Some IT professionals fear becoming like the textile workers of the nineteenth century, displaced by permanently cheaper offshore labor. A roughly analogous trend is clearly underway, and whether increasing long-term demand for software developers can offset the export of American jobs to offshore IT shops remains to be seen.

This trend, however, is much more disturbing. I am disappointed that the test results didn’t include any open-source IDEs like Eclipse or NetBeans, but the subjects’ inability to cope with the popular commercial products was not enough of an encouragement to offset the grave concern that clearly faces domestic software developers if this trend continues. Clearly, lower-level tasks like scripting, administration, and maintenance are threatened. It may end up that higher-level functions like Enterprise Software Architect are the only ones that avoid being commoditized.

Scary times.

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• Posted by Tim on Thursday, July 24, 2003 at 10:08:13 am PDT
• Category: Miscellany
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