26. November, 2003 - followups - outsourcing programming
- Pre-storm buildup amplified post-storm letdown after last weekend’s snow. For me, I was doubting the doom and gloom predictions before the snow even started to fall, but I agree that at least a part of the problem is newsies who aren’t from around here and think that six inches of snow is the end of the world. Heck, it wasn’t even enough snow for me to bother getting out the Sorels since it didn’t come over the top of my tennis-shoes in most places. [press-patch]
- Texas sues telemarketers for violating do-not-call laws, but it’s under Texas law, not the federal law. It’s still nice to see someone sued. [fark!]
- The iPod’s Dirty Secret I linked to the other day isn’t exactly accurate anymore (except for the part about the battery only lasting 18 months). According to this iPod Repair Service page, Apple will put a new battery in your iPod for $99, but that hasn’t always been their policy, and from what I’ve been able to gather, the $250 charge for a new battery applied for at least a while. [some guy]
- Evan’s got a long post about Outsourcing And Its Discontents in which he looks more at the ideas he started to express about outsourcing a few days back. He says that outsourcing labor to countries where that work is cheaper will probably start to affect the programming world soon.
I think he’s missing a couple points. The first is that there’s already outsourcing happening that’s very successful. It’s what I depend on for my business. Companies from around the US outsource some of their programming to Minnesota, because I can afford to offer them my skills for less than I would have to charge if I lived in Silicon Valley. It’s not as dramatic of a savings as if they’d sent the work to India, but they get someone who’s only a couple time-zones away, rather than a dozen.
An even bigger issue in the long run is that good programming is hard. I’ve got almost twenty years of programming experience, and I’ve learned a thing or two along the way (mostly by screwing things up). I don’t think that kind of experience is going to magically appear in places like India overnight. It takes time to screw things so you can learn from your mistakes. Maybe not the twenty years it took me, but I think I’ve got at least a couple years’ lead.
There’s also a value to being here in the US (at least today). It’s a lot easier to learn something new in order to stay ahead of the competition here. Evan thinks Flash programming might be the future of programming. I’m not sure if that’s it, or if it’ll be PHP or any of a dozen other higher-level languages that’ll eventually unseat C++ (if anything does, but I’d bet on it as much as I figured COBOL was a dead-end in the 80s), but I’d like to think that being in the US, and communicating regularly with a bunch of other smart people, I’ll have an inkling of what I’ll need to learn next in order to keep my advantage.
Or maybe I’m just building a better buggy-whip. I’d like to think I’ll realize if I am before it’s too late. [101-280]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Wed, 26 Nov 2003 08:04:35.