In a response to a NYT column on outsourcing, Jim Fawcette says " Unemployment in programming is 40 percent above the national average, despite the fact that the number of people in that profession has declined rapidly for four years, and salaries are down 15 percent." Nasty numbers, if true (and they seem believable to me).
I keep adding more and more to an offshoring rant that I'm writing, but it keeps getting longer. Why? For one thing, everyone's a free-market capitalist until their job goes overseas. So there's a fundamental dissonance between sets of beliefs that many programmers share: the belief that free trade maximizes total wealth and the belief that programmers in the U.S. ought to be able to make a living. I also have to contend with the fact that I'm a "nearshore" resource -- I work out of my house -- but believe that I deliver value to my customers despite the challenges of communication and distance.
Argh... I wanted this to be a brief post, but the subject just sucks me in. The March 8 InfoWorld has an excellent set of columns and articles on offshoring (as a matter of fact, the issue is a prime example of exploiting the advantages of the print medium -- I could give you a whole bunch of links, but it flows so much better on paper). Anyway, here's an observation: Schwartz' column quotes "work with companies that are CMM Level 5," while Dickerson's column says "Any successful project that I've worked on shared two qualities: a high degree of direct interaction between the development team and the end-users, and a high degree of agility in the team's methodology." There's an important point that's a little too subtle for the general business press: CMM Level 5 stuff is extremely formal, but there's an emerging consensus that non-formal "agile" approaches are much more productive.