Assembly line IT

Last week, I offered my perspective on the reasons for offshoring’s rise to prominence. But if creating and keeping high tech jobs in the United States is the goal, IT’s culture needs to change. We need to rebuild a high-tech workforce that gives a damn beyond the project at hand.

There are two popular approaches making the rounds for keeping jobs here in America. One is patriotism. U.S. companies should not be hiring non-U.S. workers when so many people need jobs. That will be the rallying cry of some politicians in this election year. Personal hardship and economic impact should be shapers of trade policy. The second approach addresses individuals. My colleagues tell me that each of us has to become the outsourcer, lest we become the outsourced.

Sign up for one of these options, but realize that they solve nothing. A solution that assumes outsourcing is a new idea is bound to fail.

We were outsourcing like crazy during the ’90s. Big consultancies took over responsibility for needs analysis, software development, and operations from companies that were growing too fast to pay attention to such details. Consultants supplied by body shops and foreign nationals working under H-1B visas provided a sort of internal outsourcing for companies with more work than regular employees could handle. Many full-time employees were themselves outsourced assets, as their goal was either to leave for a startup or get a raise by quitting.

All outsourcing shares one major characteristic: A worker in a temporary role has little incentive to innovate, invent, or create. This is spirit, blood, and emotion, gifts we bring to work only under rare conditions. During the ’90s, IT set aside its position as a hotbed for collaboration, new ideas, and individual achievement. All of those workers with temporary mind-sets reduced what used to be engaging, knowledge-expanding jobs to fixed stations on an assembly line. A generic Java programmer with x years of experience stands here. It doesn’t matter whether that programmer is

full-time, contracted, brought in on a visa, or part of a consulting team.

If we want to reduce the need for outsourcing, we have to agree that the mass production approach to IT did not work. You can hit every milestone on a project plan and get a beautifully documented execution of the original specification. And the thing will run like a well-oiled machine. A machine that never breaks or makes noise. A machine that will never do anything it wasn’t designed to do.

And that is exactly what you get when you outsource. A gang of very talented people will descend onto the project, execute it, and depart for the next job. Their responsibility is to fix whatever might break. But with no sense of emotional investment, no loyalty beyond this week’s paycheck, no worker will speak up about a great idea that would make your solution work better. Those ideas are everywhere, but in outsourcing, a great idea is probably something to sell to another client.

IT is not manufacturing. Contrary to the popular model, truly effective development, management, and administration require imagination and a willingness to take risks. If you want to solve the outsourcing problem, employers and workers must meet halfway to dismantle this insane notion of interchangeable parts and an emotionless approach to work.