TedPage: Software and outsourcing

I went to a party last night, and I think anytime you get a bunch of engineers together the topic of outsourcing comes up. It is a prevalent topic in software (and hardware) engineering today.

From the cost perspective, it makes a whole lot of sense. Why pay more for something that you see as the same value than you have to? The problem is that you're not comparing apples to apples. Having engineers working on your project locally means that they are interested in making your product, and future generations of your product, successful. The outsourcing company, in turn, is interested in satisfying the contract so that you can't complain. This includes not adding extra but critical features that could hurt the schedule. Local engineers can make these trade offs.

But, I think that the real question here is: What does it take to do software? And, I think the the answer is: (as much as people hate it when engineers give this answer) it depends. For many things you don't need someone who really understands software or system design to throw together a hack that will make things work. But, when you have something to deliever and maintain, you're better off engineering it. But, that doesn't mean that you have to have engineers doing every little detail of the actual implementation.

If you think back 50 years, being and engineer ment that you came up with something, and then you gave it to the draftsman to make up the engineering drawings. The draftsman wasn't doing the engineering, but was making it so that the engineer could do more system design. Today, every engineer (mechanical or civil) really needs to know AutoCAD and must do their drafting by themselves. Someday usability experts and system architects are going to have to write their own software.

I think that is the sum of it though, anything that can be outsourced, can be replaced by a tool. And you have to look at it that way. Just because it was outsourced first, doesn't mean that those jobs would stay arround forever otherwise. It just means that the tool to replace those jobs would have to written first. We live in interesting times.