North American Developers Must Innovate to Keep Jobs

By Charles Stevenson

October 15, 2005 —

If you were going to buy a new truck, and you went to your local dealer, received a price quote and then went to a dealer 50 miles away from your home and found another dealer that would offer you the exact same truck for $5,000 less, which would you buy? Surely you should support your local dealer. But you also want to get the best price you can. Most of us would choose to buy the truck from the dealer farther away and save $5,000.

Let’s now address the anti-American sentiment toward the outsourcing trend. Most of the recent coverage around the issue has focused on outsourcing’s negative impact on the technology industry in the United States. The debate has reached such a fever pitch that some politicians are getting involved, and some have even gone so far as to call the move to offshoring IT work un-American.

Yes, there’s an undeniable “us versus them” attitude toward offshoring in the U.S. development community. However, engineers in China, Czechoslovakia, India and Singapore are people, too, with the same hopes and dreams for a better life for their children. These engineers are well educated and develop applications the same way Americans do. Should we, then, really buy into the mentality that Americans are better or more important?

We live in a world where businesses function globally and are all a part of a global community. There are many companies that play a significant role in the American technology community but receive a majority of their revenue from other countries. For many small software companies, roughly 57 percent to 65 percent of revenue is derived from territories outside of the United States. Should these companies not be loyal to those territories that buy their goods and services, even if they are not American?

The American development community is upset because many companies take advantage of offshore engineering and IT services. But just as you would buy your truck at the dealer that offered a lower price than the one in your local neighborhood, so too should businesses hire or buy services from whoever offers the same services at a lower cost. Please remember, the developers located overseas have received exactly the same training and hold the same certification levels as American developers.

In a compensation survey published in the June 13, 2005, issue of InfoWorld, 28 percent of developers are worried about losing jobs to overseas operations, and 53 percent are worried about job security due to budgetary constraints. This is the reality we live in, and it will not change.

So how can American developers turn the tide?

The U.S. development community is challenged to offer unique innovations that are not perceived as commodity services. In the early and mid-1990s, developers used many different tools to solve a variety of IT problems. In the late 1990s, developers began using the same tool for every problem—enabling the development environment to become a commodity. Today, most work is being done in Visual Studio’s Visual Basic, C# or Java, and developers are tied to the particular platforms that each of these products best supports.

If the U.S. development community wants to take back control of its careers and have control of its own future, now is the time to innovate and offer something outside the norm.

Web services and SOAs continue to gain strength as the new development paradigm for the next decade. This next generation of applications can be created much faster and can be maintained more easily by using tools developed specifically to create critical new business solutions. However, before we address the technology, there are multiple steps American developers can take to add significant value to their offerings that would be impossible to duplicate overseas.

Steps for Adding Value
First, forget technology for technology’s sake. Too many developers focus on “resume building.” In other words, they want the right buzzwords like .NET or C# and fail to focus on the solution, which costs businesses millions of dollars a year. Developers need to be business-savvy and inquire as to the purpose of the application they’re building. Is it to reduce costs? Improve efficiencies? Extend and improve customer services? Increase efficiency between suppliers and vendors?

Second, we live in a heterogeneous world in which developers must address not only Windows, but also Linux and now the new Macintosh OS X running on Intel processors. Those developers who use tools and methodologies supporting multiple platforms will be able to offer significantly more value than those who focus on a single operating system.

Third, developers must play a central role in business. As mentioned earlier, more than half of U.S. developers worry about losing jobs due to budgetary cuts. Clearly, those developers who use best-of-breed tools and methodologies that can develop applications faster and at a lower cost than Visual Studio or Java will have the highest value to business.

Web services, and in particular SOA, will be the way applications are architected and created in the next decade. Developers must, once again, look to best-of-breed to increase their chances of success at home and abroad.

Many developers have even taken pay cuts over the past four years, and many jobs have been outsourced overseas simply because the services available overseas use the same development tools that American developers use and are of the same level of quality and productivity, but are offered at one-third the cost. So the American development community can continue to offer commodity skills that can be easily obtained at a lower cost overseas, or make a bold move and offer customers and employers something they desperately need.

Businesses need developers who are business-savvy and use their knowledge to choose development approaches and tools that can deliver applications faster and at a lower cost over those who are locked into just a single tool. The aforementioned developers who offer commodity skills such as Java, Visual Studio, Visual Basic or C# have taken pay cuts, while those using cross-development tools have been able to increase their rates and achieve job security.

Charles Stevenson is CTO of Gupta Technologies, which makes cross-platform data management and rapid application development tools.

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