Shiny Happy People

(Yeeeeikes! This post is a monster! Sorry about the length, it just got away from me. My short attention span friends: skip down to "Finally, we talked about dreams" if you want to get to my eventual point.)

Had lunch with some buddy ex-coworkers, one employed, the other laid-off like me. What a grand time.

We are/were IT workers and one of the topics of conversation was the possibility that the second golden age of software development is now over, and IT jobs will be scarce for a while, if not from now on. Yes, there will be killer apps in the future, and wonderful new paradigms will arise, but essentially the train tracks have been laid; from here forward, development efforts will be on making the trains run better.

Think about it. Operating systems are now established; we will have some form of Windows, Macintosh and Linux/Unix for quite a while now. We've got great word processors, spread sheets, databases, graphic/picture apps, media apps, and content creation and display apps. The battle will be over controlling content - digital rights management they call it - and whichever platform allows users to do whatever the hell they want, will win. That will be the gauntlet.

The reason my previous company tanked is they are/were reinventing a wheel no one really wants or needs. A lot of recent development is like that. Things that will now succeed in the market are those that finally get past all of the user-vicious interface gotchas. I have dealt with them for so long, I instinctively move around them. Yet, when I see a kid or someone elderly try to use a complex application, it fucks with them to the point where they often give up, and it becomes obvious the next wave of development is going to be the correction of such stupidities.

But, for now, larger IT development looks like it will be at a much diminished pace compared to just a year ago.

And then there's the India problem. Sometime earlier this year, "60 Minutes" had a show that was for all practical purposes an infomercial for using cheaper India IT workers. The economy was already beginning its death-spin towards a terrain conflict, so that was a part of the reason why we (American) IT people were tossed out on our ears. (It's no secret that anymore corporations typically use layoffs as their first option for cutting expenses rather than their last.) But from the day of that broadcast, you could see hiring and layoffs follow this new trend of moving development to India or hiring (Eastern) Indians. Within two months, everyone in the cubies around me was from India. I had to learn to wait to say "good morning" to them because the first thing most Indians do when they arrive at work is pray to Shiva and genuflect and pat a kiss on the picture they have hanging in their cubes, which takes about three minutes.

The "60 Minutes" show's main theme (which they repeated at least three times so even the most simple CEO would grasp it) was that Indian technical schools create graduates that are better - more technical, better trained, etc. - than your average MIT graduate. Well, since we had quite a few MIT graduates at my company, I realized how faint that praise was, but I'm sure it sounded impressive to hapless suits in the same way that "Harvard Graduate" or "Yale Graduate" sounds. (Anyone with any experience with such graduates knows, however, that wealth, legacy admissions, and nepotism go a long way toward diluting the supposed greatness of the products of those institutions.) Especially in IT, sheepskins and honors mean JACK regarding whether or not someone can produce logical, clean, and useful code or applications. Some of the most talented developers are self-taught and some of the biggest buffoons have a wall full of expensive framed paper.

As for the India problem, I'm hoping it will take corporations only about a year to discover that it is not the panacea it seems to be. But it will probably be about two years before companies as a whole publicly acknowledge that the cost is the same and the result isn't as good as it is with American IT workers - this isn't about sewing a shirt or sneakers together, after all. Yes, up-front salary costs are lower, as these people come from an economy that's inferior to ours. However, these folks who think they're getting development on the cheap aren't considering the language barrier and the cultural differences between our nations, and the related costs. India still very much has a caste system, and their culture, like many Middle Eastern and Eastern cultures, has a very different take on what constitutes an ethical financial business transaction. For instance, bribery is a given in their culture. To keep phone lines up and working takes more than just paying the phone bill. No, it means paying off some phone company employees, and the folks who have access to the lines, local power lords, the techs, etc. etc.* Besides the caste system, India still practices arranged marriages. The men, both here in American and in India, will typically work 60 plus hours a week because they have no desire to go home to the wife that was chosen for them, or often the wife will be at the same company doing the same work for half the price. (This doesn't even touch on the women's equality issues, btw.) Once bribes are counted, the cost of mistakes and low quality often associated to communication barriers and cultural standards, and the weird mambo of marital relations are all taken into account, the cost differential is negligible and the cultural one is considerable. These American companies simply aren't looking at that part of the picture.

* One company where I worked over a decade ago tried the India thing and ran into many of these problems. The most hilarious incident involved the bean counters as they had a real hard time working into the budget all the bribe money because 1) it obviously wasn't a fixed cost, 2) they couldn't figure out a category for it, and 3) since bribery is considered unethical here, they were worried about audits and such. Being a bean counter during our India experiment was probably an exercise in taking years off of one's life. Of course, once the big boys and girls added up the cost of doing business in India, and the rework caused by their shoddy work, they abandoned it entirely. They ended up having to write off all of the equipment, some of it very cutting edge and expensive satellite communication stuff, not to mention hundreds of PCs. I think the expense was greater than it would have been to have just hired Americans all that time due to the equipment hit alone.

