February 07, 2004
Quote of the Day
...it's not that Indian programmers are incapable of 'designing' software; its just that the Indian software industry has not yet reached that evolutionary stage. They will climb the value chain - if they have any sense - which is when the lower cost code-monkey work will move off to a cheaper destination; in fact, that process has already started. Ex-programmers in the UK/US in the meantime will climb further up the food chain, and concentrate on better-paid higher-level thinking work. At my job, we are currently outsourcing some stuff to contractors - in the UK and India - and I find I now have the bandwidth to work on that niggling design issue I have been thinking about for ages. My boss, in the meantime, is now designing the next generation network architecture, instead of working on an itty-bitty feature enhancement. Greater possibility for innovation is the whole point of globalisation.
...you could legislate to stop call-centre and code monkey jobs from going out - as some US states are doing. But in a capitalist economy, people will only pay what a job is worth. So the lower-value jobs are kept in, but wages are lowered and so are living standards. Worse, these workers are stuck in these labour-intensive jobs, so they have no time or incentive to upgrade their skills and move on to better-paying, higher-value jobs.
Suruj Datta, on the Samizdata.net thread "The fixed quantity of programming fallacy"
Posted by Russell Whitaker at February 7, 2004 11:25 AM | TrackBack