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Articles: My Thoughts | Software Career -- Think again
- Ms. nubha M
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hi all, recently i read this article which i thought was very thought provoking.....so i hope u people might njoy it too. It's written by K.Padma
Software Career -- Think again
By Padma.K
I am always concerned when I see thousands of youngsters come to the US taking up software programming as their careers. Don't get me wrong -- there is nothing wrong in pursuing this as a career, but I wonder if these men and women realize what it takes to continue to remain in this field for the next say, ten to fifteen years. In putting forth my views, I would also like to interject some of my experiences having been involved in software development for a little more than ten years.
Gone are the secure days of our fathers and grandfathers when working for a company meant security and a steady advancement in your job with regards to responsibility, perks and your position in the overall company hierarchy. In those days, you became more valuable with experience! Your experience mattered in the sense that your work did not become obsolete or irrelevant. For purposes of comparison, an Accountant, Auditor, Contractor, Civil Engineer, Doctor, Newspaper Editor etc., and others belonging to innumerable other professions are indeed perceived to be more valuable with experience. But if you had been a Software Engineer in the eighties, I am sure you would have been an expert in mainframe programming which is considered to be extremely outdated. Now I shall never forget what a young blonde once told an older mainframe programmer in my office, “So Pops, you actually know Hebrew, oops, I mean mainframe languages?” So much for experience! Putting aside the wag's comment, the fact of the matter is that this field changes very rapidly and the prestigious projects are naturally the ones using the latest technologies, languages and packages. Of course, it is not at all difficult to master a new language or a package for a good or even an average software programmer. Innumerable resources are at your command. With excellent books, websites, forums and discussion groups available a mouse click away, it has become standard for any Indian software programmer to confidently apply for jobs that require experience in technologies and languages he may not even have heard of. Our resourceful friends are rightfully confident that they can hit the ground running after thumbing through a few sample examples posted on websites or in books. And for the most part they have been successful!
When I worked at a dot-com company that aspired to go Public during the last years of the millennium, the company involved itself in all sorts of projects that made absolutely no business sense. Often we used cutting edge technology (no, bleeding edge technology) from Microsoft. All this involved many long hours of reading, tinkering around and testing during evenings and weekends. I always remember with a smile when my mother once commented in exasperation, “You never sat with a book for so long even during your college days! What is the matter with you? Didn't you study anything at all in your college?” Now compounded to this situation was the fact that there were two geeks in my office, who survived on just coffee and software code. So you get the picture! I had to compete or perish.
With the dot-com carnage now behind us and the steady unraveling of companies involved in all sorts of accounting gimmicks unfurling before us currently, there has been a lot of shake-up amongst the nomadic software programmers. Senior programmers report to juniors, your first intern who once fetched you coffee and breakfast tacos is now the veep (VP!) of a surviving company in a surviving department and the person whom you once hired is now the hiring manager of a company you are now trying to get into! It's certainly a mad, mad world as Alice said in 'Alice in Wonderland'.
So far, I have written about some of the individual experiences most software programmers go through in their professions. Let us now look at the picture at the macro level. That is, let us critically examine India's role in software products and services.
We see numerous articles highlighting India's prowess in IT (Information technology). I do not deny that IT has contributed significantly to our GDP. It had increased our foreign reserves significantly, given employment to thousands of people and is growing at a tremendous rate. But I also believe that there is a lot of hype behind this propaganda. As is the case with any growing industry, IT also contributes to our GDP. But how much of this growth provides a real value-add to either our country or the individual? I am sure that the massive Y2K conversion projects, the automated techniques used in the same and its documentation will come in very handy during the next millennium! Now I am not a sarcastic person by nature, but the fact is our software programmers simply perform massive projects that do not provide a real value-add to either him or our country. Of course, this is a bit of a generalization and I am aware that there are significant exceptions. There are some massive projects designed and developed by us completely. But consider the hundreds of thousands of programmers involved in projects with call centers, medical transcriptions, conversion from one system to another, support etc.
Speaking from strictly the individual's point of view, I think his position is not very secure. With every housewife and street urchin in India knowing a Java or a Visual Basic language and with the fact that anyone else can easily do software programming, I think the software programmer's job by definition is a semi-skilled job! This is like China claiming to be the manufacturing powerhouse of the world. In China, cheap labor is available in abundance and so products from China dominate the Wal-Marts and Targets of US and pretty much any low-end manufacturing requirement. But when it comes to high-end products like sophisticated medical scanners, aircraft engines, DVD players and other top-of-the-line consumer electronics products, would you buy the ones manufactured by China? No! You would buy branded products from either the US or Japan.
One must clearly see that the US is very open to using foreign labor for all kinds of low-level requirements. Examples abound. Mexicans, both legal and illegal, do a significant amount of construction work. There are about 3 to 4 million illegal Mexicans in the United States working in the housing and construction industry. In fact the housing industry would be seriously crippled if these illegal Mexican immigrants were to be sent back to their homes. Nurses are recruited on the spot from Philippines (There was an article in The Wall Street Journal on 7/18/2002 titled “US solution is Philippine dilemma” on page A8). Hospitals in the US face an acute shortage of nurses and so English speaking nurses are in high demand across the US as the above article clearly discusses. Contrary to this, it is a very tough process for doctors from other countries to establish practice in the US. So there you are -- Low-end professionals like nurses are welcome, high-end professionals like doctors are not! So you have the Chinese supplying all kinds of commodity manufacturing goods, the Philippines supplying nurses, the Mexicans supplying construction labor and us Indians supplying IT services. I feel we have not left our mark on areas that really matter. Consider some of the following:
· No significant software product of ours is widely used.
· Many wonderful open source software products like Linux (which gives the all-powerful Microsoft some sleepless nights), Apache web server, Postgres database etc., are all mostly contributed by “others” and not us Indians (Of course I am wrong if names like Alan Cox, Peter Anvin, John Aycock, Theodore Ts'o etc., belong to Indians!). But then, if we are so hot in software development why do I not see a single Venkat, Subbu, Rahul or Priya in the list of contributors? I scanned the contributors' list of quite a few open source software. I saw just a sprinkling of Indian names, which does not make sense if you believe that India is really an IT powerhouse.
· We are not involved in any body controlling standards like standards for wireless transmission, networking standards, open source standards etc. Of course, there may be some Indians working in these Standards body, my point is that we are not known for things like this.
· Quite simply put, I believe the majority of software projects Indians undertake (either in India or abroad) are dictated and designed by 'others'. The others are the ones who think about the business strategically and decide what needs to be done. They make all the hard decisions. And we execute them perfectly and earn a good name. Not bad at all; all I am trying to point out is not to get over-excited about our IT powerhouse status.
To conclude, what I really want to highlight is simple. Before you jump into software programming, understand what this job entails. Try to picture your life for the next ten years or so. See if you are constantly prepared to learn, get outdated, learn, and get outdated and so on. Try to see if you will become valuable with experience. Or at least try to hunt jobs where you will work on software projects that will provide you with valuable business knowledge. Ask yourself if you would still like to do software programming if your job location in the future would not be the US but rather a city called Tanjavur or Madurai in South India. Analyze yourself critically to see if you are choosing software programming as your life-long career simply because of its possible job location (the US) or because you have a herd mentality or because that is your true calling. Something is not quite right when a large percentage of Engineers and other professionals irrespective of their specialization opt for software development jobs. It's also easy and logical for US companies to fire immigrants if things don't go well. So it will probably be prudent to think of some of the above issues before embarking on a life-long career
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