How does it feel knowing that your job can be performed at a quarter of the price by third world Indian programmers. Do you go to bed at night fearing the day when you're out of work. Any regrets for not picking a profession with prestige like Lawyer or Doctor (i.e., two jobs that can't be outsourced). What's your contingency plan for the day when mainland China opens up. Read this article about why programming is a bad profession: http://www.halfsigma.com/2007/03/why_a_career_in.html
With Indian programmers you'll still be able to find higher end jobs that the aforementioned code monkeys can't handle. But that's NOT the case with Third World Chinese programmers. Once China stops censoring their web, you're pretty much out of work.
Indians and Chinese workers are probably even better than us. They have much more motivation to do well and succeed with all the competition, while we're lazy and whine about everything over here.
Yet, in many software projects programming is the ``easy'' part. It's getting the right thing programmed that is hard. It's much more a communication problem than a programming skill problem. Even within the same culture, speaking the same language and having the same understanding of the market, very often the customer and software developer are not understanding each other.
It might work for bulk-ware, but with smaller budgets and smaller teams, programming outsourced to India is a huge burden and becomes more expensive in the long run.
There's plenty of talented programmers in India and China, just as anywhere else. But there's tons more of untalented and unskilled ones churned out by local educational institutes in the hopes of cashing in on some of those outsourcing dollars.
Companies outsourcing development work to these places want to do it as cheaply as possible, so there's little surprise in what degree of talent they'll get. Quality costs money in Asia too.
During the dot-com boom the CS courses of all western universities were filled with people wanting to jump on that bandwagon, and when the bubble burst a lot of those people switched to whatever career seemed most lucrative at the time. The same will happen in Asia. The crap code shops won't be able to attract customers, and the good ones will price themselves out of business. Those who can't find work in the industry will switch to something else, and the number of graduates will drop with the employment rate.
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Anonymous2012-02-19 15:19
Any regrets for not picking a profession with prestige like Lawyer or Doctor
Well, I study medicine, programming is my hobby, so not really.
Giving proper instructions to the machine is not a programmer's primary virtue.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 7:04
>>1 Lawyer or Doctor (i.e., two jobs that can't be outsourced).
They can be. For example, China and Israel are leading centers for organ transplantology: China extracts organs from its own citizens (questions ruling class = goes to organs), while Israel - from Arabs (non-Jew = non-human). U.S. can't forcibly extract organs from healthy individuals = can't compete with China and Israel.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 9:04
Indian programmers are actually very shitty. There are lots of companies that will only outsource to Americans, and many only outsource to consultants who charge premium rates.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 9:09
>>14
Americans such as Chileans, Brazilians and Mexicans
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Anonymous2012-03-12 9:41
It's true that third world outsourcing is much cheaper than my services. However, the quality is often noticeably poorer which would lead to delays in fixing work that should already be good which means precious time is often wasted in the process.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 10:14
>>16 However, the quality is often noticeably poorer which would lead to delays in fixing work that should already be good which means precious time is often wasted in the process.
Product of the same quality in 3rd world would still cost less than your work. They don't have Labor Unions in 3rd world, you know.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 10:28
>>17
Programmers don't work in labor unions in the US. The point of >>16 is that time is money. I, as an experienced developer, can quote development times quite accurately and then deliver my work within that period. The "cheap offshore" option will take a longer time to complete if they don't deliver the required system within that same period. If this happens, more time must be invested to fix their work which can cost more time and effort in the long run.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 10:32
>>18 I, as an experienced developer, can quote development times quite accurately and then deliver my work within that period.
You're overconfident.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 10:51
>>19
Nope, I'm experienced in my particular field. I work closely with the systems analyst and the users to study the system I need to achieve. The vast majority of my time is in analysis and design (for a given system where the problems are understood). After this, the schedule we work out is very accurate; actually fleshing out the code takes my team very little time. The biggest time sink after writing code is doing the comprehensive system checks. We charge more money and time for any system scope changes that occur after the system design phase and the clients know this up front so there is complete understanding about this.
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Anonymous2012-03-12 12:42
>>20
You put to much confidence into your rituals.