Work: April 2004 Archives

In my building, I work on the 3rd floor, and the corporate HQ of Opsware is located on the 2nd floor. In my web searchings yesterday, I came across an interesting article about Marc Andreesen, the chairman of Opsware, and his opinion on outsourcing. Summary, he's for it.

Me, I still need some convincing.

-Andy.

Shortly before Easter, I found out from my bosses that half of my job is being outsourced to India.

I'm serious. I can't make this stuff up, people.

So, let me elaborate. As a Field Engineer with EDS Automated Operations, I have a dual role. Two weeks out of every six, I am "on call", which means that I carry the pager, and am available 24/7 to solve any problem that occurs with any of the systems that my team supports. The rest of my time is supposed to be spent doing development -- adding new features to our existing tools, creating new tools, implementing someone else's tool -- you get the idea.

Recently, however, the volume of support requests has been increasing, and we are also getting tasked with more projects. In short, we've got way more work than we can handle. And the solution that management has chosen is to hire some additional help, in India.

So, this was all announced, and then I didn't really hear anything about it for awhile. Then today I found that interviews are on-going, and that I'm going to be asked to do some phone interviews sometime this week (at a very inconvenient time -- like 7:00 PM on Sunday night).

My feelings on outsourcing our mixed. After reading the big Wired article, I came away with the sense that outsourcing is pretty much inevitable, good for developing countries, but I'm not so sure what it's going to do to America. The article points out that this isn't the first time we've had widespread outsourcing of jobs to other countries -- the manufacturing jobs have already bolted over the course of the last several decades. But that was okay, because the white collar jobs showed up.

So, what new class of jobs are going to show up onto the scene in order to keep folks like me employed? Wired argues that America will still be a source of innovation. I don't know that I agree (hence the mixed feelings) -- these is no reason why the next "big thing" can't come from India. The human spirit and the drive to innovate is just as alive over there as it is over here. Another idea is that new industries, like Biotech and Nanotech, may be a source of jobs here. A recent Slashdot post, though, seems to cast some doubt on that.

So anyway, I'm still sorting out my feelings on outsourcing. I tend to think that "everything is going to be okay" -- I'm just not sure how.

As for the less theoretical form of outsourcing, i.e., what's going on with my current job, my feelings are mixed there as well. One one hand, it's going to be great to have the extra help, and to get rid of the pager duty. On the other, it is going to be difficult to overcome the communications barriers imposed by distance. I think that it's going to be a lot of work so that we can have outsourced helpers. But, it will be interesting, too.

And maybe I'll get a free trip out to India, in order to do some training.

-Andy.