Dev’s Perspective: Architect and Middle Manager “Offshorability”.

This is the eighth article of my Dev's Perspective series, exploring the IT career through my personal employment experience. The first article established the scope and bearing. The discussion is limited to enterprise software only - to answer the age-old question: what it takes to achieve financial independence by doing what you love (programming). The last article in the series explains your 2017 options to fight the slashed wages.

I remember working at the headquarters of a well-known F100 company. Its IT was completely “outsourced” “offshore”. They brought a CIO from GE - specifically experienced in moving jobs to India. He was unceremoniously fired five years later after wasting $190M (unofficial number), but that’s a topic for another article.

I was surrounded by “discount resources” proudly displaying miniature Indian flags on their cubicles. No one bothered to speak English. But when they did, even the lowest code monkey used condescending PM lingo like “resource” and “offshorability”, trying to distance himself from the five times bigger workforce in India. The concept sunk in. Let’s talk about “offshorability” of software architecture and middle management, a senior developer may view as an outsourcing-free haven.

I’ve worn one or another architect title and a couple of managerial ones for the most of my corporate career. As you can probably tell by my opinion on the matter, I’ve been outsourced a lot.

You can read my take on “software architecture” here. I have enormous respect for Fowler and others, but if you stay in IT promoting the best of the patterns and architecture principles e.g. microservices, they’d still share the fate of Scrum - butchered by clueless PMs and hated by everyone. Have you seen microservices or Docker turn an IT department into an enjoyable workplace with fair compensation? Keep dreaming.

Solution Architects are often hired to communicate business requirements to the (always outsourced) junior coders. You may even think, that your ethnic background (Hindi-speaking for an Indian team, Russian-speaking for Russians, etc.) would be of value. Certainly. Your outsourced paycheck however would be a different story.

Not to mention the unproductive finger-pointing and other political commotion inside a group of stressed, rushed, and underpaid “discount resources”. You’ll be blamed for all “communication problems” your facilitating and mitigating MBA bosses offloaded to you. You don’t want to waste even a day on that sh-t, especially considering that the project is set-up for failure, which will surely be blamed on you too if you manage to negotiate a decent salary (we paid him more than everyone and he didn’t perform a miracle).

I disagree with Google about their “algorithmic” interviews and other academic hysteria, but they got one thing right. There are no formal (functional) managers and no “architects”. A senior developer is perfectly capable of coordinating his/her colleague work and drawing architectural diagrams when needed.

Be that founder-level developer and build something real, retaining your paying customers, not your allegedly “safe from outsourcing” paycheck. Or cram algorithms and go to Google - my next topic: Dev’s Perspective: Is Google Still an Engineering Company?  You can also skip to the last article in the series explaining all of your 2017 options to make the money you deserve, as an expert software engineer.