Outsourcing

From time to time, I develop software. Sometimes my title is even "Software Developer".

Knowing this, you would assume that I would be paranoid of outsourcing. The idea that my entire profession was somehow flying overseas.

Well, outsourcing is not in my nightmares.

Here's why you should forget about worrying about outsourcing:

• Software is cheap
  With the popularity of open source projects and the increased use of their software packages, most software markets are drying up. This has nothing to do with outsourcing, and everything to do with what programmers and companies are doing everywhere. In many fields, software could cost barely anything - that means high paid programmers won't exist in that sector.


• Potentially infinite amounts of software is required
  To reach every application of technology, the lines of code required could be basically limitless. Applications of software keep multiplying, as languages and platforms keep changing. There is plenty of room for programmers from every nation to come to the table and play.


• Developing nations won't stop coding
  If we don't outsource programming tasks, it's not like everyone in India is going to forget how to code. Entrepreneurs will just create competing corporations and make a killing, especially when North American software comparatively is very expensive. This leads to the next point...


• More markets is a good thing
  How do you expect buddies from foreign countries to buy your software product if its not at all developed in their country? You will have to have some sort of presence in a nation if you hope to be successful there.


• Are jobs really moving?
  The news won't hesitate to scream at you about the thousands of jobs that somehow "moved" to India or China. First, a job in a developing country doesnt translate to a job in North America. For the price of employing a few thousand people there, you would only be employing a few hundred people here.


• Helping developing countries isn't a bad thing
  If in fact we are fucking ourselves by outsourcing work, does that mean it's always a bad thing? The scales might change, we might not be the most dominant group of people on the Earth. We might just have to suck it up. Unless opportunity is created in other parts of the world, then all those parts of the world will stay in the dumpster and there will be a steady stream of refugees.


• It's not hard to compete
  When companies find geniunely better workers overseas, then we deserve what we get. For now, outsourced labour mostly doesn't have a huge payout for the companies that employ them. Software developers should be aware of things stated The Mythical Man-Month ( I haven't actually read it myself, the message seemed pretty straightforward ) in that having a million people hammering out code doesn't mean you produce something coherent. Even open source projects have a few core contributors that do the majority of the work. Basically, a lot of companies are going to find out the hard way that adding a shitload more people to the R&D effort won't exactly increase production of advances by an equal percentage.


• You don't want to do all of it anyways
  A lot of software development is grunt work. Stuff that requires some training, some thinking, but mostly requires a ton of patience and time. End user software testing and validation is a perfect example of this. Sure, they're nice jobs, but they're hardly rocket science and moving a few software testing jobs to other countries won't exactly throw a wrench into the development of local brains. In fact, it would be quite interesting to have development, building and testing being in drastically different timezones. A nice 24 hour software production cycle could be created which may speed things up.

In short, quit freaking out about outsourcing.

Nobody is starving here.