments – I dread seeing all this lumped together into one paragraph.
A random quote that demonstrates that the money jobs in the US continue to be where they have always been – in building newer and more advanced weapons. Now perhaps that includes people with biology degrees…
From http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/10/11/cancer_one/index1.html (day pass or registration required):
“Right now, drug and biotech companies are investing about $6 billion a year in cancer research, according to Fortune magazine. That’s $1.2 billion more than the annual budget for the National Cancer Institute, the government’s lone deep pocket for cancer science, and $5 billion more than all the major charities combined. A few billion dollars more each year could make a huge difference, saving thousands of lives.
In the last 18 months, taxpayers have given $120 billion to a different war: the invasion and consequent reconstruction of Iraq. By the end of next year, that figure is expected to top $200 billion. That’s about three times the total amount given to the NCI by Congress during the 33 years of the war on cancer.”
Chances are many of those “truly talented” people you talk of – they’re in Iraq.
I apologize preemptively for trying to turn your comments into Usenet News ;-). I still believe that their is plenty of innovation left to be done with IT – in fact I would take outsourcing to be part of that process – I would say there is no innovation unless it brings social change. The fact that its starting to make the powers that be uncomfortable further reinforces that feeling.
Plus, I feel that given current economic trends – high commodity prices, fiscal irresponsibility in the US, Canadian average incomes should surpass US incomes sometime before 2010 😉
What exactly was this guy thinking? He received a physics degree from Cornell around 1996. Then moved to… Cleveland, and wondered why he couldn’t find a good job? Then after 3 years of working as a waiter in Cleveland, he receives a master’s degree in operations research, and moves to… St. Paul, Minnesota? Then takes a job at an ERP software firm, and wonders why his life sucks?
As a fellow human and naieve midwesterner, I felt for the guy, but had to wonder about his foresight. What possible positive outcome did he expect from these choices? I guess it was a few years before the movie “office space” came out. However it seems like he could have simply moved to the Bay Area and made $100K a year making web pages, like everyone else from the midwest did during the late 90s.