American Programmer

Yourdan wrote two books in the 90's that dealt with the state of the IT industry at the time. The first, The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, was pretty pivotal in my interest in Process Improvement. His basic premise was that unless american programmers spent more of their time renewing their skills and staying at the forefront of the state of the art, they were going to find their jobs outsourced to software factories in other countries.

One tremendous effect this book had on me was a poignant statement that Yourdan made towards the end of the book: most american "programmers" only had execution manuals in their office (programming books) if they had any books at all and actually rarely read anything beyond language manuals. It was that comment that made me look around in my office (I had an office back then) as well as that of the rest of my team and realize he was right. I immediately began compiling a library and reading it voraciously.

His second book was the Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer. Its message was
that we seemed to have organically heeded his call and rallied to the call. Our productivity was back up and though the drive to outsource was still there, it was mostly focused at the lower end of the spectrum - the help desks and the call centers. The book ended on a happier note.

Well, he could have rewritten them again in the naughts. As you all realize, we are a global economy and highly leveraging offshore skills, talents, and capabilities. There are reports all the time about how the education and skill levels outside the US meet or exceed those in the US. The reality is different though. There are good people everywhere in the world. There are also great people and not so good people (from both the skill and intent point of view). There are companies around the world that actively seek out the best and the brightest regardless of their location and then create means of distributed collaboration.

Regardless, there are also companies that merely seek adequate capabilities but at the lowest cost. I had a company tell me recently that they had found a way to get qualified teams of people all around the world bid by reverse auction for work they wanted to outsource. Their coup d'etat was that for a particular book of java work, they managed to find a team in Vietnam that would do the work for $2.5/hr*. This is an extreme case but many organizations now are outsourcing work because they can find rates so low that even with inherent communications and skill inefficiencies, the rates are still below what the costs would be onshore.

Yourdan's point was that if we don't make ourselves skill-wise relevant, we would be outsourced. Now, we are seeing skills taking a back seat to volume. If organizations continue to accept "good enough" (one of Yourdan's watch word phrases that, once we began to practice mid-90's, we were able to climb back in to relevance in the US) at continuously lower levels of "good", there will be no way we in the US can compete.





* When I asked whether if they would consider accepting the bid and paying $3/hr just to boost their standard of living, I was met with blank stares and an incredulous "why?". This is a different situation, one of abdicating global responsibility perhaps, but not the point I am making here.