Today''s article - Career Paths for Programmers
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Do you have any comment on this article? It said programmers should shift to business side because the 'technical side' work would probably move off shore.
Do you agree with it?
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I didn't see the article, but for various reasons I think there will always be a need for technical people 'on shore'. Just as an example, many businesses can't wait until it's 8 AM in a different timezone to contact people for an emergency fix or update to their hardware or software. At the very least that means there will always be contract jobs available for those type of situations.
OTOH, it definitely doesn't hurt your skills as a programmer to understand the business and the people in that business that you're writing software for...
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The RedGate software site has an article by "Phil Factor" lamenting the fact that you have to leave your techy past behind you to get into the higher echelons of a company.
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I do agree with Mike C - there will always be more jobs available onshore compared to offshore. We have recently taken a view that offshoring isn't working for our group at least.
There's various reasons for this, we're finding it very hard to retain staff in the company offshore as competition is fierce, we also have problems with those staff providing third level support due to complications with the UK's stringent data protection laws (and with the majority of our offshore developers being contracted).
As a result of this (and more) - our group is starting to reverse this by employing more people onshore and cutting our offshore headcount.
This is by no means only for technology either - we are also reducing (although on a smaller scale) the business footprint we have offshore.
However - it's always the best idea to try and get as much exposure to the business as possible as a technologist. If I look around at our more successful staff in technology here pretty much all have come from the business side of the company or have a lot of business knowledge, you wouldn't survive here unless you did.
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Offshore technical labor has limitations. For one thing, communication in software development is difficult with people who can speak to each other clearly, much less through different languages and accents. It is very difficult to imagine our clients offshoring their software projects, even though in theory it's possible.
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I've developed software for around 20 years, and now manage a somewhat complex mission critical ERP/CRM turnkey application. My survival and any success I might be able to claim is that I'm first a business analyst and have always made the top priority to fully understand the business process.
I did not read the article; however, I have never met, nor would I hire a programmer without a solid analytical background. Our industry and its resulting software products suffer not from the on/offshore issues, but a systematic pattern of programmers having little understanding of why they are developing a system; why they are writing some specific set of code, etc. The most significant challenge I'm faced with as the manager of this system is that the programmers often have no clue as to how the system is actually applied in our business setting - so we have a pretty constant go around with having things fixed/corrected that were not built with the knowledge of the business. My albiet possibily narrow view of the world today is that we are loosing the battle a bit, because programmers aren't coming through the business analysis arena, and perhaps even more importantly, the industry as a whole tends to suffer from a lack of good logic and practicle common sense.
If you are new or exploring an IT career I believe that a very strong business analyst capability is at the core of the successful developer.
Thanks for listening
Tom Currier, DB Mgr SFCVB
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Thanks all for your response.
I agree knowing the business is very important for developers to develop the system. However today many companies divide the job into business analysts and developers. The business analysts are the one talking to the users but have no technical knowlege. They write up the specifications of the system and when the developers receive the specificatioins, they then told the business ananlysts it requires major change of the system. It is a waste of time. The whole project should include the developers in the beginning. Another one is off shore programmers, the company has no intention to let them learn the business, they just are the coders. Some of them are not very good coders. Sometimes when they turn in the code, the on shore developers have to review and find all the problem, because of the project deadline and time difference, instead of sending back the code to the off shore programmer, the on shore developers change the code instead. It takes double the effort. Also in most cases, if the project does not meet the deadline or has problem in production, the management blames the on shore developers instead of the off shore developers who actually wrote the code.
This happened in my old company and it was one of the reason why I left.
Off shore service does not work good in small and medium size company. It ended up costing more than saving money because of the time difference and training. The big company use them just because it saves money and make their quarterly report looks good for the stock market analysts.
As for the career path - I agree the programmers need to learn the business function, unfortunately a lot of the programmers do not even want to learn new technology and business process. Those are the one who thinks programming is a job only. Maybe they should be switch career !
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I totally agree that programmers need to be business analysts as much as technical experts and developers.
At my company we only hire people like this. We have no pure programmers that could hide in closets and only write code. Unfortunately our title is "programmer". I'm going to be proposing we change that soon to programmer/analyst, which is a lot more appropriate.
It's also a reality that there is no possible way to get promoted at my company without becoming proficient, if not an expert, at every aspect of our part of the business. We're simply too small to have specialist managers.
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