In 1992, Edward Yourdon’s The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer (Prentice Hall) warned that American software professionals were in danger of being replaced by offshore developers. With the U.S. IT industry clearly dominating the world software market throughout the 1990s, Yourdon’s target, as well as his timing, was off: It wasn’t the American programmer who became extinct in the 1990s, it’s the traditional programmer fading away in the 2000s.
In the last few years, the U.S. IT industry has shrunk and most of the impediments to outsourcing have receded. Although several U.S. states now have pending “anti-offshore outsourcing” legislation, I’d be surprised if anything substantial comes of these efforts. Offshore outsourcing is now a viable alternative.
Recently, Nicolas G. Carr questioned the value of IT in his Harvard Business Review article, “IT Doesn’t Matter” (May 2003), causing a furor in the industry. To me, the important issue isn’t what Carr got right or wrong, but the fact that business people are publicly asking this question—it’s worrisome when our customers wonder if they need us.
Another sign of trouble is the persistent reduction in IT spending. Some of this is due to the general economic slowdown, although business has become leery of the continued high rates of IT failure, and the fallout from the dot-com bubble certainly doesn’t help.
So what’s happening in the IT industry? Nothing short of Darwinism: The least fit IT professionals are being squeezed out of the market. Since the dot-com bubble burst, many of the easy kills have already occurred: The $100K-a-year Web designers have gone back to $250-a-week barista jobs at Starbucks, and many of the dot-commers either retired rich or are struggling to find jobs in traditional IT shops.
We’re now entering a slow cull period in which many IT professionals will be laid off. Three types of people are in danger: those who can be easily replaced with less-expensive offshore developers, those whose skills aren’t up to par, and those who are unwilling to move to where the work is. Despite the doom-sayers, all of these issues are manageable, if you take control of your career.
The Attack of the Clones
Offshore outsourcers have three significant advantages. First, many are now at Capability Maturity Model level 4 or 5 and Six Sigma-compliant. Second, they’re significantly less expensive when compared with similar U.S. organizations. At the June 2003 Agile Software Development conference in Salt Lake City, Roy Singham, CEO and president of ThoughtWorks, reported paying the top Indian IT graduates a starting salary of $7,000 a year, which placed them in the top 5 percent of wage-earners in India. That’s clearly hard to compete with. Third, offshore outsourcers do a very good job at producing software to specification, exactly what many business people believe they need. Although I argued in my April 2003 column that what they really need are systems that reflect actual needs, not what’s written in requirements specifications, the fact is that offshore outsourcing is becoming more and more attractive to U.S. businesses.The developers who are most threatened by offshore outsourcers are those who follow a traditional, serial lifecycle such as that promoted by IEEE 12207 and/or well-defined CMM/Six Sigma-compliant prescriptive software processes. Software processes that promote hand-offs among specialized groups of people make it easy to outsource large portions of the development effort—when people are treated as cogs in a machine, it makes sense to replace a $70,000-a-year American cog with a highly skilled $7,000-a-year Indian cog. Offshore outsourcers know that their low-cost, high-quality traditional approach sells well to organizations following traditional methods, methods that often prove in practice to deliver high-cost, medium-quality systems—effectively beating the CMM/Six Sigma crowd at their own game.
Compared to traditional developers, agile developers have much less to fear. Agile software development’s focus on people, enhanced communication and high-value activities (such as building working software instead of writing comprehensive documentation) makes agile teams far faster and more effective than their traditional counterparts—and these qualities can’t be easily achieved when people are on different continents. Because agile developers regularly produce measurable results in the form of working software, business has far less reason to replace them.
Luckily, many traditional organizations are now investigating agile processes, if for the simple reason that one process size does not fit all. This new openness may allow you to reconfigure your career path by getting involved with an agile project.
Will offshore outsourcers adopt agile techniques? In the short term, I don’t think so. Although they can be overcome in part, the distance and time-zone separation are significant barriers to communication (See “Bridging the Distance,” The Agile Edge, Sept. 2002). Cultural barriers may also play a significant role in delaying agile adoption.
Action Plan for Job Security
To survive the outsourcing exodus, you must actively strive to improve your
skills every single day. Because you must work effectively with others, the
most important, people-oriented skills can be developed by seeking opportunities
to work in different ways with different people. The most crucial skill of all
is the humility to recognize and respect the value of others’ contributions.
Business skills are also critical. Developers must understand the fundamentals of the business domain in which they work, the specifics of the organization that they work for, and the workings of business in general. As I’ve recommended before, start reading magazines such as Fortune and The Economist to develop your overall knowledge of what’s going on in the business world.
Though technical skills are important, they should take a back seat to people and business skills. Offshore outsourcers’ greatest competitive advantage is their low-cost, highly skilled technical staff; therefore technical skills provide no protection against job loss. Cement your job security by becoming a generalizing specialist who has one or two specialties and a solid understanding of the bigger picture (see “Isn’t That Special?”, The Agile Edge, Jan. 2003).
Don’t want to work on agile projects? Your best bet is to move into a position in which you gain skills that are valuable for both internally developed projects and interfacing with offshore outsourcers. This includes project managers who manage the overall effort, business analysts who are responsible for defining and managing business requirements for the project, user acceptance test managers and deployment experts. Other positions are easy outsourcing targets.
Finally, flexibility is a critical skill. As work dries up in one location, it blossoms in another, and developers must be willing to follow it. For example, these days, you’re far more likely to find work as a developer in the Tennessee Valley than you are in Silicon Valley.
The End—or the Beginning?
Perhaps I’m simply Chicken Little, clucking that the sky is falling, but
I’m not the only one peering at the clouds forming offshore. I truly believe
that the end is nigh for many traditional developers. I also believe that developers
who are willing to re-skill, branch out and get flexible will find themselves
at the beginning of an IT renaissance. The deflation of the tech bubble marked
the beginning of a new age in the IT industry—one that will unfold
during this decade. Are you ready for it?
Scott W. Ambler is a senior consultant with Ronin International Inc. His latest book is the forthcoming Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer (Wiley, 2003).
