[JohnPlace]

I spent the last 7 years working for a company with a massive IT deparment of 8,000 people. My company went through a three-part progression with regard to outsourcing.

Part 1: Outsourcing was the new buzzword, the hot meeting topic. Managers believed it was the silver bullet. We started replacing many of our domestic externals with off-shore externals.

Part 2: Outsourcing turned out to not be a silver bullet. This makes sense because there is no silver bullet. We had security problems, time-zone problems, hardware problems, communication problems, culture-related misunderstandings, and confidentiality concerns. Management freaked out and started pulling our work back home.

Part 3: We still use outsourcing, but more selectively. Some of our very best programmers live in India. Those guys will be with us for a long time. But we're taking a more cautious approach now.

If you think about it, this is the same 3-part process that happens with every new flavor-of-the-month in IT, especially in a heavily matrixed organization.


I think of greater concern than outsourcing is the growing impetus to turn coding into commodity work. When I started using WSAD for the first time, I was surprised at how IBM kept pushing all the automatic code generation features. Of course, people have been saying that developers would be replaced by code generators for years now, and it hasn't happened yet. Still, I see a growing trend toward model driven code generation. I guess we'll see.