Distributed Software Development :: Outsourcing Careers Technology Essays

Distributed Software Development As new technologies emerge, they often eliminate certain types of jobs. History is littered with many such examples. The number of bank tellers dropped by about 37% between 1983 and 1993.1 The new technology responsible for eliminating those jobs was the ATM (Automatic Teller Machine). More recently, the wide popularity of buying books over the web has caused many book stores to close down. You may have noticed this in your own neighborhood. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been blamed for massive unemployment.2 However, more recently, in addition to technology eliminating certain jobs, technology is enabling the transferring (for valid reasons) of certain jobs from the USA and Europe to far away places like India. Software development is a benefactor (or victim, depending on the viewpoint) of this technology. The technologies that were developed by the US in the 1990s boom are facilitating distributed software development. These range from global high-speed networks, ever-cheaper computers, collaborative tools, satellite communication, and the web.3 Requirements documents and software tools no longer need to be snail mailed, rather they can be emailed to pretty much anywhere in the world. This phenomenon of having software developed in far off places such as India, has come to be known as outsourcing or offshoring. While their may be some small differences in these two terms, they are many times used interchangeably. Earlier, outsourcing referred to the practice of turning over noncritical parts of a business to a company that specialized in that activity.4 But now outsourcing affects a business' critical components as well. While jobs have moved over seas before, like Levi Strauss jobs, which is now completely manufactured overseas, software jobs are getting lots of attention because this seems to be the first time white-collar jobs are being affected.5 While outsourcing can be painful for some of the parties involved, I will s how that it is still an ethical practice. Outsourcing is predicted to affect a very large number of jobs in the future. In the US, about 14 million jobs (or 11%) are identified as being at risk of being sent abroad.6 While not all of these are software related, many of them are. The non-software jobs that are also at risk of being sent abroad are telephone call center, data entry, business and financial support, legal assistant, diagnostic support services, accounting, bookkeeping, and payroll.