Tim Bray takes umbrage at the Economist for asserting that the outsourced jobs represent the low-end of high-tech . . . .
Coding Makes You Dumb
I quote from an article in this week’s Economist (read it here if you’re a subscriber) arguing that the negative impact of “Offshoring” is exaggerated. The reasons we need not worry include … the bulk of these exports will not be the high-flying jobs of IT consultants, but the mind-numbing functions of code-writing. [Update: my first cut of this had a snarky aside, but I decided to lose that and let the assertion above stand or fall without commentary.] [ongoing]
I just missed getting the snarky bit in here but my client updated his feed too quickly . . . .
I think there’s a kernel of truth to the Economist’s claim: I think a lot of what will be sent offshore will be the implementation and possible iterations of ideas generated domestically (for certain values of domestically. Suppose Sun’s folks in the Silicon Glens of Scotland came up with some idea that was designed there but coded up, tested, and shipped from Bangalore. If all involved are Sun employees, is that domestic or not?).
In my brief foray in computer science at UW, it was made clear that a lot of what programmers do is fix, work with, debug or refactor other people’s code. You don’t always start with a clean slate.
Reading the code and comment extracts (kuro5hin has some) make the struggle of working with other people’s cruft painfully clear . . . .