Is "Whidbey" going to de-skill developers ?

[Bob Grommes]

Oh, please.

Structured programming was going to do this. And 4GLs. And IDEs. And
object-oriented programming. And just about every other significant advance
in software development, not to mention computer technology.

I've been developing software professionally since 1979. Trust me, every
year or two something comes along that's supposed to render software
development skills obsolete, but ends up just allowing us to work at higher
levels of abstraction. You do have to keep up with changes, and you have to
sort out which changes are important to follow, but provided you apply
yourself to that, you're not going to starve.

I'm not sure what I actually did with 48K of RAM and a 97K floppy drive that
people were willing to pay me for back when I got started, and two decades
from now I will wonder what I did with a mere 1.5G of RAM and a microscopic
300G hard drive, too. So what.

A much bigger practical threat than that to your livelihood is the current
fashion of exploiting developers in the third world for slave wages, but
even that is a self-limiting phenomenon which will eventually destroy
itself.

Stay the course, young Jedi. Trust the Force.

--Bob

 

[pachanga]

I say we all move to India and take our jobs back! Who is with me?

 

[Bradley1234]

I say we all move to India and take our jobs back! Who is with me?

[Shudder]

No way, the food is too spicy and apparently showering EVERY day is
considered taboo

 

[Section 8]

Man, seriously, I would love to go to India and work all day doing .Net
programming. I think it would be great.

Low wages, but low cost housing, nice weather, great food ( well, for me, I
like curry and tandoori ) and Indian chics look hot.

I say we all move to India and take our jobs back! Who is with me?

--
"The Bush administration aims in its 2005 budget to cut by $1 billion the
$18 billion fund that helps about 2 million Americans--generally the poor,
elderly, and disabled--pay their rent."
-Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/05/05_520.html

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Lasse_V=E5gs=E6ther_Karlsen?=]

Oh, please.

Structured programming was going to do this. And 4GLs. And IDEs. And
object-oriented programming. And just about every other significant advance
in software development, not to mention computer technology.

There are many ways to look at this issue, almost all of them theoretical.

For instance, if every compiled today was replaced with a .NET compiler
and all source code was converted to .NET and all programmers from now
on could only program in .NET one could argue that we have a dumber
programmer-base than before, simply because we might have lost the
ability to create the compilers, runtimes and IDE's from scratch.

If you want to go the other way, giving more control into the hands of
the programmer (in accordance with the original question), you would
have to go back to programming with one's and zero's or assembly language.

However, such a deed isn't practical.

In order to build a great GUI application you can't occupy yourself with
the plumbing necessary to resize a window or paint things in the right
order. At some point you're going to have to let go and just decide that
the library builder has to deal with this, you will build your stuff on
top of it.

However, there's a fundamental point to be made here. Just because the
IDE will remove 70% of the code you need to maintain and write doesn't
mean that you can't write that code yourself if you want to change its
behaviour.

For instance, while I don't concern myself with how Windows windows work
I do know that if I really need to intercept a message sent to a
control, .NET will allow me to do that.

Personally I get to complete a lot more works because the IDE and the
runtime is helping me avoid the parts which are just tedious and 99%
same from one application to the next, while not blocking me if I want
to dig down and change that last 1% myself.

However, there's also a sidepoint to this. Too often I encounter people
that cannot create software but are great at naming classes and
namespaces, and while this could be said to be because they started with
the advanced compilers, ide's and runtimes that help them at every move,
which does nothing to help them become great developers, the real
culprit is the idiot who hired that programmer not knowing the difference.

 

[Sahil Malik]

Dude I've lived in India for 22 years of my life, there's very little
broadband internet there. The chicks are hot but their parents are very very
controlling. Low cost housing sure, but with lizards on the walls, wages are
low yeah, but you work a good 14 hour day on that and over that commute for
2 hours everyday and over that come back home and clean your house
completely everyday because it's so dusty there.

You will have a much more spiritually enriched life though, thats for sure,
other than that, America Rocks !!

- Sahil Malik
http://dotnetjunkies.com/weblog/sahilmalik

 

[Moe Green]

Actually, there's a huge Indian community here in Kent, Washington, USA
so I can get my doses of Indian food right here. Delicious!

People walk up and down our streets in saris and turbans all the time.

So, as long as I can get .net work, I guess its the best of both worlds.

 

[Bob Grommes]

For instance, if every compiled today was replaced with a .NET compiler
and all source code was converted to .NET and all programmers from now on
could only program in .NET one could argue that we have a dumber
programmer-base than before, simply because we might have lost the ability
to create the compilers, runtimes and IDE's from scratch.

Lasse,

It's true that today, fewer people have deep knowledge of skills such as
compiler development, but that's because fewer people *need* to know. I've
always written business software because I enjoy that problem domain and
work well with business customers. Therefore lower-level things like
compilers are of only academic interest to me. This does not make me
"dumb" -- unless I try to pass myself off as a compiler writer. ;-)

In truth, the kinds of sub-skills and personality characteristics that make
a good systems programmer tend to be somewhat at odds with those needed by a
good line of business application developer. Little things, like
successfully communicating with people ;-)

There will always be people who think in 1's and 0's and we'll always need
them. On the other hand we need even more of the people who can think in
terms of business abstractions and can coax the requirements out of the
stakeholders.

As for your other remarks, they are spot on in my view.

