(2004-01-28) Pink Offshoring

Dan Pink on Off Shoring. Ritesh Maniar reminds me that Hexaware has scored a Level 5 rating from Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (CMM/SEI), the highest international standard a software company can achieve. The others are quick to note that, of the 70 or so companies in the world that have earned this designation, half are from India.... Shirley Turner represents the 15th District in the New Jersey State Senate. In 2002, Turner learned that eFunds, the company that administers electronic benefits cards for the state's Welfare recipients, had moved its Customer Service jobs from the US to a call center in Mumbai. She was stunned that the jobs were going overseas - and that taxpayer dollars were funding the migration. So Turner introduced legislation to ban the outsourcing of any state contracts to foreign countries... "But isn't part of this country's vitality its ability to make these kinds of changes?" I counter. "We've done it before - going from farm to factory, from factory to knowledge work, and from knowledge work to whatever's next." She looks at me. Then she says, "I'd like to know where you go from knowledge."

Dana Blankenhorn follows up with There is no real limit to our need for software... Programming is rapidly being split into two separate disciplines. One is coding. The other is developing, by which I mean conceiving and designing new jobs that software might do. Development, as opposed to programming, is a job of the imagination. It's like the writing I am doing now. It is not a job that has a "price" or "value" on it. No Indian has my mind, nor my imagination, nor yours for that matter. We are all, each of us, irreplaceable in that sense. Programming, on the other hand, is a learned skill, like any other. The market value of such a skill depends on supply and demand. If you can code 10 times faster than an Indian you're worth 10 times their price. In an Agile Software Development process, you don't have these hard lines - everyone codes.