Creating your niche

Fine, so you're working in an outsourcee company, your company is growing at a good rate, you might get promoted into middle management any day now, and you think this is the time to do something about the direction your career is going in. After all, dont we all know that us outsourcees always get the low-end projects, are considered el-cheapo programmer farms? I've talked before of some brave souls starting up product companies in India as a way of 'moving up the value chain'. That is fine if you want to branch off - but what about the rest of us who want to stay in our jobs but want to be getting better work?

As I mentioned in my previous post, the outsourcing market in India is beginning to mature - companies are beginning to think beyond the baseline - the pay package - in getting work and attracting talent. For some time now there have been attempts to distinguish ones company from the others, to create USPs. Most of these attempts have been so lame that they fooled no one. Witness the rush of outsourcees to grab the CMM certifications - even a casual looking around most of those companies shows that the certification was for name only, a bullet point to be added to the marketing brochure of the company. Fortunately, now that billing rates in India have gone up a little, companies have the bandwidth to hire professional HR people, who can create effective campaigns. That may lead to better work coming in. But this is all upper-management stuff. What about the rest of us? How do we get better work for ourselves?

What we can do as members of projects within such companies, is to figure out which kinds of jobs dont yet come to us, and then try to grab those. This applies especially to those who dont want their careers created/destroyed by managements. A thoroughly self-indulgent article in ComputerWorld magazine pointed me to a possible approach. This is an extension of the facts I laid out in my "We dont need domain knowledge" post.

Read that ComputerWorld article, print it out, and stick it up somewhere prominent. This is the exact image which we need to create for ourselves if we are to get better work. The article smugly assures American readers that "Being extremely productive, innovative and capable of solving the most challenging problems" will help keep their jobs from being outsourced. This, of course, is a two-edged sword. If you can show yourself as being the same, you've won part of the game. But the crux of the article is about having domain knowledge: "... know the business well, have helped invent and/or implement technologies that give the company its competitive advantage, and have an advanced knowledge of the technologies that are most important for the company's current success and future prospects."

And that, boys and girls, is what you need to do to raise your price. Your managers have no reason to help you with this. But you, as someone who wants to really get the core part of the project, are going to have to replace/supplant those people who fit the description in this article. Identify these people, and work in the same domain and with the same mindset. That's the only way you can get the good work. Your career as a part of your outsourcers project has to take precedence over your career as an employee of the outsourcee company. [Of course, this assumes that you really like the company you're doing the project for, and want to stay with it.] This involves getting atleast some domain knowledge - you will have to be able to give suggestions and ideas for the project as a whole. Outsourcing companies usually are willing to give project documentation - that is a good starting point. But you'll have to go beyond that.

Try this exercise. The next time you have a problem with your work and need to Google for it, note the nationalities of the people asking and answering similar questions on the newsgroups. 8 times out of ten, the people asking the questions are Indian, with email addresses indicating that they're working for outsourcees, and almost all the productive replies are by Americans or Europeans, who seem to be working at product companies or with standards organisations. Ask yourself, why can't you be the person answering such questions? Why must you only be asking them? That is a good indicator of where you are on the totem pole. Those "indispensible workers" described in the article are comfortable enough with the technology to answer questions by random people on the newsgroups. Try to do the same. It teaches you to think outside the box of your project.

The next level would be to try to get into standards-making forums, or atleast into expert groups on the domain of your choice. You get to talk to people as good as or better than you, and you get to think about the domain as a malleable, open-ended area instead of following standards blindly. Admittedly, getting to this level will require some management backing. If possible, create a 'expert' group on the domain within the company, formally or informally, so you atleast have someone to talk to about the field.

It is shameful how few of us are involved in any kind of research or standards activity. Its probably because the management policies of most outsourcee companies dont specify any incentive for such involvement. But as I said, relying on your management for your career is not going to help you. You have to do it yourself. At the least, you have to be aware of the research activity, enough to understand the directions your project is taking.

Once you are at this level, you're effectively at the same level as the 'indispensible' employees of the outsourcer company. And that is the level from which you can ask for and get the core, hi-tech work you crave.