Best,

--Bob

 

[Dhilip Kumar]

Bob,

Not quite sure what you meant by third world, but I should say that your notion
of programmers being exploited and paid slave wages is absolutely not true. If
you take what programmers get paid in Asian countries and convert that into US
dollars it sure will look like they are being paid peanuts. You miss the whole
picture, that is, the cost of living, cost of basic amenities housing, travel
and the general pay scale etc. If you take these into consideration, actually
the programmers here get paid very well compared even to their skilled counter-
parts in other professions. 14 hour days, sure it is there, but I guess its
applicable to many skilled professions today rather than being a country
specific phenomenon.

And this phenomenon being self-destroying, I really doubt. Did any of those
manufacturing jobs that the US lost to Japan & then China ever come back?
Instead, Americans by and large re-trained themselves to be computer
programmers and technicians. It will likely be the same this time except that
the world is also catching up faster with America!

Dhilip Kumar

 

[Bob Grommes]

Dhilip,

I know that it's easy to rationalize any rate of pay that permits one to
live better than one's fellow citizens, but if we are really gunning for a
global economy, guess what? Your fellow citizens are not limited to those
who live nearby. If (for instance) a company is willing to pay me (let's
say) $100 an hour to perform certain work, that is what the work is worth to
them. That value has everything to do with what they agree to pay and has
nothing whatever to do with the cost of living or the average wage or the
level of desperation where I happen to live. If it were connected with
need, then US developers would get $20 an hour and people in less affluent
areas would get $100. It isn't connected with need, it's connected with
value.

If someone on the other side of the planet knows that $100/hr is the going
rate, why ever would they quote less, assuming they are actually as skilled?
Regardless of how well they could or could not live on (say) one-fifth the
rate?

The answer is that due to differences is language, culture, time zone,
educational and work standards, the limits of telecommunication technology
vs face-to-face and so on, offshoring adds a great deal of cost. Software
development is very difficult under the best of circumstances and no one
wants to tie one hand behind their back and make it even harder. So
offshore concerns have to offer a rate low enough to overcome the resistance
of business to these impediments and handicaps.

Apparently this often involves an 80% discount or better, and I still see
more than a handful of such projects come back home after they fail
miserably (in fairness, often as much because of the customer as the
vendor).

Offshoring is attractive because it is the latest "silver bullet" that we
hope will alleviate the high cost of software development. It will fail
because it fixes nothing connected with the fundamental problem, which is
the inherent complexity of software development. The fact that it will take
pointy-haired bosses the better part of a generation to work this out
doesn't change the fact.

--Bob

Bob,

Not quite sure what you meant by third world, but I should say that your
notion
of programmers being exploited and paid slave wages is absolutely not
true. If
you take what programmers get paid in Asian countries and convert that
into US
dollars it sure will look like they are being paid peanuts. You miss the
whole
picture, that is, the cost of living, cost of basic amenities housing,
travel
and the general pay scale etc. If you take these into consideration,
actually
the programmers here get paid very well compared even to their skilled
counter-
parts in other professions. 14 hour days, sure it is there, but I guess
its
applicable to many skilled professions today rather than being a country
specific phenomenon.

And this phenomenon being self-destroying, I really doubt. Did any of
those
manufacturing jobs that the US lost to Japan & then China ever come back?
Instead, Americans by and large re-trained themselves to be computer
programmers and technicians. It will likely be the same this time except
that
the world is also catching up faster with America!

Dhilip Kumar

 

[Michael C#]

The company I work for contracts out to a company in India, and you can see
the absolute truth in the Hemmingway statement. For all their programming
prowess, two of us over here spend 40% of our time de-bugging and
effectively re-writing the code they send us. And 80% of the code they send
is swiped off programming Websites I frequently visit.

I find it hilarious that this company is paying for code they could just as
easily download for free, and then paying us a salary to debug it for them.

Now *that's* marketing!

 

[Alvin Bruney [MVP]]

Is this not an isolated case? I'm sure there are very good companies in
India with engineers who produce above par code. It happens in the US too.
You get what you pay for.

--
Regards,
Alvin Bruney

Shameless Author plug
The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
http://tinyurl.com/27cok

The company I work for contracts out to a company in India, and you can
see the absolute truth in the Hemmingway statement. For all their
programming prowess, two of us over here spend 40% of our time de-bugging
and effectively re-writing the code they send us. And 80% of the code
they send is swiped off programming Websites I frequently visit.

I find it hilarious that this company is paying for code they could just
as easily download for free, and then paying us a salary to debug it for
them.

Now *that's* marketing!

 

[Michael C]

"Is this not an isolated case?"

For all I know it might be the general rule as opposed to the exception...
I haven't personally out-sourced to a large enough sample of Indian firms to
perform a valid statistical analysis of any sort.

"I'm sure there are very good companies in India with engineers who produce
above par code. It happens in the US too. You get what you pay for."

You may have noticed that I didn't address every company in India or all
engineers in India. I speak of one particular incident, with one particular
company. In this instance the company is getting screwed out of $$$ for
below-par, re-cycled, freely available code.

But as someone else pointed out, I suppose since they're outsourcing to
India, they're getting screwed out of 30%-60% less, right?

LOFL.

*** We'll sell at a loss, but we'll make it up with volume ***

Is this not an isolated case? I'm sure there are very good companies in
India with engineers who produce above par code. It happens in the US too.
You get what you pay for.

--
Regards,
Alvin Bruney

Shameless Author plug
The Microsoft Office Web Components Black Book with .NET
http://tinyurl.com/27cok