Oh, and another thing: We would have to send someone to India about every quarter to fix things up and get them back on track (a necessity), and they would optimistically view it as a free vacation in India but come back with a much different story. For instance, due to the age and culture of India, most of the major cities do not really have sanitary waste disposal systems for sewage and such, so it flows freely through troughs in the street. Because of the heat and other weather phenomenon, this stuff dries out and ends up coating everything. To be specific, a fine layer of fecal matter coats everything you come in contact with, particularly in the restaurants and other establishments in the center of the cities. Nearly everyone who went, despite the massive about of boosters and other injections they were required to get (which took about a month to complete), would get thunderously ill from encountering SHIT in their food, their water, their air, their fingernails, their mouth, their nose, their clothes, their bedding, their toothbrushes... Sometimes it would take them a month or more back home to stop vomiting regularly and having the trots from exposure to the fecal bacteria.

Another situation the corporations are ignoring is they are allowing access to many of their coding and business secrets, not taking into account that India is much like Asia in terms of their view of "borrowing" and selling software. Many sad companies will end up closing their doors because their cats were let out of their respective bags down in a country where it's not really considered wrong to sell CDs of the latest, hottest apps to anyone that will ply them with cash. And do they think the Indian legal system is going to help them with intellectual property concerns? On the bright side, corporations that worry about corporate espionage will no longer have that worry as the problem will be moot. Open-source will look like brilliant distribution device in comparison to the eventual morass that "The Pirates of the Indian Ocean" will be. Another bright side is we consumers might be able to get a copy of Photoshop for $10 in a couple years.

So, we concluded that by the time corporate American goes through this tragic India cycle (which will create a lot of entrenchment of Indian workers so we will never truly get away from this miscalculation) and the brain drain of American techies who have valuable experience but have found some other way to make money, it will probably be a while before American IT makes a recovery, if it ever does. (Think "Steel Tariffs".)

On a final note, if folks thought that servers named "Gandalf" and "Xena" were annoying, wait till they have to type, let alone attempt to pronounce, the Indian/Hindu names of their email servers in the future.

(By the way, I can see where the PC/Identity Politics crowd might try to misconstrue these observations as racist. Listen, I hold no ill will against anyone from India. But we are dealing with very different cultures, and these are just the facts. I would also point out this is about nationalities, not races. If you can admit that there are countries on the planet that have very different views of morality and ethics than we do, you can then admit you might prefer our view to theirs. And if so, there's nothing wrong with that.)

We then talked politics for a while, but since we all mostly agreed on things, and I've sworn off gratuitous political posting (which I might retract for a couple months near election time, I dunno), I won't belabor that part of the conversation here. One interesting point one of them made, though, I just have to share. He said that George Bush, unlike Richard Nixon, can not be shamed out of office for his scandals and failures. It's not a part of his "character". Had Georgie Boy gone through Watergate, he wouldn't have resigned. He would've called Murdock and had him spin it on Fox, and that's all there would have been to it. Interesting, that.

Finally, we talked about hopes and dreams. This is when I noticed something.

The other guy who had been laid off all this time (he got it around last Christmas; I got it in July) had always seemed edgy, miffed, and stressed at work - but now he was relaxed, happy and generally nice. I mean, he was nice at work, but he had this undercurrent of snark that you realized could be unleashed with correct provocation. Now that was gone. I myself noticed that in daily interaction, I'm a lot less aggressive and less likely to get angry or upset over something. I've never been a mean person - I am a Midwestern boy after all, and we are nothing if not polite and pleasant, usually. (Which, conversely, makes us much more aghast when we encounter treachery and unpleasantness; see my egregious political posts.) But these days, I just don't have that glinting, metal edge you develop in corporate America in order to keep from being squashed at work (especially in competitive fields like IT). It seems that since we no longer have to have our Corporate Teflon Transformer Professional Attitude Armor, we are a lot more human, or perhaps humane. We smile faster, laugh longer and harder, and tend not to be second-guessing if that extended hand is palming a knife destined for our backs.

The woman who still has a job does have that edge, still. She's a total sweetie, but it is mitigated by this shield, which I hadn't seen when I had to have it, too. Her face looks a tad haggard, which breaks my heart. The other guy and I, as I noticed via the reflection in the elevator on the way out, have clear skin and bright eyes, with no dark circles under them anymore. We often have a slight smile on our lips. We may be stressed about money and keeping our houses and providing for the kids (though I am the only one who has a kid in this group - they admitted they were too afraid to have them mostly because of the financial responsibility and the way corporate trends keep skewing less child-friendly), but because of that stress, I hadn't noticed the obvious until now:

We are shiny, happy people. And it's nice. I would much rather live like this than like a corporate fuckover machine. Time to start some serious planning, evidently. After all, we are pretty rich, already, considering. Will Wilkinson has a great post on this, so I'll just refer to his words.


I wonder what I'm going to do next...?

For once, that question seems full of possibility rather than an implicit threat.