Re: Outsourcing to India and China
From: Scott Ellsworth (scott_at_alodar.com)
Date: 01/05/04
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Date: Mon, 05 Jan 2004 13:05:46 -0800
In article <2793a24f.0401040827.a42df17@posting.google.com>,
rickandthuy-dc@yahoo.com (Rick Osborn) wrote:
> Reason for the poll, is I was thinking of going back to school
> and was doing little speculating as to how good it will be to have
> firmed up IT skills versus just going into Psychology or Marketing.
> Obviously would like to use IT experience, and not be 35 yr old Marketing
> intern, but is that feasible?
If you consider IT as a limited set of purely technical skills, you are
screwed. The merely technical can always be replaced, if only by a
younger, cheaper, sneakier person.
Experience, on the other hand, is hard to replace, and wisdom harder.
The only way to get that is by doing the real work. This is why I never
trust a designer who has not either done or watched the end task of the
project. Better is to have one of the customers on the team, at least
for Demo Day, which better happen weekly.
Put another way: I spent seven years doing C++ on Windows primarily, and
am coming up on five for Java on several platforms. I could probably
teach someone to be a sharp Java guy in fairly short order, but he would
have my experiences that made me such a fanatic about typesafe
collection, source control, and unit testing. These are from my past,
and would not carry over well.
When I hit a client, I look for the things that have caused me or my
clients problems in the past. They change with domain, but source
control and database audit trails live in the same space in my mind, and
thus some form of "how are you going to track changes, and back out of
bad ones" will always come up. Generalizing your past to apply to
future problems works in overall design as it does in a pure technology
project.
I do not worry about Indian or Chinese programmers, in this context,
because what I am selling is a set of solutions, not a fixed set of
technologies. These are hard to sell if you are not physically at the
client site to talk over what they really need. That is not marketing
speak - the solutions are drawn from very real technology choices, but
the client should not care how the problem is solved, they should care
that we solve the right problem.
So, if you go back to school, I suggest going back for what most
interests you, rather than what seems to be in for now. If that is
technology, try to stretch as much as you can. For a Macophile, that
means learning at least some .NET, just like Java programmers really
should learn some Perl or Python. Know thine enemy, as you may have to
interoperate with it.
If marketing or psych is interesting, on the other hand, go for it. It
will improve your ability to interact with a stakeholder.
Alternatively, if there is a problem domain that you find interesting,
it will make you a far better technologist if you have studied the
domain. I do a lot of work in biotech, and while I can usually play to
my graduate math and industrial engineering degrees, there are
definitely times where more genetics would have really helped.
Scott
scott@alodar.com
Java, Cocoa, WebObjects and database consulting
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