Prophecy Fulfilled...sort of.
At a book exhibition recently, I found a copy of a once-popular book - "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer", By Edward Yourdon. This book describes how Software jobs are going to move from the USA to India and other outsourcee countries, and what American engineers should do to save their jobs. He also adds an appendix describing the Indian software Industry, and how it is developing.
In case you haven't heard of this book before, it's understandable. This stuff was written back in 1991, fourteen years ago, long before the current brouhaha over the issue! There are lots of things he got wrong, of course, such as suggesting that Americans should use CASE tools to improve their producivity beyond the reach of the Indians.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to read the section on India. The Indian infrastructure he describes feels like a bad dream today. For example :
After learning that my flight from Madras to Bombay would be delayed for four hours, I spent another hour with an NIIT manager trying to call the Bombay office to advise them of the delay. It was fruitless: we could not get a connection. Indians are accustomed to this, and have even accepted the fact that if they make an advance deposit of 5000 rupees, it may still take four years to get a new phone installed. Shrugging, they smile and say, "Actually, it's much better now that it was before..."
Nevertheless, Yourdon is spot on with the path he predicts for the Indian IT Industry. The evolution that it will go through (according to him) goes :
1. Building a reputation by providing cheap programming services on site at the customer's location.
2. Shifting the programming services back to India, with well-specified programs and systems delivered via telecommunications link to the overseas customer.
3. Gradually shifting the emphasis and focus from low-cost services to high-quality services.
4. Shifting from a service industry to a product industry by finding market niches or by providing higher-quality, lower-cost clone products.
5. Finding a try value-added software-intensive product in some application area that encapsulates India's own unique expertise.
Where do you think we are now, 15 years after this brave prediction? I'd say we're pushing for step 3 to happen. As evidence, take this recent story on SearchCIO. It quotes the Chief Strategist of Wipro as stating proudly, "Small companies don't come to Wipro.".
Indeed, we are increasingly seeing a particular type of outsourcing projects move off the radar for larger Indian companies. I mean those projects that came here strictly to save money. The ones that insist on giving only outlying, non-core work to the outsourcees and then paying the lowest possible rates. These projects are beginning to go to Vietnam or Uzbekistan. Indian companies are proud of themselves for taking on only the 'better' quality of work.
Let me state this up front, as an Indian software engineer/outsourcee : This is VERY DANGEROUS if it's happening everywhere in Indian companies. Bad work today, if done properly, leads to good work tomorrow. While the bigger companies, that pay well, cannot fight on price anymore with Vietnam and co., we ought to be seeing a new layer of smaller, tigher, cheaper outsourcees coming up in smaller cities in India now. They should be the places where the bad projects go, not Vietnam. The Indian software industry should not be a single, monolithic block that raises or reduces billing rates together, there needs to be competition - local competition - snapping at their heels. There need to be places where simpler work is done for lower rates by less-experienced people.
This may sound paradoxical : I've been complaining about the bad work that outsourcees do, in nearly every post. But that is one extreme; this is the other. Both are bad. Creating an industry entirely of cheap, billed-rock-bottom programmers that do manual testing was my fear earlier; the new one is having a huge pool of architects doing work at high prices, with no space for newbies or part-timers. We need a proper Ecosystem of all types of engineers.
Such an ecosystem will be essential if we want to move on to the next steps in Yourdon's path.
In case you haven't heard of this book before, it's understandable. This stuff was written back in 1991, fourteen years ago, long before the current brouhaha over the issue! There are lots of things he got wrong, of course, such as suggesting that Americans should use CASE tools to improve their producivity beyond the reach of the Indians.
Nevertheless, it is instructive to read the section on India. The Indian infrastructure he describes feels like a bad dream today. For example :
After learning that my flight from Madras to Bombay would be delayed for four hours, I spent another hour with an NIIT manager trying to call the Bombay office to advise them of the delay. It was fruitless: we could not get a connection. Indians are accustomed to this, and have even accepted the fact that if they make an advance deposit of 5000 rupees, it may still take four years to get a new phone installed. Shrugging, they smile and say, "Actually, it's much better now that it was before..."
Nevertheless, Yourdon is spot on with the path he predicts for the Indian IT Industry. The evolution that it will go through (according to him) goes :
1. Building a reputation by providing cheap programming services on site at the customer's location.
2. Shifting the programming services back to India, with well-specified programs and systems delivered via telecommunications link to the overseas customer.
3. Gradually shifting the emphasis and focus from low-cost services to high-quality services.
4. Shifting from a service industry to a product industry by finding market niches or by providing higher-quality, lower-cost clone products.
5. Finding a try value-added software-intensive product in some application area that encapsulates India's own unique expertise.
Where do you think we are now, 15 years after this brave prediction? I'd say we're pushing for step 3 to happen. As evidence, take this recent story on SearchCIO. It quotes the Chief Strategist of Wipro as stating proudly, "Small companies don't come to Wipro.".
Indeed, we are increasingly seeing a particular type of outsourcing projects move off the radar for larger Indian companies. I mean those projects that came here strictly to save money. The ones that insist on giving only outlying, non-core work to the outsourcees and then paying the lowest possible rates. These projects are beginning to go to Vietnam or Uzbekistan. Indian companies are proud of themselves for taking on only the 'better' quality of work.
Let me state this up front, as an Indian software engineer/outsourcee : This is VERY DANGEROUS if it's happening everywhere in Indian companies. Bad work today, if done properly, leads to good work tomorrow. While the bigger companies, that pay well, cannot fight on price anymore with Vietnam and co., we ought to be seeing a new layer of smaller, tigher, cheaper outsourcees coming up in smaller cities in India now. They should be the places where the bad projects go, not Vietnam. The Indian software industry should not be a single, monolithic block that raises or reduces billing rates together, there needs to be competition - local competition - snapping at their heels. There need to be places where simpler work is done for lower rates by less-experienced people.
This may sound paradoxical : I've been complaining about the bad work that outsourcees do, in nearly every post. But that is one extreme; this is the other. Both are bad. Creating an industry entirely of cheap, billed-rock-bottom programmers that do manual testing was my fear earlier; the new one is having a huge pool of architects doing work at high prices, with no space for newbies or part-timers. We need a proper Ecosystem of all types of engineers.
Such an ecosystem will be essential if we want to move on to the next steps in Yourdon's path.
posted by Sudarshan | 5:46 AM
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