Outsourcing: Get Over It.

A condensed version...

If you have a family to take care of and you just lost your job to outsourcing, you just need to follow a few simple steps:

* Don't be prejudiced.

* Beat out hundreds of other programmers for a management job or start your own business.

* Be eager about... something.

* Read an economics textbook.

* Dream about traveling the world without having to work much.

* Help someone do... something. The Wealthy Programmer says greed is bad.

Wow... I haven' seen such pretentious blog in a while. He worked for over 100 companies within last 20 years! Jesus... After those I was expecting no less but a comparison of his code printouts with football fields.

"I become a wealthy programmer, and you can too!".... Yet his 2nd blog post is labeled "How to get promoted to Management" where he basically suggests to start sucking up to your immediate boss.

WTF? Who upmodded this junk?

I worked for outsourcing companies in some third world countries for years, and here's my advice: don't outsource your work if you can and you will save a lot of money in the long run.

Or, if you feel you need 50 Java programmers for a single project, you suck anyway, with or without outsourcing.

At this point in time I'm not worried about outsourcing, since I probably wouldn't want to do most of the jobs being outsourced anyway. I have no desire to write accounting software, etc for Fortune 500 companies for the rest of my life.

I'd much rather work on interesting and creative projects. I don't think outsourcing lends itself well to these types of problems, though that may change in the future.

My undergraduate education was in Industrial Engineering. Industrial Engineers are the outsourcers. They have been portrayed memorably as "efficiency experts" in movies such as American Beauty and Office Space. There will always be jobs for Industrial Engineers, until they start outsourcing the outsourcing.

I'll try to turn this crazy post into something more usable for this crowd:

From a startup point of view I think outsourcing the development of your core product is very dangerous. You need to be in constant touch with your product and have a direct feedback loop during development. That can be very hard if you outsource.

Setting up a remote team and building up a good relationship with them can be very fruitful however. We've done it too and we consider those people first class colleagues. It does take a lot of effort; lots of Skype calls and visits. But it works very well.

S.