Slashdot

in the early morning on Thursday, the 5th of February 2004 by Chad

Slashdot blathers on about what we covered in Episode 183, which is the outsourcing of technology jobs from the US.
Most of the commentary is typical slashcrapâ„¢ but there are a few gems in there. This isn’t one of them:

Chris, Thank you for your very insightful article, “The New Face of the Silicon Age.” Your final line is hopeful, and I think prophetic: “The result: more workers focused on real innovation. What comes after services? Creativity.” As a Java developer who believes that designing systems and writing code is an artistic endeavor, I am very optimistic about the future. Software developers should not feel threatened by the possibility of outsourcing to third world nations. The relatively low-level functions that these technology sweatshops provide will soon be automated out of existence by the next generation of software development tools. Developers who have low-level skills and fail to master the new development tools will be obsolete, no matter where they live. The next generation of tools will significantly increase the productivity of developers through the implementation of attribute oriented programming. We will be able to go from a detailed designed specification to system implementation with very few key stokes for coding in between. Software designers will specify the attributes of the system, the tools will generate the code. We are already seeing the emergence of these tools from both the corporate (IBM/Rational’s model driven development, Sun’s Project Rave, and others) and open source (xDoclet most significantly) communities. At present, software development is on the same level as the automobile industry was in the 1890s when teams of engineers individually crafted specialty systems using a limited set of tools. As the power of development tools increases, exponential gains in productivity will be realized. Your article was correct in stressing the importance of design and management (getting the attributes of the system correct is the essential first step). In every industry, design is where the greatest value is added. Your article was incorrect in predicting an increase in outsourcing. The low-level “keyboarding monkey” jobs are going, but they are not going overseas,they’re just going away. The great danger in the near future will be that companies will be misguided by pinhead MBAs who can not see beyond the bottom line at the end of the next quarter. Companies that attempt to slash costs by turning to outsourcing will be at a disadvantage when competing against companies that invest in software designers who have mastered the latest generation of leading edge tools. Creativity will win in the end. Mike Duffy Austin, TX

Sure, it sounds great. Here is the problem of someone whose viewpoint is so damn self centered: There are, for example, 100 people in a company. Some are great, some are good, some are not so good but still productive. Mike Duffy’s plan has just outsourced 80 people, leaving the CEO, CFO, and a few of the most talented programmers. How long can that company survive, before its outsourced side of things just takes over the entire company and everyone loses? Now, expand this on a much bigger scale, where 5% of the economy works in technology. Outsource 90% of that group. The entire industry will collapse.
He talks about coding being an “artistic endeavor.” Well, when his company goes under and he goes shopping for a new career, the managers of the remaining companies aren’t going to want ‘artists’ at all. They’re going to want people who can crank out code very cheaply just to stay afloat. I wouldn’t even now hire someone who talks about making pretty code.
His other option may be even worse. Once the code is automatically generated by the tools, the third world economies will collapse also, since they are depending more and more on technology. Not a good thing either.
Anyways, I don’t know how I missed this one on Slashdot, but another story about Scott was in Slashdot in January. This one had 2064 comments! That has to be one of the highest commented posts ever.